“I’m not interested in money,” begins a Marilyn quote I read at fifteen. “I just want to be wonderful.” By the time I was growing up, either/or configurations of womanhood were already completely alien, though liberation came with the hitch of all untested theories: taking full measure of its extremes seemed like the surest way to balance them.
The Mesomorphic Era
Though the dream girl was reduced in stature over the 1980s and early ’90s, it seemed unlikely—as long as there were young women and massive screens to project their images upon—that she might actually disappear. Typecasting has always been the two-faced friend of the aspiring movie star, but the roles of the comedienne, the character actress, and the beauty queen settled into smug complacency during those years. As though more naturalistic storytelling and acting styles equaled more naturalistic representations of women. But the categories didn’t budge—if anything, they further limited the number of traits that could be ascribed to any one actress. Meg Ryan, Meryl Streep, and Michelle Pfeiffer have tried to exchange places periodically throughout their careers; only the assiduous, almost freakishly gifted middle child met with any success.
On paper, the figure of the beauty queen—and her subset, the man-eater—is the dream girl’s closest relative. But a beauty queen’s cultural traction was limited: we now had celebrity models for that type of thing; but also, either by virtue of her empty symmetries (Pfeiffer; Kim Basinger) or the remove of reference (Kathleen Turner; Jessica Lange), the beauty queen had the feeling of facsimile. Heavily ironized, cinema-savvy, and tele-lingual, we might appreciate beauty and even use it to enforce a gold standard, but we resisted the creation of out-and-out fantasy women on-screen. Sex symbol was understood as a frivolous and possibly destructive term, and the dream girl became either a prop—the “after” reveal of the ubiquitous makeover montage—or a kind of inside joke (see the slow-motion point-of-view shot of Phoebe Cates in Fast Times at Ridgemont High and the career of model-turned-actress Kelly LeBrock). Post Princess Leia—one of the last cataclysmic dream girls; it seems significant that she was a pure character from that galaxy far, far away—for the most part we wanted things and people to look real, or anyway a movie-fied, maximally attractive version of real.
But in an industry built upon the allegoric potency of its images, the goal of realism—particularly as it relates to the feminine ideal—is pretty unrealistic. For women, this meant a divide between “serious” roles for “serious” actresses on one end and abject eye candy on the other, with a few comediennes and Sigourney Weaver high-stepping in between. In other words, actresses were subjected to all the casting constrictions of Old Hollywood without the potential for something otherworldly to take shape. Conditions were ripe for an unabashed student of iconography like Madonna to claim a spot in the cultural headspace. Music videos were a vital and innovative new form in part because they addressed a postmodern void—the place that opened up when we became too cool to respond to the same old aesthetic tricks and archetypes.
Across this divide, the movies became purveyors of an increasingly specific physical ideal. Anonymous topless babes abounded in mainstream comedies, but well-known actresses were also agreeing to explicit love scenes invariably described as “raw,” “real,” and “brave.” The haggle to disrobe major stars became part of a film’s story.
The exposure of Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct (1992) was the deceptively cool culmination of this elaborate burlesque. Cast ten years earlier as the quintessential dream girl in Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories, as Instinct’s ciggie-sucking temptress, Stone makes the castration menace of the femme fatale explicit. It’s the moment Andy Warhol, shooting a lingerie-clad Edie Sedgwick grappling with one man on-screen, another off, and a third behind the camera, teased out and ultimately denied in Beauty No. 2 (1965). Both films launched their respective stars: today Basic Instinct plays like a sleek but garish genre piece updated with reactionary, late–Second Wave twists, whereas Warhol’s shapeless interrogation tape conveys something essential of its time and themes, subject and creator.
