Reese Witherspoon.................
We have a lot of thoughts about the actress turned media mogul.
Victoria: I want to say the first Reese Witherspoon movie I watched was Legally Blonde, but I think I got Sweet Home Alabama from Blockbuster first. A bad choice.
I’m fascinated by Reese’s book club. Since it began in June 2017, there have been forty one selections. Flipping through the slideshow of books, it seems everyone she (and her people) has chosen has been by a woman.
Oprah, of course, started the most important celebrity book club on her talk show. She helped a lot of those books become bestsellers and turned some of those authors into household names, whether they wanted it or not. Reese’s book club stands in Oprah’s shadow.
Reese's club came a few years after she starred in Wild (based on the memoir by Cheryl Strayed), produced Gone Girl (based on the novel by Gillian Flynn) and months after she starred in and produced Big Little Lies (based on the novel by Liane Moriarty). The first book they picked for Reese's club, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine was optioned by — you guessed it — Reese and her producing partner.
It's a pattern. Little Fires Everywhere was a book club pick they turned into a miniseries for Hulu. They're also producing Daisy Jones & The Six for Amazon. Reese has perfected the book club as an arm of her empire — she finds a great book, boosts its sales, and then uses those sales to get more money to make something of it. I'm fascinated by this closed system she's created. I'm frustrated by her insistence on casting herself in many of these projects.
I know you have more of a grand unifying theory of Reese. Share with the class?
Hayley: I am fascinated and terrified of Reese Witherspoon. I am not quite sure when it started, but Legally Blonde has been my favorite movie for a very long time. When I’m in a bad mood I cannot shake, I will put Legally Blonde on and paint my nails and then flip through an actual glossy magazine. I find this ritual soothing, and it returns me to my baseline. All too frequently I will be reading a magazine while watching a Reese movie and something about Reese pops up in the magazine. She guest edited or contributed an essay. There’s a spotlight on her book club, or her most recent miniseries. There are photos of Tracy Flick everywhere in women's magazines when they run a political column or essay. Maybe her cookbook gets featured in a celebrity cookbook roundup, or something from her clothing company, Draper James, is featured in a fashion spread. You simply cannot escape Laura Jeanne Reese Witherspoon. I find it thrilling, like we're headed for a post-apocalyptic world where Reese is our overlord and we all use "Y'all" non-ironically and cook her grandmother's biscuit recipe and anxiously await each new meticulously staged "Mom Life, am I right?" Instagram photo of hers to drop.
I feel weird to say that I've "studied" Reese Witherspoon, but I don't really know any other way to phrase it. I have watched her go from blandly apolitical to forefront of white feminism, and then she was in A Wrinkle in Time and spent hours every day with Oprah and Mindy Kaling and Ava Duvernay. Shooting that film is a crucial turning point for Reese, where, I believe, she finally started to realize the extent of her white privilege. I think about this essay she wrote for Glamour in 2017 a lot, particularly this passage:
Another thing I think about a lot is how it feels to be a minority woman in America, so rarely seeing yourself onscreen, and it’s unconscionable. When I asked Mindy Kaling, “Don’t you ever get exhausted by always having to create your own roles?” she said, “Reese, I’ve never had anything that I didn’t create for myself.” I thought, Wow, I feel like a jerk for asking that; I used to have parts that just showed up for me. I can’t imagine how hard it is to write your own parts and simultaneously have to change people’s perceptions of what a woman of color is in today’s society.
You can see the gears start to move. Her social media posts started to change. Her PR approach shifted gradually, and then all at once. There are a few ways that you can read into this. The cynical way is that she knew that in order to maintain relevance, she needed to confront her own identity head-on and start taking actions to downplay her Southern white woman profile in Trump's America. The compassionate way is that she has always been smart and well-meaning but never challenged much, finding white feminism and really leaning in to get women represented in Hollywood. Then she spent time with prominent and successful women of color who challenged her and she realized how much more work there was to do. The truth is probably somewhere in between. I believe there are altruistic foundations to her change in attitude, but I think that the financial success of diversifying her work in every definition of that word has kept her on the track.
