NPR’s Fresh Air recently played a montage of past interviews with some of their more well-known guests, including a surprisingly insightful one with actor Lisa Kudrow from April 30, 2004.[i] I describe her interview as surprising because her comments unexpectedly turn on the subject of the sexualization of females before the lens of a camera.
Best known for her role as Phoebe on the sitcom Friends, the interview begins with NPR’s Terry Gross noting that Kudrow depicted the least-sexualized female character on the show: her character was the silly, guitar-playing free spirit with “sexy phlegm.”
But Kudrow rejects the assertion that her character was not sexual, noting that Phoebe discussed her sexual conquests in a number of episodes. Kudrow as a person, the actor counters, is not sexual, in that she is not comfortable exhibiting that part of her personality outside of the bedroom. Phoebe, therefore, did not come across as “sexy” as her onscreen female friends did. In essence, Kudrow makes a distinction between being perceived as sexual and being sexually active; in other words, being “sexual” is not limited to dressing and/or behaving provocatively.
Kudrow contrasts her character’s lack of overt sexuality with an über-sexy photo shoot she did along with her other female cast mates that landed them on the cover of a magazine. It is the subject of this photo shoot on which the focal point of Kudrow’s interview turns. What at first seems to be a fairly blasé interview suddenly becomes fascinating when she describes her photo shoot as “unnatural.”
Posing for “sexy” shoots, she says, means posing in unnatural positions and making a “crazy face”: open mouth, pursed lips, and wide eyes. True to her natural comedic tendencies, Kudrow punctuates her description with laughter and humorous adjectives such as the aforementioned “crazy face.” But underlying it all is an uncharacteristically serious Kudrow.
“It felt awful,” she states candidly, “like being taken advantage of.” In a world where it is quotidian to wait in line at the grocery store surrounded by half-dressed females posed provocatively on the covers of magazines, I am unsettled by Kudrow’s startling confession that she felt like she was “putting on a sex show” when asked by the photographer to unbutton her shirt a little.
Her discomfort was not, as Kudrow preemptively states, a sign of prudishness. She simply did not understand why she, as a female actor, should be expected to undress before a roomful of strangers to promote a product.
Perhaps it is her matter-of-fact tone as she describes how she felt being presented by the media as a sex object that is so unnerving. It makes me wonder: Would I feel comfortable unbuttoning my shirt, one button at a time, to maintain a coveted place in the winner’s circle of my craft?
Kudrow continued unbuttoning in professional deference to the male photographer, demanding of herself to “get comfortable!”—up to a point. Then her level of discomfort and her inner voice told her to stop. As she describes it, her refusal to further unbutton her blouse was an act of self-preservation. She felt an overwhelming need to protect herself from the will of another. Her sense of self was at stake.
Is Kudrow’s reaction to the photographer a self-aware instance of Laura Mulvey’s psychoanalytical exploration of “woman as image”?[ii] I would argue that the actor’s refusal to further unbutton her blouse was a rejection of the “determining male gaze project[ing] its fantasy onto the female figure”; moreover, she rejected the dichotomized “active/male and passive/female” power structure by setting boundaries with which she was more comfortable both personally and professionally (ibid).
Earlier in the interview, Kudrow refers to the poses and facial expressions that women are expected to do as conscious acts of “contortion.” She concedes that sexy poses are natural for some, but not all, including herself. So instead of forcing herself to be someone she’s not, she buttoned up her shirt.[iii]
[i] To listen to the audiofile, check out this link: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1863985
[ii] Laura Mulvey. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Visual and Other Pleasures. Indiana UP: Bloomington, 1989.
[iii] I’d like to note that Kudrow has been featured on a number of magazine covers—“crazy face” and all—but I believe that it’s possible to view her more recent refusal as perhaps new-found assertiveness rather than hypocrisy.
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