Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

by Susan Faludi

  BRINGING UP THE CINEMATIC BABY

  An unintentionally telling aspect of Baby Boom is its implication that working women must be strong-armed into motherhood. The film is not the first of its era to suggest that, at a time when “baby fever” was supposedly raging in female brains, intense pressure, scoldings or a deus ex machina (like the Tiger Lady’s improbable inheritance of a stranger’s baby) is necessary to turn these reluctant modern women into mothers. Like the media, these movies aren’t really reflecting women’s return to total motherhood; they are marketing it. Sometimes, in fact, these films degenerate into undisguised advertising. In the last five minutes of Parenthood, the whole brood crowds into a maternity ward, with virtually every woman either rocking a newborn or resting a proud hand on a bulging tummy. As the camera pans over row upon row of gurgling diapered babies, it’s hard to remember that this is a feature film, not a commercial break for Pampers.

  The backlash films struggle to make motherhood as alluring as possible. Cuddly babies in designer clothes displace older children on the ’80s screen; the well-decorated infants function in these films more as collector’s items than people. The children of a decade earlier were talkative, unpredictable kids with minds of their own—like the precocious, cussing eleven-year-old boy who gives his mother both delight and lip in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, or the seventeen-year-old girl who offers her mother both comfort and criticism in An Unmarried Woman. In the late 1980s, by contrast, the babies hardly cry.

  Once again, women get sorted into two camps: the humble women who procreate and their monied or careerist sisters who don’t. Over-board’s haughty heiress refuses to reproduce. But by the end of the film—after she is humiliated, forced to scrub floors and cook meals, and at last finds happiness as a housewife—she tells her tyrannical new husband of her greatest goal in life: having “his” baby. Women who resist baby fever, by controlling their fertility or postponing motherhood, are shamed and penalized. In Immediate Family, Glenn Close’s career woman—an Ivy League—educated realtor—delays and her biological clock expires. After a grueling round of visits to the infertility doctors, she has to hire a teenage surrogate to have a baby for her.

  In this sanctimonious climate, abortion becomes a moral litmus test to separate the good women from the bad. On the day the husband in Parenthood loses his job, his good wife announces she’s pregnant with child number four; she recoils in horror from the mere mention of abortion. The options of her sister-in-law’s pregnant teenage daughter are presented as similarly limited. She’s just received her high SAT scores in the mail, but, of course, the movie assures, she’ll give up her college plans to have the baby and marry her deadbeat boyfriend—an unemployed dragstrip racer. Abortion is denounced in Listen to Me, which is supposedly an even-handed debate on the issue, and demonized in Criminal Law, where the abortionist, Sybil, is a witchlike figure whose profession traumatizes her son and turns him into a psychopath. Even more intelligent films preach on this subject. In Woody Allen’s Another Woman, the single scholar, a rigid unfeeling spinster, flashes back to a shameful youthful memory—her selfish decision to have an abortion. “All you care about is your career, your life of the mind,” her lover charged at the time, and now she sees, too late, that he was right to castigate her.

  Three Men and a Baby became the most popular of the pronatal films (later inspiring the sequel Three Men and a Little Lady) with its baby-girl heroine center stage and its career woman expelled from nursery heaven. The premise—a single woman with career ambitions dumps her offspring at the doorstep of three bachelors—recalls the antisuffrage films seventy years earlier. (In the 1912 A Cure for Suffragettes, for example, feminists flocking to a suffrage powwow abandon their prams on a street corner, leaving the policemen to tend to the neglected babies.)

  Three Men and a Cradle, the original French version of the film, was such a hit with American audiences that Paramount hastened to release its own version, and the revisions are illuminating. For the American story, Paramount inserted a new character, wretched Rebecca, a dour lawyer with perpetually pursed lips. The wet-blanket girlfriend of bachelor Peter, Rebecca recoils with disgust at their new bundle of joy. When the baby drools on Rebecca’s fingers, she can barely suppress her nausea. Peter pleads, “Rebecca, please stay with me—help me take care of her,” but callous Rebecca refuses. She has no maternal juices, nor any romantic ones either. When Peter asks her to spend the night on his birthday, she refuses because she has a pretrial court date in the morning—and that ranks higher on her in-basket priority list.

