The Scariest Woman On Film, Ever

I almost didn’t make it to Halloween (or even October) with a post, and up to now I’d have said the scariest woman I’ve ever met was my night shift nurse.  

I won’t bore you with details as to why I’ve been away from the blog; suffice it to say that a prolonged hospital stay puts the idea of monsters and strong women (especially those carrying bedpans) pretty much into perspective. 

But I did encounter Myra, the day shift nurse who bore an uncanny resemblance to Barbara Shelley (the Gorgon in the Hammer film).  I mentioned said resemblance to her (trying to keep the lust out of my voice) and—alas—it was just a name to her.  But she did Google old Barbara and saw all that sexiness, and told me she was properly flattered.

She also asked me a question that I answered with surprising ease.  And I still would stand by the answer, even though I was pretty doped up the first time the question was posed. 

“Who’s the scariest woman you ever saw in a movie?”

It sets the mind a-reeling, remembering Barbara as the vampire woman from Dracula, Prince of Darkness, or another Barbara, last name Steele, the vicious vampire-witch in Bava’s Black Sunday.   Or any of a dozen modern blood-swilling women who start out looking fairly normal and hot, and grow those troublesome fangs.  

The best of these, even after all these years, is still the toothsome Salma Hayek (one of the best-named vampire women ever, Santanico Pandemonium) in the matchless Rodriguez classic, From Dusk Till Dawn, a cinema gorefest which, far more than Grindhouse, captures the essence of grindhouse sexploitation and blood-letting.  

But the scariest woman ever on film, for me—this is one man’s opinion—is entirely human throughout the movie.  

She never grows fangs, sprouts fur, or, more’s the pity, sheds clothes.  She never even sleeps with a guy in order to do a Black Widow number (you know, where the woman murders or castrates some poor schlep who thinks he’s going to get some).  Nor does she murder out of revenge, hatred or spite.   But murder she does, and memorably. 

She’s a horrendously strong personality, who kills others so she can survive herself.  She is not supernatural, but a human monster—twisted and self-righteous as she is, you can’t laugh her off.  Sadly, she’s barely known in this country. 

She’s Juno (played with peerlessly selfish evil by the largely unsung Natalie Mendoza) in the 2005 Neil Marshall horror masterwork, The Descent. 

This gruesome offering is about a group of six women who go spelunking in an unmapped, dark-as-hell cave and, naturally, become trapped.   

They get hungry and they get desperate, not unlike the poor fools in Blair Witch.  

And they get scared, because they’re not alone.  

There are—things—down there with them. 

If you’ve never seen it, do yourself a favor and get the DVD, and then set up a showing in the pitch-blackest atmosphere you can manage in your apartment or house.   

Treat it just as you would any horror experience that you shouldn’t see alone (and you may have noticed that few people like to watch horror films alone at home—in a crowded theater, surrounded by your pack, it’s much more fun to break the tension with laughter).   

And then, if you have the courage, see it alone. 

Incidentally, if you really want a mind-shattering experience, try and get the uncut version—it adds a nearly unbearable final minute that the director removed from American prints.  The feel bad ending of the century, and audiences here never saw it. 

And just to be a purist, end your viewing there.  Don’t bother with The Descent 2.  It adds nothing but a bunch of stupidly macho men in the same cave to the mix, and it basically sucks. 

But Juno, in the original?   What a frightening, beautifully strong villainess, and she’s still swinging at the things in the cavern when she disappears from sight.   

But I personally don’t think they have a chance against her. 

The Hunger Games: Hello Again, Jane Austen OR Why No Good Heroes This Time?

I was as thrilled as most writers and parents with the success of Suzanne Collins’ remarkable trilogy, The Hunger Games and its sequels, and their inevitable morphing into a film franchise—but the first film didn’t give me many of the joys of Collins’s prose. 

It did reinforce my opinion, seeing the characters made solid, that Collins is the new Jane Austen.

Like the best Austen novels, Hunger Games matches up a headstrong, balanced, resourceful and courageous female with a guy who needs to grow a pair. 

If you’ve never read an Austen, do not wait—go grab Emma (my favorite), Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility or Mansfield Park, all free from your library if you don’t want to pay the 99 cent download fee, and you’ll find the astounding heroine Katniss Everdeen in Austen’s pages, most especially in the first two books. 

Unfortunately, you’ll also find the barely adequate, weeps-at-a-moment’s-notice Peeta Mellark by that heroine’s side.  In Emma, the male paramour is Mr. Knightley; in Pride and Prejudice, Mr. Darcy. 

They’re nice enough guys, and as masculine as their times allow them to be.  But they seem to be matched up with Austen’s superlative heroines simply because they’re the most available men, and the best of a bad lot, from the pitifully vain, socially-warped wretches that make up her male character roster.  

Austen wasn’t a man-hater or even much of a feminist—she simply knew the age wherein she lived, where a man, even if not desirable physically or emotionally or morally, was still desirable as a husband. 

Because, well, women need men.   Jane knew it; most modern movies still relish the idea.  Suzanne Collins—and Hollywood—didn’t stray from that formula.  

Still, no one has ever equalized the playing field. 

