When I was a movie critic, I remember being struck by how reflexively people laughed at references simply because they’d caught the reference. Chuck Klosterman talked about something similar in his essay on laugh tracks: people laugh to indicate that they are in on the joke, that they are not the joke, that the joke is someone else. This is the falsest, most insidious kind of “recognition humor.” On Inside Amy Schumer, things are funny because they’re true; because the skits show things as we really see them but as they’re rarely portrayed. We laugh because we’ve seen it before, because we’ve been there before, because there was some effort involved, some tension, in pretending things were otherwise, and her perspective lets us be real and let it go.
Conversely, in Trainwreck, things are funny because they’re not true. The humor comes from thwarting expectations, but the expectations it thwarts are those created by other movies and TV shows a lot like Trainwreck.
For example:
On Inside Amy Schumer, a woman feels so much pressure to fit in and be “cool” with her toxic work environment that she volunteers to bury the stripper that her coworker has strangled, while only making seventy cents to his dollar.
A football town is so steeped in rape culture that when a new high school football coach bans raping, old ladies spit on him while out on their power walks.
A medieval peasant girl learns she’s actually a princess, then discovers to her surprise that being a medieval princess is less about balls and gowns and more about being a geopolitical pawn constantly under threat of execution and incubating male heirs.
An all-female panel of highly intelligent professional women devolves into an apologyfest, where they apologize even while bleeding to death on stage as the moderator rolls his eyes.
In a parody of a birth-control commercial, Amy talks to her doctor as a man’s voice says, “Ask your doctor if birth control is right for you.” Then a long gauntlet follows including, “Ask your boss if birth control is right for you. Ask your boss to ask his priest. Find a Boy Scout and see what he thinks. Ask the Supreme Court,” and so on. Finally, she goes to the pharmacy and picks up her prescription. The pharmacist tells her there are no refills. She will have to ask everyone again next month. “Ask yourself why you insist on having sex for fun.” After she leaves, a very young boy approaches the counter and asks the pharmacist for a gun. The pharmacist tosses one over and says, “Remember, that’s your right!”
The jokes reveal the lie at the basis of everything (every law, every story): That only men have a sex drive, that only men have libidinal desires, that only men want things and can go out and get them. That “normal” women want nothing more than to take care of their kids and do all the housework. As Amy Schumer jokes later in the episode, “I think sex is just explained incorrectly, as far as genders go. It’s like men love sex, and women just deal with it, right? Every movie, every TV show, the guy gets home from work and he’s like, ‘Honey, how about tonight?’ And she’s always like, ‘Blech! You know I hate your dick!’ (Laundry, laundry).” She mimes doing a small pile of laundry. “I don’t know any girls like that, right? Also, it’s always such a tiny, little pile of laundry. It’s like not enough for a load, which I think should be the title of my next special. Not Enough for a Load.”
In Trainwreck, meanwhile, Amy breaks up with Aaron and, after their breakup, gets drunk with the magazine’s intern and goes home with him. His mother walks in on them and freaks out, because he is sixteen. She’s fired from her job, and her work friend—her only nonrelated friend in the world—takes her promotion. Amy shows up at the door of the immaculate, palatial suburban manse where her sister spends her days alone. Amy rings the doorbell, and Kim answers in an old flannel shirt and jeans, looking very young, like a teen hostage or a “mole woman” from The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. You want to wrap her in a blanket and whisk her away to safety.
For a minute, I got confused and thought I’d wandered into Room by accident. Or some meta version of it; Room within a Room, in which Brie Larson plays a young girl locked up like a Stepford Wife, and Amy Schumer plays herself, trapped in a story fiendishly engineered to contain the uncontainable Amy Schumer.
