Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s legacy has been oversimplified and her likeness commodified in the last decade.
It’s been something of an odd cultural anomaly, the popular celebrity-transformation of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She’s become a mythopoetic cult icon of feminist resistance, a “superhero” (in Gloria Steinem’s phrasing) to be memed and merchandised (T-shirts, “dissent collar” earrings, action figures!), impersonated on “SNL” and “Futurama”, and now movie-ized, via two hagiographic films in one year: the documentary RBG premiered in May and now comes the fictionalized feature On the Basis of Sex.
It’s an unprecedented state of affairs: a sitting Justice with fans. What happened?
Was it merely that Ginsburg’s judicial presence evolved into visible heroism as the court swung right in the Bush years and gave us Citizens United? Then why did the phenomenon only grow in the Obama years, as the court got bumped out with other high profile liberal women?
Such are the mysterious, tectonic movements of modern media Zeitgeist-ness, quite possibly abetted in this case by the awakening maturation of millennials, who’ve also rediscovered for us the fabulousness of beards, dogs, Freddie Mercury, and bacon. Whatever the reason, RBG is America’s most beloved and worshipped octogenarian, however carefully practical and unradical many of her higher-court decisions have actually been (as delineated in Jill Lepore’s New Yorker profile last October).
Such are the mysterious, tectonic movements of modern media Zeitgeist-ness.
On the Basis of Sex—which was, not incidentally, scripted by her nephew, Dan Stiepleman, his only major screen credit—dives in to this sea of hagiography chin first. Directed by Mimi Leder, a busy television figure with the calculus of network programming deep in her blood, the film narrows Ginsburg’s story down to its freshman act, when she was young and pretty (personified by the puppy-eyed dewiness of Felicity Jones), and when her battles against patriarchy were the most personal. We first meet her striding into Harvard Law (in a sea of men), looking to take on the world that doesn’t want her, as she nurtures her new family (Armie Hammer, hilariously posing as nerdy tax lawyer Martin Ginsburg) and faces the fact that being top of her class is read by the crusty male profs (Sam Waterston, Stephen Root) as merely having “a lot to prove.”
A triumphant biopic of the sort recently strapped onto Stephen Hawking, Alan Turing, Winston Churchill, Billie Jean King, Colette, Mary Stuart, Neil Armstrong, female African-American NASA mathematicians, et al., the film cleans up the messiness of real life in favor of imaginary epiphanies and teary setbacks, building to a chest-swelling final act. This Ginsburg’s only flaw is being too perfect in every way. The plot arc runs through her years of teaching (alongside with the rise of Women’s Lib) to her first courtroom brief in federal court: Moritz vs. Internal Revenue (1972), a tax case she and Martin muster as a kind of legal subterfuge; it addressed the unfairness of gender differentiation in law by way of a man’s disenfranchisement, not a woman’s, working around the courts’ ingrained institutional misogyny that had so far scotched any woman-centered case.
The historical narrative, rich with tension and the outlandishly oppressive norms of the day, is fascinating on its face. “Discrimination on the basis of sex,” she tells her radicalized-but-still-shocked students, “is legal.”
If only Leder’s film didn’t over-project every narrative stroke into a sugary, overscored splat of emphasis. The only starch in the mix, and what any conscious filmgoer will respond to, is RBG herself, and how doggedly and strategically she helped to push the first boulder of anti-sex-discrimination legislation down the hill. It’s a mission she’s been chipping away at her whole life, up to and including her stentorian dissent in Ledbetter vs. Goodyear in 2007, which led two years later to the Fair Pay Act, and which might’ve been the tipping point that began our current state of Notorious RBG mania.
Her final courtroom speech in the film, entirely contrived by Stiepleman but given a thumbs-up by Aunt Ruth in interviews, is stirring and eloquent—suspiciously so. You become aware of living in the land of fist-pumping Hollywood Endings, not in the world of legal briefs and real social progress.
You become aware of living in the land of fist-pumping Hollywood Endings, not in the world of legal briefs and real social progress.
Dumb hagiography remains dumb even if it sidles alongside, and even sensually massages, our practical principles. (Perhaps especially so for progressives, who by definition should distrust simplified and sentimentalized versions of history.) One would like to imagine Ginsburg being embarrassed by On the Basis of Sex, if not necessarily for its early scene of sexy marital lovemaking (that gym-jacked, 6-foot-5-inch stud Martin!), then at least for its comic-book portrait of her private life and achievements.
But then, at the end, here comes the real RBG walking up the Supreme Court steps, in the same bright dress Jones had on in the previous shot, pacing stiffly past the camera, for a kind of applause-seeking moment that you might think improprietous for a sitting Supreme Court Justice. Maybe it’s just a favor for her nephew, but it feels a bit creepy, as if revealing nakedly at last that even the placid and stuffy Supreme Court, and even this fervently principled member, are susceptible to the lures of commercial fame.