Stephanie Brown – Bitch Flicks

The CW’s ‘Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’ and the Pathologizing of Female Desire

I would like to pretend that such crushes stopped once I graduated high school and graduated to full-blown, adult relationships complete with the objects of my affection affection-ing me back. That would, however, be a lie. This is all to say: unrequited female desire is not uncommon.

Let me rephrase: unrequited female desire is not uncommon in real life. It is, however, uncommon in popular culture.

This is a guest post by Stephanie Brown.

In a few weeks, I’ll be meeting with a Mortified producer in the hopes of having the opportunity to read my diary on stage in front of a bunch of strangers, so I’ve spent many nights pouring through every diary I’ve kept since age 8. While I wish they contained high-minded meanderings, silly but insightful childhood reflections, or at least an angsty Jewel inspired poem or two, my writings from age 8 to age 31 largely center around one topic: boys.

Yes, some of these boys were boyfriends. Boys who I loved who loved me back. Boys I fought with. Boys who broke my heart. About these boys, I wrote to work through the complicated feelings I had relating to our complicated relationships, because they’re always complicated when you’re 19. But the vast majority of the boys who litter the pages of my diaries did not return any of the feelings that filled pages upon pages; they were unrequited crushes. These were the boys I pined over in the halls of junior high, whose houses I walked past every night in case they happened to walk out the door, whose discarded pens I saved in my locker, whose every glance and word I poured over with my friends like a detective searching for clues.

Let me rephrase: unrequited female desire is not uncommon in real life. It is, however, uncommon in popular culture.

Why do I bring this up? In addition to reading through my old diaries, the premiere of the CW’s new series Crazy Ex-Girlfriend has reminded about how rare representations of one-sided female desire are within our popular culture and how often those representations, when they do exist, tend to pathologize such feelings. This dearth of representations has given me complicated feelings about the CW’s new, oftentimes brilliant, series.

The show, if you aren’t familiar, is an hour-long musical-dramedy created by and starring funny woman Rachel Bloom, who has written for Robot Chicken and who has created hilariously offbeat music videos like “Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury.” The pilot centers on the decision of New York-based, overachieving lawyer Rebecca Bunch (Bloom) to turn down a major promotion and instead move to West Covina, California to start her life anew. She makes this decision after running into Josh Chan (Vincent Rodriguez III), a summer camp boyfriend from her youth, who mentions that he is about to move back to West Covina. While the episode makes obvious that Rebecca is miserable in her current job and life situation and is subconsciously using her crush on Josh as an excuse to make a drastic change in her life, the series has so far focused more on Rebecca’s crush than it has on the other reasons she has for moving. Though, as the series progresses, we have started to get glimpses of her troubled family history and deeper insecurity issues.

The series has a lot going for it. The show’s tone is delightfully off-kilter, veering between dark comedy, upbeat musical numbers, and moments of introspection about friendship, success, gender roles, and family trauma. The jokes are clever and unexpected, the songs are catchy and subversive, and the characters are a lovable bunch of misfits played by a cast of extremely talented, relatively unknown actors. The series is largely written and produced by women, and the casting of Josh is a refreshing choice in a pop culture landscape in which Filipino actors are rarely chosen to play the hot leading man.

For the uninitiated, here is a song from the second episode that is emblematic of the silly, clever and subversive way the show plays with the societal expectations put on women:

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkfSDSfxE4o”]

The series is in many ways complex and nuanced and different, which is why its title and accompanying ad campaign have been frustrating. While the show’s intro theme song winks self-knowingly at the name of the series, (“That’s a sexist term!” Rebecca shouts at the chorus singing about her, “It’s more nuanced than that!”) someone still decided it would be beneficial to play into gender stereotypes that construct unrequited love as a pathology in women. This isn’t new, of course. We have texts like the “overly attached girlfriend” meme and Sandra Bullock’s Razzie winning performance in All About Steve that make fun of women who perform love incorrectly, and we have dark thrillers like Fatal Attraction in which women’s desire becomes deadly.

While Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is a largely wonderful series and while the writers need more than three episodes to develop its characters, two things trouble me about how Rebecca’s feelings have been treated, aside from the title’s blasé pejorative use of the term “crazy.” The first is that Josh thus far does not seem to be Rebecca’s destined love interest. Television couples are often set up from the early stages of a series, and when the set-up is incited by a male character’s crush (ie, Jim and Pam from The Office, Ross and Rachel from Friends, Niles and Daphne on Frasier), the coupling seems inevitable.

However, from what we’ve seen so far, Josh is not Rebecca’s eventual love interest; his cute yet sarcastic bartender friend Greg (Santino Fontana) is. Josh and Rebecca don’t have much chemistry, but Rebecca and Greg do. They banter. They fight. They act toward each other how most eventual television pairs act. Halfway through the pilot episode, we are already cheering for Rebecca to forget about Josh and realize that Greg is the right guy for her. Rebecca is almost immediately set up as a love object, even in a show whose very premise centers on her feelings for someone else.

Second, the show seems to want to explain Rebecca’s desire for Josh as a symptom of the actual mental health issues from which she seems to be suffering. Honest representations of mental illness are great. Honest representations of female desire are great. What I don’t find great are representations that link female desire to mental illness. The series needs to allow Rebecca to experience both, but without conflating the two.

While some critics are looking forward to she series pivoting off of its initial premise, and while I agree that the show needs to also explore Rebecca’s friendships and family and anxiety and success, I don’t want to give up on the idea that we can have funny, relatable representations of women having crushes. I longed for such storylines as a kid. The girls and women on television always seemed to be the ones being pined after. They never threw parties in hopes that their crush would show up or memorized someone’s class schedule in order to ‘accidentally’ bump into them every day. While I wish the writers on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend would modulate Rebecca’s character, I have related on some level to the feelings about which she often sings.

My hopes for Crazy Ex-Girlfriend moving forward are therefore twofold. I want the series to give Rebecca more to do than pine after Josh, but I don’t want the series or critics to pathologize Rebecca for pining after Josh. I don’t want audiences to write off the series because of some rigid definition of feminism that doesn’t allow for crushes, but I want the series to stop constructing Rebecca’s crush as borderline delusional.

In high school, my friends and I designed, printed, and laminated a 12-Step System for getting over our crushes. I still have the certificate I was awarded for successfully completing the program in the middle of the tenth grade. Even then, we characterized our own feelings as an addiction. I labeled myself “ boy crazy.” This language reinforces the idea that such feelings require treatment, however, wanting someone who doesn’t want you is not a mental illness. We need pop culture to stop telling us that it is.

