PUNCH THE BITCH’S FACE IN,” a moviegoer shouts into the darkness of the Century 21 Theater, as if the screenbound hero might hear, and heed, his appeal. “Kick her ass,” another male voice pleads from the shadows.
The theater in suburban San Jose, California, is stuffy and cramped, every seat taken, for this Monday night showing of Fatal Attraction in October 1987. The story of a single career woman who seduces and nearly destroys a happily married man has played to a full house here every night since its arrival six weeks earlier. “Punch the bitch’s lights out! I’m not kidding,” a man up front implores actor Michael Douglas. Emboldened by the chorus, a man in the back row cuts to the point: “Do it, Michael. Kill her already. Kill the bitch.”
Outside in the theater’s lobby, the teenage ushers sweep up candy wrappers and exchange furtive quizzical glances as their elders’ bellows trickle through the padded doors. “I don’t get it really,” says Sabrina Hughes, a high school student who works the Coke machine and finds the adults’ behavior “very weird,” an anthropological event to be observed from a safe distance. “Sometimes I like to sneak into the theater in the last twenty minutes of the movie. All these men are screaming, ‘Beat that bitch! Kill her off now!’ The women, you never hear them say anything. They are all just sitting there, real quiet.”
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HOLLYWOOD JOINED the backlash a few years later than the media; movie production has a longer lead time. Consequently, the film industry had a chance to absorb the “trends” the ’80s media flashed at independent women—and reflect them back at American moviegoers at twice their size. “I’m thirty-six years old!” Alex Forrest, the homicidal single career woman of Fatal Attraction, moans. “It may be my last chance to have a child!” As Darlene Chan, a 20th Century Fox vice president, puts it: “Fatal Attraction is the psychotic manifestation of the Newsweek marriage study.”
The escalating economic stakes in Hollywood in the ’80s would make studio executives even more inclined to tailor their message to fit the trends. Rising financial insecurity, fueled by a string of corporate takeovers and the double threat of the cable-television and home-VCR invasions, fostered Hollywood’s conformism and timidity. Just like the media’s managers, moviemakers were relying more heavily on market research consultants, focus groups, and pop psychologists to determine content, guide production, and dictate the final cut. In such an environment, portrayals of strong or complex women that went against the media-trend grain were few and far between.
The backlash shaped much of Hollywood’s portrayal of women in the ’80s. In typical themes, women were set against women; women’s anger at their social circumstances was depoliticized and displayed as personal depression instead; and women’s lives were framed as morality tales in which the “good mother” wins and the independent woman gets punished. And Hollywood restated and reinforced the backlash thesis: American women were unhappy because they were too free; their liberation had denied them marriage and motherhood.
The movie industry was also in a position to drive these lessons home more forcefully than the media. Filmmakers weren’t limited by the requirements of journalism. They could mold their fictional women as they pleased; they could make them obey. While editorial writers could only exhort “shrill” and “strident” independent women to keep quiet, the movie industry could actually muzzle its celluloid bad girls. And it was a public silencing ritual in which the audience might take part; in the anonymity of the dark theater, male moviegoers could slip into a dream state where it was permissible to express deep-seated resentments and fears about women.
“It’s amazing what an audience-participation film it’s turned out to be,” Fatal Attraction’s director Adrian Lyne would remark that fall, as the film continued to attract record crowds, grossing more than $101 million in four months. “Everybody’s yelling and shouting and really getting into it,” Lyne said. “This is a film everyone can identify with. Everyone knows a girl like Alex.” That women weren’t “participating,” that their voices were eerily absent from the yelling throngs, only underscored Lyne’s film message; the silent and impassive female viewers were serving as exemplary models of the “feminine” women that the director most favored on screen.
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EFFORTS TO hush the female voice in American films have been a perennial feature of cinema in backlash periods. The words of one outspoken independent woman, Mae West, provoked the reactionary Production Code of Ethics in 1934. It was her caustic tongue, not her sexual behavior, that triggered these censorship regulations, which banned premarital sex and enforced marriage (but allowed rape scenes) on screen until the late ’50s. West infuriated the guardians of the nation’s morals—publisher William Randolph Hearst called her “a menace to the sacred institution of the American family”—because she talked back to men in her films and, worse yet, in her own words; she wrote her dialogue. “Speak up for yourself, or you’ll end up a rug,” West tells the lion she tames in I’m No Angel, summing up her own philosophy. In the ’30s, she herself would wind up as carpeting, along with the other overly independent female stars of the era: Marlene Dietrich, Katharine Hepburn, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford and West were all officially declared “box office poison” in a list published by the president of Independent Theater Owners of America. West’s words were deemed so offensive that she was even banned from radio.
Having stopped the mouth of the forty-year-old West and the other grown-up actresses, the ’30s studios brought in the quiet good girls. The biggest Depression female star, Shirley Temple, was not yet school age—and got the highest ratings from adult men. When she played “Marlene Sweetrick” in War Babies, she was playing a version of the autonomous Dietrich, shrunk now to a compliant tot.
During World War II, in a brief burst of enthusiasm for strong and working women, a handful of Rosie-the-Riveter characters like Ann Sothern’s aircraft worker in Swing Shift Maisie and Lucille Ball’s Meet the People flexed muscles and talked a blue streak, and many female heroines were now professionals, politicians, even executives. Throughout the ’40s, some assertive women were able to make themselves heard: Katharine Hepburn’s attorney defended women’s rights in the courtroom in Adam’s Rib, and Rosalind Russell’s single reporter in His Girl Friday huskily told a fiancé who wanted her to quit work and move to the country, “You’ve got to take me as I am, instead of trying to change me. I’m not a suburban bridge player; I’m a newspaperman.”
But even in this decade, the other Hollywood vision of womanhood vied for screentime, and it began to gain ground as the backlash built. Another group of women on screen began to lose their voices and their health. A crop of films soon featured mute and deaf-mute heroines, and the movie women took to their beds, wasting away from brain tumors, spinal paralysis, mental illness, and slow poisons. As film historian Marjorie Rosen observes, “The list of forties female victims reads like a Who’s Who hospital roster.” The single career women on screen, a brittle, dried-up lot, were heading to the doctor’s office, too, for psychiatric treatment. In movies like Dark Mirror, Lady in the Dark, and later The Star, they all received the same medical prescription: quit work and get married.
By the ’50s, the image of womanhood surrendered had won out, its emblem the knock-kneed and whispery-voiced Marilyn Monroe—a sort of post-lobotomized “Lady in the Dark,” no longer fighting doctor’s orders. Strong women were displaced by good girls like Debbie Reynolds and Sandra Dee. Women were finally silenced in ’50s cinema by their absence from most of the era’s biggest movies, from High Noon to Shane to The Killing to Twelve Angry Men. In the ’50s, as film critic Molly Haskell wrote, “There were not only fewer films about emancipated women than in the thirties or forties, but there were fewer films about women.” While women were relegated to mindless how-to-catch-a-husband movies, men escaped to womanless landscapes. Against the backdrop of war trenches and the American West, they triumphed at last—if not over their wives then at least over Indians and Nazis.