No one has ever matched up a truly brave, strong female character with a truly brave, completely adequate male.  It simply doesn’t happen.   

Hermione in the Harry Potter books?  Ten times the brains and courage of Ron Weasley. 

Eowyn in Lord of the Rings?  Slaughtered the Witch King.  Can even Aragorn boast that? 

Edward and Jacob and Bella?  You’re kidding, right?

Consider the eligible men Katniss has to choose from, all two of them.  It’s Peeta or Gale Hawthorne, both alike as twin toy grooms on a stale wedding cake, each with no more erotic excitement, mental stimulus or material promise than the other. 

Baker boy Peeta spends the better part of the games laid up in a cave in tears, waiting for his emotional dough to rise; Gale spends the whole book (and movie) mooning over Katniss’s video images, as if he were missing his Mommy (at least the Twilight guys had erotic awareness going for them).

Every non-eligible older man in the book, from the mentor Haymitch Abernethy to the brutish villain Marvel, seems more competent and attractive than these two. 

Even the vile president Snow has all that cool power and cash.   

And there are no other strong females anywhere else except for the wicked ones in the manhunt.   All we get are Katniss’s washed-out mother, tremulous younger sister and the scarily vapid Effie Trinket. 

It’s as if it would take away from the protagonist’s courage by surrounding her with brave people.  

It’s quite a conundrum, this lack of courageous balance among the sexes; even Shakespeare never solved it.

 

Anthony and Cleopatra?  She’s got him firmly by the balls.  Macbeth and Lady M?   She collapses by Act Four.   Even Romeo is a waterfly up against the superb Juliet, with her utter love of loving at the expense of all else.

So the playing field—or hunting arena—will probably never achieve equilibrium.  If old Bill couldn’t do it, who can? 

Meanwhile, it’s nice to have Katniss around; the self-sufficient, powerful female protagonist is so rare that a good one makes us doubly joyful.   

If only there were one good, brave male out there hunting with her.  

Or for her. 

The Trashing Of A Great Action Heroine, Part Two

(Spoilers)

Imagine this: the next Indiana Jones movie lands him on the drear far side of the moon.  

There are no ancient ruins, no Nazis or any other bad guys, no sacred artifacts.  Also, he’s lost his whip and hat in the explosive landing.  

The movie is just him sitting around waiting to die.

 

Preposterous, you say?  No one would make a movie like that and expect to get an audience? 

The makers of Alien³ did.  Director David Fincher did (he went on to do Social Network, Fight Club and Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, so his life isn't all bad).  

Don’t blame Fincher for the movie, either; the poor bastard was writing the script as he filmed it, since the original, insanely enough, was vetoed while the film was in pre-production.  He later disavowed the finished product, as well he should have. 

The younger me went to see the movie, charged and eager to see more ass-kicking by Sigourney Weaver, who had entered the pantheon of great movie action heroines (there are only a few) with Aliens. 

The audience around me was charged as well; the strong woman was back in our lives. 

And then the movie did something I’ve seldom seen in a theater.

It allowed an entire audience to deflate in five minutes. 

It begins with Ripley’s spaceship crashing on a planet with a penal colony.  Everyone else on board—including the sweet little girl we were rooting for all through Aliens—dies.  Yup, Newt is dead.  Geez.  

And the film is nothing but Ripley fighting and interacting with ordinary and unwashed prisoners; she even has utterly meaningless sex with one of them.  

Oh yeah, and some Aliens show up to kill them all. 

And at the end—Ripley dies.  Yeah, she dies, too.  Giving birth to an Alien. 

In other words, the filmmakers thought it would be a great idea to have an established heroic protagonist killed off by an enemy who triumphs at the end.  No wonder it bombed--talk about nihilistic.

Imagine Jaws with a downer ending where the shark eats Roy Scheider.  E.T. gunned down by the FBI before he reaches his ship.  Bella and Edward breaking up at the end of Breaking Dawn (actually, that last one isn’t a bad idea; the actors did in real life, after all).  

Ripley came back as a clone in Alien Resurrection—presumably just so they could get a little more juice out of the franchise—but despite a sleek new physicality, this Ripley was a washout, dish-pan-dowdy, dull and more sappy than ever, this time shedding crocodile tears over an Alien infant (!)  And in neither of the latter movies was she allowed to be “in charge” of anything.  Resurrection also bombed.  

I realize I’m talking about movies made in the ‘90s, but I have a point. 

The greatest sci-fi heroine ever was allowed to appear in only two movies showing her ascending strength and vitality, and then she spent two more in movie hell, a washed-up ghost of her former self. 

Has there ever been a comparable heroine in action/fantasy movies, indeed in any genre, since then? 

We’ve had jokes foisted on us—the whole pantheon (all two of them) of the Lara Croft movies.  We’ve had kick-ass women in film flops—Suckerpunch, Sin City.  We’ve had nothing close to Ripley, ever. 

Were the filmmakers that scared of making another movie with a strong female lead that they trashed the character?  Looks that way.  And they’ve never taken a chance on another. 

Oh, we’ve had plenty of brunette sole survivors of horror films.  The Alien prequel, Prometheus, has one. 

Neve Campbell in the Scream series comes close to the track record.  But she's no Ripley.  No way.    

