You Play the Girl

by Carina Chocano

Unlike the characters on the original TV show, or the heroines of a Jane Austen novel, the sexy, self-reliant, unruffled ass kickers of Charlie’s Angels: The Movie were at once highly destructive and apparently indestructible. They were girls removed from history, from time and space. In this ahistorical vacuum, consequences don’t exist. There is no cause and effect, nor does anyone care about cause and effect (we infer), because caring about consequences, and even acknowledging that there is any such thing as a fact or reality, is for suckers. (The president would soon confirm this.) On the bright side, at least the heroines of Charlie’s Angels: The Movie had fun together, as friends. At least they had adventures, even if they were utterly fantastical. The following year, the girl most removed from history was Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, one of the first movies based on a video game. The kick-ass kicked ass in a vacuum—she kicked theoretical ass. She was the exceptional girl, the one to whom the rules did not reply, the one who wasn’t a person but an idea.

  The phrase “reality-based community” was still three years away from being coined when, in the aftermath of 9/11, President Bush suggested we all go shopping and book our Disneyland vacations. But it’s clear we were already living in a world where discernible reality was already hard to locate, especially on-screen. If Flashdance introduced the aesthetic of the music video (all style) to the movies, then Charlie’s Angels: The Movie turned the movies into a commercial (all reference, all association, all echo). It was a new reality created out of the weakened chromosomes of past realities, taken out of context, scrubbed free of problems, idealized, and dehistoricized. We were so sophisticated. We were so postmodern. We were so above it all. As Karl Rove would tell the New York Times, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities.” Judiciously, as you idiots will.

  In a 2013 interview in New York magazine, screenwriter Damon Lindelof talked about the entropy that afflicts Hollywood movies now that their budgets have become so gigantic they require gigantic special effects and “larger-than-life characters wielding those effects” to match. It’s a proportionality issue. Anything that isn’t puffed up to monster size and steeled against the whims of the marketplace by a force field of sheer humongousness looks weak, puny, and doomed by comparison. Lindelof called this “story gravity” and credited it with distorting everything from plots to characters. “It’s almost impossible to, for example, not have a final set piece where the fate of the free world is at stake,” he said.

  This Dr. Seussian “biggering” of stakes (“The Avengers aren’t going to save Guam, they’ve got to save the world,” Lindelof said by way of example), coupled with the usual sense of moral and historical unassailability, has a deadening effect on contemporary blockbusters. Characters are reduced to performative types (the hero, the villain, the girl) and planted against one interchangeable backdrop or another to enact the same story over and over again. Watching these movies is like being hit repeatedly over the head with a monolithic ideology obsessed with rehearsing its goodness and rightness. It also rewires your brain. This is the story we’re told again and again: no matter how bad things get ecologically, financially, corporately, health care–wise, or inequality-wise, our exceptionalism, embodied by a “regular guy” pumped up and morally enraged to mythic proportions, will save us. And it takes a viewer who thinks of himself as a “regular guy,” the unobjectionable center of the universe, to tell the story of this story without impugning its agenda, with a straight face.

  The difference, according to Slavoj Žižek, between the way ideology used to work and the way it works now is that we used to accept it at face value. Now our naïveté has been replaced by a cynical awareness—what he calls the “paradox of an enlightened false consciousness.”1 We see the gap between reality and the distorted representation of reality, and we understand it’s lying to us. We don’t renounce it, we just note that we are noting it. We mock it. Susan J. Douglas talks about a similar shift in feminism in her book The Rise of Enlightened Sexism. If you grew up in the seventies and eighties, then you thought of yourself as living in a postfeminist world. You solved the problem of living in a sexist world that pretended not to be sexist anymore by noticing it in quotation marks and not caring, by detaching and shrugging it off as though it were all a joke, or unreal. But it wasn’t.

  The Lindelof interview is a perfect example of this complex mental adjustment in action. No fewer than five times, he alluded to his awareness of the problems inherent in this mode of storytelling and his fundamental inability to do anything about it. “But ultimately I do feel—even as a purveyor of it—slightly turned off by this destruction porn that has emerged and become very bold-faced this past summer,” Lindelof said. “And again, guilty as charged. It’s hard not to do it, especially because a movie, if properly executed, feels like it’s escalating.” He said this “destruction porn” was almost inescapable: “Once you spend more than $100 million on a movie, you have to save the world. And when you start there, you are very limited in terms of how you execute that. And in many ways, you can become a slave to it.”

  I was reminded of the Lindelof interview recently while watching Alfonso Cuarón’s technically marvelous but emotionally weightless Gravity, which despite its surface soulfulness eventually gives way to the relentless, if-it’s-not-one-damn-thing-it’s-another thrill ride we’ve come to expect. On a routine space mission with veteran astronaut Matt Kowalsky (George Clooney), the ship suffers damage and Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) winds up all alone, in space. In the first few minutes of the movie, during a deep-space getting-to-know-you scene with Kowalsky, it’s revealed that Ryan had a very young daughter who died in a freak playground accident and untethered her from the world.

