A healthy and happy saint! What a strange combination. Yes indeed. Normally, a female saint brings to mind something fragile, cool… But in Jeanne, one can find no such characteristics: she was healthy and glad, healthy physically, and – what may sound even more strange – healthy mentally as well. (…)

(Pulla 1938,3.)

"In the writing of female biography it is easy to revert unconsciously to known stereotypes. Joan of Arc is a pre-eminent heroine because she belongs to sphere of action, while so many feminine figures of models are assigned and confined to the sphere of contemplation. She is anomalous in our culture, a woman renowned for doing something of her own, not by birthright. She has extended the taxonomy of female types; she makes evident the dimension of women’s dynamism. (…) Joan of Arc, in all her brightness, illuminates the operation of our present classification system, its rigidity on the one hand, its potential on the other."

(Warner 1981,9.)

As the above quotes illustrate, and as so many accounts on the life and the legend of Joan of Arc (Jeanne D’Arc, the Maiden of Orleans) begin: She is among those historical characters who in the Western world has evoked the most writing, discussion and inspiration – historical and scientific, as well as fictional and artistic, ranging from religious poems by her contemporaries; to paintings, and statues, music, novels, plays (e.g. by authors such as Shakespeare, Schiller, Voltaire); to hundreds, if not thousands of biographies and interpretations (most recently, see e.g. Gordon 2000, Warner 1981, Wheeler & Wood 1996).

The skeleton story around the legend of Joan is in most cases told with the same basic facts. She was born in January 1412 at Greux-Domremy (today a part of Lorraine) in France. She was one of the five children of a peasant family, "was trained in the traditional female skills and sometimes tended sheep" (Gordon 2000). When she was in her early teens, she begun to "hear voices"-- which soon told her that she was to go and fight in order to save France from the rule of England, and help the dauphin king of France to be crowned. She managed to convince the French royals of her mission; for a while she succeeded; but after some failed battles she was sold to the furious English as a prisoner. She was tried by an ecclesiastical court, and executed as heretic in 1431, only 19-years-old. 25 years after her death, in 1456, her case was retried, and Joan was acquitted. It took, however, close to 500 years until Pope Benedict XV canonised her as a Catholic saint (1920).

This (her)story, then, has fascinated scientist and artists for centuries; during past hundred of years, she has not only acted as the muse for men like Brecht and Shaw, but also taken her legendary share in the society of popular mass media spectacles. Numerous movies have staged her on screen, earliest being the Lumière brothers film of 1898; another early example, the Danish director Dreyer’s silent classic of 1928 La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, has sometimes been credited as being one of the best films of all times (see an account e.g. in Bordwell 1973, Ebert 2000). Most recently, the last year of the last century, 1999, witnessed a miniseries for American television, advertised as "the 20 million dollar production, featuring an all-star cast, million dollar consumer print campaign, CBS’s biggest and most expensive miniseries to date" (Gordon 2000). Simultaneously, an acclaimed French director Luc Besson, completed his Hollywood-style movie spectacle on Joan of Arc, called "The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc", for international audiences. The Messenger, in particular, has been the piece of cinema, which has intrigued us, if not as film art, then as yet another and the most contemporary interpretation of the legend of the Maiden.

The Messenger accounts the story of Joan of Arc from her early childhood to the bitter end. It begins by Joan as an altruist little darling who loves all creatures in the name of God. She is seen wondering in the fields and forests, enjoying the beauty of nature, and it is there where she hears the voices. In Besson’s interpretation, this seems almost like a sexual, orgasmic experience: she hears and sees a beautiful young man (Jesus?), the world is spinning and turning around her with great speed, and the experience leaves the girl flushed, ecstatic, out of breath.

But at the same time, this takes place in war-ridden France, and the film accounts in some detail how a village is destroyed, women are raped and men killed; and how the fighting has exhausted and made people bitter. The religion remains one of the only constant factors in their everyday lives. Little Joan is staged witnessing English soldiers killing and raping her dear sister, after she had offered Joan her own hiding place in a closet at their house. This event is repeated later in Joan’s dreams and is given as a clue for explaining Joan’s behaviour later. Her furious ambition to lead the war against the Englishmen is driven not only by patriotic feelings but also by her personal trauma.

After this context has been set, the movie continues with the adolescent Joan’s (played by Milla Jovovich) mission as the Messenger from God: she is to make her quest to save France believed and supported by the court of the Dauphin (played by John Malkovitch). The court is depicted in atmosphere as well as in visual terms as decadent, careless, sceptical, on the verge of war disaster and a final collapse; but Joan brings in fresh air and new hope, and wins the hearts of the Dauphin as well as his Knights, against all odds.

