Tag: Aging

‘Grace and Frankie’ and the Binary of Bisexual Erasure and Representation

What makes it even more exciting to me, as a queer woman, is that not only are we being treated to these stories of our elders but that queerness is acknowledged and exists amongst older people in this television series. … My one bone to pick with ‘Grace and Frankie,’ for all of my true and deep love, is the decision to make Sol and Robert come out as being gay after 40 years of consummated, loving marriage to their wives. Surely, there was a possibility they were in fact bisexual?

Grace and Frankie

This guest post written by Leena van Deventer appears as part of our theme week on Bisexual Representation.

Advancing women’s representation in film and television is without a doubt a noble cause, as is improving the representation of many different marginalized groups. Our media should reflect the community the story is about, and our communities are full of people of different genders, races, ages, sizes, and sexual orientations. Failure to do so can contribute to the greater erasure, dehumanization, and intentional ignorance of a marginalized group’s existence, which can have devastating effects on marginalized folks in our society.

Cheers can be heard all through the internet every time a new movie is announced with a strong female character as the lead role. But those roles have changed over the last 20 or so years, and if we’re concerned with raising a generation of girls readying themselves for the coming feminist revolution, we need to consider whether we’re doing them a disservice by holding up this combat and conflict-driven Lone Wolf Badass as Finally The Female Character That Will Deliver Us From Evil and Seize the Means of Production While Looking Fabulous.

When I look back at the movies I held dear as a teen (no judgment okay), I’m reminded of The Craft, Thelma and Louise, Sister Act (1 & 2), A League of Their Own, Now and Then, or Steel Magnolias. A common thread through all of these stories was that of women’s friendship. These women knew they would live and die for each other; they knew they were better off together than alone. This has probably subconsciously affected my feminist practice, and influenced how much Molly Lambert’s article, “Can’t Be Tamed: A Manifesto,” resonated with me on a molecular level. It’s a tool of the patriarchy to convince women that women are their own worst enemies and can’t get along; it’s a radical act to actively push against that and love harder than you ever have before.

Imagine how much more Hermione Granger could have achieved if she had a Thelma to her Louise? A smart or brave or rough best friend who would do anything for her? What about Katniss Everdeen or Bella from Twilight? Who would they spend Galentine’s Day with? Who would die to protect her? While it’s inspiring to see badass women, like Rey, Furiosa, or possibly even a new Rocketeer (which is exciting as the sequel will star a Black woman), it’s easy to see the narrative being easily hijacked from women’s collective advancement to one of insular capitalist bootstrapping, a narrative which broadly prioritizes men (and stereotypically masculine qualities) over women. We shouldn’t be leaving a trail of bodies behind us, we should be amassing an army along the way.

The modern tale of female friendship I was looking for popped up in an unexpected place, to minimal fanfare, and has now officially taken up residence in a permanently rent-controlled corner of my heart. Netflix’s Grace and Frankie is a tale of female friendship and strength, with season two recently dropping and a third season on its way. It’s a tale of two septuagenarian women being bound together by adversity to find the good in each other and potentially resign to the fact that they may be the last great loves of their lives.

The first season introduced the main characters: Robert and Grace Hanson (played by Martin Sheen and Jane Fonda), and Sol and Frankie Bergstein (played by Sam Waterson and Lily Tomlin). These couples were brought together by Sol and Robert working together as partners in their law firm, and as such, both families spent a lot of time together over their 40 years of marriage, including their now adult children, who all have cousin-esque relationships with each other for the most part. They bought a shared beach house, which after Sol and Robert come clean that they have in fact been in love with each other for the last half of their marriages, becomes the primary residence of the now-displaced wives, Grace and Frankie.

Season one had many saccharine moments that I have no doubt turned a lot of people off continuing to watch, but Season two doesn’t make that same mistake. It’s sharper, wittier, and we get to see more of what makes these women tick. They know each other’s routines and quirks now, after living together for so long, and they’ve grown more fond of each other. What was once a one-dimensional joke about a control freak, push-your-feelings-down, Type A woman living with a pot-smoking, tie-dye wearing, hippie (Ho ho! The odd couple! What hijinks will ensue?) has now become less about how different the two women are and more about how they can parlay their respective strengths and weaknesses into finding a way to be there for each other no matter what.

Grace and Frankie understand the importance of banding together, and we see this in the episode where Grace catches up with some snooty country club friends after not being in contact since the break-up. The women scoff at what it must be like to live with a strange eccentric like Frankie, and Grace reminds them that she’s the only person who understands what this situation feels like, and the only person who reached out to help her, before telling them they’re assholes and leaving to go hang out with Frankie instead. The second season is underscored by a commitment between these two women; they will be there for each other to the end.

Grace and Frankie

It’s thrilling for me to experience the stories of these women. As a 31-year-old woman, I cannot possibly comprehend what it would be like to lose a friend I’d loved deeply for 40 years. I was yelping and hooting and hollering at the closing scene, as Grace and Frankie walk in slow motion out of the house, onward to their new sex-toy-making empire that markets vibrators to older women (dishwasher-safe with large font instructions and comfortable grips to compensate for arthritis). We don’t hear these stories about older people enough.

What makes it even more exciting to me, as a queer woman, is that not only are we being treated to these stories of our elders but that queerness is acknowledged and exists amongst older people in this television series. Homophobia is so often linked with being old-fashioned; more prolific in previous generations. Queer stories of our elders are crucially important to our history, a sentiment further impressed upon me at the recent screening of Winter and Westbeth, a stunning and uplifting documentary about queer older people and the rich, full lives they led as artists in public housing in New York’s West Village. We need more older characters on-screen, especially LGBTQ people and people of color.

While we may be coming in leaps and bounds in terms of LGBTQ representation, I fear we still have a long way to go for equal acceptance for the “B” (and definitely the “T”) portions of that acronym. My one bone to pick with Grace and Frankie, for all of my true and deep love, is the decision to make Sol and Robert come out as being gay after 40 years of consummated, loving marriage to their wives. Surely, there was a possibility they were in fact bisexual? Was it because gay is easier for audiences to understand than “those confusing bisexuals”? Bisexual erasure frequently occurs in media and is common even within our own activist circles. People (even prominent LGBTQ activists) make biphobic comments about how bisexual teens are just confused; or bi people are promiscuous, greedy, and can’t be monogamous; or the very tired quip, “Bisexuality is just a truck stop on the road to gay,” as if bisexuality doesn’t exist and people must choose. So I can understand how difficult it can be for us who are bisexual to have some issues with representation when we struggle with representation in our very own dedicated spaces.

Grace and Frankie

With a lack of bisexual characters in film and television and damaging tropes about bi people in media, it would have been great to see two bi men in Grace and Frankie, especially two older men. Bi men characters and queer characters who are older are both rarely depicted in film and television.

