My time as a TV and movie critic overlapped with the second Bush administration, when power aligned itself with populism in such a way that criticism of its power and hegemony was dismissed as “elitist.” If intellectualism and even intelligence had been ridiculed as smug and effete since the 1980s, in the 2000s it began to be cast as evil and somehow exploitive. The image of the critic as a sneering, smug, supercilious, and quite possibly monocled bully—an unholy cross between Addison DeWitt and Mr. Peanut—was invoked every time a terrible movie was universally panned but made zillions of dollars. The zillions of dollars were paraded as proof that “normal people” loved and cherished stupid movies, the dumber the better. To engage critically with popular culture was to out yourself as one more out-of-touch elite, a natural enemy of popular culture and, by extension, the people. Criticism became more fan-based, as politics became branded and faith-based. There was no arguing with popularity. To argue with popularity was to be “elitist,” and “elitist” was the “Communist” of 2007—one insinuation and you were toast. The paper even changed our bylines, from “film critic,” to “movie critic,” for a while.
“Don’t you want to know why?” my new editor asked.
I knew why.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because it sounds less elitist.”
In the end, it wasn’t my elitism that did it, though. It was the lack of authority in my authorial voice that was the problem. I was instructed to be more authoritative and to state more clearly whether I liked or didn’t like things, but I thought, well, if I’m going to write about consumer products as consumer products, I should just go into advertising. I agreed to try harder. I was hugely pregnant, and I cried during the meeting. The paper was laying people off like crazy. Exactly a month after returning from maternity leave, I was laid off, too, over the phone. I blamed myself for having cried in the meeting, for having failed to be authoritative enough with my adjectives. But then I remembered that I’d been hired for my mouthy antiauthoritarian style, or so I’d been led to believe. I have problems with authority. Craig said losing the job was the best thing that had ever happened to me, and eventually he was right, but for a long time he wasn’t. When I think back on the months that followed, all I can remember are tears falling on the baby.
As it happened, four or five months later I did get a job at an ad agency. I worked there for about eleven months. While there, I acquired a whole new vocabulary, composed of many darkly hilarious terms of art; things like “emotionally competent stimulus” and “touchpoints” and “reasons to believe.” “Reasons to believe,” often abbreviated to “RTBs,” was my favorite. It refers to a kind of proof or persuasive fact from real life that supports the “brand promise”—such as “because it’s 30 percent faster and creamier” or “because it’s trusted by lepidopterists and moms.” It occurred to me that some of these terms would have come in handy for describing some moviegoing experiences for which I’d previously had no words.
At the agency, I worked briefly, with an otherwise all-male team, on a light-yogurt campaign aimed at women. Research had provided us with some findings linking light-yogurt consumption to reduced waist measurements, as well as the “insight” (another good one; “What’s the insight?” someone was always asking; I always had an insight, insights were my thing, except they were always the wrong kind, the non-reassuring kind) that a “smaller waist” is something women specifically desire. I was the person suggesting that basing the campaign on women’s collective yearning for reduced waist measurements was stupid, but maybe I was wrong. It made no difference anyway, because nobody was listening. I didn’t really care. I was just biding my time, riding out the crisis, keeping the baby in blueberries and baby-gym-class passes. Advertising is extremely authoritative, though. It broadcasts the master’s voice. It is the last word.
14
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The Redemptive Journey
The love stories of the seventies were divorce stories. Or maybe the divorce stories of the seventies were love stories. Either way, they were about learning to love yourself. This love had to be extracted from underneath the rubble of a ruined marriage, like a sparrow from an avalanche, and nurtured back to health. I remember it as an archetypal story, one I saw again and again. A wife is abandoned and cast out into a cruel and unfamiliar world she is unprepared to navigate. After a slew of bad dates and other humiliating experiences, she slowly starts to regain her confidence and find her way. She acquires new interests. She meets new people. She learns to stand on her own. She locates herself. Her ex chooses this moment to come back, but she is over him. Her style has become flowy and bohemian, and she gently rebuffs him in favor of freedom and batik. It is incredibly romantic.
