Tag: Classic

Motherhood in Film & Television: Laura Petrie of ‘The Dick Van Dyke Show’

Laura (Mary Tyler Moore), Richie (Larry Matthews), and Rob (Dick Van Dyke) in The Dick Van Dyke Show

This is a guest post from Caitlin Moran

Before Mary Tyler Moore tossed her beret to the Minneapolis sky as Mary Richards, she was the sunny princess of sitcom wives and mothers as Laura Petrie on The Dick Van Dyke Show. Laura Petrie was a different kind of TV mom. She was young, only 17 when she married on-screen husband Rob. She was perpetually fresh-faced, nimble-footed and smart, a perfect foil for the gangly, handsomely goofy Van Dyke. Laura was the young mother that young mothers wanted to be. I grew up watching reruns of Dick Van Dyke on TVLand with my parents, who had grown up watching it when it originally aired in the sixties, and we all could agree that Laura Petrie was the paragon of feminine charm.
Oh, and did I mention the capri pants? She wore capri pants. She not only wore them, but she rocked them. And she not only rocked them, but she was the first housewife to wear pants on television. The credit for that style decision goes to Moore, who has stated in interviews that while TV shows were constantly showing stay-at-home moms in dresses and aprons and heels, “woman don’t wear full-skirted dresses to vacuum in.” While it may be tempting to brush aside Laura Petrie’s forward-thinking style, her lack of skirt caused a minor flap with the network censors when the show first aired in 1961 (“but how will we know she’s a woman if she’s wearing the pants???” some capris-hating misogynists may have wondered). Laura Petrie’s signature look launched capris into the 1960s fashion zeitgeist, and earned her a spot in InStyle magazine’s Top Ten Most Stylish TV Housewives of All Time.

Laura and Rob Petrie had one child together, a son named Richie. Because Richie is in elementary school for the whole of the show, Laura’s role as a mother focuses on the challenges of raising a small child. She worries that he might be sick when he refuses a cupcake, and helps Rob explain why Richie’s middle name is Rosebud. (It’s an acronym for the names that their parents and grandparents suggested for the baby. Unsurprisingly, that was Rob’s idea.) In the episode “Girls Will Be Boys,” Richie comes home from school three days in a row with bruises on his face, and admits that a girl has been beating him up. After Rob’s visit to the suspected lady bully’s father turns up empty, Laura goes to the child’s house to get to the bottom of the strange beatings. After the girl’s mother insults and dismisses her, Laura refuses to leave until she’s said her piece. “You may not be the rudest person I’ve ever met,” she declares with her trademark quiver, “but you are certainly in the top two.” Door slam, and our girl storms off with the moral high ground and not a hair out of place in her perfect coif.

Laura was never afraid to stand up to her husband when Richie was involved. In the memorable episode “Is That My Boy??” Rob believes that he and Laura have brought home the wrong baby from the hospital. Laura, just days removed from giving birth, attempts to be the voice of reason to her emotionally overwrought husband and, when that fails, plants herself as a barricade in front of the cradle as Rob answers the door to let in the couple he believes took home his actual baby. The ending of the episode, of course, is the most famous of the entire series—the couple that Rob has invited over, the Peters, is black, and the surprise caused one of the longest uninterrupted laughs from a studio audience in sitcom history. Laura herself has a good laugh with Mr. and Mrs. Peters at Rob’s expense, and domestic peace is restored.

Laura pouring Richie a glass of milk

That doesn’t mean that The Dick Van Dyke Show’s treatment of Laura Petrie is without its problems. It is more or less assumed throughout the show that she is a mother and a housewife above everything else, leaving her former aspirations of a dancing career behind. In season three’s “My Part-Time Wife,” Rob is woefully unable to handle Laura stepping in as a secretary at his office, even though she performs her tasks at work deftly and still keeps up the house and supports Richie. When Rob throws a grown-man tantrum over her abilities, Laura apologizes and concedes that she has been “flaunting her successes.” Everyone groan on the count of three.

