A therapeutic close reading of Romancing the Stone
how my parents' failure to monitor my childhood media intake created a flawed worker
Queridos amigos del Spanish Conversation Group de Capitol Hill,
Have you ever found yourself in a situation and were struck with the realization that the root of this mess was some unfulfilled fantasy shit from your childhood?
I had been in Colombia five months total—two months to learn the language and tour around, trying to hook up with a communist I thought was a drug dealer but was actually a journalist who convinced me to meet him in Venezuela while he was covering the election after Chavez’s death; two months to have that come to an end, fail to find another migrant worker gig, decamp to the Pacific Coast to try to read a novel in Spanish, and end up on a permaculture farm in Antioquia where I took up with a young hipster from the States; one brief month to enjoy that and, when that ended, take a break from slashing at bananas with a machete with a weekend in [redacted], a small town in the southern part of the department—when I decided to take a horseback tour to see some nearby caves. It was there I realized that perhaps I hadn’t come to Colombia to master Spanish after so many hours practicing with you, but to realize a childhood fantasy of pretending to be Joan Wilder—THE Joan Wilder—digging in the silty water of a grotto that looked somewhat like this one to pull out a figurine containing a giant emerald.
When I was a kid, my favorite movie to watch was Romancing the Stone. I can’t remember how it came to be, for four-year-old Auxie, my favorite movie. I have a memory that feels more like habit of going to the cabinet where the VHS tapes (many bootlegged recordings from my aunt’s cable gifted to us on visits to Town) were kept; of riffling through the tapes, looking for the box with the handwritten labels; of crawling—not because I couldn’t walk, but because I preferred not to—across the tiled entrance of our house, to the front room with wall-to-wall carpeting where the TV stand was, to shove the tape into the player.
I’d fast forward through Footloose to start the movie.
Released in 1984, Romancing the Stone is a romantic comedy of how a timid but best-selling writer of romance novels, Joan Wilder (played by Kathleen Turner), is forced to travel to Colombia to rescue her kidnapped sister by providing a treasure map that her brother-in-law mailed to her shortly before he was murdered. During the journey, Joan Wilder has several misadventures of travel, meets a handsome white stranger played by Michael Douglas and learns several lessons: how high heels are the most impractical of shoes to traipse around the Global South; dancing leads to trust, love and sexual pleasure; and that within her is a brave woman who can find her own damn treasure, defeat the baddies with a little light mutilation and murder and take the biggest risk of all—trusting a (white) man.
Just writing that synopsis, not having seen the movie since sometime in 2012, when I forced my Platonic Life Partner (PLP) to watch it in a hostel in Taiwan with me, I’m slapping my forehead with the similarities to my Colombian misadventures. That’s not why I’m writing this to you today, amigos queridos—that story is for a later date. I want to explore the idea of why a four-year-old towhead liked this movie instead of Footloose, The Goonies or even Raiders of the Lost Ark. And what it has to do with work sucking.
No one in my family remembers watching this movie with me or even enjoying it; it was my own peculiar preference enjoyed in solitude. I imagine that a child who had as much solitude as Lil Auxie did would like this movie, though; she identified with Joan Wilder.
Joan Wilder is not like the Disney princesses in Cinderella and Snow White, both VHS options in the Ekster household. The first seven minutes of the movie establishes that our hero is a single woman capable of great imaginative power but incompetent in the traditional feminine arts. She fantasizes about an ideal partner, a lean cowboy protector who removes her from danger, but she’s far from being any man’s idea of an ideal partner. Her apartment is strewn about with clothes, she has no food in her fridge and her only ward, a cat named Romeo, has to naggingly meow at her to get his basic needs met. Her life is not in the world that she lives in, but in her imagination. So incompetent is Joan Wilder at adult responsibility that the one that her livelihood depends on—meeting her editor’s deadlines—is never successfully done.
It may have been Joan Wilder’s flouting of social expectations that drew Lil Auxie to her; Lil Auxie was a difficult child, a little asshole. She wanted to do what she wanted to do, which was playing alone in her imagination, press-ganging members of the neighborhood clowder to be unwilling participants in her play when she needed others. She was already a reader and understood that books were made by people. Romancing the Stone gave her a view of how books were made: in longed-for solitude. It also gave Lil Auxie a glimpse of the possibilities of adulthood: of being allowed to do what you wanted and not doing what you didn’t want to, such as shirking dish-washing by tossing your ceramic flatware into the fireplace.
