The Violent Femmes

There's no question that in Basic Instinct, Sharon Stone's Catherine, a perverted loony whose coital habits make Robert Chambers seem gentlemanly, is fucking everyone else in the movie but good, gun or no gun. Not only that, she does it with a shit-eating self-assurance only men were previously allowed to display. In the '70s this role would've buried an actress. Today, Stone is an icon, snuffing out Tom Berenger in Sliver and holstering six-shooters in The Quick and the Dead. And, let's not forget the pre-_Instinct_ Stone's rousing assault on Arnold Schwarzenegger himself in Total Recall, a no-holds-barred bench-clearer that inevitably ends with the Big Guy divorcing her with a bullet.

As it was for years with men, violent movie women are often given to using their weapons in defense of family, home and hubby, particularly when under attack by Dysfunctional Single People. The first to play Donna Reed with a full clip was Anne Archer in Fatal Attraction; that she shot another woman--wall-to-wall basket case Glenn Close--instead of a man was proof that in 1987 the tide was still rising. It would take a few more years for filmmakers to realize, even unconsciously, that what Archer really wanted to do was to shoot Michael Douglas's Johnson right off, and that the primal terror of that final scene came ultimately from the fact that Douglas is cornered in a room with not one but two seriously armed and extremely pissed-off women.

A woman shooting a woman was macho Hollywood's way to sneak up on its own secret dread of, as they say in the big house, being turned into someone's bitch. If I remember correctly, audiences in 1987 went nuts for the sight of Archer poised in the steam, a smoking pistol in her hand. It felt right somehow to put the avenging firearm in the hands of an otherwise harmless homemaker; after that, the villain on the receiving end of a solid cold bullet could be absolutely anybody, and would most likely be a man--serial killers, Mafia hit men (see True Romance), 800-pound, blood-drinking idiot Nazis with filed teeth. It didn't matter. (Not that catfights have become completely passe; few mano a mano tussles are as vicious as the violence in Death Becomes Her, Single White Female, Poison Ivy and Needful Things.) Nowadays, no man is too big, too scary or too powerful to come under attack.

Archer probably wouldn't have had a subsequent career (or an Oscar nomination) if she hadn't spent that bullet on Glenn Close. Nobody would've remembered her. No one would've remembered Lorraine Bracco either (and we all might be better off) had she not shot the Cro-Magnon villain (fucked him, remember, with her husband's "gun") in Someone to Watch Over Me and saved the hubby Tom Berenger's life even though he was porking Mimi Rogers at the time, and was certainly no great cop, all things considered. A single woman like my girl Margaux shouldering a 12-gauge is one thing, but suddenly movie wives and moms seemed capable of the most appallingly un-mom-like things. I've tried to imagine my own Mom reaching her boiling point, squinting down the barrel of a gun at some pesky sociopath who kept killing her friends in alphabetical order, but I can't. It would never happen. Not even if those Jehovah's Witnesses came to her door every day for a week, though that would tempt her. Granted, my father never had an affair with Greta Scacchi, which was what set off Bonnie Bedelia's warm'n'cozy hammer killer in Presumed Innocent, but something tells me that wouldn't have gotten my mother quite that upset either. She might read him the riot act and then go spite-shopping, but that's as far as it would go.

Although guns are certainly handy metaphors for the erect male member, and more or less proof of how men would like to beat each other to death with their dicks if they could, once women have taken over the 2.5 violent acts per minute of movie that Janet Reno won't shut up about, they'll use anything at hand. Strictly speaking, you don't need a gun to fuck somebody--any violent means will do. Whether they push someone out a window, set them on fire or simply beat them to chunky salsa with a rolling pin, women are still wearing the symbolic and often unzipped pants in the family. Kim Basinger bludgeons and drowns Eric Roberts in Final Analysis. Eric's sister Julia made worm food out of husband Patrick Bergin in Sleeping with the Enemy, not to mention pushing cancer patient Campbell Scott over the edge with too many limpid closeups in Dying Young. (All right, it just felt like murder.) Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman in Batman Returns is perhaps the paragon of unarmed female danger, an abused single woman transformed into a creepy dominatrix adept at simply kicking, scratching and licking men to death. Freud would have said she's a lesbian--lives alone with a cat, loves black leather, hates men, no visible penis-guns around--but, as Woody Allen would say, that's because Freud was a genius. For the rest of us, she's just a hoot in ebony heels with the world's scariest come-hither look.

