Keep the Jumpsuit, Skip the Avengers
by Julie C. Roth
I’m going to say something some fans of the original Avengers will find shocking: The Avengers series wasn’t about a black leather jumpsuit.
Huh?
The original Avengers TV series, made for British television in the 1960s, was a spoof of the James Bond movies. Every week, John Steed, “top professional,” and Emma Peel, “talented amateur,” encountered a different outlandish plot for world domination, and thwarted it. (Brainwashing, swapping personalities, clandestine organizations–that sort of thing.) It just so happens that Mrs. Peel wore a form-fitting jumpsuit (often leather) in every single episode, whether she was planning to meet a duke or kick the cheese out of some power-mad arch villain. The suit was just a costume, like Steed’s bowler; nothing more.
Yeah, right. Ask anyone, male or female, what they remember of the original series, and they will tell you: the jumpsuit.
I was a kid when I first started watching The Avengers, and I didn’t know that the jumpsuit was sexy. I just remember finding it very exciting that Mrs. Peel dressed like that and related to Steed the way she did. I remember thinking they were married, but somehow not married, and I just chalked it up to yet another grown-up thing I would understand later.
I was right. Diana Rigg and Patrick Macnee had palpable sexual chemistry working between them as Emma Peel and John Steed. They spoke to each other in the wry thrust-and-parry of lover-speak and, for all their arch sophistication, showed real affection for each other. We never saw them kiss, but they were so … familiar we just assumed they were sleeping together–what my child’s mind understood as “married, but somehow not married.”
Years ago, I read an article explaining that the creators of The Avengers made Emma Peel the wife of a missing pilot–Mrs. Peel instead of Miss Peel–so that she would know about “It.” “It,” of course, meaning sex. More recently I’ve read that she got her name from M (man) Appeal. So from the very beginning, Emma Peel was to be just as sexual as a man–in the James Bond model.
For me, growing up on reruns, the two role models I chose were Emma Peel and Laura Petrie of The Dick Van Dyke Show. Played by Diana Rigg and Mary Tyler Moore, both characters were strikingly beautiful, as every little girl longs to become. But they were like flip sides of a coin. Emma got to drive a cool spy sports car; Laura drove a station wagon. Emma faced danger and got to beat up bad guys; Laura was always safe in her home and was forbidden to work outside it. Emma wore her sexuality everywhere she went; Laura had a wonderful husband and slept in a twin bed. My little-girl mind weighed the career options: housewife, spy. Housewife, spy. Hm.
So, for me anyway, The Avengers was about the black leather jumpsuit.
What’s so weird about this summer’s Avengers movie is that Mrs. Peel doesn’t wear the leather suit. Her evil clone does. Evidently, in our sexually conservative era, overt sexuality is reserved for villainesses. So the producers kept the outfit but divorced it from what made it so sexy: its association with a strong heroine.
But that’s just one example of style standing in for substance. When Steed and Mrs. Peel bandy the double-entendres here, they show no spark, no smirk, no affection behind it; it’s just empty word-play. When the characters emerge from a harrowing encounter and make a quip, there is no sense that they are feeling anything authentic. Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman are so blasé and “sophisticated” as Steed and Mrs. Peel that they show no emotion whatsoever. Well, the audience takes its cues from the characters, and if the characters are acting like they don’t care what happens, the audience won’t either.
So the absurd plot, which might have worked in the original, rather surreal, series, has no tension, no suspense, no interest for us. And the whole movie falls as flat as the acting.
If all the black leather jumpsuit stands for is style, then what I said in my original statement is true: The Avengers series was about much more than a black leather jumpsuit. Unfortunately, this year’s terrible Avengers movie is about much less.
Julie is Executive Producer of NetGuide
(Cybergrrl originally posted this article on August 31, 1998.)
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