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According to Susan Hayward, national cinema should be perceived as ‘a practice that
should not conceal structures of power and knowledge’. It should also ‘function as a mise-enscene of scattered and dissembling identities as well as fractured subjectivities and
fragmented hegemonies’ (p. 101). In what ways have Iranian and/or diasporic Iranian
filmmakers engaged in these processes to reveal structures of power and knowledge and
destabilise nationalistic and hegemonic notions of Iranian identity?
Iranian-American filmmaker Ana Lily Amirpour’s 2014 film, A Girl Walks Home
Alone at Night, is a masterful exemplar of the ways in which national and diaspora cinema
reveals structures of power and knowledge, as well as acts as what Susan Hayward calls a
“mise-en-scene of scattered and dissembling identities as well as fractured subjectivities and
fragmented hegemonies”.1 In this essay, I will argue that it is the fundamental in-betweenness
of almost every aspect of A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night as a diasporic film that enables it
to not only straddle the line between strict, hegemonic dichotomies of Iranian cultural
attitudes and identities and deconstruct them, but also create the possibility of entirely new,
hybrid ways of being. Through the anti-hero figure of the Girl, A Girl Walks Home Alone at
Night reveals and then resists the deeply-rooted, misogynistic image of the oppressed veiled
woman both within and outside of Iranian culture, as well as patriarchal structures of power.
The film then further challenges the rigid dichotomies of identity set upon Iranian women,
adding complexity and nuance to its female characters as well as resisting the notion of the
“monstrous feminine”. Finally, Amirpour’s genre-crossing filmmaking style allows her to
privilege marginalised stories of Iranian and Iranian diaspora identity, playing with
1
Susan Hayward, `Framing a National Cinema’, Cinema and Nation, (New York: Routledge, 2000), 101.
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convention and expectation to resist cultural norms and create new spaces of possibility for
her characters.
Arguably, the most obvious way in which A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night makes
visible, then challenges structures of power and knowledge in Iranian culture is through its
anti-heroine. Set in the fictional ghost-town of Bad City - a microcosm of Iranian society the film follows a young woman with vampiric abilities, Girl, as she commits various (often
violent) acts of vigilante justice against certain townspeople and develops connections with
others. At her core, Girl is Amirpour’s direct act of resistance against the image of the
oppressed veiled woman, which, according to Khosroshahi, became the primary means to
control “abject” femininity and sexuality in post-Revolutionary Iran.2 Already, the very name
of the film, ‘A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night’, plays with the audience’s internalised
attitudes: typically, such a sentence evokes a sense of wariness, a deep concern for Girl - or,
frankly, any woman from any culture - becoming the victim of some horrific act of gendered
violence or assault. It quickly becomes apparent, however, that Girl holds all the power: she
is the one to be feared while traversing the streets at night. Khosroshahi writes that Girl is a
“feminist ‘baddie’ with a noble cause, feeding on bad men in a direct attack on the vile
patriarchy of Bad City”.3 Amongst Amirpour’s monochromatic set, Girl sticks out in voidlike deep black; her chador and veil becomes a heroine’s cloak, “shatters any assumptions of
pity” and “allows her to float with power and adopts an entirely new meaning”.4 After
watching Bad City’s almost cartoonishly-exaggerated bad guy, Saeed, physically and verbally
2
Zahra Khosroshahi, “Vampires, Jinn and the Magical in Iranian Horror Films”, (2019), https://
framescinemajournal.com/article/vampires-jinn-and-the-magical-in-iranian-horror-films/, accessed 22nd
November 2021
3
Khosroshahi, “Vampires, Jinn and the Magical in Iranian Horror Films”.
4
Khosroshahi, “Vampires, Jinn and the Magical in Iranian Horror Films”.
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assault a prostitute, Atti, Girl follows him to his flat. Completely unthreatened by the girl in
the chador, Saheed invites her to his apartment, hoping to seduce her with drugs and music.
Girl then observes him cooly. She takes his finger into her mouth and mimicking the sexually
suggestive act as Atti did - then, in a sudden reversal of power, she bites off his finger and
feeds it to him. Still completely silent, a hand-held, shaky close-up reveals Girl gazing at
Saeed’s shivering, terrified form; a flash of mocking pity crosses her features before she
violently feeds on him and kills him. Khosroshahi writes of Girl symbolically castrating
Saeed in this act, exerting her feminine power and single-handedly displacing Bad City’s
most prominent misogynistic, patriarchal force.5 Through the lens of Amirpour’s camera,
Girl’s silence, stillness, and steely gaze is not oppressive; it is ominous, all-encompassing,
and terrifying.
