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La Femme Terrible: Transgressiveness and Containment in Luc Besson's Nikita

When Luc Besson's postmodern thriller Nikita was released in France in 1990, more than 3.7 million French spectators saw it, followed by 3 million spectators in the U.S.[1] At a time when French cinema spectatorship was in serious decline, and American films threatened to overtake indigenous productions in popularity, the sweeping success of Besson's film is noteworthy. For youth and female spectators in France, Nikita represented something very new: an aggressive, sexually empowered, violent heroine whose youthful transgressiveness threatens the corrupt social order. While the period from 1986 to the mid 1990s (and, arguably, to the present), marked the rise of the powerful, active, and triumphant action heroine in American cinema with films like Aliens, Terminator 2, and The Long Kiss Goodnight, until Nikita, this figure was largely nonexistent in France. Indeed, Besson's film—as with many of his films—was criticized in both countries for its overt Americanness, and Besson has acknowledged his desire to compete and cross-fertilize with Hollywood cinematic product.[2] The emergence of the action heroine in Nikita, then, is as a hybridized Hollywood import rather than a uniquely French development—an import that created considerable anxiety for a French nation already struggling against Americanization, particularly in the cultural arena of cinema, and whose sense of national identity had always resided to some degree within its female archetypes.

Nonetheless, for the disenfranchised youth audience of la génération Mitterand, the film packed a powerful appeal. For the female spectator, Nikita offered a new feminine subjectivity, a site for identification with a female protagonist whose struggle for control renders her an agent of action. Indeed, in viewing the film, female audience members have read the narrative as a positive trajectory leading to an ultimate liberation for an empowered female character. However, this interpretation seems largely to have been limited to the viewing public. The tendency in academic criticism has been to "unpack" Nikita so as to reveal its text as a misogynistic story of the patriarchal containment of a violently transgressive woman. While the film undeniably employs strategies of containment in its depiction of the active heroine, a closer re-reading of the filmic text opens a space for a more positive and, ultimately, optimistic view of the active female protagonist Nikita—and for others like her. Nikita harnesses those tactics most often used to neutralize the female threat—fetishization, phallicization, carefully coded gender traits, a rejection of violence—and uses them to assert her own agency. Even in those moments when Nikita's subjectivity appears most denied, her threat most neutralized, her agency most defused, she resists, leading to a final escape from oppressive State and patriarchal order into an alternate way of being.

While many theorists of the cinema have shared a negative reading of Nikita, Susan Hayward's voluminous writing on the subject produces the most insightful, sophisticated, and well-developed interpretation of the mechanisms at work in the film. Her work on Nikita and the many salient issues it raises is far more wide-ranging than can be addressed here. However, I will take issue with a few significant points in her reading of the film that render her interpretation problematic.

Nikita, like many of the films of the cinema du look genre that emerged in the mid- and late 1980s, represents a foray into postmodern pastiche, merging several genres such as film noir, the polar, and even the Western, to produce an action-driven paranoid thriller. As Hayward points out, Nikita's role as a transgressive youth and transgressive woman intersect in significant ways: the mistrust and spectacle of the rebellious youth "other" aligns with the mistrust and spectacle of film noir's femme fatale.[3] The film thus fuses two powerful threats that the patriarchal order must contain, and embodies in Nikita a dual struggle. The outcome of this struggle poses the greatest dilemma for critics. A surface reading of the film presents the ending as an escape for a marginalized (youthful and female) character from a corrupt and oppressive patriarchal center. However, Susan Hayward argues, "there is a gap between what appears to be represented and which gives visual pleasure... and what is actually represented."[4] While she agrees that the film tells the story of an oppressed woman's struggle for control, she asserts that even the depictions of Nikita's transgressions, purportedly pleasurable for a female audience, are contained through the film's narrative conventions. Nikita's aesthetic suturing, Hayward claims, "allows visual pleasure to override the more deep-rooted meaning of the film which is containment, that is, using the female body as a displaced figure of masculinity."[5] Yet it is my contention that Nikita opens the film as transgressive and remains resistant throughout, despite apparent mechanisms of containment at work in the film.

