So this is what Flashdance tells us about (young, sexy) female aspiration: that it is a fantasy; that a girl’s dreams are a gift only a prince can make happen for her, if he loves her and chooses her for her unique, not-at-all-feminine specialness. Alex is the lucky winner of the patriarchal lottery: different from all the rest. And in case that message is not clear, her best friend, Jeannie, aspiring figure skater, takes her one shot and fails. Auditioning for the Ice Capades, she falls and doesn’t get up. Alex tells Nick that she practiced for two years. (Two whole years!) Next time we see Jeannie, she is naked on the stage at the Zanzibar, the strip-club alternative to Mawby’s, where a girl is not valued for her talent, so the only thing left is to roll around on the floor without any clothes on.
Only now, decades later, do I see Flashdance for what it was: a fantasy of self-creation ungrounded in political, material, or economic reality. It was a feature-length music video hawking the individualist, bootstrapping Reagan-era fantasy. It said you can do anything (in your imagination). All it takes to lift yourself off the lowliest social rung and be borne aloft on wings of stardom and true love is a big dream, a flashy style, a psychotic belief in yourself, and a willingness to sleep with your boss. You just have to want it. You can do it! Girl power! Dream on, sister! And hey, if it doesn’t work out, remember you have only yourself to blame. Maybe you weren’t good enough, did you ever consider that? Here are some tips for self-improvement. Flashdance taught us that stripping was cool and a great way to put yourself through school. It taught us that the window to success is open for a very short time. Without Nick, Alex would have curdled into something monstrous in no time.
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I was in college when Adrian Lyne next gave us his next Alex, a curly-haired, loft-dwelling, single career woman, played by Glenn Close, with whom a happily married lawyer named Dan Gallagher (Michael Douglas) has ill-advised sex one night when his wife and daughter are out of town in Fatal Attraction. Alex persuades him to stay with her for a second night, which she caps with an attempted suicide. Dan, who has already put his apartment up for sale, hustles his family to a rambling white house in Bedford (one of the inspirations for Stepford), Connecticut, but Alex is only getting started.
As an impressionable young college student, I was terrified of Glenn Close’s portrayal of Alex. At forty, she was a cautionary tale—everything a girl like me had been conditioned to fear turning into; the embodiment of the 1986 pop-art greeting card by Roy Lichtenstein featuring a weeping woman below the thought bubble “I can’t believe I forgot to have children!” At the same time, I was a comp lit major in the eighties. I got the message and it annoyed me. It especially annoyed me because it was so cloyingly underscored by Anne Archer’s portrayal of the idealized wife, Beth, with her bovine eyes and her smug smile, gazing beatifically in the vanity mirror first at herself, then up at her cheating-turned-heroic-avenger husband. “She’s so beautiful,” my boyfriend whispered. It occurred to me that perhaps this was intended as some kind of compliment, because we both had brown hair and brown eyes, and I thought, No, thanks.
Not that Alex was a viable alternative, as somebody to aspire to. The alternative to the cow-eyed wife was an obsessed, psychotic, child-endangering bunny boiler who wouldn’t fucking die no matter how many times you killed her.
Most of the time, watching stuff like this made me feel as if my eyes were attached to another brain inside another body. I understood what I was being told, it just felt all wrong. The cognitive dissonance was palpable. I could only recognize it in contrast to the rare experience of seeing something that saw the world through a perspective I recognized. That felt like a revelation every time. In a piece on the thirtieth anniversary of its release, the film critic Carrie Rickey called Desperately Seeking Susan “both a New Wave Feminine Mystique and an urban fantasia featuring New York as a graffiti-tagged Emerald City.” She wrote about how she worked for the Boston Herald at the time it was shot, and how she visited the set. She wrote that Leora Barish, the writer, had been influenced by the 1974 Jacques Rivette film Celine and Julie Go Boating, which in turn was inspired by Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Barish had told Rickey that she liked the way Rivette “play[ed] with reality in an offhanded, barely perceptible way,” showing how “the two women from different realms are curious about each other” in a nonsexual way. Two girls on open-ended adventures. The movie was a revelation, she said, because it was about liberation and “exploring the person you want to be.”
