Man in her Life: 'The Rose' & 'Coal Miner's Daughter'
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
Screen Ill MAN IN HER LIFE 'THE ROSE' & 'COAL MINER'S DAUGHTER ~oJuAT EVERY pop music star from Loretta Lynn to Janis oplin to Bette Midler wants, presumably, is to s~nd t from the...
...Books: PACKAGING OUR PAST I I W AY BACK in the academic year of AMERICA REVISED led the reading lists of courses like mine...
...Thus, quickly, the trade corrected replaces one of Booker T. Washington as print) The History of the Haymarket Af- the more optimistic views of the previous the representative Negro American...
...One face belongs to Alan Bates as Rudge, the pitiless, shameless manager...
...It's as if such people were always crushed by a common destiny no matter how high their stars have risen...
...Midler's was the career that included a Svengali figure like Rudge, a demon manager whom Midler finally fired after the completion of The Rose...
...Then she collapses and has to be carded off by the only man who has stuck with her from the start...
...They want "to be somebody, as the saying goes...
...Her whole singing career is based on a kind of superlative scripted by men...
...The film begins with Doo taking bets on whether he can drive his Jeep straight up the side of a slag heap...
...I never saw a feller so bent on gittin' t' the top o' a pile o' tresh," someone remarks, just in case we missed the point of Doo's feat...
...We may think of Spacek as the accomplished actress come the material with which men have provided them...
...By the time she's famous, he's become a good little wife...
...Screen Ill MAN IN HER LIFE 'THE ROSE' & 'COAL MINER'S DAUGHTER ~oJuAT EVERY pop music star from Loretta Lynn to Janis oplin to Bette Midler wants, presumably, is to s~nd t from the crowd...
...He is an ambivalent figure, a combination lover-manager who both comforts and exploits his star...
...tragedy is that she doesn't do this with Houston...
...If there is ultimately a way to choose The killing irony of this moral is that if anything distin- between Midler's portrayal of Rose and Sphcek's of Loretta guishes these two films, it's the single-handed ability of their Lynn, it results from the fact that Midler brings more to the stars--Midler as Rose and Sissy Spacek as Loretta--to over- role...
...redone their products, a~nd sometimes a while had caught historians and their published his quick essay, Violence in distorted the truth, not just to reflect a publishers off guard, and set "relevant" the Sixties, as a Signet book, and Richard new consensus about our history but to history teachers to scouring the stacks for Hofstadter and Michael Wallace (the cater to the whims and prejudices of the books like Jack London's The Iron Heel, standard textbook formula: a "name" "market," the redneck local school Richard Wright's Native Son, Almont historian and a young scholar to do most boards who hate the UN and fear the Lindsey's The Pullman Strike, Robert of the work) produced, compiled, Reds, and the "liberal" pressures as Penn Warren's Night Rider, and Henry American Violence, A Documentary His- well--so a picture of Stokley Carmichael David's wonderful (now sadly out of tory...
...imitation, on having a unique ear for the singing styles of the Lynn's "autobiography...
...In a sense the key to both movies is this man who is always there to pick up the pieces...
...The one thing she can do that Miner's Daughter...
...sion on the Causes and Prevention of her study of how for one hundred fifty This was a significant, traumatic shift Violence became Bantam mass market years textbook publishers have constantly in national consciousness, one which for paperbacks, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr...
...Neither he nor only way a talented, successful woman can be saved from Rydell is even trying to divert these films from their awful, herself is by latching on to a sensible, loving husband...
...1969-70, when much of HISTORY SCHOOLBOOKS IN THE TWEN- Meanwhile, one of my students, Steve America--particularly the campuses-- TIETH CENTURY Hogan, as his final project, produced a seemed to be coming apart, I taught my short film of all the violent illustrations in first history course at Fordham, "Pat-Frances Fitzgerald a group of standard grammar school and terns of American Violence...
...It's partly about Janis Joplin, but also partly about its own star, Bette Midler...
...Kent State, the Calley trial and Attica a new, but rather had been lost in a national Ten years later, Frances Fitzgerald, few months away, America was slowly amnesia...
...Rydell did so with Cinderella Liberty, Spacek can't is put the singing itself at the heart of her perforApted with Agatha...
...Rose's underlying sameness...
...Knowing she's too shy to per- form, he gets her to the first gig he arranges by pretending he's taking her out on the town...
...When she finally makes it big, Doo even does her carousing and general carrying on for her...
...In this climactic scene, as the performer ascends the concert stage for the umpteen millionth time, she is so doped up and wiped out from the pressures of her career that she cannot sing...
...But in the new film we can feel him a story in a way that The Coal Miner's Daughter never straining to make Loretta Lynn's story conform to the clich~ is...
...It's more along the lines of an exposd...
...With four Atlantic-Little Brown, $9.95, 240 pp high school history textbooks, demonassassinations (including Malcolm X), strafing how 200 years of American "ofthe Watts, Rochester, Newark and De- Raymond A. Schroth ficial" violence--particularly wars of troit race riots in its immediate past, expansion--had been sanctioned, even 33,000 Americans and untold numbers warfare, vigilantism, and domestic op- glorified, because they had led to a supof civilians already dead in Vietnam, and pression in the 1960s were not exactly posedly greater America...
...almost pulls it off...
...The Coal Miner's Daughter is handicapped by having to stick to Loretta Lynn's version of her life, which has appar- ently had only one man in it...
...And each star either case...