Leaving nothing to imagination meant less space in our imaginations for the alchemy of archetype to take hold. It turns out that when exposed in 2-D, what lies between a woman’s legs amounts to little more than visual information; like a picture of a teacup or acronyms like 2-D, we’ll all process it the exact same way. Empowerment, feminism’s new watchword, was used to describe/endorse/defend everything from Stone’s playing the V-card (though the actress later claimed she was tricked by director Paul Verhoeven, complicating matters further) to the newly unforgiving, muscle-blistered physiques of performers like Madonna and Linda Hamilton. This, we were told, was owning your body: display as decision, sex as a self-marketed commodity. There was a certain democracy in it as well. After all, a measurable ideal is one we might all attain, with enough discipline and a plastic-surgery piggy bank.
Interesting times for the girls just snapping on their first push-up bras and litmus-testing the rumored right to attract attention on their own terms. Why bother with persona or performance in forming an identity when—as long as it was “hot” or “hard”—a body itself might obtain?
Meanwhile, Back in the Cafeteria …
Having laid plans at about thirteen, someone like me was still a solid fifteen years from reckoning a dreamed feminine self with an even halfway tenable idea of functionally independent adulthood. This is in fact a pretty sensible timeline. “Being wonderful” is actually an ambition of Einsteinian relativity, and a girl can easily run up a decade’s worth of style overhauls, clique-sampling, and guitar lessons sorting out its meaning. The hidden fulcrum of the concern being, wonderful to whom?
Puberty can go off like an IED in the Iraqi desert: one morning you wake up in a German hospital and spend the next six years relearning to walk and talk. All along, the person in search of a personality triages her best interests and directs her energies toward them. A young girl’s wish to be seen had a particular backspin in the moment when feminist sex positivity coincided with the STD-phobic early nineties, when even the Catholic schools stopped fronting and rolled out the old condom-on-the-banana routine.
The hockey players at my high school were unbearable, and I dated them all. Their indifference felt like a kind of purgatory; it hardly seemed a worthy arena in which to develop and deploy one’s wiles. Ambivalence about subjecting ourselves to seemingly primitive male algorithms ran deeper than the fear of rejection or even disease, into self-reproach. Was it weak to define yourself along a retrograde curve? Can you be wonderful in a vacuum?
I spent four years wrestling at the extreme end of that question, and if my efforts were not successful, they did not go unnoticed. Surely the most decorated nerd at St. George’s elementary, I left high school with one distinction: best walk.
Who’s That Girl?
Like global bankruptcy and a good orgasm, it happened slowly, then all at once. Around the time that my hair—kept short on my mother’s watch—came within kissing distance of my fifth lumbar, the distant outline of a new ideal was spotted riding feminism’s third wave. The riot grrrl revolution—a music-based punk movement spearheaded by a group of American, female-based bands—blew through the youth culture with a radical, corrective force. After cramming up against the same old gatekeepers, women who were raised to expect more made a lunge for the mic, and suddenly their smeared faces were everywhere. Much like my awkward phase, the impact was pronounced but brief.
The defiantly wanton postsuffragette flapper—waistless, chestless, bobbed—became a cautionary figure of excess. Eventually the lush, maternal lines of the 1950s bombshell offered a comforting revisal. With the riot grrrl movement, what was launched as a revolution turned into a round of telephone that began with a guttural challenge and ended with a chattering waif in a baby T. The latter was sweet and cute but “edgy,” an essentially Victorian vision dressed in street-urchin chic. In her the problem of a new, provocative version of feminine agency was refra
med as obviously regressive and a little unhinged. When she was good, she was very, very good. But by the time the words “I think you’re my dream girl” were uttered across a telephone line connected to the author’s left ear, their meaning had shifted such that instead of merely adding to a mutual burden of romantic illusions, they fell with the force of an indictment.
Who’s That Girl? II
In 1993 I moved to the Pacific Northwest, where the tough girls were amassing, with a friend I’ll call Aileen. We grew our hair and wore combat boots and baggy cargo pants. Most of our mental energy went to maintaining the certainty that this, finally, was where we belonged. This was independence, maybe. Authenticity—certainly. I had wanted desperately to make the move, but the truth is that from the moment I met her seven years earlier, I would have followed Aileen to the moons of Jupiter. Here was a flesh-and-blood ideal for study, a numinous, red-lipped zaftig with a captivating laugh and confidence so replete that when she first strode into my sixth-grade class in London, Ontario, I felt she had to be American.
