Oliver Rose (played by Michael Douglas): “I think you owe me a solid reason. I worked my ass off for you and the kids to have a nice life and you owe me a reason that makes sense. I want to hear it.”
Barbara Rose (played by Kathleen Turner): “Because. When I watch you eat. When I see you asleep. When I look at you lately...I just want to smash your face in.”—The War of the Roses (1989), written by Michael Leeson, adapted from the novel by Warren Adler, directed by Danny DeVito.
Certain TV series and movies epitomize the Reagan Era, I think, either in specific details or their sense of the time.
The primetime soap Dynasty was an example of the former. Creator Esther Shapiro sold her show as a kind of modern retelling of I, Claudius, but in time many saw her characters as stand-ins for the Reagans.
Certain TV series and movies epitomize the Reagan Era, I think, either in specific details or their sense of the time.
The primetime soap Dynasty was an example of the former. Creator Esther Shapiro sold her show as a kind of modern retelling of I, Claudius, but in time many saw her characters as stand-ins for the Reagans.
There was the same powerful paterfamilias; the same loving second wife; the same first wife rather lost without him; the same rebellious daughter; the same son either gay or, like Ron Reagan Jr. in those years (courtesy of his brief ballet career), rumored to be so. Its length almost exactly stretched across the Reagan administration, premiering nine days before the Gipper’s inauguration and ending five months after he left the White House.
In showing liberalism at bay, Family Ties represented the second trend. Michael Gross and Meredith Baxter Birney were the stars when the show premiered in 1982, but viewer interest swung irresistibly toward Michael J. Fox, who made conservative son Alex Keaton a charmer you rooted for even though you knew you shouldn’t.
In showing liberalism at bay, Family Ties represented the second trend. Michael Gross and Meredith Baxter Birney were the stars when the show premiered in 1982, but viewer interest swung irresistibly toward Michael J. Fox, who made conservative son Alex Keaton a charmer you rooted for even though you knew you shouldn’t.
Parents Steven and Elyse Keaton, Sixties hippies who’d morphed into, respectively, a public-TV exec and an architect, looked old and stodgy, just as liberalism did in that era compared with laissez-faire economics (nowadays, we know, in politics as in life on TV, that father knows best).
But the black comedy The War of the Roses touched a particular national nerve, taking the number-one box-office spot in the U.S. on this date 20 years ago. Oliver and Barbara Rose tortured each other so much that they brought to mind Samuel Butler’s acidic summary of Victorian historian Thomas Carlyle and his wife Jane: “Yes it was good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs. Carlyle marry one another and so make only two people miserable instead of four.”
Except, of course, that Butler was not counting children as collateral damage. The two Rose kids become casualties in the couple’s ferocious divorce after 17 years of marriage, just as the children of Christie Brinkley and Peter Cook did and as those of Tiger Woods and Elin Nordegren will in the event (increasingly likely) that the golfer and his wife part ways.
Warren Adler’s novel was published in 1981, just as a new mood was sweeping the country. The film came out eight years later, when that initial headiness had long since worn off, courtesy of a stock-market correction (sound familiar?). Many in the nation began to take stock of their own lives, if only for a brief period.
The battles between Oliver and Barbara Rose struck such a chord because of this (admittedly short-lived) reassessment. Their relationship began with material goods—a typical romantic- comedy, meet-cute encounter at an auction—so it was only natural that when it all soured—when Barbara decided to have the things that Oliver, as he claims, “worked his ass off for”—it would also involve money and everything it could buy.
Their opulent home forms their battleground, and their take-no-prisoners engagements escalate to take in Barbara’s catered dinner (which Oliver ruins by urinating into it), Oliver’s sports car, and the expensive chandelier from which they dangle at the film’s denouement.
Following Romancing the Stone and its sequel, The Jewel of the Nile, The War of the Roses represented the third (and, so far, last) teaming of Douglas and Turner (who enjoyed a furtive, quickly ended offscreen affair during the making of Stone). These two actors were unafraid to follow their selfish yuppie characters to their logical conclusion. (Douglas gets off one of my favorite lines from the film: "You have sunk below the deepest layer of prehistoric frog shit at the bottom of a New Jersey scum swamp.")
The ascension to power of Barack Obama, like the earlier Presidency of Bill Clinton, persuaded many that a new Age of Aquarius, filled with love and understanding at last, was about to ensue. I’m afraid it’s not going to happen, for reasons having nothing to do with whatever mix of talents and frailties these Presidents and their appointees brought to Washington. It has everything to do with an instinct in the American people far more basic than the kind present in Douglas’ notorious 1990s thriller.
