Ellen Barkin's ‘Normal’ is New Again

In Ryan Murphy's new sitcom 'The New Normal', a gay male couple emotionally adopts an aimless young mother and her precocious daughter after she agrees to bear their surrogate baby, much to the chagrin of her archly conservative grandmother, played by Ellen Barkin. But while 'The New Normal' basks blissfully in its unabashed embrace of the ideal modern liberal lifestyle, coming across as a snarkier 'Modern Family', it's eighties screen siren Barkin who steals the show, playing an new spin on well-known archetype. 
 

Ellen Barkin in 1989: "Sea of Love"

"The New Normal"

Using the word modern in association with 'The New Normal', and in the title of 'Modern Family', is of course code for 'gay', and essentially ‘gay men’ in both cases. (Unless there really is something strikingly modern about a wealthy older man's second marriage to an incredibly hot, sexily exotic, much younger woman otherwise way out of his league...?) 

Since the rise of conservative-free pay television, and the realization that free-to-air needed to broaden its horizontal hold on mainstream America, gay men have had it a little easier on television than in previous centuries, and have certainly been more apparent and appreciated than gay women. As evidence, witness the lack of Emmy love for 'The L Word' (six seasons, 2004-09), perhaps the best drama series unacknowledged by mainstream awards in television history. This, alongside the string of awards and critical celebration for actors playing gay, if not gayish characters, such as David Hyde Pierce (four Emmys from eleven consecutive nominations, one for every year ‘Frasier’ was on air), Sean Hayes (one win from seven nominations, one for every year 'Will and Grace' was on air) and Eric Stonestreet (two wins from three nominations, one for every year 'Modern Family' has been on air, and without question for the next eight years as well.)

Cliche, stereotype, whatever; it seems apparent that a certain type of wit is attracted to the glitz and glamour of a notoriously liberal Hollywood where, if they can write, their trademark razor-sharp, ultra-critical comic remarks and retorts can make them a mint as a sitcom writer. Splice that with women still being the primary controller of the primary household remote, and it pretty much explains five seasons of 'Queer Eye For The Straight Guy', and the prominence of gay male characters across network television. (As for the other Ellen in the room, daytime is a different animal altogether...)

'The New Normal' itself is a phrase I've heard prominently in the past year, both socially and in the media, in relation to all number of things. It’s employed here with confidence, and assumes implicitly that the viewer is okay with gay men entering (some would say returning to) the mainstream – or at least, NBC... (Try googling responses to 'The New Normal' being picked up for a full season after merely okay ratings and you'll find all sorts of accusations as to NBC's political 'affiliations'; the essentially low rated but undisputedly clever and broad-minded comedies in which NBC specializes seem to play well to the up-market left). Chances are however, that a full season pickup for 'The New Normal' has as much to do with NBC recognizing a powerful niche, as it does a scene stealing, tour-de-force, glittering but withering Emmy-bait performance from Barkin.

With ex-hubby Gabrielle Byrne, "Siesta"

Everyone has their own film experiences, and their own sometimes zig-zag path to discovery; I don't remember Barkin in 'Diner', her breakthrough role, nor come to think of it do I remember 'Diner' much at all (Barry Levinson's directing debut about which there was a lot of nostalgic fuss in 1982). Nor do I recall Barkin in 'Tender Mercies', where Bruce Beresford directed Robert Duvall to a Best Actor Oscar. But then again I have not seen either of those films for more than twenty years. For me, Barkin will always be two things: first and foremost, she is Penny Priddy, the long-lost identical twin sister of Buckaroo Banzai's murdered wife in 'The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: Across The Eighth Dimension', a personal favourite*. Secondly, she was the first major actress I recall doing the full monty, in the 1987 indie head trip movie 'Siesta', which both myself and Wikipedia remember New York Times critic Janet Maslin calling "excitingly bad". A few years later she was getting the kind of eighties-style press, and good reviews (from critics who still fondly recalled the film noir of their youth) that Kathleen Turner had received for 'Body Heat', and Glenn Close for 'Fatal Attraction'; as the potential femme fatale in 'Sea of Love', essentially for appearing in an (80s TM) 'sizzling sex scene' with her leading man, Al Pacino. 

With Tony Roberts in "Switch".  

My impression is that her career took a nose dive soon after that, when she played the lead in the Blake Edwards' lambasted 1991 body-swap comedy 'Switch' - I remember avoiding that film because of scathing reviews, then renting it much later only to be greatly surprised at how progressive the film seemed, how funny it was, and how great Barkin was in it. Somewhere along the line I must have missed her Golden Globe win for the role, or maybe that was the reason I rented it in the end. Regardless, on paper Barkin's career continued in journeyman fashion for two almost decades, during which time she married and divorced twice, once to actor Gabriel Byrne, with whom she shares two kids.