And the show isn’t exactly subtle when it compares Laura’s domestic bliss with Rob’s cowriter Sally’s romantic woes. Brash, hilarious single girl Sally’s search for a fella is a constant punch line for coworker Buddy, and a source of pity for Laura. Why oh why can’t Sally just find a nice man and have a kid or two of her own? It’s bad enough that Sally writes detailed letters about her cat, Mr. Henderson, to her Aunt Agnes in Cleveland, but does Mr. Henderson have to be named after a former fiancé? Do you have to kick her when she’s down? In many ways, The Dick Van Dyke Show is a product of its era, and its obvious glorification of Laura’s married motherhood over Sally’s career life speaks to a time before the women’s liberation movement, before NOW and Gloria Steinem and certainly before Mary Richards. The tension between career, marriage and motherhood has by no means disappeared (witness the recent debacle over Hilary Rosen’s criticisms of Ann Romney), but to see it played for laughs so openly is disheartening.
Though it has its faults, The Dick Van Dyke Show remains a monument to early-60s Kennedy-era optimism (in fact, the first episode aired on the very day Kennedy was sworn in as president), and no character represents the youthful promise of Camelot more than the Jackie-esque Laura Petrie. In his memoir Dick Van Dyke: My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business, Dick Van Dyke describes her charm thusly: “The first time I stood across from here in rehearsal and heard her say, “Oh, Rob!” I thought, That’s it, we’re home.”
Laura Petrie is a TV mom we’d all like to come home to.

Caitlin Moran is a graduate of Boston College with a degree in English and creative writing. After spending many years battling Western New York winters, she now lives in New York City with a cat and too many books for her apartment. Her work has appeared in the Women’s Media Center, Post Road, Pure Francis, the Susquehanna Review, Winds of Change magazine, HerCampus, and other outlets.

Motherhood in Film & Television: ‘The Great Lie’

