Filed under: Acting, movies, TV | Tags: Acting, closed captions, movies, subtitles, The Wheel of Time, TV, What did he say?, whisper, Whisper Acting
We decided to watch the second season of The Wheel of Time (A fantasy adventure show on Amazon) and by the middle of the show, we were laughing our faces off. This was not because the show is funny. It is not. It takes itself very seriously. But we were cracking ourselves up due to the near universal use of Whisper Acting. The Wheel of Time is hardly the first show to go all in on Whisper Acting but they go hard and it happened to be the show where it started to become ridiculous.
We started talking about it because the dialogue was so hard to hear or understand and yet the action sequences were loud and aggressive. We’ve read many of the articles and watched the videos about the trends in sound design that make this happen and have led to an extraordinary percentage of people using the closed captions or subtitles when watching TV. It’s partly the sound design, sure – but it’s also the acting.
So many people are whispering. Like, so many. Is this what they’re teaching in acting school these days? If so, I kindly request them to stop.
Whispering is a film technique. We don’t use it in the theatre much, as we have to be heard and a stage whisper is, in fact, very demanding to do. But on film, when everyone is wearing a mic, whispering is easily done. In fact, it’s much easier than saying one’s lines full voiced, as it can cover some gaps in performance or make a line reading sound intense, without any real effort. It’s fairly easy to cover bad acting with whispering. I suspect in the case of The Wheel of Time, it’s not because the director is trying to cover bad acting – because they’re all very good otherwise – but maybe because they think the whispering makes things seem more dramatic or intimate? Or maybe because it’s the trend of the current moment? Or maybe everyone’s afraid of using their voices now? I don’t know why they do it but I do know I felt a palpable relief whenever anyone used their actual full voice in this show.
The extra difficulty with everyone whispering in a fantasy show is that there are a lot of made-up words, a lot of made-up names and places and when we can’t really hear the sounds of those made-up places or people, we have no idea what or who anyone is talking about. That’s when it starts to become funny. That’s when we start whispering to each other. (“Where did he say he was going?” “I don’t know. It was so quiet, sounded like stosthiesfdfkha?”) That’s why when there was a long lead up to a scene between the Aes Sedai and her warder, I couldn’t resist adding some whispered dialogue as it ramped up, saying “I can’t wait to have a dramatic whisper scene where we just whisper angrily at each other.” Then the warder came in and he started whispering, and we fell out of our chairs laughing. It got even funnier when the whispering man banged his fist on the table in the middle of whispering. Like, you’re not trying to be quiet, obviously. This is just too funny. We missed the whole scene, we were laughing so hard. I don’t think that’s what the showrunners were going for.
One of our favorite whispered moments was when a big group of guys were riding their horses through some dry hills. Despite the fact that horses are loud and the outdoors eats sound, these guys were still whispering to each other. That one wasn’t just funny, it stretched the bounds of credulity. Just a bunch of dudes whispering on horseback as their horses loudly clip-clop over the ground.
Listen, I understand the power of a whisper. My favorite technique for getting a room to quiet down is just to make little whispering sounds because almost everyone wants to know the secret and a whisper sounds like a secret. But if you whisper all the time, you lose all the whisper’s power. If you whisper all the time, people will stop listening – especially if you’re telling us about (inaudible) who is going to (inaudible) in order to rescue (inaudible).
Please Film and TV makers, I beg of you, save your whispers for only the moments in which they are absolutely necessary. It’s become a style of acting now somehow and it’s just silly to keep doing it. If whispering is all your actors can do, get better actors! Or else I’m just going to laugh through your very serious shows.
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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, art, movies, TV, writing | Tags: Austria, Cake, Corsage, Empress Elisabeth of Austria, German, Greek, movies, nihilism, Sisi, The Empress, TV
After reading a bit about the history of Empress Elisabeth of Austria (because of questions that came up after watching The Empress), I learned of another Empress Elisabeth (AKA Sisi) project in the pipeline. The film, Corsage, was reported to look at the darker side of the empress, dealing with her fatphobia, her tightlacing and obsession with her extremely long hair. After the overly romantic fantasy version of this woman in The Empress, I was ready for a thornier Sisi.
I thought this new film might be a more historically accurate version of events because of the inclusion of these less attractive aspects of her personality but as I watched it, I didn’t need to read more history to notice it was just as made-up as The Empress, if not more. The thing about The Empress was it was clear to me why they made up the fictions that they did. A love story between relative equals is a lot more attractive than the Emperor marrying a young teenage girl. It is a beautiful fantasy to imagine an empress wanting to help the poor so much she would give a factory urchin her shoes. I actually understand these impulses, even though they irked me.
