Joan Micklin Silver – Bitch Flicks

‘Crossing Delancey’: Isabelle Needs a New Perspective on Life and Love

This romantic comedy has always been more of a cult classic. But it was unusual in its female writer and director, along with its distinctly Jewish cultural setting, its generational custom-clash regarding matchmaking, and its conflicted independent protagonist, Isabelle, who could be read as a late 1980s precursor to ‘Sex and the City’s protagonist Carrie Bradshaw.

This guest post written by Susan Cosby Ronnenberg appears as part of our theme week on Ladies of the 1980s. | Spoilers ahead.

Crossing Delancey (1988) is a romantic comedy featuring Amy Irving, directed by Joan Micklin Silver and written by Susan Sandler, based on her original play of the same title. The tagline was, “A funny movie about getting serious.” This rom-com has always been more of a cult classic. But it was unusual in its female writer and director, along with its distinctly Jewish cultural setting, its generational custom-clash regarding matchmaking, and its conflicted independent protagonist, Isabelle, who could be read as a late 1980s precursor to Sex and the City’s protagonist Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker). An independent, straight single woman with a successful career, Isabelle has professional and romantic options, ambitions, and flawed preconceptions about the incompatibility of those options and ambitions as she tries to decide between an internationally acclaimed poet or a neighborhood. Yes, you read that correctly: poet or pickleman.

Isabelle “Izzy” Grossman (Amy Irving) is irritating and relatable at the same time. She’s an ambitious and successful publisher in Manhattan, where, as she insists to her grandmother, she organizes “the most prestigious reading series in New York City.” She sees herself as modern, forward-looking, cultured, and sophisticated. But she’s also self-centered, snobbish, dismissive, and deceitful. While she possesses many fine attributes, she’s flawed; I like both of those aspects of her that make her fully human. At 33, with one of her peers becoming a new mother, Izzy looks around at her life, wondering about advancing her personal life as she has her professional one. This is a common theme among 1980s romantic comedies, such as Baby Boom (1987) with Diane Keaton and Working Girl (1988) with Melanie Griffith. One of her romantic prospects, a novelist, quotes Confucius to her at dinner one night, “Ripe plums are falling. Now there are only three. May a fine lover come for me”, adding reassuringly, “Lots of ripe plums left on your tree, Izzy.” He seems to recognize her distraction over the passage of time and still being single, which has become an issue with her grandmother.

Izzy has three men in her life: Nick (John Bedford Lloyd), an old boyfriend/friend with benefits, now married, but who crashes at her place on a regular basis when he and his wife fight; Anton Maes (Jeroen Krabbe), a NYC-based Dutch critically acclaimed novelist, also married but separated, famous, creative, cosmopolitan, and intellectual; and Sam Posner (Peter Riegert), who lives and works on the Lower East Side near her grandmother’s home, the owner and operator of his father’s pickle shop on Delancey Street. Sam and Izzy meet through the pressure of her grandmother, “Bubbie” Kantor (Reizl Bozyk), and Mrs. Mandlebaum (Sylvia Miles), a traditional professional Jewish matchmaker.

To Izzy, to cross Delancey is to return to the past, “100 years” and “a million miles away” from her own life, to her grandmother’s world. She does so often and willingly, providing company and care for her beloved grandmother. But she has no interest in a man who has chosen to remain in that neighborhood, doing the same food sales work that his father did, and, she assumes, contracting a matchmaker to find a bride. It clearly seems archaic and a little desperate to her.

The setting takes place half in Manhattan — in Izzy’s apartment, her place of employment, and out socializing with friends — and half on the Lower East Side — in Bubbie’s vibrant and diverse neighborhood, historically a predominantly Jewish community. It’s clear that, in trying to leave the old world and its ways behind as she makes her way in the new, modern world, Izzy has made some arrogant and faulty assumptions that will require Bubbie’s willingness to interfere.

Passing the Bechdel test, Crossing Delancey features conversations between Isabelle and Bubbie about Bubbie’s health, the neighborhood, Izzy’s dreams and what they might mean, and Izzy’s parents. Izzy actively seeks to support her friend Rickie’s new role as a single parent with a sometimes supportive boyfriend. She also supports her publishing colleague Chinchilla Monk’s new public access show on the local performance art scene, which features a feminist performer.

