celebrity gossip, academic style

Is she or isn’t she?

Rachel McAdams has movie-star wattage. She’s got a big smile, sparkling eyes, lots of roles, and no bad press. She looks good in many different hair colors. She’s Canadian. She’s never abrasive. If she can a.) get an Oscar nom, b.) star in a runaway hit with a truly star-making role (and no The Time Traveler’s Wife is not that movie) or c.) engage in a super high profile romance, full-out stardom is hers for the taking.

Rachel McAdams is NOT Lindsay Lohan

She got her first big breaks as the eponymous Hot Chick and embodying vapidity in Mean Girls. Since then, she was the gorgeous ‘straight woman’ in Wedding Crashers; she garnered praise for working the thriller in Red Eye; she played a believable intellectual sister in The Family Stone.

Getting ready to make me weep

Oh, did I mention she’s in a little film called The Notebook, no question the biggest weepie of the decade? Millions of fans have hitched their hopes and fantasies to the McAdams and Gosling’s portrayal of young love. So when the two met again at the MTV Movie Award to re-enact their ‘best kiss,’ sparks flew, and naturally they got together.

Reenacting the Famous Notebook Kiss

The message: their onscreen story was so powerful that it even rubbed off on the stars! And you, dear viewer, can experience the same sort of romance, simply by viewing The Notebook. On repeat. (Or, like me, just fastforwarding through the old people parts). McGosling (the new name for McAdams and ‘The Goz‘ - and I highly recommend clicking on that link, as it offers a fantastic and profane read on Gosling’s hotness, courtesy of The Stranger) became a sort of weird cultural touchstone: as Andy Samberg and Chris Parnell rap in “Lazy Sunday,” “I love those cupcakes like McAdams loves Gosling.”

McAdams has been called “The Next Julia Roberts” — in part for her megawatt smile, but also for her brand of intrinsic charisma. There’s something about Rachel McAdams - she doesn’t play that fantastic of unique roles, her love life, apart from a two dalliances with The Notebook costar Ryan Gosling, is private and unremarkable. So what is it?

Personally, I love myself some McAdams. I love her sparkly eyes, I love her playfulness. Or let me modify: I love how those characteristics manifest themselves in all of her roles, because I’ve actually seen very little (and read even less) about the ‘real’ McAdams. But she’s convinced me that that’s the kind of person that she is, and through relatively few roles: my understanding of her picture personality depends (perhaps too much) on her roles in The Notebook, The Family Stone, and most recently, State and Play and The Time Traveler’s Wife. It’s as if her turns in The Hot Chick, Mean Girls, and Wedding Crashers simply convince me that the ‘real’ her is the one of her other, more ‘natural’ roles. And I want to be her friend, and many men I know want to be her boyfriend. In other words, she’s the perfect star: well-rounded, likable, and desirable. She’s the anti Megan Fox, and, in truth, the anti Julia Roberts — who many men claim to find unattractive. She’s got it all.

And she has the affection of my kid brother.

My brother isn’t wont to celebrity romances: apart from a juvenile dalliance with Carrie Fischer (which had everything to do with Princess Lea and her bronze brassiere) I can’t think of any star he’s ever told me he finds attractive. But then there’s McAdams. He even has a favorite photo.

My brother, like me, is a nerd. He used to play a lot of Panzer War General; in his early college years, he asked for a complete collection of Proust. For Christmas. Dude reads Hegel for fun. So what is it about McAdams that make her accessible to the thinking man? Or, as I suggest in the title, the perfect thinking man’s pin-up? Granted, nerds love movie actresses. But that’s a different type of nerd altogether — we’re talking fanboys (and all the derogatory stereotypes associated with them) and their affection for Angelina Jolie, Megan Fox, and others soft on the eyes and unchallenging to the mind. But McAdams offers a different allure.

Which is why I’ve asked my brother to virtually hang out with me. He recently quit his gig at The New York Review of Books to go live in the middle of nowhere in Montana, freelance, and do things like write blog posts with his sister. I told him that I’d tell him why I thought he liked McAdams, and he told me he’d tell me why I was wrong. So here goes.

I think you like Rachel McAdams for a few reasons:
1.) Her beauty and body aren’t traditionally fetishized, which would rub you and your thinking man’s sensibilities the wrong way.
2.) Liking her doesn’t make you into a dude; in fact, liking her makes other women think you’re a good guy.
3.) In one of her roles — The Family Stone, the one we saw together for our annual Christmas Day movie — she plays a woman who embodies the qualities of snark, intelligence, vulnerability, and beauty that you would find desirable in your own potential girlfriend. In other words, you’d want to date her, and you’d even let her meet me, and even tell Mom about her, and she’d probably put up with you reading philosophy for leisure but call you on your bullshit.

Am I right OR AM I RIGHT.

