Life Moves Pretty Fast: The lessons we learned from eighties movies (and why we don't learn them from movies any more) (21 page)

Sure, Lyne and his fantasies about how all women are masochistic bunny boilers are pretty attention-grabbing, but to let them grab all the attention is essentially doing Lyne’s work for him.
^fn2
Because, contrary to what Lyne seemed to think, there is a lot more to eighties women than stalkers and sadist shaggers. There were so many interesting female film characters in the eighties, and so many great movies about women. Not all of them were explicitly feminist, but the fact that these films were made at all, with largely female casts, featuring female stories, feels so feminist compared with today’s movies they make Andrea Dworkin look a bit watered down. So much so, in fact, that feminist critics – ones who grew up reading Faludi – now look back to the eighties as the last highpoint for women in movies: ‘The status of women in movies has gotten worse since the 1980s,’ wrote journalist Amanda Hess, in a 2014 discussion about
Backlash
and eighties films.

‘Just look at 1983, for example. I don’t know what was going on but you had
Yentl
,
Terms of Endearment
and
Silkwood
– all big films for women. Then there were movies like
Frances
,
Places in the Heart
,
Gorillas in the Mist
,
Aliens
… But now, well, we know what’s happened now,’ says film writer Melissa Silverstein.

And this is all true. But when I think about women in eighties movies, I don’t think of any of those perfectly fine examples (all of which are impossible to imagine being made now). Instead, I think about the classic women’s movies.

Most people know about the Bechdel test, which ascertains how feminist a film is by posing the following questions:

1. It has to have at least two women in it …
   
2. Who talk to each other …
   
3. About something besides a man.
   

Well, I’d like to coin the Magnolia test, named for a movie that is particularly close to my heart, which judges whether or not a movie is a proper women’s movie:

1. The cast is largely, maybe even solely female …
   
2. And the female characters are kind to one another because they like one another, and they talk to each other about a million things other than men …
   
3. And the relationship between the women is far more important than any they have with a man.
   (Bonus points if any of the following are in the film: Shirley MacLaine, Dolly Parton, Bette Midler, Olympia Dukakis. Triple for Sally Field.)
   

In an ideal world, these films would just be known as ‘movies’ as opposed to ‘women’s movies’. But as the ongoing success of Michael Bay proves, we do not live in an ideal world. And so, for too long, when it comes to leading roles in movies, women have been seen as the exception rather than the norm. Movies that focus on women’s stories are – now more than ever – dismissed as ‘niche’, even though women make up more than half the human race and (arguably more to the point) cinema audiences. So the gendering is, gratingly, necessary, just as, apparently, Michael Bay is to Hollywood’s current financial success.

Some people snark about women’s movies and dismiss them as ‘domestic’, as though that were a negative thing. Home is a place most of us know and to write off ‘domestic’ as an embarrassment is to dismiss the lives millions and millions of women lead as worthless. I’ve also heard complaints that whereas men get action movies and Westerns, women ‘only’ get domestic dramas and big ol’ weepies. Well, if I want to see movies set in jungles or outer space, I will, and thanks to eighties movies I can see those movies starring kickass women in the form of, respectively,
Romancing the Stone
and
Aliens
.

What I love about classic women’s movies is that they tell women that their daily lives are interesting. Westerns and action movies and other genres considered to be the area of menfolk do not, because they do not depict lives led by most men, although heaven knows there are plenty of other movies out there that depict nothing but the daily lives of men. Women’s movies show women living normal daily lives – raising their children, dealing with breast cancer, laughing with their friends, contending with unfaithful husbands, fighting sexist bosses: in other words, things that women around the world deal with every day. These movies also respect the value of women’s emotional lives and show women talking to each other about things other than men. Men see this about themselves in pretty much any other movie. Women? Not so much. In women’s movies, women exist in their own right, not as appendages, not as lonely spinsters, or idealised quarries, or someone’s wife or someone’s mother, but as funny, sad, angry, kind, supportive, independent human beings – and how many movies can claim that? So yeah, sure, men have their Westerns and their stoicism and tumbleweed. But women get to bond over cheesecake with Dolly Parton. If men make sneering comments about women’s films, it’s because they’re jealous, and I really can’t blame them.

