STARDOM: NO JOB FOR A MAN
WE NEED female heroes because the men are not up to it any more. Films are now the dominant element in our popular culture. The male heroics of stars such as Tom Cruise and Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone have become so ludicrous that they parody the concept of heroism. We have to turn to female heroes, portrayed in films by the likes of Jodie Foster and Meg Ryan, if we want images of heroism that are credible and moving. Hollywood is starting to under- stand the point. Here is an issue of some moral and cul- tural importance which has not yet been examined. We need heroes, in fact and fic- tion, to serve as models of courage. And we need models of courage because courage, as C.S. Lewis put it, 'is every other virtue at its testing point'. In the gen- eration after the second world war there was no shortage of such people, male and female, civilian and military, because the war had involved the whole nation. Nearly everybody had first- or second-hand con- nection with death or danger. This knowl- edgeable audience imposed a discipline on the film-makers — in Hollywood and else- where.
Yet in the 1960s something started hap- pening to the image of the male hero. It was most obvious in the James Bond films, beginning with Dr No in 1962. Sean Con- nery, to be fair to him, gave a bit of class to the brute, but a brute James Bond undeniably was and since then, played by various actors, he has become more arro- gant, invincible, fearless and unbelievable. Where Bond led others followed, most notably Clint Eastwood in his 'Dirty Harry' films from the early 1970s. Eastwood's Inspector Harry Callahan of the San Fran- cisco police is in a permanently foul tem- per. He is habitually violent and frequently ignores the law. He is personally honest, however, and honesty makes the only dif- ference between the good guys and the bad guys in this kind of picture. Since then, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone and Bruce Willis have made Eastwood look relatively human and have brought the concept of the hero into disrepute. Their films, such as Eraser, Die Hard and Judge Dredd, to mention just a few recent examples, should be under- stood as power fantasies catering for the adolescent male and the kind of girl who despises girls. We can see in them a large element of that bully-worship which George Orwell identified as a corrupting influence in our popular culture more than 50 years ago.
In the world of these films women are usually victims. They are there to be attacked, intimidated, raped, murdered or sometimes rescued by the guy who appears to have been on the Charles Atlas body-building course. The ideal of the gentleman is not so much despised as entirely forgotten. Now to be a man, it seems that you have to be either a bully or a wimp. Is art imitating life or vice versa? Certainly the behaviour of sporting heroes and their fans has moved in the same direc- tion as the films. Film-makers do not work outside a social context.
Women are now appearing to meet a need, which was being ignored, for con- vincing stories of courage in the face of real danger, vulnerability and fear. More films with female heroes are in the pipeline. Several important recent releases have been built around them. Contact, star- ring Jodie Foster, is due out later this sum- mer and promises to be the first serious and intelligent film about extraterrestrial Intelligence. It is based on a novel by Carl Sagan, the popular and distinguished astronomer who died quite recently. Foster will be a scientific hero who makes contact with the ETs and returns to earth. All this can be seen, very plausibly, I think, as reli- gious metaphor. Jodie Foster is one of the few Hollywood actors, perhaps the only one, with the intellectual presence to sus- tain a role of this kind.
Jodie Foster is a central figure in the female hero genre because of her role as the trainee FBI agent Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs, one of the most influential films of the last ten years. Her performance is one of blazing intensity. Indeed, the film is an archetypal story of our period in cultural history: the female hero versus the serial killer. In this picture the leading woman is not a victim, nor is she there to provide the love interest for the male hero, nor does she get in the way and create more problems. Clarice Starling is bright and tenacious and devoted. She is vulnerable and tortured by insecurity as a woman in what is predominantly a man's world, and also as someone from the back- woods of West Virginia who is trying to succeed in the great metropolitan world of the Bureau. Consequently she is able to work us over emotionally in a way that would be quite impossible for any contem- porary male hero. In the nerve-racking cli- max of the picture she confronts the murderer alone and deals with him alone. Foster's Oscar was well-earned.
Meg Ryan deserved an Oscar for her role as Karen Walden, a heroic army heli- copter pilot in Courage Under Fire, with Denzel Washington. It was one of Fox International's major successes last year and is now out on video rental. Making a film about a female war hero was a bold stroke and it turned into one of the most truthful films about war ever to have come out of Hollywood — which may sound like a bit of a backhander. Ryan's pilot is as deglamorised as possible. She comes across as a pretty hard case who carries on doing her duty by the book until the adverse circumstances become fatal. There is no sentimentalism in this portrait, which makes the final emotional impact of the film all the greater.
Sharon Stone's film The Quick and the Dead deserved a much better reception than it got in this country. Here is one of the few examples — indeed, I cannot think of another — in which a female actually parodies a particular kind of male heroism, in this case the Clint East- wood 'spaghetti' westerns of the 1960s such as A Fistful of Dollars. By a peculiar irony Sharon Stone's film is a lot more persuasive than the Eastwood efforts, and she is much assisted by the brilliant Gene Hackman as the villain. The gunfights are less absurd than in the Eastwood pictures and Stone's 'girl with no name' is a moti- vated, complicated person, not a morally empty killing machine like Eastwood's character.
Another Alien picture with Sigoumey Weaver is waiting to spring at us in the dark, and Demi Moore has had her head shaved to be a soldier for In Pursuit of Honor. A film based on the cult television series The Avengers is now being made in Pinewood, with Ralph Fiennes as John Steed and Uma Thurman as the martially artistic Emma Peel, two mysterious secret agents who do battle with masterminds bent on world domination. Fiennes is a brave man to take the role of Steed because in The Avengers on television the man was generally a 'feed' for the woman. Patrick Macnee, a good journeyman actor, played Steed as a foppish, rather absurd character. All the interest was focused on the hard-punching, high-kicking woman, played first by Honor Blackman and then by Diana Rigg. These were female heroes without doubt, and also slightly dodgy sex symbols. Xena, the Warrior Princess, who is played with great gusto and humour by Lucy Lawless, is another — and even more outrageous — example. If it is true what they say, that Xena has become a feminist icon in the States, then American feminists are a lot more broad-minded than we have been led to believe.
`I'm afraid your main arteries are blocked.' Putting Alicia Silverstone into a Batman movie as Batgirl was a good idea. It did not work, though, partly because the film as a whole is a shambles and partly because she had to share space with the fatuous charac- ter of Robin. Batman and Batgirl would have been a better combination.
Female hero pictures are generally far more intelligent and real and emotionally touching than the macho-man productions. They can exert a moral influence which James Bond would sneer at. Tough girls are nice. We must hope that the female hero does not become corrupt in her turn under Hollywood pressure. It would be an encouraging trend in our popular culture if good currency were to drive out bad.
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