Wednesday, October 3, 2018
Marriage -- And Divorce-- His Girl Style
His Girl Friday charts the marriage and divorce and remarriage of Walter and Hildy and the engagement -- and near marriage -- of Hildy and Bruce. Hildy says she wants domestic bliss in suburban Albany but she chucks it to remarry Walter and relaunch her career. Can someone balance career and marriage? Who is the best kind of spouse? Is happiness possible in marriage? What is this film saying about that state of marriage in the modern world?
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His Girl Friday critiques modern marriage and the difficulty to balance a career and home life. The movie shows a successful woman, Hildy, with a failed marriage and blames that failure on work. Walter, her ex-husband, was too busy to provide a “normal” simple home life. Hildy was too busy to start a family and be the stereotypical stay at home mother. Modern desire to be successful is hindering the ability to have a traditional marriage. The desire to live in the suburbs and raise a family in a house surrounded by a white picket fence is still there; however, now that women are starting to be allowed to work, they are choosing successful careers over that dream. His Girl Friday demonstrates that the traditional marriage set up is boring, but still appealing. It is a sexist in the way it shows that a woman must be married, whether it is traditional or modern. Hildy may be a strong, successful woman but she still has always been with a man and lets him define her. She almost gives up a career to be with a man. At the beginning the movie makes it seem like this is the obvious, correct choice. There is an apparent intrinsic desire for all women to have stability and for men to be the ones who provide for their families. Even strong, modern women like Hildy have this desire. This is blatantly sexist, but in the time period this was the common belief. Due to societal norms during this time period, the idea of a marriage where the woman has a demanding job and cannot stay home with the children is very new. His Girl Friday critiques this new idea of marriage by trying to show that Hildy is forced back into work by a man she divorced and is trapped in modern marriage when she really does want a tradition one. It is a sexist idea, but it fits in with the ideas about what marriage should be at the time.
ReplyDeleteThere are many subliminal messages throughout My Girl Friday, but the outstanding one is that marriage, and concordantly divorce, are unimportant and do not reflect actual love. As the story of Hildy is introduced, two main elements emerge: Hildy divorced Walter and Hildy is going to marry Bruce. This immediately becomes the focal point of the film as the two begin to reminisce on their previous life. Presented as if they should not already know, Walter asks Hildy why she divorced him, saying “it makes a man lose all faith in himself, gives him a feeling he wasn’t wanted”, and, like it’s a joke, she states that, “that’s what divorces are for”. Later, Walter is incredibly straightforward with the message, saying “divorce doesn’t mean anything nowadays”. Despite not having seen each other in 4 months, Walter continues to talk about how they should remarry. It’s horrible, especially considering Hildy has just introduced Bruce, who she is marrying the very next day. The conversation is the first major scene in the movie, and it presents Hildy’s engagement as comical and easily disregarded. She has a delay in rejecting Walter’s advances and Walter never stops them. Logically speaking, Hildy and Bruce should love each other, yet, as the movie progresses, Hildy throws her loving, wholesome fiancé out of the picture. He has done nothing wrong and is consistently sabotaged by Walter, yet is ignored by Hildy for the larger part of the film. Hildy even knows that Walter is sabotaging her lover, yet she seems to ignore the immense immorality behind it. She rarely defends her fiancé, and even ignores him when he asks her to get on the train… so they can get married. The entire portrayal of Bruce is sad, and depicts that a marriage is not involved by love in any way, shape, or form. To cap it all off, the ending of the film is Hildy’s breakdown, where she vows to marry… Walter. It is laughable, almost offensive to the concept of marriage, and, as if it was not bad enough, the entire film’s events take place in ONE DAY. The fact that Hildy not only divorced Walter, ignored him for 4 months, and was with another man for those 4 months (at least), should confirm the inevitable, yet it still manages to end in the marital reconciliation of the two. The entire movie, through Hildy’s journey, undoubtedly shows that love plays no part in marriage.
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