I sigh over that.  

Then I get on with my life, expecting that the all-male action film Expendables 2, coming soon to a theater near me, will be kick-ass.  

The Trashing Of A Great Action Heroine, Part One

Anyone remember Ripley from the Alien Movies?   Pushed her down good, didn’t they?

No, not the aliens, although they were part of it.  I mean the guys who make movies. 

I don’t know of any other female character in cinema, horror or not, who was so heroic at the apex of her story arc and so pushed under at the end of it.  It’s the perfect example of what most audiences now just accept as a convention:  the girl is gonna be alright until she takes her clothes off.  (To most guys, she’s alright as soon as she starts taking them off).

Alien, starring Sigourney Weaver as Lt. Ripley, is enjoying a cable renaissance  in the wake of Prometheus (an Alien prequel that did modest box office and got a sequel, natch). 

In that first film, Weaver’s Lt. Ripley doesn’t make a strong impression at the outset; she seems soft and pliable, a space teddy without the lingerie, and, despite a moment of grit when she refuses to let a crew member onboard (he’s carrying an Alien in utero, so she was right about that), the commander of their ship the Nostromo overrides her.  

She’s there to be dominated (she did undress at the end). 

She turns out to be not only the strongest person on board, but also the sappiest.  We cheer when she outsmarts and outruns the beast; we hoot when, with only minutes to go before the ship vaporizes, she goes back into the bad place to retrieve her cat. 

So we’re feeling ambivalent about her when she shoves off, cat intact, and finds the alien hiding in her escape pod.  She’s already near-naked and weaponless; despite that, she finishes the thing off for good.  

Without realizing it, director Ridley Scott and Weaver as Ripley had established a horror film convention—the female (always a brunette) who is the sole survivor of the monstrous goings-on. 

So when James Cameron (the Avatar of action innovation) filmed Aliens, with dozens of the wriggling horrors going after a group of testosterone-laden marines, he upped Ripley’s machismo factor a hundred-fold.   The Marines perish; she doesn’t, a regular Rambolina. 

And she’s allowed the same sappiness near the end, which doesn’t seem sappy at all this time—she’s rescuing a darling little girl, sole survivor of a doomed colony, from the Mother Alien.  No hooting there—we’re cheering all the way.

There’s even a Battle of the Big Mamas at the film’s end, the most perfect clash of Lovecraftian organic horror with sleek American techno-ingenuity I’ve ever seen.   When Ripley tells the arch-mother/monster “Get away from her, you bitch!” we’ve in hero heaven.   

She defines kick-ass.   

Ripley as a character was at a cinematic and heroic peak seldom seen in cinema. 

That’s when she fell and fell big.  

More in part two, including the reason I'm writing about a franchise that began thirty-three years ago. 

The BLONDE ALWAYS DIES

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

I was watching a TV rerun of the movie The Ruins the other day, and, although I had seen the movie before, I experienced the same disappointment.  

I wondered why a brooding, intense terror tale such as this could become such a run-of-the-mill teen slasher/killer flick (substitute the prescient jungle vines for Freddy Krueger and you got Nightmare on Jungle Circle).  

If you never read Scott Smith, please do yourself a favor and pick up a copy (any used book store should carry him) of either The Ruins or his other, earlier masterpiece, A Simple Plan. 

Despite their nihilistic finales (and be warned: you feel totally hopeless for the protagonists at the end of each), they are riveting page-turning suspense classics (Plan is more tautly realistic, but get and read them both).   

Unhappily, Smith is the closest thing suspense/genre fiction has to Harper Lee in output (to be fair, he’s written two books to her one), but fans are quivering with hope that he’s got a third in the hopper.

Back to the movie.   Why was it so ordinary, so much the same as every other “teens dying in the face of an implacable menace” suspense thriller?   These poor kids—they faced Freddy, Jason, Death (in the Final Destination series) and mechanized Rube Goldberg traps (in both FD and the relentless Saw series).  

After a while, it’s all the same—death has the same face (usually Tobin Bell's or Tony Todd's, both sly and implacable and always playing games). 

Then I realized what happened.  I realized what had turned the second cinematic foray into Smith’s limited oeuvre into teen/blood fodder. 

Hair color.  

As almost anyone who’s a regular reader of literature knows, there is no genre that suffers more in transition to the screen than horror/fantasy/sci-fi.   

Numerous Harry Potter fans saw those character-filled, plot-filled beauties by J.K. Rowling get scissored down for the movies (they never did do Peeves the Poltergeist); Tolkien’s Ring trilogy, despite Peter Jackson’s brilliant films, is unrecognizable (fans of the books, while fascinated, were still disappointed—no Scouring of the Shire?).   

And Lovecraft?  Only Re-Animator has come close to doing that Miskatonic misogynist justice (although the Alien is mighty close to a Lovecraftian beastie). 

The transition problem has to do with visualization, but it's the visualization of something the imagination has already seen.  

When I read a book, I picture the protagonists, alive, individual and characterized by how they think and act as well as the way they look.  In the movies, all you’ve got is the looks, since there’s little time for anything else; we’ve got a story to get on with and only 100 minutes for it. 

