Victoria (Australia), 2006. I am thirteen years old and visiting a relative. They’ve long since gone to bed and I’m watching the 64th annual Golden Globe Awards and zoning in and out. There’s a number from Dreamgirls, A showcase of Helen Mirren’s benign stateliness in The Queen, and then a scene that will change me forever.
It’s a desperate confrontation in the street. The camera is shaky and intimate, like something caught on candid cam. I feel the rush that comes from being a voyeur to a devastating argument in which you have no personal stake. Someone speaks in a sardonic drawl ‘What? You’re in love? And the child, do you think he reciprocates your soppy feelings’
‘Soppy’ is spat out like bile. “there’s nothing crueler than the adolescent male,” she continues. “I know them.”
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I’m a year into high school and my heart leaps into my throat. Yes. Yes! Then, the climax, a wire-barbed whip with “You’re not young!” I’ve barely recovered from the lash before the clip ends with: ‘I say this to help you’. It’s like I’ve passed a patisserie window that’s closed but their wares are still displayed, and I’m longing to devour them all. Nearly twenty years later I can still taste those lines.
The actress is Judi Dench, the character Barbara Covett in the film adaptation of Zoe Heller’s Notes on a Scandal written by Patrick Marber and Directed by Richard Eyre.
Like any rational adolescent f*ggot, I made the film, and to a lesser extent the book, my personal obsession. I wrote a paper on the novel for English class, which must have raised some eyebrows.I eagerly showed it to my coterie of middle-aged confidantes; namely my aunts, who found it deeply unpleasant.
Barbara Covett, is a public school teacher in late middle age and is generally disliked. Her jaded apathy towards her day-to-day drudgery and isolated future is interrupted by the introduction of the elfin Sheba Hart, played, appropriately, by the otherworldly Cate Blanchett. Sheba is completely out of her depth as an art teacher; her upper-middle-class bourgeois sensibilities are no match for the restlessness and apathy of the students. When Barbara comes to her aid during a particularly riotous lesson, a warm, casual acquaintance is developed between them. But their intimacy takes a turn when Barbara discovers that Sheba is having an ongoing sexual relationship with a 15-year-old student. Instead of exposing Sheba, Barbara tacitly makes herself indispensable to the younger woman with the expectation that Sheba will allow herself to be monopolised and eventually possessed by Barbara.
When it was released in 2006, there was inevitable discourse around the representational politics of the film. Barbara was perceived to be the latest in a long line of waspish, predatory spinsters obliquely coded as queer whose infatuation with an ultra femme straight woman is made out to be pathetic at best and psychotic at worst. For the last twenty years, the character of Barbara, especially Dench’s portrayal of her, has stuck with me as both a vindication of my own isolation and a cautionary tale of how longing can warp the soul. Notes on a scandal is a merciless evocation of the lonely and the isolated that feels unabashedly queer. But what does my identification with Barbara say about me?
“People like Sheba think they know what it is to be lonely,” we hear in the film, in voiceover.But of the drip, drip of the long-haul, no-end-in-sight solitude, they know nothing. What it’s like to construct an entire weekend around a visit to the launderette. Or to be so chronically untouched that the accidental brush of a bus conductor’s hand sends a jolt of longing straight to your groin. Of this, Sheba and her like have no clue.”
Judi Dench’s waspish narration combines Heller’s acidic prose with essential zingers from Patrick Marber in voiceover. As the other characters recoil with contempt at her, we are being thoroughly entertained by her hard-calibrated wit. People may be undermining and dismissing her, but we know she’s ferociously reading them for filth in the tight lines of her diary. A gay person’s best, and sometimes only, revenge.
In a narrative where the co-lead is a statutory rapist, somehow it’s the gay person who’s the villain. Barbara isn’t a nice person, she privately calls a full-figured colleague a ‘pig in knickers’ and Sheba’s disabled son ‘tiresome court jester’. But she belies the expectation that an older, single woman compensate by being overly warm, accommodating, and invisible.; Barbara isn’t maternal, she doesn’t fake an interest in the insipid attempts to ‘improve morale’ at school, she tries a little too hard in social situations, and most vitally, she’s a living reminder of the petrifying possibilities of ending your days alone not just unloved, but actively scorned.
In a narrative where the co-lead is a statutory rapist, somehow it’s the gay person who’s the villain.