  At first glance, Three Men and a Baby might seem like a film with feminist tendencies; after all, the men are taking care of the baby. But the movie does not propose that men take real responsibility for raising children. It derives all its humor from the reversal of what it deems the natural order: mom in charge of baby. Viewers are regaled with the myriad ways in which these carefree bachelors are not cut out for parenthood. The fact that one of them actually is the father is played for laughs. “How do I know it’s mine?” he says blithely. “Boys Will Be Boys” is the song that plays incessantly throughout the film. Indeed, despite their upwardly mobile careers and advancing middle age, the three bachelors celebrate their arrested development inside a high-priced frat house. The three “boys” gleefully adhere to an another night / another girl sexual philosophy. “So many women, so little time,” they snort, slapping each other on the back like football teammates after another completed pass.

  Unlike the French version, the American film keeps anxiously bolstering its male characters’ masculinity. As if terrified that having a baby around the house might lower the testosterone level, the guys are forever lifting weights, sweating it out on the playing fields and jogging to the newsstands for the latest issue of Sports Illustrated and Popular Mechanics. In the American remake, the straying mother will eventually learn to uphold the traditional “feminine” role, too. In the final frame, remorseful mom not only reshoulders her maternal responsibilities but agrees to live under the men’s roof. The baby, one of the bachelors asserts, “needs a full-time mother”—and, one gets the impression, so do they.

  The American film industry in the ’80s was simply not very welcoming to movie projects that portrayed independent women as healthy, lusty people without punishing them for their pleasure. Producer Gwen Field’s experience with Patti Rocks, released soon after Fatal Attraction, is one measure of Hollywood’s hostility to such themes in the decade. In Field’s film, an opinionated single woman shuns marriage (“Marriage is fattening,” she jokes), enjoys sex, chooses to have a child on her own and yet pays no price for her behavior. Patti Rocks received its share of good reviews from the critics, but generated nothing but animosity and rejection from the guardians of Hollywood. Field was turned away by one studio after another and always for the same reason; they told her the film’s message was “irresponsible” because it showed a single woman indulging in sex with whomever she pleased. (This same moral concern never surfaced over Three Men and a Baby, where the randy bachelors randomly scatter their seed.) The industry’s rating board tried to assign the film an X rating, even though it featured no violence and no more sex than the average R movie. Field recalls that the board members disapproved not of the visual display but “the language”—the same offense that brought down Mae West a half century earlier. As Field observes, “It was very ironic that we had received an X rating for a film that is against what pornography depicts—the degradation of women.” It took three formal appeals before the board members finally approved an R rating. Ultimately Patti Rocks’s chances for commercial success were slim anyway; as an independently produced film with out-of-the-mainstream content, it would get distributed to only a handful of theaters.

  THE CELLULOID MAN TAKES CHARGE

  “Who am I?” the single female psychiatrist asks her male mentor, a small-time gambler and con artist, in David Mamet’s 1987 House of Games. Although she’s the one with the medical deg
ree, he’s playing doctor. Her hair shorn, her face severe and unsmiling, she clutches the book she has written, Driven: Obsession and Compulsion in Everyday Life, but its contents have no answers for her. Those must come from him. The consultation that follows recalls a therapy session from the last backlash cinema, between the male psychoanalyst and the driven single magazine editor in Lady in the Dark. That earlier film’s dialogue:

  HE: You’ve had to prove you were superior to all men: You had to dominate them.

  SHE: What’s the answer?

  HE: Perhaps some man who will dominate you.

  After half a century of “progress,” the diagnosis remains the same in House of Games:

  SHE: What do I want?

  HE: Somebody to come along. Somebody to possess you. Would you like that?

  SHE: Yes.

