Why Can't A Woman Be a Man?

By RICHARD CORLISS

We have seen Hollywood's woman of the '90s, and her name is V.I. Warshawski (rhymes with Kah-pow-ski). This free-lance Chicago detective is tough and sexy and nurturing. She is a teenage waif's very best surrogate mother. She can come on strong to a stud stranger at the local bar; she'll buy him a drink. But Warshawski is faster with a kick than a caress. Any hulk who tries to pummel some manners into her will get his genitals twisted in a nutcracker. And at the end of the new movie named after her, she will offer the same tweaking to her boyfriend. Somebody in V.I. Warshawski has the right phrase for this all-man all-woman: "a female dick."

As it happens, V.I. Warshawski, starring Kathleen Turner as the private eyeful, is a sorry excuse for a film. It opened last Friday and may be forgotten in a week. But bad pictures as well as good feed the pop-cultural zeitgeist (cf., Fatal Attraction, Pretty Woman, Ghost). And Warshawski shows Hollywood once again scrounging to resolve a lingering dilemma: how to get women into the summer-movie mainstream.

The immediate question might be, Why bother? This summer's smash, with $120 million in its first three weeks, is the mucho macho Terminator 2: Judgment Day. But in Hollywood, Armageddon comes every summer. Last year five burly adventures -- Total Recall, Die Hard 2, Dick Tracy, Days of Thunder and Another 48 HRS. -- grossed a robust, cumulative half billion. And Batman, good man vs. evil man, was the big warm-weather hit of 1989. Saving the world is man's work, of course. (Blowing it up is too, but that just proves how powerful guys are.) It's men who face down and beat up whatever malevolent force is threatening Gotham City, Mars or poor little Earth.

So, primed by the studios, moviegoers now expect summer pictures to have hairy chests. Cinema is action, the theory goes, and action -- aggression, propulsion, flying higher, shooting quicker, thinking with your fists -- is a male franchise. Women are supposed to go off in a corner and . . . nurture something. This is the traditional take, anyway, and it signals the vacuity of modern commercial films: endless, aimless variations on the old western climax of the white hat fighting the black hat while the crinolined heroine twitters and screams.

This summer is different. Studio bosses, noting the kamikaze competition last year of all those action adventures, have released softer films (like the disease movies Dying Young, Regarding Henry and The Doctor) normally reserved for school months. The female buddy film Thelma & Louise served up an engaging pair of loser-heroes. True they were more reactive than active, dithering away their chances for escape and ending up as victims, not saviors. But they showed at least that women could dish out their share of violence -- whatever advance that represents. Even the muscle movies are admitting strong women. In Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio is a self-reliant Maid Marian. And in the Terminator films, Linda Hamilton eats cyborgs for breakfast and spits them out like ingots.

It's nice that in 1991 there are enough women in summer movies to talk about; for a while they were an endangered species. And they are of sufficient variety to cue this speculation: Is there a home for feminism in the summer blockbusters?

Not yet. And not likely, when you look more closely at the women's roles. Like Ms. Warshawski, they fall into three stereotypes: butch, babe and baby sitter.

BUTCH. In The Terminator, Hamilton's Sarah Connor evolved from a klutzy waitress to a warrior woman who crushed the killer robot in a hydraulic press and spat out the immortal line: "You're terminated, f---er." In T2 Sarah is a guerrilla gone south, dynamiting computer facilities, threatening to inject drain cleaner into the veins of her captors, stashing weapons with her own righteous version of the Baader-Meinhof Gang. She is a more twisted sister of Sigourney Weaver's Ripley in Aliens (also written and directed by T2's James Cameron), who proves her maternal mettle by blasting a space monster to ugly bits.

These are not strong women who use their ingenuity, humanity and mother wit. They are Rambo in drag. They have a higher testosterone count than the national debt ceiling; they solve problems with artillery and adrenaline. And too many filmmakers, strapped by the conventions of the shoot-'em-up genre, think they are solving the problem of beefing up women's roles by turning them into beefcake. It's steroid screenwriting. Cameron wonders, Why can't a (modern) woman be more like a (mean) man? Then he makes her into one.

If you want to get really glum about women's roles in current movies, look at the old ones. Of course, golden-age Hollywood didn't waste time on the war of the worlds; it was defining the battle of the sexes, and here the woman often won. Because she was better. Joan Crawford, as mom and career woman in Mildred Pierce (1945), could handle herself and a gun with steely assurance. And as a playwright in Sudden Fear (1952), she was smart enough to write her way out of her psychopathic husband's clutches. Could Julia Roberts have pulled that off in Sleeping with the Enemy?

There was no man more determined than Barbara Stanwyck, Bette Davis or Katharine Hepburn. These actresses were both strong and womanly. They didn't surrender their grace, compassion, resilience -- if we may say so, their femininity -- when they demanded social equality with men. They were looking to live with the other sex, not wipe it out.

BABE. You thought the breed was extinct, that the only female body fashion was the sculpted, sanded sylph. Then along came Jennifer Connelly, innocent of face, voluptuous of form, aerodynamically perfect. In The Hot Spot, Career Opportunities and this summer's The Rocketeer, Connelly has been used as an iconic throwback, a memento of a simpler (sexist) era. Film critics quickly add that she is an appealing actress, just as men once declared that they read Playboy for the interviews. But so far Connelly has been mainly calendar art: Bettie Page via Vargas, a body without a soul. Moviemakers can't find much for her to do. They can only let her be.

In the movie past, babes had brains; the flesh was almost incidental. Jean Harlow made censors' hair curl because she disdained foundation garments, but she exuded most of her sexuality between the ears. In Red-Headed Woman she cooed and screwed her way to the top, and got away with it. In Red Dust she was Clark Gable's lover, pal and lover again, taking it all in her sashaying stride. These movies were made in 1932, yet they are more mature than many current films -- more aware of love's compromises and lust's attractions.

BABY SITTER. In movies as in life, this is the most traditional woman's role: hearth stirrer, home saver, raising her children and supporting her man. It ! was an emblem, we now realize, of her superiority. Modern man knows that modern woman can do the old, cool-guy stuff -- run a tractor, beat him at poker, light a cigarette in a high wind -- but that he can't manage, so artfully or efficiently, what women have done since the cave days. So there's nothing inherently retrograde about Dying Young, in which Julia Roberts performs bedside therapy on ailing Campbell Scott, or The Doctor, in which the dying Elizabeth Perkins finds the strength to give William Hurt a reason to live (though both films do get terminally sappy). It is just that Hollywood's addiction to fantasy has kept moviegoers away from matters of real life and real death, and that the industry's canonization of the superhero has persuaded viewers that less is at stake when a woman simply, courageously comforts someone else.

A half-century ago, people perked up when Greta Garbo did the nurturing. Man, woman or boy, they were all frail things, dazzled by her strength and glamour; and she caressed every lover as if he were a child with a fever. Garbo made her last film in 1941, when Hollywood was called the Dream Factory; skeptics said it dressed up lies as art. So why -- it can't be only nostalgia -- do those old films, for all their soft focus and happy endings, seem truer than today's? Because the scale was different, smaller, more intimate. Films weren't fairy tales of destruction and salvation. Men weren't all muscle or women all flesh.

This summer, though, Hollywood is serving up empty calories and calling them high fiber. Actresses may have better body tone, but most of their roles are dispiriting to anyone who harbors the hope that American movies will some day grow up.