In Which We Observe Lizzy Caplan In Her Natural Environment

Arching Back

by ELEANOR MORROW

Masters of Sex
creator Michelle Ashford

Lizzy Caplan's fake eyebrows are organisms in themselves. They represent the little amputations that everyone has on Showtime's Masters of Sex. They indicate the very opposite of what seems most probable. It would be most probable for Lizzy's titular boss, William Masters, to be happy with his blonde, pretty wife and new baby boy. Instead, he is miserable: when his son cries, he maliciously places "Bye Bye Love" on the record player. When his mother objects, he sends her back to Ohio.

Masters' own missing pieces are all figments of his imagination. He is not really devoid of anything, since he is a man. Others shamed by the explicit depictions in his revolutionary sex studies are reduced to menial labor and propositioned in bathrooms, but he not only gets his sex study back, he gets a new gig at a hospital with a lewd president (Danny Huston).

It is the wackiest kind of fun to watch Michael Sheen play this man who can emit so little of himself into others without ceasing to function. Masters' spastic attempts at trying to relate to people at all transform into misunderstandings that feature great deal of apprehension on both sides. In the bedroom he is like a tiger, all energy directed towards what he wants. A killing lion is to be envied; isn't William Masters just Aslan in a gynecologist's wardrobe?

The revolution can never completely succeed or fail because of men like Masters, who never forget that they are beasts, and never stop being ashamed of it. It is substantially easier to feel sympathy for someone like that than, say, Alec Baldwin. Don Draper can damn well help being who he is. Masters lacks that basic programming of self-awareness, and never bothers to apologize for not having it.

A friend of mine recently visited St. Louis. She said there was nothing there. Masters of Sex is as far from a love letter to the area as you can imagine. You can ascend, she said, in a tiny little pod that takes you to the top of the city's signature arch. At its zenith, you are still somewhere between the ground and the sky, and you have had to give up so much to reach it.

Lizzy Caplan/Virginia Johnson does not seem to spend very much time with her two children by her first husband. The show seems to share Sheen/Masters' disappointment with the sinister beasts, even though Virginia's kids are adorable and nearly self-sustaining. To feed them she tries selling diet pills, something she obviously would never do.

Children on Masters of Sex are solely an appendage that no one knows what to do with. When one philandering doctor's wife finds out his infidelities, she brings the kids to the hospital so that they can all confront him. (The offending adulterer hides under a desk.) The young ones are always around when you do not want them, and missing or nonexistent when you do.

Virginia breaks up with would-be fiance Ethan on the phone, and Dr. Masters hears her doing it in the next room. Later, Virginia asks if he heard her, as she had intended, and he said that he had, and did not sound pleased by the content of the call. How difficult it is to not hear a judge's sentence and think your fate is not being described as well!

The best part of the entire show is William Masters' home. The doctor has no eye for furnishings himself, and how his wife arranged the space is pleasing to him, but also a disturbing exertion of control. He strains at that, and there is something so lonely about his environment - open spaces in the living area that he feels drawn to not occupy, or move through quickly. Standing in the middle of his own house, he looks as if he might disappear into the wallpaper.

At times people fall out of love. But that is only rarely, if it really was love at the start. Usually what happens is that a misunderstanding of sorts existed. It went uncorrected at the time. The affair went on, resonating like love in each chasm or enclosed place, dwarfed only by innocence and naivete. No one on Masters of Sex can claim to be innocent, so it should not be surprising that these people are so frequently unsure whether or not they are in love.

There is a snake that lived in Nysa that always acted in the same fashion as its prey. If its prey fell in love and cozied up to the snake, the reptile would return the warmth to whatever extent he could. If the prey struck out at him in jest, he responded the same. And finally, when the prey ceased being prey, the snake hid.

Eleanor Morrow is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Manhattan. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

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In Which We Routinely Roll Our Eyes At Institutional Sexism

For Sex and For Science

by RACHEL SYKES

Masters of Sex
creator Michelle Ashford

There is an awkward moment in the second episode of Showtime’s Masters of Sex, and it happens fully clothed. It’s October 1956 and a young woman, called Jane, is reading alone in the canteen of Washington University Hospital when she is approached by two men. The first is married and intent on beginning an affair which she, politely, declines. The second asks her to recommend the sluttiest girl in the room. Again, Jane declines, laughing at both parties as she pulls the book’s title into view. As she reads aloud, the audience is copied in on the joke. These men never had a chance: Jane’s reading The Second Sex. 

