MY MOVIE SHELF: Steel Magnolias

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 168  Days to go: 119

Movie #270:  Steel Magnolias

“Laughter through tears is my favorite emotion.”

When Steel Magnolias came out, that’s how I would describe it to people. How, one second I’m crying my eyes out and the next I’m dying of laughter, and how amazingly great that was. It was really the first time a movie had elicited that kind of bold physical reaction from me, and I’d be hard pressed to think of even a handful that have come out since that could do it even half as well. Steel Magnolias is a rare gem.

The story of six women living in Louisiana, Steel Magnolias feels like home to me. My mother’s family is from the deep south, and growing up we spent several weeks there every summer and sometimes in the winter as well. These people are my people. The characters of Steel Magnolias are people I recognize, with familiar habits and personalities and lifestyles. The gathering together of food to care for people who are suffering a hardship is commonplace. The catty but not malicious gossiping about everyone in town is just as common. The blending of church and community, of town functions and socializing at the beauty parlor are all rituals I’ve both witnessed and taken part in. That kind of authenticity and familiarity really helps bring the movie to life.

It’s often labeled a chick flick, as if that’s something to scoff at, but Steel Magnolias lifts up female relationships in a beautiful way. When Shelby (Julia Roberts) faces several health scares throughout the film, Truvy (Dolly Parton), Ouiser (Shirley MacLaine), Clairee (Olympia Dukakis) and Annelle (Daryl Hannah) are there for Shelby and her mother M’Lynne (Sally Field). Whether it’s to tell a joke or give a hug or just to grasp a hand in solidarity, these women support each other through all the ups and downs that come in life. Through laughter and tears and everything in between, these women stick together and build each other up.

I have to say, I never really related to Shelby the way I suppose I probably should have when I was younger. There’s an arrogance of youth that perpetuates the idea that nothing bad will ever befall them, and no one will ever die. I had that same arrogance, I swear, but Shelby always struck me as selfish and stubborn. She was also inordinately difficult toward M’Lynne, but perhaps that’s just part of the nature of mothers and daughters. I have been inordinately difficult with my own mother from time to time, and she remains the one person in the world who can drive me crazy at the drop of a hat. Still, Shelby and new husband Jackson (Dylan McDermott) both seemed so in-the-moment, unaware of risks and consequences and mortality. That’s always been sad to me, and one of many reason why I’ve always felt compassion toward M’Lynne.

I’ve always felt for Truvy, too, whose husband Spud (Sam Shepard) was always distant and rarely showed his love for her, even though it was always there. And I’ve loved Clairee’s color and humor and her desire to make everything more enjoyable. I’ve even commiserated for Annelle, who enters the film sort of lost and spends the vast majority of it trying to find her place. But most of all, I love Ouiser, because she and I share the same misanthropic tendencies, though I do openly love a lot more things than she does.

Steel Magnolias is full of important life lessons for any woman to internalize. Never have a groom’s cake at your wedding if it looks like a bleeding animal. Never allow your husband to shoot birds out of your trees. Listen to doctors when they tell you things. When someone screams they want to hit something, offer them up a hated individual. Tell people you love them more than your luggage, even if nobody knows what it’s supposed to mean. And most importantly, get someone to do calisthenics for you if you’re ever in a coma. (I would add that this person also be in charge of your leg shaving. It’s very important to have a girlfriend for this purpose. If I am ever in a coma, dear God, someone shave my legs for me.)

Also, always always always have a group of girlfriends you can count on. In many ways, they will be some of the most important relationships in your life.

MY MOVIE SHELF: The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas

This is the deal: I own around 350 movies on DVD and Blu-ray. Through June 10, 2015, I will be watching and writing about them all, in the order they are arranged on my shelf (i.e., alphabetically, with certain exceptions). No movie will be left unwatched . I welcome your comments, your words of encouragement and your declarations of my insanity.

Movie #28: The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas

“It was the nicest little whorehouse you ever saw.”

That’s the first line of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, delivered in the natural aw-shucks style of Jim Nabors, who plays Deputy Fred. From that line through the last, “The legend of the Chicken Ranch,” I know every word. I sing every part. Sometimes unprompted — in the shower, cleaning the house, driving in my car. I love it so much.

I have very vague memories around when this came out. It was 1982, and I was seven. No, I didn’t see it then. Of course not. But my grandmother came up from Florida, with my mother’s older sister Ann, to visit my mom soon after we moved into our new house. My mom is a lot more mischievous when her siblings are around, and the two of them decided to take my grandmother to see the film. (She was only 57 at the time, younger than my mother is now, but your grandparents always seem so much older to you when you’re young. In my head, I think, she was always in her 70s.) It was a great hilarious scandal to take my grandmother to such a show, and both Ann and my mom got a huge kick out of it. They laughed about that for years. They might still be, actually, as my mother told me only recently that my grandmother made them swear never to tell my grandfather that’s where they’d gone. (He died two years later, so their secret is safe.)

The thing is, it was such fun for my mother, and she loved the movie so much, that she bought the soundtrack on cassette. Every summer, as my mom and I road tripped from our home in upstate New York down to Florida to see her family  — a trip that took two solid days, each way — we listened incessantly to that soundtrack. There are a lot of songs and albums and artists that I hold a special place for in my heart to this day because of those trips, when radio stations were spotty in rural or mountainous areas and cassettes were necessary to fill the silences. The Lovin’ Spoonful, Patsy Cline, Ray Stevens and the soundtrack to The Woman in Red, because my mom liked Stevie Wonder’s “I Just Called To Say I Love You,” were all prominently featured, but The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas soundtrack was probably our favorite. Long before I ever was able to see the movie, I learned every single note — every single inflection — of every song on it.