I feel like I saw this story told in a million movies, but it is entirely possible that I’m thinking exclusively of Paul Mazursky’s An Unmarried Woman (1978). It loomed that large. What impressed me the most was how, when Erica’s (Jill Clayburgh’s) husband tells her after lunch one day that he’s leaving her for a Bloomingdale’s salesgirl that he met while buying a shirt. Erica doesn’t cry or yell. Instead, she asks if the girl is a good lay, then walks half a block and throws up on a mailbox. The vomiting really impressed me as being very authentic and visceral, not to mention a pretty good special effect. After making it through the requisite rough patch, Erica has a personal renaissance that includes a job at an art gallery and a relationship with a hot painter who asks her to quit her job and spend the summer with him in Vermont. She declines and he gives her a painting, which she drags out into the street by herself. Turning down the hot painter was a very big deal: a happy ending without a prince was not a thing a heroine snubbed her nose at. It was even stranger and more impressive than watching the heroine lose her lunch.
For a few years before and after Kira was born, I resisted buying a copy of Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love. This wasn’t always easy. I’d have a long layover at an airport and find myself staring at a solid wall of copies at the bookstore, and before I knew it I’d be flipping anxiously through a copy, half skimming, half looking, trying not to look. I didn’t want to buy it. I didn’t want to read it, exactly. What I wanted was for it to comfort me, to lie to me, to reveal its secret powers to me. I wanted its spiritual uplift to work on me, or its success to rub off on me. I wanted to believe in it, truly. As a little kid in the 1970s, I’d loved watching The Phil Donahue Show and then when I was in high school, my friend Susan turned me on to Oprah Winfrey. Oprah was magical. Where Phil had explored feelings, Oprah had a gift for turning setbacks into fairy tales of transformation. On the status of the fairy-tale genre as socialization for children in the nineteenth century, Jack Zipes wrote that as “notions of elitism and Christian meritocracy were introduced into the stories” by authors such as the immensely popular Hans Christian Andersen, the emphasis shifted to “extraordinarily gifted individuals who owed their rise in fortunes to God’s benevolence or miracles of destiny represented metaphorically through the intervention of a fairy or powerful magical people and objects. Another aspect that appealed to children and adults was the Horatio Alger attitude that encouraged taking advantage of opportunities and pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps.”1
Oprah was like the talk show version of a story by Hans Christian Andersen.
Eat, Pray, Love should have been exactly the story I was looking for—the one I should have wanted to read, and write. It was everything I identified with, but wasn’t. Liz, the heroine, leaves her husband, has an affair with an actor that ends badly, spirals into depression, and embarks on a quest for identity and enlightenment that takes her to various international vacation spots funded by a book advance, a trip that yields a new boyfriend and a best-selling book that transforms her life. As Steve Almond wrote in a profile of Gilbert in the New York Times Magazine, Eat, Pray, Love was Gilbert’s chronicle of “an effort to balance her pursuit of pleasure with a spiritual life.”2 Like philosophy, it examined the problems of the body and the
material world and the soul and the spiritual world. Like religion, it saved. Like a romance novel, it offered a fantasy of hedonic escape in exotic lands. Like a self-help book, it made the dream seem accessible and somehow about you, the reader. No wonder it has sold nine million copies.
I wish I could say I was immune to the promise of the redemptive narrative, but I found it hard to resist its mass-market allure. I also wanted very badly for it to save me. It wormed its way into the space where I had no faith and called out to me. In about six months, I had given birth to a baby, lost my job, and moved to a new city to work in a new industry, neither of which I liked much. I was lucky, considering. My disaster was part of a much bigger, global disaster. There were so many redemptive narratives bubbling up everywhere, so many stories of catastrophe leading to the best thing that ever happened, the thing that was fated to happen all along. I remember standing in line at Starbucks staring at a wall of books—the same book—about some terrible thing that happened to someone, spun into a gilded Oprah pick. All around me, people like me were turning their catastrophes into lessons of uplift, writing about the unexpected redemption of jam making, or gardening. I couldn’t spin wisdom from catastrophe, because I was still too terrified. I needed someone to tell me it was all going to be OK. Or rather, I needed to be able to tell that to myself. I didn’t buy this kind of stuff enough to be able to sell it.
