5. Chicks really are crazy, though. The double bind is crazy-making. In the 1960s, it was thought that schizophrenics were schizophrenic because their mothers made them crazy. This theory was the result of research conducted by Gregory Bateson at Stanford. Bateson and his team formulated a theory that schizophrenics were not born but made by their mothers: mothers who trap their young, dependent children into impossible double binds, demanding two contradictory and irreconcilable outcomes at once (for example, “be yourself” and “hide your feelings”) for extended periods of time. For a time, psychologists believed that this made people certifiably crazy. This theory was eventually discredited, when schizophrenia came to be seen as a biological disorder.
Paul Gibney, an Australian psychiatrist and author, in a paper symbolically rehabilitating Bateson’s double bind theory for application in other situations, reframed it like this: “The essential hypothesis of the double bind theory is that the ‘victim’—the person who becomes psychotically unwell—finds him or herself in a communicational matrix, in which messages contradict each other, the contradiction is not able to be communicated on and the unwell person is not able to leave the field of interaction.”2
Bateson’s original training, by the way, was as an anthropologist (he was married for a long time to Margaret Mead), and he focused on communications systems, systems theory, and cybernetics, which he then applied to the behavioral sciences. Cybernetics can be applied to the study of all kinds of systems—mechanical, physical, biological, cognitive, and social—so long as the system is part of a closed signal loop, in which the actions of a system cause changes in the environment that are fed back into the system and change its behavior.
6. I live in Los Angeles, where despite my best (and usually successful) efforts to avoid them, I occasionally hear a story like this. A friend knows an actress whose burglar-alarm code, 2828, serves as a reminder of the age she must never surpass, repeated twice for good measure. Another friend lives next door to a model-actress who, at twenty-seven, is considered to be so far out on the tail end of her prime that she was recently cast in a commercial as the wife of a forty-five-year-old man and mother of two teenage children. Although it is biologically possible that she could have given birth to the younger of the two children at the age of twelve, it hardly would have been considered optimal, nor would she have been considered an appropriate partner, at the age of ten, for a relatively mature guy of twenty-eight. (Of course, nobody really considers a twenty-eight-year-old man mature, but that’s beside the point.)
Math interfered with my enjoyment of the first season of Homeland, because I couldn’t get past the decorative casting of Morena Baccarin in the role of Nicholas Brody’s wife. Damien Lewis, who plays Brody, is eight years older than Baccarin, and their daughter on the show was eighteen at the time of this writing, which means her mom would have been fifteen at the time of delivery, an unwed tenth-grader with a twenty-three-year-old Marine boyfriend, because she could not have legally married at that age.
In the pilot of The Mindy Project, Mindy Kaling—who was thirty-three at the time, playing an anxious thirty-one-year-old doctor—goes on a blind date with a guy played by Ed Helms—who was thirty-eight but playing who-cares—when she is interrupted by a call from a boy, the son of a patient, whose indigent, uninsured, non-English-speaking mother has gone into labor. Mindy does everything she can to dodge the call, finally grabbing the phone and hissing, “Do you know how hard it is for a chubby thirty-one-year-old woman to get a legit date with a guy who majored in economics at Duke?”
If Malcolm Gladwell was right about the study that found it takes ten thousand hours, or ten years, to get really good at what you do, then the Mindy character faces the depressing prospect of being over the hill before she even gets within shooting distance of the hill. Double binds make you crazy.
“What we see on broadcast television is that the majority of female characters are in their twenties and thirties,” says Martha Lauzen, a professor and the executive director of the Center for the Study of Women in Television at San Diego State University, in Jennifer Seibel Newsom’s documentary Miss Representation. “That is just a huge misrepresentation of reality, and that really skews our perceptions.”
The movie offers some statistics. Women in their teens, twenties, and thirties are 39 percent of the population, yet they comprise 71 percent of the women on TV. Women forty and older are 47 percent of the population, yet comprise 26 percent of women on TV.
