Putting Walter Mitty on the couch

"Anatole of Paris" was written by Sylvia Fine, Danny Kaye's wife.

She was a lyricist and composer professionally, separately from her husband, but she also worked with him, writing some of his most famous numbers.

I suspect that the "I hate women" conclusion was mostly a joke, based on women's fashion often being ridiculously uncomfortable and expensive. If there is some misogyny in the fashion industry, it is not specific to the film.

One point worth noting is that the 1947 movie takes place in a much broader world.

In the 1939 story, there are brief encounters with a parking lot attendant's horn, for example, but they are as undeveloped as the non-Mitty characters in his fantasies. Even the repeated interruptions by his wife have no real detail, just that it is a nuisance, distracting him from his... well, I would say "rich" fantasy life, but it's not really.

There aren't a lot of details; just brief glimpses of something imagined where he is cool, competent, and admired, but without the details and individualization that would make it "rich."

In the 1947 movie, Mitty has a boss who steals his ideas, a fiancee he doesn't really want, a competitor who does want her, and and overbearing future mother-in-law, all before coincidences set him up for a real adventure. 

So the 1939 Walter has five fantasies while doing normal Saturday errands, though as quickly as he falls in and out of them, there will probably be more. The 1947 Walter has some similar fantasies, but also some different ones, and one major real adventure that gets started on his way to work. Then the 2013 Walter has some globe-trotting adventures, but that's not important now.

Watching the 1947 movie it was easy to wonder why Walter was engaged to someone whom he didn't love, but who was also being pursued by someone else whom she seemed to find more exciting. What was in it for either of them?

Yes, you see that under all of the meekness there is courage, but why did he expend the effort to propose to Gertrude? Did she and her mother push him into it before they knew Tubby existed?

That's mainly just set up, and one could assume that 1947 Walter being pressed for help by Rosalind is what saved him from the fate of the 1939 Walter, hating his wife and his humdrum life.

That made me wonder if Thurber hated women.

Based on reading his work, that seemed probable, but reading about his life doesn't indicate it.

Thurber married in his 20s, was encouraged in his career by his wife, cheated on her (but it was mutual), reconciled because she was pregnant, cheated more but apparently had a pretty amicable divorce, then he remarried to a rebound from yet another relationship (though that one was still in contact with him years later). You could argue that behavior is not characteristic of loving and respecting women, but it's certainly not avoiding them.

To be fair, some of his work is not merely misogynistic, but also fairly misanthropic, and yet he had lots of friends. Later health issues led to emotional instability and depression and he tended to drink too much. His work did get darker then, but it seems like it was dark all along.

I have noted that the women he portrays -- in cartoons and in prose -- tend to be large and domineering. There could be an aspect of resenting the influence that women had, even though it seemed to involve things that were helpful, like pursuing writing as a profession and caring for him through his health problems, as well as picking up after him emotionally.

However, there is also a part of me that wonders if it was just going along with the ease of complaining about wives. Apparently, Henny Youngman adored Sadie, even if you would never know it from his act:

https://www.cracked.com/article_41738_take-my-wife-jokes-began-with-a-genuine-request.html 

I also wonder if part of it is when the woman commits the crime of becoming a wife, with all of the interest focused on obtaining her, followed by disappointment in her being a real person instead of a fantasy. 

The fantasy seems to be based on a rather simplistic definition of masculinity and a lot of other nonsense, but then at least it becomes convenient to blame your perceived problems on your wife as opposed to other social forces that would require some level of cooperation motivated by more than self-interest.

Better still than blaming yourself. 

Of course, Thurber says that Mitty was based on Robert Benchley, but I'm not sure the attitude fits. Maybe Benchley actually had a rich fantasy life.

The IMDb trivia page for the film also says that Thurber offered Samuel Goldwyn $10,000 not to make the film. He did not like the film version, as it wasn't his vision, but I don't think anyone would have enjoyed a film of his vision. 

