Ghost / Big Women / Far Out

Last night I ate my dinner in front of Ghost (1990, dir. Jerry Zucker), starring the late Patrick Swayze, Whoopi Goldberg and Demi Moore. Having endured Almodovar’s Broken Embraces the night before, I was in the mood for some straight-up cinema with a linear plot, a central hero and some good old fashioned resolution at the end – in this case, Swayze’s ascent to Heaven, having just sent the bad guy screaming in to Hell.

But what really got me was Demi Moore’s costume. Lead heroine in a button up shirt? One reviewer points out that “the only thing that is possibly more outdated than the visual effects is Moore’s infamous close-cropped hairdo.” But I thought it was kind of refreshing. After seeing Broken Embraces Housemate A and I sat and talked about the Penelope Cruz Porn that we’d been subject to; Penelope Cruz looks at herself in the mirror; Penelope pouts; Penelope walks down the hall in a tight suit; Penelope has sex; Penelope is crushed to death by a speeding vehicle. Thankfully.

In fact, scrutinising Demi Moore’s outfits and appreciating Whoopi Goldberg’s turn as ‘the store front mystic’ made me think of a show I happened upon last week. It was billed as ‘television’s first feminist tv series’ and aired on channel 4 in 1998. It’s called Big Women. Amazingly, the channel’s Test Tube Telly site has all four episodes available, so I spent two evenings in a bizarre feminist time warp. The series charts the humble beginnings of a feminist publishing house in 1971 and its eventual sale to a giant corporation in 1996. In an interview with The Independent, the writer, Fay Weldon, said:

“The series was [Tariq Ali's] idea. But I go on thinking that anything that is done by men and women together has a kind of energy and life as God intended. Things that women do together tend to be more dutiful.”It’s amazing this is the first drama about feminism there has been on television. But for so long we haven’t been able to see the wood for the trees.

“Perhaps the series will show how dangerous ideologies and isms are … you’ve got women with permission to hate men now and that’s what we have to pull back from.”

It is amazing that Big Women was the first feminist drama, but actually it’s Feminist Backlash drama. There are several main characters who create the publishing house Medusa, and they bicker and back-stab each other relentlessly from the start. One leaves her husband and children behind, becomes a lesbian and by the end is a miserable wreck; another is a lascivious home breaker; another is a cold, heartless, commercially minded mega-bitch who eventually sells the firm after essentially saying “well we have to because no-one in the room is as good at running the business as me, and frankly, I want to resign”; another is a sanctimonious Oxford scholar. There is also the problem of the Token Black Woman (who randomly asks “how many black women do you see in this room?” tragicomedy if ever I saw it.) Big Women seems to highlight the issues within the feminist movement as well as the issues of sexism that have taken on a new form because of women’s efforts. It’s tricky stuff and I don’t think there has been another overtly feminist TV series in response.

However Far Out is about to have its premier in London. Apparently it’s going to be the UK L-Word, and though it has none of the production values, it is full of great UK references like DIVA magazine, First Out Cafe near Tottenham Court Road and Stonewall’s poster campaign: “Some people are gay. Get over it!”

The online preview is charming, but reminiscent of Big Women in its poorly delivered speech about sex by the bar-maid. It’s actually a great piece, very well written, but for some reason discussions / arguments about gender/feminism/lesbianism are always delivered in a tone comparable to The Fat Conductor from Thomas the Tank Engine. It’s a baffling and unhelpful part of the current lesbian aesthetic.

Anyway, the premier is October 4th, and provided I’m not stuck on another allotment in South London, I’ll be there.