What Women Want: Mel Gibson's Creepiest Movie?
First of all, some housekeeping...
Voting is now open for the Hugo Awards, which includes the Lodestar Award for young adult fiction. For the third year in a row, my young adult Unstoppable trilogy is on the ballot, which is a huge honor. This time around, Tor Teen and I have decided to provide all three books in their entirety in the Hugo voter packet — so if you're a Hugo voter and you haven't yet read my action-packed, super queer, silly/scary space opera, now is your chance to jump on board this starship.
Secondly, the latest episode of Our Opinions Are Correct is about how science fiction tried to warn us about fascism — why didn’t we listen? Plus we talked to Maggie Tokuda-Hall from the new organization Authors Against Book Bans.
Thirdly, I just have to say that lately I battle the urge pretty much every week to write an angry rant about transphobia and our messed up politics. My drafts folder for this newsletter is chock full of rants. Most of them never see the light of day, because they’re pretty incoherent and I have learned the hard way that I am usually bad at political discourse. (I do remain proud of this piece I wrote for the Washington Post, this piece for the SF Chronicle, this piece for Teen Vogue and this newsletter article about JK Rowling. But I can’t write pieces like that every week.)
So I strongly urge you to go support the newsletter writers who are able to do that work regularly: Evan Urquhart at Assigned Media, whom I previously interviewed in this newsletter, has a newsletter that’s well worth paying for. I also highly recommend Erin in the Morning and Parker Molloy’s The Present Age. I know I said a while back that you should support newspapers that do the full range of journalism instead of just getting opinions and rants from newsletters — but newspapers are not currently doing a good job of including trans voices. So until they do step up, we desperately need to support the folks who are doing that work.
So with that out of the way, let's talk about What Women Want.
Last week, I wrote about a selection of movies where someone is either disguised as the “opposite” gender, or has their body magically transformed. A handful of people asked me why I didn't include What Women Want, the absurdly successful 2000 movie starring Mel Gibson. Technically, nobody actually changes their gender in What Women Want, but it does indeed feel like an offshoot of this subgenre.
In What Women Want, instead of Mel Gibson becoming a woman, he merely gains a unique form of gender-based telepathy: he can hear women's thoughts, and only women’s thoughts. (Given the time it was made, this movie makes no attempt to reckon with the notion of other genders, and is in fact pretty essentialist.) In some ways, What Women Want shares a lot of DNA with You've Got Mail, in which Tom Hanks enjoys a similar advantage over his love interest, Meg Ryan. Hanks and Ryan are exchanging anonymous AOL messages, but only Hanks knows the true identity of his pen-pal. Both You've Got Mail and What Women Want are about a man who has access to privileged information that gives him power over a woman, resulting in a somewhat uncomfortable romance.
Looking at What Women Want in 2024, it’s hard to remember that at one time, Mel Gibson was playing a string of charming goofballs, and he hadn’t yet trashed his reputation in real life.
So in What Women Want, Mel Gibson is an advertising executive who feels threatened because his firm is trying to pivot toward advertising products for women, and is thus promoting a young, dynamic executive played by Helen Hunt. Not only is Gibson having to compete with an upstart coworker, but the notion that women have purchasing power and need to be marketed to lands like an earthquake, shattering his macho worldview.
In order to prove that he's still relevant, Gibson takes home a bunch of products for women to try out on himself. (The scene where Gibson shaves his legs and tries on pantyhose and nail polish certainly feels as though it's touching on some of the same anxieties about gender roles as the films discussed last week.) While Gibson is engaging in a touch of mild feminization, he electrocutes himself, and this is what leads to him getting selective telepathy. It makes total sense! Science!
Okay, macho shithead tries on pantyhose and gains feminine telepathy. This feels like the setup for a film in which Gibson is going to learn an important lesson and start treating women with more respect. Right? Right??? The film does make a few stabs in that direction, with one early sequence where Gibson goes to the office and hears a string of women’s internal monologues about his terrible jokes and unearned privilege. And there’s a subplot where Gibson flirts with Marissa Tomei and gets to hear her thoughts about his game. Gibson also eavesdrops on a co-worker who is contemplating suicide, and has to grapple with her mental anguish so he can save her. The film sort of gestures in the direction of Gibson growing as a person, but seems way less committed to this than many other similar films.
There is a whole sub-genre of comedies in which an arrogant guy, or someone with a huge personality flaw, has a curse that forces them to change and realize that they've been a jerk. Think: Liar Liar, A Thousand Words, Shallow Hal, and so on. I wrote a gonzo parody of this sub-genre (in which a obnoxious straight guy has an experimental procedure that makes his sexual orientation change every time someone clicks a garage door opener.) I haven’t re-read that story in a very long time, and I have no clue if it holds up.
But even though the “obnoxious jerk has a magical transformation that makes him grow as a person” subgenre is well worn, What Women Want has a hard time committing to it. Gibson even goes to a therapist, played by Bette Midler, who tells him:
You know, Freud died at age 83 still asking one question. What do women want? Wouldn't it be strange and wonderful if you were the one man on earth finally able to answer that question? … There isn't a single woman that I treat that doesn't wish her man understood her better. If men are from Mars and women are from Venus, then you speak Venusian.
Actually, I think Freud died asking himself why he’d been so slow to flee the Nazis.
