For weeks I’ve been stressing about going to see The Artist. The thought of missing the film that EVERYONE loves was unbearable (evidently that same fear of missing out on the cultural honeypot motivates the mile-long queues of people outside David Hockney at the Royal Academy and Jerusalem at the Apollo).
Normally I love what everyone else loves.
Because most people, like me, have little attention span. Much, much worse attention span since digital media and email began their staccato, insistent attack on the ability to focus. But the movies tends to be one place you can count on being entertained, not bored, even if it’s with a “bad” movie. At the cinema, even when it’s bad, it’s good, if you know what I mean.
But The Artist was…awful. I’m an insomniac who needs perfect quiet and darkness and horizontality in order to sleep. Well, this film – an endless, thematically threadbare black and white affair that was so pleased with itself I was nearly sick into my Yoo Moo froyo (yes, the Curzon sells this genius alternative to Haagen Dasz) – made me close my eyes in stupefaction numerous times. I’d have fallen asleep- certainly I was bored enough- but the soundtrack, in the absence of dialogue, specialises in cocophanous bursts. And these keep you awake.
The Artist, if you haven’t seen it (keep it that way, honestly), is an homage to the days before “talkies”. Which is evidently a golden era the public cares passionately about. The fact that naturalistic sound/dialogue/speech adds valuable dimension to characters, story, and everything else does not seem to stand in the way of a nostalgia fest. Of course, it’s true, without “sound”, you can still follow a story. But this one, such as it was, could have been unfurled in about an eighth of the time. Silent movie star George Valentin falls behind the times, and then onto bad times, as the movies of the Depression era are all about talking actors – and he’s not getting any younger or handsomer. Once great, he’s now a drunken failure who- and this is the bulk of the action – refuses to be helped by someone as presumptiously successful as, gasp, a woman. This woman, Peppy Miller, played by Berenice Bejo, wife of the director Michel Hazanavicius, is also his love interest. But YEARS drag by (yes, the duration of the film) before they finally hug.
The tension in the film comes from the way in which the maddeningly vain (and corny-faced) hero Valentin refuses to be aided by the woman who loves him. She’s more successful. She’s loaded. She wants to help. That’s never going to work. But I could see that from the get go. It never does.
Scene after scene of George experiencing dissolution – drinking whisky in his horribly downsized lodgings, being left by his devoted servant, watching dolefully as Peppy appears on billboard after billboard, drinking more, collapsing, drink more….and eventually setting fire to himself – is completely and utterly dull. Even with – especially with – his little dog at his side. Do we really need a slapstick faithful dog at the movies in 2012?
And so I am experiencing a sense of alienation from my fellow public that have made this movie such a success and continue to rave about it and pay 12.50 to see it. It seems they’re chasing a sycophantic inside joke that made its way out of Hollywood – and anything but adulation seems impossible. Allow me to say, then, that The Artist is the prefect reminder of why silent films are best left in the past. As one of the studio directors tells George in the film, about the oncoming age of talkies: “The public wants fresh meat. And the public is never wrong.” In the case of this film, I beg to differ.
No 30-something woman will be able to maintain the power with this man, an inevitable homme fatale.
In her brilliant, angry manifesto The Beauty Myth (1991), Naomi Wolf argues that the mechanisms for overpowering women have merely shifted from the public and private spheres to (mainly) the private one. Whereas before, women’s powerlessness was legislated quite openly – no voting, few or no property or marital rights and so on, as well as the usual sexual bullying on the homefront – now women were being kept down by impossible and no-win beauty standards. The battle against female empowerment, argued Wolf, was now being waged in the most private sphere of all: inside the woman’s head, where the her deepest, most fundamental sense of herself is stewed and set.
Wolf’s point still holds – why else would 100,000 women a year in the UK alone be getting breast implants, many of which (as we now know) have come from cheap ‘n’ cheerful, low-grade silicone stock? Why is carving and stitching great bloody gashes into the face to “lift it”, and injecting botulism into the brow to make it look younger, and having hot wax ripped from your deepest, darkest groin merely par for the course if it were not the case that women could not be happy with less?
