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Author:
Annette Insdorf
Director of Undergraduate Film Studies at Columbia Univ and a professor in the Graduate Film Divison in the School of the Arts, an author, writer and execuutive producer.
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Annette Insdorf is Director of Undergraduate Film Studies at Columbia
University, and a professor in the Graduate Film Division in the School
of the Arts (of which she was chair from 1990 to 1995). She is the
author of books, including DOUBLE LIVES, SECOND CHANCES: THE CINEMA OF
KRYSZTOF KIESLOWSKI and FRANCOIS TRUFFAUT and INDELIBLE SHADOWS: FILM
AND THE HOLOCAUST. Her articles have appeared in numerous newspapers and
magazines--especially the New York Times--and she is the television host
of Cannes Film Festival coverage for BRAVO/IFC. Creator and host of the
popular "Reel Pieces" series at Manhattan's 92nd Street Y, Dr. Insdorf
was a jury member of the Berlin Film Festival, and served as executive
producer for prize-winning short films.
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FROM BOYS WITH TOYS TO BABES WITH BULLETS
Hitchcock shoots love scenes as if they were murder scenes, and murder scenes as if they were love scenes.
--Francois Truffaut
If the violence that characterizes much of American cinema has been evolving from boys with toys - to include "babes with bullets," have we really come a long way? Is it progress when a heroine's hand - which, in an earlier decade, tried to cover her exposed breast - now points a loaded gun? Are women any less objectified when their semi-nude bodies are juxtaposed with weapons in the ironic mode of Quentin Tarantino's "Jackie Brown" or the opening title sequences of James Bond movies? These questions reflect a discomfort with how women have been - and continue to be - portrayed in a cinema that seems to value not only violent male action but the gimmick of disrobed female bodies. The only evolution during the 1990s was from an image of women flaunting their sexuality - using it to manipulate men, like Sharon Stone in "Basic Instinct" - to that of muscles replacing curves, as when Demi Moore becomes "one of the boys" in "G.I. Jane."
Over a hundred years ago, movies were originating in the penny arcades where one could see "peep shows." What were those pre-cinematic experiences about? "Kiss-kiss" and "bang-bang," in particular. We have advanced quite a bit since then, especially in terms of technology, but sex and violence continue to be primary attractions for the more sophisticated voyeurs of a century later. The problem lies in the frequent equation between eroticism and assault - sex which is indeed violent, and violence which provides thrill so visceral, a release so powerful, that it functions as a turn-on. In some films, sex is foreplay to orgasmic shoot-outs or explosions. Being a film professor, a woman, and a concerned citizen, I continue to be perturbed by the escalation of violence as a commodity, especially when directed against women: this has taken the form of mainstream movies such as "Fatal Attraction," as well as art-house cinema like "Blue Velvet."
The celebration of violence is, of course, a problem hardly limited to contemporary film. Why should we expect the American cinema to be any different from American society? After all, doesn't film reflect the world we inhabit? But the screen has a double-edge: movies also condition how we see ourselves. And given that the largest percentage of the American movie going public consists of rather impressionable young people, one wonders about the effects of films whose appeal lies primarily in titles like "Natural Born Killers," "Young Guns," "Lethal Weapon," "Die Hard," and their sequels.
This is not exclusively a male issue, even if most of the screen heroes are men, from Clint Eastwood to Bruce Willis. In "Beverly Hills Cop II," a huge commercial success of 1987, one of the comic moments is particularly discomfiting: as the voluptuous villainess played by Brigitte Nielsen is finally shot, the hero (Eddie Murphy) mutters, "Women!" Hearing the audience cheer this misogynistic moment is hardly heartening - a cheap shot akin to the end of "Fatal Attraction," another box-office hit of the same year. This contemporary drama begins with a happy New York family, but when Anne Archer is away for the weekend, husband Michael Douglas does not resist the lure of the independent career woman played by Glen Close. After their one night stand, however, Close obsessively follows Douglas and turns his life into a nightmare.
The original ending of "Fatal Attraction" was somewhat more sympathetic to her character, as she committed suicide. But preview audiences did not find this satisfactory, so Paramount had the director Adrian Lyne re-shoot a more confrontational climax: in the final version, Douglas smacks her, and his wife shoots Close in self-defense. As critic Dave Kehr wrote in the February 1988 issue of Premiere Magazine, "the cheers and laughter that greeted Douglas's assault on Close - were heard again - when in 'Fatal Beauty' a fuzzily asexual Whoopi Goldberg punched Jennifer Warren - knocking her through a plate glass window. As trends go, this isn't an encouraging one: when there is money to be made slugging women around, women will be slugged around."
