The one movie Geena Davis needed to make: “I absolutely knew”
The film industry has notoriously favoured male creatives, with women earning significantly fewer opportunities in Hollywood, whether that be to direct a film or to lead a movie in a stereotypically masculine genre, like action. For decades, women on the big screen have often been objectified or placed into lazy tropes, and off-screen, many women have faced a considerable amount of sexual harassment or abuse.
That’s why actors like Geena Davis have tried to make active changes in the industry, both through movie roles and involvement in charity organisations. In 2004, she founded the Geena Davis Institute so that frequent research into the industry’s gender imbalance could be properly recorded and shared, aiming to highlight the lack of diversity in media.
However, before this endeavour, Davis starred in Thelma and Louise, directed by Ridley Scott, which became a feminist classic. It was one of the biggest examples of a mainstream movie accidentally becoming a coveted feminist text upon its release in 1991.
At the Cannes Film Festival in 2016, Davis and her co-star Susan Sarandon discussed the movie, with the latter revealing, “When we were making it, we weren’t making a feminist film – we were making a buddy film.” What was meant to be a fun and thrilling tale of two women hitting the open road together and finding themselves caught up in trouble turned into an essential story of female friendship and solidarity against male power.
The movie was a huge moment for Davis, who realised that female audiences were dying for a movie like this. Talking to Arts Beat LA, she revealed, “Thelma and Louise had a big reaction, there was a huge thing at the time, that, ‘Oh my god, these women had guns and they actually killed a guy!’ and there were television debates and newspaper editorials about was this a good thing or a bad thing? I was part of that phenomenon, I was on the inside, and I got to examine it and that movie made me realise – you can talk about it all you want, but watch it with an audience and talk to women who have seen this movie, and they go, ‘YES!’ They feel so adrenalised and so powerful after seeing some women kick some ass and take control of their own fate.”
The strong reaction that the film received encouraged Davis to take on other projects that served a similar purpose: “That’s why I absolutely knew I had to do The Long Kiss Goodnight and that’s the reaction that I wanted and that I value now. That women go, ‘Yeah – fucking right!’ That’s great. Women don’t get to have that experience in the movies. But hey, people go to action movies for a reason; they want to feel adrenalised, and they want to identify with the hero, and if only guys get to do that, then it’s crazy.”
The movie, released in 1996, stars Davis as a woman with amnesia who sets out to re-discover who she is after she realises that she’s capable of many impressive skills that only an assassin would be familiar with. “The Long Kiss Goodnight doesn’t create any new level of violence at all. I am so bored with the criticism that women aren’t supposed to do it,” Davis explained.
The actor’s determination to give women representation that they’ve otherwise been starved of is impressive, and with movies like Thelma and Louise and The Long Kiss Goodnight, Davis has asserted herself as a star of several influential feminist films.
