Boxing Helena (1993)

‘Some men take a beautiful girl and hide her away from the rest of the world’ - Cyndi Lauper

With its uncomfortable, grim subject matter – a man so obsessed with a beautiful woman that he abducts and dismembers her to contain and possess her - Boxing Helena (1993) is a dark, twisted fairy tale exploring themes of obsession, control, objectification, free will and bodily autonomy. Written and directed by Jennifer Lynch, who was 19 when she wrote the screenplay (based on a story by Philippe Caland) and in her early twenties when she agreed to direct it, Boxing Helena sparked controversy and tabloid fixation as soon as it went into production (Madonna and Kim Basinger were infamously attached to it before eventually backing out). Upon its release it experienced a savage critical mauling with many lambasting it, and its director, as misogynistic. Lynch maintains it was always meant to be seen as a macabre fairy tale, stating: ‘To me, if you look at the film, the woman is always in control, it’s a fucking dream. It’s a fairy tale. He’s an obvious wallflower Prince Charming and she’s a nightmare Snow White’ (Webber, 2012). Indeed, the level of vitriol aimed at Lynch (much of it more to do with her gender and familial ties within the film industry – her father is David Lynch – than her abilities as a first-time filmmaker) was so intense she would retreat from public life and wouldn’t make another feature until 2007’s dark and disturbing Surveillance.

Obsession lies at the heart of Boxing Helena, with the unhinged and utterly infatuated Nick (Julian Sands) abducting Helena (Sherilyn Fenn) after a road accident near his house, incarcerating her and then literally objectifying her by removing her limbs. Lynch’s screenplay presents a critique of societally-defined beauty, suggesting it is often reduced to a passive, objectified commodity – like the statue of the Venus de Milo we see throughout the film - which men desire to control. As Nick strips Helena of her of her humanity, placing her on a pedestal to admire her, own her, he reduces her entirely to her physical form. Lynch makes it clear that male defined beauty is limiting to women.

In her exploration of themes concerning lust and obsession, Lynch exploits many tropes and inherently misogynistic aspects of literary fairy tales, and by presenting the story from Nick’s unreliable POV, enables the viewer to see how women characters have throughout history been defined solely by their beauty, objectified and debilitated, hidden away from the world by those who seek to possess them. According to Lau (2012) ‘Sleeping Beauty is the quintessential Grimms' girl. Deep in slumber, she is nothing but a pretty face, a supple body there for the gazing, there for the taking. She is passive, yielding, available, and— of course— silent, enchantingly incapable of speaking her mind, much less voicing any resistance to the hero’s advances.’ Historically, literary fairy tales – usually adapted from oral folk tales – are one of the oldest forms of control and social conditioning, used to guide listeners and readers to certain modes of behaviour and expectation. What do these kinds of tales say about the tellers and the communities they were told in? While certainly complex, fairy tales also espouse specific, inherently misogynistic standards involving beauty, virtue and obedience (don’t stray from the path; be beautiful, but not vain; don’t unlock doors your husband has forbidden you to open).

By presenting the story from Nick’s warped perspective as he attempts to dominate Helena, and deploying various fairy tale tropes, Lynch renders the narrative a make-believe, fantasy space within which Nick can enact his desires. [Spoiler alert] The events in the film are eventually revealed to be a dream – Nick is so obsessed with the unobtainable Helena, he creates a fantasy realm within which to live out his dark, disturbing fantasies of finally obtaining her, controlling her and having her love him and be completely dependent upon him. Her will is so great and he so utterly incompetent (and impotent), however, even within a fantasy realm of his own creation, he has to physically disable her in order to control her. The cruel simplicity of disempowering her, literally and figuratively, by dismembering her, is straight out of ‘maiden in the tower’ fairy tales – like Rapunzel and Maid Maleen – and similar fairy stories in which the heroine is physically contained and ostracised from the world, like the princesses in The Glass Coffin and Sleeping Beauty, stripped of their agency by one who would control them. There are also echoes of other feminine, folkloric beings such as the selkies of Orkney, seamaids who must remain with any man who steals her sealskin. Lynch uses the misogyny already evident in these tales to parody the male gaze and expose not only Nick’s sense of entitlement, but society’s hypocrisy, impossible standards and glass ceilings/slippers. As Quay Tyson (2018) suggests, ‘Weak women, women who need to be rescued or saved, exist mostly in the male imagination. Let’s face it, men created those fairy tale princesses. Men created those damsels in distress. Men created fainting couches. (Also, casting couches).’ 

Boxing Helena inverts the traditional ‘transformation tale’ of Snow White, and others such as Cinderella, described by Maria Tatar (2020) as ‘the make-over fable par excellence, with its narrative arc that moves the heroine from proverbial rags to storied riches.’ In Nick’s twisted mind, he and Helena can live happily ever after once she has been physically incapacitated and psychologically controlled. Tatar suggests that fairy tale heroines can only have their happily ever after once they have endured hardship and sacrifice: ‘Like Cinderella, Snow White lives happily ever-after, but not without first enduring panic, helplessness, and several brushes with death. Her story, an exercise in extreme emotion, repeatedly describes her as the fairest of them all, but her fairy-tale life itself is defined by a series of deeply traumatic events.’

