There Is Nothing Like a Dame

Last summer, there was indeed “Something About Mary”: asininity. Congenitally adorable Cameron Diaz played Mary, an orthopedic surgeon never actually shown in surgery but filmed undressing slo-o-owly before an open window. Audiences howled at one scene in which the medical school graduate couldn’t distinguish between semen and hair gel.

Thus, thirtysome-odd years into America’s most recent social, economic and cultural revolution for women’s equality, we were offered yet another dumb blond to laugh at. And it wasn’t just the guys yukking it up.

We women talk a good game: Assertiveness. Power. Take back the night. Just do it. Except even after all this time, too many of the characters I’ve gotten to know in the last decade in movies, on television and in novels are not lively or courageous spirits to reflect the times. I miss the Jane Eyres, the Hildy Johnsons of “His Girl Friday,” the Mary Richardses of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” They were my heroes, the brave dames I always admired and sometimes loved. Too many of today’s female protagonists are either ditsy or degraded. They are the tremulous, the willfully naive, the self-absorbed and self-pitying, the queens of passive aggression.

Wimpettes. And too many of us accept them as blue-ribbon feminists. A wimp is the 98-pound weakling who gets sand kicked in his face by the bully--not merely because he’s a physical lightweight but a moral one as well. Instead of trying to reason with the bully, or venturing a sock in the snoot, the wimp says: Do with me what you will.

Likewise, a wimpette is a woman who is weak or ineffectual because she gives in to the apparent limits imposed on her by her gender without a fight. Wimpettes are so much with us that we often don’t see them for what they are: weak sisters. Personifications of anti-feminist propaganda. Reflections of our lesser selves, refutations of our better selves.

In this last decade, movie heroes such as Sarah Connor in “Terminator 2: Judgment Day,” Ripley of “Alien 3” and Sister Helen Prejean in “Dead Man Walking” failed to capture the feminist imagination as much as the woman-as-victim did. Remember “The Piano,” in which soulful musician Ada, married to a churlish hypocrite, was literally mute, unable to speak up for herself? Besides having to put up with her husband, she was extorted by another man into sex. And what happened? Bingo! True to the old misogynist axiom, the heroine of this “feminist” movie became a summa cum laude graduate of the All- She- Really- Needs- Is- a- Good- Roll- in- the- Hay- and- She’ll- Learn- to- Love- It school.

There were brave working-class dames of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s such as Norma Rae and Karen Silkwood. Too often in the ‘90s, they gave way to wimpettes such as Thelma and Louise, victims naturally: of slobby men, brutish men, violent men. T&L; fought back, but did they fight back shrewdly? No, they behaved according to stereotype: overemotionally and ineffectually. They went on a shooting, stealing and burning spree in revenge, then drove off a cliff rather than accept the consequences.

Why the proliferation of wimpettes on screen? Ironically, the brave dames of the past--from 19th-century fiction, from 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s movies, from 1970s TV--developed during times when women were subjugated or taking their first steps beyond their picket fences.

Now, women have far more social and political muscle, are freer to exercise power and talent. So why don’t they laugh these wimpettes off the screen?

First, the freedom that exhilarates some terrifies others. For years, women were protected or at least confined. Suddenly they were liberated. That first peek into the existential abyss can be frightening; many long to run back to where they felt safe. For 90 minutes or so, in the darkness of a theater, it’s comforting to put aside the insecurities that come with freedom, to identify with a wimpette.

Second, some artists--male and female--just can’t stand women. Their enmity seems to have grown in direct proportion to women leaving the home and entering the marketplace.

Finally, there are writers, directors and actors who lack the imagination or the character to see past stereotypes. What is a politically acceptable way of keeping women down on the farm, out of power? Portray them as helpless, hurt, in perpetual peril. Turn them into victims.

