Malice: The New American Hero

M. Daphne Kutzer

Department of English
State University of New York at Plattsburgh
kutzerdm@splava.cc.plattsburgh.edu

 

Malice, Directed by Harold Becker. Screenplay by Aaron Sorking and Scott Frank. Castlerock, 1993.

 

The latest contender in the Woman as Evil Bitch Film Sweepstakes is Harold Becker’s Malice. The film is less interesting for its portrayal of the Bitch, Tracy (Nicole Kidman), than for its view of what makes a Real American Man. The character of Tracy–a beautiful fraud who pretends to love children and her husband while plotting with handsome Dr. Jed Hill (Alec Baldwin) to make herself sterile and thereby collect insurance money–doesn’t add much to the string of recent screen villainesses in Fatal Attraction, The Hand That Rocks The Cradle, Basic Instinct, and others. All share the central quality of denying their feminine and motherly sides and/or exploiting their sexuality to ensnare hapless men. However, the development of the character of Tracy’s husband Andy (Bill Pullman), along with the ultimate fate of handsome Jed Hill, shows us that something both old and new is happening to the men in these films. Dan Gallagher (Michael Douglas) in Fatal Attraction (1988) is guilty of bringing evil into his domestic Eden, and in the end his wounded wife must kill the bitch. The only man aware of the bitch’s true nature in The Hand That Rocks The Cradle (1993) is the mental handicapped black handyman, Solomon (Ernie Hudson): the scientist husband is blind to her true nature even once he knows her true identity. In both these films the male “heroes” are weak and ineffectual, if not emasculated. Nick Curran (Michael Douglas again) in Basic Instinct (1992) is made of sterner stuff, but despite his nickname of “Shooter,” the film hints that he, too, will be a victim in the end. Malice provides a step–forward?–in the development of the American film hero, at least in the genre of thrillers.

 

The male leads of the film are Andy and Jed. Andy’s shortened name suggests his initial weakness, while Jed’s name suggests his hunkiness–it’s the sort of name you find attached to cleft-chinned romantic soap opera heroes. The names match the physical attributes of each character. Bill Pullman’s Andy is slightly built, has a non-descript face, and is always dressed in a corduroy or tweed jacket, button-down Oxford cloth shirt, and knitted tie–suitable if stereotypical garb for an Associate Dean of Students. Jed is the former high school running back, solid and athletic (we see him jogging energetically, for instance, while Andy drinks coffee), and the film allows him to doff his shirt frequently, so that the viewer may admire Alec Baldwin’s broad and hairy chest.

 

The way each man handles his women is also instructive. Andy has married, according to the local campus newspaper, his “favorite student.” We aren’t meant to raise our post-Anita Hill eyebrows at this. The detail is provided so that we may understand that Andy is not man enough for a Real Woman: he needs a “student wife,” someone young enough to be malleable in his inexperienced hands.

 

Of course, Tracy turns out to be anything but malleable. The film foreshadows this by way of a sex scene between Andy and Tracy. The happy couple are eating take-out Chinese in bed (perhaps a reference to the scene in Woody Allen’s Manhattan, which also concerns the power balance between an older man and a younger woman). Andy can’t handle the chopsticks, and says to his wife, “Would you think any the less of me if I used a fork?” Tracy coyly begins to feed him from her chopsticks, and before we know it she is straddling him and they are having sex. It is Tracy who is on top, both literally and figuratively. She is less prudish and more aggressive than her husband; she doesn’t mind the curtainless windows and he does. Andy remains passive throughout, and all we see of his naked body is a scrawny lower leg. You can tell he doesn’t jog.

 

Jed, on the other hand, is a Real Man. When we see him having sex, Jed is energetically on top–so much so that he is keeping Tracy and Andy, who live a floor below, awake. We see his bulging biceps and naked torso, and when his partner asks him to slow down on the booze, he replies, “I am impervious to alcohol.” Hard drinking, hard working, and hard playing: an admirable example of the American male.

 

But in the end it is Jed who is killed by Tracy the Bitch, and Andy the Wimp who ends up the hero. How does this happen?