The Great Lie (1941)
This is a guest post from Erin Blackwell.
My mother used to sit me down to watch movies in front of a small black-and-white TV in our Southern California living room, not far from Hollywood, where she’d spent the happiest years of her childhood. Watching movies was part of a wide-ranging curriculum of aesthetic exercises she assigned my brothers and me. Not just any movie. The classics from MGM, the comedies from Paramount, an occasional noir from Warners. I’ve never been able to simply watch a movie like a normal person. I’m always evaluating the design elements, the performances, the script. 
Bette Davis stars in The Great Lie
In 1941, when my mother was 17, the United States entered World War II and Warner Brothers released The Great Lie, starring Bette Davis and George Brent. Bette Davis was a great actress and George Brent was the only actor in Hollywood who hadn’t gone away to war. Unthinkable today that an actor would put his high-priced face in harm’s way but in 1941, the U.S. did not have a standing army, or a “volunteer” army of mercenaries, let alone private contractors. What was called “the war effort” included the publicity generated by the donning of uniforms by Hollywood stars, several of whom saw active duty. 
There are two scenes in The Great Lie that made an indelible impression on my teenage psyche. One involves crossdressing, the other involves food, and both express the anxiety attached to giving birth and the difficulties modern women have integrating this biological imperative into an otherwise blithely artificial lifestyle. But mostly, these two scenes depict powerful moments of emotional intimacy between women in which conventional gender roles go out the window. 
The Great Lie, despite its portentous title, was not part of the war effort, although George Brent’s character, Pete, dons a uniform right after his wedding and flies off on a secret mission to a South American jungle. Pete’s lackluster presence at movie’s start and extended absence during movie’s middle is characteristic of what was called “women’s films,” in which the man is merely a rag doll to be fought over by the real characters: female rivals who vie to possess him. 
Mary Astor plays Sandra
Mary Astor, whose name is one-third the size of George Brent’s (whose name is one-third the size of Bette Davis’s — whose name is alone above the title) on the original poster, is the pivot point of this romantic triangle. She’s better known for playing Brigid O’Shaughnessey opposite Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon, a truly great film released the same year. Astor’s particular cocktail of beauty, eroticism, class, emotivity, intelligence, weakness, and the febrile glamour synonymous with mental instability raise The Great Lie to the level of… what exactly? Something more exciting than it deserves to be, something operatic with the frisson of a tabloid. She won an Oscar for her performance. 
Astor plays Sandra, the internationally acclaimed concert pianist, whose manager (Grant Mitchell) refers to her as Madame Kovac. Unthinkable today that a concert pianist could feature as a love interest in a Hollywood film but in the 40s, classical music was part of the national dialogue and every kid in Brooklyn was trying to get to Carnegie Hall. Astor is believable as a concert artist, although the script by Leonore Coffee (revised on set by Davis and Astor) trades in clichés about the artist’s life. No matter. Astor brings an innate musicality to her scenes. Her voice, a rich contralto, is itself a stunning instrument. 
The opening credits roll over a series of tightly framed shots of a woman’s arms banging out Tchaikowsky’s Piano Concerto Number One on a Baldwin, backed by a healthy string section. The piano is muscular, the ascending chords weighty, rhythmic, obsessive. The whole sequence establishes the beating heart of passion which is the source of the great lie. (Those aren’t Astor’s arms, but we do get some choice glimpses of her banging away at the keyboard. She brings to it the conviction of a trained pianist.) 
The production values in this film, dynamically directed by Edmund Goulding, are uniformly excellent, from the supporting cast, to the sets, props, costumes and the kind of chiaroscuro lighting you only get from Warner’s. Watching it for the umpteenth time, I was struck by the pacing, how the camera patiently tracks the actors. This approach is futile when filming George Brent, who has little to give, but pays off with Mary Astor, who has the reactivity of uranium. And, of course, Davis knows exactly what to feed the camera at all times. Starting with her famous eyes. 
Maggie and Pete post-wedding
Exhibiting those characteristics considered essential to the life of a temperamental musician, Sandra marries Pete while they’re both on a drunken spree, but the marriage is annulled post-consummation when it’s revealed Sandra’s divorce from her previous husband wasn’t yet final. That frees a newly sober Pete to rush back into the arms of Maggie (Davis), his true love. They marry without delay but the rivalry continues when Sandra discovers she’s pregnant. The fetus is considered a powerful bargaining chip in her attempt to recapture her runaway husband. 
When Pete’s plane’s reported missing somewhere in the South American jungle, the great lie is concocted in the head of his wife Maggie, who sees a way to preserve Pete’s only known earthly remains — his DNA — by getting his ex-wife to carry his child to term. In a stunning surrogate switcheroo, it’s not the paternity but the maternity that’s going to be in question. Maggie shows up at Sandra’s Central Park apartment in full noir regalia: wide-body fur coat and oversized black hat. Sandra’s in haute bohemian chic: a stunning floorlength black dressing-gown. 
Maggie arrives at Sandra’s apartment in suddenly-noir lighting
Sandra leans back on her white satin bed, cowed by the interloper’s assertiveness. Maggie stands looking down at her and explains, “He left us two things in this world. I have his money. You might have his child. You’re extravagant. You’re a woman of the world, a public figure. Your piano, your success, they won’t go on forever. None of us gets younger. Let me insure your future. And you ensure mine.” 
Sandra asks, “Your future?” Maggie says, “His child. That could be my future. And I’d make you secure financially always.” Sandra considers this, then says softly, “Money.” Maggie says, “Yes.” Sandra shakes her head dismissively. “It’s so completely mad.” Exactly what the audience is thinking. 
Fifty minutes in, we’re at the heart of the matter: an extended showdown between virtuous wife Maggie and vicious baby mama Sandra. Implicit to the great lie is the thwarting of an abortion but that precise issue is never raised. This kid’s life only has meaning as an extension of Pete’s. That’s the one thing these two women can agree on. They love that man! 
Their car arriving at the Arizona safe house
This scene kicks off twenty minutes of high histrionic and low comedic bliss as Bette convinces Sandra to hide out in a clapboard house in the Arizona desert, surrounded by dust and cactus, serviced by an untraveled road. Scenes of delicious intimacy suddenly erupt as the actresses sink their teeth into their new roles-within-roles. None of this would work with lesser actresses playing for laughs or, worse, camp. There’s a same-sex erotic undercurrent a mile wide to these domestic scenes, under a thin frosting of glamour puss personality. Astor unleashes a volatile vulnerability which Davis parries with pugnacious charm. And I’m suddenly reminded of a similar set-up in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), where Bette Davis dominates the wheelchair-bound Joan Crawford. That’s the late-career, Grand Guignol version. 
Maggie deploys wifely know-how to tend the tempestuous Sandra, grown crankier in a terrycloth bathrobe through forced isolation, dietary restrictions, and the gratingly upbeat companionship of her arch rival. But is Maggie the wife or the husband? She runs errands for Sandra in town. She monitors her cigarette smoking, unsuccessfully. She even keeps her from eating a pickle during a middle-of-the-night fridge raid. This scene is unique in the canon, for the pathetic self-abasement Astor offers up in her quest for a ham sandwich. 
Maggie relents and cuts a slice of ham for Sandra
Awakened by a wind storm, Maggie’s attracted by the light under the door to the kitchen. She enters and finds Sandra, frozen in dread, like a mouse cornered by a cat. Maggie gestures to the table full of food. “Sandra. Ham, onion, butter. Everything the doctor said you couldn’t have. What have you got behind your back? Come on. Hand it over.” Sandra puts a jar on the table. “Pickles. Oh, Sandra.” Sandra answers, “Yes, pickles. I like them. I want them. I’m sick and tired of doing without things I want. You and that doctor with your crazy ideas of what I can and what I can’t eat. You’re starving me.” The martyred Sandra practically sings her lines. “I’m not one of you anemic creatures who can get nourishment from a lettuce leaf. I’m a musician. I’m an artist. I have zest and appetite and I like food. I’ve being lying awake in there thinking about food and now I’m going to have it.” So Maggie gives in and makes her a sandwich. 
Maggie alone on the deck, awaiting the birth of the baby
The greatest transgressive thrill comes when the country doctor arrives to deliver the baby. Maggie’s prowling around in men’s slacks and loafers, odd man out at this female ritual. When the doctor says he’s used to having the father around, nervously wondering when the baby’ll be born, he’s describing Maggie. Then he closes the door to the bedroom, shutting her out of this women’s mystery. Virile Maggie can’t sit still but goes out onto the deck, alone in the night, smoking and pacing like a guy until that universal signal, a baby’s cry, summons her back inside. Women, too, can be fathers! She enters the bedroom only long enough to eyeball Junior. This baby is an abstract goal for Maggie and Davis is not a convincing mom. 
Sandra playing Chopin, dressed to impress
I don’t think it’ll spoil the movie for you to reveal that Pete is not dead and that his resurrection as a plot point reignites the women’s rivalry. The Great Lie is nothing if not a primer in how to get melodramatic mileage out of a baby. That’s when Pete surprises us all by declaring that he prefers a childless Maggie to a babied-up Sandra. Like the judgement of Solomon, this remark reveals the identity of the “true” mother, Maggie, who, while not the biological parent, is the one who wants to keep the kid. To cover her humiliation, Sandra sits down at the baby grand and starts banging out the same concerto we heard under the opening titles. We’re back where we started. 
Violet (Hattie McDaniel) leads the celebration
The one big glaring no-no smack in the middle of The Great Lie is Hattie McDaniel’s reprise of her role of Mammy from Gone With the Wind (1939). They’ve changed her name to Violet, but her function is the same. Treating Maggie the way she treated Scarlett O’Hara (a role Davis famously fought for and lost to Vivienne Leigh) only makes sense within a regressive, racist fantasy. It’s mind-boggling to watch the scenes of happy blacks celebrating their mistress’s wedding. Did anything remotely resembling that world exist in 1941? Because it sure doesn’t exist now. But then, The Great Lie is a time capsule full of outmoded conventions. Which is what makes it so fascinating.

