When Even the Director Doesn't Think You're Hot

This is basically a necropost in anticipation of some upcoming renewed blogging activity. I don't know why I didn't post it when it was written, and it's been quite a while since then. But on rereading, my feelings remain the same, so here goes:
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 So, if you've looked at my Twittering, you know that I've surrendered at last to the overwhelming lure of a new 40 inch flatscreen TV. With HD and DVR. With three separate remotes and no clue how to do anything. And after marveling at the sheer amount of human genius devoted to allowing me to count the number of sequins on Vanna's dress, I faced the inevitable bounceback: 100 HD channels of nothing to watch.

So I dial up the old On Demand and what is there? Very little for which I have any demand. But at last I settle on Mrs. Winterbourne (1996, Richard Benjamin), which I remember as one of those cheesily enjoyable movies that provide an agreeable way to kill 2 hours without danger of exercising any brain cells. But the movie was neither as fun nor as pleasantly mindless as I thought.

I've never read the original Cornell Woolrich novel I Married a Dead Man (note to self: put on BookMooch wishlist), but I have seen the first film version No Man of Her Own, and I think it's safe to say that Mrs. Winterbourne has lost something in translation. Not only have the screenwriters half-heartedly turned it from a taut noir thiller into a big-misunderstanding-wacky-hijinx romantic comedy, but they have gone out of their way to make Connie unbelievably young and innocent, when it really would have served the plot better to make her a little more rough around the edges, a little more in need of the redemption that the Winterbourne family offers. And look, I don't hold it against Ricki Lake that she's no Barbara Stanwyck. I mean, who is? But plenty of actresses could have done a creditable job in the part -- just look at Sandra Bullock in the basically-not-dissimilar While You Were Sleeping. Ricki's either flat or over the top -- she just drags the film down, making her very good co-stars Shirley MacLaine, Brendan Fraser, Miguel Sandoval, and Loren Dean work all the harder for very little reward.

But none of that is what I want to talk about. No, I want to talk about Ricki Lake's clothes.

They are tragic. They are heinous. And not just in a this-is-the-'80s-what-can-you-expect kind of way, either. (I was surprised to learn this movie was made in the '90s. It just has that '80s feel about it.) No matter what the decade, these clothes are epically bad.

It doesn't make any difference what part of the movie we're talking about, either -- whether she's a plucky teenager leaving home; homeless and pregnant in New York; wearing the expensive clothes of the rich girl she's replaced; or spending the Winterbourne largesse on a few new outfits -- Ricki's wardrobe is uniformly floppy, droopy, too long, too dark or too pastel, and intended to cover every inch of skin. (At least when she flees Jersey, her skirts only reach her knee, but she wears black opaque tights to make up for it.)

The kicker is when some icy WASP girls make fun of Connie for her big Jersey hair (not that big) and loud makeup (not that loud, although: cool it with the purple eyeshadow). They don't say a word about her dress, although it could use a few: it's a long, drab white tent covered with a matching duster, completely colorless and shapeless. Shirley MacLaine whisks her off for the inevitable magical makeover -- and she emerges with a $29.99 fat girl's bob* and a long, droopy pastel pink-on-pink suit with about 17 layers to it, entirely colorless and shapeless. This is enough to make Brendan Fraser fall in love.

In the whole movie, Connie only gets to wear one remotely pretty outfit. At her engagement party, she has a sparkly purple gown with a boned corset that actually displays her rack and shows her waist. When lowlife Steve remarks, "Not for nothin', Connie, but that's a good look on you," he's not wrong -- or he wouldn't be if the dress weren't inappropriately floorlength and equipped with an unnecessary jacket to prevent her from God forbid showing her arms.

I initially thought that the costume designer was a talentless hack who should be horsewhipped and drummed out of the corps forthwith, but it turns out that she may have done one or two OK little projects, so I must place the blame elsewhere. And then it hit me.

Now, I know absolutely nothing about the backstory of this production. I don't know how it came to be made, how Ricki Lake got cast, or how Richard Benjamin got involved. But it's clear to me now that Benjamin didn't want to work with Ricki. He thought she was fat and unfuckable, and that since he didn't want to do her, neither Brendan Fraser or anyone would or should want to do her. So his directions to the costume department, stated or unstated, were: "Keep her covered." (This also explains the almost entire lack of love scenes -- an odd omission for a rom-com, n'est pas?)

