All posts by THEFEMINISTSPECTATOR

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

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I’m late to the bandwagon of Stieg Larrson, but I can see why so many people are reading this translated Swedish thriller trilogy. I just finished the first novel, I’m 50 pages into The Girl Who Played with Fire, the second, and I’ve been promised a lend on the third.

Part of the appeal is that Larrson respects his reader’s intelligence and creates characters that are intellectually, as well as politically and sexually, motivated. Mikael Blomkvist, the crusading journalist and editor of a scrappy investigative magazine called Millennium, is one of genre fiction’s more appealing heroes, in part because his masculinity is surprisingly unconventional. I usually read mysteries or thrillers with women gumshoes or protagonists, because I find the hardboiled masculine variety predictable and sometimes offensive.

But Blomkvist is compromised from the start of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, as he’s been indicted and sentenced to prison for libeling a powerful industrialist named Wennerstrom. When we first meet him, then, he’s already flawed, although his journey follows the archetypal trajectory of the wronged hero who’s vindicated after he survives a series of trials that prove his righteousness. I’m not spoiling anything with this description—this is one of the rules of the genre, and watching it play out with so many relatively progressive (politically) twists is what makes this kind of novel so pleasurable and compelling.

Blomkvist restores himself to favor in the course of a labyrinthine plot that takes him north of Stockholm to a small, frozen island in the Norrland where he’s persuaded to spend a year in the employ of another powerful corporate mogul, the worthy Henrik Vanger. In his declining years, the melancholy elderly man is desperate to solve the mystery of his niece Harriet’s disappearance from the island 40-odd years earlier.

Hedeby Island’s population teems with Vangers, a family dynasty with plenty of skeletons rattling in terribly sordid closets. Because Henrik Vanger doesn’t want his family to know that he’s hired Blomkvist to continue investigating the unsolved mystery of what most presume is Harriet’s murder (though her body was never found), Henrik assigns Blomkvist to write the older man’s biography as a cover. As the shrewd journalist combs through the family patriarch’s extensive archive of materials on Harriet’s disappearance, Blomkvist pieces together a story about perversion and corruption that Larrson makes both plausible and harrowing.

Much of the book describes Blomkvist poring over evidence and interviewing likely suspects or people whose lives in one way or another touched Harriet’s before she disappeared in 1966. Research and interviews are staple tools of the mystery/thriller genre, but Blomkvist’s character is set off by the fact that his stock in trade is journalism, rather than police or detective work, which gives him a slightly different cast from the genre’s typical heroes. Blomkvist’s motives start as personal; Vanger promises him that if he gets to the bottom of Harriet’s disappearance, he has information about Blomkvist’s nemesis, Wennerstrom, which will prove Blomkvist’s innocence.

But before that happens, Blomkvist actually does his time in jail, even if it seems a very cushy, decidedly white collar stint in the slammer, during which Blomkvist continues his investigation for Vanger examining files and photographs in between his mandatory work assignments and exercise.

And before he’s given the carrot Vanger promises, Blomkvist finds himself committing to his investigation for more personal reasons. He begins a casual affair with another one of Vanger’s nieces, Cecilia, whose father is a Nazi sympathizer, along with at least one of his other brothers. Cecilia proves one of the book’s several interesting women characters, and one of the three with whom Blomkvist has sex through the story.

Cecilia is in her mid-50s (about 10 years older than Blomkvist), long divorced, admits that she hasn’t had sex in some time, and chooses to seduce Blomkvist within minutes of meeting him. But because she’s wary of emotional involvement, and because sex seems to send her into frenzies completely incompatible with her more reserved daily emotional exterior, she keeps reeling him in only to cut bait and run.

The “man on a yo-yo” theme is typical of Blomkvist’s relationships with the women inDragon Tattoo, a refreshing change for a genre in which the heroes are more typically men who phone in their relationships with women, seeking bed companions on their own terms and leaving the women to wait for their call. Larsson’s hero rarely passes up a sexual opportunity, but I don’t believe he ever actually initiates one.

Blomkvist’s long-term occasional sexual companion is also his smart, competent business partner, Erika Berger, a woman he’s known since they were both young journalists. Berger is married to another man. Gregor, Erika’s husband, knows all about her relationship with Blomkvist—the arrangement seems to suit everyone just fine. Erika and Blomkvist truly love one another, and their work together onMillennium, the political muck-raking magazine they own and co-edit, sets off intellectual and political sparks that fuels their sexual commitment.

That they aren’t married to one another, however, is a nice touch; that no one minds their unusual arrangement is also kind of cool. Erika walks in on Blomkvist with other women several times throughout the story, and while she’s always embarrassed at what she’s interrupted, she’s never jealous or angry. As usual, in Dragon Tattoo, the women in his life control the enactment of Blomkvist’s desire. And none of them are eager to haul him down the aisle.

To call his third sexual partner, the series co-anchor Lizbeth Salander, Blomkvist’s side-kick would diminish her importance to the story and its action and fail to describe her relevance and appeal. The genre’s conventions typically require one hero or heroine who, although he or she might frequent likely people for support or companionship, typically goes it alone to solve the mystery and unmask the murderer.In Dragon Tattoo, Larsson writes Blomkvist and Salander as an odd-couple who complement one another and contribute equally to the resolution of the plot—in fact, they simultaneously but separately realize the villain’s identity.

The two don’t actually team up until halfway into the story, although Larsson keeps their activities on parallel tracks until they intersect. Salander, a brilliant computer hacker, works freelance for a security firm and is assigned to background-check Blomkvist by Henrik Vanger’s lawyer before the old man hires him to find Harriet. In the course of investigating the journalist, Salander comes to her own conclusions about the Wennerstrom affair, which prove relevant as the story unfolds.

But it’s only when Blomkvist realizes he’s been investigated and reads her report that he seeks Salander out and proposes that she work with him. And it’s only because her work is so extensive and impressive—even if she’s uncovered things about him that he knows she obtained by illegally hacking into his computer—that he pursues her as a work partner. Their relationship, in other words, is professional and mutually admiring; they’re both whip smart, driven, curious, and skilled.

Salander is one of the most compelling, unusual characters I’ve come across in genre fiction. She’s a young woman with her own mysterious back-story, one that Larsson hasn’t fully revealed by the end of Dragon Tattoo. She’s a ward of the state, legally determined incompetent to govern her own affairs, even though she’s by now twenty-five-years-old. Her relationship with her new guardian, a slimy lawyer named Bjurman, taps into old traumas, as he tries to manipulate her and wield his state-derived power over her ugly in ways she can’t accommodate. How Salander gets her revenge is one of the book’s most satisfying—and surprisingly feminist—chapters.

