SHOWGIRLS (1995)



“Do you know what they call that useless piece of skin around a twat? A woman!” And that hilarious quip from strip club “comedienne” Henrietta “Mama” Bazoom pretty much sums up the philosophy towards women in this abortion of a cult classic by screenwriter Joe Eszterhas and director Paul Verhoeven. Sure, I get it...this campy, overwrought drag show bitch-fest about amoral sex worker Nomi Malone (Elizabeth Berkley) is so bad it’s good! And we can all just laugh through the parts where Gina Ravera’s Molly (the only vaguely redeemable or recognizably human character in the movie, and a black woman to boot) gets brutally raped by a loathsome white rock star. (I love it when they act out that part in the drag queen version of the show at my favorite hipster bar!) Garish, ridiculous and aggressively stupid, Showgirls is hard for me to enjoy ironically, since it so clearly embraces and truly believes in its own fetid realpolitik Hollywood philosophy that love is a lie, “art” is whatever makes money, winning is everything, men are scumbags, women are worthless (especially if they’re not hot, naked and young), the world is a shithole, if you’re not clawing your way to the top every single minute (and/or don’t know how to properly pronounce the most expensive status symbol brand names) you’re a fool and a loser and deserve what you get. Yeccch. Showgirls ain't just misogynistic: it pretty much hates everyone. And the feeling is mutual.

INDECENT PROPOSAL (1993)



If Demi Moore is, or was, a star, it's not because she's talented (she can't act a lick) or because people like her (a lot of them don't) but because she manages, just through her very presence, to convey the impression that denying her the attention she craves might have consequences that are just too dire to contemplate. Like Madonna at her least interesting and most hard to take, she seems to be all about ambition for its own sake, but possessed of a steely, confrontational gaze that says: You will take me seriously. Although others will prefer to honor her for her services to American literature in The Scarlet Letter, Indecent Proposal may be the definitive Demi Moore movie statement. Here, she takes up where the Material Girl left off in the '80s; Madonna demonstrated that pure commercialism was hip, and this movie gives Moore the chance to show that a woman can assert herself and take control of her life by whoring herself out. When we first meet her, she's totally in thrall to her boyfriend, Woody Harrelson -- his dreams (of making a haul gambling in Vegas to fuel his doomed business venture) are all that matter. But after Harrelson craps out, she agrees to gazillionaire geezer Robert Redford's offer that she sleep with him for a million dollars. Harrelson, who wants the money but also wants some credit for feeling bad about it, ends up basically serving as her pimp, but when she's had it with his whining she makes it clear to him that this was her decision -- she's her pimp. And she's right -- although Harrelson has been her one true love and her ennobling reason for accepting the offer, once he goes into his snit, she has reason to dump him, which she does, thus conveniently giving Daddy Warbucks his opening to step up and sweep her off her feet. Then, because Redford, apparently a big Cheers fan, can't stand to see Woody Harrelson feeling suicidal -- and also, maybe, because the young poor guys whose girlfriends dragged them to this movie would tear out the theater seats if Moore stayed with the old, rich guy -- Redford ennobles himself by gracefully doing a far, far better thing than he has ever done before and giving her back to Harrelson. Moore agrees, somehow failing to notice that she's not just continuing to define herself by which guy she's with, but letting the guys dictate which one of them that will be. Not that I'd want to have to choose myself if I were her; Harrelson has never come across as goofier, and the awestruck, glamour-lighting treatment that Redford is given here just tends to emphasize how much his sun-kissed visage was starting to look like the bottom of a potato chip bag.

KISSES FOR MY PRESIDENT (1964)



In this election year, let us spare a moment's reflection for the sacrifices made by those who came before us, like whoever had to sit through Kisses for My President, a Great Society-era comedy in which a woman -- Polly Bergen -- becomes president of this great land, an idea that at the time must have seemed considerably more far-fetched than anything in the Warren Commission Report. Bergen's Leslie McCloud wasn't the first pretend woman president in American movies -- that honor may fall to the nameless character played by Ernestine Barrier in the 1953 Project Moonbase, which was set in 1970 -- and she may not even be the most pathetic. (Tip your hat to Loretta Swit's President Adams in Whoops Apocalypse.)  But she may have been the most retrograde, a sad example of a would-be world leader overtaken by events on the home front. Although Bergen is actually a decisive, effective commander in a dangerous, confused and (this being a 1964 Hollywood comedy) kooky world, she has to fight to stay focused on her job because her husband, Fred MacMurray, is having a twenty-four-seven hissy fit about how unmanning it is to be the First Gentleman. Fred finally solves his problem by getting Bergen pregnant, forcing her to step down so that Dick Cheney can become president. Special prosecutors have been appointed over less.

LEGALLY BLONDE (2001)



Call it last-wave feminism: it has a target market, not a constituency, and they’re the kind of women who don’t even like to use that particular f-word. It’s the feminism of sorority girls with trust funds and breast implants, the feminism of drunk girls making out with each other in main-drag bars. It’s the feminism of marrying up, of buying at full price, of a career as a means not to equality, but to superiority: and Legally Blonde is its favorite movie. The 2001 fish-in-the-wrong-brand-of-bottled-water comedy made a fortune, and turned Reese Witherspoon into a major star; but beyond that, it inspired a legion of imitators that all followed a now-familiar formula. Nice was the new smart, fashionable was the new educated, and rich was the new liberated. It’s easy enough to brush off Witherspoon’s Elle Woods as simply another iteration of the classical comedic underdog, but that only works until you consider the fact that her underdog is rich, well-dressed, trendy and drop-dead gorgeous. She enrolls in Harvard Law School (and is accepted with insulting ease) more or less to spite her equally wealthy, handsome ex-boyfriend, and the movie’s idea of conflict is simply pitting her against a variety of snobbery slightly different than the one she’s used to. The girl power championed by Legally Blonde is the power to wear a push-up bra with pride, and to blend the power of crass nouveau wealth with that of elite establishment power. Sound like any president you know?

Click here for Part One of Girl DisemPowerment.

Or click here for Part One and Part Two of Chick Hits: The Girl Power Top Ten

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce