On being intense like Anne Hathaway
no one likes a theater kid.
I’m working up a fun little series for the next few weeks that digs into the liturgical season of Advent. Maybe a better way to say it is that I am hoping to salvage Advent for myself. If you resonated at all with some of my blogs about Catholic calendars, youthful religiosity, or how I was once told I’d make a good priest, I think this will be interesting for you.
I’d intended to complete this and send last week, while I was spending a week in Colorado, a state where I’m not legally allowed to do work for my employer. This means I left my work laptop in Philly—I highly recommend having a state where you are not legally allowed to work, especially if that state is also a nice one to spend vacation time in. Despite that free time, I didn’t really write while traveling. I just read a lot, which was also good. Sometimes what you need isn’t what you think you need.
So now I’m starting my Advent series a little late. So be it. We’ll do Advent late this year.
Paid subscribers will get a post on this topic imminently. Free subscribers will get a piece of that post, not exactly for the purpose of acquiring more paid subscribers (remember you can always get a comped subscription, just ask), but because I want an extra little barrier between these thoughts and the internet, at least for the time being. They’re still new.
How an offhand comment over dinner with friends turned into, like, an hour long debate about Anne Hathaway and we almost missed an episode of Survivor.
I feel the need, probably immature, to caveat up front: both sides of this have a real parasocial streak to them. None of us were arguing that we “knew the real Anne”, but once you start making arguments that involve guesses about how some other person feels then it’s shaky territory. This is especially true if they are famous, but maybe even if they’re not at all; if you’re talking about them when they aren’t there, whether you like it or not they are famous to you.
Still, as is my way, I’m gonna pull this experience apart like string cheese and I’m going to chew on it. Rubbery and satisfying. If I ever feel like I’m not perfectly aligning with people who I think are smart, thoughtful, generous, and are my friends, then I’m gonna be doing some reflecting. I love that shit. I think it’s one of the ways I turn a debate into something not stupid. Is that how a dialectic works? I don’t know, I had bad teachers in high school.1
So what is wrong with Anne Hathaway? It wasn’t that these friends thought she was talentless or, like, a bad person. They think that she is annoying. There are, honestly, endless examples online of her being weird toward journalists, weird on talk shows, and weird in magazines. Annoying from a distance, as a public figure, and annoying in person. One of my friends had a personal anecdote from a friend who had helped Anne pick out a gift at a book store—the long and short of it was that she was very weird and in an alienating way. A Rachel Berry-esque, chasing the spotlight even in a one on one interaction kind of weird. Anti-social.
We talked about what kind of annoying this constitutes. I suggested that it was the ingrained distaste of theater kids, the way that a certain kind of kid can’t help but throw up the symbolic jazz hands and takes extra satisfaction in reading out loud in a high school English class. I was that kid, using the time that we read The Crucible in English class to essentially pre-audition for the play, which I knew our thespian troupe would be putting on. Looking back, I am sure plenty were rolling their eyes at me. Joke’s on them, I got cast as John Procter.
I remember a time I would have been very young, maybe ten or eleven, when I walked out of Sunday school and, when my dad asked how it was, I talked about a girl who loved to sing and was kind of annoying about it. I told him she always volunteered to lead the singing parts of our study hour and how she really tried to make it a thing, “made her voice go up and down a bunch”. I couldn’t name it, but I was annoyed by her excitement to over-perform for what was otherwise a pretty small and comfortable space. I saw selfishness in her performance.
I asked my friends if the same kind of annoyance they felt for Anne Hathaway applied to Aubrey Plaza, someone who has much better press, but has been known to show up to media appearances in a full witch costume. I didn’t bring up Chappell Roan, but I could have—she famously went to a Grammy’s afterparty wearing a prosthetic pig nose and has continued to lean happily into the Miss Piggy comparisons. Chappell gets to call it drag, for some reason, but most drag performers are, ultimately, theater kids too. My friends agreed that Aubrey was a good foil, because the performativity is there, but she was much more of a welcome presence. Something was different.
Now, upon reflection, I think a big part of what is different is that at some level Anne Hathaway is hard coded as an insider. I actually don’t know if that’s the case, but she carries that association. She’s tall and slender and rich and has perfect teeth and gets to wear very fancy clothing. She plays along with the machine of fame in a way that Aubrey Plaza doesn’t (or Aubrey at least has the good sense to flip off the camera and make an ugly face when given the chance).
Over dinner, after we’d already been talking about this for a little too long, I got snippy and suggested that maybe the reason I wasn’t annoyed was just because I was less of a hater than them. This is very funny, and they laughed, because that is absurd. I almost didn’t get through the suggestion before I realized I couldn’t defend it. If they’re haters, I am too.
