Goldie Hawn – Bitch Flicks

“[Unbelievably Beautiful] Women Aren’t Funny”: Progress Through Modifiers?

A few months ago I wrote, “Today, no one who is relevant doubts that women are funny, at least not out loud.” And here we are in 2015 and Important Men are making casual declarations that only certain types of women aren’t funny. In this case, unbelievably beautiful women. Progress?

unbelievablybeautifulgoldie — The unbelievably beautiful Goldie Hawn

A few months ago I wrote, “Today, no one who is relevant doubts that women are funny, at least not out loud.” And here we are in 2015 and Important Men are making casual declarations that only certain types of women aren’t funny. In this case, unbelievably beautiful women. Progress?

Michael Eisner, in “honoring” Goldie Hawn last week, said “usually, unbelievably beautiful women, you being an exception, are not funny.” [He at least had the foresight to note, “boy am I going to get in trouble, I know this goes online.” Yes, you are in trouble.] And the media has responded by listing beautiful funny women. We’ve been down this road before.

In 2007, Christopher Hitchens’ infamous Vanity Fair essay, “Why Women Aren’t Funny” was published. People forget the first word in that title, which is a shame, because if anything is more objectionable than the assertion that women aren’t funny, it is the reasons Hitchens gave for that assertion. The essay is gone from the internet, so let me summarize (or you can see Hitchens’ own pull quotes in his 2008 follow-up piece):

Women don’t need to be funny to convince men to have sex with them, so they never develop the talent.
The onus of childbirth makes women too serious to be funny.

These ideas were mostly ignored, a) because they are terrible b) because we were too busy responding by listing all the funny women out there. Listing funny women is a good thing. We should be celebrating all the women in comedy. But the knights of the patriarchy are always going to respond with, at best, “maybe those women are funny, but they’re exceptional.”

Vanity Fair's cover responding to its Hitchens article — *Vanity Fair*‘s cover responding to its Hitchens article

Or they’ll shut it down with the nuclear option: “those women are funny, but they aren’t beautiful.” Because a woman who is not beautiful has no other relevant qualities. She might as well not exist.

This was gloriously satirized in the instant classic television episode Twelve Angry Men Inside Amy Schumer, where the jurors debate if Amy Schumer is hot enough to have her own tv show. This episode expands on an earlier sketch where a focus group is asked about the content of the show but will only talk about whether or not they’d do its star. All evaluations of women are eclipsed by one question: “could she get it?”

So it really isn’t all that helpful to say, “but these funny women COULD get it!” I don’t need your list of beautiful funny women. Even if you do an admirable job including women who don’t all look the same. And even if you frame it as “funny is beautiful.” You’re perpetuating the idea that beauty is the be-all end-all decider of a woman’s worth.

Going back to Hitchens’ horrible reasons for his horrible opinions, the idea that beautiful women aren’t funny (which is distinct from the also-pervasive belief that funny women aren’t beautiful, to be examined at another time) suggests that women only develop their qualities to please men. [Forgive me, this whole conversation is incredibly cis- and heteronormative.] The idea is that beautiful women are empty shells, never bothering to become smart or funny or athletic or good at parallel parking because they’ve already achieved the ultimate goal: fuckability. Goldie Hawn responded to Eisner that maybe she’s an exception to his beautiful funny women rule because she was an “ugly duckling.” Basically, in her early years, she had to bother to cook up a personality, which fortunately stuck around after she became unbelievably beautiful.

In this equation, a woman has no worth if she isn’t doable, but if she is too doable, we must also assume she has no “real” worth.

Listen carefully: A woman is not the way she is because of how appealing that makes her to others. A woman is the way she is because that is who she is. We have complex identities. We are made up by qualities outside of and unrelated to our do-ability. We are people.

Robin Hitchcock is a Pittsburgh-based writer and founding member of the unbelievably beautiful all-female comedy troupe Frankly Scarlett.