That's show biz. 

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? 

As told by white people

I don't really know why I am writing about these now.

This is about two books, neither of them read recently.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

Go Set A Watchmen by Harper Lee 

The Help was loaned to us by a friend who was in a book club and often passed books along. I think it was pretty popular; there was a movie two years after the book. We went to see that too; we all read the book and hadn't hated it.

I kind of liked it. It was interesting and the reading flowed and there was humor.

I was also uncomfortable with it. Some of the dialect that was used for the Black characters did not seem right, at least not written by a white woman, and some of the descriptions... I had some concerns.

The movie had things that really irritated me. From the book, Celia was never going to learn how to cook. She had other things that she could do and they had the money to hire people to cook. So when movie Celia's cooking for Minny gave Minny the courage to leave her abusive husband it was glaring.

In addition, while you don't have to hate Skeeter's mother, there was no seeing the light or changing her mind or anything like that in the book. Her being helpful with Hilly toward the end was just her usual insensitivity paying off, and that's fine. It's nice there was a use for it.

That seemed like a matter of soothing egos, making some people look better. I could give lots of examples, but only white characters got any kind of glow-up here.

I believe the movie was helpful for the careers of Octavia Spencer, Viola Davis, and Jessica Chastain, so, good. 

Then, seeing discussion by Black women on Twitter, one glaring error in the movie and book was that in addition to the racism and condescension and employer caprice that real domestic workers had to deal with, a noticeable absence was the heavy threat of sexual assault. Someone who really saw that side would have known that. It would appear that Stockett did not, therefore Skeeter could not.

As it is, Stockett has Aibileen describe herself as black like a cockroach, and her husband leaves her for another woman. Minny has an abusive husband. Johnny appreciates Minny's cooking, but that's all the white men are going to see.

On the other hand, Skeeter's big problem is that she doesn't know she's attractive and that being tall is in her favor. That's because Skeeter's mother is mean to her and sent the loving Black maid away when Constantine's daughter embarrassed her in front of the DAR.

But all of these Black women are very supportive of Skeeter. Well, there's one who isn't, but the others say to ignore that one. In fact, Constantine dies of a broken heart after no longer being able to care for her white family and being stuck retired and living with her daughter.

Aibileen prays for Skeeter and tells Mae Mobley -- who also has an unloving mother -- that she is kind and smart and important. 

The Help keeps the Black women firmly into the "Mammy" role. That's not surprising, but it hit differently years later when I read the other book.

I remember people being really excited when there was finally another book from Harper Lee; then having strong reactions against the book. 

The reactions appeared to be to finding out that Atticus Finch was not perfectly noble and not racist. Instead he was pragmatic and fair, but still pretty firmly entrenched in the patriarchy. (Again, not surprising.)

I think what might have bothered some people more is that when Jean Louise goes to visit Calpurnia, there are no warm embraces. No one is exactly mean to her, they don't dote on her the way they did when she was a child. The easy affection turned into a wary caution with the adult white woman.

They are absolutely right to be suspicious. Maybe her motives are good, but that doesn't mean that she understands all of the forces working around her and she is going to leave town again. For Jean Louise, illusions are being shattered left and right, but for everyone else the illusions have long been gone.

Part of that is finding out that the adoration that you once accepted as your due was part of a job, and part of safety. I don't think that has to mean that there isn't any real affection, but if those condescending and capricious employers were also once cared for with great affection by their Black nannies, and then grew into those honey-dripping tyrants, it is inevitable that the situation changes. 

I suspect that's something Lee figured out and Stockett did not.  

If there's a sense of disillusionment with that, change that situation. Do better.

Adoration is not your due. 

Especially not when it's built on racism enforced by law and economic inequality. 

Oh, and this is interesting:

https://abcnews.com/Health/lawsuit-black-maid-ablene-cooper-sues-author-kathryn/story?id=12968562 

Projecting

Now it's time to get back to The Other Bennett Sister, which I still have not watched, though I have seen many more clips.

