by Spitz, Marc
In the same year that she appeared in David Gordon Green’s bleak All the Real Girls, a kind of Bruce Springsteen album track come to life on film in which she plays a greasy-haired blonde trapped in a dead-end town, she also made John Favreau’s Elf, a sunny holiday classic in which she sings “Baby It’s Cold Outside” with Will Ferrell’s overgrown Santa’s helper. She was Shelley Duvall in Kubrick’s The Shining one minute, and Shelley Duvall in Fairy Tale Theater the next. Brooding. “Actressy.” “The girl” to Will Ferrell’s showboating. She also played “the girl” to Jim Carrey’s showboating in Yes Man. Or perhaps it was just a question of receiving the kind of style makeover that public figures and artists receive all the time. They reinvent, they get better clothes and cooler hair, they start dropping the right names.
“She had no style and she was mousy-looking,” says Daily Beast contributor Tricia Romano, who would post one of a trilogy of controversial essays in 2011, the year the new, retro-cool Deschanel went supernova, “and it was like she had gotten this sort of look and once she adopted this look, everything changed.”
The change in appearance seemed timed to what would become Deschanel’s signature role, the 2009 hit romantic comedy (500) Days of Summer. Zooey’s character, Summer, with her bangs and sundresses and handiness with Smiths lyrics, is the ideal girl, a smart, funny, but gorgeous dreamboat. She also leaves poor Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Tom destroyed because she cannot be possessed. “You don’t think a woman can be free and independent?” she asks his dimwitted friend. She drives Tom to tears, but she also wakes him up, moves him from his literal summer to his more world-wise autumn.
She is the free spirit who quotes Belle and Sebastian in her high school yearbook page (“Color my life with the chaos of trouble . . .”) but also compares herself to Sid Vicious in her breakup speech to Tom. There’s a clip of the two reenacting a scene from Alex Cox’s cult classic Sid and Nancy, and Deschanel is sure enough the doomed junkie. She was even in talks to play Janis Joplin on film, and she does an authentically bluesy version of “I Put a Spell on You” with her Indie band She & Him. That duo (which also features singer-songwriter M. Ward) is one of the very few actor-led bands that isn’t a punch line. They’ve put out three volumes of smart retro pop on big Indie Merge Records, and have respectably high Pitchfork reviews.
In Blakeian terms, she was a Tyger and she was also a Lamb, a complex and puzzling and captivating young star, and then, at some point, the Lamb ate the big cat and she became a Super Lamb. Then the knives came out. And heads were scratched: “Wait. Is she for real? And if so, what the fuck happened?”
I don’t mean to be reductive, but I should probably point out that in 2010, the winter after (500) Days of Summer, Deschanel turned thirty. Leaving her twenties, her actual youth, prompted her to pick up a ukulele and never look back. The cynic might just observe that she fell into something marketable, which everyone in show business seeks to do: something to dispense with job insecurity, establish dominance in the cutthroat industry, and sell something.
“Now we only see this character of her—a quasi-version of herself,” says Romano. “We don’t know what she’s actually like, but she’s got to be a pretty shrewd businesswoman. But we don’t even see her being a tough bitch. We just see cutesy girl, and the problem is everyone wants to be the cutesy archetype too.” Deschanel quickly got blamed for leading a march backward, away from the perceived ground gained by the feminist movement. The character of “Zooey the Retro dork” was, to her credit, so appealing that many, especially the young and searching, happily followed her there, many of them unaware of her earlier, edgier work. It was as if the first Cure song you ever heard was “Friday I’m in Love” and you never bothered to explore anything that came before.
“Deschanel’s artful kookiness has, as her star has ascended, threatened to engulf her entire persona—which would be an unfortunately toothless end game for an actress who displayed such edgy mettle in her early films,” Salon observed.
Deschanel, like everyone in the Internet age, was aware of the criticism and managed it well for a time. When Saturday Night Live cast member Abby Elliott portrayed Deschanel in the recurring sketch Bein’ Quirky with Zooey Deschanel, all the commentary about her was there, as were her now signature brown bangs. She stopped being the kind of actress who disappeared into roles and became a movie star whom people tailored the roles around—and who essentially played the same character every time. Deschanel got the joke. When she hosted SNL herself, she, of course, appeared on Bein’ Quirky as Mary-Kate Olsen, looking waifish, complete with huge sunglasses and blond wig.
