THE SCREEN: Sob Sisters
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
SOB SISTERS THE SCREEN An Unmarried Woman, Coming Home, Pretty Baby, The Goodbye Gtrl and House Calls all have something in common. They all exploit women. Four of these five movies are about a...
...When her husband tells her he's leaving, she spits up in the street...
...The clash between militarism and radical dissent is reduced to the eternal triangle, a drama which has psychological implications at the cost of ideological ones...
...They have nothing else to do with themselves, no larger perception of life...
...Four of these five movies are about a woman who finds herself on her own with a child to support, and in all four she solves the problem the only way that a woman, by implication, can--by getting a man to pick up the bills...
...The only time for this crying was when the war was still going on...
...But in the very act of beaming so, she gave us reason to doubt her credibility on this issue...
...She is not herself a political force...
...The moral is that we should not consider rape, abandonment and brutalization to be impediments to a happy childhood...
...The rest of the time, though~ she's too comfortable for angst...
...In An Unmarried Woman Jill Clayburgh solves the same problem differently, by doing what Jane Fonda, who has other problems, does in Coming Home: she lets her husband continue to support her while she plays around with another man...
...The rest is a lot of crocodile tears...
...It doesn't occur to her that this film finally got done only because heads far cooler than hers realized there was now money to be made on a tear-jerker about the Viet vets...
...She took this as a sign of political progress in America...
...But the heroines in these films are even worse off...
...This primitivism is a nice touch, and entirely typical of the mentality found in all these films...
...The unmarried woman seems at times a rather existential type...
...Pretty Baby is a little like some twenties or thirties movie melodrama run through the projector backwards...
...This is why Mason tinkers with her apartment and Fonda with her hair...
...That is what Clayburgh's husband deserves, since he walked out on her first...
...Moreover, the woman remains a mere prize of battle here...
...Jane Fonda was one of the prime movers behind getting this film made, presumably because she found attractive the role of a woman caught up in serious political issues...
...then he promptly falls in love with pretty baby and marries her...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...At least, I assume that's the import of the scene, since she's been resisting him until then but immediately goes home to sleep with him when he punches out this other man for her...
...Actually, in Goodbye Girl and House Calls this is something that happens to the heroines ('Marsha Mason and Glenda Jackson), not something they do...
...Richard Dreyfuss announces in Goodbye Girl that he eats only health food and is "very careful" what he puts in his body...
...They have nothing to lapse from...
...As I said before, all the women in these films somehow fall short of existential suffering...
...When Dern and Voight come face to face at last, Fonda simply stands on the sidelines fretting...
...This one attempts to replace the old myth that all whores are miserable and self-despising with a new myth that they live indolent, carefree, enjoyable lives...
...Since the first duty of a radical is self-criticism, as every revolutionist from Marx to Mao agrees, bragging about your political consciousness betrays your lack of it...
...They are themselves only charmingly ineffectual...
...The only real politics that gets into any of them is the Vietnam war, which serves 28 April 1978:274 as background for Coming Home...
...That's the problem of all the women in these films, even Brooke Shields, who plays a twelveyearold forced into prostitution in Pretty Baby...
...then he whips up a spaghetti dinner for Marsha Mason, complete with cheap chianti...
...But does it show that she has great strength of character because she can be humiliated by him without letting it change her life style...
...Keith Carradine, a peripatetic photographer of prostitutes in Pretty Baby, first announces that he cares only for his work, not people...
...Jane Fonda changes her hair style to let us know which way the wind is blowing in her love life...
...Instead of creating a heroine who is politically serious, it turns its political issues into soap opera...
...It's hard to get so clear a reading on the women in these films at other times, though...
...Jill Clayburgh thinks long and deeply about whether she should move to a new apartment, something with working fireplaces in Soho instead of the glass penthouse on the east side she now lives in...
...The truth is that all these films deal with sexual politics by pretending it isn't a form of real politics--the kind which deals with economic relations, or the distribution of power--at all...
...She is only there to be fought over...
...Like its Vietnam policy, Coming Home's sexual politics are also contained, presumably, in the drama of two men squaring off to do combat over a woman...
...The night of the Academy Awards we also got on television the spectacle of Jane Fonda in an interview congratulating herself because, "Nixon is gone, but I'm still here...
...What they experience instead is a kind of listlessness...
...Like the values reflected in their love of brutality, their ways of expressing emotion tend to remain rather--shall we say --traditional...
...The only woman showing any initiative in any of these films is Susan Sarandon in Pretty Baby, who at least acquires her husband on purpose...
...Since the two myths are equally dehumanizing, it's hard to say which is the more pernicious...
...When two men fight over Jill Clayburgh in An Unmarried Woman, for instance, she finally realizes she's in love with one of them...
...Jane Fonda's husband, Bruce Dern, is a gung-ho Marine captain who goes to Vietnam, and while he's gone she has an affair with a paraplegic Viet vet, Jon Voight, who becomes an anti-war demonstrator...
...The men have their lapses, to be sure...
...She's not so much a person as an atmosphere that has to be maintained...
...The film itself doesn't live up to such expectations, however...
...A real dilemma...
...From being a fallen woman (albeit a prepubescent one), Brooke progresses to the sort of marriage that usually goeth before a fall, and from that to ,being taken in hand by her mother so she can have a childhood and a proper upbringing...
...What political "commitment" does it take to make this film now, when Vietnam has already inflicted all the paraplegia it is ever going to inflict...
...Her one strong emotion is nausea...
...They're happy hookers all...
...Commonweal: 275...
...Nothing phases this kid...
...She probably even thinks that, besides ousting Nixon, she is the reason Coming Home has at last been produced...
...Her problem is not that life offers her a hard choice, or no choices, but only that it doesn't offer her enough choices to keep her amused...
...Judging ,by Pretty Baby, in fact, we would have to conclude that the more hardbitten the reality is in a film about women, the more romanticized the film will be...
...Marsha Mason in Goodbye Girl redecorates her apartment...
...Their lives are aimless and meandering to begin with...
...It is also why Jill Clayburgh, the most vacuous comedienne to come along in years, is perfectly cast as the unmarried woman, who is the archetypal character that all these films are about...
...Instead of practicing self-criticism, Fonda was indulging in its opposite--displaying an unseemly egomania, which is only the first duty of a movie star...
Vol. 105 • April 1978 • No. 9