Whether male or female characters are doing the slugging, such images do not exist in a vacuum. An article in "The New York Times" of May 7, 1991 cites a study conducted at UCLA which found that "30 percent of men are sexually aroused by watching portrayals of violence against women, leading researchers to assume that they fantasize about such violence." It's bad enough when a rape scene is graphically presented onscreen: but when a film depicts a female character's willing complicity in her physical degradation - as in "Blue Velvet" - it's time to question romantically grotesque conceits.
Written and directed by "David Lynch, "Blue Velvet" is a stylish, compelling and perverse mystery. At the beginning, we see a brightly-colored, harmonious suburban world. But after a man gardening is almost strangled by a mysterious string, we seem to be in a science-fiction universe. When Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan) enters the film, it becomes his story: like the audience, he is sucked into the mystery, an innocent who becomes tainted by what he sees and feels. Jeffrey sneaks into the apartment of a singer named Dorothy (Isabella Rossellini). After she finds him hiding in her closet, she makes him undress. Then Frank (Dennis Hopper) arrives, so she puts Jeffrey back in the closet, and he observes the degrading sex: Frank inhales from a green mask, and then stuffs blue velvet material into Dorothy's mouth as well as his own. Frank hits her, and doesn't let Dorothy look at him (although Jeffrey--and we--are looking).
When Frank leaves, she still comes on to Jeffrey. Dorothy asks him to hit her, which he can't bring himself to do - this time. When he returns and she asks again, he does hit her during lovemaking. With slow-motion romanticizing the scene, Lynch would have us believe that Jeffrey is enacting a female fantasy of eroticism. But "Blue Velvet" offers merely a male projection of what are perhaps the director's own fears and desires.
Whether mainstream or independent, American films have had a hard time dealing with female sexuality. As far back as the silent era, women were either vamps or victims: the former were sexual aggressors who, like the vampires from which the term originates, drained the spirits from men; the latter, when seduced, lost their reason if not their life. Some sixty years later, Hollywood had not matured in terms of presenting women's eroticism with courage, respect or tenderness. Both Paul Schrader's "Cat People" in 1982 and Tony Scott's "The Hunger" in 1983 exemplify male nightmares about female sexuality unleashed. Nastassja Kinski in the former and Catherine Deneuve in the later are beautiful at the same time that they incarnate bestial violence: the moments of erotic climax in both films are shown in terms of bloody murder. In these horror movies accompanied by fashionable punk-rock soundtracks, sex literally turns the "heroines" into destructive animals. "Femme fatale" may be a French term, but it captures a problematic concept inherent in many American movies: gorgeous women are lethal - whether to themselves or to others. Sexually-defined female characters have led men to their deaths (as in "film noir"); more often, they have been objects of violent behavior.
The 1980s had no monopoly on violence, pornography or cynicism. In every era of filmmaking, women onscreen have been subject to excesses and distortions, or at least pernicious clichés. Already in the justly celebrated work of Alfred Hitchcock, one finds many of these problems. He is arguably the greatest director of suspense or thriller material in the history of the cinema, a popular entertainer with a genuine vision of human corruption or corruptibility. But "Psycho" is a prime example of how Hitchcock manipulates audience sympathy so that we identify with someone who turns out to be Peeping Tom and murderer (Anthony Perkins), while subliminally blaming the sexy woman (Janet Leigh) in a black brassiere. As Leo Braudy suggests in his perceptive essay, "Truffaut, Hitchcock, and the Irresponsible Audience," "We follow Norman into the next room and watch as he moves aside a picture to reveal a peephole into Marion's Cabin. He watches her undress and, in some important way, we feel the temptress is more guilty than the Peeping Tom. Whether we realize it or not, we have had a Norman-like perspective from the beginning of the movie this time, like the first time, we know we won't be caught. We tend to blame Marion and not Norman because we are fellow-voyeurs with him, and we do not want to blame ourselves."
We might ask, what is the sexual morality in such films? Beyond the fact, as Francois Truffaut put it, that Hitchcock shoots love scenes as if they were murder scenes and murder scenes as if they were love scenes, it appears that a woman - usually blonde - can be killed because she is promiscuous. That a nude female body invites a knife must be demystified and revealed as a facile conceit, whether the audience is rooting - at the end of "Fatal Attraction" - for the murder of the sexually predatory blonde, or gasping at the audacity of Brian De Palma's "Body Double": here, for example, the response to the semi-clad woman (Melanie Griffith) is not a knife but an electric saw! De Palma has emulated the Master's work, and gone even further in offering cheap thrills. At least Hitchcock invited the audience into a discomfiting moral realm: to the degree that we identified with the troubled protagonists - as in "Rear Window" - we had to question our own responses and darker desires. But films like De Palma's early work are made in a moral vacuum, indulging our voyeuristic tendencies without making us aware of the price that must be paid for peeping.
