I have recently noticed a disturbing trend in Hollywood cinema: the psychotic woman. The films that come to mind are Basic Instinct, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, The Temp, Body of Evidence, Malice, The Crush and many more. It is not difficult to find these movies in the local video store. The genre is erotic thriller. Erotic for half the audience, perhaps... If films are not categorized they are still easy to spot merely from their covers. Look for the scantily clad women holding knives. One of my favorites is Pretty Kill. The cover is of a woman in a teddy lying on a bed of   _ red satin. She has a glistening knife in one hand and a rag doll in the other. In big letters: "Angel! Hooker! Killer! A night with her is full of surprises."   The descriptions of the female leads are primarily sexual. On Basic Instinct's cover Sharon Stone's character, Catherine Tramell, is described as "a cold, calculating, and beautiful novelist with an insatiable sexual appetite." Lethal Lolita reads "Deception, Promiscuous Sex, and Violence."

I suppose I should feel flattered that woman can now be portrayed as equally threatening and dangerous as men; flattered that we are now wielding the knives instead of only having them wielded at us. But I'm not, and I'll tell you why. These characters are two-dimensional. They lack justification, development, and motivation. The portrayal of these women is solely sexual and their psychoses are spurred on by jealousy, greed, or sexual thrill seeking. In other words, it usually revolves around a man. Sex is apparently a woman's most, and often only, effective weapon-- as in the case of Body of Evidence where Madonna's character, Rebecca Carlson, actually romps men to death. The femme fatale of the film noir era has been transformed into the sex-wielding psycho bitch from hell. This seems to stem from the media's interpretation of male/female relationships in the nineties. Somehow women are too difficult to understand, they expect too much, and they're bitter. Is this a new thing? Is this indicative of the nineties? Is Hollywood cinema, with its array of psychotic women, having any effect on male/female relationships?

Gary Oldman and psycho Lena Olin in Romeo is Bleeding.

This article was first conceived after I watched the film Malice. Nicole Kidman plays a greedy woman who has both of her ovaries cut out so she can sue the doctor (with whom she is in cahoots) for twenty million dollars. What a way to eliminate everything that makes women unique and powerful. There was never any sort of justification given for her greed or disregard for her body. I doubt we would ever see a male lead character have his penis cut off for reasons of greed. It just wouldn't happen!

Let's look at the archetype of psychotic women (erotic thriller) films: Fatal Attraction. Here we have a case of a woman racing toward the abyss after being jilted. Glenn Close portrays Alex Forrest, an intelligent and successful woman who, after being dumped by her lover, goes over the edge. A crescendo of horrifying and melodramatic expressions of her insanity evolve from this.

Justification is the major issue. The point is not that women shouldn't use their feminine charms to help achieve their goals, but that their goals be justified. Good examples of femme fatales would be Teresa Russell in Black Widow, Angelica Huston in the Grifters, and Kathleen Turner in Prizzi's Honor. It isn't even that women can't be psychotic. Kathy Bates is a perfect example of a well-developed psychotic woman in Misery.

Most of all, I would like to see women playing three-dimensional villains (traditionally male), where the motivation for their villainous behavior is not motivated by men's rejection of them. A good example would be Lena Olin as a hit woman in Romeo is Bleeding. Here's a woman who is just as violent as any character in Reservoir Dogs.

It seems very patriarchal of Hollywood to think that men are the only thing that women get upset about. To mass-produce these "erotic thrillers" only proves what audiences Hollywood is truly targeting. My hope is that we will soon begin to focus on women in the non-traditional, well-rounded roles usually reserved for men. MM