G.I. Jane, since opening nationwide a few weeks ago, has done a decent business at the box office. G.I. Jane — a movie that should never have survived the pitch meeting, with a star that should never have survived the casting couch — has actually justified its own existence. How did this happen? How did Demi Moore happen to our culture? And why has nobody done anything to stop her?

Apparently, studio executives smoke large quantities of crack cocaine through the tailpipe of a 1976 Coupe de Ville, wash the rock down with a handful of Pixie Sticks, and clear their palates with a 20-gallon drum of Thunderbird — and thus inebriated they decide, “Gee, that Demi Moore sure can act. She doesn’t annoy me, or anyone else, not one bit, NO SIRREE. I think we should pay her a lot — more than a lot! A whole heck of a lot! We should pay her ELEVEN AND A HALF MILLION DOLLARS! Demi does great work — just look at The Scarlet Letter. IT DIDN’T SUCK AT ALL!” I can’t think of any other explanation for Demi’s rapid rise and subsequent stubborn refusal to fall besides frequent heavy drug and alcohol abuse on the part of the entire film industry. Demi Moore and epoxy resin inhalation — two great tastes that taste great together.

Let’s take a little trip back in time, shall we? Return with me now to those thrilling days of yesteryear, the days when I used to dash from the back seat of carpool to the TV room to catch the last half of General Hospital. Jack Wagner, just warming up for the scenery chewing of Melrose, played the Frisco Jones character, and I cherished a deep crush on Jack Wagner. (Yeah, I know, barfola — but I was a 12-year-old inmate of an all-girls’ school. Good taste in men didn’t appear on the curriculum.) The Frisco Jones character had a friend named Blackie, played by that feather-haired Olivier we know as John Stamos, and the Blackie character in turn had a girlfriend named Jackie Templeton. Demi Moore “originated” the role of Jackie Templeton.

Demi, barely nineteen and packing more fringe on her wardrobe than a Stevie Nicks lookalike contest, had all the ingredients of eighties stardom — a playful whiskey voice, a pugnacious chin still nestled in the last bit of baby fat, a luxurious mane of overprocessed hair. She projected a smoldering presence unsullied by acting skill, and daytime drama — that orange-hued province of teary mascara-cam closeups, saxophone crescendoes, and voluptuously chaste bedroom scenes, replete with sateen and shot through lens lathered with Vaseline — simply ate her up. In this milieu, where the preposterous plot twists and half-dimensional characterizations tend to beg the question of acting, Demi had found her niche.

Unfortunately, she refused to stay there. She chose instead to stomp toward the big screen — and the promise of equally big adulation that it held — with every intention of making the movie-going public adore her, by force if necessary. She didn’t start out badly; she selected roles in several movies that have since become classics, One Crazy Summer for its bent interpretation of post-graduation limbo, St. Elmo’s Fire and About Last Night for their status as dated eighties set pieces. She still couldn’t act very well, but neither could most of her Brat Pack co-stars, and she seemed destined to fade into pleasant oblivion, only to appear ten years later on page 78 of People, in a where-are-they-now piece about her dolls-and-collectibles business in Dubuque or something.

No such luck. Filmmakers must feel very reluctant indeed to piss off Bruce Willis, because Demi Moore keeps getting work, in loudly marketed and persistently mediocre films, as characters that either suffer some sort of feminine martyrdom or entice Demi with their potential to shock the world. In Ghost, she loses her husband, has sex with clay, and kisses a black woman. Wow, shocking — not. In Disclosure, she portrays a female sexual harasser. Gee, what an intelligent inversion of conventional roles — all except for the intelligent part. In The Scarlet Letter, she plays a woman ostracized by a society for being in touch with her sensuality. Gosh, the commentary on the burdens and injustices a woman faces really made me think, WHEN I READ THE BOOK IN HIGH SCHOOL. And in G.I. Jane, Demi’s character strives to equal and surpass the men, earning their respect and forcing them to re-examine their attitudes towards women. Well, shucky darn. I thought Gloria Steinem ALREADY DID THAT.

Demi Moore seems to view herself as a paragon of kick-ass femininity. She does what she wants, she says what she wants, and she doesn’t care what anyone thinks — or so she hopes her carefully constructed public image will lead us to believe. Well, first of all, as a paragon of kick-ass femininity myself, I would like to tell Demi that a shaved head does not a feminist make. Playing poorly-thought-out roles in eminently forgettable movies do not a cultural commentator make. And marrying an influential (if not terribly skilled) actor does not you an actress make. Does anyone else find it a trifle bizarre that Demi — who, as one reviewer observed in New York Magazine, has to get in our faces to exist as an actress – probably had to marry Bruce Willis before she could really do and say what she wanted? And second of all, if she really doesn’t care what anyone thinks, why do we keep seeing pictures of her holding a cigar? Why does she want us to think that she pees standing up?

You know those people that talk about how many drugs they took on such-and-such a night, or how drunk they got at such-and-so’s party, name-dropping wildly and trying so hard to impress you with how hard they rage? You know, like this: “Ohhhhhhhhmigod, I got soooooo drunk last night at Tina’s. You don’t know Tina? The Todd Oldham model with the movie contract? Well, anyway, she had a party — just a few close friends, you know. And we were sitting around drinking Veuve. What? You know, Veuve Clicquot? And so we just got soooooo fucked up, and then that other girl who works for DK started doing lines, and it got pretty boring, so we cabbed over to Vain and had a few drinks there and the next thing I knew it was four in the morning and this blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.” And you just stare at the person because you just don’t care? That’s Demi Moore. I just don’t care. I don’t care about her fake-ola boobs or her three hour daily workouts or her alleged marital difficulties, or her movies or her conflation of acting with pointing her chin in different directions a la Luke Perry on 90210. I don’t care about any of it, and I want her to go back to General Hospital and leave me alone, because not everyone can act, but if someone who can’t act gets rewarded with huge sums of money, I don’t want to see or hear anything about it.

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