This Is Running for Your Life (5 page)

Certainly by the mid-1970s the erosion of the movies' classic dream girl had begun. The culture's REM needle went berserk for the decade or two I spent growing up, and representations of women veered across the charts accordingly. In between Diane Keaton's patriarchal shutout in
The Godfather
and stuttering redefinition of feminine charm in ironic, oversize menswear, we were slashed, sportified, fetishized, suited up as superheroes, and stripped down to our post–Hays Code glory. What there was little room for during those years was fantasy: the male gaze had been bagged and tagged as part of the feminist project, and to think in terms of a traditional ideal was to earn a lashing with someone's discarded Wonderbra. In the same year that Keaton was anointed as the alpha shiksa in
Annie Hall
, she was martyred to the cause of sexual liberation in
Looking for Mr. Goodbar
. Make of it what you will that both films are set on Manhattan's Upper West Side.

My mother was of the generation of women—Keaton's generation, as it happens—that was educated to the teeth and then sent into an unreconstructed job market. In the late 1970s, she lost interest in the life of raising children and hobby jobs and enrolled in an M.B.A. program. Before I hit the double digits the call of a corner office took her to Toronto, where she has remained ever since. I spent my preadolescence reeducating skeptical friends and neighbors about the arrangement, always careful to stipulate that her removal from our home was not the end of my parents, or my family. They would nod with sober courtesy and I would nod back, until mutual dizziness obscured the original concern. I made the proper noises and decorated the appropriate Mother's Day cards with reassurances that she was doing the right thing for womanity, if not her daughter. My mother donned the chunky power suits, striped the blush up her cheeks, and upgraded a pair of self-gifted diamond studs with every promotion. During visits, I learned to approach her only when she was scrubbed and dressed for bed; the executive armor seemed to transform more than her skin tone. Though I genuinely admired her ambition, echoing it with a near-deranged dedication to whipping the academic ass of every kid in school, about the time that my mother realized her generation's feminist dream, I tucked away all my Wonder Woman costumes and tuned in to a prior frequency.

“I'm not interested in money,” begins a Marilyn quote I read at fifteen. “I just want to be wonderful.” By the time I was growing up, either/or configurations of womanhood were already completely alien, though liberation came with the hitch of all untested theories: taking full measure of its extremes seemed like the surest way to balance them.

The Mesomorphic Era

Though the dream girl was reduced in stature over the 1980s and early '90s, it seemed unlikely—as long as there were young women and massive screens to project their images upon—that she might actually disappear. Typecasting has always been the two-faced friend of the aspiring movie star, but the roles of the comedienne, the character actress, and the beauty queen settled into smug complacency during those years. As though more naturalistic storytelling and acting styles equaled more naturalistic representations of women. But the categories didn't budge—if anything, they further limited the number of traits that could be ascribed to any one actress. Meg Ryan, Meryl Streep, and Michelle Pfeiffer have tried to exchange places periodically throughout their careers; only the assiduous, almost freakishly gifted middle child met with any success.

On paper, the figure of the beauty queen—and her subset, the man-eater—is the dream girl's closest relative. But a beauty queen's cultural traction was limited: we now had celebrity models for that type of thing; but also, either by virtue of her empty symmetries (Pfeiffer; Kim Basinger) or the remove of reference (Kathleen Turner; Jessica Lange), the beauty queen had the feeling of facsimile. Heavily ironized, cinema-savvy, and tele-lingual, we might appreciate beauty and even use it to enforce a gold standard, but we resisted the creation of out-and-out fantasy women on-screen.
Sex symbol
was understood as a frivolous and possibly destructive term, and the dream girl became either a prop—the “after” reveal of the ubiquitous makeover montage—or a kind of inside joke (see the slow-motion point-of-view shot of Phoebe Cates in
Fast Times at Ridgemont High
and the career of model-turned-actress Kelly LeBrock). Post Princess Leia—one of the last cataclysmic dream girls; it seems significant that she was a pure character from that galaxy far, far away—for the most part we wanted things and people to look
real
, or anyway a movie-fied, maximally attractive version of real.

