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“I don’t care if you like it” as feminism: A Bossypants review

Posted in Books, Reviews with tags , , , , , , on April 14, 2011 by Sarah

First, in the spirit of full disclosure, let me acknowledge that I am a huge fan of Tina Fey. In my head, she’s like my cool Aunt Tina who gives me advice to help me make Good Life Decisions. I really do find myself asking, What would Tina do? on a near-daily basis. I live my life in such a way that should I ever meet Tina, she wouldn’t be embarrassed by me. She might be the only famous person I would get really star struck by, at this point. So yeah, I love her.

(Sidebar: Story after story from people who encounter Tina Fey goes exactly the same—she is not into fangirls or fangirling. If you do ever encounter her, I wouldn’t recommend approaching. People ask all the time—how/when/where they should approach celebrities and my answer is always don’t/never/nowhere, but I often qualify it with, “But if you HAVE to say something, realize you’re the one interrupting, you’re the one being an asshole. If they’re less than gracious, it’s their right since you’re the one posing the imposition. With that in mind, be brief, be quiet, be kind. Don’t ask for more than they’re willing to give—you WILL know what their boundaries are based on body language—and leave quickly.” But with Tina Fey, there is no qualification. Just don’t approach. She won’t love you for it. If I ever see her, I will turn around and vacate the vicinity immediately. I feel that’s the nicest, most “I’m a huge fan” thing I could do—leave her alone.)

Second, to the guys who may be reading (I know there are a few), yes, Bossypants, Tina Fey’s memoir about parenting, womanhood and work, is for you, too. The essays about her childhood, about college, about Second City, SNL, 30 Rock, and her Sarah Palin impression are for everyone. The book is flagrantly female but if you like 30 Rock or if you liked SNL while Fey was a writer (1997-2006), then you will find something to enjoy in Bossypants. Also, if you’re a dad, you can probably relate to the parenting stuff more than I could with my dead, black, child-hating heart.

And finally…so how was the book? Um AWESOME. Of course it’s great—Tina Fey wrote it. Her voice is clear and strong, you can “hear” her throughout (and literally, if you get the audiobook). If anything, Fey is perhaps too hard on herself, repeatedly calling herself “the worst”. And yet, that’s what makes Fey, and Bossypants, so worth our time as audience. Here is a woman who has achieved a great deal of success and yet she remains humble and self-deprecating. She’s under no illusions that people suddenly think she’s marvelous just because she’s on TV. One of her best essays is about a single weekend in which she prepped her first-ever Sarah Palin impression for SNL, shot the Oprah episode of 30 Rock, and planned and executed her daughter’s third birthday party. Anyone can relate to the feeling of simply having too much to do. Fey’s experiences are unique but how she handles them, how she reacts to the stress of a high-pressure job in which hundreds of people depend upon her, are universal. Bossypants is not only interesting, it’s fucking hilarious. Just the dust jacket made me laugh out loud, and for the past few days I’ve been that asshole on the L, laughing while I read. It’s impossible not to laugh throughout this book.

It’s also impossible not to grasp Fey’s take on feminism, which boils down to: “I don’t care if you like it.” That line comes from an essay about Fey’s days at SNL when the women in the cast began taking over the show. Specifically, she relates how Amy Poehler was goofing off in the writer’s room, doing something vulgar, when Jimmy Fallon interrupted with, “I don’t like that. It’s not cute.” Fey points out that Fallon was also joking, but Poehler’s reaction was not a joke. She snapped, “I don’t fucking care if you like it,” and went back to her dirty bit. This is the attitude that defines Fey’s thoughts on feminism, and being a woman in the workplace. I don’t care if you like it. So much of her advice for how to succeed in the workplace boils down to: If you don’t absolutely have to deal with whoever is giving you a hard time, ignore that person and keep on keeping on. If you do have to deal with that person, find an ally equal to or greater than the pain-in-your-ass and work around him.

I call this the “don’t apologize” approach to feminism. We could have a huge discussion about society, advertising, media and women and go on and on about how women are kept down by The Man, et cetera, but suffice it to say that generally 80% of everything is geared to make women feel terrible about themselves, including a woman’s interaction with other women, and that it is suggested repeatedly that we buy products X, Y and Z in order to look younger, feel better, and screw harder. Amidst all this induced self-loathing and the cycles of exercise, face creams and sex manuals, I’ve found that my best coping mechanism is just to go about my business unapologetically. If someone says I’m not funny because I’m a girl, I shrug. If I find out I make less than a male counterpart, I seethe silently on the inside but on the outside all I can do is continue to work as best I can. If I have an idea and I believe in it, and someone tells me it’s stupid, I don’t cower back and apologize for daring to have a thought. I pursue my idea until I either realize whatever it lead me to (like movie blogging), or I fail spectacularly and realize it really was a stupid idea (like that time I tried surfing).