In fact, to complement Blomkvist’s equitable way with women, the unusual Salander is the book’s feminist heroine. She’s young and troubled, but she’s enormously smart and wily. Her photographic memory and quick curiosity makes her a gifted investigator, but her social awkwardness, which clearly stems from her dark personal history, keeps her an iconoclastic loner.

She lives in a messy hovel, dependent on Bjurman to dole out her finances; she chooses her sexual partners based on fleeting desires for physical connection, with little regard for emotional commitment, which she assiduously avoids; she reveals nothing of her inner life (Larsson consistently describes her eyes and demeanor as “expressionless”); and she’s particularly wary of men, even as she chooses them (as well as the occasional woman) as sexual partners.

When she and Blomkvist become lovers, it’s Salander who seduces him (in a typical mystery with a male hero, this would inevitably be vice versa). And although he protests that co-workers shouldn’t sleep together, she points out that he and Berger have an on-going affair that doesn’t seem to hamper their professional relationship.But once Blomkvist and Salander have sex, and even though they live together in the small cottage Vanger provides for their work on Hedeby Island, they don’t adopt the conventional routines of coupledom.

She keeps her own counsel, and bristles when Blomkvist tries to draw her out about her past (and even when he compliments her on her brilliance, which she thinks makes her a freak). She retains her right to be enigmatic and antisocial, often refusing to answer Blomkvist’s questions and leaving town without a word, avoiding her cell phone to prevent being tracked down. Salander is a cipher, even to the reader—through the first novel, we never find out the root of her exceedingly guarded relationship to her own life.

That mystery makes her exceptionally compelling, alongside her prodigious intelligence and commanding savvy. She dons leather chaps to ride her motorbike; she drinks heavily when appropriate, and smokes cigarettes freely; she’s hedonistic in unusual, fascinating ways. Salander understands, as the evidence unfolds, that the seamy underside of the Vanger empire is built on a profound hatred of women—she diagnoses and explicitly names misogyny in ways rarely seen in a genre that’s famous for building its plots on the backs of exploited women.

But at the same time, for reasons Larsson doesn’t fully describe, she’s deemed “incompetent” by the state, has been institutionalized for too much of her life, and is now controlled by a corrupt guardian who exercises more power over her affairs than any theoretically free person should be forced to withstand. Salander’s contradictions and the character’s ambiguities propel the narrative as much as the central plot.

I’ll avoid spoilers here, but suffice it to say that many of the book’s crises and resolutions are among the best I’ve read in the genre, and twist the typical gender politics in feminist ways. Watch for Lizbeth’s revenge over Bjurman, which enacts a kind of feminist fantasy; watch for the scene in which the villain is revealed and entraps one of the two protagonists, forcing the other to the rescue; and watch for continuing twists and turns, as one portion of the mystery is solved only to propel you into another, as each of the plot’s strands click together by the end. Even the resolution provides a kind of feminist triumph, with smart, emotionally cool new characters appearing to vindicate the proceedings.

I’ll risk one spoiler to lodge my only complaint: That Lisbeth Salander would find herself in love with Blomkvist by the book’s end seems completely out of character.Without understanding her life story, Larsson doesn’t give us enough reasons to believe that she’d allow herself the luxury of such emotion, even though he presents her feelings as a surprise even to herself. Although now that I’ve started the second book, it seems her realization could have been a plot device to set in motion The Girl Who Played with Fire, at the end of Dragon Tattoo, her however uncomfortable admission of love cheapens a relationship in which Salander has been refreshingly unsentimental and in control.

That said, I’m hooked enough to continue into The Girl Who Played with Fire, and to give Larsson the benefit of the doubt.

A Swedish film version of the first book has been released, which I’m eager to see, and press speculation circulates about casting for the English-language film. I’ve heard Natalie Portman and Kristen Stewart both mentioned for the Salander role, among other young actors. Stewart’s more sinewy frame and her sulking, emotionally guarded sexuality makes her my pick for the role.

In another world, Salander would be played by Shane, from The L Word. I don’t think Kate Moenning, the actor who played the hard-living, non-monogamous lesbian hair stylist character, is up to the task, but the look would certainly work.

A girl can dream. But in the meantime, I’m going to burrow back into The Girl Who Played with Fire.

The Feminist Spectator

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This Wide Night

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As she says in the program notes, playwright Chloe Moss based This Wide Night on women she met during a volunteering stint at Her Majesty’s Prison in the UK. Performed stories by or about women in prison have become their own genre, popularized in the US by Rhodessa Jones’s The Medea Project, for only one example, which has been studied by many scholars interested in how theatre and performance can be used to empower those without prospects or agency.

Fictionalized dramatic treatments of women presently or recently incarcerated include Marsha Norman’s play, Getting Out (1977). Norman’s pre-‘night, Mother drama concerns a young woman named Arlene’s excruciating attempt at life post-rehabilitation. Her alter-ego, Arlie, haunts her life, representing her lack of constraint and conformity as a pre-reform hellion. Much of the play pivots around Arlie’s relationship with a prison guard determined to continue seeing her on the outside when Arlie/Arlene is released, which keeps her story tied to her life inside.

This Wide Night is different in kind. This elegant two-hander, produced by Naked Angels and mounted at Playwrights Horizons, is crafted as a drama that intends to use prison more metaphorically than plays like Norman’s or devised performance like Jones’s. In Moss’s play, their stint as cellmates binds Lorraine (Edie Falco) and Marie (Allison Pill), but the story of their lives inside is revealed only glancingly, rather than becoming the play’s central focus, as it does inGetting Out. With this choice, Moss avoids the voyeurism that often propels plays (or films or television, for that matter—think of HBO’s Oz) about people in prison.

Instead, Moss uses the women’s reunion on the outside to think about the meaning of freedom, not just for those who’ve suffered its loss, but for anyone stymied by how to navigate a world they’re ill-equipped to survive. Lorraine and Marie’s differences provide much of the play’s conflict. Lorraine, middle-aged and determined to be optimistic, speaks a continuous patter of happy talk, taking to heart the adage that looking on the bright side lets you somehow live there. And yet the pain of what she’s lost, before and during her twelve-year prison sentence, creeps up on her and colors her expressions.