But in an industry built upon the allegoric potency of its images, the goal of realism—particularly as it relates to the feminine ideal—is pretty unrealistic. For women, this meant a divide between “serious” roles for “serious” actresses on one end and abject eye candy on the other, with a few comediennes and Sigourney Weaver high-stepping in between. In other words, actresses were subjected to all the casting constrictions of Old Hollywood without the potential for something otherworldly to take shape. Conditions were ripe for an unabashed student of iconography like Madonna to claim a spot in the cultural headspace. Music videos were a vital and innovative new form in part because they addressed a postmodern void—the place that opened up when we became too cool to respond to the same old aesthetic tricks and archetypes.

Across this divide, the movies became purveyors of an increasingly specific physical ideal. Anonymous topless babes abounded in mainstream comedies, but well-known actresses were also agreeing to explicit love scenes invariably described as “raw,” “real,” and “brave.” The haggle to disrobe major stars became part of a film's story.

The exposure of Sharon Stone in
Basic Instinct
(1992) was the deceptively cool culmination of this elaborate burlesque. Cast ten years earlier as the quintessential dream girl in Woody Allen's
Stardust Memories
, as
Instinct
's ciggie-sucking temptress, Stone makes the castration menace of the femme fatale explicit. It's the moment Andy Warhol, shooting a lingerie-clad Edie Sedgwick grappling with one man on-screen, another off, and a third behind the camera, teased out and ultimately denied in
Beauty No. 2
(1965). Both films launched their respective stars: today
Basic Instinct
plays like a sleek but garish genre piece updated with reactionary, late–Second Wave twists, whereas Warhol's shapeless interrogation tape conveys something essential of its time and themes, subject and creator.

Leaving nothing to imagination meant less space
in
our imaginations for the alchemy of archetype to take hold. It turns out that when exposed in 2-D, what lies between a woman's legs amounts to little more than visual information; like a picture of a teacup or acronyms like
2-D
, we'll all process it the exact same way.
Empowerment
, feminism's new watchword, was used to describe/endorse/defend everything from Stone's playing the V-card (though the actress later claimed she was tricked by director Paul Verhoeven, complicating matters further) to the newly unforgiving, muscle-blistered physiques of performers like Madonna and Linda Hamilton. This, we were told, was
owning
your body: display as decision, sex as a self-marketed commodity. There was a certain democracy in it as well. After all, a measurable ideal is one we might all attain, with enough discipline and a plastic-surgery piggy bank.

Interesting times for the girls just snapping on their first push-up bras and litmus-testing the rumored right to attract attention on their own terms. Why bother with persona or performance in forming an identity when—as long as it was “hot” or “hard”—a body itself might obtain?

Meanwhile, Back in the Cafeteria …

Having laid plans at about thirteen, someone like me was still a solid fifteen years from reckoning a dreamed feminine self with an even halfway tenable idea of functionally independent adulthood. This is in fact a pretty sensible timeline. “Being wonderful” is actually an ambition of Einsteinian relativity, and a girl can easily run up a decade's worth of style overhauls, clique-sampling, and guitar lessons sorting out its meaning. The hidden fulcrum of the concern being, wonderful to whom?

Puberty can go off like an IED in the Iraqi desert: one morning you wake up in a German hospital and spend the next six years relearning to walk and talk. All along, the person in search of a personality triages her best interests and directs her energies toward them. A young girl's wish to be seen had a particular backspin in the moment when feminist sex positivity coincided with the STD-phobic early nineties, when even the Catholic schools stopped fronting and rolled out the old condom-on-the-banana routine.

The hockey players at my high school were unbearable, and I dated them all. Their indifference felt like a kind of purgatory; it hardly seemed a worthy arena in which to develop and deploy one's wiles. Ambivalence about subjecting ourselves to seemingly primitive male algorithms ran deeper than the fear of rejection or even disease, into self-reproach. Was it weak to define yourself along a retrograde curve? Can you be wonderful in a vacuum?

