Lucy Lawless
THANK YOU XENA. MAY I HAVE ANOTHER?
By Mark Leyner
Lucy Lawless has been the subject of more frenzied exegesis than any actress in the history of primetimes syndication. But there's nothing particularly complicated about why her character, Xena, is so wildly popular. She's the first mass-murdering, bisexual, homeless woman to capture the hearts of American families. The only mystery is why no one thought of it before. C'mon-a diabolical hybrid of Joan of Arc, Bettie Page, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, and Aileen Wiorros...of course it's gonna be huge.
Is Lucy Lawless Xena or simply the most recent of innumerable avatars of Xena? I say the latter. I first met Xena thirty years ago. I was eleven. My parents, who belonged a a Maoist synagogue on the Upper East Side, had just finished getting dressed to go to some congregation gala when the new babysitter arrived. As soon as Mom and Dad were out the door, the brunette doffed her parka andOh, my God...there was this big, fleshy girl in a leather bustie with metal breastplates, short leather-and-metal skirt, writst-and armbands, and boots with a huge sword in a scabbard down her back. She was the sexist girl I'd ever seen a real girl-a demeanted, sweaty, hometown girl living in some primeval dreamworld.
Thirty years later, I'm sitting with three graduate students from the Department of Syndicated Drama at Stevens Institute of Technology here in Hoboken, and we're analyzing a videotape of the Xena episode in which the Warrior Princess
subjugates the Horde, a bunch of miscreants who look like New Guinean Kiss impersonators. And we discover, to our astonishment, that we all have the identical Lucy Lawless fantasy. It goes like this: you're at home just kicking back, watching TV, flipping thought a magazine, and you hear this "Yi-yi-yi-yi-yi!!!" and then there's Lawless doing this midair somersault and through your front window, and she decapitates you wiht her chakram, and then she throws a Gertz/Gilberto CD on the stereo, and your headless body goes at it with her, and then she hauls you outside and throws you inot a pit with the others.
See, it's all about surrender. Ceding control. Letting Go.