The next turn of events deals with Joan’s victories: long lasting scenes of bloody battles and plenty of suspense situations take place, spiced up with occasional action humour. Joan is determined to win, she refuses to give up (even when wounded) and with each victory, she earns more of a status of heroine, then one of a divine saviour. The climax of this subplot is, of course, the crowning of the Dauphin.

Then, nicely in accordance with the Aristotelian dramatic structure, comes the twist, the decline. Joan and her troops are no longer winning every battle. The weak Dauphin and his evil, opportunistic step-mother (played by Faye Dunaway) do not wish to support this passionate (or plain crazy?) female warrior any longer but let her be sold to the English. The scenes about Joan’s trial depict her personal confusion. While in jail, she hears and sees voices, this time narrated in the shape of an old man in a black cape (the devil? the consciousness? played by Dustin Hoffman). The voice questions her: "Why did you do all this? Did you not kill in the name of God, but really to be important, to have a mission? What were all your visions – messages from God or illusions of your own, confused mind?" Answers to these questions remain somewhat ambiguous when the movie ends with a lengthy scene on Joan’s death by burning.

But why another recent biography (Gordon 2000), the miniseries, the Messenger? Why does Joan’s story attract once and again such attention? What can this contemporary piece of popular culture starring the Maiden of Orleans – the most celebrated historical female figure – tell us about representations of and discourses on women and femininity in today’s society? And lastly, why do we claim that the movie celebrates the excessive characteristics associated with those discourses?

At the outset, our fascination of Joan of Arc, and specifically Joan the Messenger, stems from our personal and academic standing as feminists: She intrigues us as atypical female historical figure. However, not everyone is inspired by the same standpoint. "Besson’s movie dishonours her memory," writes Allen Williamson on his website dedicated to correcting some misconceptions about the historical Joan of Arc. "The ‘Joan’ figure in this movie is largely just another example of the usual stereotypes which are so often reserved for military women, and the character therefore bears little resemblance to the actual ‘Petite Pucelle’ (i.e. Joan of Arc)". (Williamson 2000a.) On another list of the typical misconceptions he claims that Joan was not a "feminist". He justifies this view by stating that Joan was reluctant to take on a military career, and when questioned by Jean de Metz, she replied: "I would rather stay at home with my poor mother and do the spinning". According to Williamson, Joan’s sole motivation was the God’s will that she go and fight the Englishmen. This understanding of a "feminist" is perfectly in line with Williamson’s overall critique of most contemporary views on Joan. He is convinced that so called ‘postmodern" quasi-intellectuals are recklessly destroying the reputation of this holy Virgin with their non-scientific, badly researched and argued fictions of the legend. (Williamson 2000b.)

Nevertheless, was the Maiden of Orleans a "feminist" or not, she has been a favourite figurehead of many taking part in the women’s liberation movement. For example, the American suffragist Sarah Moore Grimké, translated one of the French biographies of Joan and published in Boston in 1876. Also, the English Christabel Pankhurst was known as the Maiden Warrior. (Warner 1981, 263.) We, positioning our approach within the contemporary feminist media studies, read the legend and in particular Besson’s the Messenger as a cultural practice in which standards, boundaries, expectations, anomalies, myths, exotic pleasures and irrational fears about gender are produced, reproduced and represented. Thus, we study the film of Joan of Arc in regard to technologies of gender (de Lauretis 1987) which take place in the cultural background of Western-"Hollywood" societies, for which gender norms and discourses are at least seemingly becoming more diverse and tolerant.

Accordingly, we dare to contest Williamson’s harsh criticism on postmodernist thinking. Following the feminist postructuralist tradition, we understand gender as a culturally and socially constructed discourse placed in the human body. Gender refers to one type of social relationship and way of societal classification (de Lauretis 1987, 4-5). The body is regarded as the definitive factor of the sexual difference, the politics of body will rise up in our analysis. We understand the body as a politically inscribed discursive entity that is historically and socially constructed (see account eg. Bordo 1993b, 188). Thus, gender is about power; we share Foucault’s ideas of power not as a possession or having, but as a relation, a dynamic network of non-centralised forces that work all over in the institutions of society, and in the daily practices of the individuals within it. (Foucault 1976, 121-122.) As he notes further: power is not always oppressive, it does not rely on violence and suppression but it can be subtle and productive. "Power produces reality, it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth." (Foucault 1977, 196) Discourses transmit and produce power, they work as tools of power. Also, "where there is power there is resistance". The resistant discourses are continuously produced beside the dominant discourses (ibid.125). Power creates possibilities for knowledge in and through the production of discourses (Fisher & Davis1993, 8).