For our grade-eight graduation, each member of our class painted a ten-foot mural of our projected occupation. I chose brain surgeon, only because it seemed like the hardest and most impressive thing a boy or girl could be. Aileen went with actress. And if she never made it to the stage or screen, of the two of us she was certainly truer to her mark. As we moved through high school I watched her—everyone did—with acquisitive candor. In being a kind of character she was fully herself. More than OR scrubs and parental validation I longed to manifest the best—which is to say most wonderful, wonderfully elusive—parts of her.
On a summer afternoon shortly before we left, Aileen, her boyfriend, and I convened at our local Chinese joint for tea and fortune cookies. My mother had driven into town earlier in the day to announce my parents’ long-delayed divorce. I met the news with supreme detachment: my mother didn’t make it to my high school graduation, though I imagined the expiry of her marital pact circled red in her assistant’s day-planner. I had resolved not to mention it, but caved between our request for the bill and its arrival, bracketing the news with our customary check out this bullshit bravado.
Beneath all that was real urgency: I needed to know how to feel, and how far I was from feeling it. I filled with a private horror as tears like match flares lit in Aileen’s eyes.
A few months after our arrival in Vancouver I pushed to the lip of the Commodore Ballroom’s stage and watched in fear and awe as Courtney Love unleashed her self-tattered charisma on the crowd. The baby-doll look had reanimated in subversive zombie style, and Love was the queen of the undead coquettes. She spit out cigarettes and screamed at us, between deliriously tight renditions of early Hole songs, for acting like “sullen Canadians” at a punk-rock show. I was alone that night; Aileen wasn’t big on the music scene. Or maybe she was working. We both had new jobs and were playing house in an east-end basement apartment, installed below a trio of headbangers burning out on the finest weed in the land.
It was an unmitigated but highly empowered disaster. Aileen, trailed by pheromone-addled men wherever she went, got mixed up with a seasonal fisherman. After weeks spent pounding the pavement, I landed a job at a Kitsilano coffee shop by simply walking through the door, which might have been my first clue. The owner behaved like a member of the Hawaiian Mafia, squiring me to waterfront power lunches in my secondhand grubs. Turns out I was not criminal front material, though I worked enough customer-free nine-hour shifts to be spraying stale muffins with PAM when I heard that River Phoenix—and my childhood—was dead.
Around that time a midnight grappling session with an odious Frenchman behind the Kitsilano Youth Hostel ripped my earring clean through the lobe. “There goes your modeling career,” Aileen said.
A lot of things ended in Vancouver, which I suppose was the idea, though precious little arrived to take their place. Burgled of all of our belongings during the Winnipeg leg of a cross-country lark, we limped home to Ontario. I began shopping in BiWay’s little-boys department, preparing for freshman year with five-mile runs, and giving sworn depositions by phone. Aileen went back out West to finish what we started, which is to say she wound up stripping and sunk into heavy drugs.
No Really, Who Is She?
Was it different when we did it because we were doing it? Our unextinguished idols, the ones who had lipsticked reputation-searing slurs onto their bodies, began indeed to fade from view. They were raped, as we were; they got older, just like us; their friends died, as ours did; they sold out and so did we. If they were Courtney Love, they suffered terribly, put out a breakthrough album, then settled on an almost touchingly quaint ambition of movie stardom. As though we were not already living through her. As though it were possible to inhabit a higher plane of our dreaming selves than the one haunted by her screwed-up face and napalm howls.
In the years after her Commodore Ballroom show, after her husband’s suicide, I watched Love as closely as I did that night. Touring in 1995, she was wild with animal grief, hurling herself offstage and into a pit of young men. There is footage of them tearing the clothes from her body, grabbing at her breasts, and yanking down her underpants, as if rising to a challenge. The issue had moved approximately not at all: Where do a woman’s intentions end and the world’s indifference to them begin? Is it a statement—subversive or otherwise—if nobody’s listening? Or no one can hear you above your breasts?
