(Above: the side-splittingly funny Alec Baldwin).
Of all the commentariat columnists who visit loon pond and deliver a loud, resounding squawk, Miranda the Devine is by far the ditziest and erratic.
I just love the word ditzy (some like it with an 's'): eccentric or scatterbrained. Being something of a ditz myself, it's not a condemnation so much as a description. An evocation.
And with Movie confronts last frontier of feminism, Devine does her ditzy best. The movie in question is It's Complicated. Here's the Devine's opening few pars as she waxes lyrical about the flick:
Women are lucky to have Meryl Streep on the silver screen. It's not that there aren't great-looking, vibrant, sexy 60-year-old women around us in real life. But until now, there haven't been any in movies.
There have been character actors with great bone structure but not a gorgeous leading lady with uncorrected wrinkles and sags jumping in and out of bed, with two men pursuing her, as happens to Streep in her latest movie, It's Complicated.
This is feminism's final gift to women: in 2010, as the baby boomers begin to backpedal into old age, a 60-year-old female can - shock horror! - be sexually desirable on screen. But there's a dark side to this newfound appeal.
Directed by boomer rom-com specialist Nancy Meyers, 60, It's Complicated features Jane (Streep) and Jake (side-splittingly funny Alec Baldwin) who get back together 10 years after their divorce and have a steamy affair.
Until now there haven't been any older women in movies? Before Meryl Streep in It's Complicated? Let me count the ways that stupidity can be disproven. Second thoughts, let's not bother. Why waste time on stupid, patently false generalisations, when there's so many more to come.
And let's leave aside my own view that no one is particularly lucky to view the contrived laboring method mechanics of Meryl Streep, one of the great poseurs of cinema, or the inept helming of Meyers. Instead, in the interests of balance, I've taken the liberty of snatching David Danby's thumbnail summary from The New Yorker, here:
Is Nancy Meyers (“Something’s Gotta Give”) the squarest person ever to make a movie? This new embarrassment helps make the case. Meryl Streep, reduced to giggling, fumbling, gossipy ordinariness for the first time in her career, is a wealthy divorcée with a bakery in Santa Monica and a big house in Malibu that, for some reason, isn’t big enough. She wants to build an addition with a large kitchen (even though half the movie takes place in her existing kitchen, which is large enough to yield endless meals and seat eight). She has an affair with the husband who left her ten years earlier, played by Alec Baldwin, who comes off as hyperaggressive, dull, wet, and fat. At the same time, Streep flirts with her architect, played all milquetoasty by Steve Martin. The characters are upper-middle-class people who act like TV’s lower-middle-class people. There are many scenes devoted to the extraordinary news that sixty-year-olds actually do it. The dialogue is redundant, the direction coarse and obvious. John Krasinski, mugging creatively as Streep’s prospective son-in-law, is the only one in the movie operating with professional skill.
And Danby is being kind! Trust me, you have no idea until some deviant drugs you and drags you into the cinema, and you awake to the full horror.
But then I generally take a view of Alec Baldwin, which isn't to do with his political views or his personal life so much as his acting ability, and for the way the Baldwins once threatened to become the screen cockroaches of America. There's a fair argument that Baldwin's best recent screen appearance came in Team America:
Joe: Your plan will fail! You'll never keep the world leaders distracted here for 9 hours!
Kim Jong Il: Oh no? I've got Arec Barrwin!
Joe: Dear God!
Kim Jong Il: [to Lisa] When you see Arec Barrwin, you see the true ugriness of human nature.
Kim Jong Il: [to Lisa] When you see Arec Barrwin, you see the true ugriness of human nature.
But I digress. In the usual way of desperate columnists writing by the word and the par, the Devine offers up an extensive synopsis of the movie, which we can ignore here, to arrive at this stupendous conclusion:
The irony is that, despite feminism's advances, while nice Adam is the man women say they want, Jake the rake has always been the one that they really want - the sexy, hulking bad boy with icy blue eyes and a menacing manner towards rivals.
Let me do a re-phrase: Despite feminism's advances, while there are capable intelligent women, there are also women who love to peddle stereotypes and cliches about women, and love to reduce them - in the same reductionist way they treat a sauce - to arrive at stunningly simplistic outcomes and conclusions.