I saw the blonde girl of the doomed party; I saw the brunette.  I knew the blonde would die in the ruins; I knew the brunette wouldn’t (Spoiler alert?  For whom?).   Sadly, that defined the entire film in a glance (and that wasn’t even how the book ended). 

I thought all the way back to House of Wax—the original Vincent Price 3-D number, which I saw in a revival house in San Francisco in the late 90s.  Carolyn Jones, whom I will forever remember as raven-dark Morticia Addams in the TV series, was wearing a blonde wig.  I knew she was going to die.  

In the remake, blonde Paris Hilton dies early (the audience loved it); Elisha Cuthbert does not (she is an actual blonde, but in the movie she was a light brunette).  

And in the case of Alison Lohman in Drag Me to Hell, well, she’s a stunning blonde, so I knew she was going to Hell before the opening credits ended.   

That's why a promising story like Smith's got shuttled into video limbo.  All we know for sure is the blonde will die.  

Also, if there's an African-American in the cast he will die first.  

But that's another post.  

HORRORS!  HE WANTS TO LOWER THE DRINKING AGE!

Actually, I do.  But I'm not doing it alone, nor am I recommending it alone.  

I've put away the horror film references (don't worry, this is a one-time break) and I'm trying a quick social commentary.  Being me, though, I'm using an idea that already horrifies a lot of readers.  

The MADD maedchens will disagree ferociously with me, but I believe the drinking age should be lowered to 18.  

In fact, I think society has already lowered it without telling us.  

I have three reasons for my belief—the rite of passage, enforcement apathy and the lone stand of a single college president.

First, virtually every other activity that we as a society deem an economic, personal or social rite of passage is legal at 18.  

An 18-year-old can vote, fight in a war, drive, babysit, own property and/or a business, sign a contract, get married, get tattooed, get surgically enhanced, star in pornography and gamble (within some limits)in Vegas.  

The drinking age at 21 seems an antiquated concept at best, an old maid of a law who doesn’t realize the circle of life is spinning on without her.  Legalizing 18-year-old drinking at the moment is almost an afterthought anyway, an “oh yeah” shoe Congress hasn’t dropped yet. 

Second, the law is soundly ignored in so many venues as to make it an absurdity.  

For every convenience store that says “no” to a 20-year-old co-ed looking to supply the party, she will find a dozen that say “yes.”  

Fake IDs (presented to myopic bartenders in dimly smoky clubs) are a bigger industry now than forged documents for Jews were under the Reichstag.  

And every family has one uncle or brother or cousin all willing to front for neophyte alkies and buy the booze.  The one most interested in partying will always buy.

Finally, there is the president of Notre Dame college, Father John Jenkins, who made headlines when he refused to use college funds to police off-campus parties, despite MADD boycotts and Federal threats of cutting funds (as close to blackmail as a government can get without getting actually Stalinist).    

Jenkins reasoned that his limited economic resources had better things to do for higher education, rather than bankrupting the fund hiring party Gestapo to make sure that all 99 bottles of beer stay on the wall. 

It’s time for us to own up, cut the cord, rend the veil, let the lame rise and walk and lower the drinking age.  It may be non-PC MADDness to say so, but we as a society already lowered it a long time ago; our actions deafen our words--and muzzle our over-ancient laws.  

A Lesson From Fifty Shades, via Twilight: Take A Famous Protagonist and Tie Her Up.

A Lesson From Fifty Shades, via Twilight:  Take A Famous Protagonist and Tie Her Up. 

I swear I wasn’t looking up stuff on Twilight.  Never want to get near it again, after that last movie (sure, I watch; it’s a guiltier pleasure than the books).  Unless Meyer writes another one—then one side, kids, I was here first.

But I did discover, in researching another hit novel in a totally different genre, one of the ways writers, like vampires, feed on one another, duplicating one success with something even more outrageous.

I’m not talking about teen vampire novels; those are going the tired way of all played-out phenomena.   

There are some fine vampire books out there still, and some great stuff by (and about) teens, but duplicating Meyer’s success at this stage is a waste of whatever writing talent there is left.  

I went to a Writer’s Conference a year ago.  It was really pretty much a series of commercials—they called them workshops—for whatever publishing ploy or product they wanted to sell unsuspecting authors; there wasn’t much literature being discussed, that’s for sure.  They had a workshop devoted to teen and vampire plot combinations that just might be successful in the wake of the Meyer saga. 

One author in particular was convinced he’d be rolling in the green stuff when he sold his novel about—get this, guys, this is such a great idea—an entire school of vampires!   Can you believe it?  Can’t wait for that one.   Maybe I don’t have to, I think it came and went.

All this says to me is: go your own way, and don’t try to duplicate a success by imitation.  Your imitation, no matter how hot, will be old news by the time it’s published.  No big green stuff there. 

Nevertheless, I did discover that one ingenious fan took Meyer’s characters of Edward and Bella and wrote her own version of their story, putting them into some wild bondage (and by “some” I mean a whole lot)  and numerous sadomasochistic scenarios, making them go through the most incredible master-slave relationship I’ve ever (breathlessly) read about. 

