"If women were good, God would have one."

Saturday, cigarette #1
Outside Koffee On Audubon, 8:45am
THUMBING THROUGH: The Weekly Standard

It's possible to direct Edward II so that Edward is basically sympathetic. Derek Jarman did it in 1991 in his unsettling movie, and he did it by being very angry.

Eve Tushnet's review of the DC Shakespeare Theatre's twin Marlowe productions (Edward II and Tamburlaine) is up at The Weekly Standard, and you should read it. The above sentence alone wins a prize for Best One-Sentence Film Review, at least in the Queer Cinema subcategory. (The previous winner was Anthony Lane for his review of Love is Colder than Death: "The part of Francis Bacon is taken by Derek Jacobi, and he takes it by force.")

The plays have a few minor similarities: They won't change the mind of anyone who thinks Marlowe can't write women, for example. Both the demi-tragic Zenocrate and the girlishly demonic Isabella don't quite work as characters. Zenocrate is an attempt to turn "girls like violence" into tragic queenship, and Isabella seems to veer back and forth from self-deluder who just wants her king back to furious dictatress who commits her own adultery in revenge.

I collect three things: books, cigarette cases, and authors who "can't write women." There’s no greater offender of Not Being Able to Write Women than noir, so, having had that particular bell rung in the back of my mind by Eve's review, I stepped outside to a riff on it over a Lucky Strike. (I shouldn’t need to clarify that I was standing under a lamp post and wearing a trenchcoat.)

A lot of authors fail at writing women, but some of them at least fail interestingly. Hemingway, for example. (“The two rules for getting on well with people that speak Spanish: give the men tobacco and leave the women alone.”) Lay Juno and Knocked Up end to end and I would still rather stay home with “Hills Like White Elephants.” But when noir fails at writing women, it's rarely interesting. Raymond Chandler didn’t understand woman (just look at his marriage), so he wrote women characters who were defined by their inscrutability. Not so much one-trick ponies as no-trick ponies.

Marlowe's problem is that he tries to wield women's inscrutability for dramatic effect. His men do unexpected things because they're tormented, or heroic, or power-mad, and unpacking his men's little mysteries will yield interesting conclusions about torment, heroism, and lust for power. Isabella and Zenocrate are mysterious, but reflecting on their little mysteries will just leave you thinking, "Oh, women." Tragedy wrings sublimity from Really Sad Stuff Happening to People by making its characters seem dramatic rather than farcical (the difference between King Lear and Man Getting Hit in Groin with Football). Trying to make your tragic women clear the larger-than-life bar by using their feminine mystique (ooh, enigmatic!) is weird and disconcerting. (FTR, I haven't seen the Shakespeare Theatre's productions, so I have no idea if that happened in their productions.)

This of course doesn't mean that men who don't understand women can't write women. That would limit the Western canon to Shakespeare, Henry James, and maybe Ibsen. It just means that there are certain traps that have to be avoided, or, if fallen into, at least fallen into with style.