Movie Moment: I Don't Know How She Does It

I Don't Know How She Does It made me a little bit nervous.  As I'm sure it was meant to.  According to Mindy Kaling's list of romantic comedy stereotypes (even if this movie isn't exactly a romantic comedy), its heroine Kate Reddy (Sarah Jessica Parker) is a cross between the beautiful klutz and the busy working woman who is obsessed with her career and never ever has any fun.  As a finance executive, wife, and mother of two, Boston-based Kate is relentlessly plagued by a never-ending to-do list that catapults her into one fiasco after another (enter beautiful klutz syndrome) and makes her the subject of smug stay-at-home-mom Wendy Best's (Busy Phillips) barbed commentary (delivered documentary-style from a treadmill at the gym).  Although Kate's freelance architect husband Richard (Greg Kinnear) is mostly understanding, we sense that he is one play date away from a meltdown.

The heat is turned up on Kate's pressure-cooker life when she scores an account designing retirement fund plans for hotshot New York financier Jack Abelhammer (Pierce Brosnan).   Far from being put off by Kate's klutziness, the widowed Jack is charmed by it, a feeling that grows as Kate shuttles between Boston and New York for their meetings.  Kate is soon in the precarious position of forging a workplace friendship with a colleague who has a crush on her, a situation that causes her to unwittingly serve as emotional caretaker for Jack.  In this way her career resembles an illicit affair, not because she reciprocates Jack's feelings, but because it usurps her time and attention from her family.    

Of course, Richard lands a plumb design job just when Kate begins traveling, creating the kind of intense conflict for which movies like these are made.  Now, Richard is a pretty good guy.  Certainly not some stereotypical tyrant who would lighten the load of Kate's dilemma by way of his sheer awfulness.  It's his very mild-manneredness that complicates things, echoing the mindset of the husbands in those Second Shift studies.  Which is to say that he seems to think that it's fine for his wife to work - as long as it doesn't get in the way of her real work, which is in the home.

It should be noted that not every part of the movie is serious.  The plot is laced with classic Carrie Bradshaw-style narration that "Sex and the City" fans will enjoy, if only because it reminds them of Parker's plucky appeal as an authority on angst.  There is also plenty of witty dialogue, punctuated by well-placed jokes.  Finally, the spoiled and catty Wendy Best is funny.  Yet at the heart of her quips is a bitterness that I can't help but feel channels the movie's central message, which is this: Kate may travel a treadmill of never-ending conflict between work and home, but Wendy is trapped on a treadmill of catering to her kids and in-laws.  She's angry because she's jealous of Kate.  Although stressed and conflicted, Kate never comes off as angry.  The comparison between Kate and Wendy poses the question: What do these women really want, and how stressed are they willing to be to get it?  At first I had trouble answering this question.  During most of the movie, I just wanted Kate to quit her crazy-ass job already.  But ultimately I understood that for her, her job was her identity and therefore worthy of fighting for on her terms.

So, a lot of deep thoughts swirling around here.  I Don't Know How She Does It, by the way, got terrible reviews. (It closed fairly quickly after opening this past September.)  I admit that it wasn't great.  But I don't think it was as bad as people made it out to be either.  It was just up against the challenge of tackling an unpopular topic and falling somewhere between light fare and full-fledged drama in the process.

Book Report: Deadly Housewives

As it turned out, I wasn't far from blogland after all.

Now, about this paperback cover. The white picket fence. The four women. And that title: Deadly Housewives. All a little familiar, isn't it?

I picked up this bargain book at Borders the same day I purchased Julie & Julia and Second Shift. Funny how that feminist theme snuck its way into all of my picks. But on to the review.

Blatantly cashing in on the popularity of the TV show Desperate Housewives, the Deadly Housewives short story collection features women who have moved beyond desperate into the more disturbing realm of, well, deadly. I think just about every story centers around a housewife murdering someone. Some of the stories are funny, others are just downright dark. Similarly, some were cheesy while others boasted more layers. All in all, it was the kind of book I was embarrassed to be reading. (Which might make you wonder why I'm broadcasting it to the world here. But as I often say, this blog is dedicated to reporting an accurate cross section of all my intellectual and artistic experiences, however good or bad).

That's not to say that I wasn't entertained by this murderous missive.

