The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel – An Anachronistic Comedy that is Just Right for Our Times

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is a comedy series currently available through Amazon Prime (hopefully it will stream on other platforms at some point – it is too good to be confined to one platform).  Most of the eight episodes in the first year culminate with the title character delivering a crisp, brutally honest, deeply funny stand up monologue in a variety of venues in the late 1950s New York – and each is a high point that drives you to want to watch the next episode.  The show has been criticized for its anachronistic depiction of an era that did not welcome integration, diversity of sexual object, and acceptance of Judaism in the ways they are presented.  I think that criticism is justified in so far as this is a period piece – but I believe that the anachronistic elements are not an attempt to rewrite history, but clues that this is not written about that time but about ours and the ways in which the show deviates from history point us – as in a dream when the elements don’t quite hang together – toward the realization that the depicted reality is not the intended one, but symbols – I believe – of our time and how we need to live now.  This is a subversive – as all comedy is subversive – cry for women and others who are marginalized to celebrate who they are, what they believe in, and to support them in their efforts to make the world a better place.

I have written recently about RBG, the documentary movie about our eighty something year old supreme court justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg who has recently risen to rock star level fame, to the effect that I believe the film will be a helpful teaching tool to clarify to our kids, who can only intermittently see that the world continues to be sexist (and racist) what the roots of sexism (and racism) are by referencing periods in which that is more blatantly depicted, even though it wasn’t apparent at the time.  We see the same thing in Mad Men, where, I maintain, Don Draper, at least in season one, is not a misogynist, per se, but expresses misogyny as a member of a misogynistic culture.  The scary thing is that he does not stand out as misogynistic, but fits like a hand into the glove of the culture. In both Mad Men and The Amazing Mrs. Maisel, the sexism, to our current eye, is clear, but then it becomes not so clear as the women in various ways collude with it.  The men and women smooth off the rough edges and we see a vision of a world – like the terrible subway set - that is neither as it was, nor as it is, but weirdly, in some ways, as it could and should be, while also being a false and shifting shadow of a grittier, more complicated real world that we need to figure out how to live in, one that is filled with dirty subway cars that jostle and bang and much more crowded streets in New York, even in the 1950s and 60s, than are depicted here.  And we are relieved, in the monologues, and through other comedy, to see the structures that constricted be exposed and, at least for a moment, toppled.

The cultural sea change that allowed us to see the formerly invisible racism and sexism has required the diligent effort of many marginalized people over the course of many, many generations.  These people have been doing psychoanalysis to the culture – that is, they have been making what was unconscious conscious.  It has required the work of people in disparate fields working in concert, if only at a distance.  RBG (and other men and women) did this in the legal world; she as an attorney arguing before the Supreme Court, and Gloria Steinem (and many other men and women) did it by stirring up big crowds and helping them have rational arguments about needed social and cultural change.  Mrs. Maisel, based, according to Wikipedia, “loosely” on comediennes such as Joan Rivers and Totie Fields, is articulating the ways that comedy helped us recognize the looniness of our sexism and, I think, helps us recognize it in the current world.  It is also a testament to the power of a woman articulating her experience in a way that others can resonate with.  The power of the unconscious - and of culture - is to cover this back up once it has been exposed - and the process of psychoanalysis - and of comedy - is therefore never ending.

The roles of the stand-up comic – and of comedy generally – are manifold.  In one of Freud’s early books, he compared the functioning of jokes to the functioning of a dream.  From this perspective, the person listening to the joke is led along a path that has a conscious thread and an unconscious one that is supporting it.  If a kind of dream state is induced in the listener by the integrity of the joke and the punch line is appropriately timed, the reveal of the punch line is the “other” meaning that was being hidden underneath the conscious story.  Comedians, then, transgress unconscious boundaries by their very nature.  But they are also conservative.  They show us, by their pratfalls and their blundering, which we laugh at, what not to do and this helps us understand what is forbidden, what is off limits – and helps us avoid that.  Comedians rock the boat, but also right the ship – pointing out the unresolved conflicts in the old ways of doing things, and suggesting alternative ways of resolving them.  Crash through this – avoid doing that.  Zig zag through life alternately engaging with and avoiding danger - and use each interaction to propel you to the next.

