A hollywood joke of only a few years back ran, “She played the female lead in the The Sands of Iwo Jima.” The joke is no longer current; in today’s Hollywood, there might well be pressure to have a robust female playing John Wayne’s sidekick on Iwo Jima, and it can be assumed that in future Hollywood epics about the recent war in the Persian Gulf women will play a prominent role in combat. Indeed, throughout the 1980’s women warriors, women soldiers, women policemen, women detectives, women athletes, and even a woman football coach (Goldie Hawn) became Hollywood fixtures, if not always commercial assets. The wave of manly females is continuing with even greater strength in the 1990’s.
Distinctions must be made. Since at least the Romantic period, domineering women have been a male sexual fantasy; conspicuous ornaments of this tradition include Abbé Prévost’s Manon Lescaut, Prosper Mérimée’s (and Georges Bizet’s) Carmen, and the works of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, extending in the popular culture through Theda Bara’s “vamp” (a corruption of “vampire”) to the dangerous females of James M. Cain, many adapted to the screen (Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice). In pre-Hitler Germany, the most notable example was Heinrich Mann’s Der Blaue Engel (“The Blue Angel”), a brilliant film adaptation of which by Josef von Sternberg made a great star of Marlene Dietrich. Italo Svevo remarked that in his early years, before he wrote Senilita and The Confessions of Zeno, he had composed a youthful novel whose principal figure was the usual thing, “half woman, half tiger.”
A survivor of this earlier tradition is the successful recent French movie La Femme Nikita, in which a beautiful but murderous female drug addict is taken in hand and trained by the French intelligence services and, while dressed to the nines and exquisitely made up, is programmed to kill in cold blood the designated enemies of a somewhat intrusive French state. Reclaimed from a life of assassination by the love of a good man, the killer bimbo of La Femme Nikita is thus in a distinguished lineage, far anteceding modern feminism.
Today’s daring women frequently alternate aspects of the “half woman, half tiger” (a male fantasy) and the female “role model” (a feminist fantasy). In V.I. Warshawski, Kathleen Turner plays a “private eye,” a film character one might have thought determined for all time by Humphrey Bogart. In one of the season’s big hits, Silence of the Lambs, Jodie Foster plays a resolute FBI agent, a role which could have been performed with hardly any changes by Robert Stack. In Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Arnold Schwarzenegger is only a robot “sent back from the future” while the most aggressive, warlike, foul-mouthed human being in the film is an actress named Linda Hamilton, who can chin herself at least four or five times—not bad for the young mother of the boy destined to lead mankind in its apocalyptic battle with “the machines” in the year 2029.
Similarly, in Kevin Costner’s Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves, Maid Marian (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) acquires a previously unrecognized virility. On her first encounter with Robin Hood she is dressed in a full suit of armor and, when displeased with Robin, knees him in the groin. In recent times, too, the pop star Madonna has turned herself into a one-woman assertiveness-training program; her film homage to herself, Truth or Dare—half production numbers from her Blond Ambition tour, half documentary footage of herself as group leader—is a remarkable exhibition of a domineering women at her most swinish.
But the season has also seen major movie entries under another article of the feminist agenda: woman as victim, often compelled to murder her male tormentor. Mortal Thoughts (Bruce Willis, Demi Moore, Harvey Keitel, Glenne Headly), is the best of the recent films under this heading, with convincing acting and authentic dialogue. Justifiable homicide is also the theme of Sleeping With the Enemy, one of the season’s big winners commercially. It has been said that this is not really a “feminist” movie since the husband is not just an abuser but plainly psychotic and a real threat to the life of the character played by Julia Roberts. Still, in television interviews Julia Roberts has told the country that the abuse of women as shown in this flimsy film is “the greatest problem facing our society.”