Barkin didn't register for me again, in any major way, until many years later, in 2007, quite unexpectedly as part of Steven Soderbergh's buddysemble in the bubblegum extravaganza 'Oceans 13'. (Apparently. I have no memory of that film either, apart from Barkin, but I only saw it a few years ago. I think though, that I had no memory of it the next day.) That role, and shortly after a memorable guest turn in the third season of 'Modern Family', playing a savage real estate rival to Ty Burell's Phil Dunphy, reintroduced me, at least, to Barkin, now a smoking hot MILF. (Although technically, in ‘The New Normal’, she plays a GILF).

Hustler smile

Barkin’s sexual allure has always been striking. Along with her crooked smile, she has the knowing, predatory eyes of a hustler. When she was a star for a while, Barkin’s husky voice was more rasping than Kathleen Turner’s, her figure just as lean but curvier, and she seemed taller (although she’s slightly shorter). In ‘Siesta’, with her Eurpoean bone structure and tight red dress, it looked as though Garbo had somehow been resurrected and was performing on Cinemax. But it’s that sexual confidence that made her more difficult to cast than Turner; you can’t quite see her in ‘Romancing The Stone’, or ‘Peggy Sue Got Married’, yet it’s that Turneresque voice, and the brassy confidence she radiates, that made her totally convincing as a male sexual hedonist, trapped in a beautiful woman’s body, in ‘Switch’. Who knows, might she have equaled Annette Benning if she’d been cast in ‘The Grifters’? Regardless, Barkin seemed to be Turner with her masculine aspects turned up a notch, but with the raised sexual aggression to compensate.

Today, Barkin has aged better than Turner; Turner’s masculine qualities were unfortunately upped several notches as a result of medication for her chronic arthritis. Turner took it on the chin though, using her altered physical presence to comic effect, playing a drag queen in ‘Friends’, and a sexual aggressor on ‘Entourage’.  While she’s clearly aged, Barkin however has lost none of her sexual charisma and at 58 is almost certainly going to compete for Best Supporting Comedy Actress at next year’s Emmy Awards.

Barkin’s ‘New Normal’ character, Jane Forrest, is not dissimilar to Sue Sylvester, the character played by Jane Lynch in ‘Glee’, and Constance Langdon, the character played by Jessica Lange, another of Barkin’s contemporaries, in ‘American Horror Story’. Both Lynch and Lange have won Emmys for their roles, and both of those series were also created by Ryan Murphy (both characters also witness the deaths of a relative with Downs Syndrome who is dependent upon them). It’s clearly a character he knows well; all of these women are archly, offensively conservative, and essentially serve the same purpose. Like Sue Sylvester and Constance Langdon, Barkin’s Jane Forrest is a villainous foil to the (conservative-speak:) ‘extremely liberal attitudes, left-leaning politics, and openly gay lifestyles’ of the main characters, enabling her to voice the most offensively conservative barbs, tirades and insults that create a kind of comedy of ignorance and bigotry that goes right back to Johnny Speight’s Alf Garnett. Murphy ensures that Barkin’s insults are shockingly offensive but beautifully crafted; her rapid assault entrances give us the impression she’s been sitting outside in the car for an hour, carefully composing her vitriol for maximum impact, before shattering the serenity of the gay couple’s catalogue-perfect sanctuary.

In contrast, ‘Modern Family’ has a sensational pilot episode that plays the series’ one great trick very early on; casting Ed O’Neill, who played the iconic Al Bundy, as not only a grandfather, but also as the father of a gay son in a gay marriage with an adopted baby. It’s been a while but as I recall it, we’re introduced to the family members separately, then learn that all the characters are from the same family, and that Ed O’Neill is the patron. We’re led to expect that he doesn’t approve of his son’s sexuality, and will react badly to the news that he and his husband have adopted a child. The twist is that Al Bundy (now named Jay Pritchett) has grown wise with age, and his concerns are now more of the run-of-the-mill, grumpy old man variety. Although he has difficulty finding common ground with his gay son, he loves him and his sexuality is essentially a non-issue.

It was a clever trick but one based on the perception of Al Bundy, rather than Al Bundy as was. Not unlike ‘Roseanne’, ‘Married… With Children’ was a series about rednecks that did not preach redneck politics. ‘Married…’ took no sides, and therefore no prisoners. It’s influences, particularly in the early seasons, are more absurdist, and it owes more to the British seventies comedy series ‘The Goodies’, and the classic Warner Brothers cartoons of the forties and fifties, than the lowbrow concerns of seedy Southern standup. Al Bundy is closer to Daffy Duck than Alf Garnett, but it can’t be denied that general shape of ‘Married… With Children’ owed a lot to its predecessors.

