TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/080591/0805420.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 8.9 KB | 202 lines

                                                                                CINEMA, Page 66

Why Can't A Woman Be a Man?


This summer's films feature more female roles, but are they
strong women or just macho guys in drag?

By RICHARD CORLISS


    We have seen Hollywood's woman of the '90s, and her name
is V.I. Warshawski (rhymes with Kah-pow-ski). This free-lance
Chicago detective is tough and sexy and nurturing. She is a
teenage waif's very best surrogate mother. She can come on
strong to a stud stranger at the local bar; she'll buy him a
drink. But Warshawski is faster with a kick than a caress. Any
hulk who tries to pummel some manners into her will get his
genitals twisted in a nutcracker. And at the end of the new
movie named after her, she will offer the same tweaking to her
boyfriend. Somebody in V.I. Warshawski has the right phrase for
this all-man all-woman: "a female dick."

    As it happens, V.I. Warshawski, starring Kathleen Turner
as the private eyeful, is a sorry excuse for a film. It opened
last Friday and may be forgotten in a week. But bad pictures as
well as good feed the pop-cultural zeitgeist (cf., Fatal
Attraction, Pretty Woman, Ghost). And Warshawski shows
Hollywood once again scrounging to resolve a lingering dilemma:
how to get women into the summer-movie mainstream.

    The immediate question might be, Why bother? This summer's
smash, with $120 million in its first three weeks, is the mucho
macho Terminator 2: Judgment Day. But in Hollywood, Armageddon
comes every sum mer. Last year five burly adventures -- Total
Recall, Die Hard 2, Dick Tracy, Days of Thunder and Another 48
HRS. -- grossed a robust, cumulative half billion. And Batman,
good man vs. evil man, was the big warm-weather hit of 1989.
Saving the world is man's work, of course. (Blowing it up is
too, but that just proves how powerful guys are.) It's men who
face down and beat up whatever malevolent force is threatening
Gotham City, Mars or poor little Earth.

    So, primed by the studios, moviegoers now expect summer
pictures to have hairy chests. Cinema is action, the theory
goes, and action -- aggression, propulsion, flying higher,
shooting quicker, thinking with your fists -- is a male
franchise. Women are supposed to go off in a corner and . . .
nurture something. This is the traditional take, anyway, and it
signals the vacuity of modern commercial films: endless, aimless
variations on the old western climax of the white hat fighting
the black hat while the crinolined heroine twitters and screams.

    This summer is different. Studio bosses, noting the
kamikaze competition last year of all those action adventures,
have released softer films (like the disease movies Dying Young,
Regarding Henry and The Doctor) normally reserved for school
months. The female buddy film Thelma & Louise served up an
engaging pair of loser-heroes. True they were more reactive than
active, dithering away their chances for escape and ending up
as victims, not saviors. But they showed at least that women
could dish out their share of violence -- whatever advance that
represents. Even the muscle movies are admitting strong women.
In Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio
is a self-reliant Maid Marian. And in the Terminator films,
Linda Hamilton eats cyborgs for breakfast and spits them out
like ingots.

    It's nice that in 1991 there are enough women in summer
movies to talk about; for a while they were an endangered
species. And they are of sufficient variety to cue this
speculation: Is there a home for feminism in the summer
blockbusters?

    Not yet. And not likely, when you look more closely at the
women's roles. Like Ms. Warshawski, they fall into three
stereotypes: butch, babe and baby sitter.



    BUTCH. In The Terminator, Hamilton's Sarah Connor evolved
from a klutzy waitress to a warrior woman who crushed the
killer robot in a hydraulic press and spat out the immortal
line: "You're terminated, f---er." In T2 Sarah is a guerrilla
gone south, dynamiting computer facilities, threatening to
inject drain cleaner into the veins of her captors, stashing
weapons with her own righteous version of the Baader-Meinhof
Gang. She is a more twisted sister of Sigourney Weaver's Ripley
in Aliens (also written and directed by T2's James Cameron), who
proves her maternal mettle by blasting a space monster to ugly
bits.