  I’d expected Gravity to be a meditation on existence. I thought that Clooney would remain in Bullock’s ear throughout, prompting some existential exploration, leading her to some liberating insight. Why I’d expected this, I have no idea. I should have expected the obstacle-course plot with its tedious oscillation of progress and setback, like a football game. In The Martian, Matt Damon’s character, Mark Watney, is also struck by debris and stranded in space, and it is presumed that we will care about him and like him even though he has no family and no backstory, because he requires no justification. He’s a person, and we care about people unconditionally. But the dead-baby detail seemed to say that we couldn’t care about this character, a woman in her forties, unless she was both impressively toned and a tragically bereaved mother. There had to be a kid, and the kid had to be dead. How else could we be OK with this woman drifting so far, far away from home?

  Watching Ryan (the boy’s name implies you can trust her) struggle to overcome impossible odds all by herself didn’t really make me feel good. It didn’t make me feel empowered. I didn’t identify, except maybe with her loneliness and insignificance, and with the coldness and cruelty of the world around her. (Was it a world, even? She has no context.) It didn’t make me feel anything, except slightly anxious and clenched, because what in the world is this lady if not a long-suffering Job in space? I mean, it’s one thing after another. The calamities that befall her are biblical. A plague of boils would not have come as a surprise. By the time she swims her way to the surface of the water at the end of the movie, I was half expecting her to encounter and single-handedly fend off a ravenous shark, possibly even an entire “sharknado.” I wasn’t moved by this ritual performance of steely individualism and emotional compartmentalization against the world. I’m tired of the same binary battles between good and evil. I’m tired of fascist allegories; they exhaust me. I reject being told over and over again that even our basic survival in a vast, cold, indifferent universe is 100 percent dependent on us and our biceps. That even George Clooney is deadweight, and Sandra Bullock must pull herself up by her own parachute cords, all alone in the universe, and crawl back into her womb capsule and shoot back to Earth.r />
  I did not expect to have all these thoughts and feelings validated while watching Doll and Em, a tiny show about two Englishwomen in America, but that’s exactly what happened. Written by real-life best friends Emily Mortimer and Dolly Wells, the show is in many ways about the alienating effects of story gravity on real women—even movie stars. It is the aesthetic and ethical opposite of Gravity. Everything about the show is small: the moments, the stakes, the teeny-tiny slights and misunderstandings that trigger emotional cataclysms—which are, of course, mostly repressed. In the first season of the show, waitress and late bloomer Doll breaks up with her boyfriend in London, so movie star Em invites her to come to L.A. and be her personal assistant on a movie she is doing. It is, of course, a terrible idea; not just because Doll and Em grew up together under uncannily similar circumstances (they are almost mirror images of each other) but also because the power imbalance is too great. Em has “everything”: a husband, two kids, a home, a successful acting career; and Doll has “nothing”: no marriage, no children, no success, no home.

  And yet something weird happens when Doll joins Em in L.A. on the set of a dumb movie she is making for an awful young director who treats Em, who is forty, like shit: the imbalance of power is unsustainable, and it starts to spill over into resentment, envy, passive aggression, and outright sabotage. In Doll and Em, Emily is struggling with her role as a “strong woman” whom her director describes as “the female Godfather—the strongest woman ever!” She’s supposed to cry in one scene but can’t, even though, as she tells Dolly, in real life she cries every day. She can’t relate to the part at all and feels completely alienated from it. Dolly responds by demonstrating her amazing ability to trick herself to cry on cue by thinking of something else; and Em is required to praise her. Em’s inability to connect emotionally with the idiotic role, coupled with the blatant contempt of her self-important director, erodes her confidence until it’s completely gone. The problem is that “she keeps on being told how wonderful it is that she gets to play this strong woman and how there aren’t nearly enough parts for strong women,” Mortimer said in an interview. “It’s such a cliché conversation in our business. ‘God, it’s such a wonderful opportunity to play this strong woman!’ It was just amusing to us that the more Em gets told how lucky she is, the more freaked out she feels about how she’s not nearly strong enough to play this strong woman.” This fictional strength only makes the real woman playing her feel silly and weak.

  Here was a story I could relate to. I’d been so tired of “strong female characters” for so long by then. I was so tired of the way female strength was made to look cold and humorless; the way it was characterized as deviant and “unnatural” and always lonely and exceptional. I was tired of the grim undertone of tragedy that lurked under its surface. “Strong female characters” were never funny, and they never had any fun, either. More often than not, they were celibate, friendless, and clinically depressed. Their monomaniacal devotion to crime fighting made them lean, cranky, and impatient. Naturally, they had axes to grind: they were avenging brides, poker-faced assassins, gloomy ninjas with commitment issues. Who were these characters? What were they trying to tell us? Why didn’t they ever say goodbye before hanging up the phone? And why were they always being reborn or remade as killing machines after losing everything they held dear?

  Maybe it’s because I’ve given birth that I’m not necessarily keen on reliving the experience, nor prone to burden it with metaphors. I’m indifferent to images of rebirth, unless what’s being reborn is the whole system. I don’t want to see another symbolic woman start all over again. I want to see the symbolic world change to acknowledge her existence. I don’t want to see the young girl get a makeover or go shopping with her boyfriend’s credit card. I want to watch her blow up the Death Star—metaphorically, of course.

