"Set it Off" and Kimberly Springer
"The capitalist, white patriarchy provokes them to commit a bank robbery by pushing them over the edge of social disenfranchisement. Though they are bold, these four women will subsequently die for their actions because dreams of middle-class respectability failed to tame their Sapphiric violent tendencies."
- "Waiting to Set It Off" - Kimberly Springer - p.193
I had mixed emotions about both this article and the film. I believe the first part of this quote is an oversimplification of a complicated film that can be understood in many different ways. It is obvious that the conditions created by the white capitalist patriarchal society are what led the women to believe they had no options other than bank robbery, with the exception of Cleo. If Stony had not felt the need to sell her body to send her brother to college and then see him murdered by police, or if Tisean had enough money for her child's babysitter and did not have to bring him to work, or if Frankie had not been fired unfairly the robberies would not have entered any of the women's minds. It was a very interesting point of view watching these crimes from the point of the criminals committing them, and not from the point of view of the "good guys", the police. People watching movies, television, or even the news have the tendency to assume every person that commits a crime is simply violent and evil, but this film forces the viewer to look at crimes from a new point of view. People are not born evil criminals; the system that oppresses them for their entire lives and makes them desperate for survival turns them to crime.
I also find it interesting that Springer states the women die because they are unable to tame their Sapphiric violent tendencies. Although an argument could be made for this belief because Stoney seems the least violent and is the only woman at the end that does not take a stand against the police, I do not entirely agree. bell hooks describes the Sapphire as black women that were "evil, treacherous, bitchy, stubborn, and hateful, in short all that the mammy figure was not". Although people in the movie such as the police may have seen the women this way, the viewer does not. The viewer actually sympathizes with the bank robbers, understands their reasons for doing it, and hopes that they do not get caught. The viewer is also forced to think about what would have happened to the women had they not robbed the banks. Although they may not have been violently shot to death, it is unlikely that they would have lead happy lives; they may even have still died horrible deaths. Tisean would most likely have lost her son, and in her own words she would die without him. Losing her son would have forced her to other drastic measures, possibly even suicide.