[On October 15, 1951, I Love Lucy premiered on CBS. The show was many things, but at its heart it was a cultural depiction of a housewife—a common & complex category across our history to be sure. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of such fictional figures, leading up to a weekend post featuring my own wife’s phenomenal work on the subject!]
On two distinct ways to revisit and revise cultural portrayals of the 1950s.
Yesterday’s post focused on cultural works from the 1950s, which is certainly where many of our enduring stereotypes of housewives (both in pop culture and in society more broadly) were shaped. But as my wife thinks about a lot these days (more on that in the weekend post), it has really been in subsequent decades and periods that our collective memories and narratives of both the 1950s and American housewives have been crystalized and challenged alike. The crystallization happened most clearly in the kinds of nostalgic cultural recreations of the 1950s that began with 1970s texts like Happy Days (1974-84) and Grease (1978) and continued into 1980s ones like Back to the Future (1985). But cultural challenges to those images can also be found in those same eras (American Graffiti [1973], which I paired with Grease in that hyperlinked post above, is an exemplary case in point), and became even more prominent by the end of the 20th century, as illustrated by a pair of distinct but complementary turn-of-the-century films: Pleasantville (1998) and Far from Heaven (2002).
Pleasantville’s delightfully meta premise puts it in direct conversation with those 1950s cultural works: a pair of 1990s teenage children of divorce (played by Tobey Maguire and Reese Witherspoon) are obsessed with the titular 50s sitcom and its idealized world, and a magic remote control (given them by Don Knotts, natch) transports them into the setting of that TV show. A lot happens from there, but in many ways the heart of the story is the effect that these outsiders have on the show’s focal housewife, Betty Parker (Joan Allen), and her marriage, family, and identity. Writer-director Gary Ross came up with a pitch-perfect visual metaphor for those effects, as the black-and-white Betty becomes colorized as her perspective and world expand (the same process happens for the town overall). But I think it’s an open question whether the film sees those black-and-white starting points as simply part of a cultural representation like a TV sitcom, or whether it is arguing that the social world of the 50s itself was similarly closed and conservative. Even the former point could be contested (as I tried to suggest in the last paragraph of yesterday’s post), and the latter point is to my mind entirely wrong about the tensions and turbulences of the 1950s. Pleasantville is a fun and thoughtful commentary on 50s sitcoms, but it’s also, ironically enough, a bit black-and-white.
There was at least one 1950s cultural genre that frequently foregrounded those tensions and turbulences, and that was film melodramas, such as those directed by the incomparable Douglas Sirk. It’s no secret that writer-director Todd Haynes sought to pay homage to Sirk’s films, especially All That Heaven Allows (1955) and Imitation of Life (1959), with his 2002 historical melodrama Far from Heaven. Haynes’ film focuses on three central characters, including closeted husband Frank Whitaker (Dennis Quaid) and Black gardener and single father Raymond Deagan (Dennis Haysbert). But at the heart of Far from Heaven is another stereotypical 50s housewife experiencing a complicatedly expanding identity and world, Julianne Moore’s Cathy Whitaker. By having Cathy be married to a closeted gay man and experience her awakening through an interracial relationship, Haynes already suggests some of the layers to 1950s American communities and society beyond the mythic stereotypes. But it’s the casting of Moore that really exemplifies what these kinds of cultural revisions can accomplish—like the two actresses on whom I’ll focus in tomorrow’s post, Moore is able at one and the same time to embody the idealized images of this cultural type and to suggest constantly the fraught and human realities that lie beneath those images, giving us a window into both how an ideal is constructed and how it can be deconstructed.
Next HousewifeStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Cultural housewives you’d highlight?
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