Also, I think she is a type-A perfectionist who is chasing success to prove something to herself. There's a reason why Tracy Flick is such an indelible character. And Reese has played flavors of this character for the past 21 years, which some people will point to as a redundancy that is an indicator of poor or "one-note" acting, but I disagree. Reese is using her own knowledge of what it feels like to want something desperately and infusing that into each character in a way that is authentic. Tracy Flick, Elle Woods, Melanie Smooter, June Carter, Madeline Martha Mackenzie, Elena Richardson...in some ways, these characters feel like alternate reality versions of the same person. And I am here for it!
Which, Reese is not perfect and she still does dumb shit all the time. I blame her for influencing Mindy Kaling's fucking insane Instagram aesthetic.
I haven't even gotten into Ryan Phillippe and Jim Toth and how they play into the Reese Witherspoon World Domination Matrix.
Victoria: Reese's legal first name not being Reese has me shook! Does Jim Toth call her Laura? Laura Jeanne?
I'm fascinated by this theory of A Wrinkle In Time as the turning point. The quote you chose is interesting because the story of Reese's career from 2014 until now is her going out and creating her own roles! That's the year of Wild and Gone Girl, and she really wanted David Fincher to cast her as Amy in the latter, which would have been a huge departure for her. Almost every project she's done since then she's produced (A Wrinkle In Time is a notable exception).
I love this idea of her playing the same character in a million different universes. You told me this theory when we were watching Little Fires Everywhere, which made me appreciate what she was doing there more: Elena in LFE is Madeline in BLL unleashed, her whole destructive white woman powers operating in full force.
At the same time, despite how "with it" Reese wants to portray herself as, she has not given up her whole southern white lady schtick. Whiskey in a Teacup came out in 2018, and, to quote this very good essay that ran in The Goods at the time:
But the life she details is a rich, white life that only a few Southerners actually live, the ones who, like Witherspoon, are privileged enough to have oil paintings of ancestors up on the walls, wrap-around porches, pearls for every young lady’s 16th birthday, and a Cadillac in every driveway on the street, well-suited for drive-in movies and road trips and — she writes — even sleeping in the back seat for a lark.
The same is also true of her clothing line, Draper James. Anne Helen Peterson wrote about the flagship store in her feature about how Nashville turned into "one big bachelorette party":
Many of the women who buy clothes at Draper James embrace an old-fashioned understanding of Southern femininity, the sort that finds nothing wrong with a T-shirt printed with the imperative “Keep It Pretty, Please” ($38). As one woman in her mid-twenties from South Carolina told me, “My mom’s crazy about that store. It’s the sort of thing rich moms from the suburbs love.”
Reese wants to have things both ways.
I have not a single feeling about Ryan Philippe, except the knowledge of how young she was when they tied the knot. The mention of Jim Toth reminds me of the one event Reese most wants us to forget — his DUI and her yelling at the cops, "You’re about to find out who I am.”
Hayley: The Reese legal name reveal is always fun! I think she goes by Reese all the time, unfortunately.
Reese drunkenly yelling, "You're about to find out who I am" is so funny to me. Of all the outrageous things that celebrities have been caught doing, it feels so innocuous it hardly registers on the public consciousness.
Your points about the disconnect between how Reese wants to portray herself and how she is actually portraying herself are so good. In Whiskey in a Teacup, she includes a few references to the ways that Black women have shaped Southern cuisine. She also includes a full-page shoutout to how lovely and wonderful Kate Middleton is and how she considers her an honorary Southern woman. The cookbook itself feels like it does not know what stance it wants to take. Reese contains multitudes. I feel like Reese is trying to create an image of a white Southern woman who is woke, so that she doesn't have to contend with the darker history of what it means to be a white Southern woman. I mean, this is probably a separate conversation, and one that can include Dolly Parton and Taylor Swift and the intersections of personal history, worldwide fame and fortune, and generations of racial exploitation and subjugation in the South.