I spent four years wrestling at the extreme end of that question, and if my efforts were not successful, they did not go unnoticed. Surely the most decorated nerd at St. George's elementary, I left high school with one distinction: best walk.

Who's That Girl?

Like global bankruptcy and a good orgasm, it happened slowly, then all at once. Around the time that my hair—kept short on my mother's watch—came within kissing distance of my fifth lumbar, the distant outline of a new ideal was spotted riding feminism's third wave. The riot grrrl revolution—a music-based punk movement spearheaded by a group of American, female-based bands—blew through the youth culture with a radical, corrective force. After cramming up against the same old gatekeepers, women who were raised to expect more made a lunge for the mic, and suddenly their smeared faces were everywhere. Much like my awkward phase, the impact was pronounced but brief.

The defiantly wanton postsuffragette flapper—waistless, chestless, bobbed—became a cautionary figure of excess. Eventually the lush, maternal lines of the 1950s bombshell offered a comforting revisal. With the riot grrrl movement, what was launched as a revolution turned into a round of telephone that began with a guttural challenge and ended with a chattering waif in a baby T. The latter was sweet and cute but “edgy,” an essentially Victorian vision dressed in street-urchin chic. In her the problem of a new, provocative version of feminine agency was reframed as obviously regressive and a little unhinged. When she was good, she was very, very good. But by the time the words “I think you're my dream girl” were uttered across a telephone line connected to the author's left ear, their meaning had shifted such that instead of merely adding to a mutual burden of romantic illusions, they fell with the force of an indictment.

Who's That Girl? II

In 1993 I moved to the Pacific Northwest, where the tough girls were amassing, with a friend I'll call Aileen. We grew our hair and wore combat boots and baggy cargo pants. Most of our mental energy went to maintaining the certainty that this, finally, was where we belonged. This was independence, maybe. Authenticity—certainly. I had wanted desperately to make the move, but the truth is that from the moment I met her seven years earlier, I would have followed Aileen to the moons of Jupiter. Here was a flesh-and-blood ideal for study, a numinous, red-lipped zaftig with a captivating laugh and confidence so replete that when she first strode into my sixth-grade class in London, Ontario, I felt she had to be American.

For our grade-eight graduation, each member of our class painted a ten-foot mural of our projected occupation. I chose brain surgeon, only because it seemed like the hardest and most impressive thing a boy or girl could be. Aileen went with actress. And if she never made it to the stage or screen, of the two of us she was certainly truer to her mark. As we moved through high school I watched her—everyone did—with acquisitive candor. In being a kind of character she was fully herself. More than OR scrubs and parental validation I longed to manifest the best—which is to say most wonderful, wonderfully elusive—parts of her.

On a summer afternoon shortly before we left, Aileen, her boyfriend, and I convened at our local Chinese joint for tea and fortune cookies. My mother had driven into town earlier in the day to announce my parents' long-delayed divorce. I met the news with supreme detachment: my mother didn't make it to my high school graduation, though I imagined the expiry of her marital pact circled red in her assistant's day-planner. I had resolved not to mention it, but caved between our request for the bill and its arrival, bracketing the news with our customary
check out this bullshit
bravado.

Beneath all that was real urgency: I needed to know how to feel, and how far I was from feeling it. I filled with a private horror as tears like match flares lit in Aileen's eyes.

A few months after our arrival in Vancouver I pushed to the lip of the Commodore Ballroom's stage and watched in fear and awe as Courtney Love unleashed her self-tattered charisma on the crowd. The baby-doll look had reanimated in subversive zombie style, and Love was the queen of the undead coquettes. She spit out cigarettes and screamed at us, between deliriously tight renditions of early Hole songs, for acting like “sullen Canadians” at a punk-rock show. I was alone that night; Aileen wasn't big on the music scene. Or maybe she was working. We both had new jobs and were playing house in an east-end basement apartment, installed below a trio of headbangers burning out on the finest weed in the land.