...The Coal Miner's Daughter is based on Loretta Lynn's autobiography, from which the movie takes on a certain inspirational glow...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...Midler makes the concert scenes the most important, original way an episode from the life of another famous compelling part of her film, and thus makes TheRose whole as woman, Agatha Christie...
...who, more than any other writer, beginning to perceive itself in a new But within months the typewriters of changed how Americans perceived Vietway--as a once prosperous, progressive the historians were humming and the nam in Fire in the Lake, has taken a step and righteous nation now disoriented by publishers' presses were purring...
...In Agatha Michael Apted imagined in an mance...
...The Rose has the great advantage here of not being bound by any one star's life...
...In The Rose she makes the sixties her own as well with sensitively, as has Michael Apted, the director of The Coal her performance as Joplin...
...At last he takes up running the huge horse farm they buy, and rides herd on the kids so Loretta will have a good home to come back to when she's not on tour...
...He even tries working as a greasemonkey to keep from being underfoot all the time...
...The other is Frederic Forrest's as Houston Dyer, the "piece of meat in a chauffeur's cap" who turns out to be the only person capable of loving Rose for herself...
...A man even served as ghostwriter on Ms...
...Little by little The Coal Miner's Daughter updates Loretta's 1950s rags-to-riches story by converting Doo from a male harridan into the kind of husband today's career-minded women dream about...
...The Rose is based more loosely on the life, and death, of Janis Joplin...
...The moral is the same in plot by the sheer force of her performance...
...As played by Tommy Lee Jones, Loretta's husband-manager with the improbable name of Doolittle Lynn is not so much an ambivalent figure as a confusing and inconsistent one...
...As different in conception as these two movies are, however, both lead to the same, climactic scene...
...Loretta's In both movies, therefore, it is left to the star to rescue the victory is that she does do it with Doo...
...Yet at the same time Doo is playing the stage mother, he's also turning into something of a model liberated husband...
...He pushes her into a recording session he himself has financed, then mails the record to every country/Western station in the land, and drags Loretta around to make sure in person that the DJs play her song...
...Having split up the Rose herself between a couple of role models, the film simply splits the personality of the man in Rose's life into a couple of different parts as well...
...When the great Patsy Cline (Beverly D'Angelo) of Grand Ole Opry sends her car for Loretta one night, Doo dutifully takes the kids home to bed while Loretta goes off to bask in the glory...
...In the movie it is Doo who is restless and ambitious for some kind of success...
...But four kids later, after he' s bought her the guitar, he starts doing the housework himself so she can practice...
...He marries Loretta when she is only thirteen, practically rapes her on the honeymoon, and settles afterwards into a routine of griping about how she can't cook, can't make love, can't keep house, etc...
...The to change the way we study and pass the sudden perception of its virulent, various reports of the National Commis- along our own past in America Revised, racist, violent aggression...
...The Rose's director, Mark Rydell, thirties, forties, and fifties, and being able to make them her has made at least one earlier film that told a woman's story own...
...He's sincere when he tells her not to work so hard...
...But the bottom line for this movie, as for GRAOUATE THEOLOGY PROGRAM SUMMER SEMESTER BEGINS JUNE 23, 1980 ENDS JULY 31, 1980 We offer a full program of courses leading to a Master of Arts degree m Theology wdh con- SUMMER SESSION centratlon In 1 of 3 areas Scripture Studtes, OFFERINGS INCLUDE: Historical/Systematic Theology, or Spintual- Johannlne Lltemtum =ty Courses are open to pnests, rehglous and Rev Brendan McGrath, O S B, laay and can be taken toward a degree or in STD an unclassified status as continuing educa-Discoveries at Ebla and theirhon Undergraduate major also offered All Signfflcance for Biblical Studies graduate classes held at Lake Shore cam- Rev Mitchell Dahood, S J, Ph D pus They carry 3 semester hours credit at a tuition rate of$112 per hour Christian Eschatology Gerald McCulloh, Ph D For application or mformatton contact Department C Contemporary Theology: John Dunne'l Method Sr Mary Peter McGmty, C S J Jon Ndson, Ph D Graduate Theology Program LOYOLA UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO Morality and the Co(~rol of Life 6525 N Sheridan Road and Death Chicago, Ilhnols 60626 Rev John Conner'/, S J, S T D Telephone 312/274-3000 We are an equal Ol0portundy educator/employer i 11 April 1980:213 The Rose, is the old myth of the good man--the notion that the about pop stars which The Rose also contains...
...Now that she's on top, it's time for him to find something he's good at...
...Incoherently she tells her stunned and embar- rassed fans about her sorrows...
...Doo is the one who buys Loretta her first guitar...
...The Rose portrays this two-faced character more effectively by dividing him into two separate roles...
...Yet judging from The CoalMiner's Daughter and The Rose, stars like these end up with lives as relentlessly alike as those lived by the great, undifferentiated mass of humanity they have tried so hard to escape...
...He is by turns a helpless witness to her self-destruction and a switcheroo on the stage mother, a kind of stage husband whose grasping ambition is the drive behind his star's success...
...The here, but the truth is that Midler is an accomplished actress, Rose and The Coal Miner's Daughter were both directed and too...
...He picks on her about their need to find something she's good at, and then jokes that they may finally have found it when she gets pregnant...
...fair to show that the phenomena of class decade's consensus historians and swel- The sad, but not surprising, news is Commonweal: 214...
Vol. 107 • April 1980 • No. 7
