The “pretty” “little” “liars”: from left to right, Emily Fields (Shay Mitchell), Hanna Marin (Ashley Benson), Aria Montgomery (Lucy Hale), and Spencer Hastings (Troian Bellisario).
So I’ve become fascinated by Pretty Little Liars. ABC Family’s hit mystery/thriller teenage drama is flying high right now: about 3 million people tuned in for the fourth season premiere on June 11, and two days ago the second episode ranked as TV’s #1 Scripted Telecast in Women 18-34 and Key 12-34. The show’s also got a massive social media following, with 10 million likes on Facebook and over a million followers on Twitter, plus millions more when you factor in the Twitter handles of the show’s stars. And by now, this kind of popularity isn’t unexpected for Pretty Little Liars: the show had already been picked up for a fifth season before shooting for the fourth was even finished.
But it’s not just the show’s popularity that’s intriguing to me: despite (and because of) its poppy-cum-melodramatic texture, Pretty Little Liars is a polymorphic nexus of different and diverging images of women in American culture. Now I’ve never watched a full episode of Pretty Little Liars, and I can’t claim to have any deep familiarity with its specific aesthetics beyond what I’ve gleaned from clips, summaries, and a few experiences being in the same room while my sister and cousin were watching it. Nevertheless I want to sketch out here, in broader terms, a few of the feminist readings that emerge out of the show for me, especially because the sheer polysemy of the show’s representation of women really strikes at the tensions (both restrictive and productive, within and without feminism) that are indexed by the question, What is the feminine?
First a brief overview for those unfamiliar with the show (minor spoilers): In an affluent Pennsylvania town, a year after the mysterious disappearance of their “Queen Bee” Alison DiLaurentis, a clique of four secretive WASPy high-school girls (played by actresses in their mid- to late twenties) are stalked, manipulated, and tormented by a mysterious “A” whose motives are unclear but nefarious. In fact, as the show develops, we find out there’s a whole “A” Team led by “Red Coat,” a shrouded red lady who may actually be the girls’ not-so-deceased friend Alison (or at least looks a whole lot like her). The show follows these “pretty little liars” as they struggle to survive high-school, dating, and the apparently intricate network of bourgeois terrorists out to ruin their lives.
Sigmund Freud (left), “father” of psychoanalysis, theorized all desire as masculine, writing that “the little girl is a little man,” desiring a husband/son to satisfy her lack of a penis (“penis envy”); Jacques Lacan (right) revolutionized psychoanalysis in the 60s and 70s by focusing on the “Symbolic order” of (still masculine) desire, where man desires to possess the Phallus (the sign of the paternal law) by possessing the feminine Other.
I take it as obvious that a show like Pretty Little Liars would never exist if the main characters were teenage boys, or at least that such a show would never get picked up by a major T.V. network. The reason for this is built into the show’s title: the intense mythic resonances among the three terms pretty, little, and liars. As Simone de Beauvoir notes in The Second Sex, “a number of incompatible myths exist” under the sign of the “Eternal Feminine,” and as a result “it will be said sometimes that the Mother equals Life, sometimes that the Mother equals Death, that every virgin is pure in spirit or flesh dedicated to the devil.”1 These myths of the feminine include, in no particular order: beauty as seduction, beauty as deception; female sexuality as false, promiscuous, duplicitous; female desire as empty, parasitic, even nonexistent; the feminine as mystic, beyond understanding, sublime, as a goddess or sphinx; woman (Eve) as the first lied-to (too trusting) and the first liar (untrustworthy); the female body as small, diminished, unstable; the female libido as a lie, the clitoris as a diminished penis (Freud) — psychoanalysis and its legacies in psychology, literature, and pop culture can take credit here — the vagina as unknown, unknowable, unstable, unreal, as absence, as abscess, as the original/originary no-thing…
We could go on ad nauseam (nausea itself being feminine) — and all that’s even before we take into account the heavy-handed allusions to The Scarlet Letter and all of the imagery that evokes. (The show’s really enamored of the whole “A” motif; the second and third season finale’s titles are “unmAsked” and “A dAngerous gAme,” and one can find droves of stylized mAteriAl mAde by fAns.) The point is that Pretty Little Liars isn’t anything we haven’t seen before. That notorious sexist-but-also-maybe-occasionally-feminist? Friedrich Nietzsche is continually linking femininity with superficiality, instability, and deception — and yet also, in the preface to Beyond Good and Evil, with “truth”:
Supposing truth is a woman — what then? Are there not grounds for the suspicion that all philosophers, insofar as they were dogmatists, have been very inexpert about women? That the gruesome seriousness, the clumsy obtrusiveness with which they have usually approached truth so far have been awkward and very improper methods for winning a woman’s heart? What is certain is that she has not allowed herself to be won — and today every kind of dogmatism is left standing dispirited and discouraged. 2
Nietzsche’s playing on dangerous ground here: on the one hand, he’s dipping into thousands of years of sexist imagery (malevolent and benevolent), setting up Truth as the elusive, attractive woman-object just waiting to be dominated by a masculine, phallocratic will to power3; but on the other, it is the “dogmatists” whom Nietzsche attacks — for Nietzsche, these are the Platonists, the Christians, the scientists, the rationalists, and especially the liberals — precisely for presuming (and failing) to define woman-truth, to set up woman-truth as an Object: both an idea to be logically categorized and a commodity to be consumed.