According to Hayward, two major devices are employed to contain Nikita's threat, fetishization and phallicization. In the film, the presence of the phallic woman becomes complex. She is contained on two levels: one, in the fetishizing conventions of the film (tight, short dress, accompanied by an eroticized gun), and two, in her remaking into a masculinized figure at the hands of Bob within the diegetic space of the film. Nikita's feminine sexuality is disavowed through the fetishizing of her body, but she is also phallic as a State agent carrying out man-directed actions, using man's weapons, and taking on the male gaze through the scope of a gun. Her threat is therefore doubly undermined; her sexual difference is preserved—but contained—through fetishization, but she becomes masculinized, thus repressing the female threat of castration signified by her difference. Thus, Nikita "embodies the male construction of the femme fatale as deceptive masquerade: she looks like a woman but she is fetishized as phallic (the dress, shoes, gloves, and gun overinvest parts of the body over the whole and contain her safely as phallic)."[6] Further, Hayward claims, "In this film, the supreme male fantasy is fulfilled. Woman becomes gun (i.e. phallus). The dream of Narcissus is complete."[7] It is with both points, that Nikita is contained through fetishization and phallicization, that I wish take to issue in Hayward's account

Fetishizing Nikita

Yvonne Tasker describes the role of the action star as one in which the binaries of subject and object converge, in which the body is both active and passive, agent and spectacle.[8] As such, the action cinema provides fertile ground for an investigation of the ways in which these binaries break down, thus calling into question the universal applicability of the practices of fetishization and voyeurism as elucidated by Laura Mulvey.[9] The body of the hero in action cinema, both male and female, is on display precisely because it is through the body that such heroes take action and command the narrative. Exposed muscles—or "musculinity" in Tasker's term—function partly to reveal the hero's vulnerability in displaying the body as a site of possible penetration, but also to express the body as a weapon. "The muscular body of the action hero," Tasker observes, "seems to provide a powerful symbol of desire and lack. The body is offered for display both as a static object of contemplation and, in the acting out of the hero's achievements, as both subjected and triumphant."[10] As a generic convention, this combined display of power and powerlessness ups the dramatic stakes. In an analysis of gender conventions, however, this formulation undercuts a simple conception of the fetishized female action star as a containing mechanism for the transgressive woman. As Jeffrey A. Brown points out, "the more progressive depictions of the action heroine place her at the same level of erotic portrayal as the male icons of the screen, as primarily subject and secondarily object."[11] Nikita, I believe, holds such progressive potential.

The fetishizing strategies Hayward sees as at work in Nikita, then, involve the protagonist's donning of scant clothing accessorized by a gun, a position that conventionally renders her passive and at the mercy of the scopophilic male gaze. "Female sexuality is denied," Hayward explains, "through the very images that purport to represent her (Nikita dressed in fetishistic mode with the slinky black dress, stilleto heels, black gloves and the gun)."[12] However, these scenes are simultaneously the moments in which Nikita engages in physical action in her role as assassin. That the heroine's body assumes the status of spectacle here is undeniable, but the function of costume and the weapon in these situations take on a different significance in light of Tasker's formulation. Instead, the tiny dress exposes the body as active when Nikita is called to action, calling into question the conventional coding of the female body as mere passive spectacle. As Brown observes:

Certainly the action heroine is often filmed to accentuate her body, but this new hardbody is not offered up as mere sexual commodity. While the well-toned, muscular female body is obviously an ideal in this age of physical fitness, it is presented in these films as first and foremost a functional body, a weapon. The cinematic gaze of the action film codes the heroine's body in the same way that it does the muscular male hero's, as both object and subject.[13]

While specularized to some degree, Nikita's containment through fetishization denies a simple controlling gaze, instead demanding a shift toward active identification. She may still bear a mark of lack, but she also assumes strength and power, opening a space for an active female subjectivity and pleasure in identification (particularly when Nikita succeeds).

It should be acknowledged that in these action sequences, Nikita is largely acting upon the orders of the State, and not out of her own volition, which mitigates pleasures in subject identification to some degree. However, in each instance, she remains resistant, and it is her struggle for control—especially control over her own body, her own expression—with which, I argue, the female spectator can most identify. I will elaborate on this later.