With Corsage, I am struggling to understand why they bent history in this particular direction. Is there a word that means the opposite of romanticize? Like, darkify? Depressify? Simplify to a sadder story? And it’s not that this movie was particularly depressing. It’s more like….they tried to make legible some illegible behaviors, which then turned this woman’s tragic end to an entirely different, (actually less tragic maybe and definitely less complex) end.
But that’s not why I’m mad at it.
Here are some facts I learned after my first encounter with this empress.
- She was assassinated at the age of sixty, while traveling.
- She endured a really awful family tragedy in her fifties, when her son killed his mistress and himself
- She studied Greek during the two hours it took to wash her hair. In addition to her native German, she was also fluent in French and English.
- She studied philosophy and wrote poetry
- She facilitated the uniting of Austria and Hungary – which indicates some political power and interest.
Only one of these things appears in Corsage. (She speaks French and English.)
Corsage is the story of Elisabeth turning forty and having a hard time with aging. We watch her restrict her food, tightlace her corset and throw herself out a window. Two of these are things she actually did. (The food restrictions and the tightlacing.) This movie Elisabeth is clearly a woman going through it. Her interest in the mental health wings of the hospital (the real Sisi did have an interest in mental health care) is clearly a mirror for her own experience of mental distress. In Corsage, we are watching a woman self destruct. I think we are meant to feel that this woman’s constraints and boredom ultimately send her over the edge.
But the real Elisabeth’s life was clearly much fuller than this fictional version. The real Elisabeth was engaged with ideas, with travel, with learning. Yes, she was worried about her hair and her waistline but her inclination to learn Greek while having her hair washed suggests to me a woman who has NOT given up on life but who wants to make the most of every minute. She made an enormous difference in the alliance of Austria and Hungary. She was not a helpless trophy wife for the Emperor.
The Empress TV show reduced Sisi to a romantic modern manic pixie dream girl. The Corsage movie reduced Sisi to a dysfunctional Cosmo girl. It literally had her entourage drinking what looked like cosmopolitans on a ship.
And then there’s the main thing that made me mad at it. This is going to be a spoiler so skip ahead to the last paragraph if you’re planning on watching Corsage and want to be surprised. And yes, I know I already told you about her throwing herself out a window but it’s not a big deal in the story, actually, so that’s not the big spoiler.
SPOILERS follow:
After cutting off her beloved hair, eating forbidden cake and becoming a heroin addict at her doctor’s insistence, Elisabeth formulates a plan to kill herself and have her companion impersonate her. The film ends with her diving off the prow of a ship, presumably to her death. The moral of the story appears to be, when you hit forty and can no longer count on your appearance to win you things, you should just throw yourself into the sea.
What the…
This historical figure had twenty more years to live and thrive than this film gave her. The historical Sisi apparently traveled around Europe, often accompanied by Greek men in their 20s. The actual Sisi’s life did not end at forty. I’m very unclear about why this fictional version of her had to. Turning forty is not a tragedy. It wasn’t for the historical empress either. Her actual tragedies mostly came later and were a lot worse than refusing to eat cake. I don’t know why this movie insists on killing off a woman who had another twenty full years to live and enjoy her life. The film-maker is now forty-five, so one presumes she started making this film when she was on the precipice of forty and maybe she thought, “This sucks. Maybe I should throw myself into the sea after a lifetime of worrying about my hair and my calories.”
And I can sympathize with the pain of realizing that worrying about one’s appearance your whole life coming to naught. But – I’m not sure why she had to bring Empress Elisabeth into it.
I mean, if I’m going to watch a fictionalized Empress, I’d rather watch one decide to cut her hair, start eating cake and then go ahead and enjoy her forties and fifties hanging around beautiful young Greek traveling companions around the world. And she doesn’t even need to do the fiction of cutting her hair and starting to eat cake. I think we need stories of powerful women in their forties and fifties, doing what they want. Would I like for her to have cake? Of course. But I’d rather watch her have her real weirdo eating disorder and twenty more years of her interesting life. Having her need to end her life as soon as she experiences a hint of aging is not only ageist but also dangerously nihilistic. I mean, I suppose the filmmaker is Austrian, maybe there’s some cultural nihilism that is hard to steer clear of – but I find it a disturbing impulse to make historic-ish art more nihilistic than life. I think they think they’re somehow empowering Sisi by having her be in charge of her own death instead of getting murdered twenty years later (after all, she gets cake this way) but the message I got from this story was “better to be dead than a middle aged woman.”
