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Say Goodbye to Volleywood
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Illustration by Joan Lemay
Rick Marin | Racquet and Longreads | September 2019 | 9 minutes (2,347 words)
Twenty-five years ago, Vitas Gerulaitis was found dead in the pool house of a friend in Southampton, N.Y. Not from drugs, as many suspected after his well-publicized battles with addiction. Vitas was sober. The cause was shockingly random and banal: accidental carbon monoxide poisoning from a faulty propane heater.
He was 40 years old.
The funeral was so crowded they had to put speakers outside St. Dominic’s Church in Oyster Bay. On YouTube you can see raw AP footage of Jimmy Connors, John McEnroe, and Bjorn Borg—the three biggest stars in men’s tennis of the ’70s—carrying the casket of their perennial No. 4, Connors wrapping his arms around Borg and McEnroe in sorrow.
Mary Carillo, a friend since they were New York juniors together, was there: “John could not stand Jimmy, Jimmy did not like John, and nobody got close to Bjorn,” Carillo said. “Only Vitas would be friends with all three of them.” They were all better tennis players than he was, but it was they who worshipped him. In her eulogy she said, “Our golden sun has set.”
Governor Mario Cuomo shut down the Long Island Expressway for the funeral procession to make its way from St. Dominic’s to the cemetery. Construction workers took off their helmets in respect. Did they know it was Vitas? Maybe not, but it was a fitting tribute for a blue-collar kid from Queens who made it big in a white-collar game.
A game that lost more than a tennis player when they buried Vitas. Grace that would be replaced by power. Fame that spilled over from the sports pages onto Page Six. A sense of fun that is just…gone.
A generation after his death—when tennis champions are meticulously calibrated überathletes inhabiting a curated world of kale water, “teams,” and corporate branding—it’s impossible to conceive the swath Vitas cut through the world he so vividly inhabited.
“There were few people I’ve ever met who were so damn alive,” Carillo said. “That it’s been 25 years is a little hard to take.” Read more…
The Walkable Multiverse According to Charles Jencks
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Longreads Alina Simone | Atlas Obscura | September 2015 | 23 minutes (5,747 words)
Our latest Exclusive is a new story by Alina Simone, co-funded by Longreads Members and published by Atlas Obscura. Read more…→
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Longreads On the fate of print books in the digital age:
People of the book, such as I, not only believe that the replacement of the page by the screen will alter human character, thin it out, empty it of depth, but secretly hope this happens. A deterioration in human character consequent upon the demise of the book will be, for the inveterate reader, an apologia pro vita sua. For we who have spent so much of our lives with, and even for books secretly derived a sense of moral superiority from having done so. This is obvious from the fact that no one says “Young people nowadays do not read” in a tone other than of lament or, more usually, moral condemnation. A person who does not read—and for us reading means books—is a mental barbarian, a man who, wittingly or unwittingly, confines himself to his own experience, necessarily an infinitesimal proportion of all possible experiences. He is not only a barbarian, but an egotist.
“Loss & Gain, or the Fate of the Book.” — Anthony Daniels, The New Criterion
The Queering of the Baby Bells
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Longreads Getty, Collage by Homestead Studio
Carlos A. Ball | an excerpt adapted from The Queering of Corporate America: How Big Business Went from LGBTQ Adversary to Ally | Beacon Press | 2019 | 23 minutes (6,272 words)
In the years following the Stonewall riots, LGBTQ rights supporters chose corporations as targets for activism. At the time, some corporations had explicit anti-LGBTQ policies and practices for everyone to see. In 1970, for example, a Los Angeles bank made clear in its job application forms that it would not hire alcoholics, drug users, or “homosexuals.” At around the same time, the Pacific Bell Telephone Company, the largest private employer in California, announced that it would not hire open “homosexuals,” because doing so would “disregard commonly accepted standards of conduct, morality, or life-styles.” Until 1978, the Coors Brewing Company routinely asked job applicants, while attached to lie detector machines, whether they had engaged in same-sex sexual conduct and denied them jobs if they had. (The company’s testers also inquired whether applicants were thieves or communists.)
One reason why post-Stonewall LGBTQ activism focused on large corporations was that the firms’ interests in promoting and protecting their brands made them particularly sensitive to the negative publicity that came with exposing discrimination. Large corporations spend millions of dollars every year developing and marketing their brands and are, as a result, highly sensitive to criticisms that might tarnish those brands. Interestingly, the need to protect corporate brands from negative publicity made companies more willing to change explicit anti-LGBTQ policies than government entities. Indeed, it was more likely, during the 1970s and into the 1980s, that a large corporation targeted by queer activists would cease explicitly discriminating against sexual minorities than, for example, a government agency would stop discriminating against queer people or, just as important, a state or local legislative body would adopt sexual orientation anti-discrimination laws. To enact such laws, queer activists had to persuade a majority of elected officials in a given jurisdiction to support adding sexual minorities to civil rights laws; outside of a few liberal municipalities, this was an extremely difficult task for the embryonic LGBTQ rights movement to accomplish in the years following Stonewall.
