The Restorative Perversion of Pam Grier

and a Happy New Year

An edited version of this article previously appeared in Galerie magazine, under the title “Power Dressing with Pam Grier.”

“She swaggered into the room all fire and ice, wearing black hip boots, hot pants, and a blouse stretched dangerously over her breasts. In one hand, she carried a bullwhip, in the other a sawed-off shotgun. Snarling out of a corner of her crimsoned mouth, she commanded: “Alright, chauvinist hog - on your knees!” As the cringing male slowly sank to the floor before her, she let the shotgun slip from her arm and in the same deft move administered a karate chop somewhere below his waist, rendering him sterile forever.”

— Louie Robinson, “Pam Grier, More than Just A Sex Symbol,”

Ebony Magazine, June 1976

When Pamela Suzette Grier was born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina in 1949 to a nurse and a technical sergeant in the air force, little did anyone suspect that she would become a screen goddess with an acting career spanning 5 decades, a timeless symbol of feminine bad-assedness for women of all colors in any decade, and an enduring fashion icon.

At the beginning of her career, there was something about Pam Grier’s take-no-prisoners command presence and her singular, Cleopatra-esque beauty — her almost Persian-looking nose, her long, curvy body the pneumatic stuff of men’s dreams, her velvety skin tone, and the fact that she had a fast and powerful mouth on her — that gave Hollywood development executives a somewhat pervy desire to see her behind bars. This kept her busy in the early seventies, shooting prison movies like “The Big Doll House,” and “The Big Bird Cage.” Young Ms. Grier inspired visions of an untamed, dangerous wild woman — a conceit that led her on several occasions to the Philippines, to movie sets where director Roger Corman kept comely incarcerated women in torn t-shirts in bamboo cages, tortured them on Katherine wheels, shot them shrieking with fire-hoses and mercilessly thew them in The Hole.

Corman knew enough to let Grier do some actual acting, as opposed to just being tortured shirtlessly. Grier is comely and sadistic in “Women in Cages” (1971) as a prison guard, wearing fascist safari wear (a tailored Brownshirt -style uniform with a mini skirt) that accentuates her legendary curves. Her part is that of a deranged lesbian dominatrix prison guard with an excited sneer who revels in the psycho-sexual downfall of her prisoners, and eventually becomes their victim. She brought so much flavor and veritas to the role, she was cast again in “The Big Bird Cage,” (1972).

In the first scene of “The Big Bird Cage,” Grier, as “Blossom,” a lounge singer, is grooving in a white halter top and matching hiphuggers ensemble. She then stops singing when her guitarist plays a wrong note, grabs his guitar, splinters it against a table and pulls a machine gun out of it. It’s a fine introduction: it tells us that the chanteuse plans to bring more than tears to your eyes.

The second time we see Blossom, she threatens to castrate her philandering boyfriend with a machete, while wearing a macrame vest and matching bikini top. After the brawl, she and her paramour make out in a giant mud puddle.

When Blossom infiltrates the women’s prison, and is immediately called a racial slur by one of the inmates. Grier handily iu-jitsus her fellow prisoner into submission, and hisses, in iconic, indomitable Pam Grier fashion, “That’s MISS N — to you!”

After that, Blossom runs the place.

By 1973, (after filming the movies “Hit Man” and “Black Mama White Mama”) Grier was firmly in leading lady status, and black culture was enjoying a delectably lubricious moment in fashion silhouettes.

In 1973, Grier really secured her status as the first African American action star in “Coffy,” (1973), when she decides to seek vigilante justice against a narcotics ring.

“This is the end of your life, you motherfucking dope pusher!” Grier screams before removing the drug dealer’s head with a sawed-off shotgun. He had gotten her sister strung out, see. Now Coffy is on a rampage, in outfits the colors of Monument Valley — sandstone, rust and peachy oranges that pick up the warm highlights in her perfect skin.

While manipulating an array of pimplike underworld brutes in ochre velour leisure suits with collars long enough to be runways, Grier, in queenly fashion, dispenses orders from her pool deck chair and macrame bikini. However “blaxploitative,” the role is an awesome flexing of bitch-goddess female power.

A surprisingly good movie in the horror schlock genre is “Scream Blacula Scream” (1973). Pam plays a voodoo priestess who is trying to overcome a sudden influx of vampires in her midst. The great William Marshall plays the titular Blacula with a great air of dignity, which make all the bloody hysterics going on around him all that much more….noble.

Pam Grier does Kung Fu disco during the opening credits of “Foxy Brown” (1974). The whole movie is prime Grier, as far as fashion goes: big afro, studded denim pantsuits, big hoop earrings, chokers — yellow crushed velvet halter dresses.

“I dunno,” asks her boyfriend. “Vigilante justice?”

“It’s as American as apple pie,” purrs Pam.

The actor who played Huggy Bear on Starsky & Hutch (Antonio Fargas) plays her feckless dope-dealing, numbers-running brother, who somehow runs afoul of a prostitution ring run by a cold redheaded white woman with a giant owl necklace. Foxy infiltrates her prostitution ring with little difficulty, but ends up being captured and beaten.

“You’d better kill me,” Pam says, panting and sweating in a beige bra, still tied up after she’d been roughed up by the Madame’s white thugs. “Or I’m gonna kill you.”

This is the kind of definitive Grier moment that really inspires: even at her weakest and most defeated, tied up and undressed, she is still fiery and defiant. You cannot kill her fight.