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Brother respondz:

I would like, if possible, to move this discussion into the past tense: Why did I like Rachel McAdams? Because I’m not sure that I still do. I just saw two of her more recent films, Red Eye and State of Play, and I can’t say I really cared that much about her in either. Though it was nice that she was there. Oh, it’s Rachel! Did I ever tell you about the time I rode the elevator with her at work? There were a lot of film production companies in my building. That was a good day. But I didn’t really care. And I’m not even sure this is a change: there’s a desire for academics or other figures with cultural capital (I’m now a writer) to take an interest in pop culture. If you have to make small talk with someone in the mail room (or your sister — or those with lots of cultural capital who hate taking about ideas, a common occurrence in NYC), it’s helpful to have some assumed cultural center around which you can banter. Sports is one possibility; pop music another; movies stars another. But the fact is that I chose Rachel (we’re on a first name basis in case you haven’t noticed) as mine. Why?

Now that I’ve started to think about it, which I didn’t really do at first, I’m a little disturbed. A few points:

1. Rachel McAdams is the ultimate WASP. The first role I saw her in was Wedding Crashers, where she plays, I believe, the daughter of the Secretary of State or something. Then she went on to play this bratty daughter of a mainline Philadelphia (?) or some other old New England type clan in The Family Stone. She’s supposed to be a kind of universal materialist So-Cal materialist type in Mean Girls, and not all the Mean Girls in that film are white and WASP-y, but she’s clearly the leader because she’s the natural born WASP. Oh right, she’s the southern belle daughter of some aristocratic family in The Notebook. And then there’s Red Eye, where she runs a high class Florida hotel at the age of like 25 with her classy charms, and in the process saves the Assistant Director of the Department of Homeland Security. Which leaves a question: Is Rachel a Republican?

2. So I just watched State of Play, because I wanted to be a good brother and do some actual research for my sister’s blog, and then I read some of the reviews, and J. Hoberman, I believe, makes the obvious joke that Russel Crowe and Rachel are kinda like Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in that other great newspaper movie, His Girl Friday. Except of course State of Play kinda sucks and is trying much harder to be like All the President’s Men. I don’t think it would be unfair to say the movie is a cross between a little 30s screwball and 70s earnestness — part of why it doesn’t work at all. But then there’s The Family Stone, which is explicitly modeled on a 30s screwball, with the animated opening montage and all, even though again that movie totally sucks. But I don’t think it’s unfair to say that Rachel McAdams is most reminiscent of a 30s screwball star, perhaps specifically Rosalind Russell. And Rosalind Russell was famous, as I remember David Thomson telling me — because please, I’m not actually going to go and watch those lame old Rosalind Russell films — but she was famous for her very morally proper melodramas: His Girl Friday was just Howard Hawks figuring out how to make her sternness interesting, it was a total outlier. I think David Thomson calls Rosalind Russell a Republican.

Making sternness as attractive as possible

3. So we’re left with a few basic facts about Rachel: she walked out of the Vanity Fair nude cover shoot with Scarlett Johansson and Keira Knightley; she hasn’t done any nudity in any of her films, except the very early no budget My Name is Tanino, when she had no control over which rolls to take (I know this, among other reasons, thanks to a to-do list an editor I know once posted on the Stranger‘s blog: “2. Look up naked pictures of Rachel McAdams” or something like that); she has attempted, if I haven’t missed anything, no indie films whatsoever. Sorry, Nick Cassavetes, you’re not your dad. Maybe I’ve missed this, but she doesn’t play the game of celebrity at all — which is boring and very let’s say bourgeois. Rachel seems to be something of a prude.

4. Shouldn’t the thinking man’s pin-up be Maggie Gyllenhaal?

5. But the fact remains that she is the closest thing we have today to, if not Katharine Hepburn, then maybe Irene Dunne in The Awful Truth? I don’t know if I can imagine any other actress today playing that role. Or any of the other classic screwball roles. I’m a little uncertain what I think of Rachel’s can-do powder-puff feminism. She plays football with the guys in Wedding Crashers. She beats the crap out of an assassin in Red Eye (though he’s killed at the end by her dad — what can you do, it’s a Wes Craven film). She will apparently hand-cuff Sherlock Holmes to a bed and extort him in the film you and I will be watching this Christmas Day (Holmes, yes! finally something good will be at the Lewiston, Idaho theater on December 25). So maybe Rachel is really a third-wave feminist, and her refusal to play the celebrity game or do nudity reflects not the attitudes of a reactionary but those of a highly-developed twenty-first century popular female consciousness? Ha.

6. To sum up the three reasons you give for why I like Rachel — her body isn’t traditionally fetishized; liking her makes other women like me; she has spunk — all three, I think, can be put down to her resemblance to a classic Hollywood 30s screwball star, in which context her body certainly would have been fetishized (check out the dimple), most female stars, even at the time, would not have reflected badly on the men who liked them, and all women, in comedy at least, had real personality. It should be very very telling that we can’t imagine Rachel in a Judd Apatow film. Now that’s a real reactionary. And perhaps why she hasn’t gotten any very good roles, despite Manohla Dargis, in the ‘inside tips’ she and Tony Scott pretended to give out to Hollywood last year, shouting: “Give Rachel McAdams more roles!”

