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What’s your favorite Jennifer Lawrence moment? When she tripped on the way to accept her Academy Award, or when the paparazzi snapped photos of her drinking Veuve Cliquot straight out of the bottle? Or maybe it was the ease with which she regaled Conan O'Brien with a tale of butt plugs, or the Vine of her spilling mints in the middle of press conference? My personal moment happened backstage at the Oscars, when, with the help of a mildly lecherous Jack Nicholson, she turned the normally banal post-win interview into a master class in charm. He sneaks up on her, she freaks and fangirls out, they do some weird flirting, and when Nicholson leaves, Lawrence just loses it: “OH MY GOD,” she gasps, her face in her hands.
But is Jennifer Lawrence really just like us? She has a stunningly beautiful face and an equally fantastic body. She’s now nominated for her third Academy Award, and she’s also the star of the highest-grossing movie of the year. She’s award-collecting director David O. Russell’s favorite new muse. She’s operating on another level.
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Then again, she’s also the girl who has gastrointestinal distress and talks about it on national television. She grew up in Kentucky on a broad swath of land, where, as the kid sister to two older brothers, she spent a lot of time fishing and tomboying around; in her own unfortunate words, “I was so dykey.” Her nickname was “Nitro,” and instead of spending time at Claire’s with the middle school girls after school, she played on the all-boys basketball team. By the age of 14, she was pushing her parents to take her to New York to start her acting career — just in time to extract her from the high school gender politics that could have made her self-conscious of the sort of frankness we now so closely associate with the J.Law image.And it’s an image that keeps amplifying: She may have shed her tomboy pastimes, but she still loves fries, pizza, and Doritos — which she recently confessed to getting all over her American Hustle costumes. She talks about food, and her voracious appetite, constantly. She photobombs like a boss. She hates exercising and promises to punch anyone who says “I like exercising” in the face. Girls love her, guys desire her. I love J.Law, you love J.Law, everybody loves J.Law.
But, no, she’s not like us. She’s like a perfect character out of a book. Specifically, a book by Gillian Flynn called Gone Girl (currently being developed into a David Fincher movie), in which a main character describes a very particular yet familiar archetype:
“Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.”
The Cool Girl has many variations: She can have tattoos, she can be into comics, she might be really into climbing or pickling vegetables. She’s always down to party, or do something spontaneous like drive all night to go to a secret concert. Her body, skin, face, and hair all look effortless and natural — the Cool Girl doesn’t even know what an elliptical machine would look like — and wears a uniform of jeans and tank tops, because trying hard isn’t Cool. The Cool Girl has a super-sexy ponytail.
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The Cool Girl never nags, or “just wants one” of your chili fries, because she orders a giant order for herself. She’s an ideal that matches the times — a mix of feminism and passivity, of confidence and femininity. She knows what she wants, and what she wants is to hang out with the guys.Cool Girls don’t have the hang-ups of normal girls: They don’t get bogged down by the patriarchy, or worrying about their weight. They’re basically dudes masquerading in beautiful women’s bodies, reaping the privileges of both. But let’s be clear: It’s a performance. It might not be a conscious one, but it’s the way our society implicitly instructs young women on how to be awesome: Be chill and don’t be a downer, act like a dude but look like a supermodel.
You probably know someone playing a Cool Girl in real life, and you probably resent her — unless you’re a straight dude, in which case you probably think she’s great. But Lawrence performs Cool Girlness with such skill, such seamlessness, that it doesn’t seem like a performance at all. I’m not suggesting that Lawrence is intentionally inauthentic, scheming, or manipulative: Rather, like all the Cool Girls you know, she’s subconsciously figured out what makes people like her, and she’s using it. But is this persona truly “cool,” or is it a reflection of society’s unreasonable and contradictory expectations of women?
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Jennifer Lawrence is by no means the first nationally visible Cool Girl. Olivia Munn, Olivia Wilde, and Mila Kunis are recent also-rans, but the Cool Girl has a genealogy that traces all the way back to silent Hollywood. Famous Cool Girls are women who became stars during periods of societal anxiety over increasing freedoms for women, and as people quietly wondered whether women, once emancipated, would become homely, castrating bitches. Cool Girls have been proof positive that a woman could be liberated and progressive and yet pleasing to men, both in appearance and in action.
Yet the Cool Girl’s cool is ephemeral. We’ve been anticipating the J.Law backlash for months, but if and when it comes, it’ll have less to do with Lawrence and more to do with the need for a new articulation of the Cool Girl to keep the myth alive. This is an anxiety that needs constant soothing, and one star can provide only so much reassurance. One minute you’re cool, perfectly balancing the progressive and the regressive, but when that balance falters, you’re too much, too sexual, too loud, too performative, and the cultural backlash sweeps you under.
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Clara Bow never stopped moving. On screen, in interviews, running from one date to the next, even standing, she was like toddler constantly rocking back from heel to toe. She had short, flaming red hair, a thick Brooklyn accent, and horrible manners; instead of dining with the stodgy Hollywood elite, she spent her weekends hanging out at the USC football games, flirting with the players, including a young, pre-stardom John Wayne. Over the course of the ‘20s, Bow became the flapper par excellence: In films like Dancing Mothers, she drank and danced the Charleston and rode in cars with boys; in It, she became the biggest star in the world — and the first Cool Girl.