  Offscreen, David Mamet was complaining bitterly about women in the entertainment business who apparently prefer to dominate and “won’t compromise.” In a 1988 essay on women entitled “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” he asserted, “The coldest, cruelest, most arrogant behavior I have ever seen in my professional life has been—and consistently been—on the part of women producers in the movies and the theater.” In Mamet’s House of Games, the stepped-on confidence man slips the cold careerist woman back under his thumb through his sleights of hand. And who is the actress Mamet cast in the demeaning female role? Lindsay Crouse, his own wife.

  The ’80s backlash cinema embraces the Pygmalion tradition—men redefining women, men reclaiming women as their possessions and property. In the most explicit statement of this theme, the Wall Street tycoon in Pretty Woman remakes the loud, gum-smacking hooker into his soft-spoken and genteel appendage, fit for a Ralph Lauren ad. In film after film, men return to their roles of family potentate, provider, and protector of female virtue. In films from Moonstruck to The Family, the celluloid neopatriarchs preside over “old-fashioned” big ethnic families. In The Untouchables, when Eliot Ness goes into combat against the mob, he is as busy defending the traditional domestic circle as he is enforcing the law. In films like Someone to Watch Over Me, Sea of Love, or Look Who’s Talking, the backlash heroes play Big Daddy guardians to helpless women and families threatened by stalkers. In the real world, blue-collar men might be losing economic and domestic authority, but in these movies the cops and cabbies were commanding respect from cowering affluent women.

  For all the sentimental tributes to the return of the all-American household—“Nothing can take the place of the family!” the son toasts in Moonstruck, and “Nice to be married, huh?” the men tell each other in The Untouchables—the late-1980s pro-family films are larded with male anger over female demands and male anxiety over women’s progress. “Stick it here, stick it there,” Al Pacino’s divorced police officer says bitterly of his ex-wife in Sea of Love. “I see eight women tonight, every one of them made more money than me,” his partner tells him. “How come they’re not married?” She’s Having a Baby is sup posed to celebrate a ’50s-style suburban marriage, but most of the film is devoted to the husband’s fantasies of escaping from under his nagging wife’s thumb. In Surrender, the male protagonist, a twice-divorced author, suspects all women of malicious ulterior motives. “We’re all just meat to them,” he says of women, and vows to move to Kuwait “because women don’t vote there.” Standing in the lobby of his divorce lawyer’s building, he faces a choice: entering one elevator with a leather-clad woman or another elevator with a snarling Doberman and street hood. He takes his chances with the canine-and-criminal duo.

  The decade in family cinema ended not with a heartwarming salute to home’s cozy comforts but with an explosion of hateful marital fireworks. The underbelly of the backlash finally surfaced on screen, as spouses lunged for each other’s throats in films like The War of the Roses, She-Devil, I Love You to Death, and Sleeping with the Enemy. Usually hidden fears about strong women’s powers are on bold display. In both The War of the Roses and She-Devil, the wives are virtual witches, controlling and conquering their husbands with a supernatural and deadly precision.

  In the 1970s women’s liberation films and 1940s wartime movies, men and women struggled endlessly with each other, too, but they argued with good intentions—to understand and enlighten each other, to close rather than widen the gender gap. When the dust clears after the shouting match between Ellen Burstyn and Kris Kristofferson in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, each comes to see the other’s point of view, and they walk away from the struggle with stronger empathy and love. In Adam’s Rib, Spencer Tracy’s lawyer stomps from the house demanding a divorce after his wife (Katharine Hepburn) wins her feminist case in court. “I like two sexes,” he shouts at her. “And another thing. All of a sudden I don’t like being married to what is known as the New Woman.” She calls after him, “You are not going to solve anything by running away,” and in the end, he agrees; they reunite and work out their differences. In The War of the Roses, by contrast, there’s no hope for reconciliation, truce, or even escape from the marital battle—both spouses wind up dead, their bodies smashed in the familial foyer.