 

It happens improbably, of course. There has been a serial rapist loose on campus, and indeed the rapist’s actions lead to the initial meeting between Andy and Jed– Jed miraculously saves the life of one of the victims, Andy comes to thank him and discovers that Jed is his old high school running back hero. Before long Andy asks Jed to rent the upper floor of his run-down Victorian house. What Andy doesn’t know, of course, is that Tracy and Jed are hatching an evil medical plot right beneath his roof, and that one reason Tracy becomes upset with Jed’s energetic sex life is that she has been having an affair with him herself. Andy is not only cuckolded, but cuckolded under his own roof, by someone who is also “cuckolding” (as it were) his wife.

 

No one counts on the rapist, however. One of Andy’s students fails to show up for an appointment, and the dedicated dean drives to her house to talk to her. We aren’t surprised when he discovers her raped body in the backyard. The local (female) detective asks Andy to give a sperm sample to clear him of suspicion. Furious, he says, “Am I a fucking suspect?” This is the first time he uses the “f” word, but not the last. Up to this point in the film he has been fucked over by the judicial system and by his friend and his wife, and he has not done any genuine fucking himself, although he will ultimately fuck up the insurance scheme. When he is asked to fuck himself, he finally rebels. I emphasize the word “fuck” because it is the biggest linguistic clue in the film as to Andy’s growing manhood. Jed has used it early on–when lambasting a medical colleague, he says, “Do that again and I’ll take out your lungs with a fucking ice cream scoop.” Tracy also uses the word–and the instant Andy starts to, we know his luck is changing.

 

But first Tracy leaves him. Her ovary has burst, Jed performs emergency surgery, and with Andy’s permission removes both ovaries, even though one of them turns out to be viable. Tracy sues Jed (this is part of their scheme, of course) and leaves Andy. Disconsolate, Andy works late, goes to the basement for a lightbulb, realizes the janitor is the rapist, and socks him into unconsciousness after a battle that leaves Andy with a bloodied face.

 

A lightbulb has literally gone off for Andy. Directly after his capture of the rapist, the police detective tells him that the sperm sample he gave showed that he is sterile –and Andy knows Tracy was pregnant when she had emergency surgery. Here is proof that he has been cuckolded and that Tracy is not what she seems. Andy goes off in a fury to Jed (whom he does not yet suspect); to Tracy’s lawyer, whom he assumes is also her lover; and to Tracy’s alcoholic mother (played wickedly well by Ann Bancroft) in search of clues. Everyone he sees says, “What happened to your face?” Of course, in one sense he has lost face completely, courtesy of Tracy, and he has also lost his manhood in that he knows he can’t father children. But in other ways he has re-cast his mild-mannered professor’s face in the shape of the hero’s. He tells the detective, “You want something done right, goddamn it, you call a teacher,” and when Jed asks what happened to his face he says, “I beat the shit out of a seriously disturbed serial rapist.”

 

Andy gets final proof of what is going on when he sees Tracy and Jed together and when he finds a medical syringe in his house. He then confronts Tracy. Tracy doesn’t understand that Andy is on top now, however. She thinks she can seduce him into going along with her scheme. She, too, asks what happened to his face, and he says, “I tripped.” This is meant to be ironic–it plays to his old role as ineffectual academic, not his new one as manly hero. Tracy, once she realizes things aren’t going her way, gets up in a hug and Andy says, “Sit the fuck down.” Stunned by this verbal virility, she says, “What?” “I said, sit the fuck down. I’m running the show now.” “What do you want?” “What does any man want? I want the Red Sox to win the World Series.”

 

This little scene, more so than the fight with the rapist, shows us that Andy is now a Real Man. He can take charge of a woman and make her do what he wants her to do; he can say “fuck”; he can toss around sports references just like Jed Hill. He ultimately asks for half the insurance money, although by now the viewer knows this is just one more step in Andy’s revenge plot.

 

Just as Andy’s masculinity is on the rise, Jed’s is declining. He and Tracy have argued over what to do about Andy and the child witness Andy claims to have. Jed is for compromise–he says give Andy half and be done with it. They argue so heatedly that Jed finally hits Tracy to put her in her place. At first this appears to be in line with Jed’s he-man qualities–but then he makes the mistake of apologizing. In the ethos of the film, this shows him to be weak, despite all of his macho sex and surgery. He is willing to compromise; he is appalled at Tracy’s plan to kill an innocent child; and he apologizes for using physical violence against a woman. What is the proper fate for such a man? Why, death, of course. Tracy plugs him twice with a gun, then goes off to commit child murder solo.

