Comparison of "The Aggressives" and "Set It Off"

As I was watching the film Set It Off this weekend, it reminded me of the women we saw in The Aggressives. The film is about four women and gives three of the four women reason to rise up against a system that treats them like criminals even before they break the law.

Frankie is coldly fired from a bank teller's job simply because she was acquainted with a participant in a robbery that went awry and left four people dead. Tisean, a gentle, frightened single mother, has her young son taken away from her after an accident lands the child in a hospital emergency room. Stony has the most reason to be enraged; in a tragic case of mistaken identity, her law-abiding brother, whom she had hoped to send to college, is shot dead by the police. The only member of the four women who isn't personally devastated by an uncaring social system is Cleo, a butch lesbian in whom bank-robbing brings out the hidden outlaw. As Cleo takes a wild anarchic pleasure in robbing banks, she also becomes the fierce mother hen of the group, a protective, self-sacrificing warrior.

“Aggressive” is a term chosen by a group of lesbians of color that might otherwise be mislabeled or overlooked by both mainstream heterosexual and gay cultures. Although the three out of the four women in Set It Off were not lesbian, they still portrayed the characteristics of the women who identified themselves as aggressives. The women in the documentary speak openly about their lack of money and how it motivates so many of their life choices (suc as drug deal). Like the Aggressives, with the lack of money, the women in Set It Off were motivated to become bank robbers.

At the end of the Aggressives documentary, when we are given the “where are they now” update on all of the women, it is impossible not to feel a real concern for their welfare and a personal connection to each one of them. In comparison, as the four women are on the run from the authorities after robbing another bank, they are shot one by one, leaving its audience heartbroken. Therefore, in a stark portrayal of the poverty and discrimination they face and their creative responses to it, the film The Aggressives is much like Set It Off.