In Which We Exercise Materialism To The Extreme

The Point of Tears

by MIA NGUYEN

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt
creators Tina Fey and Robert Carlock

With a spirit of a whimsical middle schooler, Kimmy (Ellie Kemper) skips throughout New York City armed with a purple Jansport backpack and two paperback books in Netflix’s new comedic series Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. After being held captive for 15 years in an underground bunker with three other women, Kimmy forges a path of her own with minimal survival skills.

For Kimmy, starting anew means shedding her identity as one of the Indiana mole woman. The prospect of putting behind the trauma of Durnsville, Indiana puts Kimmy at ease. Along with adjusting herself to metropolitan life, Kimmy makes grand discoveries in the 21st century like a child peering into a treasure chest for the first time. The show doesn’t belittle Kimmy’s traumatic experiences, whether they would be sexual or physical abuse from cult leader Reverend Richard Wayne Gary Wayne (Jon Hamm).

Behind Kimmy’s infectious, pearly white smile, there lies a thick veil of darkness to her backstory. The underground bunker provided a place for her fears to fester. The sound of velcro makes Kimmy cringe outrageously to the point of tears.

Unlike the other three women, Kimmy has no desire to return to a place that slashed 15 years off her precious life. To start a new life in a new city, one must secure the necessities: job security and shelter. In reality, apartment hunting is stressfull; this stress is almost absent in Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. Kimmy scours the classifieds and finds an apartment she’s interested in. She is greeted by Lillian (Carol Kane), an eccentric and spaced out landlord for a potential apartment.

Lillian introduces Kimmy to her downstairs tenant, Titus Andromedon (Tituss Burgess), an aspiring actor who is trying hard to make it big on Broadway and has been for a long time. As a New Yorker, Titus is a resilient improviser when it comes to handling difficult situations head-on. In an episode, Titus constructs a chic and Oscar-winning outfit for Kimmy by using everyday household products: bathroom mat, toilet hardware, among many others.

Jacqueline Voorhees (Jane Krakowski), an Upper East Side Manhattanite, employs Kimmy as a nanny. While working in the Voorhees’ household, she changes her last name from “Schmidt” to “Smith” to prevent anyone from discovering her Indiana mole women status. As a nanny, Kimmy excels in interacting with Mrs. Voorhees' moody teenage stepdaughter, Xanthippe (Dylan Gelula) who is under the full suspicion that Kimmy has something to hide. Kimmy naturally becomes her confidant while on the job throughout the series.

Mrs. Voorhees exercises materialism to the extreme and has a refrigerator stocked with off-brand FIJI water labeled “diet water.” Wealthy people always have an abundance of white towels and a fridge stocked with the same items. When she offers Kimmy a bottle to hydrate, Kimmy politely declines, and proceeds to toss it into the waste basket. As a teenager, Mrs. Voorhees dyed her hair blonde and moved away from her home of South Dakota. Her origins and backstory appear to have broken elements that will hopefully appear in the second season.

Creators Tina Fey and Robert Carlock successfully build a successful female heroine with a group of equally charming, eccentric supporting actors. Along with the diversity of the cast, the comedic one-liners make audience members fall to their knees. The range of racial stereotypes represented on the show aren’t intended to be mean spirited. Kimmy’s GED study partner Dong (Ki Hong Lee) is a Chinese delivery guy who wins the affection of Kimmy. One of the character faults is his character being built around sexual jokes surrounding the origins of his Vietnamese name, which has sexual connotations. It’s a cheap comedy trope, and Fey has been criticized for this kind of stuff before.

The show features the upbeat pace and cadence of Fey's 30 Rock, ensuring its appeal to existing fans of Fey and Carlock’s work. Watching the entire series in one sitting closely resembles the feeling of witnessing a stream of candy fall out from a paper mâché piñata at a child’s birthday party. It’s rewarding and sweet. We glimmer at her childlike freedom. Something we wished we still had.

Mia Nguyen is the features editor of This Recording. You can find her website here.

"Hold No Guns" - Death Cab for Cutie (mp3)

In Which Tina Fey Engages With Pee Jars And Breast Milk

Her Own Foil

by DAYNA EVANS

Bossypants
by Tina Fey
Little, Brown and Company, 288 pp.

