Working Girls: Gender and Sexuality in Popular Cinema/Yvonne Tasker Filmography Includes Bibliographical References and Index 1
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WORKING GIRLS ‘There are only three ages for women in Hollywood: babe, district attorney and Driving Miss Daisy.’ Elise Eliot (Goldie Hawn) in The First Wives Club How has the ‘new Hollywood’ responded to the ‘new woman’? Working Girls investigates contemporary cinema’s ambivalent and complex relationship with gender and sexual identities in the wake of feminism. Tasker addresses the versions of the working woman offered by contemporary Hollywood: ‘spunky’ heroines of action movies such as True Lies and The Long Kiss Goodnight; female cops and FBI agents, in The Silence of the Lambs, Blue Steel and Copycat, the singer as movie-star, as typified by Barbra Streisand and Whitney Houston, and sharp-shooting cowgirls in ‘new Westerns’ such as Bad Girls and The Quick and the Dead. She also discusses the increasing prominence of women as producers and directors as well as stars and performers. In investigating Hollywood’s depictions of ‘working girls’, Yvonne Tasker suggests that popular cinema makes a ready equation between working women and sexual performance, from the figure of the prostitute in films such as Klute and Pretty Woman, to modern femmes fatales such as Linda Fiorentino in The Last Seduction and Demi Moore in Disclosure. Yvonne Tasker is Senior Lecturer in Film and Cultural Studies at the University of Sunderland. She is the author of Spectacular Bodies. WORKING GIRLS Gender and sexuality in popular cinema Yvonne Tasker London and New York First published 1998 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003. Disclaimer: For copyright reasons, some images in the original version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. © 1998 Yvonne Tasker All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Tasker, Yvonne Working girls: Gender and sexuality in popular cinema/Yvonne Tasker Filmography Includes bibliographical references and index 1. Women in motion pictures. 2. Women in the motion picture industry. I. Title. PN1995.9.W6T36 1998 791.43 ′652042–dc21 97–38918 ISBN 0-203-43815-9 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-74639-2 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-14004-8 (hbk) ISBN 0-415-14005-6 (pbk) IN MEMORY OF JOHN JOSEPH HALL CONTENTS Acknowledgements ix Introduction: Bad girls and working girls in the ‘new Hollywood’ 1 1 Cross-dressing, aspiration and transformation 19 2 Cowgirl tales 49 3 Action women: Muscles, mothers and others 65 4 Investigating women: Work criminality and sexuality 89 5 ‘New Hollywood’, new film noir and the femme fatale 115 6 Female friendship: Melodrama, romance, feminism 137 7 Acting funny: Comedy and authority 161 8 Music, video, cinema: Singers and movie stars 177 9 Performers and producers 195 Notes 206 Filmography 219 Bibliography 223 Index 229 vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thanks to Rebecca Barden (once again) at Routledge for her patience and encouragement throughout this project. Working Girls was written across different parts of the country, whilst working in several different institutions: I would therefore like to thank colleagues and students at Goldsmiths College, Chichester Institute, Sunderland University and, particularly, those who attended the Birkbeck Diploma Class in 1993/94, and to Mary Wood for offering me the opportunity to run a course on contemporary cinema. Versions of this material have been presented as talks over the last few years. Thanks to all who have listened and contributed on these occasions, including all my Finnish friends. Sessions at the Edinburgh Film House always leave me with more than I bring, not least since Shiona Wood’s enthusiasm for the cinema is so infectious. Many thanks to Patricia Pisters of Amsterdam University and to the ‘Projektor’ team and all the delegates at the Film [subject] theory conference. Thanks are due to all the friends who have helped and encouraged me in writing this book and in helping me move on (and endlessly move house) including Helen De Witt, Richard Dyer, Leslie Felperin, Mel Gibson, Mike Hammond, Val Hill, Stephen Maddison, Jill Marshall, Andy Medhurst, Margaret Montgomerie, Saija Nissinen, Mike Ribbans, Bob Tasker, Estella Tincknell and Tamar Yellin. I’m also grateful to Beverley Skeggs for sharing her forthcoming work. Finally, special thanks are due to my good friends Michele Scott and Sarah Kember, and to Rachel Hall. The author and publisher would like to thank the following for permission to use photographs: pages 1 and 161, Touchstone; pages 7, 115 and 177, Warner Bros; page 19, Twentieth Century Fox; page 89, Monarchy Enterprises; page 137, Monarchy Enterprises, C.V. and