Object #80 - Metal Wire - Coffy (1973)

Dir. Jack Hill

Having empowered women as lead action heroes is currently a hot-topic within film discourse. With the release of Captain Marvel, and her continuing role in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it doesn't seem like the conversation surrounding her will go away, but will rather develop over time with her character. If you trawl forums and social media, how the character of Carol Danvers is discussed holds a wealth of opinion, subtext, and dog-whistles. 

One of the most interesting topics to come out of the film has been the discussion surrounding the character arc of Carol Danvers. Her arc within the film has her hold extreme power, but due to memory loss and gaslighting by her male controller, she is unaware of the extent of the power, and is taught to restrain what little she believes she has. When spelt out in words the message of the film is obvious, but most specifically, the way in which this is a character arc rooted in the perspective of women in a patriarchal world has brought much discussion. Some fans, usually male, find it difficult to relate to such an arc, perhaps being used to more male-centric arcs where power is steadily gained, lost, re-gained, etc., until an eventual apotheosis of power near the end of the film/arc. In Danvers' case, her unlocking of her own power is tied to the notion of operating on her own terms, no longer pulling her punches unnecessarily, nor being restrained in development by weaker men.

Turn then, to Jack Hill's Coffy. Coffy's (Pam Grier) arc is revenge, plain and simple. Her younger sister has become addicted to heroin, and Coffy in retaliation will hunt down the drug pushers responsible. From the off, Coffy uses her femininity as an advantage, turning the specific weaknesses of men to her gain. She acts as a strung-out prostitute, desperate for a fix from Sugarman (Morris Buchanan), who'll happily take advantage of her for his own sexual gain. She is offered like a piece of meat in the back of a car, but upon returning to Sugarman's apartment Coffy allows him no pleasure, blowing his head off with a shotgun in one of the most startlingly satisfying effects in Blaxploitation history. 

This opener sets the tone for the rest of the film, as Coffy infiltrates the organisations of pimps, drug dealers, and the mob. In your traditional male-centric, Charles Bronson-y crime film, the male lead would infiltrate by busting into the corrupt locale - shooting up the place, interrogating the boss, maybe saving a prostitute along the way. But in Coffy, the beauty and femininity of the lead character is used to her gain. For example, to infiltrate pimp King George's (Robert DoQui) operation, Coffy poses an an exotic Jamaican, seductively dressing in a bikini, visually using her beauty to attract the men of this seedy world. 

However, as we saw in the opening, Coffy does not shy away from more traditional action-hero methods. When interrogating a drug-using associate of King George (Lisa Farringer) for information on the type of women he likes, she uses force, and shows no pity for her drug use. This is interesting considering that the instigator for Coffy's vengeance was her younger sister getting hooked on heroin. Clearly Coffy has no sympathy for drug-users, instead going straight to the source, and removing the suppliers. 

Similarly, she is aggressive in the face of competition from the other prostitutes. During a cat-fight which breaks out at one of King George's parties, knowing that mob boss Arturo Vitroni (Allan Arbus) is watching, Coffy wins out, and uses aggressive tactics to her advantage. Coffy pulls down the dresses of the women she fights, almost using their femininity as sources of embarrassment. She meanwhile has prepared for any such conflict by hiding razor blades in her afro, which comes in handy as one of the women grabs her by the hair, which results in her screaming and bleeding. Coffy establishes her resourcefulness and strength as attractive qualities to Vitroni. Incidentally, Pam Grier has mentioned in interviews that putting razor blades in afros was an actual tactic of defence used by hood women, a characteristic she co-opted for the film. In this respect, Coffy stands specifically as not only a symbol of a strong female action hero, but also as one rooted in African American culture. She has triumphed in a world which discriminates against her doubly.  