This is not a power struggle with men, though. It’s a struggle within women – between their mature selves and their infantile, unvalidated selves. The self they love and the self they despise. Yes, images of female desirability, as disseminated by porn and adverts and movies and magazines, do suggest that taking drastic measures to look young and thin is reasonable, even necessary behaviour. But buying into all that is a choice that I don’t see as being too hard to reject: you just have to have a vague grip on reality to know that a) Kate Moss is Kate Moss for a reason; b) you’re never going to look like her and c) that’s no bad thing because beauty of that sort won’t lead to happiness in the way that being yourself will.
Anyway, assuming the exertion of woman-crushing power has moved from the public to the intensely private sphere, nowhere does it seem so live and kicking as in the world of…DATING. Fancy that!
There’s a whole mythology of women defined for their tremendous power over men. Cleopatra is one example – she’s not just a myth, either. Helen of Troy was more of a passive object than a powerful woman but still, she launched a thousand ships by dint of existing. More relevant, perhaps, is the notion of the “femme fatale” – a woman that holds the power, knows she does so, and wields it expertly, leaving men strewn and helpless at her feet.
But it seems to me the modern reality is very different – who are these femme fatales, these Cleopatras? Rather, it seems that the vast majority of women are subject to the whims of the “homme fatale”. When it comes to dating, any half way decent man – and I mean half way – quite simply holds all the power. Women have a few ways of keeping it: one, withholding sex for a while (though I think the idea that men are gagging for sex is obsolete – these days, typical real-life sex must seem terribly dull for men glutted on porn. Note also statistics showing men have fewer thoughts about sex per day, and women more thoughts about it, than previously assumed). Two: genuinely not being interested in the man.
Otherwise, it’s all him. We wait for him to take or leave us, as if we’re paralysed. The more disciplined of female daters claw back some power through a religious adherence to silence and seeming unavailability, but it’s only a matter of time before they too are beholden to the man’s turn of heart.
Two recent conversations with homme fatales illustrate the point. The first man, Pete, 30, was moaning about not finding the right woman. He’s dated lots and lots of girls in the past year or so, some from the internet, some from around and about. None have worked out. Going off a hunch – after all, he’s pretty good looking and nice and clever – I said: “Err, have any of these affairs ended through the woman’s volition?” Looking sheepish, Pete had to admit he’d ended them all. Every last one had happened or ceased due to his desire. I looked at his bulging biceps and trendy trainers and nodded to myself: of course he was calling the shots. Then I thought of my own dalliances – and my own relationship to the powerplay within them. The idea of feeling that everything was in my hands, that it was me that could go off him, that he would be waiting for my text etc, just seemed laughably distant.
The second man, Paul, was clearly a box-ticker – tall, handsome, 34, successful. He knows at some point he’ll go for that special someone and family bliss – but with that sense of “in good time” that men have until, well, they decide they’re ready. Meanwhile, London’s best lassies are his playing field. He tried to speak in a gentlemanly fashion about the whole process, as if he and the women he dates are on an equal playing field. But from the moment we began talking, it was totally clear that he was picking and choosing, deciding who to ask to leave his house after sex and who he wanted to have lunch with; bestowing a phone call or a text rather than anxiously waiting for one. I asked him: “Do you feel you have the power?” And, nice guy that he was, he had to reply, “yes.” After all, a man of 34 is considered ideal; a woman of 34 is assumed to be desperate to have babies and should be held at arm’s length. Paul said he thought it only fair to pay for women’s dinner (so long as they thanked him later) since when it comes to 30-something dating, the game is rigged far more in men’s favour.
