My Problem with "The Women"

So, they've remade The Women. This is the new trailer. I...have issues with this.

First, I've seen the original. When I watched it, I found it irritating beyond belief that, in the whole movie, you never see the men around which all the conversation in the film revolves. I realize that is the trick pony the movie has decided to ride, but it's like watching a play from behind a pole or a home video that never quite comes into focus. I kept waiting for some sort of whole picture and was constantly denied.

On top of that, the trailer of the 1939 version clearly points out that the entire movie is about men. Now, I don't know about you, but I find that, as a woman, I manage to hold several conversations a day that have absolutely nothing to do with men. Therefore, the generalized nature of the title of the film offends me. Maybe I wouldn't care as much if the title was Women Talking About Men. At least that would be honest, if not very flattering.

Also unflattering are the depictions of how women relate to each other in the movie. They're all catty bitches who love to gossip and rejoice in each others' pain. Joan Crawford's character is an unrepentant villian--enticing a married man without guilt and crowing over his wife. Norma Shearer is at first painfully placid and then misdirects her rage at the other woman. Rosalind Russell plays a busybody and a false friend.

Why did they remake this? What possible merit could you derive from a movie based entirely on an antiquated conception of what women must be to each other? Based on the trailer, the cattiness certainly survived the overhaul. And whatever improvements could be made to the plot or to the manner in which the women interact, it will remain a movie in which women define themselves and their relationships with other women based on their relationships with men. If they have retained the device of only showing the women and never showing the men, so much the worse. As the absent but much-talked-of specters, the men become like Greek gods. They are capricious, certainly, but all-powerful and unchanging. If we never see the women interact with the men, all the rational reactions to infidelity are precluded--namely, a confrontation with the betrayer rather than with someone outside the relationship.

I know that this movie will probably attempt to end up on some sort of Sex and the City-style note of empowerment as a nod to the changed times. In some ways, I find that more offensive. It implies that the movie has taught us a Very Important Lesson about ourselves. The "hey, I don't need a man" revelation saved for the last act is insulting to our intelligence. I find it depressing to think that, after nearly 70 intervening years of feminism, this movie could be considered relevant enough to occasion a remake with only the barest of last-act band aids to make it palatable to modern women.

I might not expect it of anyone else in the new movie but, Candace Bergen, you ought to be ashamed.