TV Review: Mrs. America (FX, Hulu)

Jun 7, 2020 | Culture, Home Entertainment, Politics, Television, TV

I watched every episode of this curiously involving micro-series. Like most cable television-based micro-series, Mrs. America skims the surface of its own topicality. It’s extremely specific in certain details. These details may or may not reflect reality as the opening disclaimer of each episode discloses.

But the nine-part streaming series does provide interesting depictions of both feminism and what the series creators clearly regard as feminism’s opposite—traditionalism. It’s predictably slanted in favor of feminism. However, it’s not without thoughtful dramatic touches.

The whole series centers upon Phyllis Schlafly. Portrayed by Cate Blanchett (Carol, Truth, Cinderella, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button), who does not overact for the most part, the downstate Illinois conservative housewife and activist who took on the feminists’ pet issue, the proposed Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the American Constitution, is the most engrossing character. Who knows how much of this if any of Mrs. America is true. As Schlafly, Blanchett essentially portrays herself playing a Stepford wife.

Other characters are key real-life figures in the so-called women’s movement including Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Shirley Chisholm, Bella Abzug, Midge Costanza, Jill Ruckelshaus and various fringe figures. It’s best to watch this series for an overall sense of both political activism in the 1970s and the proliferation of feminism as a dominant cultural trend.

Feminism is a side effect of egalitarianism. As such, it’s merely a variant, an offshoot of no serious value to human progress, which is abundantly clear in today’s culture. As an offshoot, however, feminism triumphed. It did so by dovetailing with its cousin, Puritanism, a philosophical parallel dating back to women’s suffrage and the evil movement to ban alcohol, Prohibition, which was violently foisted upon our young nation at the turn of the previous century — primarily by sinister, religious and Puritanical women.

Of course, Mrs. America fails to dramatize this connection. The clues, tidbits and details are all there for you to piece together for yourself. In color schemes, costume, set and production design and in certain characterizations in this show created by Dahvi Waller, Mrs. America captures the tectonic shift in the role of women in Western civilization which took place in the 1970s. It’s extraordinary. The series depicts the change.

There are many little problems, consistency errors and incomplete stories and subplots. But Mrs. America is brisk, smart and, occasionally, intelligent. A fictional character, Alice, played by Sarah Paulson (Carol, 12 Years a Slave, Mud), is too pat and cardboard to be realistic. But she could’ve been real, or at least made more realistic, and this adds drama.

In frills, carefully curled strands of coiffed hair in the bundled and pinned up mop and an overly produced 1950s aesthetic of old appliances and shades of powder blue, Schlafly comes off as a capable if ruthless conservative feminist. She’s never really driven by a commitment to what she professes are her beliefs or convictions. She lusts for power.

There is truth in this depiction. The hypocrisy that Schlafly exhibited was real. She was a woman who tirelessly worked year after year after year to stop the Equal Rights Amendment by claiming that a woman’s place is at home procreating and tending to her husband and family. Obviously, she did the opposite. Mrs. America makes too much of this, frankly, and not enough of feminist hypocrisy, which is equaled and stems from the same distortion of reality; both “sides” radically, fundamentally oppose individualism.

There are too many loose ends and unfinished subplots in half-baked character and story arcs. A gay son subplot, for instance, never gets resolved. Neither does lesbianism among feminists. Neither does the issue of racism among leftists. A subplot about Chisholm, who ran for president, is embarrassingly abbreviated and underdeveloped.

For example, Gloria Steinem is portrayed as having a long-term affair with a black man. At some point in the series, apparently, she dumps him or vice versa. The barely visible man vanishes. Par for the leftist course toward the one who’s black, he serves a purpose as a means to the end of propagating leftist dogma. He’s never seen or heard from again.

This may have been a series point; that men are discarded as pieces of flesh by women claiming to seek liberation for women when, in fact, what they seek is for women to be as irrational toward men as they prejudge that men are toward women. But in any case his character isn’t realistic or purposeful. Most male characters in the series exist strictly to promote the feminist view that that one’s sex predetermines one’s destiny, fate and life. Not a single male character is truly dimensional. Again, this may be on purpose. Female characters are more dimensional. But they, too, lack development.

Mrs. America’s theme that man is deficient or evil and always betrays woman is depicted without much conviction. The main reason to watch Mrs. America is as a kind of cultural study of grass-roots political activism that sprang forth in the 1970s in the wake of the New Left’s domination of academia, which set up today’s entrenched status quo. Now, this brand of activism horrifyingly rules the streets in a nation that’s crumbling and falling apart.

Watch Mrs. America to find out how and why today’s monstrous Me, Too and other toxic social activist movements and their emerging anarchy came to be.