I also don't know much about where this movie falls during Ricki's dramatic weight loss story.** The only details I could find, at IMDB, said that she'd already lost 125 pounds but "they" made her lose another 20 before filming (which: figures!). Now, I think it's fair to say that in this movie, Ricki is certainly not Hollywood slender; she might even be a little chunky. But she was a very pretty girl before she lost weight, and she's a very pretty girl at whatever weight she is here. With another director, and better clothes, I think more people would have seen that. 

*I have a fat girl's bob. I like it and it works for me. But I'm not a 19-year-old lady of leisure with nothing to do but fit in with the millionaires and/or snag a man.
**Yeah, I kind of hate her for selling out and spreading her if-I-can-do-it-anyone-can-do-it bullshit, but I have to admire her. However she did it, a woman who's lost that much weight and kept it off for more than 5 years is literally a freak of nature.

Enough with the Negativity Already!

I noticed I've been talking a lot about shit I hate recently, so I thought I'd give myself the pleasure of saying a few words about Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides.

I of course had heard a lot of buzz about the book when it came out a few years ago, but I didn't really pay attention. I have a lingering prejudice against so-called "literary" fiction, born out of my experiences in the 1970s, when Donald Barthelme and his character-is-all school seemed to have banished plot entirely. (I know it's not all like that now; that's why it's a prejudice.) Anyway, that means I never register what's up for the Pulitzer, the Booker, the Whatever, because it always seems unlikely that those books will ever hold any interest for me.

I might never have changed my mind about Middlesex if it hadn't been recommended by Abigail Nussbaum. Even with her brief review, and even knowing that the title referred to a boy raised as a girl and not the county in England, I didn't know what to expect. I vaguely guessed it was something very British, with tea and nannies. I could not have been more wrong, and was completely blown away.

Set mostly in Detroit in the '60s and '70s, Middlesex ranges fluidly backward to Turkey in the '20s to Berlin in the present to tell the story of Calliope Helen Stephanides, a biological male raised and treated as a female. With riffs on genetics, history, politics, growing up ethnic in a WASPy world, family, race, the suburbs, and Cadillacs, this is a funny, tragic, eloquent book, with many memorable passages and images.

Part of the fun for me is that Cal is almost exactly my own age. He experienced many of the things I experienced growing up. Like me, he lived through the race riots of the '60s (way more up close and personal than I did, however); his teenage medicine cabinet is filled with Psst instant shampoo and Love deodorant; schoolgirls use Flair pens. (The minorest of quibbles: noone drank bottled water in 1973.) One thing he doesn't really talk about much is Callie's clothes. Did Callie the girl, like me and so many girls our age, fight with her mother about wearing jeans instead of skirts? Would she have experienced them as liberation or as another threat to her precarious gender identity, as with her refusal to cut her hair?

Another gripping, not so fun, aspect of the book is Callie's eventual diagnosis as a hermaphrodite. I think a lot of people can identify with Cal's horror at the realization that, beyond the normal insecurities of adolescence, there really is something different about him. And that what's more, his parents, who supposedly know him the best and love him the most, think he is fundamentally flawed, wrong, broken, in need of fixing. For me, this resonated very deeply with my experience of growing up fat.

In some ways, the book reminded me strongly of Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose in the way Cal reconstructs the lives of his grandparents in an effort to understand and cope with his own situation. Like Lyman Ward, Cal must fully accept his own difference before he can let others in and accept love. I only wish this part of the story -- Cal's final achievement of intimacy with a woman after 30 years of loneliness -- had been more deeply explored.

Edited June 8 to add: I may have been late on the Middlesex bandwagon, but at least I beat Oprah!

Blue Shoes and Fat Prejudice

Like many people, I fell in love with Alexander McCall Smith's vision of Botswana in The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency. It's been a privilege hanging out with Mma Precious Ramotswe, her mechanic husband Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, her feisty assistant Grace Makutsi, and assorted apprentices, orphans, and friends; drinking bush tea; making comments on the passing scene; and reminiscing about Mma Ramotswe's late Daddy, Obed (a good man and a fine judge of cattle). I've never been especially interested in visiting Africa, but Botswana sounds like a nice place to be.

