A Case for the Crying White Woman

"There is a little bit of Cassie Howard in me."

In 1983, Meryl Streep received her first Oscar win (and many to come) as the Best Actress in a Leading Role. As if her win three years ago as the best-supporting actress was not convincing enough, her 1983 performance in Sophie’s Choice as Sophie Zawistowski has put her stamp in film history and the American public consciousness.

In Sophie’s Choice, she plays a Polish-Catholic survivor of Nazi concentration camps as she is haunted by the ghosts of what she has experienced when she begins an affair with a troubled young writer named Nathan. The film follows Sophie as she is forced to make the “Sophie’s Choice.” The film follows her heart-shattering recount of trauma and finding solace in a new America.

Since the early 2000s, a somewhat predictable algorithm has emerged for what type of film will get nominated. Two years before Kate Winslet won her Oscar for Best Actress in “The Reader” (also a Holocaust film), she joked on an episode of Extras, “I am doing it because I noticed it, if you do a film about Holocaust, guarantee an Oscar.”

I do want to intervene by saying that the Holocaust is and has always been a difficult story to tell (certainly not mine), discussions of “Oscar Bait” films such as Sophie’s Choice and The Reader illuminates how catastrophic narratives and female trauma trickles down into female actresses performance and their affectations — how they have gained self-awareness and are readily repackaged/recirculated catering to the award systems. In a video essay titled “Oscar Bait”: A History, Lindsay Ellis provided a quick list of Oscar-bait categories:

“[Is the movie] character driven? Does it take place in Hollywood? Is Meryl Streep in it? Does it involve the Holocaust? Are the Black characters either slaves or beleaguered servants of some sort? Is Leonardo DiCaprio performing some form of desperate self-flagellation?”

No wonder why the actors are called players back in the old Hollywood days. Under the award-show scrutiny, some affects are more readily exploitable than others, under what bell hook might describe as the “Imperialist White Supremacist Heteropatriarchy.” How do cultural producers automate and reinforce those tropes and affects for relevance or success?

Over the past 50 years, ninety-six percent of the recipients of the Oscar for Best Actress have cried in their performances. Yet in the same fifty years, only about sixty percent of men who took home the Best Actor award had roles that required them to cry. There are various ways to interpret this data in addition to the “Oscar Bait” phenomenon — is the Oscars inherently sexist (the answer is yes) equating merit to female roles in positions of vulnerability when women are rarely rewarded for playing stoic characters or authority figures? How much of the filmmaking and accolades create toxic feedback that only reinforces the vulnerable woman and her white tears? How do white women’s tears reflect our current sociopolitical timing and bring out further conversations regarding the place of trauma and privilege in the creative arts?

On-screen, there is an inherent campiness that comes with “the crying white woman,” one that carries what film historian Jack Babuscio describes as “irony, aestheticism, theatricality, and humor”. The irony of how the tears are dragged out for unnecessary reasons and the self-awareness of it all; the aestheticism of crying so precisely to be memorable; the theatricality of tears that rejoice in excess; and the humor of sike! this is all for show, and I am gonna give the gays everything they want.

Within pop culture, the Crying White Woman has become a pathos itself; an inside joke of melodramatics; a performance that again promises likeability, especially for the queer/gay audience. In Mamta Motwani Accapadi’s article titled “When White Women Cry: How White Women’s Tears Oppress Women of Color,” she explains how our societal norms inform us that crying indicates helplessness, which triggers automatic sympathy for the White woman. It is through her tears, her reality is augmented, acknowledged, and legitimized. On the contrary, a woman of color’s reality, like her struggle — is invisible, overlooked, and pathologized based on the operating “standard of humanity.”

In pop culture representations, the visibility and volume of the white woman’s tears are amplified and applauded perhaps for reasons unexamined. In the latest episode of Euphoria (S2E4), the lovebugged Cassie Howard (played by internet favorite Sydney Sweeney) spirals into a drunken fit as she watches her love interest Nate returning to her best friend’s Maddy’s toxic grasp. In Euphoria, Sweeney (who is twenty-four years old in real life) plays an eighteen-year-old high schooler Cassie who grew up with an absent father. She is sensitive and volatile, radiant and miserable. At Maddy’s birthday party later in the episode, which Nate attends, she gets wasted and throws up in the hot tub, blubbering a vague apology to Maddy to assuage some of her guilt. For Cassie, love is euphoric and is what gives her meaning. Over the current and past season, the audience (gay audience specifically) are quick to jump to applaud Cassie’s melodramatic worldview of love — how someone can love so fiercely and fearlessly.