Girl’s quest to deconstruct traditional, toxic structures of power, however, is
not limited to the present-day. She follows the character of the young Boy on his way home
and intimidates him, blocking his path and menacingly asking, “Are you a good boy?”,
imploring him not to lie. She then bares her fangs, leans in, and tells him that she will be
watching him for the rest of his life. This scene can be read as Amirpour’s challenge to the
male “surveillance gaze”, a concept most clearly articulated by film theorist Laura Mulvey
and author Margaret Atwood; it poses that the woman becomes her own self-conscious
voyeur as a result of being unable to escape male fantasies.6 With this scene, Girl imposes her
own gaze onto the Boy and looks back, also intervening in “early formations of masculinity
and the (re)production of patriarchy)”.7 It is through the actions of Amirpour’s unexpected,
5
Khosroshahi, “Vampires, Jinn and the Magical in Iranian Horror Films”.
Amelie Pavel, (2018), You Are Your Own Voyeur: Female Sexuality and the Male Gaze, http://
docfilms.uchicago.edu/dev/calendar/fall2018/thursdays1.shtml, accessed 22nd November 2021
7
Shadee Abdi and Bernadette Marie Calafell, Queer utopias and a (Feminist) Iranian vampire: a critical
analysis of resistive monstrosity in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Critical Studies in Media Communication
(2017), 364.
6
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transgressive anti-heroine in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night that she challenges structures
of power and knowledge in Iranian culture that seek to hegemonize female identity.
Amirpour also plays with conventional film tropes and structure in A Girl Walks Home Alone
at Night to give voice to marginalised narratives in Iran and the Iranian diaspora
which are habitually erased by traditional, hegemonic notions of identity and
structures of power. In Accented Cinema, Naficy writes of ‘accented filmmakers’,
whose works are not neatly resolved by familiar narrative and generic schemas, and
who share a liminal subjectivity and interstitial location both in society and the film
industry.8 He writes more specifically of diasporic filmmakers, whose stories play
with “plurality, multiplicity and hybridity” as a result of their complex and layered
identities.9 Amirpour’s film fits into this category perfectly: a Persian-language film
shot in California that combines elements of romance, horror, and the spaghetti
Western, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night traverses across generic, cultural and
geographical boundaries to rewrite norms for Iranian identity. This is perhaps most
overtly communicated in the budding relationship between Girl and Arash, who are
both considered the ‘Other’. Instead of opting for cuts between close-ups and extreme
close-ups when Girl invites Arash into her bedroom, as one may be inclined to include
in a romantic scene between two characters, Amirpour allows the scene to breathe in a
single, natural take. “Death” by White Lies plays, with the vocalist crooning lyrics
such as “Could there be a love beneath these wings?”, as Arash moves towards Girl
on the other side of the frame. Slowly, Girl turns to face him, tilting his head back to
8
Hamid Naficy, Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking, (New York: Princeton University Press,
2001), 10.
9
Naficy, Accented Cinema, 14.
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reveal his exposed neck - but instead of biting him, she leans into his chest and listens
to his heartbeat. Parallels can also be drawn to the infamous scene from Sofia
Coppola’s 2003 romantic-comedy, Lost in Translation, which also explores themes of
disconnection, alienation, and cultural displacement. Just as the scene lingers and
ends on Arash and Girl’s embrace, Bob and Charlotte fall asleep together after a
hushed, intimate conversation lying side by side in bed. Here, both films subvert the
audience’s expectations that they have sex as the hero and heroine of the story simply
because they share a connection. Such moments are precisely what Abdi and Calafell
call a “shared intimacy of Otherness”, with the two protagonists rejecting the
heteronormative expectation of consummation in favour of a queerer intimacy.10 Their
bond is more innocent, yet arguably far more meaningful, brought together by their
shared desire for a sense of belonging.
The film’s privileging of moments for the Other by playing with temporal
structure continues in the scene that directly follows. Here, the transgender woman who had
appeared briefly in the background of earlier scenes catches a balloon floating in the sky and
dances with it freely to an angelic chorale, the camera capturing an expression of pure
passion and freedom on her face as she moves in slow motion. What is special about this
scene is that it stands completely independently of any narrative sequence in the rest of the
story; it appears as an almost otherworldly moment that exists outside the confines of space
and time. This is deeply liberating: while the trans woman’s presence in the film is a reminder
of the oppressive and harsh laws implemented following the 1979 Iranian Revolution against
those in the LGBTQ+ community, this scene also “points to the power of liminality, and the
10
Abdi and Calfell, Queer utopias and a (Feminist) Iranian vampire: a critical analysis of resistive monstrosity,
366.
