How We Choose Which Female Characters Are Worthy

When the movie Hanna starring Saoirse Ronan debuted in theaters back in 2011, my wife and I took in the flick on its opening weekend. Only a few weeks earlier, we had learned that our first child was going to be a girl. Only 10 minutes into the movie after seeing the impressive Ronan display tracking skills, hunting pedigree and adaptive hand-to-hand combat, I had declared, with some conviction, that I would be emulating Eric Bana’s character and taking our yet to be named daughter out to woods for superior survival training. Never mind that I had none of those skills myself to teach. The movie is built like a fairy-tale, an hyperbolic story of the specimen who would be a girl, but at the heart of it was the undeniable fact that Hanna was a badass. And how could you not root for the sixteen year old girl who can put grown men on their back? While the structure of the young girl that can display a physical prowess is a Hollywood trope like any other, for me, it’s still a welcome one.

There is a problematic consequence of the admiration we have for characters like Hanna. By design, Hanna is a killing machine at the detriment of her possessing a complete emotional spectrum. Her naivety or just out right ignorance to the industrialized world subverts her emotional attachment to most things. In this notion, her being a little girl is more an aesthetic spectacle than it is a function within the story. Her interactions are mostly robotic (though, they become less so through the pr…