a letter that teenage Zooey Deschanel wrote to Vogue magazine, from The Huffington Post, Zooey Deschanel, Age 17, To Vogue: 'Is Insecurity Something You ...
Why would you want to limit the spectrum of beauty to an
“ideal” when you, as a popular women’s magazine, have the opportunity to expand
it? I don’t think any woman should have to feel as if she needs to shove
herself into an “ideal” to be beautiful. Beauty should be something that is
celebrated and something that is enjoyable, not something that people should
feel uncomfortable about achieving. Most of the women, and certainly most of
the adolescent girls, in the United States do not feel completely secure with
themselves, especially with their appearance; is insecurity something you want
to advocate? As American women, we don’t need discouragement, but inspiration.
Zooey Deschanel
Los Angeles, CA
Los Angeles, CA
Actress Zooey Deschanel has appeared in such films as ‘(500) Days of Summer’ and on the hit TV sitcom ‘New Girl.’
Who Is Zooey Deschanel?
Born in Los Angeles in 1980, Zooey Deschanel started her career
in supporting roles. She earned raves for All
the Real Girls (2003) and landed parts in the big-budget movies Elf (2004) and The Happening (2007). In 2009, Deschanel starred in the hit
independent film (500) Days of Summer.
She went on to star in her own sitcom, New
Girl, which debuted in 2011.
Born into the Business
Born in Los Angeles, actress Zooey Deschanel has built a career
on playing offbeat yet charming characters. She is reportedly named after one
of the title figures in the novella Franny and Zooey, written by J.D. Salinger.
With her dark hair, bright blue eyes and
pixie-like manner, Deschanel seemed to personify the indie-film dream girl.
Deschanel grew up in the entertainment business. Her father,
Caleb, is an Academy Award–nominated cinematographer, and her mother, Mary Jo,
is an actress. Her older sister, Emily, is also an actress. Zooey spent many of
her early years traveling around the world as her father worked on different
films.
Deschanel attended the Crossroads School for Arts and Sciences in
Santa Monica, California. There, she befriended the likes of such future stars
as Jake
Gyllenhaal and Kate Hudson.
Deschanel, who loved music and acting, later told The New York Times, “All through high school I thought I might be a
Broadway singer.”
‘Veronica’s Closet,’ ‘Almost
Famous’ and Other Early Roles
In 1998, Deschanel made her television debut with a guest
spot on the Kirstie
Alley sitcom Veronica’s Closet.
She briefly studied at Northwestern University before dropping out to pursue
acting full time. A supporting role in the dramatic comedy Mumford (1999) gave Deschanel her first major career boost. She
quickly followed up with another well-regarded performance, in Cameron Crowe’s
Almost Famous (2000).
Becoming a popular actress in independent film, Deschanel
appeared in Manic (2001), with Joseph
Gordon-Levitt, and in The Good Girl
(2002), with Jennifer
Aniston. She earned raves for the little-seen but critically acclaimed All the Real Girls in 2003, co-starring
with Paul Schneider and Patricia Clarkson.
Film Successes: ‘Elf’ to ‘500
Days’
Deschanel made the most of a small role in the box-office hit Elf (2004), starring Will Ferrell.
The comedy gave the actress the opportunity to showcase some of her musical
talents, including her ukulele skills. Deschanel played best friend to Sarah
Jessica Parker in the romantic comedy Failure
to Launch (2006), with Matthew
McConaughey. The film proved to be a commercial and critical
disappointment, as did one of her next efforts, M. Night
Shyamalan’s environmental thriller The
Happening (2007), which also featured Mark Wahlberg.
Reteaming with Gordon-Levitt, Deschanel had a career-changing
experience with (500) Days of Summer
(2009). The film, sometimes called an anti-romantic comedy, reflected on a
couple's relationship in reverse—from their breakup to their beginning. Both she
and Gordon-Levitt won wide critical praise for the movie.
After appearing in the silly Your Highness (2011), Deschanel continued down the path of
comedy with Rock the Kasbah (2015)
and The Driftless Area
(2016). Also in 2016, she provided voice work for the animated Trolls.
‘New Girl’ Star
In 2011, Deschanel conquered the small screen with another
quirky-girl persona. Her sitcom The New
Girl debuted that fall and quickly won over television audiences. Her
cute and goofy character, Jess, moves in with three single guys after splitting
with her boyfriend. Deschanel shared the Critics’ Choice Award for best comedy
series actress with Amy Poehler in
2012, and went on to earn numerous other award nominations, until the show
signed off in May 2018.
