Joy to the girl

“Those who risk agony and death to bring children into this fiasco can’t afford to be too frivolous,” wrote Christopher Hitchens, that Brit provocateur, in his outrage-fueling 2007 Vanity Fair essay on why women can’t be funny.

Or is it that frivolity, where it does spring up from the female sex, is swiftly crushed underfoot? Do we like for our most dynamic women — with or without elements of frivolity — to fit into one of three defining categories: sexual commodities, subservient creatures, sacrificial lambs. It’s evident on the national political stage: A philandering husband and a single tear seem to have rendered Hillary Clinton the eternal victim. Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin feels less associated with glass-ceiling-breaking than with the porno she inspired, Who’s Nailin’ Paylin. Even feminist author Camille Paglia, in her Salon.com column, feigning not to understand Palin as a sex object, described viewing the Alaskan governer as an “Amazon warrior.” Talk about splitting hairs.

Just as I was getting really bummed that the greater storytelling world refuses to flip the script and allow a woman’s narrative to be defined by vivaciousness and humor, along came Poppy, the sunny leading lady in the character study that is the British film Happy-Go-Lucky. Writer-director Mike Leigh and frequent collaborator actress Sally Hawkins (Poppy) have brought into being a richly layered female character who is neither hooker nor doormat nor victim (nor mother nor wife nor girlfriend). Poppy is a single, poor schoolteacher who practices happiness as a way of life in an oft unkind world. She is sexy; she is at times treaded upon; she is even the victim of violence at one point; but none of these things define her. Her indefatigable good cheer does. What a revelation.

Riding her bike daydreamily through the film’s opening-credits sequence in mismatched clothes ), Poppy at first seems some iteration of the  “manic pixie dream girl,” an archetype coined by A.V. Club film critic Nathan Rabin to describe cute, eccentric, one-dimensional female characters who “[exist] solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.” (Think Natalie Portman in Garden State or Kirsten Dunst in Elizabethtown.)

But there are few male characters to speak of in Happy-Go-Lucky, certainly none whom Poppy reinvigorates. The film doesn’t offer much in terms of plot, but makes up for it as a site for female possibilities of happiness and verve. Lewd, hyper, well-meaning, and never short on jokes, Poppy swims through life — wearing the same skirt and shoes nearly every day — effusing joy whether she is dancing in a discotheque with her girlfriends, teaching her primary-school students about bird migration, or lying on a table at her physical therapist’s office. She may be 30 and unmarried, but that doesn’t mean she has anything less than a gorgeous home life — I would go so far as to say family life — with her divine roommate of 10 years. Her bicycle may get stolen, but for Poppy, that’s just an excuse to finally get those driving lessons she’s been thinking about. Rather than blathering on about longing for love, gawky Poppy seems keenly unaware of this perceived “lack,” preferring to discuss the university plans of her colleague’s daughter and how great her students are.

In Happy-Go-Lucky, Leigh has proved there are other compelling options for female characters. He has managed to use unabashed joy and pleasure, not pain, as motivations for narrative complication. For Poppy’s driving instructor, playfulness and high-heel-wearing have never ceased to be sexual signifiers or invitations. A climactic scene in which it becomes clear that Poppy’s vivaciousness has confused and hurt him reads as a reaction to the manic pixie dream girl trend. For every man they save, how many are left in their wake?

November 7, 2008. Tags: A.V. Club, Christopher Hitchens, Happy-Go-Lucky, Hillary Clinton, Kirsten Dunst, Manic pixie dream girl, Mike Leigh, Natalie Portman, Nathan Rabin, Sally Hawkins, Sarah Palin, Vanity Fair. Movies. 4 comments.