Brats in Bondage: Lessons in defiance from Tank…

AI over­lords, envi­ron­men­tal dead­lock, obscene wealth inequal­i­ty, and emer­gent author­i­tar­i­an­ism – it all reads like the open­ing crawl of some cult-clas­sic dystopi­an flick, but unfor­tu­nate­ly for us, it’s just the state of things in 2025. Dystopia looms. How is one to man­age? One sug­ges­tion: Fight fic­tion with fic­tion and cope like a main character. 

For inspi­ra­tion, look no fur­ther than the petu­lant, per­for­ma­tive, and per­pet­u­al­ly horny pro­tag­o­nist of Rachel Talalay’s Tank Girl (1995). Sure, Tank Girl is raunchy and ridicu­lous (and that’s what makes it won­der­ful) but look clos­er. Beneath the absur­di­ty lies a play­book for protest and defi­ance that (also unfor­tu­nate­ly for us) feels dis­con­cert­ing­ly rel­e­vant. Although every third coun­try or so seems to be mak­ing a hard turn right, there’s still time to course cor­rect – time to push back against the fledg­ling dystopias. 

And Tank Girl tells us how. 

It’s 2033. Eleven years pre­vi­ous, a comet crashed into Earth and destroyed the cli­mate. The result­ing drought led to the cre­ation of Water & Pow­er (W&P), a cor­rupt cor­po­ra­tion led by the com­i­cal­ly depraved Kesslee, who ​“control[s] most of the water and got all the power.”

Enter Tank Girl, played by Lori Pet­ty: A water-steal­ing, tank-obsessed waste­lander liv­ing it up in the desert until a W&P raid destroys her hap­py-go-lucky life and launch­es her into a kink-cod­ed bid for revenge. 

Let’s be clear: There are a lot of dif­fer­ences between a bad dom with a poor grasp of kink essen­tials and an author­i­tar­i­an régime like W&P (and its non-fic­tion­al equiv­a­lents) …but there are also quite a few similarities. 

In her dal­liances with W&P, Tank Girl illus­trates an ethos most in the kink com­mu­ni­ty will rec­og­nize. Con­trol is achieved con­sen­su­al­ly, or not at all. It exists only when giv­en, and can be revoked at any time. In this equa­tion, sub­mis­sion is an informed, freely-made choice, and defi­ance is always an option. For Tank Girl, defi­ance is just a way of life – she’s a quin­tes­sen­tial brat and rec­og­nizes pow­er strug­gles for the poor­ly dis­guised game that they are. 

These moments of defi­ance often hinge on Tank Girl’s under­stand­ing that her appear­ance and man­ner­isms cre­ate a set of assump­tions about her strength and intel­li­gence. She uses these assump­tions as ammu­ni­tion, trans­form­ing them into a weapon rather than a tool of her own subjugation. 

Dur­ing the W&P raid, for instance, Tank Girl unknow­ing­ly per­forms a strip tease for a W&P guard she incor­rect­ly assumed to be her boyfriend. As the bar­rel of a gun intrudes upon the scene, the dynam­ic changes: The guard nods for her to con­tin­ue, and she does, lean­ing into his (false) assump­tion that she is a sex­u­al, sub­mis­sive crea­ture for the taking. 

That assump­tion is his undo­ing. She knows the role expect­ed of her and plays it well. The illu­sion of con­trol lasts until the very moment she decides to revoke it – the very moment the guard meets his fate at the end of his own grenades. The strip show turns into a mur­der scene. Con­ven­tion­al pow­er dynam­ics turn on their head. And Tank Girl emerges on top.

Whether fac­ing impris­on­ment in a claus­tro­pho­bia-induc­ing tor­ture device apt­ly named ​“The Pipe” or shiv­er­ing after a night spent in a freez­er, Tank Girl defies fear. She elects not to give her cap­tors the response they expect. In doing so, she dis­arms them.

This phi­los­o­phy is implic­it through­out the film, but is at its most overt while Tank Girl is impris­oned in a W&P labor camp. There, she meets Jet Girl (Nao­mi Watts), a beat­en-down pris­on­er. After Tank Girl saves her from yet an obsessed prison guard who doesn’t know how to take ​“no” for an answer, Jet Girl explains her ethos for sur­viv­ing under W&P’s thumb: ​“The bet­ter you behave, the more they leave you alone.” 

Yet audi­ences of 1995, 2025, and 2033 all know this to be patent­ly untrue. In restric­tive envi­ron­ments such as these, no one is safe, no mat­ter how meek­ly they sub­mit to the shack­les. Tank Girl knows it too.