Rosanna Arquette plays Roberta, a New Jersey housewife unhappily married to a hot-tub salesman. Madonna plays Susan, a con artist and drifter on the run from the mob. Roberta has everything she is supposed to want, whereas Susan washes her armpits in the bathrooms at Port Authority and then blows them dry with hand dryers. Roberta knows about Susan because she reads about her in the newspaper personal ads, where Susan’s boyfriend places ads in desperate search of her. “I wish I was desperate,” Roberta tells her friend at the hair salon one day. She wishes she cared about something enough to be desperate, that she had a singular focus. If she did, it would inevitably lead her into adventure—and it does. Susan represents both the feminine object of desire and the feminine subject of desire.2 The desire isn’t sexual, it’s identificatory; Roberta longs for the animating, liberating, empowering “desire to desire”3 that has somehow escaped repression in Susan. Roberta starts out wishing she could be like Susan, and ends up believing she is her. As Molly Haskell wrote in her 1974 book, From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies, “Too often we interpret the roles of the past in the light of the liberated positions that have only recently become thinkable. We can, for example, deplore the fact that in every movie where a woman excelled as a professional she had to be brought to heel at the end, but only as long as we acknowledge the corollary: that at least women worked in the films of the thirties and forties.” Not only that, but even if their stories ended in tears, she argued, we remembered them for their grit, their intelligence, their courage, and their intermediate victories. We remembered them for being heroes and badasses. Meanwhile, by contrast, “here we are today with an unparalleled freedom of expression and a record number of women performing, achieving, choosing to fulfill themselves, and we are insulted with the worst—the most abused, neglected, and dehumanized—screen heroines in film history.”4 She probably wouldn’t have guessed then that it would only get worse.
The adventure in a nutshell: Susan swipes a pair of earrings from a guy she has just slept with, which turn out to be priceless artifacts. Later, she goes to a thrift store and sells her distinctive leather jacket with a pyramid on the back. Roberta follows her to the store and buys the jacket, and is mistaken for Susan by a mobster trying to recover the earrings. Meanwhile, Susan’s boyfriend, Jim (the desperate personal-ad writer), has asked his friend Dez to pick Susan up, and when he sees Roberta, he thinks she is Susan, too. As Dez approaches, the mobster snatches Roberta’s bag, and she falls and hits her head. When she comes to, she can’t remember anything. Dez thinks she is Susan, so she goes with it. Eventually, she recovers her memory, has sex with Dez, and tries to reveal her true identity. “I’m a housewife from Fort Lee, New Jersey,” she tells him. “I’ve been married for four years. My husband, Gary, he sells bathroom spas . . . saunas.” Dez laughs. Of all the unlikely things she could be, this is the most unlikely one of all. “That’s what I like about you,” he says. “I never know what you’ll say next.”
After reading Carrie Rickey’s piece about Desperately Seeking Susan, I called her to ask her what it was like to visit the set, to talk to the filmmakers, and then to see the movie. Why did it feel like such a revelation when I first saw it, at the age of seventeen? What about it was so inspiring? Desperately Seeking Susan was written by a woman (Leora Barish), directed by a woman (Susan Seidelman), produced by two women (Sarah Pillsbury and Midge Sanford, who started a production company to make the movie), and starred two women, Rosanna Arquette, who was an indie-movie star,
and Madonna, who wasn’t really famous outside of New York yet. Aidan Quinn played the insanely handsome Dez, whom Roberta ends up falling in love with, but it wasn’t only that. Or rather, the fact that the story was told from a girl’s point of view so reframed what might otherwise have been a fairly unremarkable goofy-heist, mistaken-identity movie that it felt like something profound had happened. There’s something so practiced, so polished about the image of the male rebel hero, but the rebellious girl, the girl who truly doesn’t care what people think, is a very rare bird. What people think has traditionally been a girl’s only currency.