Still, the self-deprecation only went so far, and soon Deschanel, like Cobain before her, found herself as something of polarizer—both a Twee Tribe icon and an Indie apostate, as she seemed to not only advance her persona but also blatantly go for the cash with the website she cofounded, HelloGiggles. The site is a digital universe of everything girly and quirky on the surface (“Live Owl Cam Cuteness” ran one feature; “Adventures in Thrifting” is another). There are “Nails of the Day” photos and also serious, issue-based columnists. Visitors just have to dig past all the Tweeness to find anything serious.
HelloGiggles had the misfortune to launch in the same era as another pair of “girl-aimed” sites. Former Sassy editor Jane Pratt started xoJane, originally a collaboration with Tavi Gevinson, who had been blogging on her own Style Rookie site since her very early teens. Pratt’s Indie bona fides were set in concrete thanks to her founding and editing of Sassy, which in 2011 was something of a legend; its features “Cute Band Alert” and “It Happened to Me” are now part of the Indie vernacular. Chloë Sevigny had been an intern there. Sassy had a glow that surely must have been catnip to a cool teen like Gevinson. Pratt herself in a New York magazine profile in 2012 placed her “emotional age” at fifteen. But somehow the supergroup never clicked. “Tavi and her dad couldn’t come to terms, and backed out,” New York’s Carl Swanson revealed in his Pratt profile. “Now Tavi has her own site, Rookie. On its masthead, Pratt is listed as its ‘fairy godmother.’” Romano attempted but failed to interview Gevinson for her Daily Beast piece on the puzzling and troubling “girliness” of the new wave of female-targeted websites. “I kind of feel like Tavi was like, ‘Yeah sure!’ and once she saw what xoJane was, she probably wised up and said, ‘That’s not at all what I want my brand to be.’”
Instead Gevinson launched her own website, really a Web magazine, Rookie, and despite her age quickly surpassed both HelloGiggles and xoJane as the only authentic voice for girls and young women; ironically, it seems like the cooler, Punk rock older sister site to those magazines, which are run by pop icons in their, respectively, thirties and fifties. A banner ad on Rookie recently featured Doc Marten boots, whereas xoJane was advertising a Rachel McAdams romantic comedy. Still, none of them offered much to the culture-hungry adult woman.
“I thought, I don’t understand why all these websites have a girlish tone. Does everything have to end in an exclamation point and have a sort of valley girl tone to its language? There’s Jezebel,” Romano says, singling out the serious political and feminist-culture site, “but it can get shouty and enraged. I want to read about political figures without exclamation points.”
Then, at 3:02 P.M. on June 4, 2011, Deschanel tweeted to her millions of followers, “I wish everyone looked like a kitten.” A simple, wistful, not entirely serious “wish.” Suddenly it was as if Gloria Steinem, Joan Didion, and Courtney Love had favorited and retweeted it and the feminist movement was done.
Deschanel’s carefully styled and marketed cult was, at the time, bigger than ever. She was no longer just an actress; she was an ideal. And now she was about to star as the lead in her first television series for Fox, New Girl. The buzz was already great. The show, created by Liz Meriwether, was talked about in the same breath as classics like Seinfeld and Friends: witty, urban, sexy. Others worried that it did little more than showcase a woman over thirty tacitly saying
to her increasing fan base that in order to get ahead, you had to act like either a sexpot or a little girl.
In February of 2011, NBC’s 30 Rock had run a much-discussed episode entitled “TGS Hates Women.” Shamed by feminist website Joan of Snark (clearly Jezebel), Liz Lemon hires a new staff writer, Abby Flynn. Before long, Flynn, who wears pigtails, gym socks, and short shorts and speaks in a gooey, giggly baby voice à la Zooey, vexes Lemon and beguiles the male staff with her “sexy baby” talk. Fed up, Liz asks her to meet outside the offices, by a statue of Eleanor Roosevelt, and tries to disabuse her of the idea that she has to play dumb and immature to get ahead in the male-run industry. “Look, I know it can be hard. Society puts a lot of pressure on us to act a certain way, but TGS is a safe place, so you can drop the sexy-baby act and lose the pigtails,” Liz says, attempting to be big-sisterly.
“I don’t have to explain myself to you. My life is none of your business,” Abby counters. Lemon’s retort: “Except it is, because you represent my show and you embarrass me.”