'Maid Maleen' is a Brothers Grimm fairy tale about a princess locked in a dark tower for seven years by her father (illustration by Arthur Rackham)

Nick utilises fairy tale logic to exert his will over Helena. She keeps leaving, so he acts to ensure she can’t by taking away her legs. She pushes him away and suddenly her arms are gone. We don’t see any surgery or violence or gore; it is simply as though he wills it so. While Nick undoubtedly sees himself as the hero, there is no hero in this tale. Helena is arguably the spoiled, headstrong princess, but she’s a much more modern incarnation, closely resembling the bawdy, lusty, uninhibited heroines from the work of Angela Carter, forthright and sexually assertive. Much of the criticism of the film at the time was aimed at Fenn’s character – she was called a ‘bitch’ and deemed to be too unsympathetic, and as film critic and podcaster Joe Lipsett (2025) succinctly suggests, this was because Helena was ‘the wrong kind of victim’. She doesn’t beg or plead; she is forthright and assertive. Even in a dream-space designed by Nick within which to dominate her, Helena continues to refuse his advances, to berate and belittle him. Like the characters of fairy tales, Lynch’s characters exist to explore specific themes and ideas, particularly those regarding the male gaze, patriarchal dominance and the objectification of women. According to Seifert (1996) ‘Compared to other literary forms, characters in fairy tales occupy a world apart […] part of what distinguishes fairy tales is that they draw on a set of stock characters – fairies, ogres, tricksters, princes, princesses, and the like – who perform similar (nearly identical) tasks from text to text. So predictable and so repetitious are they that critics have often noted the one-dimensionality of fairy-tale characters. Usually devoid of individuating psychological traits, protagonists and antagonists alike highlight specific narrative and ideological functions. In other words, they are first and foremost incarnations of cultural values. They purvey the norms of the community and reject those of the individual.’

Snow White in a glass coffin (1871 lithograph by A. Hendschel)

Boxing Helena can also be seen as a parody of the kinds of steamy psychosexual thrillers that were popular in the late 80s, early 90s (think Basic Instinct, Fatal Attraction, Single White Female). Indeed, Helena is actually not that dissimilar to many male characters in these steamy erotic thrillers – she is sexually confident and when uninterested in a potential partner, she doesn't think twice about showing them the door. Lynch sends up the male gaze to highlight the absurdity of Nick’s concocted fantasy – this is most obvious in the scenes where Nick spies on Helena having sex with her lover (Bill Paxton) and when the film most resembles a streamy 90s thriller; all billowing drapes, melodramatic erotica and Enigma on the soundtrack. That Helena eventually succumbs to his plan – and to Stockholm syndrome - and falls in love with him, was also heavily criticised. While it adds a further layer of perversity to proceedings, this criticism is somewhat muddied because of the revelation at the denouement – that Nick is an unreliable narrator and everything we have seen is a fantasy he has concocted. 

Whether one regards it as an allegorical fairy tale, a horror fable, a dark psychosexual drama, an absurd erotic thriller, a campy, frothy melodrama (the truth is it is all these things), or misogynistic trash, Boxing Helena continues to generate discussion and debate. Its exploration of obsession and objectification, twisted psychology and dark desire (all themes Lynch would return to in her later films Surveillance and Chained), and the lasting legacy of fairy tales, and what they tell us about ourselves and our society, still resonates strongly.

Lau, Kimberly J. (2012) A Desire for Death: The Grimms' Sleeping Beauty in The Bloody Chamber. Transgressive Tales: Queering the Grimms, edited by Kay Turner and Pauline Greenhill, Wayne State UP, 2012, pp. 121–39.

Lipsett, Joe (2025) Sexy and Surreal: Episode 41 – Boxing Helena (1993) https://anatomyofascream.wordpress.com/2025/10/10/sexy-and-surreal-episode-41-boxing-helena-1993/

Quay Tyson, Tiffany (2018) Because I Don't Know Any Weak Women https://lighthousewriters.org/blog/because-i-don%E2%80%99t-know-any-weak-women

Seifert, LC. (1996) (De)mystifications of masculinity: fictions of transcendence. In: Fairy Tales, Sexuality, and Gender in France, 1690–1715: Nostalgic Utopias. Cambridge Studies in French. Cambridge University Press; 1996:138-174.

Tatar, Maria (2020). The Fairest of Them All : Snow White and 21 Tales of Mothers and Daughters, Harvard University Press, 2020.

Webber, Jason (2012) More Than David’s Daughter: An Interview with Jennifer Lynch https://www.vice.com/en/article/more-than-davids-daughter-an-interview-with-jennifer-lynch/