Stephanie Brown is a television, comedy, and podcast enthusiast working on her doctorate in media studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. You can follow her on Twitter or Medium @stephbrown.

Invisible Fat Women on ‘How I Met Your Mother’ and ‘The Big Bang Theory’

Several sitcoms, however, rely not on the on-screen presence of a so-called “unruly body,” but rather on the imagined image on an off-screen one.

The casts of CBS’s How I Met Your Mother and The Big Bang Theory — The casts of CBS’s *How I Met Your Mother* and *The Big Bang Theory*

This guest post by Stephanie Brown appears as part of our theme week on Fatphobia and Fat Positivity.

Trevor Noah, heir to The Daily Show throne, recently came under fire for some fat jokes, (among others) that he made on Twitter, demonstrating once again that fat jokes, especially about women, have long been a staple of the comedy writer’s toolbox. Critics of Noah seem to forget that Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have been making jokes about Chris Christie’s weight for years, a disturbing trend that NPR’s Linda Holmes beautifully addressed in an essay last year. You would think Christie’s policies and actions as governor would provide more than enough material for satire, but comics have found that using fatness as a punch line is a reliable way to get cheap laughs.

Sitcoms, too, have frequently been guilty of using “fat” as a punch line. From Monica’s fat-suit flashbacks on Friends, to Mike and Molly’s poking fun at its main characters, to the Seavers’ constant ribbing of Carol about her weight on Growing Pains (made more disturbing by the fact that Tracy Gold suffered from a serious eating disorder), sitcoms have long made fun of characters for taking up too much space on screen. Often characterized as a moral failing, fatness is policed through ridicule. Such jokes tend to rely on the mere presence of an overweight character to generate laughs.

Several sitcoms, however, rely not on the on-screen presence of a so-called “unruly body,” but rather on the imagined image on an off-screen one. For instance, on NBC’s Will and Grace, Grace’s sidekick Karen consistently rattles off one-liners about her obese husband Stan. CBS’s The Big Bang Theory (2007-) continues in this tradition with its recurring jokes and storylines about Howard Wolowitz’s mother.

Howard is an engineer turned astronaut who lives for a majority of the series with his overbearing mother. The difference between Stan and Mrs. Wolowitz is, of course, that we hear Howard’s mother, played by the recently deceased actress Carol Ann Susi. Howard obviously loves his mother, despite their constant bickering, and the show deals with the death of both the actress and the character very poignantly. Regardless of any underlying affection toward Mrs. Wolowitz, though, the show generally mines humor from descriptions of her unseen obesity.

Throughout the course of the The Big Bang Theory, Mrs. Wolowitz’s weight provides an easy punch line for Howard and his friends. In “The Hawking Excitation” (5.21), Sheldon apparently sprains his wrist helping Howard’s mom into a dress when he takes her clothes shopping. Earlier in the series in “The Engagement Reaction”(4.23), Penny reacts with disbelief to Howard’s story of lifting his mother in order to take her to the hospital, joking that Mrs. Wolowitz’s own legs could barely lift her up. Not only is Mrs. Wolowitz characterized by her weight, she is also described as an overbearing, gluttonous nag. In her character we see the ways in which obesity is tied to morality and humanity, or rather, a lack thereof. And, because she never appears on screen, the audience is free to imagine an even more extreme version of this stereotypical character.

Notably, Mrs. Wolowitz appears briefly on screen during “The Spoiler Alert Segmentation” (6.15), walking back and forth through a doorway behind Raj while he sits in the dining room. Her appearance is meant to work as a sight gag not only because the audience has never seen her, but also because the mere presence of an overweight body is reason enough to laugh.

A faceless Mrs. Wolowitz appears behind Raj as he eats dinner.

While CBS’s How I Met Your Mother (2005-2014) doesn’t have a defined invisible fat character to use as a punching bag, the show is similarly permeated by fatphobia. The series, centering on a group of five friends in New York City navigating their late 20s and early 30s, is told from the perspective of the show’s main character, Ted Mosby. For a show that was often wonderfully smart, funny, and sweet, the writers’ strange obsession with making fun of fat women was often infuriating and frequently baffling, as others have noticed and written at length about.

While most of the show’s characters get in a “fat chick” joke at some point during the show’s run, most of the fat panic stems from Barney, the show’s resident bro-y bachelor. While the audience was likely originally meant to read Barney as an entitled, misogynist jerk, because he’s played by likeable human Neil Patrick Harris, the argument that we’re meant to be disgusted by Barney’s behavior rings hollow. Indeed, this site has previously written about the show’s unsettling misogynistic streak.

Barney demonstrates his notoriously icky “Crazy/Hot” Scale.

Like his misogyny, Barney’s fat jokes span the entirely of the series. He feels the need to constantly assert that he doesn’t have sex with fat women, in one instance making his friends swear a “broath” not to interfere with his life unless “unless it is a matter of health, national security or I’m about to get up on a fattie” (“The Broath,” 7.19). He also feels the need to warn his friends not to have sex with fat women. In the season three episode “Third Wheel” (3.3), he makes sure the combined weight of the ladies Ted is about to have a threesome with is “under 400 pounds.” If that weren’t enough, he frequently makes proclamations that no one should have sex with fat women:

Minister: If you want to get married in my church, you’ll stop breaking the ninth commandment.

Barney: Uh, no fat chicks?

Minister: Thou shalt not lie!

Barney: With fat chicks?

(“Knight Vision, “ 9.06)

Rather than punish him for his sociopathic, misogynistic conduct, the show rewards Barney with clever one-liners and fancy suits.

Just one of Barney’s many proclamations of his own awesomeness.

His friends make half-hearted attempts at condemning his behavior, but even they join in on the show’s the panoply of fatphobia, like when Marshall tells Barney that he “sounds like a fat girl on Valentine’s Day” (“Not Father’s Day,” 4.7). Even Lily and Robin often join in gleefully mocking other women. This includes, of course, making fun of the mere idea of fat women. Robin joins in with Marshall and Barney in this lovely exchange after Ted tells them about a wealthy architecture client:

Marshall: He’s rich? Please tell me he wrote you a big, fat check. A check so fat, it doesn’t its shirt off when it goes swimming.

