This guest post by Cynthia Arrieu-King appears as part of our theme week on The Great Actresses.
If you Google “greatest living actor,” the first hit is not only Meryl Streep, but also lists with headings like “besides Meryl Streep” and “after Meryl Streep.” There are video montages, plural, of people freaking out about how much they love her or respect her work. Her work in the mid-70s to early 80s came across the cultural wires as something freakish: the mercurially reproduced accents, the ethereality and seamlessness and virtuosity.
There’s not really any way around the boring facts of talent and hard work here. She has always known her lines. She has always been the one who bikes home from the set in the rain instead of taking a cab. She works with the coach until she’s not just speaking Polish, but Polish with a German accent (Sophie’s Choice). She hides in the closet to practice her singing for Mamma Mia! while her family yells, “We can still hear you.” She presents a moonskinned serenity and hearty laughter in her interviews that belies the hours and hours of monomaniacal obsession that is artistry that has no reason to prove it deserves to be here. It just is here. It is incontrovertible. That probably comes from a good family, a very good education, insane work ethic, shockingly keen intuition, intelligence, and a good ear.
So many actresses show in their performances why it’s hard to be a woman, and the worth of that feels political and rooted in everyday life. Streep knew she could get away with more without putting forth a persona like Jane Fonda. In Streep’s work she never seems to be like any particular person, but convinces the viewer of how human that character is. It is easier to see, especially in her earlier work, the places where people exist in themselves purely and react purely rather than emphasizing gestures. They seem like the essence of a person rather than a person, which sounds like a problem in a way. But this subtle light show makes some sense given what she once told James Lipton. She explained on Inside the Actor’s Studio that she once thought acting was a stupid way to make a living; it doesn’t do anything in the world but now she sees “its worth is in listening to people who maybe don’t even exist or who are voices in your past…come through you through your work and you give them to other people. Giving character to characters who have no other voice, that’s the great work of what we do…I mean so much of this is vanity (being a celebrity)…But the real thing that makes me feel so good is when I know I’ve said something for a soul…I’ve presented a soul.”
[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pha-aouBlo”]
Streep has an ability to embody in an otherworldly fashion so often in historical context. Shirley MacClaine in an American Film Institute tribute to Streep once said, “The mystery of your talent is so otherworldly, it makes me understand that there is more to all of us than meets the eye.” So what is she doing? What is she imagining in Sophie’s Choice when she tries to tell the truth of her past after “all the lies” she has told? The containment of her pain and love, the softness of her face recalling, weakness, puniness, rage, the effortless clarity of a traumatic recollection: these all move together in her face such that all seem to present themselves, all the layers are visible somehow. A different actor might show determination, grit, resolve, terror. Streep knows memory doesn’t quite settle into its original feelings at all. So even while recounting her character’s efforts in the Holocaust, you see something that feels from another time, paradoxically immensely present. Here’s the clip:
[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70_1MW46G9I”]
There’s another movie in her oeuvre, Plenty, that shows Streep transcending the class and propriety by being able to do almost literary interior monologue as monologue. It doesn’t even come across as something Shakespearean or professed the way Elizabeth Taylor might have done it, or balky the way Hepburn might have, it’s just spilling out. It’s not entertaining in any popcorn movie sense or even particularly sanguine. This movie trots out in Streep’s Susan Trahane the most subtle selfishness, ambivalence, detachment. The narrative elides plot to a large degree, so that you feel you’re missing something on first viewing. People slavishly watch this movie over and over. Susan is contaminated with something so guarded behind rage you do have to see it a few times to understand what her character means, and it’s the kind of vice that makes you feel bad for her. You actually feel bad for her having this rage. This performance reminds the viewer of the difficulty of true self-awareness, deceit, or self-deceit. The closest thing I’ve understood to this in art are the characters in Alice Munro’s short stories who often seem fairly normal and well-adjusted until you start seeing what price they are paying for some subtle flaw escaping their own attention. This is the small heroism for all of us: to know ourselves, to know what we cannot bear and to say something about it.
