Hollywood's Second Sex

Steve Kurtz from the March 2002 issue

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Noir will never entirely die, but it will never be the same either. Body Heat (1981), for example, is a reworking of Double Indemnity (1944). But while in the original, femme fatale Barbara Stanwyck was punished along with her sap, Fred MacMurray, the updated version makes Kathleen Turner a mastermind who literally gets away with murder.

Today, most major roles for women are hybrid parts with old, beloved concepts (a "knight in shining armor") mixed with new ideas ("women can do anything a man can do"). In The Shop Around the Corner (1940), Jimmy Stewart is head clerk over saleswoman Margaret Sullavan, and she can't wait to be swept away and cared for. In the updated remake, You've Got Mail (1998), Meg Ryan owns a whole store (even if love interest Tom Hanks owns more). Losing her store is traumatic, not merely a stepping stone on the way to romance. (Perhaps Meg Ryan gave the performance that announced the new era better than any other: the deli scene in 1989's When Harry Met Sally.)

Apparently the trick today is to make a film's story seem new enough so the audience doesn't feel insulted, but with enough of the old-fashioned formula so that it still fulfills deep-seated audience desires. In Miss Congeniality (2000), Sandra Bullock got to play both an FBI agent and a beauty pageant contestant. Even Princess Fiona in the massively popular Shrek (2001), a woman who literally waits in a castle to be rescued by a knight, gets her chance to kick some butt. Thelma and Louise (1991) don't get away in the end, but they can can lead the police on a cross-country chase and have the film firmly on their side. A woman's place in the movies is now much like her place in society: ambiguous.