In "Basic Instinct," Stone deconstructed the cool, iconic Hitchcock blonde and reimagined her right before our eyes, all flesh and blood and terrifying intelligence; instead of just skimming men's most deeply submerged fears of women, Stone coaxed them all to the surface, where she stroked and teased them into submission. Everyone remembers the crotch shot in "Basic Instinct," but the real mark of Stone's brilliance in the role is her reading of the line that comes slightly before it: Her Catherine Tramell, upon being told she can't smoke in the police interrogation room, fixes the cops with an amused, dismissive twinkle and says, "What are you going to do -- arrest me for smoking?" Talk about control: Stone both shrinks and engorges every weenie in the room, playing them like an accordion.

Anyone who automatically equates latex with "sex kitten" hasn't paid very close attention to what Pfeiffer does in "Batman Returns." For one thing, her Catwoman has no use for the "benefits" of what she sees as women's traditional victim status. She saves a woman from an intended rape, and before the woman can stammer a thank you, she clutches the woman's face in her shiny black paw and sneers, "You make it so easy, don't you? Always waiting for some Batman to save you. I am Catwoman, hear me roar" -- before disappearing into the night with a double backflip.

Neither Stone's nor Pfeiffer's role was considered "serious" at the time -- perhaps because both characters were exceedingly beautiful, and traded on it. (In the Quality Crit Biz, beautiful and serious almost always cancel each other out.) But to me, the outcry over the lack of decent roles for women meant that people in the media either hadn't bothered to look very closely at many of the performances out there or were judging them by some weird, predetermined parameters.

A "good" role for women was one in which she didn't play a woman at all -- or at least not one who was too sexual, or whose intelligence was sometimes used for evil and not good, or who looked too threateningly beautiful. By those standards, the ideal role for a woman might be a male 19th century cleric in a rough cloth robe. Forget even attempting to cover the range of women's experience -- including their sexuality, whether it's used for good or ill or just is

The biggest irony was that 1992 was a phenomenal year for actresses. A partial list of actresses who did astonishing work that year would have to include Goldie Hawn in Chris Menges' little-seen "Criss Cross," Meryl Streep in Robert Zemeckis' "Death Becomes Her" (a wicked little satire that was unpopular at the time because of its perceived nastiness -- although I'm not sure how effective a "nice" satire could be), Pfeiffer again, in Jonathan Kaplan's "Love Field," Diane Lane in Stacey Cochran's "My New Gun," and, perhaps the best but most underrated performance of the year, Sheryl Lee in David Lynch's "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me."

How much has Hollywood changed in 10 years? Or, more significantly, how much have we changed? Are we necessarily more enlightened about what makes a good role for an actress? In some ways, I think we are: The idea that a good role for a woman has to be boring, virtuous and (perhaps above all) unglamorous is somewhat outmoded these days. A few years ago, people were pointing to Susan Sarandon's role as anti-death-penalty advocate Sister Helen Prejean in "Dead Man Walking" as a good woman's role. But I like to think moviegoers are a bit more open to the idea that Sarandon's bitchy mom in "Igby Goes Down" -- or the tart-tongued, grieving mom she played in "Moonlight Mile" -- may be even better roles, in terms of allowing Sarandon to get at more complicated emotions in considerably less screen time. Those roles might be smaller, but they're still highly contoured and full of life.

But then, if "The Hours" is still the best we can do in terms of pinpointing good roles for actresses, we may not have come as far as we think. While I prefer watching Meryl Streep drink, curse and take drugs in "Adaptation" to watching her soak her kitchen floor with tears in "The Hours," I don't think of either as a particularly good role or performance. Streep is terrific at comedy: She rose to the occasion beautifully in "Death Becomes Her"; it's my favorite of Streep's comic roles, and one of my favorite Streep roles in general.

But I think the fact that Streep's two most recent roles have been held up as significant achievements suggests that what we think of as a good performance may have as much to do with habit as anything else. It's gotten to the point where most of us are more conscious of the veneration of Streep than we are of her actual acting, which is always classy and professional at the very least, but not always invigorating or challenging or passionate.

It's important, obviously, to distinguish a performance from a role. But that gets much harder to do once an actress has made a performance her own. Think of Barbara Stanwyck in "The Lady Eve" or "Double Indemnity," or Bette Davis in "The Letter," or Katharine Hepburn in "The Philadelphia Story" or "The African Queen." Is it possible to assess any of those as "good" roles, in any way separate from the actresses who played them?

We think of those roles as intertwined with the actresses who gave them to us, which is exactly as it should be, given that acting is supposed to make us believe so wholly in a character that we can hardly believe that person doesn't exist in the real world. Alternatively, Luise Rainer played the lead in the 1937 Pearl S. Buck adaptation "The Good Earth," a solid role if there ever was one -- but how many people remember her?

The same is true for male actors, of course. When we respond to an actor, we're primarily responding to a presence on-screen, and it's difficult to parse a presence in technical terms. Male actors can also be considered good-looking in a range of different ways. (I was amused when a friend once mentioned she'd had an erotic dream about Steve Buscemi -- and then, months later, long enough to have forgotten about the conversation, I had one myself.) Male lookism in Hollywood certainly exists, but there's no denying women have it much harder: Actresses feel a great deal of pressure to be a certain kind of pretty, and the right kind of thin.

But an actress's beauty can be held against her, too. How much or how little does an actress's beauty have to do with that presence? There are conventionally beautiful actresses who have very little character, and conventionally not-so-beautiful actresses whose charisma makes them stunning -- and plenty of actresses look more beautiful or less so depending on the role (not to mention the makeup and cinematography). Beauty, no matter how you define it, is often part of what we respond to, but it isn't necessarily facile or hollow -- nor is it shallow to respond to it. In his book "Movie Love in the Fifties," the critic James Harvey writes wonderfully about how and why Kim Novak stands out in the otherwise overcooked 1955 "Picnic":

"She is as moving as she is in 'Picnic' partly because of all the acting going on around her ... In the midst of all the shrillness and falsity, in the midst of all that acting, there's Novak -- with her simplicity of just being there, as it seems, inhabiting a character she clearly felt close to: a girl who feels patronized and discounted by the way people react to her beauty. Whether it's acting or not, she seems the only serious presence in the film."

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