The prop department’s brief nod to philosophy would be laughable, if it wasn’t so sincere. Jane’s moment of triumph in the canteen is short, but the agenda bashing flash of The Second Sex is part of a disarming directness that runs throughout the show’s opening episodes.

Based on Thomas Maier’s 2009 biography, and inheriting its unenviable title, Masters of Sex is the True Hollywood Story of respected gynaecologist William H. Masters (Michael Sheen) and his secretary-turned-collaborator Virginia Johnson (Lizzy Caplan) as they begin their ground-breaking research into human sexuality.

This much history, and Google, can fill in: Masters and Johnson worked for nearly forty years to develop a scientific dialect for the various stages of copulation, tireless in their pursuit of a language for orgasm that moved beyond puritanism and witchcraft. From the first episode, we see the difficulties of turning sex into science; their work was in constant danger of being shut down, by every possible authority. Masters of Sex begins with their first tentative, illegal encounters as they trail brothels in search of willing subjects, and continues as Masters, a frigid but rigorous scientist, and Johnson, a sex positive anachronism, convince the chastened university to work in their (sexual) favour.

With this relationship at its heart, Masters of Sex can’t afford to stand on ceremony. It’s a tale of unravelling and revealing, of candour and seriousness, of reclaiming what is deemed unknowable as a field of potential discovery. Sex is the ultimate unmentionable and the clothes are off within the first few minutes. By the end of the pilot, Masters and Johnson are brandishing a vibrator/camera named ‘Ulysses’ as the provost of the university (a wonderfully perplexed Beau Bridges) internally monitors poor Jane’s climax.

To both anticipate and suppress the snickers, however, Masters of Sex offers up a sincerity which, it turns out, is the most disarming of their devices. Take Jane, for example. Despite the fact that her boss is sitting somewhere between her thighs, Johnson coerces her into staying with a series of grandiose and po-faced lies. “He’s not watching you,” she claims, “He’s watching science.” This is a line that Johnson peddles repeatedly and that people repeatedly buy, slowly building the idea that this study could be the greatest step for women since they obtained the right to vote.

Jane blithely and robotically chants about her contribution to science, and Masters, too, states motives of the highest order, ranting to the disapproving provost that he studies in the name of truth, unchartered territory, and, of course, the Nobel Prize. “Science!” is the show’s real battle cry, but it becomes more of a central thesis then the sex itself.

Masters of Sex was created by Michelle Ashford, the show runner on HBO’s The Pacific and John Adams. Ashford describes herself as “a perpetual student” and her loyalty to historical detail, to biography, make her shows oddly free of subtext. This is even more evident in Masters of Sex where the title gives up the game before any flesh has reached the screen; Ashford seems to embrace the fact that the story’s end is a foregone conclusion. This is a show refreshingly unafraid of spoilers, liberated by the fact that there’s no detail on Masters and Johnson that couldn’t be looked up online.

In other words, it’s a show without a climax, and a show about sex without a climax. Stripped of intrigue, it’s also markedly different from Mad Men to whom comparisons seem inevitable, if a little unfair. It’s not until midway through the pilot episode, as Caplan gamely juggles a mid-century secretarial pool and a wrathful ex-lover, that you realise how Draper might have ruined it for the rest.

When Sheen is introduced to the audience as Masters, at a lavish dinner in his honour, we can’t help but ask what’s wrong with him. But unlike Mad Men, where each episode is bound up in the slow reveal of hidden foibles, everything is already on display. To make this point more blatant, Masters proposes sex to Johnson, as part of their experiment, within the first episode. Is he attracted to her? More than likely. But Ashford knows there’s no point in keeping the audience guessing. 

What’s telling, though, is the weight of this hindsight. If we think about that moment with The Second Sex once more, we suppose that Jane can laugh as the men approach because she knows that the tide is turning. We, the audience, see change as inevitable because we live in the progressive future. But the bluntness of this technique is also a kind of double-bluff. Masters of Sex approaches sexism with the same sensibility of Mad Men, presenting it as so overwhelmingly pervasive that it constantly knocks you on the head. When we meet Virginia Johnson, we roll our eyes at the institutional sexism she faces just to enter the typing pool. Yet we only laugh at how times have changed before we realise how little they have. De Beauvoir hovers somewhere out of shot not from narrative ham-fistedness, but because it is still jarring to see her name in passing. And we can only laugh at the prudishness of the 1950s, until the instinct to giggle takes us over.

Rachel Sykes is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Nottingham. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She tumbls here and twitters here. She last wrote in these pages about the storm outside.

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