George Hanson (Paul Rudd) and Nina (Jennifer Aniston) have a Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers moment during their Friday night dancing lessons, from 1998 The Object of My Affection
Miss Giest aka “poor Miss Taylor that was” [Twink Caplan] and Mr Hall aka Mr Weston [Wallace Shawn] talk on a park bench (1996 Clueless, free adaptation of Austen’s Emma, also starring Paul Rudd as the Mr Knightley character).
Dear friends and readers,
Over on WWTTA we have been having a second festival of reading and writing about women’s plays and films. For over a month now we’ve been reading and writing about to one another about Wendy Wasserstein’s work and life, specifically her Uncommon Women and others andIsn’t It Romantic. A couple of us read parts of Jan Balakian’s excellently biography and study of Lee’s works, not including this later material.
Well I discovered on Netflix there were available DVDS of Uncommon Women and Others (1970s for PBS), and The Object of My Affection. I watched the first last month and The Object last night and enjoyed the latter much better than the former despite a few reservations. Just now I read an article by Mark Steyn in the Spectator (“Marriage a la Mode, Sept 1988) dissing it which I take to be deeply anti-gay (the denigrating term “hag/fag” relationship gives this way) and apparently ignorant about the flexibility of sexuality. Steyn felt sorry for poor Jennifer Aniston (Nina), did he? She didn’t have a “proper male” (like himself?). She was much better off.
So partly to show why and how Nina’s better off and remains with George Hanson (Paul Rudd) walking and talking with him as the movie fades from view, partly to defend the film, however qualifiedly; and to record the good time and a few thoughts about Wasserstein we’ve had on WWTTA this past month I’m writing this blog.
The Object of My Affection is not short and I was surprised to find it was after 1:30 am when I was finished and I had stayed up! Not fallen asleep. I did very much enjoy the several dance sequences, long, short, and reprises of them (as montage, with blurring focus and some minor key music) at the end.
Our main hero, George (Rudd) and our heroine, Nina (Jennifer Aniston) who are living together decide to take dancing lessons together on Friday nights. Couples do this. One graces the opening of this blog. Nina’s scarf, flowing dress and slightly old-fashioned pumps, George’s his tie, white shirt and general elegance, plus the the swing and sweep of their motions might alert you to guess they are dancing a Ginger Rogers’ Fred Astaire sequence from which they deliberately fall.
More often they imitated Gene Kelly, and once there is some sudden (improbable not realistic but we leave realism) tap dancing.
Here they are dressed in the modern tap dancing way. Nina is now in short-skirted polka-dot dress, and George has on relaxed short-sleeved jersey and chino jeans.
At the close of the movie, they dance again and there is interwoven stills from Singing in the Rain.. One of Kelly with Debbie Reynolds in “I was meant for you, you were meant for me”
is sandwiched in between a dream-montage sequence where her pebbled silk 1920s kind of dress matches his suit:
As in “Isn’t it romantic,” “I was meant for you, you were meant for me” is the ironic recurring thematic music of the film. In the earlier play, Wasserstein alludes to the Rogers and Hart song which was part of a sequence from Love Me Tonight The suavity and charm of Maurice Chevalier’s rendition on the Net is more than a little undercut by these typical lyrics (there are different versions of this song):
Isn’t it romantic?
Soon I will have found some girl that I adore.
Isn’t it romantic?
While I sit around my love can scrub the floor.
She’ll kiss me every hour or she’ll get the sack
and when I take a shower she can scrub my back.
Isn’t it romantic?
On a moonlight night she’ll cook me onion soup.
Kiddies are romantic
and if we don’t fight we soon will have a troupe.
We’ll help the population,
it’s a duty that we owe to dear old France.
Isn’t it romance?
Wasserstein’s doing the same thing again: an ironic reference to an iconic song from a famous movie (Singing in the Rain). One “lesson” this movie teaches is no one was meant for anyone; it’s Austen’s lesson (P&P, S&S) that first attachments are often not the best, and first impressions as bad way to pick a mate (though film versions reverse her theme and have characers regularly falling in love with the person they were “meant” to have).
