Little Women (2019)

directed by Greta Gerwig

Lena Moses-Schmitt

You’d think it would be fitting to go to the National Museum of Women in the Arts after seeing Little Women. Instead it was depressing. Maybe it’s my own fault for wandering the gift shop first thing, where “feminist” commodities pontificated from the shelves, before looking at any of the exhibits upstairs. Stacks of sweatshirts and socks embroidered with Frida Kahlo and RBG’s faces (the plucky acronym “RBG” has always felt rather bleak to me), Rosie the Riveter soap (“We Can Wash It!” declares the cheerful packaging). A Louise Bourgeois eye mask. A T-shirt that says “Men Have Made A Lot of Bad Art.” The depersonalization effect of capitalism was smeared everywhere like lipstick across a cheek, a reminder that womanhood exists mostly as a product to be sold right back to me.

A movie is a product too, and I know the marketing of Little Women pandered to hashtag feminism in similar ways, as most marketing must pander to something: cut to the clip of Jo saying “Women have minds! They have hearts!” etcetera folded into every trailer, a moving scene diminished to a sound bite. But the movie I had just watched didn’t have that slick, lycra product-feel—it was intimate, reminding me that my experience was bodily, personal, existing outside of the market, even if it also has to exist within it. I hadn’t realized I needed reminding. As soon as the movie began, I was overwhelmed by tactile sensation, a sort of aura that seemed to float between me and the screen. Watching it again, several months later, having not hugged anyone but my husband since March, I almost felt like I was suffocating.

It’s the film’s intense concentration on movement that accomplishes this, I think, a fixation which feels even more refreshing and wrenching now, after months in social isolation. Jo dashing through a crowded street, running down the stairs hard and fast (bam bam bam bam, with those shaky close-up shots of her feet; you can feel the steps firing off in your ribcage); Beth strolling across the field to Mr. Laurence’s house, shimmering like the air above a gas pump; the parabolic arc of the camera swooping over Amy like a hoop skirt as she runs through the snow. The leaping back and forth in time; Amy’s eyes moving back and forth between her own canvas and someone else’s at the moment she realizes she’ll never be a Great Artist. Everyone and everything was whirling, everyone’s hair was in my mouth. Greta Gerwig has said she wanted the camera to feel like a dancer; well, she succeeded, and I felt my stomach respond with the same thrill as going sharply downhill in a car.

Even the scenes where Jo reads and writes have this energy, this motion. She wiggles her foot impatiently as she sucks on the tip of a pen; she shakes her hands out, she lays all her pages on the floor and walks around them, stooping to take a better look. She shuffles the order, moving her brain around on the ground. Part of this is just smart directing: it’s much more interesting to watch the interior at work if it’s made physical. Thinking is movement, too, even if it’s not visible. Nothing has been clearer to me at a time when all my movements are drastically reduced to fundamentals. Thoughts pile up until my body feels almost pressurized, and I have little outlet for them: pacing up and down the stairs, meandering around my neighborhood. I have to walk because often it feels like the only safe way to think. Greta Gerwig, in another interview: “I am interested in women in motion. Of course I am.” I am too. But why does it feel so special to watch women in motion? Is it the same reason why it feels so good to move and dance? Is watching that closely aligned with doing?

*

Once I extracted myself from the jaws of the museum gift shop, I took the elevator to an upper floor, to an exhibition called Live Dangerously. One of the rooms was devoted to a group of photographs called “100 Little Deaths,” by Janaina Tschäpe. In each, Tschäpe’s body lies face down in a landscape. On a beach, in a forest, in a field, on a sidewalk, on a staircase. At first the photographs were jarring to look at after watching a movie filled with so much motion. But the longer I looked at them the more I realized that Tschäpe’s positions were not passive, or at least, not merely passive; they were aggressive too. Her body seemed to enact a form of surrender and one of protest, active in the way Jo refused to be led into marriage and a typical life, the way children go slack when they don’t want their parents to pick them up. Oh, is my body inconvenient for you? she seems to be saying as she drapes herself in the middle of a footpath. Just try to fucking move me.

