The Flaws in Defense of ‘Indecent Proposal’ Script

Defending “Indecent Proposal”--the movie she scripted--from attacks by (male) critics, Amy Holden Jones claims she could not have written a more intelligent film that would also be commercially successful (“A ‘Proposal’ Intended for People, Not for Critics,” April 19). Jones also says that her film expresses a female fantasy and thus threatens male critics like Kenneth Turan, who supposedly do not understand the requirements of Hollywood genre films.

I have written extensively on “mass-produced” female fantasies--women’s films, romances, soap operas--and taught them for many years, and in my view Jones insults (a) Hollywood and (b) women. One can cite numerous films in Hollywood history that have featured women forced to make choices--between a man and a career, between two men and so on. Such films, starring such women as Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, showed women not only actively choosing their destinies but living with the often exorbitant consequences of their choices.

While Jones claims to have written such a film (a film about “women who do what they like with their bodies”), “Indecent Proposal” does not have the courage to portray a woman acting on her own desire. Right before their film characters make love, Robert Redford says to Demi Moore: “Nothing will happen tonight that you don’t choose.” There ought to have been ways for a skillful filmmaker to show Moore’s active desire more directly, rather than having the man state the fact of her choice. After all, plenty of rapists believe their victims “really” want to be raped. And Redford has just bought her.

Even at the very end, when the Moore character supposedly “chooses” to go back to her husband, it is Redford who intuits her love for her husband and makes up a story to push her away. As she is throughout the film, Moore is largely passive.

But what really gives the lie to Jones’ claim to have created a powerful female fantasy about a woman’s attraction to another man is that we never see Moore and Redford making love (whereas we see Moore twice making love with her husband).

The film has a big hole in the center of it, and the effect is to make us identify not with the woman’s thoughts and feelings but with the husband’s point of view, as he becomes obsessed by the question of whether the sex was enjoyable. Even the most tawdry of female romances are more successful at conveying female pleasure and passion.

TANIA MODLESKI

Professor of English, USC

Los Angeles