The story: girl (Nina, Jennifer Aniston) lives alone, takes in as a roommate a gay young man (George, Paul Rudd). George’s ruthless homosexual partner, Steve (Gabriel Macht), who uses people casually in other ways too, wants to get rid of him.George teaches Kindergarten. This is not exactly admirable heroic stuff for a male. Nina’s lover, Vince (John Pankow) is jealous, Nina becomes pregnant by Vince, and decides to have the baby.
Here’s my first quarrel with the film: it’s de rigeur for films to have an unwed girl decide to have the baby when in fact statistics repeatedly show that even after all the propanda, obstacles and pseudo-science most girls chose abortion when young, unmarried, early in their career, plus the word “abortion” is never used.
What has happened is Nina has learned to love George; he’s kind and good and she thinks he would make an excellent father for her baby. She loves how he leaves her room and space and doesn’t not at all try to dominate her.
Vince (the biological father) attempting to assert his “rights” over Nina
She wants George to be there all the time, to become the baby’s father from bringing it up, and as the movie progresses it becomes obvious she also would like to get him to go to bed with her, and marry her.
The film assumes the viewer has a sufficient knowledge of real sexuality to know it’s flexible, and there are two scenes where George almost does begin to have sex with Nina. In the first instance there’s a comic interruption; in the second, he has already become involved with Paul, and the truth is he does prefer men to women and so prefers Paul to Nina. He likes living with Nina; they enjoy one another’s company, reading together, watching TV together, eating the same things:
It is important that George is a gay male: he is presented (implicitly, this is not made explicit lest it make viewers nervous I suppose) as more willing to talk, more willing to open up and confide and comfort. A trope common to many romantic comedies is the couple talking on the park bench. I remember a touching one of two lonely grade school teachers in Clueless, the free adaptation of Emma movie where Rudd played the Mr Knightley role (and this is no coincidence — see still at the front of this blog, one of my favorites from Clueless)
Here they discuss her pregnancy and George says that Nina must tell, Vince, the coming baby’s biological father:
Back shots are seen as more romantic
A side shot
Gayness is part of the film’s subject matter (so to speak). What is emphasized goes with the film’s encompassing theme: the dangers of falling in love, how hurt you can be (thus how important it is to choose well), and what happens to gay people we see is since society does not pressure them to be faithful, they drop one another easily.
Early on in the film George’s lover-partner, dropping him shamelessly
As the film goes on a second or third couple emerges (depends on how you count the couples). Paul (played by Amo Gulinello) is not a free agent (any more than Steve was). He’s living very well while working as an actor because he’s the live-in partner of an older professor, Rodney Fraser (Nigil Hawthorne). Paul invites George into bed with him while Rodney is there and has no shame or feelings for this older man’s hurt.
Paul, a real shit; George on the phone making excuses to Nina
The older man can do nothing for Paul (we are made to feel) would leave him.
Hawthorne has the funniest lines and the most poignant.
Nigel Hawthorne as Rodney raising his glass to Nina (very pregnant) with George standing by
Hawthorne utters his lines more skilfully than anyone else and I found myself laughing most when he was witty about what they were seeing or the behavior of someone. The title of the film come from his wry description of his relationship with Paul: Paul is not his beloved, or mate, or partner, but (the ironic drawled-out tone here makes a complicated point) “the object of my affection.”
This delving into gayness is found in Wasserstein’s plays, especially the best known, Heidi’s Chronicles. Very Wasserstein is Nina’s choice to have her baby and end up a single mother. When it becomes apparent that George is going to bed with Paul and in their shared flat and she is to take this kind of thing as a norm, she says she can’t take it and wants George to move out. She still doesn’t want to live with or marry Vince.
There are some typical kinds of jokes or targets for jokes one finds in Jewish New York stories and plays (except here the Jewishness has been partly erased by keeping the names neutral and not bringing up any particular culture or ethnic group). Nina has this superambitious networking sister and brother-in-law (Dr Roger Jolly, Alan Aiken) who we are asked to feel a certain distaste for over their superficiality and commercial socializing — meanwhile everything in the film endorses networking, wealth, social life of conformities of various sorts.
The film has real flaws. The worst is the tacked on meretricious happy ending. After an effective because tense Thanksgiving dinner made by Nina for George, Paul, and Rodney (where Rodney does lecture her on the problems of being with a gay man), George and Vince begin to accompany Nina to the obstetrician and Paul and Rodney are seen going out with them. All four are now seen to be happy, reconciled.
