#we know shes a white fake feminist but perhaps is giving her too much credit at this point

[rosenecklaces]

ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww sjm said her fav gingerbread is who now. as if i needed to dislike her blonde ass more than i already do

[oneweekoneband]

I’m slightly nauseous already with knowing I’m going to say this, but what does “self-awareness”  even mean? In modern parlance, as a descriptive phrase, as a comment on art? I’m asking in earnest, like, I’ve been Googling lately, which for me is basically on par with doctoral study in terms of academic rigor. The self is king, anyway, tyrant, so where is the line of distinction between material that intentionally is nodding at some truth about the artist’s life and what’s just, like, all the rest of the regular navel-gazing bullshit. I mean, I’m all self, I am guilty here. I can’t get it out of my poems or even make it more quiet. This is the tenth time I’ve invoked “I” in the space of six sentences. Processing art has always necessitated a certain amount of grappling with the creator, but the busywork of it lately grows more and more tedious. Joy drains out of my body parsing marks left behind not just in stylistic tendencies and themes, but in literal, intentional tags like graffiti on a water tower. This feels an age old and moth-holed complaint, dull, and I am no historian, or really a serious thinker of any kind. I’ve now complained at some length about self-referential art, but didn’t I love how Martin Scorsese nodded to the famous Goodfellas Copacabana tracking shot with the opening frames of last year’s The Irishman? Didn’t I find that terribly fun and sort of sweet? So there’s distinctions. I’m only saying I don’t know with certainty what they even are. I’m unreliable, and someone smarter than me has likely already solved my quandary about why self-knowledge often transforms into overly precious self-reflexivity in such a way that the knowledge is diminished and obscured, leaving only cutesy Easter eggs behind. Postmodernism has birthed a moralizing culture where art exists to be termed either “self-aware Good” or “self-aware Bad”.  Self-referentiality in media is so commonplace, so much the standard, that what was once credited as metatextual inventiveness often feels lazy now. In 1996, Scream was revitalizing a genre. Today, two thirds of all horror movies spend half their running time making sure that you know that they know they’re a horror movie, which is fine, I guess, except sometimes you just wanna watch someone get butchered with an axe in peace. 

This is all to say that in 2020 Taylor Swift looked long and hard upon her image in the reflecting pool of her heart and has written yet another song about Gone Girl.

“mirrorball” is a very good piece of Gone Girl —feels insane to tell anyone reading a post on a blog what Gone Girl is but, you know, the extremely popular 2012 novel about a woman who pretends to have been murdered and frames her husband for it, and subsequently the 2014 film adaption where you kinda see Ben Affleck’s dick for a second—fanfiction. It would be a fine song, a good song, really, even if it weren’t that, if it were just something normal and not unhinged written by a chill person who behaves in a regular way, but we need to acknowledge the facts for what they are. When Taylor Swift watched Rosamund Pike toss her freshly self-bobbed hair out of her face and hiss, “You think you’d be happy with some nice Midwestern girl? No way, baby. I’m it!” her brain lit up like a Christmas tree, and she’s never been the same. If you Google “taylor swift gone girl” there waiting for you will be a medium sized lake’s worth of articles speculating about how Gone Girl influenced and is referenced in past Swift singles “Blank Space” and “Look What You Made Me Do”. This is not new behavior, and if anything it’s getting a bit troubling to think that it’s been this long since Taylor’s read another book. Still, while the prior offerings were a fair attempt at this particular feat of depravity, “mirrorball” has brought Taylor’s Amy Elliott Dunne deification to stunning new heights. And most importantly, Taylor has done a service to every person alive with more than six brain cells and a Internet connection by putting an end to the “Cool Girl” discourse once and for all. By the power invested in “mirrorball”, it is hereby decreed that the Cool Girl speech from Gone Girl is neither feminist or antifeminist, not ironic nor aspirational. No. It’s something much better than all that. It’s a threat. I ! Can ! Change ! Everything ! About ! Me ! To ! Fit ! In !

