Last night I went to see a more “serious” or “literary” movie, as opposed to the usual “shoot ‘em up blow ‘em up” action movie, or the simple “boy meets girl” romantic comedy. The movie I saw was called “The Wife”. There were several things I didn’t like about this movie, and I was reminded of why I think such films are almost always just leftist propaganda.
I think there is too much of a temptation for fiction writers to write about fiction writing, which is what you will see in “The Wife”. It indicates to me that the script-writer spends too much time hanging out with their other writer friends and, their only social circle is their writer’s group.
When I see “writing about writing”, it appears to me that the author hasn’t gone out and lived enough and experienced enough to have anything to say, other than to talk about the process of writing. It indicates to me that the writer lives in a sort of “echo chamber” with other writers. (This isn’t the only “echo chamber” the author of the script for “The Wife” seems to live in, but more about that later.)
“The Wife” starts out with an elderly man and his wife finding out he has won the Nobel Prize for Literature. The setting for the movie appears to be sometime in the late 20th Century. No one uses cell phones, and they don’t appear to have caller ID on their phones. Additionally, they fly to Europe for the Nobel Prize ceremony on a Concorde Jet, which hasn’t been in service since 2003.
Most of the story takes place during the few days leading up to the awards ceremony in Stockholm Sweden, with flashbacks to the past of the Husband and Wife. These flashbacks eventually reveal a crucial secret about the husband’s writing. That secret is (Plot Spoiler):
The Husband didn’t write any of his novels. His wife wrote all of them, with very little input from him.
I disliked the setting and plot premise of this movie “right off the bat”, because I have almost total contempt for the Nobel Prize and the people who receive it. When it comes to the sciences, like Physics, the Nobel Prize actually means something because Physics is a legitimate science.
I have less respect for the Nobel Prize in Economics. Probably, some decent economists receive the award. FA Hayek received it, and he was pretty okay, as far as academic economists go. But, I also have a feeling the Nobel Prize in Economics should be called “The Nobel Prize in Leftist Economics”, since that is what most of its recipients probably are.
When it comes to the Nobel Prize in Literature, I am 99.9999% certain that it is nothing more than an award for what passes for “literature” within the “post-modern”, egalitarian, and “limousine leftist classes” of cities like New York, San Francisco, London, and Paris. I have nothing but contempt for the Nobel Prize in Literature and the people who receive it.
So, the fact that the main character was receiving a Nobel Prize in Literature meant I held great dislike for him right from the beginning, because I think only a complete “literary blaggard” could win it. But, it was even worse than that, because it turns out the person receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in “The Wife” is a complete “second-hander”, as Ayn Rand would say. His wife wrote all of his novels. (Although, I guess that means I think his wife is the literary blaggard, and he’s just a second-hand hack.)
Aside from the setting in Stockholm, the rest of the movie is set in a series of flashbacks to the past of the Husband and Wife, and how they met and eventually married. This is how it is revealed that the Wife wrote all of the Husband’s novels.
The Wife met her Husband when she was a college student and he was her creative writing professor. He was already married with a child, but he had an affair with her, and eventually leaves his first wife. We also eventually discover in subsequent flashbacks that he has been fired from his teaching position for having an affair with a student.
Early on, the Wife meets another female author, who apparently hasn’t had much success at writing. This older author tells her to stop writing and makes some vague reference to male sexism in the world. As the flashback subplot unfolds throughout the movie, we discover that this is probably the reason the Wife lets her husband take the credit for her writing -although they are never 100% clear on why she would let him do that. (More on that later.)
The notion that male sexism prevented women in the 1950’s and 1960’s from being successful authors was insulting for several reasons. First, it is not in accord with historical fact, and is simply an attempt to push a “feminist narrative” of “male oppression” that “keeps women writers down”. There have been numerous important female writers both during and before the 1950’s. To name a few: Margaret Mitchell (Gone with the Wind), Harriet Beecher Stowe (Uncle Tom’s Cabin), Mary Shelley (Frankenstein), Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice), Agatha Christie (Murder on the Orient Express), and Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird).
Second, the notion of “male sexism keeping women down” in publishing completely ignores one of the greatest fiction writers of the 20th Century. She did it all on her own, and the fact that she was a woman didn’t hurt her success in the least: Ayn Rand.
Miss Rand was a female writer who wrote literature in the 1940’s and 50’s dealing with fundamental questions about the individual and his relationship to the state and society. Her novels have been very successful. It wasn’t “male sexism” that opposed her. It was the “literary left”, which has hated and despised her from day one. It’s not men keeping great writers like Miss Rand down -its the “limousine leftist intelligentsia”.
Like I said, they never gave a realistic explanation for why this woman would have let her husband take credit for her writing in the movie. They simply implied it was all because of “male sexism”, which I’ve shown is not based in historical fact. There have been many female writers who were recognized as great and had successful careers, well before the 1950’s, when the flashbacks of “The Wife” take place. The movie did “touch on” two possible explanations that I found far more realistic, but it never fully developed the ideas, because it would have challenged several “sacred cows” of leftism.
The Wife in the movie met her husband as a student when he was her married professor, and they started an illicit affair. The Husband was fired when this came out, and it ended his teaching career. He then turned to writing, but it turned out he wasn’t a very good writer.
One of the more powerful scenes in the movie is during a flashback when the Wife has honestly told her husband that his writing isn’t good, and he throws a tantrum. (It’s a bad idea to let your spouse tell you if your writing is good or not.) She is in love with him, and I think she feels guilty for getting him fired from his teaching job. So, she offers to re-write his first novel.
This premise could have been “fleshed out” more in the movie. Her guilt over breaking up his marriage and getting him fired could have provided a much more believable motivation for why she would let him take credit for her writing. However, this is the era of “Me Too Feminism”, in which any professor who had an affair with his adult student is automatically going to be condemned as the person at fault. To suggest that a college professor’s adult female student could have any blame for his getting fired from his job is going to run afoul of one of the Hollywood left’s “Egalitarian Sacred Cows”. As a result, this premise was only hinted at in the movie, and not made sufficiently clear to establish that this was, in fact, the Wife’s motive for letting her husband take credit for her writing.
There is another possible motive “hinted at” in the movie for why the Wife lets her husband take credit for her writing. When the elderly Husband and Wife are having a fight after his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize, the Wife has told her husband that she is leaving him. The Husband, who is Jewish, says she is not Jewish and that all of the things in the novels he supposedly wrote are about Jewish characters and subjects from his life. Basically, the husband accuses the wife of “cultural appropriation”.
First, I will note that the implicit premise here is a little bit “disturbing”. It is implied that this nice “Shiksa” has been “exploited” by her Jew husband, who is taking credit for her writing. The idea sounds a little bit “too close” to what a certain German political group in the 1930’s said about “Jewish exploitation of Germans”, and what certain “black nationalists” still say today about the Jews. However, I think fear of “cultural appropriation” accusations by critics would have formed a better premise for why the Wife couldn’t take credit for the writing.
It is widely believed among the “literary left” that only a person from a particular culture or race can write about characters from that culture or race. If a white person writes about a black protagonist, he is likely going to be condemned for “cultural appropriation”, which is regarded as a form of racism. Paradoxically, if a white author has only minor black characters, then he will be accused of using the “magic negro trope”, which is also supposedly racist. A white author is damned by the left if he does, and damned by the left if he doesn’t have major black characters.
This premise that the Wife cannot write about Jewish characters because she isn’t Jewish is only “hinted at” in the movie in one, single scene. Additionally, if they were going to make this the motivating factor for why the Wife lets her husband take credit for her writing, then they should have made it more apparent by making the husband black, where she is writing about black characters and experiences. This would have made the fear of accusation of “cultural appropriation” more obvious. (Even better would be if it had been about a white husband married to a black woman, where the black woman is taking credit for the husband’s writing about black female characters and situations.)
It is clear to me why “The Wife” came out at this moment in time. It is a reaction to the election of Donald Trump, and the stunning and unexpected defeat of Hillary Clinton. There was a “certainty” among the left that Hillary Clinton would be our next president in 2016. Part of this arrogant refusal to see reality was based on the notion that Hillary Clinton had somehow “paid her dues”. I think that much of the “feminist agitation” of the last two years, including the so-called “Me Too Movement”, is the feminists throwing a “tantrum” because Hillary Clinton lost the election.
Hillary Clinton’s husband, Bill, was a well-known philanderer, who “couldn’t keep it in his pants”. “The Wife” attempts to explain Bill’s infidelities by showing the Husband in the movie to be a serial adulterer. The implication is that he is cheating on his wife because he knows he is a “writing hack” and resents the fact that his wife is actually the great writer. Sleeping with other women is his form of “retaliation”.
Similarly, feminists are convinced that Hillary was the “real President” during the Bill Clinton Presidency and that Bill was just a womanizing “political hack” that Hillary had to use because there are too many sexists out there who wouldn’t elect her President. Bill supposedly knew that Hillary was the “better politician”, and so he slept with women because of his deep-seated sense of inferiority in the face of Hillary’s supposed genius. (I doubt this is why Bill Clinton was an adulterer.)
I will note that Ayn Rand wrote about a similar situation in her novel “Atlas Shrugged”. There, the main female protagonist, Dagny Taggart, is only the “Vice President in Charge of Operation” of the family railroad business. Her worthless brother, James Taggart, is the “President” of the company, although he is just a “figurehead”, who gets in the way of Dagny when she tries to operate a successful business.
However, Miss Rand, unlike feminists, was “subtle” in her recognition of the genuine injustices against women. Furthermore, Dagny Taggart never sits around bemoaning her plight like modern-day feminists do, nor does Dagny Taggard act like a “victim”. Miss Rand also recognized there was plenty of injustice to go around, and that some of it was aimed at men by women. In “Atlas Shrugged”, Hank Reardon is treated quite badly by his wife, Lillian, who belittles his desire for sex as “animalistic” and “dirty”. (I suspect this was a common attitude of wives towards their husband’s sex drives throughout history.)
To somewhat “re-purpose” a famous line from Texas Senator Lloyd Benson: I’ve read “Atlas Shrugged”, Dagny Taggart is a literary friend of mine, and Hillary Clinton is no Dagny Taggart.
I think the more likely reason Hillary Clinton wasn’t elected President while her husband, Bill, was is two-fold: (1) Hillary Clinton was too far to the left, especially for a country just coming off the Ronald Reagan years. (2) Hillary Clinton had, and still has, a very unlikeable and abrasive personality. Like it or not, being President is partly about being able to “connect” with a lot of people in a subtle and probably “subconscious” way. If that wasn’t true, then some “autistic” Economics professor with zero interpersonal skills could probably be President. This lack of “connection” with the mass of people by Hillary Clinton had nothing to do with her gender and everything to do with her “haughtiness”. It was this pretentiousness that caused her to avoid putting much focus on campaigning in states like Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin, and it probably cost her the election.
“The Wife” is just Hollywood providing a “victim narrative” for why Hillary Clinton lost the election, with the standard left-wing “trope” of “male sexism” that supposedly “keeps women down”. The movie misses any opportunity to explore more realistic explanations for why there are second-handers in the world, and why there are people who let the second-handers take credit for their ideas and effort.