Sir Helen Mirren and being sexy

At 65, Helen Mirren has a new film coming out:  “Love Ranch,” in which she stars as the madam of a Nevada brothel in the 70s.  Her character manages the prostitutes with such an iron fist that her pig of a husband (Joe Pesci) screams at her, “Who do ya think you are, the Queen of fuckin’ England?”  (This line alone is the very best possible advertisement for this film, as far as I’m concerned.)  For a somewhat absurdly prurient interview reflecting on her long career being sexy, she posed nude in the bath this month for New York Magazine, and this seems to be a source for one of those “should she or shouldn’t she?” debates.  Honestly?  Someone out there is looking to tell Helen Mirren whether to strip?  I have no such hubris.  She has had a long career of being sexy, such that it put me in mind of something Tilda Swinton said recently about being knighted, to the effect that Sir Helen sounds much better than Dame Helen.  This entire conversation makes me realize that when journalists and the public don’t know what to do with an exceptionally intelligent, attractive, and successful woman, they turn the conversation into one about sexiness.

American viewers like me didn’t really get much of Helen Mirren until she was in her mid-30s, and I first knew her in the “Prime Suspect” series made when she was well into her 40s.  The first episode (1991) was a revelation to me, not least because it followed so quickly on the heels of Anita Hill’s allegations of sexual harassment against Clarence Thomas during his Supreme Court hearings during the Fall of 91.  As a result, Mirren’s version of DCI Jane Tennison — steely, professional, brilliant, occasionally abhorrent, and daily faced with men’s obstreperousness — seemed pitch-perfect for the age.  Her very body language showed a lifetime of keeping her body in check in a male-dominated world; she covered herself in unsexy suits and kept her face impassive.  She was sexy to us viewers because she was so exceptionally smart and real, not because she displayed any kind of prurient sexuality onscreen.  Women viewers could so many things into a closeup of Mirren’s face:  intelligence, weakness, self-loathing, pride, self-possession, and all that in a single look.  This was why she was so appealing to us, not because she took off her clothes.  Let’s also not overlook the fact that for a woman actor to achieve such international fame only starting in her mid-40s is well-nigh unprecedented.

It was similar with her acting in “The Queen” (2006), in which again she could be utterly despicable and absolutely sympathetic in rapid succession from one scene to the next.  It was those scenes of her locked away at Balmoral during the English national mourning for Diana’s death — her personal dedication to a certain tight-lipped version of reality, and her slow realization that she was sadly out of touch — that made Mirren appear again so compelling as an actor.  In an era when women are loath to let themselves be bitches (and I speak for myself and every other female college professor out there, and likely for everyone else over 30 too), Mirren’s characters display how one can be bitchy and appealing at the same time.  It made her all the sexier to me, and I wonder if American women could learn something from the mix of hardness and softness:  in an ideal future the antifeminist conversation we’ve been having about what makes a woman sexy, feminine, or bitchy simply cannot hold, such that a new version of femininity is due to arrive that celebrates a considerable degree of intelligent steeliness.  Her performance in “The Last Station” (2009) was similar:  her take on the histrionic Sofya showed her to be highly emotional, yet also far more astute about the nature of marriage than her idealistic husband, Tolstoy (Christopher Plummer).  “Why should it be easy?” she demands from him in one of my favorite scenes.  “You are the work of my life and I am the work of yours.  That’s what love is.”

In the new film as the queen of the brothel, her character deals with her horrible husband and a cancer diagnosis by undertaking a torrid affair with a young boxer thirty years her junior (online photos of the actor Sergio Peris-Mencheta make him look like an even more Hollywood-ready version of Rafael Nadal, if such a thing were possible).  Despite the titillating account in the New York Magazine article, I doubt Mirren took this part because it allows her to look like a 65-year-old cougar.  In this regard the article is inherently weak and reveals in its very quotes from her that its overall portrayal of Mirren as a sexpot is flawed.  Take the following:

As Mirren explains it, she struggled to get a handle on her own sexuality in order to use its power to accomplish her ambitions.  “The Playboy Mansion, coke, and the rise of all that — Guccione and Hefner always pushed it as liberation, but it didn’t seem like that to me,” she says.  “That was women obeying the sexualized form created by men — though maybe we always do that, because we want to be attractive.  But I was kind of a trailblazer because I demanded to do it my own way.  I’d say, ‘I’m not having it put on me by someone else.’  I didn’t want to be the sort of puritanical good girl with a little white collar who says, ‘Don’t shag until you get married.’”

