When asked (by your editor) if she enjoyed Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s shows, Laurie Stone replied “I am a huge and maybe the hugest admirer of Fleabag and Killing Eve…She is brilliant, and brilliantly alternative, food for the starving.” Stone then gave us all a Facebook post sparked by Waller-Bridge’s work. You can read that below along with musings on Killing Eve’s last episode and a response to a review of the show written by Hannah Giorgis, a self-described millennial, hired by The Atlantic to, as Stone says, “treat the word ‘feminist’ as a spell that steals your orgasms and makes you wear corduroy the color of shit brown.” Stone ends with a thoughts on “who identifies with what when they encounter the work of people who are not them. Can men see themselves in a show that centers all of its eros and intelligence on female characters, the way women and people of color have learned to do in works that do not include them?…”
Quick and dirty thoughts aroused by Killing Eve, Fleabag, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, and other female show runners and break the mold small screen female artists. If you are a female actor, how many times did you read a part or act a part written by a male human and think, What a bunch of crap? How many times did you secretly or openly tell the woman character to leave the play and find a female writer who could convey her thoughts, dialogue, motives, and inner life with a semblance of something she could think of as herself? Every time? Has a male writer ever written a woman character who in his mind was a real human being? All male writers. All female characters. Blow me. The first good thing about Killing Eve: The women are obsessed with each other. Men are there. Men are around. All kinds of different men. And Kim Bodnia is super fabulous. Remember him from The Bridge? Still, the women are deeply and crazily interested in each other. For whatever reasons. They just are. So this is great. Another thing: You can be a female psychopathic paid assassin, feel no remorse, enjoy spending money on clothes, be good at your job of killing because you are ruthless but not in a profoundly depressing way like ideologue Elizabeth Jenkins on The Americans, and produce joy for yourself and others. You can be obsessed with your job of being a detective/spy and need a break from your loving husband and want to explain none of it to anyone ever. You do not want to have to justify yourself to anyone! Has this ever happened in a female character and she got to get away with it? This is how women really are. Believe me. We are not like you think we are. We are like Villanelle and Sandra Oh. We wish. We might be. All the female characters in all the creations of male writers are saying to themselves: If you only knew. If you only knew what I really feel and really want, you would not know what to do with me. You would not know what to make of me. You would be horrified or you would get hot from it. Suit yourself. But trust me, you have no idea. And that, David Letterman, is what you get when women write the world.[1]
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Killing Eve killed it. Anna! The Hair! The Cake! The coat! She knew the lining was stuffed. How adorable is Kenny. Eve is lying to Nico. Everyone lies. Everyone dies.
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The final episode of Killing Eve delivered beautifully and brilliantly. Phoebe Waller-Bridge is a comic, mordant genius. The kid, a mini-Villanelle, please bring her back in season 2!
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The Atlantic hired a girl to beat up the other girls. This girl is named Hannah Giorgis, and here she is telling you why Killing Eve, a masterpiece of feminist art making, is too good to be called “feminist.” The word “feminist” would reduce it to virtue guidance and role modeling. In other words, if the art is didactic and stupid, you can call it “feminist.” If the art is funny, surprising, and genre-busting and if it centers its narrative, writing, acting, and directing on the dynamics between female humans in ways that are complex and interesting, then you can’t call it “feminist.” Imagine me right now vomiting on the shoes of Hannah Giorgis. I would like to do worse…
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Yesterday I quoted from a piece in The Atlantic, written by a woman, that equated the word “feminist” with simplistic, crude, and ugly art. Another writer wondered how, in 2018, this was possible. I said: From the first sparks of the second wave up till now, corporate media has told females that feminism will take away their orgasms, turn them into dykes, require they grow underarm and facial hair, and render them angry, alienated, lonely hags. Corporate media hires women who beat up other women. It is a well-known job description. Nothing beside feminism has ever improved the conditions of women’s lives. Anywhere. If you are a female and you run down feminism, I speculate you are very afraid of the world and very isolated from other women. You also do not believe women will help you. You believe only in the power of men. One of the most important aspects of feminism to me is looking to women, organized together, for power.
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I am thinking about the piece performed by Kadin Herring at last night’s reading for Evergreen Review. It was about his experience of being homeless while attending college at the New School. What does the writer look out at? Who does he carefully observe and interact with? Other homeless people. Will he share his small amount of money with the man on the corner he normally greets and moves on from on the way to have lunch? Others on the subway want the Latina who is begging to lower her voice and leave them in peace. The narrator watches her move from person to person, telling each a piece of her story. He sees defiance, gratitude, crazy, and he thinks about where these people will sleep and where he will sleep that night. The power of the piece is its matter-of-factness. He is not translating anything or asking anything of the reader. He is writing with intimacy, and the moment of anyone’s intimacy becomes our intimacy through the tricks of narrative. These days Herring is housed and has a job. We talked after the reading. He is bright and interested in everyone else. I am thinking about this piece in regard to some lackluster reactions I have heard from men about the show Killing Eve. The show is about women primarily. The heat, power, and importance in the story is between women. Do certain men need to see themselves, actually see male characters, in order to be interested in a drama? Women and people of color learn to enter a story that offers them intimate connection, whether or not they are represented. We have to do that with most art, because in most art we are not portrayed as we appear to ourselves. We understand that the longings, thwarted desires, and fulfilled wishes of the characters who are not us nonetheless experience the same feelings as us. They move us. When I was speaking the other day about not needing to have women characters on Breaking Bad in order to engage with it deeply, I was not saying that men were also female. I was saying the rich romances of desire, betrayal, and dependency played out in the various dyads of men were sufficient for me to enter the story as if the story was about me. When do we impose restrictions on surrendering to another world? When does it feel good to be seized? When is it too scary? Why does a Russian, psychotic, paid assassin in a frilly pink dress and sometimes a glued-on beard seem so familiar to me? Last night with friends Philip Roth arose in conversation. For me, with some of Roth’s books, such as The Dying Animal, I experience so much violence to my sense of reality in his portrayals of female characters and male/female relations, they render the work unreadable, poisoned, trivial, irrelevant. It is one thing to omit women and people of color from depictions in a fictional world, it is another thing to depict them in ways that demean them and in turn use that depiction as a mirror of the world. That work stacks its contract with you, so you, too, are asked to see truth through racist and misogynistic understandings. To this work I say no. I have better things to do with my time. I’m not of your party.
Note
1 Stone’s comment on Tina Fey’s interview with Letterman is on point: “She does and does not nail Letterman. She is pressed into the role of explaining why women writers need other women to understand their humor. This is comedy 101. She is his guest and does not point out the fundamental underpinning of his bigotry. He did not have female writers and writers of color on his staff because he is not interested in them as human beings. He is not interested in what they think is funny. He is what they think is funny. The follies of power are funny. They are what he thinks is funny. Because he is ignorant and isolated.”