And it’s just along these lines — woman as object and woman as that-which-cannot-be-objectified — that a feminist reading of Pretty Little Liars splits into (at least) two. So again, we should ask: “Supposing truth is a woman — what then?”
A message from “A” — in lipstick.
The first reading is perhaps the more apparent. The show is, even from a cursory viewing, a shameless melodrama, complete with pregnant pauses, baleful foreshadows, and ominous musical cues. The “pretty” “little” “liars” themselves are the same familiar images from our culture’s phallic menagerie: gorgeous young (mostly) white bourgeois females attending what must be the most attractive high-school in America. (Emily, played by Filipino/Irish actress Shannon Mitchell, is lesbian — perhaps a commendable splash of “diversity”? — but then again, she’s also the athlete…)
In this reading, woman is object — hysteric-paranoiac object. These are stereotypes, pure and simple: prefab, Easy-Bake fetishes of irrational duplicitous femininity, manipulative and untrustworthy at one turn, helpless and naïve at the next. The girls meet in secret, snoop around at night, conceal themselves from each other and from adults; plot twists follow reversals follow betrayals; secrets once thought sustainable deepen, multiply, come to control their keepers; and no one and nothing is to be trusted, not even one’s own senses, one’s own body (“A” once tries to drive Hanna back to bulimia). The tropes are obvious: What’s remarkable is just how little pretense the show’s producers have made about this. The show’s description on the ABC Family website: the “ugliest” secrets belong to “the prettiest girls in town,” and their “darkest secrets are about to unravel.” The narrative properly finds its drive not in secrecy but in unraveling: the exposure of the ancient feminine lie and the disastrous consequences that ensue. (Garden of Eden, anyone?)
The brilliant trick here in this first reading — the pretty little lie — is that this fetishist portrait of hysteric femininity acknowledges and justifies itself with the presence of “A” (and later the “A” Team) as an external force of torment and mystery. “No, these aren’t irrational women,” the producers and writers protest, “These are just ordinary girls trying to make things work out in the face of extraordinary danger — and get dates to the prom!” The irrational feminine is just an exception — all women aren’t like that, right? Of course this is nonsense to us, unless someone wants to defend the claim that more or less every representation of women since the beginning of television has been an exception to the rule. But the trick is cunning, nonetheless: the girls are cast as detectives, essentially rational at heart, for whom irrationality is merely an object of investigation — only the difference between them and the cast of Law and Order: SUV or CSI: Miami is that the “pretty” “little” “liars” actually embody the scene of their own crime, as “rational” investigators of their own irrationality.
It’s funny because bitches be crazy.
So this is our first reading: woman as object, woman’s essence as irrational — just waiting to be mastered and redeemed by some phallocratic force of truth (as in Nietzsche-the-sexist). Here the menace of “A” is imaginary, a hysterical-paranoid fantasy of the drama queen: after all, we know that “real” “girls” worry about school, clothes, and boys as if they were engaged in clandestine operations against an anonymous terrorist organization.
But we should (much like our protagonists) be cautious of having found an “answer.” There are serious structural risks in this first interpretation, especially when one gets the impulse to “fix” a show like Pretty Little Liars. The typical liberal response to sexist representations of women in the media is reform: make the women in question “realer,” “stronger,” more independent, less bitchy, less crazy, etc.
