![\""Alex\"](\"https:\/\/graziamagazine.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2022\/02\/090_0971_MRSM_S4_UT_405_210416_SAUCHR_00026R-e1645814211189.jpg?w=1024\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Mild spoilers ahead for Episode 4 of <\/em>The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel\u2019s fourth season\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n One of the frequent criticisms of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel<\/em><\/a> over the years has been of the caginess with which the show has treated the sexuality of Alex Borstein\u2019s Susie. Despite living in Greenwich Village, the heart of New York\u2019s queer scene in the late 1950s, over three seasons Midge\u2019s surly, butch presenting manager hasn\u2019t been given anything approaching a romantic or sexual life. During a recent Q&A<\/a>, creators Amy Sherman-Palladino<\/a> and husband Daniel Palladino were asked whether they would finally address the character\u2019s heretofore unacknowledged sexuality<\/a> in the show\u2019s current fourth season.<\/p>\n \u201cStay tuned in,\u201d Palladino teased. \u201cI think for the first few years, we really focused on Susie and her ambitions. We let the character dictate what the audience should know, which is practically nothing, but obviously the people around her are going to be curious. We definitely are not going to ignore that.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re waiting for her to tell us,\u201d Sherman-Palladino added. \u201cAs soon as she spills the beans, we\u2019ll pass it on.\u201d<\/p>\n Now, I\u2019m not super sure how to read this response. On the one hand, the Palladinos are more than five years into writing Susie. It seems odd that they apparently don\u2019t have a better understanding of this pretty fundamental aspect of one of their main characters by now. But then, as a writer, I guess it kind of makes sense to allow a character to reveal herself to you as you develop her, and maybe what they\u2019re talking about isn\u2019t so much Susie\u2019s sexuality<\/em> as it is her comfort level when it comes to discussing it or making it known to people in her professional orbit, like Midge (Rachel Brosnahan<\/a>).<\/p>\n And yet, in the fourth episode of the show\u2019s fourth season, one of two that drops today on Prime Video, the Palladinos seem to have tossed their \u201clet Susie tell us<\/em>\u201d thing out the window. Thinking Susie needs companionship in the wake of Jackie\u2019s death, Midge tricks her into going to a lesbian bar that John Waters told her about. She\u2019s hoping that Susie, who is clearly super invigorated by the prospect of her new office and the potential of growing her business, will meet a nice lady friend and live happily ever after. But when Susie realizes what\u2019s happening, she\u2019s pissed!<\/p>\n \u201cWhy would you do this?\u201d she asks, letting Midge, and by extension the audience, know just what she thinks of her presumptions. If she wanted to go to a lesbian bar, she knows where to find them. If she wanted to discuss this part of her life with Midge, or with us, she would. She makes it clear that she has one priority right now: her career. She doesn\u2019t just want to be Midge\u2019s manager; she wants to be the<\/em> manager. She wants to be a power player in the world of entertainment. She\u2019s ambitious and she knows what she wants, and Midge\u2019s vestigial middle class, bourgeois concept of happiness isn\u2019t it. And with that, she storms out of the bar to collect a new client: that weird magician (Gideon Glick) from that other<\/em> bar.<\/p>\n There\u2019s a lot going on in this scene: a show addressing what has been a sticking point for come fans; a character resisting our need to define her identity; a woman clearly asserting her priorities as well as her personal and professional boundaries. Again, I have no way of knowing how much of this scene is a reaction to criticism of the way the show has handled Susie\u2019s sexual identity thus far and how much is an organic expression of who the character has always been. It does ring true of the character as we\u2019ve come to know her.<\/p>\n Now, I understand why fans are so invested in Susie\u2019s identity. There are vanishingly few butch lesbian characters on TV and in film, so every single one matters. And believe me, I want to see queer representation on TV as much as the next Darwin-fearing progressive snowflake. But I also think that choosing, for whatever reason, not to engage in romantic or sexual relationships, whether hetero or homo, is completely valid and worthy of depiction in media as well. Lately, I feel like I\u2019m out here a lot banging the drum for the spinsters and the aces (asexuals), who are even more rare on television than LGBTQ characters. And when we do see them, they tend to be problematized. Single women tend to be depicted as either pathetic or frigid, and Hollywood has pretty much no idea how to tell a story about someone whose motivation isn\u2019t complicated by romantic or sexual desire. But single people have interesting and complicated lives that don\u2019t revolve around the search for a partner, and asexual people exist!<\/em><\/p>\n One of the biggest missed opportunities resulting from Kim Cattrall<\/a>\u2019s absence on And Just Like That<\/em><\/a> was that we didn\u2019t get to see stories about a single middle-aged woman who, unlike Sarita Choudhury<\/a>\u2019s Seema, wasn\u2019t seeking<\/em> a relationship. What might those<\/em> stories have been like? Maybe that\u2019s what we have in Susie: a woman for whom, regardless of her sexuality, relationships are not a priority. A woman who is focused on building her business, on succeeding in a male dominated field; a woman who struggles financially and with gambling addiction. We know that these stories work, because we\u2019ve seen them! Over the first three seasons of Mrs. Maisel<\/em>, Borstein has created a funny, lovable, charismatic character.<\/p>\n Of course, it\u2019s possible I\u2019m making a virtue out of necessity here. After all, queers have had to do subversive readings of heterosexist texts basically since the dawn of time. And yet, I still think it\u2019s worthwhile thinking of Susie this way. And it\u2019s also kind of thrilling to see Borstein as Susie telling us, the audience, that she\u2019s under no obligation to conform to our expectations. \u201cI am focused on one thing right now,\u201d she tells Midge. \u201cSusie Meyerson and Associates. That\u2019s it.\u201d<\/p>\n Touch\u00e9, Susie. You do you!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":29097,"featured_media":51225,"template":"","format":"standard","categories":[38,16,3925],"yoast_head":"\n![\""Rachel\"](\"https:\/\/graziamagazine.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2022\/02\/185_0419_Midge_Susie_42-3_B_1RC-e1645814292595.jpg?w=1024\")
<\/p>\n![\""Rachel\"](\"https:\/\/graziamagazine.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2022\/02\/179_0384_Midge_Susie_15-6_BR2-e1645814497648.jpg?w=1024\")
<\/p>\n