It is too easy to attribute these limitations to the fact that most filmmakers are men, since female directors are not exempt from objectifying their heroines. The opening credit sequence of Kathryn Bigelow's "Blue Steel," for example, shows Megan (Jaime Lee Curtis) preparing for graduation from police academy. This includes loving close-ups of shiny bullets being placed into a gun, juxtaposed with the buttoning of Megan's blue shirt. The metaphoric counterpoint of breasts and ammunition being tucked away suggests the closing off of sexuality. Not only the heroine but the filmmaker seems to be proving her new status as "one of the boys," able to deal with violence just as graphically as her male counterparts. When Caryn James compared "Blue Steel" with Sondra Locke's "Impulse" in "The New York Times" of April 15, 1990, she called attention to these filmmaker's ability "to out-tough and out-macho any man at his own game," but lamented how "both of their policewomen show symptoms of insidious, inescapable female stereotypes. And while there is something exhilarating about women's ability to make whatever kind of movie they want, these directors are caught in sexist clichés you'd think they would have been shrewd enough to avoid."
If David Lynch suggested in "Blue Velvet" that a woman wants to be hit while making love, the directorial debut of his daughter - Jennifer Chambers Lynch's "Boxing Helena" (1993) - fuels another pernicious myth born of male fear: a beautiful woman is likely to mistreat and humiliate the man who loves her, and deserves to be punished. This film - an excuse for soft-core pornography as well as indulgence in a voyeurism that would be reviled if the director were a man - invites identification with Nick from the very beginning: he is first seen as a little boy whose beautiful, rich mother seems to hate him (and before whom she flaunts her lovers); later, Nick (Julian Sands) is a successful surgeon obsessed with Helens's window (open, of course) to watch her make love with Ray (Bill Paxton).
Helena is cruel to Ray, dismissing him after she says he bores her. At a party thrown by Nick, Helena disrobes to frolic in the fountain, picks up his young colleague, and accidentally leaves her pocketbook behind. This leads to her return to Nick's mansion- to being hit by a car. In the next scene, Nick is caring for the suddenly-legless Helena, who continues to berate him. He shuts himself off from work and friends, devoting himself to the paralyzed Helena - who taunts Nick about never having had an orgasm with him. In the next scene, she has no arms as well! (Has Nick's sophisticated scalpel punished her?) He brings home a prostitute and has sex with her while Helena watches, her eyes expressing arousal. Helena seems to desire Nick, but Ray comes in and attacks the good doctor. "Boxing Helena" ends with a twist: in the hospital, Helena has all her limbs. If what proceeded was a dream, was it Nick's or Helena's? Is the film fantasy of male revenge or of female masochism? And is one version any less reprehensible than the other?
Fortunately, other images of women (as well as men) proved more popular in the 1990s. Even if the stereotype of the whore-with-a-heart-of-gold has not disappeared from movies - as with Julia Roberts in "Pretty Woman" or Melanie Griffith in "Milk Money" - fresh characterizations emerged. From Tom Hanks's childlike incarnations in "Big" or "Forrest Gump" to the female "heroes" of "Silence of the Lambs" or "Thelma and Louise," gender roles on film have been reassessed. Earlier in the decade, the centrality of the male, ammunition-toting hero was already in question: in "Terminator 2," for instance, Linda Hamilton made a speech about a cyborg perhaps being a superior father because he is never too bust to nurture! Films like "Regarding Henry" and "The Doctor" presented Harrison Ford and William Hurt as professionals who need to reevaluate their priorities. Other movies - as diverse as "Hook," "Father of the Bride," and "The Prince of Tides" - implied the centrality of the family. The value seemed to lie in being a good father, a sensitive listener, and a nurturer.
1991 began with the release of "Silence of the Lambs," starring Jodie Foster as an FBI agent who gets her man - not in the traditional sense of romance, but the professional meaning of capturing a killer. As she remarked upon accepting the Best Actress Award from the New York Film Critics Circle, it was a "hero" role to which women had not had access before. In the same year, three studio releases - "V.I. Warshawski" (with Kathleen Turner), "Thelma and Louise" and "Terminator 2" - suggested that women were moving from vulnerable object to weapon-wielding subject.
