The Geena Davis theorem: how she got rid of all the ‘heavies’ in Hollywood to protect the sexual tension of her characters

 In Thelma and Louise , the diffident Thelma is always a few steps behind Louise, who is all daring. Until there is no turning back. Outside the cameras, things were not very different. Geena Davis saw Susan Sarandon as the “Alien Queen” from another planet and she admired how she was able to speak her mind, stand up to the director, Ridley Scott, and speak straight. “She never used expressions like ‘I don’t know what people are going to think’ or ‘This maybe what I’m going to say is a stupid idea.’ That’s what I did all the time, ”explains the actress in a memoir that has just been published in the United States and is entitled Dying of politeness , something like Dying of good manners.

On the cover she appears, with very high red heels and a dress with puffed sleeves that her character in Bitelchus could wear., inviting a giant bear to tea with good porcelain. Because if a bear came to attack her, she would offer him an infusion first. The engine of the book is that, to explain how much it has cost her to free herself from the layer of excessive moral neatness that her parents, an engineer and a teacher from Vermont, transferred to her. “I was conditioned to believe that I shouldn’t ask for anything, so trained to be insanely educated that I learned not to have needs,” she writes. And she gives some examples of how that dynamic worked in her family. On one occasion, they were all in a car with an elderly relative who could barely drive anymore and was going in and out of her lane, but her parents didn’t say anything. “The lesson was: even though your children may die, don’t say anything that could be construed as rude in any way.” At ten years old, she explains, she too, he started delivering newspapers around the neighborhood doing the classic route that has been seen in so many American movies. One of her neighbors began to invite her in, offered her gifts, caressed her and touched her, until she told her mother and she forbade him to return to the house. “But we didn’t go to the police to report a case of sexual abuse by a dirty old man, of course not.

We were New Englanders: we kept things inside and we kept them hidden. I had no idea that he had been abused.” “But we didn’t go to the police to report a case of sexual abuse by a dirty old man, of course not. We were New Englanders: we kept things inside and we kept them hidden. I had no idea that he had been abused.” “But we didn’t go to the police to report a case of sexual abuse by a dirty old man, of course not. We were New Englanders: we kept things inside and we kept them hidden. I had no idea that he had been abused.”

The question to be asked with Geena Davis is obvious: why an actress who was everywhere in the 90s and who had an Oscar (for The Accidental Tourist ) suddenly disappeared. And the answer is depressingly predictable. She turned 40 years old. Asked about that in a recent interview in The New Yorker, the actress said: “When I started, I heard those stories that at 40 they stopped calling you. But right at that moment I was getting huge roles coming in, so I thought, well, obviously this isn’t going to happen to me. So it was shocking to find out that yes. She surprised me and broke my heart. It felt like a forced retirement. Normally, I would take a year between movies, give or take. But then two years passed, and then three. It was unlikely. So they offered me Stuart Little , and then Stuart Little 2 , but other than that saga, all the work disappeared. It was incredibly painful.” Her break coincided with the two films she did with her then-husband, Renny Harlin, Lethal Memory .and The island of the severed heads, which did not have the expected success, especially the latter.

 It was there that Davis threw herself into what has kept her busy in the second half of her career, what she calls her “ nerdy ” period.of the data”. One day she took her daughter, who was then two years old (the actress had a daughter, Alizeh, at 46, and twins, Kaiis and Kian, at 48) to a children’s play and noticed that they were appearing more male and female characters. She began asking everyone about it, with the questioning style she’d learned from her friend Susan Sarandon though still with the New England “excuses” and “pleases”. “I realized that we were teaching children from minute one to have a gender bias if they see boys doing all the interesting and important things and girls on the side cheering or accompanying them,” she says in the same interview. She began to tell it through Hollywood and, apparently, everyone told her: no, but that is already fixed. Then, funded a far-reaching report on gender roles in children’s TV shows and movies, and the data proved him right. For every 16 male characters in children’s products, there was one female character, and only 29% of speaking characters identified as female. This is how the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media began to take shape, which is dedicated solely to research and is now a primary data source in gender studies. In their next big report they found that only 8% of directors are women, 19% of producers and 13.6% of screenwriters, though the numbers have been slowly improving. They have also supported specific studies on representation in comedy or in professions related to science and technology.Frozen, Brave, Inside Out and Peppa Pig -but with only one dog in the starting kit of Paw Patrol . This same year, the actress received an honorary Emmy for her contribution to the entertainment industry in that field.

In her memoirs, Davis also talks about her beginnings, her modeling career, which she downplays (she says that the only cover she ever starred in was that of New Jersey Monthly and you couldn’t even see her face), although she walked in Paris and was a Victoria’s Secret Angel before the brand turned its shows into a high-voltage misogynist extravaganza. She got her first role as an actress, in Tootsie, thanks to that, because they needed a model who could say a few lines and she went to the castingas they told him, with a bikini under the clothes. On that shoot, Dustin Hoffman, who’s not exactly known for being an easy presence on a set (because he practices his own version of The Method, which can involve being a jerk to his peers if the role calls for it), took her under his wing. his wing and gave him some tips for getting around Hollywood, including never making out with his co-stars. If they entered him, Hoffman advised, he should tell them no “because it would ruin the sexual tension of the characters” (apparently just saying no if she didn’t feel like it wasn’t enough for Hoffman). When she applied her teachings with Jack Nicholson, he said to her, “Wow, who taught you that?”

Despite Hoffman’s advice, Davis met her second husband, Jeff Goldblum, on the set of the horror film Transylania 6-5000 and together they made two more films , David Cronenberg’s The Fly and Earth Girls Are easy.When they met, both had just separated. She from her first marriage, to the hotelier Richard Emmolo and he to the actress Patricia Gaul. “Our relationship was full of joy. That was a magical period of my life,” she writes in the book. Both married in Las Vegas in 1989 and separated a year later, without clarifying the reasons, although it has later been speculated that the main reason could be that she wanted to have children and he did not. A comparative look at her subsequent careers also serves to realize just how limited options were for an actress until relatively recently. Goldblum continued to combine blockbusters like Jurassic Parkwith auteur projects and an image of an eccentric with a good eye for fashion was cultivated that everyone likes and fits just as well in a small genre film festival as in a Prada show.

 She, who also has an eccentric streak –on one occasion she decorated a bathroom with fifty cuckoo clocks– and unpredictable hobbies –she is so good at archery that she became an Olympic semifinalist representing the United States–, she is not She allowed herself to age onscreen like Goldblum, as a quirky, attractive person, a tall, weird girl with good comedic chops. The only thing they could think of to do with her was make her talk to a mouse.

Although Davis had a starring role in the series Commander in Chief, playing a woman president of the United States, and later appeared in three seasons of Grey’s Anatomy, Davis has not quite found in the series the second chance that they have had. other actresses of her generation. In the promotional interviews that she has given for the book, she assures that she now has a juicy role in mind for which she is seeking financing and that she is ready for the Gebirth.