I Like to Watch

by Emily Nussbaum

  So I had no trouble advocating for watching Cosby while reviling Bill Cosby. Certain artists, certain art forms, I could see from a distance. It was easier to detach myself when it came to music or painting or sculpture; it was much easier with mediums (jazz and abstract expressionism, say) that felt less narrative, more mathematical. It was harder with someone who made you laugh, because laughter is intimate, a loss of control. It was easier when I hated both the art and the artist. It was harder when the work felt like it was about me, my world. It was easier, too, to have a soothing sense of dispassion when it felt like it was not my place to judge. It was easier, for example, to detach myself from debates over misogyny in hip-hop music. I don’t know much about opera, either; I observed from a cool distance when the Guerilla Girls criticized sexism in the art world; I love country music but I didn’t feel obliged to weigh in on its uglier aspects. When I absorbed Cleage’s critique of Miles Davis, that was in part because it felt like it was her critique to make, not mine. Plenty of artists could never betray me. I didn’t like the movies of James Toback, I found Brett Ratner revolting, I hadn’t had any run-ins with Harvey Weinstein, and I didn’t like Matt Lauer’s interviews. That wasn’t my form of collusion.

  Still, in the aftermath of the Weinstein exposé, I began considering, obsessively and anxiously, my own taste. Why did I like so many works of art that were fueled by contempt or fear of women? Because God knows it was true. Woody wasn’t the only one who mesmerized me this way; I often found art that was fueled by angry, queasy, or flat-out misogynist visions to be car-crash compelling. Pablo Picasso, Alfred Hitchcock, Philip Roth, Eddie Murphy: I grokked the low-level buzz of hate that was present in certain forms of male creativity, finding those works attractive despite those toxins; or maybe because of them; or both. Why? Why was this contradiction more acceptable, or more intriguing, to me, when that wasn’t nearly as true of aggressively anti-Semitic or racist art? (Which was Cleage’s question, too: What if Miles Davis had been transformed into Kenny G, if he’d been a white man abusing black men?)

  Also: What did it mean that I’d succeeded in a media world that pushed so many women into the margins? Perhaps it meant that I was special: I’d squeezed through narrow cracks! I’d beaten the odds. Or perhaps it meant that I was a sellout, a woman who was capable of pleasing, or sedating, or otherwise not challenging the sexism of the men in power. Maybe I was much more of a creature of Woody Allen than I’d even begun to consider. Maybe I was still wrapping cookies for him in my teenage dreams, hoping that he’d recognize that they were homemade.

  Maybe, as a young woman, I’d opened my heart so wide to sexist art because that was among the most celebrated art—or maybe, as a heterosexual woman, it was because I felt like it would help me learn things about men. Maybe it did. The #MeToo moment had raised up uncomfortable feelings from the past: the ugly awareness, for instance, that the praise of young women wasn’t quite as meaningful to me, because I took it for granted, while the praise of older men felt harder to get, and, thus, was more valuable. (The thought brought up a Fiona Apple line: “What’s so impressive about a diamond/Except the mining?”) I remembered my deep irritation at a fan note in which a woman had praised me for writing like a man. And the double irritation when people compared my work only to other female writers, like Pauline Kael; I disliked it when people referred to me as a female or a feminist critic rather than a critic.

  Soon after I got my job at The New Yorker, a few female writers with whom I was friendly wrote to me to say they were impressed that I had strutted into this big job and not folded under the pressure, which made me nervous, because it made me feel like I should have folded under the pressure. The career advice that I gave to young women was the same tactic that had helped me: You should walk into a big mid-career job pretending, inside your head, that you are Norman Mailer. A messy genius, but worth it! If you act like a polite associate editor in a beige cardigan, your voice will be small. If you pretend you’re Norman Mailer, you can take up some space. Making a mess is what men get to do.