When I hear the phrase period piece, for some reason I immediately and exclusively think of women in the 18th and 19th centuries. I think of the propriety that enshrouded them, of their carefully choreographed walks around a garden or a drawing room (doesn’t it always seem, beneath their many skirts, like they’re toeing their way down a balance beam?), the delicate stems of their necks holding up enormous feathery hats. I think of their gloved hands, and how they present them like little dead birds for knuckle kisses. In a movie like Little Women, where Gerwig purposefully directs her women characters into poses that are playful—they don’t just dance, they romp; they stomp around; they grab, they pull, they push—and therefore “unladylike,” it lends them an agency and a mobility not completely afforded to them at the time. I don’t just mean a lack of social mobility, but of physical mobility, with the encumbrance of corsets and hoop skirts, the alert stillness modesty encourages (it’s also worth noting that as adults, only Meg and Amy, who both chose more conventional lives, wear hoop skirts but Jo does not).

Before the pandemic, I went to a modern dance class twice a week. Dancing is one of the only activities that remains untouched for me by complicated, anxious motives like ambition, money, and status. There are no stakes and there is no competition. I do it because it makes my body feel like mine, because it’s fun, and because it feels good. I often feel high for hours afterward. When I’m in the dance studio for that hour and a half, I enter a place I used to inhabit as a child, when I could spend hours drawing or playing and there was no small, timid version of me that perched on my shoulder, whispering, what is this all for? Is this good enough? Are you wasting your time? But it’s also a place that seems more ancient than me, outside of me: sometimes, on a really good day, it’s a place where there is no self at all.

In these classes, my favorite phrases provide a visual psych out, choreographed to look (and feel) as if we might fall, or turn to the right—but at the last moment we catch ourselves or pivot in the opposite direction. It’s a visual surprise but I also think of it as a reinforcement of possibility, a cultivation of the notion that more than one road is open to us, even if the outcome seems inevitable.

To me, movement is about accessing and preserving joy—not even just joy, but genuine emotion, especially in a world where it can be easier to numb that emotion in order to get through each day. And in many ways I see Little Women as a movie about the struggle to recreate and hold onto joy in adulthood. I haven’t been in a modern dance class since early March and increasingly, I feel that second self atrophying: I’m less confident, less inside-my-body, way more anxious, and while certainly all those things can be blamed on the multiple crises unfolding all around us, part of me also thinks: oh, well, I also haven’t been dancing.

I also can’t help thinking of Gerwig as the title character in Frances Ha, running and twirling and leaping through the crosswalks of New York in that film’s most iconic scene (a scene I immediately thought of when Jo runs through the crowded street at the beginning of Little Women). Moving like this is embarrassing. Even when I first started dancing, it took me weeks of classes to get over the shame and fear of looking weird, and that was in the context of an actual dance studio. Frances’s crosswalk dance is ridiculous, the kind of thing that’s only possible once you really cease watching yourself; it’s an engagement with a previous self, an inner child—or a different self altogether. And—this is especially true in Frances Ha, I think—it’s an encounter with the sort of joy that you will lose if you don’t make an effort to hold onto it. When Frances returns home, she’s still smiling to herself. And then she turns to face her apartment, looks around at her life, and sighs, shrugs. Her smile slips.

*

Of course, the commitment to past selves can be just as burdensome as it is affirming. No one should want to be the same person they were at fifteen, which is part of why Jo’s aversion to growing up is so tragic.

In the museum, I came across one of Gillian Wearing’s mask portraits, in which she photographs herself wearing eerie, lifelike wax masks of other people, most notably herself and family members. “Self Portrait at 17,” in which she wears a mask of her teenage face, I find the most arresting. The mask both conjures and severs possibility—it offers the illusion that we can go back again, make different choices, become a different person, but it’s also haunting and dead, like a moose head displayed on a hunter’s wall. The artifice is visible, but only if you look for it: the skin’s clinical sheen; the holes around the eyes where the mask ends and Wearing’s actual face begins. The gaze breaks down: are we actually drawn to the younger versions of ourselves, with all their energy and potential, or do we just think we are because society prefers us that way? Wearing stares out of the eye holes, and if I stare back long enough, I begin to get the sensation that the weight of the mask is stifling a scream.

