In my
review for The Wife, I only touched
briefly on the flashbacks (mostly just to say that they were great,) but I want
to revisit them today. For me, they add
so much to the story, to understanding the characters and their dynamic. There’s just one in particular that I’m going
to look at here, but watching the film, it knocked me out (spoilers.)
One of
the most defining scenes in the movie for me is in an early flashback, when
Joan is sitting in Joe’s class as he describes what an author is. It’s much the usual “heart of a creative”
type stuff, “I write because I must, writing is in my soul,” that sort of
thing. That right there shows us
something about Joe off the bat: his
best ideas aren’t original. In this same
scene, we get our first sighting of his go-to charm-the-ladies-with-prose line,
and it’s not even his. When he wants a
woman to sigh, he consistently uses the same James Joyce quote, and when he
wants to impress his students, he uses the same flowery description of creative
work that countless artists have used before him.
But
here’s something else this scene tells us about Joe. Sure, his speech is basic, but it works, and he knows that. He has those students eating out of the palm
of his hand, including Joan, and she has more creative talent than he ever
will. Just like that James Joyce line
keeps paying off for him, Joe’s big achievement is creating the story of his
life. This portrait of himself, first as
a soulful professor and then as a brilliant author, has been so manufactured,
and when you see him telling his stupid anecdotes at Nobel functions later in
the movie, it all seems so transparent and pathetic, but he still gets results with it! Watching Joan watch him captivate a room, it
just turns my stomach. But that’s what
Joe’s good at, and that’s why he gets away with masquerading as the literary
genius for so long. The strings are
there, obvious for all to see, but he makes people believe it anyway.
Another
interesting note about this little speech is that, for all its poetry, it lacks
real-world application. When Joe
introduces Joan to authoress Elaine Mozell in another flashback, the older
woman almost instantly tries to discourage Joan from pursuing a career as a writer. She points to her own work, sitting on the
alumni shelf where it’s never been opened, and when Joan offers her Joe’s “a
writer must write” sentiment, Elaine counters, “No, honey: a writer must be read.” And in Elaine’s
experience, ground down by publishers and critics who refuse to take her
seriously because of her gender, that noble idea doesn’t mean much when the
gatekeepers are never even going to give you a chance to prove your worth to
them. (Obviously, there have been many
female authors across the years who’ve defied those gatekeepers, but they’re
still there – would Joe’s books be as hailed for their brilliance if Joan’s
name was rightly on them?)
But
getting back to the classroom scene, what really pulls me in is Joe’s
unfaltering use of male pronouns. “He writes because he must,” and so forth, over the course of a speech that probably
goes on for more than a minute. Seeing
it, I was instantly reminded of the opening scene of On the Basis of Sex, in which the dean welcomes the new law
students with a speech asking, “What makes a Harvard man?” In both, you feel the presumptuous sexism
smack you in the face, but it’s even more egregious in The Wife. With On the Basis of Sex, there are nine
female students in a sea of men. Here,
Joe’s entire class is female, and he
doesn’t think anything of repeatedly referring to his proverbial author as
“he.” Yes, this shows the
dismissiveness, the way sexism permeates everything, but it also shows us one
more important thing about Joe. Here, in
this scene, speaking about writing in front of his all-female writing students,
he never once thinks of them as writers, or even potential writers. This speech, this lecture, isn’t about them
at all. It’s about him, returning to the “soulful professor” portrait. Although he’ll gladly critique their work and
tell them what’s wrong with it, he’s not there to teach them. This whole thing is in service of his image,
this ideal he wants to instill in them of their teacher as a tortured artist who writes because he cannot choose not
to. That is Joe all over, and it’s just
vile.
