Dramatic Tension in the Subversion of Gender Roles

Cynthia Sharp

A Feminist Analysis of the Film A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

by Cynthia Sharp

 

Abstract

 This critical paper is a study of an entertaining subversion of cultural and gender stereotypes in the vampire genre and craft study of writer and director Ana Lily Amirpour’s independent vampire-western hybrid A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, a mixture of genres from horror with a feminist twist to a dark love story with an evocative ear-piercing scene as a sexual metaphor between the main characters. The essay examines the strengths and weaknesses of Amirpour’s screenwriting and story with regard to the film achieving its intended creative outcomes. Spoiler alert–the ending is discussed.

 

Dramatic Tension in the Subversion of Gender Roles

A Feminist Analysis of the Film A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night 

In her 2014 independent vampire-western hybrid, A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, cutting edge writer and director Ana Lily Amirpour takes back the night, power and fun with her Iranian female vampire subverting cultural and gender stereotypes, sexual repression and male control of female movement. Shot in California, this Sundance film takes place in a fictionalized Bad City in Iran where a lonely female vampire walks the dark streets, killing a slimy pimp, warning a young boy to behave with almost motherly concern, and falling for Arash, a good guy, in spite of her vampire guilt for having killed.

From a craft point of view, the film has an interesting but uneven relationship with dramatic tension, delivering several memorably powerful scenes, yet falling short of its full potential. While it’s necessary for films to balance intense revelations and scenes with wide shots to allow the viewer a moment to absorb deep information, the underlying structural backbone of A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is uneven. Wide shots to music interspersed between intense dramatic moments provide a rhythmic catch and release balance, especially around strong scenes and most successfully in the first half, but too many cliché scenes of addiction rob some of the later dramatic moments of real moving presence, resulting in tediousness and flatness in those sections. It’s curious to see how a tightening and loosening of dramatic tension both creates and lessens audience investment in the characters and therefore the degree of strength pivotal moments carry. Like all screenwriters, Amirpour faces the issue of how to tell a story about addiction and repression in a new way, to get viewers to care deeply about her characters so that their emotional arcs are fully felt. She brings important twists around race and gender to the vampire horror genre, which builds mystery in the first half of the film, but then loses some of that engagement in later sections with scenes around money and drugs, that while powerful to Iranian viewers aware that a felony such as narcotics possession in Iran could result in the death penalty or life imprisonment, have become cliché to an American audience unaware of the intensity of Iranian law.

The opening of any vampire film has the audience wondering whether the first character on screen is the vampire or a victim, so automatically most viewers start out engaged. In the opening image, Arash is an alluring male star, a James Dean style Persian pop icon who literally saves a cat, his Blake Snyder approved good guy moment. His flashy car, clothes and demeanor suggest a youthful style, while his dialogue with the kid shows who he wants to be—independent, free, successful with means, having something to show for having worked hard. Beneath the surface, this scene subtly reinforces the poverty the characters collectively live in with a child asking for money as the opening line of the screenplay, a trope with many callbacks through the story:

      Can I have some money? I said, Can I have some money?
 
                   Kid, how many times do I have to tell you?
                   I don't have money.
 
                   With a car like this?
 
                   Do you know how many days I worked to buy this car?
 
                   Whose cat is that?
 
                   It's mine. 2,191 days.

 

Arash commands attention and suspense builds as the audience tries to figure out who the vampire is, if there are others, and if he or she is ethical like current day Twilight style vampires. In the first half of the film, the drama intensifies with the gulf between the hopeless setting where characters like Arash are trapped, versus who they want to be, and how they perceive themselves in scenes when they are free of family of origin constraints. Once at home, Arash is met with his father’s bill collector, ever in debt for his father’s penchant for prostitutes, drugs and gambling:

                             Do you even realize how much your father owes me?
 
                             I gave you money last week.
 
                             Business is business.

 

Arash’s unjust living situation looking after his drug-abusing single father evokes anger and empathy for the injustice of never being able to get ahead. This intensifies mystery in the plot and holds audience attention by raising the pressure and stakes in his life. He’s a good character who will need to do something outside his norm to make ends meet. Early scenes step up the interpersonal conflict and the catch and release of dramatic tension works at first as the audience takes in the setting and characters.

Amirpour’s script is a feminist twist on traditional goth horror, right from the irony of the title that the girl walking safely alone is the vampire; audience engagement is quickly elevated with this inverse of traditional vampire gender roles, a female killer who targets males. She flows freely through the night streets murdering men who’ve harmed women. The film portrays female power and sexuality in a dominant culture and political regime that represses them, along with the rights of youth to break free from exploitative families, which sets a tone of dramatic tension. By delving into similar settings and content as the 2005 dramatic Canadian film Water, written and directed by Deepa Mehta, with screenplay by Anurag Kashyap, about the heartache and plight of young widows in the Indian caste system in 1938 as Mahatma Gandhi’s movement was rising, Amirpour builds suspense with the underlying constriction in the lives of her Iranian characters in misogynist and hopeless circumstances. In many ways, scenes in the setting of the Bad City are comparable to Alice Munro’s 1971 novel The Lives of Girls and Women from McGraw-Hill Ryerson, in terms of exposing degrees of sexism in everyday conditions. In Amirpour’s case, this is accomplished in a horror spoof where the contrast between the dangerous and depressing living situations and rising forbidden female sexuality and agency drives dramatic urgency. This combination of early factors in thematically strong parts of the film enhance the sensuality of the murder when the audience guiltily hopes the female vampire will kill the evil pimp. In that crucial scene, where the vampire takes out the bad guy with a well-paced unlocking of her fangs and moves in on him in a powerful and erotic fashion, the story is gripping, displaying the allure of negative intimacy of being a lonely vampire that the lead character later trades for a good life and new beginning with Arash.