  In many of these late-’80s films, men and women not only have quit trying to hash things out, they don’t even keep company on the same film reel. Like the ’50s backlash cinema, independent women are finally silenced by pushing them off the screen. In the tough-guy films that proliferated at the end of the decade, male heroes head off to all-male war zones and the Wild West. In the escalating violence of an end less stream of war and action movies—Predator, Die Hard, Die Harder, RoboCop, RoboCop 2, Lethal Weapon, Days of Thunder, Total Recall— women are reduced to mute and incidental characters or banished altogether. In the man-boy body-swapping films that cropped up in the late ’80s—18 Again, Like Father, Like Son, and, the most memorable, Big— men seek refuge in female-free boyhoods. And male characters in another whole set of films retreat even further, to hallucinatory all-male fantasies of paternal renewal. In such films as Field of Dreams, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Dad, and Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, mother dies or disappears from the scene, leaving father (who is sometimes resurrected from the dead) and son to form a spiritually restorative bond.

  Not surprisingly, when the Screen Actors Guild conducted a count of female roles in Hollywood in 1990, the organization discovered that women’s numbers had sharply dropped in the last two years. Men, the guild reported, were now receiving more than twice as many roles as women.

  While men were drifting off into hypermasculine dreamland, the female characters who weren’t already dead were subject to ever more violent ordeals. In 1988, all but one of the women nominated for the Academy Award’s Best Actress played a victim. (The exception, fittingly, was Melanie Griffith’s working “girl.”) The award’s winner that year, Jodie Foster, portrayed a rape victim in The Accused. The producer of that film was Sherry Lansing.

  Lansing released The Accused a year after Fatal Attraction, and hoped that it would polish up her feminist credentials. The film told the story of a young working-class woman gang-raped at a local bar while a crowd of men stood by and let it happen—a tale based on a grisly real gang rape at Big Dan’s tavern in New Bedford, Massachusetts. “If anyone thinks this movie is antifeminist, I give up,” Lansing told the press. “Once you see this movie, I doubt that you will ever, ever think of rape the same way again. Those images will stick in your mind, and you will be more sympathetic the next time you hear of somebody being raped.”

  Did people really need to be reminded that rape victims deserve sympathy? Apparently Lansing did: “Until I saw this film, I didn’t even know how horrible [rape] is,” she announced. Apparently many young men watching this film needed the reminder, too: they hooted and cheered the film’s rape scene. And clearly a society in which rape rates were skyrocketing could stand some reeducation on the subject.

  Lansing said The Accused should be hailed as a breakthrough movie because it tells America a woman has the “right” not to be
raped. But it seems more reasonable that it should be mourned as a depressing artifact of the times—because it tells us only how much ground women have already lost. By the end of the ’80s, a film that simply opposed the mauling of a young woman could be passed off as a daring feminist statement.

  6

  Teen Angels and Unwed Witches:

  The Backlash on TV

  UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES is this going to be the return of ‘jiggle.’ These aren’t just girls who look good; they have actual personalities.” Tony Shepherd, vice president of talent for Aaron Spelling Productions, puts his full weight behind each word, as if careful enunciation might finally convince the remaining skeptics in the Hollywood press corps. Thankfully, most of the reporters assembled at the Fox Television Center for the announcement of the network’s new television series, “Angels ’88,” see things Shepherd’s way; they reach across the buffet table’s mountain of pastries to shake his hand. “Great work, Tony,” says one of the guys from the tabloids, his mouth full of croissant. “Great work selecting the girls.”

  This May morning in 1988 is the grand finale of Fox’s two-month quarter-million-dollar nationwide search for the four angels—a quest the company publicists liken to “the great search for Scarlett O’Hara” and “the glamour days of Old Hollywood.” Shepherd has crossed the country four times (“I had to watch Three Men and a Baby five times on the plane”), personally conducted open casting calls in twelve of the forty-four cities, and eyeballed at least six thousand of the sixteen thousand women who stood in half-mile-long lines all day for one-and-a-half-minute interviews. Secretaries and housewives, he says, weathered 25-degree temperatures just to see him; one woman even passed out from hypothermia.