Hollywood Utopia

220 Hollywood Utopia
with a personal quest for the ‘perfect girl’. 13 The woman of his dreams, the fifth
element (a post-feminist representational dream?) draws her pedigree and sense
of visual spectacle straight out of the classic German film Metropolis. Earlier, the
‘fifth element’ agent who first appears entombed in a casket, embodied a deity who
cannot be observed. Three hundred years later, however, she is transformed into a
punk female fantasy cyborg called Leeloo (Milla Jovovich), unlike more
conventional male varieties.
Reconstituted and transformed into a female humanoid cyborg with a surface
manifesting conventional female beauty, she is framed within a mysterious
scientific ectoplasm. Such a dualistic embodiment serves to recreate a
contemporary non-threatening notion of agency. In many ways she becomes the
antithesis of the conventional horror/science fiction ‘alien’, whom Barbara Creed
codifies as the ‘monstrous feminine’ with its ‘archaic maternal power over
reproduction, life and death’ (cited in Rogin 1998: 60). But the men in white coats
are unable to transform themselves, only perceiving a fragile commodified woman,
who they cannot explain and need to both objectify and control.
As David Harvey suggests, it has become dangerous to ‘confess about being meta
about anything’ (Harvey 1996: 2) these days. Consequently, both critics and
scientists find it almost impossible to take a leap of faith and see beyond the
apparent immediate physical evidence, which is necessary if they are to uncover the
playful significance and potency of such postmodernist exemplary icons.
In some ways Leeloo’s sexualised representation can be compared to the test tube
cloning of Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) in Alien Resurrection (1997), to be discussed
later. While Ripley has been cloned from alien (and human) tissue and presented
in a giant test tube, mutating into maturity, she is similarly observed by equally
hideous conformist old men in white coats. The ‘fifth element’ must literally
escape the scientists’ predatory clutches and potentially intrusive examination
(which Ripley was unable to do).
Leeloo escapes from this clinical, patriarchal control into the radical chaotic and
excessive vision of twenty-third century New York as drawn from the work of two
legendary French comic book artists, Moebius and Jean Claude Mezieres, who have
influenced Besson since he was 16 and first had the idea for this picture. Only now,
with the assistance of Avid, the digital editing system, is Besson able with his
special effects expert Stetson to pre-edit sequences for speed, action and
composition and fully suspend audiences’ perceptions and transport them to a
truly postmodernist time and place in the twenty-third century. The urban setpiece
advances the vision of Metropolis in its controlled systematic chaos. As Leeloo
stands on the ledge of a skyscraper, like Harold Lloyd in the silent films, a renewed
visceral sense of spectacle and vertigo is created with a layered, controlled flow of