Barney: That is a big, fat check. A check so fat, after you have sex with it, you don’t tell your buddies about it.

Robin: A check so fat, when it sits next to you on an airplane, you ask yourself if it should have bought two seats.

(“Fast As She Can,” 4.23).

Like the characters in The Big Bang Theory, Barney and his friends don’t direct their cruelty at a visible person. They don’t direct their jokes at any specific person at all, but rather at all fat women. Their jokes construct fat women not as people with feelings let alone family, friends, or lovers. They’re either a joke or a disembodied threat to the main characters’ sexual pride. Nameless, faceless, and bodiless, these imagined, invisible women are, like Mrs. Wolowitz, treated as less than human.

An addendum to this point is the way the show treats one of the only fat characters, Robin’s co-worker Patrice. Patrice’s main function on the show was to be yelled at by Robin for no reason and, eventually, to act as Barney’s fake girlfriend so he can convince Robin that he has changed his philandering ways and is now marriage material.

Barney talks to Patrice as Robin, Ted, and Lily try to discern the true nature of their relationship.

This particular storyline shows us, once again, that a fat character’s only function is to act as comic relief and to help the traditionally attractive main characters find love. She may be visible, but her visibility is conditional on performing the one-dimensional supportive friend that so many underdeveloped, potentially interesting fat characters have before been relegated. As Michael Arbieter of Hollywood.com noted about the storyline:

“We can’t be left to forgive Barney and How I Met Your Mother, to subjugate and marginalize Patrice. The fact that we’re asked to do this so cavalierly is frightening.”

Indeed, the casualness and frequency with which the characters make fat jokes on The Big Bang Theory and How I Met Your Mother, two series that frequently deal with themes of friendship and belonging, imbues them both with an unnecessary cruelty. While fat jokes are often wielded as a way police on-screen bodies, the ridiculing of absent bodies even further objectifies fat people. By not even giving the audience a chance to identify with the character or characters being ridiculed, all subjectivity is, in essence, taken away. Such erasure tells the audience, yet again, that thinness is the price of admission to our television sets. Not only are these characters deserving of ridicule based on their appearance, their appearance is so distasteful as to be banished from the screen.

As we’re reminded by anonymous online harassment or something as simple as talking badly about an absent friend, distance and invisibility often enable cruelty.

While film and television have historically mistreated and relegated fat characters to supporting status, How I Met Your Mother and Big Bang Theory push their fat characters completely off screen. Such distancing brings the process of dehumanization to its natural conclusion, allowing fat-phobia to rage unchallenged.

As Lily once tells Ted, “If there’s one thing you never do, it’s call a woman fat right to her face!” (“The Mermaid Theory,” 6.11). Otherwise, you might actually have to take responsibility for those words.

Stephanie Brown is a television, comedy, and podcast enthusiaist working on her doctorate in media studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

You May Meet Alex and Hedy As You Progress Through Life

Though we might sympathize, mostly we reflect on them, after escaping them, with awe and terror. They are not good. They are not our lovers nor our friends; they do not have our best interests at heart.

This is a guest post by Stephanie Brown.

“‘I won’t be ignored, Dan.'”

As a new friend and I got to know each other during the past couple of years, this became our shorthand joke. We’d say it when we worried we were calling or texting too often. We used that line because the character Alex Forrest, who says the line (actually “I’m not going to be ignored, Dan!”) in the film Fatal Attraction is the symbol for a person who doesn’t take a hint, let alone an outright declaration that a person doesn’t want an involvement. She’s a person who becomes a stalker because she’s delusions about her relationship with a married man. She becomes as destructive and vengeful as a witch in a fairy tale.

No one wants to be the person who has no common sense about other people. No one wants to be Alex Forrest, or Hedra “Hedy” Carlson in Single White Female, another film that gave us a character so needy and envious, she puts Snow White’s stepmother to shame. When someone “goes all Single White Female” on you, you know you’re dealing with someone who can suck the life out of you by copying your moves and destroying you in the process. Viewers, like the victims who surround an evil witch in a fairy tale, learn that it’s almost impossible to outwit these two, as their nasty feelings manifest into destructive actions, but outwit them we must.

Both films are misogynistic. They depict women we hate and would hate to be like. If we knew more about them we’d probably feel compassion for what made them so evil–but like figures in fairy tales, the backstory is irrelevant to the action and to the victims facing their wrath. Alex and Hedy are symbols for those hatable people who are normal-on-the-surface-but-crazy-underneath. They are hatable because they are impossible to like once you get to know them. Their big, destructive personalities can be glimpsed in people we know, as we can glimpse Snow White and her stepmother, Cinderella, and her sisters, or Jack-in-the-Beanstalk’s father-son rivalry in families we know. Male screenwriters and directors developed these characters, and they can be dismissed as depictions of exaggerated, baseless male fears. But hatable women exist, be they one’s partner, relative, or friend. Like fairytale archetypes, Alex and Hedy harken back to significant relationships–and by being sort of preposterous they are kept at a safe remove. Alex is not our own wife or nightmare ex, she is only a one-night stand who lied to us and herself about having sex with no strings attached. Hedy is not the mother, sister or co-worker who envies us, she is someone we randomly met to share expenses on an apartment. We can displace our hatred on the fictional character, while we might not be able to admit hatred for those we are close to due to fate or necessity.

I saw Fatal Attraction by myself when I was living by myself, an SFW (single white female, in the shorthand of classified seeking-roommate ads of the day) in Oakland, Calif. The theater was packed and the audience’s shout-outs to the screen funny and raucous as Alex’s behavior became increasingly bizarre.

By the climax–where she is shot in the bathtub by the wife, Beth Gallagher–I was laughing out loud. The movie seemed ludicrous to me. Soon after seeing it, I tuned into the end of a radio show. The person speaking was animated about her subject, the movie Fatal Attraction, which she said was a hot conversation topic between men and women because the story reflected anxieties about feminism and working women. To me it seemed to be a cautionary tale for men about how the wages of sin (adultery) can lead them to ruin, but it was hard for me to believe that a person like Alex could even exist. But then, I lived alone (and was lonely) and had no one to really talk to about the movie, whether it was ludicrous or should be taken seriously, or about feminism or anything else.