Except, I don’t think they’re haters. When I think of a “hater” my image isn’t of someone who dislikes or criticizes or even roasts. “Hater” evokes someone who hates naively and reactively and uncritically.
I am reminded of a time at a friend’s birthday party that a karaoke machine was brought out. Karaoke is very fun, but lots of people just aren’t interested. That is fine. But, at this party, one girl who was theoretically a very close friend of the birthday girl refused to sing and gave a little self-conscious giggle before saying something along the lines of “I would not be caught dead singing karaoke”.
Putting aside the fact that this was the safest place to just pick up the mic and act silly and hop around, because it was at someone’s house, the lights were down, all the courtesy invites had left, the implicit judgment in that ultimately self-limiting comment is, to me, what makes a hater.
Hating has to involve pushing someone into a familiar, tired, moderate box. It’s not the same as “not letting people enjoy things” as the common phrase on the Internet goes. Some things, especially things that have allied themselves or been created by the institution, by the powers that be, might not need to be enjoyed, at least uncritically. Hating on karaoke at a karaoke party is a bummer. Haters are bummers, and my friends and I are not bummers.
The disagreement about Anne Hathaway can’t be settled, since it’s just a disagreement about whether or not she’s annoying. It’s like disagreeing about whether or not improv is annoying. It is, to some people sometimes and not to other people sometimes. So what’s to be gained by thinking about it?
I was going to spend even more time reflecting on this in my first draft, but then I read this more recent cover story in Vanity Fair. It pretty much encompasses it all, down to the still moving target for Anne to be a little more normal (I love and hate the detail where she says she wants to figure out how to do this, to be normal, then clutches the writer’s hand and says something very not normal). I’d recommend the article, it’s a nice profile.
I used to frequently return to this video of Anne Hathaway talking about quitting drinking until her son is out of the house, reckoning with the idea that she just can’t really be the mom and the actor that she wants to be if she drinks. I gravitate toward this video, toward her somewhat canned story2 about drinking with Matthew McConaughey and about realizing that her son was seeing her hungover more than sober at a certain point and that she just needed to leave it.
I’ve been thinking about whether or not I can be a drinker pretty much since the first time I got drunk in high school. These days, talking it out with my therapist, a lot of the conversation has been about the feelings before and after drinking, the feelings of shame and desire, control and release. He’s interested in my exploring what moderation is and how much of it is possible. I appreciate it and am glad to explore it with his help, but I am also aware of my tendencies to be all or nothing. Sometimes this equates to black and white thinking, but I think this is also recognizing my own red line and understanding that I can’t have feet on either side of it. I am not easygoing that way, and neither is Anne, that is clear.
I didn’t want to cop to it that night, but I have positioned Anne Hathaway as a kind of proxy for being an intense and not chill person. A dork who made good, i.e. “one of us”. I am loathe to call myself a fan, ever, in any circumstance, because that’s asking the universe to reveal the object of your fandom to be at best a fallible human and at worst an abuser or a Zionist or some other disappointment, but I guess I’m a fan of Anne Hathaways.
When I was in high school, a Catholic gay boy coming to terms with the fact that I probably didn’t believe in the God I had always known and definitely didn’t believe in the church that raised me, I watched a video of Anne Hathaway talk about how her whole family left the Catholic church when her brother came out. This was an Anne Hathaway speaking a couple of years before the Les Mis of it all, before #Hathahate.
In some ways this was when her worst interviews were, but she also didn’t have quite the clout to attract the worst attention of the internet. That interview stuck with me and secured her a spot inside my moat of good will. She was earnest, intense, honest, and charming. A talented performer, emoting on a topic that meant a lot to me. The light in her eyes made me believe that it meant a lot to her too. Add on top of it that, at the time, I was working steadily toward earning the mostly meaningless title of “International Honor Thespian” and of course I felt drawn to her, felt represented in some way by her.
Am I fan of her now? Generally, yes, I like her work, even when it is very dumb. She’s someone I’m always happy to see on screen. I’m rarely exposed to anything else she does or says which works out fine for me. If it comes out that she’s got really bad politics or throws staplers at her staff, I’ll be glad to know, but I’m not enough of a fan to die on that hill. It’s so easy not to die on a hill, so why do so many people do it so often?
Thank you for reading—and thank you to my hater friends for talking to me about Anne Hathaway and liking me even though I’m a theater kid through and through.
Always a lot of credit goes to the people who have been my teachers, both directly and through their freely shared knowledge, and so many books.
I’ll be saying this when I’m on my death bed.
The canned nature of her speaking is basically the entirety of her problem, probably.