Looking back on 1960–2000, four decades of movies, reveals how little there was on the subject of marriage since the institution itself had become increasingly socially irrelevant. For the forty years of 1970 to 2010, the audience seemed not to need marriage in the movies at all, except where some new twist might be brought to bear, however briefly. There are four things to be learned; two are traditional, and two are new. The two traditional lessons are:
1. Television carried on, becoming more and more the place where those who wanted to understand marriage went to learn about it, whether comic (All in the Family), ethnic (The Jeffersons), realistic (Roseanne), or cautionary (The Sopranos, Mad Men).
2. Movies continued to use marriage, although rarely, to tell about cutting issues (“situations”), with an increasing emphasis on divorce (Divorce American Style), feminism (Diary of a Mad Housewife), and shifting morality (Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice).
The two new things that appeared, both fairly unsettling, are:
1. Marriage movies went nuclear. The battle of the sexes armed itself, and married couples literally began shooting: The War of the Roses (1989), Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2005).
2. Everyone lost interest in the events of married life, eliminating its reflective purpose for audiences. Hollywood kept only the ritual, making movie after movie about weddings. Since no one felt the need for marriage—you could have sex, children, and cohabitation without it—films elevated the event and made it the main point: the Big Wedding in which you could have the decorations, the food, the booze, and the outfits without having to be bored by marriage problems.
The nuclear couple—that is, the married nuclear couple—appear in a peculiar form of movie: the marriage in which things explode, and not because someone left them in the microwave too long. It’s a situation in which the battle of the sexes literally arms itself, but more importantly, in which the couple enact the tensions of marriage by shooting at each other and/or destroying the home in which they live—literally. As is appropriate for something atomic, the nuclear marriage was a brief, sudden, and deadly trend that self-destructed. After all, how many ways are there to blow up a kitchen, and how many times would audiences really want to see a couple take up arms against one another? There is a finality to the marriage movie implied in films that blow everything up. The nuclear marriage was a gimmick, but a clever one.
Combat in the hands of a married couple surfaced in a minor film, 1993’s Undercover Blues. Kathleen Turner and Dennis Quaid play a revved‑up Nick and Nora Charles (with no progress in the charm department). They are retired spies, married with a baby daughter, and are reluctantly forced back into service. There are jokes about having to toss the kid back and forth while escaping and having to engage in fisticuffs and explosions rather than bottle warming and breastfeeding. Two other movies of the decade were variations on the idea: True Lies in 1994 and The Long Kiss Goodnight in 1996. Both of these films use marriage as a background conceit, and they don’t really tell marriage stories. True Lies comes the closest, as its premise is that Jamie Lee Curtis is a normal everyday housewife with dreams of adventure who is married to a computer nerd, Arnold Schwarzenegger. The surprise (some surprise!) is that he actually is a high-tech, danger-addicted James Bond secret agent. She has no idea. He, in his own way, also has no idea. Neither of them has any real understanding about what is going on inside the other, until he discovers accidentally that she is longing to have some adventure in her life. He starts to woo her from “behind the curtains” by pretending to recruit her as a spy, only to find out what smolders inside her, but also to accidentally endanger her. The Long Kiss Goodnight puts the secret life of a housewife on the screen by tugging out the insides of a “normal” young mother, Geena Davis, who wonders exactly why she can suddenly zing a paring knife at a fly and nail it to the wall. (It’s because, in her earlier identity, she was a hotshot commando-style secret agent.)
The two best nuclear marriages, however, are in movies separated by sixteen years, a “first and last” set of atomic parentheses in which the couples actually do try to destroy one another: The War of the Roses and Mr. and Mrs. Smith.15 Each of these movies presents a handsome couple played by major stars (Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas in Roses, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt in Smith). Each shows the couple living in an idealized, upscale suburban home, with two cars, closets full of clothes, high-paying jobs, and plenty of yuppie friends. Chandeliers hang. Walls of ovens are ready for baking. And disaster lurks. The difference between the films is that Turner and Douglas are simply “the Roses,” an allegedly normal couple living the American dream as suitably defined by movies and women’s magazines. The Smiths, on the other hand, are merely posing as such a couple. (They are, in effect, posing as the Roses.) Secretly, the Smiths are superagent assassins, both very good at their jobs.