A man can woo a woman, but the reverse is not true, which might explain why, in dating, many women feel they have no choice but to wait for the man to call the shots. This may be due to old, entrenched narratives about masculine and feminine roles and courtship and maybe it can change so that one day, it’s considered perfectly feminine and sexy and normal for the woman to do the asking, the bedding, the ringing- to take the control and the power. But such a world seems very far off. For at the end of the day, man is the instrumental partner in sex – woman as recipient seems encoded in the basic act itself.
This 1950s housewife seems perfectly to capture women today, as represented by Times writers.
I have a soft spot for The Times – I really do. I had my first job (of sorts) there and they published an article of mine just this week. Some of my favourite writers have or do grace its pages.
But when it comes to women: Wapping, we have a problem.
I have for some time felt a simmering contempt for the paper’s brand of smug housewifery, flaunted at length in Times2 by once-impressive female columnists. But after reading yesterday’s paper, I’ve moved into a new zone of consternation.
Let’s start with the imagery. Pictures of women with cakes, ovens, brooms, Christmas trees, etc: six, in the first three pages. The cover story is about women rocking the markets – not the financial ones, mind you, but the farmers variety. And so we have two of the newspaper’s prettiest twenty-something journalists pictured in front of heaped-up cake stands, their lips bright red, cheeks flushed, long brown tresses falling down over their aprons.
Turn to page two, and up pops a column I’d not clocked before: The Mothernator: “Diary of a woman whose son won’t leave home (he’s 24).” I had thought Slummy Mummy and its ilk already covered the journalistic range possible of motherhood’s trials but evidently I
I'll wager Hillary Clinton manages to contain her inner "domestic goddess" - even at turkey-tastic Christmas time.
am wrong. To illustrate The Mothernator we have a trim woman in high pumps, with perfect calf muscles, sporting a yellow apron over a figure-hugging floral dress, waving a mop and wearing some weird Terminator-style mask. She is not just a mother, evidently, who has no power whatsoever over her male offspring or home – she is (of course she is), a housewife too. The pull quote, fyi, says: “I don’t know who to hate more: blondie or blonder”, in reference to the girlfriend her son mooches about with – or the girlfriend’s mother, who is also thin and blonde. So the picture perfectly matches the content: housewife and powerless mother feels jealousy over the youthful looks of younger women, and rivalry with her female maternal peers. Beauty, bitchiness, motherhood, the home. Femininity in one.
Across the page, we stumble upon more maternity. Behold Sarah Vine’s full-page column – Vine, Times beauty editor and author of The Great Big Glorious Book For Girls and Backwards in High Heels: The Impossible Art of Being Female, has evidently overdosed on 1950s pills and now writes primarily about domesticity, girliness, and makeup. When you google Sarah Vine, a Wikipedia entry for her husband, Tory Education Secretary Michael Gove, is the first hit. So in that sense, she really is the perfect 1950s wife – 100 per cent second fiddle to her husband. But back to her column. It is about the rearing of the female’s inner domestic goddess come Christmas time. “Christmas is the time of year when even the most ardent of feminists feels the stirrings of her inner domestic goddess – and what a swivel-eyed loon she turns out to be. A university degree, a successful career – it’s as if none of it ever happened.” Yes it is like that, Sarah. And thanks to columns like these, it’s becoming even more like that. Because I have to say – I know more men than women now who harbour inner domestic goddesses – and yet where is the term “domestic god”? It should be in the vernacular by now. And when it comes to “the most ardent of feminists” becoming obsessive about wreath pinnings, Christmas tree ornaments and having the best mince pies, I would beg to differ. My mother – who spends her life slaving as a patent lawyer in a male-dominated world (and kicking rather a lot of ass) – simply never had time or mental energy to become fixated on such things. Yes, she likes a day of cooking and providing like the next woman born in 1953 (and the next loving, nice family person, male or female, born anytime) – but she does not unleash some inner domestic goddess. Perhaps, then, by Vine’s standards, she’s not ardent enough a feminist.
