The Starlets Next Door

When Liv Tyler came out at Cannes last month, it was quite a party.

The doe-like teen was the It Girl of the film industry’s biggest cotillion of the year, her face plastered on a forest of billboards. When she made her debut in 3-D, Tyler stepped off the plane in a fedora and sunglasses. And by the time toe hit tarmac, her life had changed.

“Twenty news crews and 40 paparazzi were chasing us,” says Valerie Van Galder, vice president of publicity for Fox Searchlight, which is releasing Tyler’s next film, “Stealing Beauty,” on June 21. “They surrounded the car and they were shooting in. She took out her camera and started filming them, and from then on we had to hire her two bodyguards.”

A star is born.

“Cannes, Cannes, Cannes, Shmannes,” toots Tyler, 18. “It was so weird. It was like being in a giant bubble. It was like the Jetsons, very bizarre and very strange. It was like nothing I’d ever experienced before.”

The first whiff of the world’s adoration may be heady stuff for any debutante of film, but it’s hardly the first time the kingdom has been offered to a lavish young beauty. Movie machinery has always depended on a steady supply of fresh nubile talent, but no one else in the latest graduating class has captured the eye--and prime roles--of so many top filmmakers: Bernardo Bertolucci, Woody Allen, Tom Hanks and Jonathan Demme.

This month alone, the coltish Tyler appears in Bertolucci’s “Stealing Beauty” as well as in “Heavy,” a tender film by newcomer James Mangold that turned heads at last year’s Cannes and Sundance festivals. And thanks partly to Tyler’s iconic turn in the 1994 Aerosmith video “Crazy” for her rock-idol dad Steven Tyler, she’s being crowned “super-babe” and “video vixen” in the inevitable avalanche of besotted press.

While one can hear the starlet-hype factory cranking up yet again, there is at least one respect in which Tyler’s maiden voyage as ‘90s sex symbol is a product of her times--and that is that her breakthrough character Lucy is a maiden, much like Alicia Silverstone’s in “Clueless.” “Stealing Beauty” follows the trail of Lucy’s sexual awakening on a visit to her mother’s friends in Tuscany, tantalizing them with her presence. And if Lucy is a virgin, as one character pointedly remarks, her mother never would have been one at 19.

In more innocent times, sexual danger was represented by the vampire goddesses of film, the husband stealers, the happy-home wreckers like Marlene Dietrich in “Blue Angel” and Marilyn Monroe in “The Seven Year Itch.” But in these more complicated days, wearied by the sexual revolution and awash in awareness of sexually transmitted disease, it’s the sex symbols who may be the innocent ones.

For Bertolucci, then, sexuality on-screen is not a one-two punch but a brew of subtleties. Witness Tyler’s appeal.

“It’s because you can see on her face ideas and thoughts coming and going,” he says. “It’s not purely a question of having a nice figure or an attractive look. It’s very much something that comes from inside her.

“I think the sexual impact is very much based on not only what you can see but on what you cannot see, and that’s why in the movie, while everybody is swimming naked in the pool, she has on a one-piece bathing suit. Because hiding sometimes is much stronger and attractive. That’s the difference also between the two generations.”

That’s not the only difference. The latest crop of screen sirens has both observers and architects of their careers singing the praises of the postmodern screen goddess. To some, in the aftermath of the gender wars, they are many splendored, with brains--or at least presence--to match their more obvious charms.

“I love female sex symbols,” says Ted Demme, who directed newcomer Mira Sorvino as well as the reigning Uma Thurman in “Beautiful Girls.” “What makes Mira sexy is she’s fabulous looking and she’s got a really great sense of humor, which is big for me. When you’re dealing with a lot of women in movies right now, so many are beautiful and smart and great packages, if you will. The actresses we have today aren’t one-dimensional by any means.”

Both a Harvard grad and dead ringer for Monroe in a recent HBO film, the Oscar-winning Sorvino has so many sterling credentials that she could be the poster gal for the new screen babe. Consider too Silverstone, Elisabeth Shue (“Leaving Las Vegas”), Cameron Diaz (“The Mask”), Theresa Randle (“Girl 6”), Amy Locane (“Carried Away”) and Jennifer Aniston (the upcoming “She’s the One”).

“I think that sexuality today is not just about physical appearance,” says Steve Himber, one of Sorvino’s agents at William Morris. “It’s truly what you emit from your soul.”

