Life Moves Pretty Fast: The lessons we learned from eighties movies (and why we don't learn them from movies any more) by Hadley Freeman Page B
Authors: Hadley Freeman
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were once amazing. In fact, the romcom genre encompasses some of the finest – and most feminist – films ever made, from The Philadelphia Story in 1940 to Annie Hall thirty-seven years later. There were so many great romcoms in the 1980s that I feel like there should be a collective noun for them: a delight of romcoms, a swoon of romcoms. And they weren’t just good – they were critically respected: romcoms such as Moonstruck and Working Girl won Golden Globes and Oscars. Sure, the Oscars are stupid and ultimately meaningless, but the only romcom of the past fifteen years that has been comparatively lauded was 2012’s Bridesmaids , which – uniquely for today – was written by and starred women. Which brings me to the next point.
What marks eighties romcoms out is that so many of the best ones starred women. Whereas Woody Allen made himself the protagonist of his great seventies romcoms, such as the wonderful Annie Hall and the now pretty much unwatchable Manhattan , in the eighties he made his then-partner Mia Farrow the focus, and his movies became sweeter, more varied and more interesting for it. She is very much the star in films such as The Purple Rose of Cairo and Hannah and Her Sisters . Cher was forty-one when she starred in Moonstruck and Nicolas Cage, her romantic opposite, was twenty-three, and no one in the film ever comments on this (fairly obvious) disparity. fn1 Working Girl transplanted the romcom to zeitgeisty eighties Wall Street, with a vague (very, very vague) feminist spin, and has three fabulous actresses at its core: Melanie Griffith, Sigourney Weaver and Joan Cusack. Kathleen Turner proved that women can front romantic action films when she co-starred with Michael Douglas in the sweetly screwball Romancing the Stone and The Jewel of the Nile .
‘I was the first! The first female lead of an action movie. I knocked up a lot of firsts,’ hoots Turner. ‘But I don’t remember that being discussed at the time – certainly no one expressed to me that they had any concerns. You know, I’m a strong woman and I was a terrific athlete so the only thing that they were worried about was they had to stop me from doing my stunts: “No Kathleen, you can’t swing across the gorge on a vine, insurance doesn’t cover that.” Ah, come on!’ fn2
All these films attracted not just female audiences but (gasp! Shock! Amazement!) men, too. The Princess Bride proved that romcoms didn’t just have cross-gender appeal, they had a cross-generation one, as well, because only people without souls don’t enjoy romance and comedy and men, women and children alike all generally have souls.
The wonderful Tootsie showed that you could have a romcom that looked at love from both gender sides simultaneously. When aspiring actor Michael Dorsey (Dustin Hoffman) dresses up as a woman and redubs himself Dorothy Michaels, in order to get a role on a soap opera, this former selfish asshole finds himself helping to empower the women on the show against the sexist director (Dabney Coleman, everyone’s favourite sexist in the eighties). So far, so early eighties comedy. But Hoffman plays the part much more tenderly than audiences have come to expect from movies featuring actors cross-dressing. In an emotional interview with the American Film Institute in 2012, a tearful Hoffman described how shocked he was when he first saw himself made up as a woman because he wasn’t beautiful. He then went home and cried and said to his wife that he had to make this movie. When she asked why, he replied: ‘Because I think I am an interesting woman when I look at myself onscreen. And I know that if I met myself at a party, I would never talk to that character. Because she doesn’t fulfil physically the demands that we’re brought up to think women have to have in order to ask them out. There’s too many interesting women I have … not had the experience to know in this life because I have been brainwashed.’
To the film’s
What marks eighties romcoms out is that so many of the best ones starred women. Whereas Woody Allen made himself the protagonist of his great seventies romcoms, such as the wonderful Annie Hall and the now pretty much unwatchable Manhattan , in the eighties he made his then-partner Mia Farrow the focus, and his movies became sweeter, more varied and more interesting for it. She is very much the star in films such as The Purple Rose of Cairo and Hannah and Her Sisters . Cher was forty-one when she starred in Moonstruck and Nicolas Cage, her romantic opposite, was twenty-three, and no one in the film ever comments on this (fairly obvious) disparity. fn1 Working Girl transplanted the romcom to zeitgeisty eighties Wall Street, with a vague (very, very vague) feminist spin, and has three fabulous actresses at its core: Melanie Griffith, Sigourney Weaver and Joan Cusack. Kathleen Turner proved that women can front romantic action films when she co-starred with Michael Douglas in the sweetly screwball Romancing the Stone and The Jewel of the Nile .
‘I was the first! The first female lead of an action movie. I knocked up a lot of firsts,’ hoots Turner. ‘But I don’t remember that being discussed at the time – certainly no one expressed to me that they had any concerns. You know, I’m a strong woman and I was a terrific athlete so the only thing that they were worried about was they had to stop me from doing my stunts: “No Kathleen, you can’t swing across the gorge on a vine, insurance doesn’t cover that.” Ah, come on!’ fn2
All these films attracted not just female audiences but (gasp! Shock! Amazement!) men, too. The Princess Bride proved that romcoms didn’t just have cross-gender appeal, they had a cross-generation one, as well, because only people without souls don’t enjoy romance and comedy and men, women and children alike all generally have souls.
The wonderful Tootsie showed that you could have a romcom that looked at love from both gender sides simultaneously. When aspiring actor Michael Dorsey (Dustin Hoffman) dresses up as a woman and redubs himself Dorothy Michaels, in order to get a role on a soap opera, this former selfish asshole finds himself helping to empower the women on the show against the sexist director (Dabney Coleman, everyone’s favourite sexist in the eighties). So far, so early eighties comedy. But Hoffman plays the part much more tenderly than audiences have come to expect from movies featuring actors cross-dressing. In an emotional interview with the American Film Institute in 2012, a tearful Hoffman described how shocked he was when he first saw himself made up as a woman because he wasn’t beautiful. He then went home and cried and said to his wife that he had to make this movie. When she asked why, he replied: ‘Because I think I am an interesting woman when I look at myself onscreen. And I know that if I met myself at a party, I would never talk to that character. Because she doesn’t fulfil physically the demands that we’re brought up to think women have to have in order to ask them out. There’s too many interesting women I have … not had the experience to know in this life because I have been brainwashed.’
To the film’s
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