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AI overlords, environmental impasse, obscene wealth inequality, and emergent authoritarianism – all of it reads just like the opening crawl of some cult-classic dystopian flick, however sadly for us, it’s simply the state of issues in 2025. Dystopia looms. How is one to handle? One suggestion: Combat fiction with fiction and cope like a major character.
For inspiration, look no additional than the petulant, performative, and perpetually sexy protagonist of Rachel Talalay’s Tank Lady (1995). Positive, Tank Lady is raunchy and ridiculous (and that’s what makes it fantastic) however look nearer. Beneath the absurdity lies a playbook for protest and defiance that (additionally sadly for us) feels disconcertingly related. Though each third nation or so appears to be making a laborious flip proper, there’s nonetheless time to course right – time to push again towards the fledgling dystopias.
And Tank Lady tells us how.
It’s 2033. Eleven years earlier, a comet crashed into Earth and destroyed the local weather. The ensuing drought led to the creation of Water & Energy (W&P), a corrupt company led by the comically wicked Kesslee, who “management(s) many of the water and acquired all of the energy.”
Enter Tank Lady, performed by Lori Petty: A water-stealing, tank-obsessed wastelander residing it up within the desert till a W&P raid destroys her happy-go-lucky life and launches her right into a kink-coded bid for revenge.
Let’s be clear: There are a lot of variations between a unhealthy dom with a poor grasp of kink necessities and an authoritarian régime like W&P (and its non-fictional equivalents) …however there are additionally fairly a few similarities.
In her dalliances with W&P, Tank Lady illustrates an ethos most within the kink group will acknowledge. Management is achieved consensually, or in no way. It exists solely when given, and will be revoked at any time. On this equation, submission is an knowledgeable, freely-made alternative, and defiance is all the time an possibility. For Tank Lady, defiance is only a lifestyle – she’s a quintessential brat and acknowledges energy struggles for the poorly disguised recreation that they are.
These moments of defiance usually hinge on Tank Lady’s understanding that her look and mannerisms create a set of assumptions about her power and intelligence. She makes use of these assumptions as ammunition, remodeling them right into a weapon relatively than a device of her personal subjugation.
In the course of the W&P raid, as an example, Tank Lady unknowingly performs a strip tease for a W&P guard she incorrectly assumed to be her boyfriend. Because the barrel of a gun intrudes upon the scene, the dynamic adjustments: The guard nods for her to proceed, and she or he does, leaning into his (false) assumption that she is a sexual, submissive creature for the taking.
That assumption is his undoing. She is aware of the function anticipated of her and performs it properly. The phantasm of management lasts till the very second she decides to revoke it – the very second the guard meets his destiny on the finish of his personal grenades. The strip present turns right into a homicide scene. Standard energy dynamics activate their head. And Tank Lady emerges on high.
Whether or not going through imprisonment in a claustrophobia-inducing torture system aptly named “The Pipe” or shivering after a night time spent in a freezer, Tank Lady defies worry. She elects to not give her captors the response they anticipate. In doing so, she disarms them.
This philosophy is implicit all through the movie, however is at its most overt whereas Tank Lady is imprisoned in a W&P labor camp. There, she meets Jet Lady (Naomi Watts), a beaten-down prisoner. After Tank Lady saves her from but an obsessed jail guard who doesn’t know how one can take “no” for a solution, Jet Lady explains her ethos for surviving below W&P’s thumb: “The higher you behave, the extra they go away you alone.”
But audiences of 1995, 2025and 2033 all know this to be patently unfaithful. In restrictive environments corresponding to these, nobody is protected, regardless of how meekly they undergo the shackles. Tank Lady is aware of it too.
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