Erin Blackwell reviewed films for the Bay Area Reporter in San Francisco. She just finished writing a play. Her blog is Pinkrush.com.

Reproduction & Abortion Week: ‘Where Are My Children?’

This is a guest post by Erik Bondurant. Long before established reproductive rights, including the right to contraception and abortions, were being challenged, there was a long battle to earn these rights in the first place. Half a century before Griswold v. Connecticut would mark a real turning point for reproductive rights, director Lois Weber offered a powerful commentary, inspired by Margaret Sanger, on the morality of contraception in her 1916 silent feature Where Are My Children?

 
The film opens in heaven, where the souls of babies dwell, awaiting conceptions that will bring them down to Earth. These souls are divided into three groups. There is the highest order, granted to those who desire having children, there are chance babies, and then there are the unwanted babies, noted as being quick to return due to the intervention of either contraception or abortion. This casts the film in what may be an uncomfortably religious and moralistic tone for many.The issues of contraception and abortion are handled from a variety of angles. Richard Walton, a District Attorney, is taken with the idea of birth control primarily in its potential to weed out the supposed poor and unfit, perhaps preventing crime. This endorsement of eugenics was quite popular before the Nazi’s embrace of the concept made such support untenable. No less than Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, writing for an 8-1 majority, would claim that “three generations of imbeciles are enough” in upholding a forced sterilization law. Sanger herself was not above seeing the eugenic appeal of contraception. Eugenics remains tightly bound to the debate over abortion, with anti-abortion groups often citing drastically higher abortion rates among Black women as a form of eugenics and economist Steven Levitt arguing in Freakonomics that the legalization of abortion was a primary cause of the subsequent fall in crime rates.

