Be Awesome: Modern Life for Modern Ladies. Hadley Freeman
can flash at your next school reunion: you’ve already let the bullies win.
3. You have to be the boring woman to get the guy
Of all the film tropes, this is the one that consistently makes me the saddest. Not because I believe it (any more), but because it has ruined my enjoyment of so many otherwise great movies. I call this trope Tootsie’s Law.
Now, Tootsie is a movie that is, in a lot of ways, amazing. This 1982 film cheerfully and fearlessly overturned a lot of received Hollywood wisdom such as, most obviously, that audiences would be repulsed by a movie featuring a man dressed as a woman. Even Some Like It Hot went black and white because director Billy Wilder feared that Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon’s make-up was just de trop, and this from a movie that ends with Lemmon sailing off into the sunset with a man – IN 1959.
Far from worrying whether mainstream audiences could cope with the combination of foundation and stubble, Tootsie opens with close-ups of Dustin Hoffman putting on make-up and gleefully carries on from there, peaking perhaps with Hoffman standing in his girdle in one scene and debating with Bill Murray whether a certain dress makes him look ‘hippy’. I love this movie.
One thing I don’t love about it, though, is Hoffman’s character Michael’s love life. For those who haven’t seen this film, first, I envy the pleasure awaiting you as you lose your Tootsie virginity. Second, I shall explain.
Relatively early in the movie, Michael sleeps with his long-term friend, Sandy, played by lovely Terri Garr, who is thirty-four, a struggling actress and hilarious, and afterwards he treats her – as he treats all women he sleeps with – like crap.
Meanwhile, Michael has recently got a job on a soap opera by pretending he is an actress as opposed to an actor and there meets one of the stars of the show, Julie, played by Jessica Lange. Julie is in a relationship with the lecherous director (played, of course, by Dabney Coleman), has an annoying breathy voice, a changeable southern accent and, damningly, is not funny, interesting or smart – in fact, she herself says she is dumb, and she’s right about that (every woman knows you should never get involved with a character played by Dabney Coleman). She is also not the least bit interested in Michael, mainly because she thinks he’s a woman. Needless to say, Michael falls in love with her, treats Sandy even worse and the movie ends (spoiler alert: but you might have already guessed this) with the rather implausible suggestion that gold-digging, breathy-voiced Julie will now have a relationship with the broke and chronically out-of-work Michael who, for the past few months, has been dressing like Mrs Doubtfire.
I appreciate that questioning the credibility of the ending of a film that is based on the premise of no one in America noticing that a high-profile TV actress is Dustin Hoffman in a dress might seem like protesting that Wizard of Oz is not realistic because monkeys can’t fly. But the point is not the realism but the overall trope, the one that says the boring pretty woman gets the man and reforms his womanising ways and the one who has an actual personality gets not just nothing but sidelined out of the entire film.
Another woeful example of this film-ruining trope is Ghostbusters 2, a movie that probably most people have forgotten about but, like a female Martin Scorsese I shall now restore to public consciousness.
One of my favourite dynamics in the original Ghostbusters film is the relationship between awkward egghead Egon, played by Harold Ramis, and the amazing secretary, Janine, played by Annie Potts. The final scene when she runs up to embrace him after he emerges from the wreckage having saved the world from destruction is a delightful vision of male shyness being conquered by the enthusiastic love of a nasal-voiced woman.
But somewhere in between the making of the first and second Ghostbuster films someone decided that Janine wasn’t good enough for Egon. In fact, she should now go out with the weirdo accountant Louis – played, inevitably, by Rick Moranis – who not only was repeatedly turned down by Sigourney Weaver in the first film (in other words, set up as someone to be rejected by all but the very desperate) but, it was suggested in the final scene of the first film, possibly left deranged by his experience of being turned into a dog (it’s a long story).
In fact, there is no reference at all to Egon and Janine’s relationship in the second film; that moment on Central Park West meant, it seems, nothing. Instead, sexy Janine has to roll around on the sofa with weirdo Louis. Presumably the writers made this decision, and it just so happens that one of the co-writers of Ghostbusters 2 was none other than … Harold Ramis. The heartless cad.
Needless to say, Sigourney Weaver, who plays the main love interest in the first Ghostbuster film, is still very much presented as the hot female in the second, despite being dull, not funny and a little bit whiny. She also, as it happens, has a breathy voice. Maybe THAT’S the secret: it’s not that women have to be boring and not funny to attract men, they just have to talk on the heavy exhale.
This trope of the funny woman being sidelined in favour of the boring woman is part of another well-loved (by screenwriters) movie stereotype, the Funny Female Friend.
The Funny Female Friend is, by now, a well-known cliché in movies, especially romcoms, and TV shows, especially sitcoms. It is as tired as those other great stock movie characters, Magical Negro (as coined by Spike Lee, refers to a wise and sexless black character, usually played by Morgan Freeman); BBF, or Black Best Friend (noted by LA Times writer Greg Braxton in 2007, similar to Magical Negro, except the BBF is young and female and her ‘principal function is to support the [young and white] heroine, often with sass, attitude and a keen insight into relationships and life’,18 so maybe she’s Magical Negro’s daughter) and Manic Pixie Dream Girl (coined in 2008 by Nathan Rabin of the AV Club: she’s unconventional! But not scarily so! She is conceived purely to liven up a boring guy’s boring life! And sometimes she dies or at least disappears before she and the wistful male protagonist actually get together so he never has to deal with all that unappetising relationship stuff, like menstruation and general humanity – see: One Day! Wheeeeee!), all of whom exist to assist the main character achieve his life or her goal. I’d quite like to see a movie starring just these characters. It would be like watching three car-less sat-navs barking instructions at one another, going pathetically nowhere.
The Funny Female Friend refers to, as you might have guessed from the name, the wisecracking female friend of the main character who is, generally, female but not necessarily and she’s probably played by Joan Cusack.
And there’s nothing wrong with any of that – except the Funny Female Friend is almost never allowed to have a love life of her own. She is there to help the main character with his or her love life and to provide witty insights about the other gender, but that’s it. Because who would want to go out with a funny friend when the main female is so much less funny and therefore less threatening, right? A woman with a personality: good as a friend, not as a girlfriend. This is the only explanation for Hugh Grant rejecting sharp and funny Kristin Scott Thomas – KRISTIN SCOTT THOMAS – for dullsville and monotone Andie MacDowell – ANDIE MACDOWELL – in Four Weddings and a Funeral, even though MacDowell can’t even comment on the rainy weather without sounding like she’s slipping into a coma. Instead, poor Kristin ends up with Prince Charles. Jesus, Richard Curtis, why don’t you just burn the witch at the stake?
There are occasional movies in which the Funny Female Friend is allowed to find true love. When Harry Met Sally is probably the best example of that, with Marie (Carrie Fisher) bagging Jess (Bruno Kirby) and living happily ever after with him and, briefly, his wagon wheel table, long before Harry (Billy Crystal) and Sally (Meg Ryan) get together. But that is possibly because that movie was written by Nora Ephron who, it is probably safe to say, was a very funny female friend.
When Harry Met Sally is the exception to this rule and many, many others, not least in giving the main female character an actual and appealing personality. In the main, the role of the Wisecracking Female Friend is there to make the main woman look even more bland in comparison which, according to movie logic, makes her even more feminine and desirable. So while this is a definitely depressing theory,