My wife, Cootie, and I both enjoy the 1987 movie Overboard, and that’s weird. Romantic comedies are my least favorite film genre. I can count the number of rom-coms I enjoy on one hand, and that’s counting Hot Fuzz. When Cootie and I first got together, the first movie we watched together in the same room was Dario Argento’s Suspiria. That’s my kind of girl, and yet we often rewatch Overboard, although we have different reasons. Cootie likes Overboard because it’s quotable, funny, and she likes Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn together onscreen. On the other hand, I think Overboard is one of the most unsettling and terrifying movies I’ve ever seen.
Joanna Stayton (Hawn) is obnoxiously rich, a snobbish one-percenter accustomed to luxury. While on a yacht trip with her foppish husband (Edward Herrman) and her cadre of servants and sycophants, they wind up in the coastal town of Elk Cove, Oregon. Stayton hires local handyman Dean Proffitt to build a closet on the yacht for her shoes. When Proffitt finishes, Stayton berates him for using the wrong kind of wood, refuses to pay him, and hurls his tools into the sea.
Later that night, Stayton falls off the yacht (hence the title of the film) and is picked up by a garbage scow. She is taken to Elk Cove where it is discovered that she can’t remember who she is. After seeing a story about her on television, Proffitt instantly hatches a terrible revenge plan. Proffitt goes to the hospital and tells the doctor that Stayton is his wife, Annie. Stayton doesn’t quite believe him, but what choice does she have? She leaves the hospital with Proffit. Unbeknownst to Stayton, Proffitt has four wild, emotionally stunted boys and a house that could fall apart in a stiff breeze.
Those who were first have become last. The rich have become poor. This broad depiction of the class struggle is amusing, but there’s more going on in Overboard than wacky slapstick. If you’re looking for memorable movie villains, look no further than Dean Proffitt.
Dean Proffitt is smarmy and odious. He’s the kind of yee-haw flannel-wearing bastard that your mother should have not only warned you about but filed a restraining order against. This is a man so hell-bent on petty vengeance that he weaves his web of lies around Joanna/Annie with high-tensile emotional cables. In doing so, he traps her in his crackerbox palace and his crusty world with a leering smile on his face. Forget gaslighting. This is gas-torching.
Lost in a hellscape of unruly children, malfunctioning appliances, and indentured servitude, Joanna/Annie loses all of her agency and autonomy. Forced into the role of a tradwife, Joanna/Annie comes to believe all the lies Dean has told her about her past and herself. She has no memories of her own, a condition that Dean uses to his own advantage to gain not only a mother figure for his hellspawn, but a domestic tradwife. It is not until much later in the movie that Dean and Joanna/Annie finally sleep together. Dean turns Joanna/Annie into an adulteress not only against her will, but against her knowledge. Without the memories of her past life, Joanna/Annie is tabula rasa, a blank slate upon which Dean splatters his illicit desires. Despite his rugged good looks and awesome 80’s feathered hair, Dean is a madman, a master of trickery and deception.
Look: I’m not going to apologize for spoiling a 37-year-old movie. If you don’t want to know how this horrorshow ends, scroll down.
When Joanna/Annie returns to her husband and her snooty folks, she misses the simple way of life with her impoverished captor, Dean. She drinks beer instead of champagne. Instead of talking with her therapist, Joanna/Annie prefers hanging out with the crew. She has changed, but was that a conscious decision or the traumatic result of Dean’s continual lying?
For his part, Dean and his kids commandeer a Coast Guard ship to prevent Joanna/Annie from leaving. Her husband does the best he can to stop her, but Joanna/Annie leaps from the yacht (hence the name of the movie) and starts swimming towards Dean. They reunite in the ocean, a couple once more. Joanna/Annie returns to the man who kidnapped her and filled her head with lies. It’s the Stockholm Syndrome (except the movie takes place in Oregon) and the bad guy wins. Dean not only gets the girl, he gets her money.
Jigsaw couldn’t have planned it better.
“But it’s so cute,” some will say. “They wind up together and the kids are happy to have her back and they have a thriving miniature golf course.” Okay. All those things are true, and that “happy” ending is one of the reasons Overboard has become a cult classic.
To me, Overboard is the story of an opportunistic, sociopathic, pathological liar who tricks an unknowing and sick woman into becoming a tradwife. Dean Proffitt is a Svengali who negs Joanna/Annie into a mass of weeping flesh before lovebombing her into submission. That’s not a relationship. It’s a nightmare.
Overboard can be viewed on various streaming networks.
