OVID AND MEL GIBSON: POWER, VULNERABILITY, AND WHAT WOMEN WANT

Abstract

Knowledge of Ovid is invaluable for analyzing Nancy Meyers’s film What Women Want (2000). Advertising executive Nick Marshall (Mel Gibson) is a sexist, chauvinistic ladies’ man who acquires the ability to hear what women are thinking. He is in effect a second Tiresias, and this article examines him in light of the gender-bending seer from the Metamorphoses. Meyers links Nick’s miraculous transformation to his attempt to listen to women while simultaneously cross-dressing. He subsequently becomes an intermediary between the genders, especially on sexual matters. The article further examines the Nick/Tiresias parallel in light of Ovid’s treatment of other Theban myths in Book 3. Like Pentheus, Actaeon, and Narcissus, Nick is a frequent practitioner of the voyeuristic “gaze.” And like them, he is both deeply narcissistic and sorely lacking when it comes to self-knowledge.

What Women Want should, however, not be mistaken for a feminist film. For one thing, it does not situate male and female desire with respect to broader issues of power. In Metamorphoses, the figures of Semele and Caenis offer powerful testimony to the susceptibility of women to violence. Ovid emphasizes this in a way that Meyers does not, depicting lustful gods and men with a spry, subversive irony that pops up time and again in his otherwise stately hexameters. And as someone exiled from Rome to a remote town on the Black Sea, he understood better than most what it meant to be exposed and vulnerable to powerful authority. By contrast, Meyers’ film offers little in the way of genuine gender analysis; her forte seems to be decking out essentialized gender stereotypes with consumerist fluff. If we truly wish to determine What Women Want, Ovid’s critique of Tiresias proves a surer guide than Meyers’ embrace of Nick Marshall.