Directed by Ridley Scott from Callie Khouri's Academy Award-winning screenplay, "Thelma and Louise" is an engaging feminist road movie that touches a raw nerve in audiences: it acknowledges that women might have both sexual urges and the potential for violent action. When Louise (Susan Surandon) shoots a man who has attempted to rape Thelma (Geena Davis), the waitress and the housewife become outlaws. While some viewers are made nervous by what the women do, many more are disturbed by what the men in the film do not do. The male characters range from the ineffectual to the fatally sleazy. If a single one had been able to "save the day" by saving the heroines, fewer viewers would have been offended. But "Thelma and Louise rejects the traditional notion of the male: the characters played by Michael Madsen, Christopher McDonald or Harvey Keitel do not succeed in protecting either the women or their territory. None is able to tame the narrative as they do in conventional American movies.
But is it a step forward for women to pack pistols, or a step backwards because violence is still cathartic? "La Femme Nikita" (1990) is a compelling French thriller by Luc Besson, but its heroine Nikita (Anne Parillaud) exists as a function of violence. Her transformation is merely from the anarchic destructiveness she displays at the beginning, to the focused and sanctioned killing she performs by the end. Nikita is hardly sympathetic in an early scene when she rams a pencil through a police inspector's hand, but she is rendered a heroine when she commits the murders assigned by her mentor Bob (Tcheky Karyo). The fact that Besson's film led not only to a Hollywood remake but an American television series suggests that the title character resonates with the public. (John Badham's "Nikita" is a faithful imitation which merely has Bridget Fonda walk through the steps of her French predecessor.) But why does Nikita translate so well? Because the "hit man" is an attractive young woman?
An affirmative answer to this question is provided by "G.I. Jane" (1997) when a feisty female senator (Anne Bancroft) - who is pushing to integrate women into the military - looks over the application dossiers. After passing over a few unattractive women, she lights upon the file of the shapely Lt. Jordan O'Neill (Demi Moore): "This is really top-drawer - with silk stockings," she says approvingly. Jordan, who has been denied operational experience that was afforded her boyfriend - also a lieutenant - is thus the first woman accepted into the elite navy SEALS training program. From a script by David Twohy and Danielle Alexandra, the controversial "G.I. Jane" is directed by Ridley Scott in a return to the tense women-in-male territory that he explored in "Thelma and Louise." Violence is the norm: as the senator replies when a female reporter asks if certain jobs are not for women, "How strong do you have to be to pull a trigger?" Because the drop-out rate for the grueling SEALS program id 60%, politicians expect the little lady to disappear from the male enterprise. But the indomitable Jordan won't give up.
Goaded by the surly chief (Viggo Mortenson) as well as her fellow male trainees, Jordan hangs in there by discarding femininity. The trademark Demi Moore locks fall to the ground as she shaves her own head. She works out, growing increasingly muscular, and even loses her menstrual period (the doctor says this is normal because she is shedding body fat). Jordan is finally accepted by the guys because of her transformation into an essentially male SEAL: she fights back physically when abused, curses, drinks shots with them, and hurls the vulgar (subsequently oft-repeated) epithet, "Suck my dick." Seeing she won't quit, politicians try to smear her as a lesbian because they have taken secret photos of her at a party with other women.
When it turns out that the smear campaign has been orchestrated by the female senator, "G.I. Jane" takes on an insidious aspect: it is women who keep women from succeeding. Whereas the men are direct in their condescension to Jordan, Bancroft's character is duplicitous, willing to sacrifice her prodigy for political advancement. She has presumably risen to have her position by indeed becoming "one of the boys" - playing political games through ruthless manipulation. The central climax in the film is not the famous scene of the chief assaulting Jordan in front of her peers - testing their ability to withhold military secrets while witnessing an attempted rape - but Jordan's confrontation with the senator: realizing this politician is her real enemy, Jordan fights back - is reinstated. By the end, she manifests courage as well as physical strength, rescuing the chief in a Libyan attack and getting her men out of danger.
Given the audience is treated to numerous shots of Moore exercising to become a lean weapon-wielder, one, one is reminded of her previous film, "Striptease," in which her character bared her curves. Much like Sharon Stone moving from sexual icon in "Basic Instinct" to gun-toting broad in "Gloria," Moore represents a possible cinematic transition from woman-to-be-ogled: instead, we have woman-to-be-reckoned-with-because armed.
