‘Mrs. Fletcher’: Revenge Porn for Woke People
I’ve taken at least a dozen showers since I binge-watched HBO’s limited series, Mrs. Fletcher, and I still haven’t managed to scrub away the ickiness. The show, based on the book of the same name by Tom Perrotta (Little Children, The Leftovers), is the most grotesque example of woke propaganda since Jussie Smollett (*allegedly*) staged a hate crime. Mrs. Fletcher does have its redeeming qualities—impressive performances, solid direction (from a team of three female directors, including Hollywood’s unsung hero, Nicole Holofcener), and chuckle-out-loud humor—but in the end, the meandering and preachy storyline adds up to little more than highly stylized revenge porn for the lockstep wokescenti, in particular the faction with a special bloodlust for straight, white, “cis” men.
The eponymous role in Mrs. Fletcher is competently played by Kathryn Hahn, the forty-eight-year-old actress primarily known for her supporting roles in screwball comedies (Wanderlust, Bad Moms) until Tamara Jenkins’ acclaimed 2018 film about a reproductively challenged couple, Private Life, in which Hahn proved she is leading-role material. Holofcener, who is a master at conveying white, middle-to-upper-class ennui, has made an entire career out of directing Indie actresses like Catherine Keener, Frances McDormand, and Emily Mortimer, so for her, Hahn is the perfect fit.
Eve Fletcher is a divorcé and the director of the local senior citizen center who lives her with her teenaged son, Brendan (Jackson White), a douchebag lacrosse bro, in the Massachusetts suburbs. Their home is a gray-green split-level that on the outside resembles a doublewide trailer but on the inside is tastefully appointed with mid-century-modern furniture stacked with books and draped with bohemian-chic throws. In the first episode of the seven-part series (the only episode that Holofcener directed), Eve has been preparing the minivan to drop Brendan off for his first year at college when she returns inside to overhear, through his bedroom door, Brendan calling his girlfriend a “dirty fucking slut” while she gives him a blowjob. What follows is an awkward conversation between Eve and Brendan in the car that will unfortunately turn out to be the funniest and most nuanced dialogue about the current zeitgeist in the entire series. Eve, horrified to realize the parenting errors she and Brendan’s neglectful father have made in what is essentially the final moments of raising him, says to her son, “One of the most important things for you to always remember, especially now, in this day and age—I mean, in life, really—is that you have to be nice to women. Do you understand what I’m saying?” Brendan nods perfunctorily, mutters, “Yeah,” and turns up the radio, which blasts a rap song about hos and bitches sucking dick.
Later that night, after an emotionally draining day, Eve recalls the pep talk her friend, Jane (Casey Wilson), had recently given her about this exciting new chapter of her life, during which Jane referred to Eve as a “MILF.” The tightly wound Eve opens her laptop and Googles the acronym for “Mom I’d Like to Fuck,” eventually landing on a porn website called “Milfateria,” which she peruses in the privacy of her darkened bedroom, the titillating videos reflected in the lenses of her designer eyeglasses. Thus, even those of us who haven’t read the book are able to predict what the entire series has in store for us: a forty-something empty nester will fumble her way through a sexual awakening (of course she will: her name is Eve, for God’s sake) while her toxically masculine son flounders in college.
Throughout the series, Eve’s sexual fantasies, which frequently disrupt her life and cause her to dissociate from reality, are brought to life on screen, scored by porn Muzak—all hypnotic synth beats and lengthy keyboard strokes. One of the few examples that keeps the show from earning a perfect score in wokeness—at least according to the ideological canon with which I am familiar—was the producers’ decision to cast women of color in Eve’s lesbian fantasies [figs. A, B], perpetuating the centuries-old tradition of Western artists to depict Eastern women (and women of the Global South) as hypersexual temptresses in juxtaposition to monolithically virtuous, Western, white women—a Western practice of ‘othering’ the East that a prominent scholar of postcolonialism, Edward Said, called ‘Orientalism.’
In modern tradition, the effort of woke Hollywood to cast white people in roles typically occupied by people of color and vice versa makes sense, since casting has for a long time often relied on stereotypes that do not necessarily reflect reality. However, when this noble effort to abolish stereotypes becomes an obsession for an artist—either because he has been radicalized by the social justice movement or because he fears censorship and the social and economic repercussions of it (or both)—the prioritization of ideology over creativity compromises an artist’s ability to create works that authentically reflect his vision: if the artist is constantly preoccupied with the representation of various identities in his work, his creativity will atrophy.
