Moving Targets: Women, Murder, and Representation

The rampaging female has become a new cliché in Hollywood cinema, a sexy beauty stabbing and shooting her way to box-office success. Fatal Attraction, Thelma and Louise, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, and Single White Female are a few of the recent mainstream films that have attracted huge audiences. Meanwhile, true accounts of a teenager shooting her lover's wife and a battered woman bludgeoning her husband to death get prime news media coverage—and are quickly made into TV movies.

This pi...