Cinema for the Infirm: Steel Magnolias
Julia Roberts is the platonic ideal of the saintly sick person in Herbert Ross's tearjerking classic.
(Cinema for the Infirm is a new feature in which I, a person with a potentially life-threatening illness, discuss films that feature a seriously ill character, for better or worse [mostly worse]. Spoilers should be expected.)
Relax: I’m not going to bash Steel Magnolias. When I started this newsletter it was with the intent of not doing some tiresome “that thing you love is bad, actually” nonsense. I have too many sacred cows of my own to slaughter anyone else’s. Steel Magnolias may be campy and corny but it’s also charming, and Shirley MacLaine gives one of the all-time great crabby old lady performances, even though she was only 55 at the time1. It earns its place in the pantheon of legendary tearjerkers.
Despite my using it as an introduction to this feature, it’s far from the most shameless use of a sick person as a plot device rather than a character. But it lingers in my mind, largely because said sick person, Julia Roberts’ Shelby, suffers from similar health issues as me, and she’s an impossible role model to live up to. Shelby might be the platonic ideal of a fictional sick person: selfless, always cheerful, never complaining or self-pitying.
Though her relationship with her no-nonsense mother M’Lynn (Sally Field) is at the heart of the plot of Steel Magnolias, Shelby herself remains an enigma to the very end. The audience only knows for certain three things about her:
She has diabetes
She wants to have a baby
Her colors are blush and bashful
1 and 2 are, of course, connected: after a lifetime of struggling with (presumably) type 1 diabetes, Shelby’s health is so fragile that her doctor has told her not to have children. But the indomitable Shelby doesn’t just want to have a baby, she needs to have a baby. Though she’s newly married and barely into her 20s, a child is the only thing that will give her life meaning, and she will not be swayed to consider otherwise, even after she admits that her medical condition is so precarious that she’s unlikely to be permitted to adopt.
Now let me be clear: I am not minimizing the pain of being told that children are not in your future, and, indeed, many women do just take a chance and hope for the best. Even with a positive outcome, it’s an emotionally fraught situation. The problem is that here, with the big teary gut-punch saved for the end, that’s all glossed over. Shelby never has a moment’s doubt, or even the slightest glimmer of fear, either about her decision, or the possible outcomes. The most emotional it gets is when she has to convince M’Lynn, and it doesn’t take a lot of convincing2.
When next we see Shelby, she’s had her baby (discreetly off-camera), and, as she was warned, it’s put such a strain on her kidneys that she must undergo dialysis, followed by a transplant, with M’Lynn as a donor. We never actually see any of this, mind you, Shelby just explains it to M’Lynn’s friends at the local beauty parlor, with all the casualness of telling someone she had to go to a doctor to remove a hangnail.
I won’t fill this space with recounting my own experience as a dialysis patient facing a kidney transplant, but suffice it to say it’s a big fucking deal. It’s a complicated, anxiety-inducing process to get approved for a transplant3, even with a living donor, and that’s even before the myriad things that can go wrong, both during the surgery, and the recovery. And let’s not even get into the possibility that the new kidney might be rejected, or that you’ll develop a complication in the long term. But Shelby is blasé about it: oh, you know, it’s just kidney failure, whatev. Again, there’s not a suggestion, not the slightest hint, that she’s worried, or scared, or angry. Shelby has two moods: spunky and determined, and that’s it.
We all know how Steel Magnolias ends: Shelby’s transplant fails and she dies. Everyone is very sad about it initially, but they feel a little better knowing that Shelby’s spunky and determined spirit lives on. I mean, personally, I think someone dying before the age of 25 and leaving a toddler motherless is worth being sad about for a long time, but what do I know, I’m not a steel magnolia.
Let me reiterate: I do like this movie. I like Julia Roberts in it, and pity her for the terrible short hair wig she’s inexplicably forced to start wearing in the third act. Shelby is as likable as every other character, I just wish she was given some semblance of an internal life. For someone with such a serious illness, Shelby spends an inordinately large amount of time reassuring other people and downplaying her condition. She’s never once heard complaining, or wishing none of this had ever happened to her. While everyone else gets their big emotional moments, Shelby is a beacon of warmth and calmness, all but emitting her own angelic glow.
She is the epitome of what it means to be a “steel magnolia”: feminine but strong, and here “strong” means never taking a moment to worry about or feel sorry for yourself, even when you’re facing a major health crisis. It’s a pattern too often repeated in movies about sick people (particularly sick women): they’re less about the person and what they’re experiencing than how it affects the people around them. It’s not Shelby who has to confront her misgivings about having a baby, it’s M’Lynn. It’s not Shelby who expresses concern over the strain of transplant surgery, it’s Truvy (Dolly Parton), in a conversation during which Shelby isn’t even present. As far as we know, Shelby is perfectly fine with all of this, and even right up to slipping into a coma has no regrets.
She’s not a person, she’s a plot device, the hub around which all the action and drama take place, without any indication that any of it affects her. Shelby as a character might as well be an oil painting: a symbol of eternal grace and beauty, but when you look on the other side, there’s nothing there.
That she seemed like she might really be like that all the time made it even better.
This is the scene in which Steel Magnolias verges the closest into eye-rolling sap, when Shelby tells M’Lynn that she’d “rather have thirty minutes of wonderful than a lifetime of nothing special,” which kinda suggests that Shelby believes a life without children is empty and meaningless.
There’s also of course the financial aspects, which the movie waves away by mentioning several times that Shelby’s husband, a lawyer, is well-off.