Friday, Jul 25, 2008
Sure, she was scary-skinny and her skirts were too short. But don't blame the unfiltered neuroses of "Ally McBeal" for the crisis contemporary women (and men) face.
May 2, 2002 | Poor Ally McBeal. Off she goes, slinking past a volley of critical abuse on her way to oblivion (or syndication). She's got her sunglasses on, a magazine hiding her face. "Give us a pout, Ally!"
When Fox announced the imminent cancellation of "Ally McBeal" two weeks ago, the news precipitated a flurry of gleeful, gloating postmortems. The New York Times' Anita Gates was doubtless speaking for a horde of critics and viewers when she wrote on Sunday that "the news that her namesake one-hour comedy series won't be back next fall after five seasons is sort of a relief. Take this woman off television. Please." You could just see the people crowding outside the palace, calling for Ally's head on a stake, then realizing that Ally's head on a stake would look no different from Ally's head on her body, then cackling and pitching a few tomatoes.
Isn't it easy to bash Ally? Aren't we glad to see her go? She was so skinny, so whiny, so girly, so rubber-lipped and pouty, and her skirts were so short. She was so ruled by her emotions, so possessed by her fantasies, so annoying. What kind of woman was she supposed to be, anyway? Was she supposed to be us? Were we supposed to be her? Was she some kind of elaborately coded backlash insult?
"What 'Ally McBeal' represents," Gates wrote, "is an absurdist view of the nightmare that some men predicted a few decades ago: You let women into the courtroom -- or the newsroom or the Capitol Building -- and things will never be the same. Sure, 'Ally McBeal' is a comedy, but I've never felt it was laughing with me."
It's a valid point, save for the fact that Ally's co-worker, the impossibly neurotic, nose-whistling, tree frog-loving, hole-dwelling, mariachi-singing Porky Pig-voiced John Cage, was also meant to pass as a brilliant lawyer (while the conventionally slick and reptilian Richard Fish was not) and was never confused with a symbol for men in general, or single men in general, or single men in the city in general. Still, Gates' opinion jibes with the dominant, politically sanctioned view, epitomized by the are-they-serious? headline that accompanied a photo of Ally on the cover of Time magazine a few years ago. "Is Feminism Dead?" the magazine asked, in a way that left little room for equivocation. If so, it implied, Ally had killed it.
It's easy to prop Ally up as a straw woman and take her to task for her fly weight, her vertiginously short skirts, her bad love obsessions, her repetitive behavior patterns, her uncontrollable impulses (she once tripped a woman in the supermarket to get at the last can of Pringles) and all the other tics and insecurities that characterized her. Not surprisingly, this view of Ally as feminism killer is popular. A week earlier in the Times, Ginia Bellafante pointed out that although Ally predates flawed, addled, romantically obsessed heroines like Bridget Jones and her endless parade of imitators, we eventually grew tired of her and blamed her for the whole irritating invasion. Ally may have been an original once (this argument goes), but she quickly became a type. As Bellafante wrote: "Ultimately, her trademark neuroses became Ally's downfall. Her internal dialogues were too many; she made happiness too elusive; her narcissistic torment became too grating to watch. At least 'Sex and the City's' Carrie Bradshaw understands what a few good confidantes and a new pair of shoes can do for serotonin levels."
It's all true, of course (although it says something about the times we live in that boosting one's re-uptake with a pair of $700 Manolos is somehow more laudable than a tendency toward brooding introspection). Among other things, Ally was a depression artist, a poster girl for Prozac if ever there was one. For a time, she was touted as the "new woman," then she was castigated for just being another version of the bad, old woman. Ally had a gift for self-inflicted misery that rivaled Emma Bovary's. She trudged through the streets like an underfed calf to the slaughter, trench coat moodily cinched around her X-ray body. She called in "old" on her birthdays. She pined for years for her ex-boyfriend Billy, while continuing to work side by side with him and his beautiful wife, Georgia. She obsessed over the baby she might never have. Defying the holiest of self-help axioms, Ally refused to live in the moment, uncomfortably straddling the past and the future. "My life has always been about tomorrow," she once told her therapist. "The idea that life is now is horrible."
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