Fuck that.
I’m going to need more stories about middle aged and older women doing cool things. The Green Glove Gang was a good start and Dead to Me scratched an itch but I’m going to need more. How about a look at the last twenty years of Sisi’s life? Instead of showing us her youth or the end of her youth, how about a project where we see her bring Austria and Hungary together or, hell, the drama of dealing with the murder-suicide of her son or her assassination by an Italian anarchist? The woman had an extraordinary life. I’m not sure why we’re reducing her to a romance or an eating disorder. History itself is very interesting and dramatic. I don’t know why we have to simplify it and change it in such weird ways for our TV and movies.
Particularly in ways that make me mad.
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Filed under: feminism, movies, TV, writing | Tags: Do you?, movies, Perry Mason, screenwriting, supercut, The Power, TV, You Just Don't Get It
While watching the new Perry Mason show, I heard one character say to another, “You just don’t get it, do you?” and I wanted to ring a bell. Ding, ding, ding! Every screenwriter’s favorite line!
There was a bit of a stir around a movie clip video supercut a while back which featured one character after another saying, “You just don’t get it, do you?” As you watch, you can start to feel crazy as one person after another says, in almost exactly the same tone (because there’s really only one line reading for this text), “You just don’t get it, do you?” with occasional text variations.
The video went viral and I would have thought eight minutes of a single line repeated would have alerted every screenwriter to flash a red light whenever this phrase slid out of their pen or keyboard. I certainly put a mental pin in it. But apparently folks are still saying, “You just don’t get it, do you?” onscreen.
I feel like I read a breakdown of why this phrase was both so ubiquitous and so lame but I cannot find it now, twelve years later apparently. Maybe the folks at Perry Mason thought no one would notice their cliché because twelve years have passed since this trope got called out. I don’t remember what folks were saying about this in 2011, when this video went around, but now, it’s clear to me that it is a way for a character to explain something going on in the story, a way to squeeze in some exposition or context. It’s a funnily stylized way to include information.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say this phrase in real life – but it is relentlessly common on screen. It sounds natural because we hear it so often but it is just an exposition delivering mechanism, disguised as a tiny conflict between two characters. I was thinking about this phrase while watching The Power (I know, I know, I thought I was done but apparently not). I don’t think they actually used this line but the whole show feels like a fleshed out, “You just don’t get it, do you?” story. This is partly because of the enormous amount of exposition that the show indulges in but mostly because of the attitude. The show feels like someone is playing that line under everything, whispering it, declaiming it, shouting it – over and over again it, the series feels like one big, “You just don’t get it, do you?”
And the problem is, I DO get it. I DO understand why the women in this show are angry and why there is enormous appeal in the evolution of a power that shifts the angle of the playing field. It feels somehow condescending to have these things explicitly stated or illustrated or demonstrated. And I imagine that that patronizing feeling is much worse for men watching the show and very possibly more alienating in the ways it tries to include them and “educate” them. A show that keeps reiterating that you, the audience, just don’t get it, do you, is a show that is fairly likely to push away its viewers. We all like to think we get it. Even men without a stitch of exposure to the feminist movement don’t like to be told they don’t get it, even if they don’t.
We all have things we don’t get. I’m sure there are a lot of things about being a man that I don’t get and it’s clear that there are a lot of things that many men don’t get about being a woman. And, of course, there are tons of things cis people don’t get about being trans and so on.
Part of the reason we’ve had movements like #MeToo and #YesAllWomen is that it became very clear how much was not understood. It can feel like we live in different worlds sometimes. Here’s a conversation I had with a man recently: He said “I like to keep the shades open so I can look out and remember I live in a city.” And I said, “And I like to keep them closed so I don’t get stalked and raped and murdered.” And then there was silence. I could have said, “You just don’t get it, do you?” But there’s no need when we put beauty and fear of violence on the scale. I think he got it.
I guess I feel like, if someone doesn’t get it, finding a way to demonstrate it or feel it or even just explain it, is a more useful way forward than leaning into cliches would be. I mean, you get it, right?
