So then, it hit me: What if Delilah was that angry? What if she wanted to tear things down? What if every time she looked at Samson she just wanted to kill him because his recklessness and fury had an outlet, he had his strength, he could kill a thousand people with a donkey’s jawbone, and he could kill a ferocious lion with his bare hands. But what could Delilah possibly do with all her rage and anger? I mean, it’s nearly the twenty-first century and I don’t know what to do with mine. So what if Delilah just wanted to be able to act out and feel all these things that are so wrong? What if she’d walked around day in, day out, her whole life troubled and bothered, so that what she did to Samson had nothing to do with spying for the Philistines and had nothing to do with betraying Samson—had nothing to do with anything at all except a pain and destructiveness that she’d kind of ignored until Samson came along and reminded her that it was there, and reminded her that she was angry enough to let a whole city come falling down on top of her.
Now, me, I’m not a femme fatale. Like Delilah I think I just care too much, I fall in love and I get stupid as bubble bath. Or perhaps my emotional involvement is just overdetermined: I get obsessed and overwrought about whatever man comes along because I don’t know what to do with myself, with the excess of self I drag around like a hundred and twenty pounds of dead weight. Whether the emotion is true or truly wished for, anytime anything resembling love comes my way, it makes a fool of me. It seems that to pull off the part of the dangerous, deadly woman with any kind of conviction, you must possess a striking indifference, you must be a prickly possum—and it helps if you come by your aloofness by honest means: it helps to be a chilly New England thoroughbred like Marietta Tree, a conniving member of the impoverished British gentry like Pamela Harriman or just a careless, bitchy woman like Pam Smart, who seems to have wanted her husband dead just because a divorce would be a hassle and a blemish on her Martha Stewart dreams of a tasteful, catalogue-ready life. (One of the reasons the Smart case interested me is that no matter how many times I studied the situation, there seemed no motive for the murder except an image-conscious dread of divorce; the search led to the conclusion that she was not so much cold or shallow as altogether empty.) You can’t fake your femme fatale-ity, because emotion will lead the cleverest woman to get lost in her own game: in fact, in the cinematic versions of the Samson and Delilah story, even when she is portrayed as an all-business espionage operative of the Philistine secret police, she is also shown as full of regret, ultimately a feeling creature who falls for this man she’s supposed to simply ensnare. No director dares make her cold-blooded: DeMille rekindles the romance between Samson and Delilah while he pushes a mindless millstone in a labor camp, and shows her unable to not stand by his side as he spreads the pillars apart and sends the temple falling on everyone; in Nicolas Roeg’s version for TNT, Elizabeth Hurley is less than convincing though trying very hard to be, as she says of Samson, “Even though I betrayed him, he still belongs to me.” Delilah, in contemporary portraits, falls in love because she can’t help herself.
In the 1988 spy-who-loved-me Costa-Gavras film Betrayed, Debra Winger plays an FBI agent who’s sent to infiltrate a white supremacist group by seducing a recently widowed father played by Tom Berenger. He is a sick man, playing hunting games in which a black man is set loose in the forest just to be chased down and tortured terribly by Berenger and his buddies. But when this is not going on, he’s a good family man, his two children are adorable and adoring of Winger, who feels enveloped in the family life that is so much warmer and stronger than anything she experiences as a government agent. It does not help that her superior officer is an ex-lover who will not listen to her pleas that she is getting too emotionally involved and needs an out. At the end, Winger kills Berenger—it becomes kill or be killed—but she quits the FBI and can never again have real contact with the two children she loves. She is a pawn for forces that seem no less ugly than the white supremacists, she is bereaved and bereft, no doubt very much in the position that Delilah was in when she chose to die with Samson rather than live without him, no doubt the position many women are in when they try to merely be sexual weapons. Few of us are sufficiently dispassionate to play the femme fatale. You must be cool and contained as just about nobody is. The triumph of Sharon Stone’s performance in Basic Instinct was her ability to convey somehow, between scenes of torrid suggestion and the cool sharpness symbolized by the ice pick as murder weapon, that she was actually fragile and delicate and needed someone (Michael Douglas?) to watch over her. That movie would have been arch and simply laughable like Showgirls and Body of Evidence and Sliver all were, if Sharon Stone had not brought real heart to the part.