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IN LATE-’8OS Hollywood, this pattern would repeat, as filmmakers once again became preoccupied with toning down independent women and drowning out their voices—sometimes quite literally. In Overboard, an unexceptional product of the period, Goldie Hawn’s character, a rich city loudmouth (like Fatal Attraction’s antiheroine, Alex), plunges off a yacht and suffers a spell of amnesia. A rural carpenter she once tongue-lashed rescues her—and reduces her to his squeaky-voiced hausfrau: “Keep your mouth closed,” orders the carpenter (played, curiously, by Hawn’s real-life partner Kurt Russell), and she learns to like it. In The Good Mother, the wisecracking Babe, who resists marriage and bears an illegitimate child, winds up drowning in a lake. Her punishment parallels that of the film’s heroine, Anna, a repressed single mother who dares to explore her sexuality—and, as a result, must sacrifice her six-year-old daughter. Fittingly, this was the decade in which Henry James’s The Bostonians was brought to the screen; Basil Ransom’s vow to “strike dumb” the young women’s rights orator had renewed market appeal.
Glenn Close’s character in Fatal Attraction was not the only independent working woman whose mouth gets clamped shut in a Lyne production. In 9½ Weeks, released a year before Fatal Attraction, a single career woman plays love slave to a stockbroker, who issues her this command: “Don’t talk.” And soon after Fatal Attraction’s triumph at the box office, Lyne announced plans for another film—about a literally mute black prostitute who falls for a white doctor. The working title, he said, was Silence.
The plots of some of these films achieve this reverse metamorphosis, from self-willed adult woman to silent (or dead) girl, through coercion, others through the female character’s own “choice.” In any case, only for domestic reasons—for the sake of family and motherhood—can a woman shout and still come out a heroine in the late-’80s cinema. The few strong-minded, admirable women are rural farm mothers defending their broods from natural adversity (Places in the Heart, The River, and Country) and housewives guarding their families from predatory single women (Tender Mercies, Moonstruck, Someone to Watch Over Me, and Terms of Endearment). The tough-talking space engineer who saves an orphan child in Aliens is sympathetically portrayed, but her willfulness, too, is maternal; she is protecting the child—who calls her “Mommy”—from female monsters.
In Hollywood, 1987 was a scarlet-letter year for the backlash against women’s independence. In all four of the top-grossing films released that year, women are divided into two groups—for reward or punishment. The good women are all subservient and bland housewives (Fatal Attraction and The Untouchables), babies or voiceless babes (Three Men and a Baby and Beverly Hills Cop II). The female villains are all women who fail to give up their independence, like the mannish and child-hating shrew in Three Men and a Baby, the hip-booted gun-woman in Beverly Hills Cop II, and the homicidal career woman in Fatal Attraction. All of these films were also produced by Paramount—ironically, the studio that had been saved from bankruptcy a half century earlier by Mae West.
Of all Paramount’s offerings that year, Fatal Attraction was the one that most mesmerized the national media. Completing the feedback loop, the press even declared the movie’s theme a trend and scrambled to find real live women to illustrate it. Story after story appeared on the “Fatal Attraction phenomenon,” including seven-page cover stories in both Time and People. A headline in one supermarket tabloid even dubbed the film’s single-woman character the MOST HATED WOMAN IN AMERICA. Magazine articles applauded the movie for starting a monogamy trend; the film was supposedly reinvigorating marriages, slowing the adultery rate, and encouraging more “responsible” behavior from singles. People promoted this trend with cautionary case studies of “Real Life Fatal Attractions” and warned, “It’s not just a movie: All too often, ‘casual’ affairs end in rage, revenge, and shattered lives.” Though in real life such assailants are overwhelmingly male—a fact surely available to the six reporters assigned this apparently important story—all but one of the five aggressors People chose as examples were women.
British director and screenwriter James Dearden first dreamed up the story that became Fatal Attraction one solitary weekend in London in the late ’70s. He was battling writer’s block; his wife was out of town—and he wondered to himself, “What if I picked up that little black address book and rang that girl who gave me her number at a party six months ago?” The original plot was simple. Dearden recalls it this way:
A writer takes his wife to the station in the morning with their child and sees them off. Then he picks up the phone and rings a girl whose number he’s got. He takes her out to dinner, takes her to bed. He thinks that’s the end of it, but the phone rings the next day and it’s her. So he goes over to see her and spends Sunday with her. And Sunday evening she freaks out completely and cuts her wrists. . . . He stays the second night and gets home early in the morning. His wife gets back. The phone rings and it’s the girl. He fobs her off and the phone rings again and the wife goes to pick up the phone and you know that’s going to be it. She’s going to find out about the affair. The wife picks up the phone and says hello, and the screen goes black.
Dearden says he intended the story to explore an individual’s responsibility for a stranger’s suffering: he wanted to examine how this man who inflicted pain, no matter how unintentionally, must eventually hold himself accountable. In 1979, Dearden turned his screenplay into a forty-five-minute film called Diversion, highly acclaimed at the Chicago Film Festival the following year. In the early ’80s, American producer Stanley Jaffe was in London looking for new talent, and he paid Dearden a call. The former president of Paramount had recently teamed up with Sherry Lansing, former president of production at 20th Century Fox, to launch an independent movie production company that would be affiliated with Paramount. Lansing had left Fox in 1982, where she was the first woman ever to be put in charge of production at a major film studio, because she wanted more authority than Fox was willing to grant her. Jaffe returned from London with a stack of scripts for Lansing. “I kept coming back to Diversion,” she recalls. It was the film’s potential to deliver a feminist message that appealed to her most, she says:
I always wanted to do a movie that says you are responsible for your actions. . . . And what I liked in the short film was that the man is made responsible. That there are consequences for him. When I watched that short film, I was on the single woman’s side. And that’s what I wanted to convey in our film. I wanted the audience to feel great empathy for the woman.
Lansing invited Dearden to Los Angeles to expand the story into a feature film, a story from the woman’s point of view with a turning-of-the-tables message: The Other Woman shouldn’t be getting all the blame; let the adulterous man take the fall for a change.
But Paramount didn’t want to make that kind of movie. “[Paramount president] Michael Eisner turned it down because he thought the man was unsympathetic,” director Adrian Lyne recalls. When Eisner left Paramount in 1984, Lansing tried again, and this time the studio agreed to take the film. Almost immediately, however, the old objections were raised. “My short film was a moral tale about a man who transgresses and pays the penalty,” Dearden says. “But it was felt, and it was a feeling I didn’t particularly agree with, that the audiences would not be sympathetic to such a man because he was an adulterer. So some of the onus for the weekend was taken off his shoulders and placed on the girl’s.” With each rewrite, Dearden was pressured to alter the characters further; the husband became progressively more lovable, the single woman more venomous. Dearden finally did away with the man’s little black address book and made the single career woman the initiator of the affair. “As we went along, Alex became much more extreme,” Dearden says. “She ended up having a kind of predatory quality. It weakened her case and strengthened his.”