As a feminist figure, the legendary Joan of Arc can be seen as an active agent resisting the dominant powers. She differs distinctively from the delicate and passive images of most other female saints. Her independent and aggressive character, not considered as typically feminine, has strikingly made the issue of gender visible and questioned its boarders. To put it in Butlerian terms, she gets in to a serious gender trouble (Butler 1990) with her individual performance. She didn’t only disturb the heterosexual matrix of her time, but also, as a peasant born she threatened the power hierarchy of social statuses. Besson’s Joan is also a strong and active woman. But, we can find many gendered discourses that are in accord with the oppressing structures of today.

Thus, the power works through cultural and social institutions. One of them is cinema, which is only a part of the mass media representing relationships of power and resistance. Influenced by Foucault, de Lauretis has brought up the notion of film as technology of gender. She summarises her ideas as follows: 1) Gender is a representation; 2) the representation of gender is a construction; 3) the construction of gender is a historical process taking place in all the social institutions; and 4) paradoxically, the construction of gender also effects its deconstruction. (de Lauretis 1987, 3.)

In the line of this theoretical framework, in this paper we study the representations of gender offered by Besson’s film of the legendary figure of Joan of Arc. Following a methodological approach often utilised within cultural studies’ tradition of examining popular culture phenomena, we conduct a close reading on how the representations of Joan reconstruct and deconstruct gendered discourses in our contemporary western culture. As some discourses of the figure of Joan can be interpreted as resistant discourses that deconstruct the borders of gender, paradoxically, they also take part in the construction of dominant gender representations. As a series of cultural representations, as a cinematic work, it brings its share in the discursive negotiations of gender. We suggest different interpretations of gender offering discourses ranging from oppressive to resistant ones.

Besson’s Joan entered the movie theatres in late 1999 and early 2000 both in the U.S. and in Europe. Some critics saw in it not only another account of a 500-year old legend, but also a narrative of heroism and quest as well as an imagery of spectacle and the theme of the inevitable doom, all suitable for the turn of the Millennium (e.g. Ylanen 2000). It was judged as a thin historical romp, that labours under the misapprehension that Joan’s life is a war story and takes place largely on battlefields (Ebert 1999).

For us, the movie brought to the screen three specific topics that bring up various technologies of gender. These three issues have often been presented in Joan’s story, but have been emphasised in the movie, and seem to correspond to certain gendered discourses of our postmodern Western societies: the issue of the female body (and its particular characteristic today); that of the construction of gender on the surface of the body (cross-dressing); and that of the active, strong, ambitious woman.

"The tomboy is a cultural stereotype which describes girls who have what are conventionally thought as of boyish traits (…) Somewhat contradictory, tomboys are frequently also portrayed as sexually naïve and innocent of the ways of the world (…)"

(The Women’s Companion to International Film: Kuhn & Radstone 1990, 401.)

In the first scenes of Besson’s film we see Joan of Arc as tomboy, a child of nature running freely through the fields and forests. When she grows up to become a soldier for France and God, she is still the boyish dare-devil who attempts the most impossible attacks with joy; yet the innocent young person around whom other knights dare not swear and behave badly. There are hardly any hints towards her female sexuality (after her ecstatic childhood visions); she lives among men, and although admired, no romance evolves. While being one of the boys, she is also the virgin bride of Jesus.

According to many historians, sexual naïveté is particularly important for the accomplishment of Joan’s career as woman in medieval society. The concept of virginity is connected to innocence and it was believed that devil could not have commerce with a virgin. (Warner 1981, 15). However, the power of virginity and its great importance in the historical context remains unexplained, as if taken-for-granted by Besson. This is quite interesting in the light of Hollywood main stream film culture where sex and different forms of sexuality as the main theme have in recent years been explored in more and more explicit and ‘liberated’ ways. This, however, may be symptomatic to Besson, whose films – although featuring strong female characters -- seldom concentrate or even touch upon sexual identity, romance or sensuality (Hayward 1998).

