Feminist Thoughts About the Movies

So I made it all the way through Breakfast At Tiffany's last weekend, for the first time since I lived in Anderson. I didn't love it then, and I like it a lot better now, possibly because I find Holly sympathetic instead of ditzy and annoying. But there is one part of that movie that I just cannot stand, and it's the romance between her and George Peppard's Paul.

I know this is supposed to be one of the huge romantic movies of the century, like Casablanca or Gone With the Wind, and it's not that I blame Paul for finding Audrey Hepburn fetching -- she is fetching, she's a size negative two, she dresses great, she's very charming. But while Audrey Hepburn manages to convey a certain amount of depth of feeling, and control, and sense, George Peppard acts like he just figured out he wants to take a swan dive into her pants. Once her ex-husband shows up, he starts acting hurt and put out whenever she talks to other men, even though he hasn't yet broken it off with his 'decorator.' There doesn't seem to be any depth of feeling in his side of the relationship at all, and then suddenly it's "you belong to me."

Okay, I think my real complaint is that the relationship seems to have two elements -- comfortable friends and crazy obsessives. Like, they're walking around New York stealing masks and goldfish, getting crackerjacks engraved, and it's kind of cute and adorable and you could do that on a date or with a big group of friends and it would remain sort of cute. And then there's no middle ground, where they both sort of want to change their lives to be together, no, from there it's straight to the whole, engaged powder room wham bam thank you ma'am aspect of the movie.

And the movie sort of goes on too long in general -- I watch it in sections, usually -- but the relationship between them is just paced wrong, and messy. I heard from the Divine Dictator once that in the original Truman Capote story, Paul is gay, and I have to say that makes a lot more sense to me. The relationship would seem much more equal, if they were friends and did their wacky zany adventure type stuff and he wasn't trying to get into her pants. She could get him restarted on writing, he could get her out of jail, it would be sort of sweet. But then I thought about it more and decided it's okay if he wants to get into her pants, if it happens more gradually. It's the immediate leap that drives me nuts and makes me not like the romance.

(God, and you know what else has a horrible romance that made me cry? The new Charlotte's Web, which I saw in French last weekend. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Fern supposed to be, like, NINE? Regardless, Dakota Fanning looks about SEVEN AND A HALF, so giving her this TWELVE YEAR OLD GUY to squire her around the fair and hold hands with her on the ferris wheel is SICK AND WRONG. And DON'T GET ME STARTED about how she makes her mother so proud because she was in jeans the whole damn movie and then suddenly, through the magical influence of Ferris Wheel Boy (who has seen her keep a baby pig in her desk, so he can't be THAT particular) she wants to wear a cute yellow dress and ribbons in her hair. GIVE ME A BREAK. I mean, okay, yes, it is fine to want to look pretty to impress people, whatever, but not that young, and not that drastically. The producers seemed to think it was funny. Whatever. Shut up and go back to the fifties.)

And actually, you know, as long as I'm rambling to an un-captive audience, if I were back in the fifties, do you know what I would want to do? If I had the means, I would totally become one of those female sugar daddies like the decorator in Breakfast at Tiffany's, or Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard. Think about it! Wouldn't that be completely awesome? You could stylishly lure struggling young writers into your web of deceit and your huge bank account, you would call the shots in the relationship because you write the checks, you'd get great sex no matter your own age, and then, when you started losing interest in the young earnest writer type (as you inevitably would, they're all the same) you could pull some strings and have him meet a doe-eyed young thing, preferably engaged to someone else, who would make him feel like he still had balls, and then he (thinking it was entirely his own idea) would leave you and you could find another one, and lather, rinse, repeat! And once that started to get tedious, as it would after a couple dozen, you could liven things up by shooting your last one into your swimming pool and going insane! See, I'm totally right, that would be fantastic.

Now, after that whole entry, everyone is sort of looking at each other all, "Damn, no wonder bitch is single, the bitter old hag," but there are plenty of functional and adorable relationships -- fictional and real life -- that I think are awesome and give me hope for the future and all that jazz. And it's easier to find them in more modern movies, sure, but there are plenty of old movie couples who do great. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers are always awesome. Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland. Gene Kelly is kind of a dick, but I don't really have a problem with his relationship with Debbie Reynolds in Singin' in the Rain. Audrey Hepburn does just fine as long as she's opposite Gregory Peck instead of George Peppard. I mean, yeah, they're old movies, so you generally get the hero teaching the heroine some Important Life Lesson that your average five year old has already got a pretty good handle on, but whatever, evil villains often act like five year olds too, you can overlook it. As long as it's not the BASIS of the relationship, like it is at Tiffany's.