SAY IT, SISTERS
The 2017 Emmys celebrated stories of real women, Emilie McMeekan writes.
When three female-driven television series — Big Little Lies, The Handmaid’s Tale and Veep — sweep the Emmys, you know something big has happened.
Where once The West Wing, The Sopranos and Breaking Bad dominated with their edgy macho protagonists, the time has come for a different kind of tale to be told: Female stories where it is OK not to be OK. It is OK to struggle. It is OK to ask for more. Big Little Lies was a minirevelation. Not just because of the huge Hollywood A-listers — Nicole Kidman! Reese Witherspoon! — and jaw-droppingly stylish Californian house “porn.” But because it lifted the veil on the chaos beneath the gloss. Who knew rich women would be so relatable? But pain is pain.
The stars talked about menopause, they talked about anxiety and they talked about violence, laying down a new gauntlet for storytelling. What happens to women when motherhood threatens to hijack? What happens inside a marriage that looks perfect from the outside? And what happens when women begin to share the truth? Something powerful.
We had Kidman and Witherspoon talking about motherhood in a car. “I feel so ashamed for saying this, but being a mother is not enough for me,” says Kidman’s character in tears. To which Witherspoon’s responds: “I want more.” And she begins hitting the steering wheel and beeping her horn. “I want more,” she howls, throwing it out like a lifebelt. All of a sudden we had the permission to share all the different complexities of our lives as never before. Suddenly we felt seen.
The Handmaid’s Tale has an even darker take on motherhood. Margaret Atwood’s novel is a litany of terrible crimes against women, a dystopian vision of a future where only a small number are fertile, leading to a crisis and a cruelty that is jaw-dropping: female genital mutilation, slavery, torture, murder.
As Atwood has pointed out: “Nothing went into the book that hadn’t happened at some point in time, in some place.” It was painful to watch, but compelling to view.
Women on screen have never had so much agency. The real drama comes from the inner stories of these tangled women’s lives: the fractures, the fault lines, the fears, the doubts.
The distress all suddenly in view for everyone to see and all winning against a backdrop of increasingly hostile “lockerroom talk.”
These are women’s stories, based on books by women where the female protagonists are as far away from the homemaker mom’s soft hands and apron stereotype as you can get.
“They should never have given us uniforms if they didn’t want us to be an army,” warns Offred, Elisabeth Moss’s character in The Handmaid’s Tale.
Take Veep, also a big winner at Sunday’s Emmys, where Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s U.S. vice-president, later president, is a disastrous working parent. Not so much “I don’t know how she does it” but rather, “Do I really have to do this?”
In this new climate, it is OK to find life tough. Some days you are amazing. Some days you leave your keys in the fridge. Some days you sit and cry and don’t know how you will carry on.
On Sunday, Moss thanked her own mother in her acceptance speech: “You have taught me that you can be kind and a f---ing badass.”