Overnight, Deschanel seemed to become a similar enemy and, to some, a symbol for what was going wrong in the broader popular culture. If someone was marketing overpriced crocheted narwhals on the arts-and-crafts-marketplace website Etsy, it was Deschanel’s fault.
As this resentment built, Fox’s marketing campaign for New Girl was inescapable. Deschanel was on the side of city buses “bein’ quirky” with the phrase SIMPLY ADORKABLE over her head. Writer Julie Klausner, who also hosts the weekly podcast How Was Your Week?, posted a piece to her personal blog entitled, “Don’t Fear the Dowager.” It quickly became viral after being picked up by Jezebel. “There’s so much ukulele playing now, it’s deafening,” Klausner, a huge pop-culture enthusiast and keen observer, wrote. “So much cotton candy, so many bunny rabbits and whoopie pies and craft fairs and kitten ephemera, and grown women wearing converse sneakers with mini skirts. So many fucking birds.” Klausner lamented the fact that women were not able to be mature, sophisticated feminists. “Women with master’s degrees who are searching for life partners, list ‘rainbows, Girl Scout cookies, and laughing a lot’ under ‘interests’ on their Match.com profiles,” Klausner jokes.
Klausner implied that companies were profiting off this by selling ridiculously girlie clothes to mature women. “When I shop now, I have to make sure that garments I think are dresses, are not actually rompers.” And the women themselves, who were acting like sexy preteens instead of serious-minded, sophisticated adult women, were motivated by similarly less-than-selfless ends. “We all know these manic pixie Muppet Babies are really just in it for the peen.”
“I wrote it knowing I would be heard in the sense that I edited it a bunch of times,” Klausner says. “I’m prone to random feminine outbursts of rage, so every once in a while I will tweet something about a rape case or Olivia Munn. I’d also recently rewatched Tootsie and thought, ‘If we were to remake it today Dustin Hoffman would be with Terri Garr’s character. He wouldn’t be with Jessica Lange’s character. Terri Garr’s character would be the female lead. She’s a girl. She’s not a woman.’ I lamented the loss of the female adults in pop culture that are not either over the hill in a Real Housewives/Christine Baranski kind of way. They’re either kitsch or they’re fawns. I’m not saying all women that dress younger or act younger are smarter than they let on. I’m sure a great many of them are not—but I do know that there is a very strong history of women trying to make themselves less intimidating for their male counterparts, and that can involve a sort of lack of maturity, wherewithal, sophistication, and intelligence.”
There were no less than three shows with Girl in the title debuting that fall, as the debate ran on over what a grown woman should look and behave like. As it turns out, all three, New Girl, Two Broke Girls, and Girls, were high-quality runaway hits. New Girl was more of an ensemble than most expected, with Deschanel—as Jess, a teacher recently dumped by her boyfriend—sharing the best moments with her male costars, who play the renters of an L.A. loft. Jess answers a Craigslist ad on short notice and finds herself with three male roommates. It would be Max Greenfield’s Schmidt and his “douche jar” that would emerge as the show’s breakout success, and a romance with Nick (Jake Johnson) that would captivate audiences in that old Sam-and-Diane, Maggie-and-David, will-they-or-won’t-they fashion. In other words, Deschanel’s Twee bender was well tempered, and the show succeeded as a result.
“There is a very strong female energy there,” says Curtis Armstrong, who now has a recurring role. “Zooey knows comedy, has a strong sense of herself, and is wonderful at improv. People would hate me for saying this, but this show feels to me like a contemporary Mary Tyler Moore Show. MTM is considered prehistoric by New Girl fans, I’m sure, and obviously the humor is very different. But that single woman, accessible and attractive, surrounded by eccentrics, is an old standby in TV comedy.”
It may be decades before New Girl, one of the most consistent and original sitcoms in years, gets its due. Each week, culture sites were on alert as they recapped the misadventures of Jess, Winston, Nick, and Schmidt; Vanity Fair’s site, where I was a contributor, would even grade them: “adorkable” or “tweepulsive.”