Further, the stalwart mission to reverse stereotypes in art can in some cases even underscore the very stereotype that the artist intended to abolish. For example, during a bar scene in Mrs. Fletcher, Margo, the white trans woman who teaches Eve’s “Personal Memoir” class (“Gender and Society” in the book) at the local community college, plays a point-and-shoot video game like a damsel who is distressed by the plastic gun she holds in her hands, while the black man with whom she flirts points the gun at the screen like a veteran sniper, reinforcing gender stereotypes (not to mention the gender binary) and also the stereotype of black men as hypermasculine brutes well-practiced in acts of violence. This may sound like a reach—perhaps Margo is only performing that role because it is what the patriarchy and her love interest demand of her as a woman—however, throughout the series, Margo is consistently self-effacing and demure; and in the book, she expresses an almost constant longing for girl talk, shopping excursions, trips to the ladies room, and all of the frilly customs of stereotypical womanhood that evaded her before she came out as transgender.
In her review of Mrs. Fletcher for Vulture, Angelica Jade Bastién withholds praise for any of the impressive male performances (leading me to wonder if her disgust for the toxic masculinity depicted in the show makes her unable to separate the actors from their characters), but she does manage to note that Margo is “played with warmth by Jen Richards”—words that evoke female passivity and moral purity, and, I would argue, infantilize the character of Margo, and also Richards, who is trans. In both the book and the show, Margo is meek, virtuous, and pitiful. She is a walking after-school special, there to educate the audience about the trans experience and earn their sympathy, nothing more. (In the book, Margo conducts a trans-awareness seminar with the old, set-in-their-ways patrons of the local senior center, during which she twirls for the audience like a beauty pageant contestant and talks aloud to a projected photograph of her unaccepting mother: “I’m sorry Mom . . . I’m your daughter and I love you very much.”) In every episode of Mrs. Fletcher, woke ideology becomes the main act.
Even a beautifully shot montage in the second episode, which subverts the proper-white-woman stereotype with extended underwater shots of a nude Eve in the senior center’s indoor swimming pool [fig. C], is more of a political statement than it is an artful, thematic interlude. The lighting of this scene (which did not occur in the book) exudes the atmosphere of a moonlit, aqua lagoon. A female musical artist’s voice croons, “Gone are the days of the world we used to know,” as Eve’s breasts, buttocks, legs, and triangular patch of pubic hair fill the screen. “Do not look away from this beautiful specimen!” the show’s producers seem to be screaming at us. “There is nothing offensive about a woman’s nude body!” (In retrospect, it is possible this scene was cooked up by Hahn, a producer on the show, who, in many of her previous roles, overemphasized her character’s sexuality by elevating it to a level of almost cartoon-like eroticism; and who, in Private Life, also seized an opportunity to flaunt a full bush for the camera.) This montage continues until suddenly Eve notices Roy Rafferty—a dementia-inflicted patron of the senior center whom Eve had to kick out after he was caught watching porn and masturbating in the group space—standing fully dressed in the shallow end of the pool. Shocked by Roy’s presence, she first covers her breasts with her pearlescent arms [Fig. D], like Botticelli’s rendering of Venus, and then reveals herself to him before embracing him.
The scene would be a poignant one if it were at all clear what we are supposed to glean from it. Is it a commentary on the tragedy of sexual repression? Is Eve confronting her mortality through Roy? Is Eve’s anger towards her cheating ex-husband and her ingrate son soothed by Roy’s sad depiction of aging masculinity? Only two episodes into the series, it might help if we knew more about who Eve was before this burgeoning sexual awakening (if that’s you want to call watching MILF porn and masturbating). Otherwise it appears the show’s creators are being provocative for provocation’s sake, which robs Mrs. Fletcher of its intellectual sophistication.
The show follows the plot of Perrotta’s novel very closely (Perrotta wrote the pilot episode and the series finale), although, unlike the book, it stops short of tidily wrapping the storyline up in a bow and instead ends immediately after the crescendo, when Brendan, socially exiled for sexually assaulting a potential girlfriend in college (of course), returns home one night to find his mother enjoying the poistcoital bliss of a threesome with the geek he used to bully in high school, Julian (Owen Teague), and Eve’s fat, tatted, pill-popping, sort-of-predatory, queer coworker at the senior center, Amanda (Katie Kershaw). The final scenes move at a glacial pace, which gives the show’s (by now blatantly obvious) target audience—millennial and Gen-Z coastal elites whose politics are informed by the echo chamber of their Twitter feeds—to lick their chops in anticipation of the delicious humiliation this better-off-if-he-were-aborted, “straight cis white boy” is about to endure.
Off with his head!