“The intent was to soften the man,” a studio executive who was involved in the development discussions explains. “Because if you saw him shtup a different woman every week, then people would see him as cold and deliberate, and obviously you had to feel for him.” Apparently no one had to feel for the single woman. The feelings of another man were involved, too: Michael Douglas, who was cast early on to play the husband, made it clear to Fatal Attraction’s producers that he was not going to play “some weak unheroic character,” Dearden recalls.
With Douglas on board, the next task was finding a director. Adrian Lyne was the producers’ first choice—a peculiar one for a film that was supposed to empathize with women. Of course, they chose him not for his perspective on the opposite sex but for his record at the box office. In 1983, Lyne directed Flashdance, a hit MTV-style musical in which the dancing women’s rumps received far more screen time than their faces.
Following Flashdance’s commercial success, Lyne had also directed 9½ Weeks, which attracted media attention for its glossy depiction of sadomasochism and for a particularly graphic episode, ultimately excised from all but the video version, in which the masochistic woman is forced to grovel for money at her stockbroker boyfriend’s feet. During the filming, the humiliation continued between takes. Kim Basinger, the actress who played the woman, was cringing not only before her character’s lover but also from the ministrations of Lyne, who waged an intimidation campaign against the actress—on the theory that an “edge of terror” would “help” prepare her for the role. At one point, heeding Lyne’s instructions that “Kim had to be broken down,” co-star Mickey Rourke grabbed and slapped Basinger to get her in the mood.
Much as he would later invert Fatal Attraction’s theme, Lyne tried to reverse the original message of 9 ½ Weeks. The story of that film was drawn from a real woman’s 1978 memoirs, which recounted her devastating descent into sexual masochism. In the original script, the woman finally rejects the humiliation and walks away from her tormentor. But Lyne tried to change the ending so that she winds up learning to love the abuse. Only a mass protest by the women on the set prevented Lyne from shooting this version.
“Where is the new Kim Basinger?” casting agent Billy Hopkins recalls Lyne demanding throughout the auditions for Fatal Attraction. “Get me the new Kim Basinger.” The casting agents went after several name actresses, including Debra Winger and Jessica Lange, who turned them down. Meanwhile, they kept getting calls from Glenn Close’s agent. Close was determined to have the role; she was even willing to come in for a screen test, an unheard-of gesture for a major star. Close was anxious to shed the good-girl image of her previous roles, from the nurse-mother in The World According to Garp to the lady in white in The Natural. And late-’80s Hollywood offered actresses only one option for breaking typecasts: trading one caricatured version of womanhood for another.
Once Close was hired, the casting agents turned their attention to the character of the wife. In the original script she was a side character, unimportant. But the producers and Lyne wanted her remade into an icon of good wifery. Producer Stanley Jaffe says, “I wanted her to be—and I think this is the way she turned out—a woman who is sensitive, loyal, and acts in a way that I would be proud to say, ‘I would like to know that lady.’” Casting agent Risa Bramon recalls that she was told to find an actress who “projected incredible warmth and love and strength in keeping the family together.” Meanwhile, Dearden was sent back to his desk to turn the two women into polar opposites—as he puts it, “the Dark Woman and the Light Woman.” Originally the wife, Beth, had a job as a teacher that she was anxious to resume. But by the final version, all traces of a career were excised and Beth transformed into the complete Victorian hearth angel (a la the prototypical Victorian “Beth” of Little Women), sipping tea, caressing piano keys, and applying cosmetics with an almost spiritual ardor.
Concurrently, Lyne was pushing Close in the other direction, transforming her character, as he describes it, into “a raging beast underneath.” It was his idea to dress her up in black leather and turn her apartment into a barren loft in New York’s meat market district, ringed by oil drums that burned like witches’ cauldrons.
To inspire this modern vision of the Dark Woman, Lyne says he “researched” the single women of the publishing world. “I was mostly interested in their apartments,” he says. He looked at Polaroids of dozens of single women’s studios. “They were a little sad, if you want me to be honest. They lacked soul.” His “research” didn’t involve actually talking to any of the inhabitants of these apartments; he had already made up his mind about unmarried career women. “They are sort of overcompensating for not being men,” he says. “It’s sad, you know, because it kind of doesn’t work.” Sadness, however, is not Lyne’s dominant feeling for single professional women, particularly when it comes to the handful of career women he confronts in Hollywood.
I see it with the executives within the studio area. The other day, I saw a woman producer who was really quite powerful; and she railroaded, walked all over this guy, who was far less successful and powerful than her. She just behaved as if this man wasn’t there because her position was more powerful than his. And it was much more disconcerting because it was a woman doing it. It was unfeminine, you know?
In Lyne’s analysis, the most unfeminine women are the ones clamoring for equal rights:
You hear feminists talk, and the last ten, twenty years you hear women talking about fucking men rather than being fucked, to be crass about it. It’s kind of unattractive, however liberated and emancipated it is. It kind of fights the whole wife role, the whole child-bearing role. Sure you got your career and your success, but you are not fulfilled as a woman.
For his ideal of the “feminine” woman, he points to his wife:
My wife has never worked. She’s the least ambitious person I’ve ever met. She’s a terrific wife. She hasn’t the slightest interest in doing a career. She kind of lives this with me, and it’s a terrific feeling. I come home and she’s there.
Michael Douglas harbored similar ill will for feminism and its effects. He told a reporter:
If you want to know, I’m really tired of feminists, sick of them. They’ve really dug themselves into their own grave. Any man would be a fool who didn’t agree with equal rights and pay but some women, now, juggling with career, lover, children [childbirth], wife-hood, have spread themselves too thin and are very unhappy. It’s time they looked at themselves and stopped attacking men. Guys are going through a terrible crisis right now because of women’s unreasonable demands.
Even Dearden appears to have come around to Lyne’s view of the single career woman. “I think there are many women in New York who live like Alex Forrest,” Dearden says.
Maybe that thrusting career woman looks rather attractive for a brief fling, but in reality you don’t want to spend your life with a woman like that. Because they have their careers and their careers would probably conflict with your career and there probably would be rivalry and it wouldn’t be that kind of mutually supportive relationship.
Lyne’s and Dearden’s views on women alone did not shape the movie’s ultimate message. Close consulted three psychiatrists, who assured her “this kind of behavior is totally possible.” And market research had the final cut. Originally, Fatal Attraction was supposed to end with Alex in deep despair over her unrequited love, committing suicide by slitting her throat to the music of Madame Butterfly. But when Paramount showed this initial version to test audiences, the response was disappointing. “It was not cathartic,” Dearden recalls. “They were all wound up to a pitch and then it all kind of went limp and there was no emotional payoff for them. They’d grown to hate this woman by this time, to the degree that they actually wanted him to have some retribution.” Suicide, apparently, was insufficient punishment.
The film’s creators immediately decided to redraft the ending with an audience-pleasing climax—a last-minute revision that would cost them $1.3 million. Alex’s death would be a homicide, they decided—and the Light Woman would kill the Dark Woman. They set the climactic blowout in the home, “the final sanctum,” as Dearden describes it. The evil Alex invades, clutching a meat cleaver, and Dan grabs her by the throat, tries to drown her in the tub. But it is up to the dutiful wife to deliver the fatal shot, in the heart. The film ends with a slow pan of a framed family portrait, the family restored—the Gallagher family anyway. (For all their domestic sentimentality, the filmmakers gave no thought to the fact that Alex was pregnant when Beth shot her.)