After a point, in an effort to defuse the bomb, Meriwether even addressed the issue in a typically smart way. In a late-season story line involving Julia, a girlfriend of Nick’s played by Lizzy Caplan, Jess gets an expensive traffic ticket and entreats Julia to argue her case. Julia is perfectly cast to take on a real-life issue in the meta-sitcom universe. Caplan is a veteran of the canceled but cult-beloved Starz comedy Party Down, and that show’s genius—and failure—gave her credibility. When Julia reviews Jess’s case, she shrugs, “You never know, the judge might go for that thing.”
“What thing?” Jess asks.
“Your whole thing with the cupcakes and braking for birds. It’s a great thing. The big beautiful eyes like a scared baby. I bet that gets you out of all kinds of stuff.”
It sets up Deschanel’s big answer-song moment. “I brake for birds,” Jess admits, addressing all of the haters indirectly, but unmistakably too. “I rock a lot of polka dots. I have touched glitter in the last twenty-four hours. I spend my entire day talking to children, and I find it fundamentally strange that you’re not a dessert person. That’s just weird and it freaks me out. And I’m sorry I don’t talk like Murphy Brown, and I hate your pantsuit and I wish it had ribbons on it to make it slightly cute. And that doesn’t mean I’m not smart and tough and strong.”
There were those who argued that this was the new feminism, and that Deschanel was indeed leading a movement toward equality. If Judd Apatow’s doughy boy-men of hits like Superbad and Funny People could become major movie stars, why couldn’t a ukulele-playing girl-woman do the same?
“I’m just being myself. There is not an ounce of me that believes any of that crap that they say. We can’t be feminine and be feminists and be successful? I want to be a fucking feminist and wear a fucking Peter Pan collar. So fucking what?” Deschanel would later tell Glamour.
Blogger Tami Winfrey Harris raised another, more provocative issue in regard to Twee at this time. Her essay, called “Who Is the Black Zooey Deschanel?,” brought race into the conversation. Harris noted that when a white person puts a strand of color in their hair, it’s quirky, but when a woman of color does the same, there’s a double standard. “What I’m really interested in is how Kool-Aid-colored dos are evaluated differently,” she wrote, “based on the race of the wearer. Black Girl with Long Hair gets at this issue: ‘Any black girl sporting a weave like this after 1999 would be considered GHETTO/YARDIE/HOOD!’ Making it hardly a new trend . . . Rainbow hair on a black woman provokes a whole lot of judgments about class and education, even among other black people. Meanwhile, a bright blue streak in a white woman’s hair is accepted differently, I think.”
Winfrey Harris found New Girl and Deschanel appealing, but wondered if it would be as much if there was a woman of color in the
lead. There’ve been similar figures, the Web series Awkward Black Girl among them, but they remained obscure. Laina Dawes’s book What Are You Doing Here? similarly chronicled her experience being one of the only African-American women at Punk and metal shows.
“A lot of the qualities of the ‘Manic Pixie Dream Girl’ are not ones that society necessarily associates with women of color,” Winfrey Harris says today. “I can’t think of a black actress that could ever be slotted into a kind of Zooey Deschanel role where she could play a main character where she is kind of quirky, cute, little-girlish, and needs to be taken care of by her roommates. It almost harkens back to the ‘cult of true womanhood,’ that nineteenth-century idea of what a proper woman should be—very chaste and very innocent and very feminine and very girlish.”
There was nothing giggly or goofy about Lena Dunham, whose Girls launched the following year, in April 2012. An Oberlin grad, Dunham certainly had her feminist bona fides, and never had to declare them repeatedly to major magazines as Deschanel had. She was also a natural provocateur. Take this scene from “Hooker on Campus,” her pre–Tiny Furniture short: kids are rushing to class, and she stands on the common road, dressed in trashy streetwalker garb, shrugging, “Are you interested in pussy?” In another film, made famous via YouTube, she lingers in a fountain like Anita Ekberg in La Dolce Vita.
“You wanna be naked in front of people that don’t necessarily want to see you naked,” a boyfriend once told her. Her sexuality was aggressive, bold, and positive; her writing had a winning, very Jewish wit to it. She was well versed in just about every major Twee icon, from Sendak to Stillman to Baumbach to even Miranda July.
Dunham was also hugely influenced by Bujalski and Swanberg and was a fan of mumblecore. That her character in Girls is named Hannah is no accident. Ultimately it’s fame, not politics, that forces the audit. When Dunham debuted with Tiny Furniture, nobody questioned the world she was depicting. It was clearly one she knew well, of bohemian privilege and urban social jockeying.
