All About Eve, waiting to be "chosen"
Before the pandemic, I took a couple of private waltz lessons, with the intention of learning how to waltz well enough that I’d feel confident going to dances. Once I got to a baseline level of skill, the instructor warned me that sometimes the men are jerks to women who are new to the scene. “Sometimes, if a step goes wrong, they’ll instinctively blame you, even if it wasn’t your fault,” he said. Then he said something I’ll probably remember for the rest of my life: “Men are afraid of looking like they don’t know what they’re doing. And women are afraid they won’t be chosen.”
The idea that one of the main hetero female social fears is the fear of not being chosen sloshed around in my head for a while, and recently I’ve been thinking about it in connection with a particular trope of fiction by women that I wrote about before in this piece about Anita Brookner: the More Beautiful Woman, or, perhaps, the chosen woman. To recap: many, many novels written by women feature a duo. One woman, usually the heroine, is quiet, intelligent, observant, and vulnerable. The other woman, the object of her gaze, has some combination of the following qualities: she’s beautiful (mandatory), beloved by men (always), charismatic (most of the time), rich (sometimes). She also often has “bad girl” energy; she gets away with things and is admired even when she acts erratically. The quiet, intelligent heroine is fascinated by her but also resents her; she wants what the other woman has while secretly believing that she herself is the superior of the two. Often there’s a class dimension to the tension between the women, but more often, it’s about beauty and men.
The most-discussed recent example is the “Brilliant Friend” series by Elena Ferrante, but additional examples are so numerous1 that whenever I see a thinkpiece about a “complex female friendship” story that falls unaltered into this “chosen vs. not-chosen woman” mold, I roll my eyes a bit. I’ve started to see these kinds of character pairings as at least as tired and formulaic as the justly-maligned Manic Pixie Dream Girls.
I started to wonder what an inversion of this formula would look like, and some recent episodes of Karina Longworth’s “Erotic 90’s” podcast series about the movies of that decade gave me a clue. There’s one plot formula she characterizes as “The [blank] From Hell,” where a “normal” person is terrorized by someone who enters their life under benign circumstances and then sets about wrecking it. Fatal Attraction, the movie that in her telling kicked off the trend, features a woman (evil hookup) terrorizing a man, but many of its most interesting retellings are woman-on-woman: The Hand that Rocks the Cradle (evil nanny), Single White Female (evil roommate), Poison Ivy (evil friend).
In these stories, the protagonist is the woman with the advantages. She has some or all of the following: a loyal man, a good career, a family, beauty. But, crucially, she’s insecure or vulnerable in some way — overwhelmed, lonely — and another woman appears who promises to help her with her problems. The newcomer starts by pushing small boundaries, then graduates to larger ones. Gradually she reveals her intention to take what the heroine has and appropriate it for herself.2 The formula is inverted, if still intact: the chosen woman and the not-chosen woman wanting to switch places, playing a zero-sum game.
The urtext of this movie plot is All About Eve, the 1950 masterpiece starring Bette Davis and Anne Baxter, which is set in the New York theatre world and is easily one of my top five favorite movies. Longworth doesn’t mention it (which makes sense since it’s neither erotic nor 90’s), but it’s the clear ancestor to the likes of Single White Female.
The story: Margo Channing, a celebrated actress who is insecure about her age, is introduced to Eve Harrington, a young fan who haunts the stage door and claims to have seen every performance of her play. Eve is pretty, but not in a threatening way, and she has a tear-jerking life story involving young widowhood that’s designed to elicit sympathy. With some nudges from Margo’s best friend Karen, Eve is installed as her personal assistant and then as her understudy. Margo begins to suspect that Eve is more ambitious than she’s letting on and lashes out in anger, but her fears are dismissed as insecurity and paranoia. While Margo seems bitchy and out-of-control, Eve appears the innocent victim, and she takes advantage by manipulating Margo’s friends into helping her land the lead in a play originally written for her benefactor. Eve wins in the end — the movie opens with her accepting a major acting award for said play, with the rest of the story told in flashback — but she does get a kind of comeuppance.
