King Helene once told me that Kristin Davis is the best actress on Sex and the City, because it’s harder to act comedy well, but especially hard to play a character like Charlotte—a ditz—where we’re supposed to scoff at her, yet respect the stakes of her existence enough to be moved by her. This has stuck with me for a number of reasons, one of them being that I find Davis’s character to be one of the more three dimensional on the show, in spite of her ditzery. She’s not a drag queen marionette like Samantha, or a bed of lettuce on which to serve harlequin clichés like Carrie, but a vulnerable creature both crippled and created by her geisha routine. She’s a rare locus on the show where femininity-as-performance is queried, and it’s revealing/amusing that it comes in the form of a stock character.
What are the terms of a ditz? She’s attractive (necessarily?), frequently blonde, always well intentioned, usually in a situation of wanting or having to escape the confines of her existence—Lucy trying to leave the house and act in Ricky’s world, Marilyn trying to snag a rich husband, Parker trying to be taken seriously as a librarian.
There’s not quite an equivalent to the ditz in the male world (though something could probably be said of stoner comedies). Men can be absentminded; sweet and dopey strivers—their pratfalls endearing, but there’s a layer of pity or dismissal attached to even leading idiots that seems not to apply to the lady ditz. The ditz, though a cousin to, is something other than the fool. It has to do with a handicap granted indiscriminately to her gender, that makes her bumbling a given and casts any success as a triumph, as this poor, writhing creature tries to squirm out from behind her breasts.
I think of all the ditzes in the world—the real life ones I’ve known, and the fictional ones, and there seems a real possibility that the whole of ditzery is only a trope. The ditz trajectory on film is often that a layer of superficiality is removed, or that a form of greedy, shallow ambition is replaced with a yearning for real meaning. The costumes are toned down, the caper music quiets, and the person behind the ditz is exposed…maybe just momentarily, but exposed.
Ditzes are charming. It could be that the charm is the blundering or it could be that, unlike more composed women who have been trained in the Jackie Kennedy mode to keep their personalities milk-still in a porcelain vessel, the ditz rushes about the world a chipped vase, and the accident of leaving any droplets behind is so unusual as to constitute charm. Either way, the charm permits a veiled feminism—surging ahead doggedly, not in firm (Katherine) Hepburnian strides, but in little hogtied pencil skirt wiggles. It wavers in a half-active/half-passive mode—the ask for forgiveness instead of permission approach.
