Are Women Psycho or is it Just Hollywood?

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?

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