The 80’s were an interesting time
for women in the media. Riding the
burgeoning cusp of the second wave of popular feminism that would crash
when the ERA failed and then reform in
the confused backlash of the Anita Hill
hearings of the 90s, media in general tended to be friendly to its newfound
consumer base. It was a giddy and confusing
time, and it tended to wind up providing its audience with a mixed bag of
independent, smart female characters…being told that the only way to be happy
and have it all was to pipe down and raise up some kids.
Television was lightyears ahead of the media in this regard; having worked out the kinks with That Girl and witnessed
the adventures of Rhoda Morgenstern, Maud Finley, Hot Lips Houlihan, the
Bunker girls and Mary Richards, the 80’s treated us to the Julia
Sugarbakers, Murphy Browns and Golden Girls of the world.
Movies were, however, still an
uneven medium. In the 70s, for every Norma Rae there was a Sandy Olsen; and
it’s just as true that for every Judy Benjamin in the 80’s, there was an Emmy
from Mannequin. In fact, Judy Benjamin
herself appeared in one of the more popular of the feminist backlash films, a
1989 take on the Taming of the Shrew directed by Garry Marshall, Overboard.
The story of rich woman named Joanna
Stayton, who’s vacationing off the Pacific Northwest on her yacht with her prostitute loving
husband Grant (they have something of a combative relationship). She meets and clashes with carpenter Dean
Proffitt, who creates a shoe closet which she finds to be…inept to say the
least, even though it's clearly very impressive. Soon after, Joanna makes the mistake of
wandering onto the deck of the boat in the middle of the night – she falls
overboard, conks her head, loses her memory and wakes up in a hospital with
nobody to claim her. Dean swoops in for
a little revenge, claiming to the hospital that she’s his missing wife Annie,
then taking her to his ramshackle cottage where he lives with his four
ill-mannered sons. The kids are a
neighborhood terror, and soon all five men start using Joanna as a slave. Plagued by flashes of memory to her old life,
Joanna’s initial coldness and weepiness nevertheless results in the firming of
her spine; she turns the tables on the men, takes hold of the boys’ social and
academic lives, and tries to help Dean fulfill his dream of opening a mini golf
course with his best friend, Billy Pratt.
All the while, Joanna’s mother continues to hammer the partying Grant
(who’s hired a band of dancers called Tofutti Klein to entertain him) about the whereabouts of
her daughter. Grant finds the Proffitts just after the mini golf course opens,
and the sight of him instantly brings back Joanna’s memory. It
doesn't take long for Joanna to realize she belongs with the Proffitts and for
Dean and the boys to realize they need Joanna, which results in a confrontation
at sea.
My relationship with this movie is complex, and I think it's an 80's child thing. Every girl I know grew up watching
this movie, sighing over Kurt Russell and enjoying the tit-for-tat between the
two real life partners. As a child, it
was among my all time top ten favorite movies.
Back then most of us didn't realize how uncomfortable the sexual dynamic
really is, but rewatching the story as an adult lays bare the core of the popular
culture pushback against mainstream feminism.
It isn’t just that Joanna’s a
horrible, rude, demanding, money-obsessed person when she’s rich and lonely –
it’s that the movie’s only way to get her to even out her personality ends up
being stripping her of every scrap of her memory and
agency. There’s a scene where Dean
devises an on the spot “punishment” for his wife that involves dunking her in a
rain barrel; it ends up feeling harrowing instead of comedic, especially when she later begs not to be dunked again.
It’s undeniably strange to see
Hawn, whose work after shedding her initial flush of ditzy Laugh-In Girl fame had a generally feminist bent to it, playing a sanitized version of the down-with-feminism ‘70’s erotic comedy Castaway. Hawn's work - from the 70’s and Sugarland Express into the 80's with Wildcats and Private Benjamin, right through to the 00’s and the First Wives Club, has predominantly been feminist. It’s undeniably odd to see the subject of Joanna "bitchy" independence treated as
a joke, mostly because Dean’s a karma Houdini of the highest proportion. He never seems quite sorry enough and never
suffers enough of a punishment for his mistakes - smashed cake, case of poison
oak and double shifts at the docks notwithstanding. In the end he gets his dream, his wife and
his children (and the promise of a little girl) while barely breaking a sweat.
Joanna, meanwhile, has to suffer emotional and physical torture, undergo
a total personality transplant, then confront a world where the love of her
life used her fecklessly for months and lied about her condition – and come to the realization that the real one includes a her husband who all but wants her dead.
It melts the project down into a problematic mess and forces the audience to fast
forward toward the ‘good parts’ (IE: everything after the water fight over the
chocolate cake).
 |
| SYMBOLISM! |
The movie still has its nostalgic
charms, but damn it, the older I get the harder it is for me to give it a
pass. Maybe you can’t really go back to the Cove after all.
SCORE: 2 1/2 out of 5
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