Filed under: art, Creative Process, feminism, Gen X, TV | Tags: 60s, 70s, 80s, Betty Friedan, feminism, Generation X, Gillian Anderson, I got a name, Jim Croce, Sex Education, Simone de Beauvoir, timeline confusion, TV
The scene is a flashback. It’s looking like the 60s because the teen is in a silky turtleneck mini dress and the mom’s hair is up, cocktail hour style. But the song is Jim Croce’s “I Got a Name” which came out in 1973, so probably it’s supposed to be 1973 and this group is just rocking their clothes from eight years ago. I mean, that’s how humans are, sometimes. They wear their clothes from the previous decade. Not everyone is in style all the time. And hey, maybe this song isn’t telling us it’s 1973. Maybe it’s later in the 70s and they’ve just chosen this song for this party for its metaphorical value. But judging by the fashion and the music, it’s around 1973. But who are these people?
They’re normally not on this show that is set in the now times. We’ve never seen them before. It’s a flashback, so we have to work out who they are from their names. It turns out, the teen is Jean – who in the now times is played by Gillian Anderson and her younger sister, Joanna, played in the now times by Lisa McGrillis. The scene makes plain some character history but it really confuses the timeline. It has baffled me so much, I have not been able to stop thinking about it for days. Why does this bother me so much? That’s what I’m here to work out.
The TV show is Sex Education and Gillian Anderson is Jean, the mother of the central character. She is a sex therapist and here in the fourth season, she has just had a baby. We assume the show is set in 2023 because all the tech looks like current tech and the fashion looks like extra fashionable current fashion. One of the kids has a backpack just like mine. I’m being particular about the timeline because it is the timeline about which I am confused.
Gillian Anderson, in real life, is currently 55 years old. She is a Gen-Ex icon and a member of our generation. On the show, in the previous season, it was made clear that Gillian Anderson’s character was at least a few years younger than she herself. When this character had this baby, it was a huge surprise because she assumed she was too old to get pregnant but wasn’t quite. I don’t remember how old they said she was supposed to be but I’m guessing it was about fifty. In other words, she was maybe a baby or just being born in 1973. The Sex Education Wiki says her birth year is 1973. So.
To make the time line work, this scene of her past would have to be, like, 1986 at the very least – but somehow it is a 1986 that looks like 1965 and sounds like 1973. And I saw 1986 when it happened. Maybe I even listened to Jim Croce in 1986. Maybe I even wore my mom’s mini dresses from the 60s sometimes – so it’s not impossible for 1986 to seem like another era. But not, like, all at once. It feels like this TV show is trying to imply that Jean – a character who is in her 50s now – was a teenager in the 60s or 70s instead of getting born then. I’m intensely confused by it.
Because all of these choices are on purpose. No one accidentally chooses a piece of music or a costume period. Every one of those choices is there to tell us something and yet what they are telling us is impossible, according to how time works. The show is suggesting that Gillian Anderson’s character (along with her sister) is a Baby Boomer, or at a stretch, a member of Generation Jones – when biological facts (and time) make that impossible. Gillian Anderson cannot be both a Gen X parent in 2023 AND a Baby Boom teen. Those are two mutually exclusive identities. I have tried to work out how this might be possible and it is just not.
And I suppose I’m so troubled by it because the show is otherwise very good and has accomplished this kind of beautiful balancing act of following the lives of the teens and the parents with compassion and perspective. While it is clearly a show about the teens, it treats its adults as full complicated humans, as well. Or at least it did before it decided all parents must be from the previous generations.
On most teen shows, I expect we all relate most to the teens, because we were all teens once and the teens are written to be the center – but this is one of the first shows where it’s possible to relate to the adults on the show in equal measure. They’re not parental “parents just don’t understand” archetypes. They have their own issues. It’s one of the things I really admire about the writing.
But this timeline collapse where a woman in her 50s in 2023 could somehow be a teenager in 1973 is just doing my head in. I don’t understand it. And I don’t understand why they did it.
I watched this scene again to try and make sense of it.
On second viewing, it does look have some more markers of the 70s than I noticed the first time (though a pretty square 70s if you ask me) and there are paintings that suggest the 70s, so I could buy that they are firmly trying to place us in 1973. (I mean, they paid for the rights for that particular song. Those rights can’t be cheap. They’re trying to do something with it.) But I also saw why it felt more 60s – or even 50s at first and that was because they started it all off with a reference to Simone de Beauvoir. Like, they were trying to signal a cheeky feminism in Jean’s mother in the opening moments. But in 1973, Simone de Beauvoir was very old news. To be arguing with her positions in 1973 would be like contemporary feminists arguing with Betty Friedan. Like, we might honor her work or find her problematic in some ways but she’s too of her moment to argue with. Her work is sixty years in the past.
Challenging Simone de Beauvoir sets the time period as much as the set dressing and as it was the first thing we heard, it set the bar for the OLD days. I thought it was maybe supposed to be somebody’s grandmother in the 50s, not Gen X Jean’s mom in 1973.
Ever since I became a self-appointed documenter of Gen X, I have been aware of the Gen X erasure that tends to happen. And this is a kind of erasure as well. It’s erasing Gen X childhoods and turning them into Gen Jones or Baby Boomer childhoods. I preferred it when they were just leaving us out of the lists.
What’s funny is that the 80s – when this character’s teen years actually would have been – are all the rage at the moment. It would have been on trend to place Jean in a realistic time line – instead they created this weird blend which makes it seem like this character somehow lost 10 to 15 years in her youth. Maybe she was abducted by aliens? Not on this show, no. Maybe on the show that made Gillian Anderson famous but not this one.
Anyway – I suppose it is the Gen X erasure that has gotten under my skin. It’s a little bit like the confusion in changing the time period in The Lost Daughter. Things just don’t make sense when people don’t do the math of the moments the characters are living through.
There were plenty of feminists in the 80s that they could have had Jean’s mom argue with, if they were staying true to Jean’s actual age but instead they chose a feminist born in 1908, whose major work was published in 1949, and managed to create the weirdest period drama confusion. Arguing with Simone de Beauvoir in 1973 or 1986 would as weird as arguing with her now. She’s been dead a long time. Her ideas were pretty hot in the 50s but now she’s mostly an historical reference. I catch you arguing with her ideas, I’m going to think you’re from the 50s too if you’re in a period drama. If you’re in a college classroom, okay, historical arguments make sense but at a cocktail party for squares, let me assure you that no one is discussing Simone de Beauvoir.
Anyway, I’d love some explanation for this extremely weird mix of time signals. The only one I can think of is that the showrunners are young and elided their decades or something and no one stopped to ask what the heck was going on with this timeline.
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Filed under: age, American, art, Gen X, TV, writing | Tags: 1983, 80s, 99 Luft Ballons, 99 Red Balloons, AIDS, Deutschland 83, Generation X, history, HIV, period drama, The Normal Heart, TV
Sometimes you have an awareness of the historical quality of the moment you’re going through. I had a very clear sense that things would never be the same after the eleventh of September, 2001. I could feel the day being engraved in the land, in our memories, in our timelines. But a lot stuff doesn’t FEEL significant while it’s happening, especially childhood events, even if people TELL you a moment is momentous, sometimes it just all blends together in the fabric of a life.
I’ve lived long enough now that folks are making historical period dramas about eras I remember. It is super weird to see production teams get this wrong. Or to watch styles be elevated from a niche corner to a dominant style. (“No, 7 Lives of Lea, we did not all wear mesh, tiny tank tops and chokers all the time in the 90s. Your research included too many promo shots from the WB.”)
