Perpetuating “The Big Lie”:
Subversive Feminism in Stephen Sommers’s
Horror/Action Films
In their book, Introduction to Film Criticism: Major Critical
Approaches to Narrative Film, Tim By water and Thomas Sobchack identify the
feminist film critic as one seeking “to uncover the hidden structuring devices in
any medium whereby the male maintains dominance and reduces the female to a
passive position” (183). While such story devices are often simple to track down
in most films in which they appear, the critic must also be on the lookout for
what I tenn “subversive feminism.” This narrative trope may be found in plots
appearing to present one or more of the leading female characters in a strongly
feminist light. In reality, however, such films place many scenes featuring the
allegedly strong female character in a context that generally suggests women
may be more trouble than they are worth. Thus, while these productions purport
to show the audience strong female characters who are equal to their male
counterparts, a closer reading reveals that the film’s narrative context actually
subverts any designs upon equality the nominal storyline suggests.
This storytelling formula has been particularly evident in several
contemporary fantasy-based films written and directed by Minnesota native,
Stephen Sommers. Since 1999, Sommers has been the point man for the remake
of the classic Universal Studios’s horror film. The Mummy, as well as its sequel.
The Mummy Returns, in 2001. Most recently Sommers wrote and directed Van
Helsing (2004), his re-visioning of the Universal “monster rallies” of the 1940s.
Sommers, a graduate of the USC School of Cinema-Television’s Masters
program, broke into the feature film business with Catch Me If You Can (1989),
an independently funded production filmed in and around his hometown of St.
Cloud, Minnesota. He then wrote and directed two live-action features for
Disney before making the transition to create more action-based material with
1998’s Deep Rising.
Sommers’s more recent releases find their inspiration in the classic
Universal Studios horror films of the 1930s and ’40s, albeit with the
writer/director’s own twists to the material. Heavily laden with computer
generated imagery to help Sommers realize the fantasy characters imbued in
these stories, the two Mummy films and Van Helsing also provide examples of
what Carrol L. Fry has coined “Primal Screams” story traits. Deriving from the
writings of both socio- and psychobiologists’ studies of human behavior and
nature. Fry suggests, “Surely one of the most primal of instincts must be fear of
the predator, an ‘other’ who would consume us” (6). Referencing the plotlines in
such tales as Dracula, The Thing, The Relic, Alien, and Deep Blue Sea as
releases fitting into this fonnat. Fry identifies film and fiction that portray a