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But the most ambitious, self-important, and doctrinaire of the new feminist movies, and one that combines more than one of the motifs I have described, is Thelma and Louise, with Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon in the leading roles. Estimated early on by Variety as having only an “outside chance at a success,” by its sixth week the film had its prospects upgraded to “good but unspectacular.” It has produced a tremendous amount of press commentary; after a Newsweek cover story went to Spike Lee’s controversial movie Jungle Fever, the rival newsweekly Time, not to be outdone, gave its cover to Thelma and Louise, and for the last few months the newspapers of the land have been awash in debate over the movie’s social significance.
There is much to be said in the film’s favor. Its acting and dialogue are as accomplished and lively as one is likely these days to find anywhere, and in Ridley Scott it has a first-rate director. Scott’s superb, futuristic 1982 movie Blade Runner, modestly successful in its theatrical release, has deservedly become a cult classic on the video circuit. (Only now do I recall that some of Blade Runner‘s females from outer space are real brutes, capable of crushing men to death with their powerful, nutcracker thighs.) Yet for all of Scott’s formidable dramatic and visual skills, Thelma and Louise is not a director’s movie. It is screenwriter Callie Khouri’s movie.
A film which ends with the two heroines committing joint suicide rather than return to the unbearable world of male domination, Thelma and Louise has been advertised on a level of deceit rare in the history of promotion departments not known for their finicky delicacy. “Somebody said get a life . . . so they did,” run the ads. “For Thelma and Louise it’s Independence Day . . . and though it won’t be any picnic . . . there’ll be plenty of fireworks . . . because they’re celebrating life . . . liberty . . . and a clean getaway.” A clean getaway to death, that is. Press notices affirm that Thelma (Geena Davis) and Louise (Susan Sarandon) are “women buddies.” This statement is somewhat more truthful, in that the two women are at least friends, but if it means to suggest that their adventures are anything like those of Paul Newman and Robert Redford in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the archetype of the male “buddy movie,” this claim, too, is deceitful.
Our two female “buddies,” one a waitress, the other a lower-middle-class housewife, set off by automobile from someplace in Arkansas on what promises to be an innocent weekend. Thelma’s husband is a selfish, overbearing swine. Louise’s boyfriend, although definitely attached to Louise in his fashion, is surly, inconsiderate, and given to violence. In the parking lot of a roadside honkytonk where they stop on their “getaway” weekend, a Western Lothario attempts to rape Thelma, and Louise shoots him dead. The movie has what Hollywood calls a “back story,” clearly suggesting that once upon a time Louise herself was raped in Texas. This not only colors her whole behavior, but seems to justify, as the film develops, hostility and acts of retribution directed toward any and all persons of the male gender.
In this man’s world, the two female buddies think they will never get justice in the affair of the parking-lot shooting and decide to flee to Mexico—while avoiding Texas, a state for which Louise has a bottomless loathing. This requires quite a bit of circumnavigation, as all roads from Arkansas to Mexico lead straight through Texas. The choice of Texas as the Loathesome State is interesting in itself, since of all the states in the Union, Texas, in American folklore, surely has the most stridently masculine image.
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On the road, our women buddies pick up a male hitchhiker, who after having sexual relations with Thelma, the giddy one, steals all their money. Thelma thereupon sticks up a highway convenience store, indulging in a bit of justified armed robbery. When an arrogant highway patrolman stops them for driving 110 miles an hour, they pull a pistol, disarm him, and lock him, now blubbering piteously, in the trunk of his police car. A truck driver the two women encounter several times on the road, always making demeaning sexist remarks and gestures, finally exhausts their patience. They hold him at gunpoint; when he refuses to apologize, they make an ostentatious display of gunhandling, firing a few rounds to scare him out of his wits, also managing to blow up his tanker-truck.