As The War of the Roses opens, a divorce lawyer blows his nose into a snowy-white handkerchief and says to an unseen couple, “You have some valid reasons for wanting to divorce.” He’s actually talking directly to the audience, and apparently they were never more receptive. The lawyer (Danny DeVito) proceeds to tell the couple—audience surrogates—the cautionary tale of Barbara and Oliver Rose (Turner and Douglas). At the price of $450 per hour, he calmly relates in detail what is by now a typical American story of movie marriage. “They met great. They agreed on that. But the way I saw it, the poor bastards never had a chance.”
DeVito has, in effect, summed up the history of romantic storytelling in motion pictures. They always do meet great, and if it ends there, it’s a happy romance; but if events (that is, the movie events in particular) proceed further, his observations of their chances are pretty much accurate.
The Roses are brought together in a “meet cute” manner. During a nor’easter on the island of Nantucket, they are two strangers who both attend an estate sale and bid on a Japanese carving (circa 1700). It’s a Shinto goddess, who will then preside over their future relationship. Turner wins at fifty dollars. This sets up what will become the basic definition of their relationship: she’s smarter than he is about everything, including money; she has better taste; and furthermore, she always wins, but he’s a Harvard Law scholarship student, and she’s only a gymnast. From day one, he feels superior, and she agrees he’s right … although he is captivated by her ability to execute a V-shaped headstand.
Their romantic courtship is brief. He runs after her in the rain, and they have hot sex, and she says, “This is the most romantic day of my life,” and he says, “This is a story we’re gonna tell our grandchildren.” Boom. That’s the “they met great” romantic comedy part of The War of the Roses. As the movie cuts ruthlessly ahead, Turner and Douglas are married and have two children (a boy and a girl). He’s working on an important brief and she’s bought him a Morgan as a surprise Christmas gift. He exults, “I’m more than happy. I’m way past happy—I’m married!” DeVito tells his listeners that it “sounds like a fairy tale, doesn’t it? And it was.” After sharing further folk wisdom about how his dad always said there were four things that defined a man—his house, his car, his wife, and his shoes—DeVito moves forward to present us with the generic truth about the marriage of Barbara and Oliver Rose. It’s a horror film.
As Oliver moves up in the world, Barbara sets a fabulous table and entertains exquisitely to further his career. (Fresh figs with cognac, crystal on the table, and two very fat kids to be shown off.) Only a few more minutes of running time are needed for this modern marriage to bottom out into a presentation of discouraging truth: he’s a prick, and she’s treated like a servant. They quarrel their way forward toward a marital Armageddon, and six years later, Turner has turned their home into a spectacular showplace. The kids are going off to college, so she starts her own catering business. Douglas is uninterested in any of this—he swats a fly with her contract—and they begin their first real physical battle. It’s one thing to bicker, or to seriously quarrel, but the Roses take up arms and go to war. Their war, of cour
se, must be fought with household items. Turner begins it by turning on all their small appliances, including the garbage disposal (“Oliver was a sitting duck,” intones DeVito), and the movie begins its presentation of the disintegration of a modern marriage, as well as its decline from a realistic presentation into one of exaggerated serio-comic combat. Since it is 1989, the movie feels no need to hold back insults or pretty things up. The ultimate denunciation of marital love is clearly, cruelly, and calmly uttered by Turner to Douglas, and hearing it aloud is shocking: “When I watch you eat, when I see you sleep, when I look at you lately, I just want to smash your face in.” Finally, in the divorce court, they focus on the house, the central setting of any marriage, and the symbol of their union. All she wants is the house, but he claims all the money he’s made has gone into it. They face each other in a death stare: “You will never get that house,” he says. “We’ll see,” she says. (DeVito observes, “Women can get a lot meaner than we give them credit for.”)