But sometimes, the events are so far in the past, I question my own memory of them. I know I am often wrong about what year a pop song came out, for example, so it’s very possible I can also misremember historical events.
I started to think about this while watching Deutschland 83, which, you’ll be shocked to learn, takes place in Germany in…1983. Now, I turned ten in 1983 so it is a year I remember, more or less. But I had no sense of what was happening in Germany (nor East nor West) in that year. I guess I knew Nena’s “99 Luft Ballons” (which, like a lot of Americans, I preferred to their “99 Red Balloons”) which came out in 1983 but, again, I would have guessed it came out two or three years later – based purely on my perception of when I started paying attention to pop music. My perception is usually wrong about anything before 1989. Everything before ’89 is all mixed up.
Deutschland 83 (the TV show) apparently chose to set their show in 1983 because of the music. In addition to the thematically appropriate music of Nena, the theme song of the show is also from 1983 – “Major Tom” by Peter Schilling (which is not a cover of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” btw – just in conversation with it). The fact is, I was a big fan of a lot of the songs that were big in the West German charts of 1983. (Culture Club’s “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?”, Paul Young’s “Come Back and Stay”, Kajagoogoo’s “Too Shy.”) So it is clear that my perception of when I started to care about pop music is WAY off.
But – I found myself talking back to the show at one point, not about pop music, but about the AIDS crisis. A woman opened her desk drawer and there was a magazine with a story about AIDS on the cover. And I said, “Really? In 1983? Come on.” This is not because there wasn’t AIDS in 1983 because I’m pretty sure there was – but because I was skeptical of it being front page news in 1983. (I saw a production of The Normal Heart not so long after it was written. I feel like that’s part of why I felt so sure that the media coverage was later.)
And of course, I’m basing this on my own blurry memories of my childish knowledge of the AIDS crisis. My sense was that the mainstream media didn’t start talking about HIV until a couple of years later than Deutschland 83 would have us believe. I would have said there were no big stories about the AIDS crisis until 1985 or so. For me, the story loomed largest when Ryan White, a thirteen year old kid (only a year or so older than me!) got HIV from a blood transfusion, but I had a sense of the disease for a least a year before that. I asked my Gen X friend what year he thought AIDS became big news in the United States and he asked, “When did the Rock Hudson story break?”
We understand historical events’ placement in history by fixed points, by particular stories. Ryan White. Rock Hudson. I imagine that Tom Hanks will play a big role in our memories of the start of COVID 19. (Or maybe he won’t! We can’t know from here! He got through it just fine!)
Anyway – this subplot of the AIDS crisis in Germany in 1983 got me very curious because things could have been different in Germany! While American media was slow to pick up the story of HIV, maybe German media was quicker. Maybe the German government was less moronic about caring for its sick. Maybe my perception is overly American and there really were front page stories about HIV in Germany in 1983. Maybe they didn’t need a play like The Normal Heart because they were ahead of the game!
I looked into it. And I learned some things. For sure, 1983 was too early for American media addressing the crisis – and it wasn’t really a mainstream conversation in Germany either. However, the magazine that the secretary opens her drawer to reveal WAS a real magazine cover in June of 1983. So…a fair number of people were probably talking about it. Certainly, the German government’s response was actually much better than the American government’s response. (And to be clear, we’re talking about West Germany here. East Germany maintained that it had neither gays nor HIV until 1986, according to the show.) The level of care in West Germany was so much higher than it was in the US, with greater compassion and a much lower mortality rate. So – while I think Deutschland 83 may have been stretching the bounds of historical accuracy with the general population’s awareness of AIDS, there really was some journalism about it and investigating it did help me understand how much further ahead in health care West Germany was.
My conclusion:
Accurate for 1983: “99 Luft Ballons”, a NATO military exercise that nearly started a nuclear war and the AIDS crisis beginning to destroy communities of gay men, leading to a front page article in a magazine.
Probably Inaccurate for 1983: An East German spy single-handedly preventing a nuclear war, a mother telling her daughter to use a condom because of AIDS. But – hey, maybe!
My understanding about Deutschland 83 is that it was inspired by one of the writers’ military service in West Germany, when he was put to work translating Russian messages. But that work was later. In 1983, he was thirteen or fourteen years old, so his memories of that year, while likely better than mine, are probably a little blurry too. Maybe it’s all more accurate to the feeling of history if it’s a little mixed up. I guess that’s why we shouldn’t use period dramas as history lessons. Or maybe we can just use them as jumping off points to learn the real history.
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Filed under: age, Gen X | Tags: Bugs Bunny, cartoons, Gen X, grief, loss, mourning, nostalgia, Ron DeSantis
There are so many reasons I’m glad to be alive in JUST this moment. There are abundant stories to read or watch. I can listen to music anywhere I go. Podcasts are a thing. Migraine medicine is really taking giant leaps ahead. It is a richer world in terms of diversity and representation. So much progress has been made.
But as my 50th birthday looms ahead, I find I am also in a kind of mourning for the world I grew up in. Sometimes I feel as though I have been dropped in a strange future and expected to thrive, when the truth is, this strange world grew up slowly alongside me. I may feel like a stranger in it, but we must have grown into this together.
I couldn’t tell you what exactly I’m in mourning for. Sometimes I think it is just a quiet internet-free land where I write letters to my friends and family like I used to. Or maybe I’m missing all the older people who were giving the world its flavor as I came into it . Maybe I’m just mourning for Lucille Ball and Bea Arthur and Robin Williams and Prince and, like, Bob Hope and Jerry Lewis even. Aretha Franklin is gone and so is Sammy Davis Jr. We still have Mel Brooks but we lost Carl Reiner. First we lost Gilda Radner, years ago – but then we lost Gene Wilder too. I’m just writing names down as I think of them. The list of extraordinary famous people who were around in my youth and are no longer with us is so long, I can’t even begin to imagine how long it might be. And we’re rapidly losing all our elders. Three of my closest friends lost a parent in the last year. Very few of my peers still have a grandparent. At some point, we will become the elders and I am not prepared for it.
I listened to a couple of entertainers talk about Burt Reynolds on a podcast the other night and neither of them had any experience of Burt Reynolds in his prime but they could recognize the sexiness he’d possessed and how there was nothing like it now. I was never a Reynolds fan but I lived in the times that loved him and hearing these two podcasters laud him made me mourn for the loss of the world in which Reynolds was not that unusual. I used to mix him up with other actors all the time.
Is this just nostalgia I’m wrestling with? In a way – probably it is – but also it’s a longing for a world that never came to be. I’m not sure the world I imagined when I was a teen would have been any better than this one but it was very vivid in my imagination and the fact that it didn’t develop that way is somehow a loss.
I wonder if some weirdo Republicans feel the same way and it’s why they are fighting so hard against things that have no bearing on their day to day lives. They’re mourning for their youth when they were unaware of gay people or trans people or drag and their granddaddy taught them how to shoot a rifle and they only had to see white people in in the places they went.
And maybe the grief for the loss of their youth is so strong they feel they have to aim it at the people that remind them that the times have changed.