What I did know about living alone was that it might make you go crazy. You forget how much you have been with your own thoughts when you finally talk to someone. Not having a romantic partner made me unhappy and disappointed with life, which are probably the feelings Alex and Hedy had, being alone in the world, looking for a connection. Why they did not have connections is only hinted at, and we can only guess why. I was in my 20s when I saw these films, the time of life when most people have temporary living arrangements, like the characters in Single White Female. I had lived in five different places by the time I was 26. You took chances on roommates and places and living alone in safe or unsafe neighborhoods. I had lived anonymously in two large cities. Like city dwellers Dan and Allie, in a city one has to take a person at her word when looking for a living arrangement or when meeting in the workplace. You don’t have a small town’s generational history to inform you that someone has been damaged by their childhood or was outcast by everyone. That’s also the reason why the city appeals to people–it’s a place to reinvent oneself, where no one really knows you, and where most relationships are friendly but safely superficial. This is the same in the large workplace, where one can observe another’s eccentric or charming or moody behavior at a distance. You only know what someone is really like by working closely with them. It’s amazing how personality deficits and disorders are revealed when one is in daily contact with someone else in the workplace. In all cases, your relationships are left mostly to chance.

At that time I still kept in touch with childhood friends and still felt close to them. Though we only saw each other a few times a year, we talked on the phone for hours sometimes, at long-distance expense, which I budgeted for; it felt so necessary to me. However, every time we got together I could feel us drifting apart.

The friend I was closest to called me soon after Fatal Attraction was released, and asked me what I thought of it. It had really struck a chord with her. She saw it by herself and then took her boyfriend to see it, because she wanted him to see her resemblance to Alex; she thought it would help him understand her better. In particular, the scene where Alex sits alone in her apartment and turns the light on and off is what she wanted him to see. She wanted him to understand how she felt–I suppose how she felt when she felt desperate? They were not in a cheating relationship and were not married, but she related to the character’s personality. I don’t remember if I told her this, but I found that very disturbing. I could not imagine relating to Alex at all, and I still don’t. Had I not known her for as long as I had, I would have dropped the friendship then and there. As it was, our friendship did not last and for me is was because of coming behaviors that did indeed evoke Alex’s. I also knew by that time that I ought not to live alone with few connections. It might make me into an Alex or a Hedy. I also knew that I had the capacity to be like Allie or Dan, using people and expecting them to not care, and I knew I had experienced envy from others, and I did not like how it felt.

These films were released within a few years of each other: Fatal Attraction in 1987, Single White Female in 1992. They are sometimes seen as mirrors of the era, especially as responses to ascending feminism. But to me, feminism had already ascended and was accepted–I suppose I was naive, but to me they were about women with damaged psyches whose gigantic wells of neediness and envy were so mythic they created tragedies because they did not know how to do anything else. In the 30 years or so since these films were released, I’ve come to know many women like both of these women–not that they’ve come to bloody conclusions, but they have created nightmares, migraines and heart attacks, for instance, as well as fear and anxiety and frustration. I wish we had had the characters’ back stories in the films. In the years since, I’ve become fascinated by what breaks people and makes them behave in such ways. I have learned compassion for them while still keeping them at arms’ length. The stories’ plots, however, depend upon us identifying with Dan in Fatal Attraction and Allie in Single White Female. It is possible to find yourself at a point in life where you must obtain a restraining order against someone. At that point, it is not hard to identify with these victims.

People like Alex and Hedy are people who feel dead and empty and hopeless; they can’t be helped, they push too hard, they want the impossible and don’t give up when they should. Someone who seems fun and lovely at first but who is impossible once the mask is taken off her face. We saw a few glimpses of Alex’s scrapbook in the film, but were not given enough to speculate about her background or what made her the way she was. We don’t know why they lack connections with others.

But maybe that is beside the point: the Alexes and Hedys I’ve known have few connections because everyone has left them behind and wants nothing to do with them. No one can stand them for very long. It’s hard to believe, because when you meet them, they are friendly and fun and have good heads on their shoulders. But after a while the mask slips and one finds oneself growing annoyed at giving the same advice to their requests for advice, or hearing the same complaints about the same person again and again, or finding out something that makes the hair stand up at the back of your neck: that the person was let go from a job because, you’re now told, the principal of the school did not understand how to discipline kids properly, the way she did. When your work acquaintance becomes your boss and you discover she yells and screams until you feel like you are living with an abusive mother in a tiny house where you are never fed or looked after, you know why she has gotten stuck at this particular rung in their career, and why you are likely to pass her as she drifts downward. People like her fake it by using buzzwords and speaking aggressively and sounding smart, while there is no substance to back it up. To mask their incompetence, they need to steal your ideas, block your ideas, exhaust your ears, or take on your mannerisms and demeanor because they see how others have a positive response.

Fairytales tell us how to make practical choices when faced with another’s envy or wrath. Children are instructed on what to do when faced with Snow White’s envy (leave home) or Cinderella’s sisters (wait it out–they will destroy themselves) or how to fell a jealous father-giant (be clever and nimble and you will cut him down eventually). There are people who wish us ill and mean us harm. There are people so envious and angry of those around them (usually those who are competent, gifted or kindhearted) that their satisfaction comes from seeing the envied fail and flail. As Jeanette Winterson wrote of her mother in Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal, a book that uses fairytales tropes as a way to understand a destructive, cold mother: “She filled the phone box. She was out of scale, larger than life. She was like a fairy story where size is approximate and unstable. She loomed up. She expanded. Only later, much later, too late, did I understand how small she was to herself.” [1]

When we’ve escaped from an Alex or Hedy, we can look back and see how someone who destroys others is sad or desperate or lonely or feels small. I think Winterson is right–destructive women loom large, change size, extend themselves by loud voice, by taking things from you, by holding weapons because they feel small and overlooked. Though we might sympathize, mostly we reflect on them, after escaping them, with awe and terror. They are not good. They are not our lovers nor our friends; they do not have our best interests at heart.

Because I’ve known them, I value my new friend all the more, the one with whom I can use a shorthand joke from Fatal Attraction. She also has known these kinds of people, who actually may be men or women.

1. Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, p. 2-3. New York: Knopf, 2011.

Stephanie Brown is the author of two collections of poetry, Domestic Interior and Allegory of the Supermarket. She’s published work in American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and The Best American Poetry series. She was awarded an NEA Fellowship in 2001 and a Breadloaf Fellowship in 2009. She has taught at UC Irvine and the University of Redlands and is a regional branch manager for OC Public Libraries in southern California.

