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.
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.