Comparative Study Some Like It Hot


disguises himself as a wealthy man to win Sugar’s affections. Obviously, this lie will not stand up to much scrutiny, but Joe does not care in the early stages of the film. He is used to loving and leaving women and we suspect this relationship will be just as one-sided and selfish as his previous affairs. However, Sugar also contributes to a pessimistic view of love at the start of the film as she is equally calculating. She is glad the band is going to Florida because all the millionaires go there for the winter and she hopes to find a husband among them. The characters’ manipulative and cynical attitudes lead us to believe that the relationship will be damaging and destructive.


Despite the poor start to the affair, Joe becomes a better person as a result of his relationship with Sugar and this contributes to an increasingly positive general vision and viewpoint. He sees her sweetness and her vulnerability and he becomes ever more uncomfortable with the way he is treating her. When he and Jerry decide to flee the hotel to avoid tangling with Spats Colombo again, Joe doesn’t want to leave without saying goodbye to Sugar. Jerry is surprised at this change in his friend, pointing out, ‘Usually you leave ’em with nothing but a kick in the teeth’.


Sugar, for her part, is equally smitten. She tells Jerry that Junior was ‘the first nice guy’ she ever met in her life. What began as a cynical exercise in taking advantage of another person has, for both Joe and Sugar, turned into something deep and real.


The relationship between Jerry – ‘Daphne’ – and Osgood Fielding is even more complicated than that of Joe and Sugar, but it is presented in a much less serious way and therefore does not have such a serious impact on the general vision and viewpoint. Osgood is far less vulnerable than Sugar and so we do not worry as much about the seemingly inevitable end to the relationship. At the same time, however, Osgood is gradually revealed to


Persepolis


matters so that she pays for everything on their dates and eventually pressuring her into buying drugs for him and his friends. This is far worse than Joe’s manipulation of Sugar because Markus is forcing Marjane to break the law for him. For all his faults, the worst thing Joe did was toy with Sugar’s affections. Therefore, the view of relationships in Persepolis is that they are even more self-serving and destructive than in Some Like It Hot; there seems little hope of Marjane finding happiness.


The principal difference between Marjane’s relationship with Markus and Joe’s relationship with Sugar is that Marjane is the entirely innocent victim of a manipulative lover. At the start of Some Like It Hot, Sugar is almost as culpable as Joe; both are willing to use any means to get money or sexual favours. Marjane, unlike Sugar, wants nothing but love. However, there are also similarities between Sugar and Marjane. Both are vulnerable and far less sophisticated than they appear. The abuse of their naivety and kindness contributes to a negative vision and viewpoint in both texts.


In Some Like It Hot, love makes Joe a better person. He comes to care for Sugar and regret deceiving her. There is no such positive outcome in Persepolis. When Marjane catches Markus in bed with another girl, this betrayal has a terrible effect on her mental and physical health. She ends up in hospital after sleeping rough. She reflects bitterly that ‘a banal story of love almost carried me away’. Marjane returns to Iran and begins to piece her life back together, but the emotional scars of this first, failed relationship contribute to her unhappy marriage some years later.


In the film, Joe, Sugar and Jerry are not honest with their loved ones, and


The Spinning Heart


but even that is not enough to ward off the sense of gloom and hopelessness that pervades the lives of the various narrators.


One common thread in all three texts is the message that honesty and a strong sense of self are essential for relationships to succeed. In the film, the characters gradually come to realise this, and there is a happy ending as a result. In the graphic novel, Marjane takes a long time to be true to herself; the ending of her relationship with Reza leaves us with a faint sense of optimism about her future. However, in The Spinning Heart, a mature understanding of both self and others evades the majority of the characters.


The characters are locked in a cycle of misery from which it seems there is no escape. Take, for example, Seanie Shaper. He cares for Réaltín and loves his son but is unable to make the relationship work. He admits to himself that he ‘can’t properly tell her how I want things to be’ and reverts to boorish behaviour, staring at her chest, swearing at her and becoming aggressively jealous of Bobby’s presence in the house. Seanie is deeply saddened by his inability to connect properly with the mother of his child, but there seems little hope that he can break free of this cycle of aggression and depression. He resembles Marjane in her relationship with Markus in this respect. Although she knows it is not going well, she doesn’t have the self-confidence to handle the situation maturely.


Another reason the relationships in The Spinning Heart contribute to a negative vision and viewpoint is that we dip in and out of each one quite quickly and only see a brief period in each character’s life. There is something unsatisfactory and unsettling about this because we never know how things work out, unlike the film and the graphic novel. This is true of the only constructive, nurturing relationship in


382 King Lear and Comparatives


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