Izzy attends a bris for the baby of a high school friend of hers, where the film shows us a group of four women in their thirties sustaining a friendship from their teenage years. Two are single, one is married, and one is a new mother with a boyfriend. One of the women refers to the bris as, “Our first baby!” We see the women friends together in varying pairs throughout the film. This group resembles Sex & the City’s foursome of Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte, and Miranda, minus the multi-thousand dollar stylish and sexy wardrobe. Marilyn, in particular, reminds me of Elaine Benes from Seinfeld, which debuted a year after this film came out.

The film’s costuming is refreshing given the frequent sexualization of women in film through wardrobe today in most mainstream movies. The late 1980s is the era of the three-quarter or tea-length casual dress, with both dresses and shirts buttoned to the top, but without appearing constricting. Izzy’s clothes are appropriate for her varied activities: jogging, working at the bookstore, spending time with her grandmother, going on a date. What struck me most was that she looked nice and comfortable and her shoes were practical; she was dressed as many women in real life dress. There were no extra tight outfits, short-short skirts, stiletto heels, or plunging cleavage — at her place of employment or anywhere else. She was obviously meant to be doing things, not just to be the object of the Male Gaze: on display but not functional.

Crossing Delancey and Sex and the City share parallels as both Izzy and Carrie Bradshaw are thirty-something straight white women with successful careers and a support network of female friends. Both long for romance, question the idea of meeting someone who meets their requirements for a boyfriend, much less a husband, and both make selfish and deceitful decisions.

Izzy decides she doesn’t have chemistry with Sam but she likes him, so she attempts to set him up with her high school friend Marilyn, who recently complained that on a given first date she has “forty-five minutes to make this guy think I’m great, when I’d rather be home in my pajamas watching baseball.” But Izzy doesn’t tell Sam that she’s setting him up. Instead, she offers an apology for some of the things she said to him earlier and invites him to have dinner. She plans with Marilyn to “run into her” at the end of dinner, then leave her with Sam. Only the more Izzy talks to Sam, the more she likes him, and the longer she delays the introduction until Marilyn calls her on it and introduces herself. Sam feels used, but blames Izzy, not Marilyn, demanding “What’s there to be sorry about? She’s funny, direct, honest,” with the clear implication that Izzy is lacking in the latter two areas in particular. Afterward, Izzy pines after Sam with her other friends and her grandmother, until Bubbie brings Sam back into contact with Izzy.

Despite things finally seeming to click with Sam, Izzy allows Anton to persuade her to stay late after work to read part of his new novel. He flatters her and, knowing she has a date with Sam, encourages her to make him wait. Foolishly, she does, despite having spent time and money purchasing a new dress for the date and being eager to see Sam. Izzy realizes belatedly her error, in thinking that the mysterious and suave Anton wants a romantic and professional relationship with her when he’s looking for a part-time assistant and a convenient casual sex partner. Astonishingly, Sam has waited for her. He’s a man with the patience of a saint, but he’s not a doormat. In some ways this is a gender-reversed romantic comedy. It’s Izzy who races frantically across town, having come to the belated conclusion that she has been grossly overlooking, underestimating, and underappreciating who Sam is and what he has to offer.

The film presents us with three vivid visual images of groups of women in the city: at the senior center the women’s defense workshop that Bubbie participates in as Izzy watches in amusement; the after-work crowd in the deli/grocery, which includes Izzy, selecting dinner for one to-go from the salad bar; and the long line of pregnant women who file past Izzy and Sam in the entrance to her apartment building. These seem to suggest possible futures for Izzy: older, alone, and in need of self-defense; a solo continuation of her life as it is, focused mostly on work, eating deli take-out at the end of a long day; or preparing to become a mother when paired with Sam.

To choose one is to leave one unknown. Izzy doesn’t want to choose wrongly, or perhaps Izzy simply doesn’t want to choose at all. She’s mistaken in her arrogant and condescending assumptions about Sam, though, when she believes him to be not well read, inarticulate, and not cultured. When she mentions feeling ambivalent and then offers a definition, he interrupts to say that he knows what the word means. He adds, angrily, “You think my world is so small, so provincial? You think it defines me?” His defense of himself moves her as much as learning that he was interested in her because he had seen her around the neighborhood with her grandmother long before Mrs. Mandlebaum showed up with a picture of her (given by Bubbie) to peddle to him. He’s not trapped in the past as Izzy believed.