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Filed under: feminism, TV, writing | Tags: feminism, lessons, Naomi Alderman, television, The Power, TV, writing, writing advice
This Part Two of a Two Part Series on my viewing of The Power. You can read Part One here. Here’s Part Two:
Since I started writing this, I’ve watched more episodes – which hasn’t really improved my opinion of the show, though I am grateful that it has shifted out of exposition and into stuff happening. But as stuff happens, characters keep saying, “This is going to change the world.” And while I understand that people really do say that in the midst of crisis, as I’m sure we all heard a lot of it in 2020 – it is actually really irritating to hear in a show. Don’t tell me this thing is going to change the world; Just show me the world changing or changed, as the book did. Maybe it’s having lived through these last years but hearing that the world is going to be changed by a thing that some writers made up just rings sort of hollow somehow. “Hey everyone – in this universe we just made up, everyone is growing a tentacle out of their chest! It’s going to change the world!” I hope so! That’s why I’m watching this show, to see what a world where people grow tentacles would look like. I don’t need to know why they grew them. I don’t need to watch them figure out how it happened. Just show me tentacle world, okay? That is the joy of speculative fiction.
The book does explain the science and mechanics of the Power in such a way that it all feels very plausible but it is also very gradual. There are just glimmers of it for a while. It’s not a global event right away. It’s a secret for many of the girls, where they think they are the only ones who possess it and they’re not talking. One of the characters has had the Power for six months when we meet her and it’s a secret that she’s been keeping from her family. There is a single day in the book where it becomes clear this is a global event and it’s not the first day of the book.
The TV show by contrast, starts with a global crisis. And it somehow feels excruciating to watch the early stages of a rapid mass global event in the TV show. I can see why they wanted to add this to the story. (Though I’m not sure why they needed to add a catastrophic plane crash that seemed to recall the beginning of Station Eleven.) I guess it feels like there’s something we know now that we didn’t before the pandemic began. Maybe they feel this will help us process our recent experience – but it turns out I’m not so keen on watching a global catastrophe unfurl.
The early stages of the book were exhilarating. The Power seemed to be a liberating force, offering young women defense and equality and the downsides were not so bad.
In the TV show, the downsides are clear, right away, and the response is instantly fascistic and totalitarian. Liberate me before you cuff me, please!
Lesson for Me: If you ever use the sentence, “This is going to change everything” – cut it immediately and then show the world changed.
Since putting out Part One of this look at The Power, I have learned many things. (Thank you for the link and your comments, Markko!) One of those things is that this show has had multiple show runners, has had a change of casting after a full shoot and has had a re-write and a re-ordering. Part of that was due to COVID, apparently. So, you know, forgiven on that count. But I was never less surprised to learn that too many people were steering a ship. It feels like a story being pulled in 7 directions and it seems that was, in fact, the case.
Another thing I learned was that Naomi Alderman (the writer of the book and a producer on this show) got stuck while she was writing the book and explained that she got herself out of it by writing the book like it was scenes from a TV show. Maybe that’s why the actual show is so frustrating. The book was a better TV show than the TV show! Why why why did they have to mess with it?!
An answer seems to be that each new person leading this ship felt she needed to put her own personal stamp on this. Apparently the retrograde “panties in a bunch” line came from the life of the last showrunner. And of course sexist TV writers still say dumb retro sexist stuff, color me unsurprised. It sounds like a lot of the mayor’s narratives are the personal stories of the writer. But the writer is also someone who spent quite a few lines of her interview declaiming how much she loves men, which just reeks of someone who only worked out recently she might need a feminist movement. We have talked about this sort of thing before and it explains a lot about why the tone is so off in this show. The book is just unadulterated “burn it all down” radical feminist rage for a while. It’s just…what if vengeance rolled across the world? There are no Serena Joy type characters, yearning to support the patriarchy like they do in Handmaid’s Tale. The world tilts very quickly in the book and there’s no stopping the rage. It takes a turn into misandry and that journey of going too far is one of the things that is interesting about it. I’m not sure I like where it ends up but I appreciate the questions it’s asking. The TV show isn’t asking; it’s trying to play both sides and it just makes it dumb.
Lesson for Me: Ask questions with your story instead of giving answers.
I feel like the over-riding flow of the show is its need to explain things – either the Power itself or why all these girls and women might be angry enough to need it. And sometimes the desire to teach Feminism 101 shines through in the stupidest ways. In a later episode, the other Nice Guy™️ character (Tunde, the journalist) gives the clumsiest (and wrongest) explanation of intersectional feminism I have ever heard. He says something like, “Yeah, I never realized how my identities intersected before.” Uhhhhh. First of all, this character has all the privileges but one – so it would be hard to call this an intersectional character – and second of all, this is not how people talk, especially not about intersectionality. It’s dumb to try and teach something in a single line from a character. It’s even dumber when you clearly you don’t know anything about the thing you’re trying to reference.