The bodily in the Messenger, then, appears not to be linked to excessive and open sexuality but to another current feature of today’s body culture: that of the mainstream ideal of a female body. From the medieval to the Victorian society women were supposed to preserve their chastity, but nowadays women’s duty is to preserve and guard their beauty. In the light of previous popular representations of Joan, the need to cast this Saint to match the aesthetic discourses of each era is no news: heroic tales seem to require a picture perfect main character. Renée Falconetti, who was starring as Joan of Arc in Dreyer’s silent classic was known as a beauty, who first had a hard time getting used to acting without make up, as the director insisted. Roberto Rossellini chose his wife, the universally adored beauty queen, Ingrid Bergman to play the part of Joan in Giovanna de Arco al rogo (1954). And Besson’s choice Milla Jovovich, interestingly also his wife by that time, is an ex-model who stands for the contemporary feminine body ideal. She has a tall, slender, fitness club body. Her appearance gives the impression of being in perfect control of her body; she is androgynous in a nice feminine way, just like many women wished to be. In terms of technologies of gender, the film represents the figure of Joan of Arc as a strong and independent woman. But, simultaneously, Besson adds to her figure so many other characteristics that make her too perfect in terms of the standards of today’s feminine body ideal. After all, the bodily appearance of Besson’s Joan does not expand the cultural discourse of female beauty. Following Wolf’s argument that beauty ideals work as a means of social control of women (Wolf 1990, 68- 69), one interpretation would be that the role of Joan of Arc has been given to a beauty queen of the time to tame this strong woman.

Interestingly, Joan of Arc may have always been presented as an androgynous beauty, but some historians remind us that instead of being boyish and slim, she in fact was a short and stocky peasant girl and there are contemporaries’ accounts about her beautiful breasts (Gordon 2000, 144). In our times, it has been claimed that the slender body is regarded as a cultural sign of competence, productiveness, self-control and intelligence, whereas, for most people feminine curvaceousness is associated with "giggly, wide eyed vapidity" (Bordo 1993, 55). To reshape one’s body into a male body is not to put on male power and priviledge; "To feel autonomous and free while harnessing body and soul to an obsessive body practice is to serve, not transform, a social order that limits female possibilities". (Bordo 1993, 179). But do women simply go along with the cultural beauty images, and if so, why? This problem of ‘cultural dope’ has been criticized by eg. Davis (1995). She argues that while there is both a beauty industry and dominant discourses about female beauty, women are not passive victims of hegemonic systems (Davis & Fisher 1993, 14). For some women the action taken to improve the bodily appearance can be seen in the terms of power, resistance and control; as oppression and liberation all in one (Davis 1995, 67).

Notwithstanding, specifically one part of Joan’s experience of embodiment matches with discourses and experiences of our times, as never before, and that has to do with bodily control. She, namely, had a difficult relationship with eating, thus matching all the characteristics of anorexics: fear of food, nausea, horror for outside impurities entering a stronghold of the personal body. Also, there is no evidence that Joan menstruated. It is known that women under stress or in case of an illness can stop menstruating (e.g. women soldiers, prisoners, as well as with anorexia). For Joan’s contemporaries, her cleanliness from the menstrual blood was a holy condition, in addition to her virginity: the sexual knowledge had not corrupted her. (Warner 1981, 21-22).

Although Besson neither elaborates on Joan’s virginity, nor addresses her anorectic eating habits or menstruation, his Joan the tomboyish Fashion Model can easily to be interpreted in connection with such issues. Overly slender bodies, as depicted in the popular media by models, have over and over again been accused of creating a false ideal for women (e.g. Williamson 1987, Bordo 1993) and as thus of being one of the major causes for the boom of eating disorders in today’s societies. It has been suggested that women who fall ill with anorexia are most often overly ambitious and disciplined in other areas of life. But because of the stress caused by the strive for achievements, they want control over their bodies. Another discourse around the disorder is that young girls do not dare to become women, neither do they want to be male, but they wish to overcome and escape the issue of sex and remain androgynous children. Besson’s Joan is obviously both: overly dedicated and passionately ambitious, as well as fashionably, sexily androgyne. To take the interpretation even a step further: we suggest parallels in ritual and attitudes between religious practices of medieval times and today’s beauty regimens. To quote Wolf (1990, 65) beauty is today’s religion that is transmitted by the mass media. Women feel the same quilt of eating as they used to feel about sex (or other ‘sins’, for the matter). They "confess" to their girl friends, diet groups and physicians, just like Joan has an obsession of confessing to priests – a fixation which is made very clear in the Messenger.

"Cross-dressing offers a perfect support to the feminist claim that gender is not a biological category but a socially constructed identity (…) Cross-dressing narratives typically investigate how the other half lives and so may expose male priviledge, power, or authority. Female characters often cross-dress to gain access to a male world which excludes women."

