Jennifer Lawrence Deserves Credit for Inventing the Female Action Hero, According to Noted Film Historian Jennifer Lawrence

Tristan Fewings. Getty Images.

If there is one celebrity whose whole is less than the sum of their parts, it's Jennifer Lawrence. 

She's got so much going for her. She can act. She's made quite a few good movies, including starring in a legitimate blockbuster franchise. To borrow a phrase from Seinfeld, she possesses many of the qualities prized by the superficial man. I mean, how many other humans walking the Earth today could've stepped into the blue body paint and play a younger Mystique in the X-Men reboots after Rebecca Romjin perfected the look? 

To make no mention of how, during the Fappening, many among us who have strong objections to the illegal invasion of privacy were nevertheless thrown into a moral quandary by the quality of her photos. And for those who don't want to compromise their principals, there was her full frontal star turn in Red Sparrow. So yes, there are countless reasons to like her.

And yet …

There's something about her that is off-putting. Maybe it's because she is one of those women who is blessed with being super attractive, but loves to say stuff about how guys love her because she can hang. Like she's not a girlie girl. She's a country chick, you know? Who talks sports and eats junk food and burps after she's done chuggin' a PBR. She's not comfortable in those custom made designer dresses and necklaces of blood diamonds as she steps onto the Oscar stage to present an award. She just wants to watch the game, man. Even if it were true, those are the words of a try-hard. 

Then there was taking a huge paycheck to get second-billing in the most star-studded film of the year behind only one of the five biggest box office draws alive, and complaining about it afterward:

J-Law will have to pardon a nation that's struggling in the throes of a major economic crisis for not crowdfunding the extra $5 million to an actress who made $25 million for a few weeks' work. Ugh. 

But it's her latest comments that are the most galling. Not just for the grandiosity of them, but more for the total pig ignorance about the very industry she works in. Emphasis mine:

Variety - I remember when I was doing "Hunger Games," nobody had ever put a woman in the lead of an action movie because it wouldn't work — because we were told girls and boys can both identify with a male lead, but boys cannot identify with a female lead. And it just makes me so happy every single time I see a movie come out that just blows through every one of those beliefs, and proves that it is just a lie to keep certain people out of the movies. To keep certain people in the same positions that they've always been in.

How self-possessed do you have to be to say this? And how fawning does an interview have to be for the person she's talking to not to say, "Um, can we pause here for a second? You don't really mean no woman had been in the lead of an action movie before you in 2012, right?" 

This is something so monumentally stupid, so willfully ignorant of the entire history of the movie business, you don't need words to straighten J-Law out. GIFs will do. 

And decades before Quentin Tarantino put her in Jackie Brown, Pam Grier was kicking miles of polyester ass in the 1970s:

And one of my friends who's a working actor and movie podcaster tells me there have been female action heroes in movies since there have been movies:

This only scratches the surface. And for the purposes of our discussion, I've left out TV show title characters like Wonder Woman, The Bionic Woman, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Xena: Warrior Princess, each of whom somehow managed to survive for several seasons and hundreds of episodes with huge ratings despite not having the benefit of Jennifer's brave and stunning pioneering work in Hunger Games. 

I don't know if this level of narcissism is product of being in the insulated echo chamber that is Hollywood, or the result of getting your ass kissed 24/7, or just a generational thing where if you're famous and under the age of 40 you have to believe you invented everything. Though I suspect it's all of the above. 

The point being that you can go around thinking you hung the moon. But you put respect in your mouth when you talk about Ripley, Sara Conner, Lara Croft, Foxy Brown and the rest. They blazed the trail Katniss Everdeen followed. And will be remembered long after she's forgotten.