  Maybe riding behind the wild-man—pulling myself up onto the saddle of the genius asshole artist—was proof that I could handle ugliness. Maybe handling ugliness was a trait that I admired. It was a good thing to be resilient, because then you didn’t have to shut your eyes, shield yourself. You could take it all in instead of being the gatekeeper. It was a little strange, of course, to be a critic who hated the idea of being a gatekeeper.

  * * *

  —

  I thought again about Woody Allen. I’m hardly the only teenage girl in the world who was a fan of his movies. They are, after all, movies about young women. And few other movies during that period—in either the 1970s or the 1980s, during the eras of Animal House and the John Hughes films—showed us in quite this light. In the Allen movies, teen girls are not erotic Lolitas, not the gauzy lip-chewers of an Éric Rohmer story. They’re not, by and large, ditzes or dupes or bimbos. They are instead remarkable creatures. They are miniature intellectuals from privileged backgrounds—clever, rich, well-dressed girls who might absorb an older man’s excellent taste. In Manhattan, it’s true, Mariel Hemingway is a bit blank, an innocent with perfect cheekbones, whose tears were pure. But there were other girls in the mix, too, among them the dirty, funny Juliette Lewis character in Husbands and Wives—a 1992 movie that got swamped by critical coverage during Allen’s breakup with Farrow. That was a movie about an old man who left his wife for a younger woman, so it was regarded with suspicion, as nothing but a sordid confession poorly disguised as fiction.

  Without watching these movies, it is easier to dismiss them simply as propaganda for Allen’s sexual predilections. But watching them, it gets more complicated: Among other things, these are, in fact, movies about men who fall madly in love with middle-aged women—their peers—but get rejected by them. Those women (who are played by a cadre of amazing actresses including Diane Keaton, Farrow, and Judy Davis) are prickly, funny, demanding, messy, controlling, complicated, and intellectually accomplished figures. They’re generally portrayed as preferable to younger women, but harder to hold on to. In Manhattan, Hemingway’s wide-eyed Tracy is Isaac’s rebound, not his first choice. (That was Keaton’s Mary, who leaves Isaac for his married friend Yale.) In Annie Hall, Alvy, too, gets dumped by Annie, who grows beyond him, rejecting his tastes for her own.

  In Husbands and Wives, Davis gets to choose between men her own age: Her thrilling bitch-queen character, Sally, with her sexual hang-ups and brick-red lipstick, becomes the fulcrum of a triangle with Liam Neeson and her estranged husband, who is played by Sydney Pollack. Although Pollack’s character leaves Sally for a younger aerobics instructor, he gets bored by her—and in a violent scene that feels even more shocking now, he physically drags his girlfriend away from a party where she embarrassed him by drunkenly defending astrology. Then he reunites with Sally, who breaks Neeson’s heart. By the movie’s end, it’s Davis’s Sally who’s the clear winner: She knows that she’s something special and she’s right.

  Davis’s Sally also seems like an older version of Rain, Juliette Lewis’s twenty-year-old character in the same movie. Unlike Tracy in Manhattan, Rain isn’t a puppy dog who is content to watch W. C. Fields and eat Chinese food. She’s a cocky Columbia University undergraduate student whose short story (with the absurd title “Oral Sex in the Age of Deconstruction”) is so intimidatingly good that her professor, the Allen character, Gabe Roth, develops a crush on her. When Rain loses Roth’s own novel in a cab, she is at first apologetic. And then, casually, almost in passing, she begins to scathingly critique her professor’s writing, which strongly resembles the Woody Allen movie we’re watching. She describes his attitudes toward women as “retrograde” and “shallow.” She calls his ideas about marriage and adultery self-justifying—and, hilariously, compares the novel to Leni Riefenstahl’s work: “Triumph of the Will was a great movie, but you despise the ideas behind it.�
� And, eventually, we get the reveal: Roth’s just one in a trail of older men Rain’s been dating. In her hidden narrative, she’s the messy, exciting, adventure-having person—he’s just a comic walk-on. When Roth questions her, angrily, saying, “I’d hate to be your boyfriend, he must go through hell,” Rain is unfazed. “I’m worth it,” she explains, amused. Rain is a male fantasy, very likely. But she charmed me, too. Fantasies don’t only go one way.

