Me Gusta: October 21st, 2022
"The Best Of Everything" slaps harder than any attempts to reclaim the past
Praise be, the Blonde discourse has finally died down! As I predicted on Twitter, the takes eventually tipped from insightful to stupid (I think I read somewhere that Joyce Carol Oates was not hot enough to write about Marilyn Monroe?) and then they stopped altogether. I stayed largely silent throughout (unless you count the never-ending text threads with my friends) because a) I refused to watch the movie and b) I thought the problems ran deeper than the film (which is why I refused to watch it).
How deep, you ask? Well, as deep as you like, honestly—society’s the problem, we’ve never given Marilyn the respect she deserves, etcetera. But I specifically mean that way back when people saw a trailer for the movie and freaked out about Ana De Armas’s accent (Carmen Miranda lives on in America’s hateful heart), I was actually excited about it! Marilyn’s part of a pantheon of figures (Carmen, Tennesse Williams, Truman Capote) whose stories I’m low-key obsessed with— outsiders trying to make it big and succeeding, but paying hefty prices for it (probably resonates with me). I had never heard of Oates’ novel, and since the movie was a few months away, I checked out the book at the NYPL (shout out to it and the BPL, thanks to whom I have not paid to read a book on my Kindle in over three years).
Little did I know I was in for an interminable via crucis of rape, abuse, infantilization, abortions, miscarriages, and just a plain ol’ bad time. The book is over 700 pages long, and it’s pretty much like living Marilyn’s story in real time—it takes 36 years to read and the CIA kills you at the end. The only thing that kept me from quitting was that, in spite of Oates being very vocal about it not being a biography, or necessarily accurate, the book does sort of cover Marilyn’s story comprehensively, and I just find the facts of her life fascinating. But it says a lot that the novel’s biggest achievement was making me check Wikipedia constantly to learn new things about Marilyn—and that the Wikipedia page managed to portray a more fully rounded woman, with agency as well as trauma, and a personality that went beyond “Yes, Daddy [thumb in mouth].” The only grace Oates grants Marilyn is writing her as extraordinarily talented—but even that she does with condescension, portraying Marilyn as a natural that’s too naive and insecure to know how good she is.
It killed all my desire to watch the movie, and the press tour didn’t help. If Don’t Worry Darling (or the Broadway revival of 1776, for that matter) taught us anything, it’s that the more woke you say your work is, the more people are gonna find ways in which it’s not. And there’s the male director of it all—can men have good takes on women? I think some can (Ira Levin come to Brazil!!!!), but I highly doubt Andrew Dominick did, based on his comments. Blonde feels to Marilyn Monroe what Framing Britney Spears was to its own subject: something that its creators say is helping—but instead causes (and cashes in on) further harm. The list of women whose narratives we’ve “reclaimed” even though they haven’t asked us to (and in some cases asked us to stop) grows depressingly large. So #LeaveMarilynAlone
Or rather don’t—but instead of watching Blonde, watch her actual movies! I rewatched Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and it’s such a gem. Without overstating its virtues (a danger of the counter-Blonde discourse), GPB is quite supportive of its female protagonists. Jane Russell’s brunette wants to fuck around with hunks till she finds someone who’s actually worth her time (you go, girl), while Marilyn’s blonde knows how to plunder men for all they’re worth—she’s not waiting around for Prince Charming to rescue her (but she will take his vacation house). The incredible “Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend” number is a sobering wake-up call: men suck real bad, so be smart and take their money before they dump you like the pencil dicks they are.
Which brings me (finally) to my recommendation for this week, a nice bit of counter-programming to our current Great Reclamation: Jona Raffe’s pitch-perfect manifesto on just how much men suck, her 1958 novel The Best Of Everything (which is getting a pretty Penguin Classics edition next year with an introduction by Rachel Syme). I came to Raffe’s novel via (what else) Mad Men, as the book is shown and talked about in the series’ first great episode, “Babylon” (S1E6). I fucking love “Babylon” and could write an entire article about it (I might!), but for our purposes here what matters is that the episode, like most of the show’s best, focuses heavily on its female characters, showing us new sides of them that we didn’t know existed (one of them turns out to be good at copywriting, the other is secretly fucking the boss, and so on). So it’s no surprise that the episode name-checks Raffe’s novel, which portrays a similar universe to that of Mad Men but whose protagonists are exclusively women—in a lesser show, it could come as an effort to validate itself by association, but Mad Men had a writers room that could back it up.
I’d had the book in my NYPL hold lists for a while, and after the bitter taste that Blonde left in my mouth (as well as my embarking on my annual fall rewatch of Mad Men), I decided to finally check it out. After all, I reasoned, part of my frustration with the Great Reclamation is that it imposes modern values on the past (something that Mad Men’s early episodes often do too, though they eventually stop). Why not hear from someone in the past, like I did when I rewatched Gentlemen Prefer Blondes? In the novel’s intro, Raffe tells us that what drove her to write the novel (her first) was hearing from a film executive that he was looking to produce a movie about working women based on a book written by a man (Kitty Foyle) which she was very underwhelmed by. So she set about writing her own, getting inspired by interviewing scores of Manhattan working girls about “all the things nobody spoke about in polite company.”