Because I do love the show so much, perhaps I would like to imagine the decision to make Sol and Robert gay as opposed to bisexual is because of the history of the (undeserving, cruel) association between bisexual people and infidelity, given that the men in this show engaged in a 20-year affair with each other. Perhaps co-creators Marta Kauffman (who has absolutely managed to inject more heart into this show than previous works such as Friends) and Howard J. Morris wanted to avoid contributing to that damaging stereotype? But that’s probably being too kind.

We have a long way to go with representation of all kinds: race, gender, age, size, disability, sexuality. We can get better at advancing this cause by being critical of the things we love. We can write as many strong female characters as we like in the hopes it will advance feminism, but a lone wolf isn’t going to get much done. We also need more female characters who aren’t just young, cis, straight, white women. We need to inspire girls by showing them inclusive representation and the power of women’s friendship, and we need to show them that those women can be of any age, and that strength isn’t always about picking up a bow or aiming the crosshairs at the bad guys. Sometimes it’s about holding your best friend’s hand while you do something scary.

Leena van Deventer is a game developer, writer, and educator from Melbourne, Australia. She has taught interactive storytelling at RMIT and Swinburne Universities and is co-author of Game Changers: From Minecraft to Misogyny, the Fight for the Future of Videogames with Dan Golding for Affirm Press. You can find her on Twitter @LeenaVanD.

The Curse of Beauty: The Meaning of ‘Penthouse North’

In her Central Park West apartment, Agneta Eckemyr lives in a wonderland of knick knacks, of lace and faded photos and rose appliqués. Her artfully shabby chic wrought iron bed, mammoth and cloud-like, is crowned with embroidered pillows; she lounges with one that says, “And they Lived Happily Ever After.” She picks up another, “The Queen Reigns Here” and sighs, it’s no longer true.
Once upon a time, she was beautiful. Impossibly so.

In a melancholy moment, Agneta remembers her youth
In a melancholy moment, Agneta remembers her youth

 

In her Central Park West apartment, Agneta Eckemyr lives in a wonderland of knick knacks, of lace and faded photos and rose appliqués. Her artfully shabby chic wrought iron bed, mammoth and cloud-like, is crowned with embroidered pillows; she lounges with one that says, “And They Lived Happily Ever After.” She picks up another, “The Queen Reigns Here” and sighs, it’s no longer true.

Once upon a time, she was beautiful. Impossibly so.

Back in the 70s, Swedish born Agneta, subject of Johanna St Michaels’s documentary Penthouse North, which makes its New York premiere this month at DOC NYC, was a model turned actress turned would-be screenwriter and prodigiously skilled fashion designer and interior decorator. She lived in one of Manhattan’s best apartments, a steal thanks to rent control, and held glamourous parties with rock stars and the New York glitterati. She was a social magnet, charming and vibrant with a revolving door policy in her home and a sense of humour about herself. She designed clothes for people like Julia Roberts and Grace Jones, covered Playboy and Cosmopolitan, was considered for a Bond-girl role and was generally pleased with her place in the world. For most of her life she had succeeded at using her beauty as currency, even the ads for her clothes show her beautiful face.

The question Penthouse North ruminates on, but offers little in the way of answers for, is what Agneta can be without that beautiful face, that beautiful body that once were her everything. The documentary began as an attempt to explore the impacts of beauty on the aging process, but Agneta’s real life tragedies intervened and made the story much more substantial.

As the film begins, Agneta is in her 60s. She can’t pay her seamstress and her dresses aren’t selling. Her landlord threatens eviction after discovering she has been subletting to multiple roommates to pay the rent and if evicted, she matter-of-factly states, she plans to kill herself. She has no income and the homeless shelter and the food bank, worlds away from her penthouse, look like they will be part of her near future. Much worse is the fact that she has been forgetting things and repeating herself. In the film, she is told she has high blood pressure and advised not to eat sugar, though she ignores this. Text at its end informs us that she has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s since the film was shot.

As she faces a legal battle, a friend tells her: “You have to be real now, you can’t live in fantasy.” But Agneta continually refuses.

She will give up in a fight and leave the room before facing anything harsh. She will tell people she can’t deal with hardships right, that she’s not in the mood and break down in tears. She is sure someone or something will come along to save her. Even as she signs up for welfare, she is talking about the films she was in, her relationships with Ringo Starr and the like. In the words of someone’s over-anxious mother, she continues to make a spectacle of herself.

 

Agneta’s apartment is prime real estate and even at a reduced rate, she has a hard time affording it
Agneta’s apartment is prime real estate and even at a reduced rate, she has a hard time affording it

 

Penthouse North becomes increasingly uncomfortable to watch as she falls apart. Often it feels as if we are eavesdropping on the hardest points in Agneta’s life. The question of exploitation is raised when it becomes clear that Agneta is not in her right mind. I am left wondering if she could properly consent to having such personal aspects of her life filmed.

Just as the filmmakers were, we as viewers are lulled into a sense of security. From the film’s opening with all its lovingly framed shots of the Penthouse North apartment, a place that looks ripped from a magazine, we’re sure this will be only a light-hearted character piece. A study of a deluded woman living in luxury, that we don’t have to think much about, except every once in a while to “ooh” and “ahh” over her pretty things. But it’s impossible to pretend Agneta is not a real person; her story is stranger than fiction. As one of her friends, frustrated over the way she fascinates people, makes clear, people have a tendency to romanticize her life, to see her as a tragic figure. Instead, she’s a sick woman who needs help instead of enamored style bloggers.

Still, even in the aborted screenplay she wrote about her glamourous life back when she was living it, it’s clear that this life was far from stable. Agneta had always struggled to pay rent even at a fraction of its true worth. Back then, she was unable to sell the screenplay because all the directors and producers she encountered only wanted to have sex with her.

Agneta says she has felt exploited her whole life, that everyone has taken more from her than they provided. Men used her for sex, and did things like invite her to dinners where they masturbated under the table and it didn’t occur to her to say anything, to do anything but act the naïve, polite schoolgirl who thanks them for the invitation. After all this time she feels she wasted her energy in relationships making beautiful tableaus of the best food and flowers and giving great sex but always being left anyway. Even now, people are constantly taking advantage of her, like the squatter who refuses to leave and screams at her all day.

Like Madame Butterfly waiting for a man everyone knows plans never to return to her, Agneta refuses to believe that things will not just magically get better. She wishes she’d gone back to Sweden, that she’d accepted the proposals of rich gentlemen and left her apartment. In the end, she seems imprisoned in this home she is on the verge of losing, it is the only place where she can feel safe and in control. Yet, it is a curse that has kept her from living a real life among the mortals.

