Let us take a moment to praise the hardworking wigmakers of “Saturday Night Live.” By my lights, the yellow pelt sitting on Alec Baldwin’s head has taken on a golden glow since Trump moved into the Oval Office, a suggestion, perhaps, that POTUS might like to upgrade his hairpiece to match the rest of his new Midas décor. Still, I may prefer the subtler wig made for Melissa McCarthy’s début, this past weekend, as Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary. Spicer wears his hair clipped short at the temples and parted on the left, the longer top strands gelled down over his scalp against the threat of a strong wind. McCarthy’s stylists get high marks for accuracy on cut and color—a sort of corn silk, “green yellow” in the Crayola lexicon. But the wig’s perfection is in its hairline, the high arc of gleaming, male-pattern faux forehead it exposes. As McCarthy berated the comedians of the press corps from behind her briefing-room lectern, chomping an unholy wad of gum and jabbing her pointer finger in the air, her forehead seemed to seethe and bullishly bulge in rage. The resemblance to Spicer became uncanny, save for the nose, where McCarthy has the advantage of expressive nostrils. Open and shut they flared, as if trying to release gusts of steam, or to send an S.O.S.
The casting of McCarthy as Spicer was a stroke of comedic brilliance, a perfect fit. She got the mannerisms down pat: the pugnacious fighter’s scowl, the verbal gaffes and nonsensical spin tactics, the scorn sprayed indiscriminately at the press corps (a metaphor made literal by the inspired use of a Super Soaker loaded, supposedly, with soapy water), and, most of all, the flicker of fear behind the fury, that mark of the schoolyard bully who knows he’s going to be whupped himself as soon as he gets home. The sketch has now been viewed upward of sixteen million times on YouTube. In a reaction uncommon to this Administration, Spicer initially responded to its popularity with sanguine good humor, joking that McCarthy should take it easy on the gum.
That, however, was on Monday morning. By evening, Politico had reported that the President was displeased with the portrayal, and offended in particular that a woman had been called on to do the portraying. The article quotes an anonymous Trump donor as saying that the President “doesn’t like his people to look weak.” It’s impossible to be surprised by this morsel of news, merely the latest expression of Trump’s mundane, antediluvian misogyny. I find myself actually delighted by it. Getting under the President’s thin skin was already easy. Now all it takes, apparently, is something as basic as gender-switched casting, a commonplace of high-school theatre productions across the country. (Reader, I speak from much experience.)
Had Trump caught sight of the photo making the rounds, last week, of Isabella Lövin, Sweden’s Deputy Prime Minister, signing a climate-law bill flanked by seven other women, a rebuke to POTUS and his conspicuously male posse? What about the Photoshop job, by the French feminist collective 52, of President Hillary Clinton surrounded by a female Cabinet, as she signs legislation against ejaculating for purposes aside from procreation? Was he peeved, as a vocal contingent of American men were, about last summer’s female “Ghostbusters” reboot, of which McCarthy was a co-star? Was he feeling sensitive about the Times’s report of his bathrobe-wearing TV-watching habits and his enthusiastic perusal of a window-coverings catalogue? Or was he simply put out, in classic men’s-rights fashion, that a woman had taken a man’s job? If that’s the case, the imbalance can easily be righted in future casting calls. I, for one, think that Bill Hader would make a dynamite Melania.
The irony is that McCarthy’s performance didn’t highlight anything weak—that is to say, in Trump translation, “feminine”—about Spicer. She didn’t mince around or giggle or bat her eyes. Those are things that men often do when they play women. Rather, she played Spicer as a bruised, bloviating alpha male, pitifully, programmatically on the attack, just like his boss told him to be. From the start of the sketch, her gender was beside the point, neither provocation nor distraction. It didn’t seem that McCarthy was cast because she was a woman. She was cast because she was the best person for the job.
Other recent roles cast against gender have done something similar. I’m thinking in particular of Louie Anderson’s hilarious, bittersweet performance as the mother of Zach Galifianakis’s sad-clown character in the FX series “Baskets.” That piece of casting isn’t aimed at getting easy, buffoonish laughs but simply at producing an excellent performance, nuanced and deep. (Anderson based the character on his own mother.) Last month, at St. Ann’s Warehouse, in Brooklyn, I saw the English director Phyllida Lloyd’s production of “The Tempest,” the final entry in her trilogy of Shakespeare plays acted by an exclusively female cast and set in a women’s prison. The company’s star and its luminous Prospero, Dame Harriet Walter, has spoken of the frustration of aging out of Shakespeare’s roles for women; the solution was simply to lift the restriction on which of the Bard’s roles she could play. And then there’s the trend of rebooting movies that have an ensemble male cast with women instead, though this sort of thing seems much less interesting, to my mind, than making something new. “Ocean’s Eleven” is next up, revamped as “Ocean’s Eight”—what, could they not assemble the full crew? Still, we’ll take what we can get, along with the inevitable tussle with those who’ll complain that letting Cate Blanchett and Rihanna rob the same casinos that Frank Sinatra and George Clooney once did is a desecration of their childhoods, their sense of self, and all that they hold dear.
In a “Fresh Air” interview not so long ago, Meryl Streep told Terry Gross that, until she played Miranda Priestly, the take-no-shit boss in “The Devil Wears Prada,” she had never had a man tell her that he related to one of her characters. Streep’s theory was that girls grow up identifying with all kinds of protagonists, Peter Pan as well as the Little Mermaid, Beauty plus the Beast, while boys are encouraged to focus on the half allotted to them. How sad, to be so confined. Melissa McCarthy doesn’t have that problem. If we’re lucky, she’ll hang on to that wig, and make Spicer a recurring role.