What of Lansing’s original objective—to make a feminist film? Lansing concedes that by the end of the film, “Your allegiance is not with Alex. It’s with the family.” But she contends that the film is on Alex’s side to a point. “I do sympathize with her up until she dumps the acid on the car,” Lansing says. She realizes, though, that most male viewers don’t share her feelings. In one scene in the movie, Alex sits on the floor in tears, compulsively switching a light on and off. “I just found that tragic,” Lansing says. “But in the screenings that often gets laughter. That surprised me.”
Still, Lansing maintains that this remains a story about “the moral consequences of a man’s actions.” For the straying husband, she says, “his whole life turns into a horrendous nightmare.” That may be true, but it’s a nightmare from which he wakes up—sobered, but unscathed. In the end, the attraction is fatal only for the single woman.
“I think the biggest mistake filmmakers can make is to say, okay, we’re only going to show women who are together and stable and wonderful people,” Lansing says. In late ’80s Hollywood, however, there didn’t seem much danger of that. Asked to come up with some examples of “together and stable and wonderful” single women in her films, Lansing says, “Oh, I’ve made plenty.” Such as? “I’m sure I’ve shown characters like this,” she repeats. Pressed once more to supply a specific example, she finally says, “Well, Bonnie Bedelia in When the Time Comes [an ABC television movie] was just this functioning, terrific Rock of Gibraltar.” But then, Bedelia was playing a young woman dying of cancer—another Beth of Little Women. Lansing’s example only underscores the point driven home in the final take of Fatal Attraction: The best single woman is a dead one.
For a while in the ’70s, the film industry would have a brief infatuation with the feminist cause. Just as silent-era Hollywood gave the movement a short run—after a series of low-budget pro-suffrage films turned into big hits—movie studios in the late ’70s finally woke up to the profit potential in the struggle for women’s independence. In films like Diary of a Mad Housewife, A Woman Under the Influence, An Unmarried Woman, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Up the Sandbox, Private Benjamin, and The Turning Point, housewives leave home, temporarily or permanently, to find their own voice. At the time, the female audience seemed to be on a similar quest. In New York movie theaters in 1975, women were not sitting placidly in their seats. They were booing the final scene of the newly released Sheila Levine Is Dead and Living in New York, because the script rewrote the best-seller’s ending to marry off the single woman—to a doctor, of course, who would presumably cure her of her singles sickness.
Eventually, filmmakers came around to the boisterous audience’s feminist point of view. The end of Private Benjamin, where the heroine rebuffs her domineering groom, is a case in point. “It was very important to me that she walk out of that church,” recalls Nancy Meyers, who created the film with Charles Shyer. “It was important to write about women’s identity, and how easily it could be lost in marriage. That sounds almost old-fashioned now, I guess. But I know it mattered to many, many women.” After Private Benjamin came out, Meyers was inundated with letters from women “who saw themselves in her character.” It was a liberating event for the film’s leading actress, too: Goldie Hawn had been typed up until then as a blond bubblehead.
In Private Benjamin, Hawn plays the single Judy, whose “life’s desire”—marriage—comes crashing down when her husband dies on their wedding night. “If I’m not going to be married, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with myself,” she says. She winds up enlisting in the army, where basic training serves as a metaphorical crash course in emotional and economic independence. Over thirty but not panicked about her single status, Judy goes to work and lives on her own in Europe. Eventually she meets a French doctor and they are engaged, but when she discovers his philanderings, she calls a halt to the wedding in midceremony, flees the church, and flings her bridal crown to the heavens. The scene recalls the famous ending of the 1967 The Graduate; but in the feminist version of this escape-from-the-altar scenario, it was no longer necessary for a man to be on hand as the agent of liberation.
The women who go mad in the 1970s women’s films are not over-thirty single women panicked by man shortages but suburban housewives driven batty by subordination, repression, drudgery, and neglect. In the most extreme statement of this theme, The Stepford Wives, the housewives are literally turned into robots created by their husbands. In Diary of a Mad Housewife and A Woman Under the Influence, the wives’ pill-popping habits and nervous breakdowns are presented as not-so-unreasonable responses to their crippling domestic condition—madness as a sign of their underlying sanity. What the male characters label lunacy in these films usually turns out to be a form of feminist resistance.
Women in these ’70s films do not turn to male “doctors” to cure them: in Private Benjamin, when her fiancé (who is, significantly, a gynecologist) offers to give Judy a shot to help her “calm down,” she slaps his face. Instead, these heroines seek counsel from other women, who dispense the opposite advice of traditional male clinicians: take action and speak up, they urge. The housewife in Paul Mazursky’s An Unmarried Woman seeks advice from an independent female therapist, who tells her to go out, enjoy sex, and “get into the stream of life.” In Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, the housewife turns to a wisecracking and foul-mouthed waitress for wisdom. “Once you figure out what it is you want,” the waitress advises, “you just jump in there with both feet and let the devil take the hindmost.”
The American marriage, not the woman, is the patient under analysis in the ’70s women’s films, and the dialogue probes the economic and social inequities of traditional wedlock. “A woman like me works twice as hard and for what?” Barbra Streisand, the housewife Margaret in Up the Sandbox, demands of her husband, a history professor. “Stretch marks and varicose veins, that’s what. You’ve got one job; I’ve got ninety-seven. Maybe I should be on the cover of Time. Dust Mop of the Year! Queen of the Laundry Room! Expert on Tinker Toys!” Margaret’s mother offers the most succinct summation of what, in the opinion of these films, lies at the core of marital distress: “Remember, marriage is a 75—25 proposition. The woman gives 75.”
In these films, the heroines are struggling to break out of the supporting-actress status that traditional marriage conferred on them; they are asking to be allowed, for once, to play a leading role in their own lives. “This story is going to be all about me,” announces Judy Davis’s Sybylla, in the first line of Gillian Armstrong’s My Brilliant Career, an Australian film that became a hit in the United States in the late ’70s. The youthful heroine turns down a marriage proposal not because she doesn’t care for her suitor, but because marriage would mean that her own story would never have a chance to develop. “Maybe I’m ambitious, selfish,” she says apologetically. “But I can’t lose myself in somebody else’s life when I haven’t lived my own yet.”
Of course, according to the conventional ’80s analysis, these ’70s film heroines were selfish, their pursuit of self-discovery just a euphemism for self-involvement. But that reading misses a critical aspect of the female quest in these movies. The heroines did not withdraw into themselves; they struggled toward active engagement in affairs beyond the domestic circle. They raised their voices not simply for personal improvement but for humanitarian and political causes—human rights in Julia, workers’ rights in Norma Rae, equal pay in 9 to 5, and nuclear safety in The China Syndrome. They wished to transform not only themselves but the world around them. They were loud, belligerently loud, because speaking up was a social, as well as a private, responsibility. “Are you still as angry as you used to be?” Julia, the World War II resistance fighter, asked Lillian Hellman in the biographical Julia. “I like your anger. . . . Don’t you let anyone talk you out of it.”
