Reel Women: ’60s Sex Comedies

This month’s Reel Women is dedicated to a brief blip in the generic morphology of the romcom known as the sex comedy. Between the large-budget movie musicals of the 1950s that replaced sex with song, and the notoriously bleak cinematic landscape of the 70s in which, it seems, only Woody Allen bothered to produce romcoms (a sign that the genre was, indeed, on the rocks), the sex comedy reigned with the sugary self-assurance of a pre-Nixon world. With an aesthetic that I can only describe as what mid-century Hollywood imagined middle America imagined New York to look like, it brought glamour to middle class sex.

Dedicated to the sexual exploits of the newly urban and distressingly unmarried boomer generation, the sex comedy—like all romcoms—attempted to deal with a lot of anxieties about gender, sexuality and class by marrying them off. Despite its name, the sex comedy is exceptionally chaste. Although its characters talk more explicitly and soberly about sex than almost anywhere else in American cinema before them thanks to the Hays Code, they never actually move beyond a theoretical discussion of the mechanics of premarital sex. Two decades earlier, audiences saw more bed-hopping in the screwball comedy than they would find in these movies. Instead, sex in the sex comedy is tasked with both emblematizing a new politics of gender parity while also providing the occasion to force those politics back into the home, ensconced within a loving and now sexually-fulfilling marriage.

The postwar decades saw a perfect storm of cultural and political agitation around sex and the sexual practices of heteronormative Americans. Both Playboy magazine and Alfred Kinsey’s second and most controversial report, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, debuted in 1953. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique was published in 1962, and it became increasingly clear that the happy housewife was a myth and teens and women were having all kinds of sex despite the Leave It To Beaver-ish representations of family life. The Pill was released in 1961, and individual states began rolling back their abortion bans throughout the 60s, eventually culminating in the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision in 1973. Freud’s theories on sexuality were so permanently in the water that you couldn’t throw a stone without hitting a joke—or a straight-faced observation—about Oedipal desire. In other words, despite our vision of the 1950s as a supremely traditional, family-values oriented time—a nostalgic fantasy manufactured by the TV cowboy in the Reagan White House—it was actually as volatile and anxious about the institution of marriage as we are now.

The sex comedy is a pastiche of mid-century gender politics, a precious remnant from the early days of the Second Wave written from the other side. Metabolizing feminist concerns over professional equality, sexual freedom, and unmarried independence, the sex comedy solves these problems through hetero pairing rather than political activity—or rather, the only political activity in these films is marriage itself. In fact, the heroine is both a straw feminist and a romantic lead, seeking equality with her male professional rival while succumbing to the selfsame as a love interest.

This is how the sex comedy goes: an attractive white woman living in the big city with a burgeoning career but a dour love life develops a personal or professional animosity, erotic in intensity, with a faceless man who has made it his purpose to crack her frigid self-possession through tricks, foul or fair. Once the hero accidentally discovers the luscious body belonging to his competition—in this world, the demure, musical comedy stylings of Doris Day are treated as the most sexually inspiring thing in Manhattan—he is forced to mask his identity in order to seduce her. Disguised as a sensitive, gentile, sexually mild drip, he manipulates the heroine into seducing him until his ploy is revealed and she declares that she will never forgive him. But by then, it’s too late. She has succumbed to his charms and is obliged by the power of her own sexual desire to quietly ignore his betrayal and ride off into the sunset with him.

Renee Zellweger and Ewan McGregor in Down with Love | Image from fanpop.com

If you’ve seen Down With Love, a loving, beat-for-beat send-up of the genre, you know the rhythm.

Like most romcoms, these films don’t pass the Bechdel test. In fact, in this world, there is only room for one respectable middle-class girl in all of Manhattan. Every other female character is either a middle-aged maid who provides our heroines with the only thing that will pass for girl-talk in these movies, or they are showgirls, actresses, and French women whose apparently casual sexual relationships with the male lead disqualify them from true femininity. It’s almost as if our heroine wins by default of being the only virginal choice left.

Virginity itself is a strangely ambivalent category in these films. Although the heroine’s relative chastity is the very thing that makes her the heroine, it is also a source of shame or contempt. One of the first exchanges between Rock Hudson and Doris Day in Pillow Talk ridicules the barren bedscape of the heroine, Jan:

Brad Allen: Look, I don’t know what’s bothering you, but don’t take your bedroom problems out on me.

Jan Morrow: I have no bedroom problems. There’s nothing in my bedroom that bothers me.

Brad Allen: Ohh, that’s too bad.

Even more notably, the heroine of Sex and the Single Girl spends most of the movie attempting to hide her virginity from the hero whose purpose it is to ruin her business as a sex therapist by revealing her as a romantic novice. The heroine’s fastidiousness about sex in these films is meant to betray an unenlightened prissiness that is unacceptable even in marriage and must be hijinks-ed away before her sexuality is safely ensconced in matrimony.