Annabella Sciorra tossed Rebecca De Mornay out an attic window in The Hand That Rocks the Cradle. Sigourney Weaver's maternal Sgt. Rock battled the ultimate Bad Penis/She-Devil in the Alien movies. Drooling maniac Diane Ladd hired assassins to kill her daughter's boyfriend in Wild at Heart. Macaulay Culkin's mom dropped the little turd off a cliff in The Good Son. Anjelica Huston's bloodthirsty mater wasted her own son in The Grifters. Kathleen Turner was John Waters's pie-baking Serial Mom.

The bughouse strumpets of The Temp and The Crush didn't need guns to ruin men's lives. Elizabeth Perkins bounced a skull-fracturing coffee mug off of Kevin Bacon's noggin in He Said, She Said, not a homicidal gesture by any means but still a resourceful use of what's at hand. Rebecca De Mornay yanked Don Johnson off a ledge in Guilty as Sin. Demi Moore ventilated Bruce Willis with an X-acto blade in mid-rape in Mortal Thoughts.

Which is all fine by me. If real-life women behaved like movie women, I figure a good 15 percent of the male population would be put in the ground, and the rest of us--the ones who never do anything to deserve having our crotch shotgunned or our throat slit--could rest easy. Or could we? Sometimes all you have to do is look at women wrong, or be in the wrong place at the right time. What about poor James Caan having his feet sledged by Kathy Bates in Misery? What about James Spader in Storyville, putting subtle moves on the delectable Charlotte Lewis only to have her beat the crap out of him jujitsu-style? What about the football players in Heathers or David Strathairn in A Dangerous Woman, whose worst crimes were just being assholes? Being an asshole is no small affair, some women may protest, but isn't that taking this Madeleine Stowe thing a little too far? Gary Oldman breaks the bank on assholatry in Romeo Is Bleeding, but does even he deserve what Lena Olin, as the screen's wildest Russian gangsteress, dishes out? If I were a woman, Olin's Demarkov would be my idol--scorning the inadequacies of men with a cackle that could peel the paint off a wall, kicking out car windshields in her high heels, decked out in complementary Victoria's Secret underthings and a chrome revolver--she makes Sharon Stone look civilized. What about the many men Bridget Fonda takes out for unknown "political" reasons in Point of No Return. Sure, maybe they were assholes, but maybe not. It didn't matter, and that was the point. They were just fucked.

It's easier to count the working actresses today who haven't taken up arms. The only one I can think of is Shirley MacLaine, of all people. In my cursory filmography check, it's not hard to conclude that actresses have become a bloodthirsty breed. (Emma Thompson? Dead Again. Meg Ryan? Promised Land. Debra Winger? Black Widow. Even Winona Ryder--don't forget Heathers.) Any man with a steady diet of movies has a right to feel a little persecuted. How persecuted depends on how seriously you take movies. (Michael Medved and Dan Quayle, we must conclude, are feeling very persecuted.) As for me, I don't take movies seriously for a moment. But all of this male-directed mayhem affords a great many incidental pleasures, not the least significant of which I've saved for last: Whispers in the Dark, in which Annabella Sciorra, no slouch in the homicide department, is stalked by a perverted psychopath who turns out to be none other than... Alan Alda. Needless to say, she guns him down like the dog he is. To see America's favorite mousy TV good guy rave like Charlie Manson and then catch a gut full of lead from Sciorra--to see Alda get fucked, once and for all--is one of recent moviegoing's giddiest highs. How many loitering fuckheads in Hollywood deserve to be handled in just such a manner? Anyone's wish list would be as long as Geena Davis's legs. What are you girls waiting for?

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Michael Atkinson wrote on sexual chemistry in the movies for the Jan./Feb. Movieline.

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