At the end of the day

Les Miserables is a wonderful film.  It's a wonderful musical.  It's my favourite and I love it.  I've seen it lots of times.  It's the only musical I have seen more than twice.  The film doesn't give you the whole body vibration that you get when you see it live.  You don't feel the vibration from the music of the (pretty large) pit orchestra.  The barricade scenes seem smaller and less dramatic in the film and some of the singing lacks the accurate pitching that you would expect in a West End Stage show.  But the film gives a much greater understanding.  You can see the emotion on the faces of the characters, no matter how far back in the theatre you sit.  The first time I saw Les Mis in the theatre I knew I loved it and I knew it had something to do with a prisoner number 24601, who was an amazing singer (It was Colm Wilkinson).  I was a bit confused about who the women were and I don't think I had any idea that so much time had passed.  Each time I saw it I understood a bit more.  I read Victor Hugo's book and looked up some of the history of the French Revolution.  This understanding took me 26 years! Only an idiot could watch the film and not understand what is happening.  Huge Act Man does a wonderful job of aging, and still looking gorgeous, even when nose deep in french shit.  There is no doubt that many years pass.  The little Eponine and Cosette look like their grown up actors.  Anne Hathaway leaves you in absolutely no doubt that Fontaine is having a terrible life and that death is somehow a blessing and a relief and even a cold heartless woman like me was moved to tears by her performance of I Dreamed a Dream.

The Long Suffering Husband loves Les Miserables too but the film enlightened him in a new way.  "What I don't understand is why those women in the factory turned her in like that," he said.  "Were they jealous of her because she was pretty? There wouldn't have been any story if they'd just helped her out."  He's right and the worrying thing is that this sort of thing isn't just the stuff of fiction and the past.  Women are turning on each other all the time and there really isn't any need. Maybe, when men were in short supply women had to compete, they may have had to prove they were the most beautiful, smartest, best mates and that they would produce the best children and if they couldn't do that then they had to nobble the competition.  Now, it's time to let all of that go.

Women of the media are currently proving that they will do anything to eliminate the competition.  Last week,  Suzanne Moore had an essay from a previously published book published in the Spectator.  It was a good essay all about female anger and contained the apparently offensive line, "We are angry with ourselves for not being happier, not being loved properly and not having the ideal body shape – that of a Brazilian transsexual."  Personally, I don't know what a Brazilian transsexual looks like or whether I want a body  like a woman who used to be a man who lives in Brazil.  I know now that Brazil has terrible human rights record for these people but I'm still confused about what was wrong with the original line.  Today, her supposed friend, Julie Birchill has written a piece in the Guardian supporting Ms Moore and all I can say is with friends like that she doesn't need any enemies.  It rings of the women in Les Miserables crowding round and singing, "You must send the slut away or we'll all end in the gutter and it's us whose having to pay at the end of the day."  

Today, there was another female journalist who decided to write a spiteful piece about Clare Balding. Liz Jones is now the subject of women screaming for her public humiliation.  The article summed up how many women feel about other successful women.  The threat of Clare Balding being successful, despite not 'bothering to shop at Prada and having face-lifts like the rest of us' is too much to bear for this poor successful Daily Mail journalist and so she calls for the woman in 'terrible shoes' to be thrown out of the club in case we all have to suffer.  

Women may not be competing for men to have babies with any more but to get and keep top jobs it seems we are still using those old skills.  It's time we learnt from the men.  The way to get more women into these jobs is to help each other out, go and play golf, do each other favours and above all not to even notice what shoes someone is wearing.

At the end of the day it might mean that there is no story to tell but I would much rather no women ended in the gutter and no one had to pay.