Somehow this helps me have a little compassion for those bozos. When I watch them do their dangerous and violent things, I find it very hard to empathize with anything about them. I don’t even want to. But part of what I find so distressing is not being able to understand why anyone could be so hateful. Their grief of the loss of the times before would not, in any way, justify their behavior – but it would explain it a little for me. And maybe it opens a door to helping us understand each other, because I miss Mork and Mindy also. I never watched The A Team but I miss having Mr T in the regular public discourse.
Ron DeSantis, who is pulling the most evil stunts, is a few years younger than me and I feel like I might throw up if I met him….BUT we did share a moment in history and it’s probable we have some nostalgia for some of the same stuff. We’re just dealing with the loss of the world that has changed around us in different ways. I write about it. I cry about it sometimes. Then I celebrate the growing diversity of this beautiful future that is now the present, while DeSantis just tries to kick people back into the 20th Century, like way way back into it, too.
At the risk of turning into a Gen X nostalgia page, if I had to talk to Ron DeSantis, I might start by asking him what his favorite shows or toys were when he was a kid. Maybe we could understand each other on this one little thing. Maybe we could connect on the ground of Play-Doh and Slinkys. And maybe I can ask him if he’s mourning for the world he grew up in.
*
Note: Days after I wrote this, I saw a reference to some comments DeSantis had made about cartoons in his youth. He thinks cartoons had no innuendo when he was a child. I know they did. But that’s this nostalgia working, I’m almost positive. He idealizes the cartoons of his youth – even the crappy ones. He’s in mourning for his innocence all those years ago and imagining that things were different than they were. I happen to know that Bugs Bunny dressed in drag a lot. So….it’s not new, dude. You’re nostalgic for something you’re misremembering. But sorry, sorry, I was trying to connect. I guess I miss watching cartoons on Saturday morning, too.
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Every podcast features a song at the end. Some of those songs are on Spotify, Apple Music, my website, ReverbNation, Deezer, Bandcamp and Amazon Music.
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Filed under: Gen X, technology | Tags: fandoms, Gen X, Internet, Kids News, podcast, stans, youth
At some point in my youth, my school brought in these Kid News Shows that we would watch at the start of the day. Logistically, I don’t know how this was possible as we were still in the AV cart era and there surely weren’t enough TVs for all the classrooms. Maybe it was a weekly experience? I don’t know. But I remember these kid reporters. They always seemed a little absurd to me, like, they were playing reporter and taking it all a little too seriously. It felt a little like dressing up a pet in a costume and then making it read the news. It was kind of cute and also a little off.
I was listening to a podcast recently that brought those Kids News Networks to mind. It’s a podcast about internet culture and is very much not made for me. I listen to it because, sometimes, it can explain internet mysteries I am just too out of the loop to understand. Mr. Beast, West Elm Caleb, BYU Virgins, etc – these are all things I have (sort of) learned about. I like knowing things. I’ve listened to this podcast for a couple of years and this is the first time the Kids News Network came to mind. I think it’s because they have settled on some standard questions for their guests and those questions make it clear that they are not speaking to me or anyone in my generation or older. It’s kids talking to kids, I guess? (Except, of course, they are not kids. They are full grown adults with their own apartments and this podcast is their job.)
The first question that they will henceforth be asking all of their guests is, “What is your first internet memory?” Inevitably, these answers take the interviewee back to their childhood. They begin with things like, “In the third grade, I snuck on my family’s computer…” I don’t know how I, a Gen X-er, would answer this question. I heard a lot about the internet before it became available to me and even then, it was in little bursts. I’d been anticipating email for years before we finally got it at my college for my senior year. I had a scintillating email exchange with a guy at another college that had been set up by a mutual friend. Is that an internet memory? Not really. I got a Hotmail account in the late 90s – which was about all I could manage because I was mostly on the road. I finally got a computer that could connect to the internet in maybe 2000? None of these are like…”oooh, the impact of the internet” kind of memories. I think this is because I was an adult when the internet became a thing I had access to. Maybe others in my generation have better, more fun memories – like those who were into computers and had modems in the early days – but mostly, you’re not going to get good early internet stories out of Gen X.
The second question they ask on the Kids News Network (Sorry. That’s not fair, it’s ICYMI.) is “What was your first fandom?” I am intrigued by this question because of all the assumptions baked into it. It assumes that everyone they speak to will have been a part of a fandom of some kind and not just one, either. I have been thinking about this fandom situation for a while now and wondering about why the generations after us are such…uh…Stans.
I have been fascinated by how unironically the generations after me have loved what they love, for some time. Before I started thinking about fandoms, I had noticed how almost every Millennial had read and loved Harry Potter as a child. It seems absolutely foundational to their whole generation. There is not a book that everyone read when I was a kid. There is not a movie we all saw and there was not a TV show we all watched. There were things a lot of folks saw or read or listened to but we liked what we liked and for the most part we didn’t form our communities around those things. The only fandoms I can think of were Deadheads and Phishheads. For the most part, our communities were local and connected to the people we had access to nearby.
We liked stuff – some of it passionately but we didn’t necessarily group up around things. I’m trying to imagine who I might have been a part of the fandom for – maybe Crowded House? Or Suzanne Vega? Like, I really loved Tori Amos when she emerged on the scene but I never went to a concert and I would have been embarrassed to be as public about my interest in her as I’ve seen Millennials be. We’ve all heard of the power of KPOP fans and Swifties by now. It’s a thing. I loved Duran Duran in my youth but I was not a Duranie and no one I knew would have claimed that status, even if they were crazy for Duran Duran. Fan clubs were a mail order experience and I didn’t know anyone in one. Fandom is absolutely mysterious to me. And I suspect this is because of the internet.
I think the folks at Kids New Network ask what their guests’ first fandom was because that’s the way they formed communities as children. Identities were formed on-line in fan spaces. You found your people in your favorite show’s chat room. (Or something – I literally don’t know!) It’s a very sensible question for people younger than me and it may explain a kind of uniformity of taste that has tended to happen in the last twenty years or so. If you get your community from people all liking the same stuff, it makes sense that there is a kind of value in conformity, in bonding together over a band, for example. In my formative years, no one loved anyone as uniformly as Beyonce is loved by her generation. Madonna was very popular and I loved her too – but she was equally loathed as she was loved. If Millennials decide they love you, get ready because eventually they will all turn up. (Not really, I know but it seems that way from here certainly.) Is Gen Z the same? I don’t know. You’d have to ask the folks on the internet culture podcast, I guess.
I suspect that this fandom arts culture that we have now is entirely driven by how things developed on the internet. It is internet-based love and community. I find it fascinating and also foreign. It’s a curious sensation to feel so outside a conversation, to be able to understand all the words and begin to realize how different our generational realities can be. Hearing about generational commonalities around the internet and fandom makes me feel our differences in a way I don’t often think about. There’s just something about it that makes it feel like I’m learning about a new trend on the Kids News Network.
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Filed under: age, art, feminism, Gen X, music, TV, writing | Tags: feminism, Fleishman Is In Trouble, Free Bird, Generation X, Millennial, Once in a Lifetime, Same as it ever was
This is going to be a regular thing now, isn’t it? This thing where Millennials play Gen X-ers now? This is going to happen a lot from here on out, I’m starting to realize.
I’d already watched seven episodes of Fleishman Is in Trouble but it hadn’t been bothering me much. I was too pre-occupied with how it compared to the book and what had changed and wondering if I felt differently about it as a TV show. But then, Lizzy Caplan’s character went to a barbeque in New Jersey and the scene was just chock full of model gorgeous young Millennials and then she walked past four Millennials (or maybe Gen Z?) men, playing “Free Bird” in the backyard and suddenly the generational stuff was all I could think about.