Warren Mitchell as Alf Garnett

Alf Garnett is a British icon. There have probably been characters like him from time immemorial; bigoted fools who mine the cultural id for comic potential, but writer Johnny Speight’s rendering of that archetype is surely one of the all time greatest. Garnett’s racism, his self-harming conservative views and reactionary politics, were powerfully and hysterically voiced by actor Warren Mitchell and allowed three decades of British television viewers to laugh at his poisonous rants as he gave himself enough rope to choke himself. (Two batches of ‘Till Death Us Do Part’ were made in the sixties and seventies, leading to Garnett being resurrected in ‘In Sickness and In Health’ in the eighties.) Yet somehow Speight and Mitchell made Garnett endearing; against the foil of his lefty son-in-law, and the political upheaval of especially seventies Britain, there were never any easy answers, and as Garnett’s right wing rationales became more absurd, so his son-in-law’s socialist solutions sounded more pat and trite. Eventually, with age, Garnett calmed down a bit and became more of a curmudgeon than a cu – no, perhaps not. 

Archie Bunker

Ted Bullpitt

Anyway, ‘Till Death Us Do Part’ was famously remade by CBS in the seventies as ‘All In The Family’, giving America their own blustering but iconic racist fool in Archie Bunker, played by Carroll O’Conner, and in Australia as ‘Kingswood Country’, with Ted Bullpitt played by Ross Higgins. Indeed, the idea of creating politically incorrect characters to highlight the foolishness of racism, sexism, or simply general narrow mindedness and bigotry, has given the world some of its richest and most endearing comic creations, as diverse as Barry Humphries’ Dame Edna Everage, Sasha Baron Cohen’s Borat, and Al Murray’s Pub Landlord. In American sitcoms, the archetype broadens out to include the mercenary fool, typically a character whose selfish streak gives way to right-leaning or Republican politics; John Larrouquette’s narcissistic conservative Dan Fielding in ‘Night Court’ (four consecutive Emmys, 1985-88, until he withdrew himself from competition), or Michael J. Fox’s Reagan-worshipping Alex P. Keaton from ‘Family Ties’ (three consecutive Emmys 86-88). It’s hard to argue that these characters aren’t much loved, or misunderstood, when they are constantly praised and appreciated.

 

But with Barkin in ‘The New Normal’, it’s the first time I can recall seeing the genuine, unashamed bigot played by a woman for comedic effect. In ‘Glee’, there are musical cues letting us know that Sue Sylvester is a clown. She walks around with a megaphone and wears the same outfit all the time. She has vendettas and plots evil, she runs for office; she’s close to a David E. Kelley creation, we know it’s all exaggerated, it’s all a put-on to make a point; she’s Denny Crane in a tracksuit (offensive but loveable conservative caricature: two Emmys).

But Barkin’s Jane is for real. She’s the genuine lipsticked pit bull; she’s Sarah Palin with a brain. Barkin barks and we sit up and pay attention. Her new 'red dress' is undoubtedly Republican red, but it certainly doesn’t hurt that she’s still wearing it. For Barkin’s archetypal character, it might very well be a case of ‘The New Normal’ / same as the old normal, and maybe, same as it ever was, whether that’s Garnett, Bunker or Bullpitt. But just like ‘Switch’, there’s a change of sex here; Barkin’s Emmy bait is a performance that stems from, and honors, a great tradition, and yet builds on it and creates it anew, and it demands to be seen.

The New Normal at Wikipedia and IMDB

Ellen Barkin at Wikpedia and IMDB

* Barkin’s Penny Priddy is introduced in one of the film’s great scenes: after performing brain surgery, before driving a jet-powered rocket car through a mountain (by accessing the titular eighth dimension) the unstoppable Banzai again defies simple categorization by fronting his own kick-ass rock band. Just as the band’s first number is about to take off, Buckaroo cuts the song because he senses someone in the audience is having a bad time. “Is someone…crying?” A spotlight hits Barkin, sitting alone, crying and drinking whiskey out of a bottle. (As a sign of Barkin’s physical commitment, which we’ll see displayed in various ways throughout her career; daring nudity in ‘Siesta’, full-throttle physical comedy for Blake Edwards, plus a red hot eighties sex scene, she’s sniveling what looks like real strings of mucus and saliva along with her whiskey tears, which are highlighted by the spotlight.) On stage, Banzai instantly descends into a funk and starts singing ‘Since I Don’t Have You’, accompanying himself on the piano (having already displayed his musical skills on lead guitar and trumpet, is there anything this man cannot do?) This is all explained later, but for now Barkin, bottom lip trembling with emotion, seems deeply affected by Banzai’s display – until we see her slowly raise a silver handgun to her temple, and read the determination in her eyes. When a waiter nudges the gun and it goes off above her head, Banzai's entire band pull handguns like Secret Service agents protecting the President. Who the hell is she? Who the hell is he? – and what does he mean to her? It’s a brilliant end to a first act set-up that confounded its many fans into instantly loving it.