What Women Want

Speaking of Mel Gibson, he’s had a new movie out this weekend, “What Women Want”. And uh evidently a lot of women wanted to go see what they wanted because, [it] I guess, the reports in that it had a thirty four million dollar opening weekend, which wasn’t too bad for this time in December. It beat out all other movies and Paramount, that put it out, was only expecting about twenty million so, they’re very, very happy. Uh, That movie in itself, and of course it’s a comedy, but what is very interesting about it is, Mel Gibson starts out kind of as a um a male chauvinist. Uh Interested in himself not interested [in] in the women. He works in a “ad” exec. agency, he’s expecting to be promoted to the big job. And imagine his uh disappointment when his boss comes up to him, who’s a man, and says, uh “So sorry but for the good of the company we had to bring in a woman to do this job. And the reason we needed to bring in a woman is because women now account for”, I don’t know what they said, how many billions of dollars in consumer, uh, decisions. He said, “During the sixties and seventies, men made most of the major decisions on purchasing, and in the eighties and nineties it’s starting to switch over.” So now with the women making the decision, the ad agency certainly has to have more of a woman’s point of view in order to stay in existence and take in the big bucks. And they gave as an example, that when Sears Roebuck started in with their advertising campaign that uh the slogan talks about the gentler side of Sears or, something like that, that their revenues immediately jumped about thirty four percent. Because women all of a sudden decided that Sears was their kind of store to be shopping at and affected the women customers. So, needless to say, Mel Gibson loses the promotion and Holly Hunter, the exec from another company, comes in and is placed in that position.

Well, a crazy electrical accident permits Mel Gibson to be the recipient of what women are thinking, in their mind, when they’re around him. And at first it drives him crazy and he goes to a shrink so that the shrink can help him get rid of this problem. The shrink happens to be a woman and she convinces him that this couldn’t possibly be a problem. This is probably the greatest gift that any one man has ever gotten in his whole life. That if he just uses the gift he’d know exactly what women want and, in his job as an advertising exec, if he couldn’t give women what they wanted and, increase his capacity to go up in the business world. Then he’d be stupid and dumb in not using the gift. So, he decides to flip around and accept it. And he uses it to steal [the] the ideas of his new boss, Holly Hunter. That jumps one up on her, on all the ad campaigns, and makes him look so good now that the boss goes back to fire her and promote him. Of course, somewhere along the line when he starts listening to women, he starts gaining a new respect for where they’re coming from. In fact, he starts relating better to women than women relate to themselves because he knows exactly what they’re thinking and he never tells them he just comes out and does what it is that they want to make him look like the hero. But as progress goes along he gets to the point where he realizes that the desires of the women are as valid as what his desires were. And therefore you get a softer, more feminine side, if you will, of this masculine chauvinist. And he turns himself around and instead of being the SOB that he used to be. He actually becomes such a nice guy that he’s gotta go back and, confess to his boss, what he did to get Holly Hunter reappointed in her job, which could lead to him being fired.

If you understand what’s going on in the background, from the masculine point of view, the male chauvinist could well be described, since the male is the government, could well be described as the patriot leaning toward the constitutional, the original jurisdiction government. Where I’ve got rights, and I am going to go out and enforce my rights, type attitude. And I think what we’re seeing here, what women want, women are admiralty. I think we’re having another message that says hey look, if you want ta succeed in what you’re doing. In this time, in this law forum. It comes through the feminine side not the masculine side, you’ve gotta go to admiralty. So again Hollywood is putting this out as a comedy right now at Christmas season. But that’s the metaphor and the background that I see going on in “What Women Want.”

As transcribed by: Majic