The Eyes of Tammy Faye (Showalter, 2021)
I spent most of my time watching The Eyes of Tammy Faye trying to convince myself that the film was better than I ultimately judged it to be.
Why the film raised my expectations is almost as important as why it subsequently failed to meet them. It is surprisingly sympathetic to its subjects, which is rare in a film about religious people that is not deliberately pandering to a Christian audience. But it ultimately lacks a point of view (other than that Tammy Faye is to be pitied rather than scorned) and thus evidences a superficial understanding of the material it presents.
The film opens with Tammy Faye having makeup removed and explaining that she has “permanent” eye-liner and lip liners. She won’t be seen without her trademark “look.” When an onlooker observes, “That’s really you…” she replies “That’s who I am….” This writing isn’t exactly subtle, but it’s fine as far as it goes. The trouble is that it is hard to tell if the film really believes her, or if it is itself blind to the problematic aspects of her protestation. What does is signify that a person most prominently known for her religious faith insists that the surface looks are the “real” her? Again and again, the film beats us over the head with its insistence that Tammy Faye is sincere, but one can be sincere and wrong or sincere and misguided.
Perhaps the closest the film gets to an epiphany is when Jim Baker (Andrew Garfield) finally gives in to his years of irritation and slams his wife for her grating “Betty Boop” voice. “I thought you liked Betty Boop,” Tammy replies with just the right amount of hurt and puzzlement. The line serves as an epigram for the film’s understanding of the unconscious hypocrisy of swaths of American Christianity, seemingly unable to see the disconnect between what it preaches and what it actually believes. But neither Tammy nor the film does anything with that epiphany. She doesn’t call her husband on his hypocrisy — how could she without challenging her own internalized assumptions of the role of a wife and how they might themselves be misreadings of the faith she clings to tenaciously?
That clinging is sad, and as the film cycles through various repetitions of the notion that Christianity fails the inner child who just wants to be loved, it steadfastly refuses to entertain, even for a second, the possibility that Tammy Faye is being complicit in the things that ultimately cause her such pain. It’s impossible not to weep for all the girls told that they were too ugly, too stupid, too useless to amount to anything, who hear a message of love and acceptance, who respond to it, only to find it is all a lie. The problem the film illustrates but doesn’t necessarily see is not a personal one, it’s a structural and institutional one. Complementarianism, the doctrine that women should submit to men (in ministry and marriage) means that even when Tammy sees (and she does) corruption and lust, her natural instinct is to accept not to challenge. The film also loves her for loving and accepting GLBTQ+ people, and while it occasionally notes the fact that this puts her at odds not just with her husband but with more suave and entrenched religious powers (represented by Vincent D’Onofrio playing Jerry Fallwell as a Christian Wilson Fisk), it never quite decides if she is openly subverting the church’s homophobia, too dim to realize it, or too enculturated to use whatever subversive power she might have.
Perhaps that is the grating implication of the story. To make Tammy Faye more likable, the film oversells her powerlessness and undersells her complicity. It is telling that a late discussion of a mink coat that was hidden from creditors is said to have been stolen from Jerry Fallwell, not from PTL donors. She parrots her husband’s mantra that any criticism is an “attack” from “the secular press.” Perhaps a better film would leverage her dawning awareness of the wolves in sheep’s clothing that get in way of the gospel into some sort of introspection, but The Eyes of Tammy Faye wants to have its minks and trash them too. At heart, Tammy just wants to use puppets to talk to kids about God…she wants to be a female Mr. Rogers. But perhaps other characteristics differentiate Mr. Rogers’s neighborhood from the lavish mansions she lives in or the Christian theme parks her husband aspires to build.
The sad part of all this is that there is a genuine opportunity missed. At their core, the Bakers appear to want safety (Jim) and acceptance (Tammy). These are things all people long for, and the tragedy of Tammy’s and Jim’s story lies in how much of our convictions, our beliefs, our dreams, our aspirations, and ultimately our best selves we will sacrifice on the altar of success in the hope that those who despise us the most will let us be a part of their club.
Maybe it is unrealistic to expect Tammy Faye to examine herself or turn on those who treat her like garbage. More than once watching the film, I thought of Zack Mayo in An Officer and a Gentleman screaming that he wouldn’t quit the Navy no matter how brutal the hazing because “I got nowhere else to go!” The sympathy I felt for Tammy Faye was not just that she was trapped in a subculture that was a repugnant distortion of authentic Christianity, it was also that there were no better models for her to follow.
Eberhard Arnold once wrote, “”If we want to fight acquisitiveness and the deceit and injustice of social distinctions, we must fight them in a practical way by demonstrating that a different way of life is not only feasible but actually exists.” A film that doesn’t laugh at or scorn Tammy Faye Baker because her errors were fewer or other than those who bedeviled her life may be enough to elicit my sympathy but it is not enough to earn my admiration.
