CINEMA-USA: Revenge of the ‘First Wives Club’

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Oct 29 1996 (IPS) - It’s an odd phenomenon in Hollywood: movies can portray women as vamos or psychotic killers, and nobody complains; but when a movie comes out suggesting that some men are bad husbands, the American public rises up in furious debate.

This phenomenon is at work with ‘The First Wives Club’ – a Paramount film that has been the most-watched movie since its debut in the United States in September.

The three stars – Goldie Hawn, Diane Keaton and Bette Midler – landed on the cover of ‘Time’ magazine, in an issue devoted to the question of husbands who dump their first wives. A handful of angry men have picketed the film, saying its portrayal of husbands is unfair and demeaning.

All this for a comedy, adapted from an Olivia Goldsmith novel, based on the idea that, when wives grow old while their family gets rich, their husbands will dump them for younger women.

Midler, Hawn and Keaton – playing respectively: a sarcastic interior decorator, an alcoholic actress, and a meek housewife – decide to take their revenge when their husbands turn cads. But, rather than mere pranks, they follow the advice from perhaps the most famous rich divorcee in the United States, millionaire Ivana Trump: “Don’t get mad – get everything!”

What follows is pretty standard farce: the women run around their husbands’ homes looking for dirt on them, make cracks about each others’ failings and ultimately turn the tables on the men. It’s not exactly the sort of material that should leads to protests, and even the humour brings on chuckles rather than laughter.

But in this election year, in which incumbent President Bill Clinton leads Republican challenger Bob Dole by some 20 percent among women and only a few percentage points among men, the film – directed, incidentally, by a man Hugh Wilson – has struck a nerve.

Perhaps the most telling use of the movie as a symbol was in a recent ‘New York Times’ political cartoon, showing a “Republican First Wives Club,” showing the abandoned wives of conservative leaders like Dole, Representative Newt Gingrich and radio host Rush Limbaugh.

The caption – “a Republican family values production” – underscores the chasm between conservative doctrine on the family, and the real way in which its proponents treat their families.

The bitter dilemma faced by “first” wives is portrayed in the film both comically and quite seriously: the movie, in fact, begins when one abandoned first wife, played by Stockard Channing, leaps from her plush New York apartment after being dumped. The jokes also strike some rich targets, notably when actress Elise (played by Hawn) complains that, in Hollywood, there are only three ages for women: “Babe, District Attorney, and ‘Driving Miss Daisy’.”

The fact that the actresses in this movie have seen the number of starring roles decline as they have aged – all three were among the top female stars of the 1970s and ’80s – underscores the truth of that jibe. Yet the film is considerably less provocative than the debate it has uncorked.

In fact, the complaints of scattered resentful men notwithstanding, the butt of the films’ jokes fall not on the loutish husbands (one of whom, played by Dan Hedaya, is deemed decent enough to win Midler back) but on the younger women, dismissed as “pre-schoolers”, that they pick up.

The younger women are depicted as graceless, dumb bimbos, notably Sarah Jessica Parker as a social climber who calls one mansion “Class Central” and Elizabeth Berkley as a giddy teenager who reassures Hawn that her husband is wrong about her: “You’re not Satan.”

When the film’s male scriptwriters, who significantly changed Goldsmith’s novel, aren’t insulting women who don’t start out rich and college-educated, they pile on jokes about Hawn’s plastic surgery (“She’s a quilt!”) or Keaton’s neuroses.

That said, the movie is funny enough to maintain a pleasant spirit throughout, and, despite a dull ending, is a worthwhile showcase for Midler’s sharp retorts, Keaton’s pathos and Hawn’s flamboyance.

But it makes you wonder: If so many men and women can disagree on the respective merits of ‘The First Wives Club’ and Bob Dole, what is the “gender gap” based on? Judging from the reaction to this film, the answer may not be women’s empowerment so much as male defensiveness.