Le Studio Canal; page 195, MGM/UA; page 205, ITC. All photographs courtesy of Kobal. ix INTRODUCTION Bad girls and working girls in the ‘new Hollywood’ Image rights not available Angela Bassett as Tina Turner in What’s Love Got To Do With It osting the 1996 Academy Awards ceremony, Whoopi Goldberg cracked H jokes about the range of roles available to women in the films produced through the preceding year: Paul Verhoeven’s critically berated Showgirls (‘I haven’t seen that many poles mistreated since World War II’), Sharon Stone as gangster wife (and former prostitute) in Martin Scorsese’s Casino (nominated), Elisabeth Shue as a prostitute in Mike Figgis’ Leaving Las Vegas (nominated) and Mira Sorvino who won Best Supporting Actress for her role as a prostitute in Woody Allen’s Mighty Aphrodite.1 There is no little irony in the fact that Susan Sarandon took the Best Actress award for 1996 with her role as a nun, another indicative archetype, in Dead Man Walking (Tim Robbins). This was doubly ironic, perhaps, since one of Whoopi Goldberg’s biggest hits of recent years was as Deloris Van Cartier, a Las Vegas lounge singer who masquerades as a nun in her flight from mobster boyfriend, Vince LaRocca (Harvey Keitel), in Sister Act (1992). The enthusiasm with which popular culture recycles these limitations as comedy is evident in The First Wives Club in which Elise Eliot (Goldie Hawn) explains to her plastic surgeon that ‘there are only three ages for women in Hollywood: babe, district attorney and Driving Miss Daisy’. Goldberg’s ironic barbs may serve to alert us to some immediate propositions about the status of women in contemporary American films. First, that the foregrounding of sexuality as exchange remains as central as it has ever been in the popular cinema’s representation of women, with the figure of the female prostitute (whether romanticised or situated as abject) functioning in an archetypal fashion as both symbol and symptom of a gendered, classed and raced hierarchy. Further, that the prostitute is an overdetermined space within Hollywood representations. She exceeds her various incarnations of ‘tart with a heart’, streetwalker, flapper and so on, in the process acquiring a significance that extends beyond a literal sexual/economic exchange. The prostitute’s work involves the sale of sex for cash. Across a variety of popular genres, Hollywood representation is characterised by an insistent equation between working women, women’s work and some form of sexual(ised) performance. Thus the caricature or the stereotype of the prostitute, whose physical labour is manifestly bound up with sex, signifies only one point on a continuum which extends across legal thrillers and crime movies into the paranoid scenarios of office politics. The 3 WORKING GIRLS equation which popular cinema/popular culture has forged between women’swork and sexual display or performance functions here as a starting point for a broader analysis of gender, class and ‘race’ in the contemporary cinema. The Academy Award nominations mentioned at the beginning of this chapter do not simply indicate the persistence of various stereotypes, but also underline the extent to which they have produced some powerful and critically acclaimed performances. However, the popular cinema’s constant framing of women in terms of sexuality is in turn re-framed and modified by discourses of ‘race’. Whilst for white performers these stereotypes can produce major roles, such opportunities are rarer for Black women, already operating in relation to stereotypical constructions of sexuality. Ed Guerrero writes that the Hollywood cinema has depicted black sexuality ‘in the most distorted and perverse terms and images’, pointing as an example to ‘the Black woman’s routine construction as the sign of the whore’ (Diawara 1993:238). Karen Alexander writes of the relentless marginalisation of black women in Hollywood cinema in terms of both the failure to provide roles for black women stars and ‘the all-pervasive bit-parts for black women as hookers’ (Gledhill 1990:52). It is in both the marginality (the bit-part) as well as the role (of prostitute) itself that the stereotypical inscription of black women in Hollywood cinema has thus been constituted. Cathy Tyson’s performance as Simone in the British-made film Mona Lisa (1986) functions as a rare occasion when a black performer cast in the role of prostitute is able to come centre stage. The film also underlines the ambivalence of such characterisations. Whilst Tyson earned praise for her charismatic performance, her character is located within a narrative in which she signifies enigma for a white male protagonist.2 In such a context, Alexander wonders whether ‘the price of stardom in Hollywood for the black female is still too high’ (Gledhill 1990:53).