Demi Moore
Indecent Proposal
G.I. Jane
Speaking of great hair… this week was all about an icon of the silver screen who has mastered a myriad of hairstyles, acting roles, genres, husbands, philanthropic accomplishments, overblown tabloid-era controversies, and iconic dog ownership in her 40+ years in the biz, a smart, stunning Scorpio who has continued to be a star, despite Hollywood’s unfair treatment and the Academy’s failure to give her that Best Actress Oscar—Demi Moore. Demi (that’s de-MI) Gene Guynes was born on November 11th, 1962 in Roswell, New Mexico to an absent father and a young mother who would later undergo addiction, suicide attempts, a criminal record, and a bizarre rivalry with Demi. In her 2019 memoir Inside Out, Demi revealed countless disturbing facts about her late mother, one of which being that Demi was raped by a landlord who claimed that Demi’s mother Virginia had pimped her out to him. Her Junior year of high school, Demi dropped out to work as a receptionist at 20th Century Fox and began pursuing a modeling and acting career. Three months before her 17th birthday, Demi married musician Freddy Moore—with whom she wrote the song “It’s Not a Rumor”—and after taking on some drive-in movie acting gigs and a significant role on the soap opera General Hospital, Moore starred in 80s yuppie classics Blame It on Rio, No Small Affair, and St. Elmo’s Fire. This caused her career to officially take off and earned her a spot in the Brat Pack—an association she resented. This was the first of many unfair boxes in which Demi was placed, and since she’s so captivatingly-beautiful, audiences and execs quickly got into the habit of placing her on a pedestal then tearing her apart. Demi divorced Freddy Moore but kept his last name, even when she married her most famous (fuck you, Ashton Kutcher) husband, Bruce Willis, in 1987. The 1990 movie Ghost is probably where most people (at least of my generation) first saw Demi, setting trends with her instantly-iconic short-haired, gamine look, and breaking the hearts of audiences everywhere. At one point, Ghost and Die Hard 2 occupied the number one and two spots at the box office, a feat that would not be accomplished again for a married Hollywood couple until 2024 (with Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively, lol.) Demi’s name was becoming a household one, and the kinds of projects she took on began to diversify, but she was still scrutinized for her acting, ambition, and looks. She was criticized for posing nude in Vanity Fair while pregnant with her and Willis’ second child—and this would only be the beginning of an ongoing beef between Demi and alleged-feminist critics as well as conservative figure heads. Moore became the world's highest-paid actress when she earned a record-breaking salary of $12.5 million to star in Striptease. According to EW, this caused a "reverse domino effect" in the industry, as “Sharon Stone’s asking price jumped from $6 million to $7 million, Jodie Foster from $7 million to $8 million, Meg Ryan from $6 million to $8 million, and Julia Roberts from $12 million to $13 million." With this historic action, and some rumors that she had some absurd on-set demands, Demi was labeled as a diva, with some tabloids even giving her the nickname “Gimme Moore.” And when her films began to underperform at the box office, Demi was treated even more atrociously in the press. Demi took a hiatus from acting to move to Idaho and raise her children, but in 2003 she made a triumphant comeback as the effortlessly cool angel-turned-villain in Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle. The film is a camp masterpiece, and Moore’s part reminded everyone of her star power. As Demi explained in her 2025 Golden Globes acceptance speech, she was labeled as a “popcorn actress” for much of her career, but in the early-to-mid 2000s she began to take on more interesting, indie, arthouse films. She never stopped being skilled, and yet the media still had a diminutive view of her. David Fear of Rolling Stone described her as "someone who, despite the fact that she still graces screens[…], makes you feel as if they’ve gone into self-exile in order to survive." And whether or not that’s true, I’ve never read Demi as reserved or wounded or careful. She’s a Hollywood trailblazer with experience in horror, soaps, actions, comedies, emotional dramas, and I’ve always known her as impressive—but when she starred in Coralie Fargeat’s audaciously amazing body horror-comedy The Substance last year, it only confirmed what I already knew. I was always a Demi fan, but The Substance made me a Demi worshipper. For this actor to have suffered decades-long critiques of her body and career and very essence, then lead a film that scathingly satirizes these grotesque Hollywood standards, is pretty legendary. Her rock-hard body was called too flabby after having her daughters, each of her career pivots were labeled as try-hard, and her relationship to then-younger-man Ashton Kutcher made her the butt of everyone’s tired, sexist, jokes—and Demi still shows up to work with the beauty and charm that only she could. She’s an active member of the Democratic party, an avid doll-collector who owns a home just for her 2,000+ collection, a performer who can play eccentric just as easily as she can play down-to-earth.
