In Hollywood’s terms, of course, this is not just an unusually profound and thought-provoking issue; it is also meant as a tribute to women, a resounding reply to the feminist critique of modern movies: they say we don’t appreciate women? Is a million bucks appreciation enough? This particular view of women has been a favorite of male authors since approximately Homer, who invented the notion of the trophy wife.
In “Mad Dog and Glory,” author Richard Price rings a variation on this theme. When a cop (Robert De Niro) saves the life of a gangster (Bill Murray), the grateful hoodlum lends him one of his most valuable possessions for a week: Uma Thurman, who’s been working off her brother’s loan-sharking debt to Murray as a bartender in his club. How’s that for appreciation? This plot device-woman as a form of currency between men-also has long antecedents, dating back to “Little Miss Marker,” in which a bookie (Adolphe Menjou) inadvertently comes into possession of 5-year-old Shirley Temple when her father leaves her behind to seal a $20 bet. In the 1934 version, Menjou got married so he could make a proper home for the girl. If they made the movie today, presumably, he’d hustle her off to his place on Maui and wait for her to grow up … if he bothered to wait.
Of course, this is the Full Bourgeois critique of contemporary pop culture, including state-of-the-art enlightened outrage-what did you expect from NEWSWEEK? It is true that there are social strata, both high and low, in which all parties implicitly acknowledge a rate of exchange among money, sex and power. It’s easy to imagine Donald Trump, say, watching “Indecent Proposal” and picking up the phone to call someone he picked out of a Victoria’s Secret catalog … with the difference that he’d probably try to use junk bonds instead of cash. The interest in “Indecent Proposal” is the way in which that world intersects the middleclass world of Woody Harrelson and Moore-admittedly, a Hollywood version of the middle class, in which the struggling young lovers can barely afford to build a custom house on two acres of oceanfront property in Santa Monica. It probably wouldn’t have made much of a movie if the wife, say, had giggled and said, Gee, I’d love to, but we’ve got tickets to “Guys and Dolls” that night. Or if the husband had shrugged and said, OK, honey, do what you want-but then you cook dinner for the kids tomorrow so I can go to my men’s group meeting.
The movie industry, of course, runs almost entirely on putting a dollar value on sex. I have analyzed Demi Moore’s career in detail, and concluded that the secret of her success is that a great many men want to sleep with her. I’ll bet even Redford does, which is why during their love scenes, when I was supposed to be worrying about how Harrelson, her movie husband, would take all this, I was too busy wondering how Bruce Willis, who actually is Moore’s husband, felt about it. Moore has been quoted as boasting that she spent hours in the gym preparing for “Indecent Proposal,” so she didn’t need a bodydouble for her sex scenes with Harrelson. The movie itself, therefore, represents a kind of franchised marketing of what she sold exclusively to Redford: 10 million of us each chip in seven bucks, and Demi Moore takes off her clothes for us.
Men have been making bargains like this for a long time; in a way, “Indecent Proposal” is an extended elaboration on one of the most famous remarks George Bernard Shaw either did or didn’t make. Seated next to a great beauty at a dinner party once, he supposedly asked if she would sleep with him for 10,000, an astronomical sum in the context of the story. She replied, in the hypothetical spirit of the question, that she might.
“Would you do it for sixpence?” he then asked.
“What kind of a woman do you think I am?” she answered indignantly.
“We’ve established what kind of a woman you are,” he is said to have replied; “we’re merely haggling over the price.”
But what kind of man does that make Shaw?
