Cinematic Fairy Tales of Female Mobility in Post-Wall Europe PDF

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C H A PT E R 7 Cinematic Fairy Tales of Female Mobility in Post-wall Europe: Hanna v. Mona Agata Skrodzka (Clemson University) In the ensuing narrative I bring together Szabolcs Hajdu’s Bibliothèque Pascal (2010, Hungary/Germany/UK/Romania) and Joe Wright’s Hanna (2011, UK/Germany/USA), two recent E...

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C H A PT E R 7

Cinematic Fairy Tales of Female Mobility in Post-wall Europe: Hanna v. Mona Agata Skrodzka (Clemson University)

In the ensuing narrative I bring together Szabolcs Hajdu’s Bibliothèque Pascal (2010, Hungary/Germany/UK/Romania) and Joe Wright’s Hanna (2011, UK/Germany/USA), two recent European ilms, directed by a Hungarian and a British director respectively, that foreground the act of female mobility and the perceived feminisation of European (and global) migration in divergent, yet complementary, ways. The pairing of these two cinematic texts is motivated by their strategic use of fantasy as both a narrative trope and a coping mechanism for their female protagonists. This fantastic element, I argue, points to the continued unease with regard to female mobility, as such, and the complications that arise in the process of representing that mobility. While both ilms employ elements of the fantastic (Wright’s ilm incorporates the Brothers Grimm fairy tale ‘Snow White’, and Hajdu’s ilm engages magic realism as a storytelling strategy), and unabashedly engage in romanticising and exoticising their protagonists, when considered together, they provide an accurate and quite realistic depiction of the bifurcated nature of transnational mobility in the unifying Europe. In telling ways, both ilms racialise the female on the move and frame her within the economy of loss. By doing so, the ilms perform what Ewa Mazierska and Laura Rascaroli deine in their seminal study of the European road movie as the ‘traditional pejorative link between femininity and mobility’ (2006: 186). Ultimately, my analysis showcases how the pre-Wall divisions between the First and the Second Worlds and the historical inheritance of Nazism and Communism seem to linger on in the New Europe, determining the possibilities and potentialities of women on the move. These new inlections of the old divisions put in question the grand idea of the post-war European community as one that had been successfully reconstituted strictly in opposition to the violence precipitated by the Marxist and Fascist ideologies. In his 1998 book Globalization: the Human Consequences, Zygmunt Bauman diagnoses the disconcerting bifurcation in the modes of global

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mobility when he identiies the split between those who travel today as ‘tourists’, and whose experience of mobility is desirable, and those who move with the stigma of being forever a ‘vagabond’, who move ‘because they have no other bearable choice’ (93). As with any binary pair, Bauman explains, the two depend on each other: ‘There are no tourists without the vagabonds, and the tourists cannot be left free without tying down the vagabonds.’ There is an economy to this relationship, and this economy resembles the many exploitative contracts that characterise the labour relations in the late capitalist economy. Arguably, Hajdu’s and Wright’s ilms, when viewed side by side, replicate the relationship and bring into focus the incommensurability of the European ‘tourist’ and the ‘vagabond’. It is then no surprise that the independent Hungarian ilm tells the story of the ‘vagabond’, Bauman’s metaphor for the migrant subject, and the extravagant British-German action thriller showcases the story of the ‘tourist’, a igure that stands in for the member of the exterritorial, supranational corporate elites. Hajdu’s vagabond is Mona Paparu (Orsolya Törö-Illyés), a single mother living in Romania, whose very unspectacular journey takes her across Europe to Liverpool where she ends up working as a prostitute in an upmarket brothel. Wright’s embodiment of the European tourist turns out to be Hanna Heller (Saoirse Ronan), a German adolescent girl who has been trained to be an assassin, and whose assigned expedition is a dazzling and frenetic replay of the empowering mobility of Tom Tykwer’s Lola in Run Lola Run (1998, Germany). Mona and Hanna never cross paths; diegetic worlds apart, they obviously cannot meet. Their generic diference, one being a protagonist in a whimsical magic realist tale about the ‘mundane problems of making ends meet’ (Bori 2010: 166), the other a heroine in a thriller that boasts a ‘command of the visual poetry of action’ (Ebert 2011), speaks of an actual socio-economic diference that keeps the real-life Monas and Hannas, the First and the Second World, apart in contemporary trans-European voyages. The two characters are the polar opposites in how they experience the celebrated freedom of movement (of labour, capital, resources, etc.) that is the hallmark value of the European uniication project. The two women traverse the same roads and cross the same ‘open’ borders within Europe, yet they do not meet, because, as Bauman would argue, the late capitalist ‘tourists’ and ‘vagabonds’ never meet in Fortress Europe. They might occupy the same spaces, often in very intimate proximity, yet their economic and political status ensures their symbolic distance. When comparing the cinematographic treatment of space in the two ilms, that symbolic distance becomes evident. Hanna’s Europe is constructed through numerous long shots of open vistas, often presented in their natural light. As she darts and leaps through a

