So, this weekend I bought the package DVD set of Funny Girl and Funny Lady. I've seen both of these before, but I definitely need them in my Streisand collection, for sure. So, I watched Funny Lady and then I turned to watch Funny Girl today and I must say I came to some new revelations. I can see what an absolutely unprogressive, anti-feminist, heteronormative, Eurocentric message is being sent out from this film. This is not to do with Barbra or any of her fault, but lays all at the hands of Ray Stark and the writers of this film who romanticized and sought to make a profit off of the love life of Stark's mother-in-law, Fanny Brice. Alas, I so realized the irony of myself, in that when I was ten and twelve years old and saw this film(indeed, really up until I was halfway through college) everytime "My Man" came around at the end of Funny Girl, I was bawling, morose, and bemoaning Fanny's having lost her love. Nick Arnstein was a real treat(right). Alas, I have long realized what BS "My Man" is...and I have realized Barbra's realization of this, perhaps right after Elliot Gould.

The message that the filmmaker's send out through Funny Girl is absolutely awful (and that is contrasted against the aura which Barbra gives it, which is absolutely wonderful and truly makes the film. Firstly, Barbra's not supposed to really get this man, of course because she isn't blond and she is a Jewish girl with an ethnic look, and not Sandra Dee. So, there in lies the delight of seeing this poor sloven thing actually get this man, for a time. Absolutely Eurocentric views....alas, I have written and thought about before Barbra's positioning as the first ethnic-looking Jewish star of the modern era (Fanny herself was the one of the bygone era). She never changed her look, she wasn't a "classic" eurocentric beauty, where as Lauren Bacall quips about her experience of how she overheard a director saying to someone about her that she was beautiful and she "didn't even look Jewish." Barbra was an absolute groundbreaker. Absolutely unique.

Alas, this film is absolutely saved, torn from the grips of heteronormativity, and turned into the mantra of the Other, the ultimate other (Barbra) and "Don't Rain on My Parade," ceases to become a song about a woman going to chase after a man and becomes the mantra of those who refuse to be put down and held back, and the portrait of Fanny is not that of the kooky Jewish girl who lands a ruffled shirt, but becomes the Kooky, Jewish girl who becomes the most power woman in Hollywood.....and there in lies the rub.