“It was just your run-of-the-mill orgasm! I didn’t mean to scare you!”
That’s the first thing Connie Britton said on national television, way back in 1996. It was a fitting introduction to her character, Nikki Faber, on the long-running ABC show Spin City, in which she played the sometimes raunchy, oversexed love interest to Michael J. Fox as they attempted to manage the publicity of the bumbling New York City mayor.
The character on Spin City has Britton’s face, but the rest is nearly unrecognizable: Her hair is shorter, browner, and cut in the choppy layers that anyone familiar with the ‘90s will recognize as “The Rachel.” Nikki is a classic man-eater: She alludes to threesomes, she towers her co-stars, she’s coarse and vulgar when the rest of the women in the office come off as sweet or clueless. It’s a choice role (especially for a relative newcomer), but it’s also completely at odds with the way we think of Connie Britton today.
Dreamworks SKG / Courtesy Everett Collection
Because Nikki Faber is no Tami Taylor. Tami Taylor — she of the "y’all" and the hair and the aviators, of the soft exterior and steely drive, of infinite wisdom and ageless beauty. No matter that Friday Night Lights was one of the lowest rated and most beleaguered network shows in recent memory: Through the magic cultural catch-up tool that is Netflix, Taylor has taken on the sort of iconic importance usually reserved for massive Hollywood stars' roles. If Friday Night Lights and its brand of thoughtful, empathetic, addictive drama has morphed into a quasi-religion, then Tami Taylor is its patron saint, the complicated embodiment of all that made the show feel different and real and smart.
The character of Tami Taylor lived for 76 episodes and five seasons — long enough for her character to subsume the actress who played her. Even in her subsequent starring roles in American Horror Story and Nashville feel like she’s just following a different path on the Tami Taylor Choose Your Adventure novel: In one, her marriage falls apart and she ends up having sex with a man in a rubber suit; in another, she becomes a famous country singer with a complicated love life. But the center — the Tami Taylor-ified charisma, the waterfall of hair, and the “I’m concerned about you, do we need to have a talk” face — remains.
The fortitude and consistency of that center has fostered an adult cult of Connie Britton: a mass of women, mostly between the ages of 20 and 45, who view Britton not just with affection, or awe, but admiration. Every star has fans, but select few have cults. We often associate the word “cult” with mindless, manipulated masses, but the word also connotes a group whose beliefs are in some way deviant or different. If Britton had become a star during those Spin City years, there’d be nothing cultish about loving her: Like so many other sitcom stars, she was somewhere around 30, thin, white, beautiful, straight.
Loving the Britton of today is tantamount to ignoring much of what Hollywood has tried to impute as ideal.
But loving the Britton of today is tantamount to ignoring much of what Hollywood has tried to impute as ideal. She’s still thin, white, beautiful, and straight, but she’s the thing that the vast majority of mainstream media pretends doesn’t exist: a woman over 40. More specifically, a woman over 40 whose image combines the sexual and the maternal, the ambitious and the empathetic. As one fan of the hundreds who, when solicited, offered testimonials about why they loved Britton told me, “She makes getting older seem incredibly appealing — not just because she looks stunning, but it’s the sense of presence and surety she projects.” The combination of confidence and beauty, of wisdom and maturity — that’s what undergirds her fandom.
At this moment, the seeming singularity of Connie Britton, and the magnitude of the affection directed toward her, bespeaks a generalized hunger for a female star that models a nuanced, mature, and periodically imperfect form of femininity. It’s about the hair, of course — which has taken on a near totemic function — but it’s also about much more than that.
Britton is by no means the biggest star in Hollywood: Nashville is limping through its third season, and she was on screen for all of 10 minutes in her most recent film, This Is Where I Leave You. But if you look closely, she might be one of the most important. Hollywood didn’t make Connie Britton a star, cobbling together the most reductive and regressive notions of what it means to be a woman today. We did, forging her in the most hopeful and realistic yet strong versions of our best selves.
Tommaso Boddi / Getty
The narrative of Britton’s early career has been recited in the various profiles of her post-Friday Night Lights fame. She grew up fairly WASP-y in Maryland and Virginia, went to Dartmouth, majored in Asian Studies, studied abroad with (now Sen.) Kirsten Gillibrand. She’d been involved in theater in high school and, after graduating from college, moved to New York and married her college boyfriend, and while he became a finance banker, she dabbled in off-off-Broadway productions while taking part-time jobs to help pay the bills, including one as an aerobics instructor, leg warmers and all. (Britton declined to be interviewed for this story.)