Steinem’s portrayed by Rose Byrne as a waif. She was never as attractive in real life. Steinem’s a sniveling, sneering, nasty figure. Here, Byrne plays her as softer and sweeter. The series creators seem to think that Gloria Steinem was a real babe. That she’s not doesn’t fit Mrs. America’s thesis that women who’re feminists are hot and women who’re not feminists are not. Steinem was simply less unattractive than other feminist leaders.

Steinem accomplished next to nothing and Mrs. America at least gets this partly right. Unlike Freidan, Robin Morgan and Ayn Rand, Steinem never wrote serious or best-selling books. Steinem never had serious political impact. Even her sole business venture, a publication that’s one of the great publishing failures in the history of the American press, fades into oblivion after great fanfare.

Congresswoman Abzug, portrayed by Margo Martindale, is brash, loud and interesting and Martindale does her best to capture the louder than life woman. But she’s not nearly as abrasive as Abzug was in real life. Apparently, Abzug had two children that aren’t even mentioned until the last episode. Mrs. America never gets at what motivated this angry advocate for government control of human life, who reminds me of Ayn Rand’s literary character Comrade Sonia.

Mrs. America’s best acting performance is by Tracey Ullman as feminist intellectual Betty Friedan, author of the groundbreaking study The Feminine Mystique in 1963.

As Friedan, Ms. Ullman is outstanding — she’s always in character and on point. Friedan is a fascinating figure in the so-called women’s movement. She made the best arguments. She was the most convincing. She spoke like a rational human being. She was a thinker, writer, wife, divorcee and mother. The feminist movement treated her like trash and Mrs. America shows this. But it does not even begin to dramatize who is Betty Friedan.

Clearly, feminism poisons American culture. Much of the toxicity was at least addressed and forecast by Phyllis Schlafly, a fact which is honestly depicted. This wicked notion that one’s identity is based on one’s sex is sufficiently portrayed in Mrs. America.

Yet feminism and the havoc it wreaks doesn’t get its due; Mrs. America doesn’t depict the truth. It does get key facts right, including Schlafly‘s influence on the Republican Party, pushing it toward religionism. So, this is an interesting depiction of how things went down and spiraled America into descent. The ERA was stopped after being ratified by most American states. But it’s never been crushed. Feminism spread like a disease.

Mrs. America dramatizes this horror. It depicts the air-headed movement to reduce sex to power lust based on the fallacy that one’s sex is the essence of one’s identity. It shows both feminism and its variant, Puritanism, as petty, vain and shallow.

Tellingly, the proposed Constitutional amendment, a relatively short proposal, is never explained. The ERA is not shown, let alone defined. It exists on background, apropos of feminism, without facts, definition, detail or exposition. In the end, Mrs. America fails to explore the feminists in earnest, let alone why their feminism spreads. It doesn’t grasp that a presumed conflict between Puritans and feminists is false; that they are both a fraud.

If you watch, and you should because these vacuous, power-lusting women made a demonstrable and sinister mess of daily American life, you could learn what moves foul women to lust for power over men. And lord over other women.

TV Review: American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace (FX)

Feb 19, 2018 | Culture, Home Entertainment, Television

Having made it past the midpoint of FX’s nine-episode American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace, directed by Netflix’s new multimillion dollar man, Glee creator Ryan Murphy, I have no reason to think it’s going to improve and every reason to think it’s going to get worse. This miniseries, based on a book by a writer for Vanity Fair and denounced by the late fashion designer’s family as fully fictional, confuses, distorts and detracts from itself.

And that’s going on its own terms. Its terms, by the way, contrary to its title, have very little to do with one of the world’s most fascinating modern fashion figures, the late Gianni Versace, and more centrally to do with his assassin, gay poseur and gigolo Andrew Cunanan. After five episodes, it’s clear that this is a major part of the problem with The Assassination of Gianni Versace, which began with a taunting recreation of the Miami assassination on an epic, operatic scale.

What could have been a probing, insightful, or simply engrossing deep dive into the gay scene breaks apart into a thousand tiny, petty pieces signifying nothing except a morbid fixation on blood, death and horror. If you don’t know or have forgotten, Cunanan’s 1990s killing spree touches upon gay subculture in multiple potential arcs, ranging from the gay community’s ageism with its youth fetish to its uniquely blank sanction of indiscriminate sex without regard for the consequences. Whenever this series starts to half-raise an issue worthy of dramatization as it relates to Cunanan’s horrifying (and I mean horrifying as in gruesome and grisly) crimes, it bails and goes for quick, cheap shots.