Phallicizing Nikita

To return to Hayward's second concern about containment in Nikita, she argues that Nikita is simply "displaced masculinity," a female body "obliged to act phallically."[14] The attack on the action heroine as little more than a phallic woman—a man in woman's clothing—is familiar in critiques of action cinema. Traditionally a male-dominated space, action films, when they have included female roles, conventionally relegate women to the role of male trophy or as a means for reasserting the male hero's heterosexuality, thereby inscribing the male/active, female/passive binary. When women have taken up the gun or rescued the victim, the transgression into that male domain has been coded as active and therefore masculine. Carol Clover's discussion of the heroine of the horror film, the "Final Girl," argues that in order for male spectators to identify with the protagonist, the female hero "is clearly marked as a masculine character via her ability to survive agonizing trials, rise to the occasion, and defeat the monster with her own hands and cunning."[15] Thus, in her activity, the Final Girl is simply "a congenial double for the adolescent male."[16] The action heroine bears signifiers of masculinity, and in her phallicization, her threat as an active female is contained.

For Nikita as well as other action heroines, the contention that she, as some critics have claimed, is little more than "a man in drag" or "gender cross-dresser," presents troubling theoretical obstacles to the introduction an active female subjectivity into the cinema. As Brown sums up, "The excessively masculine association of carrying oversized guns, saving women, children, and inept soldiers, and generally kicking ass seems to necessitate a character's reading as overtly masculine by critics..."[17] Her muscularity, "so essentially linked with the 'natural' superiority of men in power relations that it semiotically overwhelms biological identity," renders the action heroine a gender transvestite or symbolic male.[18] But to confine active women in cinema to a category that is "phallic, unnatural, or 'figuratively male'" is to reinscribe a gender binary that proves self-defeating.[19] As Elizabeth Hills argues, "action heroines cannot easily be contained, or productively explained, within a theoretical model which denies the possibility of female subjectivity as active or full."[20] If "active" must be read as "phallic" or "figuratively male," then such a system denies even the possibility of an active female character, a denial that shuts down any hope for a progressive reading of feminine roles. It also denies the possibility that a woman could do things that men do—wield a gun, rescue women and children, save the day—and still be a woman. In other words, "just because she acts like a man, doesn't mean she is one."[21] The progressive potential of the action cinema to gender analysis lies in its capacity to challenge conventional representations and readings of gender roles, and particularly the open up the Mulveyian active/male, passive/female, looker/looked-at set of relations to new ideas for thinking about gender. Thus, while the action cinema may not always function as a site that contests gender norms (indeed, the genre often reinscribes them in troubling ways), it does hold the potential to demand a revisiting of confining theoretical constructs employed in feminist film theory.

Further, an additional tendency in criticism is to read the woman's use of a gun (and other male-dominated technology) as an additional phallicizing mechanism, for obvious reasons. Hardware, ascribed as masculine, becomes a physical marker of the action heroine's masculinity, and she is seen to have appropriated for herself an icon that rightly belongs in the male domain. Guns are also widely used to represent "the female phallus," an eroticized piece of technology with male-fantasy significations of "female desire, penis envy, and male fetish."[22] Nikita is often read this way, especially those scenes in which the protagonist wields a gun larger than herself. However, just as the association of "active" with "masculine" denies the action heroine her femininity, so does the convention of gun as phallus deny her access to male technology qua woman. Instead, I would like to argue that the action heroine, in her co-optation of weapons for her own use, possesses the potential to de-eroticize traditionally male apparatuses. The shift of masculine-coded technology into the feminine domain onscreen (and off) enables such technology—including guns, cars, computers, and other symbols of phallic power—to take on new (feminine) significance. If other traditionally masculine practices—including the simple wearing of pants—have succeeded in merging with feminine applications, then with increased repetition and co-optation into feminine use, the phallic power of guns may be defused and their feminine connotations normalized, thus enabling a reading of the woman who possesses a gun as woman.

For these theoretical reasons, Nikita, whether she commands the narrative, engages in gunplay, takes down her karate instructor, or seduces Marco, goes shopping, or makes dinner, does so as an active female subject. She may retain a mark of lack and continue to serve as a site of scopophilic to-be-looked-at-ness, but her capacity to assume power renders her something more complex than a passive object. As the next section will show, Nikita further challenges gender conventions through the film as an active subject playing on the representation of passivity.

