Role Model? Male Fantasy? Maybe She’s a Bit of Both

Total women make me nuts. Not the sort of total women who paraded their physical perfection the other day at the Oscars. Those specimens may as well be space aliens, refugees from the Planet Revlon. (Which would at least explain their gravity-defying anatomy.)

The total woman I have in mind is someone more earthbound, someone more normal, someone like Marge Gunderson, Columbo-esque police chief of tiny Brainerd, Minn. Marge is a loving wife, an investigator extraordinaire and considerate of both friend and foe. (She shoots to wound, not kill.)

Marge is a celluloid creation, star of the movie “Fargo,” played by the fabulous Frances McDormand. That she is fiction is beside the point. Marge represents something in the culture, and it’s either the admirable way a heroic but simple woman is able to be a stunning success both at home and at work, or the physical incarnation of an insidious male fantasy.

Maybe both.

How loving a wife is the police chief? On the way back to the station from a gruesome triple murder scene, she stops to pick up her ice-fishing hubby some night crawlers.

How considerate a friend?

When an old high school pal meets her for a drink then tries to squeeze into her side of the booth and smother her in a completely inappropriate love hug, she manages to untangle herself and get him back on his side of the table without so much as nicking his ego.

How good a cop is she?

Without divulging the plot, let’s just say without Marge on the case, a psycho killer might have gotten away with his “malfeasance” as she calls it.

Did I mention that Marge is two months away from delivering her first child?

A bulging belly and morning sickness are mere inconveniences. She tosses her cookies at the crime scene, and keeps on working. She has not a hormonal moment in the entire movie.

Marge is enchanting. And scary.

*

In the real world, of course, pregnancy is not incompatible with professional competence. A recent New Yorker cartoon sums it up: A very pregnant executive strides out of a boardroom. “I’m off now to reproduce,” she announces to her male colleagues, “but I’ll be back!”

(For the record, however, in the real world of the LAPD, pregnancy is indeed incompatible with street police work. Officers are relieved of any duties that bring them into contact with suspects as soon as they divulge their pregnancies to commanding officers. When I asked Press Information Officer Helen Lloyd, mother of a preschooler, if Marge sounded realistic, the first thing Lloyd said was, “The police chief is a she?”)

In the movie world, pregnancy is always exploited. A woman can’t just be pregnant, she has to be pregnant so she can die in childbirth or host a talking fetus or make ridiculous hoo-hah noises while refusing pain medication during labor and delivery.

This is why Marge is such a refreshing character. Her pregnancy is incidental to the plot. She’s a woman of childbearing age and, guess what, she’s pregnant. It’s not the pregnancy that’s unsettling, it’s her perfection.

Pregnancy is the single most self-involved time a woman will ever know. How come Marge doesn’t convey this? How come she crawls into bed after solving an amazing crime spree and tells her husband how fabulous he is? Sure, he’s just learned his painting of a mallard will be reproduced on a three-cent stamp, but she just collared an ax murderer.

“Nobody uses three-cent stamps,” he whines.

“Sure they do, honey,” she replies. “Every time the price of stamps go up.”

I walked out of the theater marveling at this woman, who knows how to keep peace on the streets and in bed.

He could have at least congratulated her.

*

“I think feminist ideology has warped your brain.”

This is my husband speaking. We are discussing the movie.

I have just quoted Virginia Woolf to him, on the subject of women boosting the male ego by serving as looking glasses, possessing the “magic and delicious power” of reflecting men at twice their natural size.

I acknowledge the possibility that my brain is warped--hey, what married person’s isn’t?--but the issue was fairness, emotional generosity and selflessness. These are, I meant to say, admirable and very often feminine ideals. Marge’s pregnancy underlines the point.

Of course, the movies aren’t real life. And real life isn’t a movie. So it probably doesn’t matter whether Marge Gunderson is the total woman or total fiction.

She can be both.

While the rest of us are neither.

* Robin Abcarian’s column appears Wednesdays and Sundays. Readers may write to her at the Los Angeles Times, Life & Style, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles, CA 90053.