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Look at Yourself
Joan and Peggy are standing side by side in an elevator, staring ahead in tense silence. They’ve just come from a meeting at McCann Erickson, the agency that absorbed their agency, and it did not go well. The meeting was to propose a partnership between their client Topaz Pantyhose and McCann’s client Marshall Field’s department store, but the McCann executives refused to take them seriously. Instead, they spent the whole time harassing Joan and ignoring Peggy. They said things like, “Why aren’t you in the brassiere business? You should be in the bra business. You’re a work of art,” and suggesting they send the client rep a box of pears, “because he likes a good pair.” In the elevator on the way out, Joan and Peggy stew in silence. Peggy asks Joan if she wants to get lunch. “I want to burn this place down,” Joan replies.
Peggy is angry, too. It doesn’t matter how far they came at Sterling Cooper. In the new office, they’re back where they started—back to being girls in the office. Disempowered but still enraged, they turn on each other.
“Joan, you’ve never experienced that before?”
“Have you, Peggy?”
“You can’t have it both ways. You can’t dress the way you do and expect—”
“How do I dress?”
“Look, they didn’t take me seriously, either.”
“So what you’re saying is, I don’t dress the way you do because I don’t look like you, and that’s very, very true.”
Joan and Peggy are two of the three main female characters in Mad Men, part of a triad that also includes Betty (Draper) Francis, Don’s first wife. Joan is the former lone female partner at Sterling Cooper Draper Price, a former secretary who started out as the catty office bombshell whose real métier, at first, was men. Peggy is the working-class workhorse, the media martyr, the good girl who takes on extra work for free for the opportunity to prove herself again and again and again. Once Joan starts work at McCann, it becomes clear that the respect she won from her colleagues at Sterling Cooper won’t translate. The men at the new company will never take her seriously. She’ll have to start all over again from the ground up. A colleague makes a pass at her, and when she complains to her boss, he tells her to suck it up. After coolly purring her way through conflict her whole life, Joan finally loses it. She threatens to call her lawyers, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), Betty Friedan, and the ACLU. Enraged, her boss fires her and says he will pay her only half of her buyout money. As establishment boys like Pete Campbell scamper off into the sunset with everything they ever wanted, Joan’s career in advertising comes to an ignominious end. Her boyfriend, Dennis, a retired new-age business guy, isn’t sad to hear it. He never really understood why Joan cared so much about her job in the first place. “Look at yourself!” he keeps saying, as if she could see herself through his eyes—as if she didn’t look out and see things she wanted, too.
Among other things, Mad Men was an invitation to look back at the fictions that powered postwar consumer culture as authored by self-made and self-mythologizing men like Don Draper and endlessly promoted in mass media, mostly as a way to sell soap. Don was a copywriter, an author of influential, terribly persuasive ad campaigns, and an all-around creative genius. He re-created himself and the world so that his success would magically build up around him. In this world, only he looked out and saw what he wanted. The unwanted, unloved son of a prostitute, Don joined the service as Dick Whitman, stole a dead soldier’s identity, and started over after the war as someone new. He made himself up and became the man he wished he were, a sophisticated adman about town; the man who had everything.
Don was the ostensible hero, but no characters on Mad Men traveled as far, or as elliptically, as Joan and Peggy. There was no route for them to travel. The wide-open pri
mrose path that establishment boys like account executive Pete Campbell and agency partner Roger Sterling traveled in a clear, uninterrupted shot was off-limits to them, so they started by following the rules and hewing as closely as possible to the roles they’d been assigned. Peggy was the ingenue, Joan was the bombshell. Peggy learned to suppress her femininity for validation; Joan exploited hers in return for admiration and favors. Don’s wife, Betty, was the alternative: the housewife marooned in the suburbs, stewing in resentment, shooting at pigeons with a cigarette dangling out of her mouth, like a wannabe outlaw.
Categories are useful to a point, but they don’t tell us much about who someone is—just look at Don. Where his characteristics become meaningful is where they grant symbolic or literal admission (or both) to a group where most of the power, privilege, wealth, and authority to speak for everybody else resides; a group that positions itself as the universal subject, gazing out proprietarily on its domain, tuning everything to its pleasure, asking itself only what it likes, what it wants, what it thinks, how it feels to be itself, how the world looks from where it’s standing; where only one person gets to fly off into the sunset happily ever after in a personal jet, like WASP golden-boy-executive Pete Campbell in the series finale, absolved of all mistakes and eternally forgiven.