Some feminists argue that these are Maggi sauce people, some conclude such thinking can only come from women who think Alec Baldwin is sexy:
In the same way that men are hardwired to lust after a young pair of ovaries, women are instinctively drawn towards alphas.
And when Jake falls for Jane again, you can almost hear the rejoicing of all the divorcees who were thrown over for sports models.
It's revenge fantasy for the First Wives Club, as Agness's hauteur towards the ex-wife turns to the wounded realisation that Jake still loves the old bag.
But art often presages reality.
As the baby boomers age, the world continues to revolve around them, paving the path for those behind. They will continue to break taboos, smash glass ceilings and shatter old stereotypes - those that are left, that is. Age is the last frontier.
Feminism has lately been preoccupied with such trivial pursuits as trying to convince the world that fat is good, with magazines making tokenistic efforts to embrace "plus-size" models who pose naked with a little stomach paunch dangling down.
Lard seems to have become a populist cause for feminism, but not age, which renders women invisible.
As they have grown older, even the feistiest feminists have grown quieter. Old ladies are still marginalised as appendages of their husbands and old widows disappear from sight. No one wants to know.
So women hurtling into old age do their best to pretend they're not. The revolution of Botox is to women what Viagra is to men, which shows you where the priorities of each sex lie - one to look good to have sex and one to have good sex. Sixty is the new 40.
The sight of older women with younger men barely raises an eyebrow. It's the age of the cougar, from Jackie Collins and Ivana Trump to Kim Cattrall and Demi Moore.
But the dark side of emancipation from ageism is that women have more scope to get up to the sort of mischief and wreak the emotional damage that was once the province of men. Hello Mrs Robinson.
Marriage may take even more of a battering as women are tempted to go after young trophy men to affirm their enduring desirability.
If there's one thing Meyers achieves in her film, it's the palpable sense of divorce's needless toll. Jane and Jake's adult daughter, Gabby, admits: "I am very damaged from the divorce."
And then there is the longing and regret that is in Jake's eyes when he sees Jane and their three grown-up children gathered around her table for a convivial family meal.
It may only be fair that men get a taste of their own medicine, but the establishment of a bitter First Husbands Club is not exactly a step forward for humanity.
(Below: not just a banner, but a splash for It's Complicated on the AWW site in this screen cap. Luckily you get recipes instead of Miranda the Devine, and Magda's valiant battle to stay thin, which must mean she's one of those bloody feminists obsessed with body image).
In the same way that men are hardwired to lust after a young pair of ovaries, women are instinctively drawn towards alphas.
The alpha that married Kim Basinger? If that's alpha, give me omega.
Well if nothing else, the Devine conclusively proves that hearing the word 'feminism' spit out from her keyboard is a guarantee that it will be at the level of thinking of a Hollywood romcom anxious to surf the zeitgeist in whatever feeble bodyboard way it can manage:
And when Jake falls for Jane again, you can almost hear the rejoicing of all the divorcees who were thrown over for sports models.
It's revenge fantasy for the First Wives Club, as Agness's hauteur towards the ex-wife turns to the wounded realisation that Jake still loves the old bag.
Wow, I don't know what personal fantasy life the Devine is living, but it's a good one. The only mistake is to think that something that presses personal buttons is somehow generally true and real. Sigh, press that Devine button again, here come the generalisations:
But art often presages reality.
As the baby boomers age, the world continues to revolve around them, paving the path for those behind. They will continue to break taboos, smash glass ceilings and shatter old stereotypes - those that are left, that is. Age is the last frontier.
Oh enough with the fucking baby boomers and their trail blazing ways already. What about the flappers in the twenties? What about the Victorians and their ways? What about Queen Victoria and John Brown? Sure there was only a seven year age gap, but he was a bloody outdoor servant.
And what about the sweet young things going around right now doing their own thing? I'm so over speculation about the bloody baby boomers. Age is the last frontier? You mean we can forget about space, or the deepest parts of the ocean, or the innermost truths of the psyche?
Thank the lord that after age comes death, the final frontier.
Feminism has lately been preoccupied with such trivial pursuits as trying to convince the world that fat is good, with magazines making tokenistic efforts to embrace "plus-size" models who pose naked with a little stomach paunch dangling down.