Fast forward five years later and George is again putting on a play with his kindergarten (that’s how the movie opens) only now it has Molly, Nina’s five year old daughter there. All are blissful with love for this child, cherishing her (including the commercial couple) and she is just so sweet. Nina is not a single mom after all; she has begun to live with he nice African-American male who as a cab driver befriended her.
When an ending is tacked on — a sudden gush of a wedding — like this it usually means the studio insisted. But not always.
Not very Wasserstein was how impersonal it felt. The situations are uncommon and forced — which is not at all the way of her three plays we read on WWTTA. All three of these had a cyclical structure. This was a forward moving though one could say the story is the story of Nina’s pregnancy for the move becomes hinged when she announces the pregnancy and conflicts come from that and it (in effect) ends on her going to hospital. The film reveals what happens when material is made commercial and to reach more people by turning it bland, smoothing over, disguising what gave the material the interest it had in the first place.
Do I think it more than amusing and advocating decent values and kindness? Yes, because of the gay characters, Nina’s pregnancy out of wedlock, and refusal to marry. It’s not what it could or should have been: when George comforts Nina after telling her that he loves Paul and prefers Paul and this is an inexorable reality about him, we have confronted one of its strengths:
It may seem I have spent too much time on a relatively slight comedy, but there is more here than meets the eye. Nina and Paul are decent good people who don’t betray, don’t drop, don’t sue and don’t hurt others. What’s not to like? They are last seen walking and talking as the film fades away.
Sheer ballroom dancing
I admit my favorite character was Nigel Hawthorne’s — I just loved him as Archdeacon Grantly in Barchester Towers, Madness of George III.
What Wasserstein is capable of may be seen in Wasserstein’s less commercialized plays, about which see the comments.
Ellen
Ellen And Jim Have A Blog, Two 
On Wasserstein’s _Uncommon Women and others_, I wrote:
“To me the problem with the play is no acknowledgement of ideals — or the disjunction between what succeeds in school and what succeeds in the workplace. We are left to imagine what these women’s careers are going to be like and it’s all so vague. There is in short — ironic this I suppose — too much optimism in the play, too much belief in something that remains unimagined.
It’s just not bitter enough for me. Where is any acknowledgement of what interviews are? of sexual pressure? of what jobs are? Class, ethnicity, race? if we are going to be realistic, let’s have some sense of background (which Top Girls by Caryl Churchill, though done in this wacky way has in spades) All the cant speeches by the male professors and chancellors and so on. I never believed such crap; I knew better from the get-go. I grew up in the southeast Bronx. ‘Nuff said.
I like best the satiric oppositions. Like the quotations from that awful book where there is a Lance aggressively seducing the heroine and then telling her how much she likes it. My gorge rises at that. I read such stuff when I was 13 and then stopped. “Gracious Living” makes me ill. I wouldn’t know where or how to begin. I find myself remembering a hard joke about Nell Gwynn — mistress to Charles II: she did her Important Entertaining in bed.
Jan Balakian seems to think Uncommon Women somewhat obsolete. On one level, only the details of 1950s life, the same tensions and conflicts are with us today and if remade as a movie, would speak home — only I fear that today the goals of career, of building an identity for yourself would be more muted. But on another, Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls puts this in the shade as mild indeed . . .
Linda wrote:
“What I found reassuring about the play–and I gather Ellen didn’t–was the sense I got that at the moment of truth–their eminent departure from academia–these privileged young women were just as confused and scared as anyone about to graduate from any school anywhere–perhaps more so, because they understood on some level that all the rhetoric they’d been handed the past four years was only rhetoric and had no meaningful application as they had perhaps once hoped it had.
I did not find the play that idealistic. I felt only that these women were determined to keep a stiff upper lip and make a valiant go of it. Where they’d land, they had no idea. and six years later, we see they still had no idea.
The voice of the male narrator–intoning the principles of the school is ironic in its lack or relevance for any of the issues they’re facing. In many cases it references the total opposite of what is happening in their lives.