Britton and the finance husband divorced in 1995, but at that point she had spent eight months shooting the film that would put her, however briefly, on the map as the frustrated wife of an adulterous man in Ed Burns’ debut feature, The Brothers McMullen, a small character study with a tiny budget that went on to win the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance.
McMullen didn’t make Britton a household name, but it did put her on casting directors’ radar, which is how she nearly won the Jerry Maguire role that eventually went to Renee Zellweger.
Two paths diverged in a Hollywood casting room: One star (Zellweger) became a household name, while the other went on to a string of sitcoms. The Maguire role would have made Britton into a late-‘90s It Girl, but one look at the current state of Zellweger’s career — and the current uproar over daring to age and/or her resistance to it — and you can see why Britton should be thankful to have missed the chance to make out with Tom Cruise.
Instead of Maguire, Britton found herself cast in a slew of doomed pilots and in a multi-episode stint on the original Ellen as the overbearing, clueless sister of one of Ellen’s best friends, and eventually landed the role of Nikki on Spin City, where she would win the sort of quiet following that often follows supporting sitcom characters.
But when Fox’s Parkinson’s disease forced him to leave Spin City in 2000, Britton’s character was written off the show. For the next six years, she jumped from one small role to the next, sometimes picking up a recurring gig, as she did in The West Wing, other times ending up a piece of ‘80s-costumed window dressing, as she did in the film adaptation of Buzz Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights in 2004. It was an exhausting, frustrating schlep between sets and roles and disappointments.
In 2006, Peter Berg, who had produced the film version of Friday Night Lights, was working on a television adaptation for NBC that would be far more loosely based on the real-life events collected in Bissinger’s book. He asked Britton to reprise the same role she had played in the film, promising that this time, her role would be more fleshed out. “I was really, really hesitant,” Britton told Variety. “In fact, I said, 'No. I love you and adore you, but I don’t want to.'”
Yet Berg reiterated his promise for something bigger and meatier than a meekly supportive coach’s wife — and it was that role, as guidance counselor, mother, wife, and eventually principal, that would, over the course of five seasons, turn Connie Britton into the household name that she nearly became more than a decade before. She wasn’t a buxom young starlet or the hottest new thing; she was just, quite simply and clearly, one of television’s best actresses in one of its most complicated roles.
The details of Britton’s struggle ultimately matter less than the sheer fact of a woman breaking through in Hollywood at the age of 39. But that’s just one of the qualities of Britton’s image that have made it so pervasively popular over the last eight years. For men and women alike, she exudes what feels like an amorphous, complex feminine aura. But ask any woman to tease that apart and you’ll see it’s an amalgamation of several interlocking areas: softness, maturity, progressiveness, and a particular take on “having it all.”
Michael Loccisano / Getty
The “softness” isn’t to do with Britton’s body — which is pilates-toned, but by no means a size zero — so much as her demeanor. And the way we understand Britton’s demeanor is as an extension of Tami Taylor, who spent five seasons negotiating her way to power from the stereotypically subservient position of “coach’s wife” in a football-obsessed town.
Instead of forcefully critiquing the cultural infrastructure from the outside, she works within its existing boundaries to change it. Her beauty, her smile, that nice-lady voice, all of it is a way of getting what she/the high school students she counsels want or need, especially when dealing with apparatuses of power (the boosters, the school board, Joe McCoy). She kills not with kindness, but with y’alls.
Tami’s power is negotiated, but it’s also a realistic rendering of how women in much of America are able to fight and win battles on a daily basis. Instead of busting balls, attempting to engage in conversation. Instead of insulting another’s way of life, trying to inhabit it. Tami’s mix of the soft Southern exterior with steely drive emulates a form of activism wholly recognizable to anyone who’s attempted to effect change in an environment wholly resistant to it.