I feel like the show has been made for people who “just don’t get it” – to teach them or show them the reason the rest of us read this book and thought “I’d be interested in having this power, actually, even with all the downsides.” And so in the end, in trying to serve everyone, it serves nobody.
And you could reasonably say to me – “hey, you know, TV is a medium for the masses. A certain level of appealing to more than the twenty people who already get you might be in order.” But the problem with that is that if that process kills the spirit of the work, it runs the risk of appealing to no one and wins you no new converts. I have probably bought ten copies of The Power over the years. I was a one woman promotion machine for it in its novel form. If the TV show had managed to meet it in any way, I’d be doing the same for the TV show. I’d be evangelizing it instead of breaking down all the ways it has failed so far. I would have helped promote it if I felt it was even CLOSE to the spirit of the book. But it isn’t. So. Just read the book.
Lesson for Me: Write for the 20 people who really get it. The others will have to catch up on their own. If you write for those others, you may imperil the essential nugget of your work. Maybe this show will get better as it goes along. I doubt it. But. It’s possible. There are excellent actors in it, the source material is good, the international storylines are refreshing to see on American TV. I keep watching it, even though it’s driving me crazy. I don’t think the show is a lost cause. I just want it to be better. It could have been amazing. It should have been amazing. It should have been electrifying. ⚡️
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Filed under: feminism, TV, writing | Tags: adaptation, back story, John Leguizamo, Naomi Alderman, Nice guys on TV, The Power, TV
For years now, I have been hotly anticipating the TV version of the novel, The Power. I would occasionally search for it on IMDB or Google, just to see when we might get a televised version of this book that kept me going in some difficult years. I was advised to read The Power by a friend around about the time dragons came into my life and I feel a kinship with Naomi Alderman and the world she created in her book. In case you haven’t read it, it’s the story of a power that teen girls develop which allows them to generate electricity from their hands. It changes the world and how it changes the world is illuminating. ⚡️ I bought a lot of copies of this book for many of the women in my life. It’s been an important book in recent years and I hoped the TV series would only further electrify me. ⚡️
I’ve only seen two episodes so far and so far it has not electrified me 🚫⚡️ and I’m writing this now to try and understand why and also give myself some notes, in case I ever get the chance to write a TV series.
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The first episode was written by the author of the book so I’m baffled by how it could be so disappointing. She wrote such a great book! How could she write such a bad TV episode? It was pretty much ALL exposition. Almost everything that happened pre dates the events of the book. It was just one back story after another, with no real sense of what was to come. It was set up, set up, set up, no pay off. Not much happened. A character, who isn’t that important in the book, accidentally set a couple of things on fire but those events were equally weighted with the posting of some Instagram comments. Another character (Roxy) gets dressed to go to a wedding, then she goes to the wedding, gets in some arguments, goes home and then her mom is murdered there. (This is pretty much the only thing that happens in this episode.)
And by contrast this murder scene is the moment that the novel really begins. There are a few preliminary literary prologues but then the novel opens with Roxy locked in the closet as the home invaders are killing her mo m. It is an inherently dramatic way to start a story. When it begins, we don’t know why this person is in a closet but we learn pretty quickly that she will get out and even more dramatic things will happen. It’s funny to me that a novel would be more dramatic than a TV show but it is, in fact the case. The author has undercut her own drama with “dramatic writing.”
Lesson for Me: Start in the middle of the action. The audience will catch up and it is much more exciting for them to not know things.
The first episode, aside from the murder, was pretty much all backstory. Maybe Alderman got excited to write it because it was the new stuff for her or maybe TV execs gave her “we need backstory” notes or maybe, given that there are quite a few playwrights in that writer’s room, they all got a little high on backstory. I don’t know what happened in this writer’s room but backstory is absolutely a trend in TV writing in these last several years. I haven’t read The Foundation books but I have it on reliable authority that the TV show is mostly invented backstory for the first twenty pages of the first book. That show, too, is stacked with playwrights. I don’t know why playwrights are so enamored of backstory these days. Maybe it’s something they get drilled into them MFA programs? But I am not a fan of the back story. Aside from slowing down the dramatic action, it kills a lot of mystery and intrigue. I don’t need to know why someone does something. I don’t need to understand why their childhood trauma made them stab someone or whatever. Just have them stab and let me wonder why they did it. If Othello were a contemporary American TV series, it would open with Iago as a child stumbling upon his mother’s affair with a “moor” or some shit. Can we not just let Iago be a villain who hates Othello for no good reason and goes too far?