Still, Barbara has a lot going for her: if she was my colleague, we’d smoke behind the bike sheds, trash-talk people and dish about solo date nights to the symphony and trips abroad. She’d probably hate me, but I’d think she was fabulous and I’d covet her independence. Then again, Barbara needs gay friends.
Edward Albee said of his heroine in Three Tall Women, whom he based on his stepmother ‘I can’t think of anyone in life who liked [it?], but I can’t think of anyone who saw the play who didn’t’ This is Barbara to a T, especially as brought to life by Judi Dench. Unlike many of her film roles, in Scandal she’s able to unleash the broadest exhibition of her powers, reminding many of us why she spent six decades as one of the reigning queens of the West End stage. Dench’s natural charm and joviality are turned inside out to show a woman for whom life’s repeated slights and disappointments have built a granite cavern around her heart. But my god, when hope and light peep through, she’s incandescent.
Barbara’s devotion is misguided but she doesn’t possess the social privileges that would allow her the opportunities to get what she wants (in her mind) without coercion. She’s working class, she’s not considered desirable, and therefore not considered of use. Initially the only thing she has to recommend her is the benefit of years and her usefulness as a confidante. After her first lunch at Sheba’s home, where she shows up ludicrously overdressed for what was a spontaneous pity invite, Sheba takes her into her confidence. All Barbara has to do is listen and grab onto the small crumbs of connection Sheba throws her way. Barbara knows what role she has to play and she’s a willing participant.
‘It’s a peculiar trait of the privileged: immediate, incautious intimacy.” We hear in voiceover. “But Sheba went well beyond the tendencies of her class. She was utterly candid. A novice confessing to the mother superior.”
Barbara’s desire and derision for Sheba are inextricable. If she were less in thrall, she might be irritated or even perversely amused by the entitled housewife’s solipsistic soliloquy on her middle-aged malaise.
More than once Barbara is described as a vampire, and if she was a particularly attractive man, women would be throwing themselves at her feet to be ravaged and possessed by her. It’s an apt metaphor: Barbara is ravenous. It’s key that in the previous scene we see her discreetly not eating her lunch of leftover lasagna served by Sheba. Barbara is subsisting on nothing. She’s a survivor, or at least an endurer in a world that doesn’t value her survival.
When Sheba is exposed, through a spiteful insinuation by Barbara who is grieving the loss of her cat, Barbara is subjected to as much tabloid fascination as Sheba. Every time she leaves the house whilst Sheba is with her the photographers camped outside her flat hurl slurs at her. It’s as if the world knows how grasping she is and has free rein to despise her. Society is very strict in how they punish those who want things too much.
At 13 and now, I felt Barbara’s ache. Queer desire, especially from those with low sexual currency have always been derided. I, too, yearned for what I saw as the beautiful, pure, and vulnerable, and let myself be mocked for it. Did I expose myself in ways that were deserving of mockery? Absolutely. But I learned early about the double standard that exists for the beautiful and the privileged and how much moral fallibility they are allowed.
Were my early attractions frequently grossly misguided, of course. Would I do what Barbara does? I hope not. But her path seemed like a visceral possibility.
Notes on a Scandal, much like the work of Todd Haynes, is hard for an audience because it exists so audaciously on its own terms. May December is a natural successor, and like Notes, didn’t get the awards recognition it deserved. Richard Eyre, former Artistic Director of London’s National Theatre, directs with a high-octane melodrama that suits the high-brow trashiness of the material. Phillip Glass’s score equals his work in The Hours for the florid intensity that heightens every scene. The actors deliver on all fronts with performances about 15% above naturalism. Bill Nighy as Sheba’s aged husband and Michael Maloney as the obsequious head master get overwrought confrontation scenes with our two divas that play like opera. Musical theatre star Julia McKenzie shows up for a scene as Barbara’s sister, and we even get a scene-stealing performance from a young Juno Temple. In many instances the movie plays like an episode of Dynasty with all the prestige trappings of a Scott Rudin (Ha!) produced film. For me, Notes fulfills a certain need I have from the art I consume. It lets its characters be arseholes so I don’t have to be. It vindicates my feelings that my loneliness, my desire for meaningful intimacy without reciprocation, my cynicism and social apathy are somehow part of just living in a world that doesn’t have much to offer me. Barbara isn’t aspirational—though her choicest monologues and scenes are ripe for a viral revival—but she’s real, and rather than getting caught up in identity politics, maybe we should look at the psychosocial contexts that make such people. Or just let her slay. ♦
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