Although Sam suggests that Izzy needs a new perspective (i.e. a new hat), the Harry Shipman story doesn’t make that point clearly. In the story, Shipman’s new hat allowed the girl he had his heart set on to see his eyes for the first time. She couldn’t see his face for his original hat. But it isn’t Izzy who needs a new hat to be viewed differently. Instead, she needs a more realistic view of him, rather than her preconceived and uncompromising one as she’s frustratingly obtuse when it comes to Sam. She’s selfish in her decisions to keep juggling all three of men and she’s ultimately dismissive of her friend Marilyn after setting her up with Sam.

In some ways this is a film about narrative, including the stories we tell ourselves. We’re given multiple smaller narratives within the main narrative. The excerpt from his novel that Anton reads to the bookstore audience; Sam tells Izzy the Harry Shipman-hat story; Mrs. Mandlebaum peddles other peoples’ stories, poet Pauline Swift’s only referenced story of her, the four men, and a cabbage; Sam’s story of how Izzy came to his attention; the story of Sam’s father, who did a Milton Berle impression in drag, recalled by Nick to Sam and Izzy; and Bubbie’s story of meeting her husband, which she tells Sam. Izzy’s description of Anton’s fiction also describes her story in this film: “Deceptive accessibility. Reads like pulp fiction, but then you hear music.” Some lines are so lyrical they sound like poetry. Some are poetry. And they don’t all belong to the novelist.

The film ends refreshingly only with the promise of a continued dating relationship between Izzy and Sam, no grand declarations, promises, sex, or vows. Sam’s question to himself, to her, “How do I talk to Isabelle?” is an invitation, an openness to collaborate, to teach one another how to better communicate. Although Bubbie seems assured that a wedding will be taking place for them in the future, neither of them takes it that far. They like each other, they’ve admitted that, kissed, and agreed to see one another again. And for this charming romantic comedy, that’s more than enough.

Susan Cosby Ronnenberg is a transplanted Southerner in the upper Midwest, where she has been an English professor for 16 years, specializing in the English Renaissance and Early Modern Women Writers. Currently working on a book through McFarland on Shakespeare and the HBO western series Deadwood. Email: sgcosronn@gmail.com Twitter: @Ouachita9 Blog: Caustic Ginger.

There’s More to Love in ‘Loverboy’ Than “Extra Anchovies”

Randy defines the male sex worker in ways that are diametrically opposed to more traditional depictions of female sex workers. He is not oppressed by his clients, controlled by a pimp, or violently threatened until the very end. Even then, such “threats” are delivered as a comedy of errors after a group of husbands discover their wives have been ordering a lot of pizza with “extra anchovies,” the code for Randy’s clandestine services. Thus, he enjoys a much more privileged kind of work as a casual summer gigolo than as a professional prostitute who is often trapped in such work for extended periods of time and trapped by dominating patriarchal forces.

Movie poster for Loverboy — Movie poster for *Loverboy*

This guest post by Kristina Fennelly appears as part of our theme week on Representations of Sex Workers.

At first glance, the 1989 comedy Loverboy, directed by Joan Micklin Silver and starring Patrick Dempsey, may not seem a likely choice for inclusion in films specifically focused on sex workers. After all, how could a seemingly trivial movie about a failing college student, a pizza parlor, and a group of rich yet unhappy California wives possibly inform and challenge dominant definitions of sex workers, traditional gender roles, and even heteronormativity?

Yet this film, largely derided in the late 1980s as “hopelessly tacky,” and “a pitiful waste,” speaks to these issues as it chronicles the maturation of college sophomore Randy Bodek (played by Dempsey). The film makes the claim that the education Randy gains through his summer employment, both as a pizza delivery boy and as a gigolo, prepares him to return to college in the fall as a man: a man more serious about his academic goals, his professional future, and his long-sought-after girlfriend, Jenny. Just as Randy gains a great deal of knowledge about himself, so, too, can viewers today gain a great deal of insight when analyzing this film through a feminist lens.

In the March 2008 issue of the journal Gender Issues, scholar Jeffrey Dennis gives voice to the often ignored and silent male sex workers in his article “Women are Victims, Men Make Choices: The Invisibility of Men and Boys in the Global Sex Trade.” Dennis argues that the accounts of men and boys as sex workers have largely gone unnoticed, which seems ironic given Dennis’s observation that, “Male sex workers are easy to spot anywhere in the world…Yet they are almost completely ignored by social service agencies, administrative bodies, the mass media, and scholarship” (11-12). Critically examining Randy’s profession as a sex worker in this film seeks to do the kind of intellectual and gender-conscious work that Dennis calls for: “a re-evaluation of scholarly preconceptions about male and female bodies, about objectification, about the inevitability of heterosexual identity and about the impossibility of same-sex desire.”