Music Career
The multitalented Deschanel has also enjoyed some success as a
recording artist. She met singer and songwriter M. Ward in 2006. The pair
worked on a song together for the soundtrack of Deschanel’s 2007 film The Go-Getter, and they really hit it
off. They formed their own musical group, She & Him, and released their
first self-titled album in 2008. Two years later, She & Him, Volume 2 came out.
Deschanel was also tapped to play famed country singer Loretta Lynn
for a musical based on Lynn’s autobiography, Coal Miner’s Daughter.
Personal Life
Deschanel married singer Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie in
2009, but the pair announced their plans to divorce two years later. She
announced her engagement to producer Jacob Pechenik in January 2015 and the
couple secretly married before the birth of their baby daughter, Elsie, that
August. In May 2017, they had a son, Charlie.
The
Twee Revolution - The Atlantic
James Parker, July/August 2014
Eight years ago or so, the alternative paper I was working for
sent me out to review a couple of folk-noise-psych-indie-beardie-weirdie bands.
I had a dreadful night. The bands were bad enough—“fumbling,” I scratched in my
notebook, “infantile”—but what really did me in was the audience. Instead of
baying for the blood of these lightweights, as in the Darwinian days of old,
the gathered young people—behatted, bebearded, besmiling—obliged them with
patters of validating applause. I had seen it before, this fond curiosity, this
acclamation of the undercooked, but never so much of it in one place: the whole
event seemed to exult in its own half-bakedness. Be as crap as you like was the message to the performers. The crapper, the better. We’re here for you.
I tottered home, wrote a homicidally nasty nervous breakdown of a review, and
decided I should take myself out of circulation for a while. No more live
reviews until I calmed down. A wave of Twee—as I now realize—had just broken
over my head.
Is Twee the right word
for it, for the strangely persistent modern sensibility that fructifies in the
props departments of Wes Anderson movies, tapers into the waxed mustache-ends
of young Brooklynites on bicycles, and detonates in a yeasty whiff every time
someone pops open a microbrewed beer? Well, it is now. An across-the-board
examination of this thing is long overdue, and the former Spin writer Marc Spitz is to be congratulated on having risen to
the challenge. With Twee: The Gentle
Revolution in Music, Books, Television, Fashion, and Film, he’s given it a
name, and he’s given it a canon. (The canon is crucial, as we shall see.) And
if his book is a little all over the place—well, so is Twee. Spitz hails it as
“the most powerful youth movement since Punk and Hip-Hop.” He doesn’t even put
an arguably in there, bless him.
You’re Twee if you like artisanal hot sauce. You’re Twee if you hate bullies.
Indeed, it’s Spitz’s contention that we’re all a bit Twee: the culture has
turned. Twee’s core values include “a healthy suspicion of adulthood”; “a
steadfast focus on our essential goodness”; “the cultivation of a passion
project” (T-shirt company, organic food truck); and “the utter dispensing with
of ‘cool’ as it’s conventionally known, often in favor of a kind of fetishization
of the nerd, the geek, the dork, the virgin.”
The aesthetic lineage that Spitz proposes—his connect-the-dots
survey of Tweedom across the decades, from Peanuts
to Jonathan Richman to New Girl—starts
with Mickey Mouse. Mickey’s shorts, his hooting eunuch voice, his taking arms
against a sea of troubles: Spitz appoints him “the first American Twee icon.”
Close behind in the Twee parade trots Ferdinand the Bull, followed by the
contemplative elephant Horton, and then—trying hard not to be a virgin—Holden Caulfield. The point of these characters
is the bravery with which they assert their tender selves. Or perhaps the
tenderness with which they assert their brave selves. Whatever: in a shitty
world, they’re taking a stand for beauty. We might quibble, you and I, with
elements of Spitz’s Twee taxonomy, his Tweexonomy, what he calls his “heroes’
gallery of pajama people.” I can’t accept, for example, that Sylvia Plath,
rising from the ashes with her red hair and eating men like air, was ever
Twee—although I can accept that thinking
she was Twee is Twee. And shouldn’t Kerouac be in there somewhere? (“Don’t you
know that God is Pooh Bear?”) What about Vonnegut? But all of this just puts us
further inside the Twee-dome. To bandy names like this, to compare pedigrees,
is to play the deep game of Twee.
