For the past several weeks, a small, full-color, slightly-dark photocopy of the above poster for the 2018 romantic comedy Overboard has hung in the DVD section of the B.F. Jones Memorial Library, Aliquippa. I haven’t seen this movie or the original, 1987 version starring Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell, though I have read Susan Faludi’s takedown of the original in her 1991 book Backlash: The Undeclared War against American Women.
Anyway, you might have noticed that Anna Faris shows more skin (and more Photoshopping) than her male costar does; as every intelligent person living under our belovèd capitalist patriarchy knows, unsexy (as in non-media-sexy) women make advertising—particularly for entertainment-style products—repulsive and thus ineffective, weakening the economy.
Speaking of economic matters: in this movie, Faris plays (according to Professor Wikipedia) “a struggling, working-class single mother”. So maybe you left-wing, Faludi-reading, fair-trade-coffee-enema-receiving losers should quit complaining, because America’s lower economic stratum teems with smokin’-hawt hawties. (All right, I should give this Trump-era movie credit for keeping Faris’s character’s love interest, as seen on the poster, Mexican, instead of, say, Caucasianizing him via CGI, or hiring Christopher Plummer for last-minute reshoots.) (Yes, almost everyone will understand the Plummer reference decades from now, assuming the Earth—I mean the Internet—still exists.)
Copyright © 2018 by David V. Matthews
DAVID V. MATTHEWS 