The horrifying rumor is that Jennifer Lopez will star in an Overboard remake. She’s no Goldie Hawn, though, as my sister says, Matthew McConaughey is inevitable for the Kurt Russell role. Let’s look back at the flawed but addictive original.
As with many previous Girls On Film subjects on heavy television rotation in the late 80s, I loved this film unreservedly as a kid. That is, until I read Susan Faludi’s Backlash, which saw it in the context of late 80s Hollywood being “preoccupied with toning down independent women and drowning out their voices — sometimes quite literally.” She observes,
“Keep your mouth closed,” orders the carpenter (played, curiously, by Hawn’s real life partner Kurt Russell), and she learns to like it….Overboard‘s haughty heiress refuses to reproduce. But by the end of the film — after she is humiliated, forced to scrub floors and cook meals, and at last finds happiness as a housewife — she tells her tyrannical new husband of her greatest goal in life: having “his” baby. Women who resist baby fever, by controlling their fertility or postponing motherhood, are shamed and penalized.”
Interestingly, the screenplay for Overboard was written by a woman, Leslie Dixon, who also wrote Mrs. Doubtfire. (It was directed, of course, by schlockmeister Garry Marshall.) Revisiting the movie this week, it’s clear that Faludi was dead-on in her assessment when it comes to the humiliation of Hawn’s character — but she left out the class analysis, without which all this is incomplete. (And to be fair to Overboard, she doesn’t say she wants “his” baby. As seen in the clip below, she says the one thing he can give her that she doesn’t already have is “a little girl.”)
As the stuck-up Joanna, Hawn doesn’t just need to learn to appreciate the salt-of-the-earth men around her; she also needs a good lay. In the beginning, she refuses to have sex with her effete, ridiculous husband because he wants a child (her mother coos, “But if you have a baby, you won’t be the baby”) or perhaps because she doesn’t want to get dirtied up. “No job will ever be done to your satisfaction,” taunts carpenter Dean Proffitt in their first dispute (seen above), shortly after grabbing his crotch, and the double entendre is clear. When she sobs, “Don’t touch me,” he hasn’t actually touched her, and it’s a hint at that menacing threat that women allegedly use against men: the false accusation of sexual assault.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