 

In her youth, Agneta felt constrained by “bubbly bimbo” roles
In her youth, Agneta felt constrained by “bubbly bimbo” roles

 

Agneta talks a lot about the character of “the bimbo,” who she has played for most of her life and all of her career. She says she learned being a bimbo was currency in America and does her impression of one, puffing out her chest and speaking in an exaggerated Swedish milkmaid accent. Here is the conflict in her life, she has become the bimbo to survive, dressed up in her clothes and seen her in the mirror and eventually believed that was all there was of worth to her. And it was fun, it was lucrative and exciting, but it stops working. You have to be young.

Because all she was given were “bubbly bimbo” parts in films, her decision to write a screenplay was an attempt to take control, to write parts for herself with a range of emotions and write her own stories, to no longer be a one-dimensional character in others’. In clips from her old films and magazine covers, she is mostly naked and supplicant, always smiling and asking for me.

But this was never enough. Agneta wanted to bare her soul as well as her body. In this era where women are criticized for looking ugly when they cry, her desire to be allowed to be sad,  to contort her face in a way besides eager-to-please smiles, is very relatable.

 

Agneta shows of her fashion designs, she hopes they will save her from ruin
Agneta shows off her fashion designs; she hopes they will save her from ruin

 

At some points, you just want to shake her out of it, tell her she’s incredibly talented in other ways. That she could always be a decorator if all else fails. It’s tragic that Agneta can’t see this. Her beautiful apartment becomes her self, by making it beautiful and admired, she can be too. Even the beautiful clothes she creates, the kind of floaty white dresses a generation of girls in love with The Virgin Suicides would kill themselves for, are attempts to feel beautiful herself.

At one point, the filmmakers arrange for Agneta to encounter her young self by hiring young actresses to act out her script. It is surreal to see her dress the girls playing her and size them up. In one scene, she looks on, jealous of the girl playing her young self, who is being praised for her beautiful eyes. She is framed in the same shot as the girl, looking over her shoulder, like a specter, the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.

She conflates herself and the fictionalized version of herself from her script, saying “I” and then correcting herself. When talking about the script, she describes her character as strong, but emotionally fragile.

In one scene, her friend tells her she does not need to try to sexy anymore, to pout and show off her cleavage. She can go for dignified beauty instead. In his view, the aging woman trying to be young is a grotesque.

But this cuts her off from actualization, suggests she should stop trying to be attractive because she has gotten older. This view says, if you’re not attractive anymore no one wants to see you or your body. You dressing the way you want to now offends us. Beautiful women are allowed to age if they become classic, boast taunt leather skin and an air of health, and dress in heathered sweaters and tweed slacks, buoyed by accumulated wealth and patrician voices. Not if they continue to try to dress, to live, like they’re still the fairy princesses that they’ve always been.

 

Agneta applies make-up in an attempt to look young
Agneta applies make-up in an attempt to look young

 

It raises the question of whether there is an age appropriate way of dress and why. Are there clothes an older woman isn’t allowed to wear, or decor she’s not allowed to love? Why is it that our culture is so quick to look at a woman like Agneta as a pathetic, inhuman creature? But as for Agneta herself, its unclear, whether she dressing this way because she thinks looking sexy is the only way to be worthwhile or because its how she wants to dress, what she wants to show of her body?

Early on, Agneta gets a massage and her soft, older woman’s body is on display. The film is riveted by her flesh, the spots and wrinkles, the uncontrolled movements of her neck, and her uneven cleavage. There are frequent extreme close-ups of her body, her face, her breasts, so tightly framed that we can see the pores, the hair and lines, the permanent purse of her mouth that mark her as an aging woman.

Is this view of her exploitative? Are we meant to feel sorry for her just from the sight of her flabby skin? Agneta certainly feels this way, obsessed as she is with reclaiming her youth. While being filmed, she is constantly asking if this make-up or that hairstyle will make her look younger, asking to sit in more flattering light (shades of Blanche DuBois in that) and taking breaks to freshen up her lipstick.

It’s important to note that this film was made by a female director and as such, is directed from a female gaze. We are meant to identify with Agneta, to think “there but for the grace of God go I,” not to shudder in repulsion at the idea that we once found her attractive. Shots pan from Agneta’s breasts to her face, but spend a lot of time focused on her eyes and the pain clearly visible within them. The camera’s eye is kind. These scenes are shot from a directorial distance, as documentary evidence, capturing but never commenting.

It is so odd to see her in the real world, waiting for the subway, struggling alone with heavy bags of groceries and facing eviction and indignity, an ordinary person’s problems, the ones we are a culture tend to think beautiful people are exempted from.

Agneta is living every woman’s worst nightmare: old, poor, alone and unsure of her looks, even losing her mind. I think maybe her story tells us about the curse that beauty can be. We’re told that beautiful people don’t have to live in the real world, that if you were born lovely to look at you can live in fairyland. Except, the truth no speaks, is that when you return to earth as everyone eventually does, you will find that 40 years have passed in one day of fairyland’s and everyone who loved you or cared about you will be lost.

This idea makes me feel guilty. I am exactly the audience for film. I read books like this (most recently the delightful Wish Her Safe At Home), I watch movies like this. I am fascinated by characters like Blanche, like Miss Havisham and real fallen beauties like Little Edie and Dare Wright. I decided to watch this film in the first place because I was drawn to the idea of a beautiful tragedy. Even the constant fairy tale references I am tempted to make here, seem like I’m trying to make things more picturesque than they are, that I’m attracted to the wrong parts of the story.

I don’t think I am at all unusual in that.

 

Agenta’s beautiful home is left behind
Agenta’s beautiful home is left behind

 

Penthouse North is hard to watch but maybe it should be. It’s an important film that touches a nerve, forces us to think about our ideas of aging, of how we treat the elderly, of how we tell stories and force people’s lives into romantic frameworks, three-act fairy tale structures.

There’s no happy ending for Agneta. She loses her apartment and moves back to Sweden to live in a retirement home and lose herself to Alzheimer’s. It’s important to remember these are the facts.

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Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and journalist living in Toronto, Ontario.

‘Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me’: Being a “Difficult” Older Woman

I remember a woman artist friend talking about Barbra Streisand: “When people called her ‘difficult’, it was probably just because she asked for a microphone that worked.” Broadway musical star Elaine Stritch’s reputation for being “difficult” is familiar even to those of us who can’t stand Broadway musicals. But all through the documentary ‘Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me’ (directed by Chiemi Karasawa who first met Stritch in a hair salon) I couldn’t help wondering if an 87-year-old man behaving the way Stritch (who was 87 when the documentary was shot) does in the film would be denigrated the way she has been (men are rarely called “difficult”–no matter what they do).