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variety of diferent landscapes, the space seems to shrink concentrically around Hanna, who dominates it. Mona’s Europe, especially once she embarks on her westward journey, is shot in cropped shots at night. Claustrophobically, her space closes in on her. Obstructions proliferate and contain her movement. So what do Hanna and Mona tell us about the journeys undertaken by women in the post-Wall Europe? The answer is complex because both ilms engage the fantastic and simultaneously avoid, though to a diferent degree, the critical approach employed by transnational cinema that typically frames issues of female mobility within the narrative conventions of the ‘social problem’ ilm such as Pawel Pawlikowski’s Last Resort (2000, UK), Ulrich Seidl’s Import/Export (2007, Austria/France/Germany), or the Dardenne brothers’ Le silence de Lorna/Lorna’s Silence (2008, Belgium/France/Italy/Germany). One way to decode the politics of the two texts is by bringing into focus the treatment of the mobile female body ofered by the two ilm-makers and the way in which that body is discursively racialised.

White Power as Girl Power in Hanna In a less than subtle way, Wright’s ilm uses a forced, faux-feminist agenda to revive the myth of the white European, promoting a veiled message of white supremacy, and therefore it resonates with (perhaps contributes to) the rising popularity of the white power and neo-Nazi discourses in Europe (evidenced by the institutionalisation of the far-right parties in European party politics), a surge in hate crimes (such as the 2011 massacre in Norway perpetrated by the neo-Nazi extremist Anders Breivik), the prevalent negative sentiments directed against asylum seekers and the widespread populist critiques of any comprehensive pro-immigration policy. Relying on a dubious intertext that combines the Brothers Grimm fairy tale ‘Snow White’, the Cold War spy stories, and the history of governmentally sanctioned experiments on humans, the ilm constructs an image of white agency that is as blatantly retrograde as it is politically correct because it takes the form of a frail adolescent girl who wraps her enemies around her inger. In a gesture reminiscent of classic blaxploitation cinema, where the spectacularised black female is endowed with agency that stands for Black Power as in the ighting heroines in Jack Starrett’s Cleopatra Jones (1973) and Jack Hill’s Cofy (1973) and Foxy Brown (1974). Wright’s ilm uses a spectacularised white female to speak of White Power. In contrast to the blaxploitation genre where femininity is endowed, mature and fertile, here the White Power materialises

