Cinema
Barb Wire (18, selected cinemas) Rebecca (PG, Everyman) Copycat (18, selected cinemas)
Pambo, the role model
Mark Steyn
I'm not as devoted a student of Pamela Anderson Lee as my colleague Stephen Glover (Media studies, 6 April), but I will say this: she's the nearest thing to a posi- tive role model for women in this week's movies.
Barb Wire is Hollywood's low-budget attempt to turn Pam into Pambo, a female action hero, a Sylvester Stallone with smaller breasts. Pamela herself has made many creative contributions to the concept: for example, after she'd recounted to him a dream in which she was doing a sexually provocative dance in a rubber dress while being sprayed with champagne and two fire hoses, the director David Hogan decided that this was a brilliant idea for the open- ing sequence. He has rendered it extremely faithfully, and even found a latex dress that matches her lips. But what counts is the `Rasta la vista, baby' moment, as Pamela swivels her bazookas at the bad guys and delivers her unlikely catchphrase: 'Don't call me babe.'
Other than that, it's a great week for cowering women, with an extensive choice of cowering options: in Mary Reilly, Julia Roberts is a housemaid terrorised by her master; in Rebecca, Joan Fontaine is a mis- tress terrorised by her housekeeper; and, in Copycat, Sigourney Weaver is terrorised by Harry Connick Jnr — not by his last album, which was cheesy enough, but by his acting, which is even more so. It is a sorry state of affairs that Rebecca, made in 1940, is the only one of these films in which the terror seems to rise organically from character and psychology and situa- tion — rather than just being imposed on the dramatis personae by the dictates of formula. I'm not sure you'd find many con- temporary leading ladies willing to play Maxim de Winter's nervous second wife. Even at the time, it was said that Joan Fontaine was cast only because she came with an inbuilt inferiority complex (apropos her sister Olivia de Havilland), and both Hitchcock, for his usual power-trip reasons, and Olivier, because he was annoyed that Vivien Leigh had been rejected for the role, bullied and degraded Miss Fontaine during the filming. It worked so well that the on-screen tension between the stars is palpable. But Fontaine wins easily: she makes the self-regardingly brooding Olivier look a piker. If you've never seen the film on a big screen, it's worth the effort, just for the scene in the summer house.
Jon Amiel's Copycat, on the other hand, is a That's Entertainment! for serial-killer buffs. Sigourney Weaver stars as a celebrity speaker on the serial-killer lecture circuit. After one lecture, she is attacked by Harry Connick Jnr, whose pimply complexion is one of the few genuine features of this film. Thereafter, she retreats to her apartment and refuses to come out for the rest of the picture, even though (are you following this?) another serial killer has been in the apartment trawling through her underwear.
Every plot mechanism in this picture reeks of contrivance: thus, the reason Miss Weaver doesn't just move to another part of town is that she is suffering from agora- phobia. The literal meaning of agoraphobia is fear (phobia) of the marketplace (agora), and, in a way, that's what the picture suf- fers from. They're terrified that the market is demanding more and more ingenious ways for women to wind up with knives pressed to their throats as some psycho shreds their blouses, and that all the neat ideas have been used up.
So Copycat is just what it says: a com- pendium of serial killer techniques of the last 20 years, a sort of serial killer version of those Now That's What I Call Music! compilation albums — Now That's What I Call Sick! perhaps. It turns out that this other serial killer (not Connick) is copying all the other serial killers, one at a time, in perfect recreations of their various tech- niques. A kind of psychotic Mike Yarwood, he executes a perfect Boston Strangler, then sashays into Son of Sam and moves on to a touch of Jeffrey Dahmer.
At which point, you begin to wish Dah- mer had found room in his Frigidaire for Amiel and his colleagues. Copycat is a well- named film: everything in it is copied from some other thriller, notably Silence of the Lambs. But it's one thing to copy other movies, quite another to copy real-life killers. Somewhere out there are the par- ents and siblings and friends of Dahmer's and the Son of Sam's victims, and yet here is a picture which punctiliously restages these celebrity killers' murders right down to the position of the corpse — for no more serious purpose than a gimmicky par- lour game. In its willingness to recycle real human pain as novelty entertainment, Copycat is truly revolting.
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