(The Women’s Companion to International Film: Kuhn & Radstone 1990, 104)

The bodily and constructing one’s body by, for example, controlling one’s food intake, is closely connected by further constructing one’s identity by covering the body. Dressing "stands in" for the body - body and clothes combined create the gendered "appearance" (Wilson 1993, 52). In any version of the legend, Joan of Arc has been known for the particular trait of wearing men’s clothes. But it is also said that she loved clothes, and her relationship to her body was to regard it very much as a display for beautiful clothes and gear. Ironically, cross-dressing was one of the severe crimes she went to trial for. The charge of idolatrous transvestism was mentioned in her trial text over and over again; not only because she was thought to impersonate men, but such noble men as knights and dandies. (Gordon 2000, 144-145) Her cross-dressing seems to have become a key symbol of her alleged search for followers and fame through evil means and deception. Breaking the gender rules by cross-dressing makes finally gender as a visible performative act (Butler 1990). It was accused that "her voices were illusions; her dress, a trick; her mission, a perversion of nature" (Warner 1981, 147).

Joan’s cross-dressing is also dutifully represented in the Messenger: from the scene where she cuts her long hair, to the historical detail that while Joan was in prison and had been made to promise not to wear men’s clothes anymore, someone smuggled them into her cell, to fortify accusations. The actress Jovovitch makes a note in numerous interviews of the heavy armour – almost a replica – she had to wear in the fighting scenes. In many mainstream movies, cross-dressing constructs a man out of a woman, or vice versa – although in a "safe" way by letting the viewer be aware of the truth (see Kuhn 1995). However, Besson’s Joan is the trendy tomboy, gorgeously styled in her knight’s gear, never even pretending to suggest to the viewer doubts about her femininity. This, of course, does not mean that the issue of cross-dressing would not be an interesting one, but rather suggests that this obvious disparity or ambiguity regarding those elements which construct her gender is both trendy in today’s world, but in the light of Joan’s legend, also dangerous.

Again, Besson does not bother to explicitly address the historical context of Joan’s choice of clothes. Apparently, women wearing men’s clothes had not in every case been a problem for the society and the Church: there is a tradition of "holy transvestites", of saintly women who protected their virginity by disguising as men (Gordon 2000, 122). This has, of course, been interpreted as one of Joan’s reasons for her dress code. So why was Joan accused of idolatry? Gordon (2000, 113) suggests that "sanctioned transvestism escaped accusations because the women’s female identity became invisible… they became, to the world, entirely male, not drawing attention to herself but disappearing into the job of making herself safe from male desire". Joan, on the contrary, wore an armour was most likely partly a practical matter in battlefields, and probably also a sign of the authority she took as the leader of the war. However, she never tried to impersonate the opposite sex. Since Joan never passed as a man, Gordon argues, her femaleness became a contradiction rather than erasure (ibid.). A common, and certainly feminist conclusion would then be that Joan’s transvestism, in the eyes of her contemporaries, was a sin since it was connected to activity, to a woman with power and capability to act in the male world. Thus, it didn’t only pervert biology; it upset the social hierarchy (Warner 1981, 147).

Women cross-dressing is not a new theme to Besson, but can be detected in movies like Subway (1985) and Nikita (1990). His strong, even violent female characters may be memorable among the heroines of the current cinema, but they seem to be tamed as well as punished for their transgressive behaviour at the end anyway, like in most cases of the mainstream film (see Hayward 1998). Joan the Messenger is of course no exception.

"Literally meaning women warriors, this term is commonly used figuratively to describe strong women who struggle to resist patriarchal definitions and modes of behaviour, and who attempt either to break down the gender boundaries or to explore woman-centered ways of living."

(The Women’s Companion to International Film: Kuhn & Radstone 1990, 13.)

Joan’s body image and cross-dressing contribute to her androgynous figure, ideally offering possibilities identification to both men and women. But had she taken a more passive, subtle and gentle way to pursue her sacred mission, we might not remember her today. Heroes were, and still are, often made of masculine action; not surprisingly, then, throughout the history, Joan’s Amazonian side has been her most admired trait. As an illustration: according to Warner, the name Jeanne d’Arc, Joan of Arc, is an invention; neither Joan nor her family used it. The arch or bow has been associated with the powerful women of antiquity. The bow is the weapon of the Amazon and in the early literal works written about her she was principally presented as an Amazon, a violent and independent virgin. (Warner 1981, 202.)

