Last Sunday night HBO aired the first of the nine episodes that will finish off “The Sopranos,” a show that has beguiled and terrified us with its violence, passion and unnervingly good humor for eight years. The final installment is scheduled to air on June 10. Six weeks later, J.K. Rowling will publish “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” the seventh and final book in her gripping bildungsroman saga about growing up Gryffindor.

It would be disingenuous to suggest that I am anything other than achingly, pantingly, pathetically anxious for these next and final chapters. Sunday was a holiday for me, and not because of the risen Christ; by the time the synth drum started beating over Tony’s ninth-to-final ride away from Manhattan I was, quite literally, wiggling with pleasure. But 52 minutes later it was over, one hour of my final nine spent, the lonely chill of impending finality taking hold.

A shadow hung over the show from the opening scene, in which menacing knocking drives Tony and Carmela from bed, and Carm expresses her first half-conscious thought: “Is this it?” I’m sorry to say that it is. And knowing that this is it, it was hard not to read the tea leaves: Tony’s Fredo-rific rowboat talks with Bobby, that creepy story about a kid drowning in a swimming pool, so like the swimming pool from which the Soprano family saga first took flight.

There is a similar process of reckoning happening for readers of the Harry Potter books. Two weeks ago, the unveiling of the book’s wraparound cover art on the “Today” show sparked a speculative frenzy about what every scribble might mean. There were Harry and Voldemort, playing what looked like a particularly intense game of craps in front of a stadium full of people. There was a shadowy object around our hero’s neck that looked very much like a Slytherin Horcrux, and the scene was framed by tattered brown curtains that seemed to recall the veil in the Department of Mysteries at the Ministry of Magic that separates the living and the dead.

Yes, it’s another universe, but that’s been part of the draw for both genre narratives. I have become fluent in the lingo and locations of these foreign worlds as I’ve been absorbed by them, from gobstones to goomahs, until they eventually mesh. During fitful nights, my mind teems with wizards and mobsters, playing out their last acts on Clue-board canvases: There’s Christopher torturing Neville at the Bing with the Cruciatus Curse. The ghost of Adriana tells Harry where to find the final Horcrux that will enable him to destroy Tony.

The different natures of these fictions mean they should have little in common except the degree to which they have welcomed rapt visitors. But they are also tales of exotic worlds in which we find ourselves in the mundane. We have so identified with Tony’s agita over Meadow’s boyfriends that we forget to judge him for being a murderer and serial cheat. In the wizarding world, we have fretted about passing exams and hooking up with the right guy so easily that we don’t notice the strangeness of our concerns over producing an Expecto Patronum spell to summon the smoky image of our dead father as a stag. Wait … that didn’t happen to us in high school?

In fact, the intimacies of stories that have gone on at such length for so many years with as much attention to detail mean that we do not need the steady thrill of murders and wand duels to keep us hooked. The smallest of gestures carry meaning; Ron’s arm around Hermione’s shoulder at a funeral is disconcertingly erotic; and while the sight of Tony receiving a blow job is a familiar one, the shocking frisson comes from the realization that it’s his wife who’s administering it.

People complain about mob-lite “Sopranos” episodes, or the Quidditch-larded chapters of Potter. But that is the kvetching of the spoiled viewer; the truth is we would watch these characters watch paint dry — and we have, slogging through hundreds of pages on the housecleaning of Grimmauld Place and hours of Carmela’s thoughts on plywood. But I haven’t minded these quotidian concerns; there’s always the chance that buried in them is a nugget of potential — a locket or a spec house on which a crucial plot point will someday turn.

You’ve probably heard about how “The Sopranos” ushered in a golden age of television (or not television, HBO, yadda yadda) and how the Potter books revitalized the publishing industry. Put more broadly, these two franchises kicked off a golden age of serialized narrative, during which we have been held in suspense, gratified at semi-regular intervals by ministrations of more story, more story, more story, until, finally, there is no more story.

