Hollywood

Tears of a Clone

Debbie Rasmussen — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 18:46:06 -0400

From all the films made every year, the Academy must choose the performance that deserves its Best Actress accolade—and avid watchers of their annual awards might well conclude it has no sensible criteria. Some years, the voting body wants to show its integrity. Other years, it wants to pet its poodles. This year, it wanted to pretend that racism isn’t an industry given, and rolled out an inelegant glut of tardy tributes. And there are, clearly, yet more social and political complexities polluting the field. Perplexed, we watch from the comfort of our homes while agreeable, bobbing revue turns like Gwyneth Paltrow in Shakespeare in Love or Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich are credited with the same talents we recognize in, say, Hilary Swank in Boys Don’t Cry. Refracted through the ponderous shimmying of the Oscars, it is the film industry that dictates to us all what a “talented actor” is; and all too often there’s something vital missing from its skewed definitions. What that something is was demonstrated best, perhaps, by Halle Berry’s overwhelmed acceptance of this year’s Best Actress statuette. Looking at her contorting face, gaping mouth, and swollen eyes wasn’t exactly like looking at Everywoman—since it’s a little difficult to destroy three solid days of laminating and spraying in a single sobfest—but Berry showed more powerful, genuine emotion in her shocked speech than most Hollywood females have done in decades of high-octane, high-drama filmmaking.

It’s a bizarre celluloid convention, the way that emotions such as sorrow, anger, or pain that leave your average female civilian looking like a just-birthed baboon simply shimmer over the airbrushed expanse of a Hollywood star’s face to leave the tiniest damp mark, like a fairy lick. This can perhaps be chalked up in part to the wildly varying levels of acting ability manifest in our movie-star standbys, but I think there’s more to it than that. Maybe it’s worth wondering whether there’s also some weird complicity between the people who make these movies and the people like us who pay to see them. Think of your own face in the mirror after a particularly bad crying jag or a heated, tearful argument. How often do you see Julia Roberts or Cameron Diaz exhibiting that kind of piggy, swollen rawness on film? And is that what we pay for—to see our own emotion cleaned up, sanitized, beautified?

How often do we see women looking as confidently angry, with flecks of spittle flying from their contorted faces, as Michael Douglas in Wonder Boys or John Cusack in High Fidelity? Don’t the ladies aspire to the sweaty, walleyed aggression of Brad Pitt in Fight Club or Edward Norton in American History X? Don’t they long to expand their physical boundaries into the full-on vomiting and dead-eyed fear and exhaustion portrayed by the male cast of Apollo 13? There’s no shortage of leading men out there bellowing, gibbering, and rolling their eyes. But leading women?

When Cate Blanchett’s Lord of the Rings Elf Queen gets angry, her whole head morphs into that of a mystical, shimmering and very cross wraith. When she calms down again, her perfect unruffled features are revealed. Instead of a human face with a big, yelling, angry mouth, we have an ethereal, representational one. This happens frequently in Hollywood, without the need to resort to special effects. Cinema has evolved a balletic and complex collection of signifiers to save faces, a formalized code that mimes deep emotion without ever showing their ravages. Female stars employ a bevy of recognizable acting tics to exhibit emotion: Hysterical crying is indicated by dry, rasping sobs, carefully controlled to eliminate the possibility of gurgling phlegm. The face is hidden, only to be raised as the sobs die down. And then, instead of a ketchup-colored head covered from nose to chin in a thin slick of snot, the sufferer raises a honey-hued, ironed-out visage, unaltered apart from a smudge of eyeliner, like a paint-by-numbers Pierrot. Jennifer Lopez in The Wedding Planner epitomized this perfectly. (And, yes, though it was a romantic comedy, the moment in question was meant to be genuinely moving.) Then there’s the Well and Spill style of tears, wherein the star stares directly into the camera in dizzying close-up. You can see her dredging it all up, straining desperately to relive the terrible time before she had an entourage. Finally, and thankfully, she squeezes out some moisture, locking her jaw as though struggling to produce a small urine sample. A tear trickles down the waterproofed cheek. The eyes sparkle, madly refracting the manufactured emotion.