Additionally, the fact that corporate America had tens of thousands of LGBTQ employees (most of whom were, admittedly, firmly in the closet) made corporate workplaces obvious and natural targets of LGBTQ rights activism. Whether they knew it or not, corporate leaders and heterosexual co-employees were already working alongside sexual minorities and transgender individuals, in many cases developing the cooperative bonds, mutual trust, and even lasting friendships that the pursuit of common objectives, including corporate ones, frequently engenders. In this sense, LGBTQ individuals, as a group, were not outsiders and “strange others” to corporate America; instead, they were integral members of corporate workplaces. And many of them were likely to come out of the closet and share the joys and challenges of their personal lives with their fellow workers (as heterosexual employees did all the time) if they could be guaranteed a modicum of job security and protection against discrimination. Read more…
Lindy West is Preaching to the Choir
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Sara Fredman
Sara Fredman Jenny Jimenez / Hatchette Books
Sara Fredman | Longreads | November 2019 | 17 minutes (4,696 words)
The title of Lindy West’s new book, The Witches Are Coming, derives from a New York Times column West wrote in October 2017 about the then-unfolding of the allegations against Harvey Weinstein. Woody Allen had warned against creating “a witch hunt atmosphere,” where men have to worry about their every move, and West was not having it. Or, more precisely, she was all too ready to have it. “The witches are coming,” she wrote, “but not for your life. We’re coming for your legacy … we have our stories, and we’re going to keep telling them.” For West, there is witchcraft to be found in truth-telling, a power that she says “by definition cannot be likable.”
Likability is in the news again, with the New York Times reporting this week that 41% of voters surveyed who support Joe Biden but not Elizabeth Warren say they agree with the statement that most of the women who run for president “just aren’t that likable.” But, as West and I discussed when we spoke over the phone last month, likability is hardly an objective category. It depends as much on who is doing the liking as it does on who is being liked. In other words, audience — or in the case of politics, the makeup of the electorate — matters. The Witches Are Coming knows its audience. It isn’t aimed at the Woody Allens or the Donald Trumps of the world; its title functions as more of a mantra for would-be practitioners of its witchcraft than a warning to potential victims. And the truths West tells in The Witches Are Coming will likely find a cadre of would-be witches eager to like them. Over the last decade, West has gone from a local Seattle favorite to a writer with a national profile, a best-selling memoir, Shrill, and a well-received TV show of the same name. In one of her essays, West cheekily addresses racists but she acknowledges that her writing isn’t for everyone, least of all Trump supporters. Instead, she talks about the value of preaching to the choir — in her words, the ones “who show up every week.”
Still, it’s possible that even West’s devoted audience isn’t entirely ready to hear all of the truths she’s here to tell. The essays in The Witches Are Coming cover a wide range of seemingly disparate topics, from the #metoo movement to climate change; Ted Bundy, Adam Sandler, and Joan Rivers all get chapters, as does a ’90s culture that West believes taught her that activism was lame. They share an emphasis on the power of voice: Who gets to speak and share their stories? How do we react when those stories are shared? And they often dwell on the ways in which we try to avoid having hard conversations about our culture. What the essays don’t do is provide any easy solutions. When I spoke to her, West was comfortable saying she doesn’t have all the answers and the book functions as a series of questions that attempt, at various points, to challenge, inspire, and reassure an audience she assumes is ready to take on the cultural challenges we face as we head into the third decade of the millennium.
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Sara Fredman: Shrill told a specifically feminist story: what it’s like to walk around the world in a woman’s body, and in your particular body; what it means to try and fit yourself into like cultural and physical spaces that aren’t built for you. The Witches Are Coming pans out quite a bit and engages more broadly with politics and systemic inequities and what it means to live in our culture right now, particularly for marginalized groups. What compelled you to use this wider lens? How was the writing process different for this book as opposed to Shrill?
Lindy West: Well, part of it is that there’s something vulnerable and very raw and sort of overexposed about writing memoir and I needed a break from writing memoir. So that was part of it but I think that a hallmark of the Trump era is this feeling of being overwhelmed. I’m not one of those people who thinks that this is a good thing because it’s forcing people to wake up. But I do think that it has forced a lot of people to confront how many different things are broken in our country and the ways that he’s been able to exploit those broken systems and the ways that his fans absolutely relish that brokenness. It’s really been a dark and scary time. And I just felt like that feeling of being overwhelmed is such a part of this time, so I wanted to address it in some way. I’m not an expert in anything, I don’t have a degree in policy. I’m just a person who I think is a relatively good communicator and I have this platform and this book is my attempt at gathering in all of the different parts of this great, big, overwhelming mess as best I can, trying to hold them all together and look at them at the same time and be honest and accountable about reality. That’s what this writing process felt like to me. I don’t know anything special but the point of the book is hopefully to make people feel less alone and hopefully to galvanize people a little bit. It’s the same as writing a list. If you can put something down on paper in a way where you can look at it all at once, it becomes less daunting. And you can’t cover everything but this was my attempt at trying to consolidate it so you can start cutting it up into bite-sized pieces.
It reminds me of when my daughter was dealing with anxiety as a really little person and I spoke to a child psychologist who said you have to name it before you can deal with it. And I feel like that’s so much of what you’re doing, naming it for us. Not that we don’t know, obviously, what we’re dealing with, but getting it down on paper is the first step because it’s so overwhelming.
Yeah, and it’s also scary to look at because it’s so much more comfortable to be in denial.
Once you start looking at like — “oh my God, what do we do?” — it’s really scary. And I think a lot of people — particularly privileged people and especially white people — who have the luxury of living in denial to a great extent, that’s really seductive. And I think that the first step absolutely is just naming what’s happening around us and what’s happened before us. That’s just the first step to repairing some of these really deep illnesses in our society.
But I’m interested in how you conceive of your audience. Is there an element in this book, do you think, of preaching to the choir or do you see it as galvanizing those who would already tend to agree with you but just might be complacent or think that there’s not much they can do? Do you think you might change anyone’s mind?
