Stories about law enforcement have all the prime ingredients for first-rate entertainment. You have drama. Life and death. Suspense and intrigue. And the ever-present and ever-fascinating battle between good and evil. But for far too long, what has been largely missing from police stories have been the female law enforcement officers themselves. Indeed, in film and television alike, when women in law enforcement are central characters, they all too often reinscribe traditional gender stereotypes or hew to familiar narrative constructs.
Man’s Little Helper
When women police officers are depicted in film and television, their storylines often are relatively tangential to that of male officers. In many cases, such as the 1999 Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie vehicle, The Bone Collector, the young, beautiful rookie becomes the instrument that allows and enables the grizzled but wise veteran to continue his work. In the case of The Bone Collector, the young recruit literally becomes the body for her superior who has been rendered a quadriplegic following a run-in with a serial killer whom he had been tracking. But he remains, nevertheless, the brains behind the operation and the authority through which it works.
A Game of Wits
The Bone Collector certainly reinscribes standard binaries in which the female character’s identity principally derives from her body, her physicality, while the man’s derives from his intellect, his capacity for reason and strategy. Another important cinematic representation of women in law enforcement, though, complicates and unsettles that problematic binary. The 1991 multi-Academy Award-winning The Silence of the Lambs pits young FBI special agent, Clarice Starling, against notorious cannibalistic killer, Hannibal Lecter, in the race to save lives. Much like Jolie’s character in The Bone Collector, Starling is a neophyte, untested and unsure. But where Washington’s character co-ops Jolie’s for his own purposes, the relationship between Starling and Lecter is more fraught, conflicted, and ambiguous.
Representatives from opposite sides of the law, Starling must remain ever wary of her unlikely partner and must deploy her own intellectual and emotional reserves strategically to secure what she needs from this diabolical, and often diabolically, charming killer. One of the aspects that lends the film its power, of course, is the deep psychological balance that infuses the narrative. Dr. Lecter is a master of human psychology, by training, profession, and nature. It is, indeed, what has given him such infamous success in his homicidal trade. But Starling is, herself, no neophyte in this arena. And a pivotal subplot, from which the film derives its name, is the traumatic backstory that brings Starling to her career with the FBI. The compulsion to save lives, as intense as Lecter’s compulsion to take them, derives from young Clarice’s childhood.
In this way, the Clarice character speaks to a pivotal reality of the law enforcement life: It is not a career, but a calling. When you are drawn to a career in law enforcement, you are undertaking a career that aligns with your beliefs. For a time, in the manipulative hands of Dr. Lecter, this proved to be a source of vulnerability for Clarice. Ultimately, however, it also proved to be her most significant strength.
The Heart of the Community
Another important film representing women in law enforcement received relatively little fanfare upon its box office release and in the decades since has faded into relative obscurity. So much the pity, as 1989’s Blue Steel is more than just an underrated police thriller starring Jamie Lee Curtis, but it also marks one of the first and best films from director Kathryn Bigelow. The narrative is deceptively simple: a rookie cop thwarts a crime in progress, only to lose track of her weapon. This weapon falls into the hands of an unsuspected sociopath, who, after a life free of crime, unleashes his inner demons and embarks on a crime spree with the misbegotten gun that has just fallen into his hands.
The film traces the young cop’s desperate efforts to atone for her rookie mistake, to track the gun and stop the killer, to protect the community she loves and the citizens for whom she would risk her life. In the end, the edgy thriller morphs into a meditation on redemption, leadership, and heroism. Curtis’ character is an unlikely leader and an even less likely hero, yet she puts her hair up, she dons the badge, and she gets down to the dirty work of serving her community, even if and when it sometimes means making mistakes and paying the price. In many ways, this can be seen to presage America’s modern communities, where the face of leadership is changing and more women and minorities than ever before are assuming the responsibility for keeping our neighborhoods, and our citizens, safe and prosperous.
The Takeaway
Women are a profoundly important presence in the law enforcement community nationwide. And yet representations of women in law enforcement on film have rarely reflected that reality sufficiently or well. All too often, cinematic representations of women in law enforcement reinscribe traditional gender tropes and hierarchies. However, some films do get it right, depicting female law enforcement as tough, smart, strong, independent, and moral leaders and community heroes.