  Such art could be viewed, if you were in a darker mood, as a cultural analogue to a sex predator’s “grooming” of a younger victim: These were the stories that had shaped my expectations about romantic love, after all. They certainly normalized the notion of older men dating teenagers—and since they were beloved hit movies, I assumed, without questioning, that the mores of Manhattan (for instance, that adult couples might take a friend’s teen girlfriend to Elaine’s, rolling their eyes but generally unoffended) were realistic. But maybe all art is grooming. Like street harassment, Allen’s vision of the teen sophisticate was a form of praise, and few things embed themselves in you as deeply as a compliment. When the world is full of poison, being a food taster seems like a sucker’s game.

  I thought, among other things, about one of my favorite novels: John Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick, a book so wittily malicious that, even decades later, it felt like an education in literary misogyny, a bracing ice bath. I had read it in 1984 during my freshman year in college, in my Woody Allen years, around the time I’d been marking up Roman Polanski’s memoir, back when John Updike was the beaky blockbuster-writing genius who was on the cover of all the weekly news magazines (back when there were still weekly news magazines). A few months before his death, I interviewed Updike for a profile in New York magazine. We met in a fancy hotel suite in Connecticut, where we nibbled from a tray of elegant butter cookies. Updike was doing press for his final novel, which was a follow-up to The Witches of Eastwick titled The Widows of Eastwick, a novel in which the original characters were facing old age. The new book was terrible. Despite the fact that he was supposed to be out there plugging this sequel, the author himself described it, with endearing candor, as a commercial gambit.

  I had no idea that Updike had lung cancer at the time. He answered all of my undermining questions with charm and what I described in the piece as “a certain satirical opacity.” When he had written The Witches of Eastwick, in the early 1980s, he “rose to the bait” of his feminist critics, he told me. “People of my age are raised to be, sort of, chauvinists. To expect women to do the laundry and—it’s terrible! I’m making you cry, almost! But I’m eager to correct that as a writer, more than as a person. As a person, we always have chauvinistic assumptions. But a writer is supposed to be open to the world, and wise, and generous.”

  The original novel had aims that were both satirical and ideological: It was a book about the wicked liberation of divorce, thrumming with seventies-era anxiety about “women’s lib.” The witches are home-wreckers who neglect their kids, mystically dispose of their husbands, and revel in selfishness, until they finally trip themselves up, having fallen for the flattery (along with the ice-cold penis) of the devil. Yet it was also a book that female readers embraced. You couldn’t help it, because the female characters were too alive, too well-formed—a miracle that only intensified once the movie adaptation came out in 1987, starring three glamorous movie stars, two of them middle-aged. That movie was a glossy eighties girl-power original, which largely stripped the material of its anti-feminist politics. But even in the anti-feminist book, the coven was irresistible, a trio of horny, funny single mothers—the sculptress, Alexandra; the writer, Sukie; and the cellist, Jane. Updike’s portrait of these women, reveling in their newfound powers, was a special sort of intoxicant, not unlike the compliments paid to the trio by the devil character, Daryl Van Horne, who was an art collector himself and, also, a collector of artists.

  There’s a meta-argument tucked inside The Witches of Eastwick; it’s an argument for the value of misogynist art about women. Early on in the story, Van Horne brings Alexandra, who sculpts naked goddess figures, to see his modern art collection. He shows off his prized possession, a Kienholz: It’s a naked female figure, on her back, legs spread, made of chicken wire and flattened beer cans, with a porcelain chamber pot as the belly. Alexandra is offended. She calls the sculpture “rude, a joke against women.” Van Horne insists that it is genius. “The tactility! There’s nothing monotonous or preordained about it….The richness, the vielfältigkeit, the, you know, ambiguity. No offense, friend Lexa, but you’re a Johnny One-Note with those little poppets of yours.” When Alexandra reluctantly touches the sculpture, she finds “the glossy yet resistant texture of life.” Whether she likes it or not, this garbage body is a mirror for her own. She can reject it but she can’t dismiss it.