But if celluloid crying is bad, it is celluloid anger that is, fittingly, the most infuriatingly insufficient. In a normal woman, anger is as debilitating as tears—if not more so, as its physical manifestations can make one look like a congested boil as well as compromise one’s inherent wit and grace. Hollywood has dealt with the ugliness of anger by not only placing carefully reasoned and brilliantly articulated expositions in the mouths of its furious girlies, but by developing a whole style of temper tantrum that justifies the terrible phrase “God, you’re beautiful when you’re angry.” Actually, it should probably be, “Gee, you’re cute when you’re miffed,” because its practitioners never seem to emote beyond a level of irritation more appropriate for a bungled Starbucks order. In this little set piece, whose chief abusers include Julia Roberts, Meg Ryan, Sandra Bullock, and Renée Zellweger, the actor begins by letting her mouth drop open and her eyes pop out in incredulous amazement at what’s just been said to her by that sassy clerk/pompous bureaucrat/obnoxious-but-clearly-perfect-for-her man. She punctuates her expression by slamming hands onto hips in a feisty, kooky manner. Then, there’s a cutesy double take, as if she’s at a loss for words, followed by a momentary pause, in which she alternately frowns and pouts; finally, she lets lose a stream of indignant, energetic, but basically quite polite insults.

As her fury grows, the actor’s face miraculously remains the same color as it was pre-tantrum, but she varies her original pose with some of the following movements: the 5-year-old’s foot-stamp (a Ryan romance speciality), the emphatic lean forward (so that the audience might glimpse uplifted half-moons of breast, a movement used to great effect by Roberts in Erin Brockovich), the energetic double-hand slap on a flat surface, the completely steady pointed finger (Ryan in Proof of Life; Roberts in The Mexican) and the incredulous gasp plus hair-toss. These little performances are not only completely unrelated to real life—in which the average gal doesn’t generally choreograph her movements to show off flattering clothing during arguments—but they are also calculated to emphasize how “comical” female anger is.

Though this is acceptable in the romantic comedies that Hollywood churns out like sweet butter (although surely having a little genuine emotion in there would make the stories less facile and the endings less trite), these rote moves require only a little intensification—and perhaps a pained and quizzical frown—to qualify as drama. Underwear helps too, because it’s more dramatic and grown-up to emote half-naked. In Proof of Life, Ryan indicates the torturous battle between anger, frantic worry, trapped desperation, and burgeoning desire by leaning against a fridge in her skivvies, knock-kneed and grizzling gently. Then there’s the scene in Eyes Wide Shut where Nicole Kidman points an “angry” finger at Tom Cruise while rubbing up and down against a radiator in a pair of panties.

Contrast these actresses with Emily Watson; though she has never received an Academy Award (despite being nominated twice, most recently in the same year that Gwyneth Paltrow achieved her Best Actress award for apparently just being ubiquitous), Watson’s film performances have an anguished power that can truly move an audience—and, indeed, disturb one for hours. Her mud-smeared, naked hysteria in Hilary and Jackie reveals the source part of at least some of this power: Watson’s characters often look shockingly ugly. In Breaking the Waves, she doesn’t evince distress at her lovers’ departure with huge, puppy-dog eyes and a trembling bottom lip; rather, she is an elemental force with a face that disintegrates into human mulch and a tearing, mad cry that has no gender.

Watson is, of course, with her tangle-headed, moon-faced sweetness, not at all ugly in actuality. But her most un-Hollywoodlike propensity for messing up her looks in the throes of emotion, unreservedly letting herself go, ensures that she looks like a real person when doing so. And perhaps that’s why her performances don’t slide off you like cheap foundation once you’ve finished watching the film—and can we really say the same about stompy-foot twins Ryan and Roberts and others of their ilk?