It was both music and the alternative movement’s great loss when Courtney Love regained her composure, invested in a stylist, and began trolling red carpets in bias-cut Versace gowns. It was also a futile exercise. By 1997 the riot grrrl revolution was already being distilled into a highly structured ideal, one too tame for Love’s big-shouldered persona.
Dreaming Is Twee
Consider the distance traveled by Winona Ryder between her alterna-girl apotheosis in Reality Bites (1994) and her wan incarnation of this new ideal in Autumn in New York (2000). With her slurry, tomboyish diction, marsupial eyes, butter-knife pixie cut, Dickensian slightness, and improbable breasts, Ryder was well known as the muse of 1990s rock stars and movie stars who would be rock stars. For this she was framed as both a throwback groupie and the acceptable face of alternative culture. In the Ben Stiller–directed Reality Bites, Ryder plays a recent college graduate and aspiring filmmaker stuck in a stalled job market and trapped between the dubious masculine counterpoints of a wastrel musician (Ethan Hawke) and a media suit (Stiller). Immobility forms a theme for her character, and Ryder’s astrophysically complicated allure reaches Hawking-esque heights. And yet, compared to Autumn in New York, in which a literally terminally enchanting Ryder alights to show age-inappropriate commitment-phobe Richard Gere the redemptive way of the sprite, Reality Bites looks like Norma Rae.
Ryder’s shivering sad girl underwent a kind of ritual sacrifice in 1999, when newcomer Angelina Jolie devoured her in every frame of Girl, Interrupted and licked the screen. But Jolie was quickly isolated and quarantined as an anomaly; she eventually shed the force of her personality and slipped behind the imperial mask of her beauty. As the new millennium began, for a host of young actresses and the young women watching them, there was Angelina and there was the rest of us. The leftover ingenues—including our Winona—were increasingly cast as pint-size oracles, elusive handmaidens, and afflicted, psychosexual fabulists partial to non sequitur and orange hoodies.
After years of manifesting mainly in referential fragments and glistening body parts, the dream girl had finally been wholly reinvented. Aggression, autonomy, sexual agency, and several varieties of stature had been bred out of her prototype in the screenwriting lab. Fully realized, she transmutes the rebellious energy of third-wave feminism into a set of soothing eccentricities to be applied directly to the culture’s cowering manhood. Throughout the 1980s and early ’90s, a prurient focus on the body stood in for a more fully imagined ideal. By the turn of the century, ingenues were still beholden to the warped terms of this kind of realism,
but the focus had shifted from purely physical objectification to the tyranny of “personality.”
If you really wanted to, you could find modest overlap between this new type and every innocuous female character to cross the screen with a few marbles either missing or swirling around upstairs. What sets the modern dream girl apart from vaguely similar creations of decades past—like Shirley MacLaine’s lovelorn gamine in The Apartment, for instance, Liza Minnelli’s divinely brazen Sally Bowles, and a host of early Goldie Hawn roles—is the extent to which she’s presented as both wildly original and straight out of the coffee shop. She lives in your world, somewhere between sex and safety. Not just believable, she’s so well within reach you may already have met her.
(A question: If the true dream girl seems to have emerged from our imaginations, does the fact that this version feels familiar qualify her as the real thing? To me it doesn’t matter whether she was inspired by “real” women—something her creators often claim—or triggered an avalanche of jejune posturing. Some have called her a pure projection; with its suggestion of overlay, superimposition gets closer to the trouble. All two-dimensional tics and self-conscious dysfunction, she is more formula than fantasy, more personality than persona. Rather than distinguishing themselves, a wide array of actresses have been swallowed by the mantle of her mannerisms. The character is so stuffed with this fatuous, hipster fairy-tale idea of personality that she jams the imagination instead of colonizing it.)
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