You all are familiar with the song “Free Bird,” right? It’s a Leonard Skynyrd song from 1973. For Gen X, “Free Bird” was a joke. A literal joke. You probably could not have gone to a concert in the 80s without some joker yelling, “Free Bird” to the band in any moment of silence. And it was very clear that no one actually WANTED to hear “Free Bird.” When a band got tired of this joke and learned “Free Bird” so they could play it when someone shouted it, people laughed after the first few chords but only a sadistic band would play the whole thing. And I will confess something to you. I understood this as a joke long before I ever actually heard the song “Free Bird.” I was really surprised when I finally listened to it, honestly. “That’s Free Bird?!?” It was not at all what I expected. I was imagining an epic like “Stairway to Heaven” and it was this thin, maudlin thing instead.
Anyway, to see a bunch of young people singing “Free Bird” at a backyard barbeque in a completely unironic and earnest manner really confused me. People like this song now? This character is supposed to be 41 in the show, so she is technically an elder Millennial as the eldest Millennials are turning 42 this year but the show is set in 2016, so she’s actually Gen X, just like in the book. This Gen X character is having a fully earnest moment with the joke song of the 80s? What the hell is going on?!
So I looked up Taffy Brodesser-Akner, the writer of this book, as well as the showrunner of the show and yes, she’s Gen X. She’s 47. But – and this will be significant for cultural signifiers – she spent a lot of her youth in an Hasidic community. My girl probably had very little exposure to Gen X youth culture in the moment – which may be how this “Free Bird” situation occurred. And it may be why there’s a lot of confusing cultural and generational issues in this show. I suspect the delay in entering the pop cultural landscape might mean that she may be more Millennial than Gen X in her cultural influences.
Like, she’s telling a Gen X story about aging using iconic Millennial actors. Jesse Eisenberg is the epitome of a Millennial leading man. I’m not sure you could get a more representative actor for his generation. Maybe Daniel Radcliffe? But for American Millennial angst? Top of the list. I saw a Tweet about this show suggesting that Jesse Eisenberg grappling with middle age meant that the Tweeter, too, was facing down middle age. It becomes a Millennial middle age story in a Gen X outfit. I found the whole experience disorienting.
I wasn’t crazy about the book, as you may recall. But I hated the TV show. I’m not sure why I felt compelled to watch it. Maybe because a lot of the reviews I read suggested the TV show was better than the book? Regardless, I stuck with it, maybe just out of morbid curiosity. I suppose the curiosity was largely about my own response to it. Why do I hate it so much? And so much more than the book, too? Why am I so alienated by a show by someone, who is more or less my age, taking place in the city I live in? Shouldn’t I relate to this somehow? Is it just the bizarre intermeshing of Millennial actors and styles with Gen X dialogue and t-shirts? I don’t think so.
One of the major differences between the book and the show is that we see a lot more of the narrator in the show. We get her story. We understand that the divorce she’s telling us about is just a way for her to understand her own dissatisfaction with her own life. And the thing of it is, she’s roiling with dissatisfaction. Like a lot of recent Gen X mother narratives, she’s trying out abandoning her family and fascinated with another woman who has abandoned hers. But, like, of course she’s dissatisfied. She gave up her writing career to become a stay at home mom. And when people say to her, “Maybe you should go back to work?” She somehow doesn’t think that’s the answer. It’s a whole crisis about how she doesn’t know who she is anymore but like – she’s changed her name, given up her career and moved to the suburbs. It’s not rocket science.
And weirdly, the TV show is even further removed from the feminist movement than the book was. There’s a reference to “the Future is Female” t-shirts but no one wants to talk about it. The narrator not only works at a men’s magazine (as she did in the book) but also idealizes a super sexist male writer and often re-reads his super sexist books for fun. In the journey from the book to the screen, she’s become one of those women who only like and hang out with men. (More about this later.) There is no sisterhood, only shared trauma. (If this was true for the character in the book, it wasn’t obvious.)
And everyone is just so shockingly unaware of their privilege. But also, they’re aching for meaning and searching for it desperately. The show seems to be trying to say something about “middle age” and “getting older” for our generation and yet I can relate to none of it. The narrator doesn’t recognize herself, doesn’t know who she is anymore and instead of doing stuff to help her find herself, she just shrugs and says, “I guess that’s what getting old means!”
No. Sorry. No. It’s the choices you made, you silly rabbit. You gave up your last name (as does every married woman in this show, another generational disconnect – Millennial women are statistically much more likely to do that. Such a weird backslide. And also weird coming from a writer with a hyphenated name.) You gave up your career. Like – what is this? 1955? Are you struggling with the “problem that has no name”? Read some feminist theory, goddamnit!
I guess that’s the issue. Like, it’s 2022. It should not be a mystery why a woman who has surrendered every aspect of herself (her name, her city, her work, her identity) might not be happy living with shallow people in the suburbs. It’s not some existential conundrum. Like, of course. Of fucking course. Put down the Philip Roth novels and go get yourself some Betty Friedan or Simone de Beauvoir or, like, Liz Plank? Maybe some Virginia Woolf if you’re stuck on literary fiction.
It reminds me of this woman I knew in my touring days who confessed to us (the other women on the tour) that she’d never really liked other women. She’d always hung out exclusively with men and allied herself with only men. Eight months into the tour, she got pretty sick of the men’s shit and realized we, the other women on the tour, might be some support, hence the confession. It is a strategic choice to ally with men and not a crazy one in any business run by men (which is most of them). But sooner or later you’re going to run into some sexism that those men will either be unwilling to look at or deal with and you’re going to need some women to help you. This TV show and book seem like a dramatization of that moment and but with no awareness that that is what’s happening. If any of the women in this show had had just one good woman friend, it would have made a world of difference.
This show is hard for me to sympathize with because I have many women friends I can turn to and have turned to all these years. I have been in the feminist movement this whole time. I don’t need to try and figure out who I am now because I haven’t made any choices outside of my own integrity and intention. I haven’t surrendered any of myself and I have trouble relating to these characters who just pushed themselves aside and called it a day. But I guess this is true for a lot of people who follow more conventional paths. Maybe you do find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife and you may ask yourself, “How did I get here?” In the case of the people in this book, I can guess how you got there.
But then, this reference to Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime” might just go right over the head of the writer of this book/show because it was a hit in 1980 and a Gen X cultural touchstone. Come to think of it, it’s probably the song the band at that barbeque ought to have been playing instead of “Free Bird.” “Free Bird”?! Did they really use “Free Bird”? Was “Once in a Lifetime” too on the nose? I mean, we’ve known since we were kids that adults might be struggling with their beautiful houses and beautiful wives and the large automobiles or even the shotgun shacks. We’ve heard that it was the “same as it ever was” since 1980. We can even do the dance that goes along with it. “Once in a Lifetime” does a better job of summing up this show than the show does. Maybe that’s why they didn’t use it. Or the rights were just too expensive and so they just went with “Free Bird,” joke or no joke. In this case, it wasn’t funny.
