Ok, “About Schmidt,” it’s about time a movie like this came along, but of course, as usual, the critics totally failed to notice its cultural message or significance. Frankly, I’m willing to bet that they wouldn’t have written about it even if they weren’t too stupid to understand. Most of them are groveling, sniveling, pseudo-intellectuals who do whatever they can to keep their reading public from recognizing what morons they are. But the fact is, the message of “About Schmidt” is subtle enough to be artistic, yet strong enough to be unavoidable. For the sake of maintaining some sort of curiosity in this article, I’ll resist making the effort to phrase my interpretation of the theme until I have presented my discussion. Actually, my interpretation, as always, is rather radical, so I’m going to do this Gandalf style and wait until you’ve seen my reasoning before I reveal my purpose. That way you’ll have walked the steps of my thinking free of the generally accepted belief that I am off my rocker. Incidentally, I’m not.
The first scene that makes it unmistakably clear where “About Schmidt” is heading comes early in the movie. Poor Schmidt is seen sitting on his toilet seat because his wife has forbidden him to urinate while standing. Although this scene usually provokes a round of laughter from the audience, it really is a moment of intense injustice.
The whole issue of the toilet seat has been blown ridiculously out of proportion. I’ve personally never understood it. I have always, no matter if I’ve been at home or out in public, wiped off any toilet seat that I was about to use and put the lid down when it was up. Whether the lid was up or down makes absolutely no difference to me whatsoever because it has become my habit to check the seat in any case. It’s just one of the things in life that you are going to have to deal with, and to become angry about it is just a waste of energy. Furthermore, in my travels, I have found that there are many countries that don’t have toilet lids at all, that these items are in fact considered a luxury item by most of the world.
However, neither logic nor cultural diversity has prevented the toilet seat issue from becoming some huge battle of the sexes topic in America. I have had women come out of the bathroom and yell at me for having left the toilet seat up IN MY OWN APARTMENT. What deluded cultural programming has led women to believe that it is somehow appropriate to introduce that kind of accusing stress into any kind of situation? Is the damage I suffer from being yelled at really justified by the stress the woman suffered by having to put down the toilet seat? The answer is of course, absolutely not, especially when it is understood that I, as a man, have also, and without complaint, been conditioned to check any seat that I am about to use (and yes, I have cleaned urine off a seat that was put there by a woman, and yes this is irrefutable, and no I didn’t scream at her afterwards).
Therefore the scene where poor Schmidt is perched upon the throne in his own house because his wife doesn’t “allow” him to urinate any other way, is in actuality, a symbolic spoil of the victory of women over men. There is no logical reason that he should have to sit there, it is all about simply accepting his role as a lesser person. He is forced to urinate as a woman. Why? What sense does this make? The only logical conclusion is that Schmidt’s sitting posture is meant as a daily reminder of female dominance.
Once you realize that female dominance is the issue at the heart of “About Schmidt” you start to see little signs of it everywhere. In one of the letters Schmidt writes to the African child, Ndugu, he is sponsoring, he mentions that he always felt he was destined for greatness but he was never able to take the risks necessary to reap those rewards because he had obligations to his family and his wife wouldn’t have allowed it. Through this admission, you see that Schmidt has given up his dreams in exchange for the droll life of a “working husband” a man who is there to pay the bills and nothing more. I think it is important to point out that this wasn’t necessarily Schmidt’s destiny, but what society pushed him into. The film’s point is to accentuate the other side of the feminist argument that states that women haven’t been historical contributors to the fields of art, literature, or science because their cultures have discouraged them from those pursuits. As women have throughout history been conditioned not to quest for greatness, “About Schmidt” argues that in our modern age, men are being conditioned away from it as well.
Schmidt is in many ways portrayed as a child. After his wife’s death, he is completely incompetent to take care of himself. He can’t even make himself a sandwich or keep the house clean. Again, this is not due to an inherent an unavoidable flaw in his person, but because the women in his life have told him that these are things he can’t do. Schmidt is no more incapable of cleaning or cooking than an oppressed woman is incapable of mathematics. But with enough social influence, Schmidt has come to believe in these things, and this social oppression dominates and destroys his life.
The result of all of this is that the women of Schmidt’s life have trained themselves to believe, for no other reason than he is a man, that he is a complete moron, and they don’t listen to him even when he is in a position to understand something better than they are. Take the situation with his daughter and her upcoming marriage. Schmidt can tell right away that his daughter’s mullet-bearing betrothed is a complete loser, a sense that is confirmed by the fact that he has the lack of decency to approach Schmidt on the day of Schmidt’s wife’s funeral and invite him into an investment scheme which he insists “is not a pyramid.” But the agonizing thing for the audience member is the knowledge that even with this information, nobody is going to listen to Schmidt. They believe his is inferior. Schmidt’s female controlled world has no use for the observations of men. Worse yet, they feel smugly justified in their treatment of men as if their own history of gender oppression somehow justifies their behavior.
It is painfully clear that Schmidt has spent his life too brow beaten to oppress anyone. He’s given up his dreams to buy into a sense of American duty, hoping that the promise of a family and years of meaningless work will someday pay off in a sense of satisfaction. What he gets is a wife that cheats on him, a daughter that insists he not visit her and then in turn yells at him for not coming to help with the wedding, and an end state of such solitude that the only person he can communicate with is a six year old boy from Africa to whom he writes letters.
“About Schmidt” does not portray a society of gender equality. It is a female dominated society that is unjust, oppressive, and only a half-step removed from reality. The film is a very intelligent and respectful criticism of the feminist movement.
When I was in college, feminism was not defined as a belief system that was designed to serve the interests of women, but as a system that had the noble cause of pointing out oppression and mistreatment for the furthering of equality. But it is not called equalism, it is called feminism, and that irrefutably places the interest of women above all other groups that feminism claims to fight for.
There was a time when sexist attitudes were so rampant that they were indeed a detriment to the advancement of human society and radical tactics were justified and necessary. But those days are long gone and a film like “About Schmidt” clearly shows that the pendulum is swinging back through the point of equality and into the other side. It is not, in this case, appropriate to match oppression with oppression, and it is hypocritical for the supposed opponents of oppression to believe they can justifiably inflict it.
“About Schmidt” reflects a lot of behavior which could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be labeled as appropriate human interaction. Yet it is behavior which people recognize instantaneously as genuine and acceptable in our current culture. Schmidt represents the tragic male figure, who has thanklessly sacrificed his masculinity at the request of his beloved bride. She, in turn, has abused her position mercilessly and forced him to live a wasted, meaningless life constantly holding him down with the guilt of the assertion that his forefathers oppressed her female ancestors. Most audiences think “About Schmidt” is a comedy, especially the women of the crowd, but I’m guessing they won’t find it so funny when some future generation of men decide to stop putting up with such bullshit and toss women back into the position of oppression that they had before the men gave up the reigns.
There are plenty of women in the world who have grown up in societies without toilet seats remember. They’re satisfied just to be given a roof and a couple full meals a day. After watching “About Schmidt” I wonder why any American man would even consider listening to any more of the feminist propaganda that it is so hard to escape from. It’s not an issue that is generally allowed in polite conversation. Anybody who finds a flaw in the feminist movement is immediately labeled by the media as a “woman-hater” without any examination of the validity of the argument. But feminism is just like any other human creation, bound to have its flaws, it’s only when people recognize this that we will actually be able to make real steps towards a culture of equality.
But until then, I’m off to some third-world country without toilet seats for a bit of wife-hunting.
The End