The pleasurable agony is not new; television did it in earlier “Who Shot JR?” iterations. In a time when there were only three channels, it was easier to chew endlessly on the question of who killed Laura Palmer for one sweaty summer, or to feel universally gratified by the site of “Moonlighting’s” Maddie and David finally getting it on. It’s the old Dickens story told over and over again: giant groups of people gripped by the same question — what will happen next?

Both Potter and “The Sopranos” prove that there are exceptions to every prognostication. Who 10 years ago would have predicted children and adults with MTV attention spans lining up at midnight to buy 800-page books, or audiences clamoring for original programming from the network previously known for regular airings of “Just One of the Guys”? In the era of YouTube, it’s harder all the time to feel a part of a monolithic culture, with all eyes simultaneously trained in the same direction for more than 30 seconds. These two stories, more than almost anything else, are keeping us from falling over the precipice of a thoroughly splintered cultural experience.

Movies are produced and cycled through cineplexes at such volume and speed that they cannot remain atop the box office charts in the way that touchstones like “Star Wars” did. Theaters and bookstores are glutted with products designed to tickle the taste buds of specific quadrants of audiences. While the sheer number of channels from which we now pick means that “M*A*S*H”-finale appointment-viewing events will be fewer with every passing year, “The Sopranos,” which has inspired a new generation of addictive television dramas, has helped ensure that they will not disappear forever.

But still, how often will we turn our televisions on at the same moment (let alone crack the spines of millions of copies of the same book at midnight) for any reason except to watch tragedies of 9/11 proportions unfold? We long for this kind of shared experience, the being a part of something. And what is notable about the summer of Sopranos and Potter is that in an age of spoiler alerts, of TiVo and on-demand services that allow us to watch at our convenience, the one-time-only suspense is so intense that there will likely be no grace period for lollygaggers; viewers and readers will be forced to participate in real time or find themselves ripped from speculative reverie by the jarring revelation of what in fact is going down. “Is this it?” Yes. And you don’t want to miss it.

And so I’m excited. How fun to have things to look forward to. April, May, June, July … months filled with what I am confident will be a gush of fast-flowing plot.

But then it will be over. We will have had to say goodbye to so many of the people we have spent 10 years getting to know and love. I sort of can’t imagine my life without Carmela in it. (Though, to be fair, I couldn’t imagine it without Dumbledore, either.) And in this we are about to be put in the shoes of the characters we’re empathizing with — accepting the grim punishments of having loved and now, inevitably, losing.

Like Tony drifting erratically into his late 40s and Harry becoming an adult, these narrative ends force us to feel our age by reminding us of who we were when we began them. When the fourth Potter book was published in the summer of 2000, I was covering a story in the Hamptons with an ex-boyfriend, with whom I also watched “The Sopranos” every Sunday; this week, as it happens, I will be a guest at his wedding to someone else. And I see the features of the men I have loved since in Tony’s bald pate and crinkly eyes, not because any of them have particularly resembled James Gandolfini, but because for years now, the affections I have felt in my life have overlapped with affections for the characters in my fictions.

“The Sopranos” and Harry Potter resonate in part because we got to know them when our lives, and our world, were very different. As a friend of mine who moved back to Paris a few years ago told me in an e-mail about trying to download the final “Sopranos” episodes, “I always get such a pang when the opening credits start rolling and it feels like I’m wooshed back to New York and that first winter when [she and her husband] started getting hooked and I get so incredibly nostalgic for that time, we were so careless and so glad to be in New York, it was pre 9/11 and I think of the East Village and you guys and it’s all a blur and I can’t stand the idea that it’s all over.”

Of course, the reason we are compelled to engage in narrative at all is because of the way it efficiently mirrors the pull of life: the not knowing, the wanting to know, the speculation, and finally, I guess, the end. Anticipation of completion motivates us; satiety is overrated. We want, we want, we want, and then we get, and it is finished and we are empty without the wanting to fill us up.