If Vanessa Redgrave’s Julia represented the kind of heroine that 1970s feminist cinema would single out for biographical study, then it fell to Redgrave’s daughter, Natasha Richardson, to portray her counterpart for the late 1980s: Patty Hearst. As conceived in Paul Schrader’s 1988 film, the bound and blindfolded heiress is all victim; her lack of identity is her leading personality trait. As Schrader explained: “[E]ssentially the performance is like a two-hour reaction shot.”
The same might be said of the droves of passive and weary female characters filling the screen in the late 1980s. In so many of these movies, it is as if Hollywood has taken the feminist films and run the reels backward. The women now flee the office and hammer at the homestead door. Their new quest is to return to traditional marriage, not challenge its construction; they want to escape the workplace, not remake it. The female characters who do have professional lives take little pleasure from them. They find their careers taxing and tedious, “jobs” more than callings. While the liberated women of ’70s films were writers, singers, performers, investigative reporters, and political activists who challenged the system, the women of the late ’80s are management consultants, investment advisers, corporate lawyers, behind-the-scenes production and literary assistants. They are the system’s support staff.
Most women in the real contemporary labor force are, of course, relegated to ancillary, unsatisfying or degrading work, but these films aren’t meant to be critiques of sex discrimination on the job or indictments of a demoralizing marketplace. They simply propose that women had a better deal when they stayed home. The films stack the deck against working female characters: it’s easier to rationalize a return to housekeeping when the job left behind is so lacking in rewards or meaning. It’s hard to make the case that a woman misses out if she quits the typing pool—or that society suffers when an investment banker abandons Wall Street.
The career women of the late-’80s cinema are an unappealing lot. They rarely smile and their eyes are red-rimmed from overwork and exhaustion. “I don’t know what I’m doing anymore,” Cher, an attorney, complains to a co-worker in Suspect; he’s single, too, but, being male, immune to burnout. She tells him:
I don’t have a life. The last time I went to the movies was like a year ago. The only time I listen to music is in my car. I don’t date. I’d like to have a child but I don’t even have a boyfriend so how can I have a child? . . . I don’t think I can do it anymore. You know, I’m tired. I’m really tired.
In Surrender, Sally Field’s Daisy is an “artist.” But her artistry is performed at an assembly-line factory, where she mass-produces landscape art for hotels. Her one stab at a personal statement is to brush a tiny female figure into one of the canvases; it is a picture of herself drowning. All she wants to do, understandably, is quit and devote her life to marriage and motherhood. “If I’m not married again by the time I’m forty-one,” she moans, “there’s a twenty-seven percent chance I’ll end up a lonely alcoholic.” Her “biological clock” is practically a guest star in this film. She has a dream, she tells her enviably fertile friend, who is pregnant for the fourth time. “This dream has a husband and baby in it.” The “bottom line,” says Daisy, is, “I want a baby.” Although she claims to aspire to a career as a painter, after five minutes in front of the easel she is sidetracked by her more important marital mission. She hums the wedding march as she chases her prospective husband, a prolific and successful novelist.
The single Isabelle in Crossing Delancey is another mirthless working woman. An assistant in a bookshop, she serves the needs of successful male authors. Her off hours are not too gratifying either: in one painful scene in a Manhattan deli, she and other single women flutter like souls in limbo around the salad bar, their faces ghostly under the fluorescent lights. Clutching their Styrofoam food containers, they drift home-ward—to consume their bland suppers curled solo on their beds.
Typical of “postfeminist” fare, Crossing Delancey mouths sympathy for feminist aspirations, then promptly eats its words. The film’s heroine takes a stand for self-determination only to undercut it. Isabelle huffily tells her grandmother she has good friends and a full life, and doesn’t “need a man to be complete”—then admits to a nightmare she’s just had about drowning. She claims she values her independence—then gathers with her girlfriends to bemoan the man shortage. She protests that she’s really “a happy person,” that she doesn’t need the matchmaker her grandmother has hired to save her from spinsterhood. But the film shows her bereft and alone on her birthday, eating a hot dog at a stand-up grill in Times Square—while a wild-eyed bag lady croons “Some Enchanted Evening” in her ear. “A dog should live alone, not a woman,” her grandmother tells her. And in the end, her words are the ones we’re meant to believe. Isabelle learns to “settle”—in this case, for the pickle vendor in the old neighborhood. He’s dull but solid, a good provider for the little woman.
The professional women on screen who resist these nesting “trends,” who refuse to lower their expectations and their voices, pay a bitter price for their recalcitrance. In Broadcast News, Holly Hunter’s Jane, a single network producer, fails to heed the cocooning call. She’s not out there beating the bushes for a husband and she’s passionate about her work. Her male co-worker, a single reporter, has the same traits; on him they are admirable, but on her they constitute neurosis. She is “a basket case” and “an obsessive,” who dissolves into inexplicable racking sobs in the middle of the day and compulsively chatters directions. “Except for socially,” a female colleague tells her, “you’re my role model.” While the two lead male characters wind up with brilliant careers and full private lives, Jane winds up alone. Her aggressiveness at work cancels out her chances for love. Her attempts to pull off a romantic encounter fail miserably every time. “I’ve passed some line someplace,” she says. “I’m beginning to repel people I’m trying to seduce.”
In these backlash films, only the woman who buries her intelligence under a baby-doll exterior is granted a measure of professional success without having to forsake companionship. In Working Girl, Melanie Griffith’s Tess, an aspiring secretary with a child’s voice, rises up the business ladder and gets the man—but she achieves both goals by playing the daffy and dependent girl. She succeeds in business only by combing the tabloid gossip columns for investment tips—and relying on far more powerful businessmen to make the key moves in her “career.” She succeeds in love Sleeping Beauty—style, by passing out in a man’s arms.
Tess is allowed to move up in the ranks of American business only by tearing another woman down; in the ’80s cinema, as in America’s real boardrooms, there’s only room for one woman at a time. Female solidarity in this film is just a straw man to knock down. “She takes me seriously,” the naive Tess confides to her boyfriend about her new boss, Katharine. “It’s because she’s a woman. She wants to be my mentor.” The rest of the narrative is devoted to disabusing Tess of that notion. Katharine, a cutthroat Harvard MBA with a Filofax where her heart should be (the film’s ads called her “the boss from hell”), betrays Tess at the first opportunity. The film ends with a verbal cat fight between the Dark and Light Woman, a sort of comic version of Fatal Attraction’s final scene, in which Tess orders Katharine to get her “bony ass” out of the office. Not only does Katharine not get the man; she doesn’t even get to keep her job.
The incompatibility of career and personal happiness is preached in another prototypical woman’s film of the ’80s, Baby Boom. Like Fatal Attraction, it was a movie that the media repeatedly invoked, as “evidence” that babies and business don’t mix. “Remember the troubles that beset the high-powered Manhattan businesswoman played by Diane Keaton in the movie Baby Boom . . .?” Child magazine prodded its readers. “[T]he talents needed to nurture a child are at odds with those demanded for a fast-paced career.”
