Yohoho: How Scarlett Johansson became so cool
Throughout the year We talked about outstanding women who inspired us with their free-thinking, courage and talent, whether it’s a wunderkind and publisher of the best teen magazine on the planet Tavi Gevinson or Nobel laureate Malala Yusufzai. Summing up the 2014, we can not forget about the heroin, which is not the first year called the perfect woman, but which now became the indisputable symbol (without sex prefix), playing completely different superheroes in four important films of the year.
Naked Scarlett Johansson is standing in front of a mirror, examining her body with curiosity: what is it capable of? What power do you have? What power does it give? To all these questions she, of course, knows the answer.
"Scarlett Johansson has camel eyelashes. Her magnificent femininity takes sensual, tangible forms. This siren from the movie screen, honestly, has some sharp, attractive, charm. She begins to speak, and - oh God, what is her voice! What is is Scarlett Johansson doing what makes cultural journalists do all these terrible things with words? " - the Slate magazine asks a question. Indeed, this year a record number of exalted texts devoted to an actress, twice awarded Esquire magazine with the title of “the sexiest woman in the world”, came out. She began filming at ten, at the age of twenty-nine, her filmography includes about forty films, but, oddly enough, it is safe to say that the time has come for Scarlett Johansson, it was possible only as a result of the outgoing year. The time has come to rethink this familiar voice, this magnificent femininity and these camel eyelashes - because now they are not what they seem.
There are purely prosaic and deeper reasons for all this. First, it was really impossible to hide from her this year - there were four completely different films in our box office, where Johansson played the main (or almost main) roles; Then each YouTube video began to be preceded by a Dolce & Gabbana ad, in which Matthew McConaughey, another actor who made a quantum leap for his career this year, invited her to a perfect date. In addition, do not forget about the widespread discussion of her pregnancy. Secondly, if in the case of McConaughey we observed the transformation of one person into another, then the breakthrough of Johansson is the exact opposite: here it is a complete merger of the actress with her own image.
The cynical girl with the strangeness, refusing to leave on a nonexistent bus with her friend in the "Ghost World" Terry Zwigoff, chose to accept the imperfect world of people. For both, this choice turned out to be prophetic: the girlfriend - Torah Burch - quickly went into the shadows, and Johansson almost at the same speed became a star - and this rapid ascent began with a close-up of her cowards. After Sofia Coppola's “Lost in Translation”, the cowards really turned out to be more important than the attention to the inner world of the actress: Johansson became the embodiment of the seductive simple lady, who speaks mostly so that we can enjoy the timbre of her voice.
The apotheosis of this path can safely be considered last year's directorial debut of Joseph Gordon-Levitt "Passion Don Juan" - a film in which the prevailing image comes to caricature: melodramas, tantrums, vulgar clothes, "dear, it's time you met my mom." A few years ago, even the illusion of an unspoken confrontation between her and Natalie Portman arose: they say, clever Natalie is an ideal for girls, the puffy-lipped Scarlett is the dream of all boys. As a result, Natalie was Torah’s girlfriend, and Scarlett was a superheroine, Black Widow.
What has changed? Four completely different in form of the film laid out this eternal femininity - beautiful and fleeting - into parts, hoping to get to the bottom of what she hides, how she evolves and whether it is possible in her case to talk about any humanity at all. Spike Jonze in the film "She" refuses to worship the body, literally depriving Johansson of the body as such: it is not a person, but a supernova self-learning operating system that lives in Joaquin Phoenix’s mustache computer and develops from a joyfully submissive girlfriend to an intellectual with her own self — so much independent, that in the company of a lover, she becomes cramped.
“Stay in my shoes” by Jonathan Glaser, where Scarlett doesn’t come to the fore in one of his underpants, actually deerotes her image: an alien woman descending to planet Earth, a seductive female body, is necessary, as a hunter’s gun, to enslave the naive Scottish men. Being devoid of emotions, aware of the possibilities of the female body, along the way begins to find humanity in itself - and at the same time feel lost in a cold, unpleasant and completely alien to the world.
In Lucy, Luc Besson, both the body and the mind are pumped at the same time - Johansson plays here the quintessence of all Bessonian women, minus love, plus all known superpowers. A crumpled blond woman wearing a leopard coat becomes a drug courier by accident, then an experimental drug package will break in her stomach, and a lethal dose of blue powder will begin to be absorbed into the bloodstream, gradually turning the girl into a manhattan with Nikita's manners, - every minute her brain will use everything more of its potential, and at about 30 percent, when she knows everything in the world, she will understand that she has nothing to do with emotions, but the gun will not interfere.
Finally, in the second part of "The First Avenger", the evolution of Johansson's character was much slower - and not within the framework of one film: The Black Widow appeared as a sexual fetish in the second "Iron Man", then interested Joss Widon in "The Avengers", and finally she turns out to be a superhero, absolutely equal to Captain America - and the question here is not whether they will succeed or not, but how much she can be trusted.
The symbol of inhumanity in human form and vice versa, Scarlett Johansson develops his own sexuality - or rather, the myth about it, formed thanks to a longstanding tradition - only sexuality is now entering an aggressive phase. Neither Jonze, nor Glazer, nor Besson is able to unravel the mystery of femininity, to get to the bottom of what is behind the studied image and object: once they get to the solution, their heroines immediately disappear - they dissolve in the air, by black smoke fly away from this planet or even break up into atoms.
Scarlett Johansson knows exactly who they want to see her, and, paradoxically, by taking this ultimatum onto the shield, he turns into a superwoman who cannot be objectified. Let exalted critics write as much as possible that it is made of champagne. Here it is, elusive beauty: you can watch, you can not touch your hands. It still does not work out.
Photo: Cover Image - Courtesy of Universal Pictures
