THE TALKIES: Feminist Fatales

...The title, and the presence of dogs in all three segments, remind us of how, because dogs are reliably loving and faithful, they so often become the consolation prizes for the losers in love's lotteryor even an excuse for not taking part...

...what woman wants one kind of power up for the sake of perky Kate Ashfield...

...While the others were grumbling, one named Buck drained his beer and headed for the door without a word-The others took no real notice until a moment later when there was a blast outside like somebody had cut loose with both barrels of a shotgun...

...Hunting stories are also a favorite: Hapless men wander around ponds at dawn, accidentally peppering each other with birdshot, or stalk deer through the woods only to be outflanked and attacked by does...

...Therefore a woman like Jewel is able to add guilt to an armory of feminine weaponry which still manages to include afaux innocence (so far as Charlie the cop is concerned) and an advanced sexual technique (so far as Carl the lawyer is concerned) to extract from her men the things she wants...

...The others include a thug called Utah (Andrew Dice Clay), with whom she is working a scam to rob men who are induced to "rescue" her from some invented danger and then take her home with them, and 1Kandi (Matt Dillon), a feckless bartender at McCool's, a bar in St...

...But The Low Down also hints at the problem with this archetypal pattern of human behavior in the post-modern age...

...It goes like this: The usual crowd was gathered on a hot night...

...This is too ordinary, too true to be of very much interest.A real dog-bites-man story.There has to be some kind of fatality to it, some sense of a destined ruin which the man is powerless to avoid...

...This is a film which is not nearly so heavy-handed about its intimations of" fatality as McCool's, yet which nevertheless manages to impress us with the sense of 90 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 9 June 2001 destiny in its three heroes' lives...

...One Night at McCool's almost advertises its unsuccess at doing this by dragging in a completely artificial image of fatality in its final flames...

...It was so elsewhere because even the most determined ideological assault cannot erase the consciousness on the part of both men and women of what female sexual power is and what it can do...

...So in That the topless towers be burnt And men man that face Marleen Gorris's l7u Lurhin DC~CIUC, John Turturro's Alexander Luzhin pushes himself to win the chess champithat she was made the ksistible dung she onship of the world for Emily Watson...

...Heat makes anybody ornery, and soon the whole place had had it with the dog...

...Better as a parable is One Night at McCool's, written by Start Seidel and directed by Harald Zwart, which stars Liv Tyler as a modern-day Helen of Troy trailing drooling men behind her like puppies on a leash--literally on a leash in one case...

...A little further down the line than all the sex we've been having...

...says Jewel with witheringsarcasm.At some level both men and women know that sex is meant to be a little further down the line, the culmination of a relationship, not the starting point of one...

...As is always the case in art, the great thing is to make us feel with and not against the characters...

...The B&S is the place where I learned of the catharsis of laughmg about experiences that were, in fact, incredibly p a i d . I'm much better for the lesson...

...Plmc, which, while it has flourished within living Daniel Auteuil is willing to get himself memory...

...Louis, on whom the scheme is tried but whom, on the night in question, she suddenly decides she likes better than Utah...

...While the plainer sort of fitrninh, or those who want to advenke that beauty has not turned their own preay little heads fiom sisterly solidarity may rail against "the beauty myth...

...There is a wonderful moment not long after Jewel moves in with him when the poor schmo Randi registers a feeble protest at the changes she is introducing into his house, which begin to make him feel virtually married...

...Thus the fatality of their existence comes to seem not the flashy kind represented by Helen of Troy or the Jewel of One Night at McCool's--creatures designed by the gods or the fates to bring about our destruction--but the kind that we are always quietly and unconsciously arranging for ourselves...

...ordinary women-even (out of the nest) those of very advanced views-continue to cultivate their appearance with an assiduity that is scarcely less than it was in the days when they were stiU bemg socially prp grammed to confine their ambitions to marriage and children...

...In was...

...each other to please her...

...Though very funny, this has nothing whatever to do with Jewel...

...A movie like Bridget Jones's Diary, directed by Sharon Maguire from a screenplay by Helen Fielding, Richard Curtis, and Andrew Davis, makes us think that Bridget (P,.en6e Zellweger), and the many 30-something unmarried women who have made her such a smash hit, expect too much of men instead of too little...

...In the end it is not enough for a film to show us that a woman is desirable by showing us that men are willing to make fools of themselves over her...

...As you'd expect, many of the stories are accompanied by displays of scars...

...One of the fellows had his dog tied in the bed of his pickup outside...

...And there is a vast, vast catalog of stories involving something heavy falling on someone...

...It is that in jettisoning the more inconvenient parts of the old mystique---in particular, those which the modern way of thinking has come to regard as "prudish" or "uptight"-women have cheapened themselves and so inevitably have come to expect less of men...

...More characteristic of the movies these days is the viewpoint of Wayne Wang's The Center of the World, which agonizes over the death of romance by showing how it fails between a computer herd and a stripper whom he pays $10,000 to spend a weekend in Vegas with him...

...Who'd have thunk it...

...It was as silent inside as it had become outside until Buck came back in, set a smoking 12-guge Ithaca in the corner, sat down, and ordered another beer...

...It has to be said that Stan and Harald go a bit over the top in their representation of the glitter of Jewel (as Miss Tyler's character is provocatively named), lavishing many more seconds of screen time than are strictly necessary to make their point about the sexual fantasies that she instantly inspires in at least two of her admirers, a policeman played by John Goodman and a lawyer played by Paul Reiser...

