Emma Stone and Steve Carrell |
Where were you in 1973 when Billie Jean King played Bobby
Riggs at the Astrodome? I was where many
other Americans were, watching it on TV.
Visually it was odd. The
Astrodome was huge and the tennis court was small. This was not a tennis venue. Even 13 year old me could tell that. And what I remember most – but what was not
depicted in the movie – was that Bobby Riggs (what thirteen year old had heard
of Bobby Riggs) intentionally dumped his first serve into the net to express
his disdain for Billie Jean King. I hated
him for that. Billie Jean King was cool –
I liked watching her play on TV. Plus, you
should always respect your opponent. And
when it became apparent to me early on that Billie Jean was going to win, I
kind of thought Bobby deserved to lose – but perhaps more importantly I thought
that he wasn’t in BJK’s class (and she did take him apart). It felt like a foregone conclusion that she
would win.
The movie Battle of the Sexes manages to make that foregone
conclusion – I did watch it on TV and knew who was going to win – not seem so
foregone at all. Billie Jean King is
played by Emma Stone. Emma Stone brings
to life a person who is confident, but not brash, intense while still being
human – in a word, she captures some very important aspects of BJK. That said, she is not BJK any more than Will
Smith was Ali. The subjects of biopics –
even very good ones – I Walked the Line, Ray, Julia and me, and we also watched
Jackie this weekend – are always, not just to my eye but certainly to my eye –
more beautiful than the very beautiful actors who portray them. Don’t get me wrong – Joaquin Phoenix is much
prettier than Johnny Cash could ever hope to be. Johnny Cash is not, to my eye, an attractive
man, but he is beautiful because of – I don’t know what – his inner
beauty? My attachment to the way he sits
behind that pock marked face and practically dares you not to love him,
sometimes in spite of himself can’t be topped by the appreciation of a prettier
boy trying to do the same thing. If you
want to see how beauty is not skin deep, watch a biopic and then remember the
person being depicted.
Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs |
In the best biopics, as Emma Stone does here and as Smith
did with Ali, the actor who portrays someone we know well captures essential
qualities of the person but doesn’t do an impression: they don’t mimic their
subject. They become the character. I think, then, the irony is that no one can
play us better than we play ourselves.
One of the reasons that we want to see a biopic like this is that we
want to be in touch with the person who is being depicted. We get instead a ghost of the person that we
know – a representation. And, at least
in the case of this movie, but I think more generally, we get to know that
person in a whole new way. We get to
know them intimately. This is, I
suppose, the way that we get to know our parents in the process of going through
a psychoanalysis. We remember aspects of
important early figures, and in so far as, even if they aren’t like those
figures, we imagine others – in particular our analyst (though I think this
happens all the time with, for instance, our spouses) reminds us of aspects of
them, and the task is to actually discover them (both our parents and/or other
early caregivers and our analyst and/or spouse) in other ways that they in fact
were or are is a tremendous achievement.
OK, that was a psychoanalytically determined and dense sentence. Let me take a paragraph to unpack it (if you
understood it as written, just skip the next paragraph).
Just as Billie Jean King – someone that I “knew” from
watching her on T.V. – is both someone that I am (weirdly but I hope not
creepily) attached to and that I remember, but is now a ghost – someone from my
past that I might compare to current tennis players, so my mother, who is
someone I am genuinely and deeply attached to and is someone that I “knew” from
a particular perspective – as her son – actually as her eldest son who had the
particular attributes that I have – I have internalized a version of her – or more
precisely a version of her in relationship to me – and this is a ghost that I
carry with me and compare to people in my current life. I may use the feel of
that relationship to anticipate the rhythm of those current relationships in my life,
occluding in the process both my memory of my mother and my ability to perceive
the other in their own right (I make assumptions about my spouse and my analyst
based on what has gone before and what I have learned to anticipate in intimate
relationships). In a word, I project –
or imagine – that they fit that template more completely than they actually do
because there are feelings – for instance of attachment – that tap into the
template, the ghost, that I have of my mother.
I transfer onto my spouse feelings that I have had towards my mother and
my analyst and the technical term for that is transference.
