The three-time Oscar winner’s feminist roles, from Kramer onward, sketched the script for the Christine Blasey Fords and Cassidy Hutchinsons of today.
Ever since President Trump accurately observed that Meryl Streep is “overrated,” the three-time Oscar winner has made few political comments. But Streep casts such a long diva shadow over the culture that she has changed the way people regard acting — and not for the better. Unable to discern mimicry from characterization, behavior from affectation, many allow fame and legend to pass for worthiness.
The political term for this Streepified perception of humanity is the bromide “credible,” a trite, unoriginal judgment intended to placate and bolster one’s preexisting feelings, such as the reflexive partisanship exhibited by those pundits and politicians recently excited by Cassidy Hutchinson. Part of the uproar over Hutchinson’s performance at the January 6 show trial owes to the way Streep has influenced responses to female comportment.
Yet Streep hasn’t received credit for this dumbing-down of spectator discernment. We can now see Streep’s cannily studied witness-stand testimony as Joanne in 1979’s Kramer vs. Kramer (remember how Dustin Hoffman nodded his shamed, acquiescent-male approval?) as setting the template for the “believe all women” era. Streep could be on verge of a career rebirth.
Politics has opened new possibilities for Streep’s portfolio, with several new real-life roles to assay. Three prominent social figures fall within the range of Streep’s masterly artifice: Christine Blasey Ford, Ketanji Brown Jackson, and Hutchinson. If that shortlist seems weighted toward leftists, blame the infrequent spotlight shone on conservative women. It is another sign of Hollywood practice that most female roles reflect left-wing partisanship — think back to the conclave-coven of Hillary Clintonesque women-warriors Princess Leia, Rey Skywalker, and Vice-Admiral Amilyn Holdo in Star Wars: Episode VIII (The Last Jedi). Streep’s career rise always favored progressive types, whether the Holocaust survivor of Sophie’s Choice or the Washington Post’s Katherine Graham — her remarkable, sympathetic impersonation of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady being the great exception.
Here’s a look back to the Streep stunts that foreshadowed our present political perceptions.
In Florence Foster Jenkins (2016), Streep played an eccentric New York socialite who fancies herself an operatic soprano, even performing to dumbfounded crowds at Carnegie Hall. This may have been Streep’s most perverse film role, indulging a middle-aged woman’s psychotic delusions while also undergoing the most repulsive humiliation in any film this millennium. Jenkins’s degradation by her duplicitous husband, then her impending illness and death by venereal disease, represented a low point in female victimhood, perfectly timed for the burgeoning #MeToo movement.
Director Stephen Frears staged this biopic, alternating tragedy and travesty. Streep chose an oddly strangled, high-pitched, off-key singing voice; unlistenable and unbelievable until we heard the piping of Christine Blasey Ford. Streep’s weird politesse anticipated the mature Ford’s incongruous girlishness. In both cases, the play for pity was insufferable. Buyers of movie tickets could stay away; citizens subject to media bombardment weren’t so lucky.
By straining the “empowerment through empathy” cliché, the Jenkins role politicized Streep’s art, as did her random public support of trends from Operation Desert Storm to #TimesUp. Jenkins was different from Streep’s villainous Hillaryesque gorgon mother in The Manchurian Candidate, Jonathan Demme’s 2004 update that reflected political ambivalence in the shock-and-awe era. Jenkins was a crystal-ball prophesy of Blasey Ford, feminist manipulation gone berserk, an affront to all observers.
Joanne Kramer won Streep her first Oscar in 1980, capping the initial blush of Hollywood’s Seventies feminism. That was when Streep’s bag of tricks was fresh — the surface calm hiding well-rehearsed trickery. Hutchinson, before the J6 committee, “said something to the effect of” (to use her careful bit of legalese) the witness-stand testimony from Streep’s torch-bearing feminist playbook, perfectly emulating the star’s deliberate pauses and placid line-readings. Joanne had been willing to sacrifice her child for the empowerment ideas in her head. Bourgeois at heart, she epitomized junior-staff feminism, committed to her own personal advancement.
Typifying a vengeful ex-wife, Streep’s Joanne played both the sympathy and score-settling cards, the same strategies common in Beltway gamesmanship. How else are we to understand the presumptions shared by congressional prosecutors and witnesses, which their media partners swear are “credible”? Credibility — not truth — is always Streep’s aim, even when she badly fakes a British accent, as in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, an arch Italian accent in Bridges of Madison County, or a rather good Aussie twang in A Cry in the Dark. The goal isn’t just Oscars on a mantelpiece but emotional suasion, manipulating our gullibility and trust.
Here’s how the J6 show’s reliance on hearsay resembles Streep’s chameleon theatrics. Her “versatility” depends on our own appreciation of vicarious experience, a willingness to believe any ruse because it suits our sentimentality or our political preferences. Recognizing when La Streep is phony means realizing that bald-faced politicos can also be double-dealing, treacherous, and deceiving.
Will Streep ever take on a role as untrustworthy as Ketanji Brown Jackson? I’m sure she’s capable. In Don’t Look Up she couldn’t quite get back at Trump’s on-target leveling of her because she was trapped playing a goofy female president. Streep’s most delightful screen performance was playing herself in the Farrelly Brothers’ Stuck on You. Besides, this isn’t the time for a devoted white progressive to dare blackface. (Although I have long advocated that Jennifer Aniston play Rachel Dolezal.) But imagine the hilarious beauty of Streep fixing her mouth around Jackson’s falsehearted reply of “I’m not a biologist,” in response to “Can you define the word ‘woman?’”
You don’t have to be a film critic to spot the direct through-line from Streep to Hutchinson, Ford, and Jackson, but classic movies can help make us sensitive to how pop culture affects political mannerisms and propaganda downstream. Its moral effect may expose the deliberate destructive intentions of the January 6 show trial — or what else are movies for?