As The War of the Roses reaches its peak, the couple have been married for eighteen years. A legal loophole allows them both to live in the house while they quarrel over it, and as the holiday season arrives, the house becomes a battlefield. They define a red zone (hers), a yellow zone (his), and green areas (neutral). Barbara and Oliver Rose begin a dance toward death that is not unlike one of Laurel and Hardy’s hilarious scenes of slowly paced, carefully thought-out ballets of destruction. He runs over her cat, and she nails him into the sauna. He cuts the heels off all her shoes. She pretends to want a truce and feeds him a pâté, which he loves, and then she tells him it’s made from his dog. (She lies: the dog is really okay.) At one of her elaborate dinner parties, he urinates on the fish course waiting in the kitchen. She throws a copper pot at his head, and wrecks his prized Morgan by backing over it in her catering van. (DeVito: “So far, it’s a pretty normal divorce proceeding.”) In the end, they both go totally nuts, and she drops a chandelier on him. The film becomes demented, with physical fighting that ends up in sex, after which she bites him and throws him out of the attic. They begin playing baseball with the little statue that first brought them together, swinging the fireplace poker at it. The film ends with both of them on top of the chandelier, swinging back and forth, until it crashes to the floor, taking them both down. Before they die, he admits, “Through all that’s happened I still love you,” and she reaches out her hand toward his.
Where’s Preston Sturges when you need him? What is an audience to do with such a presentation of marriage? After destroying the concept and presenting the physical metaphor of the demolition of the typical yuppie suburban home, the movie ends with DeVito offering a discussion of marriage, again delivered in direct address to an imaginary couple but really to the audience. “What’s the moral? Other than dog people should marry dog people and cat people should marry cat people? Maybe it’s because of what I’ve seen that I’ve stayed married to one person for life. Maybe it’s not natural, but my parents did it—sixty-three years … ” He advises the couple to “get up and go home to find some shred of what you once loved about the sweetheart of your life. Take a minute.” (His clients leave.) DeVito then calls home and tells his wife he’s on his way. “Love ya, sweetheart.”
Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas end up hanging off the chandelier, trying to kill each other in The War of the Roses, which was billed as “a black comedy about love, passion, divorce, and furniture.” (Photo Credit 3.8)
In other words, DeVito is telling us what the marriage movie claims: just tough it out. Find the positives. There’s nothing new here except physical destruction and death. (Douglas’s dubious dying statement and Turner’s hand reaching out toward his as they expire is no real reconciliation.) Since The War of the Roses has invested in so much negativity, and the total devastation of everything, an audience has merely visited a violent comedy with its twist simply being that it’s about marriage.
A Good Housekeeping home—once the dream of movie marital unions—was literally wrecked in Roses, and the format is confirmed by the other key example of the type. Mr. and Mrs. Smith opens up in a marriage-counseling session, with an uncomfortable-looking couple (Pitt and Jolie) carefully avoiding eye contact and answering the therapist’s questions as briefly—and as evasively—as possible. How long have they been married? “Five years,” says Pitt. “Six,” corrects Jolie. “Almost six,” adds Pitt, needing the last word. And why are they there? Pitt answers with a mechanical metaphor about “time to change the oil.” How and where did they meet? “In Colombia,” says Pitt. “In Bogotá,” says Jolie. Even when they agree, they can’t agree. “Five years ago,” adds Pitt. “Six,” corrects Jolie. “Five or six,” shoves in Pitt as the image of the film returns a viewer to a steamy, revolutionary-fueled Bogotá, Colombia. Pitt is at the bar, and Jolie whirls in from the dangerous streets. As she stands in front of him, and he eyes her top to bottom, he moves toward her like a homing pigeon. After gunfire and explosions rock their room, “I’m Jane,” she says, and “I’m John,” he adds. Then they dance—and, of course, wake up together the next morning.
Back in New York City, he’s a “big-time contractor” and she’s a “Wall Street success,” and they both tell a friend they’re going to get married. So far, everything seems reasonably normal to any viewer. Despite the steamy streets of Bogotá, where few would go to vacation, this could be a typical couple embarking on a romcom. Never mind the fact that when they visit a shooting gallery at Coney Island, both of them are remarkably adept at hitting every target, winning the largest teddy bear on the site. Everything seems low-key, familiar, and traditional.
