The Talkies / Batting Around

...But once such Tough Women have cleansed their cinematic world of annoyances, they may begin to wonder what is the point of being women at all...

...The cartoons cling to unreality because in cartoonland none of life's disasters or losses is permanent, but the same fantasy world seems an appropriate resting place for such an old-time sex kitten as Holli Would...

...The traditional-feminine appears to her as only another grotesque disguise that she put off when she chose to put on her cat suit, trashed all the girlish stuff in her apartment, and went looking for revenge against men...

...Putting into the role someone like Melanie Griffith instead of, say, Rene Russo, the killer dame of Lethal Weapon 3, and allowing her to display lots of skin is Hollywood's way of giving its audience a sly ironic wink...

...The sugary Prelude to a Kiss tries to make us love it, too...

...I don't think that it is mere fancy on my part to see this as a sign of Hollywood's new and not very robust longings for more traditional, "family" values...

...Typical woman...

...At one point she says: "He makes me feel the way I hope I really am...

...yet a look at male-female differences does come this month, and from a very surprising source...

...Melanie Griffith in A Stranger Among Us fights and shoots and does everything else like a man...

...In the end she turns down a colleague's offer of two weeks in Aruba and says that she is waiting for her destined man...

...Merely physical accidents, either of youth and beauty or age and ugliness are just that—which would be a more uplifting notion if Ryan and Baldwin were not themselves very attractive actors who end up together just as they would have done in any old-time Hollywood movie...

...I think the attraction of miscasting an obvious pussy-cat like her in roles such as these is that the director doesn't have to work to show that she retains a feminine quality...

...Monogamy is in, it seems...

...Russo isclearly the woman destined for Mel Gibson...

...There is just the hint of tragedy about this, just the suggestion that the new feminist world splits all women down the middle...

...Girls can play baseball too, just like guys...

...Certainly there is not much else ironic about A Stranger Among Us...

...In Batman Returns, both Batman and the Penguin (Danny DeVito) are orphans, lonely figures who share in the pathos of not belonging...

...That is what Hollywood is terrified of saying...

...She is even allowed to be impressed by Thal's sister's telling her that she wants to be a wife and mother because nothing could be more important...

...In the heat of battle on the diamond, Miss Davis shows no partiality to her sister, advising the manager that it's time to pull her out towards the end of a hard-fought game when she doesn't want to go...

...The whole thing is silly in the extreme, but its Cartesian soul/body dualism makes the point that it is really the soul that we love when we love...

...Having emerged out of the mousy little secretary, Selina Kyle, Catwoman is not about to become a mere "appendage" (as her psychobabbling ex-boyfriend puts it) of someone else...

...But in the end she utters the ultimate heresy, the thing that all women believe but that all men know is untrue: "It's only a game...

...A young bride (Meg Ryan) exchanges souls with an old man (Sydney Walker) on her wedding day, making it necessary for her bridegroom (Alec Baldwin) first to discover the fact and then to switch them back...

...Love, marriage, and families in the film seem to be regarded with a nostalgic longing usually reserved for the unattainable...

...Even Max Shreck, who is by no means a mere one-dimensional villain, is allowed to voice a not altogether villainous doubt about the moral "disease" abroad which "changes happy homemakers into catwomen...

...When DeVito tries to "reemerge" from the sewers where his parents dumped him at birth, he is rebuffed and retreats to the makeshift family of "my beloved penguins...

...But there is also a subtle and implicit recognition that there are reasons why the major leagues are all male...

...Certainly it raises troubling questions that no one in politicized Hollywood is equipped to answer and few can bear to listen to...

...Although its sexual imagery is repellent, Cool World at least offers a version of the feminine that is not a mere replica52 The American Spectator September 1992 tion of the masculine, and this seems to be a particularly difficult thing for Hollywood to do at the moment...

...Yet the close-knit family life of the Hasidim is allowed to make its impression on her and she begins to doubt the wisdom of her way of life, with its casual sex and no commitments...

...Yet Tim Burton is not giving us the Hollywood party line on women's toughness and independence...

...It combines an exotic setting—the cartoon world pioneered by Who Framed Roger Rabbit—and a partial time-transplant, since it begins in the 1940s and in style owes a lot to the film noir of the period...

...the souls of the old man and the young girl in Prelude to a Kiss are completely interchangeable...

...In Boomerang and Man Trouble improbable matches are made and rogue men (Eddie Murphy in the former and Jack Nicholson in the latter) are tamed by the love of a good woman...

...a kiss can be even deadlier if you mean it...

...But when the sister is traded and the whole season comes down to Geena Davis's having to tag her out at home plate, she drops the ball deliberately...

...Moreover, she has a fierce rivalry with her sister, a pitcher (Lori Petty), who always feels upstaged by her...

...The cartoon character Holli Would (played by Kim Basinger when she comes alive) displays a grotesque femininity that resembles a Hugh Hefner fantasy of the 1950s and shows why feminism grew up in the following decade...

...Along the way she unlearns her callow certainty that "the world is a really terrible place" and decides to have kids after all...