In Scene 7 of Act I, the man’s voice says:
“Am I saying that anatomy is destiny? No, it is not destiny. Providing a setting in which these subtle constraints may be overcome is particularly the mission of a college for women.”
Meanwhile Holly is stuffing a diaphragm with orthocreme.
And “subtle constraints”??? Is he kidding. The whole patriarchal culture–with its pressure on women to perform as homemakers and mothers —is considered a subtle constraint?
The principles of the school are lofty and idealistic, but we see how they break down when one tries to put them into practice.
In Scene 6, the male narrator admonishes the young women of Mount Holyoke to examine not only their academic intersts but their idea of the good life and the kinds of communities they would like to fashion.
On the next page Leilah announces she wants to go to Iraq and study anthropology. She wants to get away from that place. Her falling out with Kate may have something to do with it, Kate is somewhat nasty to her in an underhanded milk and crackers way — .sweet on the surface, competitive at heart. At the end of the play we learn Leilah did go to Iraq, married an Iraqui journalist and converted to Moslem. She didn’t return for the reunion.
There is always underneath all their conversations somewhat of an obsession with men and sex–and then the return to more normal issues about their futures and
possible careers. Back and forth they go.
I found a very handy short essay in a book called Understanding Modern Plays by Milly Barranger (Allyn and Bacon, 1990) who gives a nice summary of the history of women as playwrights in a chapter called, Understanding Feminist Drama.” I wish I could reproduce it here.
She begins with Hrosviltha of Gandersheim ( a mid-10th Century nun) and Aphra Behn (17th Century) and proceeds to Anna Cora Mowatt in the 19th century. For late 19th C-early 20th C, she lists Ann Nichols, Rachel Crothers, Zoe Atkins, Susan Glaspell, Sophie Treadwell, Gertrude Stein and Lillian Hellman, giving particular attention to the last two.
She then discusses the playwrights of the 1970’s and 80’s coming out of the woman’s movement. She talks briefly of radical feminism, lesbian feminism and materialist feminism, defining each.
She talks of conscious raising of women as being a primary objective of the movement of the 70’s and also the feminist plays that followed. She tells us that in the new feminist drama, women emerged as subjects rather than objects. She lists Simone Benmussa, Helene Cixous, Caryl Churchill, Pam Gems, Adrienne Kennedy and Maria Irene Fornes as representative writers. She also mentions Marsha Norman and Wendy Wasserman very briefly.
She includes in her volume the whole text of Conduct of Life by Fornes, implying it is very representative of feminist drama.
I found one paragraph by Barranger very pertinent.
“Evolving new forms, feminist writers rejected a linear, forward-moving action in favor of contiguity, or a series of scenes of continuous connection. Drama’s forms in feminist writing abandon hierarchal organizing principles of traditional playwriting which proceed from complication to climax to resolution. Feminists argue that this type of plot organization is tied to the male experience; that is, it is phallocentric. Women’s experiences, they argue, are rather disjoiinted, broken, and disconnected without clear lines of development.”
She goes on to say:
“One basic argument for a recurrent line of dramatic action is that women’s lives are in themselves fragmented; their experience of time and relationships is one of constant interruption.”
I think this distinctly applies to Uncommon Women and Others.
Linda”
From Fran: “Isn’t it romantic”
In answer to Ellen’s question first of all, I do think that Wasserstein was consciously instrumentalising this song and all the echoes and baggage it brings with it.
Second, while I can well see why Linda might take issue with the NYT’s pointing up the mother/daughter relationship between Janie and Tasha above all the other
equally important-seeming relationships and conflicts in the play, I have to admit I thought that one, and by extension the one with Janie’s father Simon, perhaps the most personal to Wasserstein, echoing as it seems to do her own family experiences in some ways.
Even before I started the play proper my attention had been caught by its dedication:
‘André and Gerry made it possible for me to dedicate this play to my parents’
I presume André is André Bishop the man who commissioned the play and Gerry possibly Gerry Gutierrez, the one who directed the 1984 version. The dedication
seems to suggest that the act of writing the play and working it up for performance with these men had helped her to come to terms with and get beyond certain outstanding issues with her own mother/parents.
