The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [133]
The third bath of the film is a doozy. One day, while Beverley and Gerald are out of the house, the Fraleighs take it upon themselves to put a pool in the couple’s backyard—in order to film a commercial poolside the next day. In preparation, they leave a large quantity of Happy detergent at the pool’s edge. That night, Gerald comes home after dark and drives right into the new pool. Furious, he stomps off to spend the night in a hotel, and as he goes, he knocks all the soap into the pool. Late that night a rainstorm comes in, churning up the soap until huge sudsy clumps assemble. Some float into the yard’s tree branches. It is a beautiful scene, dark and surreal. Often a box of soap is visible, showing no logo or ad patter, only the word HAPPY, floating across the dark pool or bearing up under the rain. Beverly wakes up to a blue sky, and a backyard completely full of soap bubbles—a mass of foam bigger than the house. She opens her second-story bedroom window, and the suds pour into the room. When she and the kids survey the mesa of suds in the backyard, there is a fairy-tale or sci-fi look to the image. This encounter with the soap-selling world got out of control fast! It is too much. Beverly cleans up everything. She has the bubbles carted away and has a crane raise her husband’s car out of the pool.
Of its three baths, the film pronounces the domestic first bath irritating and frustrating. The second bath was a cheap fraud: a foolish girl pretending to be sexual in order to be an actress. The third bubble bath was absurd, immense, and magical. Its pool of origin was a sign of the wife’s growing power in the house, seeded by her husband’s anger. How does the marriage survive? Magic. Beverly and Gerald happen to end up in the backseat of a car, together delivering the younger Fraleigh’s baby. The experience makes Beverly concede that her husband’s work is more important than hers. She vows to quit her job, and they head home to have some lively and explicitly procreative sex. The value of babies versus selling soap is one every family has to negotiate, but usually the woman makes babies and the man sells soap. Theirs is a crazy little fantasy solution to the battle of values, blending male and female imperatives in a way available only to couples where the man is an obstetrician and the woman’s career is as dispensable as selling soap is here. There is no question that what we are fighting over is happiness; it says so right on the box. Note that the good wife never herself got into the tub: she bent beside one, watched her husband ogle the starlet wannabe in the soap commercial, and then sort of conjured up the last one at a distance; it was awesome, as bubble baths go, but it didn’t quite happen to her.
We may begin to wonder if a good woman ever gets in a bubble bath. Dudley Moore’s title character in Arthur (1981), a parody of dependent wealth, was emasculated by his bubble baths, but at least he got to get in and relax without being a slut. Julia Roberts’s character in Pretty Woman (1990) has a bubble bath that carries the traditional bubble-bath symbolism: female luxury and ease provided by a man. Note that this works in the 1990s only if the woman is an actual prostitute, not just a mistress. Just like the good wives of an earlier era, women with productive, legal jobs do not have the time for the bath, nor the need to rehearse the bubble bath’s symbols of luxury, sexuality, and being taken care of. It is interesting to contrast the bath Diane Keaton’s character takes in Shoot the Moon (1982). Her husband has left her for a younger woman, and one night when the kids are out of the house she takes a bath and smokes