The Descendants: Oscar Best Picture and Indie Spirit Best Feature Nominee

The Good Patriarch: The Descendants, directed by Alexander Payne

This is a guest post from Stephanie Brown.

The Descendants is a movie about patriarchy, about husbandry and fatherhood as verb and action rather than noun and abstraction, about stewardship and responsibility. It implies that being a responsible and engaged and aware man is the key to being a responsible citizen and human being. It’s an important film that is very much of the current zeitgeist, but its ease and perfection and touches of comedy (very much like the persona of George Clooney himself) may mean that its depth is missed amid the excellent casting and the light touch of director Alexander Payne. The film is based on the book of the same name by Kaui Hart Hemmings, who was raised in Hawaii by her mother and step-father.

In The Descendants, Clooney’s character, Matt King, is the key decision maker for his family’s trust. Their family has lived in Hawaii for generations, part native Hawaiian and part white. They own a large undeveloped tract of land on Kauai. As the movie begins the family is in the process of selling the land to a developer and the group is poised to profit handsomely. His many cousins, also heirs, are portrayed as decent people, “good guys” who like to drink and hang out: contemporary landed gentry, enjoying their wealth and comfort in paradise. As decision maker for the fate of the fortune for a whole slew of cousins/subjects scattered around the islands and mainland, Matt is aptly named “king,” and he is affable, fair and aims to please. At the same time his wife, Elizabeth, has been in a water skiing accident and is now in a coma. Like many fathers and husbands, he is not very involved in his children’s lives and doesn’t know them very well, and is not really that knowledgeable of his wife’s life either. Soon after he retrieves his older daughter from her private boarding school (she is drunk when he finds her) to return home with him, he discovers from her that his wife has been having an affair. The movie is about the slow unfolding of this secret that has been kept from him by friends and family, and the slow strengthening of his bond with his daughters, especially his oldest daughter, Alex, played by Shailene Woodley. It’s a great performance by Woodley, who is utterly believably as an intelligent and strong but betrayed and angry teenager. She alone knows the exact nature of both her parents’ flaws but is powerless to make them change. Instead she causes problems as school and acts bratty and disagreeable. She is also shown schooling her younger sister in teenage survival skills, and while her methods and language are crude, one knows that this is likely the only practical advice the younger daughter has gotten from anyone. The movie is taken up with a road trip of sorts, actually jaunts between islands and neighborhoods therein, with Alex, the younger daughter Scottie (Amara Miller), and Alex’s friend Sid (Nick Krause) providing the comic relief. Matt and Alex search for and find the man with whom Elizabeth has had an affair and end up awkwardly befriending him and his wife (Matthew Lillard and Judy Green) as they move toward the conclusion—to finalize the sale of the land, and to see if Elizabeth will live or die.

Recent radio ads for The Descendants are comparing it to Terms of Endearment. I’m not sure Alexander Payne’s subtly crafted movies, Election, About Schmidt, and Sideways, while critical favorites, have become all-time-favorite-movie blockbusters in the way that Terms of Endearment has. I’m betting that the strategy of this comparison is to try to push it into the blockbuster box office realm. Will it ‘play in Peoria,” though? The Descendants does have an emotional death scene, where George Clooney says what is in his heart to his comatose and dying wife, but, like Payne’s other films, scenes such as this are restrained and Clooney’s soliloquy never veers into melodrama. By this point in the film, I didn’t like the wife and I was not sorry to see her die. I did not feel that the scene’s intention was to make me cry in an emotionally cathartic way. I don’t think the comparison between films works, and I think viewers who are expecting a Terms of Endearment will be disappointed. They may, however, see the powerful film that it is and come away awakened by its point of view. Think of the difference between Jack Nicholson in Terms of Endearment and Jack Nicholson in Payne’s About Schmidt. Schmidt’s character’s sad, reticent and somewhat baffled personality is naked and embarrassing to his daughter, and it’s a fine and restrained performance from Nicholson, who, like Clooney, is a masterful comedic actor. Both have elastic faces and trademark voices, and Payne’s direction keeps them true and honest in these depictions that move from comedic turns to profoundly honest portrayals of wounded American men.

The Descendants has many facets, touching on wealth and its effects on people and the history of the islands of Hawaii themselves, among other things, but to my mind, the most interesting theme in the film is the examination of fatherhood and manhood that is revealed via the relationship of Elizabeth to her father, Scott Thorson, played with frank ferocity by Robert Forster. Like a God, like Thor, Mr. Thorson has thunderous opinions and never wavers in them. We also know that he is wrong and pigheaded and the kind of person who is impossible to live with. He is certain that his daughter was a perfect wife and mother and that her accident could have been prevented if only Matt had bought her a safer boat to use rather than have her rely on her friends’ boats. Like his daughter, Mr. Thorson’s wife is shown as non compos mentis. She is in the throes of dementia and unaware of her surroundings. I do not think this is a coincidence. The only way to endure a man like this is to retreat into silence and passivity symbolized here as states of dementia and coma. His wife never speaks but she smiles. Mr. Thorson is an archetype of a Korean War-era father, all manliness, certainty and uncomplicated self-assurance. He has indulged his daughter and rejected his son—and he is not fond of his son-in-law. It is also clear that Mr. Thorson does not even know his daughter beyond superficial platitudes that he can shout about her being a good wife, mother and athlete (that she might be too much of a risk taker is ignored). He extols that she was a faithful wife when she was not. His fulsome praise has probably inflated his daughter’s ego and created a monster. Mr. Thorson is the figure of a crippled manhood that can exist only by rejecting deep feelings and hard truths about people, a style of fathering that may extol specialness, but rejects complexity and imperfection. Matt resembles him, unfortunately, in his own benign neglect of his children. Matt, whose style is more graceful and contemporary than Thorson’s, is of the generation that seeks to be seen as a “good guy” like his cousins—happy to take a profit and enjoy life, happy to live as a detached “back- up” parent (as he calls himself) who can easily just not pay much attention and not see any pain and suffering his children are feeling. They live in paradise and are quite wealthy, after all. It would never occur to the cousins or Matt to preserve the land for future generations; it is seen as inevitable that it must be sold and profit shared today. Benign neglect.

