04: Amy Archer Doesn't Sell Out
In the year 8 CE the Roman poet Ovid completed his masterwork The Metamorphoses, a chronicle of nearly 12,000 lines of poetry designed to be a chronicle of all commonly told mythological stories about the Roman gods and goddesses and their attendant heroes, nymphs, satyrs, etc. It contains the first written description of the story of Pygmalion, the story of a Cypriot sculptor who eschews the company of women, but who carves a sculpture of a woman so beautiful that he falls in love with it. Pygmalion then prays to Aphrodite to give him a flesh-and-blood woman who is the likeness of his “ivory girl”. That night he kisses his sculpture and discovers that it has turned into a real woman. We assume from this point that they live happily ever after.
In 1871, playwright W. S. Gilbert (best known for his collaborations with composer Arthur Sullivan, together known as Gilbert & Sullivan) wrote a play based on Ovid’s Pygmalion story that more or less hewed closely to the original; it was a massive success. In 1913 a protegé of Gilbert’s, the misanthropic Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, decided he could emulate his mentor’s success by updating the Pygmalion story, setting his version in the turn of the 20th century London where he lived, turning the sculptor into a phonetics professor named Henry Higgins, and the sculpture Galatea into a cockney flower girl named Eliza. Higgins “sculpts” Eliza into a “proper” woman by means of lessons in diction and etiquette, and in doing so falls in love with her. Shaw, being the cantankerous crank that he was, did not write a “happily ever after” ending for his play. Higgins realizes after the fact that what he loved about Eliza was her free spirit that he has effectively drilled out of her, while Eliza opts to marry Freddy the greengrocer, despite her being able to “pass” as a higher class than he. Pygmalion was Shaw’s greatest commercial success despite its audience’s reactions clamoring for a “happy ending” to the play. Audiences ultimately got their happy ending when the play was adapted into the musical My Fair Lady in 1956 by Lerner and Loewe, that added catchy songs in addition to a final reunion between Higgins and Eliza, ultimately finding a worldwide audience as a 1964 film adaptation starring Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison. The story was further adapted and found its most shallow and pandering version in the 1990 Garry Marshall directed romantic comedy Pretty Woman, starring Richard Gere as corporate raider Edward Lewis who finds himself in need of a respectable seeming girlfriend to accompany him to corporate functions and hires call girl Vivian Ward played by Julia Roberts to play the part, transforming her into the very same kind of respectable woman he desires, and thus falls in love with her, and they (after the requisite amount of conflict and drama) conceivably live happily ever after.
if you change yourself enough, Richard Gere might kiss you on a fire escape!
By the point of Pretty Woman, the “moral” of Shaw’s 1913 play had been completely lost. The idea that Higgins regrets the fact that he changed Eliza and destroyed what ultimately made her unique had completely transformed into “if you change yourself enough, a handsome man like Richard Gere will want to kiss you”. This tired trope has repeated itself over and over in films like Grease (1978), Romancing The Stone (1984), The Breakfast Club (1985), How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days (2003) and Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull (2008). If one only watched the first hour of The Hudsucker Proxy, one might assume that it would also be among these films recycling this same tired premise.
When discussing an upcoming writing project in 1985, Joel and Ethan Coen stated “[it] takes place in the late Fifties in a skyscraper and is about Big Business. The characters talk fast and wear sharp clothes." Liberally borrowing from Rosalind Russel’s performance in His Girl Friday (1940), no single character embodies “talk fast and wear sharp clothes” like Amy Archer as expertly played by Jennifer Jason Leigh. We first meet Amy during an all-hands-on-deck meeting as the editor-in-chief of The Daily Argus newspaper played by John Mahoney (while Leigh casually refers to him as “Al” at one point in the script and credits he is referred to as “Chief”) is desperately trying to squeeze a story out of his despondent staff about Hudsucker Industries’ new president. We know that Amy must be amazing at her job, as she is not only late to this meeting and not reprimanded for it, she talks over her boss and tells him that his pitch idea for a Norville Barnes story is off the mark (and she steals one of his cigars to boot). Before her opening monologue is over we find out she’s won the Pulitzer as well. Amy is clearly devoted to her career. She’s unmarried but at no point do we have any hint that she’s an example of the tired old trope of the career gal who’s unlucky at love. In fact we find out before the film’s end that she’s never been dumped before, suggesting that she’s not only had multiple relationships but that she’s been the one pushing partners away. Everything about Amy Archer suggests that she has it together at the beginning of the film, but over the course of its run time she endures a kind of trial by fire about everything that makes her exceptional.
The comedian John Mulaney has a bit about the mockery we all endured in middle school from our fellow 13 year olds and how biting it is:
13-year-olds are the meanest people in the world. They terrify me to this day. If I’m on the street on like a Friday at 3 PM and I see a group of 8th graders on one side of the street I will cross to the other side of the street. Because 8th graders will make fun of you, but in an accurate way.