When the realization finally occurs to you at a near-adult age that the academic path you’ve chosen can only lead to four possibilities, you feel as if you have brought shame to your family and deserve to live in the sewers. And these sewers are not fun, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles sewers with endless pizza and samurai swords — they are filthy and teeming with homeless people who also hold BAs in Whatever/Etc./Who Cares. This is where you will end up, and it is all your fault. Few of us, even the good-hearted charitable types, will escape this fate. Instead we will stagger forth in vigilant denial while we embody the qualities acquired from a liberal arts degree (self-hatred, love of free food), vowing to never stop until we've achieved critical acclaim for our novel/screenplay/artwork/who cares. And while we sneak beneath our potholes at night knowing that our success will only occur posthumously, there lives an exception to the rule. And thankfully, she has written a book.

Tina Fey — an idol for drab-haired, doughnut-loving women everywhere — chronicles her pigeon-toed walk (not run) to success in her new memoir Bossypants with a faux candor that reveals both a savvy, confident writer, and a self-effacing Dorito-muncher à la Liz Lemon. The pendulum swings between the two with impossible precision. In describing her "healthy body parts," Fey mentions her "droopy brown eyes designed to confuse predators into thinking I'm just on the verge of sleep and they should come back tomorrow to eat me." Or on the joy of matrimony: "There are plenty of positives to being married to me. I just can’t think of any of them right now." The writing is charming, and the tone is light, but what makes Bossypants memorable is that it isn’t a character telling us a story, it’s a story showing us a character. And with the wonderful plainness of her suburban background (Fey is from the town next door to mine and I believe we're soulmates — unified in mall appreciation), the character she has created is a foil that shines aggressively.

While any shmuck from a modest middle-class background can graduate college, get an entry-level, soul-sucking, endlessly thankless job vaguely related to their bullshit liberal arts degree for which their parents will never forgive them, very, very few will eventually make a creative empire out of it like Tina Fey has. Writer, actor, producer, comic, professional Sarah Palin lookalike — Fey has accomplished more than any of us could imagine doing, especially given our delusions of David Foster Wallace grandeur paired with a lack of people skills.

Alone in an expanse of memoirs that torture readers with turgid exploitation of unfortunate pasts, Tina Fey’s Bossypants stands apart from the tales of child neglect and drug abuse with what is essentially one part suburban barbecue, one part frat party, and one part episode of Sex In The City that ended up on the cutting room floor. Which all means to say that it is light, funny (“By nineteen, I had found my look. Oversize T-shirts, bike shorts, and wrestling shoes.”), and rife with insecurities. Tina at a photo shoot:

When you inevitably can’t fit into a garment, the stylist’s assistant will be sent in to help you. The stylist’s assistant will be a chic twenty-year-old Asian girl named Esther or Agnes or Lot’s Wife.

In a few years she’ll be running the editorial staff, but at this point in time her job is to stuff a middle-aged woman’s bare ass crack into a Prada dress and zip it up. In my case, Esther and I are always mutually frustrated when zipping up the tiny dress. Esther is disgusted by my dimply flesh and her low status. I’m annoyed that her tiny hands lack the strength to get Pandora’s plague back into the box. “How’s it going in there?” calls the stylist passive-aggressively. Reinforcements are called in to push on both sides of my ribcage until the zipper goes up. To avoid conflict, we all blame a third party. “It’s these damn invisible zippers!” we say in unison. “I don’t know why designers use them!"

The book also makes you want to get drunk and inappropriately touch someone.

Bossypants may afford you some bemused and/or disgusted looks should you choose to read it in public — the photo on its jacket (Fey posing sweetly with the arms of a hairy, overweight man) is as unsettling as mistaking your uncle’s cutlery drawer for his dildo drawer, an effect that Fey employs often in her writing. "I knew from commercials that one’s menstrual period was a blue liquid that you poured like laundry detergent onto maxi pads to test their absorbency," she says in describing her entry into womanhood. "This wasn’t blue, so . . . I ignored it for a few hours." Her sense of humor is easy and relatable in context (Oh, of course Uncle Norm would have a dildo drawer — he's a free spirit), but honest in a way that we don’t necessarily want to admit to (I can never make eye contact with Uncle Norm again). Tina Fey, the memoirist, is just as much of a character as Liz Lemon, the slob.

Bossypants came under fire from Jezebel.com founder Anna Holmes, who claimed it doesn't take enough of a stance on "contemporary feminism and female representations in pop culture." Fey writes reluctantly about making definitive claims in almost everything, to the point of denouncing a call at home from former president Bill Clinton. But the truth is, just because Fey is a well-respected, influential woman who empowers women simply by existing, she's a celebrity, and her book isn't called The Struggle of Women in Comedy and the Battle We Must Fight for Enlightenment. It's called Bossypants and it's a memoir. I don't agree that we should expect her or any famous person to take a stance, mostly because I want to be famous and the only issue I care about is Free Cone Day at Ben & Jerry’s.