...Catwoman's feline fanaticism is tinged with ambiguity, which is why she is afraid of a kiss from Batman...

...Tim Burton's Batman Returns is less impressive visually than the Batman of 1989, but it has interesting things to say on serious subjects, including that of sexual identity...

...Aha...

...T here is nothing subtle about Ralph Bakshi's Cool World...

...Even in Lethal Weapon 3 the beautiful and dangerous Ms...

...Of course, Catwoman has nine lives—we really are into mythic archetypes here—so the kiss does not kill her, and the deadliness she fears in a meaningful kiss is not electricity but love and consequent loss of identity...

...The phallic imagery of "the spike of power," by which the cartoon characters are able to translate themselves into such reality as the film is able to pretend to be in touch with, must have got past the feminist censors only as part of such obvious fantasy...

...CI The American Spectator September 1992 53...

...Perhaps only a woman director could get away with saying this—and in the context of what is otherwise, a feminist festival...

...t is a popular theme...

...B ut the mask cannot be removed...

...Her vulnerability appears again when she and Bruce Wayne appear at a fancy dress party where they are the only people not in disguise...

...The downside is that no one can believe in her as the killer dame...

...The trick is to set the film in a world other than this one, or in the past, or else to try for subtlety and a tragic mood by hinting at possibilities that remain more or less unfulfilled...

...Given the constraints of the feminist consensus, which will not allow women to be depicted as docile homebodies except in a negative context, Batman Returns sets a pattern for bringing back a form of traditional femininity that other films are able to some extent to follow...

...Penny Marshall's A League of Their Ownpromised to be another self-congratulatory exercise in Hollywood feminism—read retrospectively into the 1940s...

...Or so I prefer to think...

...Only a heavy-ethnic character can get away with saying something like that, of course, but the standard-issue Career Girl/Tough Woman played by Griffith is definitely affected by this family orientation...

...At the end of the film Cat-woman (Michelle Pfeiffer) says to Batman (Michael Keaton): "I'd love to come home and live with you in your castle"pause—"It's just that I couldn't live with myself...

...There is a lot of the Tough Woman myth in the picture, together with a lot of schmaltzy feminism, as the girls get together forty years later to remind themselves of what heroines they were...

...It could be just stupidity...

...By contrast, Max Shreck's devotion to his son, to save whom he volunteers to be submerged in sewage up to the eyeballs, is as rare here as his fabulous wealth...

...Predictably, Hanks comes out of his alcoholic stupor for long enough to recognize that the girls are ballplayers after all—except that even as this realization is dawning on him, the more perceptive in the audience are realizing that he was right all along: they're not ballplayers...

...this flirtation with an identity that is not self-determined and depends on being loved by a man...

...But then she quickly retreats from James Bowman, The American Spectator's movie critic, is the American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...

...It is good they suggest that permanent relationships are better than temporary liaisons, but none of these films really comes to terms with the problem posed by marriage in a post-feminist world: that men and women are obstinately different...

...There was no such wistful ambiguity about last summer's big hit, Thelma and Louise, which, like Catwoman, embodied a feminist revenge fantasy while insisting that girls, too, could be the heroes of a picaresque adventure...

...The personal relationship with her sister, requiring that the latter should beat her for once in order to escape from her shadow, is more important than winning...

...Not even Batman...

...Geena Davis (she of Thelma and Louise) plays the catcher, whose natural ability so impresses Hanks that he is prepared to proclaim her a real ballplayer...

...But then, no one really believes in this new kind of karate-kicking, high-caliber-weaponpacking killer dame anyway...

...I'm tired of wearing masks," she says as the sexual chemistry begins to cook...

...All the way through, Tom Hanks, as the washed up player who manages the girls' team, keeps insisting that they're not ballplayers, they're girls, dammit, and telling them, for example, that "there's no crying in baseball...

...The preposterousness of the film's premise is almost equal to that of Shining Through, in which Miss Griffith played a tough-asnails spy...

...Eddie Murphy in Boomerang learns his lesson in love from a sexually predatory female boss who treats him in the same way as he treated all the girls he slept with before...

...Neither the Catwoman nor the would-be Batwoman can be merged into a single identity...

...Likewise, though she enjoys the game, there is never any doubt in her mind that it is time to go back to the farm and play the dutiful wife when her husband comes home from the war...

...Batman's come-on line to her at the end—"We're just the same: split down the middle"—is true, but also the reason why they can't get together...

...It has all the usual feminist accoutrements, including a final scene in which the pacific man (Eric Thal) must kill the bad girl and then keel over in horror while Miss Griffith, whose criminal victims are popped off with the same insouciance that her buttons are, looks on in scorn...

...She then proceeds to execute the evil Max Shreck (Christopher Walken) with an electric kiss that is meant to seem both a condign punishment for his sexism and an allusion to the recognition line between Batman and Catwoman: "Mistletoe is deadly if you eat it...

...Another stab at it comes in A Stranger Among Us, in which Melanie Griffith plays a tough-asnails New York cop who goes undercover among some Hasidic Jews...