In Falco’s brilliant rendering, Lorraine’s face becomes practically transparent. Longing, doubt, and confusion cloud her aspect. Falco (famous from HBO’s The Soprano’s and now Showtime’s Nurse Jackie) is nearly unrecognizable in a wig of drab long hair of indistinguishable color, over-sized glasses whose ears she pushes over her hair instead of under, and a faded navy sweat shirt and baggy gray sweat pants. (The costumes, by designer Emily Rebholz, provide perfect punctuation to both actors’ performances.)

Marie looks as under-fed spiritually as she seems physically. Younger than Lorraine but more world-wise and world-weary, she appears to have already given up, an acquiescence to loss and despair that shows in her disheveled studio apartment and her slouching posture. Pill is a tall, willowy woman, but in the guise of Marie, her posture appears pock-marked, as though she’s already taken one hit too many to all the places that count.

The intense 80-minute, intermission-less play is set in a room that epitomizes the kind of existential despair the two women confront throughout This Wide Night. In set designer Rachel Hauck’s conception, the walls’ paint peels, its grimy color long since faded. The never-made bed sags when either of the women lie in it. The sink is filled with grimy dishes and the small square of mirror above it is clouded and chipped. The garbage underneath the sink spills out of the box in which Marie collects it and empty Marlboro packets lie crumpled nearby, as though Marie’s aim invariably fails.

The threadbare carpet offers no warmth or comfort. The single swiveling “easy” chair has long since lost its upholstery. And the ancient television set that sits in a corner of the floor gets only intermittent, fuzzy, rolling reception. The rusty bathroom, glimpsed through a door at the upper stage right quadrant of the set, throws a cold light that cuts angles of unflattering, unwelcomed illumination into the studio’s living space (Matt Frey’s lighting deftly makes visible the interrogatory nature of Lorraine and Marie’s lives). In such an environment, the designers and director Anne Kauffman seem to suggest, no one could thrive.

The play tracks Lorraine’s arrival at Marie’s apartment for an afternoon’s visit that winds up lasting for weeks or months through to her actual physical attempt to move out and on. Lorraine never really chooses to move in with her friend but can’t beat the inertia or find the agency required to leave. What happens between these women is less about action than it is about an arc of emotion that the actors trace with empathy and nuance, finding in these two characters the most universal themes in the most specific details of their lives.

Lorraine’s release from prison compels her to find Marie, the younger woman with whom she shared a cell during part of her longer sentence. Marie is diffident at first, her ambivalence about seeing Lorraine making her jumpy and reticent. She eventually admits that after her release, she stopped coming back to prison to visit Lorraine, even though she missed the older woman, because Marie realized during those meetings that she also missed prison. These brief direct confessions are few in This Wide Night; usually, the characters reveal their feelings and motivations through non-action, a clear choice to do and say almost nothing.

Eventually, Marie warms again to Lorraine, whose insistent ministrations are determined to recreate the intimacy they clearly shared behind bars. But here, in the supposedly free world, the women’s relationship remains syncopated—they can’t find a new groove, and the old one stays elusive and situation-dependent, bound to their common history of imprisonment.

The two women can’t really pull themselves back together. Instead of starting over, their lives have stopped. They feel most comfortable still confined, now to this studio bed-sit that’s clearly a lot like the prison cell they shared. They eat pizza and drink Budweiser, a menu that comes easily to hand for people who can’t afford real nourishment and survive on as little as possible. The room doesn’t even have a table; Marie and Lorraine share their pizza out of a box left on the floor and their beer directly from the can. You can practically see the roaches crawling through this apartment and the grit in the colorless carpet on which they often sit.

This Wide Night is in many ways a tone play. Moss envelopes Lorraine and Marie in a thick miasma of despair and indecision that they can’t see their way through. Lorraine medicates herself with an unnamed psychotropic drug. When she first downs a beer or two with Marie, her sensitive system can’t handle it and she vomits the pills and alcohol all over the already-stained carpet.

Lorraine’s constitution is weak, despite the bravado of her physical presence. In Falco’s virtuosic performance, Lorraine boasts a scatter-shot bodily bravado. Falco’s physical gesture has her sitting back on her pelvis and splaying her legs, hooking her thumbs up along the elastic waist of her sweat pants.

With this fabricated, hopeful but somehow pitiful stance, Lorraine tries to fill the new space around her, trying physically to inhabit her freedom. That she looks only gawky and awkward is part of the character’s supreme pathos. In one scene, Marie, who tends toward manic-depressive extremes of energy and emotion, suggests that they dance to the radio, and Lorraine, after hesitating for a short, embarrassed moment, throws herself into a gangly, goofy imitation of free-style movement, forcing her limbs to look loose and relaxed when they’re only stiff and stilted. The moment gets Falco a laugh, but it’s also incredibly painful, a physical demonstration of Lorraine’s inability to meet the challenges presented by being free.

Neither woman really fits into her now free body. Marie curls herself into the room’s single chair, her knees under her chin and her feet tucked into her bottom, peering out like a turtle debating if it’s safe to leave its shell. Marie can’t judge her relative safety. In fact, although she tells Lorraine that she works in a pub, over the course of the play it seems that Marie is turning tricks to survive. She services the landlord (an action intimated when she returns to the apartment to feverishly wipe her face and gargle with water over the sink) and eventually gets beat up, presumably by a trick. That Pill’s prettiness shows through Marie’s prematurely stooped and self-protective stance only makes the character’s despair that much more wrenching.

Inertia inspires Lorraine and Marie to settle into the uneasy, bumpy rhythm of an undefined life. As Marie eventually remarks, when she’s trying to hurt Lorraine by throwing her out of the flat, they’re not mother and daughter and they’re not lovers (Lorraine cringes when Marie uses the word). Their intimacy comes from being forced to share space, which fostered a connection between them that they can’t even describe or name. On the outside, Marie wields the power of the space and the lease, but Lorraine holds the power to care, an obscure notion on which Marie clearly can’t depend. She’s waiting to be abandoned again, as it appears her mother left her earlier in her life.

The women’s back-stories remain murky throughout the play, as if Moss insists that the details of their histories, their crimes, and their rehabilitation don’t really matter to how they’ll go forward in their lives. Moss does reveal that Lorraine killed someone, possibly her husband, and once out, she tries to connect with her now-grown son, Brian, who agrees to see her only once, out of curiosity, but refuses let her back into his life.

Time has closed over Lorraine. She tries to burrow back to the past—she carries around a worn sheet of children’s handwriting practice paper, on which six-year-old Brian wrote her a note. The message represents a shred of a past from which her own action forever separates her. The two women gradually realize that although their sentences have ended, time has stopped for them.There is no now, only a then that continues to entrap them.