And so now, while we are still wanting — to know what will happen to Tony and if Snape is good or evil (he’s good) — we are full. So full of speculation and guesses and ideas and theories. We can feel as much a part of the story, an active, living narrative, as the characters we are considering, arguing with each other about who is really doing what and why. But talk to me in August, when our heads aren’t brimming with possibilities, but littered with bodies of characters who will not rise again — not even in dream sequences, because Tony and Harry will not be doing any more dreaming, about talking snakes or talking fishes.

It has been reported that when she finished writing “The Deathly Hallows,” Rowling was moved to mark the moment by graffiti-ing a piece of sculpture in the hotel room where she was holed up. “J.K. Rowling finished writing Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in this room on 11 Jan 2007,” she wrote in black marker.

On Sunday, as the final arc of “The Sopranos” was about to unfold, I was grabbed by the nonsensical impulse to record the episode, along with all the HBO “last episodes” nonsense that surrounded it, to authenticate the not-knowingness of the event, as someone might once have squirreled away a newspaper ad asking, “Little Nell, alive or dead?” or “Do they ever get the ring to Mordor?” What could propel me to want to stop time in this way? I suppose it would remind some future version of myself that I was around before these stories became calcified, that I lived and breathed them while they still lived and breathed and tantalized with possibility. I guess I wanted to be able to recall that there really was a time when no one knew how they would end.

Today, Obama doubled down on his disregard for the concerns of these groups, claiming that while Sebelius made her decision without his counsel, he agreed with it. Obama pooh-poohed the findings of the FDA, which had concluded that Plan B pills posed no medical hazard and supported Sebelius’ official argument, citing a lack of confidence that “a 10-year-old or 11-year-old going to a drugstore would be able to, alongside bubble gum or batteries, be able to buy a medication that potentially if not used properly can have an adverse effect.” The logic expressed today by the president, and yesterday by Sebelius, is ludicrous: Medicines like Tylenol – which have been proven to have adverse effects in high doses – are available by the truckload on drugstore shelves, at prices far cheaper than the $30 to $50 it would cost a preteen to purchase just one dose of Plan B, let alone go wild with it.

But part of what was most disturbing about Obama’s statement was his reliance on language that reveals his paternalistic approach to women and their health.

“As the father of two daughters,” Obama told reporters, “I think it is important for us to make sure that we apply some common sense to various rules when it comes to over-the-counter medicine.”

First of all, the president was not talking about “various rules.” He was supporting a very specific rule, one that prevents young women from easily obtaining a drug that can help them control their reproductive lives, at an age when their economic, educational, familial and professional futures are perhaps most at risk of being derailed by an unplanned pregnancy. “As the father of two daughters,” Obama might want to reconsider his position on preventing young women from being able to exercise this form of responsibility over their own bodies and lives.

But as an American, I think it is important for my president not to turn to paternalistic claptrap and enfeebling references to the imagined ineptitude and irresponsibility of his daughters – and young women around the country – to justify a curtailment of access to medically safe contraceptives. The notion that in aggressively conscribing women’s abilities to protect themselves against unplanned pregnancy Obama is just laying down some Olde Fashioned Dad Sense diminishes an issue of gender equality, sexual health and medical access. Recasting this debate as an episode of “Father Knows Best” reaffirms hoary attitudes about young women and sex that had their repressive heyday in the era whence that program sprang.

A question of who should be allowed access to a safe form of contraception is at its root a question of how badly we want to, or believe that we can, police young women’s sexuality. When Obama is talking about his daughters, we know he’s not really basing his opinion on an anxiety that they might suffer the adverse effects of drinking a whole jug of Pepto-Bismol or swallowing 50 Advil, things that any 11-year-old who walks into a CVS with a wad of cash could theoretically do. When he says that he wants to “apply common sense” to questions of young women’s access to emergency contraception, he is telegraphing his discomfort with the idea of young women’s sexual agency, or more simply, with the idea of them having sex lives at all. This discomfort might be  comprehensible from an emotional, parental point of view. But these are not familial discussions; this is a public-health policy debate, and at a time when “16 and Pregnant” airs on MTV, the fact that a daddy feels funny about his little girls becoming grown-ups has no place in a discussion of healthcare options for America’s young women. It is also nearly impossible to imagine a similar use of language or logic to justify a ban of condom sales.

