Lyne lashes back
Adrian Lyne's latest film, Indecent Proposal, a romantic Hollywood blockbuster which will be released in Australia on April 29, contains a brief and tantalisingly puzzling shot. Demi Moore, the sexy "wife" (the film's publicity tag line is "A husband. A wife. A billionaire. A proposal.") enters the office in which she is employed as a real estate salesperson, and passes the desk behind which sits the office receptionist, filing her nails.
The receptionist is a bleached blonde secretary stereotype, a cheap and fussy fashion disaster — the total antithesis of Moore, who sports a casual but elegant, feminine but businesslike, ensemble which no doubt took weeks of work in wardrobe. The receptionist does not speak. The camera lingers at her desk just long enough for the audience to see that she is reading a book, propped against her typewriter so that its title is clearly visible — Backlash: The undeclared war against women by Susan Faludi.
My household saw this film at a preview because there was nothing on the telly on Friday night. We felt the need for some big budget Hollywood production values, a slick and pacy 90-minute escape from the workaday, so we jumped on a bus and stood in a Friday night queue with hundreds of people, mainly young couples, who were after the same thing.
Indecent Proposal didn't fail to deliver. It is a non-stop flurry of beautiful people in beautiful settings wearing either beautiful clothes or no clothes at all, having sex, making money and, in the end, saving the beautiful marriage of the beautiful central characters. It is a simple morality tale, lavishly told, and the moral is the same as that in Lyne's most successful blockbuster, Fatal Attraction: get married, stay married and don't forget to stick to your traditional sex role, or you'll find yourself in BIG TROUBLE.
So why does a director who promotes his film with a poster featuring a glistening, photographically
decapitated female body wearing nothing but a pair of undersized cottontails, and whose closing shot is of the clasped hands of husband and wife, in soft focus, sporting oversize wedding rings, also feature a lingering shot of Faludi's book, one of the most important recent additions to world feminist literature?
We puzzled over it for hours, but when I went back to reread Faludi's chapter on film in Backlash, the answer jumped out and bit me on the nose. Lyne's reference to Faludi's book is a simple "up yours", a two-finger salute to the woman who revealed him, and his films, as central to the current backlash against feminism.
"In [Adrian] Lyne's analysis", she writes, "the most unfeminine women are the ones clamouring for equal rights". She quotes Lyne's own words to prove the point:
"You hear feminists talk, and the last ten, twenty years you hear women talking about fucking men rather than being fucked, to be crass about it. It's kind of unattractive, however liberated and emancipated it is. It kind of fights the whole wife role, the whole childbearing role. Sure you got your career and your success, but you are not fulfilled as a woman."
Indecent Proposal indicates Lyne has redoubled his efforts against feminism. The fact that Faludi's book provoked him enough to force him to refer to it indicates our target has been hit. Whether you see the film or not, let's take up where Faludi left off and refuse to let this one go unchallenged.
By Karen Fredericks