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| Steve Buscemi on Boardwalk Empire, and Rachel Dratch on Saturday Night Live. |
Yesterday, Slate's DoubleX blog ran a post by Torie Bosch that challenged recent claims put forth by Rachel Dratch in Girl Walks Into A Bar..., her recently published memoir. In the book, Dratch claims that the rejection that has faced her since she left Saturday Night Live - she was famously replaced by Jane Krakowski on 30 Rock, and her big leading-lady moment Spring Breakdown was relegated to the direct-to-DVD wasteland.
Bosch, however, disagrees. She writes:
But was Dratch really a victim of Hollywood’s insane beauty standards? What if her particular brand of acting—and she has admitted that she is more a character actor—just isn’t right for leading-lady-dom? Am I betraying feminism if I say that I’m just not a huge Rachel Dratch fan? She seems like a lovely person. Girl Walks Into a Bar’s discussion of her unexpected, late-in-life pregnancy is funny and honest and poignant. I’d love to get drinks with her. But as much as I strive to support smart, funny women on TV and in the movies, Dratch’s work doesn’t appeal to me.I actually sort of agree with Bosch on this one, at least to the extent that Dratch's acting style has always turned me off when it appears outside of sketch comedy. In particular, Bosch's claim that Dratch's appearances as various characters on 30 Rock didn't really fit with the tone of the series was, I thought, pretty spot-on.
But that doesn't mean that Bosch's argument is airtight. The biggest problem on display is her assertion that Dratch "isn't right for leading-lady-dom" because she is a character actor. The writer appears to have forgotten that "character actor" is generally synonymous with "person who is too unattractive for a lead role." Bosch reverses the causality, assuming that it's Dratch's particular acting style that keeps her from getting lead roles, and conveniently forgetting that Dratch's appearance has, in all likelihood, consigned her to these sorts of roles.