The hunger for material goods has only been checked by the recent recession, just as the “Decade of Greed” did not end when Reagan left for California. That hunger shrivels everything, including marriage.
With so much materially at stake these days, divorce only promises to become nastier. The weapons in the Divorce Wars have only multiplied since the Roses jousted.
In the old days, photographic evidence of liaisons would be enough to compel a wronged spouse to scream bloody murder. Think of the classic early episode of L.A. Law when Arnie Becker warns a client that she does not want to see the pictures of her errant hubby. When she persists and he shows them reluctantly, the inevitable explosion—and resulting legal complication—follows.
But now text messages, reports The New York Times, represent a new “Digital Lipstick on the Collar.” According to the piece, divorce attorneys are seeing an increase in cases where spouses are offering text messages as evidence of adultery.
The War of the Roses missed out on the telecommunications boom that produced the explicit text message, but in so many other ways it anticipated how our age is producing thousands of increasingly toxic divisions of the spoils.
But the black comedy The War of the Roses touched a particular national nerve, taking the number-one box-office spot in the U.S. on this date 20 years ago. Oliver and Barbara Rose tortured each other so much that they brought to mind Samuel Butler’s acidic summary of Victorian historian Thomas Carlyle and his wife Jane: “Yes it was good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs. Carlyle marry one another and so make only two people miserable instead of four.”
Except, of course, that Butler was not counting children as collateral damage. The two Rose kids become casualties in the couple’s ferocious divorce after 17 years of marriage, just as the children of Christie Brinkley and Peter Cook did and as those of Tiger Woods and Elin Nordegren will in the event (increasingly likely) that the golfer and his wife part ways.
Warren Adler’s novel was published in 1981, just as a new mood was sweeping the country. The film came out eight years later, when that initial headiness had long since worn off, courtesy of a stock-market correction (sound familiar?). Many in the nation began to take stock of their own lives, if only for a brief period.
The battles between Oliver and Barbara Rose struck such a chord because of this (admittedly short-lived) reassessment. Their relationship began with material goods—a typical romantic- comedy, meet-cute encounter at an auction—so it was only natural that when it all soured—when Barbara decided to have the things that Oliver, as he claims, “worked his ass off for”—it would also involve money and everything it could buy.
Their opulent home forms their battleground, and their take-no-prisoners engagements escalate to take in Barbara’s catered dinner (which Oliver ruins by urinating into it), Oliver’s sports car, and the expensive chandelier from which they dangle at the film’s denouement.
Following Romancing the Stone and its sequel, The Jewel of the Nile, The War of the Roses represented the third (and, so far, last) teaming of Douglas and Turner (who enjoyed a furtive, quickly ended offscreen affair during the making of Stone). These two actors were unafraid to follow their selfish yuppie characters to their logical conclusion. (Douglas gets off one of my favorite lines from the film: "You have sunk below the deepest layer of prehistoric frog shit at the bottom of a New Jersey scum swamp.")
The ascension to power of Barack Obama, like the earlier Presidency of Bill Clinton, persuaded many that a new Age of Aquarius, filled with love and understanding at last, was about to ensue. I’m afraid it’s not going to happen, for reasons having nothing to do with whatever mix of talents and frailties these Presidents and their appointees brought to Washington. It has everything to do with an instinct in the American people far more basic than the kind present in Douglas’ notorious 1990s thriller.
The hunger for material goods has only been checked by the recent recession, just as the “Decade of Greed” did not end when Reagan left for California. That hunger shrivels everything, including marriage.
With so much materially at stake these days, divorce only promises to become nastier. The weapons in the Divorce Wars have only multiplied since the Roses jousted.
In the old days, photographic evidence of liaisons would be enough to compel a wronged spouse to scream bloody murder. Think of the classic early episode of L.A. Law when Arnie Becker warns a client that she does not want to see the pictures of her errant hubby. When she persists and he shows them reluctantly, the inevitable explosion—and resulting legal complication—follows.
But now text messages, reports The New York Times, represent a new “Digital Lipstick on the Collar.” According to the piece, divorce attorneys are seeing an increase in cases where spouses are offering text messages as evidence of adultery.
The War of the Roses missed out on the telecommunications boom that produced the explicit text message, but in so many other ways it anticipated how our age is producing thousands of increasingly toxic divisions of the spoils.
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