By Lisa Swander Sarjeant
Twenty years ago, I sat around a conference table in a course called Women in Contemporary Theater, trying to impress my favorite professor, Dr. Snyder. She’d asked us to name a single feminine action hero.
“Lara Croft!”
“Trinity!”
“Ripley!”
“Uma Thurman with a giant sword!”
She shook her head again and again. “Not a female hero,” she said. “One who uses the feminine to save the day. Connection. Relational intelligence. Intuition. You’re giving me women with machine guns and logic.”
As a teacher-pleaser and a perfectionist and a connoisseur of the 90s action genre, I recall wanting to flip the conference table.
I couldn’t even get my mind around the question. Fourth-wave feminism had not been invented yet, and to me and my classmates, feminine was more or less the same as female. Besides, we’d been raised on Harrison Ford movies. Any action film that did not dispense with its villain via either fistfight or forcible ejection from an aircraft would have been a box office disaster.
What did she expect this action lady to do? Become friends with the villain?
Finally, a non-teacher-pleasing classmate threw up her hands and asked, “Well what would that even LOOK like, then?”
Dr. Snyder shrugged. “We don’t know,” she said. “No one has written that movie yet.”
And that’s why Moana took me down, two decades later, like a beautiful, walloping sack of sacred feminine bricks.
When it debuted in 2016, Moana made Disney progress on many fronts. Moana is a competent future chief, an adventurer, and a young woman of color. Her journey revolves not around romance or escape but around identity—both in claiming her own and in reclaiming that of her people.
All of that was invigorating from the first frames. But it was the climax, that mythical feminine denouement, that left me teary-eyed, open-mouthed, and wishing for a Moana DVD and a DeLorean to fly back to 2003.
You’ve seen it, right? In the final showdown with the lava monster Te Kā, Maui’s warriorship has run its course. Moana is desperate to reach the mother island, Te Fiti. She’s sailed across the ocean to return Te Fiti’s heart—a green spiral stone, itself a symbol of the feminine—but the goddess island is missing.
As Te Kā winds up her final fatal fireball, Moana notices a spiral on the monster’s chest. And then she does something weird.
She holds up the stone and summons Te Kā.
You think Maui is going to swoop in here, to take advantage of the diversion and do what action heroes do—kill, bludgeon, throw off airplane, etc. But he doesn’t. In fact, he doesn’t do anything at all. The camera stays with Moana, who sings softly as Te Kā approaches in a ferocious swirl of smoke and flames:
They have stolen the heart from inside you.
But this does not define you.
Inexplicably, the lava monster, who has rage-crawled her way to within inches of Moana during this musical interlude, cools to stone.
This is not who you are, Moana sings. I know who you are.
And instead of incinerating her, Te Kā bends to the earth and touches Moana’s forehead to her own.
Moana places the stone in the monster’s chest. The spiral lights from within, and Te Kā cracks and expands into the lush, green goddess of creation: Te Fiti.
It was 2016 when I watched this, at home on my couch, with a baby clinging to one arm and a toddler trying to escape from the other. And I believe I confused the children with my sobbing.
With that climax, Moana became my holy grail of feminist cinema: an action movie, complete with murderous coconuts and chase scenes and molten projectiles, whose big, scary, violent villain is defeated with…compassion and understanding.
I’d been hoping to see it for twenty years.
Te Kā crumbles in the face of Moana’s deep knowing—of her own courage, of the stories of her people, of her confidence in the still, small voice of her intuition. No one tells Moana that Te Kā and Te Fiti are the same. Yet she knows. She’s in possession of her feminine power to see the humanity in others. To quiet thoughts of vengeance long enough to peer under the surface. Or through the cracks.
No one on earth can silence that quiet voice still inside you, Moana’s grandmother sings a few scenes before, when Moana is ready to refuse the call and cast Te Fiti’s heart into the ocean. Her grandmother urges her to cast off logic instead. There is no logic in the goddess of life transforming into the demon of death, but logic is for the masculine hero. And by then he’d already lost his fish hook.
Moana’s power lies in her ability to understand a world not of opposites, but of “both/ands;” of the liminal feminine. Of course the goddess, robbed of her life force, would transform into her opposite, Te Kā. We’re all only one stolen heart away from our shadow selves, aren’t we?
The “both/and” applies to Maui and Moana, too, as the masculine and the feminine. Maui couldn’t defeat the monster with force alone, but neither could Moana reach the goddess island with only her intuition. In Moana as in life, the two energies depend on each other to thrive.
And the real-life issue we need to correct, with a hundred thousand Moanas and other stories like it, is that those energies have been out of balance for all of modern history.
In Goddesses, Joseph Campbell calls this new library of stories the “feminine future.” A catalog of feminine monomyths to counter thousands of years of mythology written by men.
“And it is a future,” Campbell says. “It’s as though the liftoff has taken place.” In the 70s, I doubt he imaged Disney would help to usher in that future, but he’d appreciate that the rocket has climbed much higher since Moana was released.
I remember realizing what I was seeing that day. I remember wishing I could call Dr. Snyder.
I remember looking at my kids as the credits rolled—my son going limp with boredom and my daughter trying to correct the error of our bodies ever having been separated—and thinking, “Your world will be different than mine.”
And it has been. My children’s media collection—Frozen 2, Inside Out, Brave, Justin Time, Octonauts, Sophia the First—is filled with characters who diffuse villainry with curiosity rather than clobber it with reactivity. Moana was the first one I met, but she was certainly not the last. I don’t know how that will hold up into their adolescence, but I’m optimistic. If those feminine stories don’t exist for adults yet, this generation of kids will surely be the ones to write them.
In general, I’m optimistic about our long-overdue rebalancing. About a world like the one Elisabeth Lesser envisions in her book Cassandra Speaks, one not with a false dichotomy between masculine and feminine, but one with “women and men mixing it up, blending it all together, tempering power with wisdom, giving muscle and prestige to love and nurture. That’s my dream.”
I think that dream might just come true, one Moana at a time.