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Filed under: age, feminism, Gen X, movies | Tags: 40s, ageism, Carey Mulligan, feminism, Gen X women, Generation X, Jodi Kantor, Megan Twohey, movie, She Said, Zoe Kazan
It was the publicity photo that filled me with rage. In it, star reporters, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, stand like bookends around actors, Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan, who are leaning on a ladder. I’ve got nothing against ladders or any of the people involved but still the photo made me mad. Here we have two of our Gen X heroes, two women who heroically chased down a thorny story, putting themselves at risk and for no reason at all, other than “Hollywood” they are being portrayed by two younger fresher faced women. It’s not as if this story happened twenty years ago so they need to demonstrate younger selves. These events took place in 2017. It’s not like they’re ancient history. Why are we looking at women in their 30s when it was women in their 40s who broke this story?
Now – I’ve done the research and it turns out Mulligan and Kazan are not technically THAT much younger than Twohey and Kantor. There’s a not quite ten year gap. But to my eye it is much larger. Mulligan and Kazan can (and have recently) played characters much younger than they are – so they do not read as women who will soon be greeting their 40s. And maybe more significantly, there is a generational divide in that nearly ten year gap.
It feels meaningful to me that Gen X women broke this story and that they broke it in their 40s. I think women in their 30s couldn’t have done it. This is not because women in their 30s aren’t capable or smart or even experienced. It’s because, I think, something shifts for a lot of women in their 40s that allows for the kind of tenacity and not giving a fuck that was necessary to break that New York Times Weinstein story.
The fact that it was Gen X women who broke this story matters. It was largely Gen X women who were the victims of Harvey Weinstein and these ground shifting conversations happened between women who shared a generational history.
I know Hollywood loves to cast particularly beautiful movie stars to play regular people. This is not new or news. But to my eye, it looks as though they cast two beautiful girls to play two powerful women. And the women they’re portraying are also very beautiful! I imagine their beauty was helpful in their careers. Congratulations to everyone on looking gorgeous. But I wish they’d made a different choice for this film. I’ve been impressed with Carey Mulligan for a long time now. Promising Young Woman was a tour de force for her. I am usually thrilled to see her in anything. Not this time though.
There are so few women in their 40s on screen. As I’ve said before, there are so few, many people have no idea what women in their 40s could even look like. Couldn’t we have had this one? Couldn’t Generation X have seen ourselves as we actually are instead of played by younger women who look like they just got out of college? The eldest Millennials have entered their early 40s. I think they might be powerful and plentiful and loud enough as a generation to remain visible – but could we, Gen X, not be erased even as we stand here?
I think age is an important factor in the reporting that happened around Weinstein – at least for the women at the New York Times. I think women any younger than 40 could not have broken this case. I think a reporter who is also a woman would need a lot of experience under her belt, both of journalism but also at negotiating being a woman, both with other women and at not taking the usual bullshit from men. Harvey Weinstein targeted young women. He used tricks and tactics that young women are especially vulnerable to, or at least were when the events of this story took place. I think it’s incredibly significant that this a story about what happened twenty years ago as well as what happened now.
I understand why these younger actors wanted to play these reporters. The reporters are powerful women who are incredibly good at their jobs. Those are shoes it could be very powerful to step into and live in for a while – but if I were to watch this movie, I feel like I’d watch it the way I watch little girls playing kings, like “Good for them! They’re going to grow so much from this!” In other words, it’ll feel like watching some playacting, not authentic powerful women taking down a monster. The movie will be like the Shutterbugs‘ lil’ 911 instead of Spotlight.
There are so many actors in their 40s, who are the age of those reporters, who I would have loved to have seen do this. I think younger women would also benefit from seeing actors older than them. If there’s one thing that’s for sure, it’s that if things go well, they too will be in their 40s one day and they’ll want to see their peers kicking ass, just like I do.
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Filed under: art, Art Scenes, community, feminism, Gen X, grief | Tags: 90s, Believe Her, Charlottesville, cloche hat, Cool, Cool Chicks, Criminalized Survivorship, Dawn Powell, F Scott Fitzgerald, Gatsby, Gen X, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Remedios Varo, scene, Steve Keene, The Great Gatsby, True Crime, vintage clothes
Around about the time I was coming of age, my hometown was becoming a scene. Our hometown band was about to hit the mainstream and art was seeping out of every corner of the place. There were plays in bars, on the street, in art galleries. There was an artist who sold his paintings for $3 and also painted the walls and restrooms of restaurants all over town. His work was everywhere. It was a heady moment.
Into that heady moment, stepped a man who my friends and I called Gatsby, because he was always dressed up like a 1920s gentleman. He had an air about him – a man out of time. I live in New York City now, and here you’d never notice this guy. He’d slip into some faux speakeasy and you’d just think – oh sure, one of those – but then, there, in my hometown, this guy was highly visible. It was a scene then and Gatsby quickly took his place at the center of it.
I was part of the scene, too. I was in a play at the art gallery with the man who a couple years later became a rock star. I was in the play in the writer’s apartment. I was in the legendary production of Hair that happened in the ROTC building. I hung out at the restaurants where the cool hung out and I was in the Three Penny Opera featuring the hip alt bluegrass band as the orchestra. I played the old mother, at age 19 – but still. I was in it. I was there. But somehow I wasn’t really included most of the time. And it wasn’t just that I was young. Many girls much younger than me were seen on the arms of the cool guys, at the cool parties, on cool guys’ retro motorcycles. They were cool chicks.
Then, I didn’t understand why I wasn’t more IN the scene. I mean. I wrote poems, too, just like all the fellas. I played guitar. I was ALSO obsessed with the Beat poets. I also wore vintage clothes. (Hats especially! I was the one in cloches and such. I had a hot pink feathered one for special occasions.) I was doing so many of the things the cool guys were doing – not because I was trying to be cool but because that’s just where I was at. And yet…Gatsby never spoke to me. He probably didn’t know my name.
Decades later, in this era, I heard that Gatsby has been shot and killed by his girlfriend. The community heaved in grief. Many people I care about were devastated. There was a great mourning for the man and also the scene of which he once was a big part. It is beautiful and awful and nostalgic and odd and endlessly captivating.
I want to be clear that the facts of this case are more or less in and they are tragic and sad but I’m not here to talk about the facts of this case. What I feel the need to unpack is my own journey with both the news and the history of the scene and how they intersect.
My first response to this dramatic circumstance was to mourn with those who were close to him, to mourn the symbol and the past he took with him. I immediately assumed that the dominant perception that his girlfriend was crazy was correct and that that was the whole story, because that’s what those closest to him thought.
But then the podcast I’d just finished listening to (Believe Her) came to mind, in which a young woman had shot her abuser, an outwardly gentle man who none of his friends could imagine hurting a fly but who routinely assaulted his girlfriend and posted his assaults to Porn Hub. I didn’t want to assume Gatsby was somehow involved in his own murder but I also could easily imagine how he could be. I didn’t really know him after all.
And once I’d thought it, I couldn’t help searching for evidence in one direction or another. I looked first at my own experience with him – one wherein I was invisible, one where he spoke to my friends who looked like models but not to me and I recognized a pattern of behavior I have seen over the years in other people. Those who don’t see women as people are historically the most dangerous. I just read this article about the court case around the Shitty Media Men list and writer Claire Vaye Watkins says, “I am saying a sexist negation, a refusal to acknowledge a female writer as a writer, as a peer, as a person, is of a piece with sexual entitlement.” This is what raised my antennae.
Gatsby had a reputation for dating a lot of young waitresses. In a small city, dating young waitresses is like dating models in a big one. It reflects an interest in aesthetics beyond other characteristics. And again, I want to be clear. I did not know this man but it was easy to extrapolate, to guess, to wonder.