What Fey’s anecdote about Poehler relates is that attitude of unapologetic womanness. Just because a man didn’t think Poehler was being cute doesn’t mean Poehler has to stop what she’s doing. She’s not in the business of people thinking she’s cute. She’s in the business of making people laugh and whatever accomplishes that wins. And that’s how it should be for women in the workplace. Looking pretty, being cute, whatever—none of it has anything to do with the performance of your job.* Professionalism, common courtesy and hard work—that’s what defines a woman (or anyone, really) in the workplace. And those are the tenets of Fey’s outlook on business and work. Her advice consists of be professional, be courteous, be smart and the rest of it will fall into line. And then don’t apologize for having ambition, ideas, goals—any of it.

*Unless you’re a supermodel.

There’s also a strong undercurrent of Fey’s disapproval of meangirling. Early in Bossypants she confesses a teenaged episode of meangirling and you can tell that she still, all these years later, regrets her behavior during that time. Since you can’t change what you’ve done, only what you will do, Fey spends a lot of time encouraging better woman-to-woman behavior (she did write Mean Girls with its “let’s all be nicer” moral). This is a topic close to me right now as my mom is currently the victim of workplace meangirling. She recently started a new job and her coworkers are being cliquey and meangirly and are excluding her from things, which makes me angry and frustrated because my mom is awesome and everyone should be nice to her. But what can you do? I think Aunt Tina would say to keep your chin up and continue being kind, even when they’re not kind back, and go about your business without apologizing for failing to meet whatever criteria the meangirls think you’ve failed to meet.

Bossypants is an enormously funny book, and it’s interesting for anyone curious about the behind the scenes life of someone who has risen to the top of the television and comedy worlds. But it’s also a great book for understanding how a life can be defined without apology. Fey, for all her self-deprecation, is an ambitious woman who is still pursuing her goals. She won’t be made to feel bad for not breastfeeding, for not only accepting but wanting Photoshop touch-ups on her magazine spreads, for doing things that a man might not find funny in the name of comedy. I have a feeling that when it’s time for my next “triannual torrential sob”, I’ll be pulling Bossypants off the shelf for the council and wisdom of Aunt Tina, who can always make light of the worst situations.

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On road movies, unfilmable films, and why reading matters

Posted in Books, Movies with tags , , , , , , , on August 17, 2010 by Sarah

Recently I read Chuck Klosterman’s collection of essays entitled Eating the Dinosaur, in which there is an essay called “Going Nowhere and Getting There Never” (the original version of this essay was published in The Believer in early 2008). In it Klosterman includes excerpts from Brazilian filmmaker Walter Salles’s (The Motorcycle Diaries, Central Station) “About Road Movies”, an essay originally written for a film festival, then emailed to Klosterman in response to his interview question, and ultimately published in the New York Times Magazine. Klosterman also interviewed Gus Van Sant (Milk, Good Will Hunting), one of the producers of On the Road, which Salles is currently lensing up in Canada.

I’ve been tracking the film adaptation of On the Road for a long time. In high school, a teacher had us make a list of “unfilmable films” and On the Road was third on my list (behind A Confederacy of Dunces and The Catcher in the Rye). My teacher informed me that the movie rights for On the Road had been bouncing around Hollywood since the 1960’s, and Francis Ford Coppola had been working on an adaptation for twenty years. “The other two,” he said, “maybe never. That one, definitely someday.”

Road trip movies are among some of the most iconic in American cinema: Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider, Thelma & Louise to name a few. And there are movies that are road trip movies without cars—Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and O Brother Where Are Thou? I would counter Klosterman’s assertion that Americans love cars with—Americans love travel. The allure of On the Road is undeniable—it’s a road trip story, the road trip story, the road trip that launched a thousand road trips. And as Klosterman points out in his essay, Americans love cars and they love driving, and On the Road is really just a couple guys in a car, driving places.