In the episode’s closing dreamy sequence, Cassie is sitting inside a mirror surrounded by an aura of roses as she sobs gently and looking afar. It is the image of a girl in a gilded cage of her own making — bright and distressing. The truth is, we have all been there — we knew this is not the average high school experience yet we still relate how apocalyptic it felt losing our first love. It is through this combination of excessiveness and relatability the white woman’s tears regather credibility and some grasp of what we perceive as a good performance.

djinnkazama2_thereturnofjafar

A post shared by tilikum stan page (@djinnkazama2_thereturnofjafar)

Calvin Seabrooks @larrygayvid

Why are we still impressed when yt actresses cry? Y’all know that’s like their basic attack right?

When the “Crying White Woman” has become a cultural trope, Sweeney’s Cassie character appears to fall into just another actress who cries but I suspect a broader conversation about media’s sexist obsession of heightening and marketing woman’s vulnerability — when crying no longer prompts discussions of the character journey but only a token promise of a good performance. On the flip side, Hollywood’s own obsession and long history with white woman’s tears have created a desensitized (or unimpressed) yet galvanized viewership. In a show like Euphoria that reflects on the overwhelming consumption in our current zeitgeist, the crying white woman signals a kind of release, a production, an affirmation albeit its docileness. And every time, we sop those tears in revelry.

White Women on the Internet

In 2021 summer, Bo Burnham produced Inside — a one-man singing comedy show about his day-to-day life indoors, depicting his deteriorating mental health and exploring the themes of performativity and his relationship to the Internet, as well as addressing issues including climate change and social movements. One of his songs, titled “White Woman’s Instagram” pokes fun at how the white woman on the internet has become a recognizable aesthetic that is inundated with “latte form art, tiny pumpkins / fuzzy comfy socks / coffee table made out of driftwood / a bobblehead of Ruth Bader Ginsburg / a needlepoint of a fox” and among many other instagrammable objects.

The “Basic White Girl” has been one of the Internet’s longest-running jokes about her symbol of happiness through consumption and excess. Basicness is not basic at all but a form of drag — “goat cheese salad / backlit hammock / simple glass of wine / incredibly derivative political street art / a dreamcatcher bought from Urban Outfitters”.

Shots from Bo Burnham’s “White Woman’s Instagram” that imitates his subject

During the bridge of the song, Burnham expands the 1:1 frame (much like Instagram’s square-grid format) to a full ratio and provided another dimension to his character. He creates an inner dialogue between the narrator and her mom:

Her favorite photo of her mom
The caption says, "I can't believe it
It's been a decade since you've been gone
Mama, I miss you, I miss sitting with you in the front yard
Still figuring out how to keep living without ya
It's got a little better but it's still hard
Mama, I got a job I love and my own apartment
Mama, I got a boyfriend and I'm crazy about him
Your little girl didn't do too bad
Mama, I love you, give a hug and kiss to dad"

Through a glimpse of the bridge, we connect with the song’s basic white girl character and her backstory. Her personal story is safeguarded within the 30 seconds song bridge tucked away from the Instagram public persona. The screen squeezes back to a 1:1 ratio as Burnham finishes the song with repeating objects associated with the basic white girl. The haters poke fun at the basic white girl because they knew something deeper is within and wanted to exploit her trauma for quick laughs; the haters poke at the basic white girl because they want to believe that there is more; the haters wants her to fail and cry. We are miserable and so should you.

Michael Benjamin @mfbenji

This one goes out to Lakynn

The Internet culture of senseless typifying — the white woman’s happy performance on the internet as “basic”, the white woman’s tears on film as “camp”, “unimpressive”, “award-winning”, Black women reaction pictures/videos are repeatedly used as mere “sassy” response on Stan Twitter— signals more attention to how pop culture/media has continuously cultivated practices and overall permissibility which places women’s vulnerability and trauma on a cultural altar with no return.

