You Play the Girl

by Carina Chocano

  Hepburn put up a portion of the money to finance the play on Broadway, and Hughes bought the film rights and gave them to her as a gift. The play was a huge hit, and it made her rich. Then she sold the rights to Louis Mayer at MGM, chose the screenwriter (Barry’s friend David Ogden Stewart) and the director (her dear friend George Cukor), and approved the costars. (She had wanted Spencer Tracy and Clark Gable, but they weren’t available, so she was offered Cary Grant and James Stewart instead. She said yes.) The movie was also a huge hit and made her even richer. As the critic Andrew Sarris later put it, The Philadelphia Story was about Hepburn “getting her comeuppance at long last, and accepting it like the good sport she was.”

  Sarris was right about the comeuppance, but I think it is more than that. What Hepburn did in her most popular movies with her real-life (married) lover (one of many) Spencer Tracy was to show one independent, high-achieving, highly threatening woman after another subsuming herself, at the very last minute, in a traditional marriage. Time and again, she “gave it all up for love.” Which is how she got it all back. She traded fairy tales about love for the freedom to never get married. She got what she wanted by playing “the girl” she refused to become.

  Technically, Hepburn belonged to the first postfeminist generation. She didn’t take up the mantle of her mother’s causes but was grateful for them and expected to enjoy them. But as she found out the hard way, she was a new kind of woman in the old kind of system. Which is what The Philadelphia Story, the story of a girl in the city of brotherly love, is actually about. At the start of the movie, Tracy thinks that leaving Dexter and banning Seth from her wedding is all she needs to do to take control of her life. But Dexter’s sudden appearance lays bare the way male authority functions in patriarchy: it trumps logic. His arrival pulls Tracy into an alternate reality where male authority is laid bare, and she is made to see that it has the power to cancel out reality and replace it with nonsense. The Tracy we’ve seen until now is Tracy as she sees herself. The Tracy we see after Dexter arrives with the mass media in tow is Tracy—the girl—as she is seen when not playing “the girl.” The movie’s second act is a gauntlet of scrutiny. Depending on who’s judging, she’s idolized and devalued, mocked and excoriated, undermined and shamed. Dexter tells her she’s too cold, too unforgiving, too demanding. She sets too high a standard for herself and others, and she is no “helpmeet.” He also thinks she is distant, vain, and spoiled. To George, she is a symbol of unattainability; a prize, a trophy, a goal. She should be locked up in a tower, worshiped, punished. It’s her fault Dexter drank. It’s her fault her father cheated. It’s her fault George is jealous and possessive. It’s her fault Mike is resentful and feels cheated by life. One by one, Mike, Dexter, Seth, and George hoist Tracy up on a pedestal and knock her back down again until she has no idea who or where she is.

  The Philadelphia Story is a story about a story. Specifically, it’s a story about a tabloid story that, thanks to Dexter’s clever, behind-the-scenes puppeteering, changes the outcome of the event it’s supposed to be chronicling and that causes Tracy to break up with George and remarry a reframed, recontextualized Dexter instead. But it ends on an ambivalent note: Sydney Kidd, Spy magazine’s publisher, crashes the wedding and catches the moment on camera. Will they make it or won’t they? It’s hard to say. It’s hard to sustain an equal relationship in an unequal world, where the stories aren’t true or real, where the stories have agendas. That’s what the movie is about: it’s a true story about fake stories, about how they shape reality and perception. It’s about how stories guide our empathy and identification. The Philadelphia Story lampoons this while simultaneously capitulating. Tracy thumbed her nose at convention and then gave in. Hepburn’s solution was the solution that smart and ambitious women have always sought. She found a way around the system, but the system remained in place.

  As the philosopher Stanley Cavell wrote in his book, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage, The Philadelphia Story is a story about transformation through marriage in the Shakespearean tradition: the woman is remade as a wife at the hands of lecturing men. But it’s also a story about the corrective power of reframing. The movie suggests it’s not women or men who need to be remade, but marriage itself that needs to change from a condescending patriarchal indoctrination to a mutual conversation between equals. The gauntlet that Tracy runs lays bare the hypocrisy that the system is built on, and calls out the men who insist on upholding it and subjecting others to its double standards for injustice and inhumanity. Via Tracy, Hepburn reframed her experience as a star from her point of view. As a star playing the part of a happy bride, she put the audience in her shoes. She made herself the underdog and spoke truth to power and emerged dazed, bruised, clear-eyed, herself. Only then did she decide to set off once again on the ship True Love with Dexter—charming, manipulative, sexy, problematic Dexter—with no expectations and no guarantees, on an open-ended adventure of becoming.

