Word: hollywoodizations
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...body with mixed feelings: envy for its sleekness and disdain for the work needed to maintain it. All those hours logged on the Stairmaster: "You climb and you climb, and you don't get anywhere." Why, Midler might be referring to women movie stars and women's pictures. In Hollywood it's one step up, two steps back, and sometimes you fall...
...movie a more genteel version of the misogynistic She-Devil and Death Becomes Her. And the audience applauds when Midler, Hawn and Diane Keaton take comic revenge on their duplicitous mates. In movie theaters around the country, similar crowds registered similar approval for the movie--enough to set Hollywood to scratching its (male) head and to give women moviegoers cause to hope for more films like...
...Hollywood was also attentive, as The First Wives Club is, to a brutal supposition in popular psychology: men tend to homicide, women to suicide. In the traditional view, this is the only heroic violence suitable for a lady--to die with dignity. In the 1932 Three on a Match, society wife Ann Dvorak leaves her loving husband for a small-time gambler, neglects her child and, realizing the error of her ways, kills herself. Best friend Joan Blondell marries the husband, and Bette Davis moves in as nanny. The 1937 Stage Door has an array of dazzlers (including Hepburn...
...with men off at war and women taking their place in the factories, Hollywood turned paranoid. Film noir made the black widow an embodiment of evil as seductive as she was destructive. What man wouldn't want to go to hell with Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice? What man wouldn't prefer hell to two days in a motel room with the spectacularly shrewish Ann Savage in Detour...
...Hollywood wants women to fit these stereotypes (even feminist stereotypes), if only to prove the rules of its game: that films must be tailored to the appetites of young men; that women will go to male-oriented movies but men can't be dragged to women's pictures; that an actress's bloom as a box-office icon (Julia Roberts, Jodie Foster) can soon fade, while the appeal of male stars (Sean Connery, Dustin Hoffman) stays solid for decades...