The kidnapping trope is a tale as old as time. It creates a conflict of crime, family, and possession. It is a classic ‘damsel in distress’ motif, and the action/thriller genre has soaked it up like a sponge. However, it is a trope worthy of critical evaluation, as many examples of it in films are oozing with misogyny and traits of sadism, and I can’t be the only one who suffers from discomfort when watching.
While most may bat an eye to these tropes as they are ingrained in ancient stories, to me the impact lingers more so on the big screen. Due to the nature of cinema, voyeurism is an act that often appears in academic discussions, especially when it concerns male viewers (and crew) watching women. It is when someone gains pleasure from the act of watching someone else, whether they are in pain or being sexualized. It is good to unpack this and to question it. What pleasure is to be gained from kidnapping women and the onscreen abuse that comes with it?
We watch films to stimulate and entertain, and often conventional pieces will rely on certain repeatable genre elements to evoke the intended response from the audience. If we briefly glance back at what is deemed as a reliable audience by large production companies, you will see that the catered demographic is often young men, and these audiences tend to enjoy pieces from genres such as action, as they satisfy their craving for adrenaline, without the need for excessive thinking. The spectacle on screen is nothing but pleasurable, making the trip to the cinema engaging and worth the price of a ticket. This has been the mainstream blueprint for Hollywood blockbusters since Jaws and, because catering to young male audiences makes money, the cycle continues. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, as they say.
Linda Williams explores this in depth in her ‘91 Film Quarterly essay ‘Gender, Genre and Excess,’ explaining how genres such as melodrama, horror and pornography have a tendency to make a spectacle out of women’s physicality. This, when merged with the cinematic experience – dark room, characters ‘unaware’ of being watched, audience members all facing the same way – invites the audience to take part in this voyeuristic end result, gaining pleasure from female characters’ emotional outbursts and vulnerability. Their heartbreak, gory murders, and sex scenes are gawked upon and often take the place of actual narrative development.
The presentation of women on screen has been analysed by critics and feminist theorists alike for decades, but the emphasis and fixation on more grotesque elements surrounding the treatment of these women, and the sheer gawking at their demise, is worse than ever. As censorship laws have loosened over the years, filmmakers have pushed the boundaries of what is acceptable to display on screen, yet the lingering scenes that exploit helpless women add nothing to the narratives that deem them so relevant.
The Taken franchise, consisting of three films, revolves entirely around this premise, cashing in over $900 million worldwide on a glorified sex trafficking kidnapping situation. It’s every parents’ worst nightmare, and it encourages a seemingly desirable possessive attitude between fathers and their daughters. The disrespect felt by the father at the news of his daughter’s disappearance is narcissistic and comes from a place of dishonor between men. With the climax of the film taking place at a covert sex slave auction, one could argue that this scene merely highlights some of the horrendous industries that exist, but to me it reads as merely reciprocating the central point regarding women being seen as someone’s property, whether it is the Albanian thugs or Liam Neeson’s character as their owners. To me, this is what I find most terrifying and concerning about these tropes: it reiterates these stereotypes that we are trying to steer away from, but producers who are looking to make a large global profit see as stories worth funding.
While rewatching Fargo recently, I couldn’t quite get over the scene when Carl and Gaear arrive at the remote cabin by Moose Lake. Based on a true story, Fargo follows Jerry Lundergaard as he plots to kidnap his loving wife, Jean, in order to get the ransom money out of her wealthy father, the owner of the garage where Jerry works. Unbeknownst to him, Jerry hired the kidnappers himself to get out of debt and knowingly put his wife’s life in the hands of two untrustworthy strangers. It is a foolish plan that ends very, very badly. When Carl, Gaear, and Jean arrive at the cabin, Jean breaks free and tries to run away in the snow, blindfold on her face, hands tied to her back. The medium shot lingers on her fruitless attempts, as Carl (Steve Buscemi) laughs at her. Although this is a comedy/drama and the intentions are for comedic effect, this reiterates the idea that women in pain are entertaining.
In both of these narratives, women’s suffering is central to the plot, used as a Macguffin to keep the narrative moving along. However, the trope is not invariably limited purely to father and daughter/husband and wife, as seen in Lê Văn Kiệt’s recent Vietnamese martial art film Furie (Hai Phượng) which follows an ex-gangster and estranged mother Hai Phuong (Ngô Thanh Vân) seeking revenge on the thugs that kidnap her daughter Mai (Cát Vy). Amongst the action sequences and the main premise surrounding kidnapping, it is a refreshing telling of motherhood and the importance of family, as opposed to glorifying the treatment of the girl who is kidnapped. I hope that new Hollywood releases take inspiration from well-received pieces such as this, in hope that they will fixate on substance and story over spectacle.
While the use of this trope produces an enticing storyline, it is a merely a fairytale with the same exhausted traits that liken female characters to the property of others, another piece of materialism to aspire to and to control. As a trope that is rarely repeated the opposite way around, it is hard to not get dampened by the subconscious misogyny that seems to sneak in to these stories we love, only to take us away from the narrative’s true purpose, for the sake of serving voyeuristic tendencies.