Transgressiveness, Containment, and the Role of Identity

Hayward argues that although Nikita resists containment at the opening of the film, it is after she is given the ultimatum by the State—cooperate or die—that she undergoes a transformation into a "woman" and becomes "tamed." While Hayward agrees that Nikita continues to resist her oppressors as a government agent, she maintains that even Nikita's apparent transgressions are nullified by cinematic conventions and that her transgressions result in her expulsion from the social order at the end. She explains,

...in identifying with Nikita as a positive image for women (as transgressive and obtaining freedom) we must accept all sorts of violations to our sense of identity. Nikita is annihilated and remade as Marie/Joséphine; she is subjected to the orders of the State; her freedom is to end up as absence. This "acceptance" positions the female spectator masochistically. By identifying and taking pleasure in viewing Nikita, we view "our" own subjection and approve of it.[23]

While the segment of the film in which Nikita carries out her role as State-appropriated assassin is certainly a form of containment for an unruly, violent woman, I argue that rather than being contained by State-imposed identities, Nikita's identity shifts throughout the film as part of her resistance to cultural codes of appropriate behavior. Instead of being confined by identity, Nikita appropriates the constructed nature of identity as an additional weapon in her rebel's arsenal. If anything, Nikita's gender unfixity destabilizes any sense of gender as natural and reveals its status as a cultural construct, a destabilization that opens up possibilities for new ways of being. While subjected to the orders of the State, Nikita continues to transgress in ways that revive the possibility of pleasure for a female spectator.

Nikita challenges culturally accepted gender codes from her first appearance in the film. At the most basic level, her self-assigned name positions her as outside; it is both foreign (Russian) and masculine, and therefore decidedly outside the social center for a young French woman. In the opening sequence, Nikita's transgressiveness derives from her status as both an androgynous-appearing woman and a defiant youth. As Hayward notes, "youth is the 'outside' (the 'other') that must... become 'inside' (the upholder of the social order of things)."[24] As long as youth resist the order, they remain a threat that must be controlled. Similarly, the androgynous-appearing woman violates gender codes, and in refusing to reflect her sexual difference to the male that assures his unified sexuality, poses a threat for which patriarchy demands punishment. Interestingly, unlike the eroticized figure of the child-woman so pervasive in French film (Brigitte Bardot, Audrey Tautou), Nikita's juvenilization serves to de-eroticize her; indeed, part of youth's resistance to the social order involves a challenge of gender norms. The iconography of Nikita's punk dress—disheveled, dyed hair, darkly painted circles around her eyes, and baggy clothes—blur traces of her female identity. She is identifiable as a woman, but as a woman who defies cultural proscriptions of gender. Thus, Nikita's youthfulness augments her dangerous character as a woman. Her resistance to conventions of feminine identity in particular continues throughout the film.

While the opening of the film serves to present Nikita's gender insubordination as motivation for the State's "taming" of her, the fact that Nikita continues to (successfully) resist gender assignments even after she is co-opted by the State demonstrates that her transgressions withstand containment. She persists in frustrating gender conventions during her State training as an assassin. As one of the few women in the program, she is treated by her male trainers as unskilled in the "manly" arts of martial arts and marksmanship. At a shooting range, she is handed a Beretta and told she should "get to know" the gun before actually using it. Instead, she turns to the paper target (not coincidentally, a cut-out of a male figure) and blows it to shreds, undermining the authority—and phallic sufficiency—of her trainer. She may be a woman—and a girl-woman at that—but by demonstrating her mastery of the phallic arts, she flouts gender-appropriate behavior, even under the eyes of patriarchy.

When Nikita resignedly agrees to the contract to become "woman," the notion of identity most palpably comes into tension. As a child-woman, she is pre-Symbolic; she is virtually without speech, she wails, cries, and yelps when in trouble. In the scene in which Amande (Jeanne Moreau) begins to show her the way of the woman, Nikita sees her image in the mirror for the first time. She is a Lacanian infant viewing her ideal self. Yet she is not alone; Amande places her face next to Nikita's, so Nikita views a double self reflected back to her—her own and that of what she should become. For Nikita, a dual conflict erupts. Which self is the ideal self? Amande is the ideal of femininity (within and without the diegesis), but the negation of youth ("My hands," she says, "they give me away, don't they?"), while Nikita is youthful, but not "feminine." Thus, two ideal selves ricochet from the mirror, and two conflicting ideal selves remain forever alienated from her. Identity, even when the State attempts to contain it, remains unfixed for Nikita, forging a path for her to assume identities at will. Amande further underscores the constructedness of Nikita's new identity and instantiates its very constructedness as a tool. "Two things have no limit," she says to Nikita, "femininity and the means for taking advantage of it." Nikita's foremost training in utilizing identity as a weapon extends from the very order she resists.

