I recently rewatched a handful of movies that centre (white, middle class) women and their experiences. They were: 20th Century Women, Mona Lisa Smile, Desperately Seeking Susan and She’s All That. These are vastly different film experiences across at least four decades, but they feature women that have a similar longing, for independence, authentic expression and connection.
In Desperately Seeking Susan, Roberta is captivated by her imagined assumptions of Susan’s life. She’s never met her, but she follows her posts in the newspaper’s personals. Susan (played by Madonna) and someone named Jim find each other this way and usually meet up. By an unusual set of circumstances Roberta ends up dressed in Susan’s clothes and unable to remember who she is or what she’s doing when she meets Dez. This sends her on an exciting adventure, far away from her unrequited and rather dull married life.
There’s something that repeatedly pops up in these 80s films where the leading woman is “actually” something else (Mermaid, anyone?) or mistaken for something else, or she’s a twin, or she is a nanny but a mom, but not either! It’s as if the men writing back then really saw women as interchangeable stand-ins for one another. I like to think Roberta’s adventure is one of freely searching for appreciation and identity and that she finds it, even if it’s just in another romantic relationship.
In She’s All That, high school student and artist Laney Boggs, someone relegated to the nerd portion of the population, is given the ‘chance’ to date the popular football player Zack Siler. Usually skeptical and hard to please, Laney takes up the opportunity out of curiosity, but soon finds herself liking him. Zack, both dared to ask Laney on a date and committed to proving his friend wrong, follows up on the dare only to find that Laney’s charm is in who she already is.
This is a typical 90s high school rom-com, but I’ll admit before anyone else does that it is just plain bad. I remember liking some of the songs and probably feeling like an unappreciated outcast as well at the time. Laney’s given no real character, though, not in her actions or speech. She’s supposed to symbolize the genuine weirdo, but most of her dialogue is just defensive quips. Zack is pretty one-sided himself. The attempt to flesh out two archetypes that don’t usually play together was cute for 1998, I guess, but it was so unenjoyable to watch that I zoned out for the second half. The scene where Laney changes into a typical prom dress to “be pretty” for the guy at the end reminds me of the iconic and heartbreaking Breakfast Club ending where Claire gives Allison a totally unneeded makeover.
Mona Lisa Smile features Julia Roberts as Katherine Ann Watson, an art history professor whose been hired at a conservative and prestigious all-girl’s college called Wellesley College. Katherine soon finds herself in over her head as her class both astonishes and intimidates her. This film is based in the 50s and so the women of Wellesley are simultaneously the smartest in the country as well as strictly relegated to domestic roles in their life outside of college.
The cast of this film is very early 2000s. You’ll note I’m just naming decades as things we should be familiar with, but for real, it is! It features Kirsten Dunst, Julia Stiles and Maggie Gyllenhaal.
One nice thing about this movie is that it is actually quite lovely to watch these students become inspired by their teacher and just as lovely to see a professor change due to her own students. There’s a lot of dialogue about a woman’s role in the world, let alone in an institution of education. While watching I found myself thinking how even in 2024 some of us are still left to consider the impact of such roles on our own lives.
20th Century Women begins with three generations of women living together in the 1980s, a young man growing up without a father and the kind of interplay of tradition and resistance to normative culture all of these people are having in their lives and with each other. It features the lovely Annette Benning, the inspiring Greta Gerwig as well as Lucus Jade, Elle Fanning and Billy Crudup (I love Billy Crudup). A lot of the narration in this film is made by Jamie (Lucus Jade) about his own mother (Annette Benning), the admiration of her and the observing of her as a person outside of being his mother. But there is a story about parenthood lurking in this too, about who gets to do that or how much of it is necessary to grow healthy boys and healthy girls.
To me this reads as something of a man’s diary, as he tries to contend with his own changing perspective of girls and women. In humanizing women, one needs to look at their strength of character as well as their weaknesses, to accept them and to hold them dear, in their varying shapes, colours and sizes and in their fluctuating intensities. It’s only after we remove the pedestals, the demonizing, the prescribed roles and the idea that one woman is just another woman in disguise that we can give them the credit they deserve, in navigating waves we weren’t witnessing before and can now.
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