feminism and the movies

I've just recently seen both the original Stepford Wives and Mona Lisa Smile, and I've got to say, Hollywood feminism has lost a lot of ground. The Stepford Wives is over the top, yes, but it raises a serious issue in the so-called "gender wars" and doesn't let up. It doesn't have a happy ending; Katharine Ross ends up an animatronic wife just like everyone else. The movie knows that men are threatened by feminism, and suggests that some men might just as soon turn back the clock.

Well, Mona Lisa Smile does turn back the clock. It shows us a version of the 1950s in which a feminist "infiltrates" Wellesley college and gets her comeuppance. I mean, there are glimmers of something else, but in the end it makes the whole issue personal rather than institutional and therefore lets everyone off the hook. The Julia Stiles character gets to "choose" marriage (and presumably motherhood) over Yale Law School because "you always taught us to make our own choices, and this is mine." Well, yes and no. How much support would she, or any woman at the time, have for the opposite choice? Unfortunately the male characters are so shallow, so one-dimensional, that we can't really tell whether this is a good choice or not. The women who end up pursuing their own interests are 'damaged" in some way--the Kirsten Dunst character is divorced, and the Maggie Gyllenhall character has obvious father issues and is, moreover, both Jewish and a "slut." (While the movie doesn't imply that these are related, it's just a fact that she's the only Jewish character and the only really overtly sexual one...)

Yes, the Julia Roberts character seems to have real options--she's turned down at least one proposal, and freely chosen to leave another man, but again, there's no critique of any institutional realities. Nor do we know what she's going to do for money when she gets to Europe at the end of the movie.

I know, I know, it's just entertainment. And if there were lots of entertainment out there that took up women's history, and this were just one, I wouldn't be upset. In fact, I'm not really upset--just noting that this is the way Hollywood seems to work. Take a big institutional problem, personalize it, and then imply that the personal solution will do. Dickens did pretty much the same thing in his fiction over 150 years ago, so it's an honorable and time-tested tradition. But it's one-sided at best and dishonest at worst.

I tend to hate teacher movies, by the way. Especially English teacher movies. (Dead Poets Society comes to mind.) I hate how we romanticize teachers in movies and then don't pay them what they're worth, as if their love of their students was somehow supposed to make up for that. Julia Roberts, in this movie, seems only to teach one class, not to do research, and to have ample funds for all kinds of clothes that were probably not even available in Welleley, MA in 1954. But I digress.

For the sake of full disclosure I should also say that the movie had me tearing up a couple of times, including at the end when Kristen Dunst and Julia Roberts finally reached some understanding. But then I think I'm really weirdly hormonal right now--is this perimenopause? Honestly, I think there's some violin cue that goes directly to my tear ducts, bypassing my brain entirely. It happened at the end of Saved!, too, but that's for another time.