Moreover, Obama’s invocation of his role as a father is an insult to the commitments and priorities of those on the other side of this issue. Are we to believe that those who support the increased availability of emergency contraception do not have daughters? That if they do, they care less about those daughters than Barack Obama does about his? And that if they do not, they cannot possibly know better than a father of daughters what is best for young women? Why should we be asked to believe that Obama’s paternity imbues him with more moral authority on the subject of women’s health and reproductive lives than the investments of doctors, researchers and advocates who – regardless of their parental status – have dedicated their lives to working on behalf of increased reproductive health options. This line of argument is no better than the Mama Grizzly argument developed by Sarah Palin during 2010′s midterm elections, in which she asserted that her band of super-conservative mothers were qualified for office because “moms just know when there’s something wrong.”

Barack Obama has long had a tin ear for language that has anything to do with women and even more specifically with women’s rights. While on the campaign trail for president in 2008, he waved off a female reporter who asked a question about the future of the auto industry, referring to her diminutively as “sweetie.” The same year, attempting to play both sides on the issue of reproductive freedom, he gave an interview with a religious magazine in which he asserted his support for states’ restrictions on late-term abortions as long as there was an exception for the health of the mother, but added that he didn’t “think that ‘mental distress’ qualifies as the health of the mother.” Attempting to recover from that line and reassert his pro-choice bona fides, Obama later clarified that of course he believed in a medical exemption for “serious clinical mental health diseases,” just not when seeking a late-term abortion is “a matter of feeling blue,” perpetuating a wildly irresponsible vision of the rare and difficult late-term abortion as a moody impulse-buy.

Today also isn’t the first time he’s used references to members of his family to make a larger offensive point about women. Back in 2009, when charges that his officially female-friendly administration included some boys’ club tendencies hit the front of the New York Times, Obama dismissed the claims as “bunk.” Reporter Mark Leibovich noted at the time that the president “often points out that he is surrounded by strong females at home,” an argument that not only mimics an old saw about how being henpecked by women is equivalent to respecting them, but reflects a dynamic as old as patriarchal power itself and sidesteps the question of how strong females are treated at work. In 2010, while appearing on “The View,” Obama made a creaky Take-My-Wife-Please joke about how he wanted to appear on “a show that Michelle actually watched” as opposed to the news shows she usually flips past. The joke being that his missus, the one he met when she mentored him at a high-powered law firm, just doesn’t have a head for news delivered by anyone other than Elisabeth Hasselbeck.

It should no longer come as a surprise that the president of the United States is, on perhaps an unconscious level, an old-school patriarch. What’s startling is the degree to which Obama seems not to have learned from any of his past gaffes, how no one seems to have told him – or told him in a way that he’s absorbed – that the best way to address a question of women’s health and rights is probably not by making it about his role as a father.

This might be an especially valuable chat to have with the president as he moves into 2012 and toward an election in which he is going to be relying on the support of people he has just managed to anger, offend and speak down to — women. The least he could do is learn to address them with respect.

But has it actually whetted the film business’s appetite for more female-driven projects? Salon called Lynda Obst, producer of movies like “Sleepless in Seattle,” “Contact” and “How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days,” the television show “Hot in Cleveland,” the author of “Hello, He Lied” and all-around movie sage, to see what, if anything, has changed in her town this summer.

Did the success of “Bridesmaids” make a difference to your business?

Yes. It had the biggest impact of any women’s movie that I can remember in my career.

In your whole career, which began with “Flashdance” in 1983?

Yeah. It came at a moment when any movies for women, women’s comedies — forget dramas, there are no dramas for anybody — but women’s comedies, women’s thrillers were going to get put by the wayside forever. Women’s projects were dying everywhere. That’s why the opening of “Bridesmaids” was so critical for every woman in features, why its success was attended with such profound interest by every woman writer, producer and director in town.

The second important factor was that there were no stars in the movie and it wasn’t tracking in advance.