Outside the studio’s window, Lorraine and Marie watch their neighbor comb the street with a Geiger counter. Although they don’t know what he’s looking for, they’re mesmerized by his determination to find something, to continue his quest. They watch him studiously, curious about what makes him strive. He becomes their only external example in a world that refuses to ease their way back in.

Kauffman’s direction honors Moss’s text by unobtrusively but decisively guiding these two fine actors through each moment. She doesn’t push the play to reveal more than it can, but allows each moment to find its shape in the characters’ inability to mold their lives back into place. The play’s transitions are marked by dissonant music by sound designer Rob Kaplowitz that comes to sound like the screech of time as it passes, regardless of what Marie or Lorraine do or don’t do.

Because the women don’t have the emotional or social or financial resources to propel themselves elsewhere, the room becomes an existential “no exit,” in which they’re bound to one another through fear as well as through longing for a future neither one of them can really imagine. Even the television, their only benign connection to the world, doesn’t get a good signal. Propped against the stage left wall, the small old fashioned cathode-ray tube set broadcasts a picture that rolls, full of static and barely discernible images in blurred colors with hints of words scrolling across the screen. Although Lorraine eventually remarks that she’s getting good at watching without sound or a coherent picture, even the solace of escape or fantasy that television normally provides isn’t available to these women.

The one-room apartment becomes just a slightly enlarged version of the prison cell Lorraine and Marie shared. More is at hand to fill the space, but they don’t know what to do with all these objects. The detritus piles up around them—they have no sense of “out” (as in take out the garbage or throw out what you’ve used and no longer need). Everything accumulates within, both emotionally and physically. The women have no outlet for their fear, their anger, or their frustrations.

Instead, the world enacts its violence on them. Marie leaves the studio physically but never emotionally. She doesn’t bring anything back with her until the end, when she returns cut and bruised, wearing the external marks of the outside. Lorraine understands that Marie knows the person who beat her up. And Moss implies that Marie was in an abusive relationship before her prison stint. But nothing can be done to protect her, because even free, Marie is at the mercy of a system that imprisons her much as she was in jail.

Even Lorraine, whose awkward, jerking movements represent a woman desperately trying to embody what she thinks freedom means, hasn’t a clue how to remake her life. Lorraine is so accustomed to the regimentation of prison life that she gets hungry precisely at 5:30, when dinner was served inside. Marie is her life preserver, but she clings to her only to float through still-perilous waters. Neither woman will be able to reach land, nor will they be rescued by some passing form of virtue or understanding. Lorraine and Marie are among the forgotten, formerly institutionalized women for whom a world not bound by four confining walls is impenetrable, unreadable, and utterly uninhabitable.

How nice to see a play written, directed, and performed by women. How nice to see a play that doesn’t need to be framed or redeemed by a heterosexual love story. How nice to see a middle-aged woman in a complex, compelling leading role. How nice to see a play that doesn’t wrap up its story with colored paper and a bow, but instead leaves you thoughtful, wondering what it means to be free and aware of the word’s the innumerable definitions.

How nice to watch a production in Playwrights Horizon’s Peter Sharp Theatre, where the house’s intimacy brings you physically close to This Wide Night’s performers and emotionally close to the characters. How provoking to watch a production that depicts so viscerally the wages of poverty and the lack of options for women like Lorraine and Marie.

This Wide Night is at once excruciating in the finitude of Lorraine and Marie’s prospects, and strangely hopeful, as you leave the play wanting to believe that at least these women have one another. Still, as they end the play staring out the window at the man with his Geiger counter, they’re framed within the window’s bars as imprisoned as they ever were and, sadly, probably, always will be.

The Feminist Spectator

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The Good Wife, Redux

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The Good Wife finishes out the season next week with a finale that promises to launch Peter Florrick (Chris Noth) back into the center of corrupt Chicago power, while Alicia (Julianna Margulies), his very good wife indeed, suffers her own moral turmoil over using her husband’s connections to bring clients to her money-hemorrhaging law firm, Stern, Lockhart, and Gardner, where she’s just secured her future as a junior associate.With Margulies in the lead, and the still terrific Archie Punjabi refining her role as Kalinda, the ace investigator with a rather mysterious personal back-story, The Good Wife continues to offer one of television’s more captivating representations of a middle-aged woman with complicated desires and a real job at which she excels.

The series does a good job exploring, from women’s perspectives, the murky ethical complications of the law and politics (personal and public). Peter Florrick serves as the anchoring amoral, self-serving, grandly ambitious politician and Alicia as his morally righteous counterweight, but the series increasing muddies the waters of Alicia’s purity, placing her in situations that clarify how difficult it is to keep your hands clean, especially when they’re in close proximity to money and power.

In her competition with the Boy Wonder, Cary (Matt Czuchry) for the single junior associate position Stern, Lockhart, and Gardner can afford, for instance, the writers show the cut-throat young white boy overtly campaigning among the other associates, talking Alicia down (she’s too old, too female, and too soft for a tough man’s job, he says) among the sinks and urinals of the firm’s men’s room. But if Cary’s ambition follows the well established capillaries of the good ole boys’ network, Alicia’s bid for the firm’s favor takes her into even murkier territory, in which trading favors with her husband’s handler, Eli Gold (played with subtle and controlled irony and wit by an increasingly appealing Alan Cummings), lands her clients that make her invaluable to the senior partners.

When Cary fails to get the nod for the permanent position, all of his erstwhile good will toward Alicia evaporates, leaving him only with the white male privilege and entitlement that he held in good-natured check while he worked alongside her. Pale with anger at his dismissal from the firm, he accuses Alicia of using her personal connections to advance her cause. And although Cary’s return to always available sexism and ageism makes the once likable character instantly appalling, it’s hard to say he’s wrong. Alicia has indeed finally used her proximity to Peter in ways she resisted throughout the season, now sliding along the slippery slope of political machinations she used to view with clear distaste.

In a demonstration of the power of the new girls’ network, in fact, it’s Diane Lockhart (Christine Baranski), one of the two chief partners at Stern, Lockhart, and Gardner, who encourages Alicia to mine Peter’s connections to prove her usefulness to the firm. Alicia, the theoretically good wife, has insisted on holding herself aloof from Peter’s problems and the possibilities his connections present, as though she’s not already dirty by association. When she capitulates to Diane’s suggestion, Alicia doesn’t even seem to suffer ethical qualms. Eli Gold’s 11th hour support allows Alicia to keep her job at the firm.

