20th Century Women

As the plural title suggests, the film limns the range of woman’s lives in the last century, the century of feminism, its achievement and its restrictions. The release coincided with America having its first chance to elect a supremely qualified and experienced woman president — but opting for a ludicrous, disastrous male. 

Dorothea is the centre, a character of both ambition and suppression. She dreamed of being a pilot but entered the war too late and was grounded. Only in the epilogue do we learn that her next husband fulfilled her desire for a few years of flying before she died of lung cancer. Having wanted to fly herself, her compromised success at the end is being flown, being a passenger. Annette Benning in type and appearance here evokes Amelia Earhart. But in Dorothea, a woman with Earhart’s desires has to play out a different role than the destiny she desired. Earhart had no kids. 

Dorothea also presents an unusual type of mother. The independent spirit that would have suited her flying serves her badly as a mother. At son Jamie’s school she sides with her truant son instead of the principal. She relates to Jamie awkwardly, talking and acting unconventionally then retreating to her maternal role in defence: “”You can’t talk to me like that.” Jamie’s recurrent complaint is that she doesn’t connect to him as a mother. Having borne him at 40, their separating gap is cultural as well as in age and role.  
     She takes in stride the discovery that Julie is sleeping (albeit chastely) with Jamie. She doesn’ t mind or judge either girl’s sexual activity. But at her dinner party she retreats to priggish decorum over Abbie’s “menstruation" and Julie’s recalling her first intercourse. Dorothea’s instincts are for the spirited and free, but she always draws herself back. However free, she's also locked into habit. She keeps smoking because it was considered safe when she started. So too in her scenes at the club and when the colleague asks her out. The contrast between her suppression and the two girls’ openness encapsulates woman’s limited liberation over the century of the suffragette and the feminist. 

Also unconventionally, she enlists her two women tenants’ aid in making Jamie a man. A boy, she avows, doesn’t need a man to teach him how to be a man. Women can provide better models and instruction. Indeed one of 1970s feminism was the questioning of traditional masculinity. What is the good man for the good woman? Julie’s lesson on gratifying women provokes a bully’s assault on Jamie as “a fag” for respecting the woman’s needs. She teaches him (the woman’s strategy) not to confront or challenge another man’s ignorance. Also,  "Guys aren't supposed to look like they're thinking about what they look like."

William is on the cusp of the new manhood. “I know how to get women but I don’t know what to do when I have them.” He’s respectful and sensitive when Abbie comes to him in emotional need for a sexual relatonship. Presumably William’s second wife leads him from his mechanic job to his preferred life, making and selling pottery.

The other women provide variations on Dorothea’s compromised or limited freedoms. Abbie’s mother is a therapist whose only relationship with her daughter is professional. Abbie comes to her group therapy sessions but doesn’t speak to her mother outside them. Or in the ones we see. Relying on her instincts rather than theory, Dorothea is the more effective mother. Julie’s mother also retreats from her in shame or anger.

For the second generation women their new freedoms prove challenges. Abbie is the more aggressive, as we see in her approach to William. Julie is more compliant, submissive, in her affairs. She is so accustomed to sex unconnected to love that she can’t have sex with the boy for whom she really cares. Neither girl finds satisfaction or fulfilment in sex, or drugs, or unconventional relationships. Both undergo contemporary dangers, Abbie her cervical cancer and Julie a pregnancy scare. 

Perhaps Dorothea provides the key summary of 20th Century feminism when she consoles Abbie: “It’s really bad for a while but it will get better. And then it will get bad again. Oh, I really shouldn’t have said that.” 

For all the warmth in this community there remains an abiding insularity. That is confirmed by one narrative strategy in particular. A separate biographical summary is provided each major character in turn. The characters are in the same story but each also has his/her own, a self apart from the plot and its interconnections.  There is a self apart from the characters’ interchanges.

When Dorothea’s old Ford bursts into flame at the supermarket it’s an emblem for the century, with its wars, violence and loss. The film is about the 20th Century as much as it is about its women. The news clips and President Carter’s telling speech about the modern malaise that results from instant gratification foreground the socio-cultural history off the period. For women helped define the century, its advance, its opening out of individual and collective rights, its only partial advance (see election above). Hence the specific setting, Santa Barbara in 1979. Dorothea is the early pioneer, her tenants the future. 

For the characters and the culture alike, social and personal changes challenged people’s available resources and experience. Hence the emblematic description of the untalented punk rockers: “It's like they don't care. They got all this feeling but don't have the tools they need to express it…it all comes out as passion."
     For all the failures of the century the film appends an optimistic epilogue. In addition to William and Jamie, both young women grow on to have families and satisfaction, perhaps in retreat to the traditional female stereotype, perhaps not. Abbie even gets two kids, her doctor having warned her not to have any. The happy ending may seem an anodyne imposed on a saga of fall-shorts and frustrations. Or it may be the logical observation that however we fail as a person or a culture life goes on. We have another chance. We may blow that too, but we have another chance.