When I first moved to Los Angeles, in my late twenties, I remember being shocked by how readily women my own age accepted the “fact” that they had aged out of desirability; how resigned they were to their own irrelevance; how uncritically so many accepted this ideology propping up privilege and power inequality as being synonymous with reality rather than helping produce and maintain reality; how readily they mistook culture for nature. “It’s like when a female reaches the age of 39 or 40 she simply needs to go away,” Lauzen says. “When any group is not featured in the media they have to wonder, ‘Well, what part do I play in this culture?’ There’s actually an academic term for that. It’s called symbolic annihilation.”
7. Remember when they made that talking Barbie, and what she said was “Math is hard!”? That was bullshit. Girls love math. We do it constantly. As a kid, I’d often lie awake in bed, frantically performing mental calculations in my head to help me figure out when, exactly, I would get to live the adult life I imagined was being suggested in the ¡Hola! fashion supplements, some kind of unencumbered, sophisticated but fully inhabited adulthood. Not a broke, insecure young adulthood, nor a crabby, resentful parenthood, but the good part. I’d think, If I finish graduate school at, say, twenty-eight, that leaves me six months to a year in which to work before I have children before the drop-dead date of thirty.
Was it crazy to worry about being dismissed for being too young right up until I could start being dismissed for being too old? I spent a disproportionate piece of my twenties and thirties thinking it was all over. The funny thing is that I’ve always looked and sounded younger than my age. At twenty-three, I looked about sixteen—and not a lanky, ectomorphic sixteen that passes for thirty with the right makeup and clothes, either, but the kind that gets hit on by twelve-year-olds and gets patted on the head a lot. In job interviews, I’d clock the time it took for the look of surprise on the interviewer’s face to relax into a look of fond condescension. Looking young, at least for me, never really got me much beyond getting carded a lot. It wasn’t particularly advantageous, professionally or even socially. Considering, I can’t believe how much of my youth I squandered on feeling old.
19
* * *
Train Wreck
The “liberated woman,” like the “free world,” is a fiction that obscures real power relations and defuses revolution. How can women, subordinate in every other sphere, be free and equal in bed? Men want us to be a little free—it’s more exciting that way. But women who really take them at their word make them up-tight and they show it—by their jokes, their gossip, their obvious or subtle put-downs of women who seem too aggressive or too “easy.”
—Ellen Willis, “Up from Radicalism: A Feminist Journal”
To call a person a “train wreck” is to declare without equivocation that he or she is headed toward a foreseeable yet unavoidable disaster. There is no such thing as a minor train wreck. The phrase evokes a catastrophic pileup of mangled metal and bodies—a scene so grisly and gruesome that we can regard it only with horror and disgust. It’s beyond empathy, recognition, even pity.
The phrase “train wreck” is used to describe a man or a woman who has lost control. But women are expected to keep more things under control than men are. When a man loses control over his libidinal impulses, we regard it with some measure of awe: it’s a flameout. When a woman fails to contain herself, we leer. The female train wreck is needy, emotional, grotesque. There may be blood.
So what might a lighthearted comedy
called Trainwreck whose main character is an adventurous young woman be about?
The title refers to a familiar tabloid trope: the attractive but reckless young girl who ruins her life, career, reputation, and finances by gorging herself on drugs, alcohol, food, toxic boyfriends, expensive clothes, and bad plastic surgery. You get it! But this isn’t that story, which you already know how to consume and enjoy: ironically, with zero empathy. “Getting” the story means you’re in on the joke, which means you’re not the joke, which means the joke must be on her—the train wreck. So, the movie hasn’t even started, and already it’s painted itself into a narrative and moral corner. You expect to feel some sense of positive identification with the character. You expect to like her and relate to her. But you find yourself sitting in the stands, looking down as the girl stumbles around drunk and wobbly in platform shoes, stunned and blinded by flashbulbs. This doesn’t feel great. You don’t want to cast her out. You don’t want to kill her. You are not a monster. So, what needs to happen? How can we look at her in such a way as to reconcile this problem?
Two possible ways: from inside Amy, looking out, or outside Amy, looking down on her.
