The Talkies: What Do Women Want?
Bowman, James
| | | i Ir,_.g I [ I i | ~ by James Bowman What Do Women Want? Since there's no answer, better not ask. W omen are different from men. Or so we may surmise from the "gender gap" which has been...
...The sexual adventuresses in Whipped and Love and Sex seem to have been designed solely to make the ideological point that women and men are (or ought to be) the same...
...T places his wife, like all other women, on a pedestal, insisting to his golfing and duck-hunting buddies that "you don't understand women"--who cannot be bad, or bad luck for men, except as men make them so...
...If you want her, don't tiy to understand her," he advises one of Isabella's suitors: "you have to feel...
...Still, it cannot be denied that the iconography of female suffering has always exercised its own very special and powerful hold over the imaginations of both sexes, as we may be reminded by the weird Korean film, Chunhyang, that screened as part of the New York Film Festival last month...
...Like Chunhyang and Dancer in the Dark it features a female victim at its emotional center, but this one scarcely even knows she's a victim...
...to act as a chorus spouting Gore-like sympathy, as well as being in himselfa symbol of the most radical kind of feminization...
...At any rate, Dr...
...If you don't take it seriously, you never get hurt...
...In short, they want to have it both ways, which is another way of saying they want what they can never have...
...T can continue to worship his benignly deluded spouse while honking the new golf pro at the country club (Helen Hunt) -- and, of course, worshipping her as well...
...Though at one level it is about the sex and drugs and rock'n'roll of the 197o's rock music scene as it was observed by a 15-year-old fan at the time, its subtext is the emotional devastation wrought by the sexual revolution...
...As in most Altman films, there is always something to watch and a sense of barelysuppressed chaos forever on the point of breaking through to the tautly-held surface, which bubbles with frenetic, feminine activity...
...This, I gather, was supposed to be funny...
...The four male heroes of Whi#ped are, as the title suggests, entirely feminine in their eager complaisance towards Miss Peet, their common girlfriend, and reserve only an absurd and obscene braggadocio among themselves as the sole remaining shred of ma]eness they have to cling to...
...Calling herself Penny Lane (Kate Hudson again), she is only a year older than the boyhero, William Miller (Patti& Fugit), butas the leader of the Band-Aids (a term she prefers to "groupies") in service to the rock band William is reporting on for Rolling Stone, she has already figured out how to live her life...
...At any rate, now it seems merely incomprehensible, as impossibly exotic as penis gourds or human sacrifice...
...The nuisance of having to insert the "W" every time one refers to this Bush--to say nothing of the wearisome task of having to defend Bush's own line of putatively seductive, "compassionate" cant for the next four years --would be almost worth it to see that happen...
...They want both the glory of their suffering and, naturally enough, not to suffer...
...Or so we may surmise from the "gender gap" which has been a constant feature of American politics since 198o-- and which has been largely responsible for keeping the Democratic Party, alive through a period of disillusionment with statist soluEons to social problems that might othem, ise have been fatal to it...
...Yet there may be less difference than we might expect between such a culture, common to traditional societies, and the emerging post-feminist official culture of today...
...Both come through with flying colors and have as their reward a sort of semi-saintly or iconic status in an official culture which places its highest value on female chastity...
...Thus Isabella (Penelope Cruz), the ditsy dame who is the heroine of Woman on Top, is offered a flagrant ragout of adoration fantasies (even the flowers spring to attention when she walks past), including a straying husband JAMES BOWMAN, our movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...
...tests of their fidelity...
...Not so Lars von Trier, who showed in Breaking the Waves four years ago that his own devotion to women, and especially women's capacity for self-sacrifice, bordered on the pathological...
...Bowman} regularly updated "Movie Takes" are available on TAS Online at ~.spectator.org...
...As we see her through the eyes of William, who falls instantly in love with her, life lived according to the tim credo seems to have made a psychic cripple out of her...
...T and the Women by Robert Altman, a man who has notoriously promised to shake the dust of his native land from offhis expensively shod feet if George W. Bush should win the presidency...
...The American Spectator _9 No v e m b e r ~ o o o 81...
...Well, she doesn't always have fun...
...This opinion, worthy of Al Gore at his smarmiest, is not exactly meant to be contradicted by the fact that his treating Kate as a saint has made her embrace celibacy...
...Only protecting patrilineal bloodlines...
...And, logically enough, to kill...
...The nice thing about this kind of woman-worship for the men, I guess, is that it is polytheistic...
...Whenever I see a movie like this, I think of the guy in Erica Jong's Fear of Flying who said he was handing out feminist tracts because it was "a good way to get laid...
...Well, at least it's good to be able to suspect that Gore's flirtation with the women's vote is not being taken seriously on either side...
...His latest, Dancer in the Dark, is a confirmation of his morbid feminism which, like the earlier film, takes a quasi-mythic instance of female self-sacrifice and makes it into a sick fantasy-the savage torture of a child-womanmasquerading as preternatural sensitivity to the sacred victimhood of women...
...Now there was a guy who had Clinton-Goreism figured out thirty years ago...
