MusePaper January 15th, 1999
The Perinatal Appeal of Ally McBeal
by Mickel Adzema
Now, don’t get me wrong. There are many reasons why the Ally McBeal show is the hit that it is. It is superbly acted and directed. The dialogue is crisp, fast, unique. The plots open up issues and themes no one ever before even touched on in other shows. And it brings together a charming cast of characters. Like the cast in the sitcom Friends, you fall in love with every one of them. I might also mention the way it weaves Vonda Shephard and her music into the plots. This is the first time this has ever been done, as far as I know; and for Vonda Shephard it has been so successful that it has resulted
in the release of her own CD of music from the show. It seems the show’s appeal is rubbing off on everyone affiliated with it. And to give credit where it is due, the directing of Peter MacNicol and the writing of David E. Kelley are raising their reputations heads above the rest, showing them to be at the top of their art.
All that being said, I want to point out that the show was a success almost before it was played. And there is a reason for that. I say it is because of the Kewpie-doll face of Ally herself, Calista Flockhart. Her countenance has the appeal of the perinatal. Her eyes are large and prominent in relation to the rest of her face and her round head appears large in relation to her body. This is reminiscent of fetal
proportions. Note I said "reminiscent," not equivalent. Unconsciously, the producers of the show have picked an actor with these features and used make-up to accentuate them. And these features, this face, was heavily featured in the promotions for the show before its release. I say it has something to do with the shows success from the beginning.
This face tugs at our prenatal matrix strings. It triggers a feeling of an oceanic time in the womb, when we feel that everything was innocent and blissful. And it is not the first time this sort of face has had the strong commercial attraction that it shows in this program. Not only can we point to the success of Kewpie dolls, there are those delightful paintings of children – I don’t know the artist, but you see them everywhere – whose heads are huge and eyes large and opened wide, looking out at you. This has sold many a piece of art, as well as other trinkets -- from music boxes to children’s sand buckets and watering cans -- where these children are painted on them. And the prenatal appeal of this sort of art has been noted by at least one other author, though I cannot place where I read it.
Anyway, this face, with its prominent feminine eyes, also brings rise to our newborn experience of
looking into the face of our first love: our mothers. As newborns we noticed especially the eyes of our mothers; research on newborns has shown this. Newborns instinctively pick out their mother’s eyes as the point of relation and communication with her. In later life, we hear romantic talk of how it was his or her eyes that first attracted someone to another. This is not exactly true, for the eyes really tell little to an adult. It is the expressions on the face around the eyes that are saying what we claim the eyes are speaking.
But the eyes are the focal point for what we consider the individuality of the person; we say they are "the windows on the soul." And so when we point this out romantically, we are really saying that this person has brought up warm feelings of being a newborn, cared for by a loving mother, whose eyes really were the most obvious and most noticed aspect of her features.
There are other reasons why it can be said that the show’s appeal is strongly related to our perinatal, or at least newborn and childhood, experience. Ally doesn’t just look like an infant, she acts and speaks with all the innocence of the newborn or the child. Her physical awkwardness is played out often in scenes. I remember one where she comes rushing – totally uninhibited, like a child – into an office room and falls flat on her face with a large thud. She gets up immediately, embarrassed but otherwise acting as if nothing had happened. This is reminiscent of a child’s awkwardness in learning to walk, and our heart goes out to her, since she represents then that innocent bumbling child within us all.
Her childlike innocence is played out as well in the way she blurts things out, somehow her childlike exuberance finding a way past that adult fearful mental censor we carry inside our minds to keep us from saying anything embarrassing. The transparency of her feelings is so like we observe in children, which endears us to them. Slips of her tongue are both hilarious and telling in the way she cannot seem to keep her inner life from coming out into her outer one. And is this not so much like children who, because they have not yet built up the wall of defenses, end up "saying the darndest things," because they have not yet been corrupted into having an agenda in the way they act and speak. Children just come out and say it like it is, so often; and Ally does to, even if she must immediately and shame-facedly take it back and correct it. Again, the point is that her character triggers in us those (mostly imaginary) "golden years" of childhood.
And she makes us wish that we could go through life again without all the agendas, walls, and defenses that we build up over time. More than that, she gives allowance and acceptance to those aspects of ourselves that are not quite perfect and sophisticated. Unlike the savvy, worldly portrayals of lawyers and other professionals that we see depicted in other TV shows, Ally is like us. She is not always at her best – perfectly speaking and behaving. She ends up embarrassing herself often. She allows us to smile at our own embarrassing incidents, as well as tendencies. For she shows herself to be competent despite her imperfections. Now, that’s how we like to think of ourselves. And deservedly so, since those other polished portrayals are unreal and phony anyway, setting up unrealistically high marks of adulthood and maturity, which none of us can match.
So her awkwardness, her uncontrolled words, and her Kewpie-doll eyes combine to touch and bring forth the inner child within us that we long to be again – innocent and with the world so full of color, possibilities, and wonder.
But there is a final aspect of her appeal that is perhaps her most powerful trait: her loneliness. This speaks volumes of our newborn and childhood experiences as well. We see Ally walking the streets
dejectedly, dragging a scarf, against a backdrop of winter cold and the anonymous and unfeeling bricks of the city. Our hearts go out to her. We want to cuddle her. We want to reach out and comfort that child within us that spent so much time, that waited so long for someone to love us. It resonates with our abandonment after birth, when we lay there in the newborn’s ward, fearful and pained, waiting to be reunited with our mothers – our only source of the familiar and of comfort in an alien world, quite different from the womb we’d known. But it resonates also with our childhoods, waiting dejectedly, year following upon year, to be really seen and heard by our parents; only to discover that we would never be really seen by them, or anyone else, for that matter, for a long time . . . if at all.
Yes, Ally McBeal is a great show. But its appeal is that it reminds us of the poignancy of our early life . . . when things were both delightful as well as lonely, but we were at least very alive and often, with an entire life ahead of us, still able to hope and imagine wildly for the wonderful and magical that could be. That is why Ally means so much to us. She gives us back our hope. She makes us young again.
Related MusePaper: "Move Over World War Two Generation, the Sixties Generation Has Arrived! An Essay Review of the Movies, 'Pleasantville'"
Related MusePaper: "What's So Bad About Doing Good? An Essay Review of 'The Rainmaker'"
Comments? E-mail me by clicking on: mickel@primalspirit.com Mickel Adzema
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