The sinetron can combine the powerful and the feminine harmoniously because of the different concept of gender in Indonesian culture, where femininity does not imply weakness.Ī woman's body could be displayed only in films about prostitutes. In Misteri Gunung Merapi, when women are in action, they are not exceptional as women. While the body performance does show the biological sex, gender identity characteristics can be fluid. Nevertheless the gender fluidity of Misteri Gunung Merapi suggests that the sinetron is ambiguous in representing the gender and the body of both male and female figures. The heroes in the sinetron are performed by actors with muscular bodies, which represent the contemporary (rather than traditional) ideal Indonesian male body: ' bentuk bahu lebar, pinggang ramping, bahu tegap tidak bungkuk, dan betis yang bagusotot yang menonjol melekat di tubuh' (wide shoulder, slim waist, straight back, good legand muscular body). The sinetron does not, however, construct the body of male heroes either as the soft body, like the construction of the heroes of the earlier kung fu cinema, or as a continuation of the ideal of male body in Javanese traditional performance. Source., online: site accessed 24 November 2008. A similar question in relation to 'the compatibility of beauty and power, femininity and violence, and desire and desirability' is also raised by feminist scholars studying the Chinese martial art genre, where action heroines have traditionally been more prominent than in the West.
In her study of Hollywood action cinema from the 1970s to the 1990s, Tasker found that representations of the action heroine were marked by 'ambiguities of identities and desires.' In her opinion, 'this blurring of categories is crucial to understanding the play of femininity and masculinity over the bodies of male and female characters, a process that has been inflected significantly in the action cinema of recent years.' The blurring of gender categories emerges as a central concern of feminist critics of action-adventure. According to Tasker, the emergence of the action heroine is partly a response to the criticism of images of gendered identity raised by Mulvey and other feminist scholars. Molly Haskell has argued that it is 'precisely because women have traditionally been more peace-loving than men that it's more ambiguous and more of a story when they do take up arms or pursue an enemy into dangerous territory.'. The hero of action cinema, according to Dawn Heinecken, is presented as a figure that is able to control his own body and to 'overcome all physical suffering.' But Yvonne Tasker has disagreed with Mulvey's idea of the 'active/passive division of labour' in relation to action-adventure cinema because both male and female figures are subjects in the narrative as well as objects of spectacle. Through the three levels of cinematic gaze-the camera's, the character's and the spectator's-women are established as 'to-be-looked-at'. In her groundbreaking article 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,' Laura Mulvey argued that the narrative structure of Hollywood classical cinema positions the male character as active and powerful while the woman is the object of desire for the male characters. Problems in representing fighting women in Western and Asian cinema and TV. This article presents a close analysis of Misteri Gunung Merapi, via a consideration of the feminist literature about fighting women on both Hollywood and Chinese screens, as an example of the gender politics of popular culture in post New Order Indonesia.
#FILM MISTERI GUNUNG MERAPI 3 CRACKED#
It reflects the social and cultural situation of the time of its production, although as if through a cracked mirror.