Desperate Housewives, and a quick comment on shoes in 9 to 5 March 5, 2007
Posted by rebeccao in Bad Girls, desperate housewives, fashion, female perfection.1 comment so far
I think that the first scene of women going to work in 9 to 5 was a real reminder of the shoe theme in Bad Girls go to Hell. Although I’m not sure that they’re there to mean the same thing – shoes in Bad Girls go to Hell were a lot more about sex and in 9 to 5 I think they were more about showing that women were moving in men’s circles, in fact a symbol of their fight for power (walking on the same streets) in a powerless (still stuck in different shoes) world – but I just thought I’d note the similarity.
Also, Did anyone see the Desperate Housewives episode from last night? For the first time, it was a male narrator instead of Alice (as usual). The theme was the plight of desperate suburban men, and I thought it was a pretty great twist on the desperate women of Wisteria Lane. But there was also this moment about half way through the episode where Edie had left her 8-year old son home alone while she went out and got drunk on a date, and she came home to find that Carlos had taken care of him when he found him out playing in the middle of the street all alone. Carlos didn’t let Edie take her son back home that evening and told her to come back sober in the morning. While she was waiting for her son to gather his stuff at Carlos’s the next day, she made the comment that a “woman can’t be a good person if she’s not a good mother.” (not a word for word quote, but I think it’s pretty close to the actual dialogue). When I was thinking about how gender roles are sometimes challenged in this show, especially by Lynette’s character, I though it was really interesting that it was the episode narrated by a man in which Edie made this serious proposition. Although recently I think the characters of Desperate Housewives have been fighting gender norms and roles less and less (Lynette lets her husband open a pizza place with their savings and he’s now the boss, etc.), the fact that the writers actually had Edie’s character come out and say that she’s not a good person because she’s not a good mother, especially when the episode was all about the men, was a twist I wasn’t so happy to see.
