A Girl and a Gun

Filmmaker Jean Luc Godard famously declared that, to do his job, all he needed was "a girl and a gun." On his hunt for a Vice President, John McCain apparently came to the same conclusion. So now we have Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska, a sprawling state with a tiny population*, a genuine wilderness woman who kills wild beasts, takes on the establishment, and raises a brood with her fisherman husband.

Godard, no doubt, would've been thrilled with the choice, or at least the dramatic possibilities it offers. The arousal sparked by combining women and violence has driven cinema for decades; now it's driving politics.

Of course, Palin is no woman in peril; she's not tied to the train tracks, not held captive in the villain's lair. (That's for aspiring First Ladies.) Instead, she's here to save the day. Her character will be instantly familiar to anyone who spends much time at the movies; she's the motherly Action Gal: tough but sensitive, put-upon but hyper competent, frustrated by the indecision and inability above her, here to clean up the mess the boys couldn't handle. (As Elastigirl said, "Girls, come on. Leave the saving of the world to the men? I don't think so!")

It's a specifically feminine variation on the action hero, which, like her political persona, is constructed out of the trappings of contemporary womanhood. Certainly, it was all there in her announcement speech last week in Dayton, Ohio, which could be summed up in five words: Mother. Reformer. Fighter. Partisan. Woman.

Palin does it all, and does it with a zippy, frontier pluck. When she first stepped on stage, I half expected her to pull a bloody survival knife from her skirt. Did I mention she's a former beauty queen, too? She's both Tarzan and Jane.

Still, per Godard, guns are the weapons that dominate her persona — specifically, those wielded by two conservative archetypes: the hunter and the soldier. She shoots assault rifles with troops in Iraq (ready to defend!) and poses for pictures on a couch decorated with a gargantuan bear skin, head still intact (ready to provide!). The backdrop signals both her affinity for the firearms set and her country roots. It's also a not-so-subtle threat to her political opponents: This could be you.

That's hardly unexpected from a woman who willingly compares herself to a pit bull (albeit one who wears lipstick) and sharply mocks her opponents for their narcissism. Listening to Barack Obama speak, she says, "It's easy to forget that this is a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or reform." We already know she's comfortable behind the trigger of a rifle. Turns out she can fire zingers too.

So she's feisty, she's sassy, and she can deliver a put-down. And of course, the people — or at least her people, the pro-gun, pro-family, pro-life, rural evangelicals who are such an integral part of the Republican party's base — love her for it. In less than a week, she displaced Chuck Norris as the American right's favorite kitschy action star, complete with her own page of over-the-top "facts." She hunts! She snarks! She shoots! And, at least with America's conservatives, she scores. "A girl and a gun," it turns out, is as effective a formula in politics as at the movies.

Still, it may have been Godard's maxim that informed John McCain's decision-making process, but it was another filmmaker who built the best model for Palin's public persona. That would be James Cameron, director of Aliens and the first two Terminator films, cinema's reigning master of the macho-mom.
 

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