But then the author, whose name is E. L. James (maybe), having fed her hungry posts with the ever-popular characters of the dominant male and the submissive female, changed the names of her blog-post characters to Anastasia and Christian.  She took her blog, which had been drooled over faithfully by her mostly female readers (with, I’m guessing, a gratifying increase in kinky sexual activity when their significant others came home), and named the whole shemozzle Fifty Shades of Grey.

Thus the hit of the summer arose from the ashes of the hits of two, three and four summers ago.  

I’m going to try something like that.  I don’t expect the kind of success James had, but just as an intellectual exercise and challenge, adding bondage and lots o’ sex to a familiar protagonist’s life sounds dauntingly invigorating. 

How’s this:

 “The spent and gasping whore, reamed inside and out by the tender yet brutal thrusts of the sailor’s manhood, had, even while chained to the bed, experienced a sexual ecstasy she could not name and had never come close to in all her sodden and love-starved life before.  Nevertheless, she summoned enough strength to wave at the sailor’s crotch-swollen departing figure, remembering the true, warm and sensual wonders of the seaman (no pun intended), and call out, “When you get back to this town again, call me, Ishmael.”

I just know it’ll be big!   The book, I mean. 

Go Ahead and Kill Her, as Long as We Don’t Care About Her

Part Three   (plot spoilers)

There is one woman character in horror films whose movie death I really cared about, even though I know I wasn’t supposed to; the movie was designed for me not to care because it’s the kind of movie where no audience member cares who dies.  They just care how.

Gotta be the Saw series, right?  It went from a taut, tense and ingenious first feature (with Cary Elwes’ memorably sawing off his foot—offscreen—for a rousing finish) to basic horror-porn comedy.  I don’t know anyone who watches the Saw movies for their tension or suspense.   We watch to see how people die—we just wanna see the Rube Goldberg death devices. 

Don’t get me wrong—I have a soft spot for these, just as I do for the Final Destination traps they keep springing on dumb teens.  These scripts are such retreads that by now they must be written in Mad-Libs format:  “Seven people escape death in a __________________ but die one by one anyway, killed by a__________________, a ___________________, a ______________________, two ___________________  (fill in the blanks with “girder,”  “falling car,” “vibrator,” “E-Z-Bake oven” etc.).  More complicated deaths than these are not easy to find, and, like Saw, these movies have a sly sense of misdirection (you thought he’d get killed by the falling wall safe, but the rabid mole got him!)

Saw sequels are retreads too, but they did an ingenious thing midway in the series, replacing Jigsaw, who has a sense of ironic justice and occasionally allows for escapes, with Amanda, who shows no irony and allows no escapes, but still has an Old Testament sense of justice—we’re ALL guilty, so we all die.  

Two classy actors (Tobin Bell and Shawnee Smith) ground out these nemesis scenarios for ordinary people with fatal failings (Smith’s a sharp comedienne, too—check out reruns of Becker), and the body count ran into the dozens. 

But what about the one death I cared about?  It happened in Saw 3, which also has the changing of the guard from Bell to Smith, and the death that got to me was the killing of Dr. Lynn Denlon (Persian actress Bahar Soomekh, also terrific in Crash two years earlier).   Her death at the finale absolutely wrenched me, and I cannot explain why.  I have inklings, though.

Part of it is Soomekh’s talent; she has been quoted as saying that playing the part was close to the knuckle for her and that, unlike other performers who find horror parts a lark, she got right into the character’s emotions and they thoroughly depressed her (read her insightful interview for her own explanation of the emotive process).  

Part of it was the “will they-won’t they” seesaw (yes, I’m aware of the pun) of the ending, where it looks like she is indeed going to escape—maybe—no—yes?—nope.  I haven’t been that tense (and not pleasurably either) since Kate Capshaw was raised and lowered over the lava pit in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and I knew those thugs were not going to kill her.  

Dr. Denlon was another matter, though. 

I think where Jigsaw really got to me was in choosing the crime for which she dies.  She is depressed.  That was all; her estrangement from her husband Jeff makes her dead inside, the life drained from her.   It took me back to Emily Dickenson: “you, who were Existence, yourself forgot to live.”  I think everyone in the audience cringed at that a little—some of us asked ourselves:  “Why are you sitting in this movie when you should be out DOING something?”   She is depressed, and her punishment is death. 

She is strapped into a collar of shotgun shells; her ex Jeff tries valiantly, but fails, to save her.  This really is a cheat, because he actually passes all his tests, but jealous Amanda kills her anyway.   And all the while, Dr. Denlon is surrounded by that damn collar, affirming her love for Jeff, and her renewed need for life.  This is not just whitewash to escape; we can tell she means it.  She’s been reborn—do you really kill someone just reborn?  

Well, yes, you do if you’re Amanda. 

Now why does that death, out of all the ones I’ve seen in Saw (did you see Saw?  I saw Saw) hit me where I live?

Well, I was depressed at the time I saw it.  Just went through a divorce, and I experienced it as the loss of a loved one.  I had failed (at least emotionally) to save someone who was counting on me to come through, and that is a truly deep-seated fear for some, as it was for Jeff. 

Well, hey, maybe Saw 3 wasn’t the best movie to see in my state of mind.  But I wasn’t the only one in the audience with that fear.  Divorced or not, depressed or not, it’s universal, and in that moment of finality, a movie that was supposed to be fun, horrific escapism went right to my heart, armed with a collar of shotgun shells. 

