The Mission: Impossible Franchise Can’t Seem to Figure Out Women
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The post The Mission: Impossible Franchise Can’t Seem to Figure Out Women appeared first on Consequence.
[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One.]
Until the year 2023, the most impossible mission faced by the Mission: Impossible franchise was passing the Bechdel Test. Over the first six films, the franchise had shone brightly thanks in part to actresses like Vanessa Redgrave, Thandiwe Newton, Michelle Monaghan, Keri Russell, Paula Patton, Rebecca Ferguson, and Vanessa Kirby — named characters one and all, but women unable to have a single conversation amongst themselves that wasn’t related to a man.
The seventh film does successfully accomplish that very basic task, thanks to a conversation between skilled thief Grace (Hayley Atwell) and international power broker Alanna (Vanessa Kirby) about the job Alanna hired her to do. However, Grace and Alanna’s groundbreaking conversation is followed by one of the film’s many muddled scenes of dialogue, in which AI henchman Gabriel (Esai Morales) declares that Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) will have to make a choice about which of his semi-platonic brunettes will die, a prophecy only sorta fulfilled later.
I say “only sorta” because the foot chase through the streets of Venice that leads to Ilsa’s death doesn’t actually give Ethan much of a choice about who will die — if anything, Ilsa does at least seem to be the one to choose to go after Gabriel, though her reasons for doing so are unclear. Did she feel a need to protect Grace? Did she feel… anything? Who knows. Blame it on the self-aware artificial intelligence that serves as the film’s villain.
This is just one of the many script issues inherent to Dead Reckoning Part One, yet it also points to why using the Bechdel Test as a measurement of a film’s feminism isn’t a great idea. Despite passing the test, and featuring a diverse array of female characters, Dead Reckoning Part One continues the franchise’s proud tradition of being regressive at worst, and weird at best, when it comes to half of the world’s population.
It Could Have Been Worse
The first Mission: Impossible film had four prominent female characters: the two members of Ethan’s IMF team who die in the opening sequence, the eventually untrustworthy teammate Claire (Emmanuelle Béart), and the amazing Max (Vanessa Redgrave), who feels like she’s having an illegal amount of fun in her brief scenes flirting with Ethan. (A 59-year-old Redgrave calling Cruise “dear boy” may be one of the franchise’s sexiest moments, thanks to the unexpected chemistry between the actors.)
Ethan ends the film as a free agent romantically, setting him up for a fling in the eventual sequel with perhaps the franchise’s best-developed female character, Nyah (Thandiwe Newton). The irony, of course, is that Mission: Impossible II is the most misogynistic of the franchise.
In the blatant Notorious remake, Ethan falls for Nyah before finding out that he’s recruiting her for a dangerous mission that involves rekindling her relationship with bad guy Sean Ambrose (Dougray Scott). It’s not the scenario that grates, though, but screenwriter Robert Towne’s dialogue: At one point, Sean observes “You know women, mate. Like monkeys, they are — won’t let go of one branch until they’ve got hold of the next.” Not to mention Anthony Hopkins, as the film’s designated giver of missions, saying “She’s a woman — to go to bed with a man and lie to him, she has all the training she needs.”
They put that line in the fucking trailer. Towne did it on purpose, too, telling Salon in 2000 that…
“I injected some chicken-shit misogynism into Anthony Hopkins’ remarks, just to be politically incorrect. There’s an interesting thing about audiences today: I guess that’s one of the few ways to shock people. Cruise says [Thandiwe] doesn’t have the training [to act as an agent and go back to her evil ex-lover, Scott], and Hopkins says, ‘She’s a woman — to go to bed with a man and lie to him, she has all the training she needs’ and you hear, ‘Oh, oh my goodness! Wow!’ Time was when you had to have a really scatological turn of phrase to get this kind of response.”
That’s the response of a writer who doesn’t recognize women as people, people who might have a very good reason for being shocked by a major motion picture calling their entire gender lying sluts. (It’s been over 20 years, and I may still be furious.)
Yet, thanks to Newton’s performance, Nyah has a strong personality and her own backstory prior to meeting Ethan, and while a lot of the movie involves her standing around looking beautiful while Tom Cruise tries to save her, she does at least get a little agency. (Okay, said agency largely amounts to injecting herself with the deadly virus MacGuffin at the center of the film, but it’s something.)
