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Holoholo%20Girl
How Movies Shaped My Expectations of Men

April 07, 2005





You’re not too smart, are you? I like that in a man.



 - Matty Walker (Kathleen Turner) in Body Heat







When I was just a wee lass, my little girlfriends and I would act out scenes from the movie Grease (1978) at every slumber party. We never tired of resuming the affected romanticism of Sandy (played by original Aussie queen Olivia Newton-John), and her persistent quest for hopelessly devoted summer lovin’. Weekend after weekend, we dozen girls would fight over who got to play Sandy. Somehow, I always ended up playing John Travolta’s Danny.



My point is that the lingering lesson of Grease on our impressionable minds was that there was really only one guy for you, but you first had to don the vinyl pants before he would lick your stilettos.



At the same time, I learned in Superman (1978) that strong, brave men who would save you from crumbling buildings and fly you through the moonlit sky in their arms were also most likely to wear tights and go limp in the presence of—now, what was it? A globally decimating natural disaster? A legion of skull-capped cannibalistic warriors? A really bad case of terminal dermatophytosis?—a pretty green rock.



M’kay.



But that led to the more “real” superhero version of men in the Indiana Jones series. And I will admit, Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) wins the title for Most Obsessively Watched Film of My Formative Years. Back then, what it taught me romantically was that a swashbuckling he-man may rescue you from an elephant-sized golf ball rolling your way in the Amazon, but he will never stick around when there’s a classroom full of blushing collegiate girls waiting back home.



And so I entered a brief vampire movie phase. I watched all the classics, from Nosferatu (1922) to Love at First Bite (1979). Finally, in The Hunger (1983), Catherine Deneuve broke the age-old vampyric formula of submissive female succumbing to blood-sucking sexual alpha male by rapturously helping herself to the ample veins of Susan Sarandon. Go, girl!  



Thus began an ardent cinematic “sexual exploration” phase, starting with the movie that brought ice cubes, cherry Jello and Vick’s cough syrup back into the bedroom—Nine 1/2 Weeks (1986). After seeing more of Zalman King’s cheesy erotic-noir films, like Two Moon Junction (1988), Wild Orchid (1990) and Red Shoe Diaries (1992), I was seduced by the soft-focus images of young, adventurous women on some sort of “journey,” haphazardly running into strange, emotionless men in the dark alleys of exotic locales. It was all the rage in the late-1980s: “sexual liberation” in lieu of romance.



But don’t get me wrong. Smutty can be intellectual, too. There were the heady indie flicks, like Dangerous Liaisons (1987), The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988), and Sex, Lies and Videotape (1989), showing men to be just as tortured and searching—and women as soulless and selfish—as their opposing gender stereotypes.



Of course, by the 1990s, this eroticism turned even darker, delving into the world of freaky fetishism. The kinky and depraved were on display in Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1990), The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1990), Boxing Helena (1992) and Crash (1996)—which is a movie that still disturbs me. But at least, in the ‘90s, men and women are on equal footing again. Albeit, voluntarily amputated footing, but even so.



More recently, the films I’ve been seeing show a far more depressing reality. Movies like Unfaithful (2002), and last year’s We Don’t Live Here Anymore, as well as Academy-nominated Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Closer, douse love and sex with complications, deceptions, betrayal, ennui, pain and suffering—and the concerted, very “real” effort it takes to hang on to some semblance of happiness.



I have to admit that I find comfort in this new cinematic reality. I could never trust the plastic perfection of the chivalrous superheroes of my youth. Mysterious bad boys are highly overrated anyway. The pressure is officially off to be “Sandy.”



Now if you’ll excuse me, I must get back to watching Casablanca (1942). MTW