The Body Electric

Margo Jefferson and Claire Danes

Every so often, you crack out of the language invented by other people. I mean, language itself. You crack out of the language that has given you the means to say, wait a minute, that’s not who I am. Every life, in a comic sense, is the Hitchcock movie North By Northwest, in which Roger Thornhill, a man in the wrong place at the wrong time, is mistaken for a killer named George Kaplan, a killer who doesn’t exist. He’s an invention of the CIA. What I’m saying is we move through life misidentified. What’s called identity is a case of mistaken identity—other people’s ideas of who you are. Mistaken identity is going to run your life. There’s no way out. That’s why it’s a comedy.

Every so often. Or once, if you’re lucky. If you are a writer and are lucky. Or maybe luck has nothing to do with it. Maybe a spark sets you off. A spark from a campfire in your childhood you don’t really remember, except you can always smell the pine trees and taste the marshmallows. You’re going to crack out of the language that was your only means of saying, wait a minute, this is how I really talk when I’m talking to myself. You’re going to invent a new language and teach everyone to read it. And they will think they already know how to read it, because you’re that good.

I spent Christmas reading Constructing a Nervous System, by Margo Jefferson, one of the most brilliant books I have ever read. Imagine that Margo has made a giant scroll of everything she has thought and felt about her experiences as a writer, as a black girl, as a person who loves artists and the art they make, as a younger daughter in a family, as a friend, as a ferocious intelligence that thinks in five balls in the air at all times.

Imagine she cuts the scroll into thin slices and then cuts the slices into smaller bits and tosses them into the air, making a snow globe of her life, and where the bits fall on the surfaces of the room where she sits is a chapter. She is going to say things about her life she has never said before. Maybe not even to herself. She’s going to tell you secrets, the hell with the consequences. Why did her mother stop speaking before she died. To take her secrets to the grave? What did it feel like to fall into lust after the death of her father? Every piece worth writing contains a secret not even the writer wants to know. Maybe especially not the writer, or else fear might set in.

Every so often Margo throws the pieces of her life into the air again and makes another snow globe and another landscape of memories and associations. What are Sammy Davis Jr and Jimmy Baldwin, two prodigies of literature and entertainment, talking to each other about inside Margo. What is Bing Crosby doing as Margo's minstrel man.

“I love the early Bing.

I am in thrall to the later one.

So I have made Mister Crosby my personal minstrel man.

Everybody needs a minstrel man and black women like me have finally won the right to ours.

Oprah had Dr. Phil.

Condi had George Bush.

I have Bing Crosby.

Rules for minstrels:

—They must do something in public you want and aren’t allowed to do. Dr. Phil for instance: he never smiled or made warm little jokes. . . . Minstrels must have some performative essence (gestural, verbal, behavioral) that you (spectator, imitator and opposite) hold in contempt even as you crave its license. . . . Such willfulness! Such shamelessness! You long for that performative license but you’ve been taught it’s unworthy. Inappropriate. You have higher standards and better values. You’re sure of that. But if, however briefly, you could act like that . . . get away with it . . . be rewarded for it . . .”

Ingeniously, Margo has turned the entire book into a Shakespeare soliloquy, where the narrator shows thought-in-action. The narrator is a mind thinking about its observations and findings during the moment of speaking to the reader and then changing its mind in the moment of speaking to us as well. What if. What if. Well, how about this. Margo has made race/girlness/sisterness into such thrillingly distilled ink, it can write about anything it wants to, including you, and all at once.

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Clair Danes as Carrie Mathison in Homeland.

Clair Danes, a love story.

The other night, Richard and I watched The Maltese Falcon (1941) again. Every time you see a movie you have seen before, you are watching the changes in you.

The movie takes place in a few small rooms in hotels and in Sam’s office and apartment. The cast is tight and keeps rearranging itself in patterns of partnership and threat. Sydney Greenstreet steals any scene he’s in with his merry throated menace and delight in his appetites. Bogie enjoys him, too.

Bogie steals scenes in a different way, with a form of independence from the ordinary tropes of male movie stars that still almost always feels like today. There’s a way he presses the cheek of Mary Astor when he kisses her that’s the man not the character.

There’s no chemistry between Sam and Brigid, just as there’s no chemistry between Bogart and Ingrid Bergman the next year in Casablanca (1942). There’s no chemistry because the writers of the films did not write the female characters with divided thoughts and feelings. They aren’t people, and Bogie can’t make love and perform his lip twitching comedy opposite a book mark. In Falcon as in Casablanca, he has fun with other men and with Effie (Lee Patrick), his trusted secretary, who worships him, understandably, and helps him sort the case.

Richard and I are also rewatching Homeland (2011-2020), a show anchored by a witchily thrilling performance by Claire Danes. What you realize seeing Claire’s creation of Carrie Mathison, who is bossy and sure of herself and obsessed by a sense of mission, is that an entirely new kind of female character has been allowed to exist here. Yes, she’s allowed to exist with the caveat she’s nuts (her words for being bipolar).

What you feel is that Claire can inhabit a human being she has partly lived, and what you feel about Ingrid in Casablanca and Mary in Falcon and Meryl Streep in The French Lieutenant’s Woman and in The Hours, as well as Julianne Moore and Nicole Kidman in The Hours and Nicole in Eyes Wide Shut, is male writers slumming in the entrapment and gloominess and self-sacrifice they have concocted to stand for WOMAN. What you feel about almost every actress who has been cast in a role written by men, gay and not gay, almost every role an actress has been asked to play, she has had to become not a real person, not a real woman, not someone like herself in terms of her complexity. (George Kaplan instead of Roger Thornhill. Credit to her race Margo instead of real Margo.) She has had to perform the part on screen that is exactly the same lie real women have had to play to get through life. And it’s so dull.

There's a scene in season one where Brody is coming to warn Carrie not to mention their sexual affair. She hopes he's coming to start things up again. She puts on a black dress and lipstick, and she pours two glasses of wine. He's not there for that reason, she quickly understands, and she's unable to mask her disappointment from him.

Damien Lewis is bad at playing dumb marine Brody. He's better at playing sexy turned foreign agent terrorist hiding in dumb marine, and with Carrie he doesn't have to hide his intelligence, so we see him registering her disappointment.

After he leaves, Claire pours the wine in the sink and dumps the bottle in the trash. We're shown the degree of her hurt and anger as she storms around. Richard speculated the writers were dousing some of her fire by making her vulnerable in this form. There are ways the writers are scared of their creation, for sure, and obstruct Carrie’s brilliance and power throughout the series. But this scene is not an example of that, in my opinion.

No real woman on the planet would feel the disappointment of the blown off/hoped for pass and not show it in exactly the way Carrie does. In my eyes, she becomes mightier by being unstoppable and at the same time a crybaby. Love/sex disappointment is the cut of a razor. It always is. Nothing mends it. Time passes. You do it again.

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Still married after 10 days.

It’s minus two degrees, and we’re happy in our fortress of solitude. On the street, Richard said, “Do you notice how couples dress alike?” I was wearing the same thing I wear every day. Back home, he opened his computer and said, “Should I order this shirt?” I said, “Order whatever you want.” I don’t know why I said that. He said, “Corduroy is warm.” Before that, he’d shown me a plaid shirt and said, “Should I get this?” I said, “No.” He said, “Why not?” I said, “If you wear a plaid shirt and live on a farm road and when you go outside you cut up tree limbs, you can see where this is going, right?" He said no.

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