My official recommendation is that you need to watch Election and if you have time you can watch Walk the Line.
Speaking of multiple universes, think of the one where Reese and Ryan Philippe are still married. Let me speculate wildly on the intimate lives of strangers: Ryan Philippe is the kind of fuckboy that you are charmed by when you are 22, and all you have to do is scroll through his Instagram for thirty seconds to see that. She got married right as she was rising to the very top of her acting career and Ryan's career basically stalled. I don't think that this dynamic served their relationship well. In 2011, she married Jim Toth, who seems to genuinely support her and her career ambitions. It helps that he is in the business (he's an agent) but he's not the talent. There isn't professional competition on the same scale. We wouldn't have the Reese Empire we have today if she was still stuck in a shitty power-struggle relationship with Ryan Philippe. That's my hot take!
I am glad that Reese has gone through what seems like an ever-evolving self-awareness journey and has created more opportunities for women and has started doing the same for women of color, which I want to see with more consistency. I want more from her, always, which doesn't feel quite fair, but I want it nonetheless. I want more vocal denouncing of the things she is purportedly against, more support for Black authors' books in Reese's Book Club. I also want less of her acting in her own production company's adaptations, and less inane wine mom merch at Draper James.
Victoria: The Reese DUI moment is hilarious, but it’s also the embodiment of the privilege of a rich, white woman to scream at the cops and assume everyone will see her as the victim when her husband was drunk driving! And she's definitely used her power and position to make sure we don't remember that as a thing that happened! She should talk about it now, but she never will because she wants us all to forget.
Making Kate Middleton an honorary southern woman is just ... whew. I could write a whole email unpacking that! It's interesting you include Taylor Swift with Reese and Dolly, since Taylor is from Pennsylvania but claimed southerness — specifically its white, gentile femininity — for her own purposes as a country artist. I recommend Dolly Parton's America to anyone who missed the podcast last year. I guess the moral is I want to read more work about southern writers deconstructing this very thing.
A long-standing theory I have about successful actresses is that their marriages only work if their husband has a different job from them. Too many men can't handle when their wives are more successful; I believe this also explains the high divorce rates of current and former Real Housewives cast members.
At this point Reese and her production company/emerging media empire is a huge force in what gets in front of people's — especially white women's — eyes, and she has an ethical imperative to use that power for good. I hope she continues to interrogate her own complicity in the system that benefits white women, and I hope me and you do the same. Is this too preachy? Probably, but what could be more important?
[id: still of Reese Witherspoon as Tracy Flick in “Election”]
Things Hayley Recommends
This pumpkin bread recipe from Jessica in the Kitchen, which is moist and so perfectly spiced it tastes like a dream.
These monthly planners from Silk + Sonder. Each month has a different theme, and it’s really manageable (dare I say fun? I have a Virgo moon, sorry) to fill them out. They feel like a hybrid Passion Planner/bullet journal.
These three Instagram accounts that focus on decolonizing yoga and this one that shows more accessible options for poses.
The studio where I obtained my 200-hour yoga teacher certification from has a free 14-day Yoga Therapy For Anxiety course that I found incredibly helpful.
Links Victoria Thinks You Should Click
I had the honor of being on my friend Lauren and Caitlin’s amazing podcast, We Stan Together, to talk about One Direction with the great Ariel Gitlin. I think you’ll enjoy listening to it! Here’s the very short Intro to 1D playlist Ariel and I made to welcome you into the standom.
There’s a new Bruce Springsteen song, Letter To You! His new album is coming out in October. I am very excited.
The world felt particularly terrible all week. You can donate to this fund to help get masks for unhoused people in Oakland, to help them deal with the pollution from the wild fires, which have probably only just begun.
There was a viral story about the US Marshals breaking up a sex trafficking ring in Georgia. This article, written by Michael Hobbes of the excellent You’re Wrong About podcast, explained what actually happened and how we can actually help at-risk kids and teens.
Don’t forget Gold-Plated Girls comes out twice a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays! Don’t miss Hayley’s Tuesday essay, about her secret to getting through breakups.