The horror was there in plenty, but the horror-porn comedy of such movies, seeing people you don’t know or care about meet their exotic deaths, was gone.  

If I ever get too dismissive of Saw and Final Destination movies, which remind us, as Freddy and Jason used to, that death is out there and it’s only a matter of time before he gets us, all I have to do is think of Dr. Denlon.   You nailed me, Doc, you really did.  

Go Ahead and Kill Her, as Long as We Don’t Care About Her, Part Two

Time to get sad (OK, just me, you’re fine as you are) over a couple of fictional characters dying, as I prove my own theory about killing women onscreen being OK as long as we don’t get to know them. 

I (and the rest of the audience) briefly get to know Sarah, the ill-fated girlfriend of Sylvester Stallone’s buddy in the 1993 adventure Cliffhanger, in the three minutes or so she’s onscreen: she’s pretty, just had sex with the best buddy that morning and is no good at climbing, but she goes along because the boyfriend wants her to.   Mountain arm candy. 

Then her dumb son of a bitch boyfriend gets her into an untenable position on a mountaintop, from which Sly tries to rescue her.  

And in an unbearably taut sequence, her harness breaks apart (the scene is suspenseful all right, but not pleasurably so, because of the audience’s dread of what’s about to happen), and, despite Sly’s muscled grip and her heart-rending cries of “I don’t want to die, please help me, please help me”—whoops!   She falls to her death, screaming all the way down.

Am I a pussy for feeling bad about a movie character’s death?  Yes.  Do I realize that the scene was there just to give Sly some psychological underpinnings?   Sure.   But I cannot escape the fact that I would NOT have given a damn if the male best friend had been the one to fall.  But if the girl falls screaming, I’m affected by it.  We in the audience expect the box-office talent to keep a frightened girl safe, it’s that simple.

Some members of the audience were upset also; at the screening I saw, some were talking afterwards about the “cruel , heartless” edge of the scene.  Most of the complainers were women.  We had 100 minutes of derring-do and thrilling adventure after Sarah’s death, and that opening scene still made the movie a downer. 

It didn’t help much that a mountain-climbing expert pointed out to me, about a week later, that no harness would ever give way as Sarah’s did.  A real life death like that was well nigh impossible, he said.  Sorry, Sarah, you died just ‘cause you had to. 

The other woman whose cinematic death I keep remembering is that of Melanie, a press secretary in President Harrison Ford’s entourage in 1997’s Air Force One.  The bad Russian terrorist (Gary Oldman, that acting god among villains) has a gun to her head, and is calling to the president to come out of hiding or he’ll shoot her.  He’ll count to ten.   Remember, this is a woman he’s threatening to kill. 

When, in all the history of movies, has a bad guy ever pulled the trigger on a woman?  We in the audience knew he wouldn’t.  We knew Harrison Ford wouldn’t stand for it.  He is also Han Solo, he is also Indiana Jones.  So we knew it would work out for Melanie. 

The president would surrender (and find some other way to defeat evil) or he’d come up with a snazzy way to distract the gunman.  Besides, Melanie was sweet and pretty and we had gotten to like her.   If it was a guy being threatened, like the idiot negotiating with Alan Rickman in Die Hard, we would have worried.   It’s a girl, no sweat. 

The president doesn’t come out.  He doesn’t come up with a snazzy distraction.  The baddie reaches ten and, unbelievably, pulls the trigger.   We were stunned into silence.  

Cliffhanger and Air Force One were box office hits. 

These two filmed deaths were done by actresses who, of course, did not die.  They wrapped up the shoot and are still out there acting (Melanie—Donna Bullock—is on One Life to Live, Sarah—Michelle Joyner—appeared recently on Bones). 

And yet, their onscreen deaths affected me as if they were real. 

I’m absolutely convinced it was because both scenes depicted the deaths of helpless women. 

I have one more murder to discuss (no, I’m not Hercule Poirot, it’s just one more film), and my theory as to why these scenes are what they are, and what they’ve led to—that movies are so new they’ve gone back to really old ideas. 

 

Tell you about it next time. 

Go Ahead and Kill Her, as Long as We Don’t Care About Her, Part One

Remember Siskel and Ebert, before the one’s death and the other’s mouth cancer all but silenced them?  

I was a mere kid in 1986 when they broadcast their “thumbs down” review of the Rutger Hauer psycho-killer flick The Hitcher, and you’ve never seen such righteous wrath in your life as those two served up. 

Both thought the film was an outrage, with gratuitous and needless violence; one crowning act had them both traumatized during the viewing.  Siskel afterwards said something to the effect that “since we believe in artistic freedom, we think a film like this should be allowed to be made, and then not seen by anyone.” 

What were they so horrified about?  The killing of Jennifer Jason Leigh.  She played a waitress, an innocent drawn into the cat and mouse game of Hauer and the protagonist, C. Thomas Howell.  She is just a sweet girl trying to help a guy in trouble, acting out of pure human charity.  And she dies for it.

