You Play the Girl

by Carina Chocano

  In 2014, I stumbled across an article in the Guardian by James Dearden, the screenwriter of Fatal Attraction. He was talking about how Glenn Close’s character, Alex, started as a sympathetic character and ended up as a psychopath. Dearden said he originally wrote Alex as “an essentially tragic, lonely figure.” “Yes, she does go a bit far, but I think we can all recognize how close to obsessive behavior we can be driven by love—or the illusion of love.”2 The movie was in development for four years, the rewrites continuing even after Michael Douglas and Adrian Lyne were attached, but Paramount remained resistant. “‘How do we root for this guy?’ they keep asking. ‘He cheats on his wife!’ Hollywood likes its leading men unequivocally heroic, and it seems there are far too many shades of grey to Dan Gallagher, Douglas’s character,” Dearden wrote. “So gradually, remorselessly, Dan is made more and more blameless, while Alex turns inevitably more and more into the villain of the piece. The changes are subtle, almost imperceptible, but they accumulate, so that she has become—without us fully realizing—this predatory and eventually deranged character.” A monster nobody can identify with.

  In 2011, and apparently not without trepidation, Nancy Joe Sales profiled Courtney Love in Vanity Fair. Everything that could be said about Love had already been said so she wrote about what it was like to try to portray someone whose story precedes her. She wrote about how we interpret people, and what the responsibilities are to the people we portray. What emerged was a fascinating portrait of a person in conflict with her persona as observed by someone ambivalent about shaping the story. Everybody “knows” Love. Should she part from this assumption? address it? confirm it? ignore it? try to dispel it? To defend the public figure known as Courtney Love is to risk an identification you probably don’t want. To defend Love against the charge that she’s crazy is to take on her alleged crazy yourself. It’s to martyr yourself to the crazy. You think twice.

  In the story, you learn that Love is obsessed with the idea that she’s broke. She says she’s been defrauded of hundreds of millions of dollars. Sales and Love spend the weekend at the country house of the Earl of March and Kinrara, and Love says she fits in among “the toffs.” They get her. Sales skates on the edge between credulity and disbelief. It was a fascinating study in ambivalence. The story seemed to dare to you empathize with the vilified woman, to own the consequences of hating her, and, at the same time, the chill of sticking your neck out. At one point, Love tells Sales that when she was little, she dreamed of growing up and getting famous so people would finally love her. But a girl as ambitious, as reckless, as needy as she is is never loved in the way she probably dreamed of, uncritically, by millions. To be loved in that way, you can be a mess or you can be a girl, but you can’t be both. A girl like her is never loved that way—which is why girls love her. The story was called “Love in a Cold Climate,” and the subhead was “Human train wreck or victimized genius?”3

  In her book The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980, Elaine Showalter talks about how in the Victorian era madness became a gendered condition. Until then insanity had been represented as male, but was reinvented as a sexier, swoonier “female malady.” The newly built asylums of the nineteenth century were mostly filled with women, whose “delicate constitutions,” it was believed, whose hysterical tendencies, and whose logical deficits made them especially susceptible to the diagnosis. Victorians ushered in crazy girl chic, by reframing insanity as a disease of sensibility, of refinement. A Great Man could be expected to weather the nerve-jangling force of genius, but the finely strung lady nerves of a woman artist, the thinking went, would eventually succumb—usually in middle age, when her eccentricity stopped being cute. This is why nobody romanticizes Alex Forrest in Fatal Attraction, or identifies with Laura Dern’s character, Amy Jellicoe, on Mike White’s HBO show Enlightened, and why Tina Fey jokes that “the definition of ‘crazy’ in show business is a woman who keeps talking after nobody wants to fuck her anymore.”

  Enlightened begins with Amy’s nervous breakdown: she’s holed up in a bathroom stall, wailing and moaning as black streaks of mascara run down her contorted Melpomene-mask face. The scene is a front-row seat to her unraveling. Amy is a forty-year-old sales executive at Abaddon Industries. Her younger, married boss has just transferred her from her beloved Health and Beauty Department to the Siberia of Cleaning Products, because he doesn’t want to sleep with her anymore. (Health and Beauty to Cleaning Products! The sequel to the marriage plot in a nutshell!) When two of her coworkers enter the bathroom and start gossiping about her, Amy bursts out of the stall, calls one a backstabbing cunt, and storms out to confront her boss, who is on his way out to lunch with vendors. Her assistant tries to stop her. “Amy,” she hisses. “You look insane.” And she does, but she’s beyond caring. When a forty-year-old woman is transferred from Health and Beauty to Cleaning Products, she’s expected to go quietly. If, by the time a woman reaches Amy’s age, she has not sublimated her passion, ambition, and ego to others’ needs, then she is “an essentially tragic, lonely figure,” worthy of our sympathy.

  Amy loses her mind in front of everyone and gets shipped off to a mental-health retreat, where she swims with dolphins and wears flowy garments and has the epiphany that she is one with the universe. She returns home transformed and full of hope for transforming her evil corporate overlord, her drug-addicted ex-husband, her depressed, shut-down mom. She wants to change the world with positive affirmations. She believes she can. When Amy learns that Abaddon is hiding something big, she decides to become a whistle-blower. A sexy reporter, played by Dermot Mulroney, talks her into it. He really wants that story. She really wants something to believe in.

  I once interviewed Mike White for a New York Times Magazine profile, and we spent the first twenty minutes talking about Kim Richards’s meltdown on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, which had aired the previous night. Richards, a former child star who long ago eclipsed her dowdier sisters, is now the broke, twice-divorced, alcoholic family head case, at once pitied and despised by her well-married sisters. Her elder sister, Cathy, is married to a Hilton, with whom she produced Paris. Her younger sister, Kyle, is married to a sexy, high-end Realtor who dotes on her and their daughters. Now in her fifties, Kim has the kind of life that makes her sisters feel smug and lucky. The pathos of Kim Richards—of “the Kims of the world” in general, as White called them—flows from an admixture of bad choices and bad luck, overexposure and neglect. Kim has no apparent defenses. She is a raw nerve vibrating with hope, anxiety, and need. She tells truths that nobody wants to hear; they don’t want their own feelings exposed. We understand Kim and Amy to be crazy in the way of all disruptive, uncontained women; women who simply cannot hold themselves together, who spill out grotesquely in all directions.

  Not long after seeing Camille Claudel with You-Rita-Hayworth-there, I was walking down Montparnasse on my way home. I’d just passed the Villa Borghese and was waiting to cross the street when a tall, lanky man with wild, curly hair and glasses, a kind of French Jeff Goldblum, made a reference to the villa, which I caught. Then he fell in step with me without asking. It was broad daylight on a crowded street close to home, and he seemed harmless. He asked me if I was a writer. I was the kind of girl who believed in signs and portents. I enjoyed flattery as much as the next person. I’d been waiting for a sign from the universe to give me the go-ahead, to anoint me in some way. At the same time, I felt a hard twinge of annoyance. I thought: This dude thinks I’m an American college girl. Read: Dumb. Read: Easy. Read: A bunny to be seduced with a carrot. He reads me as a sign with referents going back to Jean Seberg in Breathless. To him, I communicated, “I will fuck you and then you will have sixty seconds to vacate the premises before I detonate the crazy or the insufferable kitsch.” I was twenty-one. French Goldblum was about forty. I thought, I’m going to get this fucker. I thought, I am not harmless.

  The feeling that my identity could be so easily negated and swapped out for anoth
er bothered me. Jean-Paul Belmondo swapping out Jean Seberg for the femme fatale in his imagination had annoyed me, and reading Henry Miller had made me feel defensive, ambivalent, pricklier than usual about power relations. Miller’s style was so exhilarating, and his contempt so eviscerating. If I kept walking, whatever Jeff Goldblum’s assumptions about me were would remain intact. If I engaged with him, he would assume that I was an impressionable, easily manipulated ingenue with Eiffel Towers in my eyes. Even if I walked away, someone would eventually come along and confirm those assumptions. So I agreed to get coffee with him, intending not to sleep with him but to change him.

  This is kind of an embarrassing story. I tried for years to write it and get past the cringe-inducing surface of it. I failed a million times.

  We talked about my future as a writer.

  He said that (T/F?) I would have a tragic life, because a woman can’t be a writer and be happy both.

  He said it’s not because they can’t be artists but because society won’t let them. Women are expected to stay within the bounds of acceptability and to limit their experiences and their expression in ways that are counterproductive to art. T/F?

  I said I could do anything I wanted to do, because I was afraid of nothing. T/F?

  He said it was obvious that I was a well-brought-up little bourgeois and that I would most likely lose my nerve. T/F?

  I said I was not. T/F?

  He said, “Prove it.”

  “How?” I said.

  “Come with me to a hotel and spend the afternoon . . .” I think there was some pornographic description of activity, but I can’t remember it and my French was deficient in that area. This sort of stuff didn’t get talked about in my nouveau roman seminar. Bonjour, tristesse. I neither went with him nor left on my own. Instead, I ordered another café crème and willingly stepped into a “communicational matrix.” I tried to show him that—what? that I was a person? that I could change things with words? that I was a hero who would one day demystify the story he took for reality, revealing it for the authoritarian nightmare that it was? I was not successful. Neither was he. We arrived, at the end of our third coffee, at an exhausted stalemate. We said goodbye politely, completely drained of piss and vinegar on my part and sexual interest on his. I wandered out blinking into the street, dazed and jacked up on caffeine, depleted and depressed. I felt ashamed for some reason, like I really hated myself. The guy was a dick, but he was right about the double standard. Stories about men tend to have a certain swashbuckling quality; they read like open-ended adventures full of setbacks and brushes with disaster leading inexorably to a satisfying conclusion. Stories about women rebelling and deviating from the conventional path tend to end in disappointment, arsenic, laudanum, or brief encounters with oncoming trains. My attempt to tell him a story about me that would overwrite his story about me (he didn’t even know me!) had failed. His story was the official story, the weight of history, of repetition, of authority, of might. His version was the official version, and mine was a rank conspiracy theory. I was just a stupid American college girl. You know the type. A year later, I went to Jamaica on spring break, and my friend Whitney tried telling a guy who was harassing us on the beach about how he was actually harassing a cultural construct. I was like, Let’s maybe just keep walking. Except I’d done that the previous spring break in Greece with my friend Rita Hayworth, and the guy had ended up following us for two blocks calling us bitches. It was never not a hard call. You did what you could.

  Why would he give up this position, when all fictions are oriented toward his subjectivity? Would I, if I were in his shoes? If the world were made for me? Then again, who knows, maybe I got through to him just a little. Maybe he saw me and changed. I doubt it. Either way, I’m sure he forgot about me a long time ago.

  PART TWO

  The Pool of Tears

  Dear, dear! How queer everything is today! And yesterday things went on just as usual. I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night? Let me think: Was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I’m not the same, the next question is, Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle!

  —Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

  6

  * * *

  The Ingenue Chooses Marriage or Death

  Fairy tales are about money, marriage, and men. They are the maps and manuals that are passed down from mothers and grandmothers to help them survive.

  —Marina Warner

  Immersing yourself in literary theory as an impressionable young person is a little like squinting at a piece of toast until the face of Jesus materializes. It’s a slight perceptual shift (all you have to do is unfocus your eyes) but risky, because there’s no going back to plain toast after Jesus. Similarly, once you’ve engaged in enough feminist readings of The Iliad, or performed close textual analyses of Alf, or written papers limning the intertextual relationship between Videodrome and Madame Bovary—once, in other words, you’ve glimpsed the social, political, historical, and ideological underpinnings of every text ever constructed—you’ll never again see stories in the same way. They’ll shed their innocence and expose their dirty secrets and reveal the world as a darker, more dangerous place than it once seemed. You might find yourself longing, at this point, for a return to a simpler relationship with your toast/stories, for a return to the way you saw things before your innocence was lost to some icy French bastard like Foucault or Baudrillard. But that innocence will be lost to you forever, as will your formerly effortless communion with the vast, transformative commercial enterprise known as “pop culture,” and you’ll feel the way Thelma did when she told Louise that something had crossed over within her and she couldn’t go back.

  When I look back on my first postcollege year, I imagine Pretty Woman and Thelma and Louise flanking it like a pair of quick-draw gunfighters in a showdown, or dueling metanarratives at dawn, or a fork in the postfeminist road, or some other desolate but decisive Wild West scene. In any case, dust, tumbleweed, and plaintive Ennio Morricone music are in the background. The culture wasn’t big enough for the both of them. Pretty Woman appeared a couple of months before my college graduation, and I went to see it with my boyfriend, whom my father had nicknamed “the Landowner,” not because he owned land but because he looked like he’d just stepped off the set of a Merchant-Ivory movie. He was Julian Sands in A Room with a View, and I, on a very, very good day (and exclusively in my own mind), was Helena Bonham Carter.

  The first line of Pretty Woman is “No matter what they say, it’s all about money.” The line is uttered by a hired magician performing coin tricks at a party in Beverly Hills. Philip, a sleazy lawyer played by Jason Alexander, is the host, and his guest of honor is his fat-cat client Edward (Richard Gere). Edward is an eighties-era corporate raider on the brink of a raid. He’s a snake recoiled for a bite. We first see him on the phone with his girlfriend in New York, who is letting him know that she won’t be flying out to Los Angeles to be his plus-one at the plunder. “I speak to your secretary more than I speak to you,” she complains, and you understand that this line is intended to communicate her entitled bitchiness and self-delusion. Edward, you understand, has no time for women like these—women who expect to be treated like people.

  “I see,” he says.

  “I have my own life, too, you know, Edward,” she says, but it doesn’t sound convincing.

  Edward looks at his reflection in the big plate-glass window. It’s a reflective moment with a reflective surface. He tells her what’s what. It’s “a very important week” for him, and he needs her there with him.

  “But you never give me any notice!” she says. “You expect me to be at your beck and call!”

  “I do not believe that you are at my beck and call,” Edward says. And, like that, it’s over between them. The bossman does not tolerate dissent, and will not suffer girly conversations.

  Edward borrows his lawyer’s fancy sp
orts car and sputters off into the sunset (he can’t drive a stick shift), and as he heads off on his journey of discovery (he has no idea where he’s going), the movie begins to crosscut with the have-not life of Vivian, baby streetwalker, played by a then nineteen-year-old Julia Roberts. The very first shot of her is of her ass in black lacy underwear. She flips over and we get a front view, then a shot of her boobs in a tank top, then of her legs as she zips them into boots, then of her arms as she piles plastic bracelets on them, and then of one eye as she cakes on mascara on the lashes. The parts finally add up to Vivian, sneaking out of her fleabag motel because her roommate has taken all the rent money for drugs again. She climbs out the fire escape down to the street, where a cop is pulling a dead hooker out of a Dumpster.

  Pretty Woman was a confusing movie. It did something I’d never even thought possible. It took “the unbeatable Madonna-whore combination” and inverted the Madonna and the whore. It made the whore virtuous by turning her into a princess on the inside, and holding her up to the smudgy mirror of her cynical, gum-snapping roommate, who did drugs and did not believe in fairy tales. Vivian didn’t do drugs or have a pimp or kiss on the mouth. She controlled her own destiny. She kept business separate from pleasure. She got monthly AIDS tests and flossed religiously. Mostly, she believed in the power of her perfect body parts to win her the life of privilege that could be traded for on the open market, but never, ever acknowledged this. She maintained an aura of blithe, childlike innocence at all times. She was the most wholesome, intemerate hooker ever to walk Hollywood Boulevard. Vivian and Edward meet when Edward stops to get directions to the Regency Beverly Wilshire, and Vivian charges him for a personal escort. By the end of the night, she has accepted $3,000 to spend the week with him as his girlfriend. The hotel’s concierge tries to kick her out, but he is soon won over by her princess-like charm and doe-like innocence. He appoints himself her own personal Tim Gunn. Later, after doing it on the grand piano in the hotel lounge, and after Edward instructs Vivian not to chug champagne but to swish it delicately around a ripe strawberry, he gives her a credit card and deputizes her to go to town. There is scarcely a moment in this great romance that is not transactional, instructional, or otherwise deeply condescending.