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as atrophied femininity. The ilm takes the sixteen-year-old Hanna – a German by birth and an Über-human by experiment – on a journey across continents and national borders, where soulful ethnic subjects provide foil for this ideal of a New European citizen, aptly described by Ginette Verstraete as ‘someone with a thin connection to any single place – a rootless, lexible, highly educated and well-travelled cosmopolitan, capable of maintaining long-distance and virtual relations without looking to the nation-state for protection’ (2010: 8). Hanna’s whiteness is championed through her innocent (defeminised) and intensely mobile body. On the other hand, the ilm makes it evident that Hanna’s supreme agency is due to her genetically induced preference for primal and animalistic behaviour which the ilm inadvertently links back to femininity. Arguably, the ilm champions white agency as a privilege of the European female while exorcising all femininity from the female body. Luminescent, at times almost translucent, weightless, speaking languages of many cultures, yet belonging to none, Hanna is the white European whose palatable and politically acceptable whiteness displaces the brown body on route to the European marketplace. Hanna is not a ilm about traicking or sex slavery though it is a ilm about a clandestine transnational voyage and exploitation of the female body. Much like any of the numerous recent ilms about traicking of the Eastern European lesh for the purposes of sex industry, this ilm frames whiteness as highly fetishised/reiied category linked speciically to the female body. Hanna’s ilm-maker, Joe Wright, is a British director who is known for his very popular contributions to the ongoing British heritage cinema trend. His very stylised adaptations of literary classics have quickly become a sought-after commercial product. Wright directed Pride & Prejudice in 2005, Atonement in 2007, and Anna Karenina in 2012. Hanna is not a heritage ilm per se (unless one considers the Grimms’ fairy tale to be its heritage source text), it is an action ilm. Yet, it is important for my analysis of Hanna to note that its ilm-maker enthusiastically partakes in peddling heritage nostalgia that gloriies life under the imperial rule and frames European history well within the heroic paradigm. Set in contemporary post-Wall Europe, Hanna tells the story of Hanna Heller, a sixteen-year-old German girl, who lives in the remote Arctic wilderness (Finland to be speciic) with her father Eric Heller (Eric Bana), an former CIA Cold War operative who went into hiding to keep a secret which the CIA would not want him to disclose. The secret has much to do with who Hanna is: a super soldier, whose DNA make-up has been engineered in a highly classiied programme that recruited pregnant women from abortion clinics across East Central Europe to produce a

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cohort of superior ighters by altering their genetic proiles. Eric Heller was directly involved in managing the programme at the facility based in rural Poland. Eventually the programme was terminated and all involved liquidated with it, with the exception of Eric and Hanna. Out of sympathy for newborn Hanna and her mother Johanna Zadek, Eric tries to save the woman and her child. Their escape is not wholly successful: the mother Johanna is shot dead by Marissa Wiegler (Cate Blanchett), another CIA agent who becomes Hanna’s nemesis later in the ilm. Eric does save the child and himself and decides to go into hiding and raise the girl to be the super-assassin that she was born and engineered to be. In the harsh Arctic conditions, he trains Hanna in the art of combat and survival. Away from civilisation, Hanna grows up not knowing what music sounds like or what art feels like (as we ind out, her emotions have been suppressed to enhance her combat skills). Eric teaches her a number of languages and forces her to memorise endless encyclopedic facts about nature, culture, geography and the history of the world. Hanna’s education is designed to turn her into a worldly person, a global citizen, who can conceive of her identity outside of any national belonging (or any community, for that matter). The father’s education prepares the girl to exist in a world without technology or where technology became defunct. The physical drills that Hanna practises with stolid determination are meant to harness her full bio-engineered potential. After long days of rehearsing the elaborate survivalist protocol, we see Eric read Brothers Grimm fairy tales to Hanna as the only tender exchange between father and daughter. Knowing that Hanna will one day want to come out of hiding, and when that happens she will once again become a target for the CIA, Eric ensures that Hanna is ready for confrontation with Marissa Wiegler. When Hanna makes her decision to leave, Eric activates an old radio transmitter which immediately alerts Wiegler to the Hellers’ location. A bizarre deus ex machina detail, the transmitter seems to exist solely to facilitate a single action in the ilm, that of bringing Marissa and Hanna together, in what becomes a race to kill. The remaining two-thirds of the ilm stage this spectacular race as a thrilling adventure in extreme globetrotting. Frequent narrative and visual cues posit the confrontation between Marissa and Hanna as that of the evil stepmother and the Snow White from the Grimms’ fairy tale, therefore marking the race as a female competition to win the title of ‘the fairest of them all’. While some viewers might not immediately see Hanna as the Snow White, most viewers cannot help but see her as very white. Aesthetically, the ilm emphasises Hanna’s whiteness in ways that cannot be overlooked. Unlike Richard Dyer’s concept of invisible whiteness (Dyer 1988), Wright’s staging of whiteness is pronounced and

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Figure 7.1 Saoirse Ronan in Hanna.