This only made me feel worse. I could have chosen a year of off-the-grid baby bonding and creative production, maybe an unsponsored freelance sabbatical in Slovenia or Slovakia, could have started a parenting blog or a YouTube channel about how raw food changed my life. Everyone seemed to be casually launching empires. What kind of a failure was I that I had failed even to make lemonade from the lemons I’d been handed? I’d taken a job I didn’t want, for half the money I used to make. I’d marvel at the blossoming Facebook pages of all these out-of-work journalists and screenwriters. Where did they find the emotional resources? the wherewithal? the inexorable story arcs that would translate into salable book proposals? I was not capable of writing whimsical Facebook updates. I was not graceful under pressure. I was a train wreck. My anger was not purifying, it was contaminating, boring, paralyzing. I had nowhere to put it. My marriage was falling apart. I couldn’t write. I thought I was going to die.
What was the name of this problem, though? I couldn’t quite name it.
In her New York Times review of Eat, Pray, Love, Jennifer Egan wrote, “[Gilbert’s] crisis remains a shadowy thing, a mere platform for the actions she takes to alleviate it . . . [She] acknowledges the ‘almost ludicrously fairy-tale ending to this story,’ but reminds us, ‘I was not rescued by a prince; I was the administrator of my own rescue.’ Rescue from what? The reader has never been sure. Lacking a ballast of gravitas or grit, the book lists into the realm of magical thinking. Nothing Gilbert touches seems to turn out wrong; not a single wish goes unfulfilled.”
It’s true. At the start of the book, Gilbert paints herself as a desperate suburban wife in the throes of a nervous breakdown. But she was already a prize-winning journalist. She was rich. She’d had stories made into movies. She talked about having shopped for appliances on credit for the big house with enough rooms for children, despite not wanting children. Something about the way she presents herself as “Liz,” a regular girl blindsided by love and doubt, a girl in desperate need of comfort in the form of pasta, gelato, scenic vistas, fun friends, and exotic spiritual uplift, feels not entirely honest, or not fully explored. Maybe she felt she had no choice but to get married and buy a house and buy appliances and discuss children. Or maybe she had to pretend that she had once almost wanted it, because we were being relentlessly hammered with this message all the time. Gilbert and I are almost the same age, and I can attest to the vast gulf between her early-eighties young girl’s yearning for adventure and her turn-of-the-century, Edith Whartonesque angst about houses and things and what you were supposed to want.
Say Eat, Pray, Love was a “journey of transformation”—what kind was it? Can a “journey of transformation” really be preplanned and undertaken under contract? What if you start out mildly dissatisfied and end up wildly depressed? Or if, instead of realizing what’s truly important in life, you end up hopelessly dwelling on what’s wrong? Zipes writes that fairy tales “reinforced the patriarchal symbolical order based on rigid notions of sexuality and gender. The stereotypes, not archetypes, depicted in printed and staged versions of fairy tales tended to follow schematic notions of how young men and women should behave.”3 I believe the feelings behind the idea were sincere, once it was sold it could turn out a certain way. The redemptive narrative was the new heroine’s text for the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It was the Eileen Fisher phase of the fairy tale—the fairy-godmother phase. It was tasteful, flowing, and calming, it had one foot in the beckoning foamy wavelets.