Angelina Jolie in Girl, Interrupted, is another actor given the green light to transform herself into a truly scary, dribbling mess of emotion in a recent film, and then rewarded for it with a Supporting Actress Oscar. But there are a few points to consider here. First, Jolie is a one-person lunatic fringe, as much a precious Hollywood exception-that-proves-the-rule as Watson, a wacky little human flag waved when movie people wish to demonstrate that even the most conservative creative industry can tolerate unconventional people. Second, she’s exceptionally good-looking even by movie standards, possessing flamboyant, fleshy features that can withstand emotional engorgement in a way that, say, Paltrow’s fluttery pastel looks would not. Third, Girl, Interrupted was set in the enclave of a girls-only institution; thus, Jolie’s character had not the faintest possibility of getting it on with available males, liberating her character from the emotional/physical constraints of playing the cinematic Love Object. And regardless of how these factors were involved in freeing up Jolie to give the incredible performance she did, it was heartening that the attention to her performance focused on its quality rather than on the ruination of her remarkable looks through real, live acting.

Of course, if you’re a star like Paltrow or Roberts, you should be able to do what you want—and if that happens to include compromising your hundred-watt looks for the emotion demanded by a role, so be it. But by a certain stage in an actresses’s career, her In Style-cover image is like the grossly inflated tit in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, ballooning ahead of her with a life and earning power of its own, squishing all in its path. She is afraid, perhaps, to puncture that kind of appeal. Hence such feeble attempts at uglying down as Paltrow’s and Roberts’s much-discussed fat suits (for Shallow Hal and America’s Sweethearts, respectively), and Renée Zellweger’s “daring” Bridget Jones’s Diary weight gain—all gimmicks that substituted physical transformation for actual acting and did nothing but emphasize the perfection of the stars who temporarily tried them on. Emotion may be the carbohydrate of the industry, but consistency is the key when serving in bulk. Movie stars are simply brands, guaranteed to look and behave in a predictable way: To show Meg Ryan displaying a level of anger or sadness beyond what her audience has come to expect would be a serious devaluation of her brand and a could result in loss of faith, customer loyalty, and revenue. With no plot or point to speak of, a film such as America’s Sweethearts, say, exists only so we, the imperfect masses, can pay money to watch improbable perfection in motion. If these people started looking and behaving more like ourselves, we could sit comfortably gawking at each other in street cafes rather than shell out cash to sit in an itchy theater seat for two hours.

Perhaps the outcome of this year’s Oscars are evidence of an upward trend. Of the five nominees, three gave truly emotional performances—Halle Berry’s almost making up for the buttock-clenching moment in Swordfish where her character was strung up from the ceiling and registered her fear and pain with no more than a mild pout. The subtle, heart-rending performances of Berry and nominees Sissy Spacek and Judi Dench served to emphasize the stilted stylisation of the other nominees, for films that seemed to demand facial evocations more suited to Elmer Fudd than to flesh-and-blood humans. Renée Zellweger was apparently worthy of nomination because she porked up a bit and did a funny accent in a cartoonish caper. And Nicole Kidman’s performance in Moulin Rouge was a porcelain collection of feminine cinematic conventions, from the tubercular “coughs” delivered as if she was blowing out the candles on her 12th birthday cake to the wobbling close-ups, a single tear leaving no trace on her rubberized spray-on pancake base. Perhaps, in this whirling, ironic, faux-naîve film, that was the point. But how should we distinguish? It also seems worthwhile to mention that while Russell Crowe revelled in limps, twitches, dribbles, and psychotic episodes, his costar Jennifer Connelly’s single emotional breakdown in A Beautiful Mind took place entirely in the dark. (She received a Best Supporting Actress statuette for her decorous restraint.)

Part of the draw of movies and their stars, of course, is the fact that we obediently desire those beings so carefully packaged to be desirable—even when they’re packaged with gender assumptions galore. Just as the studio execs assume that females always want to be rescued by the likes of Nicolas Cage and Russell Crowe, perhaps they also think that their average male audience member has had quite enough of his real-life partner’s real-life tears and anger. Perhaps they worry that, however lovely they are, if Julia or Sandra or Cameron seems too irascible and emotional, too “hysterical” up there on the screen, she’ll drive the boys away.