Gone Girl (2012) by Gillian Flynn

“mirrorball” (2020) by Taylor Swift

When the twinkly musical stylings of Jack Antonoff, a man I distinctly distrust, but for no one specific reason, whirl to life at the beginning of this song I feel instantly entranced, blurry-brained and pleasure-pickled like an infant beneath a light-up crib mobile or, I guess, myself in the old times, the outside times, three tequila sodas deep under the disco lights at The Short Stop. Under a mirrorball in my head. I know very little about music, as a craft, and I really don’t care to know more. I’m happy in a world of pure, dumb sensation. I’m not even sure what kind of instruments are making these jangly little sounds. I just like it. I am vibing. We may not ever be able to behave badly in a club again, but I can sway to my stupid Taylor Swift-and-the-brother-of-the-lady-who-makes-like-those-sweatshirts-with-little-sayings-or-like-vulvas-which-famous-white-women-wear-on-instagram-you-know-what-I-mean song, pressing up onto my tiptoes on the linoleum tile of our kitchen floor and can feel for a second or two something approaching bliss. “mirrorball” is a lush sound bath that I like a lot and then also it’s about being all things to all people, chameleoning at a second’s notice, doing Oscar worthy work on every Zoom call, performing the you who is good, performing the you who is funny, performing the you who draws a liter of your own blood and throws it around the kitchen then cleans it up badly all to get your husband sent to jail for sleeping with a college student... Too much talk about making and unmaking of the self is way too, like, 2012 Tumblr for me now, and I start hearing the word “praxis” ring threateningly in my head, but I’m not yet so evolved that I don’t feel a pull. Musings on the disorganized self—on how we are new all the time, and not just because of all the fresh skin coming up under the dead, personhood in the end so frighteningly flexible—are always going to compel me, I’m afraid, but that goes double for musings on the disorganized self which posit that Taylor Swift still thinks Amy Dunne made some points.

Because on “mirrorball” Taylor is for once not hamfistedly addressing some “hater”, in the quiet and the lack of embarrassing martyrdom it actually offers an interesting answer to the complaint that Taylor is insufficiently self-aware. This criticism emerges often in tandem with claiming to have discovered some crack in the chassis of Swift’s public self, revealing the sweetness to be insincere. My instinct is to dismiss this more or less out of hand as just a mutation of the school of thought that presumes all work by women must be autobiography. And, regardless, it is made altogether laughable by the fact that anyone actually paying attention has known since at least Speak Now, a delightful record populated by the most appalling, horrible characters imaginable, and all of them written by a twenty year old Taylor Swift, that this woman is a pure weirdo. To accuse Taylor Swift of lacking in self-awareness is a reductive misunderstanding, I think, of artifice. Being a fake bitch takes work. Which is to say, if we agree that her public self is a calculated performance—eliding the fact that all public selves are a performance to avoid getting too in the weeds yadda yadda— why, then, should it be presumed that performance is rooted in ignorance? Would it not make more sense that, in fact, someone able to contort themselves so ably into various shapes for public consumption would have a certain understanding of the basic materials they’re working with and concealing? Taylor Swift, in a decade and a half of fame, has presented herself from inside a number of distinct packages. The gangly teenager draped in long curls like climbing wisteria who wrote lyrics down her arms in glitter paint gave way to red lipstick, a Diet Coke campaign, and bad dancing at awards shows. There was the period where she was surrounded constantly by a gaggle of models, then suddenly wasn’t anymore, and that rough interlude with the bleached hair. The whole Polaroid thing. Last year she boldly revealed she’s a democrat. Now it’s the end of the world and she’s got frizzy bangs and flannels and muted little piano songs. Perhaps this endless shape-shifting contradicts or undermines, for some, the pose of tender authenticity which has remained static through each phase, but that doesn’t mean she hasn’t been doing it all on purpose the entire time. I’ve never been a natural, all I do is try, try, try...

In the Disney+ documentary—which, in order to watch, I had to grudgingly give the vile mouse seven dollars, because the login information that I’d begged off of my little sister didn’t work and I was too embarrassed to bring it up a second time—Taylor referred to “mirrorball” as the first time on the album where she explicitly addressed the pandemic, referring to the lyrics that start, “And they called off the circus, Burned the disco down,” and end with “I’m still on that tightrope, I’m still trying everything to get you laughing at me,” which actually did made me laugh, feeling sort of warmly foolish and a little fond, because it never would have occurred to me that she was trying to be literal there. I suppose we really do all contain multitudes. Hate that.

[unmistakably]

In 2017, Jenna Maroney Is 30 Rock's Most Relevant Character

Ali Goldstein

News that the cult favorite 30 Rock left Netflix this month sparked a series of frantic reactions on certain corners of the internet. 30 Rock Is Leaving Netflix and People Are Furious wrote the Daily Beast. The New York Times offered 5 Things to Cook While Watching 30 Rock Before It Leaves Netflix. Last week's subsequent announcement that it was moving to Hulu mitigated the loss, although the switch in streaming platform also changes how effortless it is to watch a show usually experienced on a loop. Created by Tina Fey, 30 Rock, which aired on NBC from 2006 to 2013, revolved around an SNL-like variety show. With its mile-a-minute joke delivery and irreverent takes on pop culture, it became a critical hit, rejuvenated Alec Baldwin's and Tracy Morgan's careers, and marked Fey's ascent to comedy A-lister.

