Lorena Bobbitt aside, there are some very scary women out there. And the scariest of all, whether in the news or in the forefront of popular culture, are suddenly high-powered career types with a yen to humiliate men.
The motivating force in “Mrs. Doubtfire,” the season’s most popular film, is a woman who kicks her husband out for no good reason, and whose crisp professionalism is presented as her worst character flaw.
Meanwhile, back at the bookstore, Michael Crichton’s latest movie-on-paper is “Disclosure,” about a female executive who connives her way to the top and then tries to force an ex-boyfriend to have sex with her.
“Remember the night we broke the bed?” Crichton’s Meredith Johnson asks playfully, at the start of a closed-door session that is supposed to be a business meeting. But Tom Sanders is suspicious, as well he should be: Meredith forces a drink on him, then arranges for her assistant (also a woman) to deliver a package of condoms and lock the door to Meredith’s office.
If Sen. Bob Packwood were accused of this particular behavior it might sound embarrassingly clumsy, but Crichton presents Meredith as a serious threat to Tom’s well-being.
“She moved toward him in a steady, confident way, almost stalking,” he writes in another scene.
America’s fear of the she-boss goes right to the top, with David Brock’s risible descriptions in The American Spectator of Hillary Rodham Clinton as a foul-mouthed, trooper-bashing harpy intent on abusing her position.
Even scarier are Vanity Fair’s current photographs of a lingerie-clad Roseanne Arnold, one of the most daunting women in show business, done up as every man’s sexual nightmare as she discusses her extremely powerful position in television.
What’s going on here? Whatever it is, it certainly looks toxic, at least where the link between sex and power is concerned.
An interesting corollary to the mass-market popularity of “Mrs. Doubtfire” is the critical and art-house success of “Naked,” Mike Leigh’s portrait of a staggeringly caustic English drifter whose anger often takes the form of verbal and sexual brutality toward women.
The fact that the film’s lonely, alienated women are so receptive to abuse from Johnny (David Thewlis), who is himself so tormented, gives “Naked” its complexity, and even a semblance of social commentary. (What has made the lives of Johnny’s conquests so uniformly desolate?)
But much of what fuels “Naked” is one man’s sexual rage against those who underscore his feelings of helplessness, and women bear the brunt of his fury.
“Naked” makes no bones about its vituperativeness, or about the desperation that lies behind that feeling. But when working within mainstream popular culture, it’s necessary to be more careful.
So the sugar-coated “Mrs. Doubtfire” tries to sound reasonable as it explains the breakup of Miranda (Sally Field) and Daniel Hillard (Robin Williams) over irreconcilable differences, mostly having to do with professional disparities. Miranda, who works in decorating, is supposed to be hard-hitting and ambitious.
Daniel, an actor, is supposed to be the saner and nicer of the two, which just goes to show what can happen when an actor (Williams) and his wife (Marsha Garces Williams) become co-producers of their own movie.
As a comedy about a man in a dress “Mrs. Doubtfire” inevitably recalls “Tootsie,” but there’s an important difference. At the end of his masquerade, Dustin Hoffman’s character in “Tootsie” realized that pretending to be a woman had made him a better man. “Mrs. Doubtfire” takes that idea a notch higher by suggesting that Daniel, aka Mrs. Doubtfire, is now a better mother than his wife ever was, since Miranda spends so much time studying fabric swatches at the office.
Among the many interesting questions “Mrs. Doubtfire” never answers is why Daniel needed to be evicted by his wife in order to discover what a terrific parent he could be.
Incidentally, any man in Daniel’s position would probably consider suing his wife for support payments, but this film isn’t willing to face the angry side of its own premise.
Crichton doesn’t have that problem: “Disclosure” is eager to vent its anger against a woman like Meredith Johnson, who has been given an unwarranted promotion at the expense of men who consider themselves more qualified.
“Pale males eat it again,” observes one of Tom’s resentful colleagues. “I keep coming back to the idea that we have to make allowances for women,” Tom’s boss explains. “We have to cut them a little slack.”
Ever the skilled technician, Crichton takes pains to state that the men at Digital Communications Technology, the large company in whose Seattle office Meredith and Tom work, resent Meredith only because of her dubious track record.
She is in no way typical of all female executives, which is why it’s all right for Tom to keep remembering that she used to favor white stockings and a white garter belt decorated with little white flowers.
Similarly, the fact that Meredith is a former Miss Teen Connecticut and has taken great advantage of her good looks is not meant to have sexist connotations. Neither is the fact that Meredith, who is rejected by Tom, later claims that Tom tried to rape her.
Not all women behave this way. Maybe it’s only the ones who tap into today’s angry zeitgeist, and whose stories (like “Disclosure”) are headed for the big screen.
Last year brought us a number of films about sick (“My Life”), repressed (“The Remains of the Day”), traumatized (“Fearless”), grief-stricken (“Sleepless in Seattle”) or otherwise dysfunctional men.
So if what we’re seeing now is male characters who have found a target for their anger, perhaps it represents some form of progress.