Can we not have everything explained? If you absolutely have to put backstory in, please wait until we’re much further along in the series when I might at least find it an interesting explanatory flashback. But, truly, I’d be happy to have it disappear altogether.
Lesson for Me: If you feel tempted to explain why someone is the way they are – with backstory or a speech – don’t.
On a related theme, the TV series has already failed to do something that the novel did beautifully and that is, create mystery. The first thing in the novel (after an epigraph) is a letter from its “author” – a man whose name is not the name on the front cover of the book. That’s Mystery #1.
Mystery # 2 is the letter in response to that letter from someone with the first name of the author on the front cover (Naomi) and a reference to “this world run by men you’ve been talking about.” This Naomi is titillated by “male soldiers” and “boy crime gangs” and we have to wonder, “what is this backwards world?” Then when the narrative begins – its title page says “Ten years to go” and as the novel goes on that number counts down. We don’t know what happens in ten years but we have the whole novel to wonder about it.
The TV show opens with Toni Collette at a press conference and then flashes back with a title card that reads “Six months earlier” – which is not a particularly curiosity-inspiring title card.
Lesson for Me: A little thing like a title can create a whole lot of mystery and continue to drive curiosity through a whole experience.
Sometimes I feel like I can see the TV executives’ notes as I watch a show. In the case of The Power, when John Leguizamo showed up as the Mayor’s husband, I saw the TV execs’ note that said, “We need at least one more good man in this. We need a man who’s doing the right thing. We just need a little balance. We’ve got a lot of bad guys. We need a good guy we can root for.” So we get this nice guy dad and we like him because he’s played by John Leguizamo, and he’s a doctor who cares about teenage girls, like his daughter – and he’s a good husband who wants to help his wife express her rage. Where would this mayor be without her nice husband? (Well, in the book she’s already divorced when the story starts, so we can see where she’d be. In a much more powerful position, truthfully.)
But because this Nice Guy character is not at all necessary to the story, they have to come up with nice guy stuff for him to do. They get the mayor mad by having the governor tell her to not get her panties in a bunch – something no one has actually said directly to women since the 80s, I think, and then they have Nice Guy™️John Leguizamo encourage her, a forty something year old politician, to express her rage.
First, you’re asking me to believe that Toni Collette (age 50) doesn’t know how to express her rage?! Sorry, no. And then you’re asking me to believe that it takes an especially enlightened nice guy doctor to teach her how to break a plate? That she’s never been mad before in all her 50 years? Did this character miss the entire Trump administration? Believe me, she’s broken plates before – and she did not need her nice guy husband to release her somehow. But they surely added this scene so Nice Guy™️ had something to do that shows he’s not like the other guys.
It feels like this whole character arc is remedial feminism – like, “Hey fellas, did you know women could get angry too? Sometimes it takes a little while or some help from a friendly man to express it but those ladies have a lot of anger stored up if you know how to see it!”
Lesson for Me: If anyone ever insists you put a Nice Guy™️ in your work to balance it out, please break a plate and tell them to go fuck themselves. ⚡️
The other note I can practically hear from the execs is to appeal to the young people more. They beefed up the part of the Mayor’s teen daughter and created some of the dumbest conflict between mother and daughter because somehow they thought it would be interesting to have the teen express her anger on an Instagram-like platform. (Don’t they know kids don’t use Instagram? That’s a Millennial platform! Kids are maybe still on TikTok. Even I know that and I don’t even have kids.) So – they’re, like, trying to appeal to teens – because I guess the two working class teen girls weren’t enough? They needed a weird argument where the privileged teen is mad her mom doesn’t spend enough time with her? What sort of teens are those? I know kids these days are closer to their parents than my generation was – but still? Do these writers not know any teens? They are not generally wishing their parents were MORE on top of them.
Also, they’ve weirdly added a teen boy to this family, seemingly so they can explore the ripped from the headlines’ madness of Andrew Tate and have some conflict between these kids! Cause kids like conflict? And they like to see stuff they saw on TikTok on TV shows? I don’t know. Seems dumb.
Lesson for Me: Has someone asked you to appeal more to teens? Don’t just write your idea of a teen, go talk to some teens, see what actually appeals to them (it’s not necessarily characters their own age) – and if you’re going to include social media, please use what they actually use.