What seems in question as the season finale approaches is whether or not Alicia really can maintain her role as the good wife. Peter’s mother, who’s provided the conservative counterpart to Alicia’s modern, even feminist working mom throughout the season, keeps reminding her daughter-in-law that to be a good wife means to support your husband regardless of your own feelings or ideas. As soon as Peter’s electronic monitoring device is removed, securing his full personal and political freedom, he returns to his influence-mongering, wheeling and dealing ways, glad-handing the powerful who’ve gathered at his home to congratulate him, as his wife, son, and daughter watch from a distance, wondering whether or not they’re glad that he’s back in their lives without restrictions.

When Peter beckons to Alicia to join him at the party, she hesitates, and then walks slowly into his orbit, where he introduces her to two authoritative white men looking for a new law firm, whom he says are from the AFL-CIO. The episode ends on a shot of Alicia grasping hands with one of these gentlemen, symbolically underlining her own willingness to get her hands dirty, and Peter’s willingness to buy her personal loyalty with his political connections.

Unfortunately, while she proves herself more than capable professionally every week, Alicia’s competency as a lawyer gets muddled by her attraction to her boss, Will (Josh Charles), whom she knew in law school and who took a risk by giving her the job when Peter went to prison. The Good Wife would be so much more interesting if it avoided the romantic angle all together, instead of letting snarky Cary be half right when he accuses Alicia of benefiting from the sexual energy between her and Will. The couple’s as yet unconsummated affair is only interesting because Alicia uses it to lord some power over Peter, who’s astonished that Alicia won’t simply forgive his own entirely public sexual peccadilloes and return happily to his bed. Watching Alicia flaunt her sexual independence from Peter has been one of the season’s pleasures.In last night’s episode (#22, “Hybristophilia”), Kalinda insists Alicia celebrate keeping her job as a junior associate by taking her out for multiple shots of liquor. As the two women get increasingly drunk, Alicia asks Kalinda point-blank if she’s “gay” (why can’t anyone on television say the word “lesbian”?). The juicy moment makes textual what the series has hinted at but never verified. Kalinda’s had her share of electric moments with women, who flirt with her and sometimes even try to seduce her. But we’ve also seen Kalinda trading sexual favors with a local detective to get important information relevant to her cases. Is Kalinda a lesbian, or just a woman willing to use any means possible to get what she needs? And does that make her ethically suspect? Or less powerful and full of what often looks like feminist agency?Kalinda dodges Alicia’s question at the bar, coyly insisting she likes to keep her own life private and that her sexual preference doesn’t really matter. And it doesn’t—Kalinda remains sexy and alluring probably for spectators across gender, because of the character’s cheeky brilliance and Punjabi’s charisma (and, okay, her body). It’s fun to speculate about for which team she bats, but it doesn’t really matter, to the plot or to the pleasure of watching the character operate.

Is this the season of incidental lesbianism on television? The L Word is no longer on Showtime, but it seems every time I watch something, another lesbian couple or reference pops up. I’m no longer a fan of Grey’s Anatomy, but flipping through the channels a week or so ago, I wound up catching an episode in which Callie (Sara Ramirez) openly flirts with a female patient at the hospital, who’s forward enough to write her phone number on Callie’s palm. In the same episode, Callie breaks up with her girlfriend, Arizona (Jessica Capshaw), because Callie wants to have a baby and Arizona doesn’t. And mind you, this wasn’t an episode about lesbians; this was just part of the on-going story of two of the show’s recurring, central characters.

And on Showtime’s Nurse Jackie, which I do watch and enjoy regularly, Dr. O’Hara (the inimitable Eve Best) turns out to have had an on-again, off-again relationship with a woman, Sarah Khouri (Julia Ormond), a famous television journalist. Although the story arc is brief, it begins when Dr. O’Hara has a quickie with the too-sober All Saints nurse, Sam (Arjun Gupta), who protests, as they begin kissing frantically, that he has a girlfriend, to which Dr. O’Hara responds, “So do I.” When O’Hara’s relationship with the tv reporter sours, Jackie, who’s been something of an eager, willing witness to the two women’s affair, tells O’Hara she never really liked Sarah, and that she prefers being O’Hara’s “girl.”

Finding lesbian feelings, relationships, or characters peppered across the television spectrum still seems to me a wondrous thing. When I’m feeling optimistic, I have to think it signals an opening of options for women, representations of new choices we might make for ourselves as not just sexual beings, but as people who want certain kinds of relationships, and professions, and families, which may or may not be conventional, regardless of the gender of our partners.

And that’s a good thing.

The Feminist Spectator

Damages

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The latest season of Damages on FX ended with a 90-minute finale that somehow managed to wrap up all the season’s loose narrative threads and even some of last season’s, for good measure. With rumors that Damages has been losing viewership and might not be renewed, the finale might be the last time we’ll see Glenn Close as Patty Hewes, the wily, steely lawyer who even though this season was working for the good guys, always manages to seem like she’s on the wrong side of the law.

Despite a snarky column in Salon.com not long ago that suggested none of the women acting onDamages can move their foreheads, I don’t think Botox has reduced the power of Close’s acting. She might not be able to disturb her forehead’s preternatural smoothness, but Patty has always been a character whose unruffled demeanor is part of her chilly allure.

Close plays Patty Hewes with her mouth: that straight line her lips form when she’s resolved, that wrinkle that sneaks into her upper lip when she sneers, the way she opens her lips to various extents to indicate other nuances of Hewes’s not very wide range of emotion . . . these small things let Close evoke this ball-busting woman’s tremendous power.

Even her eyes don’t really seem to change from moment to moment, although when she watches those opaque flashbacks that kept popping up this season play out behind the hole she punched in her condo’s wall, she sometimes tears up a bit. But the water never, ever trickles down her face—she’s way too controlled for that.

Patty Hewes is one of my favorite television heroines, not because she’s fun to hate—on the contrary, I like Patty for how horrible she is, for how willing she is to jettison all the pieties about women and all the conventional presumptions about appropriate gender roles. Last season, after she caught her husband (Michael Nouri) cheating on her, she discarded him from her life in a rage-full fury.

But as they shared custody of their old dog (and of course their teenage son, Michael), the couple began to spend relaxed, casual time together again, which lead the man to think perhaps he had another chance with Patty. No such luck. Just as her husband began to feel comfortable in her presence, and entitled to the forgiveness that unfaithful men these days seem to expect, Patty turned her always ready knife and kicked him bleeding back to the curb.

