Criticism
The Stickiness of Truthiness
When the lights came up on the evening performance of The Lifespan of a Fact at Studio 54 in Manhattan’s manic theatre district on Tuesday January 8, 2019, it was 8.53pm (I checked my phone as we shuffled out of the theatre and back onto the frigid street).
The play is in its final week on Broadway, stuffed with talented magnetic performers (Daniel Radcliffe is as different to Harry Potter or Alan Strang as a man so famous for the parts he played as a teen could hope to be, a comfortable Cherry Jones, and a consistently delightful Bobby Cannavale), and wrestling with a question that all of America seems utterly fixated by.
How are facts and truths different and how much do each of these things matter?
Hannah Gadsby’s ‘Nanette’ Isn’t Messing Around
On a Tuesday night in early April, I lead my father to a small theatre on Vandam Street, the Soho Playhouse. Snow is still stuck on the edges of sidewalks in stubborn grey sludge piles as if to say winter will throttle us all somehow. My father and I are full of doughy Neapolitan style pizza, but alert, thanks to the brusque 20-minute walk we just legged to get here. It’s two minutes to eight when we arrive, and we join the queue to pick up our tickets and shuffle into our seats for Hannah Gadsby’s stand-up show, Nanette.
On our way to the theatre we had passed the comedy touts on MacDougal Street. Each brandished their flyers and stickers, beckoning us into their basements, but I’d already bought the tickets for Nanette. We pushed through them with purpose.
Mad Men, and the Women who Love Them
Watching Betty Draper (now Francis) march out to her front lawn and take aim at the neighbour’s birds in season one of Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men there is a moment of realisation – maybe, just maybe, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
It’s the same when Joan Holloway (now Harris) is raped by her fiancé on the floor of Don Draper’s Sterling Cooper office in season two. Or when, throughout her rise to copywriter, Peggy Olson is constantly met with the kind of barriers a modern career woman does not expect to encounter.
She works through the weekend, she pulls the weight of three copywriters, she drives successful account pitches, but no matter how hard she pushes herself, she will never be given the slack or recognition of her male counterparts.
The draw of Mad Men is that it is a study in deception. Don Draper is built on an unraveling lie. But the world around him is equally misleading – no one is really who they appear to be.
'The Girlfriend Experience' and the Performative Expectations of Womanhood
About six episodes into Starz’s latest series The Girlfriend Experience something clicked.It didn’t stop being about sex work, exploitation and morality, but it became clear what it’s really about is the performative reality of being a woman.
Christine Reade (Riley Keough) is a second year law student, intern at a major law firm (with a curious and, it’s suggested fake, fascination with patent law) and a big bucks escort.
Escort Christine is largely a vessel for other people’s expectations, desires and feelings. In her day to day life she performs a series of roles, from student to sister to sex worker.
In the very first episode, we see Christine perform for potential employers – she’s studied hard and she knows all the right things to say about the law firms she interviews with.
Are You Watching Jessica Jones? You Should Be
She’s a hard-drinking, PTSD-suffering private eye. And a superhero.
Meet Jessica Jones, the latest addition to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and namesake of Netflix’s newest binge-able show.
Asked why Krysten Ritter wanted the role of Jessica, the actress told New York Magazine that she was inspired by the way showrunner Melissa Rosenberg saw her.
“She never really talked about Jessica as gender first. She never wrote the character as gender first. It’s always character first, which I loved right away,” Ritter said.
“She pointed out at one point, “You don’t hear anyone ever saying, ‘white male superhero.’ You just say ‘superhero.’ But for a girl, for some reason, it’s ‘female superhero’.”
Abortion on Prime Time TV. Finally we get Some Realism
The lead character in a major prime time network drama had an abortion.
Scandal’s white-hatted-gladiator, Olivia Pope, skipped an official White House dinner to terminate an unwanted pregnancy and we didn’t even know that she was pregnant until it happened.
There was no soul searching and no miscarriage to save the character from being a Woman Who Had an Abortion.
All in all, the procedure took up about a minute in a montage set to Silent Night during the hugely popular show’s mid-season finale.
This is a huge step forward in the representation of abortion on screen, and one we probably should have known would come from Shonda Rhimes, Scandal’s showrunner.