Elaine_Stritch_NoMakeup

I remember a woman artist friend talking about Barbra Streisand: “When people called her ‘difficult,’ it was probably just because she asked for a microphone that worked.” Broadway musical star Elaine Stritch’s reputation for being “difficult” is familiar even to those of us who can’t stand Broadway musicals. But all through the documentary Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me (directed by Chiemi Karasawa, who first met Stritch in a hair salon), I couldn’t help wondering if an 87-year-old man behaving the way Stritch (who was 87 when the documentary was shot) does in the film would be denigrated the way she has been (men are rarely called “difficult”–no matter what they do). Certainly the men Stritch has worked with in her long career don’t seem easygoing. In one scene Stritch reads aloud a letter Woody Allen wrote her in the ’80s listing point by point the circumstances under which he’ll work with her. One of his many conditions is that she can’t second-guess his wardrobe choices. Earlier we see Alec Baldwin have a hissy fit on camera because he thinks Stritch is stepping on his laugh line (Stritch is playing his character’s mother on 30 Rock). When he stalks out she laughs at him–as does the crew.

Stritch_Curlers

This partially Indiegogo-funded film has some superficial resemblance to Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, another documentary that followed a famous older, “difficult” woman as she prepared for and performed in shows, but Stritch doesn’t seem interested in using the film as a tool to bolster her image, the way Rivers did. Shoot Me has no scenes as cringe-worthy as the one in which Rivers takes her grandson to deliver meals to people with AIDS (as if Rivers headlining a fundraiser wouldn’t be a better use of resources) or the one in which Rivers mentions that she pays for the private school tuition of her employees’ children.

Stritch makes her home in a hotel, never had children, and her husband died 30 years ago, so she is free to focus on her own health, career and legacy–and doesn’t feel the need to launch a revisionist propaganda campaign. Stritch isn’t afraid to mumble wry asides when fans in the street approach, and she raises her fists in victory when she learns that she will still be paid for a gig canceled in the wake of a hurricane.

Stritch_Makeup_Hat

Stritch’s legendary directness and humor are aimed right at the filmmakers and audience, when, in the middle of talking about something else, she looks up to say, “Don’t you think that camera is awfully close?” When the camera pulls back she continues, “We’re not making a skin commercial here.”

Like many other artists, Stritch is working decades beyond the age most people retire. But the activities many senior citizens take up after they stop working–travel, singing, dancing, and acting–have been the staples of Stritch’s career since just before the end of World War II. When she was based in London (a fact that doesn’t make its way into the film though she even starred in a successful TV series there), she worked with the great English actor Sir John Gielgud (in the 1977 film Providence), who made his last film appearance in 1998 when he was 94. Gielgud was able to temper the exertion of his later work by taking smaller roles in films and also acting in radio dramas. For Stritch, her continued career is much more demanding: song and (in a limited way) dance in live appearances where she is the show.

Elaine Stritch, Triumphant During Her Live Show
Elaine Stritch, triumphant during her live show

Stritch has diabetes and some memory loss (her recall of long-ago events like her improbable–but photo-verified–two dates with a very young John F. Kennedy is razor-sharp) as well as an unsteady gait (she sometimes uses a cane and although she is unassisted while onstage, she needs assistance to make it there) and her voice shows the effects of age, but she’s still an effective performer. Before I saw the film I thought that audiences must go to her shows for nostalgia or for the same reason people in the mid-1990s went to see Courtney Love live, to see if she made it all the way through her act without collapsing or having a breakdown onstage.

Some of the film’s reviews seem to want to reframe the film as a pathetic spectacle with Stritch as an object of pity. They call Shoot Me “grim,”  “painful,” and “about aging and its myriad horrors.” These reviewers seem determined to review their own fears of aging (or what they imagine the life of an older woman is like) instead of what is actually onscreen. In the same way that disabled and older people shouldn’t be called “inspiring” just for living their lives in ways many of us who aren’t disabled or very old do, the film shows us that the effects of aging for Stritch aren’t tragic–any more than they are advantageous–but just inconveniences and obstacles for her to work around. Stritch herself says of her worry about forgetting song lyrics, “The fear is part of the excitement.”

Excerpts of the show in the film, as well as vintage clips of her recording her signature “Ladies Who Lunch” for a cast album, and even a clip of her acceptance speech for winning an Emmy show that she lets the audience (or in the cast recording, her songwriters) not just see her vulnerabilities, but share them and empathize with them. We see her in rehearsal for the show forgetting the lyrics to “I Feel Pretty” repeatedly and then, during the show, she forgets again, but makes the moment a comic one, getting the audience to root for her as she (eventually) comes up with the next line.

Stritch and her musical director, Rob Bowman
Stritch and her musical director, Rob Bowman

Stritch has a lot of friends, many of whom are much younger than she is: every time we see a shot of her bed at the hotel where she lives we also see a wall covered in post-it notes of names (some of them well-known to us through movies and television) with the phone numbers digitally blurred. Though Stritch has no children we see unrelated, younger people pitch in to help her: during the show and rehearsal, musical director, Rob Bowman, for an upcoming dedication, an assistant who sorts through old photos and other memorabilia and for miscellaneous errands a woman who sat next to her at an AA meeting long ago and in spite of Stritch’s demands (Elaine not only wanted a ride home from the woman; she told her she needed to clean up her car before picking her up again), credits Stritch with helping her maintain sobriety.

Stritch, after many years of recovery, informs us that she allows herself one drink a day, then after a hospitalization (for diabetes) stops drinking again, then during a birthday party at the end is back to “one drink a day.” But the definition of alcoholism is the inability to have just one drink. The revelation that since her retirement (always just around the corner in the film, which was shot two years ago, but as of last year, when she did one last show and moved out of New York seems permanent now), she has upped her limit to two drinks is worrying. In the film she argues that at 87 a limited amount of drinking won’t harm her and is something she feels like she deserves. She says, “It’s wonderful being almost 87. You can get away with just about anything.” Now that she’s 89, she might be right.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQysjiUA68U”]

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing has appeared in The Toast, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.

HBO’s Dark Comedy of Geriatrics and the Nurses Who Love Them In ‘Getting On’

But Laurie Metcalf hammering a nail into the wall with a gynecologist’s ducklips thingy is priceless, as is a confused patient’s eyes clearing as Niecy Nash holds her hand. Here is perhaps where the show’s delicate balance between comedy and compassion becomes most apparent; the understaffed nurses are, at times, ridiculous in their adherence to bureaucracy and hospital politics, but they, and the patients they serve, are also given moments of generosity and human connection.

Written by Rachel Redfern

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhGQxLFS_P4″]

It is a wide wonderful world filled with HBO. My love for the brilliantly gritty channel has grown exponentially the past three years, starting with the toe-curling, cherry-popping of my innocence that was True Blood and from there, it took over my computer screen in a way I never knew was possible: Game of Thrones, The Sopranos, Girls, Deadwood, The Wire, Veep and we haven’t even mentioned their miniseries yet.

