The Bluestocking, vol 124: James RapAvoy
Happy Friday!
I'm writing this from Amsterdam, where I am achieving a minor ambition - to see a play by Milo Rau, the artistic director of NTGent. Rau has a deliberately provocative manifesto for theatre-making, including using amateur actors, minimal scenery and rehearsing one show a season in a war zone. Familie, which I'm here to see, is about a family of four who hanged themselves in 2007, and the cast is a real-life family of four.
It will provide an interesting counterpoint to my other theatre experience of the week - Cyrano, Martin Crimp's rewriting of Cyrano de Bergerac, starring James McAvoy, done with minimal staging, rap battles and absolutely no prosthetic huge nose. If you've seen it, I'd love to hear your take - the reviews were positive, tending to ecstatic, whereas I was torn. It was fizzing with ideas. McAvoy handles the verbal dexterity needed incredibly well - and it's always a pleasure to see virtuosity on stage. But it didn't make me feel as much as I expected (call me a philistine, but I'm pretty sure I cried at Roxane.)
One of the most interesting strands of it is the . . . how shall I put this . . . incel subtext. This is kind of the foundational text of that modern manosphere trope of how fit girls want hot Chads and friendzone the "nice guys". So you can read it as a homely intellectual's wish fulfilment fantasy: what counts is your brain, not your face. (You can see why it has appealed to so many other writers down the centuries, huh?)
I also admired the director Jamie Lloyd's depiction of an army culture of laddishness, brotherhood and violence. (While acknowledging it's not something I can personally connect with.) Cyrano here reminded me quite strongly of Begbie in Trainspotting, and not just because of the accent: he's a tornado of unpredictable rage. It's interesting to see that coexisting with the ability to write fluid, sensuous love letters - and a reminder that our ideas of masculinity are, amazingly, more narrow than those of the seventeenth century.
At the Atlantic, I published two things this week: why the twitter electorate isn't the real electorate, and why pitting Kate and Meghan against each other is bad.
Until next time,
Helen
PS. In the background to this photo of Jess Phillips is a proof copy of Difficult Women! And some Bovril, which is also exciting.
Learning to Drive at 35. How bad could it be? (Times)
It was a deep comfort to find that, although pathetic, I’m not the only person who finds the whole thing terrifying. I’m also not statistically unusual in having failed. I was 36 by the time I took that first test; in 2018/9 only 34 per cent of women my age passed first time, and 35 per cent second time. That’s compared with 53 per cent and 56 per cent of girls aged 17 and under (17 is the legal driving age for most, but some with mobility issues are allowed to take their tests at 16). Whether it’s overconfidence or a brain that’s tuned to school, we’re much better at this stuff when we’re young.
Reluctantly, but in the interests of good journalism, I’ll tell you that the statistics are startlingly different for men. Boys of 17 and under had a 56.3 per cent pass rate, while men my age still had a very respectable 48 per cent pass rate. This is annoying. Do women get worse at driving as they age, or worse at learning, or worse at handling their nerves? Do women have a crushing, debilitating awareness of mortality that men don’t suffer from? Then again, the statistics look rather different when you learn that men account for 74 per cent of all UK road deaths; the pass rate doesn’t seem to reflect a greater competence.
Absolutely fascinated by these statistics. All potential explanations welcome.
How To Sell Good Ideas
He wanted his new book to be an immersive experience and spent five months making the audiobook version in contrast to the usual three days. It is no coincidence that Talking To Strangers has more directly quoted speech than previous books. In the tape of his interview with Gladwell, the man behind the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques”, James Mitchell, makes an argument that feels more powerful than it does on the page. “It’s beautifully complicated,” says Gladwell. “I still don’t agree with him. But in his voice, he’s making a much better case for what he’s doing than I could.” In effect, Gladwell is reinventing the role of public intellectual for an aural culture.
Ian Leslie profiles Malcolm Gladwell. I'm currently re-reading David and Goliath, for a thing, and Gladwell has just quoted a Canadian psychologist called Jordan Peterson. Remember that name. I think he's going to be big.
