The Violent Femmes

Vixen vigilantes, vamping viragoes and otherwise very nice young women have taken to taking up arms on-screen.

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Back in the now largely forgotten 1976 film called Lipstick, chock-full o' nuts coffeecake Chris Sarandon tied supermodel Margaux Hemingway to a bed, played a tape of his avant-garde noise-music--loud--and raped her with all the slavering bad manners of a starving bear at a Yellowstone picnic. She pressed charges, the court dismissed them, and he went on to rape her younger sister Mariel (off-camera) just for good measure. In response, Margaux found herself a 12-gauge and, with more adeptness than she displayed while trying to say "Hi" in several scenes, shotgunned the rat-bastard to kingdom come. Her final blast, we were all so shocked, shocked to witness back during feminism's we-just-want-equality salad days, hit Sarandon right in the groin.

This was also the age of Death Wish and the Dirty Harry films, a time when movie audiences were seemingly crazed with a thirst for wholesale vigilante executions. But whereas Charles Bronson and Clint Eastwood became box-office kingpins, Lipstick was roundly condemned and Margaux Hemingway went the way of silent pictures. Why? Well, it was the worst of these films for one thing--that music Sarandon played was enough to get the editors of Billboard to form a lynch mob. But the real problem surely rested with Hemingway. The toothsome, gangly, icy-eyed glamourpuss couldn't have aroused sympathy if she'd stood shoeless in the snow selling matchsticks. More than that, she was a woman, goddamn it, unloading both barrels into a guy at close range in broad daylight. "Who the fuck does she think she is?" male America must have worried, scratching its gut and farting quietly.

That was almost 20 years ago. Today movie villains are nearly as likely to get cut down by a woman as by a man. Why? What is it about prairie justice dispensed by someone wearing nail polish that Hollywood finds so meaningful? Why can't Madeleine Stowe make a movie where she doesn't eventually pick up a gun?

Is it merely a case of women finally carrying their weight in an increasingly violent movie landscape? ("I'm exhausted, someone's got to blow his head off. Here, you do it.") Is it simply beyond Hollywood to conceive of an assertive female character who doesn't leave corpses in her wake? Or is it just Hollywood's pitiful nod to feminism--allowing otherwise forgettable female characters to defend themselves in the last reel?

These all seem like perfectly reasonable hypotheses, as far as they go. But they assume Hollywood knows what it's doing half the time. Which is not a fair assumption. The fact is, whatever it is filmmakers tell themselves they're doing, they're invariably wrong about it. You think Spielberg ever noticed the cleft head, erectile neck and rosy-red glow of E.T.? He had no idea.

As I see it, the real reasons for all this intergender bloodshed run a little deeper than feminist niceties or box-office practicality. By "deeper" I mean "subconscious," even "unconscious"-- motivations that creep around the musty mental cellars where our most shamefaced desires and childish fears bubble, sometimes making their way to daylight. And what we've got here is major-league bubbling. Note that The Silence of the Lambs is the first Best Picture Oscar-winner to feature a woman killing a man since Vivien Leigh shot that carpetbagger in the puss in Gone With the Wind. (The one or two female Vietcong glimpsed in Platoon don't count; Oliver Stone deserves his own theory.)

Freud once said that in dreams sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. True enough, but for my money, in movies a gun is always a penis. Meaning that in movies--which have just as much subconscious symbolism as dreams-- when you're shot, you're not only shot, you're fucked. Male movie stars, the kind with pecs the size of a Sunday ham, have been fucking each other and waving their huge, all-powerful dicks around for years. (Think this is funny? Why did Sly and Arnold need such huge muscles just to shoot guns?)

For decades Hollywood and America could side with the musclehead and get foolish on a testosterone rush. But then came, in one year, the Smith & Wesson sisterhood of Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2: Judgment Day and the dynamic duo in Thelma & Louise. Suddenly, men weren't doing the fucking anymore. They got fucked instead--by great-looking, tanned women in tight jeans. Now that the earning orgy of the Reagan era was over, and feminism just wouldn't go away, cold fear started creeping into movies, the fear of a well-manicured trigger finger.

Now, men make these movies. And whatever the conscious reasons they've got for backing movies about murderous women, it's the subconscious reasons that ultimately get these movies made. Simply put, just as movies once expressed the genital-brandishing desires of Hollywood ("My penis is so big and dangerous!"), now they expressed its nightmares ("Hey, whatta you think you're doing? Where did you get that dick?").

Why do you think Thelma & Louise pissed so many male viewers off? It's a pretty scary movie for guys. Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis were fucking the men in that movie, after being fucked too many times themselves.

Seriously, I'm for a world without guns, but if someone has to be armed, I'd rather it be women. They're much less likely to commit drive-bys, for one thing. And few things linger on the backs of your eyeballs longer than the image of a shirtless woman firing a Magnum (see Kim Basinger in The Getaway). Many smug anti-exploitative news types wondered endlessly why Amy Fisher's case became so well publicized. Who finds this so interesting? they kept asking. I did, for one. For the same reason I liked Drew Barrymore in Guncrazy. A rapacious teen slut with a Saturday-night special in her hand--what's not to find interesting?

Fisher, Lorena Bobbitt and only-serial-murderess-in-the-history-of-the-world Aileen Wuornos notwithstanding, women in real life simply don't reach for guns as readily as do women in movies. Movie women are a different species, as ready as your average Eastside New York cop to whip out the .45 and turn anyone who crosses their sightlines into turkey burger. By the looks of things Madeleine Stowe could turn out to be the reigning queen of manslaying movie stars. She may have learned her lesson in Unlawful Entry, pulling what turns out to be an unloaded gun on psycho cop Ray Liotta and thereafter having to wait a dog's age for hubby Kurt Russell to get around to putting the bastard down like a lame horse. The process of stopping Liotta's clock is so protracted, and the shit he puts the cute couple through is so ridiculous, who's surprised that Stowe has had all six chambers loaded ever since? She's not about to make that mistake again. In The Last of the Mohicans, she handles a flintlock superbly, knocking a Huron off like a fat fly at the end of summer. In Blink she's seriously sight-impaired and still manages to mow down the raving serial killer who's been stalking her. In China Moon she pops not only her abusive husband, but also, in a fit of guilty pique, the corrupt cop who helped her do it. In Bad Girls she's a tough frontier ex-whore who gunfights with the best of them. In short, there's little that men can do in movies that Stowe can't, besides using a real dick to fuck with. She's willowy, ravishing and quite ready to shoot your scrotum off if you don't leave her alone--the prototype of the '90s Hollywood woman. My own theory is that Stowe's recent career turn is revenge for Closet Land, a little-seen parable about government-sanctioned torture and mind control, in which Big Brother-type agent Alan Rickman hooks live electric wires to Stowe's genitals. I have faith that sooner or later Stowe will find Rickman in another movie and stick a gun so far up his ass he'll be sneezing bullets.

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