Approximately 30% of the women in prison for murder are criminalized survivors – that is they defended themselves and the state locked them up. Not a lot of women kill for no reason. The latest news suggest that this woman did. But I couldn’t help noting other factors that made me nervous about just assuming things were as they seemed. Gatsby’s girlfriend was a 38 year old circus performer. He was a 53 year old finance professional. There was a disparity of age, finances and experience that suggested a power differential. Gatsby had a gun collection – one of the guns was the murder weapon. So, I guess he had a loaded gun collection? Or at least a bullet collection alongside the gun collection? Maybe lots of kind gentle men you know own a lot of guns – but in my experience, a man with a lot of guns is a man to be wary of. So – Gatsby’s crazy girlfriend murdered him with one of his many guns.
And it is awful. It is. But it was wild to watch a community of people – many of whom I used to know – unravel around the situation.
Apparently other women had noticed that it was mostly men who were openly grieving his loss. Other women wondered, aloud – un-like me, if there could be more to this story than “crazy girlfriend kills partner.” One woman leapt to the defense of the grieving men saying they were probably more feminist than a lot of women she knew. And probably that is true for her and I’m sorry she knows so few feminists but sorry, no, this would not be true for me. A lot of these dudes, though I have a lot of affection for them, aren’t demonstrably feminist. They’re maybe not actively sexist but I’ve not seen much feminism from them. Granted, I hang out with mostly feminists these days so my bar is high. Just being a mostly nice guy doesn’t qualify you in my book. These guys were the scene back then and despite being a lifelong and active feminist, I would never have made the mistake of mentioning it to this crew at that time. Maybe things are different now. I hope so.
The community – the one from the past and the one of the moment – were sort of running into each other and from my distant post in NYC, far away from this, from my hometown, from my own nostalgia for that bygone Gatsby era, I felt as though I were watching a community car wreck in slow motion. There were a lot of heartbroken Gen X and Gen Jones men in incredible wrenching mourning for their friend and a lot of Millennial women trying to sort through the mess – some loudly making assumptions, some defending, some grieving, too.
Was Gatsby a gentle man or a closet abuser?
The man was cool and very visible. So a lot of people had opinions. In the True Crime podcast version of this story, we’d hear from all of them and decide for ourselves what we think. Having not had any contact with this guy in decades, I have no idea. He was an icon in a small community. That comes with some baggage, I imagine.
This is the thing, though, that I keep returning to. I hung out with some of these guys in the apex of this heady movement in the 90s. Some of them saw me and some saw past me. They didn’t think I was cool but women weren’t really at the forefront of this scene. They were barely in it at all.
There were some cool chicks around though. The cool chicks then were a different sort of girl. A lot of them were very vulnerable in some way. I went to the house of one of these guys one time and when we got there, there was a girl in his bed. He told me she’d just run away from home and had nowhere to go. She was in high school. He was in his 20s. There was a lot of this sort of thing in those days. The cool chicks drank a lot and smoked like chimneys and now I realize that they were likely also processing an abundance of previous trauma. A girl like that might finally go “crazy” in her 30s. A lot of these guys wanted to “help” these girls. But they also wanted to have sex with them and I’m going to guess that sometimes these things did not sensibly go together.
Where do I fit these memories in the True Crime podcast version of this story?
What I keep returning to was how uncool I felt myself to be among a lot of fellas who were into a lot of the stuff I was into. As a young woman, I was not IN the scene. But now I know what it feels like to be seen as an equal, to be genuinely cool to my fellow artists – to have a mutual artistic experience. The scene was a boy’s club. In those days only cool chicks were allowed. I literally cannot recall a single identifiable woman from this scene. This is not to say that they weren’t there. I don’t remember everything. I didn’t know everyone. But I was on the look out. If there’d been a woman to look to in this movement, I’d have locked on like a lobster. My sense is that women just weren’t really included as visibly as the men. If you were a woman in this scene then, I’m sorry I didn’t see you either.
This has happened throughout history in arts scenes. Remedios Varo was a surrealist. She was at the salons. You can see her included in Exquisite Corpses. You can see her work on their themes. She was in it. But read a book on Surrealism and she might only get a passing mention as Benjamin Péret’s lover. She was IN that scene but never seen as an equal part of it.
She and Leonora Carrington made their own scene in Mexico City, I think. They may not get a chapter in the Art History textbooks like the male Surrealists do – but they built their own world, where they weren’t the girlfriends of the cool guys – but the center of a magical realist world.
It feels like, scenes are for men and the cool chicks who hung around them. Being part of a scene that was once a genuine SCENE was exciting. I do have tremendous nostalgia for that moment in time but it is accompanied by a strange lacuna. On reading the newspaper article about Gatsby and the scene, I had the strange sensation of having been there but always just out of frame. The play in the writer’s apartment that Gatsby sent a typewritten note about? I was in that play. I was kind of the center of it. The band that Gatsby promoted? I was in those audiences a lot and I was in that musical where they were the orchestra. I’m there but not there. That’s what it was like to be in the scene then. I could stand, center stage, sing my heart out and still be entirely invisible.
It turns out that the crazy girlfriend shot Gatsby in his sleep. She shot him with his gun, called the police and began livestreaming. It’s an awful situation. The end of the True Crime podcast is just sad. It’s just really sad. All it is is sad. But ultimately this is not about Gatsby. Just like The Great Gatsby is not really about Gatsby, is it? It’s the world around him. It’s the scene.
And you know something? F Scott Fitzgerald was in a scene. Maybe he WAS the scene. But my favorite writer of the period, Dawn Powell, was born the exact same year and wrote truly remarkable novels and plays that were well received at the time and never felt herself part of the scene. Not Fitzgerald’s scene and not the theatre scene, which Powell longed to be a part of, as well. (Read her diaries for lots of these sorts of moments.) She was so much not a part of scenes that her work went out of print for a very long time. Meanwhile, no one gave a damn about The Great Gatsby when it first came out but the scene grew in retrospect and now few American students can escape reading it.
Of course, I long to be a part of a scene again but I want it to be one where women are full artistic participants and not just the cool chicks at home in an artist’s bed. Thinking about Gatsby sent me down a lot of paths I haven’t visited in a while and I see them a lot differently than I did decades ago. A scene shifts in the rearview mirror – it gets both a glow and a sharper focus.
I learned about Gatsby’s death a few hours after I wrote about meeting Lawrence Ferlinghetti. I’d been thinking about one of the most famous art scenes in American history and about what it was like to be a woman trying to just be seen by someone from it for a moment. I was patronized by a man who hung out with the Beats but was so confident in his position in a scene that he preferred not to be called a Beat poet. There was a chiming quality of these two things for me. These were highly visible men in artistically exciting times and just out of the frame, just a little blurry and off to the side, I’m sure there were many women who longed to be seen, to be heard, to be in the scene for real and not just there and out of focus.
Good night Gatsby. Good night Ferlinghetti. Rest well gentlemen. I’m so sorry for the loss of your loved ones. You made an enormous impact on a lot of people.
Now –
Ladies? Y’all want to start a scene with me?
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Filed under: Gen X, music | Tags: Atomic Bombs, doom, Indigo Girls, Prince of Darkness
You will likely not be surprised to learn I was crazy for the Indigo Girls in my youth. When I learned to play guitar, it was Indigo Girls’ songs that I particularly focused on. I didn’t learn the entire Nomads, Indians and Saints songbook but I got pretty close. In those days, we bought songbooks. There were no chords on the internet since there wasn’t much internet.
