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19 january 2002 |
the hours They gave me a title, so I'll just use it. You guys know me; I don't go around reviewing movies. They don't need me to help them make a few more bucks, especially when I don't get a ding-dang thing for saying nice things about them. This weekend, though, I saw a movie that made me do way more than weep-and-hope-no-one-sees-you. I don't know if the stars were aligned funny, or it was the fig bars, or my wacked-out eyeballs, but The Hours punched me in the stomach. Hard. I required a napkin. It wasn't pretty. In my favor, it was dark in the theatre. By now, you all know that The Hours, starring Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep, and Julianne Moore, won the Golden Globe for Best Dramatic Picture. It is, critics are saying, a good, good movie. Listen to them, and go see it. Yes, it stars three women, but this is no "chick flick". I hope for all of my women friends that they see it, that my family sees it, that everyone who loves their mom, their girlfriends, and their wives--I hope they see it. Perhaps without realizing it, Stephen Daldry and the cast have made what I believe is the most important movie for women this year. I had such a raw, visceral reaction to The Hours--I was overwhelmed by its weight. I was overwhelmed by the weaving of Virginia Woolfe's novel Mrs. Dalloway through three women's lives, three women who begin to realize that no matter what time period you live in, "it was very, very dangerous to live even a single day." Virginia, Laura, and Clarissa are women living featured in three different time periods (1920's, 1941, and 2001, respectively), who are searching for more "potent, meaningful" lives. Through her groundbreaking feminist writings, many of us are familiar with the struggle and the madness of Virginia Woolf. What we may not face often, however, are the struggles of women like Laura, a beloved suburban American housewife who realizes that she does not want her children. That, as monstrous as it sounds, she is a mother who realizes that she shouldn't be one. She is not abusive, but rather quiet and passive. She spends her days agonizing over the mundane successes and failures, such as baking a cake. They are, her life and her neighbors tell her, the measure of her success as a woman. As her neighbor, Kitty, says through tears, "you're just not a woman until you've had children." While Laura grapples somewhat quietly and somberly with her struggle to invigorate herself, Kitty hides her repression behind the happy housewife stereotype: snappy dress, perfect hair, and perfect cake. Clarissa is a big-shot editor in 2001 New York City who has lived with her lesbian lover for ten years. Nonetheless, she daily helps to take care of a lover from her youth, a world-famous poet now dying from AIDS. She still loves Richard, who states that he thinks he stays alive for her. He challenges her, and makes her wonder if her life, for all of its schedule and detail, is relevant. Does anything outside of caring for him make her happy? She spends the movie wondering just that. To tell you any more about The Hours would give away too much of this delicately-entertwined story. During the last twenty minutes of the movie, I began to really feel its impact. Like every other educated, community-minded, independent woman out there, I struggle to remain a relevant, contributing member of the world. But I'm still a woman. No matter how I define myself--and I think I've done an adequate job so far--my society will always pre-define me. Single or married. Childless or mother. Career woman or mother. Pretty or ugly. Young or old. Community activist or national revolutionary. Democrat or Republican. (I'm an Independent. They all lose that one.) I have read most of Virginia Woolfe's work over the years, and was always struck at how relevant she remains, in spite of her lifelong waltz with madness. That maybe her struggle to break free of society's conventions was the madness. I wonder if, born thirty years ago, her spirit and creativity would have been medicated away, or diluted by our workaday lifestyle. To remain a fruitful world citizen, I have to fight the daily feelings of failure that will suffocate anyone who indulges in this struggle for potency and meaning. I mean it; this stuff can melt you down if you spend more time exploring what you could have done, instead of focusing on what you can do. On what you're doing. On what you're doing well. We spend our lives pursuing hobbies. Always with the hobbies, the sports, the avocations, the diversions. I always feel like I'm on a mission. I'm on a few missions, and have been for most of my adult life. They don't change so much, but my ability to accomplish them seems to be growing as I get older, more confident, and less concerned about what people think. I am insignificant and know it. I would rather be insignificant and minimially beneficial, than significantly destructive. I live every day to remind myself that too many people fought so that I could work, vote, speak freely, and be a benefit to my state and country. I struggle like everyone else does with my decisions. Sometimes I am traditional, other times not. I am exactly the woman that my parents expected me to be. They expected me to be who I wanted. By sheer luck of being born in the 70's to them, I can be a woman with a mission that doesn't involve baking cake. I can be the woman who nearly set a take-out pizza box on fire today in my own oven, and no one will measure my womanly worth by that act. Living within the confines of your society, no matter how free, can be painful for the conscientious citizen. The goal, I think, is to recognize who you are, and what societal barriers will challenge you the most. You write, you design it, you build it, you put it in the test tube, you fix it, you feed the baby, you love him back who loves you. You work to trade your angst for action, because these days, you can. Sometimes, I think that my only problem is that I have too many choices, but I don't agonize over them. I select from them, work at them until my fingers are swollen, and admit my failure or defeat. I fill my hours with good minutes. Sometimes, that can be the hardest thing. |