Feisty and Heisty: Female Friendship in ‘The First Wives Club’

The main characters’ friendship goes way back: a flashback shows the group in college, together with their valedictorian and close friend Cynthia. The four of them vow to be friends forever. This, however, turns out to be easier said than done. After graduation, the four of them lose touch and are only reunited years later, with the occasion being Cynthia’s funeral. After her husband took financial advantage of her and then left her for a younger woman, she commits suicide. At a post-funeral get-together, the three women bond over their own failed marriages and spite for their ex-husbands. Their friendship is rekindled as they decide to settle the score with their exploitative exes.

This guest post by Artemis Linhart appears as part of our theme week on Female Friendship.

This made-by-men film navigates female friendships through the proverbial battle of the sexes, steering clear of “a feminist manifesto,” unleashing just what it deems feasible. This is the premise, which sounds much worse than it turns out to be.

Three mid-40s women whose husbands have left them for younger women decide it’s time to opt out of misery and take matters into their own hands. Thus forms the First Wives Club. Assembling Goldie Hawn, Bette Midler, and Diane Keaton makes for a true 90s Dream Team of female energy. Who wouldn’t want to be a member of a club like that?

While a desire for revenge starts out to be the foundation of The Club, the driving force behind it soon proves to be the substantial companionship the three of them share.

When it doesn’t all pan out at first, a feud arises that splits the trio up temporarily. They lash out at each other in a way only close friends can and reconcile accordingly. The big fight is overcome and it is emphasized that there are more important things than silly catfights – specifically friendship and, in their case, the pressing issues at hand.

There is a lesson to be learned here – one that transcends the supposed target audience of the middle-aged woman, as well as the decades, and connects with more recent cinematic works focusing on female relationships. In order to end the notorious “Mean Girls” spirit, there needs to be a shift in perspective – starting with an awareness of the significance of establishing and maintaining support among females. By vanquishing the damaging representation of the “Girl vs. Girl” trope, The First Wives Club is a good example of teaching adolescents the values of female solidarity, which, in turn, is an important pillar of everyday feminism.

However, the key demographic of the film is not to be disparaged. Amidst the rather ageist “Girl Power”-craze of the 90s, it focuses on one of the movie industry’s lesser-discussed subjects. This is addressed directly in a self-referencing statement made by Goldie Hawn’s character: “There are only three ages for women in Hollywood: Babe, District Attorney and Driving Miss Daisy.” The film itself makes room for this overlooked, often excluded group of people and places it in a feminist context.

Triumphant Triumvirate

As the First Wives Club takes shape, the three women rise to the occasion and take on the challenge full-scale. This allows for the power dynamics of the group to shift and become more balanced. Annie (Diane Keaton) leaves her old pushover-self behind and takes charge. Elise (Goldie Hawn) gets off her high horse and Brenda (Bette Midler) gains more confidence in the face of her ex-husband’s new fiancée (satirized aptly by Sarah Jessica Parker, who rode her broomstick alongside Bette Midler just three years prior in Hocus Pocus, a female friendship tale of the witchy kind).

Owing to their new-and-improved friendship, they each gain strength and build each other up along the way. What follows is a buoyant heist show with slapstick galore – all of this against the backdrop of the good cause, the big picture, the women power. Indeed, they have the full support of one of New York’s society grande dames (Maggie Smith), who, too, was once a first wife (as well as a second, third, and fourth). Unconditional support also comes from Annie’s Daughter and Brenda’s boss, as well as a handful of cameos by the likes of Gloria Steinem and Ivana Trump.

After settling their own issues, they proceed to step it up a notch and help other women in need. As they found the Cynthia Swann Griffin Crisis Center for Women, the trio truly rises to the top – of society, the media, and the moral code – their (granted, naïve) objective being that no woman will have to suffer the same fate as their friend Cynthia.

Based on a novel by Olivia Goldsmith, this film is written, directed and produced by men. Whereas in the movie there are certainly a few problems with the representation of women and their actions, they seem less grave without direct comparison to the book. In view of the film version being constructed as a lighthearted comedy, there are a few content-related details worth mentioning.