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Believe it or not, I’ve got another thousand words to say about what I’m learning from this TV show so I’m going to do this in two parts. Meanwhile, I’m in the process re-reading the book, just so I can be accurate about the differences.
Short version of my re-reading experience so far: The book is still good. The TV show is still not. More to follow.
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Filed under: American, TV | Tags: Brazil, bus, Cable Girls, Crash Landing on You, friendship, Germany, International TV, Italy, kindness, Norway, South Korea, Spain, travel, Turkey, TV, Velvet
For a while, I thought my interest in International Television was coming from a desire to escape, to be so far from my own world that I couldn’t even understand the language or the norms. That may still be a factor, but lately I’ve found that watching these things has revealed things about my own culture, the patterns that were underneath that were previously invisible to me because they were just the air I breathe.
Of course a TV program is not the culture itself. A TV show tends to reveal things about a culture that it wants to be seen doing that aligns with its values or pushes them in illuminating ways. American TV is not American culture but it is how we like to imagine ourselves – and there a lot of things we DON’T do in our TV that reveal as much as we do.
I’ve talked about Men Crying before. Men don’t cry much in American media and I thought it was just Spain where men cried beautifully on TV. Since I wrote the piece, I have also enjoyed men crying in Korea, Turkey, Poland, Norway and more. Some of the countries have a reputation for machismo – and yet seeing so many men crying for a wide range of reasons, I gotta say, we may have some of the most screwy tropes of masculinity going here in these United States. Given our recent (and current) political situation, this is probably not a surprise.
We also don’t do a lot of kindness and consideration in American media, I’ve realized. I’ve been watching the Korean mega-hit Crash Landing on You and the thing that moves me over and over about the main characters’ relationship is how considerate they are of one another. Sure, they save one another’s lives by shielding each other from gun shots, that’s pretty usual in American movies, but the stuff that touches me is, like, thinking about what their partner would like or what would make them more comfortable. The male lead, who is very tall, bought some groceries for his beloved and he put them on an empty shelf – but then squatted down to his partner’s height to place them where she could reach them. The grand gestures are very American but the small ones are things I can’t think of ever having seen in an American show or film.
There was a whole sequence of this character making coffee for her before they get together and it was almost erotic, the way the camera lingered on the process. First there was a scene of him searching for beans in the market, then boiling the water in a cauldron, grinding up the beans by hand, pouring it into the cone. It is not a short moment.We know he loves her by the way he makes that coffee. Which just points out for me the way American romantic leads will take a bullet for you, but make you a cup of coffee? Only if you’re both cops at the station’s machine and it happens to be convenient. American media loves a big gesture and cares very little for small acts of devotion. Because of my exposure to American media, I feel like it took me way longer than it should have for me to work out how important kindness might be in a partner. The most kindness an American partner might demonstrate is pulling a blanket over a sleeping person, which, you know, is nice – but not, like….exceptional.
Another thing I find myself moved by in a lot of International TV is friendship. It’s not true of every country’s TV I’ve seen (I’m looking at you, Norway and Germany) but a lot of countries have incredibly powerful groups of friends who are as devoted to one another as romantic partners. I first noticed it in Cable Girls but I’ve seen it in many Spanish programs since (Morocco: Love in the Time of War, Valeria, The Time Between, Velvet) as well as Brazilian shows (The Girls from Impanema, Maldivas) and of course Italy (My Brilliant Friend). You don’t see this kind of camaraderie in American Media – unless it’s a war film or a heist. Pretty much you can’t enjoy one another’s company unless you’re killing people or working together to steal things. American media has a lot going for it but there are a lot of gaps in how we represent relationships and given the influence of the American media on our culture (and other people’s culture). I wonder if the gaps are reflective of gaps in our actual relationships
I have a lot of great friends but they are scattered across the globe so I haven’t enjoyed the joy and power of a strong friend group in ages. I find myself very jealous of these groups on TV when I see them and wonder if our media had shown us more of them in your youth, if we might have held together more. Prioritizing one’s friends is a little unusual in these United States. That’s probably clear in the way we present to the world.
One of the most interesting things about traveling, like, real-in-person get on a bus in a foreign country type traveling, is how much it can reveal about one’s own culture. I have never felt so American as when I am far away from home. I have come to appreciate aspects of my culture that I might have previously never considered. It is fascinating to be identified as American, not because of my accent or appearance but because of some aspect of my behavior. The smiling will often give me away. Or some effusive expression of enthusiasm.
