I saw Salt last weekend. I thought it was awesome. And I kept thinking about it, until I wrote up this whole blog post about the way that femininity is turned on its head in Salt. (Spoilers necessary for analysis ahead!)
As the movie begins, Angelina Jolie’s character, Evelyn Salt, is imprisoned and tortured in North Korea. We see her stripped down to her lacy white underwear while she’s being beaten. Salt is extremely vulnerable in this scene. She may not be giving answers to her interrogators, but she’s practically naked, bloody, lying on the floor.
In this opening scene, Salt is woman-as-victim, completely rendered helpless while men, all in uniform, assault her. As I watched, I cringed, afraid that it was going to take another step into rape. Thankfully, it did not. Because her male love interest saved her.1
After this scene, we fast forward a couple of years to the present day, when Salt is celebrating her wedding anniversary (she married the guy who saved her, of course). She’s wearing a grey skirt suit with a high slit on one side, along with 3-inch heels. She’s at the office and trying to learn how to fold a napkin properly. There are jokes about how bad she is at this kind of domestic task.
When the action starts and Salt is forced to flee, the first thing she does is take off her heels so that she can run faster. I admit, this made me laugh with glee. I cannot count the number of times I’ve been flat-out annoyed by action movies in which the female heroine has to sprint in heels. I was very happy that Salt abandoned hers.
Next, in order to obscure a video surveillance camera, Salt pulls off her black lacy underwear and throws it over the camera lens. Not only is Salt removing yet another marker of femininity (those were not Hanes briefs), she uses that feminine accessory to help her escape.2
Salt peers up at a surveillance camera
Remember, at this time Salt is also barefoot. The first thing she does after making it back to her apartment is grab some boots (boots, thank you!!) and put on some jeans (buh-bye, skirt). The rest of the movie is one long chase scene, during which Salt does some extraordinary things like leaping off highway overpasses onto moving trains, surviving car crashes that would have killed ordinary men (and women), and getting in fights with men twice her size yet still managing to defeat them. [click to read more…]
- However, despite playing the hero in this scene, Salt’s husband remained a sensitive intellectual type during the movie, because he saved her by being pushy with CIA administrators, not by shooting his way into the prison. And I actually found the relationship between Salt and her husband to be kind of quirky and even realistic. [↩]
- I realize that this scene might also have given a cheap thrill to those in the audience who liked to imagine Jolie running around without underwear, but since Salt’s next move is building a chemical bomb out of cleaning products, I’ll give that a pass. [↩]
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