  PART THREE

  You Wouldn’t Have Come Here

  “In that direction,” the Cat said, waving its right paw round, “lives a Hatter: and in that direction,” waving the other paw, “lives a March Hare. Visit either you like: they’re both mad.”

  “But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.

  “Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”

  “How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.

  “You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”

  —Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

  10

  * * *

  Surreal Housewives

  In 2000, the feminist film-and-television scholar Charlotte Brunsdon published a book called The Feminist, the Housewife, and the Soap Opera, which chronicled the story of second-wave feminist theorists’ obsession with soaps. In interviews with prominent scholars, she asked why feminist critics of the 1970s were so interested in the genre. The consensus came back that because soaps “were perceived to be both for and about women,” feminists studied them as part of “a commitment to knowing thine enemy.” The personal was suddenly political in those days, and soap operas helped feminists define themselves in opposition to “an imagined other, the soap opera–watching housewife.”1 More than thirty years later, these venerable tropes—the angry feminist and the happy housewife—remain locked in the same musty semiotic cage, at least they do in the public imagination.

  Every new generation of women, it seems, feminist and housewife alike, is encouraged by popular culture to disavow its forebears and rebrand itself as an all-new, never-before-seen generational phenomenon, completely different in every way from what came before. The “housewives” of the 1970s gave way to the Martha Stewart “homemakers” of the 1980s, then the “soccer moms” of the 1990s, then the stay-at-home moms of the 2000s. Next may come the homeschooling homesteaders of the impending postapocalypse—who knows? What’s significant is that the cycle of idealization, devaluation, and revision gives an appearance of progress, of superficial change, that distracts us from the big picture. The word housewife itself went from connoting drudgery to evoking the privilege to indulge in self- and home care 24/7. We loathe the housewife now, but we love her modern rebranding—now with complicated new signifiers! If the Stepford Wife was the Victorian “true woman” of the mid- to late twentieth century, the movie The Stepford Wives gave us permission to reframe and vilify her as the “angel in the house” of the “me decade” and to hold her entirely responsible for choosing to devote herself to domestic perfection. By the time the label “Stepford Wife” entered the lexicon, it had completely turned in on itself. She was no longer a murdered wife replaced by a robot but a shallow, conformist woman who chooses to turn herself into an automaton and who deserves what she gets. Three decades after the movie came out, The Stepford Wives was remade as a corrective to the original. In the remake, the problem is not that marriage snuffs out women’s humanity and turns them into robots, but that their jobs do. The villainous patriarch Diz, the head of the Men’s Association, is recast as a woman: a former neurosurgeon and engineer played, of all people, by Hollywood’s favorite loneliness-crazed, career-lady menace, Claire (Glenn Close), whose husband has left her for her assistant and who therefore vows to turn back the clock to a time, as Claire says, “before overtime, quality time, a time before women were turning themselves into robots.”

  It can be easy to forget that the ubiquitous Real Housewives franchise was born of a housewifely renaissance kicked off by the long-gone Desperate Housewives, which in turn evolved from 2004, when Frank Oz remade The Stepford Wives. Given the archconservatism of that moment, it’s not surprising that the show—or, perhaps more accurately, the cultural meme it rode in on—struck such a cultural nerve that then First Lady Laura Bush made a joke about it at the 2005 White House Correspondents’ Dinner: “Nine o’clock, Mr. Excitement here is sound asleep and I’m watching Desperate Housewives. With Lynne Cheney. Ladies and gentlemen, I am a desperate housewife.”

  At the time, the phrase “de
sperate housewives” had only recently been reappropriated, and it still carried with it the easy shock of the original pejorative. Or maybe the Real Housewives are the legacy of eighties nighttime soaps like Dynasty and Dallas. Producer Scott Dunlop had been wanting to make a film about Coto de Caza, the exclusive gated community in Orange County where he lived, when it occurred to him that the housewife subculture of Coto de Caza would make for the ideal reality show. As much as the realism of the original Orange County version was self-consciously constructed by its stars, the germ of something organic was there—basically, Bravo lifted a rock and found Real Housewives, a hit show.

  The housewives are so far removed from housewifery that they’re not even all married. Whether they are single, married, or divorced, whether they work or have children, and whether they came by their money through marriage or made it themselves, what they pride themselves in is their ability to pass for ladies of means, leisure, and indulgent patronage. The “real housewives” fill their days with shopping, grooming, lunching, feuding, and self-promoting. What they don’t do, actually, is housework—although some of them take offense at the suggestion that they employ others to manage their households and do the drudge work. Even assuming that the intended audience is made up primarily of married women, the feminist intellectual and the soap-watching housewife are not so diametrically opposed anymore. If anything, the contemporary reality-show consumer is conscious of the fact that what she is watching is a performance based on the theme of housewife, which is being performed in service to a personal brand. The “real housewives” have as much in common with June Cleaver as she had in common with Cleopatra.