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2026/03/spotlight-on-jane-austen.html 

From those clips, it looks fairly charming, for the most part. I can see why people are into it. 

The Mary Bennett that you get seems like someone that the Mary Bennett you read about could become, but that is not how the series depicts Mary at the start.

They do the most dirt to Mrs. Bennett, which seems odd because there is never a really flattering portrayal of her; being true to the book is usually mean enough.

With the other Jane Austen discussion that had been going on, I had developed a new appreciation for Mrs. Bennett. Yes, she was a silly, shallow woman, but she understood the need for her daughters to be married for their own security and she was determined to see it happen. She did not get much in the way of thanks for that from her daughters, nor respect from her husband, who was mostly not helpful.

Regardless, she was still never vicious or mean. If anyone had suggested that Mary would be a better match for Mr. Collins than Elizabeth, I can see Mrs. Bennett immediately pursuing that. Sure, anyone with any sense would have figured that out on their own, but sense was not her strong point.

The most interesting thing was seeing how the series portrayed Mr. Collins, as someone timidly trying to understand happiness through reading Aristotle, rather than a self-satisfied sycophant who focused on sermons as befit his role as a man of the church.  

Based on that, I can only assume that the viewpoint behind this -- whether more due to the author or the adaptation -- is that smart, introspective people are not appreciated, especially if they are not particularly good-looking and especially by their mothers; shame on those mothers!

That is a thing that can happen, but that's not what Jane Austen wrote.

It's been close to fifteen years, but there was a time when I was reading a lot of fan fiction, trying to understand why people would write things certain ways. 

There is a lot of variation, including just that sometimes people find things they want to take further. What might be most relevant here is that often much of it was based on a hatred of one beloved character and an overly close association with someone who seemed to be a villain but had obviously just been mistreated and misunderstood.

That doesn't have to be bad, but are those writers missing something?

For example, if you are really smart and introspective, but the things you say to others frustrate and annoy them (Mary after Lydia eloped, or Mr. Collins always), that may be something to reflect on. It may require observing other people as if they are also important.  

It doesn't mean that you will mesh with everyone, or that you have to change your identity to fit in, but at least knowing if maybe you are a little smug or insincere can be useful.

Also worth thinking about; do you read only to project your views over others? If that's the case, you're missing out. One of the really great things about reading fiction is getting to understand other people and other thoughts. Empathy has been getting short shrift lately, but that's a problem.

Let me just conclude with something that came up when others were irritated at new, romantic Dracula ads (it's not just me). I can't find it now ( I think someone copied it from Tumblr), but someone suggested they would like to see a continuation where Jonathan and Mina solve mysteries together.

The end of the book implies that their adventuring is over once Dracula is destroyed; Jonathan will continue to work, Mina will be a wife and mother, and all will be well, happily ever after. 

However, he's still a lawyer who could end up with weird clients and property deals that happen to involve hauntings and she still types and knows shorthand; they have skills.

They also have one friend who's a British peer,one friend who runs an asylum, and one who's a medical doctor familiar with the supernatural.

It could work. 

Vampires suck

This post title was the title of a terrible movie, a spoof that was neither funny nor clever.

For this series of posts, perhaps it makes sense.

I am not completely against attempts to sympathize with the monster. If the monster represents something human in us or something valuable in nature, that can be valuable.

I can also see where certain tendencies now would lead to always casting the humans as the worst in favor of the monster. I don't appreciate it, but I can see how it happens.

I have pretty much lost patience with making the vampire the sexy love interest.

I saw a theory once that this happens because the vampire kills in an embrace. Maybe it helps that the corpse can look still look pretty intact. After all, consumption was romanticized for a while, and was sometimes linked to vampires, so why not the fictional character that you can cast with really handsome actors.

I know I am off-trend here; I have my reasons. 