  “The dire or merely domestic outcomes of so many of her movies can be easily dismissed as the requirements of a less enlightened age,” Claudia Roth Pierpont wrote in The New Yorker after Hepburn died, “or as a sign of the ongoing bewilderment about how a truly ‘modern’ woman’s story might conclude.” What is marriage anymore, anyway? How is the institution structured? What assumptions do we bring to it? Is it an irreducible economic unit, in which production and labor remain distributed along traditional lines (the model of husband as protector and breadwinner and wife as “angel in the house,” domestic goddess, and nurturer)? Or is it a spiritual, intellectual, artistic, and social partnership—a lifelong collaboration, a project, a constant becoming? Is it what patriarchal society said it is, or what Hollywood pretended it was? What does it mean to be a modern woman? Where does a woman’s “modern-ness” reside? In what she looks like, how she acts, what she does, wears, or says? Or is it somewhere else entirely outside of her, in a larger system that allows her to be a whole, free person? that represents her as such? that allows her to represent herself? that recognizes her individuality and subjectivity? Is it about things like voting and birth control, the issues that Katharine Hepburn’s mother devoted her life to fighting for? Is it about wearing pants, not aiming to please, sleeping around, and not getting married, like Katharine Hepburn did? Is it about smoking Virginia Slims? Is it not perhaps all and none of these things but the fact that we keep having to make a case for our personhood? Is it not the story that needs to be reframed? the heroine who needs to be allowed to create herself, from scratch? These were the questions I think Hepburn was really posing. These are the questions we are still asking today, more than seventy-five years later. This is the elephant in the room.

  What worked for Hepburn in the end, what allowed her to become the person she was, was her tactical decision to play the girl on-screen. Playing the girl on-screen liberated her from having to play her in life. “I put on pants fifty years ago and declared a sort of middle road. I have not lived as a woman. I have lived as a man. I’ve just done what I damn well wanted to and I’ve made enough money to support myself and I ain’t afraid of being alone,” she told Barbara Walters in a 1981 interview, when she was seventy-two. Not that she was ever alone much. Still, if you had told her 1940 self that, more than three-quarters of a century later, the question of how a truly modern woman’s story might conclude would still be bewildering, I think she would have been surprised.

  4

  * * *

  What a Feeling

  I’m fifteen and new in town, a freshman at a Catholic school. Why I’m at a Catholic school, I have no idea. My parents panicked. They got me to a nunnery. I have one friend. She seems a little bewildered, too. And miserable. We are both miserable. We are so miserable.

  We go see Flashdance over Christmas break. Then we see it again. And again. And again. Our moms drive us to the mall without comment, and I’m grateful. The movie is our Star Wars. We watch like we’re trying to absorb it, merge with it, organize our
lives and build our identities around it. If my friend and I ever discuss this, I have no recollection of what we say. It’s not the sort of thing you talk about. It’s not even the kind of movie you talk about. There isn’t anything to discuss. We just commune with it in silence. One gray and freezing Sunday afternoon, my mom drops us off at the crappy mall, where the movie has washed up after ending its run at the fancy mall. My naked longing to see this movie again makes me feel self-conscious. Standing in the empty parking lot on this dreary and windy day, I’m not quite Jane Eyre; maybe more like Cathy in the Pat Benatar version of Kate Bush’s tribute to Wuthering Heights. All at once, I’m overcome with a shame so bilious I think I’ll dissolve into the asphalt. I’m fifteen, but I’m not stupid. I know this is a terrible movie. I know it’s a lie from start to finish. But it’s a lie I very badly want to believe in. Because what other lie is there for me to believe in—I mean, that I can get really behind?

  Puberty is a disturbance. You change, like a werewolf. It causes upheaval, perturbation—in your own body, yes, but also (mostly, when you are a girl) in others’ bodies and words and attitudes. It transmutes the world. It’s not that you lose control of your body so much as that you lose control over the way your body is interpreted. Your body becomes an alien body, a question rather than a statement. The same culture that once hijacked it as a symbol of its own inviolable purity and innocence now finds this transformation unbearable, and blames you for defiling it, for allowing it to happen. Who else? The girl is always burdened with impossible standards. She is made to pay for the loss of innocence with more loss—of love, respect, protection. In the story, she is given one way out, a single path to validation. The story says: Don’t get dirty. Don’t break. Don’t think you can escape the narrative. To think you can escape the narrative is the definition of crazy.