And for every person who protests against the channel’s, hmm, illuminating use of sex and violence (and perhaps not entirely unjustly—there were a few scenes in Game of Thrones that made Quentin Tarantino raise an eyebrow) can it be denied that going back to a network show after a satisfying three-day binge of cable, feels lackluster and overly clean without the free-flowing use of the F-word?

Therefore, I give you Getting On, the latest British show to make its way across the pond in a cabled retelling, leaving us asking, is it a show ahead of its time?

Getting On is a dark comedy from creators Mark Olsen and Will Scheffer (Big Love) following the daily trials of the beleaguered Billy Barnes Extended Care Unit. There, we meet its aging female patients–ambitious director of medicine Jenna James, Laurie Metcalf (Roseanne), kiss-up head nurse Dawn, Alex Borstein (Family Guy), empathetic nurse DiDi, Niecy Nash (Reno 911), and neurotic supervisor Patsy, Mel Rodriguez (Community).

Three comediennes: Laurie Metcalf, Alex Borstein, and Niecy Nash
Three comediennes: Laurie Metcalf, Alex Borstein, and Niecy Nash

 

Obviously, the setting is a bit unusual, and potentially disturbing; some are concerned about the show trivializing a difficult time of life and the rigors of hospital work. Yet, death happens to everyone, so in the same way that we can all relate to the subject matter, it also makes us, at best, a bit uncomfortable, and for some, possibly a painful reminder of someone they’ve lost.

Which makes the whole comedy setting seem so insanely inappropriate, but perhaps brilliant at the same time? I mean, at least ER had hot doctors and a lot of people who made it out alive; you get the sense with Getting On that there won’t be that many George Clooneys and even less chance that the fountain of youth will appear in the final season.

But Laurie Metcalf hammering a nail into the wall with a gynecologist’s ducklips thingy is priceless, as is a confused patient’s eyes clearing as Niecy Nash holds her hand. Here is perhaps where the show’s delicate balance between comedy and compassion becomes most apparent; the understaffed nurses are, at times, ridiculous in their adherence to bureaucracy and hospital politics, but they, and the patients they serve, are also given moments of generosity and human connection.

getting on1
DiDi (Niecy Nash), our hero.

However, will Getting On resonate with an older audience? The original British version never made it past the third season, but I’m hopeful, as the show has some incredible dialogue and fantastic acting.

And besides its unusual setting, the show sports three main female characters (all middle-aged) taking care of elderly women. Basically, Getting On defies every statistic about women in Hollywood by single-handedly employing almost every woman over the age of 40 located in Los Angeles: women with wrinkles, saggy boobs, and poorly executed fashion choices; women of color, women with money, women without it; foul women, funny women, fantastic women. I even loved episode two’s racist, homophobic grandma that kept throwing up on everyone and then throwing things at everyone.

While the show isn’t perfect, it’s boldly treading into off-limits territory (or at least boldly following in the footsteps of it British predecessor) and exposing both funny and profound elements of growing old.

Now, let’s hope that the show isn’t cut off while still in its prime.

Older Women Week: ‘Notes on a Scandal’: The Older Woman As Predator and Prey

This is a guest post by Elizabeth Kiy.

“I don’t know. It’s just the distance between life as you dream it and life as it is.” –Sheba Hart

Notes on a Scandal film poster

In Notes on a Scandal, a 2006 British psychological thriller, a web of lies and manipulations form around the relationship of two schoolteachers who live very different lives.

Told through her point of view, the film takes viewers into the mind of Barbara Covett (Judi Dench), an elderly woman whose sweet voice and grandmotherly appearance hide a cunning mind and sinister intentions. She lives alone with her cat and confides only in her journal, whose entries form the film’s narration.

Her loneliness is compounded by this narrative technique, as Barbara is often given no one to play off of and instead watches interactions from a distance, remaining an entirely closed off person with a rich internal life she only reveals in her private writing. For an older woman, whose age, unmarried status and perceived lack of attractiveness leave her virtually invisible and of no value to society, this narration allows her to express her resentment. But underneath her malice is the profound loneliness of a woman who seems to have never learned how to connect to people and to remain in their lives without manipulations.

Barbara only confides her real opinions in her journal

To a degree, her isolation is self imposed as Barbara sees the people around her, students and teachers alike, as uncultured, unwashed and unilaterally badly behaved. That she sees herself as above them is highlighted in an early sequence when she watches the children come into the school from an upper floor window. This is the scene where Barbara first sees Sheba Hart (Cate Blanchett).

Sheba’s first appearance presents a sharp contrast. She floats, very blonde and pale in a sea of dark haired students in black uniforms and the viewer’s eye, aligned with Barbara’s, is easily drawn to her. While Barbara, a through disciplinarian in dowdy clothes, fits naturally into the school environment, Sheba is alien within it. It is suggested that she has no authority over the students because she still sees herself as a young person and wants to be their friend. The film also addresses the idea of class difference which further sets Sheba, with her upperclass background, apart from the working class pupils.

The details of Sheba’s life seem comfortable enough; she lives in a large, ornate house with her much older husband (Bill Nighy–who interestingly portrayed a love interest to Dench in Best Exotic Marigold Hotel) and her two children, a teenage daughter (Juno Temple) and a boy with Down syndrome, but none of it makes her happy. In a telling detail, a photograph of Sheba in her youth, dressed in a punk style, is shown in her studio.

Teenage Sheba was a Siouxsie & The Banshees fan

Like her pottery and the art in her shed, this photograph suggests a life unfulfilled, that she imagined a bigger, more bohemian life for herself. This was the time in her life when she felt most free and most herself, before she was married or had children, and it is this sense of fulfillment she tries to reclaim by ultimately entering into a relationship with one of her students.

Her relationship with 15-year-old Steven Connolly is particularly disturbing because actor Andrew Simpson certainly looks this age. At first, he satisfies her idealism, and helping him develop his potential as an artist makes her feel useful in a way she hasn’t felt in a long time. She tells Barbara it was he who began to pursue her, constantly following her and playing on her sympathy with sad stories about his family life. The first time she leaves her family to meet him, lying about where she is going, the camera briefly lingers on her son and husband, showing her last minute hesitation.

In viewing the situation as one where he pursued her and she was helpless in her desire (whether or not Sheba’s story to Barbara is reliable), she allows herself to feel young, desirable and like a teenager again, experiencing clandestine affairs. In this sense, her much older husband is recast as her father, which Connolly thinks he is when he sees him. Sheba’s relationship with her daughter, who is the same age as Connolly, is also changed as they both enter a similar world of teenage dating.