There have been, though seldom, some brilliant portraits in film of women who truly are all ice: Barbara Stanwyck as Phyllis Nirdlinger in Double Indemnity is dead-on deadly, a woman who seems to kill on contact; in The Last Seduction, Linda Fiorentino made a real star turn as Bridget Gregory, a woman who writes backward, talks tough and throaty, fucks with an indifference that is too indifferent to qualify as studied and is so ruthless that her own attorney asks if she’s checked her pulse for a heartbeat lately. But the only reason these films have become, respectively, a classic and an art-house classic, is the exquisite performances of the lead actresses, the convincing qualities that are so crucial to keep from the caricature and crass cattiness of, say, Showgirls. But in Basic Instinct—for which Sharon Stone should have been nominated for an Oscar—it is the softness and sweetness of a woman who is supposed to be all harsh blonde angles, all starched slim dresses, all sangfroid, that make the movie more than mere exploitation. The scenes of Ms. Stone sitting with an afghan blanket wrapped around her in a rocking chair on the front porch in the San Francisco rain—the cliché setup of catching the bad girl off guard in a moment of repose—which could seem contrived, instead work as genuine and revealing. The truism that every shrew is just a woman waiting to be tamed does, after all, have some truth to it. Nobody wants to be alone.
So, as I was saying, I am not nor have I ever been a femme fatale, and I am certain I’m probably missing out on something big. Like Delilah, and like most single women above the age of consent, no one ever refers to me as some man’s daughter or another man’s wife. I pay my own rent, I earn my own living, I have not had to answer to anybody in many years, and the only people who are likely to tug at me in ways that will feel like some kind of surrender in the future are my own children. I am completely free, and as far as my life goes, I have all the power. In fact, I have turned thirty in an era when for the first time in history a woman can feel as unencumbered and unbound as I do. And yet, for all the power I command in not being some man’s dependent appendage, I generally walk around through life feeling pretty powerless. I don’t think this makes me unusual, nor do I think this feeling is particularly female: men and women alike, with certain exceptions, walk around feeling small, insignificant and helpless compared to the enormity of the world, and I think it has always been so. People weren’t always dwarfed by Calvin Klein billboards in Times Square and a Sony screen broadcasting bombs in Iraq right next to it, but I’m sure there was plenty of ignorance and megalomania to keep the majority of Cro-Magnons fairly humbled.
Just the same, powerless as I feel when it comes to everything, but particularly with love, every so often some guy will come along whom I find terribly attractive and he feels the same way about me and anything can happen, anything goes, and the strange thing is that the strongest urge I will get is to make a mess of him. I don’t know where this comes from—compared with my own self-destructive problems it seems too healthy to hash out in therapy—and these attractions have tended to be years apart. But when I have a man in front of me, even one I really like, one who is quite literally putty in my hands and wherever else, I feel the incredible urge to use the power he has given me to ruin his life. The only way I can figure this is that—and this is the reason The Rules was written for women, not for men—as much of my life that is m
y own and that I have made in ways that my mother and grandmother could not have imagined, and as much as in matters of the heart I think right now at my age both men and women are nervously, nakedly groping, none of that changes the fact that as I get older, my real power will diminish while my male contemporaries will see theirs grow. Whether it’s biology or culture or both that make this so, it does not much matter: feminism can’t cure it.