I love this movie for many reasons, chiefly the spectacular script by Joseph L. Mankiewicz (younger brother to Herman, the subject of David Fincher’s Mank) and the equally spectacular performance by Bette Davis as Margo. One of its big set-piece scenes is a disastrous party where Margo, on her fifth martini, requests that the hired entertainment play Liszt’s Liebestraum over and over again. Later in the movie, hearing Liebestraum on the car radio, she declares “I detest cheap sentiment” and switches it off. The movie has cleverer lines, but that one is my favorite.
If the movie has a flaw, it’s that Anne Baxter as Eve is not a credible threat to Margo as a stage star. Bette Davis’s performance makes the audience take Margo’s stardom for granted; Eve’s success has to be taken on faith, since Anne Baxter has only a fraction of Davis’s bravura and screen presence. No one in the movie besides Davis has anything like star quality, with one very notable exception: Marilyn Monroe in a small but scene-stealing role as an aspiring actress who can’t act3. When I imagine Monroe in the Eve part, it feels like a lost opportunity, although it would undoubtedly have changed its character. Part of what makes Eve initially seem trustworthy to Margo and her friends is her general lack of sexiness.
Eve is the clear villain of the movie, but — to return to the theme — some notice deserves to be given to Karen, the best friend who introduces Eve into Margo’s life, defends her from suspicion, and then uses an underhanded trick to bring about her stage debut. Karen, who is not an actress or “creative” and therefore has the lowest status in their friend group, resents Margo for dominating their social life, for having the freedom to misbehave and make scenes, for possessing the kind of personal gravity that makes lesser persons orbit around her. Though Karen is ultimately loyal to her friend, she admits that she helps advance Eve’s career partly to punish Margo and take her down a peg. But it’s Karen who takes the punishment when Eve nearly steals her husband: “It felt helpless, that helplessness you feel when you have no talent to offer — outside of loving your husband,” she muses in a voiceover. “How could I compete? Everything Lloyd loved about me, he had gotten used to long ago.”
Even Margo fears not being chosen. In a famous scene, she tells Karen that for women, career accomplishments are worthless if you don’t have a man: “In the last analysis, nothing is any good unless you can look up just before dinner or turn around in bed - and there he is. Without that, you’re not a woman. You’re something with a French provincial office or a book full of clippings. But you’re not a woman. Slow curtain, The End.” Being Margo, she needs to temper her sentiment with irony. This “being a woman” speech is the moment when Margo disappoints me, not because I expect a movie made in 1950 to be progressive about women, but because it seems like a much worse self-diminishment than the five martinis and the insecure barbs. Bill just isn’t worth it.
But the movie itself doesn’t believe her. It’s overwhelmingly clear that the man isn’t the big prize: it’s the Sarah Siddons Award for Best Actress that’s worth backstabbing for. Women have complained for decades of being depicted in books and movies as perpetually in competition with each other, tearing each other down in the quest for male attention. I agree with this complaint, which is why I shake my head at the proliferation of “beautiful friend” stories marketed as being about “the complexities of female friendship.” I wish this narrative were interrogated more often. At least the women in All About Eve were fighting for something glorious.
Of the two fears my waltz teacher mentioned — the fear of humiliation and the fear of not being chosen — the former at first seems more easily resolvable. Humiliation can happen at any time and must be constantly guarded against, but once you’re chosen, you’re chosen, right? The trouble with seeking to be chosen is that it, too, requires endless guards and fortifications. The better thing is to seek to choose for yourself.
Some examples: Conversations with Friends, Sally Rooney; Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Anita Loos; Villette and Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë; The Robber Bride, Margaret Atwood; Rebecca, Daphne DuMaurier; Swing Time, Zadie Smith; Jacob Have I Loved, Katherine Patterson; Wicked, by Gregory Maguire (rare male author example), pretty much everything Anita Brookner wrote. For movies: Bridesmaids, Mean Girls, Ghost World. Interestingly, Jane Austen nibbles at the edges but mostly stays away from this plot.
Another dimension that I won’t get into but am fascinated by is stories about women who alter themselves to become other, more idealized women — or are threatened by a woman who is becoming them. Vertigo is the obvious one, but there’s also Persona (wrote about it here) and movies like Black Swan.
Actually, I’ll also make an exception for Thelma Ritter.