Flights of Fancy: An Essay on 'Con Air': Part 5

Part 5: Reasons To Rehabilitate: The Use of The Feminine

The protagonist of Con Air is fighting to get back to his blonde wife and angelic child (and along the way he protects the honour of a female prison guard from a rapist). The codification of women as passive objects to be obtained at the heroic conclusion of the narrative is widespread in Hollywood films – the desire for a heterosexual relationship and masculine environmental control interpreted as a great cultural leveller. Poe’s wife Tricia does little of consequence, and Guard Bishop exists in much the same role as Poe’s obligatory black friend – to be imperilled, used by the villains and saved by the hero.
    Despite their conservative use within the narrative, the female characters are surprisingly free of objectification. Tricia is a married woman, a mother, and un-sexual (the possibility for a steamy scene in the opening minutes is avoided, presumably due to her pregnancy). Larkin’s assistant Ginny clearly has an unspoken affection for him, but this plot goes nowhere and she is never used as anything other than a professional at work (if a slightly wimpy one: “All those prisoners on one plane” she says apprehensively at the start of the film, which Larkin flippantly dismisses). Her twinning with Tricia in one of the last shots of the film explicates the unconditional existence of female affection in the world, and the gaudy uncomplicated nature of it (through the bank of glowing lights behind them):

    Guard Bishop is treated as nothing but a sex object by rapist Johnny 23 (“When you wake up, I’m gonna be Johnny 24!”), but his viewpoint is undermined by the marginalized and lecherous positioning of his character (“Don’t treat women like that!” yells Poe as he knocks Johnny out). The unconscious rapist is in effect castrated in the finale, his arm (the symbol of his violent virility, carrying a tattoo for each victim) torn off and left dangling on handcuffs. (The only presence in the film to invite objectification as a female sex object is the male cross-dressing convict Sally Can’t-Dance, about more in Part 6).
    One of the only times Steve Buscemi’s crisply cool sociopath Garland Greene talks about his own crimes is to state that “this one girl, I drove through three states wearing her head as a hat.” It is unclear whether this “girl” is a woman or a child. Poe’s response to this claim is to insulate himself from the arbitrary sickness of Greene by reminding himself that today is his daughter’s birthday. A subtle but important connection is drawn between Greene’s crimes and, in opposition to these, the utopian life Poe expects when united with Casey.
    It is Greene’s actions when he meets an eight-or-nine year old girl in a trailer park near Lerner Air Field which redefine his character. They talk and sing bland songs inside a dry swimming pool, and a jump-cut forces the audience to assume Greene has murdered the girl. When we later see her waving goodbye to the convicts’ plane, it is clear that Greene is to be seen in a new light. This allows his escape from maximum security isolation to be a happy ending.
    The poverty-stricken girl has for Greene been a “walking, talking reason to rehabilitate” (as Guard Bishop said to Poe of his own daughter). This man, who has perpetrated dozens of motiveless killings, is redefined by a single non-violent meeting. In discussing the presentation of paedophiles in the media, Yvonne Jewkes states that “the moral panic over paedophilia has perpetrated the notion that sexual dangerousness resides in strangers and that those strangers are not like ‘us’.” (Media and Crime, p97). Greene is indeed a stranger – isolated within his own vehicle for prisoner transport, gagged like Hannibal Lector, and attired in a white jumpsuit with the word SEPARATEE emblazoned on it, he is treated by society as a virulent pathogen.

    While he is dangerous, he is never labeled a paedophile, even though the tea party between himself and the child hinges on the threat of abuse, not least in the disturbing point-of-view shot that closes the scene. Greene’s violence and cruelty are spoken of, but not depicted: a moment in the extended cut of the film hints at his premeditated and unnecessary murder of a guard (“feel better?” asks Cyrus when he sees the body) – while this omits directly presenting the murder, it still failed to make the final cut, presumably in part because it makes the happy ending of Greene’s escape more discernibly worrying.
    It is left to Cyrus to be a threat to the little girls of this world. “The last thing little Casey Poe ever gets to smell will be my stinking breath,” he says to Poe with lasciviousness. “You ain’t getting near my daughter,” Poe retorts later, and it is this reminder of Cyrus potential paedophiliac qualities which most justify his overwrought punishment and death. 
Con Air treats women conservatively as objects under threat or objects of reward. However, it presents pre-pubescent girls as the ultimate engines behind correct action, as Poe’s desire to meet his daughter are his explicit motivations, while Greene’s rehabilitation suggests that love and mercy shown to a child are enough to overwrite heretofore unremitting sociopathy.
    I hope to here have indicated the conventional approach to the feminine taken by Con Air, which is reinforced by its depiction of (inevitably female) children as angels of redemption. This groundwork is necessary for the following exploration of the strange and unexpected presentation of masculine identity in the film.