Yet the truth is that much of the abovementioned mulch is aimed at us undiscerning women, a part of the paradoxical conspiracy that includes women’s magazines, hair-color commercials, and Ally McBeal. We have a collective, masochistic urge to submit to these saccharine entertainments, with their syrupy smiles and cooing, joshing advice disguising the shrieking, brass-clawed commercial raptors forever pushing us towards some mummified idea of perfection. The rigid control we are supposed to have over our own lives extends beyond physical appearance to emotions themselves and, in the struggle to be lovely, we are urged to be as mean and sparing with tears and anger as we are with our food.

Hollywood, despite the way it eagerly seizes on every inoffensively hip global trend, is still alarmingly conservative. Its images of women remain mostly proscriptive, not reflective; and for some of us, this is beginning to curdle. Otherwise excellent films like Vanilla Sky and A Beautiful Mind are spoiled by their vapid, unthinking depictions of women. Once you start to notice them, the examples are all over the place, becoming more discordant every time. Perhaps in the end, we’ll simply refuse to pay any more to see these morbid annoyances; and finally witness raw, complex, real emotions reflected in the faces of Hollywood females as they watch what happens to their paychecks.

After graduating from Oxford University with a degree in English Literature, Laura Smith spent a few years in Eastern Europe, editing a cultural magazine and website in Warsaw, Prague, and Budapest. She is now living and writing in France, for climatic and culinary reasons.

The Women's Academy

Kyla — Sat, 01 Mar 2003 00:00:00 -0500

There are some contests in which women are truly at a disadvantage when competing with men. Football. Presidential nominations. Snow-writing. But acting is not one of them. Streep vs. Nicholson, Dame Judi vs. Sir Ian, Maggie Gyllenhaal vs. Jake Gyllenhaal - the Vegas odds would be close ones indeed if these actors were pitted against each other for top honors.

They're not, of course. Movie awards have always segregated the genders, without ever explaining what emoting has to do with X and Y chromosomes. And no one's done it longer or with more cachet than the Academy Awards. The separate categories for Actor and Actress are unfair, but practical: What with the dearth of strong roles written for women in Hollywood (not surprising, given the high percentage of male screenwriters and directors), if the sexes were expected to duke it out in the acting categories, the imbalance in the numbers alone would ensure that women never got face time with the little golden man. (And since a parade of peacock gowns is always more interesting than yet another black tux, we'd also be missing out on what Joan Rivers and InStyle consider the real competition of the night.)

Between Salma Hayek's efforts to bring Frida Kahlo to the screen, Chicago's nominated trifecta of Zellweger, Zeta-Jones, and Latifah, and the leading-lady powerhouse that is The Hours, 2002 was a year when writers finally offered up a diverse assortment of juicy roles for the ladies. Here, in honor of the 75th annual Academy Awards, which will be broadcast on March 23, we'd like to offer what the Academy can't: more opportunities for women to win. And, unlike Best Actress in a Leading Role and Best Actress in a Supporting Role, these are truly gender specific.

Best Actress in a Male-Fantasy Role
Emily Watson, Punch-Drunk Love
Leonor Watling, Talk to Her
Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, Femme Fatale
Liv Tyler, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
Natalie Portman, Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones

Best Actress in a Romantic Lead Opposite a Man Old Enough to Be Her Father
Hilary Swank, Insomnia
Wanda De Jesus, Blood Work
Debra Messing, Hollywood Ending
Tea Leoni, Hollywood Ending
Do Thi Hai Yen, The Quiet American

Best Acting by a Former Romantic Lead Now Playing Someone's Mother
Daryl Hannah, A Walk to Remember
Geena Davis, Stuart Little 2
Kim Cattrall, Crossroads
Lesley Ann Warren, Secretary
Kim Basinger, 8 Mile

Best Actress in a Role Requiring a Nude Scene That's Integral to the Part
Salma Hayek, Frida
Maggie Gyllenhaal, Secretary
Emily Mortimer, Lovely & Amazing
Kathy Bates, About Schmidt
Thandie Newton, The Truth About Charlie

Best Actress Who will Likely Be Replaced in the Sequel By a New Babe
Rosario Dawson, Men in Black II
Fann Wong, Shanghai Nights
Beyonce Knowles, Austin Powers in Goldmember
Halle Barry, Die Another Day
Asia Argento, XXX

Lifetime Achievement Award for Surviving Hollywood with Her Dignity More or Less Intact
Susan Sarandon, Goldie Hawn, Catherine Deneuve, Sissy Spacek, Sally Field, Diane Keaton

Melissa Morrison is a Phoenix-based writer who tapes the Oscars so she can fast-forward through the boring categories.