I would never place Demi Moore into a box, but for the murky era of 90s pulpy movie-making, bad movies were unavoidable for most actors. And for what it’s worth, many of the sappy, cheesy, oversexed movies of this caliber that starred Demi were not commercial failures, just critical ones. One of these critical failures came from resident-erotic-thriller-maker of the 1990s Adrian Lyne, with his 1993 adaptation of Jack Englehard’s novel, Indecent Proposal. Indecent Proposal imagines Demi and Woody Harrelson as Diana and David Murphy—a young married couple with a ton of charm and ambition, but not a ton of money. With some clunky narration and a couple of abysmal “youthful” wigs, we learn of Diana and David’s high school courtship, and are given a front-row seat to their over-the-top-lovey-dovey antics—which includes an extremely downplayed near-death experience as they make out on the floor of their kitchen which has caught fire due to their horny negligence. Diana is a real estate agent closing almost no deals in the wake of the early-90s recession, and David is a starving architect who is designing their dream home that they cannot afford. It’s a scenario that’s never as charming as Adrian Lyne tries to sell it, and pretty soon this attractive couple is extremely poor. As with other misguided men in movies and IRL, David hatches a plan to travel to Vegas in order to win the $50 grand they so desperately need, and Diana comes along for the risky ride. After one, singular, lucky day of winning at the casino, Diana rolls around their motel bed with all their cash as Sade plays in the background, and David says they just need a little bit more. Cut to David immediately losing every last penny the next day, and the depressed but still gorgeous Diana catches the eye of billionaire old man playboy, John Gage (Robert Redford.) Gage asks Demi to sit by him and roll his dice for good luck, she hesitantly acquiesces, David and a fairly large crowd watches in disbelief as she rolls the exact number Gage needed, which earns him a very large sum of money. As a thank you for borrowing his wife, Gage gifts David and Diana with a luxury suite at this casino and an invite to a little shindig of his. He also gifts Diana with a very sexy $5,000 Mugler dress that he witnessed her trying on earlier, which doesn’t strike dumb David as odd at all. At the party that evening, Diana and David are schmoozing with the high-rollers, all the other older men and their younger women—none of whom can be distinguished from one another. But eventually, Gage approaches the couple with a wild, obnoxious age-old proposition that has been hypothetically played with for centuries: for a million dollars, would you let me sleep with your wife? It is the titular indecent proposal, the premise of which was used as salaciously as possible for the marketing of this film—which, ultimately, did pay off. Diana and David are bewildered by this proposal and just nervously laugh at Gage, who shockingly puts up very little of a fight before giving up. But when Diana and David both spend all night tossing and turning, the couple begins to seriously discuss this idea. Their philosophical debate makes for the most bizarre pillow talk, but before we can blink, David has his sleazy lawyer, Jeremy (Oliver Platt), write up a contract for Gage to sign before anything happens. Jeremy remarks to David that Diana could’ve gotten “at least $2 million”, whereas, “I couldn’t have gotten $500 for my girlfriend.” For whatever reason, this is the line that woke me out of my wide-eyed, disbelief-suspended, cinephile stupor and made me hate the whole movie, and it only gets much worse from here. We do not even see the night of the affair, only the moment in which Gage helicopters Diana to his superyacht, gifts her a conservative Cheongsam-style dress, kisses her, then tells her, “Trust me, nothing gonna happen that you don’t choose.” My eyes rolled so far back into my head at this point that I could see back in time to when Robert Redford actually played charming men. Redford allegedly insisted that his character be more sympathetic and less villainous, often butting heads with writer Amy Holden Jones (who also wrote Mystic Pizza, Beethoven, and The Slumber Party Massacre), but he still just comes off as disgusting and boring to this viewer. But even more despicable is Woody Harrelson’s character, who, of fucking course, does NOT take any of this well, and spends the rest of this movie descending into a paranoid schizophrenic state of mind over the fact that his wife fucked someone else. More than annoying or pathetic, this cuck turns straight up abusive—even throwing a whole bottle of wine at the wall near Diana. It’s a nightmarish scenario that is brought on by this stupid, misogynistic scenario that feels like Michael Bay wrote an episode of The Twilight Zone: what if you get, like, a million bucks but your broad aka your property has to fuck an older, hotter man? Whoa, man. (Coincidentally, Michael Bay filmed the fast-tracking close-ups of the dice in the gambling scenes of this