Netflix does not offer viewer statistics on its shows, but between all the elegiac write-ups and the sad texts from my friends that say they will have to talk to some food about this, I gather that constantly streaming 30 Rock is a common experience. I know I'm not alone in saying that I have forged more than one friendship based on a shared language of deep cuts like the old leather pumpkin or very wool. For me, the threat of losing the constant company of 30 Rock means not getting to spend time with the character that makes me feel like it's okay to be a human woman. I'm talking about Jenna Maroney. Though ever-exasperated eyeroll master Liz Lemon (Fey) has been the source of many viewers' it me moments, the histrionic train wreck Jenna Maroney (Jane Krakowski) is the character who resonates most with me. In the hyperbolic Trump era, it is Jenna's outlandish reactions that feel appropriate. And after a decade of thinking about Liz's self-interested feminism, it is Jenna's relationship to feminist concerns like misogynistic violence and discrimination against gender nonconformity that are most salient today.

Giphy

Liz and Jenna are old friends on the show, each serving as a foil to the other's deeply ingrained hang-ups. Liz is a frowning brunette killjoy; Jenna is all blonde ambition and horse glue. The two are more negative images of each other than opposites, with Jenna's self-aware fakeness cutting through Liz's tone-deaf self-righteousness. Throughout the show's run, Liz's feminism was subject to rigorous debate. Ten years after the show's premiere, essays are still being penned about Liz's feminism and whether it sufficiently registered on the subjective barometer of what a feminist should be. Why Liz Lemon Was The Flawed Feminist We Needed 10 Years Ago & Still Need Today, claimed Bustle in an article from last year. On the Huffington Post, Zeba Blay wrote that 30 Rock, while myopic and dated in its white feminist worldview, also made apparent the need for women who aren't white, straight, and middle-class in comedy.

Watching the show in 2017 is to be frequently confronted with a liberal feminism that considers success to be personal and professional contentment - having it all to yourself. Liz Lemon is the kind of individualist feminist who likes to stick it to the man while playing it safe, who knows that being a woman is the worst because of society, but does not seem concerned with making that society better for anyone else. Liz leaned in - and was rewarded with the G.E. Followship Award. I would have been a Nazi, she muses about her willingness to collaborate with her CEO boss Jack's machinations in spite of her nominal objection to them. In critic Sady Doyle's blog post from 2010, she correctly identified this strain of Liz Lemonism as privileged semi-feminism. Emily Nussbaum, TV writer for the New Yorker, aptly characterizes Liz as a George Costanza more than a Mary Tyler Moore, pushing back against the idea that she should be considered a role model of any sort. But in this post-sheet cake moment, it is harder for me to sit with this shallow feminism.

It's clear that Liz's concerns were meant to be relatable whereas Jenna's were ridiculous. But what about those of us whose lives have taken an odder turn than Liz's has, who are not baby-crazy, who cannot afford to buy our own apartments, and who do not even have the option of settling, even if we wanted to? And those of us for whom feminism helps queer our lives, rather than serving as a belief set that reconciles us toward marriage, motherhood, and the workplace?

Giphy

Early in the series, Jenna's problems are more typical. A struggling actress upstaged on her own show, she deals with a pathological need for attention along with more universal female complaints such as weight gain and ageist beauty standards. Her issues, however, become less normative as the show continues. Instead of revolving around the tragedy of an old crone yearning for the spotlight, her storylines in later seasons consider how to pair love with kink, and the need for attention with the desire to please. Whereas Liz gets to have it all by the end of the show, giving the audience that relates to her the happy ending they ostensibly want, Jenna's life takes a turn for the weird and wonderful. Jenna is so dramatic, she is radically unrelatable; it is difficult to identify with someone who exclaims, Stop being dramatic. That's my thing. And if you steal it from me, I will kill myself, and then you. It is a given on the show that Jenna is unlikeable and not to be taken seriously. Even in Doyle's nuanced critique of Liz, Jenna is written off as a shallow, unstable narcissist. But in 2017, I find Jenna's issues more resonant, her outlandishness a better balm against the outrageous misogynist currently in power.

