Three Lives of Walter Mitty

After writing about The Help and the limited understanding of race relations that went into producing both the book and the movie, I thought I would write a little bit about misogyny. 

There are always so many examples.

I wanted to make a point of how easy it can be for a white woman to be aware of the sexism she faces without being aware of the racism that she perpetuates.

One thing that I kept remembering was a gaffe from Bette Midler back in 2018:

https://www.the-independent.com/arts-entertainment/music/news/better-midler-n-word-tweet-apology-brett-kavanaugh-vote-supreme-court-a8571781.html  

I do not hate Bette Midler, I have not cancelled her, but this is exactly the kind of crap that makes it so hard to overcome dominator culture. Awareness of one's own suffering as the most important thing in your world can easily lead to mistaking it for the most important thing in the entire world.

In fact, while progress has been made in some ways for various forms of marginalization, including racism and misogyny, nothing has progressed so far that it can be replaced by others. All of the bigotries still exist. Even when they seem dormant, they are easily revived. Among other reasons, some bigotries being outside the sphere of your awareness does not mean that they are gone.

I wish this wasn't true, but it is.

I was thinking about how to approach that, and suddenly I started thinking about the various incarnations of Walter Mitty.

In the spreadsheet tab where I track my reading for various awareness months and projects, there are a bunch of movies and things that I thought I would write about. Time passed and I didn't get to them, but I didn't erase them either.

With Walter Mitty specifically, maybe what started it was an ad for the video release of the 2013 movie with Ben Stiller, or something related to that.

At that point I had only seen the 1947 version with Danny Kaye. 

I am sure that I saw it back in the '80s on the Disney Channel. They ran a lot of Danny Kaye movies; I also saw The Court Jester (1956) and Wonder Man (1945), though somehow never Hans Christian Anderson(1952), though I remember seeing it advertised. In some ways, it seems like the early Disney Channel did a better job of delivering classic movies to me than Disney content, but I enjoyed it.

Anyway, I had seen the movie, wondered about how different the remake would be, and how different either would be from the original material, then decided to find out.

One motivation was this line that kept coming back to me from the musical number (of course the Danny Kaye version was a musical) "Anatole of Paris." This is one of Walter's fantasies, where -- descended from a long line of disturbed and artistic people -- he designs hats for women.

I thought it was a bigger part of the number, but in fact it's the last line and then the number is over. For all the expensive and ridiculous hats he makes, his reason is...

"I hate women."

Was that going to be a theme?