Though the State attempts to contain Nikita's violent resistance by appropriating it as its own, the State's primary effort return her to the center is to transform her, via Amande, into a "woman" who abides by the social order in dress, appearance, and comportment. However, Nikita poses a double threat as a youth and a female, and while the State for all appearances transforms her into a woman-as-object, it fails to contain her transgressive youthfulness and fully appropriate her into the social order. Her juvenile transgressiveness continues to resurface throughout the film—she eats with her fingers, sings at the top of her lungs, jumps on the bed—and never abandons its "otherness." If youth, as a threat, must be contained as fetish and like the woman, punished for its transgressions, the State neglects to successfully to contain the juvenile Nikita. In her youthful resistance, she continues to resist the feminine identities imposed upon her by the State.

Interestingly, Nikita seems at her most willing to accept the female gender code when she emerges from her training for her dinner date with Bob. Decked out in a tiny black dress, stockings, and spiked heels, she must be coaxed from the vanity where she luxuriates in carefully applying her mascara. However, when presented with Bob's "gift" of the gun, the oppressiveness of the patriarchal system snaps into sharp relief, and Nikita begins to resist once again. She deftly demonstrates her mastery of the gun and, despite the State's attempts to entrap her and thereby prove the woman's inability to handle both masculine and feminine roles, escapes in spiked heels, an "image that condenses the apparently conflicting signifiers of feminine and masculine iconography... and confounds the strict categories of gender absolutism."[25] While the scene is problematic in that she succeeds on behalf of the State, it demonstrates her ability to fluidly glide into a new identity and to blend what are coded as masculine and feminine behaviors. As her assumption of subsequent identities shows, the masquerade of femininity—and gender identity on the whole—becomes a source of empowerment for Nikita.

In several scenes, Nikita foregrounds femininity as a masquerade, testing its boundaries. In a job for the State, she plays a French maid who delivers coffee armed with a bomb to a government enemy. Eyed by the target's bodyguards as a specular object, Nikita initially plays the meek, passive spectacle, accepting the controlling gaze. After delivering the "coffee," however, Nikita defiantly turns the gaze back on the men, a gesture to the covert power she harbors as an active subject playing the part of the passive object. In another scene, she meets Bob over coffee in a dress and an outrageous hat that drapes over her head like a converted umbrella. An obvious slight to French couture and to the State's efforts to assimilate her, Nikita exaggerates her femininity in a demonstration of its constructedness and her ability to wield the construction as a tool.[26] In her most radical transgression, Nikita cross-dresses as a man in her final operation, a taboo that almost inevitably results in punishment. However, though the operation encounters complications, Nikita succeeds in her transvestism; she is only given away when a dog, sensing that she is an outsider, calls attention to her presence. It is significant to note that it is not her cross-dressing that gives her away, but her trespassing. Nikita thus assumes multiple identities to grant her greater access to the phallocentric order—a source of empowerment—while resisting any assimilation of its norms.

To claim, then, as Hayward does, that "Nikita is annihilated" when appropriated by the State, or that we, as female spectators, are subject to violations of our identity, is to ignore her fluctuating identities from the get-go, and to then deny that she harbors the capacity to resist restrictive codes via her shifting gender roles. Instead, even if she masquerades as particular identities, she nonetheless becomes those identities; she is as much Marie or Joséphine as she is Nikita. Her role, like her American counterpart Maggie, "is perhaps most illustrative of [Judith] Butler's postmodernist claim that 'gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts'... [For Nikita] there is no original... all layers of identity are performed... there is no underlying natural state."[27] Nikita destabilizes the very nature of identity and demands a rethinking of what it means to resist—and reinvent— phallocentric gender codes. Her fluidity of identity ruptures the gender binary and provides an alternative way of being, not dependent on active or passive behaviors, appearances, or technological appropriations.