The general tone of the much more progressive novel is darker and more serious. Here, the punishment for the ex-husbands is more brutal, while the female characters are portrayed as multi-dimensional – as opposed to their cinematic depiction, which is shrill, occasionally hysterical and lacks depth. Especially the roles of the new girlfriends are particularly cardboard in Hugh Wilson’s version.

In contrast to the film, the story is about more than revenge – it focuses on empowerment and actively addresses the notion that women should not feel afraid to be labelled as having strong opinions and personalities.

As one might expect, the film is considerably more hesitant concerning feminist representations. To sidestep a too “radical” stance that was perhaps misconstrued as “male-bashing,” a “light”-version of Olivia Goldsmith’s original ideas was created – often in questionable ways. The filmmakers’ way of redeeming the image of the “man-hating beasts,” for example, was the decision to reunite Brenda with her ex-husband. This seems like a cowardly quick fix that goes against everything the First Wives Club stands for, especially considering the fact that in the novel Brenda’s new partner is a woman.

And yet, while it may not be as groundbreaking as the book, the movie could be a great deal more disastrous. It is pro-emancipation without too much of an “anti-men” vibe. Interestingly enough, the title of the German version translates to “The Club of the She-Devils” – a crude demonstration of an obnoxiously archaic perspective on the film.

Retaliation in Style and in Rhythm

While the trio’s friendship seems to be based largely on achievement and a distinct goal respectively, there is, nonetheless, a perpetual sense of a true and meaningful connection. Merely by the way they interact with each other, it is palpable that there is still a lasting bond between them. There is, indeed, an air of the blithe BFF sentiment from back in their college days. Correspondingly, both Cynthia and Annie still keep a framed picture of the four of them in their homes.

Another symbolic marker of their friendship is Leslie Gore’s hit song “You Don’t Own Me,” their college-times performance of which they reminisce about and even repeat twice in the film. This song is truly a great pick and shows that the filmmakers were not too afraid to use a clearly feminist song. As a recurring theme, their own rendition of the sixties classic can be seen as a symbol of their lasting friendship as well as their newfound empowerment. It culminates in the very last scene of the movie as they sing and dance off into freedom. The happiest of endings: not primarily a romantic one, it celebrates the courage, independence and companionship of the three women.

Another important factor that comes into play is the way in which the women handle their respective husband’s new relationship status. While they harbor anything but positive feelings for the mistresses they have been left for, instead of blaming the “other woman” for the man cheating – as seems to be common practice among women on and off screen – they focus their anger and revenge on the men. They do this in a dignified manner, true to the tagline of the film: “Don’t get mad. Get everything.”

Artemis Linhart is a freelance writer and film curator with a weakness for escapism.

Older Women Week: Pretty Little Zombies — The Lure of Eternal Youth in Robert Zemeckis’ ‘Death Becomes Her’

This is the turning point of the movie. All the conflicts revolving around jealousy, beauty, and, of course, youth, are henceforth turned into a spirit of sisterhood. The dependence on Ernest transforms into a friendly co-dependent relationship between the two women. However much of a love-hate sentiment resonates throughout the final part of the movie, friendship and solidarity triumph. The special bond that Madeline and Helen share is still based on the wish for eternal youth, but they have finally turned to each other.

Death Becomes Her movie poster

This is a guest post by Artemis Linhart.

Somewhere between Marty McFly and Jessica Rabbit, it became quite clear that one thing Robert Zemeckis’ characters have in common is an utter defiance of the laws of nature. Now, channeling this notion in Isabella Rossellini’s role of Lisle von Rhoman, emerges the ultimate temptress: “Sempre viva – live forever.”

However, for the women of this movie, it isn’t so much the promise of eternal life that entices them to drink the rejuvenating potion offered by Lisle. It is the ever-lasting youthful appearance they are after. For this they are willing to spend all the money they have, which seems to them like a small price to pay. But “the sordid topic of coin,” as Lisle calls it, is not the only price eternal youth comes at; set against the backdrop of a seemingly never-ending thunderstorm, Zemeckis unfolds a lurid tale of (attempted) murder, jealousy and spray paint.

