I hadn't seen The Odd Couple (1968 movie) in years, so the other day I decided to watch it with my husband and kids. It's just as hilarious as it always was (the scene in the restaurant where Felix is trying to clear his ears had us rolling!), but a few aspects of the story got me thinking.
Could The Odd Couple, as it was originally written, take place today?
The whole premise of the movie is based on the old-fashioned view of marriage where the husband goes off to work while the wife stays home and tends to the house and kids. Don't get me wrong. I am not in any way offended by the idea of traditional gender roles. In fact, my own marriage is structured in much the same way. My husband works full time and, while I have had jobs outside the home, for the most part I've been a stay-at-home mom for the majority of my adult life. And when we're both home there's sort of an understanding that I take care of things inside the house (laundry, cooking, etc.) while he deals with the outdoor issues of cutting the grass and trimming the bushes. It's all very traditional, but that's okay with us. As long as the division of labor works for both partners, there's no problem.
In The Odd Couple, that division of labor obviously did not work. But it begs the question: If the movie took place today, would Oscar and Felix have ended up divorced?
Felix says that the reason his marriage ended is because he was always going around and cleaning up after his wife. He would also go into the kitchen and recook all of her meals. Back in the sixties, that would have been a major problem. The wife's whole identity would have been wrapped up in her role as homemaker, so a husband coming in and trying to usurp her role would have come across as an attack on her character. But today? Today we would be inclined to ask why the wife couldn't go out and get a job while Felix stayed home and did the cooking and cleaning. That's obviously where his talents lie.
What about Oscar? He sums up the problems in his marriage when he describes the wife asking him when he wanted dinner. He would tell her he wasn't hungry, but then he'd wake her up at three in the morning and ask her to fix him some food. Again, in the sixties that would have been a problem. In the sixties, it was a wife's job to keep everyone in the home fed. Today? Well, today no wife in her right mind would get up in the middle of the night and fix her husband a meal. She would simply roll over and go back to sleep, leaving the husband to fend for himself. And the husband would, we certainly hope, be perfectly okay with that because he would know that he just made a ridiculous request.
I do recognize that there are pros and cons to modern society's shunning of traditional gender roles. While it gives people more freedom with regard to how they're allowed to live, it can also make it confusing when two people are just starting out in their life together and are trying to decide who is responsible for what when it comes to care of the home. However, up until the late twentieth century, people were married (no pun intended) to the notion that there were manly jobs and there were womanly jobs. If people didn't fit naturally into those roles, too bad. And in the case of Oscar and Felix, it resulted in the end of two marriages. And we have to ask: Had they been given the same freedom of choice that couples today have, could their marriages have been saved?
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