Intellectually, the film hits its peak with its focus on Dr. Homer and his testimony at a trial in support of contraception. Through his eyes we see various large families stuck in poverty and women suffering the grinding fate of being pregnant every year, until menopause or death. With a bit too much symmetry to the recent all-male Congressional panel on the matter, we are told “a jury of men disagreed with Dr. Homer’s views.” Thus a pamphlet discussing family planning is ruled obscene.The emotional heart of the story takes place within the District Attorney’s own household. He is desperate to have children, but his wife enjoys the freedom to remain in the social scene. This is a group of women who, in contrast to the poor families that Dr. Homer discussed, are curiously unladen with children. This, we find out, is because they have access to an illegal abortion provider named Dr. Malfit. When one of his patients dies from complications and the District Attorney’s prosecution unveils the client list, the film roars to its dramatic conclusion with Walton condemning his wife, asking her the titular question.

Like Vera Drake, this film shows class divisions within reproductive services in an environment where those services are illegal, and the cost that can come from illegal abortions. However, unlike Mike Leigh’s film, this film is decidedly anti-abortion, which may be off-putting to some watching it from a modern perspective. Ultimately, the important pro-contraception aspect of the film and the compelling dramatic construction in portraying the heavy moral component to abortion, no matter what one ultimately thinks of abortion, makes Where Are My Children? a must-see film. Lois Weber, one of the first and greatest directors in cinema history, provides a much-needed woman’s voice and eye on the topic.Where Are My Children? is available to stream for free.

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Erik Bondurant is a political scientist and a film blogger at The Movie Review Warehouse and contributor to Sound on Sight, with a primary focus on the portrayal of politics, gender and sexuality in cinema.

Quote of the Day: ‘Movie-Made America’

Movie-Made America by Robert Sklar
I came across this interesting piece from Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies, in which author Robert Sklar talks about a fairy-tale aspect of acting (being “discovered”), the patriarchal foundation of casting, and the behind-the-scenes women of the 1910s and 1920s. I’ve added some links to the original text for further reading.
In the World War I era–an unsettled period when late-Victorian mores persisted side by side with an emerging image of a “new woman”–it could only have been disconcerting to respectable Americans to see photographs of determined young women in the ankle-length dresses, high-button shoes and broad-brimmed hats standing in long lines outside a Hollywood casting office. The American middle class had only just begun to regard movies as something other than immoral trash for working-class people; and suddenly their daughters were packing up and leaving home to seek their fortunes in the movies.
If they had to go, the least one could do was give them sound advice, most of it intended to be discouraging. A girl should plan to have enough money to survive for a year without additional income; authors of advice books and articles for the movie aspirant set the minimum figure at $2,000. She should have resources enough to be able to acquire her own wardrobe, since extras in those days had to supply their own outfits for scenes of contemporary life. She should consider what abilities she possessed and perhaps direct her ambitions to other interesting work in motion pictures.
Studios needed talented dress designers, set decorators, film cutters, all jobs that were open to women. In fact, the motion-pictures studios in the 1910s and 1920s gave more opportunities to women than most other industries, far more than they ever did again. Many of the leading scenario writers were women, among them Anita Loos, June Mathis, Frances Marion and Jeanie Macpherson. Lois Weber was a well-known director and independent producer, and Elinor Glyn, Dorothy Arzner and other women directed films during the 1920s. Women were occasionally found in executive positions in Hollywood producing companies. And if a woman possessed none of these talents, there were always jobs as secretaries, mail clerks, film processors, and in other modest but essential roles in the making of movies.
But what women wanted was to be actresses. They could see that other girls, many still in their teens, without acting experience, were making it. Why not they? But no one informed them that a fair share of the young girls with film contracts were “payoffs,” as Colleen Moore called them: players who were hired as a favor to influential people or to pay back a favor they had done the studio. Moore got her start because her uncle, a newspaper editor, gave D.W. Griffith help in getting his films approved by the Chicago censorship board, and Griffith repaid him with a contract for his niece. In Silent Star, Moore reports that Carmel Myers, Mildred Harris (a bride at sixteen to Charlie Chaplin) and Winifred Westover, who began acting as teen-agers, were all “payoffs” in similar ways.

Feminist Flashback: ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’

Written by Megan Kearns.