But when it comes to the movie industry’s coining of the feminine ideal, have things really changed? And have they necessarily changed for the better?

Not all observers see greater individuality among rising starlets. Some, in fact, see a barely distinguishable raft of conventional beauties.

“To me the roles for women now are more one-dimensional,” says Jeanine Basinger, author of “A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women, 1930-60” and chair of the film studies program at Wesleyan University. “We certainly do not see the mature woman’s film that we saw in the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s, films about mature women grappling with grown-up women’s problems.

“Here’s my basic question: Can you define these women in any other way besides sex symbol or young or beautiful? Do you say that old cliche, ‘Give me a young Elisabeth Shue?’ ”

To San Francisco Examiner film critic Barbara Shulgasser, Tyler seemed generic in her pliant femininity.

“She struck me as being the black hole of the movie, that there’s nothing going on with her except what people ascribe to her in the movie and from the audience,” Shulgasser says. “And she has this pliable face that’s a combination of Ava Gardner without the humanity and Gene Tierney without the neurosis, and that makes her a very good-looking piece of cardboard.

“So the only thing you can do with an actress like that is exactly what Bertolucci did and that is objectify her in the most fetishistic kind of way, to allow the camera to dwell on her.”

Shulgasser blames the celebration of blandness on “a feminism backlash, that men don’t know what to do with women who are really strong and smart and ambitious. It’s nice to fantasize about a blank slate, the younger the better”

Yet the same actress blew away Mangold when she read for the waitress part in “Heavy.” Perhaps the difference can be chalked up to the gender of the beholder.

“I never in my life had this kind of deep and profound sense of what a movie star is,” says Mangold, who cast Tyler as the love object of an introverted pizza chef. “I’m a big fan of Liv, who in an age of high-octane scenery chewing plays with a very, very fragile palette. There’s this incredibly glowing soul that’s shooting out of her eyes and through her skin in this mercurial way she can move from one emotion to another without words.”

But other actresses are also regarded by some as quarry for backlash. Perhaps it’s ironic that onetime Harvard students Sorvino and Shue, both shining examples of the new breed of Ivy League actor, had breakthrough roles as well-scrubbed practitioners of the oldest profession. The women may be smarter, but not necessarily the roles.

“Backlash” author Susan Faludi considers Shue’s character in “Leaving Las Vegas” to be far from enlightened.

She “is given these superficial trappings to make you think it’s updated,” Faludi says. “She looks like she’s been at the gym. She looks like she thinks for herself. She has her own apartment. She enjoys being a prostitute. It’s a career goal.

“So it’s really the same story with a few new bells and whistles to make you feel like Hollywood really gets what the women’s movement is about.”

If feminism hasn’t necessarily rewritten the scripts for female sex symbols in these days post-Marilyn, it has nevertheless had impact: few actresses want to be identified as her successor. Accordingly, few agreed to be interviewed for this story.

“A lot of smart actresses who have studied the career of sex symbols have noticed they’re not careers of longevity,” an agency source says. “An actor wants to work forever, and admitting that you’re a sex symbol may not be the way to do it. Now they want to say, ‘I’m a serious actress and I do rep.’ If I were representing Mira Sorvino, I’d say, ‘Come back when you’re writing about the gifted actress who happens to be beautiful.’ ”

Indeed, Monroe was trapped by her image despite being one of the first women in Hollywood to establish her own production company. “I am tired of the same old sex roles. I want to do better things,” she said, announcing the debut of Marilyn Monroe Productions in 1955.

But when Monroe’s first independent film, “The Prince and the Showgirl,” went into production, director and co-star Laurence Olivier bristled with condescension setting up the first scene. “All you have to do is be sexy, dear Marilyn,” he told her.

Actresses worried about being limited to bombshell roles need look only as far as their corner six-plex for ominous signs. Sharon Stone’s attempts to break out in “Last Dance” and “Casino” snagged her an Oscar nomination for the latter, but the films performed far more poorly than the star.

“The public’s response to ‘Last Dance’ indicates that people like their female sex symbols to do glamorous stuff and not necessarily to be in hard-hitting, depressing dramas where they don’t wear makeup,” says New York Post film critic Michael Medved, author of “Hollywood vs. America.” “They had to subpoena people to see ‘Last Dance’ and Sharon Stone is a major star.”

“It’s a short-lived career being a sex goddess,” says Time film critic Richard Schickel, “because people really can’t stand the heat for very long.”

