There’s been a lot of debate over the years over what exactly qualifies as the male gaze in film, but most people can agree that Leia’s treatment in the opening act of “Star Wars: Return of the Jedi” definitely counts. Like the rest of Luke’s crew, Leia (Carrie Fisher) gets caught by Jabba as part of their plan to rescue Han Solo (Harrison Ford) and is held captive by the Tatooine crime lord in the movie. Unlike the rest of the crew, however, she’s forced to wear nothing but a metal bikini and a chain around her neck.
Jabba, and seemingly the camera itself, is constantly leering at Leia throughout the 1983 film, which is a strange choice for a supposedly family-friendly movie. Fisher herself would often speak out about how weird it was in the years that followed. “Don’t be a slave like I was,” she warned Daisy Ridley in 2015. “You keep fighting against that slave outfit.” The sequel trilogy, for all its faults, managed to make it the whole way through without doing anything like this to its own female lead.
Still, if there’s one saving grace of this part of “Return of the Jedi,” it’s that Leia gets to be the one to kill Jabba in the end. She takes the chain around her neck and chokes Jabba to death with it — an act that could be interpreted as the movie commenting on the objectification of women. At least, that’s how Fisher saw it. When asked in a 2016 NPR interview if she saw that act as “female empowerment,” Fisher responded, “Oh, absolutely.”
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