And that matters because it means that it was the material, not a movie star, that drew people to theaters?

Yes. Its success wasn’t automatic. A star opens a movie. Sandra Bullock opens a movie. But there was nobody in this movie who had ever been in a movie before, so it’s the hardest kind of movie to open.

It means that its success was due to the fact that people enjoyed it, and gave it good word of mouth once the movie started screening. Which leads us to the gigantic thing, which was the revelation that women can open a movie, and also, that this [women's movie] crossed over. Men came. It drew women of all ages and it drew guys and was a major hit. And not just domestically, which is part two of this gigantic thing, because the movie business right now is being driven by international box office.

Comedy doesn’t usually travel well. Movies that travel are movies with very little dialogue, usually dependent on action or family content or big international stars. But “Bridesmaids” did very well internationally. The concept was easy to understand in all languages. It gave us a clue as to what movies will work internationally with women in them. So what we learned is: Broad comedies will sell abroad, even with broads.

What are the immediate effects of this?

There are suddenly projects for women! I’m pitching one right now that is a female-based comedy and people are really responsive to it. And then my directing debut, which was dead in the water at New Line, went from having no momentum to having momentum, the weekend right after “Bridesmaids” opened. “Bridesmaids” meant that the idea of being able to make a movie about women was resuscitated.

Well, for now. What if the next female comedy flops?

If the next one flops, who knows? Two action movies flop and it means nothing; one women’s movie flops and it’s the end. But “Bridesmaids” was followed immediately by the success of “The Help,” which was terrific because that was driven by women too.

So what we’re finding in the American market is that younger male eyeballs are disappearing in large numbers, going to video games, going to the Internet. But women are going to the movies, if you make movies for them.

Now, does this mean we will stop making movies for the younger male quadrant? No, because the young male quadrant likes the same movies as international audiences — action movies, man movies.

Man movies?

“Ironman,” “Spider-Man,” “Batman.” Man movies.

Are studios pursuing women’s projects or are people just feeling like they can pitch them again?

I think the latter. But I think studios were suddenly receptive to them.

This is not the first time in recent memory that a woman’s movie has done well and studios have failed to notice in any permanent way. “The Devil Wears Prada,” your movie “How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days,” “Sex and the City” have all been big women-driven hits, and yet women’s movies were on the brink of extinction.

Studios have institutionally short memories when it comes to women’s movies. “Sex and the City II” did better internationally than it did domestically, which would have made you think that they would have noticed it. I mean, that’s what inclines Fox to make “Ice Ages”; sequels do so well internationally. But studios don’t seem to generalize by the same rules in women’s movies as they do for other movies.

Every time a woman’s movie does well, it’s a brand-new fact. Every time we rediscover the female audience, it’s astonishing.

So it’s possible that despite “Bridesmaids’” success, four years from now you and I will be having the same conversation about the death of women’s comedy?

Yes.

That’s depressing. But back to the success of “Bridesmaids.” There was a certain amount of social awareness around going to the movie. Because of the press it got, women seemed to be aware that going to see the movie was not just about enjoying it, but about sending a message to Hollywood. Do you think that had an impact on its box office?

Well, I know there was tremendous awareness in Los Angeles that we had to open this movie. I believe it happened in New York too, but I don’t know that that happened nationally.

What happened nationally was that there was a hunger for something for women to relate to, because there’s usually nothing out there for them. It’s what happens with an urban audience with Tyler Perry.

I had a sense from friends in other cities that they were going with their girlfriends and that they knew it was made for them.  It’s so rare that there’s a movie made for them. It generated such excitement.

You would think that that excitement alone would send a message that there is an eager audience out there for material about women.

Well, I think you can see a lot of that reaction on television. It is the year of women on television. Television is much more female-friendly than Hollywood. There are a tremendous number of female executives, and when they see something like “Bridesmaids,” it’s much easier to react fast to it, and there’s less institutional resistance. They love the zeitgeist.

But timing-wise, this season of television was already a done deal before “Bridesmaids” opened, so it can’t have been a reaction, can it?