The Julia Era
Nyah also represents the first (and to date, last) time a Mission: Impossible movie had a traditional love interest — in the third film, she’s long gone, and Ethan is now engaged to Julia (Michelle Monaghan). This allows III to fast-forward past all that pesky romance business and get straight to the putting-a-woman-Ethan-loves-in-peril stuff. However, Julia does rise to the various challenges presented to her; she might not be as fully realized as Nyah, but her relationship with Ethan feels real throughout, she gets to put her nursing skills to good use over the course of the film, and by the end emerges as a worthy partner for Ethan.
Of course, that’s the last time she plays a central role in a M:I movie. Julia’s arc over the entire franchise is actually a pretty dynamic one, as she goes from clueless nurse to bad-ass aid worker who doesn’t hesitate to help Luther (Ving Rhames) defuse a nuclear bomb at the end of Fallout. Yet, since III, her continued existence has forced Ethan into a strange sort of romantic purgatory, which may be the reason why, in the following four films, Ethan Hunt’s dick seems to have fallen off.
Perhaps Cruise doesn’t like the implication that Ethan (still technically married to Julia, as far as we know) would commit full-on adultery — it would explain why the closest he comes to any romantic entanglement with Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) is hugs and nuzzling. And in fairness, not all of Ethan’s relationships with women in these films are intended to have romantic undertones: In the third film, he does have a professional relationship with Zhen Lei (Maggie Q, my personal favorite of the franchise’s female characters, mostly because she’s so bummed out about having to blow up that cool car).
Mission: Impossible III (Paramount)
That pattern also continues when Paula Patton’s Jane Carter fills the position of “platonic female agent” in Ghost Protocol. Jane has more personal motivation for her mission than the criminally underused Zhen Lei, and even gets a bit of an arc; in fact, Ghost Protocol does get close to passing the Bechdel Test, except that kicking a woman out of a skyscraper window for killing your beloved doesn’t technically count as a conversation.
However, Jane also continues another trend: If Ethan Hunt could be said to exist as an actual character, and not just an avatar of Tom Cruise, one defining character trait would be that he gets off on the mentor/mentee relationship. It at least defines his relationships with the women in his life who happen to have less experience with impossible missions — and ever since the first film, there is no one who has more experience with impossible missions than Ethan Hunt.
Ilsa Faust does come close, though, and certainly earns Ethan’s respect during her appearances in the early franchise — probably because she keeps saving his life. Her death in Dead Reckoning would sting more if Grace wasn’t immediately presented as a backup nuzzling partner for Ethan, with the added bonus of being a neophyte who (you guessed it!) is also in need of mentoring in the ways of the IMF.
Girls Just Wanna Have Fun
One of the franchise’s smartest latter-day decisions was letting Max’s legacy live on in Alanna, her daughter and heir to Max’s criminal enterprises. There’s not nearly enough of either character, but both represent a new kind of role for women in this world, that of someone with actual power, capable of enjoying a moment, and guided solely by their own scruples. (And no one pops up, Anthony Hopkins-style, to suggest that their gender is the only reason they’re good at their job.)
In addition, Grace — like Nyah, a former thief — does prove to have her own spark (full credit to Atwell for bringing a lot of life to the role). Yet her introduction is done no favors by putting her in immediate contrast to Ilsa — the “choice” theoretically foisted on Ethan boils down to “which of these ladies do you want to live, the woman you’ve had the years-long connection with who has saved your life a bunch of times, or the flirty thief who has left you to die at least once, but holds valuable information?”
If Ethan had actually been involved in making a choice, it would have been infuriating on one level, but it at least would have said something about him as a character. Except we don’t even get that — instead, all we get out of that moment is pitting two women against each other, while also suggesting that they’re essentially interchangeable.
At least that’s tempered somewhat by the introduction of Pom Klementieff as Paris, gleeful chaos wearing bizarro grunge punk fashions as she smashes her Hummer through the streets of Rome. We may not know much of Paris’s story, but I know that I want to know more about her, and am very glad that Ethan chose not to beat her to death with a pipe when he had the chance. (Though he gets a little too much credit for choosing not to do that.)
It’s characters like Paris who offer up hope for the future of one of Hollywood’s remaining blockbuster franchises, who indicate that it’s possible for women to actually be shown having fun in the midst of the action, and exist as more than just love interests or bland villains. (Can you remember the name of Léa Seydoux’s assassin from Ghost Protocol? I looked it up for you, it’s Sabine. You’re welcome.)
For, it might surprise Robert Towne to learn this, but women aren’t just one dame with many faces. We contain multitudes.
Hell, sometimes we even talk to each other.
Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One is in theaters now.
The Mission: Impossible Franchise Can’t Seem to Figure Out Women
Liz Shannon Miller
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