It is bothersome, however, that Fey chooses to consistently devalue her intellect, appearance, and work. It becomes a tired act less than halfway through the book. Though Fey is consistently praised for being both winsome and accessible while remaining sharp and in charge, she rarely acknowledges the latter qualities in Bossypants, and it is positively infuriating. Why can't Fey take a moment off from the homely girl routine and write with pride about her numerous accomplishments?

Even when she brings up 30 Rock — the wildly popular TV show of Fey’s creation — her remarks are diminishing: "We premiered on Wednesday, October 11, 2006, at 8:00 p.m. and we were an instant hit — like figs for dessert or bringing your guitar out at a party." If Dane Cook (guh) were to write a memoir (if he could write) exposing even the slightest insecurity, it would elicit confusion similar to when a fitness trainer tells you to "soften your knees." (Does anyone actually know what that means?) Meekness in male comedians is preposterous to expect.

Tina was a product of a cozy suburban upbringing in which she was encouraged to pursue her creative passion, much like a lot of people I know, including myself. She has seamlessly melded her public image into a hybrid of slovenly wimp who enjoys cable TV and closed-toe shoes with a high-power, hard-working businesswoman who looks great in formal wear. Though she has an enormous following and success beyond our wildest dreams, Fey is entitled to create a persona because that is what writers do. However, it is disquieting to imagine that if she chose to channel the overconfident douchebaggery of Alec Baldwin instead of your 13-year-old cousin Kristen, she'd be lambasted for acting like a snobby bitch that takes all the credit. By writing her memoir as she has, Fey is able to establish some vague opinions on feminism without sacrificing the humor in stories about pee jars and breast milk. I only wish she had done it with more conviction and less downplaying; that way we would be able to distinguish the writer from the character, the human from the comic, and the boss from the bossypants.

Dayna Evans is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. She tumbls here.

"Can See Miles" - I'm From Barcelona (mp3)

"Always Spring" - I'm From Barcelona (mp3)

"Battleships" - I'm From Barcelona (mp3)

In Which We Ask That You Reconsider Purchasing This Bill Of Goods

The Power of Objects

by MOLLY LAMBERT

Sex Offender Week on The Awl got me thinking, how long has it been since I wrote something about gender politics? Twenty minutes? Everywhere in L.A. takes twenty minutes! These are my random thoughts on the preeminent intellectual sex symbol television characters of our time. (Timothy Olyphant in Justified, I'll get to you later.)

The Don Draper issue cuts down to some basic things. When women say they want guys to be more like Don Draper, what they are really saying is "we want more guys who look like Jon Hamm." Maybe guys are a little grossed out by how blatantly chicks just drool over him, or jealous because who can compete with a guy who is just naturally incredibly super fucking handsome. But you know, girls are presented with images of physical hyper-idealized femininity a zillion times a day, so I emphathize. 

Other people have said this and I agree, but the Don Draper fantasy is also a fantasy about being Don Draper, which is everyone's fantasy (including Don's). Everybody wants to be hot and talented and rewarded for being hot and talented. Everybody wants to be respected and admired, with a desirable sexual partner in every borough.

Jon Hamm, real guy with the horrible fashion sense of a regular modern day type bro

That masculinity is a performance is not talked about enough, and one thing we need to do more of is help men recognize that it is a performance that they don't have to do (also, to not call them pussies). I see masculine performance everywhere, and it's always weird seeing guy friends put on their bro hats to talk to their bros.

It seems like an act men are doing for each other that neither one really believes in deep down, and even (especially?) smart guys are still prone to it. For a couple of sustained examples, see the recent Robert Downey Jr. and Walter Kirn interview in Rolling Stone, or the David Foster Wallace and David Lipsky book that just came out.

The counterpoint yang to Rivers Cuomo's (nerd who chose to make women the other) yin is Kurt Cobain, whose feelings of being an outsider/faggoty/not a bro actually made him sensitive and sympathetic to women and other historically oppressed groups. Kurt's most subversive and punk instinct was his feminism, which he manifested by wearing dresses on Headbanger's Ball and writing songs like "Rape Me." 

One of Michael Chabon's essays about masculinity was about driving his family through a snowstorm and being totally scared, but insisting on doing it anyway and then pretending he was calm and fearless about it. He talks about how he feigned bravery because his family seemed to need him to do that, that they just wanted somebody to tell them it was going to be okay. So maybe another part of it is that women need to stop telling guys to "man up," because manning up is bullshit that involves stuffing down your feelings, and that never works out well for anyone.