Well, the [final] decisions about this current fall season were made at the upfronts, which roughly coincided [Editor's note: actually, directly coincided in mid-May] with the opening of “Bridesmaids,” so there actually could have been a connection.

But also, I have just been through the next season of creative development and let me tell you it’s just as female-friendly as the one that’s on air now. There are shows about women and girlfriends and not just couples. There is television about women, for women. Real women.

“Hey A Lot Of Ladies,” began a mass email I received on Wednesday from Emily Bracken, a writer and acquaintance. She was forwarding a message from Kirsten “Kiwi” Smith, a producer and the screenwriter of “Legally Blonde” and “The House Bunny,” who has no professional connection with “Bridesmaids” but is nonetheless agitating on its behalf. “I know you get a lot of emails about donating money to worthy causes, but I’d like to draw your attention to one in particular: The Chick Flick,” Smith wrote. “It is currently on the Motion Picture Association of America’s list of Endangered Species and it faces extinction if we don’t act now.”

Urging everyone to buy tickets to the movie, Smith continued, “Let’s show the planet we are capable of queefing out some major box-office lady-power.”

Bracken added her own message on top of Smith’s. It read, in part, “I encourage each and every one of you to see ‘Bridesmaids’ this weekend, not just because it’s hilarious, but because we MUST show Hollywood that women DO want movies that are not vapid romcoms or something about shopping … A lot is riding on this movie. So please bring your girlfriends, boyfriends, husbands, and neighbors out in droves. And please, if you feel moved, encourage others to do so, as well.”

Yes we can … buy tickets to a Kristen Wiig movie in an effort to persuade Hollywood that multidimensional women exist, spend money and deserve to be represented on film.

What’s motivating this campaign is simple: Hollywood studios do not make comedies for or about women anymore. Yes, they used to. As recently as a few decades ago, when comedy stars like Lily Tomlin, Bette Midler and Goldie Hawn stalked through theaters alongside supporting players like Teri Garr, Carol Kane and Madeline Kahn, bringing us movies that were sometimes sublime and sometimes disposable, but which had women at their heart. Think “Private Benjamin,” “9 to 5,” “Outrageous Fortune,” “Down and Out in Beverly Hills”…

Those days are long gone, and we now inhabit an entertainment universe in which everything male-centered is standard, and everything female-centered is female (yes, this dynamic extends into publishing, politics and professionalism, but for now, let’s keep it to Hollywood). What that means in practical terms is that women will plonk down dollars to see a male-dominated action movie, a girl-gobbling horror flick, or a dude-centric comedy just as easily as they’ll pay for the kind of female-fueled movie that is literally made for them. Men, meanwhile, have apparently been so conditioned to find anything female emasculating (notwithstanding the expectation that their girlfriends find anything male, including “Thor,” scintillating) that they cannot be moved to sit through any movie with a fully developed woman at its center. As Tad Friend recently put it in his New Yorker profile of the actress Anna Faris — in a sentence mentioned frequently by “Bridesmaids” activists — “Studio executives believe that male moviegoers would rather prep for a colonoscopy that experience a woman’s point of view, particularly if that woman drinks or swears or has a great job or an orgasm.”

So studio executives simply don’t make movies, and especially comedies, from a woman’s point of view anymore. Which doesn’t even make that much economic sense, given the fact that even without a male audience, women are so powerful a consumer force that they can make the few movies that do focus on them successes — see “The Devil Wears Prada,” or “Sex and the City” and “Sex and the City 2.” (Actually, don’t see “Sex and the City 2,” but consider what its high grosses say about exactly how desperate women are to find themselves reflected on the screen in anything other than supporting, carelessly sketched nubile girlfriend roles.)

Enter “Bridesmaids,” a movie chock full of female talent, based on a script solicited from Wiig after she impressed bro-mantic comedy king Judd Apatow in her supporting role in “Knocked Up.” If this movie can win the box office (or, frankly, even get close) on its all-important opening weekend, the thinking goes, studio executives will have an economic incentive to make more female-friendly films like it.