For a while, I had a real fear of being bitten. When I had nightmares, they were generally about vampires (even though the underlying phobia seemed to come from a dog). Stories and screenplays I have worked on featured vampires. I get the fascination.

Energy vampires -- usually in the form of attention seekers -- are my personal weakness. That may be why I feel the threat so much.

As someone who also usually has a lot of responsibility and can get overwhelmed by it, at times I do feel the appeal of someone coming in and just taking control of everything, removing the problems.

That is not what I actually want, though. Maybe what I really want is more sleep or more money or for someone else to take care of one of the things so that I can concentrate on the others and get in a nap.

Maybe it really is always just a desire for more sleep, but not in a coffin.

Our simple, fantasy solutions are probably not what we really want. 

My solution is not going to be wanting to die, or wanting to be undead or under the control of someone else and certainly not changing in a way that harms other people. 

I may be more frustrated with the current tendency to idolize the evil, especially at the expense of the good.

Yes, trying to divide two sides into good and evil can be reductive and overly simplistic, but subsisting on the blood of others, stealing their life forces, and twisting their souls... it's going to be pretty hard to put a positive spin on that.

First it takes changing the rules and the purposes of how it all works. Then, at least in the case of the Athena Club books, it takes ruining everyone else, making them villains to justify (or nullify) any malice in your hero.

But yeah, it bugs me more because I liked the source material as it was. 

For another take on the cycle of vampire sex appeal, you may be interested in this episode of Monstrum:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=demJo-CfGU0 

The sheer, unmitigated gall

In the first installment of The Extraordinary Adventures of the Athena Club, The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter, it appeared to be making Dr. Van Helsing and Dr. Seward bad people. I didn't love that, but it was a relatively minor part of the overall story. 

There were changes to many characters from many authors' works, but that part bothered me more. 

I love the book Dracula. Because of that affection, I have read it multiple times, as well as having read some of the parts that were written and then removed. That makes departures from the book as written more glaring.

The series revolves around a group of daughters of scientists who experimented on them, giving them unusual abilities. They come together and solve mysteries. 

Those daughters are Mary Jekyll and Diana Hyde, Beatrice Rappacini, Catherina Moreau (a puma turned into a woman by Dr. Moreau on his island), and Justine Frankenstein, who was reanimated by Victor after she was hung for the murder actually committed by his other reanimated corpse.

The first novel also incorporates Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. As it progresses, other characters enter from those books, as well as books by H. Rider Haggard and J. Sheridan Le Fanu.

As it is, I don't really like Arthur Conan Doyle's work and I haven't read any Haggard. I have mostly read Frankenstein, but my mind wandered a lot, possibly unfairly. 

I have read Carmilla, though it's been a while, and I might like The Strange Case of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde as much as I like Dracula.

I actually kind of liked Rappacini's Daughter surviving her end, but the price was that her lover died, and her father as well, both of which were sad for her.

The characters from Carmilla don't come up right away, so that wasn't an issue. With the characters from Stevenson, Mr. Hyde himself shows up briefly at the end, but I did not immediately object to either half having daughters. That made the main frustration the maligning of the Dracula characters, and again, it started out small.

It got much worse, including unforgivable Quincy slander. Then Goss blew them all up while they were in pursuit of their evil schemes.

I have some thoughts about why it went down this way; that is one post. 

In addition, there was something else that came to mind more recently when I read the spoiler for The Bride movie.

The tricky part with these posts is that I am going to criticize a lot of things without full or any viewing. I worry that's unfair, but watching them is a price I am unwilling to pay.

Anyway, The Bride apparently starts with the ghost of Mary Shelley saying she hadn't been able to tell the story before. 

When I first read the movie spoiler, the way it was written implied that those primitive times wouldn't allow her to say what she wanted. 

That raised my hackles; I really got the impression that she said what she wanted to say. 

Something else I read made it seem more like she wanted to tell additional story but did not live long enough. That's not quite as offensive, but it's still questionable. Frankenstein was published in 1818; Shelley died in 1851. I think she had time.