Nine to Five
amply passes the Magnolia test, as do those
ne plus ultra
eighties women’s movies,
Terms of Endearment
and
Beaches
, two of the most classic women’s weepies of all time. These movies starred women, were made for women, told distinctly women’s stories involving breast cancer, straying husbands and motherhood, and the few men onscreen are repeatedly shown to be a disappointment, whereas the women are there for one another until death.
Beaches
comes with the obvious added bonus of being the last film to provide truly great hairbrush-microphone-in-front-of-the-mirror singing, thanks to Bette Midler’s irresistible soundtrack, a quality frustratingly lacking from movies today, and it serves as some distraction from Barbara Hershey’s lips seemingly inflating and deflating during the film.
Terms of Endearment
is probably not a film you’ve seen recently, but you should – it is as delightful as you’d expect a movie to be featuring Shirley MacLaine as a crotchety busybody and Jack Nicholson as her astronaut(!) lover. But the real heart of the film is the relationship between MacLaine and her charmingly daffy daughter (Debra Winger) who, while married to one useless man (Jeff Daniels) and being wooed by another (John Lithgow), develops breast cancer. These two films are both sad but, like the best weepies, they are also very funny, and this brings me to a quick defence of women’s weepies.

American feminist film critic Mollie Haskell, writing a decade before the eighties, was very dismissive of women’s movies and, in particular, women’s weepies in her classic text
From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies
:
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‘The woman’s film,’ she writes, ‘fills a masturbatory need, it is soft-core emotional porn for the frustrated housewife. The weepies are founded on a mock-Aristotelian and politically conservative aesthetic whereby women spectators are moved, not by pity and fear but by self-pity and tears to accept, rather than reject, their lot. That there should be a need and an audience for such an opiate suggests an unholy amount of real misery.’

Well, first, unlike Haskell, I don’t see too much wrong with providing fodder for masturbation, especially if that other person is frustrated. Seems like simple generosity to me. Second, the idea that crying at sad movies is a form of transference is, to be frank, grade A baloney. A movie that makes you both laugh and cry is as satisfying as a pop song that is both moving and ecstatic.
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It’s about the pleasure of experiencing the full gamut of emotions from a single piece of art, that feeling of standing up at the end, exhausted by the emotional pummelling but still giggling at some of the jokes. After all (cue stirring instrumental eighties women’s movie theme song), isn’t that what life itself is like? I can understand why some critics – and especially feminist critics – object to the trope of a woman dying in the women’s movie (belated spoiler: someone dies in both
Terms of Endearment
and
Beaches
). But that is, in fact, only a tiny part of both of those films: they are really about female friendship and mothers and daughters. It’s just that the deaths ramp up the tears and the tears are part of the way female audiences (by which I obviously mean ‘me’) bond with the movies and bond with each other while watching the movie. A movie that makes you cry is a movie you have to love, and crying while watching a movie with a female friend is as intimate as getting drunk with them.

But the really telling detail is that these movies make (the largely female) audiences cry over the death of a woman. So often, women who die in movies (and books) are either idealised or completely anonymous, and it’s impossible to cry over such characters today (I have never, for example, cried over the death of tedious Miss Melanie in
Gone With the Wind
). Whereas with the women in
Terms of Endearment
and
Beaches
, we got to know them pretty well – their sexual desires, their flaws, their jealousies. That female audiences still cry at the end of these films is a testament to how hard the films work to make these female characters feel real.