Darren Criss (Glee) portrays Andrew Cunanan, a player in San Diego’s gay scene who became a serial killer more like spree killers Bonnie and Clyde or the Clutter murderers than like Ted Bundy, John Gacy or Jeffrey Dahmer, whose murders were numerous, premeditated and planned over time. Criss is a decent actor from what I’ve seen, though, here, his role is reduced to wide-eyed facial expressions, giggles and stunned silences to convey the character’s breach with reality. The Assassination of Gianni Versace unfolds in a backward timeline, unfortunately, costing the show any real sense of what happened and why because it doggedly stays focused on what happened at each killing point — Minneapolis, Chicago, the Carolinas, Miami — rather than why. So, Criss never gets an opportunity to dramatize Cunanan’s interior thoughts, motives and trigger points.

This may come later, but, by now, Cunanan’s background, psychology and motive should be well on the way to clarity in the series’ theme. They’re not. Instead, the portrayal repeats the same crazed look, followed by kinky sex (usually, merely the suggestion of sex) and cold-blooded outbursts resulting in murder and often, later, a few giggles, songs and frolicking about the room. Anyone who followed Cunanan’s 1997 killing spree knows how this ends and, those, like me, who followed it closely may already know or be able to suppose what moved and motivated Andrew Cunanan to seek out intelligent, creative gay men, envy them to the point of grafting himself onto them and all the bloody, ugly rest. But, again, The Assassination of Gianni Versace jolts with only the most shocking scenes and pre-scenes, leaving what made these men return Cunanan’s interests aside. Something must’ve drawn Lee Miglin, a top Chicago architect, father and husband, bravely portrayed by Mike Farrell, to Cunanan. The Assassination of Gianni Versace never shows why.

The same goes for Jeffrey Trail (Finn Wittrock) an ex-Navy officer and David Madson (Cody Fern). Murphy’s show logs character studies about each man and murder victim, but never connects the victim to the handsome, exotic and smoothly fraudulent Cunanan, who must have been more alluring and enticing than is portrayed here. Instead, each victim is sort of explained (thus far in the series) to oversimplification. Trail’s a military man who is tormented by his sexual orientation to the point of suicide and becomes vulnerable prey. Madson, as depicted here, loves his father (a good turn by John Lacy) but should have come out sooner. Miglin is a closeted gay architect who’s proud of his productiveness — he shows Cunanan a sketch of his skyscraper — but he’s a religious man who acts out his forbidden desires. Versace, played by Edgar Ramirez who does what he can with the part, gets even less characterization. Versace’s lover (an unconvincing Ricky Martin with little to say or do) has a complicated, non-monogamous relationship with Versace, which, again, might be a good flashpoint for dramatizing how gays are marginalized and act out accordingly, but any evidence of complication is cut out.

Versace’s enigmatic sister, Donatella, is played by miscast Penelope Cruz, whose accent is difficult to understand. The actress is too glamorous in the part, missing an opportunity to portray why Donatella became even more interesting in the wake of her brother’s homefront assassination.

Rough gay trade dominates the show without getting an appropriate tie-in, too, leading the audience with the impression that American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace, like the stereotype of gays as shallow, petty and frivolous or flamboyant, exists to shock and titillate. For example, restraints, toys and explicit scenes are deployed without development.

Dialogue is painfully inadequate. Cunanan’s lines with victim characters ring most false. Miglin, Trail and Madson look at him and talk to him as if he’s escaped from a mental health clinic and that’s before they realize he’s going to murder them. This leaves the question of how he gained such access and power completely unanswered, let alone properly, interestingly dramatized. The disjointed series plays like a choppy but moody horror movie, tossing plot points across its ominously scored scenes, assuming the audience knows what Cunanan’s thinking, photographing everything with a greenish, artificially muted tint to enhance the surrealism, which only enhances the distortion, and taking the killer’s perspective.

A scene of Andrew Cunanan eating a bowl of what looks like Kellogg’s Froot Loops (get it?) adds nothing to the plot. That it probably never happened supports the Versace family’s statements renouncing this uneven, insignificant show as purely and entirely fictitious and worse for sensationalizing mass death. Netflix, which recently inked a big deal with The Assassination of Gianni Versace‘s creator and director, should take note that Hollywood legend Olivia De Havilland, the 100-year-old actress portrayed without her consent or permission in Ryan Murphy’s FX show Feud and suing to restore her good name and reputation, similarly dissents.

So, it’s not that The Assassination of Gianni Versace, barring any unforeseen turnaround in its remaining four episodes, does not dramatize the truth about the murder of a fashion legend (though I highly doubt it). It’s not even that it doesn’t try (though it doesn’t). It’s a bunch of slick scenes quickly stitched together to maximize titillation while faking that it has a meaning and primarily for the sake of the assassin, not the men or the man the assassin downed, which glorifies murder with horror (and badly). The real horror is how these innocent men fell prey to this monster and, perhaps, what made and makes Cunanan evil and depraved.

But depicting this would have required a story. What’s so unfortunate about American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace is that it fails to properly portray the relationship between the criminal and his victims, so it never becomes a crime story.