Furthermore, Nikita's flexible assumption of identities serves as a metaphor for spectatorial identification in the action cinema, and thereby opens pleasure in viewing to a greater range of identifications. Tasker elucidates, "The processes of shifting identifications within the action cinema involve the play of both 'passive' and 'active' identifications. The action scenario is not simply a narrative of empowerment, in which we identify with an heroic figure who triumphs over all obstacles, but is also a dramatization of the social limits of power."[28] Nikita provides a source of viewing pleasure for marginalized groups because she dramatizes those social limits of power and plays them out as a range of characters on a spectrum of active and passive associations. Furthermore, she opens a space for pleasure in viewing on the part of both female and male spectators in her function as both spectacle and subject. She holds an obvious scopophilic appeal in her specularization, but she signifies both lack and power, an acknowledgement of the lack and potential in all of us. That audiences have identified with action heroes of both genders in other films suggests "that viewer identification based on gender is a much more fluid practice than many critics are willing to accept."[29] Nikita, in her metamorphosing of identity, invites spectators to identify with her in multiple ways.

The End of Containment

The ending of the film presents the most troubling depiction of containment for most critics of Nikita. Instead of representing an escape, critics have argued that "Nikita's femininity is reestablished through her 'taming' and, ultimately, her rejection of violence."[30] Hayward argues that Nikita's transgression ultimately exceeds patriarchal tolerance, causing her to fail in her final mission. She rejects killing, erases herself from the narrative and avows her powerlessness, resulting in a misogynistic interpretation of the text. However, I believe this reading oversimplifies the tensions played out in Nikita. To state that Nikita is nothing more than Bob's construct, a female body engaged as male voyeur and killer, and that "Nikita the State-killer only looks to shoot, and she does it under State/male orders" is to underestimate the strength of Nikita's subjectivity in the text.[31] Clearly, Nikita is far from tamed and continues to defy State-imposed containment upon her as a youth and woman. Further, she leads a life outside of the State's control in which she agences an aggressive sexuality, played out in her forceful seduction of Marco. Here, Nikita possesses the active female gaze, with Marco as her erotic object/target. Her gaze and subjectivity exceed her role as pawn of the State/patriarchy.

More than that, the narrative fundamentally tells the story of a struggle for control: over one's identity, one's body, and one's mobility. Nikita's use of violence becomes a source of control on the part of the State. As Hayward puts it, it is "a sadistic outcome of containment of woman as violent."[32] Yet, in the final analysis, it is not violence that Nikita rejects as much as it is the controlling State—and patriarchal—apparatus. The Secret Police have used her skills and willingness to commit violence for its own ends, and she finally rejects its manipulation. In the opening of the film, she acts on her own volition, and her readiness to shoot, slap, punch and bite is immediate, but only after she becomes an agent of the State do we see hesitation. In her mission to Venice, we see clear dread when she gets the phone call for Joséphine, and in the following assassination, we view her struggle to maintain control, caught between Marco's demands to talk and her own mission to kill. Her reluctance represents not her rejection of violence, but her refusal to live a life under patriarchal auspices.

More palpably, Nikita's final operation results in a climactic struggle against State control, leading to her final act of resistance. In the operation, she is placed in charge, a chance to assert authority in an otherwise restrictive situation. Yet the operation goes horribly wrong. Although Hayward claims Nikita botches the mission as a statement against the female ability to handle a male technology, a more careful viewing shows that the State holds culpability. Partway through the operation, Nikita learns that the State failed to obtain a needed password, and to compensate, they're sending in a "cleaner" to liquidate the witnesses (namely, the art dealer Nikita has drugged). Nikita attempts to maintain control of the situation by suggesting an alternate plan, but the State overrides her. Once Victor, the cleaner, arrives, he proceeds to murder the dealer's bodyguards and gruesomely pour acid over the bodies, but he discovers too late that the dealer is still alive. Nikita again attempts to assert control, directing orders at Victor to abort the operation, but he threatens to kill her instead. Forced to complete the mission, Nikita disguises herself as the dealer and proceeds to steal the designated files from his safe, but a guard dog discovers her and in her fleeing from the building, she draws the attention of security. Victor, who had been waiting, sees the commotion and despite Nikita's pleas to proceed carefully, Victor launches a bloodbath. Nikita escapes, returns home for a short good-bye to Marco, and disappears.

The details of these scenes are significant to understanding the ending and its relationship to other aspects of the film. First, though the mission goes wrong, Nikita completes it; she leaves the documents with Marco, who hands them over to Bob. She succeeds, a clear source of spectator pleasure. Secondly, the absolute male defiance of Nikita's authority, and subsequent assertion of control by the State/male machinery, especially Victor, results in the botching of the mission. Indeed, Victor is punished for his failure to obey Nikita, resulting in his grisly death. Thus, Nikita's choice to leave at the end—and it is an assertion of agency—is a rejection of patriarchal control. Though the state employs violence as a means of asserting that control, fundamentally, her final statement is one of agency, not surrender.