This ready-made identity was available to Don because of the categories he belonged to and the felicitous way he looked. And, unlike the constricting female identities that limited his wife, girlfriends, and female coworkers, his ready-made identity was liberating. He was semiotically lucky. He stepped into the role of privilege as though it were a custom-made suit someone had tossed in a Dumpster. It put him in the subject position. It opened every door. That privilege was built on the same fictions that set the standards for Joan, Peggy, and Betty, whether they liked them or not, whether the standards applied to them or not, whether they acknowledged their existence in the real world or not, and regardless of what it took for each of them to wake up from the dream and become who they were.
Then again, look at Don. He was alienated from his outward self and lived inside an identity that didn’t allow for the full expression of his humanity. He used his image and its effect on people to get what he wanted, because he knew (and he was right) that he could never have gotten it as he really was. He watched other people watch him and revised his behavior based on feedback. But whereas Joan and Peggy had to earn everything they became, as well as the context in which to be their actual selves, all Don had to do was walk in the door. To his credit, at least he was aware of the door. And he had to wait a long, sad time for an opening. Unlike Roger and Pete, who were born inside the room and weren’t aware that a door existed, Don never took his eyes off his privilege. He knew exactly how valuable it was, how hard it was to get, how easy it was to lose. He knew it didn’t just “happen naturally,” that it wasn’t just “what is.” He understood that he could put on this persona like an off-the-rack suit or like one of the fur coats he used to sell before Roger rescued him.
Mad Men is not nostalgia; it’s hindsight. Nostalgia obscures history’s lessons, but hindsight lets us learn from the past. From a contemporary perspective, Mad Men looks at times like a horror movie. Joan, Peggy, and Betty were trapped inside the sealed-off, bricked-in fortresses that Don (consciously, because his privilege was borrowed) and Roger and Pete (unconsciously, because their privilege was inherited) had constructed for them: inescapable ideas about what they were, endlessly replicated. Joan, Peggy, and Betty had to find ways to push their way out and make themselves from scratch. They had to start to build a world in which they could exist. Joan created a separate space in which to do this undisturbed. Peggy claimed her space inside the system. Betty remarried someone who loved her, and eventually enrolled in a psychology program in order to understand. She died before she could become herself. (At least she was spared Freud.) In the symbolic world that Don helped create, there was no space—no real or imagined context—for Joan, Peggy, and Betty to exist and to act as protagonists or subjects of desire. This is what Virginia Woolf was talking about in A Room of One’s Own. One needs not just an actual room but also symbolic space in which to exist.
Joan, Peggy, and Betty all had “that outward existence which conforms, the inward life which questions” that Kate Chopin ascribed to her heroine Edna Pontellier in The Awakening. Like Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, and Callie Khouri’s Thelma and Louise, The Awakening is the story of a heroine becoming conscious of her condition; reclaiming her identity, femininity, and independence; and then—the story goes one of two ways—walking off a cliff or out the door. Thelma, Louise, and Edna go off the cliff, into the ocean; Ibsen’s Nora, Shaw’s Eliza, and Mad Men’s Joan walk out the door.
By the end of the series, Don had traded places with the women. His outward existence, the persona of the hero, the protagonist he took on, conferred on him all the things he lacked when he was a poor, unloved, unwanted, marginalized, traumatized nobody and gave him everything he needed to be a person in the world: freedom, agency, autonomy, and the authority to shape reality with his words to serve and please himself. He stepped into the role of the male subject with ease, no matter how fraught and misdirected his own relationship to his identity was, no matter how different his inner existence, because he looked the part (unlike, say, his brother, or the unattractive young copywriter who took his advice on acting like a dick to gain the client’s respect only to get himself fired).
