Jennifer Siebel Newsom is the second wife of our very own ex-Mayor Gavin Newsom, a tall, handsome man with a gorgeous head of black hair who once stood back-to-back with me so we could determine just how much taller he was. About two inches. Gavin impressed me with his beauty and playfulness, as someone who wears his masculinity gracefully. Perhaps Jennifer thinks so, too. They married in 2008 and have three kids aged six, four, and two, with another on the way. That would be plenty for some women, but she has aspirations beyond the Mad Men model of wife and mother. Her second documentary, The Mask You Live In, is being screened at the Castro Theatre on Dec. 2 at 8 p.m. The screening will include a Q&A with Newsom by Joy Venturini Bianchi; and special guest Gavin Newsom; hosted by Mark Rhoades and sponsored by AT&T.
Before Jennifer Siebel Newsom got behind a camera, she put in her time as an actress, earning a certificate at A.C.T. and trying her luck in the cess pit that is the film industry in Los Angeles, starting in 2002, at age 28. Students of her work will enjoy fast-forwarding through the low-budget feature Till You Get to Baraboo (2007) on YouTube. In it, Jennifer plays "the ideal woman," the one who got away, who returns to haunt a young man who has masochistically agreed to attend her wedding in Las Vegas, which literally makes him sick. Jennifer shows promise in this charming, existential bedroom farce, but one understands with hindsight that as an avenue for self-expression, acting was something she simply had to get out of her system.
Acting on-camera was also a way to learn about filmmaking, and appears to be the only "film studies" on her CV. An erudite jock in high school, Newsom played on the Stanford soccer team while picking up her MBA. According to Wikipedia, she focused on conservation policy and third-world development, both of which are, of course, ideal areas of focus for the wife of an enlightened politician, which I consider our Lieutenant Governor to be. Who can forget those weddings in City Hall? What a man. What a metrosexual. It's wrong of me, I know, to be talking about the husband of the subject of the piece, but masculinity being the subject of the film, perhaps you'll forgive me.
The Mask You Live In is an evocative title that could apply to anyone living an inauthentic life, but the filmmaker is specifically attacking U.S. cultural norms of masculinity. Newsom is on a bullet-pointed warpath against forms of socialization that destroy boys' emotional lives, be they parent, peer group, school, or the more elusive influences of movies, video games, and online porn. I got very sad watching this film �" depressed, really. Everything she's talking about seems only to have gotten worse since Adrienne Rich wrote Compulsory Heterosexuality (1981), the landmark essay documenting the systemic legal, medical, and moral coercion of women to comply with the norms of male dominance or face brutal consequences. It remains a galvanizing read.
There are no radical feminist theorists in The Mask You Live In, alas, and no artists, but plenty of psychologists, doctors, and educators. Most of them flit by, but we spend time following Ashanti Branch, a young, black, burly, dredlocked teacher in Oakland, who conducts a simple experiment with his young charges. On the front of a paper mask they write words expressing what they show the outside world, like "happy." On the back they write how they feel, which is universally "afraid." Since boys or men are typically taught not to display vulnerability, this simple game demonstrates a lifetime of alienation in store for males who don't find a way to dismantle their own hypocrisy.
The most compelling speaker is an old white guy named Joe Ehrmann, with the saddest face in the world. As a young man, to palliate his father's expectations of manliness, he chose football as a place to hide. "You get to project this facade, this persona, the epitome of what it means to be a man in this culture." At some point, the NFL player saw through that game. Today, he coaches football, not in a spirit of overdetermined masculinity, but "to help boys become men of empathy and integrity who will be responsible to change the world for good."
Tickets: castrotheatre.eventbrite.com.