It all begins with the aging starlet Madeline Ashton (Meryl Streep) performing an ill-conceived version of Tennessee Williams’ “Sweet Bird of Youth,” and people stepping on her photograph as they leave the theater mid-show. It is no secret that working as an actress and living as a human being subject to the process of aging don’t go well together – the limitations of which real life Meryl Streep has been known to point out.

Helen Sharp (Goldie Hawn) after Ernest leaves her

As the aspiring writer Helen Sharp (Goldie Hawn) introduces her fiancé Ernest (Bruce Willis) to her long-time frienemy Madeline, their lives start to unravel. Instantly smitten, Ernest loses no time to break off the engagement and marry Madeline instead. His occupation as a plastic surgeon should prove to be beneficial to Madeline’s crumbling career.

“Tell me, doctor, do you think that I’m starting to need you?” she asks him, flirtingly. Her choice of words illustrates the undisputed consensus that, at a certain age, women need to act on the fact that time is taking a toll on their appearance. Retaining a youthful image has become a need like breathing or eating (in moderation, by all means).

Meanwhile, Helen’s appearance undergoes three stages. Starting off as rather mousy and plain, she gains weight after being left by Ernest, resulting in the clichéd cat lady couch potato. The camera mocks her voluminous buttocks on more than one occasion. Due to her inertia as well as an obsession with her rival Madeline, she is admitted to a mental hospital where a doctor yells at her for being overweight. Disregarding the fat-shaming, she plots her revenge. In a cut to seven years later, we see her as what society describes as a desirable beauty, finally having managed to get her life back together. It seems that success and appearance go hand in hand. Her book (titled “Forever Young”) finally sells, as she looks fresher than ever – all thanks to a little magic potion, which Madeline is about to happen upon herself shortly.

Ernest (Bruce Willis) and Helen

Ageism You Can Drink

Madeline Ashton is a regular at a spa where she routinely receives extensive (as well as expensive) facial treatments. It is run by people with European accents, which, in combination with Isabella Rossellini’s character, allows for the impression that the beauty and youth lobby is run by a wealthy Eurotrash elite.

Madeline is told that she cannot undergo a treatment, as her last appointment was only a few weeks ago. Frantic in the face of an employee with “22-year-old skin and tits like rocks,” she begs for a spa treatment, illustrating the obsession with physical appearance women are pressured with.

Upon being offered makeup, she screams, “Makeup is pointless! It does nothing anymore!” thus highlighting a problem many women, especially actresses, face. Once hiding behind a lot of makeup no longer serves the purpose of rejuvenation, more drastic measures have to be taken. In addition, Madeline’s frenzy demonstrates the idea that Botox and collagen treatments as well as plastic surgery often have addictive potential.

Madeline (Meryl Streep), Helen, and Ernest

A staff member apologizes, explaining that they are “restricted by the laws of nature.”

Cue Lisle von Rhoman.

“Screw the laws of nature!” she shouts furiously at one point. Defying every physical law, she is just what Madeline is looking for. Between her twenty-something boyfriend cheating on her with someone his own age, and her husband Ernest having a newfound interest in the now youthful Helen Sharp, Madeline has a nervous breakdown. Youth seems to be all that matters to society, and she has internalized the desire to keep up.

Lisle describes aging as “life’s ultimate cruelty – it offers us the taste of youth and vitality and then makes us witness our own decay.”

Her remedy: “a touch of magic in this world obsessed with science.”

Madeline and Helen

While Meryl Streep was appalled to be offered as many as three different roles as witches as she turned 40, her character in Death Becomes Her now resorts to supernatural powers as an alternative to medical treatments in order to battle aging – when really she should be battling ageism instead.

The women of this movie are consistent with the idea that they are only worthy of success, men, or happiness as long as they are – or appear to be – young. As Madeline watches her body age in reverse after consuming the potion, she exclaims cheerfully, “I’m a girl!”