This extends to the object of this post, the metal wire she hides in her afro, and which she uses to retaliate against her would be killer and rapist, a henchman of Vitroni, Omar (Sid Haig). Coffy has been cast aside by Vitroni, believed to be a spy and assassin of King George, who himself has been brutally lynched by Vitroni's henchmen. There is no question that Coffy is in danger, as she is in the car of a corrupt cop, who drives her and the henchmen to an underpass for her to be killed. However, Coffy pretends to be in need of a fix and a man, which Omar gladly responds to. They inject her with drugs to make her more complaint, as Omar lays her down in the dirty trash. 

However, Coffy, resourceful as ever, swapped out the drug with harmless sugar earlier in the film, faking her high the entire time. As Omar pulls his trousers down, Coffy reaches into her afro, pulls out a pointed metal wire, and repeatedly stabs Omar in the neck. As she does so, Roy Ayers' soundtrack begins the track Escape, a song which ticks along with suspense, and a sense of purpose. Omar bleeds-out, calling for help from his associates who ignore him and chase after Coffy. The strong henchman has been left to die by a resourceful woman, who uses planning, her female sexuality, and her very African American culture to her advantage. Now that's a hero!

The film doubles down by having Coffy escape, off Vitroni, and in a coup-de-grace kill the corrupt cop Brunswick (Booker Bradshaw), her former boyfriend. In a brilliant move, Coffy finds Brunswick, who at this point has left her for dead, in bed with a white woman. As soon as Coffy sees this woman, she unloads her shotgun into Brunswick's groin, killing him for good, and removing his manhood along the way. He was corrupt through and through, cheating on his own police career, cheating on her, and even cheating on her with a white woman. It's a crowd-pleasing moment for anyone who sympathises with the plight of African American women, and the films ends with Coffy walking along the beach, her righteous campaign concluded.  

Coffy is a Blaxploitation film unusual for its time, by having the drug pushers be the bad guys, not the good. But why it succeeds as a hallmark of the genre, and certainly as a hallmark of action and crime cinema, is by leaning into the femininity of the lead character. Captain Marvel does the same, but is somewhat constrained by its own genre and age rating to really dive into the ways in which women are treated. Coffy on the other hand twists the genre of Blaxploitation, offering an anti-drug message from an empowered, vengeful black woman. Coffy thrives in her seedy, patriarchal world by leaning into the way women are viewed as lesser, purely sexual beings. 

It's unfortunate that lead action roles for women do not lean into the femininity of their lead characters more often, as we see the positive result in Coffy, a film released 46 years prior to Captain Marvel. The conversation around lead female action heroes, if anything, seems to have regressed, and one wonders how some male fans would react to more overt delves into the femininity of film leads. If anything, as positive a collaborator Jack Hill was with his female leads, I think the answer might lie in more female directors and screenwriters, who can imbue their leads with a different approach. Regardless, 46 years on, Coffy stands as a terrific example of Blaxploitation, action cinema, and the refreshing power of a female action-hero lead.    

Object #79 - Trophies - Paris is Burning (1990)

Dir. Jennie Livingston 

"I went to a ball, I got a trophy, and now everybody wants to know me."

What is the purpose of a category? To differentiate one thing from another; to recognise similar things; to know a thing? Does a thing have to be categorised, or can it simply be?

In the balls of Paris is Burning, the contestants compete in contests of dressing in drag. Categories include 'Luscious Body', 'Schoolboy/Schoolgirl Realness', 'Banjee Realness', or 'Butch Queen First Time In Drags At A Ball'. These are categories created and developed within the queer ball community of mid-1980s New York. The categories have men perform a specific performance - one of dress, hair-styling, make-up, but also of attitude, of physical movement, of expression. Categories can tell a lot about the people doing the categorising.

It is difficult to describe the men and women who star in Paris is Burning, as to do so means categorisation, which in this case feels diminishing. The wonderful people at the heart of this documentary come from what they would have likely called the Hood, what the top-tier White class of the time would have called the Black and Hispanic community; we would refer to them today as People of Colour, a term broad enough to encapsulate many minority backgrounds. Not all are people of colour, but most are, and that in and of itself cannot be discounted. Even their status as men is called into question by they themselves. The entire ball performance is hooked on the notion that these are queer, usually feminine men, who perform to pass as specific types of women, or to pass as accurate caricatures of their straight counterparts, again in varying types.