Mr. Maisel (Joel, played by Michael Zegen), our heroine’s husband, is the original stand-up in the family, but he is terrible at it.  In his day job, he has been installed by his uncle as a vice president at a plastics firm – by night, he steals material from Bob Newhart records and delivers it poorly.  Mrs. Maisel (Miriam or Midge, played by Rachel Brosnahan) plays the role of the supportive – indeed – perfect wife.  She keeps his home, cares for the kids, does the shopping, looks glamorous (including putting on cold crème only after he has gone to sleep and then waking early to curl her hair and put on make-up so that he wakes to her perfect beauty) and she bribes the owner of the comedy club with her home cooked brisket so that he can get earlier slots that are more likely to deliver laughs (though this does not help him much).  Mr. Maisel’s perfect life ends up being too much for him, and he leaves Midge.  She, dazed and confused, wanders from their upper west side apartment to the club in the Village where he has performed earlier, ostensibly to retrieve the baking dish the brisket was in, but she wanders on stage and, in a drunken and deranged state, delivers a monologue about what has happened to her that day and, in the vernacular of the club, she absolutely kills it (before she is carted off by the police for indecency).  The stage manager – Susie Myerson played by Alex Borstein - a woman people mistake for a man – notices her skill and, because she doesn’t want to be insignificant and senses that Midge does not want to be either, decides she will manage her, and they become a warmly dysfunctional team that fights through the remaining seven episodes to figure out how to do comedy while Midge figures out how to manage her family as it falls apart around her after the revelation that her husband has gone.

Midge runs into Lenny Bruce (played by Luke Kirby) first as an audience member, then as a fellow arrested person (she bails him out when he is picked up for lewdness the same night she is and he later returns the favor), and then he lets her share the mic at a club and, in the final episode, he introduces her as his undercard at a show.  The inclusion of Lenny Bruce, the improvisational comic who broke boundaries that allowed later comics to enjoy freedoms he could only dream of, underscores (in my mind) two things – first his appearance in New York at this time as if he has achieved the fame he will only achieve later underscores the anachronistic nature of the series.  Second, connecting Midge with Lenny underscores the free associational, improvisational, jazz and underneath it all, psychoanalytic thrust of this series.  In psychoanalysis, the exploration of the unfettered mind – the only directive is to freely associate - takes place on the couch with the analyst as audience and interpreter.  For Midge, when she, as Lenny did, is just letting it fly in front of an audience – and we are laughing with her as we hear, as she does, what is coming out of her mouth and we are, as she is, making what little sense we can of her mind as it reacts to what is occurring in her life, the comedy club becomes the psychoanalytic space and the audience – with its laughter and support – becomes her analyst, guiding her towards truths that are more clearly articulated.

The series, then, is filled with conflictual material for Midge to “work out” on stage.  One of the conflicts in the movie is between the straight laced – or apparently so – upper west side proper Jewish housewife, who is obsessive to the nth degree and the comic – the bride who, still wearing her wedding dress the morning after her wedding, invites her new husband, still in his tails, to discreetly follow her into the ladies at the diner where they end up having breakfast so they can do the dirty deed.  Miriam, the housewife, regularly exercises, measures her ankles, thighs and waist on a regular basis, and wears the latest fashions.  Her repression is not as severe, however, as that of her mother, Rose (Marin Hinkle) whose neurotic concern with appearance, appearance, appearance drives her very narrowly defined life.  Miriam has learned how to utilize the control that her mother expresses without being controlled by it – and while remaining in touch with the curiosity and verve that the control would suppress.  She stays vibrantly alive while her mother mostly just vibrates in place – worrying that this or that might not be perfect but without quite being articulate about it and without having the capacity to change things.

Another tension is between Rose and her Columbia Professor husband Abe (Tony Shalhoub), whose wish for an orderly world, one that is run with the clockwork precision of his field of mathematics, is continually foiled by the women in his life who don’t stick with the simple plan of doing the right thing.  There is, however, more apparent substance under the surface with Abe, and he is able to connect with and to provide support for Miriam, even as he is ranting to and about her – his love for her is apparent even, or perhaps especially, in his disappointment in her.  One of his disappointments is the way that her marriage to Joel has brought him into contact with Joel’s parents – Joel’s father runs a sweat shop producing clothing and his mother is a world class worrier and both look more like recently immigrated Jews than the more patrician and respectable Abe.  Abe, despite his visceral disappointment with Joel and his parents, is constantly encouraging Midge to patch things up with her husband as, from his perspective, a woman cannot live without a man.

Other conflicts are present visually and play out in the comic interaction.  Susie, Miriam’s manager, is clearly from the “downtown” world (really the Village) and is both awed and non-plussed by Miriam’s uptown digs and function.  Miriam, as a pending divorcee, takes a day job as a make-up sales person at B. Altman’s and she is there thrust into the world of working class women doing a job while looking for a husband.  The variety of social strata and relationships depicted in the series are tied together by a society that dictates roles for individuals in different sectors of that society that are divided and determined by class, race, and gender.  Midge’s life, but also her comedy, bridges and exposes the cracks between and among these sectors – illuminating the construction of the society as she simultaneously deconstructs and savages it – hilariously creating space for she and the audience to appreciate the tensions that she experiences as she walks back and forth across and through these various separate spaces that are all intended to support human life but at the same time require that essential elements of being human are suppressed.  As much as we, and Miriam, despise Joel for leaving her, it becomes clear that he, despite being weak and therefore pitiful, is not a bad person, and he is playing at being an adult rather than embracing it.  We end up feeling for him (a little) in spite of ourselves.

