Malinda Lo

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.

She also has a number of costume changes, which I found very interesting. While she’s playing the part of an assassin, she dyes her hair black and dresses all in black, but it’s not sexualized at all. She’s dressing for the job.

Ready for work

While she visits a Russian spy leader, she puts on a Russian fur hat and cloak, looking very Dr. Zhivago. This is the second most feminine moment in the movie for Salt, and appropriately, during this scene she runs into her husband again. Unfortunately for her husband, he dies in this scene, and after this, that’s the end of femininity for Salt.

The last big sequence in the film has Salt dressed in drag. Yes: Salt dresses as a man (in uniform, no less! the roles from the first scene have been totally reversed here) to infiltrate the White House. Gone are any vestiges of femininity; instead Salt’s hair is short, she’s wearing a suit and men’s shoes, and she speaks (though minimally) in a lower register. Salt does wears prosthetics to alter the shape of her face slightly, which makes her look a bit odd at first. But she peels that off soon after we (the audience) realize that Jolie is behind that mask, and then it’s Salt (clearly) in menswear for the rest of the movie.

Peeling off the mask

In an interview about the film, Jolie said that it was very important to her that Salt not be re-glamorized at the end of the movie. That she stay roughed up (and in pants and a button-down shirt!):

There was even talk for a long time about adding a scene in the end… because, I mean, if you’ve seen it, I don’t end so pretty. And there was a discussion about, do you kind of catch up with her glamorous again because this is what people would want, this is what audiences would want, and we made a definitive decision of no, it’s very, very important that we don’t do that to her, so we always angled it back into… trying to make it just harder and more raw. (Cinematical)

Tossing aside those trappings of femininity one by one — the shoes, the underwear, the skirt — transformed Salt from the victim in the opening scene to the hardened agent who cuts a path through the rest of the movie. The fact that she becomes briefly feminine for the last scene with her husband was interesting to me because it also marked the end of her femininity.³

After that, she went full-on into masculinity, and without those trappings of femininity, I found Salt to be much more naked in these scenes. She was, ultimately, all coiled action and roiling emotion. She was definitely raw. She felt real — as real as an action movie hero can feel, I think. Watching her climb buildings barefoot and survive insane amounts of explosions was fun, but it wasn’t realistic. Real was Salt at the end: bruised, defiant, hurt, desperate, and still going.

Feminine artifice can be truly fascinating. I think that women in real life have used femininity to their own advantage for centuries, but most Hollywood movies ignore (or obscure) the subversive nature of femininity, instead presenting a flat vision of femininity that disempowers women while it underscores heteronormativity.

Salt really turned that vision of femininity on its head. It was openly, gloriously celebratory of Salt’s power — regardless of whether or not she was wearing heels and lingerie. I think that might be the most triumphant element of the movie overall.

I’m not saying that the movie is the best thing ever made for women. It’s clear that a woman can’t just be a woman⁴ in this kind of movie, yet; she has to be more manly than the men. But I’ll accept that, as a step toward evening the field for women in Hollywood.

1. 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. [↩]
2. 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. [↩]
3. Does this imply that without a husband, a woman has no need for femininity? Maybe. I don’t think that’s true, but it is an interesting statement on the role of femininity. [↩]
4. Granted, part of me wants to delve into “what’s just a woman, anyway?” [↩]