At the onset of the film, Randy concludes his sophomore year of college where he has failed, yet again, to make the grade. In addition to failing at school, Randy has also failed in his relationship with his live-in girlfriend, Jenny. When Randy returns home for the summer, he is admonished by his father, Joe, for his lack of any visible work ethic. Thus Randy must pursue a job as a pizza delivery boy in order to earn $9,000 to pay for his own tuition. While working for $4.80 an hour—a rate that Randy and his co-worker crassly describe as less than wages earned by “people who swim here from Mexico”—he realizes that his life of privilege as a young, white, middle-class male is not automatically guaranteed. Gone is the financial protection from his parents, Joe and Diane. Now he must venture forth on his own to earn the money. His goals, at this point, are not based whatsoever in academic or professional ideals; rather, he wants to earn the money simply so he can return to college, recapture his girlfriend, and continue on with his “party hard” lifestyle.

Randy, having returned home from college, explains to his parents that he is failing at school

One day, a chance encounter leads him to meet Alex Barnett (played by Barbara Carrera), a wealthy Italian businesswoman (presumably in her 40s) who owns a chain of high-end clothing stores. Soon, Alex lavishes Randy with expensive clothes, allows him to drive her racy red sports car, and seduces him. Randy is not a morally bankrupt character, however. He quickly tells Alex that he is in love with Jenny, to which she replies: “I think I can handle it.” She understands the arrangement before Randy does because she has established the parameters of such an arrangement. At this point, the viewer cannot help but pity Randy’s naiveté and obvious lack of experience with an accomplished and mature adult; after all, his social circle in college has consisted primarily of party-driven peers with a similar penchant for goofing off.

Alex, however, shows him the kind of privileged lifestyle he is missing out on at making only $4.80 an hour. When she awakens him the following morning by dropping $100 bills on his pillow, he tries to refuse the payment by telling her, “Alex, I can’t. It makes me feel…” Though Randy does not explicitly give voice to his feelings in this scene, the audience can infer that he feels bought and paid for, much like a traditionally-defined prostitute. He even acknowledges the quickness of the exchange when he says, “I’m never going to see you again, am I?” Their brief and fleeting affair is framed in more financially pragmatic terms by Alex who explains that if their roles were reversed and she needed the money, she knows he would give it to her. “So what’s the difference?” she asks as she gets up to leave. It is at this point in which the film seems to ask this exact question of its audience: What’s the difference between a male sex worker and a female sex worker? What’s at stake for a “gigolo” versus a “prostitute,” even from a purely rhetorical analysis of those classifications? Does sex work involve the same kind of possession, objectification, and violence for men as it does for women?

Randy, a pizza delivery boy, meets Alex, the owner of high-end clothing stores

These questions do not go unexplored or entirely unanswered in the film. Randy defines the male sex worker in ways that are diametrically opposed to more traditional depictions of female sex workers. He is not oppressed by his clients, controlled by a pimp, or violently threatened until the very end. Even then, such “threats” are delivered as a comedy of errors after a group of husbands discover their wives have been ordering a lot of pizza with “extra anchovies,” the code for Randy’s clandestine services. Thus, he enjoys a much more privileged kind of work as a casual summer gigolo than as a professional prostitute who is often trapped in such work for extended periods of time and trapped by dominating patriarchal forces.

Randy, by contrast, appears to benefit greatly from his work as he grows attuned to romance and intimacy, cultured in ballroom dancing and photography, and refined in his ability to genuinely listen to women and their needs. For example, he fulfills the fantasy of his Asian client, Kyoko Bruckner (played by Kim Miyori), whose husband has stereotypically assumed she, like “all” Asian women, will submit, remain silent, and above all, satisfy his every whim. Randy also provides much-needed validation to Monica Delancy (played by Carrie Fisher), a photographer whose husband personally trains women with “Barbie doll”-type bodies. Finally, he reminds the cynical doctor Joyce Palmer (played by Kirstie Alley) that romance still exists when he engages in an act perhaps even more intimate than sex: ballroom dancing.

