Rewrite

 My wife and I tend to rewrite movies when they don't meet our needs or standards. A few nights back, I showed her Looking For Mr. Goodbar. This was one of those, "you've really never seen..." moments in a relationship that has been crowded with them. Having spent so many years in darkened theaters and in front of televisions in my youth while she was out cavorting about in the sunshine, I quite naturally maintain quite a lead in terms of titles viewed, many of them multiple times. This one, from 1977, came up in a discussion of women's struggle to free themselves from the oppressive male dominated culture. Though I hadn't seen it myself for more than twenty years, I could recall the power of Diane Keaton's performance and the stark depiction of the mid-seventies sexual revolution and its casualties. 

The story was adapted from a novel which in turn was a retelling of Roseann Quinn, a young teacher who frequented neighborhood bars and allegedly had a habit of bringing men home. In the end, she brought the wrong man home. She was stabbed eighteen times by this stranger and left to die. Her death opened the door on her so-called "double life," and became tabloid fodder and eventually the subject of a bestselling novel. To paraphrase a good friend's reaction near the conclusion of his first viewing of West Side Story, this story doesn't end well. 

I will say that I attempted to prepare my wife for the ending, stopping far short of spoiling it or discouraging her from watching in the first place. So after more than two hours of immersing ourselves in the life of this proto-feminist, a woman who was struggling to get out from under the thumb of her father, the men she hoped to love, and the Catholic Church, it seemed that her sacrifice came like a judgement bolt out of the blue. After all, everyone knows that good girls don't get murdered by strange men in their apartments. 

So there we were, stuck with the "true story" angle, but feeling as if there must be some better way to deliver the message that must be more complex than "good girls don't." I apologized from dropping this culture bomb into our evening, and tried to appeal to her appreciation of all the things that went right. "You wouldn't have been so upset if it weren't for Diane Keaton doing such an amazing job," and other half-measures to appease her spirit. It hadn't been broken, but rather taken for a ride that ended abruptly and unpleasantly. 

What to do? 

As I mentioned, one of our periodic pastimes is to play "How Would You Fix It?" She took her laptop to bed that night and typed furiously for an hour or so. The resulting page was enough to calm her jangled nerves so she could let herself sleep. The next morning, she had even more ideas, but she was ready to accept my premise that there must have been something there to go through all the trouble to make it turn out a certain way. Not to change the ending, but to deliver something that spoke to the generations of women who came after Roseann Quinn. The absurd notion that she was somehow "asking for it" or that her untimely death was inevitable should be purged forever. And maybe in 1977 there was no one willing to make a statement like that. Not in Hollywood, anyway. What would a woke version of Looking For Mr. Goodbar look like? 

Stay tuned, I guess.