And this is no ordinary death.  Hauer chains her arms to a stationary pipe and chains her legs to the back of a semi-truck.  And after an insufferably long session tormenting Howell with the threat of her death, he actually hits the gas, effectively pulling her apart.  

Siskel and Ebert had never seen such a death on film before; probably no one had, except the viewers of snuff films.  Check out www.kindertrauma.com for a brief discussion of it, where the author of the blog admits it still bothers him, decades later.  Maybe it really shouldn’t have been seen by anyone.  

The irony is that it wasn’t.  The actual dismemberment took place off-screen; the sounds of screams (and, as I remember, tearing flesh) fed the imagination well enough.  As long as the imagination gets fed, the horror hits home. 

The Hitcher was not a big hit (the 2007 remake with Sean Bean in the Hauer role was an even more resounding flop), but the 1986 film’s producer had a different reason, the polar opposite of Siskel and Ebert’s.   He thought the film would have done better box office if JJL’s killing had been shown.   His rationale was that people need to see a horror that is promised; that it cheats the audience when you don’t show it. 

Speaking of feeding the imagination, Stephen King once evinced that we have alligators in our minds.  He figured that you can be a civilized, outstanding non-Hitcher type who does good and never harms a fly “as long as you keep the gators fed.”   Feeding the gators probably includes the catharsis of watching violence, but it’s interesting that Siskel and Ebert’s view, over time, has grown silent, while producer’s view has grown more prophetic.

Some major studio releases have shown some fairly horrific deaths, in box office blockbusters, no less.  And in common with JJL’s killing,the victims were all women, innocent and young, and regrettably well known to the viewer. 

Why was it “regrettable” that we got to know them?  Who were these unfortunates?   And why did these films succeed where The Hitcher didn’t?  

That’s for part two.  

Vampire Women: I Want One, Please.

The girl went on her knees, and bent over me, simply gloating. There was a deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive, and as she arched her neck she actually licked her lips like an animal, till I could see in the moonlight the moisture shining on the scarlet lips and on the red tongue as it lapped the white sharp teeth. Lower and lower went her head . . . I closed my eyes in languorous ecstasy and waited, waited with beating heart.

No, that’s not from a pornographic work, nor a “racy” book from back in the day.   

It’s from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and if it reads like a man about to passively submit to oral sex, that’s not surprising; Stoker realized early on the ravenously strong link between vampirism and sexuality, far better than any of his predecessors.  Nowadays, there's scarcely a vampire in literature or film without an erotic subtext; it comes with the fangs, I guess. 

In Stoker's Victorian age, open sexuality was unacceptable (at least as conversation) in polite society, and a woman who was known to be sexually active was a social outcast.  

And what are vampires?  Social outcasts, blood-drinking children of the night.  

What better way to exemplify the “forbidden” nature of sexuality than by cloaking it in a work of fiction as nocturnal blood-letting murder? 

Notice also that the narrator, Jonathan Harker (if you know the book, you’ll remember he has a fiancée and romantic commitments at home), is extraordinarily passive, “waiting with beating heart” like a virginal teen on prom night.   The force of the near-rape (the Count interrupts it before it can be consummated) does not rest with the man but with the woman, and the man’s commitments to  a previous lover vanish; he is happy to let them go in the face of a strong woman. 

Gender-reversal statistics aside, rape has always been classified as a male fantasy or male activity--even, in some cultures, a male prerogative.   Stoker’s novel presented readers with a new kind of monster, but he did something more; by pouring erotic wine into the wine-skins of fantasy literature, Stoker ruptured the skins. 

The novel doesn’t confine sexuality to the denizens of the castle.  Both Lucy Westenra and Mina Harker (yes, Jonathan marries her; that vampire woman at the castle meant nothing to him, I’m sure) become stronger, more fearful and much more interesting when the Count puts the bite on them. 

Lucy, already in the throes of vampirism and speaking to her fiancé Arthur on her death bed, is “voluptuously” begging for a kiss.  Mina, once bitten, develops second sight, as well as extraordinary courage in facing the vampire women: “None safer from them than I am,” she says, thus declaring both her defiance of the powers of darkness and her affinity to them. 

If vampirism can do that to the pale, pallid and defenseless heroines of the Victorian age, imagine it inflicted on a girl with modern sexual and social sensibilities today! 

For some reason, I have seldom seen that metamorphosis in film or on TV.  True Blood was once a possible exception; now it only liberates human women to become vampire participants in a soap opera that long ago abandoned its source material.  The transformed girls still have little power above and beyond what they had as humans, but the sex is a little better.   There is none of the frightening strength and sensual role-reversal that Stoker crafted so subtly. 

In fact, vampirism in movies doesn’t seem to change most characters at all, except for the fangs.  Most fictional female victims, if they are sexually active, turn into sexually active vampires; if they are pale and repressed, they become pale and repressed vampires, pathetically uninteresting (no, I must be wrong; I’m sure Edward will love her forever just as she is). 

The best filmed depicition of the liberating force of vampirism was, I think, all the way back in 1966, with Hammer Films’ Dracula Prince of Darkness.  