“Everyone has an anthropology,” wrote Walker Percy, right on the
money as usual. “There is no not having one. If a man says he does not, all he
is saying is that his anthropology is implicit, a set of assumptions which he
has not thought to call into question.” Mother, father, doing laundry for your
Twee son, washing his bike-messenger shorts or his “Three Wolf Moon” T-shirt,
you may ask yourself, What does he stand
for, this kid? What does he believe? Your hard-core Tweeniac, in the 21st
century, appears quite settled in his floating-ness, quite rooted in his void.
His anthropology looks like an aggregate of encrypted style statements,
rarefied consumer choices, B sides, punch lines from canceled sitcoms,
teeny-weeny totems and teeny-weeny taboos. In his mind, at least, he’s off the
grid. He is easily ironized because he comes, in a sense, pre-ironized.
Consider the cultural degradation of the “hipster”—once a jazz-and-orgasms
spirit warrior with battle hymns by Norman Mailer, now a dude with a funny hat
rooting through a bin of used vinyl. And he is easily exploited. One of the
most beautiful lines in Spitz’s book, curiously or perhaps fittingly, comes in
a description of the famous 1999 Volkswagen Cabriolet ad that (blech!)
appropriated Nick Drake’s “Pink Moon.” Spitz calls it “a sort of blue-bathed
grace moment of shyness and gentleness.”
The Twee food fads come and go, as do the tribally sanctioned
T-shirts and the weekly musical subgenres. But I am grateful to Spitz for
reminding me that Twee has, beneath all the chirping, something passionately
affronted and defiant; that its embrace of underdogs—their flops, their
freak-outs, their difficult third albums—has an actual moral application. Spitz
plants the British singer Morrissey upon the throne of Twee. I was happy in the haze of a drunken hour /
But heaven knows I’m miserable now. The yearning, the susceptibility. But
Morrissey is too sleek and magnificent an ego for that ambiguous seat, I think.
(He is also responsible for the radically un-Twee couplet When we’re in your scholarly room / Who will swallow whom?) Spitz
is on firmer, which is to say much more unstable, ground with Kurt Cobain. Here
was the Elvis of Twee, a complicated angel, “rock’n’roll’s own Little Prince,”
not only a shockingly potent performer but a militant Twee ideologue. He
inveighed against sexism and homophobia; he loathed jocks; he sang Grandma take me home; he painted his
toenails; he used his fame to promote unpromotable bands. It may have been the
massive drumming of Dave Grohl—nothing could be less Twee—that powered Nirvana
into the mainstream, but Cobain, like all great figures, had already invented
his own historical inevitability: he was, briefly and tormentedly, the
bursting-through of generations of Twee.
Spitz describes Twee as a “revolution.” A gentle one, to be sure,
but revolution is revolution. Has it happened? Is it happening? Have we lit the
fuse of a transformative explosion on the twinkling tips of those Brooklyn
mustaches? In Boston, as I write, two former college-football players have just
been arraigned for beating a homeless man—a beating that might have been fatal
were it not for the intervention, as reported by The Boston Globe, of “a petite woman in her 20s who asked not to be
named.” The woman’s intervention was apparently literal: she placed her body
between the victim and his attackers. Truly Salingerian, or Cobainian. A
paradigmatic instance of Twee heroism, one might say. Defend the vulnerable.
Disarm the tormentor. Be strong. Be Twee.
The Twee Pantheon
Wes Anderson: Outsider
boy-heroes and tinkling glockenspiels? Check. Perennial struggle between
innocence and experience? Check. Sudden, disorienting swerves into the dark
side? Heavy, heavy check. Cinema’s primary auteur of Twee.
Zooey Deschanel: “Who’s
that girl?” she inquires in winsome song, from behind the wheel of her comedy
vehicle New Girl. Well, who is she?
An actor-musician with a smoky voice for whom battalions of Twee roar in
praise. “Kooky,” “quirky,” “dorky”—terrible words. But she did co-found a Web
site called HelloGiggles.
Belle and Sebastian: More
than the Smiths, more than Nirvana, Belle and Sebastian—with its Glaswegian
jinglejangle and wry depressive undertow—is the folk music of Twee. Although of
course folk music is the folk music of Twee.
Jonathan Safran Foer:
Or at least the Jonathan Safran Foer of Extremely
Loud & Incredibly Close, heartlessly excoriated by non-Twee critics for
its “kitsch” take on 9/11. Meanies! Bullies!
