Victory Ford

This week’s finale of Lipstick Jungle (Carpe Threesome) offered an important lesson about female friendship. We all need friends who will be there for us when we fall.

Wendy Healy (Brooke Shields) had been extremely critical when she found out about her friend Nico Reilly’s (played by Kim Raver) extramarital affair with a young stallion named Kirby (Robert Buckley). In fact, her remarks were so irritating that Nico accused her friend of acting like “Mother Superior.”

Was Wendy too judgmental? Too heavy-handed? Too strident? Whatever she felt and said wasn’t persuasive enough to make Nico change her mind---which is true to life. When friends we respect question our morals, it’s not that we ignore them completely. We hear them. On the other hand, when a close friend---or even a best friend---tells us what’s “right” or what they think is “right”, it usually isn’t enough to make us change our behavior.

People are only capable of making changes when they are emotionally ready to do so. In the (literally) steamy opener of the episode this week, which began with Kirby and Nico showering together, Nico still wasn’t ready to listen. Hours later (or minutes in TV series time), she finds out that her husband Charles hae suffered a sudden heart attack. When his life seemed to be hanging in the balance, Nico realized that her true allegiance was to her husband and her ambivalence was resolved for the moment. “I just want my marriage back,” she said.

Hospital waiting rooms are pretty lonely places (having been in one a couple of weeks ago myself). The third friend in the threesome, Victory Ford (Lindsay Price), left a pair of new clients to rush to be at her friend’s side and then Wendy showed up in tears soon after, giving Nico the hugs and understanding she needed.

The takeaway messages from the first season of Lipstick about friendship:

• Friends have a moral responsibility to be honest and forthcoming when they feel a friend has done something that seems self-destructive or unethical.

• Dishonesty among friends has the potential to destroy intimacy and lead to estrangement.

• Yet, we can’t expect friends to change on a dime just based on our say-so. Change has to come from within when the timing is right. Good friends understand that and are there without saying, “I told you so.”

The fourth episode (called Bombay Highway) of Candace Bushnell's hot new TV series Lipstick Jungle raises an important set of issues that many women grapple with during the course of their friendships with one another.

 

What should a friend do or say, if anything, when her Bestie does something illegal, immoral or hurtful to herself or to others---or something that clearly conflicts with her own moral or ethical values? Can they still remain close friends or will it eventually alter the nature of their relationship?

On Lipstick, Nico Reilly (played by Kim Raver) plunges into a steamy affair (behind her professor husband's back) with a young stud named Kirby. There are hints that her husband, too, might be having an affair but he comes across as a pretty decent guy.

 

Nico, a high-achiever like the other women on the show, has such strong needs for affirmation that she never considers the potential ramifications of her lusty indiscretions for her marriage or her career---let alone her own self-esteem. Her friends Wendy (Brooke Shields) and Victory (Lindsay Price) are a bit taken aback and seem puzzled by this out-of-character behavior. They accept it to Nico's face but talk about it disparagingly behind her back.

 

This scenario isn't far-fetched---nor is it only the stuff of Hollywood scripts. When I surveyed women for my friendship study, women of all ages told me stories about friends with addictions who they painfully watched destroying themselves; ones who were abusive to their husbands or children; ones who lied to their friends and let them down; and ones who committed crimes. They struggled with the feelings of dissonance over these once-close but now fractured friendships.

 

Is it the duty of a good friend to support whatever path her friend decides to take? Or should she dissuade her friend from jumping off a cliff? Should she ignore, isolate or overlook behavior she doesn't condone? To step in, how egregious does the behavior have to be?

 

Although the answers aren't clear-cut and depend on the people involved, what has transpired, and how discrepant the friends' values have become, it is truly a myth that, "Good friends stand behind you, no matter what."

 

Lipstick, along with Cashmere Mafia, is one of a genre of TV shows that depict women's friendships---like I Love Lucy, Laverne and Shirley, Kate & Allie, Cagney & Lacey, Mary Tyler Moore, Rhoda, Friends, Designing Women, The Golden Girls, Sex and the City, and Desperate Housewives that came before them. What women love about watching these shows is that they raise issues in Technicolor that are often just beneath the surface of our own lives.

Like life in Manhattan, the premiere of Lipstick Jungle was fast-paced and engaging. The show’s message about female friendships, however, wasn’t all too clear. With both TV series and friendships, it’s hard to know what you are getting when you’re right at the beginning.

Only over time do casual friends turn into close friends---and do our friends begin to reveal themselves to us, warts and all. The same can be said about the ties that bind Wendy Healy (Brooke Shields), Nico Reilly (Kim Raver) and Victory Ford (Lindsay Price). We will learn more about their lives, relationships, and struggles as women in a male-dominated work world next week.

For now, we have seen a glimpse of the three friends celebrating their sorrows and their successes with one another. Hopefully, we’ll learn more about the potentials and pitfalls of female friendships as the series progresses.

P.S. Was I the only one irritated by all the Maybelline commercials?