Women in the Warriors

Today a coworker got us all to watch The Warriors, a 1979 film about a New York street gang. (It seems they're doing a remake, set in Los Angeles, and he wanted us to understand why he was so pissed off about the location change.) The gang itself was all male, as were most of their enemies, but I was really struck by the main plot points that involved women in the movie. Each encounter is just such a perfect example of how women are treated by macho all-male communities.

And yeah, I'm gonna spoil the shit out of this if you haven't seen it before. Also, there's a lot of sexual assault threats in the movie and I don't get too detailed with those but if you find that triggering you should consider this a warning.

There's four major portrayals of women in the movie. The first we meet is a disc jockey who passes encoded information to street gangs during her radio show. The most powerful gang in the city, the Gramercy Riffs, have set up a network of gangs that are aligned with them. The Warriors are in that network, but they've been framed for murdering the leader of the Riffs. Through this woman, the Riffs tell their entire network that the Warriors are the perpetrators, where they are, and that they want them dead. Throughout the movie she cuts in and tells the network where they were last seen and who they fought. We only ever see her mouth, but her voice is the voice of the universe aligning against our heroes. She's a powerful, removed, anonymous celebrity.

The second is Mercy, who follows and eventually joins the Warriors. She was initially involved with another gang--the Orphans (who are not part of the network and not trying to kill them), and purposefully turns a peaceful situation into a confrontation between the Orphans and the Warriors. For this, Ajax--the biggest, strongest member of the gang--seizes her from behind and threatens to rape her. The gangleader Swan tells him to let her go, then grabs her and threatens to have the entire gang rape her. Then the Orphans show and the Warriors avoid a major fight by blowing up a car. Duly impressed by the explosion as well as her own capture and their threats, she goes with them and somehow ends up following them the entire way to Coney Island despite Swan telling her he doesn't like her or approve of her way of life. Naturally, she and Swan end up together.

Okay, I actually rather liked Mercy. She actually gets to be a person, stands up for herself, takes as many stupid risks as the boys, and ends up arming herself for the final confrontation. She's the girl who joins the male clique. And while they do have good reason not to like or trust her, they still attack and threaten her. She suffers threats and insults based on her gender, but if she's persistent, sticks around and proves she has the same values and macho toughness as the men she gets to be a fixture. (But she doesn't get a vest. That's significant to me.)

The third and fourth women are both Odyssey-style traps, our Circe and our Sirens, I suppose, even though our Circe is the dispenser of justice.

At the beginning of the movie, we see scenes of the gang on the subway spliced with them exchanging exposition in pairs. Here we meet Ajax (played by James Remar) who immediately establishes himself as a homophobic asshole. He says something about hopefully meeting and bedding strange women during their trip to Gramercy, and when the other member suggests they have more important concerns he uses a gay slur. It's his go-to insult, and it along with his attitude towards women and his challenging Swan for leadership make me figure we're suppose to hate him and hope he dies first. (He does not die first, and there is a point in the movie where I actually blurted out "You killed the wrong one.")

Ajax, however, is the best fighter of the group (barring probably Cleon at the beginning) and gets a really great line and fight scene. Thing is, he knows he's a great fighter and he thinks that as the most manly man in the group he should get leadership and wimmiz. Lots of wimmiz, whenever he wants them. He's the strongest and the fiercest but gets taken down by his own entitlement and his disregard for other people's boundaries. Passing through a park they walk by a woman on a park bench. Ajax wants to go back and pick her up, the others want to move on. He separates from the group and sits next to the woman, who flirts with him.

Flirting wasn't enough for Ajax, though, and he moves on to sexual assault. She struggles and tells him at least twice to stop, then she handcuffs him to the bench, jumps away and shows him her badge. Then she whistles for a police car. Ajax, of course, starts ranting and trying to break free and actually pulls the bench towards her when the uniformed officers arrive.

And he won't calm down, so they whack him with a nightstick.

It is immensely satisfying to watch.

Ahem... Disappointing as it was not to see further police brutality against this character (All the cops in this movie seemed to be decent hardworking people removed from the plot who didn't escalate any of the encounters themselves), I was pretty happy to see that the homophobia and misogyny were leading to this guy's downfall.

The policewoman is obviously our Circe analogue, but she's also the unknown woman. And even to Swan and Co, she's not spoken about as a person. The argument is whether Ajax can stay and claim her as a conquest, or if it's more important to move along to the next station. If Swan or the others feel rape is wrong, they are prevented from admitting it by their bullshit macho code. The unknown woman is just a piece of meat on a park bench, and that attitude takes Ajax off the board.

And last we have the all-girl gang. This was easy to see coming, because they were grouped and posed just like a gang, and all wearing a matching article of clothing just like the other gangs.

Of course our heroes follow them home, hoping to get laid. That's where things get weird. The camera lingers on a female character dressed in blue overalls (rather than the tye-dyed T-shirt so I think that meant she had a leadership position) and smoking. It travels around the room and points out images of women posed in masculine poses, moving in masculine ways. As time passes, two of the women start to dance together very suggestively. When asked what the girls call themselves, one of them answers "the Lizzies."

I think at this point we can abandon the sub and safely call it text.

Either way, all of the lesbian implications and masculine posture are framed as warning signs. You get the intense feeling (and only one of the Warriors, Rembrandt, seems to get this) that something is wrong, that these guys are not going to have a relaxing night of sex, smoking and sandwich service. In fact, you get the feeling that the "dudes" they said were up in the Bronx don't really exist, and that someone's going to do something OH GOD SHE LOCKED THE DOOR AND THERE'S THE KNIFE. Yeah, that's a lesbian gang that wants to kill you RUN! RUN!

Lucky for our heroes, the girl with the gun is a shitty shot and they escape with their lives. I will give the Lizzies this, though. Out of all the casualties in the movie? The cops were the biggest danger to the Warriors. The Gramercy Riffs, who are super-intensely-tough-and-scary took out their leader Cleon, but after that no gang touches them with the exception of the Lizzies managing to cut poor Rembrandt. This makes them the most effective antagonistic gang after the Riffs.

But out of all the women in the movie, I found the Lizzies scene the most intense reveal about how a group of men might view women. Because here is a group of very like-minded women that have formed a community of their own, and it is portrayed as very suspicious and very dangerous. There are lesbian overtones all over the place, and the atmosphere is a dreamy haze of welcome that just stands to be ripped away when the women surround and destroy the men.

And that was when I looked back at the movie and saw Fandom, the military, the technical communities wrapped into one hypercompressed macho unit called the Warriors, acting out my life and the lives of my peers on the screen with gangland violence. But I like stuff like that, so it made the movie instantly much cooler to me.

Well, that and a cop smacking Ajax with a nightstick. Man, he deserved that.