Frankly, detection has never been the focus of this series, although the first couple of books are stronger in that respect. Inasmuch as any detectiving goes on, however, it is focused not on law but on justice and social harmony, what Smith refers to as "the old Botswana morality." Even without actively pursuing leads or questioning witnesses, Mma Ramotswe manages to apply her vast knowledge of human nature and common sense to bring problems to a resolution that offers satisfaction to all parties.

But after awhile, even the pleasures the books afford begin to grow a little thin and shopworn, particularly when there's no framework of plot to hang them on. For example, even if Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni doesn't care to reveal his names to the world, surely his wife doesn't have to address him as Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni every time she speaks to him (nor does he ever call her anything but Mma Ramotswe. Thank goodness at least Mma Makutsi calls her fiance by his first name). Speaking of Mma Makutsi, the author has switched from poking a little fun at how fiercely she insists on her score of 97 percent at the Botswana Secretarial College to insisting on it himself. Learning that Mma Makutsi signs her reports "Dip. Sec. (97 percent)" is funny; hearing Mma Ramotswe think of her as "Madam Ninety-Seven Percent" is stupid and unnecessary. And while it's a touching tribute that Obed Ramotswe was a fine man and a good judge of cattle and Precious thinks of him every day, I do not need to be told so FOUR TIMES in the same book.

The latest paperback in the series, Blue Shoes and Happiness, is the sketchiest yet in terms of both investigation and satisfactory outcomes. Mma Ramotswe starts off looking into a fraud in which the head cook of a government university is stealing food and soon learns of a blackmail plot. She successfully routs the blackmailer, but the old Precious would have made sure to stop the theft as well, not to mention informing her initial client and the blackmail victim that their cases were solved. She learns that the uneasiness at a nearby wildlife preserve has been caused by the presence of a wounded hornbill (she finds out from a cousin, although she later says that she learned it from somebody else, just one of many, many examples of sloppy continuity). However, before she can take action (for no important or plausible reason), her sad-sack employee Mr. Polopetsi (introduced in In the Company of Cheerful Ladies when she ran over him) abducts the bird and accidentally kills it. And she twice makes a resolution to speak to Mr. Polopetsi's uncle and straighten out their family situation without ever taking the slightest effort to do so. (She does effectively solve a complaint of medical wrong-doing, although her client tells such an unnecessarily long and overly complicated story that I really didn't know what the problem was.)

But none of this is what really upsets me. One of the things I have most enjoyed about the series is that while Mma Ramotswe is fat ("traditionally built," as she so famously puts it), she is depicted as an attractive, confident woman. In the first book, there are not one but two men who want to marry her. (I never understood why she picked Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, since she clearly wasn't that into him at the start of the book, but that's another story.) If Smith made the occasional gentle joke about her size, or her denial, it was in keeping with the spirit of the story, and I didn't mind.

In Cheerful Ladies and to a much greater extent Blue Shoes, however, all that has changed. Everyone from a client to a suspect to her husband feels free to make jokes or outright chastise Mma Ramotswe about her weight. That's just rude, and I want it to stop. (Nor do I believe that Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni would ever say any such thing.) As my little PSA for the day, I will say: being fat does not give you high blood pressure and losing weight will not necessarily cause you to stop having it. Eat your fruits and veggies, watch your sodium, and exercise a little.

How traditionally built is Mma Ramotswe? In one of the earlier books, we learn that she wears a size 22 dress, which would make her perhaps up to 250 pounds. That's large, certainly, but it's not large enough to break the springs in her tiny white van or the furniture at Zebra Drive, or to crush a man hiding under the bed. That kind of cheap and obvious fat joke makes it clear that like so many thin people, Smith knows nothing about what various weights are really like. This kind of writing perpetuates nasty, untrue stereotypes about people like Precious, of whom I happen to be one.

On her behalf and my own, I bitterly resent it.

And did I mention that Obed Ramotswe was a fine man and a good judge of cattle, and Mma Ramotswe thinks of him every day?