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Great movie. Got very mad at brother in law for making me watch it last Christmas, actually, because despite my wife being subscribed to an absurd number of streaming services, he insisted on buying another movie through my Amazon account. Which struck me as an absurd extravagance, $4 or whatever totally unnecessary, but it did turn out to be amazing, so that shut me up.
No. That's how things were. It didn't create a trope through film, it represented a reality. Mad Men drew on that same historical set of facts. Christmas parties really used to be fun before we all turned our noses up at them. Go to any local bar association event, corner the oldest man you see, and ask him to tell you stories from the old days. This isn't to say that there isn't a cycle of art imitating life imitating art
And we're shown the alternative to the nice guy forgiving the harlot: she kills herself. The alternative to beta men being cucked is that women who make mistakes just, kind of, shuffle off camera and die. No one has come up with a scalable solution yet. Baxter is obviously the good guy here, in that he is saving her from literal or social death by swallowing his pride.
What's the really interesting cultural reality in the film is the overwhelming nosiness of all the people around everyone in New York City.
Why do the executives value the privacy of Baxter's apartment so highly as to consider its use a major favor? Because back then hotels paid attention to their guest lists, and cared if two unrelated people stayed there, or if people showed up in the afternoon and checked out that evening. A non-concern today, when hotel employees couldn't care less, and in a pinch you could always find a place where you check in and out online without seeing anyone. No corporate hotel property pries into the business of its customers, and no pajeet motel owner could come close to caring what the YTs do there.
Baxter lives in an apartment house where everyone knows everyone's business. The elderly neighbors around him are watching him. Everyone thinks he's a playboy. Nowadays, they might snide-post on twitter about how loud their nextdoor neighbor is, but no one would say a word to him however much he plowed. The doctor cares about how Fran ended up the way she is, today's doctors want to "tolerate" your lifestyle to make sure to do harm reduction. This all has no consequences for the executives he lets the place out to, but terrible social consequences for him, which is what they are more or less paying him for.
Even in a city as large as New York, the very hub of anonymity for the time, reputation is important, and traditional morality still has its enforcers. Baxter is the very model of the lonely, isolated, atomized individual in this film, and he is still constantly worried about what other people think of him. Today's equivalent wouldn't know any of his neighbors. Traditional morality would have no grasp on him. He'd move out before he'd care what some old biddie thinks of him. And no executive needs a discreet love nest, he can just find a way to open a credit card online and spend $100 on a decent hotel room for the day where no one will ask any questions, if any of the staff even speaks English.
Where in 1950s New York, even a single man was subject to a panopticon of judgment, today a married man in the suburbs doesn't worry about it too much.
Your comment reminded me that Dick Fuld, infamous boss of Lehman Brothers for the fifteen years before it collapsed, had a very harsh policy against adultery for senior executives. He fired the bank’s president for it (along with several others over the years) and warned every executive that any extramarital affair was an immediately fireable offense. He also policed their behavior around their wives. Apparently he even told the wives, on their annual executive family retreat, that if they came to him with an affair, he’d fire their husbands but make sure they were looked after.
>name is Dick
>CEO of a company called Layman Brothers
>massive Karen about his employees slinging dick and getting laid
What the FUCK was his problem?
I'd be weirded out and annoyed as hell to have a boss who were a fraction that invasive and controlling toward his employees' personal lives. Imagine if bro had channeled a bit of his managing-employees'-personal-lives energy into managing subprime MBS exposure.
Because guys who break their vows are just as likely to be diddling their employer. If they have no loyalty to their wife, why expect them to be any more loyal to you, and not be embezzling/selling corporate secrets/cheating on expenses, etc.?
It's "dishonest in a small thing is likely to be dishonest in a big thing".
You state this so confidently but you actually don't know what you are talking about.
Loyalty is not some single monolith that you either have in all areas of life or lack in all areas of life. It's surprisingly context dependent.
I disagree. If someone shows no loyalty to their spouse, someone they literally promised to stick by no matter what happens, I have zero expectation that they will show loyalty to me or anyone else. It is a huge character flaw to be disloyal to your spouse.
"Shows no loyalty"--if this were true I'd agree with you. I'm not sold that extramarital sex is showing no loyalty. It's certainly a violation of trust, a breaking of a vow, to be discouraged, potentially soul-destroying, etc. And a full-blown affair where the dude is now in love with his mistress, that's an even more egregious violation. This gets down to whether you feel a man who supports his wife and family financially and (as much as possible) emotionally but has had illicit sex with another woman (once or more times) has therefore abdicated all his responsibilities to his wife and family. Arguably he has failed on one front only--granted potentially disastrously. But still one front.
This is similar to saying all lies are equal. Maybe they are. That if you tell any sort of lie, ever, of commission or omission, your pants are on fire. I find this oddly naïve as a view of the world. Possibly I've internalized more of Japanese cultural norms than I usually imagine.
Fair enough - "shows no loyalty" was too strong a phrasing. That said, I don't think my post substantively changes if it were to say "shows disloyalty". Sleeping around on your spouse is just about one of the worst things you can do to someone, short of criminal acts. I think it makes perfect sense to use that as a marker of character and act accordingly. It seems to me that not wanting to have an adulterer in a position of responsibility in your business is just another application of the ancient wisdom "bro, if she'll cheat with you, she'll cheat on you."
Is it? Maybe it is. I wouldn't react well, to be sure. I think in Japan, while marriage is certainly valued (my mother-in-law said to me 浮気したらだめでしょ the night I had proposed to her daugther. This means basically "Don't cheat on her.") at the same time the true fuckup is not the tryst with a hostess or whoever, but making it public, or bringing knowledge of this into the household. The disruption of the wa That's the dealbreaker. That's when you bring shame down on everyone.
Even then, if the mistress is employed as part of her job to woo the man (as in a hostess) in Japan this is not grounds for divorce for the woman--or at least the wife cannot receive monetary damages from the woman, as she would otherwise be able to do were the relationship seen as an emotional bond (as in the traditional mistress.) This is termed 枕営業 or makura eigyo (literally pillow work.) The idea, if I understand it, is that the interaction was transactional in a sense, and that there was no emotional bond. Interesting as well since prostitution is technically illegal in Japan (though rampant in probably any form you can imagine.)
Law in Japan is as slippery as it is elsewhere.
I realize you weren't talking about law itself, but morality. In Japan infidelity is in some sense seen as an inevitability at some point or another, by many. This is, like everything else, changing as society changes. Keep in mind there was never a real "sexual revolution" in Japan, as sex has always been one bin in the bento box, separate from everything else. You can get a fucking headache trying to figure out what's going on sometimes.
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