Jenna spends her adult life dodging death at the hands of dangerous boyfriends, most famously, Mickey Rourke. While Liz's worst (but funniest) ex, Dennis Duffy, constantly threatens into come back in her life with his promise, You'll be back, Jenna's exes are considerably darker. On 30 Rock, when trauma resurfaces, it is always treated as a moment of wild comedy. Other main characters on the show have moments of unearthing repressed trauma and are somewhat better off after talking it out. Jenna, however, never has her breakthrough on the couch, not because she is too shallow to bury anything deep, but perhaps because she does not repress that much. Her asides about her own traumas have the horrifying buoyancy of a woman who walks away with a stride of pride. You should have killed me when you had the chance, she sneers about Rourke. Violent exes are her specialty, including but not limited to O.J. Simpson, a mob boss, and a sniper who would never shoot her because he was afraid of his own mother - there is perhaps no greater kiss-off for an ex. It is fitting that the rom-com Jenna was supposed to star in, Take My Hand, gets turned into a torture-porn flick. Jenna is a final girl in her own right. And that's why it is all the more satisfying when she finds The One.

Will Forte (left) and Jane Krakowski as Paul L'astnam and Jenna Maroney

Courtesy of NBC

In the end, Jenna's secret weapon - her sexuality - allows her to become a more self-actualized person by the end of the series. When she finally finds love, it is with someone who shares her profession, the female impersonator and performer Paul L'astnam, played by Will Forte, a both decent and perverse person (#RelationshipGoals). The campiness with which Jenna always approached gender is perfectly complemented by Paul's drag performance of her.

On the surface, her relationship with Paul exists merely to make two obvious points: Jenna is a narcissist, and gender is absurd. This reminds me of a remark of Fey's during her sheet cake manifesto: You know what a drag queen still is? A 6'4 black man. Drag laughs in the face of the idea that who you really are exists under the makeup and clothes. I've struggled with whether or not Paul as a character hints at suspicion toward nonbinary identity. Am I laughing at the small-mindedness of those who would mock Paul? Or is his character a wink of acknowledgment at those who think, Oh brother, people sure do take this stuff too far? Even if I can't shake the feeling that this line was written with an eyeroll at such a nonconforming identity, it is to Forte's credit that the character is played with such earnest compassion, joyful in his expression of how he identifies as gender dysmorphic bi-genitalia pansexual (pronounced sex-u-AL). As someone who regards gender both as a category that tries to exclude me from normalcy and, paradoxically, a playground with no rules, Jenna and Paul's relationship might be the most relatable on the show.

Sexuality, let alone complicated sexuality, so seldom gets an open-hearted and curious treatment in any rom-com plotline. Together, Jenna and Paul figure out not only how to make it work, but how to make it weird and keep it that way. Though they initially struggle to define what their normal might look like, they settle on a deliciously campy parody of heterosexual couples getting surprise married and going to Bed Bath & Beyond. Eventually, she has a coming-out of sorts and stands in her own truth in front of the Wool Council to let them know that her relationship with Paul is also based on love and warmth. And chafed skin.

As the series progresses, Jenna learns not only how to feel but also how to express her emotions. For a woman who was taught to identify sadness through flash cards, she makes incredible strides by the end of the series. She accepts Paul's need to dress as another woman (Cher) and even turns down his televised marriage proposal - her dream - to compromise with his needs for intimacy. But she's still our girl. Don't interrupt, she says to Liz during a reconciliation. The pill that lets me feel emotion is gonna wear off soon. The moment is again played for laughs, but as someone who takes pills like that, I can relate.

We have a clear enough picture of what Liz Lemon feminism looks like. The Liz Lemon of today wears a Nasty Woman T-shirt; Jenna sells them on her website, Jennas-Side.com, profits going to benefit a scholarship in her name at the Royal Tampa Academy of Dramatic Tricks. Liz Lemon keeps her maiden name and would point out the sexism behind the term maiden. When Jenna and Paul marry, he takes her first and last name - good praxis! If there could be such a thing as Jenna Maroney feminism, it would be queer, unruly, and untraditional, and it would not define itself in relation to normative benchmarks of adult life like marriage or children. But I don't want to reclaim Jenna as a feminist antihero. She is a hero for those of us who are fatigued with the question of whether a pop culture figure is a feminist.

Whereas Liz sees the patriarchy as her personal stumbling block, Jenna, who truly suffers at the hands of men, seems blithely unaware that she exists within it. It's not so much that Jenna is a feminist figure; it's more that she becomes proudly anti-heteronormative. She is at turns both delusional and self-aware enough to know that prettiness is a facade, and that portion control and exercise won't heal a broken heart. 30 Rock excels when it treats gender as a performance of the absurd, and perhaps I watch it again and again for this absurdity. I am not a Jenna Maroney, because no one but Jenna can be a Jenna. But I do see myself in her. Not so much, however, that I would steal her thunder. You cannot steal her thunder. Her whole life is thunder.

Natalie Adler has a PhD in Comparative Literature and works in disability advocacy. She is currently writing a novel on obsessive thinking and feminist disillusionment.

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