Happily Ever After. I’ve come to regard these three words with hardy cynicism. They have a tendency to conclude tales of tiresome female passivity with the false hope that Sleeping Beauty woke up to more than an endless pile of ironing.
They appear in stories which have no care to depict empowering, mutual partnerships, rather the winning over – or worse, the rescue – of the flailing girl by the commanding Knight/Prince/Creep who Climbs Hair. And whilst fairytales are no friend of egalitarian relationships, they are heteronormativity’s arch-comrade – rarely, if ever, providing positive messages to young gay kids. So it was with delight that last week, at the 24th London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, I finally watched something which subverted the paradigm. The film was Edie and Thea: A Very Long Engagement – and it might just be a model of a modern day fairytale.
Originally conceived as a short to record the wedding of Edie Windsor and Thea Spyer after 42 years together, the project, directed by Susan Muska and Gréta Ólafsdóttir, evolved into a full-length feature. Via a panoply of slides and anecdotes, traversing four decades, several continents and many more dance-floors, it lays bare the two women’s tenacious and compelling relationship. And they were pretty exceptional women. Beyond the superficial truth that they made a stunning pair, each were high-flying professionals at a time when so many girls were only just waking up to the fullness of their potential. Thea was a clinical psychologist with a PhD to boot, whilst Edie, with a masters degree in Maths, became a computer systems consultant for I.B.M. It seems worth remembering that to this day the Tech industries grapple with a significant gender imbalance; being a women in this field, let alone an openly lesbian woman, seems something of a feat for the mid-1960s.
Which brings us to my only quibble with this otherwise excellent film – there is little exploration of either woman’s professional life. Their collective memories are clearly an anthropological treasure-trove for understanding changing attitudes to homosexuality over the past 50 years. Yet I left the theatre with a litany of unanswered questions, all of which surely had some bearing on their relationship: what was it like navigating the working world as gay women? Did they discuss children? They never had any – was this because prevailing opinion meant it wasn’t even considered, or was it an active choice? This tender love story was embedded in a wider nexus of social norms, and the film’s empowering message might have been even richer were they not so brief a footnote.
This certainly does nothing to undermine Edie and Thea’s importance as a challenge to prevailing prejudices, and not just on obvious fronts. Clearly, it is a formidable advert for same-sex marriage. We witness the pair utter the words ‘until death do us part’ only to find out that it did, just over a year later. In February 2009 Thea passed away after an extended battle with MS. The film delicately details Edie’s increasing role as carer, from a bedtime routine of oxygen tubes and medication, to donning flippers in order to help guide Thea’s increasingly limp body through its pool therapy. Confronted with this fierce and long-standing commitment the well-rehearsed arguments against such unions feel weaker and more bigoted than ever.
Similarly the film speaks to the disgust which so often seasons anti-gay rhetoric – that pernicious quiver which links the reactions of common-place homophobes to the most brutal of gay-bashers. But it becomes tough to imagine even the Pat Robertsons of this world upholding their malice in the face of these two women. In the wake of a recent spike in homophobic attacks, there might be worse reactions than getting Edie and Thea’s message to as large an audience as possible.
The film also disrupts another set of stubborn misconceptions: these two women, both in their 70s, quite clearly desire other. They speak openly about their sex life, in fact, they attribute their longevity to its active maintenance. In one scene, Thea recounts one of the first dances the couple shared: ‘we immediately just fit, our bodies fit, and we danced the whole night through’. Whilst she speaks, her eyes defy the paralysis that has ravaged her body and the keen adoration of her future spouse is palpable.
In comparison, dominant British culture seems to be resigned, perhaps even committed, to the ‘comfy old slippers’ model of elderly companionship. I’d even go as far as to suggest we actively expect this from older people. Everyone under 65 appears to have borrowed the blueprint made for parents by their embarrassed teenagers, all colluding to de-sex anyone with so much as a wrinkle or a walking stick. Edie and Thea’s delight in every aspect of their relationship makes them a refreshing counterblast to such an oppressive (and depressing) world-view.
Here we reach why this movie really is so widely accessible. At its core it is a simple tale of enduring love. The history of human story-telling could be cast as a series of attempts to scrutinise, upend or deconstruct this capricious entity; it just so happens that these two New Yorkers captured its essence, and for nearly 45 years held tight to the secret so many have tried to explain. No matter what you believe about sexuality, witnessing their a story cannot fail to be spellbinding.
Edie and Thea: A Very Long Engagement will be showing a final time at the BFI Southbank on April 11, 2010 at 20.30 – for bookings see www.bfi.org.uk.
