ABSTRACT
The female counterpart to this male move ran, predictably, in the opposite direction. If we saw muscleman Arnie with a fecund bump, we then saw ditsy vanilla heroine of the decade’s most successful romantic comedies, Meg Ryan, piloting a Huey in Courage Under Fire. If we saw Stallone as country singer in Rhinestone, we saw Hollywood’s most cerebral of thespians, Meryl Streep, shooting the rapids in A River Wild. Both Courage Under Fire and A River Wild were serious dramas. Neither gained comic relief from the star’s more usual actorly choices. These women were also extending their portfolios, but with the serious intent of demonstrating adaptability through work within unfamiliar genres. Even Laura Dern’s palaeobotanist Dr Ellie Sattler in Jurassic Park leaves behind academic pursuits in order to weigh in and do her bit for the film’s action, such as it is, eschewing Richard Attenborough’s chivalry with a line objecting to ‘sexism in survival situations’. Jamie Lee Curtis in Blue Steel and Angela Bassett in Strange Days both won
Curtis developing this with her work on Cameron’s True Lies. Both Curtis’s Helen Tasker and Geena Davis’s amnesiac CIA assassin in The Long Kiss Goodnight metamorphose into kick-ass heroines from an initial position of apple pie domesticity, and much of the comedy as well as the power of their new images comes from the contrast between domestic drudgery and dangerous derring-do. Curtis does the action equivalent of the bespectacled secretary who turns man-eater as she loosens her hair with one hand and discards her glasses with the other; more interestingly, Davis’s action character emerges through the cracks of memory flashes which reveal a forgotten past career.1 This backstory of violence is remembered through the symptoms of her body – she finds she can chop carrots at an extraordinary pace, and defends her home from an attacker with revelatory skill. The work of the film, then, is to expose the action woman underneath the layers of motherhood (though when defending her daughter protectiveness and aggression are complementary). Read together, these films might serve as images of the female star’s move from more traditional roles into action in the 1990s: reveal to yourself and your audience a previously unexploited talent, and your portfolio of possibilities will extend far beyond the limits of the usual female (screen) roles.