Penny is in a much better position to say how true this is, but the Jewish background, the fact that Wasserstein’s own mother was an enthusiastic hobby dancer and that Wasserstein is down as saying that her parents only let her go to Yale because they thought she’d meet and marry an eligible lawyer not only suggests certain parallels, but a similar disappointment of and conflict with parental expectations.
A little quick research has also shown that there is an autobiographical source for Janie’s sense of betrayal at Harriet’s decision to opt for a sudden, conventional marriage rather than sticking to the ideals she had evidently only paid lip service to – Wasserstein is on record as saying that it was it was fueled by the bitterness and betrayal she had felt when a close friend did exactly the same thing when she was in her 20s.
One aspect that has come out in both plays I’ve read so far and which was also a strong element in that cycle of feminist plays we did before is just this same
lack of real solidarity between women themselves.
Fran”
ON Heidi’s Chronicles:
“As I wrote about 7 hours ago, I enjoyed this play, and it cheered me — probably precisely for those reasons Balakian says some feminist critics have been adverse to it: it’s disillusioned, melancholy, and includes post-feminist options — like adopting a child, which now in retrospective is autobiographical since Wasserstein had herself artificially inseminated (I suppose) and took some heavy medications to make a childbirth in her later 40s possible.
Its strength lies in the central character of Heidi and the use of her as a dominating presence in the play. In Uncommon Women, Kate is interesting but only one voice among many; Isn’t it romantic has the same plurality dispersion of energies, but having Heidi remain with us, on stage, going into her character over the years, its facet and changes suddenly gathers all the strengths of Wasserstein’s typically cyclical presentation (and I agree that this is a feminine/woman’s structuring) together in one. She is at once a conventionally successful woman and in her thoughts and private ideas subversive of many of the norms of her society: we learn we cannot both live the conventional wife/mother life and have a successful career, and to do versions of either takes subterfuges and a living with hypocrisies (as Meryl Streep pointed out in her speech to Barnard).
I can’t better or even sum up the variousness of contexts Balakian puts this play in: since it does take places as a series of scenes in a life (resembling come to think of it Hughes’s Miss Austen Regret), each scene then epitomizes some moment in our culture.
We see the disappointment and failures of the feminist movement from the get-go, and why such social idealism as it’s based on in a sense is doomed to fail unless society be transformed. The point of view reminded me of Lilian Robinson and Ellen Willis (Balakian quotes her). Wasserstein is not going to be fooled into accepting feminism as a instrument for giving individual women power in the present structure on its own sexist terms which keep in place “ravening competitiveness, adapting women to the worst qualities of men” (Balakian p 98).
Two men, Scoop, the ultimate male yuppie, unfaithful to the wife who finally leaves him reminds me of one of the two male characters in Isn’t It romantic. Another thing hat made this play likable for me was the central use of a gay male character, Peter.
I liked the humor: here she makes fun of all this name dropping,school name dropping but she also shows this elite world with its enclosed coteries.
As someone who loves women artists and has written so much over the years about trying to put art into circulation to be understood, and praised when it’s by someone with a girl’s first name I got a kick out of the jokes.
I’d love to see it. Her plays probably play much better than they read. I think I could assign this to students and they would understand it if they could visualize it. Churchill’s Top Girls is much more readable, but her presentation of the issues (much more complexly done than Wasserstein) and determined show of defeat would not be understood or sympathized with if understood.
I’ll leave it at that until someone has read the play and wants to respond — or if you can find another good critical analysis 🙂
Ellen”
More on Heidi’s Chronicles:
“Fran:
I still can’t be absolutely sure that ‘Gerry’ actually was Gerald Gutierrez, but I did come across a nice story Wasserstein told of their personal and professional relationship when honouring him after his far too early death:
“Gerry and I had a great deal in common — he grew up in Brooklyn and so did I — so when he directed my play ”Isn’t It Romantic” in 1984, we became extremely close friends. One time when we went to a wedding or a bar mitzvah together, my Aunt Florence said to me, ”Is he more than a director to you?” From then on, Gerry would sign notes to
me ”More Than a Director” or just ”MTD.” He also became close to my sister Sandra. He used to say that the two of them were people who had opinions. He wanted to do a talk show with her called ”Opinions Are
Us.”
