Sisters In Arms

As is well known to readers of these pages, Hollywood cinema in the Reagan era was largely devoted to the glorification of wealth, power, destruction, and conformity. Women were relegated to the sidelines ("Please don't go out there!" said the scaredy-cat wife/girlfriend to the brave sheriff/soldier/spaceman/whatever) or to the ever-popular bedroom. If a woman achieved a position of any importance it was because she was, beneath it all, a real girl and not a cold, bitchy (read "feminist") woman (see Working Girl by ex-liberal Mike Nichols or the era-ending, cradle-robbing Pretty Woman).

But after a decade in which women were systematically abused, exploited, or, perhaps worse, infantilized, 1991 has seen no less than four (count 'em four) major Hollywood productions -- with stars and everything -- in which women stand up and fight back against violent, abusive, and sexist men. In case you've been napping, the four (by my count) are Sleeping With the Enemy (Julia Roberts), Mortal Thoughts (Demi Moore), The Silence of the Lambs (Jody Foster), and Thelma and Louise (Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis).

Sleeping With the Enemy is by far the weakest of the four. The first half (when Julia Roberts suffers under, then escapes from, her upper-class brute of a husband) works well enough. The husband's sexual violence is a logical extension of his general rage for order, hierarchy, and hygiene (all the good neo-fascist virtues). Roberts' silent scheming against him is believable and suspenseful. But the filmmakers seem to have not a clue what to do with the woman once she is free. So the movie falls back on Hitchcockian camera tricks and set pieces of Julia Roberts being beautiful (and in love again), all to a Motown soundtrack. Then the final cop-out, when the monster returns, another man has to come to the rescue.

There's no rescuer in sight in Mortal Thoughts. And Demi Moore doesn't seem to need one. Her buddy Glynne Headley has nothing but bad luck picking them. There's a Rashomon point-of-view trick to this movie, which I won't elucidate for those who are waiting to catch it in video. But I can tell you that it gives us two women in a claustrophobic, ethnic-Jersey, working-class world who surprisingly find the strength to look out for themselves and each other when everything and everyone is telling them to defer. It's also about the rage that many women carry around, turned inward, and how it can twist their lives around.

Silence of the Lambs (directed by Jonathan Demme of Melvin and Howard, Something Wild, and Married to the Mob semi-fame) is a flawlessly executed chiller-thriller. Because of the director and star's politically correct credentials, when they show you a bloated and disfigured corpse, you trust that there is a good reason for it. The movie has taken some flack for the depiction of its serial killer as a gay man. The gay-watch activists may have a point, at least about how the film is popularly perceived. My very limited TV-tabloid knowledge of serial killers tells me that their sexuality is often so crazed, distorted, and splintered all over the map as to defy our usual notions of "orientation." And I thought the film was trying to depict that point.

But Silence isn't really about the killer. It's about Jody Foster's rookie FBI agent doing battle to protect the innocent and to purge her own childhood fears. It's about a woman who has access to power and who is using it to stand up for other women who are victimized and abused. It's also a crime story, set against the most garish extremes of human behavior. But those psychopathic extremes are also set amidst the daily cultural devaluation of women that provides the atmosphere for their growth.

THE STEP-BY-step continuum from patronization to harassment to rape is spelled out more clearly in Thelma and Louise, which I happen to think is hands down the best (i.e. most important and most fun) American movie since Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing. It represents the apex, so far, of the women-are-fighters trend. This is the movie we've waited for all these years, in which women finally get to lay their claim on America's core mythology, from Huck Finn lighting out for the territory to the lone gunperson cleaning up Dodge City.

Directed by Ridley Scott (the man who made the proto-feminist Alien epics), Thelma and Louise is a film about women who, again in an extreme situation, find the opportunity to express themselves, which is all freedom ever was or will be. Here, as in real-life struggle, freedom ain't free. But it is definitely worth fighting for ... and more.

Along the road to freedom, Thelma (Geena Davis) and Louise (Susan Sarandon) encounter controlling husbands, well-meaning but manipulative boyfriends, and trigger-happy police. This is not to mention a friendly neighborhood rapist, an outlaw gigolo, and a garden-variety, unrepentant heavy breather. But in the end, they brush them all aside like so many desert insects and find their strength in each other, right to the bittersweet end.

If Thelma and Louise becomes the blockbuster success it deserves to be, and which Silence of the Lambs already is, we may well be treated to a series of increasingly dumb and exploitative women-with-guns movies. Maybe even a Desert Storm clone edition. Maybe then there will even be time to consider calmly the distinctions among legitimate self-defense, artistic license in countering old stereotypes, and the slippery slope toward the legitimation of force for its own sake. But for now, I think it is safe simply to cheer the long-overdue advent of the female hero and enjoy the ride.

Danny Duncan Collum is a contributing editor of Sojourners.