Lady Business: Can You Ever Forgive Me? and unapologetic women
Hello and welcome to Lady Business, a weekly newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the fiftieth (!!) issue, published November 29, 2018.
Sorry Not Sorry
Movie outings are a big part of my family’s Thanksgiving tradition, and so last weekend I found myself at the delightful Bryn Mawr Film Institute in suburban Philadelphia, to watch Can You Ever Forgive Me?
I knew little about the movie other than: It stars Melissa McCarthy But Serious; it’s based on the memoir of writer-turned-literary-forger Lee Israel; it looks rather drab and dreary; and it’s gotten good reviews, mostly for McCarthy’s performance.
Kind of; yes; not really; and totally justified! I loved it, and highly recommend it. McCarthy was both tamped-down and very funny in a role that could have easily become unremittingly sour; her platonic friendship with Richard E. Grant was given the narrative weight of a romance, which made the characters’ betrayals and reconciliations that much more powerful; and the movie, about two queer people in early 90s New York, managed to acknowledge the realities of the AIDS crisis without wallowing in tragedy.
Heck, even the makeup and wardrobe choices were subtly fantastic. McCarthy-as-Israel spends the movie in an atrocious haircut and shapeless khakis -- there’s the drab and dreary! -- and yet you can somehow see her changing fortunes and growing self-confidence reflected in the gradual improvement of how she looks on-screen. (There’s also a scene towards the end where a wardrobe choice is both devastating and nearly unremarked.)
The overall effect was of low-key excellence. But what I loved the most was the movie’s subtle, yet central, meditation on unapologetic women. Can You Ever Forgive Me? depicts a smart, prickly, funny, lonely, selfish, unpleasant, proud woman -- a “difficult” woman, the type of irascible antihero you usually only see in prestige dramas about Tortured Men.
As in those dramas, director Marielle Heller and co-writer Nicole Holofcener spend Can You Ever Forgive Me? celebrating the ingenuity of their main character, neither forgiving her crimes nor punishing her for her personality. (NB: We’re not talking Walter White or Tony Soprano-level damage here. Israel’s big offense was defrauding antiquities dealers, rather than murder or drug-dealing; and her biggest victim, according to the movie, appears to have been her own romantic life.) So it’s pretty important that Israel never apologizes for who she is -- nor does the movie ask her to.
Which is risky business for a woman, still! Apologies are fraught territory for us, at work and in life: We apologize more than men. We need to stop apologizing so much. No, we need to stop telling women to stop apologizing. No, we need to tell men to apologize more. Here’s what happens when we stop apologizing.
I could spend all day hesitating over how many times I’ve said “sorry” reflexively, and should I delete it from that email, and am I being a bad feminist if it’s easier and more expedient to say “sorry” as a quick nicety, and will another woman think I’m rude if I don’t say “sorry,” and and and …
Which is why it’s so much fun to watch a movie about a woman who never apologizes. Who’s proud of her work, even when it gets her in trouble -- “I can’t say that I regret any of my actions,” Israel says, late in the film -- and who abjectly, insincerely, performatively begs for forgiveness by bragging about her work.
I especially love the meta-joke of the title, which is taken from Israel’s memoir -- and from one of Israel’s best forgeries, a faked Dorothy Parker letter:
“Alan told me to write and apologize … to save me this kind of exertion in the future, I am thinking of having little letters run off saying, ‘Can you ever forgive me? Dorothy.’”
That’s Lee Israel imagining and forging -- essentially writing fan fiction about -- how Dorothy Parker would apologize. Answer: She wouldn’t, really. And neither would Lee Israel.
Lady Bits:
--Did you know that Dorothy Parker also was a writer of the original A Star Is Born? I did not know that before this week! Which means that, with a credit in Bradley Cooper’s remake with Lady Gaga, Parker deserves posthumous credit for two Oscar contenders this year.
--I also learned that you can’t find a complete version of that original film, which starred Judy Garland, because the print was destroyed by its studio:
“Shockingly, the only version of Garland’s A Star Is Born that audiences can watch today is missing a huge chunk of footage, and features dialogue played over still photos in several scenes. The original, three-hour cut of the film released in theaters didn’t live up to the studio’s box-office expectations, and an editor trimmed 30 minutes to make a shorter version that movie houses could play more times in a day. The studio melted the negative from the cut scenes to recoup the film’s silver content, an act which today seems akin to wiping clean a Rembrandt so you can sell the canvas to make a tent.”
--Over the holiday week I also binged Bodyguard, or “what if we tried to cram three seasons worth of Homeland into six hours?” The mini-series did some things very well (tense action scenes, excellent casting, beautifully stoic Scottish men giving “Ma’am” every possible inflection) and some things … less well. (Yes, it’s very cute and earnest of you to center the story around women running everything, but that doesn’t always … make sense for your plot? And speaking of Homeland, telling a story about UK threats from Islamist terrorists – while ignoring Brexit or the fact that the biggest threats to British politicians of late are white supremacists – feels dated as well as racist these days.)
--“I’m fine with women in power, just not this one specific woman currently in power.” Two weeks old, and yet, perennial.
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