Legacy of Carol P. Christ: “Am I Crazy?” Loving Laura Dern

This was originally posted on April 1, 2013

“Am I crazy?”

“No, just full of hope. You got more hope than most people do. It’s a beautiful thing to have a little hope for the world, you know.”

This question was posed by Amy Jellicoe, played by Laura Dern, at the end of the HBO television series Enlightened.  Unemployed, single, and in debt after she was fired for “whistle-blowing” on the corrupt activities of the corporation where she worked, Amy wondered if she had done the right thing.  The answer of her ex-husband Levi  brought tears to my eyes.

In many ways, I am Amy.

Let’s begin with the obvious.  When I was young, I was slender and pretty and exceedingly tall, with long blonde hair—I imagine I looked like Amy.  I couldn’t take my eyes off Laura Dern. There just aren’t many women in the world as tall as I am. Because of that I don’t know what I look like to others.  In the series, Laura Dern is taller than just about everyone else, including the men, and she seems not to care, because she often wears high heels. 

Though probably no one else noticed, I could see that though Dern has a great figure, her dresses and jackets didn’t quite fit her—skirts that would have been below the knees on other women barely grazed hers and the waistlines of her dresses and jackets were a couple of inches above her natural waist.  This is just one of the ways Laura Dern and I and other tall women are reminded daily that we will never quite “fit in.”  I suspect Dern’s combination of grace and awkwardness in her body is like my own.

I was raised in the suburbs of Los Angeles in tract homes like the one Amy shared with her mother.  When I went to college, I learned to feel ashamed of having grown up in “little boxes made of ticky-tacky [that] all look just the same.”*  I can think of only one other film portrayal—Erin Brockovich—in which anything good came out of the lower middle class post-war neighborhoods of southern California.

I could also see my relationship with my mother in Amy’s relationship with her mother–-who is played by Diane Ladd, Dern’s real life mother. Like Amy’s mother, my mother loved peace and quiet, roses, and her little dog. Like Amy’s mother, my mother kept her blonde hair in the “bubble cut” style popular in the 1960s. Like Amy’s mother, my mother only wanted her daughter to be happy.  Like Amy, I wanted the wholehearted approval and open expression of love my mother was not always able to give.

Our mothers had been trained not to show their feelings too much, except with small children. Because Amy and I got very tall very young, we both may have missed out on the hugs that smaller children our age still received.  I remember my mother cringing slightly as Amy’s mother did, when I came home with open arms and hugged her.  I loved Diane Ladd’s look of incomprehension when forty-year old, tall Amy climbed into bed with her. I also loved it that Ladd did not pull away.

In another scene Diane Ladd stands behind a distraught and crying Amy. Though Amy can’t see them, Ladd’s hands are hovering about 6 inches from Amy’s shoulders, finally coming to rest in an embrace.  After my mother died, one of her friends told me that my mother was in awe of me. In this scene, Diane Ladd seemed to be afraid of the beautiful tall unhappy daughter who was so different from herself.  Ladd’s worry that her daughter might never be happy meant that she could not accept Amy as she was. In another episode when Amy is all dressed up and asks her mother how she looks, Ladd responds “Your hair could use a trim”—instead of saying, “You look great.”  This happened to me too.

Like Amy I am often perceived by friends and colleagues as too “out there” – too open, too emotional, too confrontational, too passionate about things (like patriarchy, war, and the environment) that they don’t want to think about. I must admit that it was painful for me to watch the first series, during which Amy desperately wanted to change her life, but only succeeded in making one blunder after another with her friends, her former husband, her mother, and her colleagues.  I have seen others roll their eyes and wait for me to stop talking—just as Amy’s friends did with her.

In recent weeks, months, and years, I have been having a theological argument with my best friend from graduate school Judith Plaskow about the nature of God and the relation of God to the evil in the world.  Judith believes that the great power of creativity that underlies our world is impersonal and amoral, incapable by nature of caring about or loving the world.  When Judith wrote that my view that Goddess is love seems to contradict “the facts of the world,” I asked myself, “Am I crazy?” When she said that in my blog on matriarchy I unrealistically imagined “the perfection of human nature,” I asked myself, “Am I crazy?”  Am I crazy to believe that there was a time before patriarchy, war, and domination? Am I crazy to believe that we might create a better world?

From now on, when I ask, “Am I crazy,” I will respond to myself: “No, just full of hope. You got more hope than most people do. It’s a beautiful thing to have a little hope for the world, you know.”  And I won’t apologize.  Thanks Laura.

*This song by Malvina Reynolds which may be considered leftist expresses class contempt for the lives of my parents and grandparents; it was allegedly written about the Dolger homes of Daly City where my grandparents lived.  In my graduate and undergraduate years I learned to feel ashamed of where I came from.  My father, grandfather, and several uncles were insurance agents, the occupation that symbolized the meaninglessness of American life in Death of a Salesman.  In my post-graduate years lower middle class Jews and Italians from the east coast were viewed as “colorful” by intellectuals, but my family background is more often disdained.