When I was young, my mom raised me on classic films: Gone with the Wind, Casablanca, The Great Escape, Breakfast at Tiffany’s. I fondly remember watching Elizabeth Taylor on-screen. Hollywood royalty, we often think of her arresting beauty, numerous marriages, struggle with alcohol, philanthropy and perfume commercials. It’s easy to forget she was an amazing actor; a stellar artist who fluidly exuded strength, sensuality, vitality, passion and pain.Starring in over 50 films, Taylor often chose feminist roles.  In National Velvet, she plays a young girl disguising herself as a male jockey to compete. In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, she’s a fiery survivor embracing her sexuality. And in the Texas saga Giant, she plays an educated and outspoken woman, challenging sexism. So after years of my mother urging me, I finally watched Taylor’s legendary performance in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Based on Edward Albee’s Tony Award-winning play (it also won the Pulitzer although it wasn’t awarded it due to its vulgarity and sexual themes), the 1966 film follows Martha (Elizabeth Taylor) and George (Richard Burton), a middle-aged married couple. He’s an assistant professor at a New England college and she’s his wife who happens to be the college president’s daughter. Through their vitriolic and bitter alcohol-fueled feuding, they lash out at each other. When a young couple, new professor Nick (George Segal) and his wife Honey (Sandy Dennis), visit their house after a late-night party, Martha and George continue their battle of wits, interchangeably attacking their guests and using them as ammunition, to further lash out at one another.
Director Mike Nichols wanted to have real-life married couple Taylor and Burton star in the film, a celebrity couple famous for their off-screen turbulent relationship. Known for its acerbic dialogue, Martha and George sling verbal barbs throughout the movie. Martha continually insults George calling him a “dumbbell,” saying he makes her want to “puke.” Critics often focus on Martha’s vicious verbal attacks but George equals her venom. He says she makes him “sick” and equates her voice to “animal noises.” Their guests Nick and Honey initially appear to be the quintessential couple, contrasting Martha and George in appearance, age and demeanor.  But as the night wears on and more alcohol is consumed, the problems both couples face come to the surface.
I’ve read that Who’s Afraid of a Virginia Woolf? is a feminist film.  But when I started watching, I initially thought, what the hell? There’s no way this is feminist as it’s mired in misogyny!  The film follows George’s perspective as there are scenes with just George and Martha, George and Nick, or George and Honey.  George is almost omnipresent. Also, there a few violent scenes in which George attempts to strangle Martha, pushes her, shoves her against a car and pretends to shoot her with a gun (an umbrella pops out instead of a bullet).  But when you begin to peel back the layers, you realize that while it might not be an overtly feminist film, feminist tendencies emerge nonetheless.
In the 1960s, the domesticity paradigm for women reigned.  In the beginning of the film, Martha tells George about a Bette Davis movie she’s trying to remember the name of.  She says, “She [Bette Davis] comes home from a hard day at the grocery store.”  George snidely and skeptically replies, “At the grocery store?” to which she retorts, “Yes, the grocery store. She’s a housewife, she buys things.”  Women were expected to be docile, obedient wives and mothers tending the home. Yet this revealing exchange shows the disdain for domestic duties women in the 60s faced.

Policing of sexuality also appears.  When Martha calls George a floozy in one scene, Honey jovially and drunkenly retorts,  

“He can’t be a floozy.  You’re a floozy!”

The film makes a subtle commentary of the double standard in sexual conduct between women and men.  Men could sleep with whomever they pleased while women who did the same were branded as “sluts.”

A role that earned Taylor her second Oscar, she considered the role of Martha her “personal best.”  A bravura performance, Taylor seamlessly sinks into the part; it’s difficult to ascertain where she begins and the character ends.  A college-educated woman, Martha perpetually humiliates her husband for his lack of ambition and professional failures:

Martha: I hope that was an empty bottle, George! You can’t afford to waste good liquor, not on your salary, not on an associate professor’s salary!

She pushed George to be the head of the History Department and the head of the university.  But why couldn’t she do those things herself?  In an exchange with Nick:

Nick: To you, everybody’s a flop. Your husband’s a flop, I’m a flop.
Martha: You’re all flops. I am the Earth Mother, and you are all flops.