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As a kid, Bow spent most of her time trying to play with boys: hanging out at the dirt baseball diamond like a scene straight from a League of Their Own. But she was the Madonna, not the Rosie O’Donnell; as she recalled in a three-part fan magazine profile, “I always played with the boys. I never had any use for girls and their games. I never had a doll in all my life. But I was a good runner, I could beat most of the boys and I could pitch.” As she aged, the tomboy stuck: Even in high school, she wore hand-me-down skirts and old sweaters: “I didn’t give a darn about clothes or looks. I only wanted to play with the boys.”But it didn’t matter how much Bow dismissed clothes, or makeup, or other girls. She had the one thing that a girl really needs to succeed: a stunning face. And it was that face, entered into a magazine contest, that earned Bow her chance at stardom. At first, she struggled to find roles — her face was round and innocent, but her eyes gave off something wild and electric. She couldn’t play the slinky, vampish roles then dominated by Gloria Swanson, but neither was she a Mary Pickford-esque good girl. Where Swanson was angular, Bow was round; where Swanson moved languidly, Bow ricocheted across the room.
Bow didn’t fit the Hollywood mold — but then, over the course of three manic years, she transformed the mode entirely. The vamp and the good girl were out; the flapper, of which Bow was labeled the most vibrant example, was in. Everyone knows the flapper stereotype: endlessly dancing the Charleston, with drop-waisted, heavily fringed dresses and finger curls. But that’s just the Halloween costume version of the flapper. Flappers were, in truth, an amplified version of the “New Woman” — a type that F. Scott Fitzgerald famously described as “lovely, expensive, and about 19.” After the first World War, the continued spread of modernity, combined with growing rights for women, made it possible for more and more young, single women to move to cities, where they lived with other women, went to movies, road streetcars, and used their wages to buy things, especially clothes.
By the mid-‘20s, the cities were filled with millions of these New Women, and the most visible and vibrant ones, including Bow herself, became the flappers of the public imagination. Bow rarely wore the fringed dresses we associate with the type; instead, she wore a cloche-style hat over her unruly, flaming red hair, along with drop-waisted gauzy shifts and a noted lack of bra. But Bow was no waif: She had luscious, perky breasts; the effect when she bounced across, however, wasn’t obscene so much as joyful.
On screen, Bow’s characters reveled in everything: walking, dancing, drinking, flirting, even just being in their own bodies. There’s a perfect scene from Dancing Mothers when Bow fights her way into a suitor’s apartment, grabs the cocktail shaker from the butler, and takes a huge drink, and shivers with delight as the alcohol makes its way through her body.
See the way everything about her feels like a wink? How natural and easy life seems to her? Textbook Cool Girl. Clara Bow wasn’t just hot: She was fun. She never nagged, or stayed home watching rom-coms; she never complained, or was scared or shy. She had loads of “It” — a word that came, in the late ‘20s, to stand in for sex appeal. But It was more than just sexiness. As defined by Photoplay, It was a “sort of invisible aura that surrounds your being and bathes you in its effulgence” — and anyone with It is “always utterly un-self-conscious and perfectly indifferent and unaware of anyone’s interest in her. The moment self-consciousness enters into the affair, ‘It’ departs.”
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Bow acknowledged that the It quality attributed to her came from her “fearlessness”: “Perhaps I’m just a regular girl, a tomgirl, one that doesn’t think of men much, maybe it’s my indifference to them.” And therein lies the crux of the Cool Girl, adapted from One Direction: She doesn’t care if she’s beautiful; that’s what makes her beautiful.
Bow’s nonchalance was by no means limited to the screen. She showed up for interviews in outfits thrown together from her closet (in 1927: “a white flannel sport outfit — no sleeves, very short” with “white kid sandals, no hose, and a jaunty little blazer cap”), she loved to gamble, and she plowed through men. Gary Cooper, director Victor Fleming, Gilbert Roland, Yale student Robert Savage — she was engaged (and quickly unengaged) to them all once she grew tired of making out with them. She was a man-eater, but it wasn’t on purpose: She just loved hanging out with men, and “engagements” were the easiest way to do so.
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And for a while, Bow’s strategy worked perfectly. At the height of her popularity, she received 45,000 fan letters a week — and her trademark “bee-stung” lips and red hair were emulated en masse, sending sales of henna through the roof. But by 1930, the public began to grow weary with her. She found herself “engaged” to yet another man, but instead of celebrating the new dalliance, the press ridiculed it. When the still-engaged Bow was caught in Dallas flirting with her very married doctor — all while exchanging sexy telegrams with actor Rex Bell — she didn’t seem like a Cool Girl so much as a caricature of one. She began amassing giant gambling debts, claiming not to have noticed the difference between $14,000 and $1,400, and the gossip columnists began to tease her openly about her weight gain.
But things were about to get much worse: In the fall of 1930, Bow discovered her former hairdresser and current confidant Daisy DeVoe had been skimming her accounts. Bow fired her immediately and filed charges against her, but before the case went to trial, DeVoe took her revenge, selling “secrets” of Bow’s private life to a local tabloid. The “secrets” were total bombast — Bow slept with dogs; Bow slept with the entire USC football team; Bow had every strain of VD — and everyone knew the paper was trash. But they stuck: Bow was, after all, a confident, shameless girl; who’s to say she wouldn’t have behaved that way?
And so the patina of Cool Girl left Bow behind. After a humiliating trial that damaged Bow more than DeVoe, she retreated to the desert with new husband Rex Bell. An attempted comeback, making light of the allegations against her, fell flat. In the depths of the Depression, the flapper — and, by extension, Bow — wasn’t a Cool Girl, or an It Girl, but a tired, forgotten woman who quickly receded in the public imagination. Today, the biggest star of the late ‘20s is remembered mostly via Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon, which reproduced the most salacious of the tabloid rumors about her. But for a handful of years in the late ‘20s, Bow was the bee’s knees.
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