I’m just now watching this movie, and all I can say is, Robin Williams is WAY too old to be playing a high school student.
More observations in time…
I would say it is one of the most misogynistic movies I’ve eer seen – doubly surprising since feminists loved it.
But it clear that Irving really, really, really,* really* hated women. They’re all portrayed as fools and psychopaths. The only decent women in the entire film is Roberta Muldoon – and she was a man first.
Who would you choose to play a young Robin Williams?
I think they probably decided, since they were cutting out most of Garp’s childhood (I remember they showed some: ‘Lone Ranger, not long.’) to go with RW from adolescence on up.
The book goes way more into his pre- and adolescent years at the prep school.
Wow. I just saw the scene where the pages of his story get scattered in the wind. As a writer it made me cringe. Thank God for computers, is all I can say.
As to who could have played him, I think any teenager with brown hair and a strong jaw would have been preferable to trying to pass Williams off as a high school student. He really looks ridiculous.
Are men portrayed any better?
Whoa…John Lithgow as a woman!!! I thought I recognized the actor so I had to look it up - I wouldn’t have known it was him otherwise.
Even his wife? I liked her. The mother I thought was creepy for taking advantage of Garp’s father, but I did like Helen. And the little girl who got her tongue cut out…Ellen James? The Ellen Jamesians were insane but Ellen James herself was a well done character.
My take on the book was that the women in the book, for the most part, hated men. One could argue that one of the reasons that Garp was such a misogynistic piece of shit was that his mother pretty much viewed any and all men the same way - as, at best, troublesome but occasionally necessary objects. To a certain extent, Garp was living down to his mother’s view of men. Mother Garp hated men, and viewed them, at most, as sperm donors, such as the comatose Technical Sergeant Garp.
Speaking technically, Mother Garp was a rapist, and if the sexes were reversed, with a male nurse or physician impregnating a comatose female, I can really imagine that character being viewed sympathetically.
Pretty much everyone in that book, with the possible exception of three adults: Ellen James, Garp’s trans-sexual friend/Mother Garp’s bodyguard and Garp’s son’s trans-sexual fiance were pretty much all severely flawed people. The Garp children seemed alright, somehow.
One might well argue that the book’s viewpoint was rather misanthropic, rather than being just misogynistic and misandryst. I think that part of the book’s worldview was that people are pretty fucked up in some way, sometimes victims, sometimes offenders, usually both at once - the damage is in assuming that one has some sort of moral purity. That, and that shit happens, too, just because - trying to read meaning into too much can drive one bonkers.
TWATG was a good book, just not a hopeful one.
I’m utterly baffled by this. I just finished it and I would not say there was anything misogynistic about it at all. His wife, Helen, is a great character, not a fool or psychopath at all. In fact, she forgives him much more easily for his affair with the babysitter than he does for her affair with her student. I also thought his mother was a great character, a strong and independent woman far from being crazy or foolish. Some of her ideas about lust and men might be over the top, but I don’t think they were portrayed in an overly negative way.
What motivates your opinion of the film?
IMHO Garp, the author himself, and most of his characters, are far from misogynist. No way did Irving hate women. Most of the really awful things happen to men. Most of the awful deeds committed are done by men. Women are usually strong; the best of the men are nurturing. Jenny Fields gave the dying soldier the sendoff he really, really wanted.
As I recall, the dying soldier was comatose, gone, brain-dead. She used him as a sperm dispenser. At no point in the book did TS Garp function at any level above that of, say, an asparagus. I suppose he wanted it in the same fashion as any comatose patient “wants it.”
He could say his name “Garp” and masturbated furiously like a mother fucker every chance he got. Show me an asparagus that can do that and we’ll make some money on a new internet site!
Marc
Not only that, but after they banged he said ‘good’.
RealityChuck, I’m hoping you return to this thread and give some reasons why you found the movie misogynistic.
He may have wanted sex, but did he want everything that came with it? Fathering a child, for example?
IIRC, the book went into Jenny Fields’ background with a very overprotective mother who sent her endless douche bags and warnings about men, which went some way to explaining why she chose a donor who could have no input into the baby’s life.
I don’t recall if they showed TS Fields masturbating in the movie, so it and it’s source could be interpreted very differently - though I still think Jenny’s actions were morally wrong.
Can someone who’s brain-dead have an orgasm? Or say “good?”
There was no mention of his masturbating in the film. He had priapism.
I concede the point that the book version of the patient wasn’t completely vegged-out. Even so, one can’t argue that a brain-damaged patient is an appropriate choice of a mate - one doesn’t fuck one’s patients. In the movie, the patient was vegged out.
Reverse the genders - try it: male nurse/physician, female semi-vegged-out female patient.
Then again, as I said before, almost all of the characters were, in general, all deeply-flawed, morally and otherwise.