Action may be a very popular, safe way to tell a heroic story for the mass audiences of our time, and this is definitively utilised in the Messenger. The movie is first and foremost about aggressive activity, fight, war: the battle scenes of the film are the most extensive and excessive in action, visuality and duration. Joan could be the female ancestor of the Terminator or the model for Tank Girl and G.I. Jane, following the recent trend of this new sub genre of action heroine movies. If one takes a look at Besson’s work, one could speculate that he, in fact, has been inspired all along by the Amazon Maiden of Orleans. Joan, without doubt, is regardless of her world fame a very French character, with nationalistic connotations. And especially Besson’s most famous character, Nikita, can be read as a current time Joan: a loner in men’s world, brought in to the world of agents from a different social context (from being an adolescent criminal), cross-dressing and fighting for a good cause.

When action heroines and Amazons emerged in the screen, they have most often been seen in films by feminist filmmakers. However, the legend of the Maiden of Orleans has not yet inspired many female cinematographers. Numerous films of her are made by men; to our knowledge, the only exception is an internationally known movie Johanna d’Arc of Mongolia by Ulrike Ottinger, 1988. Warner suggests one answer to the male fascination by the following: "Transvestism can accentuate sexuality, not eliminate it, and the Amazon, in her apparent rejection of men, can be seen to affirm sexual difference and male superiority. Joan’s life---is a tribute to the traditional sphere of man, as opposed to woman, so that Amazon independent virgin that she was, she became suitably versatile talisman for a host of causes conducted by men, military and political." However, she does not doom Joan as a men’s ideological doll but offers an additional interpretation: At the same time, because Joan was undeniably female, she was "a figurehead for women’s side in one phase of the lasting struggle, the continuing duel, between Penthesilea and Hero Achilles." (Warner 1981, 217.)

As Smelik notes, the images of female violence are a very specific attempt to construct the female subject as active agent - using resistance against injustice, abuse of power or sexual violence. (Smelik 1995, 104). Joan, the avenger for her dead and disgraced sister, the Messenger on a God’s mission fits in this picture. But do we see any traces of the feminist figurehead in the Messenger? Not in a communal, bonding, mentoring sense. Joan the Amazon is fighting among men and is hardly seen to connect with other women. In this sense, she is a metaphor of the independent single career woman whose counterparts can be found in today’s working life. Women do the double job: besides full time employment they take care of most of the house work. Wolf suggests that women do even a third shift adding the work done for beauty to the previous. She lives for her vocation and did not want to sacrifice her body to reproduction of future generations. She is alone in the male world, gaining respect by doing male deeds, and working excessively to match up, to fit in, to achieve.

"For a character to achieve the status of heroine, audience members must find some identification with that character. How they do so, depends on their own position in relation to what they are seeing on the screen. For feminists, this simple statement presents interesting possibilities."

(The Women’s Companion to International Film: Kuhn & Radstone 1990, 198.)

Joan’s virginity, her male dress and her amazon behaviour are all key characteristics of the legend, they all have to do with gender, and they all are also portrayed in the Messenger. Nevertheless, one of the most interesting discourses around Joan circle around representations of the spiritual. Is Joan the Messenger, at the emergence of the new Millenium, a holy saviour or a maniac? If the above quote holds true, would today’s women (and men) find some identification in the issues Besson’s representation of the Legend brought about – would this Maiden of Orleans achieve a status of a heroine among us? And, with her characteristics and features crossing traditional gender boundaries, could she be interpreted as a feminist figure? The film itself did not become a blockbuster, and we have not conducted any ethnographic study on how it was experienced, certainly she was intended to represent a main, heroic character. We have tried to show how some central characteristics of Besson’s Joan reflect the excessive in our present (Western) culture – excessive regarding the body, regarding the construction of one’s appearance (dress, gender) and regarding the action. However, one trait of Joan’s received surprisingly little attention in the Messenger, namely the spiritual excess she was engaged in; the quest, the burning mission which ultimately sent the peasant girl to royal battles and resulted in her execution.

A poignant illustration of the focus on the excessive material and visible, but the lack or the uneasiness with the excessive spiritual in the Messenger is seen when comparing Besson’s Joan to that of Dreyer. The classic from the late 1920’s concentrates on the last days of the Joan’s life, the plague of the trials and burning at stake, that made her a martyr and saint. It is a highly religious film emphasising the heroine’s inner battle of spirit versus flesh, self-doubt versus conviction, a tension between the worldly authority versus spiritual strength (Bordwell 1973,31). The image of Joan is emotional, devout and defiant. Dreyer himself explained: " I wanted to interpret a hymn to the triumph of the soul over life." (Ibid. 59.) It is often been interpreted that Dreyer’s Joan is indeed suffering martyr, a victim of the situation; and that nothing suggests that she would desire to change her faith (Gordon 2000, 151).

