Domenika Marzione (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
domarzione) wrote2018-12-12 11:08 am
domarzione) wrote2018-12-12 11:08 am
Entry tags:
squeekiller
The Cloying Fantasia of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”
It took two minutes of Season 2 before someone said the words: “Gosh, you’re amazing.” The speaker was one of Miriam (Midge) Maisel’s colleagues at the B. Altman switchboard, but, really, it might have been anyone: a genius painter at the Cedar Inn, who says, “It’s like Vermeer painted you! Or you swallowed a light bulb”; a Johnny Mathis-esque crooner at a telethon; Lenny Bruce; Jane Jacobs; Midge’s estranged husband, Joel, who is still stuck on her; her boyfriend, a choosy doctor who prefers Midge to the vapid gold-diggers in the Catskills; her devoted agent, Susie; or even some Parisian drag queens, who dub her Miss America. Is there anyone who doesn’t love Midge?
Me, as it happens. Last year, “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” was a boffo hit for Amazon and for its top-hatted creator, Amy Sherman-Palladino. The series swept the Emmys. It sent shivers of delight up the spines of vintage-shoppers everywhere. Lusciously art-directed, from Midge’s classic six to her kitten heels, the production landed at an ideal moment, tapping into a desperation—particularly among women—for something sweet and inspiring. No more “Handmaid’s Tale,” no more pussy-grabbing. “Mrs. Maisel” offered a bright-pink escape hatch from 2017.
I craved such an escape myself—but I was also mystified by the show’s reception, because the first season struck me as both treacly and exhausting. This was true despite its having a premise that was so far up my alley it was practically chopping onions in my kitchen: a Jewish girl does standup comedy in the late nineteen-fifties in New York, when Joan Rivers first rose to fame. And, in fact, the show’s heroine, played by Rachel Brosnahan, is—exactly like Rivers was—a college-educated rich girl in her twenties, who is forced to move back home after her marriage blows up. When Midge enters show biz, her shtick, just like Rivers’s was, is to dress for a date, in a black dress and pearls, then free-associate truths about women’s lives. As with Rivers, the radical “sick” comic Lenny Bruce is Midge’s inspiration—and, in the show, Bruce (Luke Kirby) becomes her mentor. (In real life, after Rivers once bombed, Bruce left her a note: “You’re right, they’re wrong.” She kept it in her bra, for luck.)
But “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” makes two major adjustments. First, it gives Midge kids, a baby and a toddler. It also makes her a winner. Whereas Rivers was an alienated oddball, a loner fueled by rejection, gagging onstage at her own “ugliness,” Midge is popular and pretty. She’s skilled (and brags of her skill) at everything from sex to brisket. When Joel, a wannabe comic, cheats with his secretary, Midge gets drunk and jumps onstage, and, right away, she kills. She keeps on killing—at cocktail parties and dive bars, even at a Washington Square rally, where she awes Jane Jacobs with a speech about how women “accessorize” the world, as a multiethnic crowd cheers. “Oh, that’s good, write that down,” Jacobs tells her assistant....
Many people found this fantasy invigorating. For me, it felt grating, and not just in terms of verisimilitude—the verbal anachronisms (“totally”), the sitcom clams (“Good talk!”), the cloying Disneyfication of Midge’s Jewish family—but in its central psychology. In “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” sexism exists. But it never gets inside Midge. Her marvelousness comes from the fact that she’s immune, a self-adoring alpha whose routines feel like feminist TED talks, with some “fucks” thrown in. Brosnahan delivers them with moxie, but they’re rarely funny. They’re also the opposite of Rivers’s act, which relied on the tension between looking pretty and calling herself a dog—provoking taboo laughs from the revelation that even this nice girl felt like a loser, desperate, unfuckable.
In “Mrs. Maisel,” Rivers’s more unsettling qualities—her vengefulness, her perception of women as competitors, her eating disorder—all get displaced onto Midge’s foe, fat-joke Sophie, who lives in an opulent French-themed apartment, like the one Rivers lived in, collects furs, and, like the real Joan, wanted to be a serious actress. It’s as if Rivers has been split into good Joan and bad Joan, because it’s too hard to make such a caustic trailblazer seem cute, to acknowledge how much her success derived from being shaped by misogyny, not from transcending it.
I really wanted to love this show because, like Nussbaum, it's squarely up my alley. I had to overcome a few quibbles to be charmed by the pilot -- is pretty Irish girl Brosnahan the best they could do for an Ashkenazi Jew? Why the hell is Midge (a) a regular at a butcher shop that sells pork and (b) why is she going there to get High Holiday food... to serve a rabbi?!? -- but I just kept noticing more things that annoyed me. And Midge being a Mary Sue eventually got to be too much for me.
The show was recced to me by a good friend and I passed the rec on to my BFF, who loves it a lot. So I just sort of stopped watching without explaining why because I didn't want to harsh anyone else's squee and because I thought I was just being a sourpuss. But apparently I'm not the only one, so here I am, letting my squeekiller flag fly.
Not just you
Re: Not just you
A new thing: I just read a review of Season Two (written by a Jewish man) and he brought up the absurdity of how the show and the characters forget that Midge has very young children. It's something that never comes up in her decision-making and they are constantly majicked away when they are inconvenient and it's just not within the realm of plausible in that era and in that situation that Midge's motherhood is not a factor at all.