The sexual politics of Sex and the Single Girl are even more striking because they are directly tied to the real life cultural landscape. Named after the advice book of the same name by Helen Gurley Brown, who would later go on to found Cosmopolitan magazine, it follows the exploits of a woman named Dr. Helen Gurley Brown (Natalie Wood) who writes an advice book called Sex and the Single Girl. Her book, which advises single women to own their desires and have affairs with married men, is a controversial sensation and attracts the attention of a tawdry magazine journalist (Tony Curtis) who wants to write an exposé proving that Dr. Brown has never taken her own advice. Turning the book into a sex comedy means turning Brown herself, an instrumental figure in the Second Wave, into a naive priss in need of a husband. These movies trope feminism in order to reify tradition, celebrating the new sexual freedoms afforded to white middle-class women at the same time that they seek to put them in their place.

Meanwhile, male sexual dysfunction is a crucial plot device. In their attempts to seduce the heroine, the heroes of these films always adopt an impotent, sexually unassuming persona. Through a series of phone calls in Pillow Talk, Brad convinces Jan that the sensitive cowboy he is pretending to be is gay—“there are some men who…how shall I put this? Well they’re very fond of their mother. They like to share bits of gossip. Collect recipes.” This conversation is made all the more cruel by the fact that Rock Hudson was gay in real life. And Tony Curtis’s Bob shows up to Dr. Brown’s office as an impotent patient in need of therapy in Sex and the Single Girl. It seems that without an impotent straw man, the empowered straw feminist is neither empowered nor, finally, transformed into a wife.

These films seem to want to turn masculine vulnerability into a farce—it becomes simply a role played by a cocky alpha—in order to protect masculinity from true vulnerability. The type of vulnerability, say, made possible by a feminist politics. Although the trajectory of the sex comedy is from career woman to wife through the crucible of normative sexuality, it must get there by queering the masculine. A recurring gag throughout Pillow Talk involves Brad hiding from Jan in the office of an obstetrician where he distractedly attempts to make an appointment and convinces the doctor that he is, miraculously, a pregnant man. The last shot of Pillow Talk is not of the happy couple, but of Brad being dragged into the doctor’s office after cheerfully declaring that he’s “going to have a baby!” He may have gotten the girl and returned to his alpha persona, but, the movie seems to say, he is still a little queer.

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Reel Women: Sister Act

Today, E.L. brings us back to a movie invested in community—though this community is expressed in a somewhat unexpected way. As with all of the movies in our Reel Women series, this one offers up a kind of unabashed pleasure that can be the most radical form of self-care. And, like all movies in this series, this one is best enjoyed with your witch coven by your side.

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Welcome back to Reel Women, our series featuring women on film. Last time we talked about the erotics of female competition in Working Girl. This time we’ll concentrate on the erotics of female collaboration in Sister Act.

 

Whoopi Goldberg, rare EGOT winner and shade-throwing daytime TV hostess, sparkles as a lounge singer-cum-nun on the run. My childhood memories of this movie include the musical numbers and habits, but I had totally forgotten the brilliance of Whoopi’s comic timing. She leads a cast of talented comedians who, dressed in habits, must more or less bring the laughs using only their faces. Considering the use of women’s bodies in mainstream comedy from the 90s, this is an impressive feat. Women tend to exist in these movies as either the objects of lust that reveal the limits of the male protagonist’s own attractiveness (think There’s Something About Mary), or as the undesirable butt of the joke (think every fat woman to grace celluloid since the inception of the film medium).

In Sister Act they are neither. Women’s bodies aren’t played for comedy here, which feels pretty impressive when you begin to count the number of non-normative bodies in this movie—the convent is filled with old women, fat women and a black woman, and none of these are targeted for easy jokes. Dressed in habits, their bodies don’t figure much at all (with a few notable exceptions, including Kathy Najimy’s dance scene). Instead, comedy grows naturally from women talking to each other.

Kathy Najimy, Whoopi Goldberg and Wendy Makkena owning the face game in Sister Act (1992)

Released in 1992, Sister Act feels like an anomaly. Part of a small cohort of early 90s sisterhood movies such as Thelma and Louise (1991) and A League of Their Own (1992), it is far more interested in the drama of female relationships than the will-they-or-won’t-they of heterosexual romance. In fact, the fantasy offered by all of these films is that of an escape from the stifling confinement and sometimes outright violence of a world with men. At best, the men in these films are well-intentioned but myopic (see Harvey Keitel in Thelma and Louise) and at worst, they are selfish and brutally violent (Harvey Keitel in Sister Act). And even Brad Pitt’s torso can’t soften the fact that the options for male relationships in these films are so much less compelling than those offered by women.