Central Park Birdwatching Incident

As much as the audience live for white tears on screen, white tears in real life often bear life or death consequences. On May 25, 2020, Amy Cooper, a white woman walking her dog, and Christian Cooper (no relation, the irony of them sharing the same last name), a black man who was birdwatching in New York City’s Central Park. Amy Cooper's dog was unleashed in an area where leashing is required; she allegedly refused Christian Cooper's request to leash her dog. When Christian gestured the dog toward him with a dog treat, Amy cried out "Don't you touch my dog!"

Christian started recording Amy, who placed a call to 9-1-1, telling them "There is an African American man—I am in Central Park—he is recording me and threatening myself and my dog. Please send the cops immediately!" And by the time New York City Police officers responded, both parties had left.

Just a few hours following the event, the incident received wide reporting when a video of the incident went viral. A month later on July 6, 2020, the Manhattan District Attorney announced that Amy Cooper had been charged with filing a false police report and a misdemeanor with a penalty of up to one year in jail. She was put on trial on October 14. The charges against her were dropped in February 2021 after she completed an educational course.

Coincidentally, the Cooper incident happened the same day as the arrest and murder of George Floyd, where both incidents gained instant media coverage due to being filmed by passers-by, and to the video being shared on social media (the Twitter video has had 40 million views).

When put in context in relation to black lives and the police, white tears as a cultural narrative of helplessness become a credible catalyst for violence. After the incident, Amy Cooper apologized and claimed she was “not a racist.” Cooper later filed a criminal complaint against her employer Franklin Templeton in Manhattan federal court, claiming that her employer fired her without investigating the incident. She also claimed that her workplace falsely portrayed her as racist, and that Christian Cooper was an “overzealous birdwatcher” who had selected her as a “target.” In Acapadi’s case study, the aftermath of the white woman's tears often ends with her “denial, rationalization, false envy, benevolence” when the media majority is again drawn to the melodramatics of her tears when we should advocate for accountability and calls for police reform.

From Wellness Influencer to Alt-Right Pipeline

Similarly, in the recent Freedom Convoy “movement” in Ottawa Canada, where truckers are protesting the vaccine mandate — Instagram wellness influencer Angela Liddon (352k followers) expressed emotional support over the cause for freedom and against segregation when the convoy organizers are heavily tied to white nationalism and alt-right movements. Everything collides in the Liddon example — how wellness culture has co-opted into white feminism; how her Instagram persona has sided with white supremacy rhetoric; how her innocence and vulnerability has leveraged into dangerous credibility. Will she double-down her position with the convoy and call herself a “victim” of cancel culture?

So…What Now?

I want to stress that my intervention of the crying white woman is less about the person but how it (noted not she) has become a cultural category-performance — a conversation that has always been about the media, celebrity, and privilege within a cultural landscape that continuously magnifies her whiteness as to distract from social change and accountability.

In the 2017 Golden Globes Awards during Trump’s first year, Meryl Streep gave a speech regarding her position as a renowned actress:

Once, when I was standing around on the set one day, whining about something — you know we were gonna work through supper or the long hours or whatever, Tommy Lee Jones said to me, “Isn’t it such a privilege, Meryl, just to be an actor?” Yeah, it is, and we have to remind each other of the privilege and the responsibility of the act of empathy. We should all be proud of the work Hollywood honors here tonight.

As my friend, the dear departed Princess Leia, said to me once, take your broken heart, make it into art.

As a gay/queer Asian (here comes identity politics self-diagnosis spiel), I wonder how my affinity to white actresses and pop culture at large reveals my proximity to whiteness. The truth is, in their own relatability and credibility — I could see how Cassie Howard, Amy Cooper, Angela Liddon, or even Meryl Streep can manifest in our lives. The ubiquitous thing about pop culture is that we consume with a lack of intention — placing figures on the cultural altar as aspirational models with a sleepish criticality, let alone under the constant male gaze/gays scrutiny.

Let’s be honest — celebrities are going nowhere. But the case of the crying white woman reveals so much more about our responsibility as viewers and the potential to activate pop culture as a critical field of study, as means to rechannel our adoration for celebrities and whiteness somewhere else. I want to think along with Joan Didion:

“It was once suggested to me that, as an antidote to crying, I put my head in a paper bag. As it happens, there is a sound physiological reason, something to do with oxygen, for doing exactly that, but the psychological effect alone is incalculable: it is difficult in the extreme to continue fancying oneself Cathy in ‘Wuthering Heights’ with one’s head in a Food Fair bag.”

—Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 1968

Where are we channeling and spacing our tears?

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