The story that intrigued me the most was "Next-Door Collector" by Elizabeth Massie. Its heroine is Anthea, a stay-at-home mom and artist who likes to be alone. The drama begins when a new neighbor, Lisa, moves into the house next store with her forty or so dogs and cats. As messy as Anthea is pristine and as sociable as Anthea is aloof, Lisa takes every opportunity to invite Anthea into her unkempt and fur ball-ridden home, cheerfully explaining that her pets are like the children she could never have. But Anthea, put off by Lisa's slovenliness and forward nature, politely declines, insisting that she needs time to work on her paintings. Meanwhile, Anthea notices that Lisa often ventures out to her yard in her bathrobe past midnight to haul a veritable forest of plastic storage bins into her basement. Although troubled, Anthea seems content to satiate her curiosity by spying. The story most likely would have ended here had Anthea's only son not taken a shine to Lisa and her menagerie. He sneaks over along with the other neighborhood children to play with Lisa's pets, much to Anthea's horror. She forbids him to return, her anxiety ignited when she hears that her son's two best friends -- twin brothers -- are missing. Convinced that Lisa and her ominous boxes are somehow to blame, Anthea creeps into Lisa's basement one night. As predicted, Lisa is there in her bathrobe, handling the boxes. Her movements are punctuated by crying that seems to be coming from beneath the floor. Sure that's she's hearing the pleas of the twins and countless other kidnapped children, Anthea bludgeons Lisa, killing her. The deed done, Anthea peers into one of the boxes and finds -- dogs. Piles and piles of dead dogs awaiting burial. Then Anthea returns home and begins painting a picture, entirely in black, in a frenzy. In the morning her husband sees her and says, "You've killed another neighbor, haven't you?" And that's when we realize that the "next-door collector" isn't Lisa, a mere lonely woman with too many pets, but Anthea, a paranoid serial killer who's murdered neighbors in various cities, forcing her family to move time and time again. (The twins, by the way, resurface quickly, having run away.)

Creepy, huh?

Book Report: (And Now for Something a Little More Intellectual) The Second Shift by Arlie Russell Hochschild

I went to Borders to pick up a copy of Julie & Julia the other day and was waylaid by a display of bargain books before I could even make it into the store. Thumbing through the selections, my curiosity was piqued by a sociology book called The Second Shift by Arlie Russell Hochschild, a Berkeley sociology professor. The title sounded familiar, and I stared at the cover, trying to remember where I'd heard it. Then I remembered. One of my particularly liberal male professors had raved about it. It wasn't a novel. And I wasn't in the habit of picking up nonfiction in pursuit of a good read. But scanning the back cover and perusing the pages promised that The Second Shift had all the elements of compelling fiction.

I wasn't disappointed. Hochschild's book is based on her interviews with working married couples with children. Her central question for each couple is the same: Who handles the second shift? The phrase "second shift" refers to the job that starts after the one you get paid for ends. You know. Cooking dinner. Grocery shopping. Scrubbing the toilet. Driving the kids to soccer practice and then helping them with their homework. Laundry. Trips to the post office. Buying birthday cards. Making angry phone calls to the insurance company. The couples being questioned came from all walks of life and subscribed to one or more of the three gender ideologies: traditionalists, who believed that the husband should earn more money and that the wife should handle all of the second shift; egalitarians, who believed that husbands and wives should equally share the job of earning money and handling the second shift; and transitionals, who fell somewhere in between. Now, you may be thinking, oh, so this is a man-bashing book. But it's not. If anything, it's a society bashing book. Hochschild delves in the everyday lives of dozens of different couples, pulling up a chair at their dinner tables to find out what makes them tick.

To me, the most interesting part of this study is the cross-section of couples being interviewed: Men who want their wives to handle the entire second shift instead of working who are married to women who want the same thing. Men who don't mind if their wives work as long as they handle the entire second shift married to working women who want their husbands to help with the second shift. Men who want to help their working wives with the second shift married to women who do not want their help, deciding instead to adopt a "supermom" strategy. Men and women who want each other to work and ignore the second shift entirely, paying housekeepers and nannies to do it. Within each couple, each husband's and wife's viewpoint was based on his or her ideas about gender roles coupled with the powerful motivator of financial need. Reading Hochschild's analysis of each couple was fascinating. She deftly peels back the onion-like layers of each husband's and wife's issues (and there are plenty) to reveal the psychological lies, or as she terms them, "marriage myths" they construct to keep their unions alive in the face of conflict. The conflict is usually between a husband and wife who have different ideas about who should do what. However, husbands and wives who believed in the same ideology dealt with a conflict between said ideology and either finances (traditionalists) or family life (workaholic egalitarians).

Not surprisingly, the most common couples were comprised of husbands who didn't mind their wives working as long as dinner was on the table and wives who wanted to rebel against this. (The book was published in 1989 and was based upon interviews conducted in the late 1970s and early 1980s.) Hochschild doesn't offer a solution to this problem at the book's end. Instead she expounds upon a theme woven throughout the book, which is that working women are part of an ongoing revolution to which men must still adapt. She says that these days women are changing more than men because they're moving from the home to the office, whereas back in the 1800s, men were changing more than women because they were migrating from farms to cities. At that point it was the women who weren't changing because they were always at home. So, the woman's revolution isn't over yet. That was what I got out of that.

The one thing I kept thinking while reading this book was, I'm glad I don't have kids yet. Kids, it seems, tip the scales in terms of the drama and bitterness that the second shift can create. You can ignore a sinkful of dishes and subsist on takeout instead of grocery shopping (I'm guilty of both more often than I'd like to admit), but you can't ignore a child. Not that a child can be equated with a dirty dish or a pizza. (Please do not to send hate mail.) But, if I was a working woman with children, then I probably wouldn't be able to do much of anything. This includes blogging. And reading books to blog about. And painting hippos and ice cream cones on tote bags. And writing. And spending the entire weekend in my pajamas. And living on Smartfood popcorn. Maybe such fears sound shallow, but at least I'm honest in acknowledging that life as I know it would change.

So, The Second Shift. Pretty compelling stuff by a lady who tells it like it is.