In a time when women weren’t supposed to have jobs beyond wife and mother, perhaps Martha wanted her own career.  As she came from a wealthy family, Martha had money so she didn’t need George to succeed for fiscal security. It seems as if Martha lived vicariously through her husband and his capacity for success which would explain why his lack of ambition was such a blow.
While the play was written a year before the publication of feminist Betty Friedan’s ground-breaking The Feminine Mystique, the play explores the same issues Friedan railed against.  Friedan writes about the “feminine mystique,” where the highest value for women is embracing and maintaining their femininity, and the “problem that has no name,” the unhappiness women faced in the 50s and 60s and their yearning for fulfillment beyond being a housewife and a mother.  Friedan argues:
“They [women] learned that truly feminine women do not want careers, higher education, political rights – the independence and the opportunities that the old-fashioned feminists fought for…All they had to do was devote their lives from earliest girlhood to finding a husband and bearing children.” (58)

“Self-esteem in woman, as well as in man, can only be based on real capacity, competence, and achievement; on deserved respect from others rather than unwarranted adulation. Despite the glorification of “Occupation: housewife,” if that occupation does not demand, or permit, realization of women’s full abilities, it cannot provide adequate self-esteem, much less pave the way to a higher level of self-realization…But women in America are no encouraged, or expected, to use their full capacities. In the name of femininity, they are encouraged to evade human growth.” (435-437)

[Warning: Spoilers ahead!!] Motherhood, a reoccurring theme in the film, comprised one of the few ways society allowed fulfillment for women. Both women don’t have children, Martha is unable to and Honey, whose “hysterical pregnancy” led to her marriage with Nick, takes pills to eliminate any pregnancies as she’s scared to conceive. As women were supposed to be good wives and mothers, society viewed reproduction as one of their vital duties.  If a woman didn’t have children, ultimately she was a failure.  Friedan writes:

“Over and over again, stories in women’s magazines insist that woman can know fulfillment only at the moment of giving birth to a child…In the feminine mystique, there is no other way she can even dream about herself, except as her children’s mother, her husband’s wife.” (115)
As someone in their 30s who doesn’t have children (and isn’t even sure I ever want them), even in this day and age, people often act as if there’s something fundamentally wrong with you if you don’t have or want children. Martha invented the story of a son probably because she genuinely wanted one.  But I think she also did it to make it easier for her to fit into society. As a woman, I often feel I don’t fit the stereotypical mold of what a woman “should” be. Perhaps Martha, with her abrasive, obnoxious persona, wanted at least one component of her life to fit. While I genuinely believe Martha wanted a child, her yearning may be tempered by the fact that society views her as an inadequate woman. It’s as if she can handle being a non-conformist woman in every way possible except this one.
What makes Martha so interesting is that she’s not merely a bawdy, angry woman.  Taylor imbues the complicated character with fleeting moments of agony and vulnerability.  In a tender rather than simply rage-filled moment, Martha refutes George’s accusation that she’s a “monster.”  She asserts,

Martha: I’m loud and I’m vulgar, and I wear the pants in the house because somebody’s got to, but I am not a monster. I’m not.

George: You’re a spoiled, self-indulgent, willful, dirty-minded, liquor-ridden…
Martha: SNAP! It went SNAP! I’m not gonna try to get through to you any more. There was a second back there, yeah, there was a second, just a second when I could have gotten through to you, when maybe we could have cut through all this, this CRAP. But it’s past, and I’m not gonna try.
To me, this is such a pivotal scene.  Women are supposed to be, especially during that era, docile, proper and well-mannered; the epitome of femininity.  Blond, thin, meek Honey appears to be the perfect wife while bawdy, brash, raven-haired, curvy Martha stands as the complete opposite.  In the equally ground-breaking The Second Sex published in 1949, philosopher Simone de Beauvoir wrote about the treatment and oppression of women.  In her tome, she argues that society teaches us that passivity is “the essential characteristic of the ‘feminine’ woman.”  Society encourages men and boys to explore their freedom while women and girls are taught to embrace femininity, turning their back on what they themselves want. She asserts:

“In woman, on the contrary, there is from the beginning a conflict between her autonomous existence and her objective self, her “being-the-other;” she is taught that to please she must try to please, she must make herself object; she should therefore renounce her autonomy. She is treated like a live doll and is refused liberty.” (280)

 

Wives were supposed to support their husbands, echoing their desires.  While Martha eventually admits that George is the only man who has ever made her happy, she refuses to silence herself. She is loud, vulgar, shrewd, intelligent, assertive, sexual and outspoken; the antithesis to femininity. And in many ways, society punishes Martha and women like her for it. Yet she rails against constraints, struggling to navigate the sexist terrain on her own terms.