Looking for Girls in All the Boys' Places

Kyla — Fri, 01 Mar 1996 00:00:00 -0500

Wish there were more kick-ass female characters in the movies? Enough with The Piano-esqe mute-is-powerful bullshit. Sometimes you can find feminism in the most unlikely places, like action movies and Freaky Friday-like comedies.

Batman II

Why isn’t this movie called Catwoman?In a classic reduction of any women’s issue—the lack of great film roles for women—into a petty disagreement, the media paid more attention to the catfight among Hollywood’s top actresses over who would play Catwoman than to why the role was worth fighting over. Batman II is more about Catwoman’s inner conflict over her own gendered identity than that sulky bat guy. Catwoman struggles with two ideas of herself: is she the naive secretary Selina Kile who waits for her fairy-tale prince to rescue her, and whose dead-end job gets her knocked out the window of a tall building by her boss, the evil Max Shreck? Or is she Catwoman—standing up for herself, protecting other women, delivering justice, and scorning Selina’s weaknesses in herself and other women?

Catwoman’s first act is to save a young woman from sexual assault. Afterwards she sneers, “You make it so easy, don’t you, always waiting for some Batman to save you. I am Catwoman, hear me roar.” For Catwoman, women are not just innocent victims; she holds them responsible for not using their power to defend themselves. It’s not a blame-the-victim thang—her words are an encouragement to women to take an active role in their own defense, and an indication of the potential of female power.

In keeping with this rejection of dependence and emphasis on agency, Catwoman/Selina Kile is ambivalent about her relationship with Batman/Bruce Wayne, who wants to be her knight in shining black armor. Early in the movie, her Selina Kile side says, “He makes me feel the way I hope I really am.” But later, after she has come to more power through her Catwoman persona, she tells him, “It seems that every woman you save ends up dead or deeply resentful. Maybe you should retire.” This outright criticism challenges the damsel-in-distress trope that no superhero plotline is ever without.

Catwoman’s inner conflict comes to a head when she must choose between living a fairy-tale life with Batman, or being true to her sense of justice and new-found personal power. The ending does not disappoint. Warning—I’m about to give it away, so if you want to see the movie and be surprised, you’ll have to skip this part. In the final scene, Batman and Catwoman confront Shreck, the ruthless tycoon whose plan to build a huge power plant—one that would secretly drain instead of generate electricity—has brought mayhem to Gotham. Batman wants to take Shreck to jail. But Catwoman distrusts the justice system and wants to take care of him herself.

Batman: Why are you doing this? Let’s just take him to the police. Then we can go home, together. Selina, don’t you see, we’re the same, we’re the same, split right down the center. Selina, please.
Catwoman: Batman, I would love to live with you in your castle forever just like in the fairy tale. I just couldn’t live with myself. So don’t pretend this is a happy ending.
Shreck: Selina Kile, you’re fired.

But it is a happy ending. Selina Kile is fired—that naive dependence is gone forever. Catwoman administers her own justice, giving Shreck the kiss of death as she grabs a power cable and fries him to a crisp. Then she takes off, leaving Batman and his fairy-tale desires behind. Go girl!
So where’s Catwoman II?

Lethal Weapon III

Lethal Weapon III is one of the more progressive shoot-em-up buddy-cop flicks. Sgt. Murtaugh, one of LA’s finest, kills a gangbanger in a shoot-out. It turns out he knows the kid, a friend of his son. When the father of the dead boy tells him, “You want to do something, Sgt. Murtaugh? You find the man who put the gun in my son’s hand,” Murtaugh takes the gun and works his way back up the ladder. In doing so he makes a few points about young black drug-dealing men being small-fry victims of larger powers that be:

Murtaugh: Where did this gun come from, motherfucker, huh?
Perpetrator: Fuck you.
Murtaugh: You ever heard of genocide? You stupid motherfuckers. You ever heard of genocide? You fools are killing yourselves. You’re killing us. And I’m tired of it.

