Valerie Harper and Dennis Weaver in The Day the Loving Stopped.
As if Rhoda Morgenstern’s divorce from Joe Gerard wasn’t emotionally bruising enough, here Valerie Harper (Goodbye, Supermom) goes again, putting us through the wringer in The Day the Loving Stopped (1981). This telefilm about a 1970s split with ’80s repercussions isn’t as giddily melodramatic as its title suggests, but coed Judy Danner (Dominique Dunne, Valentine Magic on Love Island) sure cries a lot, a trait shared with mother Norma (Harper). Younger sister Debbie (Ally Sheedy) gets so fed up with all the waterworks that she eventually snaps “Just knock it off!” — it was either that or break into “No More Tears (Enough is Enough).”
The family has gathered for Judy’s wedding to Danny Reynolds (James Canning), a persistent classmate who is resolutely untroubled by his betrothed’s ambivalence about marriage and hostility toward her estranged father, Aaron (Dennis Weaver of Cocaine: One Man’s Seduction). Alone together, the sweethearts can’t put groceries in the trunk without pausing to kiss. Alone with her thoughts, or with Debbie, Judy’s a waterlogged mess who isn’t sure she believes in love. “I’ve never seen it last. I don’t know if it does. Don’t you understand?” she asks, increasingly hysterical. We do, but she clarifies: “I don’t want to do to my kids what they did to us.”
Ellen Page in Hard Candy: “I fucking hate Goldfrapp…but love Team Dresch.”
Clearly this item belongs in the department of delayed reactions bin—this New York article first appeared in late November, before I started spewing nonsense here—but out of the kindness of my heart I’m posting it anyway, for the throngs of young lesbians who have been running straight home from screenings of Juno en masse to Google “Ellen Page + baby dyke.” (I know you’re out there because I’m related to one of you.)
From Page’s interview with Logan Hill:
“What they do to Ally Sheedy at the end of The Breakfast Club,” she groans, recalling how Sheedy’s androgynous loner gets a pink Barbie makeover so she can kiss the jock. “How could that have been allowed to happen? No, really. I mean it. I know it’s iconic…but you’ve got to be kidding me!”
“Think about the poor kids who’ve watched this stuff,” she continues, leaning into her argument. Films like that make tomboys like her “start judging ourselves, just because, you know, you’d rather climb trees than give blow jobs.”
And Hill notes of Juno:
The movie could very well make her a star, not just the next Molly Ringwald but the next Johnny Depp: a transgressive teen idol whose weirdo-hero crossover appeal might evolve into real staying power. But perhaps it really is best that she avoid L.A. Because right now she’s watching herself play one kind of girl yet still being pushed toward another. “It’s just freaky. Like, are we really still stuck there?” she asks, noting that a few photo shoots have already set off waring bells. “Every shoot, I don’t want to be thrown some lacy pink shirt—sometimes I would prefer to not wear a shirt at all. At least I’d be owning that moment.
I mean, Annie Lennox used to be able to dress like a man and sell albums,” says Page, in her flannel shirt and Converse sneakers. “I don’t think a big star could do that right now.”
So, let’s tally things up. Ellen Page calls out John Hughes on his hackiness, points to Annie Lennox as a style icon, and comes out in favor of climbing trees over giving blow jobs. By my calculations that means she kicks ass, and that must be celebrated now, before Hollywood chews her up and spits her out, right onto the sets of movies like Anna and the King and Flightplan. And don’t play dumb about that last part; you wouldn’t be here right now if you didn’t think there were a few similarities between Page and Jodie Foster.
Speaking of which, if you’re disappointed by a lack of explicit lesbian content in this post, thinking perhaps I’d have footage of Page re-creating scenes from Bound with one of her Canadian compatriots to offer you, I have two things to say. First: You’re an idiot. Second: Keep an eye out for an upcoming movie called Jack and Diane, which stars Page and will feature some lesbianism with a lycanthropic twist. It is undoubtedly the film Lon Chaney Jr. always wanted to make.
