“Guns Go in the Cookie Jar”: Parody, Nostalgia, and the Post-Hardware Heroine

Abstract

The post-hardware heroine is argued to be the latest revision of action heroines since the 1990s, emerging into a parodic postmodern paradigm that recalls compensatory reactions exhibited by the “beefcake” cinema of the 1980s that is inextricably caught up in nostalgia and desire. For Yvonne Tasker, muscular, built male bodies the likes of Schwarzenegger and Stallone are reactions to a then-new male encounter with the cinematic gaze, while Scott Bukatman argues they are reactions to technology and the rising posthuman. Post-hardware heroines, as such, are not only imbued with a nostalgia for the hardware heroines that first subverted male action roles of the 1990s, but actively parody the iterative history from which they appear in a fashion evocative of the waning postmodern moment. Contemporary action films Atomic Blonde (2017), Anna (stylized ANИA, 2019), Gunpowder Milkshake (2021), and Jolt (2021) are argued to mark the emergence of the post-hardware heroine and represent the new parodic paradigm in which they operate. By transgressing and subverting narrative roles occupied by gendered performances, these films look toward an action cinema that blurs the boundaries of gender and leaves behind the visual pleasures of the body.