The movie goes like this. Once upon a time, there were two little girls named Amy and Kim, who were sisters. Amy was the big sister, and Kim was the little sister. One day, their father sat them down on the hood of the car in the driveway and explained that he and their mother were getting divorced because he couldn’t stop playing with other dolls (he was trying to make an analogy that they could understand) and their mother didn’t like that. He explained to them that monogamy isn’t realistic and asked them to repeat after him: Monogamy isn’t realistic. Monogamy isn’t realistic. Monogamy isn’t realistic.
Jump ahead about twenty years, and Amy is now a successful magazine writer in New York. She works at a men’s magazine called S’Nuff. She lives alone in a cute apartment, wears nice clothes, and suffers from what is framed as a pathological inability to pair-bond, which is further compounded by the delusion that she is happy. She has lots of one-night stands with guys who would all like to get to know her better but whom she can’t get away from fast enough. Her hookups are as brisk, well-lit, and efficient as gynecology appointments, with the same dissociative I’m-going-to-pretend-this-isn’t-really-happening-right-now quality. Amy fucks with her bra on and orgasms like a sneezing kitten. She makes jokes about penis size and pretends to fall asleep before reciprocating oral sex. She has rules against sleeping over. She drinks, but it doesn’t appear to impact her life much. She is up for a big promotion at work. She has no female friends, except one girl she talks to at work. Her social life consists of hanging out with her dad, who has multiple sclerosis, and her sister, Kim, who is married and has a young stepson who seems to be about ten years old. This being a fairy tale, their mother is dead. Amy is sort of seeing a sensitive trainer, played by John Cena, who has unrequited feelings for her but is also gay. The possibility that she has not met the right person and fallen in love is not entertained. There is just something wrong with her.
One day at work, a colleague pitches a profile of Dr. Aaron Conners, surgeon to NBA stars. Amy says, “No offense, but I just think that sports are stupid and anyone who likes them is just a lesser person. And has a small intellect.” So their editor assigns the story to Amy. After her first interview with Aaron, she gets drunk with him, jumps in a cab with him, and tells him to give the driver his address. He’s taken aback but doesn’t object. She doesn’t meet his gaze. The whole thing is awkward. Nobody makes out in the cab. It’s a scene about a drunken hookup written by someone who either has never had a drunken hookup or has blacked out every time. For a train wreck, Amy is remarkably together and composed.
Aaron is a rich New York City surgeon with front-row Knicks tickets and an enormous Manhattan penthouse with wraparound views of the city. His best friend is LeBron James. He is nice, down-to-earth, well-adjusted, and humble. He is also practically a virgin, having slept with just three women in his entire life. He’s the forty-year-old practically-a-virgin. (LeBron James, meanwhile, plays himself as a frugal, sensitive, persnickety, hopelessly romantic, and naive Downton Abbey fan who is vicariously obsessed with his friend’s romantic life.) He has all the positive attributes and fancy extras. This is meant to signal that he’s a nice guy, a prince among men, but actually it’s just weird. After his first interview/date/drunken hookup, he says, “I really like you, so we should be a couple.” She’s not interested, but he comes to her sick dad’s rescue, and in this vulnerable moment she gives in. Amy’s lifelong resistance to monogamy evaporates, and from that point on they are an item. But of course romantic comedies are about overcoming obstacles, and from the outset the obstacle to be overcome is Amy’s “slutty past.” It’s not like you don’t see it coming. From the moment weird Aaron enters the picture, the movie’s perspective stops being Amy’s, even though Schumer is credited as the sole screenwriter. To be fair, Aaron is also not a character so much as a combination of stereotypical attitudes: that is, he’s a direct inversion of “the girl” stereotype (wrapped in a diversionary, toxic “nice guy” veneer) infused with a fragile (stereotypical) male ego. Aaron sees Amy entirely as an extension of himself. It bothers him that she doesn’t like sports and criticizes the cheerleaders. When she yells, “You’re going to lose us the right to vote!” from the bleachers, he tuts, “These girls work really hard!” At Kim’s baby shower, Kim’s husband, Tom, jokes that Aaron had better “keep [Amy] away from those pro athletes,” and rather than tell Tom he’s a dick, Aaron gets upset, and Tom has to reassure him that Amy’s not really a slut, those are just the jokes she makes about herself, ha-ha. Amy tells inappropriate sexual jokes at the shower (girls never tell sexual jokes), and Kim doesn’t like it. Their father dies, and Amy and Kim argue, because Kim feels that Amy is too critical of her “normal” choice to get married and raise her stepson. In an Orwellian twist, it turns out to be a movie about a liberated girl who finds happiness in conformity.
