Oh, Anne! With your small head and pert nose and oversized, ready smile and glossy pixie cut and squeakily tuneful speaking voice, uttering lines like “It came true!” as you gaze at your newly won Oscar with moistened doe-eyes, wearing a powder-pink Prada gown adorned with diamonds and bows: Why are you so annoying?
This question was posed repeatedly in the days after Anne Hathaway’s Oscar win for her role as the destitute-prostitute mother Fantine, in “Les Mis”—and various answers have been offered: she’s too actorly, and reminds us of the show-tune-belting nightmare we knew in high school; she’s polished, successful, and driven, and people still find this distasteful in a woman; plump faces are the vogue and her face is too thin; the public every so often elects a random celebrity victim for vitriolic hatred—every generation needs one, and she is ours; her sunny persona is a coverup for steely ambition that catapulted her out of youthful stardom into a mature career that runs the gamut from eccentric indie to big-franchise blockbuster. To these reasonably convincing propositions, I’ll add one more: she represents the archetype of the happy girl, which is one that many people resist.
Just flip randomly through the photographs of women on the red carpet: their faces are taut and inscrutable, their bodies often posed in the defensive posture of one muscled arm on hip. They smile without teeth. Their eyes are glazed and look off into a hazy middle distance, guarding some secret. Now, look at Anne: she stands with her long arms at her sides, looking directly (even a little pleadingly) into the camera, her smile is toothy and takes up half of her face. It’s a look of unfettered excitement and openness, an expression of high-wattage joy that reminds me of none other than a nine-year-old girl about to dig into a big slice of birthday cake. There’s generally only a small window of time when girls have that mien of utter at-homeness in the world—it gets snuffed out in many of them by age twelve or thirteen, when their glance turns inward, scrutinizing. Anne has somehow managed to retain that bright look, and many people would like to wipe it off her face.
Let’s take a quick survey of the people who were applauded for their red-carpet performances. A pale, limping Kristin Stewart with her perennial teen-agery pout and a bruise on her arm; Jennifer Lawrence, who is casually funny and naturally sarcastic and is most famous for her tomboyish roles; actresses in middle age like Sally Field and Meryl Streep, whom one can admire freely in the way that one admires a mother. Bruised teen-agers: likeable. Women who seem a little like men, or like they can hang with men: likeable. Post-menopausal women, old enough to be sexually non-threatening: likeable.
But I’m not so sure that girls are likeable, and I think this goes for girlish women like Anne Hathaway, who retain a bounding, uncontained energy. Look no further for evidence than the treatment of an actual nine-year-old girl who made an appearance at the Oscars, Quvenzhané Wallis, the star of “Beasts of the Southern Wild.” She was meanly criticized for spontaneously raising up her arms and making a muscle when her name was called in the list of nominees for best actress. Seth MacFarlane made a joke about her being too young for George Clooney, and The Onion tweeted its infamous tweet: “Everyone else seems afraid to say it, but that Quvenzhané Wallis is kind of a cunt, right?” The tweet was taken down and apologized for, but The Onion, as usual, had blurted out a terribly ugly version of a suppressed, itchy attitude that is probably more widely held than we’d like to think: the idea that young girls are ridiculous, annoying, and a little disgusting. They’re glittery, they squeal, they like attention, and—most disturbingly—they threaten to evoke illicit sexual feelings. The word “cunt” didn’t bubble up by accident.
Coincidentally, last night I came across a wonderful scene about the predicament of the little girl in the second installment of the autobiographical novel “My Struggle,” by the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard. (It’s published here in May.) Karl takes his little daughter, Vanje, to a classmate’s birthday party. She is a shy and introverted child, but she longs to play with other children, and looks forward to the party with a mix of trepidation and eagerness. She chooses to wear a new pair of sparkling golden shoes. When she arrives, she is thrust into a room with other children, who are all playing wildly. Karl watches her as she tries to figure out how to break in:
This scene is almost unbearably touching because it so deftly encapsulates a problem we all face: having to temper naked pleasure so as to be thought socially appropriate. Little girls learn very quickly not to ask so openly for praise, and to modulate their excitement if they want to be acceptable.
Anne Hathaway seems to never have quite ingested this lesson. She’s the girl proudly holding out to us her sparkling golden shoes. She wants praise. (And I don’t think it has been said enough that she deserves it. She’s a very gifted actress, particularly when she plays roles that cut against her cheery persona, like Jack Twist’s lacquered, embittered wife in “Brokeback Mountain.”) Would it really be so terrible to give her the applause that she craves?
Photograph by Jason Merritt/Getty.