A 'Love Story' Gone Awry: The JFK Jr. & Carolyn Bessette Show's Fatal Error
The Hulu-FX limited bio series Love Story is so easy to watch, especially for anyone craving a nostalgic portrait of 1990s New York City, anyone who wants to sit back and watch a tale of the young, the wealthy, and the connected (by bloodline or by accident of radiant beauty). It evokes a simpler time where the paparazzi are ever-present, but also collegial, where damning headlines are constant, but only last until the next day’s print deadline. Love Story tells the tale of the tumultuous titular saga of Carolyn Bessette and John F. Kennedy, Jr., including their interpersonal drama, what it meant for Bessette to date arguably the most recognized face in New York City (and the sexiest man alive), their professional and personal entanglements, and, ultimately, their untimely death in a plane crash.
Love Story also treats the women of the 1990s who live within JFK, Jr.’s orbit miserably. JFK, Jr., is the independent variable against which all other characters are defined. He, his family, his professional foibles and successes, and his charm (reminiscent of his deceased father), were notorious and are the architecture for how we see the women in the series. The series introduces Bessette to new audiences who do not know of her, or may have forgotten her to time, or to the other, more infamous Kennedy of this particular moment in time.
Like any biopic, memoir, or “based on real life events” stories, there is a simultaneous adherence to, and departure from, truth (or what those not in the inner circle of the characters portrayed in the story conceive of as truth). And, not to put too fine a point on it, because Bessette, her sister Lauren, and JFK, Jr., all died in the plane crash, we will never get their version of the truth or whether they may have a counter-narrative to the version told in Ryan Murphy’s production.
We do have at least one counter-narrative: A scathing op-ed written by actor-activist Daryl Hannah, who, for several years, on-again-off-again dated JFK, Jr., prior to, and maybe during, his relationship with Bessette. Hannah absolutely and unequivocally rejects how she is characterized in the series. As is Murphy’s habit, he did not consult Hannah during the development of the series (nor did he consult any other real person depicted in the show). Hannah’s characterization is constructed as a foil to shop-girl-turned-fashion-whisperer-turned-America’s-princess that is Bessette. Producer Nina Jacobsen defends the choice, “Given how much we’re rooting for John and Carolyn, Darrell [sic] Hannah occupies a space where she’s an adversary to what you want narratively in the story.”
What an unearned privilege, that a cis, white, male producer chose not to consult with the real women of this story. What a cruel twist of fate that three women who may have things to say about their own characterizations are all dead. And what a further privilege that his female co-producer defends his choice for him.
In her op-ed, Hannah asks, “Popular culture has long elevated certain women by portraying others as rivals, obstacles or villains. Isn’t it textbook misogyny to tear down one woman in order to build up another?”
Maybe she meant that as a rhetorical question, but I would like to take the opportunity to answer: Yes, Ms. Hannah, this is absolutely textbook misogyny. And this is how all the women in Love Story are depicted, as one-dimensional counters to JFK, Jr’s complexity. Jackie Onassis is represented as calculating; Caroline Kennedy is cold; female cousins are vapid; women passersby are obsessed gold diggers; Hannah is a whiny train wreck; and Bessette is a delicate princess. Is it possible that the women in the story embody some of these characteristics? Sure. Is it fair that these are their only characteristics? Absolutely not.
This is exactly how women and stories of women have been maligned in pop culture for generations, and it is this history I trace in my new book, The Judgment of Gender: How Women are Centered and Silenced in Pop Culture. While there was a moment of reckoning, aligned with the MeToo movement, where past treatments of women in pop culture were revisited and reimagined, in the age of Trump 2.0, there is license once again to reduce women to one-dimensional caricatures.
At the very least, this characterization illustrates a profound mistrust of the audience, who are clearly presumed to be too stupid to understand that maybe JFK, Jr. and Hannah had a complex and complicated relationship that ran its course and that Bessette and JFK, Jr. may have been more suited to each other at a particular moment in time. The premise is simple: In order to love Bessette, as the audience is supposed to do, they must hate Hannah. This treatment invites audiences to see women in the public sphere through a simple binary perspective, that of shrew or damsel.
Daryl Hannah has used her platform to reopen a familiar conversation about the treatment of women in pop culture. Far from being settled, it’s a conversation that deserves to be continued. Now that Love Story is out there in the world, it is garnering a ton of press attention. How about we use that attention against itself to point out the maligned representation of these women? Preventing future mistreatment means not waiting another moment—let alone decades—to confront the misogyny that still defines too much of our pop culture.
Allison T. Butler is Senior Lecturer and Associate Chair in the Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is the Vice President of the Media Freedom Foundation and the author of the forthcoming The Judgment of Gender: How Women are Centered and Silenced in Pop Culture, published by The Censored Press.