Later on in the movie, Aaron is honored by Doctors Without Borders and asked to give a speech. Beforehand, he criticizes Amy’s dress for being inappropriate and asks if she doesn’t have a gown or something. (Amy mocks him, but his hit was much harder.) At the dinner, Amy gets a text in the middle of his speech. It’s from her crazy (female) editor telling her to answer or she is fired. She can’t afford to lose the job. She goes outside to take the call, and when he is finished, Aaron comes out to find her. He is angry. He finds her smoking pot out the window and asks if she skipped his speech to get stoned. She explains that she thinks she is losing her job. He says it doesn’t matter. He needs her. She is his “lifeline.” Somehow, this segues into her asking him why he likes her—what’s wrong with him? She’s “a drinker.” She’s “been with a lot of guys.”
“I don’t care!” he says. “How many?”
“I don’t know. How many women have you slept with?”
“I’ve slept with three women.”
“Me, too,” she says. “I’ve slept with three women, too.”
Aaron doesn’t like it that Amy drinks, smokes pot, or slept with a lot of guys before meeting him, because it makes him “feel unsafe.” Just to reiterate, sex that she had before she met him makes him feel “unsafe.” He says he loves her, but all he has done is claim her. Aaron tells Amy that it bothers him that she had a life before him. Amy says that maybe he should marry a cheerleader.
“Go be with that kind of girl. Little Texan with huge hair and big tits. But when you get married, she wants to be more conservative, so she gets smaller fake tits. But they still look amazing,” she says.
“You know the thing about cheerleaders is they bring people together and make them happy,” he replies. “Unlike you and your friends at your magazine, who sit there and judge people from afar, because if you don’t try then you can’t fail. That’s why you’re threatened by cheerleaders.”
Amy keeps him up all night berating him, even though she knows h
e’s performing a very important surgery on a very important basketball player the next day. Aaron, meanwhile, heroically struggles to stay awake for her tirade. The next morning, he tells his patient that he can’t keep his eyes open, because “Amy was acting like a psycho last night.” He doesn’t know what he did wrong. He really likes her, “but she’s like a fucking demon. She’s like the fucking exorcist.”
So, they really got through to each other.
In a 1992 article about Seinfeld in the Atlantic, Francis Davis writes,
[Jerry Seinfeld’s] specialty used to be called “observational” humor but has been renamed “recognition” humor, and the difference is more than semantic. Instead of generalizing from his own experience, as Mort Sahl, George Carlin, and Richard Pryor do and Lenny Bruce used to, Seinfeld, like most of his standup contemporaries, internalizes everybody’s experience. The result is peevish bits about airports and dating and the candy we ate as children, which—timing and other tricks of the trade aside—you feel as though you could have come up with yourself . . . He said that when he wearies of doing the show, he’ll write a final episode in which “my character will get a TV show and have to move to Los Angeles.” In other words, Seinfeld isn’t about “nothing” anymore. It’s increasingly about itself.
What does it mean when a hugely famous and influential comedian or writer “internalizes everybody’s experience”? Who, exactly, is “everybody” in this scenario? The short answer is, nobody. To internalize “everybody’s experience” is to deny your own and replace it with what you assume (but can’t possibly know) “everybody” is thinking. “Recognition humor” is a kind of preemptive defensive conformity; a hedge against experiencing your own experiences, and feeling your own feelings, and thinking your own thoughts. It’s pandering to a presumed audience that expects their expectations to be met. It’s McDonald’s humor. It assigns comedic value to things “we can all agree are funny” (which explains how a movie like Shallow Hal even gets made). And it’s really not very funny most of the time.
You Play the Girl Page 25