I know that I have changed people’s minds with my writing before because I hear from them. I clearly did not write this book for Trump supporters to read and be like, “Huh, I never thought about that.” Obviously that’s not going to happen. I don’t feel any kind of qualms about preaching to the choir. I get accused of that a lot and I’m like, great, the choir is who shows up every week. And we have a lot of shit to do and if the choir is feeling despair and doesn’t know what to do with themselves, I have some ideas for them and I would like them to feel energized and galvanized and I would like them to not feel hopeless. The choir is who’s showing up because they want to be preached to so I don’t really mind when people say that about my work. I don’t think everything has to be changing people’s minds. And I don’t know that there are many books that are going to reach across that partisan divide. I think that’s the work of very, very long, slow culture change or one ultra-charismatic politician TBD who maybe hasn’t been born yet.
When I teach argumentative writing, I usually start our discussion by asking if the students can give an example of a piece of writing that changed their minds because I think it’s extraordinarily difficult to change someone’s mind. And it’s always a very interesting discussion but this semester, one of my students said that he used to be anti-abortion and then started seeing all these Twitter threads of women talking about their abortions and they changed his mind. And I was flabbergasted because when does this ever happen? But then it was like, “Oh my gosh, that was on Twitter.” And I bring this up because you started the Shout Your Abortion movement on Twitter and, in this book, you write that “personal story telling is an engine of humanization, which is in turn an engine of empathy.” So here I have this kid who’s telling me he changed his opinion on abortion because of Twitter threads but Twitter can often be this toxic wasteland for women. What do we do about the fact that this is a major platform for changing minds but it’s also the main arena for policing and punishing women’s voices? What would be your advice for women who want to try to change the world by sharing their stories but don’t want to participate in an abusive garbage platform?
I don’t know. I’m certainly not telling people that they need to get off Twitter. I love Twitter. I think Twitter is incredible in a lot of ways and I had a lot of fun on Twitter and I learned a lot on Twitter. All of that is real and if people can find a place, a way to navigate Twitter that feels safe and productive to them, that’s great, you know, go ahead and stay. I left Twitter because of the president. It wasn’t so much the getting trolled all the time. I just felt ethically disgusting validating that platform or embracing the platform with my presence. So while I do think it might be a net gain for the world if we all left Twitter and let it die and move to a different platform, I don’t know what that platform is. That’s all well and good to suggest but in practical terms, it doesn’t really do much for us. We don’t have it yet. Shout Your Abortion happened on Twitter 100% and I know firsthand that that movement has changed a lot of people’s lives. And it’s just one of many absolutely incredible spontaneous outpourings of truths that have happened on Twitter that have changed a lot about the landscape that we live in. So I don’t have anything wise to say beyond that it sucks. Some people get to use this platform and have fun and feel safe and laugh and goof off with their friends and some people, in order to do any of that, have to figure out how to armor themselves against really, really violent, horrific abuse. And the fact that it’s racialized and it’s gendered, it’s just a really apt and a really disgusting reflection of our society at large. If I had a solution for our society at large, I promise I’d tell everyone. It’s real tricky because people absolutely need that platform and there’s a lot of good stuff happening there. I choose to not be there, but I don’t begrudge people who do. And even though I don’t have a lot of faith in them, I hope that Twitter continues to try to make that space safe for everyone. And maybe they’ll figure it out.
That idea of how some people get to exist very benignly, safely and other people have a totally different experience of the world, you touch on that in your chapter on Ted Bundy and likability, which kind of fed my soul because I write a series for Longreads on TV antiheroes and gender, trying to figure out why we find it so easy to like men who do bad things and so hard to like women who do anything at all. Your argument is that likability is a con and that it can’t possibly be an objective criterion in our sexist, racist culture, which I found very compelling. But you also have a TV show and, I think, in the opinion of most critics, you created a likable character in Annie Easton.
I know.
Although there was some criticism that I remember seeing when season one came out that she wasn’t shrill enough, which I guess meant that she was so likable that she was unlikable, which hilariously and sadly proves your point. Can you talk a little bit about the process of creating that character? Did you fall into the likability trap at all? Were there discussions of “we want audiences to like this character” or “I’m crafting the character in such a way” in order to get audiences to like or relate to her?
Yeah. I’m sure I’ve absolutely contradicted myself in print because I definitely have said that part of my purpose in the show, part of my goal, was to create a fat person that you like because I just think that that’s such an excellent way to change people’s minds — if you can fall in love with this character that you’re used to seeing as a kind of negative archetype, a stock character, a sidekick, a sort of broken person, a work in progress. If you can make a fully realized human being that people care about in a genuine way, then that might affect the way that they think about the fat people around them in their lives. So I’ve certainly said that in interviews and then I condemned myself in my book, which I hadn’t realized, so thank you for pointing that out. You’re always working within the confines of the culture that you’re working in. I guess maybe you can exploit that system to a degree.
I think that the way it’s been set up like likability is a con. My argument in the series has basically been that these stories of antiheroes have been told in such a way that it stacks the deck for liking a certain character. We wouldn’t ordinarily like a mob boss or a meth kingpin, but because we get these backstories, because we see that they’re just trying to provide for their families and they’re thoughtful, they get interiority, all that stuff, and we find ourselves rooting for them in spite of ourselves because it’s been stacked. It’s all about how you construct a narrative. And so I think it’s so cool and fascinating to be thoughtful about that, but for the kind of character who doesn’t usually get that kind of narrative structure.
