Make room for Daddy.

• Author: Rapping, Elayne
• Position: Culture - Popular film portrayals of women and men - Column

I was tempted to subtitle this column What ever happened to Meryl Streep? Except I wasn't sure anyone but me had noticed her disappearance. Remember Meryl? She used to star in those quirky films about complex, oddly accented women "of a certain age" back in the 1980s. Many of these films were easily missed, since they passed through town rather quickly. Even the ones that stayed around awhile were often problematic, since Streep usually came to a bad end, or at least had to cry and whine a lot. But she was given a lot of complicated dialogue filled with multisyllabic words. And she did get to be on screen, fully clothed, during most of the important action. So her films were always interesting.

Since "the year of the woman" hit us all in the head, I haven't seen much of Streep--in anything worth mentioning, anyway. And the few women I have seen on movie screens have had a lot less in the way of dialogue, clothing, and dignity

than Streep used to.

As Michelle Pfeiffer gutsily pointed out at the Seventeenth Annual Women in Film luncheon, major movies have been valuing heroines for rather different assets these days. "Demi Moore was sold to Robert Redford for $1 million," she said sarcastically. "Uma Thurman went for $40,000 to Mr. DeNiro, and just three years ago, Richard Gere bought Julia Roberts for . . . what was it? . . . $3,000? I'd say that was real progress."

Go, Michelle.

And those, I might add in all seriousness, are the good roles. In the last several months, as I dragged myself from cineplex to cineplex in search of the perfect summer movie, I have seen very little in the way of female flesh, clothed or otherwise. In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that women and girls have all but disappeared from major movies, as male screen heroes, in blockbuster after blockbuster, go hand-to-hand with each other, or tend to the care and training of young male heirs and proteges.

The biggest films of the season-rising Sun, The Fugitive, Cliffhanger, In the Line of Fire, The Firm, Last Action Hero, Jurassic Park--have mostly employed women in the most fleeting and tangential of roles. Most often, as in the first three, women appear in brief segments early on, in which they are brutally done away with and then reprised throughout, via flashback, as a reminder of the point of the rest of the action. Even when women and girls manage to survive, they usually serve as stage props and plot gimmicks around and through which the important conflicts are played out--as bait for villains or inspiration for heroes.

But I don't want to belabor the bad news about female representation--both quantitative and qualitative--in contemporary movies. The disappearance of female life on screen should not be surprising to anyone who understands the process by which movies are conceived, developed, and produced. This, after all, is an...