Films you see differently as an adult...

[LoveShitJokes]

I presume this has been done before but fuck it, it's Saturday night and I'm bored. So I'll start...

Mrs Doubtfire. As a child I saw Miranda as a boring, stuck up cow. As an adult I see her as a successful, independent woman exasperated with her man child husband who gives me The Ultimate Ick. And then some. I'm gobsmacked she ever married him. Stuart was a capable, equal partner not the villain I once thought him to be. Anyone else?

With regard to Sandy changing. I always saw it differently. I was of the opinion that the Sandy with the red lipstick and tight pants was the ‘real’ Sandy who was exploring her sexuality after having been repressed.
However, if we examine the film as a whole, it does appear that the women were the victims of misogyny . The slut shaming of Rizzo stands out as a prime example of this .

Has anyone mentioned "Overboard" with Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell yet?

She's a spoiled, demanding "rich bitch" and he's the widowed carpenter who is working on her yacht. She falls overboard, loses her memory, and he claims she is his wife and she ends up run ragged looking after all of his feral kids? (All boys).

When the truth comes out and she is (of course) in love with him (and pregnant), and she gets all of her wealth back, he says what can he give her now and she says "A little girl" (Aaaaaaaaaw! - not!). Really enjoyed it umpteen decade ago, but really, it was appalling.

I can't remember any films. Before or after. 🙀

Hmmm, well we might have to agree to disagree. I studied Jane Eyre at A Level and at university. It's definitely inferred that Bertha is too emotional/passionate for a 'respectable' woman, her moods compared to 'the blood red moon' (I think?) with the moon symbolising fertility/lust etc. Interestingly, in 'Wide Sargasso Sea' by Jean Rhys she also touches on Bertha's strong sexuality. Rochester mentions that he's startled how often Bertha dies when in bed with him (orgasm was often called 'le petit mort' or 'little death' in literature).

The reason Rochester didn't have Bertha committed to an asylum is because he wanted her kept totally secret, so he could pretend to have never married. It would have been too risky to leave her in asylum.

Wide sargasso Sea is not Jane Eyre. It is another author taking someone elses character to tell their own story with their own interpretation, which is all very well but it isnt the original text.

There was a generation of university literature analysis that had a tendency to interpretation text based on current politics whilst blithly ignoring what is actually in the text:

"My bride’s mother I had never seen: I understood she was dead. The honeymoon over, I learned my mistake; she was only mad, and shut up in a lunatic asylum. There was a younger brother, too – a complete dumb idiot. The elder one, whom you have seen (and whom I cannot hate, whilst I abhor all his kindred, because he has some grains of affection in his feeble mind, shown in the continued interest he takes in his wretched sister, and also in a dog-like attachment he once bore me), will probably be in the same state one day."

Unless we are going to suggest the men are also only mad because they don't fit into conventional ideas of female sensuality....

And no it would have been very easy to lock Mrs Rochester in an asylum, you only have to look at Sir Percival Glyde's treatment of Laura in woman in white.

very much agree to disagree.

The grinch… poor guy was misunderstood and ostracised from society for it

pretty baby with Brooke shields she was exploited by her cow of a mother

”Bertha Mason, the true daughter of an infamous mother, dragged me through all the hideous and degrading agonies which must attend a man bound to a wife at once intemperate and unchaste“ [https://victorianweb.org/authors/bronte/cbronte/janeeyre/27.html]

Thank you. I think that's the line I was probably thinking of? I knew that 'unchaste' featured somewhere. Ironic that Rochester was horrified by Bertha's intemperate and unchaste behaviour, but he was perfectly happy for his several mistresses to be unchaste and presumably a tad intemperate?

Perhaps that indicates something more than just female sexuality and therefore the difference between sane and mad.

Quite possibly. As I remember, much of Bertha's story is the fact she is different, strange, 'other' purely because she has Creole heritage.

I'm interested in all the points about Jane Eyre! There's a famous piece of early feminist literary criticism by Gilbert and Gubar, entitled 'Plain Jane's Progress', in which Jane and Bertha are read as elements of the Freudian 'iceberg' theory: Jane being the superego and intent on living by the laws set down by society and God; Bertha being the untamed libido, or 'id'. They get very symbolic about all this, viewing Bertha's tearing of Jane's wedding veil as a symbolic loss of virginity, and in acting out the desires Jane would really like to act out herself.

Which is all very well, until we see from the text that Jane herself is an impassioned soul, and that this passion gets her into trouble many times in childhood. After the abortive wedding when Rochester turns the full power of his sexuality and passion on her to make her stay Jane wavers: she wants to accept being him on the terms he suggests, despite his attempts to deceive her: she's by no means turned off him.

It's Rochester himself who has pretty inhibited attitudes to female sexuality, despite his travelling around the continent bedding every mistress he could get. Celine Varens was too sexy, and too promiscuous, which disgusts him even though so was he. He later abhors the time he spent with his mistresses, which is the one thing sealing Jane's resolve not to follow in their footsteps and end up being an object of disgust to him. Rochester seems to be employing a peculiar form of cognitive dissonance: he wants, and is repeatedly attracted to, passionate, sexual women with a free-spirited, physically voracious appetite for sex, and by the same token he's disgusted by them and having had his satisfaction, they leave him cold. Jane's suspicions are right: when she meets him near the end of the novel he tells her 'I would have sullied my innocent flower' (ugh, UGH!) had events transpired the way he wanted them to at first, before the death of Bertha.

Du Maurier's Rebecca is pretty much a duplicate of this narrative, but here the husband is overtly disgusted by his wife's sexuality. I also love Wide Sargasso Sea and I love Jean Rhys, but Rhys is a very different type of author to Bronte, and the world she wrote in was one of unprecedented change for women.

I personally prefer Vilette, but Jane Eyre is an incredibly powerful novel, even the number of huge coincidences in the end challenged my suspension of disbelief.

PS. IMO Timothy Dalton was the best Rochester, although that wasn't necessarily the best adaptation.

Gilbert & Gubar! That's a blast from the past! I couldn't stand Rochester and found him pathetic, him and his twisted 'Madonna/Whore' obsession. I've never seen the Timothy Dalton version but can see he'd make a wonderful Rochester - all jutting chin and brooding glances.

Plus "Jack" gives an entirely erroneous picture of progeria - sufferer's from progeria don't "grow up", they grow old.

Oh, Lord.

I might just watch your version.

I have a lot of respect for JKR, and love the Strike books, but I can't get away with HP.

Also agree.

I love Tom Sharpe's books

It was the turning of her friend into a servant when her father returned that really pee'd me off when I saw the film! Especially as in the version I saw her friend was a girl of colour - I mean, just WHAT!?

Whatever skin colour her friend was, they should have been brought up as sisters

Crocodile Dundee’s unique way of determining the gender of someone certainly hasn’t aged well.

What? I thought they were brought up as sisters when he took them home!

I need to rewatch.

What was it?

He would grab their groin area.

I didn't but it was purely lack of opportunity. 😄

That's really interesting.

I never realised that I had been thinking of it on a very superficial level (in my defence `I saw it many decades ago, disliked it, and have never re-visited it). I'd never recognised the much deeper layers of meaning.

Wide Sargasso Sea, anyone?