This story contains spoilers through the fifth episode of And Just Like That Season 2.
No one wearing a Harvard hoodie has ever looked as uncomfortable as Miranda Hobbes, the no-nonsense lawyer played by Cynthia Nixon, does in an episode from the first season of Sex and the City. In “Bay of Married Pigs,” Miranda agrees to be set up on a blind date at her firm’s annual softball game. But when a colleague introduces Miranda to her would-be match, she realizes her peers have misjudged the reason for her lack of a boyfriend. Flushed with embarrassment after meeting a perfectly nice woman named Syd (Joanna Adler), Miranda admonishes her colleague for his assumption about her sexuality. “Yeah, I’m not gay,” she says. “Christ, when did being single translate into being gay?”
“Bay of Married Pigs,” which aired in 1998, focused on the “cold war” between married people and singles—a simmering conflict in which couples cast single women as either enemies or objects of pity. In Miranda’s case, the partners at her firm gave her far more respect as a partnered lesbian than as a single straight woman, prompting her to pursue a fake relationship with Syd. After Miranda’s boss invites the couple over for dinner, Miranda comes clean about the charade—but kisses Syd on the elevator ride down. “Yup, definitely straight,” she declares, a conclusion that Syd quickly affirms.
In the 25 years since that episode aired, it’s become an ironic favorite of Sex and the City’s occasionally begrudging queer fans, if only for its tremendous meme potential. Some of its allure comes from the trajectory of Nixon’s real-life romance: The actor split from her longtime male partner in 2003 and began dating the education activist Christine Marinoni as the original series ended. Since then, she’s come out as bisexual, married Marinoni, and chosen to publicly identify as queer. Even before news of a Sex and the City reboot was confirmed in 2021, many queer fans hoped the series might revisit the possibility first raised at Miranda’s softball game. Miranda, in some circles, was the show’s most aspirational character—the most levelheaded of the bunch, and the one most likely to admonish her friends for orienting their entire lives around men. She had long functioned as an imperfect avatar for queer women on a show whose treatment of queerness sometimes veered into comically offensive territory.
In the first season of And Just Like That, the new series following three original Sex and the City characters, now in their 50s, Miranda did indeed get her queer story arc. But for many fans, the experience was bittersweet—in large part because of the love interest who kicks off her awakening. Miranda, still very much married to Steve (David Eigenberg), falls hard for the nonbinary stand-up comedian Che Diaz (Sara Ramírez), a polyamorous, pansexual agent of chaos who co-hosts X, Y, and Me, a podcast they describe as covering “gender roles, sexual roles, and cinnamon rolls.” The idea of a repressed, high-achieving lawyer having a midlife queer awakening isn’t at all unfathomable—nor is the possibility that she might become enamored with a younger, pot-smoking provocateur. Still, though, Che really grated. In their first scene, Che welcomed their two cisgender co-hosts onto the podcast by calling Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) “Ms. Cis,” introduced themselves as a “queer, nonbinary, Mexican Irish diva representing everyone else outside these two boring genders,” then hit a button on the soundboard that punctuated the zinger with a loud “WOKE MOMENT!”
On a recent episode of Sam Sanders’s podcast, Into It, one of the show’s writers, Samantha Irby, compared Diaz to “the kind of person who turns a coffee order into a lesson in colonialism … Che is like that turned up to a 12.” Not since Jenny Schecter, the insufferable ingenue at the center of The L Word, has a fictional character so thoroughly vexed pretty much every queer person I know—and countless strangers whose tweets, Instagram posts, and TikToks have crossed my screens. To quote one especially passionate review in The Daily Beast, “How unfortunate that a character like this is so heinous. No one wants to single out the only new LGBTQ+ character on a series as the worst. Yet Che Diaz leaves us no choice.”
I was surprised, then, to find myself feeling something akin to sympathy for Che in the most recent episode of And Just Like That. Season 1 ended with Miranda uncharacteristically leaving Steve, her friends, and an important career opportunity behind in order to follow Che to Los Angeles, where the comic is hoping to get the pilot of their semi-autobiographical coming-of-age sitcom green-lit. Whereas Che, in that first season, was a subject of easy parody, Season 2 makes it clear that the And Just Like That writers’ room wasn’t pulling aimlessly from a grab bag of internet social-justice lingo. Beginning with Episode 5, which aired on Thursday, the show adds depth to Che—a welcome shift that also creates more room for Miranda to address some of the existential questions she’s faced while imagining a future as Che’s live-in cheerleader.