Many of the subjects within the film wish to be exactly like the women they admire from magazines like Vogue, to the extent that many of them, if they can afford it, engage in surgery to become biologically closer to their goal. In modern terms this is transsexualism, an extension of being transgender. But in all honesty, it is difficult to say whether their need to feel like women comes from an internal voice or feeling (that which we today consider as one of the hallmarks of trans people), or is an extension of the ball environment. What came first, the chicken or the egg? Were these trans women drawn to the community to express their true selves, or did the community itself spark the light of questioning their identity and gender? These are questions which trans people find difficult to answer, let alone outsiders who categorise and classify.

Crucially, what makes the drag community so fascinating is that the exploration of identity, gender, and performance is so intertwined with the same internal exploration of the queer community. Of course transgender and transsexual people would be drawn to drag, as it allows the accentuation of the feminine from the societally gendered masculine body. It is an externalisation of the internal.

'Realness' is one of the most interesting topics presented by Paris is Burning. To be Real in the ball community is to have the ability to pass as straight to the trained, or even the untrained eye. This is such a loaded concept. It naturally assumes that if you have found yourself into the ball community, you are a feminine gay man. To the gay community of the time, being gay and being feminine went hand in hand. The feminine gay was something about yourself that was hidden in the straight world, and policed in terms of fashion, voice, and demeanour.

For the majority of the runtime of Paris is Burning, straight people are The Other, characterised as legion on the streets of New York, as the elite on the covers of magazines, and the beauty models of the fashion world. Only near the end do we gain an insight from straight people. What this achieves is full empathy, as the straight view of the community is utterly irrelevant, as odd as it may seem considering that many of the contestants desire to be among the glamour models of the straight world. Drag is a reaction to the straight world, it could not exist without it, but it would not exist without queer people. 

The trophies that the ball contestants compete for feel like a carry-over from the straight community. They look identical to oversized racing trophies, or bowling trophies, hell probably some beauty pageant trophies somewhere. Trophies are symbols of victory, and in this case the victory is passing as a woman, a Real Woman, or a Real Straight Man. The trophies are as nondescript as a bowling trophy, and therefore almost act as symbols of this Realness. The contestants have done so well at being Real that they've won a trophy that could have been imported directly from the straight world. In that respect, the trophies themselves are almost playing a performance. They appear straight, but are proof of the victory of being queer. 

The vast majority of the contestants of the New York balls came from poverty, and resort to the thieving the expensive designer clothes they vogue in, or even turn to sex work to afford their outfits. Some of the older contestants lament that the balls are all about the designer clothes, rather than the extravagance of outrageous fashion back in their day. There is a lineage and history to the balls, they are part of queer culture, a culture which continues to this day in shows like RuPaul's Drag Race. The balls are a world unto their own, and to many of the contestants they are processes of self-actualisation. Indeed what is life but continual self-actualisation?     

To transsexual people self-actualisation is integral, they cannot feel themselves without this process. Therefore it becomes all the more tragic when the film closes with the news that Venus Xtravaganza was found four days after her death via strangulation under a seedy hotel bed. Throughout the film we have seen Venus detail the first day she met a drag queen, how she meets men who believe her to be a woman and are disgusted at the 'truth' of her biology, and how she wishes to go through surgery to become the real version of herself. The real version of herself. Think what that ball trophy must mean to people like Venus. Through competition, with shade passed or not, we can only hope that every trans person achieves the trophy of self-actualisation. 

So who knows, perhaps categories are in fact integral to discovering one's true self? Can one only be, when one is outside of a category? The categories of the drag balls allow their contestants to become their true selves, their real selves. The balls are microcosms of the struggles everyone faces, but are nonetheless unique to the queer community. The film ends with the words of a wise-beyond-his-years fifteen year old:

"The religious community want to pray together a lot, right? Well, this gay community might want to all...all, they like want to be together."