But to the picture. Having now taken in the pink-hued cakes ‘n’ aprons bonanza of the cover, and the coquettish mop-wielder of page two, we are now given a woman in red polka dot high heels and a short skirt diving head first into a Christmas tree, with her legs bare and toned, all the way up to her upper thigh. Her head is not visible – nor, one can only conclude, necessary. We have, after all, her inner thigh to behold.
Vine’s not finished with feminism yet, though. In her second column to the right, she pours a knowing domestic godddess’s scorn on a blogger called Laura Nelson, who wrote a post claiming a role in Hamleys’ decision to put boys and girls stuff together. Nelson – no doubt sick of the endless categorisation of girls with all that’s pink and fluffy and pretty, and boys with tough and active and blue – came up with the term “gender apartheid”, to which she felt felt Hamleys was contributing.
“I’m sure she has the best of intentions,” sneers Vine. “but surely she can’t really believe that toy store labelling contributes in any significant way to gender stereotyping.” Err yes, that is exactly what she – and numerous other women, including mothers – believe. “Children’s likes and dislikes are driven by their peers: if the most popular girl in class is a pink freak, the other girls will emulate her…” Yes- but the most popular girl in class isn’t likely to be a blue freak is she? Of course she’s a pink freak. Girls are taught – thanks to commercial displays like those at Hamleys – that to be popular, you better like pink. The quickest way to be unpopular at school as a girl is to be into action figures, I’d imagine. So Vine is rather avoiding the issue.
The 1950s picture is perfectly topped off just below by a recipe column – “Dinner Tonight” – by Lindsay Bareham. It’s Sultana and ginger baked apples with rum sauce tonight, ladies. Which all good practice for when you turn over the page for the main feature on how to sell your cakes at market….
Quit those websites, people - lying in the right meadow at the right time may be the best way to find love.
It’s interesting. As one nears 30, singleness becomes intense. Not necessarily in terms of personal, day-to-day reality, but socially. Before, the quest for “man action” or “happiness through man action” or even “a man full stop” was more childish – lived in violent ups and downs, giggles and mishaps, gory anecdotes.
But it’s all got a bit serious now. I mean, it shouldn’t be “interesting” or even surprising that it has – after all, society gets all het up about the biological clock time crunch, as do many women, justifiably. The fact is, the stakes for finding a partner in the magical five-year race towards the clock winding down are inevitably higher than they were – certainly for women.
Man, though. People are really tied in knots over it all. Singleness is a massive, all-consuming preoccupation, fascination, industry. I guess I sort of knew this – hell, I have a whole book devoted to the topic. But what is becoming clear is that the “singleness problem” has spawned such an enormous, diverse industry that it’s sucking up some of the brightest business brains out there. Every day someone tells me about an idea they have for a dating website, and lately, those people have been graduates of London Business School. The “someone for everyone” puzzle is getting more and more enticing with each wave of stats indicating fewer marriages, more single people, more unhappy women, more “unmarriageable” men.
But I fear they’re wasting their energy. On one level, anyway. Sure, moving pawns around in the right way can win you the chess game. But unlike in chess, no matter how well you’ve manipulated the pieces, check mate can not be guaranteed among the 30-something dater. Too much gets in the way: suddenly we’re old – things annoy us, time is precious (and considered money), people don’t fit the picture we’ve drawn of ourselves and our future. All these things mean we’re harder to impress, the chances of mutual impressedness are slimmer than ever and – crucially – chemistry failure is rife. We are too icy now, too unreachable – our actual availability is in inverse proportion to our technical availability. We sign up to things: we put ourselves out there “as single” but in reality, we’re not signed up, nor out there, when push comes to shove and that shove is a total stranger sitting opposite you jarring your nerves. A total stranger who, years ago, perhaps you’d have thought was “interesting” or “cute in a weird way” or “out there” or “worth a shag”. Of course, the dating industry is predicated on failure – or at least, just the right amount. Business can’t boom if everyone’s happily coupled, after all.
