Why Can't A Woman Be a Man?

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We have seen Hollywood's woman of the '90s, and her name is V.I. Warshawski (rhymes with Kah-pow-ski). This free-lance Chicago detective is tough and sexy and nurturing. She is a teenage waif's very best surrogate mother. She can come on strong to a stud stranger at the local bar; she'll buy him a drink. But Warshawski is faster with a kick than a caress. Any hulk who tries to pummel some manners into her will get his genitals twisted in a nutcracker. And at the end of the new movie named after her, she will offer the same tweaking to her boyfriend. Somebody in V.I. Warshawski has the right phrase for this all-man all-woman: "a female dick."

As it happens, V.I. Warshawski, starring Kathleen Turner as the private eyeful, is a sorry excuse for a film. It opened last Friday and may be forgotten in a week. But bad pictures as well as good feed the pop-cultural zeitgeist (cf., Fatal Attraction, Pretty Woman, Ghost). And Warshawski shows Hollywood once again scrounging to resolve a lingering dilemma: how to get women into the summer-movie mainstream.

The immediate question might be, Why bother? This summer's smash, with $120 million in its first three weeks, is the mucho macho Terminator 2: Judgment Day. But in Hollywood, Armageddon comes every summer. Last year five burly adventures -- Total Recall, Die Hard 2, Dick Tracy, Days of Thunder and Another 48 HRS. -- grossed a robust, cumulative half billion. And Batman, good man vs. evil man, was the big warm-weather hit of 1989. Saving the world is man's work, of course. (Blowing it up is too, but that just proves how powerful guys are.) It's men who face down and beat up whatever malevolent force is threatening Gotham City, Mars or poor little Earth.

So, primed by the studios, moviegoers now expect summer pictures to have hairy chests. Cinema is action, the theory goes, and action -- aggression, propulsion, flying higher, shooting quicker, thinking with your fists -- is a male franchise. Women are supposed to go off in a corner and . . . nurture something. This is the traditional take, anyway, and it signals the vacuity of modern commercial films: endless, aimless variations on the old western climax of the white hat fighting the black hat while the crinolined heroine twitters and screams.

This summer is different. Studio bosses, noting the kamikaze competition last year of all those action adventures, have released softer films (like the disease movies Dying Young, Regarding Henry and The Doctor) normally reserved for school months. The female buddy film Thelma & Louise served up an engaging pair of loser-heroes. True they were more reactive than active, dithering away their chances for escape and ending up as victims, not saviors. But they showed at least that women could dish out their share of violence -- whatever advance that represents. Even the muscle movies are admitting strong women. In Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio is a self-reliant Maid Marian. And in the Terminator films, Linda Hamilton eats cyborgs for breakfast and spits them out like ingots.

It's nice that in 1991 there are enough women in summer movies to talk about; for a while they were an endangered species. And they are of sufficient variety to cue this speculation: Is there a home for feminism in the summer blockbusters?