Watching a lot of international TV seems to have a similar effect as real life traveling can but on a broader cultural scale. I feel and understand my culture’s Americanness in a new way. I can see some things we’re missing and the impact that might be having on us, as a nation. Like, maybe if we weren’t such rugged individualists, we might value our friends more, we might cry more freely, we might show love, not just to our romantic partners but to the world at large in acts of service or devotion. I feel like it would be good for us as a nation – which might be good for the world, too. Like, if we stopped romanticizing men who shoot bullets (or take them for us) and leaned into men who make coffee and kindness, well, maybe we’d stop sending bullies to govern us. Or something like that. I know other cultures have their troubles and issues, too, and sometimes I can see those peeking out beyond their engaging works of television – but it’s the things that showcase our differences, our cultural contrasts that really teach me something. And maybe, someday, if I get to travel for real, someone can show me how to ride a bus in those places.
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Filed under: art, feminism, TV, writing | Tags: Dahlia Lithwick, feminism, Fleishman Is In Trouble, Lady Justice, Lizzy Caplan, people, The Patriarchy, Trojan Horse, women, women's stories
Probably because I have now written TWO pieces about Fleishman Is in Trouble, my friend sent me Lizzy Caplan’s interview where she talks about the show, and her role as Libby. My friend figured I’d be interested and he figured right! Lizzy Caplan explains that the writer (Taffy Brodesser – Akner) created the novel as a kind of Trojan horse, a way to trick people into reading/watching a story about a woman. (Tricksy! Didn’t I tell you?) Caplan says, “Libby discovers in our story – that people don’t seem to care about her stories if they’re written about a woman. They care about them if they’re written about a man. And so Taffy manages to kind of Trojan-horse the real story into this – you know, you think that you’re watching this story about a man getting divorced, figuring it out, dating apps, and you’re really not watching that story at all. “
And I am sympathetic to this problem. I write women’s stories and I can confirm, a lot of people aren’t interested. “People” may, in fact, need to be tricked into caring about women’s stories.
It’s these “people” that I am suddenly curious about. Who are these people who only read stories or novels if they are about men? Who are these people who will only watch shows if they are a man’s story? I doubt anyone would cop to being one of those people. Most people don’t like to think of themselves as being so biased. But I also can’t argue with the assertion that men’s stories are the preference of most people. Both men and women. It’s not shocking, given the media diet most people grew up on. For a very long time, the prevailing idea has been that girls will read stories about boys but boys won’t read stories about girls, so most stories had boy protagonists to have the widest appeal. (Thank you, The Patriarchy!) I’d hoped that might be changing but this sense of the “people” makes me fear that we’re no better than before.
The thing is, while I can’t argue that the majority of “people” seem to prefer stories about men, there are a lot of us who are very keen on women’s stories and always have been. Are we not people, too? If you went and hung out at, say, the Feminist Press – you’d find that pretty much all the people there would prefer a woman’s story. If you sat in the editorial office of Bust or Bitch or Ms magazine, I think you would choose a woman’s story first.
But some people still need to be tricked into reading or watching a woman’s story, I suppose. I was reading the first chapter of Dahlia Lithwick’s Lady Justice, which is full of stories about women in the law, and she talks about how a law professor wondered why she’d “waste time and credibility writing a ‘pink book about the law.’” That guy would clearly need to be tricked. But the people who made Lady Justice an instant bestseller didn’t require any tricking.
This is the part that feels key to me. Who are you trying to talk to? If it’s the guy who feels you’ll lose credibility by talking about women, yeah, you’re going to need to trick him into paying attention to women’s stories. I have nothing to say to that guy – and yes, maybe that DOES mean that “people” don’t want to listen to me – but also, that guy sounds like a dick. I don’t like to think of people as irredeemable but I can’t imagine what I could say to reach such a person. Nor do I want to.
I guess “people” are usually the population of the Patriarchy and of course the Patriarchy prefers stories about men and if you are trying to please the Patriarchy, you will have to resort to some trickery to be heard on the subject of women. I’d just as soon the Patriarchy went and fucked itself so I’m not so keen on the trick. I mean, if I were going to Trojan Horse the Patriarchy, I’d go all the way and hide our best feminist warriors in a wooden horse’s belly and bust out in the middle of the night to create havoc and burn the Patriarchy down. (Then dance in the moonlight over the dying embers with my sisters.) But “people” don’t like that.
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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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