...Gillen is at least equal in prominence with what she makes him give up...

...In Andrucha Waddington's Me, along...

...What poor Miss Ashfield deigns to put up with from Mr...

...The film consists of three separate segments, all radiating from a central episode common to all three, a car crash, and all telling stories of men unlucky in love.Two of these three men are seduced into folly by women--it helps that the women themselves, unlike Jewel, seem not to have gone out of their way to do any seducingand the third is seduced by politics...

...And there is a kind of knock-on effect to women's acknowledging, in effect, that boys will be boys (if not, as in extreme cases, being boys themselves...

...Of all the legends I've heard there, the best is the one that accompanied my first beer at the B&S...

...Find me another bar with a story like that and I'll drink there, Until then I'm spending my money at the B&S...

...At any rate, they are forever having their expectations of men disappointed...

...The farce of One Night at McCool's is more distancing in an almost absurdist way, but it comes to seem very slight indeed when compared with the seriously lovelorn of Amores Perros...

...It's a story about two guys, a dog, and the bar's unlikely nickname...

...It also helps to erect a firewall between romance as such and the sorts of relationships that tend really to happen in the world in its absence...

...M ore successful, I think, is the Movie of the Month, Amores Perrosmtranslated as "Love is a Bitch"--by the Mexican writing/directing team of Guillermo Arriaga and Alejandro Gonzfilez IfiArritu...

...It is a view ofwomanly (sexual) power Patrice Leconte's Widow of St...

...Friedan would have had us believe show that it was not only in the past, or that if women wanted the male kind of in the wilds of Brazil, that men have w h y s i c a l , political, financial, even done such things, in Jamie Thraves's The military-they would have to shuck the Low Dolmr, a pathetic, dope-smoking old mystique in a hurry...

...This makes an interesting and a constructive contrast with the other two, since the sense of fatality can only gain from being generalized and not tied up in one attractive woman--or even two of them...

...There is just the hint of a touching innocence in Jewel's clippings file...

...Of course in prac- slacker (Aidan Gillen) is driven to shape tice...

...Ms this the face that launched a thousand ships?', wonders Faustus of his vision of Helen of T v , the same woman whose beauty was toyeats literally a work of art, made by whatever gods there were for a particular, catastrophic end...

...So long as the rules of the sexual game allow a man to expect sexual intercourse the moment that any romantic sparks are kindled, there is not much that women have left with which to demand something substantial in return for their sexual favors-in particular long-term commitment...

...tinue to find favor in the movies and THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR W June 2001 These are all films with quite different purposes, and none, except perhaps the last named, is specifically about what men will do for women's love, but they help to illustrate how natural, even inevitable, this theme is, even today...

...Bruce nodded, got Buck his drink, and fiom that day forward the B&S has been called the Bark & Shoot...

...It seems like a lot of extra trouble to go to in order to create t~tal passions that would once have been generated by beauty and virtue alone...

...Soon she has moved in with Ran& in the house bequeathed him by his mother, and begun to fix the place up to look like the file of magazine clippings that she has compiled, full of ideas for her ideal house...

...Bridget Jones's Diary manages to produce something of the charm of old-fashioned romance partly by using the early pride and prejudice that keep Bridget and her true love, Mark Darcy (Colin Firth), apart for most of" the picture as an excuse to keep their relationship artificially chaste...

...This, by the way, turns out to be very bad news for Utah...

...We don't as a result feel the tone of the film to be cynical, as it is in McCool's, but melancholy and compassionate toward the characters who, while they are not a great deal more likable than those in the other movie, nevertheless suffer largely enough to make us feel involved in their sufferings...

...One Night at McCool's is a funny movie, but it is also a heartless one, much more cynical about sex and "relationships" even than The Center of the World...

...Bruce doesn't believe in air conditioning, so the windows were open for a little breeze.The guys were enjoying a ball game and some conversation...

...The dog set to barking and wouldn't stop--not even a slab of old meatloaf could quiet the animal...

...But as we know from other areas of life, "the soft bigotry of low expectations" characteristically produces results which are even lower...

...all vying with mantle as a social benefit to both sexes...

...The ironing, the new mattress," he says, fumbling for the right words, "I just thought they were a little further down the line...

...at the expense of the other...

...has had rather a rough time of it shot for les beaux yeux of Juliette since the second wave of feminism came Binoche...

...And, just to Ms...

...Once you let them get away with expecting get-acquainted sex, what will you not let them get away with...

...In Amores Perros, they help the Senors Arriaga and Ifilrritu create a context for their stories of disastrous passion which makes its victims seem more like people who struggle and fail like ourselves...

...It is a reminder of the days when women's using their sexual allure to get men to provide them with a nest seemed a normal part of life and not something practiced by psychosluts from hell...

...Why not have both...

...BY JAMES BOWMAN F ew ideas are more deeply embedded in the Western culture that has shaped us all than that of thefmme...

...Indeed, it was an extreme example You, Tltem, the charming Darlene of the "feminine mystique" that Betty (Regina C&) snags herself not one, not Friedan's famous book undertook to dis- two, but three husbands...

...Thus, modern retellings of the amazon.com, www.drhurd.com Helen of Troy myth will doubtless con- and finer bookstores...