Anyway, a woman therapist, in a movie directed by a woman, still pushes the weird notion that women are mysterious and foreign — and that, in essence, it’s not really men’s “fault” if they don’t understand women. Rather than men needing to develop a smidgen of emotional intelligence, they just need to follow John Gray’s lead and understand that Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. Even with actual freaking telepathy, the most Gibson can hope for is to gain some cheat codes.
So given that it’s apparently impossible for Gibson to actually learn anything meaningful from eavesdropping on women’s innermost thoughts, he might as well use his newfound psychic powers to commit plagiarism instead.
That’s right: He uses his powers to undermine his new colleague, Helen Hunt, and steal her ideas, until she finally loses her job and has her career ruined. He eventually repents and helps her get her job back, and he kinda sorta comes clean with her at the end of the film, but it’s still extremely weird and gross. And meanwhile, the big triumphant moment of the film isn’t when Gibson displays some newfound sensitivity toward women — but when he successfully creates a hacky ad for Nike shoes. The true purpose of understanding women, after all, is to sell them shit they don’t need.
Yep, listening in on women's thoughts basically makes Mel Gibson a better corporate shark.
I feel like this film pulls its punches for the same reason, a lot of other 1990s rom-coms do: the fantasy is not that straight men actually become less selfish. Rather, the fantasy is that women are magically better able to deal with men's shitty behavior. Thus, in You've Got Mail, Tom Hanks has a great deal of power in relation to Meg Ryan both because of his giant bookstore-eating corporation and because he knows who he’s chatting with. But Meg does win a consolation prize: the ability to have charming conversations with Hanks without having to reckon with his true predatory nature. In What Women Want, the real fantasy is that Mel Gibson can tell women what they want to hear.
As you can tell, I'm a little obsessed with this movie.
So much so, that when it was remade in China in 2011, I went out of my way to see the Chinese remake at the earliest possible opportunity. I was curious to see what, if anything, would change, but by and large, the Chinese remake is extremely faithful to the original, though it features fewer female characters and gives a big role to the protagonist’s father. I reviewed it for io9, and I'm just going to quote from that review here:
The American version is primarily about a gender shift at the turn of the millennium, with women becoming more powerful in the workplace. The Chinese version is subtly commenting on the rise of consumer culture in itself… this version of What Women Want isn't just about the rise of women to power — it's about the rise of China's middle class and upper class, a process which, in turn, has created an army of female consumers.
Finally, there was a 2019 gender-flipped remake called What Men Want, starring Taraji P. Henson. I was super excited for this version, because Henson is brilliant in both comedic and serious roles, and there seems to be a lot of potential in the idea of turning things around so a woman can hear men's thoughts. The trailer, below, seems to promise a film in which Henson uses her selective telepathy get the better of her misogynistic co-workers, because now she knows exactly what they're thinking at all times. Sounds great, right?
Unfortunately, What Men Want fails in a very different way than What Women Want.
Remember how I said that you might have expected What Women Want to be one of those films where a jerk has a magical transformation and grows as a person as a result? That's pretty much the approach that What Men Want takes, with… not great results.
In What Men Want, Henson plays an agent at a sports agency, competing with a group of dudes (who are mostly white) to represent the hottest athletes. She doesn't actually need telepathy to know that her colleagues are misogynistic jerks, because they make this very obvious. But she gets psychic powers anyway, thanks to a magical tea brewed by Erykah Badu. (Now she can connect with Tyrone without having to call him!) Once Henson has the ability to hear men’s internal monologues, she does use this to her advantage in various ways. But… that's not what the movie is mostly concerned with.
What Men Want decides to give its protagonist a fatal flaw: she doesn't listen, she's too arrogant, she tries too hard to be like a man. Over the course of the film, Henson keeps making selfish, cocky choices, and hurting the men around her. Until at last, she realizes that she's been an asshole and needs to do better. Yep, they gave Taraji P Henson the arc that Mel Gibson should have had. (I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions as to why Hollywood feels more comfortable teaching humility to Henson than to Gibson.)
Having now sat through three movies in the What Somebody Wants ouevre, my overall takeaway is that all three movies are not so much about exploring a fantasy of gender equality, but much more about soothing the anxieties around a world where gender-based hierarchies are no longer quite so stable and firm. Would the original What Women Want have been a monster hit if it had been even a smidge more feminist? Your guess is as good as mine, but I'm going to go with… nope.
Music I Love
I’m pretty obsessed with Cheryl Lynn, the R&B singer best known for the 1978 hit “Got To Be Real” (and for being arguably the best thing to come out of The Gong Show.) She has such an unmistakable voice, with her twangy vowels and touch of vibrato on the high notes, and she recorded a string of incredible albums with producers like Ray Parker Jr. and Terry Lewis/Jimmy Jam. But lately, I’m really digging her 1982 album Instant Love, which was produced by Luther Vandross (and features a duet with Vandross on “If This World Were Mine.”) This was Vandross at the peak of his music-making powers, accompanied by Marcus Miller and Nat Adderley, Jr., and every song on this album is a total banger. This was around the same time that Vandross produced two highly underrated albums for Aretha Franklin (Get It Right and Jump To It) and he brings the same brassy, upbeat sound to Instant Love. Cheryl Lynn is one of R&B’s most distinctive vocalists, and Instant Love is her working with a master of the form.