Now I don’t intend to let any of this ruin my good time. I’m glad to see that Farrah Fawcett at fifty can dump Ryan O’Neal and run off with someone younger and thinner and basically, what with the Playboy body-painting spread, behave like a menopausal man, but the fact that I can even root for her in all her ridiculousness stems from the same sense of disempowerment I usually feel. Because I don’t like the idea that I’ll be getting older and lesser; I want to keep becoming more and more and more. My sexual energy is so much a part of who I am, and the idea that it might at some point be taken away is all too horrible. And so there are these moments when I feel this power, this power I have been temporarily credentialed with while I see men only getting more and more and more of it, and it makes me so mad and crazed and I want to jump out of my skin with my desire for MORE MORE MORE. And then, I don’t know, there could be some perfectly nice guy sitting there in front of me and the urge to use what power I now have in every which way, to love and to hate, to take this window of opportunity that represents either my childbearing years or my sexual desirability and smash my fist right through it and make the most of it. I don’t want to spend any time making lists of things I need to do by age thirty-five or no one will marry me, I don’t want to be on this fucking clock that no man on earth is at all concerned with. I want more than that. That’s the word that keeps echoing in my head as I think of ways to make a mess: MORE.
And that’s how it was for Delilah. Samson loved her. It’s a big deal for the Bible to say that. I think she loved him too. But she was an independent gal, and the men come and go when that’s who you are. Who can tell who among them might just be so good and faithful and true that he’s the one person you shouldn’t, say, kill with an ice pick. It’s hard to know what to do. History brands you betrayer when really it’s just that you were thinking: Why should the men get to have all the fun?
PART TWO
Hey Little Girl Is Your Daddy Home?
Sometimes it’s like someone took a knife baby edgy and dull and cut a six inch valley through the middle of my skull
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN
“I’m On Fire”
There is only one thought that I ever have about Amy Fisher, no matter how many incriminating, nasty, horrid things I read about her: That she is blameless. She should never have been prosecuted for shooting her boyfriend’s wife, all blame should have fallen firmly on Joey Buttafuoco’s beefy, bulgy shoulders.
Because she was a teenager. Teenagers are hormones with legs attached to them, and not much else. What I would have done for a boy or man I loved when I was fourteen, fifteen, sixteen—things I most certainly would not do now. I also never would have done what Amy did, but who cares? That just means that I got lucky. The fact that most teenagers get through adolescence without lawyers, guns and money should not reflect badly on the ones who do end up turning into juvenile delinquents in the name of love. Those high school years, they are the time when anything goes, when you’re just a flimsy piece of walking substrate in search of a catalyst, and when girls, in particular, are just one man or one boy away from doing something really stupid. In a country with the highest teen suicide rate on earth, no self-inflicted fatality really surprises us any longer: we accept the hara-kiri crash as just another war wound—the drag-racing accident, the drunk-driving death, the overload of a Percodan scrip still lingering after Mom’s root canal, the wrists getting ready for a very large donation to the Red Cross. Homicide, on the other hand—that rare occasion when an adolescent actually thinks to do harm to someone other than herself—it seems we ought to be a bit more prepared for it. And when adults are involved, adults who may have influence on the behavior, adults who should be staying out of the rarefied, hyperbolic world of teenland to begin with, adults who above all should really know better—they must be held responsible. When Pam Smart, a grown woman who became sexually entangled with a fifteen-year-old boy, convinced her young lover to kill her husband, she was sent to prison for life without parole. Somehow, Joey Buttafuoco, who did eventually serve a six-month sentence for statutory rape—all the while denying that he’d ever slept with anyone underage—managed to elude prosecution for his complicity in the shooting of his wife. Even though the minute he began to toy with Amy Fisher’s sixteen-year-old mind, such as it was, he became responsible for its thoughts, rather in the way that when a person drives drunk, if there is an accident, it is the driver who is held responsible and not the car.
Look: you don’t get angry at a middle finger for doing what a middle finger does. A pointer points, a pinkie picks, a ring finger wears a symbol of holy matrimony and a middle finger says fuck you. And a teenage girl will kill and die for love, for what she believes is love. She doesn’t read Smart Women, Foolish Choices and decide to get a grip. She reads pulp novels and decides to get a gun. If she’s still bothering with school, she reads Romeo and Juliet and Wuthering Heights and lets the melancholy of these classics teach her that true love justifies any consequences; or else she checks out her mother’s copies of Judith Krantz and Danielle Steel (a new one every nine months!) and worse, and creates fictions and fantasies involving all-for-love scenarios as if life were a Harlequin Romance.