So the Billie Jean King that I didn’t know – the one who
left the women’s tennis circuit and started her own because Jack Kramer, who
ran both the men’s and women’s tennis circuits and was the real bad guy in this
movie, wanted to pay a small fraction of the prize money to women that he was
paying to men even though the women were putting the same numbers of fans into
seats is like the person my mother was when she was off at work – someone I
didn’t know. But she is also like, when
I see her in this new movie, the person my spouse or analyst actually is –
someone with whom I have a much more complicated relationship and about whom I
know a great deal more than I knew about my mother as a child. This Billie Jean King, for instance, is
married to a man that I took an immediate dislike to onscreen because he just
looked too perfect – like the quarterback for the football team who models on
the side – but he turns out to be a prince of a guy. She is married to a man who understands that
tennis is her first love and he is a sideshow – and somehow he is OK with that:
really OK with that. He is still able to
love BJK despite her inability to know and connect with him in the way that he wants to with her. So when BJK has an affair
with a woman, rather than being threatened by that, this man connects with and
supports her lover. Wow. But I diverted myself.
The BJK that I didn’t know, the one who was real and not
just bouncing around on the court destroying women players (and one man), was
struggling to discover her sexuality.
She was struggling to discover what it meant to be a woman – and a woman
jock. How do you engage in both of those
identities simultaneously? Jack Kramer
maintained it couldn’t be done. He
firmly believed that she would fold in the match with Riggs because she was a
woman and couldn’t bring her “A” game when it really mattered. She would defer.
There is interesting data to support that. Girls tend to be competitive with guys in the
classroom until
about junior high school. Then they
start deferring to the guys. The reasons
for this are complex and socially based.
Single sex education – as in the seven sisters colleges and some Catholic school traditions – makes sense
for women in a way that it doesn’t for men, where that tends to be exclusionary
for a privileged group rather than providing a base for a group that needs
it. What BJK did was to found a women’s
league – one that had ironic corporate sponsorship from Virginia Slims – the cigarette
brand – and it was a league where the players sold tickets and greeted fans as
they arrived at the venues.
Meanwhile, Bobby Riggs is played wonderfully by Steve Carell (and the biopic issues of
attachment to him don’t play in – I was angry at a guy I saw once in the tiny
corner of a small screen taking in a very big space). He was leading a childlike existence, doing
nothing for his rich father in law’s company, playing delightfully with his
son, and making outrageous bets on himself in acts of tennis wackiness, though
probably on lots of other things as well, all of which his very rich wife did
not approve of. Riggs turns out, then,
to be a clown. He is not so much a
chauvinist as clueless – and both pitiable and oddly loveable. But he is a good tennis player. The chapter that was unknown to me was that,
before he beat BJK, he beat Margaret Court, her nemesis and the person who had
passed her to be number one in the world.
The outcome of the match between Riggs and King was hardly a foregone
conclusion.
What the picture portrays in microcosm is the symbolic
nature of the event for the nation in the context of the life of an individual
and her battles with figures in the establishment. The tennis match, as silly as it was, marked
a shift in the consciousness of the country.
Rosie the Riveter, who had picked up her rivet gun to build the tanks
that won the second world war, had put that down to welcome back the GIs who drove
them and walked beside them and she had (here I am painting with a very broad
brush) raised her boys and girls at home on her own. Her daughters were intrigued by the
possibilities of wielding that riveting gun.
The strident, first generation or wave of feminism was here. This game foreshadowed for my 13 year old
self what would become a lifelong adjustment process in the way that I would
come to see women, an adjustment process that has been occurring within me and
around me ever since and which continues to shift and change both for me but
also for society. It was interesting to
go back to a formative moment, one that, at the time, I did not know was
formative, and to get a better sense of the complex narrative that was at the
heart of it. I discovered that it was
not simply a weird sideshow but something that drew as large an audience as it
did because of what it actually was.
This bears an eerie resemblance to the revisiting of our childhoods that
we do as part of the analytic process.
We revisit with our adult selves a time in life when we had a very
narrow vision of what was occurring and we discover that a lot more was going
on both around us and within ourselves than we could have known at the time.
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