Women in love, then and now
TV’s Transparent, film Carol offer a study of contrasts in Hollywood LGBT romance
In the second season of Transparent, a quick scene gave me one of the most ecstatic highs I’ve had watching almost anything recently.
Transparent is Jill Soloway’s Amazon comedy, loosely — and too narrowly — described as the awakening of Maura Pfefferman (Jeffrey Tambor), a 70-year-old transgender woman in Los Angeles. At the end of this eighth episode, Maura has guilted her two bisexual but radically different adult daughters, Sarah (Amy Landecker) and Ali (Gaby Hoffman), into bringing her along to a womyn’s music festival.
Before you even see them in Sarah’s speeding minivan, you can hear guitars strumming. And if you recognize the song, you have to laugh at the sheer of-courseness of the choice: “Closer to Fine,” the Indigo Girls’ 1989 coffee house spiritual. It’s so obvious in its earnestness, the musicians so perfect in their brand of feminist existentialism it’s practically the womyn’s festival theme song.
Maura has probably never heard “Closer to Fine,” or rolled her eyes if she has. But now she’s so desperate to have a girls’ weekend that she’s willing to be swept up in a liberation anthem she doesn’t even know.
The whole scene should be the height of embarrassment: two grown women rocking out to folk music in a suburban car with their earth-mother “Moppa.” But what makes this scene transcendent is the proud reclamation of the uncool, of obviousness. It clears out all of the self-conscious noise of being cool and concentrates instead on being free.
Transparent is a specific yet galactic conjuring of female energy, as strong as any from any screen lately. And given what else is out there, that’s something: for starters, Orange Is the New Black, Being Mary Jane, Broad City, UnREAL, Inside Amy Schumer, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Jane the Virgin, Girls. None of these shows argue anything essentialist or supremacist about women. Women are just simply, yet never only simply, at the centre of their own adventures.
The improvement isn’t a matter of occupation; many of the women in these shows don’t have one. It’s a matter of behaviour. These are messed-up, funny, unhappy, vulnerable, yet indomitable, people. They can feel anything and everything.
Then, at the movies, there’s Carol, Todd Haynes’ lesbian romance, which is hampered by its sense of discretion.
In Haynes’ film, set in the early 1950s, a strapping, affluent housewife named Carol Aird (Cate Blanchett) locks eyes across a busy Manhattan department store with a petite cashier named Therese Belivet (Rooney Mara). They fall for each other, hit the road and have a less blissful time in Carol’s car than the Pfeffermans do in theirs. Carol and Therese are ruing the consequences of their love, fleeing the hurt of a morality clause in a legal judgment that, under the circumstances, sounds more horrific: morality claws. In discovering Therese, Carol stands to lose custody of her daughter.
Working from an adaptation by Phyllis Nagy of Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel The Price of Salt, Haynes is back in the mannerist mode of another of his period studies of sexual awakening and repression, the crest of which is Far From Heaven from 2002, a masterly conflation of film history and feminist tragedy. This time, he’s just as interested in sexuality and the cinematic past. But where in Far From Heavenhis strategy was to unpack and reveal, with Carol he has decided to conceal.
The camera obscures its two women in the glare of windshields and windows. You see the backs of their heads almost as frequently as you see their faces. “Keep this room orderly,” reads a sign in the staff cafeteria at Therese’s department store and on that front Haynes’ doesn’t disappoint. This is a work of respectful restraint. The film’s lone sex scene is shot in part from abstracting angles and fades into a writhing blur.
This movie is the opposite side of transparent. It’s opaque.
In the Dec.14 issue of the New Yorker, Ariel Levy dropped in on planet Soloway and wove a report of the preciousness, eccentricity, academia and pre-emptive, presumptive femaleness that fuels the creation of the show. All the waves of feminism and queer theory seemed to have Levy questioning, understandably, whether to put on a wet suit. But to the extent that activist ideology operates within the actual show, it’s presented as unsettled and up for debate.
Ali’s exploratory, politicized lesbianism offends her more traditional girlfriend (Carrie Brownstein, who also shows up for a minute in Carol) and amuses the roving, rapacious Sarah who, while stewing in a sauna, basically says that she couldn’t care less about the patriarchy.
The show makes it look easy to not care less, even though caring is a key to why Transparent works so powerfully. Like any good drama, it keeps inventing problems for itself to solve, in matters of religion, Jewishness, class and snobbery (although not so much on race, not yet). The show is a whirlpool, pulling in characters from other places and other eras, subtly psychologizing their behaviour and revelations. The farther out it spins — juxtaposing the present and the past; history and “herstory” — the stronger it seems to get.
Haynes, by contrast, has built an island for two. His lesbians are ambiguously adrift in some queer, icy before that makes you wonder if they’ll experience — or help instigate — a version of Soloway’s emphatically self-actualized after.