Ruth Bader Ginsberg made a statement, and it was one that helped her argue her cases before the Supreme Court – to the effect that repressing women is bad for all of us.  This movie celebrates the dangerous and painful joy that is possible, both with Mrs. Maisel, but also between she and her audiences, when a more authentic way of living – a life that involves articulating the pain and acknowledging it – and owning who she is as a person – both as a repressed upper west side Jewish woman and as a lively, naïve, enthusiastic person trying to figure out how the whole thing works – engages in living and infectiously encourages us to join her.  I will spoil one of her final wonderful jokes by relating it here.  After she is confronted at her job by the woman with whom her husband had an affair about tampering in the woman’s relationship with the man who is still her husband, she asks, “What are the f*cking rules?” and then she asks the question again, but with a different inflection that implies, “What are the rules about f*cking?” 

This comedy, with its very current vernacular and its integrated night clubs at a time that they did not exist in this form, and with the frank language that, at the time was called the language of sailors and wasn’t permissible in the clubs she is working, is not about that time, but about our time – a time when we believe that we are free to express ourselves as we will – and yet I have to wonder about using the asterisk in the paragraph above.  What are the rules?  And if we are really free to make them, how will we do so?  What will we discover about ourselves and our society as we shed those rules?  Are some of them necessary?  Do we have protocol for a reason?  Does it work?  For whom?  When?  When should we deviate from that?  One way to discover that is to blow past the rules; to disregard them.  When we do that, what occurs?  Do we discover greater freedom or a different kind of bondage?  What are the limits of what we can live without?  In what context do we do that and to what end?

Miriam becomes a comedian because Joel blows past the rules – he doesn’t quietly keep a secretary who is dumb as a post on the side as a mistress, he runs into the secretary’s arms as if his life with Midge were the problem and he uses that as an excuse to avoid expressing his dissatisfaction with life more generally.  This, in turn, causes Miriam to blow past the doorman, out into the world, wearing only her nightgown and she finds a place – a relatively safe place – to express what it is that she is experiencing – and she finds a responsive audience.  Where are the spaces that afford the safety to explore these ideas – especially when those ideas are inherently unsafe.  The analyst’s couch is private and there is a contract of confidentiality.  The comic’s mic is very public – how will Joel deal with being the object of scorn – he can dish it out, but can he take it?  How will her parents react as Midge’s public life collapses the complex structures they have erected to keep their lives apparently clean and friction free?

By setting this series at the beginnings of a time of social and emotional upheaval that we eventually survived, I think it is encouraging us to explore who it is that we are at a time when we may have settled into a self-satisfied sense that things are all right.  It may be telling us that things are not all right.  That those who are in power haven’t followed the rules – and that has created problems.  I think this series is encouraging those who are not empowered, but may be more empowered than they know – women like Mrs. Maisel, who have a tremendous amount of privilege but may live in gilded cages – to explore that freedom and to revel in it.  And who among us, the empowered, does not live in a gilded cage?  One of the many problems – and perhaps one that is being enacted – is that it is those with privilege who are most likely to exercise this freedom – including in dangerous ways.  Miriam is endangering those around her – her parent’s relationship falls apart, her time at the club is time away from her kids, and her relationship with Joel, as it should be, will be sorely tested.  The story of those who are truly marginalized, who most need to explore alternative means of expression, may not be told as frequently because the margin for error there is much smaller and the expression of freedom more often has dangerous and self-damaging repercussions.  But isn’t that where the freedom of expression modelled here most needs to be exercised?

Miriam works hard at her newfound craft, as she worked hard as a Russian Literature major at Bryn Mawr.  She refines her message.  She brings all the privilege that she has been afforded to bear on the problem of how to articulate what it means to be free – and to do that in a way that others can resonate with – not because they are being paid to work to listen to her (Susie serves the role of this foil and teacher), but because to connect with her is to experience some of her freedom – to soar with her as she, not completely freely, but in a guided and shaped form of free expression, discovers how to articulate something true and real about her own and thus about many other peoples’ most important, and human, functioning.   What she creates is not a veridical account of her life as lived, any more than our free associations are a stenographic record of our lives, but a version of it that illuminates the aspects of it that are both problematic and, because they are so particular, universal.  Her audience – the one in the coffeehouse, and the one in our homes, resonates with this effort, laughs with her about it, and applauds her for the courage it takes to live as she does.

  

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