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possibility of queer utopias”, lives full of new potential.11 This sentiment of hope and
possibility for hybrid Iranian identities is perhaps most powerfully cemented in the final
scene of the film, wherein Arash and Girl drive away from Bad City following the death of
Arash’s father, Hossein. Hossein was killed by Girl after tying down and forcibly injecting
Atti with heroin, a fact Arash comes to realise as they are packing to leave. Partway through
the journey, Arash stops the car and gets out, standing in the glare of his own headlights,
conflicted; however, he eventually decides to get back in the car. Through a two-shot, we see
our protagonists gazing each other, sharing a smile through the window of Arash’s car as
music plays, before they drive away into the night and the screen cuts to black. Even in
knowing that Girl was directly involved in his own father’s death and having briefly
glimpsed her monstrosity, Arash, like Atti, completely accepts Girl for who she is - because
“they see their Otherness reflected in her”.12 This fact, combined with the open-ended nature
of the film’s ending typical of postcolonial and postmodern narratives, exemplifies Munoz’s
“field of utopian possibility”: paradoxically, the lack of a concrete resolution to our
characters’ stories in fact encompasses their newfound freedom, the potential for an existence
characterised by multiplicity instead of hegemonic boundaries.13 In not just allowing for, but
cherishing moments such as these in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Amirpour places
value on her characters’ deeply personal narratives, treating them as multifaceted beings with
complex inner worlds, whose identities extend far beyond stereotypical and hegemonic
notions of what it means to be Iranian.
11
Ibid., 367
Ibid, 365.
13
José Esteban Muñoz,(2009), Cruising utopia: The then and there of queer futurity. (New York, NY: New
York University Press)
12
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Through A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Amirpour exemplifies Hayward’s
concept of national cinema as a practice that does not conceal structures of power and
knowledge, but instead makes visible, scrutinises, and even shakes the very foundation of
these structures. Her unconventional anti-heroine, Girl, rewrites the hegemonic narrative of
the oppressed veiled woman within and outside of a patriarchal Iranian society, and it is
through Girl’s subversive actions in the liminal Bad City that allows the entire film to act as
an allegorical reversal of existing values and attitudes. What’s more, Amirpour’s embracing
of diasporic filmmaking as a hybrid practice, blurring the lines between genre, location, and
narrative structure, allows her to create the “mis-en-scene of scattered and dissembling
identities” and “fractured subjectivities and fragmented hegemonies” Hayward writes about,
treating her underprivileged characters - and therefore marginalised Iranian and Iranian
diaspora voices - with compassion and nuance and creating new possibilities for meaning.
Bibliography
Abdi, Shadee & Bernadette Marie Calafell. Queer utopias and a (Feminist) Iranian
vampire: a critical analysis of resistive monstrosity in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night,
Critical Studies in Media Communication (2017), pp. 2-14
Edwards, Emily. Searching for a Room of One’s Own: Rethinking the Iranian
Diaspora in “Persepolis”, “Shahs of Sunset” and “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night”,
Beyond Democracy: Innovation as Politics (2017) https://glocalismjournal.org/searching-fora-room-of-ones-own-rethinking-the-iranian-diaspora-in-persepolis-shahs-of-sunset-and-agirl-walks-home-alone-at-night/ (accessed 18th November 2021)
Hayward, Susan. Framing a National Cinema, Cinema and Nation (2000), pp. 88-102
? (z5210277) / {Supervisor-Surname} / 22 Nov 2021 ... 8
Khosroshahi, Zahra. Vampires, Jinn and the Magical in Iranian Horror Films, Frames
Cinema Journal (2019), https://framescinemajournal.com/article/vampires-jinn-and-themagical-in-iranian-horror-films (accessed 18th November 2021)
Muñoz, Jose Esteban. Cruising utopia: The then and there of queer futurity. New
York, NY: New York (2009)
Naficy, Hamid. “Situating Accented Cinema”, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and
Diasporic Filmmaking (2001), p. 10-39
Filmography
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. Dir. Ana Lily Amirpour. USA, 2014.
Lost in Translation. Dir. Sofia Coppola. USA and Japan, 2003.