Film: Boys on the Side (1995)
Writer: Don Roos
Director: Herbert Ross
Starring: Mary Louise Parker, Whoopi Goldberg, Drew Barrymore (oh yeah, and a couple of guys)
Dear Boys and Boys on the Side and Main Ingredients,
Female friendship is an interesting thing.
It’s different than the bro-hood. And somehow, at some point, female friendship gets lost when women settle down with men.
It doesn’t always have to happen that way, but we only have so much energy, and we can’t manage a bunch of needs of humans in our household and the pangs and anguish and joys and celebrations of our fellow countrywomen, too.
Ain’t that a shame?
Boys on the Side (1995) was written by a man (Don Roos) and directed by a man (Herbert Ross). And yet it is about female friendship.
So let’s overturn this jawn! I want to see a woman writer and woman director writing about the friendship between men! I think we could do it pretty well. We’ve watched it and experienced it for ages!
This film was significant for me when it came out in the 90s because it taught about safe sex in a very nonchalant and non-agenda-y way.
The character Robin (played by Mary-Louise Parker) has a sexually-transmitted disease (I won’t tell you which one). She is very uptight on the outside and seems very put-together with her fancy skirts and well-coiffed hair, but she made a mistake one night with a bartender and it changed the trajectory and meaning of the rest of her life. So she gets sick a lot.
Personally, having been born to a single mother, I think contraception must be a central tenet of any religion. Choosing when to have a baby and protecting your health—these are basic liberties for a progressed society. And yet we still keep fighting about that stuff all the time. Who suffers? Women. Children. (You know how it goes.)
In the film, Holly (played by Drew Barrymore) is abused by her boyfriend but she keeps defending him and saying he’s not so bad. And then she meets this cute handsome police officer, Abe (played by Matthew McConaughey) (McConaughty) and he tells her she has to face up to what she’s done. What she finally did was, hit the guy with a bat and tie him up so that he can’t come after her to kill her when she joins a cross-country road-trip with her lady friends.
So, um, here, a woman pays again for the bad behavior of a man.
Okay, wait. Maybe I do see how this movie is written by men! Robin gets a disease and Holly gets incarcerated for the wrongs of men.
Mm. Hmm. I see. O-kay!
The only person who maintains her dignity in the film, is Jane (played by Whoopi Goldberg). She’s a lesbian and people wonder if she’ll fall in love with every heterosexual woman, but damn if Jane doesn’t have the most common sense of all of these ladies. And she is loving and kind, and she even helps Robin almost get laid. Jane also plays piano. I love a person who plays piano. I just love the piano-man or woman and I overlook a lot of their flaws because piano keys are the path to my heart, not a home-cooked meal. (If you want to know the truth.)
Anyway, I have long said that lesbians are the smartest of us all. And perhaps that’s why Jane is the most grounded character in the imaginations of these two filmmaking men—who write about women. Because men love women, too?
I don’t know. I just think that this movie is a little off-key, and yet I think it shows the power of film to teach us things we need to know (like one-night-stands are a bad idea and always use contraception), and it shows that women have to do their time but men can just drug it up and beat people up and keep getting away with it, and it shows us that cute police officers with Southern dialects fix wayward blonde girls by making sure they only get 6 months in prison for defending themselves from domestic abuse, which is like, probably true? Like, maybe not just, but true?
I don’t know. I am thinking yes to boys on the side, and put the girls on the playground playing ring-a-rosie, and how about adults (both men and women!) do some deep-breathing exercises and sing together in a room where a nice person plays some songs on piano.
That’s an ending we shall keep!
By the way, Mary Louise Parker has that cute sexy lip thing she does, and it is only her own, and no one can really mimic it, right? Like, the dimples and all that? I just think she’s magic.
Good luck out there, sisters! Read my book, I tell you how to avoid getting involved with bad guys. Start while you’re young. :)
Cheer-io,
Ms. Wonderful
Monday Lucky Playlist on Vinyl