Teenage Steven Connolly pursues Sheba

In the end, it becomes clear Connolly can’t take the burden of this complicated relationship and the knowledge that she has a family and feels he has been used by her. In her efforts to reclaim her own carefree youth, she has been stealing his and forcing him to grow up. In one telling scene, Connolly looks through her records and is unfamiliar with the artists, highlighting their age gap. The wrongness of Sheba’s actions is brought home to her when Connolly, naked post-sex tries on her son’s hat. At the sight of him, she is repulsed and forces him to take it off.

Though both women struggle with loneliness and are unhappy with their lives, the different ways they deal with similar emotions cast them in degrees as predator and prey.

Alone and undervalued, Barbara rapidly develops an obsession with her younger colleague, which makes her feel more vital and connected to the world. She is fascinated with the exotic character that Sheba seems to be, someone so different from her. She is also jealous of Sheba, as in her narration she says that people like her only think they know what real loneliness is. With this in mind, when she discovers Sheba’s affair with Connolly, she uses it to blackmail her into being her friend.

Though society easily defines a woman like Sheba as a predator, and she is punished with a jail sentence at the film’s end, Barbara’s predatory nature is much subtler and hidden. She looks at Sheba’s life noting how around her family, she acts in a serving position, making dinner and tidying the dining room while the others sit and talk, that she alone has had to take care of the children. This allows Barbara to resent Sheba’s family as a burden placed on her that she’d be glad to be rid of.

Several characters mention Barbara’s old friend, Jennifer, who she doesn’t want to talk about, suggesting she has had these obsessives friendships before. They also suggest Barbara’s attraction to Sheba is actually repressed lesbian desire, unfortunately casting this desire as predatory by connecting it with Barbara’s manipulations. In one scene, the camera, showing her point of view, focuses on an extreme close-up of one of Sheba’s golden hairs falling. Like a lover, Barbara holds it delicately, as if it is precious to her and saves it in her diary.

The camera shows Barbara’s point of view as she gazes at Sheba with lust

In addition, during a moment of casual dancing during her first visit to the Harts, Barbara’s eyes scan up Sheba’s body, and her dancing is shown in slight slow motion, accentuating Barbara’s lustful gaze. This gaze challenges the societal view of an older woman as a sexless grandmother and presents her as someone with active sexual desires.

Sheba is also guilty of manipulating Barbara and dismissing her because of her age. Early on, when she first begins to confide in Barbara, she sees her as a good person to talk to because she assumes she does not have her own life or secrets. She assumes a woman like Barbara would be glad just to have a friend, and dismisses any idea that she could have sinister intentions running contrary to the older woman’s assumed place in society as the grandmother. With this assumption, she begins to prey on Barbara’s loneliness, continuing to see Connolly and buying Barbara gifts to silence her. The viewer begins to feel sympathy for Barbara here as her narration reveals that she lives in a fantasy world, believing she has a wonderful relationship with this loving friend who will take care for her in her old age.

Barbara dresses as a doting grandmother to visit the Harts

Similarly, Barbara shows her first genuine smile when she is first invited to Sheba’s family dinner. Because the film follows her through the minute details of getting ready; buying clothes and having her hair done, the invitation is inflated in importance. As the details momentarily consume the film, the preparations seem to become her whole life, revealing how small, unimportant and lonely it is. The insert shot of her in the mirror, nervously touching her hair stresses her concern about looking a certain way and fitting into the role expected of her.

She emerges wearing pearls and carrying flowers, the very picture of a sweet grandmother.

The film takes great care to show Barbara in an unflattering light, making the signs of her age, her thinning hair, neck fat and heavily wrinkled skin, appear (for lack of a better word) pathetic. It also suggests Barbara’s appearance mirrors her cold-hearted nature. This seems a bit hypocritical, as much of the film can be interpreted to suggest that the older woman should not be dismissed as having none of her own desires and secrets. By aligning the film with Barbara’s point of view and then including scenes, like the overhead shot of Barbara smoking in the bath with her sweaty older body on display, it is suggested not only that she is monstrous, but that she sees herself as monstrous.

Barbara’s “monstrous” older body on display in a purposefully unflattering shot
The older unmarried woman is often portrayed in media in a very cliched fashion, as treating her pet like a child, and this point in Barbara’s character is a bit heavy-handed. Her most vulnerable, “pathetic” moments occur around her cat, Portia, and its failing health. The one time she is explicit about her sexual attraction to Sheba, when the camera, showing her point of view, pans down to Sheba’s breasts, is after she finds out Portia is terminal. Angered Sheba doesn’t reciprocate, she reveals that she fully understands Sheba’s state of mind when she delivers the ultimate insult, telling her, “You’re not young.” When Portia is put down, Barbara is bewildered and irrational and tries to force Sheba into being with her. She goes to Sheba’s house and screams at her, attempting to pull her away from her family exactly when she is trying to reconnect with them.

To Barbara, this final betrayal marks the end of their friendship, as she buries not only her cat, but the silver frame Sheba had given her. Having become completely unhinged, Barbara now wants to possess Sheba and become the only thing in her life, as Sheba is in Barbara’s. With this goal, she reveals Sheba’s relationship with Connolly.
The overwhelming solitariness of Barbara’s life is contrasted with Sheba’s warm family evening, through crosscutting between them, counting down the last moments of Sheba’s happiness. When the affair is revealed, Sheba’s house is swarmed by the media, and her family rejects her. With no one else left, she has to call Barbara and rely on her friendship when she has nothing else.

Sheba, in her punk make-up, discovers the journal

Alone in Barbara’s apartment, Sheba tries to convince herself that she is still young and attractive, by applying punk make-up, finally visually becoming the teenage girl she had felt like.
As she sits, considering herself in the mirror, she discovers ripped pages from Barbara’s diary and, furious and scared, she begins to search for it. The film cuts between Barbara innocently shopping for their new life and Sheba discovering her obsessions and manipulations.
In the end, Sheba returns home to talk with her husband and rebuild her family, while Barbara sits with her new notebook, speculating on the life she could have lived with Sheba. Time passes and Barbara meets a new woman and begins her predatory advances all over again.

Barbara makes a new friend and the story begins again

Notes on a Scandal is an interesting film to look at through a lens of age, as it portrays elderly and middle-aged women being driven to manipulate each other and those around them by their fear of growing old and being (or feeling) alone. It is complicated in its depiction of lesbianism, its suggestion that a teenage boy is responsible for seducing his teacher, and its often cliched presentation of an elderly woman as a spinster worthy of pity.

Elizabeth Kiy has a degree in journalism with a minor in film from Carleton University. She lives in Toronto, Ontario and is currently working on a novel.

Older Women Week: ‘The First Wives Club’: "Don’t Get Mad. Get Everything."

Film poster for The First Wives Club
This is a guest post by Jen Thorpe.

The First Wives Club is the story of four women who became friends with each other when they were in college. After graduation, the friends ended up drifting apart. This is a situation that happens to a lot of women. Life gets in the way.

