Entry for 3 August

I won't be in class, but, if I was going to be in class, I would've brought another movie. This sounds really cheesy, but this class made me think about "My Best Friend's Wedding" with Julia Roberts. I thought about it because of the day we were talking about women who like to be pursued and how there's rarely a narrative that involves a woman going after a man. I think this movie goes with and against some of the narratives we've been talking about. Most conspicuously, the woman as the pursuer is very different from the traditional narrative that we recognized where the woman wants to be pursued. What's ironic, though, is that it doesn't work in the movie because the man that she pursues ends up with another woman. So really, maybe it's not going against the narrative that much in the first place. Also, she does all kinds of sneaky, underhanded, manipulative things to try to win the guy over, which I think is in line with the image of women as, well, sneaky and manipulative. I also saw the narrative of the competition between women here because the fiance thinks she will never stack up to the Julia Roberts character, but the Julia Roberts character complains about the perfection of the fiance and how annoying it is that there's nothing annoying about her perfection. (That's not me being unclear; that's what they say in the movie. Anybody who has seen it will vouch for me.) Anyhow, that led me to think about the narratives of friendship between women and between women and men. I think that there's one narrative that says that men and women can't be friends because one will end up being attracted to the other, which is obviously the basis for this whole movie. But I can't decide if the movie supports that or not because, in the end, part of me wants to believe that the Julia Roberts character (Julianne) wasn't really in love with her best friend; his engagement just threatened the security that she found in their relationship. The images that the fiance and Julianne represent are also different ideas about kinds of women. The fiance is girly and giggly and a horrible driver and Julianne is a tomboy and hates PDA and other emotional stuff. Anyhow... those thoughts aside, there's a bunch of secondary women characters that represent other images of women like the two promiscuous cousins and even the women in the bathroom at the stadium who, despite their being dressed in less feminine ways and the slang they use that seems to represent a different class or type of women, still relate to the drama and competition between the fiance and the Julia Roberts character.