The book that resulted from those efforts is incredible (especially considering that, according to Raffe, what was published is basically the first draft). The curse of a classic is that it inspires so many other works after it that, by the time you revisit it, what made it new back then now feels done. Not so with Raffe’s novel—the familiarity of its setting does not hinder in the least its ability to intrigue and delight. In a format that would be popularized in my generation by Sex and the City, the book transitions between the points of view of four women, who navigate work and romance in their unique ways—though you can sense Caroline, a young woman who comes to the big city to work as a typist at a publishing company after getting dumped by her fiance, is the character Raffe is closest to. She gives her the more nuanced plotlines (career advancement, an emotional affair, an actual affair, paparazzi scandals) and allows her to navigate them with a mixture of practicality and impulse that makes her (I hate to use this word, but it fits) relatable. That’s not to say the other characters don’t have their own good traits (I’m a Barbara stan), but it’s in Caroline that Raffe’s stated intentions for the novel in her introduction are best realized: “if I could help one young woman sitting in her tiny apartment thinking she was all alone and a bad girl, then the book would be worthwhile.”
Like Blonde, The Best of Everything has plenty of suffering (including, yes, sexual harassment and abortion), but Raffe keeps her characters in the driver’s seat, even when they don’t feel like they are. If Blonde tries to sell us on the evils of the patriarchy by punishing Marilyn with them at every turn, TBOE shrugs: this shit’s just part of life, and it defines these women just as much as the things that bring them joy—promotions at work, the nice things they can buy, friendship with each other, the fleeting moments in their lives when men aren’t terrible. These women are victims, yes, and trapped in some ways, yes, but they’re also adults who make decisions and face the consequences of such decisions. They have agency, even in a world where that agency is constricted. They’re not superheroes, mind you, but they’re certainly not damsels in distress.
However, TBOE is also notable for unabashedly making men the biggest focus of its protagonists’ attention. There are no Mirandas here: every single one of these gals wants to get married (or remarried) real bad. Reading the book reminded me of another Mad Men episode, “The Rejected” (S4E4), in which the ad agency puts together a focus group to find out why young women use beauty cream besides trying to land a husband, only to come up empty-handed—the promise of marriage is the only reason girls buy the stuff. To this depressing result, Don Draper argues: what if they don’t want other things because they don’t know they can want other things?
Jaffe seems to be asking the same question in her novel. After all, an obsession with marrying a man presupposes men are worthy vessels of such dreams—yet Jaffe writes exactly 02 men into the book who are not complete vats of toxic feces (and even those two are not, like, great guys). The most egregious example comes in the final chapter, the only one that’s not told from a woman’s point of view. In it, a man is baffled by his lover’s decision to leave him after he offers to relocate her to his hometown so they could carry on their affair without him having to leave his wife. But instead of realizing “she left me because I asked her to give up everything so that I wouldn’t have to give up anything,” he simply concludes that he “never really knew her.” Bitches be crazy amirite?
This “shitting on men” approach could become pedantic, but it doesn’t: Jaffe’s characterization of these ogres is so natural that you may find yourself standing up and yelling “down with men!” as you read (and in my case, realizing that you’re calling for your own execution and quieting down). The women of TBOE really want husbands, and while some of them could indeed be happy in a marriage, Raffe does seem to ask us: why this all-consuming need? These women are smart, attractive, funny, resourceful. Their obsession, then, betrays a lack of options, rather than a lack of imagination. But, crucially, Raffe still takes their desires at face value—the book is not a lecture, but rather a portrait of a time as it was perceived by those in its trenches. There’s no condescension here, just desperation.
After finishing it, I found myself troubled by how many of the emotions in it resonated with me, over 50 years later after they had been written. Emotions, by the way, that came from people with whom I have very little in common—and yet the book really shook me. It reminded me of a lesson that was repeated often in writing school: be specific. Only specificity can engender true empathy. It could be because (and this was not part of the lesson, but rather my own addition) specificity allows for feeling. Ideas can generate passion, but it’s people/places/things that generate love (or heartbreak).
Perhaps that’s the problem with the Great Reclamation: it turns its characters into symbols, dehumanizing them by making them embody contemporary values, ciphers in an equation whose result (“sexism/racism/homophobia/etcetera are bad”) is known and agreed upon by those making the content and those consuming it. There’s no room for error, surprise, disagreement… you know, the business of being alive and human.
Thank you for reading this newsletter for two years now! And for sticking around as it changed formats more than once.
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Also: no newsletter for November 4th! I have a hellish couple of weeks ahead and then I’m going back to Argentina for a bit. Wish me a good vacation =D