  The late 1970s, as Updike remembered them, were “full of feminism and talk about how women should be in charge of the world. There would be no war. There would be nothing unpleasant, in fact, if women were in charge of the world. So I tried to write this book about women who, in achieving freedom of a sort, acquired power, the power that witches would have if there were witches. And they use it to kill another witch. So they behave no better with their power than men do. That was my chauvinistic thought.”

  I was charmed to hear Updike use the word “chauvinistic,” that yellowing scrap of the old insult “male chauvinist pig,” a rhetorical souvenir of ancient battles, ones that took place before my time. Writing, he told me, remained the most pleasurable thing in his life; it filled the time, it was easy and soothing. I nodded along. But the truth was, around the time of that interview, writing was, for me, painful. I had a baby and a two-year-old and was suffering from what was, in retrospect, a mild case of postpartum depression. As I struggled to transcribe his words, I was at a rented house on vacation with friends. They all went apple-picking, while I sat frozen, staring at my computer: I somehow had to complete a damning profile of an author who was among my biggest influences, to find a way to call my literary hero sexist without making myself a prude, a moralist, a scold. I was never satisfied with the results. After his death, the memory prickled with guilt: The project seemed pointless and a little like I had killed him.

  Rereading the piece, however, I was struck by how cathartic our interaction had been, how powerful it was to have Updike not deny but actively embrace his own limits, to tell me, at the end of his life, that he couldn’t really escape his own biases, that his only choice was to turn it into an artistic challenge. “To a misogynist, it’s bliss to write from a woman’s point of view,” he said. Of course, it’s impossible to say how much the great novelist was making fun of me and how much he was making fun of himself: likely more than a small amount, on both counts. But it was comforting that my sexist hero, too, believed that his art should be bigger than its creator. That failed final book, the one about elderly witches whose artistic gifts had receded, a book that overflowed with scornful descriptions of women’s aging bodies, and of their bad, failed art, the art they’d created in their waning years, is now forgotten. Back then, he described their physical plight as very much mirroring his own. “I’ve been spared baldness, but in a strong hotel light, you suddenly see your awful head that you never had to look at before.”

  * * *

  —

  As the weeks of November 2017 passed, I began to see my own awful head. Because I knew who was next. It was Louis C.K.

  And as it happens, I knew something about Louis, something that was about to hit the press, that I wanted to hit the press. But with Louis C.K., I had always found it harder to detach myself. And while I was hardly the first or the most important person to praise his work—during his artistic rise over the past decade, it frequently felt like every men’s magazine featured a worshipful portrait of the comedian as a philosopher-saint, often written by a man his own age or slightly younger—I felt tied to his reputation, specifically because I was
a female critic, and a feminist, too, and not one of three thousand guys writing for Esquire.

  In 2010, I wrote a mixed-to-negative review of the first season of Louie, dunking on it for self-pity. Seven months later, I wrote a profile of him for the TV issue of New York magazine, a positive profile, but one-half notch less sycophantic than the rest, I hoped. Yet each year, my admiration grew: Perhaps my most psychedelic rave ever was written about the third season of Louie, the first five episodes of which I binged in a state of bliss. I still thought about those scenes, particularly the one in which Parker Posey sits on a roof ledge, her face shifting, elusively, from suicidality to love and back—her expression hard to read but impossible to look away from. The show could be didactic and, by design, it was self-indulgent: It was a one-man show, a sitcom made by an auteur, something new for TV. The final two seasons had agitated me in ways that I’d never been fully able to articulate. Still, Louis C.K. was a hero to me. His stand-up had a virtuosic filthiness that echoed Philip Roth and Woody Allen, but also many of my favorite female creators, like comics artist Aline Kominsky-Crumb. In a medium that was built on compromise, he’d spearheaded a model of production that was more capable of risk and failure, a kind of comedy that elicited anxiety, not just laughs. As a critic, I felt sure that tolerating that kind of discomfort was a positive thing.