One of the series’ highlights has been that it’s women, not men, who have the only chance of rattling Patty’s proverbial cage. Her relationship with Ellen Parsons (Rose Byrne), her protégé, nemesis, and perhaps daughter-substitute, hinges on their distinctly homoerotic attraction/repulsion for one another. Ellen began the series as ambitious but naïve, and wound up losing her fiancé, David, in the bargain. (He was viciously murdered for convoluted reasons that still aren’t clear, even though the finale revealed who killed him—which we already knew by now.)

David’s murder hardened Ellen and forced her to hone her own killer instincts. With Patty to emulate, she learned at the feet of the master. The two women have taken turns playing cat and mouse in each episode this season, with Ellen’s loyalties never quite clear. Her stint as an assistant district attorney was marred by her own perverse willingness to bend the law for her own gain.

She set Patty and the District Attorney (an always disappointed, cynical Ben Shenkman) against each other, insisting she was scheming for one while appearing to scam the other, and vice versa.Neither of them trusted Ellen, but where the DA found her machinations abhorrent, Patty couldn’t help but admire the monster she created.

The new female lawyer Patty hired this season couldn’t hold a candle to Ellen, even though she was clearly willing to drink the blood Patty spilled around the firm. Patty hired the woman capriciously, and fired her just as impulsively, drifting into a reverie during their last meeting that ended with Patty telling the astonished young woman that it “wasn’t working out,” that she should empty her desk and leave the building. Patty’s mercurial affections kept her staff and her family on edge, wary, watchful, but aware they could never catch her with her guard down.

Pity her son Michael’s girlfriend, Jill, for instance, the significantly older woman who seduces the young man when he’s really just a boy. Jill thinks she can play Patty’s game, and exhorts her for $500,000, pretending she’s willing to be paid off to get out of Michael’s life. When Jill stays, spending the money to buy Michael a Jaguar and the two of them a three-bedroom apartment big enough for their soon-to-arrive baby, Jill gloats that she can play hard ball just like Patty.

Fat chance. By the finale’s end, Patty sends Jill to prison for statutory rape, forcing the woman to relinquish her parental rights to Michael’s child forever. Patty always gets what she wants, even if her son retaliates by trying to kill her with a borrowed car.

This season’s plot followed the Bernie Madoff story’s template, creating a parallel family called the Tobins, whose patriarch runs a Madoff-like Ponzi scheme (it turns out) to protect his ne’er-do-well son, Joe, who’s a drunk and a failure at his father’s business. In characteristically labyrinthine narrative turns, the show led viewers in one direction only to pull us instantly in another, as we tried to fix the blame and responsibility for the corruptions that pollute the Tobin’s lives and that haunt the vulture-like lawyers who circle them ever more tightly.

Patty represented the families whose lives were ruined by the Ponzi scheme, but even on the side of righteousness, Patty’s sleazy methods make her look villainous. Ellen played her own angles in the DA’s office, and Patty’s law partner Tom Shayes (Tate Donovan) was implicated on both sides, since he lost his family’s and his in-laws’ fortunes in the Tobin’s house of cards. Once Louis Tobin’s scheme was revealed, the three principles worked through a series of feints and punches to track down the money they knew the family had stashed away.

The story’s impenetrability makes it difficult to track, but the details hardly matter, since the characters created this season proved fascinating whether or not their motivations and objectives were crystal clear. Impeccably cast (by the Emmy Award-winning casting director Julie Tucker), the Tobin family modeled the peccadilloes of the fabulously wealthy and corrupt. As the dissolute son, Joe, Campbell Scott beautifully played the man’s Oedipal complex and his determination to head his family at all costs, despite his own utter inability to do anything right.

Len Cariou (who starred in Sweeney Todd on Broadway) played Louis Tobin, who ended the season as a hero, even though he took his own life early on to escape his prison sentence. The incomparable Lily Tomlin played the Tobin matriarch, Marilyn, the dyed-red-haired Machiavellian wife and mother who will do anything to maintain the standard of living to which she’s become accustomed. She, too, was prone to the underhanded wheeling and dealing that distinguished her family’s business.

The information she revealed and withheld had much to do with who lived and died this season. In her own final act of volition [spoiler alerts to follow here and below!!], she sat sodden with alcohol and amused herself by watching old family movies, then, without a trace of self-pity, took a taxi to the East River. In the next moment, we saw, in an extreme long shot, her body falling from a high bridge to the water below.

The final agent of the Tobin family’s destruction was their trusted lawyer, Leonard Winstone, played against type by a clenched-jawed Martin Short. Turns out that Lenny, too, had been living a lie; the kid from a bad family in straitened circumstances stole a new identity and passed himself off as a lawyer. Although we never got the details, we learned that he’s spent 30 years conniving and advising the Tobins.

When his weasel of a father turned up to blackmail him, threatening to reveal his fraud, Winstone uses the old man to turn against the Tobins. Through a lucky quirk of fate, in the gory finale, Winstone managed to walk away with his life and a good chunk of the family’s money.

The series’ wrap-up was a bit too pat, as though the producers knew the episode might be the show’s last. Plot points that seemed dense and complex for the last 13 weeks were resolved too obviously, easily, and quickly, which made the last show a bit of an anti-climactic disappointment. Tom Shayes’s death was the only one that lived up to its hype, since we’ve known almost from the first episode that he dies at the end.

In Damages’ typically frenetic flash-forward and -back structure, which made all but the most salient details difficult to absorb and the timeline impossible to track, the detectives investigating Shayes’ murder insinuated variously that Patty, Ellen, and others were to blame.

The season’s best reveal was that Joe murdered Tom for endangering the Tobin family’s future and its fortune. After a day of public drinking from a brown-paper-bagged bottle, Joe showed up at Tom’s house, beat him up, and then drowned the already-bleeding man in his own toilet. The scene’s gruesome camera work and editing focused on Shayes’s feet, kicking and twisting, his shoulders pinned over the toilet’s bowl, his head deep in its well. Scott performed virtuosically as the drunken, out-of-control, utterly inept and misguided Joe, shaking his head vigorously to try to clear it as he methodically disposed of Tom’s body.

But when Joe is brought in to the police station at the end, it’s Patty who interviews him, who revels in forcing him to accept certain truths. She turns off the intercom into the adjacent viewing room while she cajoles Joe to admit his guilt. When Ellen asks how she got him to divulge to his crimes, Patty says cryptically that they talked about confession, implying that she made a connection with the shattered man based on shared spiritual burdens. Many key moments like this were also treated cavalierly, even though they had inspired deep speculation and curiosity throughout the season.