As a married couple, they have a beautiful colonial house in an upscale suburb, with elaborate landscaping and magazine décor. He’s first seen out in front of the place, in his pajamas, picking up the newspaper off the curb. She’s in the kitchen, making the coffee. As they dress for work, going about their routines like robots, talking but not really saying anything (“Dinner’s at seven”), they could be Mr. and Mrs. Blandings from 1947. They get in their cars to go to work, driving out and turning in opposite directions. At night, as she’s making dinner, she tells him sweetly, “I got new curtains.” There are other small hints, of course, besides the shooting gallery. When Jolie is plumping up the top of her curtains, she’s standing on a small dining chair in high heels, perfectly balancing the chair on its back legs. (As Pitt approaches, she carefully lowers it back down to the floor so he won’t see.) When they drive out of their garage, they both roar forward at high speed, one having to cut back to allow the other to go first in the one lane they have. But, on the whole, it is Mr. and Mrs. Blandings in a suburban house. In her solo session with their counselor, Jolie says, “There’s this huge space between us,” which she defines as the fact that she knows they don’t say what they really think to each other. “What’s that called?” she asks. “Marriage,” answers the counselor.
A viewer is set up to be watching a traditional marriage movie, with a couple who have lost touch with each other and are seeking help. The twist comes when she has to go back to work one evening (“a problem in the office”) and he takes advantage of her absence to go out alone. Jolie goes to a hotel, dresses up like a dominatrix, and starts whipping a handsome young man. (Is she an adulterer? A sex worker on the side?) Pitt goes to a seedy dive, stumbles drunkenly into the back room, and bulls his way into a closed poker game. (Is he secretly a lush? A gambler?) No. That, after all, would not necessarily be news. They are both assassins, working for rival firms. She twists the head off her trick and plunges out the window, down the side of the hotel on a flexible wire, hailing a cab as she lands on the sidewalk. Sober as a judge, he shoots everyone at the poker table and sashays out the door. Back home, each of them puts away his secret weapon. His stash is underneath the garage, and hers in a secret compartment behind one of the wall ovens.
It’s another day at work for Mr. and Mrs. Smith (Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie). Playing a married couple who f
ind out after the ceremony that they are both assassins may seem bizarre, but it’s not really different from what happened in many marriage movies in the past: they didn’t really know each other when they wed. (Photo Credit 3.9)
Mr. and Mrs. Smith is a story about what happens when the escapist dream life of a couple is their real life. After an assignment goes wrong, they find out about each other, and everything changes. At first, he still comes home for dinner at seven. She still greets him with a smile, a cocktail, and his favorite pot roast, but when she slices the bread, and when he cuts the meat, there’s danger in the air. They are both not quite able to believe what they’ve discovered, so he tests her, casually walking by her chair and dropping a bottle of wine. She instinctively catches it without a moment’s hesitation … and then remembers (too late) to let it “slip” through her fingers. Then they both know.
From this point on, Mr. and Mrs. Smith is a gun battle of the sexes. Each is assigned to kill the other, and off they go. As they duke it out, she asks him, “Did you expect me to roll over and play dead?” and he says, “I should have been used to it after five years of marriage.” “Six!” she yells back. “Any last words?” she asks him. “Your curtains are hideous,” is his reply.
The movie then enters a round of car chases, gun battles, exploding buildings, and hand-to-hand combat. During all this, the couple speak lines to each other that, if separated from the action, would be typical of a marriage movie or a session with a therapist. “Satisfied?” she asks him. “Not for years,” is his reply. “Why do you think we failed? Because we led separate lives?” and “We approached our marriage like a job.” After she has failed to kill him on her second try, she sits alone at the elegant restaurant where he first proposed to her. When he shows up, maddeningly alive, they dance a hot tango during which they also cleverly disarm each other. Driving home in separate cars, they talk on the phone. He tells her the first time he saw her, he thought she “looked like Christmas morning … I guess in the end you start thinking about the beginning.” This is the traditional format of the marriage movie—to reach the end, look back to find the lost love, the original purpose and meaning to the relationship. (Jolie undercuts this by telling him that the first time she saw him, “I thought you were the most beautiful mark I’d ever seen.”)
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