Unless it's just that the actual successful creation of the Bride had not happened until well after her death, so only her ghost saw it. THAT makes perfect sense. 

To some extent I had viewed the series as a feminist spin on works like The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which leaves out any women except for Mina Harker, and always with Jonathan dead. I can see centering women, and perhaps also making the men less heroic to that end, my personal preferences aside.

However, making Victor Frankenstein sweetly devoted to saving Justine and nurturing, while the monster is pure evil, against the writing of Shelley... that's not super feminist.

I will add to this that I had not been interested in the Emerald Fennell version of Wuthering Heights. It looked like they wanted to take the eating scene from Tom Jones and play it straight. Okay, that's not how the book goes, but okay.

Then a clip happened to come up on my feed of Isabella on a chain -- completely degraded and clinging to it -- and I am just going to be embarrassed for everyone here because they should be.

One of the comments on the clip talked about the courage book Isabella showed in leaving her husband and then raising her child without him. I was mainly glad that her dog survived, and add nearly killing the dog to Heathcliff's psychopathic nature. Like many psychopaths, he could be charming, and that's how he got Isabella, but his cruelty did not keep her.

I am very irritated with all of them. 

Related posts:

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2026/04/spooky-season-finishing-up-series.html  

Spooky Season: Finishing up the series

Writing about this has been very drawn-out; there was a lot happening. I pursued different themes, and had other things to write about that were not related to Spooky Season at all.

Really, the only thing left is the series:

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2025/03/spooky-season-series.html 

(Perhaps I should note that I have now read the Universal Monsters Mummy book now and I did not hate it.) 

One thing that is absolutely clear after going through them is that if something bugs you in the beginning of a trilogy, it will only get more frustrating. Therefore...

Iron Tongue of Midnight (#3 in The Forge and Fracture Series) by Brittany N. Williams

Yes, the violent fairy scenes got more frequent and gorier. I think that even got to Williams; after one fight something appears around the corner for a cliffhanger, then the next chapter just says it was quickly dispatched. I was dreading the details, but that was still weird.

After all of that, the ease of the resolution didn't feel real or earned.

Angel of the Overpass (#3 in Ghost Roads) by Seanan McGuire

More lore, more expanding mythology and more teenage attitude from ghost Rose. She periodically mentions that she isn't really a teenager anymore, despite still looking like one. I have an idea for how you could demonstrate that. 

Most of the attitude is shown as a way of adding dramatic tension to things she is going to need to do but does not want to do. We all know you are going to do it; just get to it.

I may not be a young and fun person anymore.

While this is the end of the series, there is a shared universe with other series. If I loved these books I would probably be thrilled by that. Nope. 

House of Elephants (#3 in Witchlings) by Claribel A. Ortega

It still gets overly tween at times, but there are aspects that I do like. 

As it is, this one is definitely not a trilogy. A fourth novel is out, as well as a short story and a fifth novel slated for publication later this year. I may read them, but am currently uncommitted.

The Sinister Mystery of the Mesmerizing Girl (#3 in The Extraordinary Adventures of the Athena Club) by Theodora Goss  

Goss is not a bad writer. If she were working with original characters I would probably have been okay. 

I could say that the issue is that she messed with characters that I really like in works I really respect, but I am not a huge fan of Frankenstein or any of the Sherlock Holmes stories and they are part of my irritation, which grew exponentially worse by the end of the series.

In yesterday's post I mentioned that I was going to pursue a tangent before continuing in that vein.

This is the reason for the tangent.

It's not just this, but also The Other Bennett Sister and The Bride and Wuthering Heights.

I need to take some time to complain!  

Related Posts:

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2025/12/ghostly-childrens-picture-books.html  

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2026/01/a-ghostly-movie.html 

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2026/01/monstrous-comics.html 

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2026/01/ghostly-middle-reader-books-old-school.html 

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2026/04/spooky-season-new-horizons.html