7. Maybe I still love Rachel? Should I? Please tell!

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Sister briefly responds:
She has done an indy picture - Married Life — it just received a very limited release, in part because it wasn’t very good. I saw it; she has bleach blond hair and we’re supposed to believe she loves Chris Cooper. It’s odd, in part because it doesn’t compliment the McAdams image. The screwball comparison honestly had not even crossed my mind, which is ridiculous. You love screwballs! So do I, but I should’ve recalled that your favorite female roles are those fast-talking, verbally eviscerating females of His Girl Friday and The Awful Truth. But I don’t think McAdams is our screwball hero. She’s not, on her face, ‘smart’ enough. I don’t watch her in The Notebook and think that she’s tremendously smart and cunning; I watch her and think she has a specific and irresistible type of beauty and would probably be fun to hang out with. In State of Play, I wish she were in my grad program. Her picture personality is indeed assertive, but, as you point out, assertive in a Condi Rice sort of way, as opposed to, say, Tina Fey, who might actually hold the contemporary screwball comedienne mantel. (And you’re right: Maggie Gyllenhaal is the thinking-man’s pin-up, but that’s because she’s a 21st century Mae West, who had much more of a pin-up body than any of the screwball comedians you mention. Men were attracted to the minds and flirtatiousness of Hepburn, Dunne, and Russell, not necessarily their bodies, were were, as a rule, long, lean, and the opposite of voluptuous.)

But I’m not ready to label her a ‘Republican.’ How do you reconcile her role in The Family Stone? She has a canvas NPR bag and drives a Volvo! And she’s attempting to bring down big corrupt government (and protecting the fourth estate!) and State of Play. As for the idea of third wave feminism — possible. Distancing herself from the clearly postfeminist body politics of ScarJo and Keira Knightly certainly speaks loudly. But she’s said little else. Which is part of the problem, of course — our speculation is based near wholly on her picture personality, leaving us to either map the characteristics of her characters onto the ‘real’ Rachel or fill in the gaps ourselves. (As you can do in your mind: Rachel would love me! I hang out in the West Village!)

In other words, the fact that she hasn’t attempted to flesh our her star image has made it easy first for you to like her, just as it has now made it easy for you to dislike her. Her image is subject to your shifting sense of who you are. I mean, when we watched The Family Stone, I don’t think either one of us was fully conscious of what WASP meant, or what the Diane-Keaton-headed family of that film represented. Now, in hindsight, after you’ve lived in New York for three years, it’s easier to find those depictions problematic, and your affection for her dated. Finally, her lack of public image once was endearing; now it renders her a prude.

Ultimately, your experience illuminates greater trends in celebrity and fan culture: stars become stars because they mean something important to enough people at a certain time. The stars that we like — that we want to be friends with, that we desire, that we think would offend us — speak loudly as to the type of people that we are. Because I’m your sister and I know everything, I know that you’ve changed a lot over the last five years. Along with the fact that you now own towels and pillowcases, you also don’t like Rachel McAdams, or at least the part of you that liked her has matured, learned more, become disillusioned, become attached to different female and cultural ideals. I mean, you didn’t always like screwball heroines — but when you figured out that you did, or when you tell other people that you do, that signifies something crucial about the type of person that you are, the type of things you find funny, the type of woman who challenges you.

So you don’t have to like Rachel McAdams anymore. And maybe the fact that you won’t find another actress to love — other than Irene Dunne — is all that you, or your friends, need to know.
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Brother concludez:
Shouldn’t the fact that I own towels and pillowcases just make me love Rachel more? I bet she has lots of towels and pillowcases, with very high thread counts. (By the way, I’ve always owned a towel and a pillowcase, just maybe not plural.)

I don’t think Tina Fey could play a screwball heroine. She’s completely afraid! She’s like the female Judd Apatow. I haven’t seen 30 Rock since the first season but if it’s stayed the same that show is all about Tina Fey getting put in her place by the wise Alec Baldwin, whose explicit conservatism always turns out miraculously right in the end. And Tina Fey writes that show. Amazing.

There is the question, since we have no idea who Rachel really is, of what we take for her most representative role. Certainly she’s most famous for The Notebook. But I first saw her in Wedding Crashers, where, I have to say I haven’t seen that film since it came out, but I remember thinking she was quick witted and tended to put Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn in their place. You’re right that she doesn’t strike us as incredibly intelligent. But neither does Irene Dunne or most of the screwball heroines, even Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby. For me I think the above confusions do show a great deal about how I’ve changed, and not how Rachel has changed. And it’s not like there’s anything wrong with loving a WASP. Guess what, all of the classic screwball women are WASPs! Like really really waspy.

I also don’t think my disappointment with the films Rachel has made since Wedding Crashers is mine alone. She just hasn’t gotten very good scripts. And I would hypothesize that this has much more to do with the contemporary state of Hollywood than it does with Rachel. You don’t have to be super smart to be a screwball star; you just have to be quick and alive; and I think Rachel is quick and alive. But I don’t think Hollywood is. You mentioned that she’s been called “the next Julia Roberts.” Given what you’ve been writing about the decline of stars, it’s not clear to me we’re going to have another Julia Roberts, much less another Katharine Hepburn or Irene Dunne — or Barbara Stanwyck! How did I leave her out?

The true love of my life

Sister has the last word:
INDEED.