movie, so.) As I watched this movie with my mom, we were both taking turns accidentally predicting lines of dialogue, and writing better plotlines. What if Woody Harrelson is so jealous because he wants to fuck Robert Redford? What if he already fucked Robert Redford? What if Demi accidentally killed Robert Redford during their romantic evening and she and Woody had to cover it up somehow? All of the twists we envisioned never occurred, unfortunately, and I was left just feeling bored and pissed off by Indecent Proposal. Movies this messy should be fun! But this one was not. Demi, as always, gives a passionate and believable performance—even for this horribly unbelievable movie—and shouldn’t be blamed for its abysmal writing or directing. And even the writer can’t be fully blamed, as she lost control and agency over her once-feminist script early on (originally it ended with neither man “getting” Diana.) Toward the end of the film, David says to Diana, “Now I know that the things people who are in love do to each other, they remember” and I would love to know if Amy Holden Jones wrote that or if some stupid man did because, my god, that’s a worse line than “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” Indecent Proposal was somehow a massive box-office and home video success, but critics and audiences hated it. It received such an outpouring of hatred from feminists and horny men, alike, that Jones wrote a piece in defense of it, saying, “When the film was released, it caused a great deal of controversy… The idea that a woman should not be tempted by any of those things, or she should be so pure that you can’t make a movie about her feeling that way — I mean, go watch some French cinema! It's more complicated than that. I’m as big a feminist as you’ll find, but part of feminism for me is that women can be portrayed not as visions of perfection on-screen, but as whole human beings with choices.” I completely agree with Amy’s sentiment, however, that is not what this film conveyed.
Tonight’s next film, however, comes much closer to some semblance of female empowerment, though Demi received even more backlash for starring in it, this is Ridley Scott’s 1997 film G.I. Jane. G.I. Jane, the film that inspired the shitty Jada Pinkett-Smith joke that Chris Rock told at the Oscars which caused him to get slapped by Will Smith, tells the fictional story of the first woman to undergo special operations training akin to the U.S. Navy Seals. In reality, the Navy S.E.A.L.s didn’t open up training to women until March 2016, and while this film is fictional, it was made with the painful awareness of how patriarchally close-minded the world actually is. The film begins with the Senate Armed Services Committee interviewing Theodore Hayes (Daniel von Bargen), a candidate for the position of Secretary of the Navy. He clearly thinks he’s got this job in the bag, that is until a democratic senator from Texas (this is when I knew this film was a work of fiction) Lillian DeHaven (Anne Bancroft), criticizes the Navy’s sexist policies. DeHaven shakes the table so much with this interview that a landmark deal is struck: if women can compare favorably with men in a series of test cases, then the military will integrate women fully into all occupations of the Navy. “What about people who say that women are physically weaker than men?”, one member of the press asks. “How strong do you have to be to pull a trigger?”, the Senator scoffs. Cut to Demi Moore as Lieutenant Jordan O'Neil, hard at work in some sort of submarine command center, saving lives and making important decisions despite her boss’ distrust and disbelief in her. We then cut back to Senator DeHaven, who is going through potential female candidates for this special program. Her team goes through numerous photos and resumes, none of which seem impressive or feminine enough to please the U.S. military bosses, “She’s perfect, ‘til they do a chromosome check”, DeHaven says about one candidate. (We still had a long way to go in terms of empowering feminine representation, and still do…) O'Neil is ultimately chosen, not just because of her noble set of skills and experience, but because she presents the most feminine and non-threatening—the ideal specimen to undergo this experiment. The chic Senator runs through the requirements with O’Neil, “Have you got a man? Some kind of solvent heterosexual? We can’t have you batting for the other side.” Thankfully, O’Neil does have a man (Jason Beghe), and the two discuss this insane plan in a shared bubble bath that was far sexier than anything in Indecent Proposal. “I’m not interested in being some poster girl for women’s rights, and I’m aware that they may not want me there,” O’Neil says, and after some back and forth, her man retorts, “Look, if you wanna go hang with some cock-swinging commandos, that’s on you.” It’s his discouraging and reluctant acceptance that seems to inspire Jordan to say yes, and shortly after, she arrives at a base where a Navy Captain (Scott Wilson) is immediately uneased by her presence. But the unease and glaring and