The original title of Klosterman’s essay is “What’s the difference between a road movie and movie that just happens to have roads in it?” That’s the difference—travel. A road trip movie is a movie about the specific act of traveling, regardless of where, how, or why. A road movie is any movie with roads in it, like Mad Max, which certainly has a lot of roads in it, but the act of travel is not the point or purpose of the movie. Mad Max is a justice vs. revenge drama in which a bunch of shit blows up and has many car chases. Similarly, while Salles and Van Sant may disagree about the point of Thelma and Louise, it is most definitely a road trip movie. The story revolves around the women travelling. Stuff blows up only to aid their goal of reaching Mexico.

Salles asserts that the central conflict in a road trip movie is an inherently internal one, that what the experience of what the characters feel trumps the traditional three-act format of a screenplay.  His concept of the road trip as narrative is one of internal realization and transformation, not action. When I first met Salles he was in the US promoting The Motorcycle Diaries, which was billed as a Che Guevara biopic, but was really a road trip movie about a couple young guys touring South America on a motorcycle. After a screening of the film, Salles was confronted by a man who said, “Hey, that movie was pretty boring for being about Che. I mean, nothing happened.” Salles was palpably disappointed by this. In fact, everything happened, but none of it was active-happening, it was the passive-happening of ideas and feelings. The image that stays with me today from The Motorcycle Diaries is Che-before-he-was-Che sitting among the ruins of Macchu Picchu with his friend Alberto, discussing revolution. At one point, Che-before-he-was-Che turns to Alberto and says, “A revolution without guns? That will never work.”

In that moment, no, nothing happens. Two men are sitting, reading and writing, occasionally talking. But in that moment, a man who will change history plants his feet in an idea, which will become a philosophy, which will become a revolution. That moment is everything. When Salles was tapped to direct On the Road, that was the moment I remembered and it was the first time I thought, Maybe if anyone could film it, it would be Walter Salles. The next time I saw Salles, he called On the Road an “entirely possible film”, even though there was nothing at the time to indicate he would entirely possibly be making it.

In contrast to Salles’s assertion that road trip movies are exempt from three-act storytelling, Van Sant (who was once attached to direct On the Road himself), says that “going from point A to point B is kind of the obvious criteria”, which probably explains why Van Sant ended up losing On the Road to Salles. The destination in On the Road is not the point, the travelling is. A film adaptation of On the Road will work whether Sal and Dean ever “get anywhere” or not. The only requirement is that Sal and Dean travel together. But I see Van Sant’s point about needing a destination. I think On the Road is unfilmable not because it’s boring or because “nothing happens”, but because as a narrative, it never gets anywhere. The difference between a book and a movie is that a book doesn’t need a destination. It isn’t necessary in a book, where the act of reading ideas and thoughts can be the only raison d’etre for the work (see also: Franny & Zooey by JD Salinger).

The joy of On the Road is reading. It, like A Confederacy of Dunces, has everything you could want to make a decent film adaptation—interesting characters, interesting events, interesting periods of introspection—but also like Dunces, what gives On the Road its impact, the reason it matters more than fifty years after it was published, is something intangible about reading it. Everything I like about On the Road relates to the physical and mental act of reading. I like the narrator’s voice. I like how the words look on the page (speaking now of the “scroll” version of the text). I like how the sentences are formed, or not formed, depending on your perspective. I like the thoughts I have while I read it. I like how sometimes I stop reading and think about what I’ve just read.

In a film adaptation, none of those things will translate. It’s the difference between Lord of the Rings and every attempt to adapt Kurt Vonnegut. Lord of the Rings are complex stories which are well written, but at the end of the day, they’re about stuff that happens. There’s a lot of stuff happening in LOTR. This character does or says something and more stuff happens. Those kinds of books make for excellent adaptations because stuff happening usually lends itself to cinematic values like visuals and story arcs (see also: Harry Potter, The Millennium Trilogy). But Vonnegut is more abstract. His books are usually first-person narratives interlaced with a lot of thoughts and ideas. Vonnegut’s voice is that intangible that can never be translated to the big screen, and it is why adaptations of his works always fall flat (see also: Tom Robbins, Ayn Rand).

Jack Kerouac’s narrative voice cannot be replicated. It has to be read. Sal Paradise can be recreated and I’ll give Sam Riley (13, Control) the benefit of the doubt that he’ll turn in a fine performance as Sal. And if anyone can make On the Road an interesting and maybe even entertaining film, it would be Walter Salles. But the one thing Salles and Riley can’t do is give us the experience of reading On the Road. They can’t give us Kerouac’s voice. And for that, the movie will always be less. Hopefully good in its own right, but it will always be less. Some things just have to be read.

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