  In the male coming-of-age story, the boy creates himself. In the female coming-of-age story, the girl is created by forces around her. In the feminist coming-of-age story, the girl resists the forces and becomes herself. Movies about teenage girls in edgy, aestheticized peril are everywhere. Brooke Shields, Jodie Foster, and Tatum O’Neal grow up so fast it threatens to kill or ruin them, or kill or ruin those around them. In Foxes (directed by Adrian Lyne, who would go on to direct Flashdance three years later), The Blue Lagoon, Pretty Baby, Endless Love, Taxi Driver, Carrie, The Exorcist, and Christiane F., girls don’t get into trouble, they turn into trouble. The danger comes from inside. It’s mutative, transgressive. It made them uncontrollable. “At 12, it was angel dust,” read the tag­line for Christiane F. “At 13, it was heroin. Then she took to the streets.” Maturity and experience were gateways to the most dangerous substance of all: unsupervised freedom. Why is a girl’s leaving childhood and venturing out into the world always the go-to symbol for everything that can, and absolutely will, go wrong?

  Jennifer Beals in Flashdance is not very many years older than we are. She’s a freshman at Yale, which is in the general ballpark of where we also hope to be at her age. She graduated from the Francis W. Parker School in Chicago—Anna knows people who know people who know her. It’s almost like she could be us. We could never be her. Jennifer Beals is ideal feminine beauty circa 1983. She is the standard. We can bask in the proximal thrill of it all.

  Her character’s name is Alexandra Owens, but she goes by Alex. The boy’s name implies she’s cool and you can trust her. Alex works as an arc welder in a steel mill by day, but at night she gets on stage at a bar called Mawby’s and dances. To say her dancing is flashy does not come close to describing it. It’s like strip-club kabuki theater staged, costumed, set-designed, and shot for a 1980s music video. Actually, it’s not like that; that is precisely what it is. At Mawby’s, the salt-of-the-earth clientele has a surprisingly high tolerance for experimental performance art, so Alex can really express who she is—with her clothes mostly on.

  Ultimately, though, it is not Alex’s dream to dump bucketfuls of water over herself every night in front of a bunch of steelworkers. She wants to be a ballerina and dreams of training at a prestigious dance conservatory. It’s part of the story of how she’s not an average girl. Alex is exceptional. She’s so exceptional that she can start training as a ballerina at the age of eighteen. She’s so exceptional that she has a boy’s name, and a man’s job, and holds her own in an all-male environment. She lives all alone in a cavernous warehouse space off a dark alley with only her pit bull—the preferred breed of toxic masculinity—Grunt, for company. She has the temperament of an angsty suburban teenager but the life of a landed eighteenth-century poet or bohemian, garret-dwelling genius in 1920s Paris. Her warehouse is decorated in a kind of high-bordello style—Pretty Baby meets Blade Runner. She is so free, so unself-conscious, so impervious to norms and conventions and her effect on others, namely, men, that she’ll remove her bra from under her shirt in front of her boss while maintaining a kind of inquisitive Bambi look on her face the whole time. In Alex, all the things that should be “girl things” are reversed except the ones that count. She is the antithesis of a lady, a portrait of a non-lady. She’s a twelve-year-old boy in a young woman’s body.

  Nominally based on a true story, or a composite of true stories, Flashdance is as divorced from reality as it is possible to be without being of a different planet. Inexplicably free of the gender, social, and financial constraints that fetter the rest of humanity, Alex is free to be a genius. And we know she’s a genius because, like (the idealized image of) most geniuses (who are male), she is moody, impulsive, reckless, entitled, and rude, and it makes people fall in love with her and realize the error of their stuffy, mannerly, and classically trained ways. She is represented not like a girl in a romance so much as like a romantic hero. She’s Byronic in her tempestuousness and effrontery. She tosses her hair over her shoulder like a cape before stalking off in search of sublime Alpine vistas—or the Pittsburgh equivalent. One night, Nick, the owner of the steel mill, notices her dancing at Mawby’s and asks his buddy who she is. His buddy laughs and yells him her social security number—she works for him. The next day, at the mill, Nick invites Alex to dinner at a fancy restaurant. There, he tries gamely to make conversation while she performs oral sex on her entrée and simultaneously rubs his groin with her stockinged foot. Her appetites are lusty, and she chews with her mouth open—I can’t decide which is more rebellious. Nick’s ex-wife happens to be there, and she approaches their table. She looks down her nose at Alex and sneers. Did Nick take her to his favorite spot by the tracks, the same place he takes all the girls? Alex peels off her tuxedo jacket in response, revealing only a dickey, possibly made of paper, underneath. She informs Nick’s ex that she did in fact fuck Nick’s brains out, as Nick smiles sheepishly. This is how she signals to the ex-wife that she’s won. We think this is amazing. We think, You tell that stuck-up bitch.