Yeah and also, you know, Annie is not likable universally. I am, in the chapter, talking more about the idea of this sort of blanket, nice, universal likability that actually isn’t what we’re going for in the show. There’s plenty of people who are mad about her abortion, who hate her for being fat even though she’s nice. But I think you’re right. I think if you are a flattened person, then your likability can only be hollow. And all it can do is pander to stereotypes and traditional gender roles. But if you can make a character that is alive, it’s likable in a much more nutritious way. And you’re still within the confines of a fucked-up culture and there’s stuff about Annie that I’m sure is problematic in some way. But everything is just this kind of weird dance. You’re trying to position yourself in this matrix of fucked-up forces.
I think it’s a complex thing but I think it’s telling that you were able to create this character who you want to root for despite the fact that she was doing all of these things that have not traditionally been likable characteristics. So that’s moving the needle but also probably reflective of the fact that so many women saw themselves for the first time in this character and that we have more women’s voices in pop culture criticism and all that stuff to say “this is a great portrayal.” So I guess it’s all about representation. Which is another topic that you talk about a lot. You’ve spoken about it in Shrill and in this book as well. And the chapter on likability comes right after the chapter on Adam Sandler, which argues that all Adam Sandler movies share a number of major unnerving qualities. I’m the same age as you and I’ve always seen myself in your arguments that so much of pop culture when we were growing up just wasn’t for us. I’m finding that part of adulthood for me is figuring out what I actually like because so much of my youth was spent subconsciously shaping myself to fit a pop culture that wasn’t created by people like me.
Totally.
And actually Adam Sandler was a notable exception in one tiny little way. His Hannukah song was like the first time my religion had a major pop culture moment. But that was literally the one thing.
I mean, I almost put it in the book that “O.J. Simpson, not a Jew” is an incredible joke. It’s a very, very good line.
It was so of a moment. You could write a chapter on that.
Yeah, for sure.
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So I guess I’m wondering whether you think things have shifted enough. Is it that pop culture has become a bigger tent such that it speaks to girls and young women in the same way it does to boys and young men? Or has it just become fragmented? You have teenage daughters. Do you feel that it’s different now?
It’s definitely different. I don’t know that it’s like, you know, “Oh, we fixed it.” It’s so much better, there’s so much more diverse representation, different ways to be a girl on TV, than there were when we were growing up. But still 99% of the actresses on TV look exactly alike and lo and behold, that’s what all the teenage girls at my daughters’ schools happen to strive to look like. And that’s just exactly the same as it was when we were teenagers. But at the same time there’s a lot more depth and breadth to the female characters and the different kinds of women’s stories that we see on TV. I mean, when we were kids, you couldn’t have interracial couples. I was at Jezebel already when Cheerios had an ad with an interracial couple and people lost their minds. So that was 2012 at the earliest. So things absolutely are moving and shifting. My daughters are so clued in. They’re so on top of the media that they consume and monitoring it and policing it and thinking critically about it. And that’s another thing that Twitter has, I think, taught a lot of young people. It’s just a constant global conversation churning about every single thing in the world. And so my daughters are hyperaware of racist bullshit and sexist bullshit and homophobic bullshit in the media around them and it’s amazing. In a different interview, someone asked me: How do you equip your kids to navigate the sort of media landscape? And I think I kind of rambled on about, you know, “You gotta be honest with them and always talk to them like they are smart and they can handle it and don’t dumb things down,” blah, blah, blah. But I’m realizing in this moment that my real answer is, don’t worry about it, they got it. My daughters are so much smarter about media literacy.
I feel like I was so dumb. I feel dumb compared to them.
Yeah. And the thing also about them is they’re not embarrassed to be militant.
I really appreciated that activism chapter. It was cheering.
I worry about it being a little bit, um, too sweeping, too broad, because I’m ultimately talking about my own experience in high school, but it’s definitely real.
You talk about how activism was viewed when we were in high school, how save the whales was a punchline, like, “Oh, you care about this? Pretty lame.” And the fact that we grew up in that culture, I mean it’s so sad.
So sad.
What could we have done if that wasn’t the predominant cultural attitude toward activism?
And it was absolutely by design, you know? People did that to us and that’s so messed up.
Changing topics from the future to the past, your Joan Rivers chapter made me think about The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel because the show is supposed to be loosely based on Joan Rivers and other early female comics. But in your chapter you point out the crucible Joan Rivers operated in. There were such limited choices facing women in comedy and she was shaped by the forces around her. If she wanted to do this thing, she needed to work in a certain way. And the show takes a totally different route. It allows its protagonist to remain likable — there’s that likability again — while killing it as a female comic. She gets to keep her humanity and also do comedy. And she’s pretty and everybody loves her but nobody sexually harasses her. Except for maybe comments, like, [old timey voice] “What’s that broad doing here?” Nobody’s grabbing any locations on her body. Emily Nussbaum, the New Yorker’s TV critic, made a very similar point when she wrote about the show. But I think that your chapter on Joan Rivers offers this kind of sliding doors alternative story that the show could be telling and it would be a heavier show and less triumphalist. And I know you’ve worked in comedy and you’ve written about the role that comedy plays in culture and the responsibilities of its practitioners. It seems to me like an example of what you talk about in “choosing the lie,” right?
Totally.
It’s enjoyable entertainment but maybe another example of how we choose to gloss over the things that make us uncomfortable.