That Tami Taylor brand of softness is replicated in Britton’s off-screen persona. No matter that Britton isn’t exactly a native Southerner: Her Twitter account is littered with y’alls. Which isn’t to suggest that Britton is performing “softness”; rather, it’s become a naturally accentuated component of her public persona. It’s amplified every time an interviewer asks her to recreate the “magic” of Tami Taylor — getting her to don Taylor’s signature aviators, for example — and underlined in her leading role in Nashville, in which she might say fewer “y’alls” but still embraces the same model of conciliatory power and strength, this time with more glitter and halter tops. The softness — and its power to persuade — endures. And of course, on screen and off, with its soft waves, its welcoming caramel color, there's the hair.
When people talk about Britton, the first thing they talk about is the hair. Even in professional interviews, journalists ask her about it. Seth Meyers pegged an entire segment to it. The Britton cover story in More magazine begins with, “The hair is tawny, thick, and tousled to casual perfection. And it’s all her own.” American Horror Story showrunner Ryan Murphy says, “She has the best hair in Hollywood.” And then there’s the hair-supported Tumblr and the Twitter and the endless tutorials.
The hair connotes softness, but it also suggests a sort of unfettered, unabashed womanliness. It’s not just the volume — although that’s part of it — or the beautiful color. It’s not even the hair itself so much as what it’s not: namely, the stereotypical haircut of a fortysomething mother, doomed to the next four decades of practical mom-cuts.
As cultural critics Sarah Blackwood and Sarah Mesle put it, “The Hair asks us to think about a heavy ponytail at 40. Let’s not dismiss this as a joke, or as the same question as Botox or artificially plumped lips. If Botox is always about youth obsession, Connie Britton’s Hair is not always — or even ever — an attempt to look like Lyla Garrity or Hayden Panettiere. It might actually be about the specific pleasure of forty-ness.”
The utter fullness of the hair is like a testament to a life well-lived. The strawberry blonde highlights suggest a life spent in the sun; its ability to swing in a ponytail, to rope up in a French twist, tousle around the shoulders, even to look just this side of J.B.F., is like an extension of all the modes of femininity occupied by today’s accomplished woman.
Britton’s hair refuses to hew the line of what a woman’s hair (or life) should resemble. It’s not unruly the way that, say, Helena Bonham Carter’s hair is — but it declares, through its sheer existence, a different self-conception for a woman over 40 than those proffered by the media. The hair, in other words, feels like a revelation.
But if we’re talking about Connie Britton’s hair, we’re also talking about the way it complements her face. Usually people say that a face “betrays” one’s age, but Britton’s face functions as the opposite of betrayal: Each smile line and crow’s-foot makes her somehow more, not less, beautiful. She’s not old; she’s mature. And with that maturity comes a certain wisdom: the ability, for example, to discuss big, often alienating issues with grace and empathy, whether it’s talking to her teenage daughter about losing her virginity (Friday Night Lights) or figuring out how to admit that her marriage is over (Nashville).
Usually male stars are the ones who grow into their looks — see George Clooney, Jon Hamm, even Cary Grant.
It’s no coincidence that Britton worked in Hollywood for decades before breaking through. She was always beautiful, but it wasn’t until she looked the way she does now that beauty became one of her defining adjectives. Usually male stars are the ones who grow into their looks — see George Clooney, Jon Hamm, even Cary Grant — but most female stars peak and often became hyperreal versions of their former selves, an amalgam of precise surgery and injections.
In this way, Britton’s refusal to transform her face becomes an act of rebellion against a system of norms that would rather she freeze all movement above her eyebrows than have a visible wrinkle. But Britton has also consciously refused to bend her narrative into that of a woman obsessed with her own aging. As she told Esquire, “I haven’t really focused on myself as a quote-unquote ‘woman maturing.’ I try to avoid that at all costs. ... Some of the press that happened around Nashville really was an eye-opener for me, because there were a lot of initial stories describing my character as ‘aging’ and ‘over the hill,’ and I was like, ‘What the fuck?'”
Originally, Britton’s Nashville character was framed as the aging has-been to Hayden Panettiere's Taylor Swift-esque ingenue, but Britton hated the dichotomy. She fought the writers to cut scenes, like one planned for the premiere, in which she did the stereotypical pull-at-your-face-and-look-sad routine. She was “furious” about the trajectory of her character, especially, as Britton explained, given what had recently happened in her own career: “That’s not even who I represent as an actor,” she told the New York Times. “My life started being awesome five years ago.”
To admit that life can, indeed, start to be awesome at 40 — that’s a great quote. But it also exemplifies the sort of ideological rebellion that crystallizes the cult around her.
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