The title of the play and film comes from a riff of “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf” with the wordplay on Virginia Woolf.  It was a quote that playwright Albee saw scrawled on a bathroom mirror in a bar.  It’s also an allusion to show that people concoct imaginary scenarios and personas in order to cope with their lives, a theme that runs throughout the entire film.  The audience is never quite sure what is fact and what is fiction, the line often blurred.After the pivotal climax and shocking revelations, in the penultimate line of the film, George asks Martha, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” to which she replies, “I am, George, I am.”  Some scholars assert that this alludes to being able to live without illusions, which both George and Martha, with their web of lies and treacherous games, clearly find difficult.  But the play/film’s title is also an accidental feminist reference as feminist author and writer Virginia Woolf famously advocated for women to be able to possess their own money and space to be creative and ultimately themselves.

Captivating yet uncomfortable to watch, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? depicts the brutal deterioration of a marriage and the crumbling of hopes, ambitions and illusions.  Through their cruel taunts and insults, the film exposes the illusory facades people create, while challenging stifling gender roles.In the 60s (and to a large extent still today), society demanded men act assertively and women behave passively. As men wield a disproportionate amount of power over women, people often fear female empowerment.  Despite her brazen outspokenness, Martha might be afraid too — afraid of her own power in a society that doesn’t embrace or accept powerful women.

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Megan Kearns is a blogger, freelance writer and activist. A feminist vegan, Megan blogs at The Opinioness of the World.  In addition to Bitch Flicks, her work has appeared at Arts & Opinion, Italianieuropei, Open Letters Monthly and A Safe World for Women. Megan earned her B.A. in Anthropology and Sociology and a Graduate Certificate in Women and Politics and Public Policy. She currently lives in Boston. She previously contributed reviews of The Kids Are All Right, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest and Something Borrowed to Bitch Flicks.

In Memoriam: Elizabeth Taylor

Elizabeth Taylor 1932-2011

 

As you all likely know by now, Elizabeth Taylor died yesterday from congestive heart failure. There’s not much I can think to say about her that others haven’t said–and likely said better. Here are some highlights of her career as an actress, successful businesswoman, and HIV/AIDS activist.
  • Other awards Taylor won include a BAFTA, a GLAAD Media Vanguard Award, three Golden Globes–including the Cecil B. DeMille Award (one of only twelve women to win since the award’s inception in 1952), a SAG Lifetime Achievement Award, and many others–even a Razzie, for her role in 1994’s The Flintstones.
  • Her first film role was in the film There’s One Born Every Minute, when she was only ten years old, which led to her status as a child star. Adulthood brought her hit after hit, including Cleopatra in 1963, which was the most expensive movie to date with a budget of a million dollars. Her final feature film role was, unfortunately, in The Flintstones, though she appeared on television twice in 2001 and once on stage in 2007.
I must confess that the only film I’ve ever seen starring Elizabeth Taylor is Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (not even Cleopatra, for shame!), which was amazing. In the past few decades, she’s been more active in business ventures and activism (and, of course, she remains known not only as a classic Hollywood actress, but also for her eight marriages, celebrity friendships, and pricey jewelry collection).
  • Not only did Taylor collect jewelry, but she also designed a successful collection. Her perfume line, which includes Passion, White Diamonds, and Black Pearls, earns roughly 200 million dollars a year. Many celebrities followed in her footsteps, creating signature fragrances as part of their branding initiatives.
  • Perhaps her most lasting legacy, other than her acting, is her HIV/AIDS activism. She raised over 100 million dollars to fight the disease, helped found the American Foundation for AIDS Research, and founded The Elizabeth Taylor HIV/AIDS Foundation.  

This isn’t, by any means, an exhaustive list of her accomplishments and influence. Check out her obit at the New York Times and the interactive media imbedded within, including a clip from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and leave your links to Elizabeth Taylor related pieces in the comments.

Preview: Grey Gardens

This Saturday night (April 18), HBO premieres its new film version of the classic Grey Gardens. Starring Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore as Big Edie Bouvier Beale and Little Edie, the film recreates scenes from the original documentary as well as providing the backstory of how these women came to find themselves in such a condition. Directed by Michael Sucsy.

Here’s the movie trailer:

Before it was a movie, of course, Grey Gardens was a fantastic documentary. Made in 1975 by David Maysles, Albert Maysles, Ellen Hovde, Muffie Meyer, and Susan Froemke, the film gives an unflinching portrait of two discarded members of the American aristocracy and their co-dependent relationship. The film is gorgeous, tragic, poetic, and haunting. One of my all-time favorites.

Here’s the original documentary trailer:

Finally, PBS’ Independent Lens made a film about the making of the documentary, and about the premiere of a Broadway show based on the lives of the women.

Here’s the PBS trailer: