You Play the Girl

by Carina Chocano

  So, all of this is to say that this story is not a composite, but it easily could have been. It’s not exceptional, just funnier than most. I wasn’t traumatized by the experience, I don’t think. I think of it as formative. It’s not like I was traumatized. I think of it as one of the many experiences that hones my sense of the absurd. It’s not like I was traumatized. It’s how I ended up making a living, paying attention to moments, locating the cognitive dissonance, saving it for later. It’s not like I was traumatized—but it’s not like I bear no responsibility for my intermittent hopelessness, either, for the urge to just cosmically give up.

  Not long after the Anita Hill hearings ended, my boyfriend and I were invited to another party—Thanksgiving dinner at the home of a friend of a friend, a woman about a decade older than me. After dinner, someone suggested we watch Pretty Woman. The women squealed and professed their love while the men engaged in distancing behaviors. I was old enough to know better than to get into an argument, but not old enough to play along. Instead, I sulked. I found a corner of pastel carpet and sat through the movie in aggrieved silence. I knew the movie had fans, of course, I’d just never met them in person. That afternoon, the women enacted for me my greatest fears about womanhood. I resented them for it. I was trying to locate a narrative in real life, in fiction or in nonfiction, that I could relate to and aspire to at once, and I couldn’t find one anywhere. And they were happy not to care, or to act like they didn’t.

  That afternoon, I became aware of something I hadn’t been aware of before. Our hostess and her friends could take Pretty Woman at face value in a way I wasn’t capable of doing, but apparently I required some kind of a fairy-tale ending, too. It bothered me that women’s lives seemed unfinished to me, and that I couldn’t resist the longing to see everyone put in her place, either. But even if I’d wanted to, I couldn’t unsee the message of Pretty Woman. I couldn’t unknow what I knew. The role of romantic fiction since the eighteenth century, but especially starting in the nineteenth, was to obscure the transactional underpinnings of marriage, to blur them over with love and romance. Nothing was more high-stakes than marriage for a middle-class girl in Jane Austen’s time, yet it was necessary, for obvious reasons, to minimize the appearance of a transaction. The heroine never married for money, of course. But her kind, wise, noble prince just always happened to have it. (To marry for love without money was never not a tragic mistake.) Pretty Woman gave us the shameless American capitalist version, predicated on the self as something to be sold. Revisiting Thelma and Louise decades later, I was struck by how dated it seemed. At the time, I would never have guessed that Pretty Woman would prefigure every romantic comedy for the next two decades, but it did. Pretty Woman turned out not to be a throwback at all. It turned out to be the future.

  7

  * * *

  Thoroughly Modern Lily

  Shortly before the turn of the millennium, Adam Gopnik wrote a piece for The New Yorker about the redesign of the U.S. currency. People found the new money disturbing, he said, because it seemed to mock the old money through use of “traditional satiric devices of exaggeration, displacement, and oversimplification.” Whereas the old money recalled the excesses of the Gilded Age, he thought the new money looked like parody money. Like “metamoney,” it seemed “to be getting at us in some obscure way.”1

  Money did seem very conspicuous all of a sudden. This hadn’t been true before. I’d moved to San Francisco after college, when it was so cheap people used to call it the city “where the young come to retire.” Then I moved away, to Los Angeles, and then moved back up right before the turn of the millennium. I barely recognized the place. It seemed like money was mocking us, or some of us, anyway. One day, I stepped outside my ruinously expensive studio apartment, on Divisadero Street, and I saw that someone had stenciled something on the sidewalk outside my building in red spray paint. It was an egregious statement that then mayor Willie Brown had made in the press, to the effect that nobody should try to live in San Francisco on less than $50,000 a year. I tried. My efforts were heroic but doomed. My rent was insane. When my car died, I didn’t repair it. My boyfriend bought my groceries for me, because he worked in finance and I worked in journalism, and that was just the way things were always/again. I had just turned thirty and was suddenly acutely aware of both the apparent availability and personal unattainability of money in ways I hadn’t been before. I was newly/once again steeped in ideas about how money intersected with sex and relationships. Sex and the City had just come on the air.

  I don’t remember how or when, exactly, I started to come around to Sex and the City, but eventually I did. At first, it got on my nerves in the same way Pretty Woman had. It struck me as a fantasy for older single women who were oblivious to its regressive message. I associated the show with a coworker in the cubicle opposite mine, who used to spend what felt like hours on the phone with her sister dissecting the show after each episode.

  Sure, the situations in which Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha found themselves were often familiar or redolent of my similar experiences, but the characters themselves were too archetypal and one-dimensional to identify with consistently: Samantha was too strange, Miranda was too bitter, Charlotte was too rigid, and Carrie was too infantile. They weren’t identifiable characters so much as fantasy projections whose most mundane moments were instantly recognizable, even if their clothing budgets or Park Avenue apartments or sexual rosters were utterly fantastical. Carrie and Charlotte were the romantics, and both were focused on landing rich men. Love, for both, was wish fulfillment. Charlotte wished for traditional high-status domestic-pedestal dwelling, and Carrie for luxury, glamour, and sybaritic pleasures.

  The conventional take was that Sex and the City was so clever at capturing the modern female archetypes that no woman could fail to identify. To me it seemed that the four friends were not modern archetypes so much as media-created stereotypes, allegorical figures standing in for the divided parts of the feminine mystique. Their conversations weren’t conversations so much as referenda on the lady topics of the day, as each character manifested and grappled with an oppressive fantasy of contemporary womanhood, tested against the others. That’s what made the show ultimately worthwhile; you could feel the tension between ideology and experience. The war was being waged inside each of the friends’ psyches, but at least they were in the foxhole together.

  The end of the nineteenth century gave rise to a new American upper class whose wealth seemed unthinkably vast. People lined up outside the Standard Oil offices to catch a glimpse of John D. Rockefeller. Money seeped into the American imagination. Millionaires became folk heroes. How did they do it? Most people didn’t have a clue. Most people still don’t. But everyone was drunk on champagne wishes and caviar dreams. This time, perhaps, other people’s money has ceased to be the object of fascination that it was then, and is regarded with more suspicion and resentment. But at the end of the twentieth century, just as at the end of the nineteenth, money loomed over the culture and colored everything. New fortunes permeated the atmosphere, they got in the groundwater, they demanded attention. During the Gilded Age, wealth worship ran amok.

  The popularity of the wedding-as-a-path-to-fortune drama had ebbed during my early life to the point that, save perhaps for Charles and Diana’s much-publicized courtship and televised nuptials, my only significant experience with the story had involved Disney princesses. Then, toward the end of the nineties, big, elaborate “dream weddings” as a cultural gesture came roaring back into prominence. Maybe it started with My Best Friend’s Wedding, the movie that reintroduced the concept of panicking about your “expiration date” to my generation. The website The Knot had been founded a year earlier. It was suddenly rare to open a magazine and not come across an article lamenting the way that money had seeped into romance like damp through plaster, staining and soiling it beyond repair. Men with little money wrote about the unreasonable economic demands made on them by women with little money
. Women with little money defended their impossible economic standards while grieving that men with money held them to impossible beauty standards. Women with money (these were rarer) complained that men with no money eventually resented and left them. Magazines from Forbes to Harper’s Bazaar devoted pages to the surplus of available Silicon Valley gazillionaires and provided instructions on how to snag them. Cosmopolitan argued that it was just as easy to date a rich man as a poor one. The Forbes 400 list included information on marital status.

  Proponents of media consolidation claim that it has given the market freedom to deliver what audiences want. So, what do audiences want? They want what they have been taught to want. Without increasingly consolidated media, there is no “audience” with predictable desires. The rise of social media has allowed for a great proliferation of voices at a time of unprecedented media consolidation, it’s true. Yet at the same time it has tended to mask the fact that social media has only consolidated media even more. The question also rests on a false premise, anyway: that there is such a thing as a single, collective audience, and that this mass consciousness “wants” something. It’s the same false premise that Freud’s infamous “woman question” was rooted in. “The great question that has never been answered,” he famously said, “and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?’”2 Of course, that question is unanswerable, because it is not even a question, it’s a trap. The women of Freud’s imagination were the symbolic opposite of everything he understood to be human, so it’s no wonder he was convinced that women by their nature “oppose change, receive passively, and add nothing of their own.”3

  *

  In 2000, Terence Davies adapted Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth. Davies said he cast Gillian Anderson in the role of Lily Bart because a photograph of her reminded him of a painting by John Singer Sargent. But Wharton’s Lily Bart, no matter how beautiful, would never have had her portrait painted by Sargent, nor by his fictional counterpart, the society painter Morpeth; there would have been no one to foot the bill. Sargent’s sitters were the wives of very rich men—something that Lily, despite her efforts (or because of them), never managed to become. Lily hates big parties but attends them because it is “part of the business.” But she is a lousy businesswoman who chokes every time she comes anywhere near closing a deal. Lily, whose definition of success is “to get all that one can out of life” (by which she means “marry the biggest fortune”), lacks the self-knowledge and the courage to recognize that she may have to sacrifice her romantic ideals in return for wealth and status—or vice versa. As a result, she winds up with nothing. What’s poignant about Lily is not that she fails to achieve her goal, nor that she has an unwitting hand in her own failure: it’s that, as she finally realizes, “there had never been a time when she had had any real relation to life.”

  If ever there was a book that disproved the notion that beauty is only skin deep, at least where it comes to self-concept, it is The House of Mirth. For Lily, her beauty is the prism through which the world sees her and through which she sees the world. Beauty is her cardinal trait. Her character and her destiny are shaped by it. Without it, she would have been someone else entirely—namely, her poor, plain, and unmarried cousin and only (unappreciated) true friend Gerty Farish. Gerty, a pivotal character in Wharton’s story, was omitted from Davies’s adaptation. Yet without girls like Gerty, there could be no girls like Lily. Gerty is the standard against which Lily defines herself. “She likes to be good,” Lily says of Gerty early on. “I like to be happy.”

  That Lily equates money with happiness, that she believes it is her birthright to trade her beauty and charm for both, and that goodness, in her mind, is the surest path to poverty are just some of the themes that made Wharton’s House of Mirth feel so contemporary. Lily doesn’t just “enjoy the finer things in life.” She is a single-minded junkie. “I am horribly poor,” she tells Lawrence Selden near the beginning of the story, “and very expensive. I must have a great deal of money.” For some reason, the movie failed to dwell on this aspect of Lily’s character. Her greed and her desire for constant adulation were never addressed in the film. I remember feeling like Davies had glossed over the sense of entitlement that her beauty has inculcated in her and her own complicity in her financial ruin. Anderson played her as a tense and lachrymose innocent who is brought down by her own scruples and sense of fair play in a world that has none.

  The writer Candace Bushnell, who wrote the novel that Sex and the City was based on, expressed an affinity with Wharton, and she struck one mass-market nerve after another not only by not shying away from the same territory but also by making it current. What Bushnell hinted at that nobody else seemed to acknowledge as pointedly was that, where money and beauty are involved, not a lot has changed between men and women in the past hundred years. There have always been women who participate in their own commodification, but suddenly it was a popular dream, the kind of thing people flaunted. Whereas Davies delivered Lily as the victim of a cruel and bygone era, Bushnell and series creator Michael Patrick King saw Lily working it everywhere they looked.

  A friend of mine who grew up in New York described it like this: “You walk down Madison Avenue and you see things. Eventually you start to like them, then want them. Then you realize how much they cost.” Luxury items have always been marketed predominantly to women, and the women who can afford them invariably become luxury items themselves. In his 1899 critique of upper-class values, The Theory of the Leisure Class, economist and philosopher Thorstein Veblen wrote, “The dress of women goes even farther than that of men in the way of demonstrating the wearer’s abstinence from productive employment. It needs no argument to enforce the generalization that the more elegant styles of feminine bonnets go even farther towards making work impossible than does the man’s high hat. The woman’s shoe adds the so-called French heel to the evidence of enforced leisure afforded by its polish; because this high heel obviously makes any, even the simplest and most necessary manual work extremely difficult.” Women may no longer wear bonnets, and high-heeled shoes may no longer be seen as hindrances to employment, but the fact remains that “the more elegant styles” are outside the reach of most working women. They require more money, more attention, and more leisure than the average working woman can afford. This is their point.

  I remember an episode of Sex and the City in which Carrie has her credit card cut in half while she tries to purchase a pair of Dolce and Gabbana shoes: powder-blue mules with a feathery pom-pom on top. The shoes are absurdly expensive, impractical fetish objects. To Carrie’s rescue comes Amalita, a woman who lives off her rich, jet-setting boyfriends. Amalita charges the shoes to her boyfriend-of-the-moment’s card and sends Carrie off with a kiss. Later, when Carrie runs into the woman and her friends at a bar, she gets herself an invitation to Venice. The financially strapped Carrie wonders, “Is there a line between ‘girlfriend’ and ‘prostitute’?” Ultimately, because she is our heroine, Carrie decides that for her the line does exist, and she declines the invitation and resolves to avoid Ama­lita in the future. Carrie is a modern version of Wharton’s Lily, whose failure to get what she wants (she blows at least three chances to marry a fortune) could be the result of either her moral upbringing or her naïveté. Marriage-obsessed Charlotte doesn’t grapple with these questions; the only difference between her and the “professional girlfriend” is that she is not willing to sacrifice anything in return for her never-ending reward.

  Despite her notoriously low-paying creative profession, Carrie craves and feels just as entitled to luxury as Lily does. Like Lily, she denies herself nothing, even if it means racking up debt. When it comes down to it, she doesn’t have the stomach to face the intrinsic hypocrisy of her life. The things she wants cannot be acquired virtuously—no one who is unwilling to cross a few moral lines can afford $500 shoes. For Carrie, as for Lily, the conflict between their longing for romance an
d their longing for luxury is unresolvable. In the new Gilded Age, the tragedy of Lily Bart would have been reframed. In the new Gilded Age, her tragedy wouldn’t be living in a world that valued her only for her ornamental qualities, or being complicit in her own commodification, or being reduced to a parasite and then discarded, but having everything she needed to succeed and just being unable to go through with it. She knew what she wanted, and it lay within her grasp, but she just wasn’t pragmatic enough to pay the price.

  8

  * * *

  Bad Girlfriend

  Once, in the late nineties, I spent three strange days hanging around the Sheraton Hotel in Universal City—which is not a city so much as a mostly unincorporated area in Los Angeles County that houses Universal Studios and its attendant theme park—reporting on an event that billed itself as an academic conference on the First Amendment and pornography. I was there on assignment for Salon’s then new (now dead) education section. The hook was that the conference was being cosponsored by the Center for Sex and Gender Research at California State, Northridge, and something called the Free Speech Coalition, which turned out to be the lobbying arm of the adult-entertainment industry.

  Having never attended an academic conference, I didn’t know what to expect, but the mix yielded some highly amusing juxtapositions, some bordering on parody. Panels on Victorian pornography and erotic vases from Ancient Greece were presented alongside chats with porn stars. My job, as I remember, was to soak in the ambience, filter it through my disbelief, and report back in arch tones. The article would write itself.