Damages’s last scene took place by the ocean, outside the city, where Patty and Ellen attended Tom’s memorial service. The two women stood together at the end of a long wooden pier, windswept physically and emotionally, staring out into the water, their faces as impassive as ever.Ellen told Patty she wants to ask her a professional question, which got the older woman’s attention. As Patty turned toward her, Ellen said Patty’s achieved everything she ever wanted in her career. The younger woman asked what Patty thinks Ellen’s next move should be; should Ellen come back to work for Patty? Work in another firm? Leave the law altogether?

Patty didn’t answer immediately, and for some reason, the women began to talk about Patty’s first child, a daughter who was stillborn. Ellen knew about the child, but not why she died. Patty said that losing the child, although difficult, enabled her to take a job at a New York law firm, where she was the first woman ever hired, and was able to begin her inexorable climb to the top.

In one last revelation, it turned out that the cryptic flashbacks Patty had all season when she looked through the ragged hole in her apartment’s wall—which were somehow related to David Carradine’s mysterious, brief appearance this season—turned out to be from 1972, when Patty was first pregnant. Her pregnancy had complications, and her doctor ordered her to stay on complete bed rest. But in the flashback, we saw Patty ignoring her doctor’s admonishments and walking—heavily pregnant—down the long lane of a horse farm where, presumably, she rides, and lost the child (who’s perversely named—Julia—given that she arrived stillborn).

Ellen wants to know if it’s worth it, what Patty’s done to realize her brilliant career. When Ellen posed her question, we saw Patty flash to an image of herself, distraught, wiping leaves and dirt from Julia’s gravestone and keening like Medea. When the brief image faded, Patty stood still on the dock, struck mute. Ellen watched her for a moment, then murmured good-bye and walked away. As Ellen left, Patty turned to watch her disappear down the dock.

Although they didn’t meet one another’s gaze in this scene or many others, the two women were profoundly and desperately, wordlessly and knowingly connected, Ellen as the daughter Patty terminated, now enlivened and eroticized by Patty’s own longing.

What a shame, though, that such a vivid three-season portrait of a powerful, compelling, untraditional woman had to end on such a banal, predictable note. Damages proposed that Patty sacrificed her child to pursue a career that she couldn’t, in the end, say was worth it. To damn this fascinating, gender-perverse woman as finally just a “bad mother” ends what was a fun, Grand Guignol series with a conservative, moralizing kicker.

Consigning a woman who’s better at being a lawyer than she is at being a mother to the purgatory of regret and maternal sorrow is a cheap shot, an easy way out for a series that always did seem to be more complicated than it turned out to be. If Damages returns for a fourth season, I hope Patty and Ellen can proceed into their mutually corrupt, ruthless future without worrying about the kids they left behind or never had.

The Feminist Spectator

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The Blind Side

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First to state the obvious: Gabourey Sidibe, the young actor from Precious: Based on the Novel Pushby Sapphire, would have been a better choice for Best Actress at the 2010 Academy Awards. Her transformative performance in a role that showed both toughness and tenderness, that took her character on a journey from abjection to determination, required the young actor to plumb the depths of an experience far from her own.

Sidibe’s performance, directed by Lee Daniels—the openly gay, African American who was only the second man of color ever to be nominated in the Oscars’ Best Director category—is powerful and impressive, as she modulates Precious’s tentative but dogged growth from a girl cocooned in layers of self-protective mistrust to a young woman open to learning, to love, and to survival. Sidibe captures the spark of fortitude and life that fuels a physically and emotionally abused teenager to make her own way, to strive to be more than her circumstances dictate.

As my partner in movie-going and in life Stacy Wolf pointed out, how ironic that Sandra Bullock won Best Actress for a role in an idealized story about white people “saving” an African American teenager, instead of Sidibe, who plays an African American teenager who manages to save herself.

Although Sidibe deserved the award, I’m glad that Sandra Bullock won instead of, say, Meryl Streep, whose vivacious turn as Julia Childs in Julie and Julia was great fun but not as impressive in this competition. Bullock’s achievement comes from the understatement she pulls off in a film whose moral is writ so large she practically bumps her head on it in every scene. In the ham-fisted and formulaic movie The Blind Side, Bullock performs with thoughtfulness and depth last evident when she played a racist housewife in Crash (2005).

Bullock plays Leigh Anne Tuohy, the wealthy Memphis woman who adopts a homeless African American teenager and encourages him to become a football star. Bullock performs Tuohy with an ethical clarity and straightforward, no-nonsense, ameliorating love that wins over even the toughest of toughs (who, in this film, are African American men in the housing projects from which Leigh Anne helps teenager “Big Mike” “escape”).

Michael “Big Mike” Oher, the Baltimore Ravens football player on whose life story the film is based, is played by Quinton Aaron as a taciturn, gentle giant dumbfounded but heartened by Leigh Anne’s insistent substitute mothering. Oher’s own mother, in the story the film chooses to deliver, is an inattentive addict who can’t pay her rent. When Tuohy goes to their apartment to see the woman, wanting her tacit approval for becoming Michael’s guardian, Denise Oher (Adriane Lenox) happens to be home.

Both women are inarticulate with grief that Michael’s mother hasn’t the wherewithal to hold on to her son. Leigh Anne’s Christian sympathy (her cross is insistently apparent around Bullock’s neck throughout the scene) is meant to somehow mask the fact that the Tuohys intend to take control of this poor woman’s flesh and blood. Lenox plays Denise Oher as angry but too befuddled to be proactive about Michael’s future or her own. Her sensitive performance and Bullock’s restraint make the scene halfway bearable.

Given very little to work with, the skillful Lenox ennobles Denise Oher with her own sympathetic dignity (Lenox played another African American kid’s mother in John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt on Broadway in 2005). And because she doesn’t give in to the condescension or moral superiority that could easily overpower the scene, Bullock’s self-possession tempers what might have been a stark showdown between would-be mothers with very different entitlements to and investments in Michael Oher. Instead, Bullock takes Lenox’s hand and sits beside her, the two characters wordless as the scene ends.

Tim McGraw plays Sean, Leigh Anne’s rich husband, who never once objects to his wife’s altruism, and only shakes his head affectionately over her forceful personality and bullying, get-it-done style. Their young son Sean Tuohy, Jr., or “SJ” (Jae Head), appoints himself Michael’s manager and front-man; he’s a talkative little tow-headed guy of perhaps eight or nine.