Unsurprisingly, I understood none of it. I mean, if I barely understood Beetlejuice at thirteen, I sure as hell didn’t understand this movie. Not when I knew it only through its soundtrack, and not for a long time after I first saw the film. I don’t remember when that was, exactly, because by that time I already was so familiar with it. That first line is included in the first line of the soundtrack, as is the entire opening monologue. I knew it completely, so in some very real ways I was watching a movie for the first time that I already knew by heart. To this day, I gauge how much I like a person by how much they can enjoy this movie while watching it with me.

This was back in the days when Dolly Parton (as Miss Mona Stangley) still had a little healthy weight on her hips and Burt Reynolds (as Sheriff Ed Earl Dodd — “E’rybody liked Ed Earl. ‘Specially Ed Earl.”) was a bona fide sex symbol. The movie is a story about the events that led to the closing of The Chicken Ranch, loosely based on real events surrounding an actual brothel of that same name, and the romance between Ed Earl and Miss Mona. (Their duet “Sneakin’ Around” is one of my favorites to sing in the shower; I perform both parts.) But the most interesting plotline to me is how prescient the film is about the sensational influence of TV, and how ratings-motivated “journalism” is often more devious than the corruption they’re trying to expose. It’s all a charade; it’s all a game. Everything’s about editing and presentation and nothing is actually authentic. Reynolds’s perennial sidekick Dom DeLuise  plays muckraking journalist Melvin P. Thorpe, intent on revealing the presence of a whorehouse in the sheriff’s county (despite its being there, out in the open, for almost a century with no one complaining), all the while fastening his girdle and stuffing his jock and carefully centering his toupee as he decries the dishonesty of people, corporations and public institutions. (His attempt to be “discreet” for his television audience starts with the loud declaration, “Texas has a whorehouse in it,” which leads into his song.) (“Please excuse the filthy dirt details, and carnal lust.”) (“Loveless copulation going on, and it must stop!”)

All the songs are whip-smart, actually, especially the governor (the delightful and fabulous Charles Durning) singing “Sidestep” as his philosophy on handling difficult questions from the press. (“Was that a yes or a no?” “It was a possible maybe.”) My favorite, by far, is “Little Bitty Pissant Country Place,” the opening number by Dolly Parton, which, again, I did not understand at all for years and years after I learned all the words. But, in truth, all Parton’s songs are excellent. This movie is the heart of the reason why I will never care for Whitney Houston’s version of “I Will Always Love You,” because where Houston is bombastic and anthemic in her delivery, Parton is heartbroken and resigned, as the lyrics dictate she should be. And as for “Hard Candy Christmas,” I’ve always loved it (though I didn’t realize until recently that, the climactic events with Thorpe happening on Thanksgiving night, it was actually nearing the Christmas season as the house was closed). My mother had a Country Christmas album, a compilation of songs by various artists, that she would play every year as we put up our Christmas tree. “Hard Candy Christmas” was the second track. I admit it’s that version I prefer (the same one as on the movie’s soundtrack, in fact) over the one in the movie itself, which is partially sung by the Chicken Ranch girls (one of which, I learned tonight, was an honest-to-God porn actress. It’s a shame, because she wasn’t a bad dancer. Her high kicks during the backyard ball are great.). Still, there are a lot of wonderful memories of mine wrapped up in these songs with me.

Of course, the movie is also a comedy, and there is nothing funnier than a Texas A&M football team of all tall lanky white men and one similar-bodied black guy. They wear large-collared shirts unbuttoned halfway to their navels, with rakish scarfs tied around their necks. And they sing about how now that they’ve won the Thanksgiving game against Texas they get to celebrate at the Chicken Ranch, “where history, and Aggie boys, get made,” because we all know how difficult it is for college football players to get girls. I’m being tongue in cheek here, obviously, but it is pretty funny, and a lot of the songs, in addition to being whip-smart, are witty and full of clever lines. And where the songs die down, there are clever lines and jokes (and lots of double entendres, which are my favorites) all through the dialogue, (“Me, jumping up and down? I’d black both my eyes!”), not to mention plenty of visual gags (my favorite one is a shot during a musical number in which all the Chicken Ranch girls are studying art and photography and classical music out in back of the house in their free time).

It’s just a super fun, super enjoyable movie. I love everything about it. It’s shaped some of my attitudes toward sex and romance, toward common sense and the problems with legislating morality, and toward sensationalist media and building a healthy skepticism. It’s fed my love of musicals and songs that tell stories. It’s cemented my adoration of Dolly Parton and her slurry, sometimes squeaky drawl. It’s probably entered my subconscious at some point and influenced how I feel about tattoos on my person (“It’s downright tacky.”). It even prompted me to ask my mother what a pimp was. (“Pimps are something you don’t need to get your daily business done. Are you listening, girls? Keep them leeches and bloodsuckers off the back roads; I know how to use a gun.”)

There’s simply nothing I don’t love about it. It makes me happy, and I will continue to watch it ’til I’m 80, still saying all the lines, still performing all the parts in all the songs. However ….

“You know what really burns my ass? A flame about three feet high.”