As was the case in Working Girl, the male boss’s hands in Baby Boom are clean. A benign patriarch, he reminds J. C. Wiatt, an aspiring management consultant with a messianic complex to match her initials, that she must choose between the corner office and the cradle. He’s not being nasty, just realistic. “Do you understand the sacrifices?” he asks as he offers her a chance to become one of the firm’s partners. “A man can be a success. My wife is there for me whenever I need her. I’m lucky. I can have it all.” Baby Boom was cowritten by Nancy Meyers, creator of Private Benjamin, so one might expect that the film would set out to challenge this unjust arrangement—and argue that the corporation must learn to accommodate women, not the other way around. But this is a very different Nancy Meyers from the one who championed Private Benjamin’s liberation seven years ago.
In keeping with the decade’s prevailing views, Meyers now envisions women as divided into two hostile camps. “There are certain women who are very aggressive and great at business but who know nothing about babies and are intimidated by the thought of having kids,” she told the press now. “They want them but don’t know how to go about settling down and having one out of fear of what it’ll do to their careers. I feel bad for those women.”
“I don’t see women having it all and achieving great things,” Meyers says later in an interview. She’s sitting in her Studio City house with a baby in her arms. “I don’t see them in the corporate world.” Rather than protest the lack of progress, Meyers has made adjustments. She says she has chosen to take a back seat to her creative partner and common-law husband, director Charles Shyer, so she can look after their two young children. Although Meyers was deeply involved in the creation of Baby Boom, Shyer got the directing credit. “People ask me why I don’t direct,” Meyers says. “I’ve had directing offers and I’ve turned them down. It wouldn’t be right for my family. It wouldn’t be right for my children. The movie says ‘Directed by Charles Shyer’ and people look at that and I guess they think, well . . .” Her voice trails off. “But that’s just the way it is. I’m not saying it’s fair; I’m not saying women should compromise, but they do have to compromise. I guess if more men would give up something . . .” Meyers’s voice trails off again. If this last remark is meant for Shyer, who is sitting across the table from her, he doesn’t acknowledge it.
In scaling back her female characters’ expectations, Meyers got plenty of encouragement from the Hollywood studios. When she and Shyer wrote Protocol, they ran into heavy interference from the presiding studio, Warner Brothers. The story was supposed to be about a naive waitress, again played by Goldie Hawn, who has her consciousness raised and becomes a politically wise diplomat. The studio insisted the producers rewrite the female character’s development, Shyer recalls, removing Hawn’s political evolution from the script. In the final version, she winds up a scatterbrained national sweetheart, cheerleading for the American way. “They were very nervous about the content of the movie, that it not have a political point of view,” Charles Shyer recalls. “It was the beginning of the Reagan administration and they didn’t want anything that might be seen as an anti-Reagan movie.” A woman who thinks for herself, apparently, could now be mistaken for a subversive.
By the time production rolled around for Baby Boom in the mid-’80s, Meyers and Shyer had internalized the studio’s commands; no unseemly political outbursts sully Diane Keaton’s performance. At the start of Baby Boom, J. C. Wiatt, the Tiger Lady of the boardroom, has “chosen” career over marriage and maternity and in the process scoured away any trace of womanhood—or humanity. Diane Keaton’s Wiatt is an efficient machine; even her sexual encounters are confined to passionless four-minute couplings. When a baby is forced into her unwilling arms by the death of a distant relative, she tries to explain about the zero-sum game of “choice”: “I can’t have a baby,” she says, “because I have a twelve-thirty lunch meeting.” Because she has cast her lot in a man’s world, she is also seemingly incapable of the simplest acts of child care. Diapering the baby becomes an impossible ordeal for this Ivy Leaguer. Eventually, in the female game of trade-offs, as her baby skills ascend, her career plummets. Devotion to the baby destroys her chances of a promotion; the partnership offer is retracted and she is demoted to the dog-food account.
It never occurs to the highly educated Tiger Lady that her treatment might constitute sex discrimination. Instead of proceeding to the courtroom, she quits and moves to the country. Ensconced in a bucolic estate, she soon softens up, learning to bake and redirecting her business skills to a more womanly vocation, making and marketing gourmet baby food. Ultimately, her truly feminine side is awakened by the local veterinarian “Cooper.” Like Tess, she finds love the old-fashioned way—by fainting. The doctor revives her on his examining table, and she falls in love.
Baby Boom’s values are muddled; the film takes a feeble swipe at the corporate system before backing off completely. It pretends to reject the ’80s money ethic without ever leaving its orbit. The Tiger Lady retreats to the country, but to an obscenely expensive farmhouse that she can afford only because of her prior Wall Street paychecks. She turns up her nose at yuppie materialism, but supports herself by selling boutique applesauce baby food to yuppie mothers. When one of her old corporate accounts at the firm offers to buy her baby-food company for $3 million in cash, she marches into the boardroom to reject the deal. “Country Baby is not for sale,” she says piously. Her speech might have been an opportunity to take the firm to task for expelling its most valuable employee simply because she had a child. She could have spoken up for the rights of working mothers. But instead, the former Tiger Lady’s talk dribbles off into a dewy-eyed reverie about the joys of rural living. “And anyway, I really think I’d miss my sixty-two-acre estate,” she explains. “Elizabeth [her baby] is so happy there and well, you see, there’s this veterinarian I’m seeing . . .” The last shot shows her back at home in a rocking chair, baby in her arms, surrounded by curtain lace and floral upholstery.
Like Fatal Attraction’s creators, Meyers and Shyer defend the “you-can’t-have-it-all” message of the film by explaining that they based it on “research.” To their credit, they did go to the trouble of interviewing an actual career woman. They modeled the Tiger Lady on a management consultant with a Harvard MBA. “She was so torn by the whole thing,” Meyers says. “It was so hard for her. She didn’t know what to do.” What their model, Nadine Bron, didn’t do, however, was give up work. She managed to find love and marry, too, despite the career. She’s not even particularly “torn,” she says.
“Well, I know it’s Hollywood and all,” Bron says diplomatically when asked later for her view of Baby Boom, “but what bothered me is that the movie assumed that is the only way—to give it all up and move to the country.” Bron’s life does not fit the you-can’t-have-it-all thesis: she has worked for a large consulting firm and now runs her own money-management business—without abandoning a personal life. Her marriage, she says, is stronger because both she and her husband have “full lives.” She has no desire to become a country housewife.
“My mother stayed home while my father ran the business,” she recalls. “She was very frustrated.” Growing up, Bron was a pained witness to her mother’s weight swings and bouts of depression. It is not a pattern she cares to repeat. “For some women,” Bron says, “staying home is preferable, but I could never do it. For me, it’s very important to work.” The problem, as she sees it, is not women wanting to go home but the male business world refusing to admit the women on equal terms. “Society has not been willing to adapt to these new patterns of women,” she says. “Society punishes you.”