Yeah, and that does a great disservice to women who are struggling in that field or in any similar field where, you know, we can just tell a story about a plucky gal who excels in her job and doesn’t face any of those really dark complications, if she’s even able to get there at all. There are so many people who were run out of comedy by sexist creeps. We don’t know who they are, we don’t know how many of them there are, we don’t know their names because they never got to do it. So I think it is easy to be like, [old timey voice] “Well if you just try hard and you got good jokes, anyone can do it!” That’s just bootstraps again. Like, if you failed, you must not have tried hard enough or you must not have been good enough when really there are — not to be a broken record — but there are massive, powerful, entrenched systems in place that move the ride for some people and make it impossible for other people, or at least very, very painful and grueling. And you’re not going to fix that, you’re not going to fix the world, if you don’t look at those honestly.
I thought about the Chip and Joanna Gaines chapter when the whole Ellen and George W. Bush thing happened.
Right, I thought about it too. “Oh, my chapter!”
Ellen commented and said, “Just because I don’t agree with someone on everything doesn’t mean I’m not gonna be friends with them.” But in your chapter on Chip and Joanna, you write: “The partisan divide is not insignificant or cute.” So how did you feel about that whole kerfuffle?
Like everything else, it’s just really complicated. It would have been incredibly powerful if Ellen had made some public statement like, “You know what? He’s my friend and I really love him as a person, but it’s true that he did XYZ horrific things to the LGBTQ community and I feel …” You know what I mean? I think more transparency is always really powerful. But also, she’s walking a tightrope.
Right. So what do we say to people who, like Chip and Joanna, are trying to shelter in this neutrality cocoon and walk that tightrope? What do we, as consumers of pop culture, do about that?
I don’t know, like, constantly bitch about it on Twitter? I don’t know. I think that part of this book, that I try to get into over and over and over again, is that all of this stuff is really messy; there’s not a perfect system. I think that it’s good to always encourage people to be principled and transparent and honest. Ellen or Chip and Joanna could have used those moments as an opportunity to have a complicated, candid conversation and they chose not to. And I understand that there are probably teams of publicists telling them what to do.
Same with the candidates who got that question, you know, about “friends who aren’t like you.”
Yeah, I mean, you know what? I don’t have any friends who are homophobic, right-wing, racist monsters. Monsters is not a productive term. People, real people. I don’t have those people as my friends and I frankly don’t understand how that would work. But I also recognize that I live in Seattle and I live in a bubble and I am not confronted with messy situations. I couldn’t find you a Trump supporter if you were gonna give me $1 million. I don’t even know where to look. And so I recognize that it’s more complicated than that. I think all we can do is continue to have these conversations in public and resist falling into absolutely useless clichés like “I don’t need all my friends to believe the exact same way as me.” Like, yeah, I don’t need all my friends to root for the same sports team as me but I do need all my friends to feel the same way I do about racism and homophobia and transphobia. I do need that and I think that that is a virtue. I think that that is a good thing.
Right, and the stakes of being kind to people who are not being kind on a much grander scale with major systemic consequences.
Yeah, and that doesn’t mean that we have to — I’m not advocating violence. Look, if there are people in your life that believe horrific things and you love those people and you care about them, of course you don’t have to cut those people out of your life. But I do think that a great start would be to at least try to communicate with them in a real way, like not in a contentious way where you’re arguing about politics, but in a human way, like we’re talking about human beings and people’s lives. It’s yet another question to which I don’t have a perfect answer because, you know, I think I said this in the book that we’ve torn down some old systems and we haven’t built new ones yet and we’re still kind of beta testing, we’re troubleshooting. I think that most people are good, or at least mean well and want to be kind. And I think a lot of people are really controlled by fear and resentment and I don’t think that that’s insurmountable. But I also don’t know how to fix it, except for doing what I’m already doing, which is using my platform to say the same eight things over and over and over again until I die.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
And What of My Wrath?
Posted by Sara Fredman
Sara Fredman Illustration by Zoë van Dijk
Sara Fredman | Longreads | May 2019 | 9 minutes (2,555 words)
What makes an antihero show work? In this Longreads series, It’s Not Easy Being Mean, Sara Fredman explores the fine-tuning that goes into writing a bad guy we can root for, and asks whether the same rules apply to women.
I didn’t want to write about Game of Thrones. Truly, I didn’t. In the first place, it is an ensemble show and therefore not technically an antihero vehicle. It is also generally the realm of the hot take and this series is usually a place for tepid, if not downright frigid, takes. It is Winterfell, not Dorne. But here we are in Dorne, talking about Game of Thrones, though probably a week or so after it would have been maximally festive. So maybe it’s more accurate to say that we’re in King’s Landing, which is perfect because we’re here to talk about how, on any other show, Cersei Lannister could have been the female antihero we’ve all been waiting for.
Cersei is the closest female analogue to the Golden Age antiheroes who turned the genre into a phenomenon. Those men — Tony Soprano, Don Draper, Walter White — all do terrible things for a host of reasons: because they want to, because power feels good, because they’re doing what they need to do to survive in the world. Despite the fact that these men do terrible things, we root for them because of a careful calibration of their characters and the environment in which they operate. They are marked as special, or especially skilled; they are humanized by their difficult pasts and their dedication to their children; and, finally, they are surrounded by other, more terrible people. Cersei has, at one point or another in the show’s eight-season run, fallen into all of these categories. She is smart and cunning. I recently rewatched a scene I had forgotten, early in the first season in which she pokes holes in the plan her dumb and petulant son Joffrey comes up with to gain control of the North. The scene shows us that she understands the stakes of the titular game and how to play it successfully: “A good king knows when to save his strength and when to destroy his enemies.” The audience knows that Joffrey can never be that king and, despite Cersei’s keen grasp of her political landscape, neither can she. She may be depicted as a villain throughout most of the series but she is also clearly a talent born into the wrong body, and she knows it. As she says to King Robert Baratheon: “I should wear the armor and you the gown.”