In that episode, co-written by Irby and Lucas Froehlich, Che watches a New York focus group give feedback on a test screening of the pilot for their show, Che Pasa. One member of the group, a young queer person of color, takes issue with the character based on Che, calling their storyline a “phony, sanitized, performative, cheesy-ass, dad-joke, bullshit version of what the nonbinary experience is.” (“It sucked,” they add for good measure.) The criticism immediately brings Che to tears, shattering their belief in the meaning of their life-defining work. When Miranda later tries to console them by saying the respondents don’t know what they’re talking about, Che brushes her off: “A genderqueer person from Brooklyn tanked it! That call came from inside the house.”
Che could have been replying directly to real-life audience complaints about them, but the exchange works because it allows us to see the potential for a real character to emerge from the caricature. Producing art of any kind is an intensely vulnerable process, all the more so when the work is autobiographical. For queer and trans people, and especially people of color, getting a big break in Hollywood often means contending with the industry’s exhausting structural barriers and preference for easily reducible stereotypes. That type of feedback can be demoralizing, but it’s expected. Intra-community judgment, however, hits much harder, making the criticism Che receives especially devastating. “It took me 46 years to figure out who I am,” Che tells Miranda, “and then a focus group one hour to fuckin’ destroy me.”
Part of what has made Che so maddening to watch up until this point is the extent to which the show itself seemed unsure of who their character is, and what role they play in the story of the three central women. In Season 1, Che was the younger foil to Carrie, who was cast as Che’s prudish heterosexual counterpart on the podcast because she was uncomfortable with the paint-by-numbers jokes about queerness and the questions about sex. Charlotte (Kristin Davis) didn’t really interact with Che, except to question why Miranda would blow up her relationship with Steve almost overnight. Che existed, it seemed, not just to show Miranda that she was unhappy in her marriage, but also to teach the trio about their privilege—acting as a corrective to the original Sex and the City while expanding the sorts of lives the new series depicted.
That’s a lot to put on one character. Nonbinary characters do exist on other shows, with storylines that are rich and complex, but in the shadow of Sex and the City, a character like Che would’ve always struggled to be perceived as anything other than the show’s best approximation of what nonbinary people are like. In the original run, Carrie once referred to bisexuality as a “layover on the way to Gaytown.” So it’s not hard to see why including a character who identifies as “an equal-opportunity confuser” on the reboot would be seen as an attempt at writing “catnip to … Gen Zers who identify outside of the binary,” as James Factora wrote for Them in 2021.
Having the Gen X Che reckon with the limits of their story among younger queer people gives And Just Like That viewers the first real sign that the series doesn’t think the comedian actually does stand in for their whole community. On Into It, Irby remarked that Che’s pitched-up personality was “intentional.” In Season 2, though, “the artifice of Che starts to crumble.” We see that clearly in Irby and Froehlich’s episode, but it continues throughout the next two episodes too. Without spoiling anything, Che’s search for meaning brings them closer to Carrie, and pushes Miranda to explore her queerness with depth and curiosity rather than with awkward, selfish impulsivity.
By the seventh episode of the season, And Just Like That comes closer to fulfilling fans’ hopes for this new canonically queer Miranda, even if it hasn’t quite reconciled her with the Miranda who recoiled from kissing Syd. Steve gets more space for his own complicated reactions to Miranda’s journey, and to the dissolution of their beloved, if sometimes rocky, union. And Che, surprisingly, carves out a role in the troupe that feels more fleshed out than that of either the real-estate baddie Seema (Sarita Choudhury) or Miranda’s graduate-school professor turned roommate, Nya (Karen Pittman). Thank goodness for that, because I’m not sure I could handle even one more “WOKE MOMENT!”
"like this" - Google News
July 14, 2023 at 09:37PM
https://ift.tt/X7nNJtM
And Just Like That Addresses Its Che Diaz Problem - The Atlantic
"like this" - Google News
https://ift.tt/n4avUi7
Shoes Man Tutorial
Pos News Update
Meme Update
Korean Entertainment News
Japan News Update
No comments:
Post a Comment