After a daring escape from the brothel, Pam decides to go revolutionary, for the People.

“I want justice,” she says to a neighborhood gang she is trying to recruit. “Not just for us, but for all the other people whose lives are bought and sold so that a few big shots can climb up on their backs. And laugh at the law. And laugh at human decency.”

Grier gives the Black Panther Angela Davis a run for her money, and moviegoers an opportunity to consider revolutionary socialism (or something).

The wah-wah pedal and bongo drum music is wobbling into high gear in “Sheba Baby” (1975). Grier is street-smart and coiffed to perfection in tight denim ensembles. The theme music has soul singers belting out, “She’s a dangerous lady/and she’s well put-together.”

This time she’s a private eye with a gun holster, who also cleans up beautifully in a white suit with wide-brimmed hat and Louis Vuitton luggage. When her father runs into trouble with a big thug man who is shown in bed with a number of multicolored women, and a gang of racial-slur wielding gunmen kill him, Sheba gets revenge with her shiny chrome automatic. In one particularly climactic scene, she does it on a yellow jet ski.

Grier plays a Washington DC fashion photographer in one of her most iconic roles, “Friday Foster” (1975). She has to combat a crew of dirty cops with the young Carl Weathers at the helm. She looks caramelly and comestible in low-cut, wraparound batwing blouses that accentuate her frontal assets to a T. When a model is stabbed at a local fashion show (played by the effervescently naughty Eartha Kitt) Grier decides to get to the bottom of it, by using her feminine wiles in a white lycra and silver sequined pantsuit worthy of Marilyn Monroe.

After doing three more movies in 1976 and 1977, Ms. Grier seems to have taken a little me-time; she doesn’t reappear onscreen until “Fort Apache the Bronx” (1981).

Grier looks wildly sexy and is occasionally hilarious as a Charlotte, a killer prostitute on angel dust. Her long limbs are noodly, she’s so high she can barely stand up - but when she fixes her big brown cat eyes on her victims, her entire psyche turns to ice as she pulls the trigger. It’s a tremendous bit of character work; while most Pam Grier characters are, to some extent, Pam Grier, the hot, fucked-up mess character is a real departure, and she delivers it with a lot of humor and silky black vernacular. It’s fun to see her go full “street.”

Grier did 16 films between 1983 and 1996, including cult favorites like “Above the Law” with Steven Seagall (1988), “Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey” (1991), and “Mars Attacks” (1996)

The reification of Pam Grier — arguably her best role, was in Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown (1997). Tarantino knew enough to recognize Ms. Grier as his muse, and gave her a vehicle where she gets to trot out her real acting chops and pour gravy on them. Jackie, a 44-year-old stewardess, is a woman on the brink of going to prison for importing a gun-dealer’s cash into the states.

What shouldn’t even need to be stated is that despite the fact that she has aged a few years, Ms. Grier is still exceptionally bangingsome — very sexy in the mind, like a mature French actress.

Grier does some exceptional acting work here, particularly in a scene where she is waiting in a dark office for her enemy, with a gun next to her. She stares at the darkened door, waiting for him to enter, and practices picking up the gun and pointing it at him.

Her eyes convey numerous emotions: fear, bad-assedness, bravery, and a cold blooded willingness to shoot — all with grace, beauty, and quicksilver femininity.

Ms. Grier has worked continually in films and television since 1999. Perhaps most visibly in 70 episodes of “The L-Word”

( 2004-2009) Ms. Grier plays Kit Porter, the menopausal member of the ensemble. In Season 3, Grier performs a nice bit of thespian alchemy when she is being courted by a much younger white dude.

What is excellent about Grier is that even in a very vulnerable place — the abounding insecurities felt by an older woman - there is still an anchor in her psyche that I like to believe is the certain knowledge that she could kick that skinny white boy’s ass, if he does her wrong.

She lets her inner gorgon fly when she castigates fellow cast member Alan Cumming for doing drugs in her nightclub. “You can fuck up your own life, but don’t fuck up my club!” She shrieks. It’s an anger you don’t get to see in beautiful women very often; one that is usually played down, or coldly — but Grier’s temper is decidedly hot.

“Blaxploitation” movies earned a bad name, somewhere down the line, but the Pam Grier character has always been a fusion of sex and raw power — a beautiful woman with the agency and ability to overcome dreadful circumstances and, by fighting the good fight, emerge righteous and victorious. Fashionwise, her look has always been both ready for karate or equally ready to turn every head at the Hyatt Regency bar —arguably, the original athleisure. Even in cuts and fabrics as radical as those of the 1970’s, Pam Grier manages to

Julia Kristeva spoke about “restorative perversion” being something transgressive that men indulge when they’re feeling low. I wondered for a long time what a “restorative perversion” could look like for women, since the idea of it being simply shopping was just too grim. I realized, watching Pam Grier films, that they are genuinely cathartic if you’ve had a few bad experiences with men. Sometimes the machete or the machine gun just feels like the right way to go. Transgressive, yes, but is pleasure not innately transgressive? Pam Grier is nothing if not the embodiment of that rawest of female pleasures - the revenge fantasy. In that sense, she is restoratively perverse — but in a way perhaps only the women really understand.

Theme song: Jack Black

Artwork: “Foxy Brown,” oil on linen, Cintra Wilson 2020.

Cintra Wilson is accepting painting commissions at this time. Please inquire at cintraw@gmail.com.