What Are You Playing At?

THE BEST FRIENDS

Meryl Streep, Penny Marshall, and Carrie Fisher

Photographed by Art Schreiber at the Four Seasons Hotel in Los Angeles on December 2, 1996.

Friendship is the recess from the graduate school of life. My friendship with Penny and Meryl has the sense of a secret handshake of shared sensibility, of shared history. Penny is disgruntled, courageous, and funny. Meryl is maternal, grounded, funny, and so loyal it’s impossible for you to hate her for her talent, her long marriage, her many children, or her beauty, which seems unlikely to dimish anytime soon.

We three are in the same business in three different ways, though we originally started out in the same union. Penny and I changed careers in midstream around the same time and branched off into work behind the camera; Meryl remains luminous and astonishing before the lens. Penny and I are suspicious party throwers, exhausted workaholics who understand each other through various overlapping idiosyncrasies; we finish, if not anticipate, each other’s sentences. Meryl’s empathy runs rampant; she never loses faith in her friends’ ability to bend back into shape. Or her ability to speak in shorhand and silence. I have been sustained by these women through adverse times and personal difficulties. We play for fun and for keeps till the bell rings.

“The double agent for the patriarchy is basically just a woman who perhaps unknowingly is still putting the patriarchal narrative out into the world. Is still benefitting off, profiting off and selling a patriarchal narrative to other women. But it’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing. You know, just because you look like a woman, we trust you and we think you’re on our side, but you are selling us something that really doesn’t make us feel good. You’re selling us an ideal, a body shape, a problem with our wrinkles, a problem with ageing, a problem with gravity, a problem with any kind of body fat. You’re selling us self-consciousness. The same poison that made you clearly develop some sort of body dysmorphia or facial dysmorphia, you are now pouring back into the world. You’re like recycling hatred. I find that really dangerous and I think it’s unacceptable and I don’t care if you’re a woman. I think constructive criticism is needed for anyone to ever evolve. For our gender to evolve we need some sort of constructive criticism. As long as we do it in a somewhat careful way. (…) So many of the worst things in the world have happened motivated by greed. And I just don’t think that’s an acceptable excuse anymore. How much money do you need? Really how much money do you need? How much money do any of these huge influencers who are worth millions or billions sometimes… why are they still promoting appetite-suppressant lollipops to young girls? And it’s not a fight against obesity. They have young, already slim girls, in their adverts for Flat Tummy company, this company that are absolutely everywhere, and they’re even being advertised in some of the most mainstream magazines, women’s magazines, and they have a billboard in Times Square. The money is built on the blood and tears of young women who believe in them, who follow them, who look up to them like the big sister they never had. It’s so upsetting and it feels like such a betrayal against women.”