This brings us to our next antihero criterion, which is the humanizing influence of interiority and family. It is axiomatic among the show’s characters and creators that Cersei’s most humanizing characteristic is the love and dedication she shows her children. In their final scene together, her brother Tyrion begs her to surrender with the only card he believes will matter: “You’ve always loved your children more than yourself. More than Jaime. More than anything. I beg you if not for yourself then for your child. Your reign is over, but that doesn’t mean your life has to end. It doesn’t mean your baby has to die.” In showrunner David Benioff’s view, Cersei’s children were the only thing that could humanize her: “I think the idea of Cersei without her children is a pretty terrifying prospect because it was the one thing that really humanized her, you know — her love for her kids. As much of a monster as she could sometimes be, she was a mother who truly did love her children.”
But the thing about an antihero show is that it can turn any monster into a hero.
It is of course true that Cersei loves her children, but it is hard to square Tyrion’s description of his sister with the Cersei of season two’s “Blackwater” who was prepared to kill herself and Tommen, her youngest son, rather than be taken alive by Stannis Baratheon and his army. Tyrion thinks that Cersei loves her children like a June Cleaver when she actually loves them like a Walter White. For the antihero, love of family is about self-advancement, not self-sacrifice. Invoking his children will not dissuade him from doing bad things because their existence is the very thing that motivates him to do them. This is why Walter White can yell “WE’RE A FAMILY” right before he takes his infant daughter away from her mother.
David Benioff’s assertion that Cersei’s love of her children is the only thing that humanizes her is possibly the best example of the way in which the Game of Thrones writers misunderstood their characters and their audience. It overlooks the other reasons the show gave us to root for Cersei and betrays an ignorance of the extent to which enduring patriarchy might itself be, for at least a portion of its audience, humanizing. It reveals an inability to grasp the possibility that the mother and the monster can be the same person. For a show dedicated to demonstrating just how thin the line is between good and evil, Game of Thrones was surprisingly blind to Cersei’s potential to become a compelling antihero, to be humanized by something other than her children. Or maybe the show realized it all too well.
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Seasons five and six in particular could have been a — forgive me — game changer for the audience’s relationship with Cersei. Their storyline has Cersei first trying to manipulate and then fighting off a band of homophobic and misogynist religious ascetics called the Sparrows. Initially, the audience appreciates the way the High Sparrow thwarts Cersei’s attempts to use religion to strengthen her own political position. She’s been a villain for four seasons and we relish seeing her hit a roadblock. But the High Sparrow and his sidekick Septa Unella take it too far and our allegiances begin to shift. Septa Unella tortures Cersei in prison and the High Sparrow declares that Cersei must take a walk of penance through the streets of King’s Landing. Her hair is shorn and she walks naked from the Sept of Baelor to the Red Keep as Septa Unella chants “shame” and rings a bell to draw onlookers. In that sequence, we don’t forget that Cersei’s done terrible things, but we feel sympathy for her because she is, in that moment, at the mercy of other, more sinister forces. We also feel sympathy for her because this showdown with the High Sparrow reminds us that her story is that of a woman living under patriarchy, that her autonomy has always been contingent and therefore largely an illusion. We remember that this is not the first time Cersei has been powerless, that in the first season we saw her husband hit her and then tell her to wear her bruise in silence or he would hit her again. We remember the way her father, Tywin Lannister, spoke to her (“Do you think you’ll be the first person dragged into the Sept to be married against her will?”), and we also remember that she was raped by the one man she loved next to the body of her murdered son.
In most of the ways that matter, Cersei’s relationship with Sansa Stark, betrothed to marry Cersei’s abusive son Joffrey, is evidence of her villainy but it is also a frank education in what becoming a wife and mother means under patriarchy. Looking back on some of their scenes together, one gets the sense that Cersei feels compelled to explain to Sansa what she’s in for, to disabuse her of any notions of happily ever after and replace them with the reality of life as a political pawn, a prisoner in expensive dresses. We see this as coldhearted and evil because we hold out hope that Sansa will be able to remain an innocent princess looking for true love, but that’s not an option for girls like her, and Cersei knows it. In a heart-to-heart after Sansa gets her period for the first time, Cersei assures her that while she will never love the king, she will love her children. Sansa has just become a woman, which makes her eligible to be a wife and mother. Cersei knows that this is an occasion for a political lesson rather than a domestic one: “Permit me to share some womanly wisdom with you on this very special day. The more people you love, the weaker you are. You do things for them that you know you shouldn’t do, you’ll act the fool to make them happy, to keep them safe. Love no one but your children. On that front, a mother has no choice.” When we hear it from her own mouth, Cersei’s love for her children sounds less like deliberate self-sacrifice than yet another matter in which she has no choice.
Tyrion thinks that Cersei loves her children like a June Cleaver when she actually loves them like a Walter White.