The resulting phony “debate” about whether Mirren should have stripped for the magazine’s photo shoot reveals that we’re trapped in a pornified conversation about women and sexiness.  In this quote she criticizes the terms of that very conversation, but the magazine can’t quite grasp what might lie outside it, so it offers her up as some kind of GILF (for example, it reminds readers of the paparazzi photos of a couple of years ago showing her looking pretty goddamn awesome in a red bikini).  Oh for fuck’s sake.  Sexing her up allows writers to take her a little less seriously as one of the most stunning actors of her generation.  But in doing so they overlook her real appeal, and that just makes me tired.

Queer eyes and smart girls

…in which I think about smart objects of desire and girls’ willingness to identify with both boys and girls.

I used to have a crush on Jon Stewart, but for a long time now it’s been Rachel Maddow.  Exemplary of her crush-worthiness is when she interviewed J. D. Hayworth — the conservative Tea Party opponent of John McCain in the upcoming AZ Republican primary — who’s been making a lot of political hay reviving the gay marriage “problem.”  The homophobic Hayworth claims that the Massachusetts Supreme Court defines marriage as “the establishment of intimacy,” and argues that such a definition leaves open the possibility that men will marry horses:

Maddow:  “Where in Massachusetts law or in the Supreme Court ruling does it say, ‘the establishment of intimacy?’ I read, spent the whole afternoon sort of looking for that, and couldn’t find it anywhere.”

Haworth:  ”The high court in Massachusetts defined marriage in a rather amorphous fashion, simply as, quote, ‘the establishment of intimacy.’  Now, I think we all agree there’s much more to marriage than that.”

Maddow:  “Sir, I’m sorry, it didn’t.”  (Goes through every example of the use of “intimacy” in the decision and MA state law and shows it doesn’t appear.)

Hayworth:  “Well, that’s fine.  You and I can have a disagreement about that.”

Maddow:  “Well, either it’s true or it isn’t.  It’s empirical.”  (Hayworth stumbles and fumbles on his way out of the interview.)

Me, fawning:  “Rachel, will you marry me?”

It’s not just that Maddow speaks truth to power, like Stewart did on “Crossfire” back in 2004; it’s the brevity and lucidity of her comments like “it’s empirical” that make me go mad for Maddow.  (Plus, obviously, she takes no prisoners, likes cocktails, speaks frequently of her partner Susan, and is a geek).  But then I have a long history of wanting to be with smart girls, wanting to be them, wanting to do them, wanting to watch them.  It’s baffling to me that, according to received wisdom, men only want to watch men.  (Cheers to all those actual men out there who feel the same way I do about smart women.)

Smart girls are hot.  Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) in “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”; Kima Greggs (Sonja Sohn) from “The Wire”; Jane Tennison (Helen Mirren) from the “Prime Suspect” series; Sybylla Melvyn (Judy Davis) in “My Brilliant Career.”  They’re hot because they don’t need to please men; indeed, much of the time they’re smart enough to do without them altogether.

One of the problems I keep circling as I write this blog is that according to popular culture, men are the privileged readers/viewers:  they avoid women’s films and “chick lit.”  Women will read/watch everything, but men only read/watch stuff by/about men.  Because of this, it’s no surprise we have Harry Potter rather than Hermione Granger as the main protagonist.  I remember reading Lloyd Alexander’s The Book of Three aloud to a ten-year-old girl who unabashedly identified with both male and female characters.  When Scott O’Dell wrote Island of the Blue Dolphins in the 60s, he had to fight to keep the protagonist a girl.  (Never mind that it was based on a true story, or that he won the Newbery Medal and other prizes – the important point, from a publisher’s perspective, is he didn’t sell as many copies as he might have otherwise.)

In a different mood, this might be the opening for me to denounce the sidelining of women authors and women characters — and the concomitant emphasis on all those male buddy films, the fact that children’s shows have three male characters to every one female character (according to the new Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media), ”The Frat Pack,” and all things Judd Apatow, in which men bull-headedly just don’t get women, and engage in a lot of fag and fart jokes.

I’ll keep denouncing those things, to be sure.  But for the moment I’m struck by something else:  the fact that, in essence, female reader/viewers learn what you might call a queer view of self.  I think women learn to see the world with queer eyes, a perspective that holds the possibility of allowing women simply to enjoy looking at women in a non-male-oriented way altogether.  The problem comes when women simply channel this toward making themselves attractive to men – but I think that if we can teach them to emulate the smart girls rather than the Playboy bunnies, we might see this queer view as really pretty subversive.

Now, Rachel:  please cover women’s issues more.