In contrast to the emotional and spiritual emphasis of Dreyer’s film, Besson portrays his Joan of Arc as a violent, Amazon with few other emotions than the mania to pursue her vision, by acting it out. The visual imagery of the two versions of Joan also illustrates these very different screen interpretations – of different times - of the legend. While Dreyer ‘s black-and-white film emphasises the tragic story of the trial by minimalist staging filmed entirely in close-ups and medium shots; Besson lavishes on colourful landscapes with sunsets, heavy clouds and endless fields, crowded and loud war scenes, luxurious staging of the court, and the like. Special effects, of course, are central not only to action and fighting, but provide for a gruesome end scene on Joan burning in agony.

Our heroine’s battlefield seems so grand, excessive: not only because she leads entire battalions and armies, but also because her representation here is glorified with a trace of authenticity. While Besson’s other female characters often have no personal history (Hayward 1998), a real Joan of Arc does, she has existed. One could then speculate if only the historical facts have forced Besson to explicitly address the battle of the spiritual against the worldly, conviction against self-doubt, since this scene deserves relatively limited attention towards the end of the movie. An American movie critic Ebert (1999 Chicago Sun-Times) noted, that the scene in prison with the darkly dressed man and his doubting questions about Joan’s true motives: "seems inspired by the desperate need to somehow shoehorn philosophy in the film". (Ebert 1999.)

This moral evaluation in the Messenger gives nonetheless an uneasy feeling from a feminist perspective: Is it so that an aggressive and determined feminine action figure cannot automatically be credited as a brave soldier, without a self-doubt, sacrificing her body over the ideals? Does she -- even or specifically today -- need to be presented as a possibly deranged, schizophrenic soul? Besson is insinuating that the origin of Joan’s voices were in her own head. This is in line with the fact that Besson seems to be utilising the tradition of aggressive female characters driven by injustice (Smelik 1995): Injustice against France is very present in Joan’s legend as such, but Besson takes the rape of her sister to mark a personal revenge mission. It follows, then, that Joan the Messenger is made to admit herself having been bloodthirsty, selfish and cruel. The sanctity of her deeds are almost nullified in the last scenes of the film, but in the end she decides to go the stake in order to appease with God.

If Dreyer’s Jeanne is a victim of the situation, then Besson may be said to suggest that his Joan the Messenger is the victim of her own excessive ambitions and the excessive behaviour which follow from those ambitions. In Joan the Tomboy, there is also a hint of infantile or adolescent overflow of passion and lack of realism, which in our culture are in their excessive forms connected with mental illness (McNay 1994). And one viable vain of interpretation could here point towards a Freudian idea of the obsessive, hysterical, and thus mentally unhealthy female (see discussion on popular culture, obsession and gender in e.g. Mellencamp 1992). Could a provocative critic find here a suggestion: As a woman, she wanted too much. As a woman, she crossed too many boundaries? As characters not fitting the cultural order so often are represented in popular media, she, too, had to be exterminated. At any rate, the voice/face of the consciousness torturing Joan in the Messenger is that of an older man.

However, to recreate Joan as a movie hero in 1999, once again, can be interpreted as having some ‘broader’ meaning, and we argue that it has to do with the excess of the material and the questions of its binary opposition, the spiritual. Joan of Arc seems always to have been a very volatile legend, widely used to match the Zeitgeist of each era. For example, she was finally canonised at the beginning of this century when more "working-class", rebellious kinds of saints were needed, to attract those estranged from the Catholic Church with the labour movement; along the same lines, the socialist Brecht stages her Johanna as someone who fights for the cause of the people (Gordon 2000, 171-2). She has a saint been a saint working through the material world. Many times in French political history, Joan of Arc has been used as a symbol of political unity of the nation (Warner 1981, 257); and she has also been featured with the same message in American propaganda during the WWII.

Accordingly, one reason why Besson jumped from the sci-fi theme of the Fifth Element (1997) to a story from 500 years ago could be that Joan’s legend inherently offers something that is currently circulating in popular discourses. An androgynous and aggressive action heroine has for a few years already been a part of the mainstream; rather, the central issues addressed by such recent box office hits as the American Beauty and All About My Mother deal with the contradiction between material and spiritual, egoism and altruism, in situations where the shadow of death is present (not as a threat, but as given reality to be faced). Joan’s legend, without her sacrificing for her principles, would not be as glorious as it is today. She died before she could have been proven weak. "Her stake likened the Christ’s cross, through it, her virtue can be transmitted to others and save them." (Warner 1981, 268.)