The action of Sister Act begins with the threat of masculine violence that sends us to the most homosocial place on earth. The convent here is at once a refuge from the world of men and a space in which female collaboration can transform the world for the better. Once sex with men loses its capacity to generate action and motivation, what’s left is the powerful, difficult and dynamic society of female friendship.

That’s not to say these female friendships aren’t also erotic. The taut looks that Maggie Smith’s Mother Superior shoots Whoopi Goldberg’s Deloris sizzle with angry energy, and their understated power struggles are nothing if not sexy.

Maggie Smith as the Reverend Mother with the look of a Dom in Sister Act (1992)

But the true romance, I think, blossoms between Deloris and Sister Mary Robert (Wendy Makkena), the convent’s hot young novitiate. Delores is the worldly older mentor to Mary Robert’s naive but curious pupil, and if Delores were a man we would expect a steamy kiss before the final credits roll.

Their relationship reminds me of another film in which witnessing a gruesome murder sends a worldly metropolitanite to a cloistered religious community. In Witness (1985), it seems obvious to us that Harrison Ford’s cop will end up in the arms of the Amish mother played by Kelly MicGillis, but in Sister Act the convent keeps queer possibilities safely in the subtext. Delores cracks Mary Robert’s shell and frees her voice, and Mary Robert in turn offers Delores a gentle welcome to the convent community and even sneaks into Delores’ bedroom to offer her flower (alarm clock) to keep Delores company while she sleeps.

Uncertain attraction in the convent, Sister Act (1992)

Mary Robert is almost always shot in closeup to capture her doe-eyed gaze at Delores, and the looks they exchange are always tender and quietly knowing. Beneath their robes Delores is velvet wrapped in steel, gently drawing out Mary Robert whose self-effacing timidity belies her spunk.

The thesis of Sister Act is that really well-arranged choral music can revitalize a neighborhood. In this world, a rollicking arrangement of “Salve Regina” can entice teenage street toughs to Sunday Mass and a dozen nuns in a local church choir can become famous enough to attract the Pope himself for a visit. In this world, the rejuvenation of the church and the community beyond is made possible by the artistic collaboration of a bunch of middle-aged women. In this world, the final reward isn’t the arrival of a man (even if he is the Pope), but is rather the final musical number itself.

Church choir remixes “Salve Regina” in Sister Act (1992)

Community in this movie takes shape around the commune rather than the couple. Sister Act is interested in the possibilities that open up when we shift our attention away from heterosexual sex, reproduction and the nuclear family toward forms of connection that do not need men to thrive. Community spaces and relations are built through joint effort among non-reproductive women rather than through normative family structures, and the aesthetic appeal of the choir’s performances replaces the sex appeal of the female body as the site of community (re)production.

While heterosexual sex ends with Vince chasing Delores with a gun, female collaboration here ends with a bunch of nuns cackling joyfully over contraband tubs of ice cream.

Finally, because I can, I will leave you with this image of one of my favorite moments from the film: Delores dismissively eyeing Vince’s gift of a purple mink jacket while sporting a full-length fur coat. An allegory of heterosexuality if there ever was one.

Two fur coats in one scene, Sister Act (1992)

 

Reel Women: Working Girl

Melanie Griffith changing into professional uniform as Tess in Working Girl (1988)

 

Welcome to our new series: Reel Women! Every month, we’ll offer a few films—classic, indie, campy, award-winning, forgotten, beloved, bad—that feature powerful, resolute, angry, conflicted, hilarious, shallow, deep women. This series stretches beyond the Strong Female Protagonist trope—our leads can’t kick ass in heels without smudging their lipstick. They don’t throw off pithy one-liners after they’ve pulverized the foolish men that Underestimated Them, and their strength doesn’t serve as justification for their presence in a male-driven movie. They’ve got bad hair and mean families and do stupid things in pursuit of guys that aren’t good for them. We’re here to celebrate the results—sometimes brilliant, sometimes cringe-worthy—when women are given the opportunity to carry a movie.

These films are best experienced with other women. So assemble your coven, and queue it up!

Megan Fox in Transformers, proving she’s hot and strong by fixing a car (!!)—what she lacks in midriff she makes up for in mechanical skill

First up to bat: Working Girl.