Those who have pulled it off in the ‘90s--Stone and Madonna, particularly--generally don’t play the straight sexual diva but add a wry twist. “Both are put-on artists,” Schickel says. “They’re playing in some ironic postmodern way the role of sex goddess. They’re almost sending up that kind of imagery.”

If images of bombshells from the ‘50s had the unsavory tinge of exploitation, actresses who play the female sexuality card are redefining it from a one-down stance to one rife with power. Sorvino told Buzz magazine her thinking has come full circle: “I used to rail against the portrayal of women as these physically sexy beings, but I have to say there is actually a lot of fun in assuming that power--in just saying, ‘Hey, this is part of my personality. I’m going to play with it now.’ . . . It’s really freeing when you stop fighting it and go with it, when you stop saying, ‘Oh God, this is going to make me feel like I’m not a serious person anymore.’ ”

Before Theresa Randle played the seductive phone sex operator of Spike Lee’s “Girl 6,” she was generally cast in the more wholesome--and peripheral--roles of girlfriend and wife. In “Girl 6,” “the men are my appendages,” she says, “which is something a girl can get used to.”

Randle says she’s thrilled to be considered a sex symbol.

“I think it’s a blessing,” she says, “because all my life I never felt that way. You’re talking about a girl with a face full of zits and fluctuating weight. It would be ridiculous to say that to be considered a sex symbol wouldn’t be something every actress would aspire to. You want people to appreciate your talent, but also to be someone they appreciate looking at.”

To be accepted in that guise, actresses probably need to be perceived as goddesses of their own making.

“We don’t have to be hugely ideologically feminist about it,” Schickel says, “but I don’t think anybody wants to see women in roles that look as though they’re being exploited. It’s discomforting. I don’t think there ever will be again a sex goddess of the Rita Hayworth-Marilyn Monroe kind in the sense where you feel that in some way they’re not the products of their own ambitions but are products of studio manipulation and exploitation so that they come to some kind of tragic end.”

There are other reasons to doubt the resurrection of studio-style sex goddesses in the ‘90s--the ironically dampening effect of sexual liberation. “The whole idea of a goddess was as a kind of religion,” film critic Molly Haskell says. “[The heyday of the studios] wasalso a time of repression. I think taboo is what gives sex its spice. It has to be done very well not to be tedious. If in every movie the man and woman fall into bed and there’s nudity, you lose any sense of character and it becomes a documentary about how people do it.”

The lack of taboos and what used to be called morals softens the focus on the newest pantheon of goddesses, says Vivian Sobchack, professor of critical studies in UCLA’s Department of Film and Television. They’re erotic in a way that’s, well, friendlier, utterly bereft of the mystique of an unattainable Garbo.

“Where everything is so in your face and we have very few taboos, everything gets softened and homogenized so that mystery goes away,” Sobchack says. “But I think there’s a kind of blandness that comes from a homogenizing of experience. Alicia Silverstone and Jennifer Aniston and Mira Sorvino are sort of puppy dogs. They’re all accessible. There’s no mystery and no distance. Those starlets aren’t even the girl next door. They’re the girl in the next apartment. Could you see Greta Garbo in a mall?”

At the same time, Brazilian director Bruno Barreto considers true sensuality to be a rare quality in American cinema precisely because, he says, the culture is sexually repressed.

“As a foreigner, I find this the most puritanical country in the world,” says Barreto, who cast the highly seductive Amy Locane in her Lolita-like role in “Carried Away.” “Sex has gotten such a bad rap, and it shouldn’t, because it’s something so energetic, so beautiful. But in Europe and South America it’s something very good, something very noble. It doesn’t have this dirty connotation.”

In the end, being crowned the next screen goddess is a function of accident or fate. It probably helps if you don’t go after it, if you are Liv-like, pose coyly bare on the cover of Details magazine but then turn a pretty pink when someone comments on your allure.

“If someone says that,” Tyler says, “I find it to be an incredible compliment. It makes me blush and makes me feel flattered, because I certainly don’t look in the mirror and say that to myself. I don’t know who does. If they do they should be thrown off the edge of the planet.”

That offhanded embrace of perfection could help send Tyler on her way. After all, film deity “isn’t an office you can run for,” Schickel says. “We have to discover them. They can’t impose on us. People who really attempt to do that are never going to get it. Then you become Mamie Van Doren or Jayne Mansfield.

“I think it comes by accident, not by design. Some linkage is made with the Zeitgeist that no one can predict.”