It's Just About Our Little Life
I think Louisa May Alcott, whether she knew it or not, made the ordinary lives of girls and women extraordinary by turning her pen to them. I still think we very much have a hierarchy of stories. I think that the top of the hierarchy is male violence—man on man, man on woman, etc. I think if you look at the books and films and stories that we consider to be “important,” that is a common theme, either explicitly or implicitly.
Greta Gerwig unpacks a page of her Little Women script. Saw the film last weekend, and enjoyed it - it manages to stay true to the book's essential Victorianness, which risks coming off sentimental and pious, and resists becoming pro-Jo propaganda. (I suddenly realised this week that the reason I've read zillions of pieces by people who identified with Jo is selection bias. The people who identified with Meg and Amy are just out there, living their lives. The people who identified with Beth are, obviously, dead.)
Also I want all of Saoirse Ronan's androgynous but crucially WARM wardrobe. She looks absolutely toasty in every scene. Not least the one where she's literally on fire.
You Guys Are Scaring Me
When Powell made her statement to police, she was stepping out alone against a venerated institution, one with deep support both where she lived and where she said she’d been attacked. At the same time, she was joining a cause much bigger than herself—an angry, hopeful push to identify and even redefine a plague of sexual violence against women. The year that Powell went to the police, 1992, was the Year of the Woman at the polls. It saw the dawn of third-wave feminism and the cresting of a furor over “date rape.” The Powell case made headlines not long after Anita Hill had testified in the Senate about the degradations she’d suffered in the workplace. Sexual harassment and assault were everywhere on prime-time television. L.A. Law even ran an episode about a baseball star accused of rape. (The player gets acquitted in the show, unjustly.)
In 1992, America was going through a reckoning: a moment when it seemed that rich, powerful, and well-connected men might, at last, be made to answer for abuse. And then, very quickly, it seemed that rich, powerful, and well-connected men might not be held to account at all.
Then, as now, there was a backlash: fear that men’s reputations could be too easily destroyed by idle claims of sex gone bad, angst about the spread of “victim culture,” and worries over the “polarizing discourse of political correctness.” Powell’s allegations against Gooden, Coleman, and Boston, coming when they did, got caught up in this broader storyline. And, like the movement itself, her case would founder.
This story of a 1992 accusation of gang rape against three Mets players could have happen yesterday. In fact, something very similar happened in Belfast, featuring rugby players, happened in 2018. I wrote a one-woman play inspired by that last year, which I feel like I might revisit some time, because the toxic brew of venerated men, alcohol, lad culture and money-making institutions apparently hasn't changed that much in three decades.
The Third Rail of Calling "Sexism"
What has been exposed here are some of the complicated, painful, difficult dynamics that have kept women from the presidency for the country’s entire history. Among those dynamics is the chilling fact that talking in any kind of honest way about marginalization becomes a trap for the marginalized. To acknowledge the realities of running as a woman — the double standards, the higher bars, the demands for likability and relatability in a nation that mostly only relates to and likes dudes; the need to be authoritative but not hectoring; to be smart but not a know-it-all; to be cool but not fake; to be warm but not a mommy; to be maternal but not too soft; to have the contours of your life, from your breasts to your skin-care routines to your maternity leaves, treated as foreign and weird and maybe counterfeit by a political media that’s never had to take this stuff seriously before; to be honest but not actually tell the truth about any of this stuff because you’ll sound like a whiner — is a trap. You will be understood as trying to leverage the bleak unfairness of it all to your benefit: as if you are the one to enter the arena with the advantage of getting to cry “Sexism!” and not with the multiple disadvantages of … sexism.
Love this, particularly that last line.
Quick Links
"He prefers spontaneity to consistency, and he won’t rehearse a scene more than a few times. The most emotionally arduous scenes, he barely runs at all, which can unsettle actors." This NYT profile of theatre director Simon Stone made me very tense.
An obit to aspire to, although honestly I'd include more petty score-settling.
I never stop being impressed by Elizabeth Warren's grasp of policy detail.
"If you ‘‘don’t know how to handle someone in a physical capacity,’’ he said, touch tends to be constrained to finger pads. He demonstrated a dispassionate, there-there pat on the edge of the table. If motivated ‘‘more from the heart,’’ touch tends to incorporate the palm. If sexually motivated, touch might include pressure through the hand’s heel." The NYT on the newest member of film and stage sets, intimacy co-ordinators.
See you next time!