Mad Woman
With ‘Big Little Lies,’ TV lovers finally have a female anti-hero who’s as delicious as Donald Draper
MOVE over Donald Draper, there’s a new badass protagonist in TV town.
This one also cheats on their milquetoast spouse, excels at their job, has a complicated relationship with their two children and looks great in a trench coat.
Oh, and it’s a lead role played by Reese Witherspoon. Her character Madeline Mackenzie on “Big Little Lies” is television’s answer to a gal who can follow her own desires and make doing so seem stylish and cool. Finally, women can breathe a great and joyful sigh in seeing that we’ve got a Mad Woman of our very own.
To be sure, Madeline isn’t the first anti-hero to appear on TV. HBO has always been better than many channels at creating female characters who are not simply adoring spouses or straight women to their funny husband’s jokes. Nor are they shrewish wives who do not want their husbands to become meth dealers (it’s always perplexing that such a desire was seen as “shrewish” rather than “extremely sane,” but people certainly seemed to get really upset that Skyler was standing in the way of Walter White’s drug-dealing dreams on “Breaking Bad.”)
However, typically, when we see female anti-heroes, well, their lives are a bit of a mess.
That’s true of Carrie Bradshaw in “Sex and the City,” who spent $40,000 on shoes and had no place to live as a consequence. It’s true of Hannah Horvath on “Girls,” who is about to become an unemployed single mother following a one-night stand with a surf instructor.
While it’s easy to envy the devilmay-care way these characters approach life, the shows make it clear that there can be consequences. We might enjoy watching Hannah, we might sympathize with her, we might recognize our foibles in her, but we do not envy her.
Not so with Madeline. There’s plenty to envy in her California beachfront life in Monterey.
Like many male anti-heroes, there’s a strong element of wish fulfillment contained in Witherspoon’s character. Not only does she get to breeze onto the scene in a spiffy trench coat like an old school femme fatale, she gets to do what she wants, when she wants.
When her boss tries to shut down a production Madeline is staging, she promptly tells him to “go f--yourself on the head.” And it’s thrilling! Who hasn’t wanted to say that to her boss? When someone messes with her, she responds by upstaging their child’s birthday party by hosting a better party on the same day.
The idea of a woman behaving badly is refreshing in itself. But what’s even more delightfully unexpected is that Madeline’s not punished for her moments of anger.
If anything, she seems to reap the rewards that are typically only bestowed on female characters who are demurely inoffensive, or men who partake in such passionate displays. She is not fired for shouting “go f--- yourself on the head.” The show she’s staging seems likely to go on. The alternate party she plans goes well. Her husband loves her. Her co-worker is in love with her. She looks great. She doesn’t even have to deal with a weird secret identity á la Don Draper. She also seems to enjoy wealth and a Nora Ephron-esque kitchen.
It’s pretty great to see someone who isn’t punished for not being a “good woman.”
And viewers love her, because, at last, she seems honest. If she’s angry much of the time, well, women have plenty of reasons to be angry. She is not the only female who has wanted to swear at a domineering boss or flick off the people moving too slowly in the carpool lane. A lot of lady life — one of the biggest little lies we all engage in — is learning to dissemble so you don’t reveal that anger. In part, that’s because pop culture teaches us that bad things happen to women who do not conform. So, you learn to sweettalk your boss or mutter under your breath when you see the slowpokes in the carpool lane or make nice with the mean mom at your child’s school. Madeline does none of that. If the truth sets people free, well, Madeline seems gloriously free.
The fact that this performance is coming from someone like Reese Witherspoon, who spent much of her early life playing traditionally perky, virtuous roles, makes it even more of a surprise. But then, perhaps due to all those good girl roles, Witherspoon, more than many of us, must know the toll of maintaining a perpetually perky façade. Certainly, that façade broke four years ago when Witherspoon was arrested for disorderly conduct for yelling at a police officer. Which seems exactly like something her character Madeline would do! And frankly, a lot more believable than the simpering good girl she played in movies like “Cruel Intentions.” And you know what? That brush with the law worked out fine for the actress. If anything, it made people feel a little closer to her than they did before. Her career, meanwhile, has blossomed as she has developed into a Hollywood power player, creating highprofile vehicles including “Big Little Lies” with juicy parts for herself and other women to star in. As a result, this role isn’t just refreshing for women to watch, it must be refreshing for her to play. Because there’s a bit of a madwoman in all of us. And maybe if we all forsook the big little lie that women are sweet and perfect, we will find, just as Madeline does, that nothing particularly terrible happens.