*

I love how much Little Women is obsessed with making things, and in such an intimate way. Someone is always sewing or writing or designing costumes or painting or playing music, and for the March family, creating carries so much power: Jo even believes she can keep Beth alive by telling her stories. More broadly, Little Women seems to be concerned with making a self. How do you reconcile the life in your head—the person you think you are—with the life outside it—the person you have to change into to accommodate the world?

A few weeks ago, I downloaded Strava, an app that tracks my walks, runs, and hikes. I go on a walk or a run every evening now, only feeling truly accomplished if I travel at least three miles. After, I study the line drawing my body created on Strava. Sometimes I paint them, as if to prove they happened, and to make them happen again, this time outside of my body.

With a limited amount of places to go, it’s almost like the line is a string that tethers me to my house. The farther I walk, the more I stretch the string, until I boomerang back again. I don’t know why I like looking at these loops. I guess I enjoy thinking of my walks as tactile material. I like fooling myself into believing that I have something to show for my time, a line or loop with which to measure it, during a year when time feels giant, huge, somehow passive-aggressive. When it’s hard to create anything I feel like is valuable, well, at least my body made this little shape today. I like to think I made something while I walked. Or maybe it’s even more simple: that living through time is making something.

The way time moves in Little Women dramatizes the making of self, and evokes the idea that movement is making; that it is agency. The movie pivots back and forth through time, between the current timeline of Jo’s adulthood and the scenes of all the sisters growing up together at Orchard House in Concord, Massachusetts. Sometimes these transitions lay bare how helpless we are to time’s passage and its small cruelties (Meg dancing at the debutante ball, pretending for just one night to be rich, cutting to the scene of her and her husband sitting in a dark room, years later, trying and failing to balance their accounts); other times, they seem to emphasize the way a character wills the past to be reanimated, or imagines an alternate timeline: the scene of Jo looking down at Beth’s grave cuts to one of Jo looking out the window at Beth, still alive, getting the yard ready for Meg’s wedding. And then there’s that heartbreaking scene of Beth playing the piano, the applause from the theater in the forthcoming scene already piping in, as if Beth is finally allowing herself to dream of performing. The movie’s emphasis on art-making extends to memory, too. Life is a product of how your mind makes it and remembers it.

I also love how these transitions operate like a dance, opening possibilities, closing them, and reopening them again. We can’t go back to who we were—a central sadness of the movie—but we can zoom out, fly above it, remember it, honor it, see the little trails we made down below as if on a map. We can honor it by making it into art.

I’m thinking again of Tschape’s photos, how they are an interruption of movement, of progression. I imagine dropping down into this pose on my walks, refusing to continue. How it would appear on my walk maps as the sputtering out of the line.

Looking at Tschape’s photos, the simultaneous assertion and passivity of her body, gave me a heady disorientation, the kind of funhouse feeling you get when you enter an emotional space where you’re not sure where is the ceiling and where is the floor.

It’s been almost a year now since I’ve been in that museum. I revisit the photos on the museum’s website. “Tschäpe’s ‘little deaths’ represent the transmutation that occurs during her travels,” the anonymous descriptive (marketing?) copy says. “Her prone figure negates her identity. This allows the artist to become a part of the landscape and represents the death of her old identity. The figure is not Tschäpe; it is her old self, left behind. Her new self continues on to her next location and next little death.” So these are portraits of her constantly recreating herself.

Because I can’t walk from photo to photo, I click through them with my pointer and ring fingers on the arrow keys. Seeing the same poses over and over from photo to photo, the body takes on a kind of thingness, separate from the self and also inextricable from it. I’m drawn to Tschäpe’s idea that transformation occurs at this point of stasis, having always assumed that to move is to transform myself. What does a self look like? How do we make it? I like these photographs for implying the self is a burden we carry, but also something we can shed. For offering the possibility that just as we are tethered to it, we can also leave it crumpled on the ground, and walk away. We can honor it, we can be haunted by it—or we can refuse it altogether. Is that death, or is it freedom?

Lena Moses-Schmitt's work appears in Best New Poets 2015 and 2019, Indiana Review, Ninth Letter, Cincinnati Review, The Normal School, Terrain.org, Devil’s Lake, and elsewhere. She lives in Berkeley, California, where she is a publicist at Catapult, Soft Skull, and Counterpoint Press.