The elasticity of dramatic tension then becomes uneven and loses North American viewers’ investment with cliché scenes about the cycle of drug abuse and stealing, which may be more powerful if they unearthed tighter underlying connections between characters or reminded viewers about the stakes for narcotic possession in Iran. The film could use more direct interaction between the main characters, Arash and the vampire girl, to justify the progression of sensual and vulnerable moments they share and evoke a greater sense of awe in the audience for her choice to love and be with him. Even though there are some threads woven through that connect characters, like Arash stealing earrings from the woman he works for to pay off his father’s debts, then giving them to the vampire he’s falling for after the death of the pimp who was pressing him to pay his father’s drug and gambling bills, there is untapped potential for deeper revelations that could raise the stakes to heighten audience involvement, such as the vampire having a familial relationship to the kid she checks in on rather than just warning him not to be bad and stealing his skateboard, or at least a deeper symbolism with more layers, although conversely being his actual mother or aunt would make it difficult for her to cut free at the end and leave the Bad City.

Amirpour’s creative strength cuts to the heart of the audience with her unique scene revealing the vampire girl’s vulnerability in letting Arash pierce her ears, a metaphor for intercourse. Dramatic tension and symbolism soar in that scene on account of the originality of the action and it representing a decision of the main characters to be open and trusting with one another, a believable level of trepidation and commitment in the painful, vulnerable, body-changing action. The scene carries the juxtaposition of a sharp incision done gently. From there though, the relationship progresses too easily to its next key visual, the moment in every vampire-human love story where the vampire overcomes the ingrained compulsion to tear into an exposed human neck and is instead gentle, a decision to commit to a relationship over a feed.           The slow-moving stereotypical depictions of the Bad City played out through other characters, however, detract focus from the key relationship by causing the elasticity of the film to become too loose, robbing the main characters of a longer build up to their final moment and the audience deeper satisfaction. Without enough dramatic scenes with Arash, the heroine or anti-hero doesn’t truly earn the neck scene as well as she could, which undermines the strength that plot point could have. Even with this diminishment of dramatic potential, it holds true that producing unique scenes like the ear-piercing at crucial beats will continue to resonate deeply with audiences. The transcendence of that pinnacle piercing scene alone makes the film worth viewing.

The story continues with strength in the surprises of negative and positive scene turns, such as when the audience expects Arash’s father Hossein to rape the prostitute Atti when he ties her up against her will, but instead forces a drug injection on her: 

                             Atti, sit down.       I said, Sit down.
                             We're going to have a good time.
 
                             I said, I don't want to.
 
                             Do you hear me?
 
                             Let's have a good time.
         
                             Do you hear me, Hossein?
 
                             We're going to have a good time together.

 

These tragic mild surprises have a power to them about the hopelessness of being surrounded by  selfishness and addiction, but they remain at a flat surface level. The lead girl asks questions like, “Why are you here?” suggesting an existentialist desire for meaning and freedom by eventually leaving Bad City, but the film doesn’t do as much as it could to justify her arc from loneliness to partnership.

          On the whole, A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night is a fun and empowering film, ideal for festivals. The drama falls short in places, but the feminist values the writer evokes are noteworthy, especially for a first film. When Arash stands up against his exploitative drug addict father and he and the vampire girl drive away together at the end, they offer viewers permission to leave cycles of exploitation, unjust debt and poverty from drug-addicted relatives and dare to carve their own lives.

As Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night takes its place on the shelves of film history, storytellers are left with the ethical dilemma—given that the roots of the vampire horror genre eroticize violence, as depicted in the murder scene when the girl kills the pimp, how do we write about depravity without feeding into it? Perhaps the answer lies in the choice of the main characters to drive away altogether, to move beyond subversion of assigned norms to the discovery of their own voices.

Source: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014), dir. Ana Lily Amirpour.

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Cynthia Sharp is the author of Ordinary Light, a first prize winner in the SCWES Book Awards, Rainforest in Russet and The Light Bearers in the Sand Dollar Graviton. Her poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction can be found in many literary journals including CV2, Toasted Cheese, untethered and The Pitkin Review, while her dramatic work has been performed through North America. She was a long-time member and independent film producer at Video In Studios in Vancouver where she taught screenwriting, storyboarding and editing and assisted with numerous independent productions. She holds an MFA in creative writing and an Honors BA in literature.

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Setu, July 2024