mistreatment is only beginning, and her first night at the base cafeteria plays like a scene from Mean Girls, where all of these big, hulking, tough guys avoid her, as they’re just so butthurt by her existence. O’Neil is subjected to a predictably-uncreative smattering of insults, rape threats, whistles, whispers, pushing, and taunting, that seems just as painful as the physically-exhausting training she also endures. O’Neil and the men are participating in 12 weeks of the hardest military training known to man—doing all of the hellish exercises and practice warfare that’d you’d expect, but here, they have to do half of this shit in the water. They do push ups in the water, burpees in the water, experience frostbite while standing in a line at the sea shore, being pounded by waves and the screams of their commanding officers. Meanwhile, sexy Viggo Mortensen (which, let’s be honest, is mostly why I chose this movie) is the Command Master Chief, donning a mustache, crew-cut, and the shortiest-short-shorts that could rival Officer Dangle on Reno 911!, and he’s still just sex on a stick. A woman’s presence in this male-dominated arena just makes the woman-hating language of the military all the more obvious—lines like “Come on, girls” or “I’ve seen girl scouts move quicker than this” sound even louder and meaner. Even though she survives all of the same mental tests, physical challenges, and waterboarding that her male counterparts do, and even outlasts dozens of them, there are a good amount of men still giving her shit, still blaming her for their own shortcomings. Fed up with the isolating treatment, O’Neil demands that she no longer receive her own room, bathroom, or any accommodations, and since no one will even cut her hair at the barber shop, she grabs the clippers herself and buzzes her hair down to her famous, symmetrical scalp. It’s all pretty engrossing for a U.S. military propaganda film, and just when I started to get kinda bored, they had Viggo take his shirt off. I’m well aware that this film just feeds perfectly into the military-entertainment-complex that, today, is represented more robustly in superhero movies, but I liked this film a surprising amount. G.I. Jane sometimes feels at odds with its own feminist message, with each sweeping shot of Demi’s sweaty, chiseled body in a cropped white army tank top and with some war-role-playing that seemed in bad taste for a plethora of reasons, but ultimately this film is pretty aggressively feminist. It wasn’t inspiring in the sense that it made me want to enlist or even do a military-inspired work out, but inspiring in the way that witnessing a woman repeatedly kicking men’s asses is. And as uncomfortable and frustrating as it was to see Demi getting shit on or disregarded for having tits, it also seemed frustratingly accurate. I mean, G.I. Jane really doesn’t shy away from portraying men as repugnant and abusive and moronic, which is rare in a film that’s meant to portray “heroes.” This was likely due to the refreshingly-funny and candid script, co-written by David Twohy and Danielle Alexandra, which unfortunately garnered zero awards or positive attention. In fact, despite performing decently at the box office, critics and audiences somehow hated this film more than Indecent Proposal. I hated all of the military mumbo jumbo and cringed at all of the yellow-filtered, horrifically-offensive depictions of the Middle East, but this isn’t what viewers took issue with. As they were filming G.I. Jane, Striptease was released, resulting in a significant change in the way the culture viewed Demi. The loathing of Striptease is what is often blamed for G.I. Jane’s lukewarm reception, since Moore was judged so severely for a bad story that she had little to do with, and this timed out poorly for this film. She was awarded the Razzie Award for Worst Actress for G.I. Jane, which is particularly insulting because Demi just gives everything you could want and more in this film—she’s vulnerable, she’s strong, she’s sexy, she’s scary, she’s interesting, she’s funny, and she did the impossible task of holding my attention during a war movie. As Demi herself once said, "With Striptease, it was as if I had betrayed women, and with G.I. Jane, it was as if I had betrayed men.” It breaks my heart to learn this, not just because she had to constantly compete with the standards and pedestals society placed her on, but because all women do. And I didn’t need to do a deep dive into Demi’s filmography to properly understand how cool she is, how resilient she is, or how good of an actress she’s consistently been, but my research of her illustrious career just made me appreciate her (and her role in The Substance) so much moore. Well I suppose that’s enough hero worship for one blog post, but I had to give my girl her flowers since the Academy was so afraid to. Thank you, as always for reading along, dear reader. Today marks 5 years of writing this goofy blog, and I really appreciate it if you’ve ever taken ten minutes out of your day to read my silly, cinematic opinions. Ta ta for now! ❤️