 

She is foiled in her plot–Andy knows what she is going to do and substitutes a dummy for the boy. Tracy ends up going to jail. Andy ends up with a sprained arm, and when we last see him, the female detective (whose only role in the denouement is to masquerade as a nurse and mother), says, “You’re supposed to put ice on that.” He replies, “Fine. I’ll have mine with some scotch on top.” And off they go. Now Andy is the hard-drinking, swearing, womanizing Real Man, and the film’s end hints that he will end up next with a (psuedo) nurse, just like Jed.

 

Malice has links with its predecessors that go beyond the Evil Bitch stereotype. First of all, it shares with them a particular, strategic deployment of the word “fuck.” In all of these films we are given to understand that when a man uses the word, he is a Real Man: when a woman does, she is the incarnation of evil, no matter how beautiful she may be. Peyton (Rebecca deMornay) in The Hand That Rocks The Cradle provides a nice example of this. She twists the arm of a six-year-old schoolyard bully and says, “I’ve got a message for you. . . . Leave Emma alone. . . . If you don’t I’m going to rip your fucking head off.” A scene or two later, she says to Solomon, the wiser-than-he-seems handyman, “Don’t fuck with me, retard.” She not only says “fuck” but picks on children and the mentally handicapped– hard to get much bitchier than that.

 

Second, all of these films portray men as for the most part weak and dim-witted, their wits especially dulled by the siren calls of evil women. Dan Gallagher in Fatal Attraction has the perfect life, until Alex seduces him into a one-night stand and all hell breaks loose. In the end, he is still so weakened by her that he cannot kill her. He misses one chance in Alex’s kitchen, when he nearly strangles her but then backs off–he’s a nice middle-class lawyer, after all–and botches another in his own bathroom when he thinks he has drowned her, but hasn’t. It’s up to his wife, battered and weak from a car accident, to find the gun and fire the fatal shot. Matt McCoy’s Michael in Hand That Rocks The Cradle has facial expressions blanker than those of the handicapped Solomon, and although other men salivate at the sight of Peyton, he seems oblivious to her charms until nearly the end of the film. Even when he knows who she really is, he is reluctant to call the police and forgets to ask for the house keys when he throws her out; his wife has to ask for them. And in the final confrontation, he is completely out of the action, left in the basement with broken legs while the quick wits of a child and Solomon give Claire the chance to send Peyton out the attic window to her death. Nick in Basic Instinct is apparently somewhat shrewder, but even he misses out on crucial clues, is incapable of saving his best buddy from death, and is obsessed beyond reason with the pantyless femme fatale played by Sharon Stone.

 

Even more interesting is the attitude towards paternity in these films. The fathers in Fatal Attraction and The Hand That Rocks The Cradle appear on the surface to be loving and involved parents: Dan Gallagher buys his child a pet bunny rabbit; Michael sings operetta to his daughter and plays board games with her. But Dan’s bunny ends up boiled because he has put carnal desires before fatherly duty, and Michael should not be so willing to turn over so much of the family’s care to a nanny.

 

Nick in Basic Instinct has the paternalistic job of policeman, but he also has the nickname “Shooter,” earned by his tendency to wound innocent bystanders. He is not a father, nor does he show any desire to sire children by Sharon Stone’s Catherine, but he is a symbolic and murderous father. In this he points the way to Malice and what may be the latest trend in cinematic visions of manhood.

 

In Malice paternal behavior leads one first to marry the Evil Bitch, and then to discover raped bodies in the bushes. Finding out one is sterile, however, leads to the possibility of endless sexual play without consequences — unless you choose a Sharon Stone, that is. Malice‘s Andy is smarter than Basic Instinct‘s Nick: he figures out the entire scheme on his own, cancels the bitch out of his life, takes up with someone who will nurture him rather than the other way around, and is freed from having to worry about unanticipated pregnancies (one of Dan Gallagher’s problems) or from ever having to worry about evil nannies in his childless household. He’s smarter than scheming Dr. Jed Hill, who ultimately is killed not only for greed, but for his paternal feelings towards an unknown child. Paternity is lethal all the way around in these films.

 

The New American Hero, at least in the genre of popular film, is no New Age Sensitive Guy or angst-ridden Iron John. He’s an updated John Wayne–he can swear and drink, but he doesn’t smoke; he has brains but knows how to use his muscles; and most importantly he can have guilt-free, child-free sexual relationships in which he, of course, is always on top.