In the end, Matt decides not to sell the land but to preserve it. It is not a popular decision with the cousins. It is, however, the right decision. Matt uses his power for the first time and he risks not being popular, affable, or liked, and he is not. That is what it means to be a father and a steward and a patriarch, however. It means thinking about the future beyond current gain and comfort. It means thinking of future generations, accepting responsibility and using it reasonably and well. It means choosing not to be part of the rather dissolute landed gentry and not encouraging your children in this direction either. As I watched the film and saw him choose to preserve the land for future generations, it occurred to me that this decision would not have been believable if the film were released ten or twenty years ago. I don’t think I myself would have agreed with the decision. I would have thought, development is inevitable so why not let these decent people profit from it? But it has been released in a very different economic and social climate, where we are questioning the realities of profit and gain run amok. What is the result of all the wealth that we acquired and lost in the last twenty years? The culture tried to live like landed gentry. We exported our jobs and we exported our pollution in order to create our crap without regulations, and we sought to live like the cousins, expecting a good deal to come our way and to continue to come our way. The Descendants got me considering these truths. If one is a patriarch, one should accept it and be a responsible one. One should father and husband as a verb. And that goes the same for matriarchs and mothers and wives. If Mr. Thorson was our father, we need to wake up and pay attention and change the traits that resemble his. We need to be stewards of our families and of the earth for our descendants.

I was talking to friends one night and I mentioned that I had seen this movie and Lars Von Trier’s movie Melancholia during the same weekend, and that I liked both of them. Von Trier gets at the gnawing dread that I think we all feel about the world being destroyed. I felt grateful that an artist had made this film, because it forced me to think about my own hopelessness in the face of that destruction. But I added that I felt that The Descendants was just as powerful of a film and just as profound, even if the tone is lighter. In the last scene, Matt and his two daughters are shown sitting on a couch together, eating ice cream and watching TV. We can hear the movie’s narrator, Morgan Freeman, and after a while one realizes that they’re watching March of the Penguins. As my husband pointed out to me as we walked out of the theater, the male penguin is the one who cradles the egg, who protects it and keeps it safe from danger until it hatches. Like the father who has learned to father in film.

Stephanie Brown is the author of two collections of poetry, Domestic Interior and Allegory of the Supermarket. She’s published work in American Poetry Review, Ploughshares and The Best American Poetry series. She was awarded an NEA Fellowship in 2001 and a Breadloaf Fellowship in 2009. She has taught at UC Irvine and the University of Redlands and is a regional branch manager for OC Public Libraries in southern California.

Horror Week 2011: Rosemary’s Baby: Marriage Can Be Terrifying

This is a guest post by Stephanie Brown.

Rosemary’s Baby is one scary movie. It’s about a woman’s lot in a hostile world. It is about a terrible marriage to a narcissistic and selfish person. It is about the fear of motherhood and giving birth. It is convincing as a terrifying movie about the supernatural, and as a life lesson about selling your soul to a metaphorical devil. I like horror to convince me that I have learned something about the dark side of human nature…not just play with gore, or supernatural themes, or catastrophic nightmares. It has to name a fear that we really have, or a truth we find hard to believe, and the best horror enlightens us by showing us the darkness that haunts our lives.

The film, directed by Roman Polanski and released in 1968, has been written about at length, for its link to the era’s zeitgeist, its use of everyday people as agents of evil, even its shooting locations. Urban legends have been told about it; real-life events surrounding and following the film have been scrutinized. Rosemary’s Baby is essentially a fable about marriage and motherhood, and its magic is in the sleight of hand that all effective horror movies use: we focus on the scary yarn and are fascinated by it, so that the truth told (in this case, domestic unhappiness) goes down entertainingly. If it were told in a straight narrative arc, it would be kitchen-sink-drama depressing. Ira Levin, who wrote the novel the movie is based on, also wrote The Stepford Wives. How did we ever function without the phrase “Stepford Wife,” such a useful pejorative that has entered our lexicon? We all understand this shorthand phrase to describe a certain kind of too-perfect woman who seems to have lost the ability to articulate thoughts of her own. In Levin’s upper-middle class America of the 1960s, a male-controlled, male-centered marriage meant a slow death for a wife, as she loses control of her mind, her choices, and especially her body. In both novels, the husbands are able to transform the women’s bodies against their will—this is what marriage amounts to. Levin was acutely tuned-in to embarrassing truths about self-centeredness—the man who programs his robot wife to yell, “You’re the champ!” while having sex in the Stepford Wives; Guy Woodhouse, Rosemary’s husband in Rosemary’s Baby, eager to sacrifice his wife for his acting career. And while we all know a Stepford Wife, we probably have met these husbands as well. I find them recognizable. Levin’s characters found themselves in predicaments that were hard to imagine coming true—but the motivations for their behavior (wanting a pliant spouse, selfish ambition) were not hard to imagine at all. These human foibles are at the heart of the matter.

In the film, Mia Farrow is Rosemary Woodhouse, and John Cassavetes is her husband, Guy, an actor whose career is stalled and going nowhere. The two of them move into a spacious apartment in the Bramford building (shot on location at the Dakota building) in Manhattan. Rosemary meets a neighbor in the laundry room, a young woman who speaks highly of the people she lives with, Minnie and Roman Castavet whom, she says, took her in off the streets and saved her life. Just a few days later she is found dead on the sidewalk outside the building, a suicide. Rosemary and Guy meet Minnie and Roman that night; they are both strolling home to the building and arrive at the same time. Minnie and Roman are an older couple, in their late 60s or 70s, played by Ruth Gordon and Sidney Blackmer. They soon insinuate themselves into the younger couple’s lives, forcing themselves onto the couple, who are too polite to reject them, but soon Guy is seduced by them. You don’t see it happen but later you come to understand that Roman has proposed a deal to Guy and Guy has accepted it. Guy has sold his soul to the devil so that he can have success in his career, and it works. The man playing the role he covets suddenly goes blind, and Guy gets the part.

The price for his success? His wife will be impregnated by the devil and bear his child. The young woman who has fallen to her death was supposed to bear the child, but maybe killed herself or was killed when she realized what she was involved in. In a terrifying scene, Rosemary, surrounded by the coven that includes Minnie and Roman, is held down and raped. She is hallucinating as this happens but some of the action she sees is taking place, and eventually she screams what has become a signature line from the film, “This is not a dream! This is really happening!” The next day, Rosemary discovers long claw marks on her back, and Guy tries to pretend that he made the marks during sex with her the night before. Rosemary looks at him differently than she has; she had seemed to adore him and now she looks at him with confusion and fear. If he scratched her like that, it’s very strange; if he is lying, it’s worse still. Much of the rest of the movie is about Rosemary trying to figure out what is happening to her, understanding what is happening, and trying to convince others that it is “really happening.” After she gives birth, the coven members tell her that her baby has died, and Guy expects her to move on and forget about it. The baby hasn’t really died, and the ambiguous ending makes it clear that the coven will use the baby to gain power and wreak havoc.