The character of Helen, played by the inimitable Barbara Shelley, began the film as a repressed spinster; once the Count (the irresistible Christopher Lee) had put the bite on her, she turned into a free-wheeling sexual force, in scanty night dress, lovingly fanged and showing a lech for her sister-in-law (when Sis asks for her husband Charles, Helen says, “you don’t need—Charles”).  

A real vampire woman, like Helen in Prince of Darkness, like the women in Castle Dracula, is someone every man wants, and every woman wants to be, whether they will admit it or not.  She has strength, she stands up to the male population, she is the rapist rather than the rapee (if it should come to that) and she’s sexually relaxed and happy about it.

In the Stoker novel, when the Count confronts the vampire women and rages against them, they answer with “ribald coquetry”—they laugh like defiant happy hookers, with fangs.  

I want a vampire woman, please.  Any age, any time.  Soon, though, I'm not getting any younger.  

Is Twilight Bad Writing?  Part Two

Readers of a blog like this will inevitably sharpen one of two axes—the fans who love her work are waiting to pounce; folks who hate her are waiting to attack me as a literary softie who’s too indulgent.    

 Both sides should attack, really, since this column is about what Stephanie Meyer got right—NOT what she “got write.”

 I do not say she writes well, since there’s not much to recommend there.

 She is guilty of all the things the previous blog covered—too much verbiage, overwrought style and jaw-dropping diction  (my favorite example is Bella saying: “forbidden to remember, terrified to forget.  It was a hard line to walk.”  It’s also a hard line to read without breaking up). 

Beyond that, as a storyteller she doesn’t bring much to the party, since her characters seem to have no sense of self-realization (or self-effacing humor).  What do we say about an author who presents Bella (in Eclipse) begging Edward, for dozens of pages, to make her a vampire, then when he agrees on condition that she marry him,  has her say, “I don’t know if my mother will approve."

I’m not in the mood for puncturing written work, however, and there are endless blogs with endless barbs about the overbearing male characters in Meyer’s works.   There have been massive protests about the anti-feminism in her schema.   And there are continuous forums about the fact that her protagonist is a woman who is treated like shit by her lover.

So what did Stephanie Meyer get right?

She wrote four books about a woman being treated like shit. 

That is the most powerful element in her storytelling, and, like it or not, that element is enormously popular in literature and film.  It has always been enormously popular. 

Just to name a recent example, in the big summer blockbuster this year, The Avengers, the male superheroes, including that self-absorbed womanizer Tony Stark (Iron Man), got the lion’s share of the action, and all the good lines.  

It’s hard to remember anything the lone female superhero Black Widow got to do (or say), but she was certainly right there for her share of the “women-are-good-for-one-thing-only” jokes.   Virtually every female in every kick-ass action film is in the same predicament.   Woman-hating?  Sure.  Big box office?   Absolutely. 

Consider a recent, and massive, internet literary hit, Fifty Shades of Grey.   It began as author E. L. James’ blog, a continuous serial about a literature student who encounters a brilliant, gloriously handsome man who treats her like shit (in explicit sexual ways).   

Some reader have made feeble protests about this one—nothing major, because I suspect they, like all the other readers caught in James’ sadomasochistic web, are too busy gobbling up the details of Anastasia Steele’s incredibly erotic, utterly submissive relationship with Christian Grey.   

Go back even to the classics; pick the greatest authors around.  Nathanial Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter is about a good woman guilty of a single sin, whose community treats her like shit (and she never really gets to redeem herself).  Shakespeare’s Othello is about a jealous man treating his wife like shit, and as a punching bag (before he kills her).   

Jane Eyre’s Mr. Rochester treats her like shit; Heathcliff (in Wuthering Heights) treats Cathy like shit; Pearl Buck’s Good Earth protagonist Wang Lung treats his miraculously devoted wife O-Lan like shit.  Let’s not even get into the spousal abuse of characters such as Estella (Dickens only gives hints of wife-beating in Great Expectations) and of Nancy (much more murderous and explicit in Oliver Twist). 

Even in Jane Austen’s novels, her intelligent, strong-minded and mildly rebellious females, who are some of the finest, sharpest characterizations in all of literature, submit to marriage with men who are beneath them, at least in intuition and intelligence.   Their marriages are celebrated, since, in Austen’s society, women were incomplete until they were wives. 

Oprah may disagree, but the fact is that none of these works were written to make women stronger.  

None of them had feminist agendas (not even Austen).  None of them take women out of their social boundaries (although Austen satirized those boundaries while Dickens and Buck lamented them).   

In most of these works, the women are moths to the men’s flames. 

That’s discouraging, and it’s also hot.   Readers hate dominance, yet they love to be dominated.   The guy who says, “Treat a woman like a whore in bed” elicits the response from women: “What a terrible thing for a man to say!  What’s his number? “

Everyone from Stephanie Meyer to Shakespeare has understood, wittingly or unwittingly, that inside most readers—enough to make the bestseller lists—is a masochistic child who wants to be dominated, told what to do and then punished or abandoned, often for no reason, without a hint of moral uplift to any of it.   Readers gobble it up, from Desdemona to Harry Potter. 

Why does Bella suffer and whine?   Because she ought to, and so should we.   

That is why Stephanie Mayer is a terrible writer of terrible books, and I can’t wait for her next one.  

What a shame the series ended at four.