The movie is being sold in the vein of Apatow’s boyish burp-fests: Trailers focus on a food poisoning scene that involves women in bridal gowns excreting from both ends. But the plot line — which centers on Wiig’s 30-something character, down on her luck professionally and personally, being put through the modern maid-of-honor mill by her best friend — offers the promise of something really good: an exploration of female social relationships, all the more complicated in an age when we do not all marry by 22 but create our adult lives alongside our girlfriends.

From the trailers, I have come to hope that “Bridesmaids” might in fact be a broader and more commercial take on the kind of relationship Nicole Holofcener painfully and hilariously picked apart in 1996′s “Walking and Talking,” one of the best movies about women ever made. (Holofcener has consistently made funny, stirring flicks about chicks, but they are by no stretch of the imagination blockbusters, or even major releases. It is a testament to their rarity that after her 2006 movie “Friends With Money” concluded, one of the two girlfriends I’d gone to see it with remained in her seat, staring at the screen. When I nudged her to move, she looked at me balefully and said, “I didn’t want it to end. I want it to keep going.”)

I have not seen “Bridesmaids,” though I know many people who have said good things about it, including Salon’s Mary Elizabeth Williams. And Tuesday night, before receiving the email from Bracken forwarded by Smith, I was moved to post on Facebook Melissa Silverstein’s explanation from “Women and Hollywood” of “Why Bridesmaids Matters,” after seeing a link to Silverstein’s post on the Facebook page of movie producer (“Sleepless in Seattle,” “How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days”) Lynda Obst. Obst had written, “Seriously, we have to see this movie this weekend. If you are a woman, like women, or simply don’t hate them … if we don’t go, they won’t build them anymore.”

Just a few minutes later, Farrin Jacobs, an editorial director at HarperCollins Children’s books, commented on the link that though she had already seen the film, she had made a date to see it again this weekend with girlfriends, “because I want funny lady movies to keep existing.” Jacobs later told me that her determination was born of that New Yorker piece, and how sad she’d become thinking that men just won’t watch female characters. She’d been in Los Angeles and scored tickets to the “Bridesmaids” premiere, and she claims that at one point, the movie made her laugh so hard that she cried. “Seeing the movie and thinking about the Anna Faris article, and knowing that if this movie didn’t do well, that would be it for at least the next couple of years for the life of female comedies, I’m trying to get everybody I know to see it,” said Jacobs. “Also, it’s funny.”

So here is this movie. This movie that may be silly, may be gross, may be great, may be terrible, may have hidden under its flatulent exterior a nuanced and too rarely spied depiction of female connection. It seems that it really matters — to Hollywood and its press and its executives and its female moviemakers and storytellers and performers — how it does. As Obst, who has no professional involvement in “Bridesmaids,” told me when I contacted her about this story, “We are all watching it like we made it.” The film’s director, Paul Feig, who perhaps has copped an overly chivalrous tone recently, told the Onion’s AV club, “It’s not often that a studio will allow a movie that’s all driven by women to be made, so I felt the pressure of, ‘If I screw this up, it’s going to fuck things up for women.’”

I just keep thinking about Wiig, the driving creative force behind the existence of the film, having been thrust, apparently unwillingly, into the role of feminist figurehead. I imagine her holed up in a hotel room, Hillary Clinton style, waiting for the polls to close and the weekend box office numbers to be finalized.

Me, I’ve been wondering how I’m going to get out of the house to the movie theater. I am home on a maternity leave, a 6-week-old beside me, just beginning to figure out baby sitting. Perhaps I will try to take my daughter to the earliest neighborhood matinee, provided she’s not fussing. She’s in the only stage of a woman’s life in which she’s actively encouraged to do what the ladies in this movie apparently are doing: belching, farting, barfing. More than that, maybe it will be an investment in her moviegoing future, an effort to ensure that she will have years ahead of her in which she has a chance to see herself, her friendships, her relationships, her work and her life reflected back at her in a way that makes her laugh till she cries.