In many ways, Working Girl is the wicked step-daughter of 9 to 5. Produced only 8 years later, it seems already to be looking back with contempt at intra-office sisterhood. In less than a decade, the secretary’s fantasy transforms from righteous punishment of a boneheaded misogynist male boss to the strategic usurpation of the job and boyfriend of a Mean Girl female boss. In some ways, this represents a kind of progress—women can be bosses now as well as secretaries. At the close of the 70s, even after so much feminist agitation for workplace reform—over the course of a few decades, The Equal Pay Act  and Fair Labor Standards Act (1963), Title VII of the Civil Rights Act (1964), Title IX (1972), and the Pregnancy Descrimination Act (1978) among others were instituted to address gender inequity—women were still relegated more or less to the role of secretary and subject to all sorts of violence and discrimination in the workplace. But by the end of the 80s the Working Girl, with her sneakers and shoulder pads, had become a powerful trope that suggested both women’s increasing professional power as well as the fear that their desire to “have it all” might undermine their femininity. As Harrison Ford’s character Jack says to Melanie Griffith’s Tess during their first encounter, “You’re the first woman I’ve seen at one of these things that dresses like a woman, not like a woman thinks a man would dress if he was a woman.”

But in other ways, the rise of the Working Girl at the expense of the secretarial sisterhood signals a shift away from professional equality toward an ethos of individualist success that has no room for something like community. Where three women in 9 to 5 not only teach a much-needed lesson to an incompetent man but also successfully run a corporate department as a team, Working Girl represents the heights an ambitious woman may reach when she’s willing to leave other women behind.

Behold the sisterhood of Lily Tomlin, Dolly Parton and Jane Fonda in 9 to 5 (1980)

There are moments in Working Girl of non-competitive female connection, but they are few and far between. Tess’ best friend Cynthia, played by the sparkling and wacky (and so much better than her brother, I don’t care what any of you say!) Joan Cusack, sticks by her side and throws down tough truth bombs when Tess’ ambitions seem to outpace reality. “Sometimes I sing and dance around in the house in my underwear,” she tells Tess, “Doesn’t make me Madonna. Never will.” But, for the most part, Cynthia is there to remind us with her Midwestern solidity and real talk that a girl with green eyeshadow and feathered hair will never make it in the world of double-breasted power suits.

The lesson of Working Girl is that sisterhood is best left to the secretaries.

Joan Cusack rocking that green eyeshadow as Cynthia in Working Girl (1988)

The film actually rehearses the language of female solidarity only to reveal it as stale and empty. The central female relationship between Tess and her manipulative boss Katherine, played by Sigourney Weaver, is one predicated on deep animosity and competition veiled—at least at first—by the rhetoric of sisterhood.

During their first meeting, Katharine lays out some “ground rules” which include a dress code authorized by Coco Chanel—“Dress shabbily,” Katharine declares while eyeing up Tess’ jewelry, “they notice the dress. Dress impeccably, they notice the woman. Coco Chanel.”—And an emphasis on teamwork. “I consider us a team. Tess. I want your input. I welcome good ideas and I like to see hard work rewarded….It’s a two-way street on my team.” But female teams in Working Girl don’t seem to work. Katharine steals Tess’ ideas and Tess steals Katharine’s clothes, house, job and boyfriend. It is the All About Eve of the yuppie generation, and like many things that don’t surprise me about the yuppie generation, this version celebrates Eve Harrington dethroning Margot Channing.

Rather than sisterhood, we’re offered male partners and mentors whom Tess can trust and run to when the women in her life get too catty. The business plot includes a fatherly corporate type who can see through Katharine’s machinations and finally gives Tess the credit (and the job) she deserves. This is a far cry from 9 to 5 in which both the bosses and the husbands are witless at best, and downright malevolent at worst. In Working Girl, there is only room for one woman in the corner office, and you can either be her or be her secretary.

Harrison Ford as the moderately charming but pretty forgettable love-interest/trophy is the least interesting part of this movie. He exists, on one hand, as the reward for Tess’ plucky go-get-‘em attitude, and on the other, as the heaterosexual object of desire that secures her femininity in the midst of her ambitious ladder-climbing. He might be the least suave rich investment executive in Manhattan in the late 80s. He mixes Scotch with Tequila, he has the smallest bed any bachelor living in a historic walkup has ever owned, and his closed-mouth kisses look deeply uncomfortable. His character is, in other words, the embodiment of what a pubescent boy thinks game looks like.

The most pitiful bed ever to grace a bachelor pad, Working Girl (1988)

Sigourney Weaver’s Katharine is, for me, the best thing about Working Girl. She is the Mean Girl par excellence, and in the version of this movie in my head, she is Christian Grey to Tess’ Anastasia Steele. She wears full-length mink coats, uses fainting as a business tactic, and proves just how milquetoast Harrison Ford is standing next to her.

Full cougar, even with a cast, Sigourney Weaver is perfection itself in Working Girl (1988)

Her scenes with Melanie Griffith sizzle because the chemistry born of female aggression, in the world of Working Girl, is so much more potent than the desire born of heterosexual love. This movie conjures up the very thing it attempts to discipline: a world in which female relationships—competitive, destructive, erotic—are more vital and compelling than the men offered to replace them.