Pandora's Box by Peter Biskind

Author:Peter Biskind [Biskind, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141992761
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2021-03-06T00:00:00+00:00

10

Amazon’s Women in the High Castle

Amazon hit a roadblock called #MeToo, while Apple, its bigger tech cousin, started its own streamer.

Ever since dad dropped the trans bomb, Joey Soloway had been mulling over a show in which “the father of three adult children transitions to mother, in this case, from Mort to Maura, Papa to Moppa. I was thinking about Lena Dunham in Girls, where the parents make it hard for Hannah to be Hannah. I wanted to take that idea and really bring in the family unit of Six Feet Under.”1

Soloway doesn’t sentimentalize the characters in Transparent because they’re nonbinary members of the transverse. Far from it. They’re a rogue’s gallery of self-absorbed, neglectful parents, heedless children, and faithless mates. Imagine your parents were Nancy Botwin and Walter White. They behave badly like everyone else, but Soloway makes them entertainingly politically incorrect, and indulges them, because they’re human.

“Roy Price wasn’t working creatively with me,”2 says Soloway. “I feel very lucky that I met Joe [Lewis], that he could love these unlikable Jewish women. To get on TV, women could be just Jewish or unlikable, but they couldn’t be both. It was the old ‘Speak Yiddish, write British.’ We want writers to be Jewish, but you don’t want anybody who looks Jewish.”

The pilot began conventionally enough with the credit sequence—a montage of Pfefferman family photographs picturing a boy at his bar mitzvah, prepubescent girls in period bathing suits, women cutting cake—and then bang: naked women hungrily devouring one another, remarks like, “Why don’t you clean up the barbecue sauce inside your vagina”; cunnilingus salted by self-pleasuring; intimations of interracial “sexercise,” aka “twerkouts”; a tasteless riff Nazifying Jewish surnames into Marcy “Kristallnacht” or Barbara “Belsenberger”—funny if you have a certain, pre-Ye sense of humor. It was all topped off by the cherry on the sundae—the patriarch of the Pfefferman family appearing as a shapeless woman with long, stringy gray hair badly in need of volumizing, looking, from a conventional point of view, altogether grotesque. And that was the point. Calling it “blowing up the binary,” Soloway tossed the genders in a blender and took them for a spin, and you never knew what was going to come out. But, the showrunner goes on, “I’m not saying destroy the category of male and female, or the category of straight and gay. I’m just saying that there is a third category. There is a place in between.”3

Soloway moved ahead, casting the members of the Pfefferman family with actors who shared in Soloway’s vision, although one choice turned out to be ill-fated: Jeffrey Tambor, best known for The Larry Sanders Show and Arrested Development, to play the dad-to-mom. The trans community attacked him and the series for using a cis male in the role, comparing it to Black people watching a white actor in blackface—in this case, “transface”—even though Soloway made a real effort to hire trans talent and make them comfortable. All the restrooms on the set were gender neutral. Soloway established a

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