Hence, womanhood is based on certain physical features defined by society to please the eye. This is mirrored in the character of Ernest who desires whoever looks the youngest, yet accuses Madeline of being cheap for wanting to maintain a youthful facade.

While Ernest is portrayed as a “pushover,” whose domineering spouse makes his life a living hell, we watch his spirit break and his life force dwindle as he is increasingly emaciated and, most notably, emasculated. He is undoubtedly condemned and punished for this until, ultimately, he stands up to Madeline and Helen, which enables him to regain his dignity and lead a decent life after all. Women’s dominance is clearly demonized in Death Becomes Her. It entails depraved moral values, hysteria, and, naturally, a good old cat fight. Helen and Madeline engage in a bizarre brawl that results in a grotesquely comic CGI spectacle. As he lets them lash out at each other, Zemeckis does things to the human body previously only seen in cartoons. The chronic bitchfight based on envy, that the two of them have been carrying out for years in much more subtle ways, has now extended to the physical dimension.

Helen, after Madeline shoots her

Life As We Know It

“It’s alive!” Helen calls out in a nod to Mary Shelley as she sees Madeline’s zombified self happily walking around the house. In a previous foreshadowing analogy, Ernest asks their housekeeper about Madeline, “Is it awake?”, emphasizing his despise for his oppressive wife on the one hand and the objectification of the woman monster on the other.

After shooting a hole through Helen’s stomach, Madeline cheers, “These are the moments that make life worth living.”

And yet, alive is a thing both women are not even close to being. The forces of nature have been tampered with, and disaster is taking its course. Death Becomes Her sends a pretty clear message when it comes to the distribution of power, morality and, ultimately, gender roles. Life, as many a patriarch has come to know and appreciate it, has been turned upside down. Here, a reversal of gender roles results in the collapse of the main characters’ lives.

The moral decay is mirrored in the disintegration of Helen’s and Madeline’s faces. This is where they realize their dependency on Ernest, who has been fixing their lesions with spray paint. Even beyond death, beyond eternal beauty, they still need the plastic surgeon to fix their crumbling visages. “What if it fades? What if it chips? What if it rains? Will he come back for touch-ups?”

As it turns out, he won’t, and they will have to master the skill of restoring their faces themselves.

Madeline’s turning point

Meanwhile, Earnest has been living his life without them, his new motto being “Life begins at 50.” As a man, he can afford this attitude. Earlier on, as Madeline and Helen attempt to convince him to drink the potion and attain immortality, the thought of a youthful appearance never even crosses his mind.

Instead, he contemplates being able to continue his career. Eternal youth is not the determining factor for him. In the light of an everlasting life, in contrast, Ernest refuses to drink it. This goes to show that men, as opposed to women, do not face the terror of the beauty industry in quite the same way.

Helen and Madeline still prevail

In fact, he is rewarded for this decision later on by the pastor at his funeral who asserts that Ernest, just by being a remarkable man who has gone on to found disputable institutions like “The Menville Center for the Study of Women,” he has achieved eternal life. Even after his death he has accomplished eternal youth, as he “lives on in his children.” The irony of this causes Helen and Madeline to get up and leave, not without declaring, “Blaaa blaaa blaaa.”

And yet, as tragic an ending as they face, Madeline and Helen prevail, long after Ernest’s death. Thirty-seven years of interdependent touch-ups later, they now look like bizarre zombie puppets. As they drag their brittle bodies away from the funeral, they fall down a flight of stairs and break into smithereens.

With all their separate body parts scattered across the ground, they are still best friends. This is the actual happy ending – one of solidarity, friendship and emancipation.

Artemis Linhart is a freelance writer and film curator with a weakness for escapism.

Older Women Week: You Don’t Own Me: ‘The First Wives Club’ and Feminism

Movie poster for The First Wives Club

This guest post by Mia Steinle previously appeared at Canonball and is cross-posted with permission.