Can I amend that a little? Dumb commentariat columnists eager to row their own boat into trivial criticism think that lately feminism has been preoccupied with trivial pursuits, largely because not being feminists, in fact actively disliking feminists and their ilk, they'll do anything they can to misrepresent, distort, and malign the term 'feminism'.
Next week, the Devine writes a scathing column about models and a morbidly thin obsessed industry, and teenagers with eating disorders and body image dissatisfaction, and the terrible way that some models and teenagers suffering from anoorexia bulimia kill themselves? Forget it Jake, it's Devine town.
Lard seems to have become a populist cause for feminism, but not age, which renders women invisible.
Only if you don't actually bother to read feminist discourse. Why not trot over to this review of Feminism, Aging and the Life Course Perspective? Or simply do a google. Dozens more examples abound. You might even stumble on an older women's network, or more.
It's not age which renders women and in particular feminists invisible in the main stream media, it's the likes of Miranda the Devine hogging the spotlight.
As they have grown older, even the feistiest feminists have grown quieter. Old ladies are still marginalised as appendages of their husbands and old widows disappear from sight. No one wants to know.
Tell that to Germaine Greer. And I guess Miranda the Devine overlooked or ignored Grumpy Old Women because it ran on that hotbed of socialist leftie librarian thinking, the ABC.
So women hurtling into old age do their best to pretend they're not. The revolution of Botox is to women what Viagra is to men, which shows you where the priorities of each sex lie - one to look good to have sex and one to have good sex. Sixty is the new 40.
The sight of older women with younger men barely raises an eyebrow. It's the age of the cougar, from Jackie Collins and Ivana Trump to Kim Cattrall and Demi Moore.
Speak for yourself dearie, sweet lord speak only for yourself. If you haven't learnt that the idea of having sex is to have good sex by the time you've turned forty, man or woman, you must either be a Catholic, a puritan, a religious zealot, or a Miranda the Devine in search of a misguided silly bon mot.
Oh god, bring me a New Idea. I feel like a fresher and deeper insight. Steady, cancel that, The Australian Women's Weekly should do the trick, and amazingly it had a banner ad for It's Complicated on it when I clicked through. Is that eerie or what? Still New Idea did have a great story I Breastfeed My Dad.
Sorry, deep breath, back to the dismal text at hand:
But the dark side of emancipation from ageism is that women have more scope to get up to the sort of mischief and wreak the emotional damage that was once the province of men. Hello Mrs Robinson.
Uh huh. The dark side of emancipation? Always with the dark side. Women being equal to men, such a dark side. And say hello to The Graduate, a movie made in 1967, and featuring Anne Bancroft, a woman born in 1931, as the cougar. Lordy, you mean the baby boomers didn't come up with the idea? Hello dumb double play with words, and the new Irish Mrs Robinson, which merely suggests that the Devine is badly in need of a read of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and in particular the five times married Wife of Bath's tale. Even if it was written in medieval English times.
Never mind, here's the final simplistic analysis:
Marriage may take even more of a battering as women are tempted to go after young trophy men to affirm their enduring desirability.
If there's one thing Meyers achieves in her film, it's the palpable sense of divorce's needless toll. Jane and Jake's adult daughter, Gabby, admits: "I am very damaged from the divorce."
And then there is the longing and regret that is in Jake's eyes when he sees Jane and their three grown-up children gathered around her table for a convivial family meal.
It may only be fair that men get a taste of their own medicine, but the establishment of a bitter First Husbands Club is not exactly a step forward for humanity.
For fuck's sake, it's just a third rate American romcom, not Havelock Ellis or even Alex Comfort (who apart from writing The Joy of Sex, also spent years popularizing gerontology) - I sat through it squirming and writhing and sensing the brain cells draining away, yearning for the deep intelligence of Sandra Bullock and wondering if it would ever end. Whatever it was, it wasn't a deep sociological, cultural, social or sexual analysis of sex, love, life and divorce amongst the older set.
Well we've been blessed by the Devine doing over Avatar, and now It's Complicated, and for the love of the lord, can she just be constrained to doing over Sydney streets or Australian politics, because when she tackles movies and feminism, she sounds like a dribbling idiot. And that's not exactly a step forward for humanity.
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