Gerry had no interest in anything that didn’t stem from emotional truth. When there were jokes that he thought were not integral to a
character, he would tell me I was spritzing the stage with them. I had to cut them. There was a piece of dialogue in ”Isn’t It Romantic” where somebody tells Janie [the heroine], ”You’re clutching your purse,” and she says, ”I have valuables.” Gerry said, ”You know what, just cut it.” So I cut it.
About four years later, I put it in ”The Heidi Chronicles.” On opening night, that line was said, and I heard a howl of laughter in the
audience. Gerry came up to me afterward: ”That’s a lovely play, but you’re spritzing the stage with your valuables.”
Fran”
Linda directed us to excellent essay on Heidi’s Chronicles:
“http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3687/is_200801/ai_n27901175/?tag=rel.res1”
“Rediscovering Female Voice and Authority: The Revival of Female Artists in Wendy Wasserstein’s The Heidi Chronicles
Frontiers, 2008 by Barko, Cortney Cronberg”
The opening paragraph:
“The existing body of criticism on Wendy Wasserstein’s play The Heidi Chronicles largely ignores the significance of the female artists and paintings Heidi Holland names in the prologues that begin both acts of the play. Likewise, critics only briefly address Heidi s profession as an art historian, giving little thought to the meaning of her career choice. Recent feminist interpretations of Wasserstein’s play dismiss the significance of Heidi’s profession as an art historian because, as critics say, her profession and intellectual achievements “are of minor importance and have little or no effect on her or anyone else’s life.”1 Jan Balakian sees Heidi’s profession as typifying the traditional woman, “detached from the action but informed about it,”2 and Charlotte Canning interprets Heidi’s tone during her art lectures as “not very respectful,” trivializing “the historical differences between the paintings and the current moment.”3 Many feminist critics look unfavorably upon Heidi’s character in general; Helene Keyssar sees Heidi as a “self-pitying” woman, silenced by voices of men,4 and many critics accuse Heidi of “selling out” by adopting a baby at the end of the play. These negative portrayals of Heidi’s profession result from critics ignoring the remarkable creativity, agency, and passion that artists exhibit through their work. In The Heidi Chronicles, the female artists Heidi incorporates into her lectures produce paintings that preserve the artists’ identities, creative visions, and skill. Heidi informs her class of the marginalization of female artists and uses her position as an art historian and instructor to bring the past into the present, reviving female artists who symbolize women’s constant struggle for recognition and inclusion. A close analysis of the female artists and paintings that Heidi incorporates into her lectures reveals that the female artists named in The Heidi Chronicles serve as representations of women finding their own voices and authority within themselves through the creative outlet of painting . . .
E.M.
Perhaps I should emphasize a bit more what I say in passing in the blog: This movie comes out of, exemplifies the movie genre that genre Austen’s novels (especially Pride and Prejudice and Emma) are often turned into when they are made into feature films: the romantic comedy, sometimes more than a little screwball. It’s no coincidence that the actor who played the hero in this play, Paul Rudd, was the Mr Knightley character in Clueless. The still of the couple on the park bench are the Miss Taylor (“poor Miss Taylor”) and Mr Weston characters in Emma.
Two of its themes are Austenian: don’t trust or believe in first impressions a criteria for love relationships and the idea that “You were meant for me, I was meant for you” is nonsense. This is theme song of this comedy – which contains much dancing (also a mark of an Austen film) where hero and heroine dance like Astaire and Rogers or Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds.
ellen
ON the article by Mark Steyn, from Linda: “Yes, I thought the article was anti-gay as well. The author talks about someone
“queening it up”, which sounded very politically incorrect. I hesitated to send the review.
Later, I remembered the Spectator (or American Spectator, if it is the same journal I’m thinking of) is a conservative, right wing sort of publication–but even so, it was harsh toward gays.
Linda”
From Penny:
“I am enjoying the Wasserstein read and the Balakian book [Reading the Plays of Wendy Wasserstein] is a jewel, thank you for bringing it to our attention. It is hard to remember without her what the era was like for the time of each play.”
From Linda:
“Ellen,
Very good blog on Object of Your Affection. I put it on my list.