People get married, have children, and (hopefully) find “real jobs.” It becomes increasingly difficult to find the time (or the energy) to socialize with friends who are no longer a part of our day-to-day lives. When you are in your 20s, you truly believe that you will be best friends forever. You intend to stay connected. Years later, you wonder whatever happened to those friends (whom you haven’t heard from in years).

In the movie, three of the friends reunite after learning that the fourth friend, Cynthia Swann Griffin (played by Stockard Channing) died by suicide after her husband divorced her. The surviving friends are now in their mid-forties. Each one is either divorced or is going through the process of divorce.

The movie does a good job of picking up on some of the thoughts that women who are 40 or over struggle with. Elise Elliot (played by Goldie Hawn) is overly concerned about aging. There is a scene where she begs her plastic surgeon to make her lips fuller (again). He resists, reminding her of all the plastic surgery she has already undergone and pointing out that she is beautiful.

Elise looking for wrinkles at the plastic surgeon’s office
Not every woman over 40 is going to turn to plastic surgery as a “fountain of youth.” Elise chose it because she is an actress who is having difficulty finding work. Suddenly (or so it seems to Elise) she is only being offered the role of “the mother.” For her, aging essentially means that she will no longer have a career. Elise is the perfect example of what really does happen to actresses once they turn 40.

She is a more extreme example of what many women (who are not actresses) feel when their hair starts turning gray and they begin to get “crow’s feet.” The fear is that these very natural parts of aging mean that the woman is no longer desirable, or sexy, or beautiful. There are women who are absolutely terrified of “getting old” because they worry that no one will want them.

Unfortunately, this fear is not an unfounded one. Elise’s husband, Bill Atchison (played by Victor Garber) is divorcing her and has started dating a woman who is much younger than than Elise. Tension builds when Elise is asked to play the role of “the mother” in a script where Bill’s new lover will play the lead role of the daughter.

A similar thing happened to Brenda Cushman (played by Bette Midler). She got married to Morton “Morty” Cushman when they were young, ran the cash register in his electronics stores, and had a son with him. Now, Brenda is 45 and Morty has left her and gotten into a serious relationship with Shelly Stewart (played by Sarah Jessica Parker). Brenda and Morty’s fifteen-year-old son has trouble coping with this situation.

Brenda laments to her friends that everything with she and Morty was just fine. Then, on their 20th wedding anniversary, Morty began having what Brenda calls a mid-life crisis. In short, he decides that she isn’t fun anymore and is holding him back. He replaces her with a thinner, younger, blond woman who is about half her age.

“Who’s supposed to wear that? Some anorexic teenager?”
There is a scene where Brenda is walking past a department store with a friend. She stops to look at a tiny black dress in the window. “Who’s supposed to wear that?” she rhetorically asks her friend, “Some anorexic teenager? Some fetus?” Her rant continues with her intent to lead a protest by never buying any more clothing until the designers “come to their senses.”
Her words are something I can personally relate to. I recently turned 40, and I am no longer the “anorexic teenager” that I was in high school. I’ve gained some weight since then. This is normal. We get older, our metabolisms slow down, and weight loss becomes more difficult. I, too, wonder when the designers will “come to their senses” and produce clothing that adult, women can actually fit into!

Annie Paradis (played by Diane Keaton) has a slightly different story. She isn’t actually divorced yet. She and her husband Aaron Paradis (played by Stephen Collins) are separated. They had been going to couple’s therapy but now are each seeing a therapist individually. Annie truly believes that they are in the process of working things out and getting back together.

Her daughter, Chris Paradis (played by Jennifer Dundas) describes her mother as a “doormat.” Chris is a college student and old enough to see that her father isn’t treating her mother very well. She is frustrated that her mom allows it. Unlike Brenda’s son, Chris doesn’t want her parents to get back together.

There is a scene where Annie is going on (what she believes) is a date with Aaron. She is convinced that he is going to tell her that he wants to get back together. Instead, after they have become intimate in his hotel room, he announces that he wants a divorce. This completely destroys Annie.

She is a woman who, like many women, has issues with self-esteem. After a lifetime of suppressing her anger, and striving to always be “nice,” Annie finally lets out her feelings in a loud, sobbing, messy way. At the same time, the phrase she uses most often during this catharsis is “I’m sorry.”

Annie screaming “I’m sorry!!!”
Annie, Brenda, and Elise form the “First Wives Club” and decide that they want to find a way to take revenge upon their husbands. The main plot of the movie focuses on the many ways the women do exactly that. Their ex-husbands find themselves losing favorite possessions, losing money, and (potentially) losing their jobs. Women who are going through a divorce may want to watch this movie simply to live vicariously through it. What happens is overblown and unlikely to happen in the real lives of most women.

Later, the women start to want more than revenge. They decide to turn their efforts toward helping other divorced women. Again, this requires their ex-husbands, whom they have now managed to blackmail, to spend more money. To me, this part of the plot felt a bit forced and strange. The change from “let’s get ’em” to “let’s open a charity” was rather abrupt.

The First Wives Club was released in 1996, a time when almost no one carried a cell phone. As such, the majority of phone calls that take place in the movie are done on land-line phones with clunky receivers. There is a scene where Brenda goes out to dinner by herself. She doesn’t spend the meal fiddling with her cell phone – and neither do any of the other people in the restaurant. Times have changed since the late 1990’s (and realizing this makes me feel “old”).

Jen Thorpe is a freelance writer, podcaster, and gamer. She is the cofounder of the No Market website (nomarket.org) and writes for it frequently on a wide variety of topics and subjects. You can keep up with everything she does by following her @queenofhaiku.

Bitch Flicks’ Weekly Picks

Network TV is Broken. So How Does Shonda Rhimes Keep Making Hits? by Willa Paskin via The New York Times

Girls on Film: The Danger of the ‘Female Filmmaker’ Label by Monica Bartyzel via The Week 

The Onion Can Go to Hell [Trigger warning: on their “joke” over Chris Brown beating Rihanna to death] by Melissa McEwan via Shakesville

YA Author Takes on Gendered Book Covers with the Coverflip Challenge by Rebecca Pahle via The Mary Sue 

The Gender Coverup by Maureen Johnson via The Huffington Post

This 17-Year-Old Coder Is Saving Twitter from TV Spoilers (Spoiler: She’s a Girl) by Dana Liebelson via Mother Jones

The Women of Mad Men Kick Ass in Season 6 by Nicole Aragi via Buzzfeed

What have you been reading or writing this week?? Tell us in the comments!

‘Lola Versus’ Not Your Average Romantic Comedy: Bad Love Life Decisions, Finding Happiness…and One of the Best Film Endings Ever

Greta Gerwig as Lola in Lola Versus

Romantic comedies usually make me want to gouge my eyes out. Now, that doesn’t mean I hate them all. Some of my favorite films are rom-coms. But every now and again, one comes along that entertains rather than enrages me. Following in the footsteps of female-fronted comedies Bridesmaids, Young Adult and Girls (all of which I love), Lola Versus follows a single woman making horrendously bad decisions yet struggling to find her way. 