The other phenomenon of the ‘90s is the return of the ditz. Look to legal thrillers as an example of the trend. Despite smart, assertive jurists such as Sonia Klonsky in Scott Turow’s “The Laws of Our Fathers” or Reggie Love and Darby Shaw in John Grisham’s “The Client” and “The Pelican Brief,” the decade’s attorney-of-record is Ally McBeal, a litigator far longer on legs than brains. This Fox-femme is not so much feeble as ditsy, a reversion to the old equation: perfect woman equals cute plus mindless. McBeal proves you can send the girl to Harvard Law School (Harvard should sue for slander), but not even seven years of higher education can stay her from doing what comes naturally--trying to catch a man.

Recent Films Offer

a Mixed Bag

In this long, hot summer of ‘99, are we on the verge of anything better? There’s been much in the media about Rene Russo in the current film, “The Thomas Crown Affair,” about the bravery of a 45-year-old woman showing her breasts and buttocks. Bravery? Come on.

Nonetheless, Russo has come miles since “Outbreak,” in which she and Dustin Hoffman played microbiologists. He was the hero while she got to bleed by nose and mouth as she waited for him to save her (and the world) from a deadly virus. In “Thomas Crown,” she’s a tough, glamorous insurance investigator out to catch a thief. She’s bold, cool and smart. Does she use sex to get what she wants? Sure. Sex is but one weapon in her arsenal, as it was in James Bond’s.

On the other hand, another displayer of bare derriere, Nicole Kidman as Alice Harford in “Eyes Wide Shut,” isn’t so much a brave dame as a quasi-assertive one. She confesses to husband Bill that she was so powerfully attracted to a naval officer, a man she never actually met, that she would have abandoned Bill and their daughter had the man asked her to sleep with him. For director Stanley Kubrick, however, there seems to have been less interest in the power of Alice’s fantasy life and sexuality than in an inch-by-inch exploration of Kidman’s physiognomy. “Eyes Wide Shut” feels like sad old stuff.

In many movies, female characters certainly qualify as semi-brave dames. They do not flinch from moral challenges and physical danger. Think of Dorothy in “Jerry McGuire.” But the films in which semi-brave dames appear tend to be about the lives of men. The women’s concerns have far less to do with the outside world than with the care and protection of their guys.

The woman who needs neither man nor child is too scary to be a mere wimpette. She’s often presented as a fiend and a freak. The woman who seeks power. A hellcat. Sharon Stone in “Basic Instinct” comes to mind. “The Blair Witch Project” also features such a woman--just don’t expect to see her in the lead role. The film does feature Heather, an ordinary, modern woman in power. No monster, Heather Donahue plays the director of the hypothetical documentary, giving orders to her crew, Josh and Mike. On the other hand, she comes close to the misogynist’s notion of the woman in charge: overbearing and somewhat incompetent. Possibly it’s not Heather’s incompetence that leads them into disaster, but the witch’s machinations. If that’s the case, then the omnipotent, vengeful evil at work in this horrific film--the monster we never see--is that quintessential vengeful woman.

The best brave dame I’ve come across recently, the sort of character I’d love to see in a movie, is in a new novel.

Colson Whitehead’s “The Intuitionist,” published in December, is a dazzling meditation on race and technology and imagination. Dazzling, too, is Whitehead’s hero, Lila Mae Watson, an elevator inspector. An elevator inspector? Lila Mae lives in an alternate America where she is--in the book’s language--her city’s first colored elevator inspector. First by chance, then by design, civil servant Lila Mae becomes the seeker of truth and the righter of wrongs in a great city very much like New York. She faces public and private disgrace, threats from the pols, kidnapping by the mob and terrible loneliness with the steadfast commitment of the truly just.

How great if there were more like her: How wonderful that at the end of this decade, we are, once again, getting such a brave dame in art.

Susan Isaacs, whose most recent novel is “Red, White and Blue” (HarperCollins, 1999), wrote about women on page and screen in her book “Brave Dames and Wimpettes” (Library of Contemporary Thought).