In addition, Nikita's absence, as Hayward acknowledges, holds a profound power. She removes herself from the male gaze, and in doing so, removes herself as an object of male control and specularity. While Hayward views her absence as a banished non-image that denies the assertion of male power, and thereby signifies "her very unrepresentability within the workings of masculinist power," the power and resistance Nikita has asserted throughout the film leads to the possibility that Nikita has sought a more positive way of living.[33] She has denied the center as a site of oppression, and in the ultimate act of transgression, sought another social order better suited to a fuller, active female subjectivity. Indeed, Nikita's narrative trajectory represents a becoming, but it is a human becoming—she is in excess of any gender categories. While excess often signifies threat which engenders punishment, here, Nikita actively chooses to desert an ideological system that cannot contain her. We may not know what constitutes the alternative, but wherever she is, it's not here. In this sense, Nikita serves as a statement about the contemporary woman's ambivalent place in society, aware of her containment but harboring the power to resist. The conclusion, then, provides a more hopeful reading for women spectators.

Importantly to this reading of the ending, the patriarchal order with which we are left is not reaffirmed or even whitewashed. Instead, the film's dominant patriarchal symbol, Bob, is left shattered and wallowing in lack. Indeed, the message of the film suggests that a patriarchal order that demands containment of transgressive women also contains men in restrictive ways. Though Bob falls for his young disciple, he clearly sees in her the seeds for his own resistance. Bob, himself, is subject to the Law of the Father, in the form of an oppressive superior who threatens Bob's position should he fail in training Nikita. After Nikita's harrowing "test" in the restaurant, she returns to Bob, infuriated. In his only expression of anger, Bob explains that he was forced to challenge her, his frustration with the system apparent. Bob, though he may possess control, lacks agency. In the final scene, after Nikita's departure, he whispers, "elle va nous manquer," as if speaking for others who wish to escape. Marco, in an unusual display of male emotion, weeps privately at Nikita's departure. The social order, then, is not a happy place for men or women, further underscoring Nikita's absence as escape, not erasure. The film ultimately critiques the fictions of dominant ideology, suggesting that we all desire to be anywhere but here.

Concluding Nikita

The fact that Nikita has produced a plurality of readings, both positive and negative, suggests that the action heroine remains an ambiguous trope, particularly in French cinema. In a culture which celebrates femininity as glamorous, elegant, and often child-like, Nikita represents a significant confrontation to the norms. Though Besson certainly embraces an oppositional cinema in his films, part of the reason behind Nikita's differing reception in France (by both critics and audiences) may stem from the difficulty in dealing with an American form in a conspicuously Americanized film. The emphasis on spectacle and image, rather than substance and narrative, drew the criticism that Besson had sold out to Hollywood and undermined the distinctive French cinematic tradition. As such, notes Lucy Mazdon, "it undermined the différence so central to the maintenance of a national cinema."[34] If an understanding of our gender identity depends upon sexual difference and the way in which the "other" is reflected back to us, and if cross-dressing poses a threat, then Nikita as a French film in Hollywood's clothing posed a threat to French national identity at a time when anxieties about the U.S.'s cultural encroachment already ran high. And if the female body serves at some level as an emblem of national identity, then the tensions in understanding Nikita's significance reflect a nation's struggle to understand itself at a shifting historical moment.

Thus, while Nikita provides a space for a radical and positive reading of implications for active women in contemporary French society, such an analysis is certainly subject to cross-cultural interpretations. While my investigation of gender issues in Nikita is by no means exhaustive, nor does it account for a number of problematic issues raised in the film, I hope that it unlocks possibilities for empowered and pleasurable identifications with an action heroine, both as spectacle and agent, particularly in contemporary French cinema.