Somehow in the last couple of decades, I’d lost track of what the Indigo Girls were making (along with almost every other band I used to be into – I don’t know what happened. I blame digital music and aging, I guess.) so I thought I should catch up. I added all of their albums from the last era to my “New Moment” playlist on Spotify, which is where I put all the music I want to make sure I listen to. Since there’s a live album in that mix, I’ve been hearing some old favorites in addition to new songs. Some of them I’m hearing differently now. “Prince of Darkness” popped up and I thought, “Damn if this song doesn’t sum up the Gen X experience!”
The Indigo Girls themselves are not (technically) Gen X. They’re both Gen Jones, the OG X-ers by a couple of years, but this all makes sense somehow. They’re who we looked up to growing up. The Indigo Girls first major label album came out when I was in high school and “Prince of Darkness” wasn’t on the radio but it was a favorite for me and many of my friends.
My place is of the sun and
This place is of the dark
And I do not feel the romance
I do not catch the spark.
And the real Gen X kicker:
Someone’s got his finger on the button in some room
No one can convince me
We aren’t gluttons for our doom.
This line was always meaningful to me. It was always THAT moment in the song – the one you’d wait for.
But it strikes me now that while this concern was meaningful to my peers, this idea was not ever present in EVERYONE’s youth. There was a lot of doom talk in those days. Movies, TV shows, TV movies. There was a very popular poster of the mushroom cloud over Japan that folks hung up everywhere. As a kind of memento mori, I guess?
War Games is a fun movie about possible nuclear annihilation and we were so convinced the Russians were going to come for us that Sting had to write a song about the Russians loving their children, too. The world seemed full of people who were greedy for doom. That’s how it felt in the late 80s – and damned if it hasn’t come back around. The nihilistic Supreme Court has rolled back Roe v Wade and gun restrictions and many other things that helped keep doom at bay – but here it comes.
For the first time, the generations behind us are worried about nuclear annihilation and Russia is a serious threat again.
Are we gluttons for our doom?
The thing of it is – and I think this is the thing other generations don’t understand about Gen X – that song is actually about finding ways to live in a dark world. We may be gluttons for our doom but we “try to make this place (our) place” and our “place is of the sun and this place is of the dark.”
But our place is still of the sun. I think that’s what people miss about us as a generation. We seem cynical and nihilistic but we’re actually weirdly hopeful. We know our place is of the sun, even as no one can convince us we aren’t gluttons for our doom. We will not be a pawn for the Prince of Darkness. We try real hard not to be a pawn for anyone, when it comes down to it.
I think most Gen X-ers can handle the contradiction of living in a world hungry for its doom and still seek grace and light wherever we can find it. We’re practiced at that double vision. Over on the Gen X subreddit a few months ago, a younger person asked us how we dealt with the ever present threat of nuclear annihilation in our youth. They were starting to panic about what Putin might do as the war in Ukraine heated up so they asked us, the generation who has some practice at threats like this, what we did to not go off the deep end. It was a weirdly hopeful thread. There was some snark, of course. But also lots of earnest words of advice for someone stuck in an anxiety that was new to them and old for us. We may be gluttons for our doom but we’ll help someone out of the darkness if we can.
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Filed under: art, Creative Process, feminism, Gen X, Imagination, podcasting, writing | Tags: Elizabeth Gilbert
As many of my readers will be aware, back in 2018, provoked by the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, I wrote a piece called “I Am a Dragon Now. The Fear of Men Is My Food.” A few months after that piece went around, elements of it poured themselves into a piece that became The Dragoning, an audio drama podcast. The podcast came out in the spring of 2020 and Season Two just launched.
I’m taking you through this timeline because here, in 2022, an award winning author has published a novel called When Women Were Dragons, in which there is an event known as The Dragoning. A friend sent me a review of this novel because it sounds an awful lot like my piece. Not identical, of course, but close enough to be uncomfortable.
Has, bestselling author, Kelly Barnhill STOLEN my idea? I doubt it. I suspect dragons were in the air and we both reached for them. I think of Elizabeth Gilbert’s idea about ideas. She unpacks this notion in Big Magic. This is her theory that ideas just sort of float through the air and they visit whomever they think will realize them. The ideas visit lots of artists at once, just to be sure they are born. My guess is that The Dragoning was in the air and it chose both me and Kelly Barnhill. I got the idea out faster but Barnhill will spread it wider.
It is slightly uncomfortable, of course, to find that something that came from my brain also appeared in another person’s brain – and a woman who is exactly my age, no less. It’s like the idea was flying around in 2018 and was like – “I need a 44 year old woman to take this and run with it” and maybe it wasn’t even just me and Kelly Barnhill. Maybe there are a dozen more 48 year old women who were visited by the dragoning fairy four years ago.
Is it possible that Barnhill consciously or unconsciously lifted this idea from me? Like maybe she read the blog, which did go pretty viral, especially among Gen X women and thought, “I can imagine a world based on this!” And off she went. It is possible. Same thing happened to me! But, do I think she STOLE this idea from me as every novice writer is always convinced will happen to them? I do not. I’ve read Barnhill’s work. She has no shortage of imagination. She’s not out here trying to steal anything. She doesn’t need to. Her brain makes up lots of neat stuff on its own. She does not need to steal. I’m incredibly confident in her ability to make up her own magic.
But I do find myself in this incredibly awkward position of finding my own work slightly less google-able because someone else, with a much larger platform than me, has written a work with my title in it. They got Naomi Alderman, who wrote one of the most exciting books of the last few years – The Power, to write a review of it in the New York Times. Naomi Alderman is ALSO 48 years old. It feels like all the girls in my class are writing magical feminist speculative fiction and they all joined a club so they’re getting together and hanging out and I’m all by myself over here, quietly declaring I was here with this first.
The other thing that sucks about this is that the only way to find out if Barnhill’s work is somehow derivative of mine is to read it and I don’t feel I should, even though I know I’d enjoy her writing. I loved her novels for young people but I don’t want to mix up the waters. I don’t have any plans to write a third season of The Dragoning but I’d like to have the option and I don’t want to unconsciously take on a different writer’s dragons. So I guess I just have to wonder about it – or wait for my friends to read Barnhill’s book.
I feel like I want Barnhill’s book to be a success because maybe a rising dragon tide could lift all dragon boats. But I’m also not looking forward to being overshadowed by an established writer, who has an agent and an editor and all the trappings that come along with success. I’m proud of my work and it would be very painful if the spotlight shining on that award winning author just cast me further into the shadows. That’s why this is complicated. I am reasonably sure we’re all just part of a zeitgeist in a world where women long for the power of dragonhood, while we watch our rights and hope disappear. But the zeitgeist doesn’t feel great. Maybe just because I’m not in the club.
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Filed under: art, feminism, Gen X, movies | Tags: Anne Sexton, Elena Ferrante, feminism, Feminist, Gen X, Generation X, Livin' on a Prayer, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Sylvia Plath, The Lost Daughter, women
There’s a little bit of a conversation happening in feminist circles around the movie The Lost Daughter, written and directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal. I felt it was my duty, as a feminist on the internet, to watch it. I didn’t really think I’d have anything to SAY about it necessarily but I like to be informed and it turns out I do have something to say. Funnily enough my thoughts are probably more Gen X related than feminist related, though. I suppose at its heart it’s Gen X feminism that’s gotten under my skin.