    These are not strong women who use their ingenuity,
humanity and mother wit. They are Rambo in drag. They have a
higher testosterone count than the national debt ceiling; they
solve problems with artillery and adrenaline. And too many
filmmakers, strapped by the conventions of the shoot-'em-up
genre, think they are solving the problem of beefing up women's
roles by turning them into beefcake. It's steroid screenwriting.
Cameron wonders, Why can't a (modern) woman be more like a
(mean) man? Then he makes her into one.

    If you want to get really glum about women's roles in
current movies, look at the old ones. Of course, golden-age
Hollywood didn't waste time on the war of the worlds; it was
defining the battle of the sexes, and here the woman often won.
Because she was better. Joan Crawford, as mom and career woman
in Mildred Pierce (1945), could handle herself and a gun with
steely assurance. And as a playwright in Sudden Fear (1952), she
was smart enough to write her way out of her psychopathic
husband's clutches. Could Julia Roberts have pulled that off in
Sleeping with the Enemy?

    There was no man more determined than Barbara Stanwyck,
Bette Davis or Katharine Hepburn. These actresses were both
strong and womanly. They didn't surrender their grace,
compassion, resilience -- if we may say so, their femininity --
when they demanded social equality with men. They were looking
to live with the other sex, not wipe it out.



    BABE. You thought the breed was extinct, that the only
female body fashion was the sculpted, sanded sylph. Then along
came Jennifer Connelly, innocent of face, voluptuous of form,
aerodynamically perfect. In The Hot Spot, Career Opportunities
and this summer's The Rocketeer, Connelly has been used as an
iconic throwback, a memento of a simpler (sexist) era. Film
critics quickly add that she is an appealing actress, just as
men once declared that they read Playboy for the interviews. But
so far Connelly has been mainly calendar art: Bettie Page via
Vargas, a body without a soul. Moviemakers can't find much for
her to do. They can only let her be.

    In the movie past, babes had brains; the flesh was almost
incidental. Jean Harlow made censors' hair curl because she
disdained foundation garments, but she exuded most of her
sexuality between the ears. In Red-Headed Woman she cooed and
screwed her way to the top, and got away with it. In Red Dust
she was Clark Gable's lover, pal and lover again, taking it all
in her sashaying stride. These movies were made in 1932, yet
they are more mature than many current films -- more aware of
love's compromises and lust's attractions.



    BABY SITTER. In movies as in life, this is the most
traditional woman's role: hearth stirrer, home saver, raising
her children and supporting her man. It was an emblem, we now
realize, of her superiority. Modern man knows that modern woman
can do the old, cool-guy stuff -- run a tractor, beat him at
poker, light a cigarette in a high wind -- but that he can't
manage, so artfully or efficiently, what women have done since
the cave days. So there's nothing inherently retrograde about
Dying Young, in which Julia Roberts performs bedside therapy on
ailing Campbell Scott, or The Doctor, in which the dying
Elizabeth Perkins finds the strength to give William Hurt a
reason to live (though both films do get terminally sappy). It
is just that Hollywood's addiction to fantasy has kept
moviegoers away from matters of real life and real death, and
that the industry's canonization of the superhero has persuaded
viewers that less is at stake when a woman simply, courageously
comforts someone else.

    A half-century ago, people perked up when Greta Garbo did
the nurturing. Man, woman or boy, they were all frail things,
dazzled by her strength and glamour; and she caressed every
lover as if he were a child with a fever. Garbo made her last
film in 1941, when Hollywood was called the Dream Factory;
skeptics said it dressed up lies as art. So why -- it can't be
only nostalgia -- do those old films, for all their soft focus
and happy endings, seem truer than today's? Because the scale
was different, smaller, more intimate. Films weren't fairy tales
of destruction and salvation. Men weren't all muscle or women
all flesh.

    This summer, though, Hollywood is serving up empty
calories and calling them high fiber. Actresses may have better
body tone, but most of their roles are dispiriting to anyone
who harbors the hope that American movies will some day grow up.