One of the reasons the film is so effective is because of the fine performances by all of the actors, even those in small roles such as Patsy Kelly as Minnie’s dim-witted friend, and Ralph Bellamy as a bellicose doctor. Ruth Gordon’s Academy Award winning performance, however, is a stand-out. She makes the conceit of devil-worshippers-who-look-like-your-grandma work, and it works beautifully. Her Minnie seems to be a batty old lady, kind of nosy but endearing and well-meaning, eccentric but not dangerous, and most importantly, harmless. It is hard to believe—nearly impossible to believe—that this old woman with her badly applied lipstick, gaping handbags and herbs from her herb garden, is sinister and evil. Gordon is entirely convincing as someone who is a skilled liar and con artist. She wiles her way into their lives because a person like Rosemary is too polite to refuse her. By the time she is sick of the Castavets and is ready to politely refuse them, Guy has been seduced and will not hear of her rejecting them.

If you take away the supernatural element, Guy could be any man who is seduced by his neighbors—wanting to keep up with the Joneses, wanting to get in on the deal, wanting to be famous, wanting to impress the others, whether it be in the building, on the job, or to the world. These people are a ticket to a bigger life and more success, money, and fame. He is willing to use his wife’s body to make it happen. Surely this is a metaphor for a person who sells his soul for success. The wife in this situation can be sacrificed in many ways to make it happen: to work hard while he pursues his dream, to be ignored or be ashamed of when he realizes he wants another kind of life than the one she can offer, to help him become a success until he is successful enough for a trophy wife. One of the tenets of a religious marriage vow is the promise to keep sexually faithful and even, in some vows, to “worship” each other’s bodies, perhaps in a holy sense of worship; what happens in the Woodhouse marriage is a complete blasphemy of this idea. A selfish person puts his or her own desires ahead of the other—with that person, there can really be no union. Stories of the “black mass” and Satanic stories may even reinforce the validity of the religious idea that they purport to trample, as may Satanic fables reinforce our most basic values: when you think about it, there could be nothing more appalling than betraying your spouse, and when it happens to you it feels horrific, like being fucked by the devil.

I’ve watched Rosemary’s Baby at different points in my life, and when I watched it after giving birth, it resonated with me about the experience of childbearing. Rosemary finds herself craving raw meat and having terrible pains—due to the fact that she is birthing a devil baby. However, cravings, pains, sickness—these are real and miserable parts of pregnancy. Having had my pregnancy nausea and sickness start around Valentine’s Day, I only have to think of Valentine’s Day to feel nauseous, and that happened to me nearly twenty years ago! I remember the fear and mixed feelings I had about having a baby, and I wanted to have a baby, and so did my husband. But I had sensitivity to smells, felt dizzy, threw up every day, and felt completely out of control of my body; I felt invaded as well as afraid, in the first part of my first pregnancy. That changed; I felt happy and calm as time progressed. But having a baby is a change that marks your life forever, and there is no turning back once it happens. It’s something that is seldom talked about or admitted to; we are annoyed or disgusted by women who feel that their pregnancy is less than ideal, or that their passage into motherhood was not easy. We do not talk about how we fear that we could be bearing a monster or a “bad seed,” how we may not know what to do, that we fear we may not have enough love or patience or mothering instinct. We do not want to hear about those fears, and we do not want to hear about how pregnancy changes a man and woman’s relationship, maybe for the worse. In Rosemary’s Baby, Guy is shown as not caring much about the baby; he knows that it will be taken away and given to the coven. How many women have found that their husband is not really interested in their pregnancy, or feels it interferes with the attention given to them, to their needs? Guy is really only interested in his burgeoning career. The knowledge that one has made a mistake, that the person one is tied now to is not the person you thought you married—Rosemary’s Baby reveals that bleak, depressing, and real-life scary story. Rosemary realizes it when she sees the scratches on her back, and she never feels the same way about him again. When Guy sees what is waiting for him in a glittering future, he realizes he’s set his sights too low in a life with Rosemary. He is no longer an understudy and is ready for more.

Horror stories like Rosemary’s Baby tell the truth about our darker natures. We can look at our bad feelings, hatreds, misgivings and betrayals without knowing too well what the story really reveals about our feelings—it’s displaced onto a monster, a Thing, a killer, a mist, a contagion. We can see the truth and the horror refracted, like looking at a Medusa head in reflection so that we do not turn to stone. We can look at our darker natures, and accept that they exist somewhere, displaced into a place we call the supernatural.

Stephanie Brown is the author of two collections of poetry, Domestic Interior and Allegory of the Supermarket. She’s published work in American Poetry Review, Ploughshares and The Best American Poetry series. She was awarded an NEA Fellowship in 2001 and a Breadloaf Fellowship in 2009. She has taught at UC Irvine and the University of Redlands and is a regional branch manager for OC Public Libraries in southern California.

Best Picture Nominee Review Series: Frost/Nixon

Men will be Men: Frost/Nixon

This is a guest post from Stephanie Brown.

Frost/Nixon is a movie about male power as it looked in 1977. Starring Frank Langella as Richard Nixon and Michael Sheen as David Frost, the story recounts the efforts of David Frost, a television talk show host from Great Britain, to interview former president Richard Nixon, then living in disgrace and exile in his “Western White House” in San Clemente, California. The movie is based on a stage play by Peter Morgan, which debuted in 2006 in London; Langella and Sheen were the debut actors in that production. Directed by Ron Howard, Frost/Nixon was a critical and financial success when it was released in 2008, and was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor for Frank Langella’s performance. Frost/Nixon is the story of two men who have lost power and whose lives have become claustrophobic and small. Frost and Nixon have much to gain by using each other—each sorely needs credibility and needs the other’s help to regain it.