I’d mention here, too, that the song from the title has, like Isn’t it Romantic, a very catchy tune–the kind that goes over and over in your head at odd times. The melody is indelibly printed in my brain from days of yore:
“The object of my affection is to turn your complexion from (blank) to rosy red…”
Here are the lyrics I remember as recorded by Dean Martin, probably in the 1950’s–I could not find the year. I believe the movie title is a takeoff from this song. It was very popular in my childhood, very romantic.
(The catchy part of the tune is the first two lines.)
The object of my affection can change my complexion from white to rosy red
Anytime she holds my hand, tells me that she’s mine
There are many girls who can thrill me and some who can fill me with
dreams of happiness
But I know I’ll never rest until she says she’s mine
I’m not afraid she’ll leave me cause she’s not the kind who’ll be unfair
But instead I trust her implicitly
She can go where she wants and go do what she wants, I don’t care
The object of my affection can change my complexion from white to rosy red
Anytime she holds my hand and tells me that she’s mine
There are many girls who can thrill me and some who can fill me with
dreams of happiness
But I know I’ll never rest until she says she’s mine
I’m not afraid she’ll leave me cause she’s not the kind who’ll be unfair
But instead I trust her implicitly
She can go where she wants and go do what she wants, I don’t care
The object of my affection can change my complexion from white to rosy red
Anytime she holds my hand and tells me that she’s mine
Linda”
I want to thank Linda for remembering (!) and typing out the lyrics to the central song of the movie. It’s certainly a tuneful movie — musical as well as gay (pun) romantic comedy. As with “Isn’t It Romantic” the phrase meant nothing to me beyond Nigel Hawthorne’s ironical wry description of his relationship with Paul: Paul is not his beloved, or mate, or partner, but (the ironic drawled-out tone here makes a complicated point) “the object of my affection.”
I was certainly alive in the 1950s and do remember some of the movies (mostly Lily, a sad early 1950s movie, with the refrain, “The song of love is a sad song, hi lily hi lily hi lo). The lyrics say the “object of [his, natch] affections can go where she wants and do what she wants. The movie suggests that is not humanly possible, and people who do this to one another are cruel (i.e., Paul), and George phones Nina even if it’s to lie.
It’s a meaningful song and in context ironical.
Why I don’t remember more of these songs I don’t know. My mother didn’t go much to the movies, and my father would not respond to this kind of thing at all. So for me to respond I had to be older and seeing things by myself.
Ellen
While I very much liked the essay on Heidi as art historian and how her lectures fit into the themes of the play, I have to say I didn’t much care for the choice of painting.
My response is we’ve gone on from here, Wendy. Wasserstein’s choices are dated; she shows a lack of knowledge of women’s paintings — perhaps this should cheer us, as when I look at a number of my survey books they come from the 1990s (except for the inimitable Germaine Greer so Wasserstein has less excuse as she could have gone there for her choices).
Just compare the choices Heidi discusses with some of the images in our albums on WWTTA.
For the 19th century ablum I’ve put in and now compare,
Llia Martin Spencer’s We Both Must Fade
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/WomenwritersThroughTheAges/photos/album/1859227777/pic/1777227109/view?picmode=&mode=tn&order=ordinal&start=81&count=20&dir=asc
The above makes me cringe. She’s awful.
Cabot Perry:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/WomenwritersThroughTheAges/photos/album/1859227777/pic/1520724608/view?picmode=&mode=tn&order=ordinal&start=81&count=20&dir=asc
Not much better. This one can be read as at least showing a depressed woman I suppose, but it call attention to this depression in the way say of Gwen Johns, but rather pretties it up.
Anguissola and Peeters are safe. Compare them to Gentileschi in our album for 16th to 17th century women paintings:
anguissola and her sisters playing chess
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/WomenwritersThroughTheAges/photos/album/2065527367/pic/1514936831/view?picmode=&mode=tn&order=ordinal&start=1&count=20&dir=asc
Peeter’s Cheese period:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/WomenwritersThroughTheAges/photos/album/2065527367/pic/257070982/view?picmode=&mode=tn&order=ordinal&start=1&count=20&dir=asc
I fear Benoist’s image is known because it is a black woman slave and she’s partly naked:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/WomenwritersThroughTheAges/photos/album/1444801289/pic/1232826004/view?picmode=&mode=tn&order=ordinal&start=1&count=20&dir=asc
I am wary of putting it up lest we be categorized as “adult” again.