Murtaugh traces the gun back to a dirty ex-cop who steals automatic weapons confiscated by the LAPD, and sells them to drug lords and gangbangers in communities of color in Los Angeles.

Enter our heroine, Sgt. Lorna Cole from Internal Affairs, hot on the trail of the crooked ex-cop. A martial arts expert who wields a computer as well as a gun, she doesn’t hesitate to take on five men at a time in pursuit of truth and justice. Unlike many intelligent women in the movies, devotion to her job does not make her sexless and undesirable. When Sgt. Cole single-handedly subdues a garage full of armed men, romantic interest and fellow cop Martin Riggs doesn’t jump in to help or rescue her. He turns to Murtaugh and says, “I want you to see something. Watch. She has a gift.” He looks on in awe saying, “That’s my girl.” When all the bad guys are unconscious on the ground, she plays with popular perceptions of feminine anger and quips, “This pms, it’s murder.”

Not everything about the movie is this fab, of course. The comic use of excessive violence by our heroes on the force isn’t quite as funny as I guess it was supposed to be before Rodney King. (“We’re LAPD. We’re just doing some routine inquiries. Have you been checked for lungs lately?” “You better tell me where this gun is from or I’ll shoot your motherfucking brains out.”) On the up side, the movie hints at a larger societal context and acknowledges the role that white-dominated power structures, as well as individual white men, play in that violence. On the down side, this point is tempered by the one-rotten-apple fallacy: the bad guy is an ex-cop, because oh yes, we all know that there’s no systematic abuse of power at the LAPD.

And our heroine’s character doesn’t evolve much. But who cares? It’s an action movie—we want explosions, not character development. And explosions and car chases are what we get. When the dust clears, we’re left with some surprising political messages—like Murtaugh’s daughter’s “Pro-Choice NARAL” t-shirt. And, of course, the kick-ass Lorna Cole.

Switch

Switch is about Steve Brooks, a male chauvinist pig and ad exec who is invited to jacuzzi with three of his ex-girlfriends.

Steve: I don’t believe it, I’m sitting here with three beautiful women who said they hated me. I must be dreaming.
Margo: We still hate you.
Felicia: We decided you should be punished for the way you treat women.
Liz: Oh yeah, men like you just have to be stopped.
Steve: How’re you going to stop me?
Liz: We’re going to kill you.
Steve: What a way to die...

And they drown him in the jacuzzi, hog-tied with their silk stockings. Steve arrives in purgatory to find that—tee-hee—men who don’t respect women go to hell. But in this case, God—played by two voices: one male, one female—gives Steve a chance to redeem himself. He must find one female who loves him. To prevent him from simply sweet-talking some woman, he is returned to earth in the body of blond bombshell Amanda. And then this gender bender gets interesting.

Steve/Amanda shows us how a person very unused to being insulted would react to those everyday experiences of sexism that those of us who’ve spent our entire lives inhabiting female bodies know all too well. It’s a treat to see such self-confident responses, as Steve/Amanda pauses to react to offenses so commonplace that women usually ignore them. A sample: “I’ll tell you why I’m so pissed off, buddy boy—I’m sick and tired of being treated like a piece of meat.” And unlike so many women—even those with stereotypically “perfect” bodies—Steve/Amanda is in love with his/her new body, and keeps feeling him/herself up on camera. Even though this action is spurred by a male consciousness and so is kind of a breast envy thang, the spectacle (and it is one) of a woman fascinated with the beauty (as opposed to the excess or unruliness) of her own body, touching herself in a pleasure-filled and quasi-sexual way, is transgressive and empowering.