In the late nineties, as I was entering early teenagerdom and as a group of marketers was inventing the term “tween,” my favorite movie was about a group of middle-aged divorcees waging war on their self-centered ex-husbands. The First Wives Club had come out in 1996, and it’s possible — nay, likely — that my parents rented it from our local Blockbuster shortly thereafter, but it wasn’t until some years later, at the dawn of a new millennium, that I was treated to this quintessentially 90s nugget of female empowerment, over and over again on my friend’s VCR.

Diane Keaton, Goldie Hawn, and Bette Midler in The First Wives Club

We admired Bette Midler as ballsy, street-smart Brenda, who is incensed that her ex-husband Morty has the gall to bring his girlfriend (Sarah Jessica Parker) to their son’s bar mitzvah. We laughed at Goldie Hawn as Elise, a habitually drunk, botoxed actress, whose producer ex-husband has just taken up with an even younger actress (Elizabeth Berkeley, whose performance makes SJP look like a comedic genius). And, while the other ladies are fun and glamorous, I think we were most touched by the neurotic realism of Diane Keaton as Annie, an anxious, eager-to-please, but ready-to-burst housewife whose husband (played by the Rev. Eric Camden, aka Stephen Collins) leaves her for their therapist.

After the suicide of a mutual friend — a woman who gave the best years of her life, and her self-esteem, to a man who then left her for a younger woman — the ladies band together to get back at their exes. As Annie explains, it’s a matter of justice; they made life easy for their ex-husbands for years, only to be discarded in middle-age — that time of life when society tries to force women into invisibility: sexually, romantically and professionally.

The ladies set to work destroying their exes, using a combination of cunning and, perhaps most unconventionally, financial savvy. Their greatest successes aren’t born of cat fights with second wives, but of their ability to read tax returns (Morty cheated on his), rig auctions (Annie uses her winnings to buy ownership of her ex-husband’s advertising firm) and do simple arithmetic (turns out Elise’s ex-husband’s new girlfriend is only 16). And their accomplices, on the surface, are the types of characters who don’t usually get to be clever, the types of characters we’re supposed to laugh at. But Maggie Smith as a wealthy socialite, Jennifer Dundas as Annie’s lesbian and feminist daughter and Bronson Pinchot as an interior decorator of vague foreign origin, are just as smart and savvy as the first wives. Not being male, not being young and not being straight aren’t liabilities for these characters.

As a 12-year-old, my life bore little resemblance to theirs, but The First Wives Club gave me one of my first, delicious glimpses into womanhood — a womanhood that includes sassy retorts and getting drunk at lunch and hanging out with your best friends (and also with Bronson Pinchot and Gloria Steinem). It’s a version of womanhood where we know that Maggie Smith, no matter how old, is always cooler than Sarah Jessica Parker. Where finding out that your daughter is a lesbian is no big thing. (“Lesbians are great nowadays!” Annie remarks after hearing the news.) Where female empowerment isn’t just a nebulous buzzword, but something you achieve and celebrate.

When I sat down this week to watch the movie with fellow Canonball editor Lindsay (who had never seen it before — by contrast, our contributor James owns two copies), I wondered how it had weathered the 15 years since its release. But, really, aside from a few instances of characters exclaiming, “It’s the nineties!” the movie holds up surprisingly well. In a way, it’s almost more progressive than a lot of today’s female-led comedies. Spoiler: while we’re left to assume that Brenda and Morty are going to get back together, neither attention-seeking Elise nor insecure Annie take back their ex-husbands. As Annie explains:

He wants to come home again and he feels emotionally ready to recommit to an equitable and caring relationship. I told him to drop dead.

Because at its core, The First Wives Club isn’t a story about romance or marriage. It’s a story about finding the bravery to stand up for yourself — especially when “yourself” is a woman, and not the young, pretty kind either. And seeing Keaton’s Annie transform from the nervous wreck that I so deeply identify with, to the kind of woman who can tell the dad from 7th Heaven to drop dead, is like a breath of fresh air.

Mia Steinle is a journalist living in Washington, D.C. Her work has appeared in Huffington Post, Columbia Journalism Review, and POLITICO, among others.

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.