There is something magical about the combination of altruism and death; we only have to look at the case of princess Diana (see an analysis of this phenomena in Gabler 1998) to see how attractive such a case is for today’s popular culture. Yet, at the same time, there also seems to be a great deal of uneasiness about excessive determination and belief when they are not associated with gaining personal and material benefits. As Gordon (2000, 172) aptly states, discussing Joan as a saint: "’Saint’ connects immediately to ‘goodness’. But what does goodness mean to us now? Which are the virtues that we prize? Is it possible for us now to prize any virtue, believing (all of us necessarily post-Darwinian if not post-Freudian) that we act as we do from self-interest?" This is exactly Besson’s point when he, in the midst of his action movie, brings in the doubting visions of Joan in her cell.

Besson has always been credited as being the creator of hybrid film genres, combining comedy and thriller to musical, melodrama, and future fantasy – and the Messenger is obviously no exception. According to some film critics, hybrid genres inevitably construct hybrid gender representations (Hayward 1998, 129). Joan, then, provides the story par excellence for everything fluid and hybrid, from the opposite and excessive ends of the scale of behaviour. Not only is this the case in terms of the body and sexual identity (virgin – cross-dress), but also in terms of social class (peasant – knight), in terms of the material and the spiritual (lover of clothing – spartan in practicing religion) and in terms of thought and action (visionary – warrior). Even her role as a prophet itself involves contradictory elements. Historically, being open to all guilds, social classes, occupations and above all, to men and women, the role of a prophet was taken by a numbers of women because so few other means of expression were available to them – so they could use spiritual visions to influence political affairs. But Joan did nothing of that sort: her ‘voices’ dealt with the concrete action she was to take, and which she then pursued vigorously (Warner 1981 85-86).

Contradictions in Joan’s legend may just have made her always so easily modifiable for various times, ideologies, discourses and forms of presenting those differing narratives. To illustrate this with the quotes in the beginning of this paper: for the Finnish historian Pulla, in 1938 in the middle of a war, Joan’s saintliness seem to have been glorified by bravery and good health – important features for women in Finland at that time. For Warner, writing from the perspective of a feminist historian in early 1980’s, Joan has provided an inspirational example of a woman making it in the most patriarchal surroundings. From our theoretical, methodological and contextual framework, we are inclined to claim that for our times, Joan of Arc represents postmodernism if understood, to rephrase Smelik (1995, 27) as the complex and contradictory culture of our societies. The legend definitively can be said to do so in breaking down stereotypical gender discourses and in corresponding to a constructed, fluctuating, multi-dimensional, performance-like continuum of identities. As Warner defines her view of Joan, she is the personification of mobility: she accepted none of the limitations of society had provided for her circumscription. (Warner 1981, 160).

Besson’s Joan of Arc, then, as many other portrayals of the legend, work prominently through the technologies of gender of its own epoch. We suggest that the gendered discourses represented through the character of medieval heroine have its equivalents in our time. As for embodiment, Joan the tomboy, the expectations of virginity for are now equated with those of beauty. Joan the knight’s bodily appearance and dressing to a knight’s armour could be replaced with trouser suits of female officers. Joan the active Amazon could be seen as an independent career woman or a rowdy patriot military woman. In sum, the Messenger brings out specifically key excessive characteristics of today’s culture: the excessive regarding the control of the androgynous body, the somewhat fluid play with gender roles, and the drive for action; simultaneously touching the emerging and ambiguous relationship with the above mentioned active individualism with the spiritual and the collective. The last issue may explain the excessive element: in today’s culture: We just may opt for excess, and "perform" it in very contradictory terms, because boundaries of modern society are not there to hold us back. Yet, as suggested by so many writers after the legend was born, perhaps Joan of Arc still intrigues all of us because ultimately, the contradictions in her character and deeds represent contradictions in all humans, at all times.

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Williamson, Allen 2000a:Myths and Distortions about Joan of Arc (Jehanne Darc)

http://members.aol.com/hywwebsite/private/joanofarc_besson_film.html

Williamson, Allen 2000b:Myths and Distortions about Joan of Arc (Jehanne Darc)

http://members.xoom.com/HYWWebsite2/joanofarc_myths.html

Helsingin Sanomat, elokuva-arvostelu: 1999 Luc Bessonin jykevä tulkinta Jeanne d’Arcista päättyy traagiseen hiljaisuuteen

http://helsingin.sanomat.fi/nyt/elokuvat/arvostelu.asp?movid=102

Catholic Community Forum, Saints Index Page 21.6.2000: Joan of Arc

http://www.catholic-forum.com/saints/saintj05.htm