Thursday, January 10, 2008

So far in our movie watching we have not dealt with the dynamic of gender between cops. All we have seen is male, male partners who work in male dominated offices. This is not the case of The Long Kiss Goodnight. Charly Baltimore is an assassin working for the United States government, but she forgets who she is because she developed amnesia while attacking a target. Mitch Henessey becomes her stereotypical sidekick while helping her figure out who she use to be. When the government realizes that she is alive they are trying to kill her because of the secret information she knows.

Charly remembers who she is and becomes determined to fight off these people. This is when the idea of gender becomes a very important part of the film. Charly is the only woman we see in the movie, yet she seems to have no problem taking on hundreds of men who are trying to kill her. Since she is a woman there are some twists to the plot that we would not see in an all male cop movie. For example there is some tension between Charly and Mitch. When she wants to forget about her old family she tries to hook up with Mitch. He has to tell her no because he knows that she really does care about them. We also know that she has sex with the villain because they have a daughter together that he never knew about. When there is a sexual tension between cops and their partners or the villains it brings a new plot twist that you do not get when cops only work with men. There were definite buddy cop ideas that were in the movie, but the most important part of Charly’s relationships had to do with the fact that she was a woman.

1 Comments:

Blogger Syd said...

I agree with you that the buddy cop relationship between a guy and a girl totally changes the premise of a buddy cop film because the issue of sexual tension gets added into the equation. Mitch was the sidekick, while unlike the other cop movie we have seen the black cop always played the lead role and the white guy was the sidekick. In this movie the hero was not only white but a movie.
Also after discussing in class the importance of choosing the right names for the character that the name for griffiths character from samantha to charly allowed her character to seem macho when paired up against Mitch as her side kick. In fact even though she is a woman I felt that she was more intimidating then Mitch

7:58 PM  

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