The movie takes place in the more or less contemporary moment (though not precisely, as it is a covid-less world) and Olivia Coleman plays a 48 year old woman. When the movie flashes back to her twenty something self, it is to about twenty years ago, though it has a vague sense of being in the 90s. The character wears foam earphones, like back in the day. The song she tells us she loves is the Gen X anthem of Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer.” The context of the film says, “This is a Gen X woman.” But very little of this makes sense. Like, I guess a Gen X English woman could go crazy for “Livin’ on a Prayer” but it’s odd. It would mean something in real life. I don’t know what it would mean exactly but whatever it means doesn’t add up to the person in the movie.
Look, I, like the character, am also 48 so I may be overly tuned in to the specifics of this woman who is meant to be my age – but I would be awfully surprised to meet a woman my age who grew up in Leeds, became a passionate and respected academic translator of English poetry into Italian AND her favorite song was “Livin’ on a Prayer.” I’d need a whole movie to explain how that could be. Honestly.
Also – one of the central events of the movie is just so weird and out of generational character that it would need another movie’s worth of explanation to make it make sense. In the movie we learn that Coleman’s character has two daughters in their mid to late 20s – which means she had them in her early 20s. This would be extremely unusual for a highly educated ambitious Gen X woman. Certainly there are Gen X women who had their kids young, no doubt. But it is incredibly rare in a character like this one. Most Gen X academic nerds would wait years to have their kids. And to have TWO kids so young? Again, as an ambitious academic? One, I can buy. That’s a mistake, probably. Two, seems crazy. Like, I need an explanation for it, or I’m going to spend the whole movie confused. Which I did.
Anyway – (and this is a spoiler so skip ahead to the * towards the end if you want to be surprised)
SPOILER FOLLOWS:
– when her kids are five and seven she leaves them, whole cloth, never to be seen again until three years later. The movie tries to make this understandable but it’s just – weird.
As my Gen X friend, with whom I discussed this, said, “There WAS child care in the 90s.”
Like – leaving their kids is just not something I’ve ever heard of anyone doing. Tempted? Sure. Kids’ll make you crazy, I’m given to understand – But to just leave? When divorce, joint custody, childcare and blended families are all options that are on the table? She leaves her family for a rewarding sexy professional life. Seems like a nice life she’s leaving them for but the choice is super weird. Gen X moms know how to work it out. We grew up with working moms. The work/life question really isn’t this giant a conflict for Gen X moms. It still sucks. Don’t get me wrong. But it’s not so extreme that leaving for years at a time makes any sense. Our conflicts in this arena are much more subtle, more nuanced. We didn’t have to flee the people we love to have a life of the mind.
The thing that seems important to recognize is that this film is based on a book by Elena Ferrante – who writes about the specifics of Neapolitan women in earlier eras with razor sharp analysis. I haven’t read The Lost Daughter – but I’ve read her Neapolitan quadrilogy, with which it would seem to have a lot in common. I’d imagine they are set in similar time periods. I assume, from the structure of this film, that the book takes places decades ago. I know from the articles about it that it is concerned with both the mom character’s Neapolitan background and the bits of that she shares with her fellow tourists in the group. I assume that the main character, Leda, is of an entirely different generation. I can probably even guess which one. Based on the choices she makes and the desperation she feels and how limited her scope is – I’d say she’s a contemporary of Sylvia Plath or Anne Sexton. These are women so backed into corners they feel they have no other choice but to stick their heads in the oven or permanently walk out the door.
These choices are perfectly readable in a time of extreme oppression. And I’m delighted to realize that the 90s were not a time of extreme oppression. Gen X women did actually have choices in the 90s. If we wanted to study Italian poetry, we did it. It’s not that extreme, actually. So this character just seems like she has a need for some medication and a good therapist, at the very least. This story, as told in the film, makes no sense. But – if I just sort of overlay the events on to say, the 1950s or early 1960s– with a bunch of Neapolitan roughs – it all falls into place. Context is everything.
Let’s do some math. Let’s assume this film is set in this current moment. So – this character is my age, right? Which means she probably graduated from college in 1995. Her eldest child is 25 – so she had her two years after she finished undergrad so that’s 1997. The character is a serious academic so she must have gone on to get a masters, probably a PhD. Did she get pregnant while she was in grad school? Probably. Unless she’s supposed to be in grad school at the point when we first meet her? And that old guy is her advisor? I don’t think so – because a well regarded scholar wouldn’t be citing the work of a grad student. She’s published somewhere. She had her two kids somewhere in the middle of getting a PhD and getting published. I’m not saying that’s not possible – but it is pretty unlikely in the late 90s. At the point when we meet this character, her kids are 5 and 7 which means it’s around 2002.
This Gen X mom abandoned her kids in 2002. It’s not 1957. It’s 2002. There WAS childcare in 2002. Again, not great childcare- but childcare. Also, there were cell phones. I got one in 2002 and I was very late to the party. AND – as my friend pointed out there was feminism. There was serious feminism. I’m sorry but you couldn’t be a serious scholar in this era without some encounter with feminism. It’s a whole field of scholarship and no Comparative Literature scholar could get through academia without a serious grounding in it. I’m not saying every academic in this era was a feminist but to not have any relationship to those issues at all in this era? Sorry. No way. You’re either in the game or you’re Camille Paglia and no one’s going around just translating a bunch of male poets in 2002 with no awareness of what feminist scholarship would have to say about it.
But set in the right context – in, say, an era that had problems “that had no name,” like what Betty Friedan was talking about, and when second wave feminism was really just strapping on its boots, sure – it all would make total sense. We would, in fact, root for a character to get out in that context. This character would be a singular person up against the tide of her culture and her time and we would have her back.
I mean – the thing is, both feminism and childcare had been around for decades by the time this character leaves her kids. A lot of Gen X kids were raised on both of those things. Many of our mothers were feminists. Many of them were working mothers who sent us to daycare. Our parents got divorces when things didn’t work out. And it was fine. Not a big deal. But this film somehow lives in a world where there are neither Gen X feminists nor Baby Boomer feminists or Millennial or Zoomer feminists for that matter. This is probably because it’s based on a book that takes place so long before.
Do Gen X moms fantasize about leaving their families and disappearing for awhile? I’m sure they do but fantasizing is very different than doing – and the choice to chuck it all, just generationally, doesn’t make sense. I feel like a lot of Gen X moms waited to have kids so we wouldn’t feel the need to abandon them.
*SPOILERS COMPLETE
Is the film well done? It is actually. The performances are excellent; Coleman is always amazing and Gyllenhaal has done extraordinary work. I loved how the eroticism of the character’s work was palpable and exciting. There’s an artful quality to it all – but it’s just weird. And not in a good way.
As Nylah Burton said, in Bitch Magazine,
“We need more messy female characters, but “messy female character” does not have to mean illegible female characters. Sometimes the two are mixed up. Confusing the audience about who a character is at their core doesn’t endear us to them or make them feminist heroes;”
Making Coleman’s character specifically Gen X makes things that would have been legible, absolutely opaque. The good news is that this movie makes me see some incredible progress that has been made over the years – that Gen X women are actually more together than I’d have thought.
I feel like you could MAKE it make sense – with another few hours of story and context and explanation. Just the way I’d need another movie to figure out how a working class Gen X academic woman from Leeds ended up a big fan of Bon Jovi, I need another movie to make this movie make sense. It might be an interesting story but it would take a long time to explain.
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Songs for the Struggling Artist 