[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJq6mafSr-Y”]
From the feminist angle, Streep’s mold-breaking of the representation of women and her mark on scripts probably adds to her greatness in a way we can never completely measure because we can’t track it. One particular example worth mentioning is that the script for Kramer vs. Kramer did not originally explain why Joanna Kramer wants to leave Ted (Dustin Hoffman) and she fought the director Robert Benton on the script until the character is allowed to say why herself. The effect turned Joanna from a villain of misunderstood women’s liberation–as the script was written–into a person I think it would be hard for any woman living in/having lived in a male-bread-winning-female-
One can look back on this era of Streep’s work and see that she did not pick the Jane Fonda roles, or the roles of abrasive people on the outside of establishment. She seemed to pick roles or be given roles of a woman always struggling against the constraints of her place, but within something: a marriage, a company, an historical moment. She said on being cast in The Deer Hunter: “They needed a girlfriend, so that was me.” And so she took roles, got acclaim, was always thought to be overpaid when the male actors were getting far more than she. Then something happened when she turned 40. She did not get the same kind of roles. She noticed. She wanted to be in something funny, so eventually she was cast in several comedies, sometimes as a witch, always sending up the Hollywood machine as in Death Becomes Her. She didn’t care if she was not the pretty one. She didn’t think that was what she had been getting cast for anyway, in the pre-40 days.
Having said that, what has happened since that turning point that makes Streep the go-to actress everyone wants for any role for a woman over 60? As Tina Fey quipped at the 2014 Golden Globes, “Streep proves there are still roles for Meryl Streeps over 60.” Tracey Ullman said it so we understand the score even more: “You’re (Meryl’s) the only one working: The rest of us have to show our tits.” She’s taking all the roles: Margaret Thatcher, Julia Child, a composite of Anna Wintour. This is after a career that started with her domination at Yale, her acceptance then moving into funnier parts. She decided, at some point, “(I)t’s easier to project yourself into what you were, not what you are. Movies are a young person’s playground.” And a little more tellingly: “As there begins to be less time ahead of you, you want to be exactly who you are, without making it easier for everyone else.” Ergo, dominating her field. Ergo, not questioning where her territory begins and ends. As Goldie Hawn says, “Meryl is a freak. She has no limitations. Well, she’s a martian.” That must be her unsaid lesson to us on greatness. You can’t really learn it, and you never let opportunity get past you.
Part of me wonders what would happen if she did some little off-the-map film or what it would mean for her to have a late breaking McConnaissance (with less crazy self-regard). Maybe more of a ReConnaissance, a re-knowing? Would that amount to “making it easier for everyone else”? She has nothing to prove, and part of her potency as an artist comes from the fact that she never gave off one vibration of having to prove herself, actor-wise. But something might replenish what have become somewhat recognizable mannerisms in her impersonation-like roles these last years: The head wag of delight. More importantly what are we losing in our depictions of people getting older by having, seemingly, the mythos that only she and three other people play these parts? Something about class probably, race, and ethnicity definitely.
Having gotten momentum in the last few years to gravitate toward fun (Mamma Mia!) and over the top (August: Osage County), she’s thinking nevertheless about history, history as made by women (The Iron Lady). She’s literally supporting the museum of women’s history. Her artistic wishes seem to revolve around wanting women’s history to prevail. For the roles to become more numerous. For film to show the lives of women in proportion to their importance in the real world, as she’s always worked for. Bit by bit, how can it happen? And today, do actresses need to thank her for her breaking the glass ceiling in acting as much as they did in the last decades? Probably not. Maybe we’ll get to a moment when actresses will have the luxury of not having to recall that ceiling. Hopefully long before we forget about Streep.
Streep’s daughter once said of her role as Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada: “Now they know the real you.” But whatever monomaniacal and feminist politics she’s wielding, Streep’s still conveying the soul. At a tribute to her acting she said, “I wish I were her, I really do,” and this remark on her celebrity doubles as a remark on the people she’s portrayed. She’s given us this love through 35 years of work to date, and she’s going to keep pushing for the unheard to be heard. In this scene from Silkwood, she gives a look. Friendship, pity, love, helplessness, resolve, seeing the mortal body, a whole idea supported by the shot of the wig and the glasses. It’s a good microcosm of what Streep does–the listening to a spirit, and making sure to truly witness and to speak up for that person’s essence.
[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2Ec20v7wX8″]
Cynthia Arrieu-King is an associate professor of creative writing at Stockton College in New Jersey where she teaches about literature and plagiarism, so beware lazy magazine sites. Her previous Bitch Flicks articles include one on True Grit and one with Stephanie Cawley on Twin Peaks.