End of an Era. Reagan. Season Finale of “Mrs America” Reviewed.
1979. You can’t help but be nostalgic for a time when you could afford to feel disappointed by people like Jimmy Carter – something that feels like an impossible luxury in this day and age. One day soon, please oh please oh please, we may get back to being allowed to get grumpy about nominally progressive politicians who let us down badly. This would represent a colossal step forwards from where we are now.
Bella has been fired from being chair of the National Advisory Committee for Women, you see. The series does not want to show us Jimmy Carter being nasty himself – so the task of being horrible is subcontracted to some of his dodgier Georgian cronies.
The composite character that is Alice continues (but does not conclude) her slow journey away from Phyllis. It’s not that Alice is undergoing an ideological shift – it’s more that the sheer unkindness of Phyllis is starting to rankle – as is her ability to dismiss proven facts as “fake news”. Alice’s journey is not towards feminism, but toward a world in which feminists can be listened to patiently rather than derisively, a world in which exchange is possible. Sarah Paulson may be the most fascinating televisual presence of our age – and the previous episode – “Houston” – which she dominates – is surely the standout episode of this series. It is also the most honestly fictitious.
In a meeting which is plausible if not proven, Phyllis is sounded out by youngish men with the chilling names of Stone and Manafort. This is part of a very conscious effort on the part of Dhavi Waller to connect the past to the present, to make us feel that this is not so much a historical drama we’re watching as a slice of ongoing history.
Then there’s the final scene. Reagan personally phones Phyllis to tell her that she is too divisive for a high profile cabinet post. And then she retreats to the kitchen – the kitchen that she has always declared is a place where women have the “right” to feel happy. And then she slowly starts to peel stuff. The necessary slowness and tediousness of this conclusion makes its own point. Dramatically, it couldn’t have been bettered.
There’s a sense in which Gloria Steinem and Ellie Smeal continue to be very right about this series. I have no doubt that Phyllis Schlafly had far less to do with the slow defeat of the ERA than anonymous lobbyists for insurance companies worried about employer liability, lobbyists whose unminuted meetings with prominent politicians were far more politically effective than any number of STOP ERA rallies.
Try to turn those meetings into a drama though? Have any of these lobbyists published their accounts of any such meetings? Can we have any clue as to what they were like? Are any of these lobbyists anxious to tell “their side of the story”?
The complaint that this series turns 1970s feminism into a cat fight seems less fair. The series is dominated by arguments between women, but this is because, dramatically speaking, nothing is more fascinating than arguments between people who care about the same thing in different ways. Debates between people with nothing in common are no debates at all. We are realising this only too late. When the media hosts “debates” between extremes, there is no journey, no progress, and no dialectic. The two polarities just shout past each other. Nothing happens – either politically or dramatically. If every climatologist has to be confronted with a climate change denier and every circumnavigator with a flat earther, then all rhetorical confrontations will be sterile because predetermined. No change is possible. Nothing will “happen” in these exchanges. For a debate to be exciting – some values and/or facts must be shared by the parties concerned.
Phyllis is an early advocate of ignoring troubling facts and doubling down on lies. She helped sponsor our political culture of shouting rather htan listening. During the final credits we are told that she wrote The Conservative Case for Trump just before she died. This is untrue. She was one of three authors of this book. She was the only female co-author, and Steinem and Smeal can feel justified that this final line in the series continues to give Schlafly undue prominence in order to sustain the idea of a conflict “between women”.
The decision of so many “Christianists” to support a man with no concept of forgiveness, contrition, or the ability to stand in awe of anything bigger than himself, was central to Trump’s election as POTUS. Schlafly was part of this decision. But only part of it.
Well, I haven’t seen a better acted series this year and that’s a fact.
I have thoughts about other episodes in this series.
Episode One:
Phyllis. Mrs America Reviewed – very slowly.
Episode Two:
https://conradbrunstrom.wordpress.com/2020/09/09/gloria-mrs-america-part-2-reviewed/
Episode Four:
Betty. Mrs America, Part Four. Reviewed.
Episode Five:
It’s Couples’ Night on Mrs America: “Phyllis & Fred; Brenda & Marc” reviewed.
Episode Six:
https://conradbrunstrom.wordpress.com/2020/10/07/jill-remembering-liberal-republicans-episode-6-of-mrs-america-reviewed/
Episode Seven:
“Bella” – Episode 7 of Miss America, reviewed.
Episode Eight:
“Houston, we have a problem…” Episode 8 of Mrs America Reviewed.
conradbrunstrom 