My fortieth year had very little calm and wisdom in it. Mine was not a story of courage, hope, and chai tea. It was a story of stress-eating Cheetos and Googling things like “voodoo” and “how to put a hex on someone’s balls.” It was neither a redemptive narrative nor a revenge fantasy. I did not travel the world or transform into a kick-ass. Mine was a Douglas Sirk melodrama about the tragedy of privileging romanticism over pragmatism, or some other inexcusable thing. You follow your heart at your peril. I was a dreamer, so I was an idiot doomed to wander the hinterlands in a fallen state. Unlike Liz Gilbert (or “Liz Gilbert”), I’d failed to use my adversity to locate my inner strength and courage and big paycheck, so the universe, too, had responded with indifference. I’d failed to believe in the unified theory of female redemption. This was unforgivable.
Eat, Pray, Love felt about as authentic to me as the heroine’s “journey” on The Bachelor. Either she triumphed against all odds, or she quietly disappeared. It had to be a certain kind of redemptive narrative for a certain kind of lady at a certain stage in life when perhaps she has taken to wistfully wearing caftans on the beach at dusk while holding a mug of herbal tea. I am not making fun of this lady. I don’t believe this lady really exists. She was invented by Celestial Seasonings and Real Simple. Her greatest desire in life is “balance.” She wants balance so badly. This lady wishes that she, too, could escape her suburban life and her annoying husband. Imagine going off to Italy, India, and Bali and eating all you want, flirting with hot Italian guys, falling in love with a Brazilian, and then getting to call it a mystical journey because of a layover in an ashram! Gilbert’s mantra in the book is “Tell the truth, tell the truth, tell the truth.” But she doesn’t really. She tells around it. Nobody is expecting the truth here. What’s being sold is a fantasy of reassurance. The movie of Gilbert’s book only amplifies this, both because it’s unable to exteriorize Liz’s inner life and because the person taking the journey is Julia Roberts. Julia Roberts is the vehicle. The reassurance that everything is going to be OK is the product.
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The women on The Bachelor fight each other for a prince, a stranger to whom they have been presented like a portfolio of options. The bachelor on The Bachelor then begins to exercise his preferences, slowly winnowing the ranks of options as he zeroes in on the girl who best embodies his ideal. The girls, meanwhile, are trapped in a nightmare palace where the booze is more accessible than the food. All that’s left to do is drink, wait, and hope to meet the prince’s requirements. (He seems to really like them. He really liked them five minutes ago. He is making out with twenty other girls right now.)
The Bachelor is a game of attrition. The point is to stick it out at whatever cost to your dignity. There are two proven strategies for survival. The safe one, of course, is to hew as closely to the prevailing ideal as possible. Conformity works. The ideal girl is pretty, sexy, submissive (the whispered thank-yous as they survive one more rose ceremony!), demure (adjusted for the twenty-first century), and domestic (in the theoretical future). The younger, thinner, prettier, more submissive, more agreeable, and more
insecure, the higher her value. Her ladylike demureness should exist in inverse proportion to her sexual adventurousness—although virgins who look like porn stars are also highly valued. It is always a risky strategy to try to stand out from the crowd, especially in an environment as fiercely competitive as this one. Women who express their needs or let their personalities or emotions show are immediately written off as weird or crazy; and the ones who let their personalities show except when the prince is there to see are labeled troublemakers. It’s inappropriate to be anything but sunny and accepting and sweet and to make statements beginning with “I.” The crazy and weird ones are often kept on the show for entertainment value, as examples of how not to be, but they never win. They know that confrontation is a fatal strategy and that the prince doesn’t like being made to feel guilty about kissing all the girls. This is not how it is put to them, of course.
The girls and the bachelor talk constantly about their “journey.”
It’s not an accident that journey is one of the most overused words in reality TV. On The Bachelor, which has been on the air since 2002, and its spin-offs The Bachelorette and Bachelor in Paradise, host Chris Harrison kicks off every season in the same way. “Let the journey begin,” he says. Then the limo pulls up. Although efforts are made on the show to avoid too much word repetition in general, an exception is made for journey, which participants—who are not allowed to acknowledge that they are participating in a constructed, televised experience—are encouraged to use as a synonym for the bubble they are living in. They’re not allowed to use words like process, or situation, or human experiment. It is only, always, a “journey.”
You Play the Girl Page 20