takes them over a waterfall, shouting for joy. Themes Writing in the 1997 book Trash Aesthetics: Popular Culture and Its Audience, Deborah Cartmell states that while the comic showed Tank Girl to be "unheroic or even [an] accidental antihero", the film sets her up with "classic western generic" emotional and moral justifications for her liberation and revenge on W&P, as she witnesses the slaughter of her boyfriend and her "trusty steed". She also sees one of the commune's children being abducted, and is herself captured and enslaved. Cartmell also says Tank Girl holds parallels with other "contemporary 'postfeminist' icons", as she displays dominant female sexuality and a "familiarity and knowing coolness of 'outlawed' modes of sexuality", such as masturbation, sadomasochism and lesbianism. In her 2006 book The Modern Amazons: Warrior Women On-Screen, Dominique Mainon writes that the film has antiestablishment themes and, unlike many comic-book adaptation films which feature "gratuitous sexual objectification" of women, Tank Girl stands out as being "stridently feminist", with the exception of the "cliché victim/avenger complex". According to Mainon, the film makes fun of female stereotypes, as shown by Tank Girl's repeated emasculation of Kesslee with witty comebacks while she is being tortured, and by her response to the computer training device telling her how to present herself to men at the Liquid Silver club. The device provides seductive clothing and tells Tank Girl to remove her body hair and to wear make-up and a wig. Tank Girl completely ignores the advice and modifies the clothes to create her own style. In the 2011 book Cult Cinema, Ernest Mathijs and Jamie Sexton discuss the issue of whether cult films purported to be feminist were truly feminist or "partly the effect of the performance of feminist attitudes in its reception". The authors consider Tank Girl to be a "'real' feminist cult film", as opposed to the feminist cult films of Kathryn Bigelow and Catherine Hardwicke, which they consider to be too masculine and too eager to cater to "hetero-normativity", respectively. Production Preproduction In 1988, about a year after the launch of the Tank Girl comic in the British magazine Deadline, its publisher, Tom Astor, began looking for a studio interested in making a film adaptation. While several studios, including New Line Cinema, expressed interest, progress was slow. Rachel Talalay's stepdaughter gave her a Tank Girl comic to read while she was shooting her directorial debut film, Freddy's