Did Joey Buttafuoco tell Amy Fisher to kill his wife? Perhaps not in so many words, but this man was nothing if not a signifying monkey.
Amy Fisher should not be in jail. In college, in reform school maybe, but not in jail. That several years later, beyond eligibility for parole, she remains in Albion State Correctional Center while an array of bozos and buffoons involved in this case get on with their lives—and turn a profit and befriend Howard Stern—proves just how scared we are of the inchoate violence of a woman scorned. Even if she is just a girl.
The events of the Amy Fisher story, the 1992 adolescent/adultery/attempted-murder case, better known by headlines like “Lethal Lolita” or “Long Island Lolita” or “Teen Fatal Attraction,” comprised a lowbrow media event, a situation that was so strikingly tacky it never really got out of the tabloids. It was the kind of story that a newspaper like The New York Times would cover only in order to note how much coverage it was getting elsewhere, rather like the nineteenth-century puritanical pretense of painting someone else painting a nude, or rather like reporting what Gennifer Flowers said in The Star as if it were news analysis. Or pretending that the presidential race, the evanescent stump speech promises, were more important news than the story of Amy, a small, shaggy high school girl on the South Shore of Long Island who fell for a puffy, married auto mechanic with a smashed-in face and a really funny name, one so improbably unpronounceable that for months David Letterman would get onstage and just, pie-eyed, say “Buttafuoco” as if it were joke and punch line all by itself. Anyway, this bit of extramarital and extracurricular intrigue in suburbia did not become news until Amy shot Joey’s wife on their front porch while pretending to sell Girl Scout cookies, puncturing a carotid artery and permanently lodging a bullet in the woman’s head—though somehow, miraculously, Mary Jo Buttafuoco lived on. No one particularly cared about this story up until then, no matter that Joey gave Amy herpes, got her started as a beeper-service hooker who made house calls and somehow arranged things so that she joined his gym and ended up sleeping with his personal trainer, who happened to have both a hair weave and a wife, so that, via Joey, Amy at sixteen was involved with two married men and turning tricks as an after-school activity.
But this only really, really became news when Joey claimed that he didn’t even know Amy—maybe they had pizza together once—she was just an accident-prone customer, totaled one car, kept denting
another, he couldn’t imagine why she would shoot his wife. It became news because here they had the actual smoking gun, which meant the third act of this morality play had come off without a hitch, the conventions of narrative obeyed precisely; but in a sudden twist of Pirandello, you had one of the players claiming that the first two acts, the only logical explanation for why a shooting took place, did not exist: in other words, a sixteen-year-old girl with no prior police record had shot a Long Island housewife she’d never met before for no reason at all.
This was akin to, several years later, O.J. Simpson looking at pictures of the now-deceased Nicole Brown with a cleft lip and bruised cheeks and a black eye and saying that he never beat her. And he never wore those ugly-ass Bruno Magli shoes that he was wearing in thirty-six different photographs either. This is about men who approach history with a method that can only be described as Soviet.
Amy Fisher became a story because it was about a teenage girl and it involved sex and violence—and automotive mishaps—and all that other titillating stuff, but it was also a story because it was an attempt to detach these acts of sex and violence from their meaning, to deny life its logical flow at a time—adolescence—when so much of what happens already feels illogical. Amy Fisher personified those strange moments at the end of an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie when buildings start to blow up and bridges start to burn for no reason—the enemy has already been done in at another skyscraper or weapons silo—and yet, viewers watch these scenes of cinematic catastrophe, ignoring the conventions of plot, because the special effects seem like enough. The Amy Fisher story is about an attempt to focus on one girl’s special effects and pretend that no story line preceded it. And there’s a lot of that going around these days.
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