Maybe I'm Gonna Need Some More Categories

1. Psycho Siblings? I’ve got another movie on board (The Perfect Family, review forthcoming) that has the psychotically-protective-sister-with-creepy-sexual-undertones thing that was the plot engine for The Perfect Wife, and I’m starting to have some suspicions. Maybe this is just the idea of the suffocating, overprotective mother, smuggled into a sibling relationship (with maternal overtones) to avoid the more obvious misogynist stereotype, and with the incest thing thrown in for extra pathology? Though I think suffocating mommy usually has creepy sexual undertones too (see Psycho, for example), so maybe it’s just a straight transfer.

I’m picking up a library copy of the second edition of Tania Modleski’s Loving With a Vengeance to read this weekend. I understand it has an added chapter on women’s films, which I’m guessing is going to be all those 40s movies about heroically self-sacrificing mothers who love too much like Mildred Pierce and so forth (which were the types of movies she discussed briefly in the first edition). So I think I’ll read through that before I come up with a name for this pattern, there might be a whole section on crazy mommy in there.

2. It’s starting to look like Professional Misconduct is indeed an emergent theme in Lifetime movies (as suggested by Mike S. in comments earlier). In addition to the therapist from Hell in Mind Games, we’ve got the mad scientist doctor from Whispers & Lies, an unethical developer in A Decent Proposal (review forthcoming), and a shady lawyer in another movie I’ve got queued up on TiVo (I’m blanking on the title). And now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen a couple of Lifetime movies inspired by (or even based on) news stories about policemen who have abused their knowledge of crime scenes and influence with other cops to cover up spousal murders; they’ll come around again on the schedule sooner or later.

It occurs to me that shady professionals have maybe replaced the evil aristocrats found in gothics, so far as their ability to disguise their true intentions, generally push other people around, and prevent our doughty heroines from enlisting various kinds of help against the authority granted by their professional (rather than class) status. Much has been made of the social critique implied by all the class issues in novels like Jane Eyre, but on a pretty basic level, the evil aristocrat is a workhorse of a plot engine too, creating all kinds of problems for underlings that they’re too powerless to resolve in obvious ways right away.

Is there an underlying suspicion of professional privilege in Lifetime movies per se, beyond the need to supply heroines with powerful enemies? Evil professional women are usually balanced out by good ones (so as not to offend the working women who constitute most of their viewership, I would imagine), but offhand I’m not sure if they bother to do that with bad professional men too. Something to keep an eye on, I guess.

Comments

[Mike S.]

"Evil professional women are usually balanced out by good ones (so as not to offend the working women who constitute most of their viewership, I would imagine), but offhand I’m not sure if they bother to do that with bad professional men too."

Surely they must. The other way professionals have replaced aristocrats is as marriage success objects, after all. I don't know if there are good-guy doctors or lawyers who *aren't* the love interest, but they must be heavily represented there, no?

[SR]

I meant within the same movie rather than in Lifetime movies in general. Like in Whispers & Lies, the mad scientist is balanced by our heroine the science teacher; it's usually a very literal one-to-one kind of thing involving prominent characters.

But in Decent Proposal, the foil for the evil developer is a blue-collar construction guy rather than another professional. So not to generalize too much from one example, but it could also be that Lifetime doesn't feel any need to balance out images of professional men since being professionally successful is just not a fraught issue for men as it is for women.

(However, they do seem concerned about always portraying men as violent, so there's usually always a sensitive caring guy waiting in the wings or possibly actively helping a woman who is being stalked or threatened by a violent man.)