When I was in high school, I thought we girls were entering a new era—that this would be the way things were from now on. Once perception had shifted, it could never shift back—right? Until around this moment in film, there were very few representations of the happy conclusions of female adventures that didn’t end with marriage. All conflicts—social, familial, financial—were resolved by marriage. But then, between about 1975 and 1980, movies made by women came in a fast and furious clot. Carrie told me she was twenty, at UC San Diego, when she saw Agnes Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7. Shortly after that, she drove up to UCLA for a Dorothy Arzner retrospective. By the time she was at NYU, in 1978, she was aware of many female filmmakers, from Lois Weber to Elaine May. For her, it was the release of movies like Gillian Armstrong’s My Brilliant Career, Diane Kurys’s Entre Nous, Nancy Myers’s Private Benjamin, and Amy Heckerling’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High, along with Desperately Seeking Susan, that made her aware of a new, female gaze.
Desperately Seeking Susan eroticized Aidan Quinn in a way she’d never seen an actor eroticized before. The idea that a straight female director might look at a man differently, frame him differently, was just dawning for her. When she said that, I realized why my friends and I had fallen so deeply in love with Quinn as Dez: we’d seen him through Roberta’s eyes. Rickey said she’d never really come across that kind of rueful black humor by women before, but suddenly there it was in movies like Private Benjamin. Written by Nancy Myers and Charles Shyer, Private Benjamin was the hilarious story of the gradual awakening, or self-deprogramming, of a young self-made Stepford Wife. Judy Benjamin, played by a hilariously wide-eyed Goldie Hawn, knows her whole life that all she wants “is a big house . . . nice clothes, two closets, a live-in maid, and a professional man for a husband.” She gets it all—and then the husband dies of a heart attack on their wedding night. So she does what people do when they run out of ideas: she joins the army. Against all odds, she makes it through basic training, then meets a French doctor played by Armand Assante and has an affair. “Now I know what I’ve been faking all those years!” she says of sex with her second partner. She also says, “I didn’t understand An Unmarried Woman. I would have gone away with Alan Bates.” But she doesn’t go away with Armand Assante at the end. There were echoes of this humor in When Harry Met Sally and Thelma and Louise—the feeling that we knew ourselves from somewhere, that we’d met us before.
Carrie also told me that, in the original screenplay, Susan was a hippie, but director Susan Seidelman wanted to make her more downtown. Nobody had heard of Madonna outside of New York. Then her single “Into the Groove” dropped in the middle of production and made her into an instant international star, and people mobbed her on the street. I was in high school then. I sensed something “new” but assumed this was just the way things would be from now on. We appeared to be done with the marriage plot. (“What’s the alternative to the marriage plot?” She said: “The alternative is adventure.”) My generation (I thought) was the first postfeminist generation. The first to be allowed to see love in terms of adventure and quest, not salvation and redemption. I didn’t know (couldn’t have known) that this moment was the tail end of a brief period in American cinema, between 1978 and 1985, when heroine’s stories didn’t end in marriage but started with adventure, as in An Unmarried Woman, 9 to 5, Alien, Norma Rae, and the like. Mike Medavoy, the head of the studio, was reportedly persuaded by his stepdaughter to make Desperately Seeking Susan. Nobody expected it to do well.
It’s an old story with a recurring theme; this idea that there is no audience for films about women, unless the women are abstracted to the point that they no longer resemble people. Desperately Seeking Susan was a revelation for many reasons, not least of which was the fact that it was told from a woman’s point of view, a woman who had everything a woman was supposed to want, and yet was miserable. “I remember getting excited and talking to Molly,” Carrie told me, referring to her colleague and fellow moviegoer, the critic and feminist film theorist, Molly Haskell, about what a revelation it was to start to see films directed by women in the 1970s. She recalls talking to her “about how there were no women in The Godfather.” Or rather, that the women only served to reaffirm that it was a man’s space, that they were only there to serve drinks and be shut out. In classic Hollywood cinema, a woman walks on-screen: She is there to be looked at. She interrupts the action. Diane Keaton in The Godfather is a foil for Al Pacino: She whines, she interrupts, and at the end she’s put in her place. She makes drinks and gets the door shut in her face.