Between the one-liners and the slapstick (Steve/Amanda’s inability to walk in high heels gets old quick), the movie raises some questions you don’t expect from light comedy: How do men and women talk about desire? Is there anything essentially male or female? How much choice do we have over our gender identities? When Steve/Amanda makes sexual comments to Walter, Steve’s best friend, and Walter finds it strange, Steve/Amanda asks him, “So women aren’t supposed to feel the same things a man feels?... It’s ok for a man to say, ‘I’m horny, I’d like to get laid.’ This is not ok for a woman to say?” In another key scene, Steve/Amanda wakes up to find that while passed out from drinking, he/she was date raped by Walter. He/she smacks Walter in the jaw, and when he insists that she loved it, he/she sets him straight. “Don’t you give me that macho self-serving crap. I was unconscious, buddy boy. I didn’t love anything.”

Also unusual for a mainstream movie is the lesbian subplot. Steve/Amanda hits on Sheila, the CEO of a cosmetics company, because he/she wants to win her advertising account. In some ways, it’s positive: the physical image of two women embracing and dancing romantically is very daring (not to mention fun to watch). And the film does acknowledge Steve’s homophobia, when Margo explains Steve/Amanda’s inability to consummate anything with Sheila: “Gay, male or female, scares the hell out of you.” But the subplot gets dropped and the film never explores the possibility of Steve getting to heaven through a relationship with Sheila.

Now, the end of the movie is weird and convoluted at best—yes, I’m giving it away again—Steve/Amanda bears Walter’s child and, because this baby is a female and loves her mother, Steve gains entrance to heaven while simultaneously abandoning the child to single-parent Walter. Not the most satisfying ending. But how could there be one? The joy of this film lies not with any sort of resolution, but instead with watching a very male consciousness inside a very female body: we can see and analyze the differences.

We may love these movies, but that doesn’t mean they’re perfect—as their individual flaws demonstrate. And even though Catwoman (Michelle Pfeiffer), Lorna Cole (Renée Russo), and Amanda (Ellen Barkin) certainly aren’t dumb blondes, all three perpetuate the usual beauty images. It’s still Hollywood, after all, and I don’t think we’re likely to see many leading women who are anything but drop-dead gorgeous anytime soon. Yet overall, there is more to like than dislike; all three movies give us surprisingly powerful female characters and hip social commentary. Put these movies—and others—to your own test: do you feel more kick-ass after you see them?

Stephanie Rosenfeld is a research associate at the Institute for Food and Development Policy (Food First) by day, and a feminist film critic by night.

"Subversion on a Massive Level"

Kyla — Mon, 01 Jan 1996 00:00:00 -0500

When I rented Sleep With Me, I was expecting a silly angst-ridden Gen-X romantic comedy. I’d read the back of the box, so I knew that Joe and Sarah were married but that Frank, Joe’s best friend, was in love with her. Instead of an entertaining but benign and forgettable 90 minutes, I got a playful, subversive discourse on gender as a constructed spectacle.

First of all, the movie begs for a theoretical critique, both implicitly and explicitly. In numerous places, dialogue and/or circumstance serve to engage issues of textual analysis. The use of a video camera at parties creates a movie-within-the-movie and thus causes the viewer to ponder the nature of film as spectacle created for an audience. Lines explaining the success of a character’s first screenplay mocks film as an industry: “I knew it was just a matter of time before Hollywood realized that adolescent wish-fulfillment was the way to go,” quips the budding screenwriter’s wife; “What makes the script so good is that it’s a woman’s movie but it’s still manly,” comments a random partygoer.Note that these statements also point specifically to issues of gender as locations for critique. Quentin Tarantino, in what is probably the funniest cameo ever filmed, plays another random partygoer who convincingly dissects the homoerotic subtext of Top Gun, both suggesting and demonstrating that a critique of seemingly superficial popular culture can be rewarding.

Not only does the film invite analysis, it specifically addresses gender as an overdetermined concept. Some characters are locked into behaviors circumscribed by gender (Dwayne and Nigel are the most obvious examples); others destabilize it by slipping in and out of over-the-top caricatures of both femininity and masculinity. Athena and Lauren are like a pair of Shakespearean clowns—they play dumb and then reveal with a few remarks that they’re more perceptive and clearheaded that the more “serious” characters. They gleefully mock typical gendered qualities with their performances.