In my latest rewatching, I could see that Joan Wilder was a caricature of the feminist monster that conservative men are afraid of: incapable of performing the traditional wifely duties of homemaking even when she is only homemaking for herself and a cat. She’s no catch to men and thus in the scene with her drinking with her editor (played by Holland Taylor, a favorite of Lil Auxie) Joan’s rejection of all of the men without even talking to them is laughable. Would they even be interested in her?
Wilder’s adventure is initiated by a threatening phone call where she is informed that the caller has kidnapped her sister and is ransoming her for a map to a hidden treasure that Joan Wilder has just received via international mail. She goes alone to Colombia. While there, she’s so clueless speaking Spanish (and the people are poco amable, very unlike every Colombian I met), that she is easily misled by a dark stranger to getting on the wrong bus that heads not to Cartagena but to the jungle.
We can go here to an imperialist reading of the movie, and other people have already done it, but for the sake of the therapeutic reading, this device engineers the meeting of our couple. After an indeterminate amount of time, Joan Wilder suspects that she’s not going the right way, and tries to ask the bus driver if they are going to Cartagena. Attempting to pay attention to this foreigner who doesn’t speak Spanish, the bus driver fails to see a jeep parked in the road, and crashes head on into it, rendering the bus inoperable. While the other passengers walk away (helping themselves to cages filled with birds on the jeep), the same dark stranger who told JW to get on this bus, tells her to wait and that another bus will come soon. He then pulls a gun on her and demands the map.
Here, a tall stranger walking along a ridge hears the tussle and drives off the dark stranger in a shoot out. Lo and behold, who is walking around the mountainous jungles of Colombia? Just some lean white dude in a safari hat, played by Michael Douglas.
And here is the meat of the story which Lil Auxie was obsessed with: the Pride and Prejudice-esque story of two people who overcome initial mutual distaste to like and then love each other. Amigos queridos, why was a four-year-old interested in romance? I suspect that Lil Auxie was comparing the relationship arc of Joan Wilder and Jack T. Colton (“the ‘T’ stands for ‘trustworthy’,” he tells her) to that of her parents, Nancy and Danny Ekster.
Lil Auxie’s parents were on a different story arc: fractious dissolution. Trust was not had between them. At this point, all they did was fight. The protagonists of RtS were saying things like her parents were saying to each other:
“You’re nothing but a liar!”
“You’re not a real man.[.…]A real man is honest, forthright, trustworthy.”
“What did you do today? Did you wake up today and say, ‘I’m going to ruin a man’s life today?’”
Romancing the Stone nurtured for Lil Auxie the hope that you could say those things to another person and still believe in their essential goodness, still want to be with them, to make a life with them.
My parent’s story is not one of a romantic comedy: their marriage became just another statistic of rising divorce rates of the late twentieth century, post-second wave feminism. My parents missed the message of all the cultural tropes of jealous fathers and overworked single moms being shit parents and forced my sisters and I to live through the cliche. Yes, their divorce was the incipient trauma of my childhood.
I still returned to Romancing the Stone after my father moved out, though; fairy-tales are nice, aren’t they? In retrospect, the main characters became the role models that Lil Auxie needed. She needed to be reassured that there would be time enough when she was a grown-up to be as brave as her family hounded her to be. She need to know that you could be adventurous and not care too much for material needs. She also needed to know that you could not listen to your parents’ advice and still turn out okay.
And here is where we must return to the story of my parents’ post-divorce lives. The wreckage of their marriage had forced Nancy, a stay-at-home mom with a high-school degree, into the workforce, into service work, which happened to be running a convenience store in a small border town. The hours were long and she’d come home too exhausted to cook or to speak with her children about anything but the state that her home was in and how unacceptable it was before she fell asleep on the couch to Law and Order reruns. Nancy didn’t sell being a parent. She also didn’t sell hard work in exchange for money. We were poor as dirt.
So I chose differently. I got a college degree and learned to force myself to do scary things; mostly without the airport bottles of liquor that JW used. And while I wanted to be like Joan Wilder, queridos amigos, it turns out that the character who I imitated wasn’t Joan Wilder, slaving away at her typewriter. It was the character who “was into shortcuts”, Jack T. Colton.
The shortcuts took me to the hair replacement clinic run by mobsters, the temping that led that to human resources, the one-year teaching contracts abroad, yoga teaching and manual labor in exchange for room and board, trying to get to the ocean to get better at surfing, to live the 1-4-40.
It was love that made me clean up my act before I hit the low of animal smuggling. And for love, I tried to find the realest job available to me after a career of least resistance. That led me to the service sector—the work that stole my mother from me. Only I ended up in an even more soul-draining flavor: doing HR for restaurants.
un fuerte abrazo,
X