Addendum: Synopsis of Luc Besson's Nikita (1990)

Nikita tells the story of a drug-addicted teenage street punk whose botched attempt to raid a pharmacy and apathetic shooting of a cop lands her in the hands of the police. After several violent outbursts following her trial, Nikita (Anne Parillaud) is administered what she believes to be a lethal injection, only to wake up in the ivory cell of a French Secret Police institution. There, under the supervision of Bob (Tcheky Karyo), she is informed that her death has been officially faked by the government, and she is offered the chance at freedom in exchange for serving as a State agent—specifically, as an assassin. She struggles against her training until she is given an ultimatum: cooperate or die. As she begins to collaborate, the androgynous Nikita is transformed into a "woman," taught the ways of femininity by the elegant Amande (Jeanne Moreau), alongside crucial training in gunplay, martial arts, and computer and surveillance technology. During her training, it becomes clear that Bob has fallen for her, and she for Bob, yet they both acknowledge that nothing can come of it. Three years later, Nikita emerges, and Bob invites her to a congratulatory dinner "outside." At the restaurant, Bob offers a gift, but the gift is one of betrayal: the package reveals a gun which she is to use to assassinate two other guests at the restaurant. Nikita discovers further State duplicity when she finds her escape route blocked, and she must fight her way to freedom. She succeeds, and with her mission accomplished, she is allowed to re-enter the real world. Bob gives her a new identity as Marie, along with the code name Joséphine (used solely for State missions), and she sets out to start a new life, all the while on-call for State jobs. She meets, seduces, and falls for Marco (Jean-Hugues Anglade), who becomes her fiancé, while struggles to conceal her identity as an assassin. She nervously, but successfully, carries out several jobs, assuming new identities for each, until she is offered an operation of her own. She is to steal secret documents from an East European embassy and return them to the State. The operation goes horribly awry, resulting in the State's decision to call in Victor nettoyeur (Jean Reno), a "cleaner" who will "liquidate" any unwanted witnesses and remove all traces of the botched operation. Even the cleaning goes badly, resulting in widespread bloodshed and Nikita's near-breakdown. She ultimately carries out the mission at the expense of Victor's life, but unable to tolerate her situation any longer, she returns home to furtive bid good-bye to Marco and disappears. In the final scene, Bob meets with Marco, believing Nikita stills holds the documents in her possession. Marco hands over the documents Nikita left in his care, finalizing her departure, and Bob says, "Elle va nous manquer."

[1] Lucy Mazdon, Encore Hollywood: Remaking French Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 2000), 108.

[2] Susan Hayward, Luc Besson (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1998), 40-41.

[7] Susan Hayward, French National Cinema (New York: Routledge, 1993), 293.

[8] Yvonne Tasker, Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre, and the Action Cinema (London and New York: Routledge, 1993).

[9] Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Visual and Other Pleasure (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 14-26.

[11] Jeffrey A. Brown, "Gender and the Action Heroine: Hardbodies and the Point of No Return," Cinema Journal 35, No. 3 (Spring 1996): 68 (my emphasis).

[13] Brown, "Gender and the Action Heroine: Hardbodies and the Point of No Return," 56.

[15] Carol Clover as paraphrased by Brown, "Gender and the Action Heroine: Hardbodies and the Point of No Return," 58.

[16] Carol Clover, Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1992), 51.

[17] Brown, "Gender and the Action Heroine: Hardbodies and the Point of No Return," 59.

[19] Elizabeth Hills, "From 'Figurative Males' to Action Heroines: Further Thoughts on Active Women in the Cinema," Screen 40:1 (Spring 1999), 39.

[21] Brown, "Gender and the Action Heroine: Hardbodies and the Point of No Return," 65.

[22] Martha McCaughey and Neal King, REEL Knockouts: Violent Women in the Movies (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), 17.

[25] Brown, "Gender and the Action Heroine: Hardbodies and the Point of No Return," 64.

[26] On another level, Nikita resists the particularly French ideal of femininity embodied in Brigitte Bardot or Catherine Deneuve. While in other Cinderella or Pygmalion inspired stories (including the American remake of Nikita, Point of No Return), the protagonist evolves from brunette to blond in her transformation. Instead, Nikita maintains a short dark bob, recalling Louise Brooks, herself an American import. Considering the action heroine as a trope drawn from American cinema, Nikita's appearance smacks of Americanness, itself a subtle resistance to the dominant (French) cultural order.

[29] Brown, "Gender and the Action Heroine: Hardbodies and the Point of No Return," 69.

[30] Laura Grindstaff, "A Pygmalion Tale Retold: Remaking La Femme Nikita," Camera Obscura Volume 16 Number 47 (August 2001): 170.