And there’s merit in that response. American pop culture is full enough of crazy, bitchy women as it is (here’s lookin’ at you, Homeland), and that’s if they’re lucky enough to get a T.V. show or film about them in the first place. Linda Holmes, who runs NPR’s pop culture and entertainment blog Monkey See, wrote an excellent piece last Friday calculating that 90 percent of the films available on that day in her area (metropolitan DC) were about men:
Dudes in capes, dudes in cars, dudes in space, dudes drinking, dudes smoking, dudes doing magic tricks, dudes being funny, dudes being dramatic, dudes flying through the air, dudes blowing up, dudes getting killed, dudes saving and kissing women and children, and dudes glowering at each other.
The point is well-made: women are either arm candy, fuck toys, controlling moms, dead prostitutes — or they’re absent altogether. Simone de Beauvoir thought that since “in pure subjectivity, the human being is not anything” but rather “is to be measured by his acts,” and since women are not permitted to participate in public life except as objects, the Feminine Mystery really just represents the enormous void of woman’s forced inactivity. Thus, for Beauvoir, let women act alongside men, let women be transcendent subjects instead of objects, and the Feminine Mystery will dissipate.4 The success of movies like Bridesmaids and Pitch Perfect seem to indicate that, indeed, there is an audience for films about women who act (pun!), which means that, as Jezebel blogger Madeleine Davies writes about Holmes’ piece, studio execs aren’t just failing us: “They’re failing capitalism!”
“Capitalism conserves shit” (credit: atari_elle)
But there’s the rub, because if we work that phrase in reverse, we might find that making more movies about women, making stronger women characters in film and television, “fixing” the kind of feminine mystique encasing shows like Pretty Little Liars — which is all to say, rationalizing woman into some kind of autonomous, transcendent subject — all that might actually be good for capitalism. Capitalism’s forte, after all, is the miracle of the loaves and fish, but perverted: capitalism feeds one hungry person and creates five thousand starving. As Guy Debord writes, in the “permanent opium war” of advanced capitalism, even survival is just another commodity, and “[c]onsumable survival must constantly expand.”5 And what better place to expand to than the untapped resources of female subjects, who make rational consumer choices, participate rationally in production, legitimate a rational state, and educate their children to rationally do the same — that is, female subjects who behave “like men”?
Of course bourgeois rationalist feminism has had its successes: the benefits of the entry of women into the workforce, the government, and the marketplace (as producers and consumers instead of products) have been many. But the point is that to escape from irrationality into rationality isn’t really much of an escape in the end: it’s reform, not revolution, and it’s not going to end patriachy. To “fix” the representation of women in Pretty Little Liars — keep the suspense, ditch the stereotypes — wouldn’t really fix anything, because we’d be stopping short of interrogating the whole concept of “representing” something in the first place, privileging what a representation “means” over how it functions: socially, politically, economically.
So while we can condemn the images of the irrational, hysteric-paranoiac feminine in Pretty Little Liars all we like, we can’t just turn blindly back to “reason” and the “subject” — they may be too poisoned by capitalism and patriarchy to be worth salvaging. So maybe there’s a third option, somewhere outside the matrix of reason/unreason — what Deleuze and Guattari call a ligne de fuite6, a line of flight that escapes from the territory of reason altogether towards something new and still without form.
And perhaps our second reading of Pretty Little Liars will give us a glimpse of it…
(Stay tuned for Pretty Little Liars & the Feminine, Part 2: incendiAry clAndestine provocAteurs!)
_____
1Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley, p. 260-1.
2Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann, p. 2.
3It is an infuriating and shameful fact that so much of the dominant (white bourgeois male) scholarship on Nietzsche (including leftists like Deleuze) either quietly ignores the blatant sexism of Nietzsche’s work or embarrassingly attempts to craft mincing apologies of Nietzsche’s thoughts on women (especially in Thus Spoke Zarathustra) by invoking pitiful and patriarchal images of love and romance. Laurence Lampert’s unbearable book Nietzsche’s Teaching offers a facile analytic reading of Zarathustra that concludes with a rhapsodic and sexist valorization of Zarathustra’s “marriage” to Life — personified as a wild, inconstant woman whose reluctance is the very sign of her eroticism (“no means yes”) and whom the phallic prophet accordingly subordinates with his whip.
4Simone de Beauvoir, op. cit., p. 264.
5Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Ken Knabb.
6Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Vol. 2, trans. Brian Massumi, p. 9.
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