La opinión de los coordinadores de la Comisión de Procesos de

“She’s both hot and sinister—and a performer uninhibited by any cinematic disaster 130

happening around her.”28

The issues around star persona cannot be divorced from issues of genre. The kinds of roles in which we begin to expect stars to perform exist in particular kinds of films, that is, in particular genres. In the Classical Hollywood system these roles and these genres were carefully maintained, with generic crossover being the exception. In contemporary Hollywood however, roles across genres are expected of any “serious” actor. With the opening up of stardom that happens after the dissolution of the classic Hollywood period, there is also complimentary change in the ways genres are constructed. Their outlines are looser.

One of the reasons I chose Taking Lives was because it stars Angelina Jolie. She is a powerhouse. Her position in the film activates and plays off her complex star persona. The actresses that portray the Avengers are some of the most beautiful women in Hollywood, or figured as such in magazines. The women who play Avengers tend to also pursue a career in Romantic Comedy—with all the hazards to the dignity of women that that entails, and all the essentialism about women that it portrays—as if to mitigate the anxiety that they might provoke in the uneasy position of Avengers. Sandra Bullock, in both Miss Congeniality and the darker Murder By Numbers (Schroeder, 2002), Ashley Judd in such roles as Double Jeopardy, Kiss the Girls, or even Twisted is able to be beautiful, tough and vulnerable on screen. As is Julia Ormond in Smilla's Sense of Snow. These actresses are undeniably “feminine”; these are not women with "boyish" frames, nor tomboy personas, or even more subtle kinds of femininity. Their star personas are deeply entwined with their femininity. Jolie is intriguing here, with her exotic looks; there was

28 _{Basinger,Star Machine, 549.}

131

never anything she could do that would make her unfeminine. She played fierce and unconventional characters, but was most successful in roles where her femininity, which is quite literally embodied, was highlighted, even (or perhaps especially) as she is violent. In addition to this kind of dangerous violent femininity, she began her now enormous family and motherhood that inextricably colors our impression of her.

Angelina Jolie is dangerous and a humanitarian, home-wrecker and ideal mother. She was always excellent gossip fodder. From her earlier incarnation of kissing her brother inappropriately at an award show, to wearing a vial of (her older slightly inexplicable husband) Billy Bob Thornton’s blood around her neck, to breaking up the fairy tale pairing of Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston and stealing him away to create an even more fairy tale world with him. The stories in circulation about her are all deeply embedded in anxieties about her sexuality, which when coupled with her extraordinary looks, must be voracious and unpredictable.

Jeanine Basinger, in her insightful survey of Hollywood stardom, The Star Machine, explicates the frequently precarious position of the modern “star” without the force of the Hollywood machine behind her. On the one hand there are more choices, but on the other there is less security. As she notes in her discussion of Jolie, “Jolie has an overall filmography that is less than stellar. She is famous because the fanzines need to write about someone, so it may as well be a genuinely charismatic woman…Fans don’t need to watch her films. Jolie, like a rock star, lives her type. Her roles are only pale imitations of her off-screen self.”29 Basinger views Jolie through the lens of classic Hollywood types, marking her as a mix of “the sex symbol and the ‘exaggerated

29 _{, Jeanine Basinger, The Star Machine. (New York: Random House, 2008), 548. (Italics}

original).

132

woman’ of old-time female melodrama.”30

When did Jolie actually become a star? Where in her trajectory was she when Taking Lives was released? In 2001, she starred as Lara Croft, perfectly encapsulating the video game action hero. In 2010, she was given the lead role that was written for Tom Cruise in Salt (Noyce), who before his Scientology breakdown was one of the most bankable action stars in Hollywood. In between she has played killers (in the wonderfully pulpy Wanted (Bekmambetov, 2008), CGI animated evil (as Grendel’s sexy mother in Beowulf (2007)) in addition to other animated roles, a humanitarian (Beyond Borders, 2003) and finally desperate mothers (A Mighty Heart (2007) and Clint Eastwood’s Changeling (2008)). As Basinger states, these all seem to be aspects of her persona. Earlier in her career, she played the sexy crazy ones (Gia (1998), Girl, Interrupted (1999), and Pushing Tin (1999). And it was certainly in this early phase of her career that she rose to media attention, with her passionate acting and explosive sexuality in addition to her tabloid fodder history. (She is John Voight’s daughter and their relationship’s ups and downs are as histrionic as any other part of her career.)

Taking Lives was not even her first role as a female investigator. 1999’s The Bone Collector, (intriguingly, another film that could be considered within the modality of the Avenger) features her as a smarter than average beat cop. But curiously, she is the body in that film (physically doing the work for the quadriplegic Denzel Washington) but her body is figured in an unusual way. While it is the active body, the body that does things, it is guided by his wisdom, sometimes, quite literally guided by his voice and superior intelligence as he virtually directs her through commands over a phone. (Perhaps anticipating the pleasures of video games that Lara

30 _{Basinger, Star Machine, 548.}

133

Croft activates. Lara Croft can kick ass, but in the video game she is controlled by whoever is playing her). And it is the body that one hates (loves!!) to see in jeopardy. But in the film she plays perhaps her least explicitly feminized role.

But as this film is released, her persona is in flux. Jolie’s position in the film in some way reflects the position of the figure of the female investigator. Because of her committed, if odd performance, the film has trouble finding a foothold and is perhaps best known for its extremely steamy sex scene which features a great deal of her body, as a brief Google search will attest. It is as if her body, like her persona, and like the character she plays, cannot be contained within the film. Everything bleeds outwards. And it is her persona that gives both the sex and the violence of the ending its impact. I would argue that it is Jolie’s positioning in the film that rescues it from its own pulpiness, perhaps to its detriment, giving the seediness an almost unbearable weight. But most disturbingly, is the way it plays off her very recent motherhood. Images of a pregnant and glowing Jolie were already in circulation. Thus the image of her in the film merged in a peculiar way with the images of her in the tabloids, adding an almost literal heft to her performance and making the end result more horrifying.

To return to Basinger’s activation of Jolie as sex symbol (that seems obvious and early roles certainly liked her as sexy but vulnerable and perhaps a bit dangerous) and the “exaggerated woman” of melodrama (which she enters into fully in her later roles, although perhaps we could see Lara Croft fitting in here). But there was never quite the combination in Classical Hollywood or even in noir, although perhaps we come closest in the femme fatale. The tension between the two roles is problematic, especially positioned in a genre in which neither figure was used as a protagonist. They were the problems, not the heroes.

3.9 ZERO DARK THIRTY: DEPICTION IS NOT