The association between babe and bullets informs "Jackie Brown" (1997), Quentin Tarantino's first feature after the wildly influential "Pulp Fiction." Adapted from Elmore Leonard's Rum Punch, the heist film with well-drawn characters centers on a clever and mature stewardess (Pam Grier). But before we get into her story, and opening scene simultaneously engages us in and distances us from women with guns. At the California home of Melanie (Fonda), the pothead girlfriend of a weapons dealer Ordell (Samuel L. Jackson), he proudly shows his buddy Eddie (Robert De Niro) TV ads for his product. Bikini-clad chicks smile seductively as they hold massive weapons, while Ordell explains that every guy wants the gun he sees on screen. Ordell articulates what Tarantino is attacked for: seeing violence onscreen creates a desire to imitate it! The semi-nude females are simply repeating what they do in traditional advertising - showing their bodies to sell a product.
What is literalized in "Jackie Brown" is figuratively presented in the opening title sequence of "Tomorrow Never Dies" (1997). As in previous James Bond movies, gorgeous, almost-naked young women hold guns and other paraphernalia, creating a visual association between females and phallic worship. These beautiful creatures are simultaneously voyeuristic objects and a tool for selling weapons. While one can focus on the self-conscious - and thus ironic - aspect of this depiction, the objectification is doubly loathsome: read literally, the women in both films want their undraped bodies to be ogled, and they want to fondle instruments of assault. (Fortunately, the narratives of "Jackie Brown" and "Tomorrow Never Dies" transcend the opening imagery. Jackie turns out to be vulnerable but tough, a black woman who is able to outsmart criminals and feds of every color and age. And Pierce Brosnan's 007 seems less the hero than Michelle Yeoh, playing a super-competent martial arts expert working for the Chinese. When compared with their 1970s counterparts, these heroines are a blast of fresh air. As the star of "blaxploitation" films like "Cleopatra Jones" and "Foxy Brown," Pam Grier played the first sexy black heroine to brandish weapons. Two decades later, the same actress defined by "Foxy" is "Jackie," allowed to show smarts rather than flesh, and maturity rather than ammunition. Similarly, "Bond girls" used to be bedded and easily sacrificed by the plot. Without Yeoh's warrior, on the other hand, Bond might not survive for a sequel.
Women holding weapons may seem liberating, but the image is potentially facile and harmful. "The New York Post" of January 5, 1998 recounts that "Four women looking for 'kicks' kidnapped a man at gunpoint, took him on a terrifying three-hour ride and robbed him of $500 after watching a flick about female bank robbers, police sources said. -The suspects' inspiration was 'Set It Off,' a 1996 movie staring Queen Latifah, Jada Pinkett, Vivica Fox and Kimberly Elise, about four Los Angeles women who rob banks, the detective said. It was described by one critic as 'Thelma and Louise' times two." (If this sounds like the young male criminals who said their crimes were inspired by "Rambo" or "Money Train," it is hardly coincidental.) While we would like to think that the screen violence of the late 1990s uses irony - that doesn't take itself as seriously as earlier films did - viewers are less likely to come away with cultural critique than desensitization.
Speaking at a Columbia University film class in 1993, Philip Kaufman lamented that whereas movies can show a female breast being shot, they still can't show a breast being caressed. The director of such stunningly provocative films as "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" and "Henry and June" should know: the latter was the first American movie to receive the NC-17 rating - a classy X. Violence is a commercially viable commodity in motion pictures, whether enacted by men or women, while erotic tenderness is not.
What can be done? Some politicians would have us believe that art is subject to the morality of the most vocal legislators - a position that leads, regrettably, to censorship. Imagine banning "Romeo and Juliet" on the grounds that Shakespeare could inspire teen suicide! It is dangerous to impose on the filmmaker the obligation to be "moral," especially because the world needs constant redefinition. But it is also dangerous to absorb movies without reflecting on their potentially harmful effects.
As the Women In Film International Coordinating Council stated in 1993, "We are committed to raising awareness of the destructive repercussions of excessive screen violence particularly on young audiences. This disproportionate number of women brutalized on screen, and of ethnic minorities cast as violent characters, perpetrate negative stereotypes. Great drama is created through the development of characters and the relationships between them, not through bullies, bullets and bombs. This is not a call for censorship. It is a call for sensitivity, responsibility and accountability." Critics must continue to seek out and make known great films - to celebrate the skill - but also to question the clichés. Filmmakers are responsible for what is on the screen, and so are enlightened viewers.
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