carefully revealed. Played by the Irish American actress, Saoirse Ronan, Hanna embodies the white Aryan ideal. For this role, Ronan’s hair and eyebrows were bleached and she is frequently photographed in the luminescent style of the classic Hollywood period, when the use of intensely lit, radiant close-up of the female star’s face punctuated the narrative with an image of glamorised whiteness. Famously, in his 1946 ilm Gilda (USA), Charles Vidor photographs Rita Hayworth in the luminescent manner described above, in the midst of the modernist, all-white interior which mimics and reinforces Hayworth’s carefully constructed ‘white goddess’ demeanour. At this point of her career, Hayworth, formerly Margarita Carmen Cansino, had her Latina appearance rid of its ethnic characteristics through extensive bleaching and years of electrolysis (McLean, 43). In Hanna, the classic Hollywood set is replaced by the equally glamorised natural environment shot on location in the Finnish region of Kuusamo, one of the most snow-secure places in Europe. Here Hanna’s staged whiteness is paired with the natural whiteness of the Arctic landscape, therefore framing whiteness as a natural attribute, a biological fact rather than a constructed category. Apart from race, the location hints at the new global North/South divide that has replaced the East/West geometry of the Cold War. The ilm opens with a lengthy scene of Hanna stalking and hunting a caribou in the pristine, snowy landscape of the European North, which provides the Aryan-looking hunter with a perfect cover. At one with her environment, Hanna moves gracefully and quietly. She attempts to kill the animal with an arrow but, having missed the heart, she has to shoot it down with a pistol. She proceeds to disembowel her prey. The bloody guts, in a grotesque vignette, spill over the immaculate environment,

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punctuating the spectacle of whiteness with a splash of dramatic colour, therefore making the viewer suddenly conscious of the colour white – the previously undetected, yet expansive aspect of the scene. I ind these opening images of white on white to be illustrative of what Sarah Ahmed calls the ‘phenomenology of whiteness’. Ahmed engages Husserl’s philosophy to show whiteness as ‘a way of exploring how whiteness is “real”, material and lived’ (Ahmed, 150). She argues that, although whiteness as race is obviously not a biological fact, it does, however, exist as a ‘background to experience’ (Ahmed, 150). In certain spaces, under certain circumstances, white bodies dominate their surroundings and make them white. In those situations the bodies and the surroundings gravitate towards each other, forming a kind of unison, with shared attributes, a likeness, making those who are not white immediately diferent and deviant. Ahmed explains that when white bodies become ‘habitual’ in certain surroundings, then whiteness becomes that which ‘lags behind’, unnoticed: ‘When bodies “lag behind”, then they extend their reach’ (Ahmed, 156). The white bodies low beyond their physical limits within the space, taking up more space. Ahmed describes this as a ‘sinking’ feeling, linked to comfort: Comfort is about an encounter between more than one body, which is the promise of a ‘sinking’ feeling. To be comfortable is to be so at ease with one’s environment that it is hard to distinguish where one’s body ends and the world begins . . . White bodies are comfortable as they inhabit spaces that extend their shape . . . In other words, whiteness may function as a form of public comfort by allowing bodies to extend into spaces that have already taken their shape (158, author’s emphasis).

Ahmed is talking about institutional space and how that space is white, as it functions for whites, existing in a symbiotic relationship with the bodies that occupy it, but I ind her theory useful in my attempt to understand the racial dynamics in Hanna where natural space, the Arctic wilderness – here also shorthand for the global North – becomes coded as white and for whites. The opening scene of the ilm, in no uncertain terms, visualises what Ahmed argues is a uniquely white privilege of being, in her words, ‘so comfortable and so ininitely at ease with one’s environment that it is hard to distinguish where one’s body ends and the world begins’. In a sense, then, that irst scene of Wright’s ilm champions whiteness as an attribute of the natural world. The ilm suggests that, before any human, civilising manipulations ever take place, the world is white. This message becomes clear when we consider the fact that Hanna is presented in contrast to technology which, in the ilm, is an attribute and the realm of the ethnic other. At one point the action of the ilm takes us to Morocco

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where Hanna for the irst time in her life witnesses television and electricity. These encounters are depicted as exciting to Hanna on some level but mostly disturbing and painful to her uncontaminated cognitive interfaces. By framing the ethnic other as the technological threat to the white subject, the ilm echoes some the paranoid theories that circulate in the nativist circles of the European far-right political organisations. It would be too simple, however, to dismiss Hanna as one toxic, racist anachronism. Both the ilm and the character become more complex when the narrative divulges Hanna’s peculiar genesis, her birth as a bioengineered human. The CIA programme that Hanna’s mother – who was looking to abort her pregnancy – is a part of, ...