After inviting Peggy to be her partner in a new company (Peggy is flattered but decides to put in her time at McCann), Joan gathers together the fragments of herself; calls her new company Holloway-Harris, hyphenating her maiden and married names, putting herself back together, and striking out on her own. Meanwhile, Peggy, whose defining characteristic, as she told Joan on her very first day at work, is that she “always tries to tell the truth”—“Good for you,” coos Joan, who always tries not to—marches back into McCann like she owns the place, strutting down the hall with her sunglasses on, a cigarette dangling from her lips, and Bert Cooper’s Japanese painting of a woman being pleasured by an octopus under her arm. “I always try to tell the truth” is a funny thing for a future copywriter to say, but she means it. Like her mentor, Don, whose success hinges on his inborn talent for locating emotional truths in the biggest deceptions, she knows that, as Virginia Woolf said in A Room of One’s Own, “fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact.”
The scene with Joan and Peggy in the elevator takes place during the final season of Mad Men, set in 1970. The first season took place in 1960. Joan and Peggy were fucked from the outset: Joan by Roger, who betrayed her by finally leaving his wife and marrying his new secretary, Jane; and Peggy by Pete, who came over to her apartment drunk the night of his bachelor party, when she was brand-new at work and had been made to understand that part of the job was always saying yes, and got her pregnant. (Peggy had the baby and gave it up, and never told anyone about it.) But they didn’t stay fucked for long. Here are some of the things that actually happened between 1960 and 1975. In 1960, the FDA approved the birth-control pill. In 1961, President Kennedy established the President’s Commission on the Status of Women and appointed Eleanor Roosevelt as its chairwoman. In 1963, the commission issued a report documenting substantial workplace discrimination against women and made specific recommendations for improved hiring practices, paid maternity leave, and affordable child care. In 1963, Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique and Congress passed the Equal Pay Act, which made it illegal to pay a woman less than what a man would make for the same job. In 1964, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act barred employment discrimination on the basis of race, religion, national origin, and sex. The EEOC was established to investigate complaints. In 1966, Friedan and others founded the National Organization for Women (NOW), which tried to end sexual discrimination, mostly in the workplace, through legislative lobbying, litigation, and public demonstrations. In 1967, Presiden
t Lyndon Johnson’s affirmative-action policy of 1965 was expanded to cover gender discrimination.
The Miss America protest in Atlantic City took place in 1968. That year, the EEOC ruled to end sex-segregated help-wanted ads. In 1969, California adopted no-fault divorce, and laws were passed regarding the equal division of common property. In the summer of 1970, in what turned out to be the largest protest for gender equality in U.S. history, fifty thousand women marched down Fifth Avenue in New York demanding equal employment, educational opportunities, and twenty-four-hour child-care centers to make it possible to take advantage of these opportunities. In 1972, Ms. magazine was published for the first time, with a picture of Wonder Woman on the cover. That year, a universal twenty-four-hour day-care bill was drafted into existence and passed by Congress. Nixon vetoed the bill in 1972. In 1973, President Johnson’s affirmative-action ruling was upheld by the Supreme Court and allowed women to apply for higher-paying jobs that had previously been open only to men. A U.S. court of appeals ruled that jobs needed to be “substantially equal” but not “identical” to be protected by the Equal Pay Act, making it illegal for an employer to change a job title in order to pay women less than men. A group called WOWI (Women on Words and Images) conducted a study of children’s readers called Dick and Jane as Victims, used in New Jersey public school districts. The group found that boy-centered stories outnumbered girl-centered stories 5 to 2; adult male main characters outnumbered adult female main characters 3 to 1; male biographies outnumbered female biographies 6 to 1; male animal stories outnumbered female animal stories 2 to 1; and male folk or fantasy stories outnumbered female folk or fantasy stories 4 to 1. By the age of eight, 99 percent of children of both sexes were in basic agreement about “which sex does which job, what kind of person a girl or boy should be, and what the role limitations and expectations are.”1 WOWI pushed for revising the curriculum.
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