Liz Lemon actually manned up recently on 30 Rock and more or less redefined it as "momming up." The fantasies of manning up/momming up are the same, that somebody else will take charge. Implicit in the taking charge is that the mom or man will disavow all fear, thus placating the rest of the family. The reality is that everyone is somewhat freaked out in the kind of situations that really require charge taking. 

Alex Carnevale said about the Tina Fey backlash (paraphrased) "Why do people want to destroy this beautiful thing that is Liz Lemon? Being pathetic is what makes her original and hilarious." It's true. Watching TV the other day I said excitedly "It's just nice to see so many women portrayed as irresponsible losers." In a lot of comedies, women are often stuck being the straight man, and how boring is that.

Current sitcoms are full of wonderful omega females. Julia Louis Dreyfus's Elaine Benes is the template (maybe Rhoda if you want to go back further, maybe Gracie Allen if you want to go back even further than that) and she is great in CBS's Old Christine (as is Wanda Sykes). Amy Poehler is amazing on Parks & Recreation, as is Aubrey Plaza. All the minor female roles on The Office: Angela, Kelly Kapoor, Meredith, Phyllis. 

Modern Family's ginger/bear gay couple, and originator The Sarah Silverman Show's 

Sarah Silverman on The Sarah Silverman Show should sue Modern Family for ripping off their Ginger + Bear gay couple. They even stole the way that Brian Posehn and Steve Agee's characters never make out on the show because their intimacy is so deeply normal and boring like any other super long term serious couple. 

As for Liz Lemon's sexuality, it's something I think about all the time. We always hear how she'd rather do anything than have sex, but she apparently fucked Grizz (LOL). Comedians are almost always oversexed, for a comedian to be sort of prim and prudish is a great and relatively un-mined field for comedy.

did they get this idea from Kristen Wiig's baby doll hands Lawrence Welk character?

However the fact that she cast Jon Hamm as her love interest and has a now twice-mentioned Disney prince fetish (who doesn't?) tells me that Tina Fey's sexuality is actually a much deeper well that is quite far from being entirely pumped yet. 

But she should never be criticized for not admitting that she's hot, as though that equivocates to not "owning" her sexuality. Tina Fey is markedly more of a second wave feminist than a third. She is against strip clubs and will definitely not be thrilled when her daughter is old enough to shop at American Apparel.

All gender is a performance. That all it takes to turn Tina Fey from a normal person into a bombshell is some makeup, high heels, and a push-up bra is mostly a testament to the extreme fetishistic powers of makeup, high heels, and push-up bras.

Not to undermine her fantastic rack, but the boobs and the dark eyeliner and stripey mauve blush are just a smokeshow for what is actually hot about Tina Fey, which is (duh) her brain. That she is hottest with her glasses on just reinforces that we are actually attracted to how fucking smart and funny she is.

"Hot" Tina Fey is just Tina Fey in "sexy" feminine drag, just like Don Draper is just Dick Whitman/Jon Hamm in hyper-masculine drag. Maybe women just like guys in a suit. But it's actually probably just because rape fantasies (Don D. Raper).

"Rape fantasy" is kind of an oxymoron, as actual rape is by definition unpleasant, and at the very least the concept is a lot more grey-shaded than the words imply. Also, you know, lots of people fantasize about and fetishize things they have no interest in acting out in real life. See you in the rape tunnel!

What Don Draper and Liz Lemon really stand for is the fairly common fantasy that somebody else will step in and take care of everything else for you. Once thought of as a primarily female fantasy, the truth is that nobody wants to work full time in a soul-killing job, and men and women now both aspire equally to being stay at home trophy spouses. This is not a great or realistic fantasy for anyone because a) everybody has to work and b) basing your identity around somebody else will lead to resentment and contempt. That's why The Feminine Mystique got written in the first place!

Tying up your self-esteem with somebody else's accomplishments, even/especially somebody you love, is going to screw you over and make you feel terrible in the long run. However in a terrible economy where the bulk of jobs are both super shitty and competitively sought after, it makes a lot of sense. But if you really want to be happy, it's best to take the wheel yourself. Otherwise you're going to be so pissed when Don Draper drinks too much and crashes it into a ditch while fbanging Bobbie Barrett (and also like "her?") and it'll be nobody's fault but your own.

Molly Lambert is the managing editor of This Recording. She is on twitter and tumblr.

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