With all the posts on here, I'm surprised this is the first one dealing with Ted's treatment of women (of his nude models, more specifically). While I felt it was an important part of his character, the need for its existence still felt a little unclear to me-- I didn't "get it." I haven't read "A Widow For One Year," but I imagine it goes into more detail on the matter; Irving never leaves much open-ended. Thoughts?
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You missed my point: I'm referring more to the "degrading" treatment as described by Basinger's character-- you know, the "phases" he goes through with the models. She says something about it and then it cuts to him rather violently moving the model's head more towards the light...
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I would also like to hear about this matter from someone who has read the book. When his wife said goes through a "degrading" phase, the camera cuts to a model trying to pose as Ted wants, then him getting frustrated and jerking her head, spearing her face with paint. Were there other phases, and what were they?
Ted appeared very misogynist, and his artwork seems to provide him a captive audience. Of course, he appeared to hate men too, so I guess he'd be more of a misanthropist.
I've read it/ seen it and I don't think he really explained much more about it in the book (or maybe I just don't remember) But what I got from Ted's degrading phase in particular goes with how he feels about his wife. These women are what he fills her role with, after awhile they aren't cutting it, they definitely aren't "her" and he gets angry with them for not being who/what he really wants. Or maybe he's mad at himself? For not being able to make Marion "ok" again / keep his wife. I don't even know if he means to be misogynistic. It just seems like (once again) other women aren't his wife so they don't matter.
shareI think that is has something to do with capturing all the true emotions of a woman (person) and this is how he gets the best drawings. Seeing women at their rawest. I believed that it was just a creative process that he came up with and it did seem to work for him.
Just my take on it, and btw, I haven't read the book, at least not yet.
I actually just finished the half of the book that this movie is based on--I never got the impression that Ted was using these women to fill Marion's role, as one poster on this thread suggested. I may have interpreted it differently I suppose--but it comes across as just Ted's behavior. He's described as always having been a womanizer, but he prefers younger women. He's lost true interest in Marion by this time because she's no longer the 17 yr old girl he gor pregnant and married and then you throw in the tragedy of losing their sons and it just kills any kind of love they may have had for one another. I noticed in the trailer I just watched that Ted says something about the end of a long and happy marriage when their boys died--in the book, he never says the marriage was happy, just that it's been long. I think that Ted was sucked into Marion's incredible beauty and so he married her, but his happiness with the marriage didn't last long, which is why he continued to seduce women throughout their marriage.
In the book, Marion discusses Ted's motives for all of his womanizing--she explains it as being more about the chase for him, the thrill of the seduction. Once he gets what he wants and seduces the women he is interested in, he subsequently loses interest and he loses it rather quickly. Unfortunately, the women he tends to seduce are the kind of women who are unhappy with their own lives, namely young, unhappily married mothers or just unhappily married women in general--at least by this point in his life, which is where the story is taking place. These unhappy women allow themselves to be seduced by him because he's handsome and successful and he's got this beautiful wife--if he's married to her and sees something in them, then they must be worth something. This is why they allow themselves to reach the stage of degradation, when they feel ashamed of themselves for letting him have them in the first place.
Anyway. It seemed to me that Ted never really saw them as anything substantial or permanent and he treated them as such--he enjoyed the chase and the thrill of it all and when he got what he wanted, he no longer saw any need to really be nice to them. He already had the woman under his spell and, with the kind of women he chose, he knew he could keep them around as long as he chose, regardless of how he treated them. If he treated them well, then they'd be more inclined to stay around longer, which is exactly what he didn't want because he never stayed truly interested in any of them for very long, if he was ever truly interested in them at all. Sorry for the long winded answer--I tend to get a little wordy when talking about books. Hope it makes some sense to you!
@meowbark_9899: Well-stated. Thank you for sharing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbhrz1-4hN4
Love the movie. Love the book. Ted's treatment of women...Marian could look past Ted's womanizing before their son's death-after that there was Marian's oblivion, and Ruth's birth. Marian said Ted was a good father. She never said he was a good husband. Perhaps Marian was a good mother while the boys were alive. Not to Ruth too much. It happens. And when Marian was talking about how Ted treated women..."the humiliation phase". Like she experienced it personally and through observation. Perhaps it escalated after the boys death. Read the book...Ruth's story continues. The author of the book this movie is based on ( the first 1/3) "Widow for a Year" by John Irving has an interesting life. He injects some of his life into every book he writes...except maybe Son of the Circus ;)
shareExactly. It's because Ted is an a$$hole. Irving with his cheating charming studs. Pfffft.
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