And now look at the 20th century album and then:
Stettheimer’s Picnic
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/WomenwritersThroughTheAges/photos/album/1620967743/pic/771565059/view?picmode=&mode=tn&order=ordinal&start=61&count=20&dir=asc
The stick figures are a kind of coding for shrinking figures.
There is so much more beauty, daring, interest. And especially the “We Must Fade” except as a piece of unconscious self-hatred, shrinking the self.
Ellen
I finally got to watch last night The Object of My Affection, starring Paul Rudd and Jenifer Aniston. Despite the screenplay being written by Wendy Wasserstein, whom I admire–I found the film to be just plain awful. At best annoying.
First off, I thought Aniston was wrong for this role. Although generally I like her as an actress, in this film she was just too cutesy, too stylized. It detracted from the progression of the plot. She had an ethnic name–Borowski–but she was anything but ethnic. I suppose it was meant to emphasize how authentic and real she was in contrast to the glittering world of her sister’s family.
The response from other characters–the regular folk–to George’s gayness and the emphasis on it–was just plain crude. If it was meant to be humorous, it fell flat.
The first half of the film seemed to have no focus–it just meandered around–no conflicts, no solutions. Yes, this hetero girl and gay man share a flat and have a nice relationship. They take tango lessons and watch tv. They are warm to and accepting of one another, but the relationship doesn’t really develop.
Why Nina rejects Vince, former boyfriend and father of her unborn child, and latches onto George is never made clear. That she is very needy is clear. Why she couldn’t forsee that George could never meet her emotional needs is a mystery. She clings to George, but he doesn’t cling back.
If the focus had been on Nina’s dilemma, her plan to be an unwed mother, rather than on this non-relationship, it might have been a more interesting film. The film does pick up in the last third when George meets Paul and a few real sparks are ignited. Paul’s former lover, an older man, forms a kinship with Nina. It is a quote by him that picks up the film’s title–
“When the object of your affection returns your affection with less enthusiasm than you’d hoped for…” or words to that effect. Unrequited love becomes a new theme for a while.
Nina is rescued by a policeman named Louis who drives her home one night when her purse is stolen. He is a sympathetic fellow and there is a connection between them. One hopes Nina would pursue it, but he drops out of a sight except for a chance meeting in the park one day. At the end he suddenly emerges as her new livein partner.
The ending did seem rather abrupt. Nina announces to George after the birth of her daughter that he must move out. How she emerged from her veil of illusions is not clearly shown. When exactly did she stop deluding herself?
There were some group scenes with the sister’s family and the children’s play productions that had a warm, energetic quality–but on the whole I’d say the film was a dud.
Linda
I guess we have to agree to differ here: I enjoyed the movie — not as much as The Wedding Banquet, also a screwball comedy based on gayness (Ang Lee, James Schamus, the writer and producer), but enough and there was much less to be offended by than The Kids Are All Right, much less cruelty, class bias, false cheer. See
Ellen
For me “The Object of My Affection” was not an Anniston film, but a Paul Rudd one. Rudd played Mr Knightley in the Clueless film and I’m a real Mr Knightley lover — I like to imagine him combined with Henry Tilney as the perfect male companion for life. I also loved Nigel Hawthorne, an inimitable Archbishop Grantley in the 1984 Barchester Chronicles; I still hear his retort to Mr Harding when Mr Harding refused the beautifully-paid and housed sinecure on the grounds it was 1) a corrupt patronage offering; and 2) he didn’t think he could fulfill the duties.
What Duties? thundered Hawthorne.
I also loved the dancing and music — so Wasserstein won me over by the music that I was at first tone-deaf to in her plays.
Finally for me the theme that counted was the danger of entanglement, of any falling in love, its risks outweighing any benefits. I ignored the ending as Lean tells us to.
I was far more offended or irritated by The Kids are All Right. As someone on the blog comments points out what an upper class snobbish fantasy this was.
No one in Object of My Affection as the big income, fancy car and ease with paying private college educations.
Also the happy ending was central to The Kids are All right, not tacked on.
Ellen
interested in the art in the heidi chronicles