So back to the contortions and effort and dollars that people put into their singleness. I was having beers with some Swiss PRs from a chi chi ski resort the other night. One of them is single, in her early forties, and extremely good looking. Or rather, she was single when we met in August, in the shadow of the Alps, drinking Bernese wine. Now, though, she’s not single. She is dating a hot Australian of mysterious but certain means, who shares her passion for cowbells and mountains.
Guess how they met? She was dozing on a meadow on her own, midway up a mountain. The next day she was due to meet a counselor who would advise her on the single problem. The man spied her, said hello, and off they went. “He just found me,” she said. “I did nothing. Nothing. I’ve always known it’s better for a woman to be found than to find, but didn’t think that was reality.”
I know, I know. Woman as eternally and necessarily passive is not what we’re going for, nor what I think is true or good. But still. All the websites in the world couldn’t have got her that man. For a start, he’s not the type for dating websites or nifty dinner party businesses. But more importantly, human will (prolonged scoping for other single men; going to counselors) battled serendipity (man in meadow at right time) and the latter won. The thing is, serendipity has favourites, and until you can count on it, the single problem is going to remain. Unless, of course, you can think of a service that secretly – and for free – delivers handsome older men to your favourite outdoor resting spots unawares.
Life is so much simpler when this kind of male pops out of the party.
You walk into the dinner party, expecting the usual: couples. Suddenly, a hot man emerges from the throngs of coupledom and is introduced to you. You perform your now-habitual ring finger check and it reveals a blank – no ring, so there’s the chance he’s unmarried. Taken, though, surely – after all, he’s an attractive man in his thirties and there’s always a catch. But then it turns out you’re in the clear for that, too – the guy is single. Yippee! What luck. You bide your time, then settle into charm mode. The opening exchange will go well – how can it not – the man’s eyes are beautiful and yours aren’t bad either. You lock them into his and vice versa – this is how fairly tales start; imagine when your friends see what the cat brought home; the sex…
But wait. Suddenly it’s five minutes in and he’s expanded from his job description (you did ask) to an assessment of geopolitical shifts that are changing the shape of the world. While minutes ago you were sweetly talking about the warm Israeli weather, and talking about your holiday last week, now you find yourself diving in to discuss the ascendancy of China and the reluctance of the world to sacrifice US cultural dominance. He doesn’t want to hear your views on this – not because he is more interested in where you want to be taken for dinner on the date he is soon to propose, but because he isn’t really interested in what other people – least of all women – have to say on matters that he ALREADY KNOWS THE ANSWERS TO.
That universe in which you felt a surge of hope – that sense of “maybe him” (for sex, love, both, whatever) – seems entirely parallel now. Ten minutes in the real world have passed and you realise that he is staring straight ahead delivering his manifesto on global finance. You feel bad. Shitty. Invisible. Guilty – why did you lead him here?
No matter how modern they are, women carry deep ideas about how they’re meant to be with men they might like: the pressure to be “feminine” is never stronger than when faced with a potential date, and being “feminine” doesn’t mean, grill him about every aspect and implication of his work; about where men stand of feminism and fake blondes, and then disagree with almost everything he says because you just can’t help it. See? When we lapse from our femininity template, we get in trouble, which clearly we deserve (just ask Mother and selected married friends). Hence the guilt. Oops, I did it again and all that.
And so, it doesn’t matter that half an hour ago you looked in the mirror and thought you looked good. Feminine, in fact. Pretty. Because now – post sub-prime mortgage chat – you are not a viable woman, you are a stranger locked in slightly combatative conversation with this man, rocking on the seas of grownup mistrust.
Chemistry has died – and this micro-death is violent in its way, and oddly sad. A brief but heady spike of hope has bottomed out, hard. Reality has come back and interposed itself in that way reality has, whereby it shows how little it believes in fairytales, even if you do. And you know what? Reality is right to remind us that it determines the outcome of two people meeting, not the wishful narratives women keep in our heads, raggedly and often wrong-headedly passed down to us throughout the ages.