The plot of the movie is simple: it recounts Frost’s efforts to obtain an interview with Richard Nixon, who had remained silent and incommunicado after his historic resignation on August 9, 1974, and the short and strange relationship they had while filming the interview. Nixon remains the only American president to resign from office, and did so because of his involvement in the Watergate break-in and cover-up, which revealed the efforts of the Committee to Re-Elect the President (also known as CREEP) to sabotage the efforts of the Democratic Party and its candidate George McGovern. The Watergate scandal also revealed that the President taped all his conversations, that some potentially incriminating conversations were missing from these tapes, and the conversations revealed the president to be a nasty, ruthless, and uncouth person. Many allies and aides in the White House were eventually implicated in the scandal, and the nation watched and read about it as more was revealed every day in newspapers, magazines, and in the televised Watergate hearings.

In Frost/Nixon, David Frost is at a nadir in his career. A formerly popular television talk show host who is fond of parties, power and fame, he is in the process of losing it all. His talk shows in the U.S. and in Australia have been cancelled, and he’s also lost “his table at Sardi’s,” a perk of his fame that he cherishes. A raconteur and jet-setter, he’s considered an intellectual lightweight, even a joke. While in the first class cabin on his flight to the U.S. to meet with Nixon, he encounters Caroline Cushing (Rebecca Hall), a beautiful and beguiling international beauty from Monte Carlo, who lets him know just how much of a punch line he has become. She rattles off several caustic comments that have been made by the press about his career and even his personal style.

After this, however, they are together for the rest of the film, and she is the kind of woman who enters the room softly (looking gorgeous in a series of halter dresses), retreats quietly, knows how to say the right thing in support of him, and makes a presentable companion. The only woman in the movie save for a brief scene with Pat Nixon (Patty McCormack) and the silent presence of Diane Sawyer (Kate Jennings Grant), who was a Nixon team member,Charlotte is a goddess amidst the power-jockeying of the mortal men around her. Upon meeting her, Nixon remarks to Frost that he ought to marry her, not because she’s lovely but because she lives in Monte Carlo and “those people pay no taxes.” Is Nixon trying to be witty here? As played by Langella, he is too much of a galoot, too artless, to try for wit, and it seems wholly believable. Langella captures the awkwardness and oddness of Nixon, in both his speech and stiff, stooped body.

Frost seeks the interviews with Nixon as a way to get back on top with this coup of an interview; the problem is that no one is really interested in financing it, but he proceeds anyway, gambling on the idea that the show will be bought when all is said and done, and he will recoup the considerable amount of money he’s invested in the project, including a check for $200,000 that he’s written to Nixon for the interviews. As played by Michael Sheen, Frost has good manners and plenty of English self-deprecation and modesty, even as he is shown to be a dandy and someone perfectly comfortable in posh surroundings. He flits in and out of the Plaza Hotel in New York and the Beverly Hilton in Los Angeles, after schmoozing on white push-button phones. I remember watching the David Frost Show as a kid, and even I remember him being a little more pompous than he’s portrayed here. Finding himself at a vulnerable time in his life, he’s humbled by failure and from hearing the truth about his reputation, not only from Caroline, but from the two researchers who have come to help him prepare questions for the interview, Bob Zelnick (Oliver Platt) and James Reston, Jr. (Sam Rockwell), who are a PBS journalist and academic, respectively. Each possesses serious bona fides, and risk losing it if they are involved in a bogus and lightweight interview.

Assisted by Frost’s aide John Birt (Matthew Macfadyen), the three are shown working together in a comfortable camaraderie, with Reston agitating for harder attacks on Nixon in the interviews than Frost is comfortable with. Parallel with Birt, Nixon also has an aide de camp and defender, Jack Brennan, who is a true believer in Nixon and defends and protects him. Played somewhat tongue-in-cheek by Kevin Bacon, it’s as if his ROTC character from Animal House, Chip Diller, has grown up and achieved his Young Republican wet dreams. The supporting actors inhabit the characters believably and comfortably. Rockwell as Reston is especially effective in his talking head segments, where he conveys gravitas as well as the stubborn single-mindedness of the expert.

The movie belongs to Frank Langella, however, whose performance is a tour de force. The movie was filmed on the grounds and in some of the rooms of the Western White House (Casa Pacifica) in San Clemente, and he’s like a giant inhabiting a fairy tale cottage, barely able to stand up straight. The claustrophobic feel of these rooms as well as those of the tract house where the interviews are filmed, remind us that this once giant man of power and influence has shrunk, and he doesn’t fit in well in these more plebian surroundings. Ungainly and weird, full endless, meandering stories, he’s a deposed king who still expects to be deferred to, and he comes with courtiers who smooth over his tics and translate him to the world. Langella’s voice takes on the literal, even tone of Nixon’s, reflecting Nixon’s dogged and single-minded personality. The centerpiece of the movie is a soliloquy that Langella delivers as a drunken phone call to Frost where he reveals his innermost character: his is a personality built on lifelong resentments. Real or perceived, his dismissal by East Coast power brokers throughout his career will never be forgotten or forgiven. He tries to find a common ground between the two in their class differences, but Frost is too cautious to comment or let on that he might agree. This scene is hypnotic and fascinating, and even more so when it’s revealed later that Nixon had no memory of the conversation because he’s said it all while in a blackout from drinking.

Ron Howard’s direction is straightforward, a “style of no style” that allows the actors and story to shine, but it’s full of wit and sly humor, such as a scene in which an unwatched TV is playing the ubiquitous and silly television commercial of the 1970’s which depicted a tear-stained American Indian man canoeing through a polluted river. The costumes and art direction give us the wide lapels, shag carpet, black limousines and white phones of the era and they look normal; no one is making fun of past lapses in taste—indeed, they look like totems of power. Frost/Nixon is a movie full of men who are talking, standing, sitting, and walking through halls on the way to important meetings. Charlotte Cushing, Pat Nixon, and Diane Sawyer are not central players, either in the cast or in the drama of the story. This is right and fitting at a time when Martha Mitchell was deemed crazy for truth telling about Watergate, and was alleged to have been drugged in order to keep her quiet. It was a man’s world, and it is their power as well as their corruption depicted here.

Stephanie Brown is the author of two collections of poetry, Domestic Interior and Allegory of the Supermarket. She’s published work in American Poetry Review, Ploughshares and The Best American Poetry series. She was awarded an NEA Fellowship in 2001 and a Breadloaf Fellowship in 2009. She has taught at UC Irvine and the University of Redlands and is a regional branch manager for OC Public Libraries in southern California. She grew up in the same area as Richard Nixon and lives in San Clemente, where the Western White House still stands at its southernmost shore.