It reminded me of a story a friend told me about a job she had at a production company where she was the only female development executive. Every Friday at five, all the others would meet in their boss’s office for drinks without her. One Friday, she decided to invite herself. A few minutes before five, she walked into her boss’s office and sat down. He looked at her like she was insane. “Don’t you have work to do?” he asked. She got up and left as the others filed in. This was in the twenty-first century.
This idea of who was looking, of how directors create reality from a point of view, came gradually. Rickey was a graduate student at NYU when she first heard of Dorothy Azner, for example, when Francis Ford Coppola mentioned that she had been a teacher of his in film school. Dorothy Arzner was a prolific and highly successful director within the studio system throughout the 1930s. In Linda Seger’s When Women Call the Shots: The Developing Power and Influence of Women in Television and Film, I read about how she was the first female member of the Directors Guild until Ida Lupino joined seven years after she had shot her last film,5 though she was far from the first famous female movie director. The list of forgotten female pioneers in Hollywood is long: In 1895, Alice Guy, a young secretarial employee of Gaumont, a film company in France, had the idea to film a story, and she asked her boss for permission to write a scene or two for friends to perform in. He agreed to let her, as long as she did not neglect her secretarial duties. In 1896, Guy made a film called The Cabbage Fairy, about babies who grew in cabbage patches. Gaumont loved it and set up a studio for her. She became the first female writer, producer, director, and studio head of production in the business, before there was a business. Then he sent her to America, where she did it again in New Jersey. Lois Weber, an American actress who acted in Guy’s films, would go on to be the only other woman to write, direct, produce, and control a studio. “By 1915, she was as famous as D. W. Griffith or Cecil B. DeMille,” Linda Seger wrote, and “a year later Lois Weber was reputed to be the most important and highest-paid director at Universal Studios, making $5,000 a week.”
Guy, who made hundreds of films in every genre, was very influential and set the tone for how women were portrayed. “At a time when male filmmakers were objectifying the woman,” Seger wrote, “Guy focused on strong female protagonists who took charge of their lives and their destinies. In 1912, she directed In the Year 2000, a film about a time when women rule the world.”6 Julia Crawford Ivers, who was the first female general manager of a studio, brought Guy over from Universal Studios to Bosworth Studios, where she became the first to hire screenwriter Frances Marion. Marion, who would go on to become one of the major writers in film history, wrote 130 produced screenplays. Nell Shipman made wilderness adventure stories with nudity, wild animals, and feminist themes. She pioneered animal safety on the set. “From the early 1900s to the early 192
0s, there were hundreds of successful and prolific women in film,” Seger wrote. “Anything seemed possible. The film industry was open to anyone with talent and determination and a dream. And it was open to women primarily because women already in the industry either directly supported other women or influenced them as role models. Under these conditions, women excelled.”
As Seger recounted, the film industry, which had been fairly spread out, consolidated and moved to Los Angeles. Alice Guy’s “Blaché Solax Studio was taken over by her husband, Herbert, who renamed it Blaché Features, drove it into bankruptcy, and then ran off to Hollywood with his mistress . . . Alice Guy Blaché’s career was ended . . . As a woman now in her fifties, she was not wanted. She tried to freelance but was unable to get work in either the United States or Paris. Credit for the first fiction film . . . was given to George Méliès . . . Nell Shipman experienced the same fate.” Seger quoted an early script supervisor named Meta Wilde, who wrote a book about her eighteen-year relationship with William Faulkner and was a script supervisor on more than two hundred films, including Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,7 saying the pioneering days of Hollywood were far more open before the studio system compartmentalized everything and created hierarchies. As Seger quoted Wilde, “By the 1930s, the only women on the set were the wardrobe women.” And so, if you were a girl in Hollywood, it was back to fucking and shopping for you.
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