They will get to the thing that you don’t like about you. They don’t even need to look at you for long, they’ll just be like, “Ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha ha ha! Hey, look at that high-waisted man! He got feminine hips!”
And I’m like, “No!! That’s the thing I’m sensitive about!!!!”
Without realizing it, as soon as Norville reads Amy’s story headlined “Imbecile Heads Hudsucker: Not A Brain In His Head”, while she’s still posing incognito as Amy Smith from Muncie, he insults her to her face like a 13 year old.
NORVILLE: She's probably just a little confused.
AMY: Confused?
NORVILLE: Yeah, you know, probably one of these fast-talking career gals, thinks she's one of the boys. Probably is one of the boys, if you know what I mean.
AMY: I'm quite sure I don't know what you mean.
NORVILLE: Yeah, you know. Suffers from one of these complexes they have nowadays. Seems pretty obvious, doesn't it? She's probably very unattractive and bitter about it.
AMY: Oh, is that it!
NORVILLE: Yeah, you know. Probably dresses in men's clothing, swaps drinks with the guys at the local watering hole, and hobnobs with some smoothtalking heel in the newsroom named Biff or Smoocher or...
AMY: Smitty.
NORVILLE: Exactly. And I bet she's ugly. Real ugly. Otherwise, why wouldn't they print her picture next to her byline?
AMY: Maybe she puts her work ahead of her personal appearance.
NORVILLE: I bet that's exactly what she tells herself! But you and I both know she's just a dried-up bitter old maid.
It’s worth noting that Amy is never portrayed as unattractive. Another tempting but tired cliché in filmmaking is to take an attractive actress and dress her in unflattering clothing and nondescript hair and makeup and pretend that she’s not gorgeous. This of course can be turned into a third act “reveal” where a flattering hairstyle, removal of eyeglasses and more flattering (and ultra-feminine) clothing are placed on the same actress to “reveal” that she was gorgeous all along. Despite Norville’s hypothesizing about her being “extremely unattractive” and a “dried up bitter old maid” these, nothing about her portrayal so far should make us, the audience, believe that anyone who knows Amy thinks this to be true. At the same time though, Amy Archer, as a woman who exists in 20th century America, quite probably feels insecure about her appearance, she potentially feels insecure about her workplace friendships, and she certainly feels insecure about being very literally a “fast talking career gal” and thus her dress, preferred after work activities, and association with a smoothtalking heel in the newsroom named Smitty.
We see that Norville’s struck a nerve as Amy chats with Old Moses in the clock tower in a subsequent scene as her insistence of “I’m plenty happy” rings as empty and hollow as Sidney Mussburger’s cavernous office next door. In the very next scene the same smoothtalking heel Smitty breaks up a fight between Amy and the Chief by saying “Easy, tough guy”. In a moment of insecurity, realizing she doesn’t know which of the two of them Smitty is talking to, Amy asks meekly “does this suit look mannish to you?”. Immediately afterwards, Smitty pinches her butt her while inviting her for a highball, causing her to slap him across the face exclaiming “Back off, Smoocher!”. The Chief’s look of shock and Smitty’s subsequent line “hey, what gives?” imply that Smitty’s behavior is in no way unusual but this is the first time Amy’s reacted negatively to it.
Amy Archer will not hesitate to slap a fool
If we paused the film here and asked the average moviegoer what they thought Amy’s fate would be by the end of the film, it would be completely understandable to think that she would pull the same Pygmalion to Pretty Woman style move, and that by the end of the film she would have quit journalism entirely to go wear a Donna Reed dress in the suburbs, finding happiness in warming up a casserole for Norville as he takes the train in from work in the city.
This however is not what happens to Amy Archer.
By the end of the film Amy no longer works for the Daily Argus, realizing that its priorities are selling papers rather than telling the truth, but she remains a journalist. She offers to (and conceivably does) write a story about Sidney Mussburger’s stock swindle and thus Norville’s innocence. While she no longer seeks validation from her dimwitted colleagues, she keeps her sharp mode of dress, she still goes to beatnik juice bars for poetry readings.
Just as importantly, she sacrifices nothing in an attempt to “save” Norville. Yet another tired trope is female characters desperately jumping through hoops for a man who continues to make bad decisions, trying desperately to fix them as they continue to defy fixing. She recognizes he’s in trouble, and she cares about him, but beyond telling him her honest feelings first in his office and subsequently in the Café Wha? / Gaslight stand in Ann’s 440, she knows it’s on Norville to fix himself.
She grows emotionally, knowing that, in Old Moses’s words “acting like an old sourpuss ain’t gonna make [her] happy” and thus getting back in touch with her own emotions, but she doesn’t sell out. Amy Archer is her own woman, she is no Galatea.