This post by Ren Jender appears as part of our theme week on Representations of Female Sexual Desire.
In the words for women that have no male equivalent–like “bitchy,” “slut” and “hag”–we can easily discern sexism, but we can also see it in words and phrases that mean something different when applied to men than when applied to women–or when applied to boys rather than girls. A boy who is “acting out” is often a euphemism for a boy who is physically threatening or harming others or (less likely) himself. A girl, especially an adolescent girl, who is said to be “acting out” is sometimes harming herself (and even more rarely harming others), but is more likely behaving in ways that, in a bygone era, would have been called “unladylike” (when no one ever used the word “ungentlemanlike”). She’s loud; she’s crude; she’s inconsiderate–all things girls and even adult women are rarely allowed to be. When she is seeking out her own pleasure she is “acting out sexually,” another phrase with no male equivalent.
Emily Lloyd’s Lynda, the main character of 1987’s Wish You Were Here is a textbook example of a girl (Lloyd, like her character, was 16) “acting out” in every way in a sleepy, English seaside resort town. The film is set in the early 1950s, and though the town has a postwar patina contemporary audiences have enough distance from to find picturesque, the sun barely breaks through the clouds over grey sea walls and piers, and the salty wind from the ocean has faded all the building signs. Wide shots show the dinky dance hall and rollerskating rink even at their busiest, are never really full. Against this backdrop Lynda rides her bike, has a penchant for colorful language (or the 50s British version of it: her favorite phrase is “up yer bum”) and likes to show off her underwear to boys her age–and to men.
She can barely wait to lose her virginity, making out with a boy in full view of an older man who threatens to tell Lynda’s stern father, a World War II veteran, hairdresser and “Freemason.” We can see Lynda become disenchanted with the boy when he runs scared. She wants someone who has as little use for propriety as she does.
She seems to find a good match in the young bus conductor, Dave (Jesse Birdsall), who takes her dancing and then to his grandmother’s house–empty while she is away. Lynda waits for him in bed, and he comes out of the bathroom in bright yellow pajamas and smoking a cigarette with a holder. He asks,”Do you fancy me?”
She laughs, “Not half as much as you fancy yourself.” Because it’s the early 50s Lynda has no knowledge of birth control and doesn’t even know what condoms are (or how they work) until her boyfriend informs her that he’s wearing one. We see both Lynda’s and Dave’s faces as they have sex, a study in why the sexual revolution and feminism couldn’t happen soon enough: Lynda, at first wide-eyed and then unimpressed at how quickly it’s over, and Dave pumping, straining and sweating but not really paying much attention to how much pleasure Lynda is getting out of it. But Lynda, taking another condom out of the package, tells him that they have all night to practice.
In the morning Dave’s uncle comes by for an unexpected visit, grilling Dave (“I heard you brought a girl here”) while Lynda hides under the bed, stifling laughter as she watches the man’s dog snatch a used condom from the floor. When the uncle leaves they watch from the window as he discovers what the dog has in its mouth–and he sees the two of them looking down at him. In the small town where everyone knows each other and each other’s business, the uncle informs her father–who then warns off the boyfriend for good.
Lynda’s father takes her to a psychiatrist, for whom Lynda proves a challenge. When he asks her to recite every obscenity she knows going through each letter in the alphabet, she pretends she’s stumped at “f” as he becomes increasingly impatient. Her father, wary of the expense, doesn’t schedule her for any more visits. Lynda’s encounter with psychiatry and the powers that be could have been a lot worse: “promiscuity” was a condition that could get young women committed to mental hospitals in those days, or, just across the water in Ireland, to lifetimes of unpaid labor.
From the earliest parts of the film we notice the bookie friend of Lynda’s father Eric (Tom Bell) looking at Lynda. Lynda refers to him as “Long John Silver” because of his lopsided (perhaps war-injured) gait: he is a tall, hatchet-faced, rail-thin, middle-aged man in a suit. One day he asks to come into the house even though her father is out, and while they are alone in the parlor, he mocks her, tells her she’s all talk and gets ever closer until he works his hand into her underpants–and we see her eyes grow wide again. She doesn’t say yes and she doesn’t say no, but she also doesn’t try to get away from his touch. When they are interrupted (but not caught) he whispers to her to meet him in the backyard later that night.
At first she’s determined not to go, but she’s starved for attention and affection; her boyfriend is with someone new, her mother is dead and her father, absent for much of the war, barely knows her. In spite of Lynda’s modern attitudes to sex and swearing, she’s a creature of her time (and of the movies she goes to see) when she asks Eric if he loves her. He tells her no, and also confirms that her father wants to be rid of her. She stays anyway.
Lynda is given to telling off (or showing up) the stodgy, older, often hypocritical people around her, and in some of those scenes we can see how, a decade early, other people in small-town England are primed for the rebellion of the sixties: the tea room waitresses in their black-and-white-uniforms (along with a 60 -or 70-something woman pianist) applaud her outburst, and, after Lynda causes a commotion at the bus company where her father has arranged for her to work, the other workers boo when the boss tells her she’s fired–and cheer when he tells them that they’re fired too.
Lynda’s tirades (like the song “Take This Job And Shove It”) are the sort most people fantasize about but never actually follow through with. But unlike in fantasies we see the aftermath, where Lynda is staring out her bedroom window in the dark or crying over tea, distraught. She’s in the wrong time as well as the wrong town, so her victories over the hypocrites around her are Pyrrhic ones, and we see her actions have consequences.
Her father catches her coming back from sex with Eric in the backyard shed and tells her that she can’t continue to behave this way because he’s “respectable.” His concern has nothing to do with her own well-being but with her reflection on him. He does not think to confront his friend about the affair. When his daughter asks about his own sexual relationship with a woman he brings to the house, he says, as if he need give no further explanation, “I’m a man.”
Lynda leaves home and tries to move in with Eric in his room above the movie house, but Eric is no comfort to her, taking off her clothes on the unmade bed that takes up most of the space as she sobs about her confrontation with her father. Later she informs Eric she’s pregnant, and following the lead of shitty men throughout history, he asks, “How do you know it’s mine?” Lynda, instead of being hurt, the way we expect women in movies to be, parries right back, “If it walks with a limp and thinks with its prick, I’ll know it’s yours!” Lloyd is fantastic in this scene as she is in the rest of the film. The script by director David Leland was the perfect vehicle for his young star who is alternately hilariously rude and vulnerable, an unusual mixture for a woman or girl character in films, TV or literature even today.
Lynda, at the end, has a kind of triumph over the town’s insularity (and the woman on whom the story was originally based went on to become a famous madam) but after a few high profile projects (and even more high-profile firings) Lloyd’s career shrank to very occasional, very small roles. The film industry continues to not have much tolerance for women and girls who “act out” in real life no matter how talented they are.
[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJY1Koru_Fs”]
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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.