About Claire Danes

First, a disclaimer: it is most often weird and gross to comment on the physical characteristics of women in general and actresses specifically, and doing so typically accomplishes little outside of reinforcing sexist double standards.

So I feel some trepidation in doing this, but after watching eight full hours of The Beast in Me, Netflix's latest entry into the mid TV canon, I can't help but express thanks, on this Thanksgiving eve, for the face and neck of Claire Danes.

I have been watching Claire Danes since she was 15 years old on My So-Called Life. I've followed her through Romeo + Juliet, The Family Stone, and the first three-ish seasons of Homeland, peed next to her in neighboring bathroom stalls at the Sunshine theater (RIP), and sat one restaurant table over from her and Billy Crudup when they were doing that whole thing. I even paid real currency to see Brokedown Palace.

Claire Danes is now 46. In The Beast in Me, she plays a fancy writer who, in the wake of her whole life falling apart, must contend with Matthew Rhys as her new, probably-a-murderer next-door neighbor. A lot has been written about the perfect reptilian charm that Rhys gives his character, and the barometer-like tendency of Danes's tremulous chin to convey inner turmoil. But it's her face that got me. And her neck. Because they look like they belong to an actual 46-year-old woman.

Again, it feels weird to remark on this, particularly as a woman. But it's even weirder for an ostensibly unaltered middle-aged female visage to be such a rarity on TV, or any screen. Seeing one feels as remarkable as catching the appearance of a comet or full solar eclipse. And that makes me sad. Sadder still because I get why actresses feel the need to fuck with their faces, necks, and really any body part that can be captured on camera and then vivisected by people like me.

It's quite easy for me, a relatively anonymous person, to sit here in the shelter of my computer and bloviate about what actresses (and actors, while we're at it) should and shouldn't do to themselves in the name of bankability, and to say that they have a public duty not to perpetuate impossible physical standards for the rest of us. I mean, I wish they wouldn't, just as I wish the onus hasn't always been on women to adhere to such standards while Woody Allen gets to make a movie where Julia Roberts leaves her husband for him.

But this is the world we live in, and as such I remain compelled to give thanks to Claire Danes for what shouldn't count as bravery but is. We've been through a lot of years, her and I. Her face is almost as familiar to me as my own. And when I see it in an otherwise mostly ridiculous Netflix limited series, I don't see plot holes and convenient narrative contrivances. I see the world I want to live in.