This is why, of all the great eighties women’s movies, my favourite one is
Steel Magnolias
. I watch this film at least twice a year (and always down tools if I happen to come across it on TV). It still makes me laugh out loud (‘I’m not crazy, M’Lynn – I’ve just been in a very bad MOOD for forty years,’ Shirley MacLaine’s character Ouiser says to Sally Field’s M’Lynn at one point, and that quote in particular has proven astonishingly useful in real life) and, yes, I still cry, every time, at the end. ‘Laughter through tears is my favourite emotion,’ says Dolly Parton’s character, Truvy, in the film, which could be the motto of the film, and it’s apparently everyone else’s, too. Twenty-five years on, this film is still adored, so much so that it was remade (badly, sadly
^fn5
) in 2012 with an all-black cast.

‘People still talk to me about
Steel Magnolias
today – today!’ says one of the film’s stars, Olympia Dukakis. ‘At benefits I ask women to put their hands up if they’ve seen the film five times, ten times, fifteen times. The other day I got up to twenty-seven times. These women had seen the movie twenty-seven times! What a draw that film has. It tells women that female friendship is profound, and women watch it together and cry together, still.’

But even more important than weeping and hooting is the way it teaches audiences to expect more from movies when it comes to the representation of women.

For a start, this movie stars six female characters and there is not a single bitch fight. Not once do they even fight over a man. Imagine that! What next, a movie suggesting women can work together without throwing tampons at one another? A movie suggesting women like and respect each other – get outta town! Each of the six female characters gets her own story, some more lightly sketched out than others: Truvy (Parton) has to deal with a deadbeat husband and son; Annelle (Daryl Hannah) is coming out of a bad marriage and making a new life for herself; Clairee (Olympia Dukakis) has just entered widowhood; Ouiser (MacLaine) is starting a new relationship; M’Lynn (Field) is facing the loss of her daughter; and Shelby (Julia Roberts) is risking her life to have a much longed-for baby. These are all typical women’s stories, acted by six actresses who, between them, had an average age of fifty when the film came out.

It is impossible to imagine a studio film being made today featuring such everyday, even ‘domestic’ stories about women so unforgivably north of thirty-five. The only vaguely equivalent film that has been released in the past decade is
The Help
, in which the five leading actresses (Emma Stone, Octavia Spencer, Viola Davis, Jessica Chastain, Bryce Dallas Howard) had an average age of 34.8 between them when the film came out and instead of just focusing on real women’s lives, it took as its plot one of Hollywood’s most beloved storylines: white people solve racism. In fact, Hollywood hasn’t made a classic women’s movie since the nineties with
Fried Green Tomatoes
and
A League of Their Own
.

But if the telltale sign of a classic women’s movie is that it illuminates the reality of women’s lives, then it’s no surprise that
Steel Magnolias
is so good because the reason it was written was to illuminate one particular woman’s life. When paediatric nurse Susan Robinson, a sweet-faced brunette from Louisiana, died suddenly in 1985 from complications stemming from diabetes at the age of thirty-three, leaving behind a two-year-old son, her brother, Bob Harling, was distraught. But when his sister’s widower, Pat, remarried a mere five months after Susan’s death, he knew he had to do something. ‘It was very, very hard. I mean, it was just five months which was a little, you know,’ says Harling, from his house in Natchitoches, Louisiana, his and Susan’s hometown. ‘Susan had gone through all this out of devotion to her son and when I heard him call another woman “mama”, I thought, No way, he needs to know the story of his mother and his grandmother.’

Harling had worked as an actor and had never written ‘a thing’ before. But he became, he says, ‘obsessed’ with telling Susan’s story. So, with the encouragement of some friends who were writers, he wrote it as a play about six women set in a beauty parlour, renaming his sister ‘Shelby’. ‘I wrote it very quickly because I wanted to capture how the women spoke. But I had no idea that anyone would do anything with it, I just wanted to make a document that celebrated Susan,’ he says in his gentle Louisiana accent.

The first thing that someone did with it was to turn it into an off-Broadway play, and it opened to huge critical praise. To Harling’s amazement, Hollywood studios then approached him, asking him to adapt it as a screenplay. This being the eighties, the fact that the play had an all-female cast did not dissuade producers from thinking this play could make a hit film and there was a bidding war. ‘I think it spoiled me for the rest of my career, actually, because we had so many suitors for the film,’ Harling says.