An unintentionally telling aspect of Baby Boom is its implication that working women must be strong-armed into motherhood. The film is not the first of its era to suggest that, at a time when “baby fever” was supposedly raging in female brains, intense pressure, scoldings or a deus ex machina (like the Tiger Lady’s improbable inheritance of a stranger’s baby) is necessary to turn these reluctant modern women into mothers. Like the media, these movies aren’t really reflecting women’s return to total motherhood; they are marketing it. Sometimes, in fact, these films degenerate into undisguised advertising. In the last five minutes of Parenthood, the whole brood crowds into a maternity ward, with virtually every woman either rocking a newborn or resting a proud hand on a bulging tummy. As the camera pans over row upon row of gurgling diapered babies, it’s hard to remember that this is a feature film, not a commercial break for Pampers.
The backlash films struggle to make motherhood as alluring as possible. Cuddly babies in designer clothes displace older children on the ’80s screen; the well-decorated infants function in these films more as collector’s items than people. The children of a decade earlier were talkative, unpredictable kids with minds of their own—like the precocious, cussing eleven-year-old boy who gives his mother both delight and lip in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, or the seventeen-year-old girl who offers her mother both comfort and criticism in An Unmarried Woman. In the late 1980s, by contrast, the babies hardly cry.
Once again, women get sorted into two camps: the humble women who procreate and their monied or careerist sisters who don’t. Over-board’s haughty heiress refuses to reproduce. But by the end of the film—after she is humiliated, forced to scrub floors and cook meals, and at last finds happiness as a housewife—she tells her tyrannical new husband of her greatest goal in life: having “his” baby. Women who resist baby fever, by controlling their fertility or postponing motherhood, are shamed and penalized. In Immediate Family, Glenn Close’s career woman—an Ivy League—educated realtor—delays and her biological clock expires. After a grueling round of visits to the infertility doctors, she has to hire a teenage surrogate to have a baby for her.
In this sanctimonious climate, abortion becomes a moral litmus test to separate the good women from the bad. On the day the husband in Parenthood loses his job, his good wife announces she’s pregnant with child number four; she recoils in horror from the mere mention of abortion. The options of her sister-in-law’s pregnant teenage daughter are presented as similarly limited. She’s just received her high SAT scores in the mail, but, of course, the movie assures, she’ll give up her college plans to have the baby and marry her deadbeat boyfriend—an unemployed dragstrip racer. Abortion is denounced in Listen to Me, which is supposedly an even-handed debate on the issue, and demonized in Criminal Law, where the abortionist, Sybil, is a witchlike figure whose profession traumatizes her son and turns him into a psychopath. Even more intelligent films preach on this subject. In Woody Allen’s Another Woman, the single scholar, a rigid unfeeling spinster, flashes back to a shameful youthful memory—her selfish decision to have an abortion. “All you care about is your career, your life of the mind,” her lover charged at the time, and now she sees, too late, that he was right to castigate her.
Three Men and a Baby became the most popular of the pronatal films (later inspiring the sequel Three Men and a Little Lady) with its baby-girl heroine center stage and its career woman expelled from nursery heaven. The premise—a single woman with career ambitions dumps her offspring at the doorstep of three bachelors—recalls the antisuffrage films seventy years earlier. (In the 1912 A Cure for Suffragettes, for example, feminists flocking to a suffrage powwow abandon their prams on a street corner, leaving the policemen to tend to the neglected babies.)
Three Men and a Cradle, the original French version of the film, was such a hit with American audiences that Paramount hastened to release its own version, and the revisions are illuminating. For the American story, Paramount inserted a new character, wretched Rebecca, a dour lawyer with perpetually pursed lips. The wet-blanket girlfriend of bachelor Peter, Rebecca recoils with disgust at their new bundle of joy. When the baby drools on Rebecca’s fingers, she can barely suppress her nausea. Peter pleads, “Rebecca, please stay with me—help me take care of her,” but callous Rebecca refuses. She has no maternal juices, nor any romantic ones either. When Peter asks her to spend the night on his birthday, she refuses because she has a pretrial court date in the morning—and that ranks higher on her in-basket priority list.
At first glance, Three Men and a Baby might seem like a film with feminist tendencies; after all, the men are taking care of the baby. But the movie does not propose that men take real responsibility for raising children. It derives all its humor from the reversal of what it deems the natural order: mom in charge of baby. Viewers are regaled with the myriad ways in which these carefree bachelors are not cut out for parenthood. The fact that one of them actually is the father is played for laughs. “How do I know it’s mine?” he says blithely. “Boys Will Be Boys” is the song that plays incessantly throughout the film. Indeed, despite their upwardly mobile careers and advancing middle age, the three bachelors celebrate their arrested development inside a high-priced frat house. The three “boys” gleefully adhere to an another night / another girl sexual philosophy. “So many women, so little time,” they snort, slapping each other on the back like football teammates after another completed pass.
Unlike the French version, the American film keeps anxiously bolstering its male characters’ masculinity. As if terrified that having a baby around the house might lower the testosterone level, the guys are forever lifting weights, sweating it out on the playing fields and jogging to the newsstands for the latest issue of Sports Illustrated and Popular Mechanics. In the American remake, the straying mother will eventually learn to uphold the traditional “feminine” role, too. In the final frame, remorseful mom not only reshoulders her maternal responsibilities but agrees to live under the men’s roof. The baby, one of the bachelors asserts, “needs a full-time mother”—and, one gets the impression, so do they.
The American film industry in the ’80s was simply not very welcoming to movie projects that portrayed independent women as healthy, lusty people without punishing them for their pleasure. Producer Gwen Field’s experience with Patti Rocks, released soon after Fatal Attraction, is one measure of Hollywood’s hostility to such themes in the decade. In Field’s film, an opinionated single woman shuns marriage (“Marriage is fattening,” she jokes), enjoys sex, chooses to have a child on her own and yet pays no price for her behavior. Patti Rocks received its share of good reviews from the critics, but generated nothing but animosity and rejection from the guardians of Hollywood. Field was turned away by one studio after another and always for the same reason; they told her the film’s message was “irresponsible” because it showed a single woman indulging in sex with whomever she pleased. (This same moral concern never surfaced over Three Men and a Baby, where the randy bachelors randomly scatter their seed.) The industry’s rating board tried to assign the film an X rating, even though it featured no violence and no more sex than the average R movie. Field recalls that the board members disapproved not of the visual display but “the language”—the same offense that brought down Mae West a half century earlier. As Field observes, “It was very ironic that we had received an X rating for a film that is against what pornography depicts—the degradation of women.” It took three formal appeals before the board members finally approved an R rating. Ultimately Patti Rocks’s chances for commercial success were slim anyway; as an independently produced film with out-of-the-mainstream content, it would get distributed to only a handful of theaters.
“Who am I?” the single female psychiatrist asks her male mentor, a small-time gambler and con artist, in David Mamet’s 1987 House of Games. Although she’s the one with the medical degree, he’s playing doctor. Her hair shorn, her face severe and unsmiling, she clutches the book she has written, Driven: Obsession and Compulsion in Everyday Life, but its contents have no answers for her. Those must come from him. The consultation that follows recalls a therapy session from the last backlash cinema, between the male psychoanalyst and the driven single magazine editor in Lady in the Dark. That earlier film’s dialogue:
HE: You’ve had to prove you were superior to all men: You had to dominate them.
