“Suck my dick!” said Demi to the dude

Demi Moore as G.I. Jane

I’m not sure how many participants in Film Experience’s Action Heroine Blog-A-Thon will remember or care, but the great-great grandmother of this limited subgenre is Pearl White. Actress and stuntwoman, she appeared in over two hundred movies between 1910 and 1924. Many were shorts and most of them forgotten (some would say justifiably so), but her fame rests on The Perils of Pauline (1914), an immensely popular serial that was still running on television well into the 1970s.

As the lead character thrust into physically demanding situations, she was nonetheless a victim of the status quo. As a rule, we’ve fostered an image of women as subservient, irrational, unintelligent and duplicitous, stereotypes the movies, despite all their industrial and technological advances, rarely endeavor to correct. And besides, villains are often always more interesting than the heroes chasing after them, and with women it starts with Irma Vep (played by Musidora) in Louis Feuillade’s delicious Les Vampires (1915)—a serial with the kind of smart and sentient approach to cinema and sexuality that left Pearl White and her perils looking anemic, trite and safe by comparison.

The heroines who transcended eye candy to go toe-to-toe with the bad guy barely evolved with the medium. Mary Pickford was a plucky backwater tomboy in the excellent Heart o’ the Hills (1919), battling thieving land developers while preserving the ecosystem. Elinor Field played The Jungle Goddess in 1922. Greta Garbo shed her chilly refinement to control Sweden in Rouben Mamoulian’s remarkable Queen Christina (1933). In 1938 and 1939, Bonita Granville portrayed Nancy Drew in four b-movies. Francis Gifford gave us Jungle Girl (1941), a female spin on Tarzan from a novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Its lead character, Nyoka, returned in Republic’s The Perils of Nyoka (1942), a serial with Kay Aldridge out to dethrone the evil Vultura, Queen of the Desert (Lorna Gray). By the 1950s, Irish McCalla was Sheena: Queen of the Jungle, television’s silly G-rated answer to burlesque.

Above: Pearl White.
Below: Musidora in Les Vampires

With the exceptions of the Pickford and Garbo pictures, tits, ass, and the jiggle factor make most of this tosh seem even more ridiculous than it actually is while underlining the male stranglehold on both the art and industry. Indeed, one of Hollywood’s finest screenwriters, Frances Marion, used the pseudonym ‘Frank Clifton’ on The Two-Gun Man (1926) and Jesse James (1927) in a bid to ‘legitimize’ them as westerns. When Fritz Lang, Nicholas Ray and Sam Fuller used female leads in Rancho Notorious (1952), Johnny Guitar (1954) and Forty Guns (1957), it was mostly a scheme to rework an action genre for emotional and intellectual gain.

A man I know once declared, “I love women”—though we may have been watching bikinied Raquel Welch in Fathom (1967) or Sharon Tate bouncing on the trampoline in Don’t Make Waves (1967) at the time. A few years later, after he’d seen a movie by Kathryn Bigelow or Mary Harron, he announced, “Women direct movies the same way they drive cars—badly.” His conflict of interest exemplifies the average hetero male’s mixed interpretation of women, and reminds me of the scene between Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable in The Misfits (1961): men tell her she looks happy, but Gable says her appearance and femininity—not her intellect or personal worth—make men feel happy.

In Catwoman (2004), after detective Benjamin Bratt chides murder suspect Sharon Stone, she spells it out for him: “I’m a woman—I’ve had to do plenty of things I don’t want to do.” That scene takes me back to a group therapy session I attended over twenty years ago, when an archaic divorced dad told us about his day: “I did some cooking and cleaning—I was getting in touch with my feminine side.” A lot of Catwoman is about confusion over rules and gender, to where the heroine (Halle Berry) isn’t sure of her own motives and the vain villain (Stone) is the hardened product of male cruelty.

Full tilt: Cameron and Demi in Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle (2003)

When Navy SEALS Lt. Demi Moore barks “Suck my dick!” to get the attention of Master Chief Viggo Mortensen in G.I. Jane (1997), it tells us that progress has always been sexually lopsided. As he displayed in Alien (1979) and Thelma & Louise (1991), director Ridley Scott is aware of the female sensibility struggling to declare itself in a man’s world, while his buff and voluptuous star—equal parts mannequin, centerfold, truant officer and kook (she was born in Roswell, UFO territory…is Demi a Martian?)—weathered one of the strangest and profitable movie careers in recent memory: as a blonde and barefoot sprite in The Butcher’s Wife (1991), hokum high on the list of my guilty pleasures; banging Robert Redford for a million in the ludicrous Indecent Proposal (1993); using her mojo to undermine doughy Michael Douglas in Disclosure (1994)—a midnight movie ripe for discovery; self destructing as Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter (1995); and the calculated fiasco of Striptease (1996), whose publicity junket had Demi pole dancing on TV for Barbara Walters.

Although her best film, G.I. Jane was Demi’s ticket to smaller roles and connubial bliss with Aston Kutcher, sixteen years her junior. I’m sure the lad is up for feeding her needs, just as I believe Demi is driven and insatiable but grateful for such good fortune. For this alone, I nominate her for Queen of the Action Heroine Blogathon. She’s certainly got the balls for it.