The clearest instance of this is poker night—an ongoing event within the context of the story, as well as a stereotypically masculine activity. There are women at poker night for the first time ever, and their self-conscious, overdone femininity is disruptive as hell. Lauren breathily sings country songs; Athena interrupts the game to ask questions like, “What’s a bluff?” They make girly-girl gestures and coo to a man who has expressed an emotion, “Ooh, you’re so sensitive. Come sit between us.” Athena provokes the guys by telling Lauren, “Hold onto that ace,” and when she’s told that she can’t bluff someone else’s hand, she immediately drops her playful, feminized lightness and asks, “Why not? Does it confuse you?... Why are you so angry?” The shift in tone is clear; she’s not talking poker anymore. She’s asking if he’s confused and threatened by her exposition of gender. “Ok, big cock,” she says as she slides a few chips into the pot, “here’s my bet.”

The clowning reaches a high point as Athena says, “You should do that guy Frank, Lauren,” and Lauren replies, “Oh, I don’t know, I checked him out and he looked kinda small. I need a big stiff one and I don’t mean a cocktail.” She swigs her beer and squares her shoulders in a parody of masculinity and the two women trade patter like, “It’s raining sperm in here,” and “Oh, I think I just grew a penis.” Since they have now thoroughly revealed themselves to be as different from their original airheaded personas as possible, all of the exaggerated femininity enacted earlier in the scene must be reinterpreted as the joke that it was. Athena and Lauren have been in control the whole time, talking rings around confused men in a mocking choreography of subversion.

Athena and Lauren aren’t the only ones who resist gender conventions. While Sarah’s behavior is stylistically opposite to theirs, it serves a similar purpose. She also challenges a deep-rooted role by simply asserting her agency at each and every turn. What might have been—in terms of plot—a boring and overdone conclusion (she and Joe stay together in the end), becomes a statement about women’s power to make their own choices. During one fight, she responds to Joe by simply saying, “Fuck you. You don’t tell me what to do.” The final scene is even more explicit:

Sarah: Gimme the keys.
Joe: What?
Sarah: It’s my car. Gimme the keys.
Joe: Are we starting the distribution of property now?
Sarah: Give me the fucking keys. (She grabs them out of his hand.)
Joe: Honey, where are you going?
Sarah: Wherever the fuck I want. (She runs off and gets in the car.)

The expected response to his question is, “Away from you,” or something along those lines. But instead, the emphasis is on what she wants, not on her reactions to him. She’s in control; she’s making the decisions.

Perhaps more important than their content, however, is the public nature of several pivotal scenes. The concept of spectacle is highlighted mainly through the staging of central confrontations in front of an audience.The fact that parts of the group’s social events are seen through a videocamera’s viewfinder also serves to emphasize spectacle. Frank first admits his feelings for Sarah at a dinner party, in front of his own date, Joe, and a few of their friends. Sarah and Joe have a fight in the kitchen at another party while Athena watches and guests in the living room overhear their raised voices.Furthermore, the fight is actually about being observed— “Yes, I do think you’re enjoying this. You’re the center of attention, everyone’s looking at you, everyone’s talking about you,” Joe rages. The afore-mentioned final fight between Sarah and Joe is on the lawn with party guests massed on the porch to watch. Her final speech is directed not only at him but also at their audience. “In case anybody didn’t get that,” she says very loudly toward the porch, “my husband over here wants to know why I fucked Frank over here. He seems to think that if he humiliates me and makes a big scene, it’ll put me back in my fucking little place.” Ever-present viewers reference us as movie-watchers, but they also point out that an audience is crucial for any kind of widespread perception. By self-consciously engaging issues of audience, spectacle, and male and female behavior, the film exposes the constructed nature of gendered behavior. It acknowledges the role that movies can play in this construction, and suggests ways in which they can also play with it. As Quentin Tarantino’s cultural-critic character says about the ideal screenplay, “You want subversion on a massive level.” —lj.