Much of the film’s calculated humor comes from the Laurel and Hardy, Mutt and Jeff shtick of Michael and SJ’s scenes together, but inevitably, Michael plays the straight man to SJ’s comedy. Director John Lee Hancock allows young Head to so overplay his scenes with Aaron, they become much more about SJ than they are about Michael. Head is used throughout to showcase how young white children are “color-blind”; the fact that he’s befriended Michael (before his family drives by the teenager one night, seeing him alone and cold, walking on empty Memphis streets in the rain) sets in motion SJ’s parents’ decision to become Michael’s guardians.

That’s the film’s point and its problem. The Blind Side isn’t about Michael Oher’s rise from poverty to a notable career as a professional football player. In fact, we rarely get to hear what Michael thinks about any of the decisions his new white family make for him. Even his interior monologue on the football field, replayed in voiceover as he struggles to win a big game for his team, is supplied by Leigh Anne, as Michael simply echoes her instructions to protect his teammates as he does his (new, white) family.

The film uses Oher as an excuse to extol the virtues of the rich white folks who take him into their home and their lives. Michael provides the vehicle for their redemption, the vessel through which they demonstrate their unique ability to rise above racial divisions.

Bullock somehow manages a dignified performance in the middle of this bull, resisting the angelic heroism the script thrusts at her character. Bullock’s Leigh Anne just does what she thinks is right. Her catty, rich, white women friends ask during lunch at a fancy restaurant if Leigh Anne isn’t worried about bringing such a “big strapping black Buck” (not their words, but their implicit meaning) into her house to live under the same roof with her teenage (white white white) daughter. In response, Bullock as Leigh Anne narrows her eyes and says softly, “Shame on you.” She lifts the check from the table, says quietly, “I’ll get this,” and walks out with her spine straight and her head high, as her friends look by turns guilty and defiant.

The film continues in this vein. Bullock keeps her posture firm and the schmaltz in check, acting with subtle, emotional and physical nuances that avoid self-righteous, morally haughty display. No slapstick pratfalls show off her comic timing; no goofy scenes end by revealing the lonely tears of her clown. Hancock’s film objectifies her, including too many shots of boys and men staring approvingly at her lithe, appealing figure as she walks away from them.

These voyeuristic shots imply that Leigh Anne advocates effectively for Michael because she’s a physical knock-out. That’s just sexist. And not at all true-to-life, if the photographs of Leigh Anne Tuohy that ran in various media outlets when the film premiered are any indication of her actual appearance. But Bullock resists her director’s misogyny. She plays Leigh Anne as a woman following her own moral compass, determined to do right by a young man who through no fault of his own, has nothing but the chance she gives him.

That is, at least in this version of Oher’s story. From what I understand of the much more complicated, true story of Michael Oher and Leigh Anne Tuohy, the African American community in Memphis did a lot more to help out than The Blind Side lets on. The film needs Leigh Anne to be its sole heroine, so that white middle-class spectators just like her, to whom the movie is so blatantly pitched, can identify with her pure selflessness.

Mark Harris wrote an incisive column in Entertainment Weekly (February 19, 2010, http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20347725,00.html) about how The Blind Side distorts its source material, the book by Michael Lewis on which it’s based. According to Harris, Lewis’s book offers a more realistic, truthful rendering of the community effort it actually took to move the teenager from homelessness to a football scholarship, detailing how a series of African American and white families rotated caring for Michael. Harris ends his editorial saying,

Too much substance gets swept aside by The Blind Side’s feel-good agenda. Lewis’ book remains clear-eyed in its view of the kid he calls ”my main character,” a young man with the one-in-a-million luck to ”swap one life for another” because he has a pair of multimillionaire benefactors and a skill that can make a lot of money for a lot of people. In the movie, the ”main character” isn’t Michael, but the nice white lady who plucks a winner out of the otherwise apparently worthless population of the projects. What does this alteration accomplish, other than to tell audiences that all you need to change someone’s life is a heart (and wallet) of gold, innate bossiness, and a pistol in your purse? It’s sad that many of the people moved by The Blind Side haven’t seen Precious, a much more challenging story of a poor black teen who also survives shocking adversity to find the road to an identity. The Blind Side is a fable of exceptionalism about a kid who’s worth saving because he might become a superstar. Precious is about a kid who’s worth saving simply because she’s a human being. That’s a case that The Blind Side forgets it should be making. But it’s in Lewis’ book, ripe for discovery by anyone who suspects that this movie has a problematically large blind side of its own.

The Blind Side’s film doesn’t escape the racism of its sanctimoniousness message about “tolerance and acceptance” (which is only ever about white people). But if Bullock had to win—as thin, pretty white women are wont to do in these competitions—I’m inclined to celebrate her selection because at least she also demonstrates that a woman can pull in the biggest box office of the year and still be very good at what she does.

Harris reports that the film is now the highest grossing non-fiction adaptation in the history of the industry. The Blind Side is also apparently the first female-lead movie to make over $200 million. Given that women over 40 (Bullock is 45) are rarely cast in active, strong leading roles, and are never expected to make money, Bullock’s coup is worth an Oscar, even as I rue the racist slant of her material.

An epilogue: Days after the Academy Awards aired, the tabloid press revealed that Bullock’s husband of five years, the motorcycle aficionado and reality TV star Jesse James, had an affair with a woman of ill-repute (her name is linked on various internet sites with Nazi paraphernalia, porn, and prostitution). While I’m the last to invest in “happily ever after” narratives, or what Jennifer Armstrong, in her Entertainment Weekly “PopWatch” piece, “Sandra Bullock’s Marriage Woes: The End of a Fairy Tale?” (March 18, 2010, http://popwatch.ew.com/2010/03/18/sandra-bullocks-marriage-woes-the-end-of-the-fairy-tale/), sentimentally calls the mythic story of the woman with a successful career and a good marriage.

But I do think it’s a shame that so soon after her professional victory, Bullock has to contend with paparazzi needling her about her unfaithful man. Even though this story underlines that some men remain threatened by strong, successful women, Bullock is the one who’ll bear the brunt of the press’s intrusions. She’ll be tarred the “ball-buster,” the powerful broad who “forced” her man to seek out the comforts of what some bloggers have harshly called a “bimbo” with a life much more quotidian than Bullock’s.

Why is it that even successful women rarely have a chance to enjoy their deserved accomplishments before they’re taken down, put back where American popular culture continues to think they belong?

Bullock stays thin to conform to conventional notions of sexiness for white women; she works very hard to create a career for herself with films other than screwball comedies; and she succeeds as she stretches her craft. But when the day is done, she’s still judged according to whether or not she can hold on to a man who by all accounts hasn’t a fraction of Bullock’s talent.

That’s just wrong.

The Feminist Spectator

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