A new breed of superhero

Warrior princesses, in comic book folklore, films and TV series, slay armies singlehandedly, wielding their swords and their brains, riding their fabulous horses (or racing on foot) and occasionally allowing themselves a romantic turn. But never does sex, romance or girlie frailty get in the way of the mission: Kill the enemy, stand and conquer.

And so it is today, in this summer of female action heroes. I am talking about Angelina Jolie as the protean CIA undercover agent Evelyn Salt in the film “Salt,” and Noomi Rapace as Lisbeth Salander, the enigmatic bisexual computer genius in the fiction monster hit of our young decade, Stieg Larsson’s “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” and its sequels, “The Girl Who Played With Fire” and “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.”

Jolie, who made her action-hero mark as the leather-clad archaeologist Lara Croft in the box-office hit “Tomb Raider” movies, has turned the action up several notches as an icy-hot American operative accused of being a Russian sleeper agent. She had joked about wanting to play James Bond but may have gotten something better: a role originally written for Tom Cruise. Jolie transforms the testosterone-and-octane Salt into a more compelling and intriguing character than any of the action-hero boys could’ve done — yes, even more exciting than Jason Bourne, on whom Salt is pretty much modeled.

Salander is something else altogether. Frail and small (less than 90 pounds, under 5 feet tall), she’s antisocial, sullen, cynical. She fears nothing. She outwits assassins. She outruns and outsmarts hired thugs and cretins. She learned cruelty early — as a child, her mother was abused — and grows up distrustful, reclusive, elusive and dangerous. She is a loner, a solo act. She has a certain androgynous beauty, a pierced and tattooed body, chopped-up dark hair, and she treats sex as an exercise, without emotion or sentiment attached to it, here one night, gone the next.

Salt and Salander flip conventional notions of gender roles.

Are these women the new models of millennial femininity? Do they sacrifice being “real” women — with boyfriends, husbands, kids — to fit a male fantasy ( Phillip Noyce’s, the director of “Salt,” and Larsson’s, respectively)? Or are Salt and Salander the right ideal: brainy, independent, physically and emotionally tough, sexual but coldblooded? The movie critic Owen Gleiberman declared them “the new normal.” But are they?

While a Tom Cruise action character could have a wife and kids, Evelyn Salt could not. Mothers define attachments; they aren’t free to run for their lives. No mother would walk on a narrow ledge way above the ground or jump from a bridge railing onto a speeding truck below or wipe out a gang of Russian killers without breaking a sweat, mowing them down like a row of toy ducks at the country fair, after she watches them kill her husband with a shot to the head. Evelyn Salt had to be childless and a widow. Among reviewers and bloggers and commenters and my friends, women are split on this thing about Salt and Salander. Men swoon over Salt and back up Salander, but women are not so sure. Some adore Salander and, to a lesser extent, Salt. Some see them as weird, narcissistic and heartless, putting their careers — killing (mostly) bad people, saving the world — above the gentler pleasures of womanhood. And many women, while applauding Salt’s guts and Salander’s sang-froid, take it all in as just pulse-racing entertainment, a Saturday matinee fantasy.

Fitting females to these kinds of violent, physical heroics is rare in the Western canon dating to the Greeks and Romans. But since the mid-20th century, as Western women made strides toward political equality, there have been plenty of antecedents for Salt and Salander: “Xena, Warrior Princess,” the “Powerpuff Girls,” “Wonder Woman,” Sarah Connor in “The Terminator,” “La Femme Nikita,” Ellen Ripley ( Sigourney Weaver) in “Alien,” Beatrix Kiddo ( Uma Thurman) in “ Kill Bill.” It can’t be an accident of timing.

And whether Salt and Salander are women as imagined by men may not really be important in the end. I believe that they are idealized women — even if we don’t want to kill people, in real life, we want to be as cool, competent, in control and right as they are. These outsize characters strike a chord deep in us — that’s why we fill the theaters for “Salt” and why we buy Larsson’s books by the millions.

This summer in particular. On cable there’s Annie Walker ( Piper Perabo), the muscled blonde beauty who plays an undercover spy in the new USA show “Covert Affairs.” There’s Jane Rizzoli ( Angie Harmon) in TNT’s new hit drama “Rizzoli & Isles,” who shoots, thinks and moves like the toughest cop around, all the while ignoring or unaware that she is drop-dead gorgeous (like Jolie in “Salt,” whose beauty and sexuality are subsumed to the action).

None of these women are domesticated. They run with wolves, usually alone, sometimes in pairs, but always ahead of the game. In our dreams — and in our fears.

Luisita Lopez Torregrosa, a former editor at the New York Times, writes for Politics Daily, the International Herald Tribune and other publications. She is working on her second book.