Indie muse Greta Gerwig — hands down the best part of Greenberg — plays Lola, a 29-year-old woman whose life is about to unravel. Not only is she on the precipice of turning 30 (a potentially introspective time in any woman’s life), her fiancé (the effortlessly charming Joel Kinnaman…watch him as Holder in The Killing…simply brilliant) breaks up with her shortly before their wedding. Like 3 weeks before their wedding. Understandably, her world crumbles around her. 
Lola is sweet, intelligent and articulate. Gerwig imbues her protagonist with vulnerability and quirky humor. And she’s an absolute mess. A disaster. Lola doesn’t know what she wants or what to do with her life. She now has no man, no fabulous NYC loft to live in any longer, and she’s suffering from writer’s block while trying to complete her PhD dissertation.

Supporting Lola through her break-up are her best friends supportive Henry (Hamish Linklater, who I will forever think of as Julia Louis-Dreyfuss’ brother on New Adventures of Old Christine) and scene-stealing sarcastic Alice (Zoe Lister Jones, who also co-wrote the script).

Joel Kinnaman and Greta Gerwig in Lola Versus

As she tries to move on, we witness Lola ask a man to put on a condom and take a pregnancy test. Not only is it great to see aspects of sex and reproduction. It’s refreshing to see a woman exert her sexuality but not be defined by it merely an object for the male gaze.

While it started off promising, I gotta admit, the bulk of Lola Versus pissed me off.  I wanted to shout at the screen, “No, Lola!! Don’t sleep with him!” or “Spend more time with your girlfriends!” or “Don’t believe him that he’s clean…whatever the fuck that means…make him wear a fricking condom!!” or “Stop smoking weed with (and being nice to) your ex-fiancé who dumped you!”

By the end of the film, I realized I wasn’t mad at the movie per se. I was pissed at Lola’s bad choices.

But isn’t that life? Isn’t that what people do when they’re dumped? They obsess over their exes, retracing the steps of their relationship, trying to deciper the clues that led to the relationship’s unraveling. They pine for them. They strategize ways to accidentally run into them (or avoid them like the plague). Either way, there’s a lot of strategizing involved. I wanted Lola to be empowered. To stop obsessing over nice but douchey guys who didn’t appreciate her or who weren’t right for her. I wanted her to hang out with her female friends. But the way the plot unfolded rang more realistic and way more uncomfortable.

Greta Gerwig and Hamish Linklater in Lola Versus

In an interview with Collider, Gerwig shared how the script spoke to her because Lola was such a hot mess:

“Sometime female characters, especially in the genre of something that people consider rom-com, make mistakes in a cute way or they’re a mess in a way that’s palatable. I like that Lola is a real mess. She’s making big mistakes and it’s not just cute. It’s destructive and self-absorbed and not awesome and she has to recover from that. She stands to damage relationships around her. Even as this crappy thing happens to her at the beginning of the movie, she uses that as an excuse to behave badly for the next year of her life. I like movies about women behaving badly, because women behave badly just like men, and we’re not always adorable and cute about it.”  

Gerwig is absolutely right. Women in film aren’t usually allowed to be messy or unlikeable. Although that’s slowly changing.

Lola Versus made me uncomfortable because it reminded me of too many of the bad decisions I’ve made in my life. Falling back into sleeping with people I shouldn’t. Agonizing and analyzing every single conversation. Calling an ex, desperately hoping to rekindle that spark. Settling for someone not that great in a vain attempt to fill the gaping void that my partner’s disappearance has left.

I eventually stopped all this time-sucking nonsense. I thought by hanging onto relationships, I was boldly forging ahead seeking my happiness. But that’s not what I was really doing. I was placing my happiness in the hands of others. And so was Lola.

Zoe Lister Jones and Greta Gerwig in Lola Versus

The movie tackles the topic of single women and aging. As we approach or pass turning 30 (like me!), we contend with societal expectations. Not that turning 30 is some horrible harbinger of doom. Quite the contrary. I’ve been more confident and comfortable in my own skin after turning 30. But it’s still hard to silence the social cues that tell us our lives should fall into place in a certain pattern.

Here’s the thing about Lola Versus. It frustrated me and I rarely laughed out loud. Although the scene where she screams at the party…priceless. But Gerwig mesmerized me and the film enthralled me. It passes the Bechdel Test (yay!!!). And it boasts one of the absolute best endings I’ve ever seen in a film. Ever.

In every romantic comedy, it’s all about two people getting together in the end. Or if it’s really radical — and trust me, I use that term facetiously — they’re already together in the beginning and it’s about the two lovers facing obstacles but ultimately staying together. The only rom-coms I can recall that deviate from this predictable paint by numbers path are Annie Hall, The Break-Up and Kissing Jessica Stein.

I don’t want to spoil the ending. But I will say this. (Aver your eyes if you want to be completely surprised) Lola achieves happiness, something that had eluded her all along. She suffered writers’ block, not being able to silence the voices and noises in her head — ironic since her dissertation was analyzing silence in film — but now she could write again. She became happy with who she was and with her life.

And it had nothing to do with a man.

Now that doesn’t mean she says fuck you to all her relationships. While she knew how to love other people, she didn’t know how to love herself, a lesson most of us need to learn.

Lola talks about Cinderella with her mom (Debra Winger…so glad to see her in more films!). She tells her that she liked Cinderella as a kid but how fairy tales are toxic, teaching girls to wait for a man to sweep them off their feet and give them shoes. Fairy tales set women up for failure. We put these unrealistic expectations on love and romance. Now, I’m not arguing for settling, not by any means. But fairy tales teach girls that when they grow up, they should wait around for men; that they should put romantic relationships before everything else in their life even sacrificing themselves. Lola realizes that she must navigate her own happiness rather than relying on a man or some lofty romantic fairytale.

Too many romantic comedies subject women to stereotypical gender roles. Needy, passive, just out to find a man. Can’t romantic comedies be intelligent? Can’t they highlight the importance of female friendship too?? Yes, yes they can. And Lola Versusdoes.

One of my favorite lines in the film is when Lola says:

“In this world of shipwreck, there’s hope in uncertainty.”
Isn’t that what we do in this world? Try to salvage the wreckage of our disappointments, losses and broken hearts, forging ahead and charting a new course? 
Through her relationships, Lola discovers what she truly wants from life. She realizes it’s okay to have your life in tumult as long you’re happy with yourself. Throughout the film, I kept rooting for Lola — for her to find her place in the world. I was rooting for hope. And ultimately, I was rooting for myself.