SHE: What’s the answer?
HE: Perhaps some man who will dominate you.
After half a century of “progress,” the diagnosis remains the same in House of Games:
SHE: What do I want?
HE: Somebody to come along. Somebody to possess you. Would you like that?
SHE: Yes.
Offscreen, David Mamet was complaining bitterly about women in the entertainment business who apparently prefer to dominate and “won’t compromise.” In a 1988 essay on women entitled “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” he asserted, “The coldest, cruelest, most arrogant behavior I have ever seen in my professional life has been—and consistently been—on the part of women producers in the movies and the theater.” In Mamet’s House of Games, the stepped-on confidence man slips the cold careerist woman back under his thumb through his sleights of hand. And who is the actress Mamet cast in the demeaning female role? Lindsay Crouse, his own wife.
The ’80s backlash cinema embraces the Pygmalion tradition—men redefining women, men reclaiming women as their possessions and property. In the most explicit statement of this theme, the Wall Street tycoon in Pretty Woman remakes the loud, gum-smacking hooker into his soft-spoken and genteel appendage, fit for a Ralph Lauren ad. In film after film, men return to their roles of family potentate, provider, and protector of female virtue. In films from Moonstruck to The Family, the celluloid neopatriarchs preside over “old-fashioned” big ethnic families. In The Untouchables, when Eliot Ness goes into combat against the mob, he is as busy defending the traditional domestic circle as he is enforcing the law. In films like Someone to Watch Over Me, Sea of Love, or Look Who’s Talking, the backlash heroes play Big Daddy guardians to helpless women and families threatened by stalkers. In the real world, blue-collar men might be losing economic and domestic authority, but in these movies the cops and cabbies were commanding respect from cowering affluent women.
For all the sentimental tributes to the return of the all-American household—“Nothing can take the place of the family!” the son toasts in Moonstruck, and “Nice to be married, huh?” the men tell each other in The Untouchables—the late-1980s pro-family films are larded with male anger over female demands and male anxiety over women’s progress. “Stick it here, stick it there,” Al Pacino’s divorced police officer says bitterly of his ex-wife in Sea of Love. “I see eight women tonight, every one of them made more money than me,” his partner tells him. “How come they’re not married?” She’s Having a Baby is sup posed to celebrate a ’50s-style suburban marriage, but most of the film is devoted to the husband’s fantasies of escaping from under his nagging wife’s thumb. In Surrender, the male protagonist, a twice-divorced author, suspects all women of malicious ulterior motives. “We’re all just meat to them,” he says of women, and vows to move to Kuwait “because women don’t vote there.” Standing in the lobby of his divorce lawyer’s building, he faces a choice: entering one elevator with a leather-clad woman or another elevator with a snarling Doberman and street hood. He takes his chances with the canine-and-criminal duo.
The decade in family cinema ended not with a heartwarming salute to home’s cozy comforts but with an explosion of hateful marital fireworks. The underbelly of the backlash finally surfaced on screen, as spouses lunged for each other’s throats in films like The War of the Roses, She-Devil, I Love You to Death, and Sleeping with the Enemy. Usually hidden fears about strong women’s powers are on bold display. In both The War of the Roses and She-Devil, the wives are virtual witches, controlling and conquering their husbands with a supernatural and deadly precision.
In the 1970s women’s liberation films and 1940s wartime movies, men and women struggled endlessly with each other, too, but they argued with good intentions—to understand and enlighten each other, to close rather than widen the gender gap. When the dust clears after the shouting match between Ellen Burstyn and Kris Kristofferson in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, each comes to see the other’s point of view, and they walk away from the struggle with stronger empathy and love. In Adam’s Rib, Spencer Tracy’s lawyer stomps from the house demanding a divorce after his wife (Katharine Hepburn) wins her feminist case in court. “I like two sexes,” he shouts at her. “And another thing. All of a sudden I don’t like being married to what is known as the New Woman.” She calls after him, “You are not going to solve anything by running away,” and in the end, he agrees; they reunite and work out their differences. In The War of the Roses, by contrast, there’s no hope for reconciliation, truce, or even escape from the marital battle—both spouses wind up dead, their bodies smashed in the familial foyer.
In many of these late-’80s films, men and women not only have quit trying to hash things out, they don’t even keep company on the same film reel. Like the ’50s backlash cinema, independent women are finally silenced by pushing them off the screen. In the tough-guy films that proliferated at the end of the decade, male heroes head off to all-male war zones and the Wild West. In the escalating violence of an end less stream of war and action movies—Predator, Die Hard, Die Harder, RoboCop, RoboCop 2, Lethal Weapon, Days of Thunder, Total Recall— women are reduced to mute and incidental characters or banished altogether. In the man-boy body-swapping films that cropped up in the late ’80s—18 Again, Like Father, Like Son, and, the most memorable, Big— men seek refuge in female-free boyhoods. And male characters in another whole set of films retreat even further, to hallucinatory all-male fantasies of paternal renewal. In such films as Field of Dreams, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Dad, and Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, mother dies or disappears from the scene, leaving father (who is sometimes resurrected from the dead) and son to form a spiritually restorative bond.
Not surprisingly, when the Screen Actors Guild conducted a count of female roles in Hollywood in 1990, the organization discovered that women’s numbers had sharply dropped in the last two years. Men, the guild reported, were now receiving more than twice as many roles as women.
While men were drifting off into hypermasculine dreamland, the female characters who weren’t already dead were subject to ever more violent ordeals. In 1988, all but one of the women nominated for the Academy Award’s Best Actress played a victim. (The exception, fittingly, was Melanie Griffith’s working “girl.”) The award’s winner that year, Jodie Foster, portrayed a rape victim in The Accused. The producer of that film was Sherry Lansing.
Lansing released The Accused a year after Fatal Attraction, and hoped that it would polish up her feminist credentials. The film told the story of a young working-class woman gang-raped at a local bar while a crowd of men stood by and let it happen—a tale based on a grisly real gang rape at Big Dan’s tavern in New Bedford, Massachusetts. “If anyone thinks this movie is antifeminist, I give up,” Lansing told the press. “Once you see this movie, I doubt that you will ever, ever think of rape the same way again. Those images will stick in your mind, and you will be more sympathetic the next time you hear of somebody being raped.”
Did people really need to be reminded that rape victims deserve sympathy? Apparently Lansing did: “Until I saw this film, I didn’t even know how horrible [rape] is,” she announced. Apparently many young men watching this film needed the reminder, too: they hooted and cheered the film’s rape scene. And clearly a society in which rape rates were skyrocketing could stand some reeducation on the subject.
Lansing said The Accused should be hailed as a breakthrough movie because it tells America a woman has the “right” not to be raped. But it seems more reasonable that it should be mourned as a depressing artifact of the times—because it tells us only how much ground women have already lost. By the end of the ’80s, a film that simply opposed the mauling of a young woman could be passed off as a daring feminist statement.