Dr. Joyce Palmer (left) teaches Randy how to dance

As he seeks to explain his time with Alex to his horny co-worker, “That isn’t all we did. We talked…,” he again tries to resist traditional definitions of sex workers as objects of pleasure. Unlike heteronormative prostitution, which tends to rely on an exchange of sex for money and positions women as the object of men’s desire, the kind of “work” Randy finds himself doing requires him to be more of a companion than a lover, more of a listener than a performer, more of an adored “loverboy” than a mere sex object.

It is no accident that Randy’s first delivery of “extra anchovies” is to Alex (short for Alexandra), a woman with a name typically considered for boys. She, in fact, assumes a traditionally masculine role as she—a powerful, successful, and rich businesswoman—pursues a partner for her own sexual satisfaction. It should not surprise the discerning viewer that just as Alex showers Randy with expensive clothes, so does Edward Lewis (played by Richard Gere) provide prostitute Vivian Ward (played by Julia Roberts) with a new wardrobe in Pretty Woman, a popular film which proved a box-office hit the following year in 1990. The inclusion of Randy’s improved clothes, combined with Alex’s more masculine name and behavior, are not incidental matters in this film.

In an effort to further the comedic effect of the movie, Randy’s first gift from Alex—a $500 sports coat—is delivered by his co-worker, Tony, who drops it off at Randy’s house after it arrives at the pizza shop. Randy’s father, Joe, who has already told his wife, “Our son is a fruit,” reads the attached note from Alex and believes the coat is actually a gift from Tony, the presumed gay lover. It is not a stretch to qualify his father’s comments as homophobic when he tells his wife Diane, “A guy shows up at our door wearing enough cologne to make me puke.” After bemoaning the fact that Randy never talks about any girls, he tells himself, “You always think it happens to the other guy”—as if the reality of a gay son has now become an affliction, an “it” that one “always think[s]” (read as “always hopes”) will happen to, or pain, someone else. Thus, not only is Randy atypical in his role as a male sex worker, but he is also cast as aberrant (especially in 1989 at the height of the AIDS crisis) in his presumed homosexuality.

Randy, unsurprisingly, is clueless about his father’s fears. Instead, his primary concern is to improve his own identity, to transform himself from a part-time gigolo, defunct college student, and inconsiderate boyfriend into a mature student, respectable son, and loving boyfriend. Inevitably, he must answer to Jenny, who shows up on the day of his parents’ twentieth wedding anniversary. Ironically, it is on this same day that his mother places a pizza order for “extra anchovies” as revenge against her husband, whom she believes has cheated on her. As Randy’s parents try to sort out their mistakes, Randy tries to explain to Jenny that he engaged in such work for the money so that he could return to college and ultimately return to her. His actions prove unforgivable, at least initially. Soon, though, Jenny comes to see Randy as a matured man willing to go to great lengths for love: not only for her love, but also to preserve the love between his two parents. She is heartened and warmed by him and his parents who welcome her with open arms. How could they not since they are so happy and grateful to have a heterosexual son? All is forgiven when Randy promises to return the money, and Randy’s father even promises to pay for his tuition.

Randy's girlfriend, Jenny (right), is not forgiving of his work as a gigolo at first — Randy’s girlfriend, Jenny (right), is not forgiving of his work as a gigolo at first

If this film succeeds in doing the kind of work Dennis calls for, to acknowledge male sex workers largely ignored by “mass media,” does it fail in its treatment of homosexuality? Does it insist on “the inevitability of heterosexual identity”? Not entirely. Before Jenny is identified as Randy’s girlfriend, Randy’s father embraces him and tells him: “You’re my son. I love you.” Certainly, this father-son relationship appears progressive for 1989, especially from where we sit 25 years later when gay marriage is one of the most contentious political and social issues of our time. What’s most potent is the way in which the film anticipates Pretty Woman by framing sex work as a means to a financially and emotionally secure future…when we know it rarely fulfills such dreams. Yet before we toss this movie aside as irrelevant, as “instantly forgettable…the kind of movie that’s perfect for a lazy summer afternoon,” it behooves us to acknowledge how this film can and should encourage conversations about male sex workers that have heretofore been silenced.

Kristina Fennelly is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Kutztown University in Kutztown, Pennsylvania. Her research and teaching interests focus on composition and rhetoric, gender studies, and digital texts.