a grammar

can I tell you something about Christina Hendricks in a mostly neck-up way?

So last week I spent a day home sick, staring at the television. And, well, due to the mysterious absence of any form of Law & Order marathon, I wound up half-watching the beginning of an episode of Las Vegas, that casino-based James Caan / Josh Duhamel / Molly Sims show from a few years back. Then I started watching more intently, because the opening shot, panning across an outdoor pool, seemed to include Christina Hendricks, sitting in a yoga pose and staring off into space.

And, yes, it was her. She turned out to be playing a woman who claims to have seen the image of a saint in the pool’s waterfall feature; she says the saint tells her when to bet. She seems earnest, friendly, a little batty, generally harmless — slightly maternal, maybe, very feminine. The casino staff mostly ignore her. Soon enough, though, she’s collecting money from people in return for the saint’s advice, and involved in various petty thefts, and it becomes clear that she’s running a con. And when the security staff bring her in to talk to her, that friendly/batty yoga-pose demeanor instantly evaporates, and she tilts her head on her very long neck and makes that familiar face that’s approximately 80% contempt — that face that says you little morons never realized I would slit your throats? At which point I think the average viewer will actually like her far more than before.

Which got me thinking about the first time I ever saw Hendricks in anything, which was an episode of Joss Whedon’s sci-fi western, Firefly. My memory of that one is a little blurry, at this point, but here’s what I recall: the ship’s captain, Mal, off in some impoverished space hinterland, makes some mundane gesture toward Hendricks’s (teenaged) character — something like offering her food or drink — that he’s told, in the local custom, makes her his wife. The next morning, she’s stowed away on his ship, telling him, happily: Now I have to follow you. Now I have to do anything you want. Now I’m your servant and property. The episode’s first half involves the ship’s crew finding this really disconcerting, and telling her no, she’s a free individual, and they’re going to take her back home. The second half, of course, involves her dropping the act and stealing the ship, and while I can’t remember exactly, I’ll bet she makes that same face, the face that says: you idiots always fall for that innocent-and-submissive act, don’t you. And this time she will literally kill you in your sleep.

You can probably see where I’m going with this: Hendricks’s character on Mad Men is in large part just an immensely more complex and layered and nuanced version of this same thing she’s been doing all along — the way she can drop so seamlessly and convincingly between different levels of power, or play at softness or subservience to further her own agenda, or suddenly reveal these flashes of complete contempt toward the people she’s been playing nice with, or play out huge changes in just how vulnerable you think she is. This is not something many actors are very good or convincing at — most actors would play this sort of thing as being duplicitous, whereas Hendricks can make all the elements fit together coherently, none of them so much more false than the others. It’s odd to think that she was acing simplified versions of it long before anyone even started thinking about Mad Men.

These days we mostly get a very odd conversations about her body, which — to be fair — is not irrelevant to this thing she’s so good at: she has a look and shape she can invite you to look at as soft, inviting, and traditionally, pliantly “feminine,” but can also project size, power, and dominance. (There is one quality that ranks high in both of those categories — poise — and it’s something she has a whole lot of.) But most of what she’s doing is right around the neck, eyes, and mouth: this really remarkable ability to use her face and head to telegraph all kinds of fluctuating, complex information about what kind of power she’s employing at any given moment. You can watch this cruddy Las Vegas episode — or, I would guess, plenty of the other dramas she guest-starred on years back — and you’ll see that it’s not just the writing on Mad Men, it’s not just the character of Joan, it’s actually her great skill.