We sense that something wonderful is happening to these two women. They are free now as they could never be free in the world of men. They swagger about in an oddly masculine style: wearing sweaty T-shirts and no makeup, swigging Wild Turkey. Louise swaps her jewelry for gasoline and an old man’s straw hat and later, in a deeply symbolic action, throws away her lipstick; Thelma sloshes her armpits at a water pump. Always the more girlish of the two, Thelma marvels that during their trip something has “turned around” in her, and the two swear never to turn back. As the dream of Mexico becomes as impossibility and a fleet of police cars closes in on them, Thelma and Louise take each other by the hand and drive their car off a cliff into what looks like the Grand Canyon. Free at last.
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To justify the suicide-pact ending of this film, the novelist Alix Kates Shulman has invoked the stirring battle cry of the Spanish Civil War’s La Pasionaria: “Better to die on your feet than live on your knees!” For what it is worth, the historical Pasionaria, did not die on her feet in the Spanish Civil War, but at its conclusion proceeded to live on her knees for some years in Stalin’s Soviet Union. Whether Alix Kates Shulman knows this, I have no idea, and one may in any event be permitted to doubt that the condition of women in today’s America necessitates quite so drastic a choice. But she is not alone among Thelma and Louise‘s more breathless women admirers in taking a rather crazed view of the film’s final suicide. The New York Times‘s Janet Maslin, convinced that the men in the film “don’t really matter” and are just “figures in the landscape,” declared that by the end the two women “arrive at a philosophical clarity that would have been unavailable to them in their prior lives.” The film’s “bracing ending,” she wrote, has a “welcome toughness.” Anne Taylor Fleming, a commentator on PBS’s MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour, spoke of the “sickeningly joyous lurch of revenge” (against men) and the “liberating road to self-destruction.”
Examination of the expression “buddy movie” is illuminating. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid have adventures, meet good guys and bad guys, but bear no settled grudge against anyone in particular, certainly not against any class of human being. Thelma and Louise is nothing like that. With the exception of one “good” male (Harvey Keitel), the film’s Uncle Tom, men are depicted as a uniform class. When they are not actual rapists, they are violent (to women), insulting (to women), surly (to women), charming but treacherous (to women), and in all possible other ways obnoxious (to women). When the tables are turned and our female buddies become the gunslingers, these same men turn cowardly, snivel, and whimper. Nothing, however, will save them from gender guilt.
A curious link joins the aggrieved women of Callie Khouri’s Thelma and Louise and the aggrieved blacks of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing and Jungle Fever. Both Spike Lee and Callie Khouri seem to be ardent believers in the principle of collective guilt, and both seem to hold an indiscriminate attitude toward retribution. For Spike Lee it seems logical and just that any white who comes to hand should suffer for the sins committed against blacks, And, for Callie Khouri, it seems logical and just that any man be punished for the historic suffering of women.
True, these two spokesmen for aggrieved groups do part company at the end. At the conclusion of her story Callie Khouri is pessimistic, overcome by tragedy. Spike Lee would never accept an outcome like that. But then again, from Callie Khouri’s viewpoint, Spike Lee would be not a victim but another male chauvinist oppressor.
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Thelma and Louise has the merit of attempting to synthesize two strands in the current wave of movie feminism: woman as victim, and woman as fiercely independent and assertive. Yet in Thelma and Louise our two women do not do very well, killing themselves because of the perceived hopelessness of their position. The trouble here might be the fundamentally artificial nature of Thelma and Louise’s portentous plot. Are women really so oppressed in our society that the only principled outcome is death? Is the solution for women’s problems the slavish imitation of male characteristics? Is the killer bimbo the way ahead?
For reasons that have nothing whatever to do with ideology, the entry of American women into professions largely reserved in the past for men has also been a godsend for hard-pressed scriptwriters as it vastly facilitates one of the thorniest of Hollywood’s traditional plot problems: how boy meets girl. Nowadays, they can both be lawyers (Robert Redford and Debra Winger in Legal Eagles), both medical interns (Kiefer Sutherland and Julia Roberts in Flatliners), or, plausibly enough, both highly paid television people (William Hurt and Holly Hunter in Broadcast News).