All
the Single Ladies -- From "That Girl" to "New Girl" |
HuffPost Marlo Thomas, March 21, 2012
Television takes a lot of heat from its critics — for its
excesses, for its lack of subtlety — but no one can deny that it is a true
reflection of the ever-changing times we live in. So as part of our ongoing
celebration of Women’s History Month, we decided to explore the evolution of
single women on TV — a cultural time capsule that not only reveals this
remarkable journey, but has also given us plenty of laughs.
I started thinking about this a few weeks ago, when I was asked
to present an award at a dinner honoring Linda Lavin, the gifted actress who
starred in the hit television series “Alice.” As I did my research about Linda
and “Alice,” I began to see how they perfectly fit into the colorful — and
historic — transformation of single female characters on television.
Those were radical times for women on TV. Until then, women’s
characters were primarily housewives, wearing gingham aprons and permanent
smiles. I was just breaking into TV at the time, and as a young actress I felt
the sting of those limitations. Whenever I was lucky enough to land a job on
TV, I’d either be playing someone’s wife, or someone’s secretary, or someone’s
daughter.
Then I read The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan and thought,
Wouldn’t it be great if we could see a show where the girl was the “someone?”
ABC was brave enough to green-light my idea as a new TV series
called “That Girl.” My character, Ann Marie, would be an aspiring actress
living alone in New York who was independent and ambitious — and had the
courage to utter the earth-shattering words (usually to her protective father):
“But I don’t want to get married!”
Although network researchers didn’t think a single girl had a
chance in prime time, “That Girl” found her audience — because there were
millions of That Girls in homes across America. We were not our mother’s
daughters. We were a whole different breed.
But even with our success, women still had a way to go. Yes, Ann
Marie was a revolutionary figure — but she had a fabulous wardrobe right out of
an Audrey Hepburn movie, and you could’ve landed a 747 in her apartment.
And when Mary Tyler Moore came along a few years later, as one of
TV’s first single women in the workplace, her first job on the show was pretty
high-end — a television news producer. For many women in America, TV was still
in fantasy land.
Then in 1976, in walked Linda Lavin’s “Alice,” who gave TV
viewers a true dose of reality — as a widow and single mom, living with her son
in a small apartment in the Phoenix desert, and slinging hash at a greasy
diner. Her dream was not fame or success or the big corner office. It was
simple survival.
From then on, this amazing transformation would continue, as
women across the TV dial passed the baton to one another in their depiction of
the modern single woman.
Linda Lavin’s single woman would eventually clone herself into a
twosome — in shows like “Kate and Allie” and “Laverne and Shirley” — doubling
the impact women were having on TV, while pointedly illustrating the enduring
potency and warmth of sisterhood.
Bonnie Franklin’s Ann Romano in “One Day at a Time” — like Alice,
a single mom, but with two daughters — would deliver dependable laughs each
week, but the show also pushed the envelope in exploring serious social issues,
including teen runaways and teen suicide.
Candice Bergen would a introduce a more complicated version of
the single working woman in the character of Murphy Brown, a temperamental and
tough-skinned TV journalist who thought nothing of berating her boss (would Lou
Grant have ever tolerated that from Mary?); and whose seismic decision to have
a baby out of wedlock (imagine Ann Marie doing that!) would not only rock
television viewers out of their La-Z Boys, but also have a thunderous impact on
that year’s presidential election.
And the once taboo topic of sex — which for decades had made the
boys at the networks squeamish — would be confronted head-on in a host of
women-driven shows — from “Will and Grace” to “Ellen” to “Sex and the City.” In
fact, sex was not only discussed but flaunted among the quartet of sassy
seniors in “The Golden Girls,” as the ladies continued to reject the notion
that their life was over, just because they’d reached the golden age.
And now the latest member of the club is “New Girl”‘s Zooey
Deschanel. Like her predecessors, she’s quirky and big-hearted — but this time,
our single girl is rooming with three guys. Is her character once again
redefining women on TV? Put it this way: Ann Marie wore Halston in “That Girl”;
Zooey wore a dominatrix outfit in a recent episode of “New Girl.” ‘Nuff said.
But seeing is believing. So take a look at this slide show we put
together, which will remind you of those television programs that helped chart
the course for women in the latter part of the 20th Century. To paraphrase the
“Laverne and Shirley” theme song, “We did it our way.”
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