  But what sort of gauntlet-throwing one-upmanship is this, really? What does it mean to me, a girl whose father spends mealtimes relentlessly correcting her manners? It looks like freedom, I guess. Like self-assertion, or punk rebellion, or some kind of corrective power. Also, and this is important, it’s the first time I’ve seen a girl whose artistic genius does not get her frog-marched directly to a course of electroshock treatments and long-term institutionalization.

  Of course, the blissful, naughty transgression can’t last, and worlds will collide. Alex is a feral princess: she’ll resist domestication until after she’s proven she can make it on her own. Driving home from dinner one night, Nick lets slip that he made a call and helped Alex get her audition at the prestigious dance conservatory. Alex freaks out. She desperately needs to believe in a level playing field. She wants to do it all on her own. It’s meaningless otherwise. She wants to be recognized and validated by the establishment in the most punk-rock, antiestablishment way possible. If not, she’ll take her ball and go home. In fact, she jumps out of Nick’s moving Porsche in a tunnel, dismissing the high potentiality that a pileup could quickly turn into a blazin
g death trap for hundreds of people.

  We get it. We’re fifteen, and we have big, vague dreams. We need to believe in a level playing field, too. We think Nick indulges her outbursts because he totally “gets” how passionate she is—not because he’s paternalistic, not because he owns her. For a girl whose destiny is determined entirely by her body—as a dancer and the future wife of the rich prince—she is blissfully oblivious to her material conditions. With her blue-collar job, her tough-girl dog, her uncontrollable emotions, and her atrocious manners, Alex is an archetype that I’ve never encountered before. She’s a teen-girl übermensch, an übermädchen, a maniac. She’s utterly, implausibly, ahistorically free. Alex’s confidence and unflappability are disconcerting, bordering on delusional, but it is rather fascinating to watch this girl not much older than us enact this particular romantic fantasy. “Man becomes that which he wills to become, his willing precedes his existence,” Nietzsche says, and I guess Alex says so, too. Her rebellion is like a superpower, an invisible shield against reality. The limitations of her embodied existence are no match for her grit, her determination, her bizarre ability to enjoy all the perks of living in the body of a teenage girl with none of the drawbacks. Because there are both, but media tends to misrepresent the perks and rarely talks about the drawbacks.

  Decades later, in an interview, the screenwriter, Tom Hedley (with Joe Ezsterhas), explained his decision to spin a Cinderella fantasy from a grim true story, saying, “I was touched by her dream of what she was. I made a decision early on in the piece to stick with her fantasy, not her reality.”1 We don’t care how this young girl in a depressed steel town got a union job. We don’t care how she manages not to get slighted, diminished, harassed, or bullied at work. We don’t care how she affords her enormous warehouse space, and heats it, while saving money to attend a prestigious dance academy. We don’t care that she is too old to be a ballerina and too young to be a steelworker because by then the steel mills had stopped hiring, and wouldn’t have hired her in the first place. We don’t notice how creepy the love story is, that her boyfriend is twenty years older than she is, that she works for him, that he owns the means of production, for Karl Marx’s sake. We don’t think it’s weird that she has at least two full-blown tantrums in his presence, that she jumps out of his car and throws a rock through his window, and that he looks on indulgently at her adorable, childlike impotence and it only makes him want to fuck her more. We don’t ask how she manages to single-handedly produce, choreograph, costume, art-direct, and stage a high-end cabaret every night after her shift at the steel mill. Flashdance doesn’t ask us to ask these questions, so we don’t. After the movie came out, it was revealed that Alex’s big audition scene had been performed by not one but three different uncredited body doubles—a dancer, a gymnast, and a break-dancer, who was a guy.