It’s probably worthwhile to remember that the “game” we have spent eight years watching is only being played in the first place because Robert Baratheon assumed that a woman who left him had to have been taken (“I only know she was the one thing I ever wanted and someone took her away from me”). Women are things to be taken and traded; they are the tools men use to cement alliances and consolidate power. Freedom of movement and freedom of self-determination are precious commodities to which only some people in Westeros have access, either by birth or cunning. None of those people are women. Cersei is hardly the only victim of patriarchy on the show, but she could have been its most symbolic. More than anything, Cersei wants to control her own body and her own destiny. She wants to be a player, rather than a pawn. When Ned Stark confronts her about her relationship with Jaime and the illegitimacy of their children, he warns, “Wherever you go, Robert’s wrath will follow you.” Cersei replies, “And what of my wrath, Lord Stark?” This question is, of course, rhetorical — everyone knows that a woman’s anger only earns 78 cents on the dollar. We side with Ned, but on another show, Cersei’s question could have been a rallying cry. We might have written it on signs taken to #resistance rallies and anti-abortion protests. Neither Cersei nor Robert has been faithful, but Robert’s anger matters more because he is the king and Cersei’s infidelity matters more because her body is for making him a bloodline.
The Sept of Baelor pyrotechnics in the season six finale could have easily been Cersei’s “Face Off” moment: a shocking triumph over her enemies showcasing her intelligence and tactical skill. The move was not only brilliantly efficient, killing off everyone who opposed her at once without leaving home, but also bursting with symbolism. She destroys the religious cult that stripped her of what little bodily and political autonomy she had and blows up the place where she married Robert and was raped by Jaime. Cersei watches from her window as the architectural incarnation of patriarchy goes up in green flames and then takes a sip of wine.
That masterfully shot suspenseful sequence is immediately followed by Cersei’s vengeful speech to her torturer, Septa Unella, before leaving her in the hands of Gregor Clegane:
“Confess, it felt good, beating me, starving me, frightening me, humiliating me. You didn’t do it because you cared about my atonement, you did it because it felt good. I understand. I do things because they feel good. I drink because it feels good. I killed my husband because it felt good to be rid of him. I fucked my brother, because it feels good to feel him inside of me. I lie about fucking my brother, because it feels good to keep our son safe from hateful hypocrites. I killed your High Sparrow, and all his little sparrows, all his septons and all his septas, all his filthy soldiers because it felt good to watch them burn. It felt good to imagine their shock and their pain. No thought has ever given me greater joy. Even confessing feels good under the right circumstances.”
Cersei is hardly the only victim of patriarchy on the show, but she could have been its most symbolic.
This is Cersei’s “I am the one who knocks” speech, the moment where the antihero lays bare her unsavory machinations, and we applaud because a formerly weak person now has some hard-won power. Walter White takes some time to understand that if he is to have any power, he must take it. Cersei has always understood that power is her only available means toward self-determination, a ballast against the whims and wishes of those who would try to use her to further their own storylines and try to capture a bigger piece of the Westeros pie. Power is, for her, a necessity rather than a perk. Thinking about Cersei as an antihero, however brief the time we spend cheering her on, makes clear the extent to which writing a successful antihero always involves portraying that character as but a small player in a much bigger game. This is Walter White up against Big Pharma, which cut him out of profits to which he feels entitled and is now forcing him to forfeit his family’s financial security to stay alive. It is Tony Soprano chafing against RICO and the possibility that anyone in his orbit could help the FBI lock him up. It is Don Draper trying to hold on to a life he was never supposed to have. And it is Philip and Elizabeth Jennings doing the job they were trained to do, while people we never see change the rules and determine its stakes. An antihero isn’t on top of the world but right there in the melee, jockeying for some small measure of self-determination. We realize, as they do, that no matter how much power or control they seem to have, they are only one step away from being literally or metaphorically paraded through the streets naked while someone rings a bell.
Cersei is the closest we’ve come to a female version of this kind of character. David Benioff is right: Cersei is a monster. But the thing about an antihero show is that it can turn any monster into a hero. It compels us to root for a monster by making us see the monstrosity lurking all around him and, in so doing, turns him into our monster. Monstrosity in Westeros is like wildfire under King’s Landing: There is more than enough of it to make Cersei a queen we root for while she sips her celebratory wine. Allowing Cersei to become a full-on antihero could have been incredible, giving the show an opportunity to explore the particular powerlessness of women under patriarchy. What difference does motherhood make? What particular vulnerabilities does it bestow, what kinds of unexpected powers or motivations? But this is the fantasy world we have, not the one we need, and Game of Thrones could never allow Cersei to fully become the antihero character they had temporarily conjured. Three weeks ago — on Mother’s Day no less — we saw her crushed by a building, dying in the arms of her rapist after begging him not to let her die. As bad as Game of Thrones was at writing women, it gave us one possible roadmap for creating a female antihero on par with the bad men we’ve seen win Emmys over the past two decades. But it also makes clear just how tough that road is to travel because it requires that we expand our idea of what kinds of people are allowed to do bad things in pursuit of their own self-determination, to become the one who knocks.
Next, we’ll dive into half-hour television for our first solo female antihero — single mom Sam Fox of Better Things — because there’s no audience more adept at pointing out a woman’s flaws than her children.
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Previous installments in this series:
The Blaming of the Shrew
The Good Bad Wives of Ozark and House of Cards
Mother/Russia
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Sara Fredman is a writer and editor living in St. Louis. Her work has been featured in Longreads, The Rumpus, Tablet, and Lilith.
Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Illustrator: Zoë van Dijk
Rita Dove on Creating a ‘Collage of American Consciousness’ with Poetry
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Krista Stevens
Krista Stevens American poet Rita Dove. (Photo by Emaonn McCabe/Redferns)
At Columbia Journalism Review, Brendan Fitzgerald interviews Rita Dove on how she plans to approach her upcoming one-year stint as poetry editor at the New York Times Magazine. Taking over for Terrance Hayes this summer, Dove has free rein to select a new poem that will appear in the magazine each week, along with her short introduction. Dove is the fourth poet to hold the poetry editor position.
My first feeling is not to consider what might constitute the audience’s blinders. In other words, to assume that they are going to be open—that’s for the first read. Something that moves me, I will immediately put into the pile to be considered later.
But there is something else to consider, and that’s something I’ve thought about a lot. That is to imagine what my audience’s lives might be like when they’re not reading my poem. What they bring to whatever venue or event or magazine. To imagine how much time or energy they can devote, and how to pull them in.
I would hope that what would emerge would be a kind of portrait or collage of American consciousness. Which means, there would be poets from the west as well as the east coast as well as the middle, and men and women, and that would shake out, hopefully, to some kind of parity, representative of what the population is like at large. Poems from all races and all cultural ethnicities. But there will not be bad poems because I need a woman or I need an African-American. No. There are so many amazing, beautiful poems out there that we don’t get to see. That’s going to be my goal. Bring a few of them out there.
The Apology Tour
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Jonny Auping
Jonny Auping Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma
Jonny Auping | Longreads | April 2018| 12 minutes (3,043 words)
As I stared at my reflection in the bathroom mirror of a Mexican restaurant, I realized I didn’t want to go back to the table. I didn’t want to follow through with my plans. I splashed a bit of water on my face and tried to give myself a pep talk, but nothing helped. It was all just too painfully awkward.
I was at the restaurant to apologize to Chris, a regular of mine when I used to serve tables a few years back, who I had befriended and stayed in touch with. He didn’t know I was planning to apologize — or even what I’d done in the first place — so if I wanted to go the cowardly route, I could get away with it.
I thought about that when I’d pulled up outside of his apartment and opened the back of my SUV so that his guide dog, Westin, could hop in. I thought about it as I helped lead Chris from the parking lot to our table. I thought about it as I avoided making eye contact with myself in the bathroom mirror. How could I even explain why I was apologizing, anyway?
Let me try right now: We’ve all been in a public place, maybe a grocery store for example, and spotted someone we know before they spotted us. We didn’t feel like talking to them for whatever reason. Maybe we were in a hurry. Maybe we didn’t particularly want to talk to anyone. So we changed directions or walked down another aisle and managed to avoid the interaction altogether. It’s not a particularly nice thing to do — treating someone as if we wished they didn’t occupy the same space as us.
But how do you apologize for that? Worse yet, how do you apologize for walking right past them without saying a word? How do you apologize for using someone’s blindness to avoid interacting with them? How do you begin to fess up for doing that numerous times, months apart?
I reminded myself that this was the right thing to do, that I owed this to my friend, even if he didn’t know it. But I really didn’t want to do it. Soon, the food would be at our table. I could order another beer, tell a couple jokes, listen to his stories and have a great time catching up.
Why ruin that?
Read more…
You’ve Reached the Winter of Our Discontent
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Rebecca Schuman
Rebecca Schuman Universal Pictures, Illustration by Katie Kosma
Rebecca Schuman | Longreads | March 2018 | 9 minutes (2,305 words)
The ’90s Are Old is a Longreads series by Rebecca Schuman, wherein she unpacks the cultural legacy of a decade that refuses to age gracefully.
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After Richard Linklater’s Slacker became an unexpected box-office hit in 1991, every major studio in the United States dropped untold amounts of money trying to clone its success — that is, to duplicate a film that cost $23,000 to make and whose entire raison d’etre was that it did not care about success.
Some offerings, such as Cameron Crowe’s Singles (1992), succeeded in spite of their own distributors’ low expectations. Others, such as then “indie comic” (!) Ben Stiller’s Reality Bites, succeeded in spite of, or probably because of, their own craven cynicism. (There was also Threesome, Lord help us all.) These films relied, without exception, on two crucial tropes: the cynical cool of rejecting ambition and popularity, and the mopey, tortured Gen X man-child who embodied that cool.
In the nineties, the rules for how to be cool were pretty simple.
- Having a job (or four) was cool, as long as you didn’t try very hard at it. (Having a “career trajectory” was decidedly not cool, which is probably why I am 41 years old and have never had one to speak of.)
- Wearing a vintage grease-covered gas-station attendant uniform as a jacket was cool if its original owner was that weird older cousin who bought you beer. (Buying an expensive jacket crafted to look like a vintage-replica gas-station attendant uniform was extremely not cool.)
- Weed was cool. (Doing coke and being all ’80s yuppie aggro was not cool.)
- Being nasty about famous people who were way too popular was cool, which is probably why I thought it acceptable to proclaim, in the arts column I wrote with my friend Justin for my college newspaper, that I wanted to shoot Jewel. Shoot Jewel! What did Jewel ever do to me? She seems very nice. But Jewel didn’t subscribe to the Vassar Miscellany News, so it was a victimless crime.
- Numbered lists of how to be cool were definitely not cool.
- It was cool to view everything at an ironic distance, including the concept of ironic distance itself.
In the nineties, the worst insult you could lob — or get — was to be a sellout. Dominant mass-produced mainstream culture — literally anything, the exact moment it became popular enough to no longer be confined to your friend’s basement and maybe a ‘zine — deserved to be mocked. If you were lucky enough to like something before it got big, then you found yourself flush with the only currency Gen X accepted. Read more…
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