08: Looking at Lucy
"A desire to be fully subsumed into the myth of her image."
Men look at women, but women, we don’t look back. We turn to mirrors, to other women — because really, who cares to look at men? It was John Berger who said, “Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.” Thousands of women have felt this unilateral gaze long before 1972, the year Ways of Seeing was broadcasted on BBC. Thousands, if not millions, have felt its discomforting throb intrude the home of their psyche and averted their eyes and attention, but it often takes a man to speak for other men to listen, for the male surveyor within a woman’s mind to listen, as Berger has theorized. This unilateral gaze is not universal truth, but it is close enough. Women don’t stare. We study. Our selves, our mothers, strangers, friends, enemies.
My studies begin at ten years old. It is 2009. YouTube is not yet an automated conveyor belt of content, but an infinity pool, a neverending horizon of 480p videos, maybe 720p if you’re lucky. Moderation is an unfamiliar word. Movies are uploaded in ten-minute installments onto playlists. The freedom to watch pirated videos on YouTube, like many other freedoms, will soon be surreptitiously revoked, a possibility programmed into impossibility overnight, but in 2009, it is a liberty I take for granted.
I am watching Lucy Liu, rewinding a clip of her in Charlie’s Angels strutting past rows and rows of desks, rendering a cohort of awkward men in ties slack-jawed by her presence. Lucy is Alex pretending to be a Ms. Erins, but to me, she is Lucy Liu because who can forget a name, a face like that? She is clad in a glossy leather suit-jacket ensemble, the fabric taut against her petite curves. Her inky black curls bounce to the rhythm of her prowl. Cue Heart’s “Barracuda.” The zipper of her jacket falls a few inches beneath her clavicle, a knee-length skirt covers her pantyhosed legs. There is no sly peek of cleavage, no daring flash of thigh. Still, the men are dazed into obedience. It is a performance of professionalism, and the subtext is sexual. Lucy paces back and forth at the head of the auditorium, menacingly snapping the blackboard pointer in her hand. The thrill of a threat at her command. “You,” she declares to one man in the front row and cracks the cane that is edited to sound like a whip. “What was the last suggestion you made to your boss?” She snakes the cane-whip from the desk to nudge up the man’s recessed chin. She slams down on the table — gasp — and props herself on its surface. She grabs the man and tousles his hair, leaning the crown of his head into her bosom.
I am seated alongside these men, enrolled unwittingly in my first observational course of fantasy womanhood, staged for a rapt audience. I don’t blink. I am hypnotized by the charade. Lucy Liu is putting on a show, and I — like the men on screen and the thousands of viewers before me — am ensorcelled. She is an unpredictable dominatrix, her scene persona like one of those fireworks that spin, pop, and crackle in all directions. Get too close and risk singeing your skin.
Her beauty feels impossible to me at ten years old. But because she is Asian and I am beginning to understand that I, too, am seen as Asian even though I do not feel Asian — as if feeling Asian is more than a projection of perception; as if it is an emotion as tangible and universal as fear, sadness, envy (which it is not) — so Lucy Liu, or rather, the image of Lucy Liu, becomes my aspiration. I begin to keep an archive of her red carpet outfits. The low-rise jumpsuit exposing her enviously flat midriff at the 1999 premiere of “Play It To The Bone.” The glittering red, one-shoulder Versace dress at the 2000s Oscars. The elegant white satin number at the 2002 premiere of “Chicago.”
I am obsessed with looking at Lucy Liu, willing to make myself after her image. I am an only child without siblings and and sisterly-inspired beauty rituals. And so in magazines and on the internet, I search for my missing muse: Any girl, any woman of East Asian heritage with a splash of black hair and slight upturned eyes, features delicately carved as chinoiserie. I didn’t want to settle for anyone who fit this description. In the 2000s, the woman of the moment was Lucy Liu, her name tart like a cherry. How lucky, I thought, to be named Lucy Liu. As if beauty can be bestowed within a name. There are many myths about media representation so often repeated that I am dulled beyond skepticism. The pathos of the argument wills me into becoming a believer. Maybe, they say, if I saw more women like myself on screen I would have the confidence of a Girl Scout troop leader. Maybe my ten-year-old self would be “empowered” to confess to her journal that she wants to be an actress when she grows up, not a writer, because actresses speak up and speak loudly. Maybe I would forgo makeup, forgo boys, forgo starving myself to be light as a featherweight. Maybe maybe maybe. But there is more to a muse than representation. There is, I think, an added element of parasociality, a desire to be fully subsumed into the myth of her image.
Now, I know: In Charlie’s Angels, Lucy Liu is Alex is a heroine and a figure of male fantasy. Male fantasy is not sex, even though it is often confused for sex. Male fantasy needs surrender and sublimation, not sensuality. The thrill of a threat. A power struggle. If we are to believe, as Roland Barthes has written, that myth is a relation of deformation, then male fantasy distorts the muse, distorts Lucy Liu into an empty gesture. An empty, but alluring gesture.
A few years ago, I learn that Lucy Liu is a practicing artist — a painter, sculptor, and mixed media artist. She has been showing work since 1993 under her Chinese name, Yu Ling. Her figurative paintings seem to be her most-talked-about works online, unsurprising, as they are sapphic nudes inspired by the style of shunga, 17th century Japanese erotic art. Contemporary poetry, according to Barthes, resists myth by clouding language, playing with and rearranging words, such that meaning is not so easily imposed. Contemporary painting, I think, does this too. In her off-camera artistic work, Lucy Liu resists interpretation. She demands the viewer to see, to not draw analogies or offer projections as to what her paintings can mean, figurative or abstract. Within these works, particularly her 2008 painting Forever, goodbye, there is the sentiment of discovery, and I get the sense that I am finally looking for Lucy Liu and not at Lucy Liu. I am not studying the crafted image of an on-screen marionette; I am witnessing an unraveling.