...This kind of practical (as opposed to theoretical) feminism means that you can devote yourself to providing sexual pleasure for men just so long as you keep your fingers crossed behind your back...
...Both are meek and submissive and completely faithful and trusting to husbands who put them, more (Griselda's Walter) or less (Chunhyang's Mongwong ) deliberately, to the most awful In movies we have to make allowances for female feeblemindedness...
...Politics, fortunately, at least in our time, is mostly comedy...
...The nearest thing to compare it to in English is Chaucer's "Clerk's Tale," the sto W of Patient Griselda, which was already old-fashioned in Chaucer's time, six centuries ago...
...A1 Gore has learned well the lesson of Bill Clinton's presidency, which is that the women who are essential to his political success will forgive a (male) politician anything save a principled refusal to flatter them and offer obviously bogus assurances that he "cares" about them and their tender feelings...
...Celibacy is right for her, presumably, as is the corresponding delusion that her husband is her brother, just as the discovery by their daughter (Kate Hudson) on her wedding day that she is a lesbian and her elopement with the maid of honor (Liv Tyler) must be supposed to be all right for them...
...One or two Republican women could be heard privately grumbling their second thoughts about the nineteenth amendment, but no Democrats that I know of...
...The filmmakers (director Fina Torres and writer Vera Blasi) take it all as seriously as A1 Gore's kiss...
...Yet she sees no other way to live-- and apparently her reallife prototype, like many other women unknown to movie-fame, has been living the same way ever since the 7o's...
...N James Bowman welcomes e-mail at ]amesBowman@home.com...
...The veteran Korean director, Im Kwon Taek, boldly (not to say foolhardily) puts a traditional Korean Pansori singer on a stage and films his recitation of the Chunhyang story as the framing device for his own, very faithful screen version of the same...
...and if you never get hurt, you always have fun...
...Certainly, Dr...
...In movies too, we apparently have to make allowances for female feeblemindedness, and even to pretend it's not feeblemindedness, but a unique essence to which men, too, ought to aspire...
...Who ever thought that this was an attractive prospect...
...Men used to die for it...
...I suppose her character is what cigarette company marketers were once supposed to have identified as "virile women," but virile women are really just an artifact of the disappearance of viriie men...
...In the same way they want both the maistrie over their husbands that Chaucer's Wife of Bath describes and to be dominated and owned by them, like the Clerk's Griselda...
...What was that obsession with virginity and female honor about anyway...
...That's what makes for a large part of both the comedy and the tragedy of the world...
...In fact she has some pre~, ghastly episodes of un-fun when there comes the inevitable backlash from such an obvious suppression of her emotional nature...
...Set in the Korean eighteenth century, this film falls somewhere in between the oral poetry ofa pre-literate culture and the sophisticated image-manipulation of today's post-literate popular culture...
...The ending is an exercise in 80 No v e rn b e r 2 o o o _9 The American Spectator "magical realism" designed to underline the point that the doctor's devotion to women is a permanent vocation, but to his credit Altman offers up just the tiniest hint of irony about the compromise to masculinity such a vocation entails...
...No wonder they give us the drag queen "Monica" (Harold Perrineau, Jr...
...Never take it seriously," she tells William...
...Though it doesn't make a shibboleth out of chastity, Dancer in the Dark does celebrate the pathos of a woman's sufferings for the sake of a man's frivolous pleasures as surely and as thoroughly as Chunhyang or any of the more lurid of the lives of the female saints...
...The confirmation that we are living in the Clintonian age of the woman is not so much "The Kiss" that was said to have turned around Gore's poll numbers at the Democratic convention as with the dearth of Democrats willing to say how little such a reaction was to our national credit...
...By nature they're saints, and should be treated as such...
...At least this movie recognizes that women and men are distinct...
...T he connection between the new feminization of the male and progressive politics is also implied in Dr...
...Here, perhaps, is one clue to answering Freud's question as to what it is that women want...
...T (Richard Gere) is a gynecologist in Dallas whose wife, Kate (Farrah Fawcett), develops something called a "Hestia complex," which is characterized by a regression to childhood, allegedly caused by being loved too much...
...Murilo Benfcio) prostrate at her feet and begging her to let him submit himself to her governance...
...The ideological implications of sex, marriage, and child-bearing mayall be utterly transformed, but the one constant linking the old and the new official cultures is the high emotional charge theyget--and make use of for ideological purposes--from images of beautiful, good, and patient women being tortured By powerful men...
...N o obvious candidate for Movie of the Month emerged this month, but a picture I liked quite a lot, perhaps for the wrong reasons, was Cameron Crowe's autobiographical Almost Famous...
...Both Chunhyang and Griselda are low-born lasses who marry high-born husbands, and are meant to serve as the representatives of ideal womanhood as established by what the Russian critic, Mikhail Bakhtin, called the "official culture" of their time...
...The result in the former case is such a bizarre concoction that Amanda Peet is made to look more like a man in drag than Harold Perrineau, Jr...
Vol. 33 • November 2000 • No. 9
