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This weekend, Scarlett Johansson hits theaters with a problematic-as-eff remake of the Japanese anime Ghost in the Shell, a movie that’s been riddled with controversy since Johansson was cast in the role of a Japanese character. While the debate now shifts to whether this is simply a whitewashed movie or a terrible whitewashed movie, what’s flying under the radar is the fact that Ghost in the Shell is the latest film where Johansson burnishes her reputation as Hollywood’s least romantic leading lady.
It wasn’t always this way. Like every beautiful young woman who breaks through in Hollywood, Johansson went through a series of romantic setups. After beguiling Bill Murray with a sweet, affecting non-sexual love story in Lost in Translation, Johansson was paired with everyone from Topher Grace (In Good Company) to Ewan McGregor (The Island) to Eric Bana (The Other Bolyen Girl). In 2006, Johansson played the woman torn between two handsome protagonists in both The Black Dahlia (Josh Hartnett and Aaron Eckhart) AND The Prestige (Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale), not to mention the three Woody Allen movies she made, each with their own typically peculiar take on modern love. This isn’t in any way unusual or surprising. Hollywood was built on love stories, after all; most movies have ’em. What’s interesting is what’s been happening in Johansson’s career recently. Since roughly the time that she entered the Avengers franchise, Johansson’s biggest movies have been either completely devoid of romantic storylines or at least deeply skeptical of them.
Johansson’s played reformed assassin Natasha Romanov in five Marvel movies, and despite an initial tease that she was going to make a play for Tony Stark in Iron Man 2, Romanov has been almost entirely removed from romantic storylines. This changed in Avengers: Age of Ultron, with Natasha and Bruce Banner’s Hulk engaging in a rather angsty bit of “but we can’t!” romantic tension. Even the Saturday Night Live Black Widow rom-com parody, which was ostensibly poking fun at Marvel for their lack of female-led superhero movies, also manages to get at just how disinterested Johansson seems to be in doing the rom-com thing.
Look at a film like Lucy, which puts ScarJo at the center of the film and simply never has time for a romantic subplot, mostly because for the bulk of the movie she’s playing a super-being whose full creative and destructive potential has been fully unlocked. Or Under the Skin, which plays around with the ideas of sexuality and desire but mostly as a means of luring men to their doom.
And while she’s taken “girlfriend” roles in smaller films like Don Jon and Chef, the most prominent romantic role she’s had in the last decade came in Her, where she played the voice of an operating system that Joaquin Phoenix ends up falling in love with. She doesn’t even appear in the film, and the very notion of Her‘s central romance is treated with several raised eyebrows.
It’s tempting to say that Johansson’s films are merely reflecting the times we live in. Romantic comedies aren’t in vogue the way they used to be, after all. But actresses like Emma Stone and Anna Kendrick continue to find romantic plot after romantic plot. The closest analogue to the un-romantic vibe that ScarJo is putting out there lately has been Charlize Theron, who has parlayed that ice-hard thing she does so well into roles like Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road and the captain in Prometheus. Even the movies that seem like they’d be headed towards some kind of romantic territory, like Young Adult — which so happens to feature Theron’s best performance this decade — are ultimately harder, scratchier than that.
As with Johansson, it’s not that Theron can’t be alluring or romantic on screen, it’s just that she’s so much more interesting when she’s playing with notions of power. Look at the next two movies she’s got coming up: the trailers for both Atomic Blonde, where she plays a British spy, and Fate of the Furious, where she plays the main villain, feature Theron kissing another character. But in both instances, the sex we see is so caught up in notions of power, it’d be impossible to mistake either film as romantic.
Part of the reason for the rise of ScarJo and Charlize as un-romantic powerhouses may be that women are finally starting to get a taste of the kinds of roles that men always got to play. Twenty years ago, if there was a movie about a character whose brain-potential was fully unlocked, leading to them becoming a super being, that role would have most likely gone to a man. Twenty years ago, the rebel protagonist of a Mad Max movie would have been a man.
And while we can all hope that romantic comedies and dramas stay as vital as they can be, the rise of un-romantics like Scarlett Johansson and Charlize Theron ultimately represent something positive for Hollywood. A Hollywood where women are no longer tethered to tales of the heart.
Where to stream Under the Skin
Where to stream Avengers: Age of Ultron
