By Anne T. Donahue
This Halloween, I’m going to hunker down and watch the scariest thing I can possibly think of: Martha, the upcoming Netflix documentary about Martha Stewart.
And this is because Martha Stewart has always scared me. The woman can wield recipes like a weapon. She morphed her name into a verb, a noun, and a lifestyle, all while casually dropping phrases like “It’s a good thing” as though what she wasn’t creating wasn’t fantastical or out of this world. On Chopped, she doesn’t smile, and when she does, it’s in response to something terrible one of the contestants has done. She even had her own Chopped series in which the people she judged vied for her approval through a series of impossible tasks. Martha Stewart is Jigsaw for the HGTV set, and she frightens me. I will never live up to her standards, and I understand that.
Martha is directed by RJ Cutler, the mastermind behind The September Issue and the reason I’m delusional enough to think that if I met Anna Wintour, she might laugh at a joke I’d make. (Probably not, she’d probably hate me, but like I said: delusion.) This week, the trailer made the rounds alongside the revelation that Martha had cheated on her first husband, Andy – of which he was not aware. (Andrew and Martha Stewart were married from 1961 to 1990, three years before Martha started her own show.)
These quotes are especially commanding: “What is more important? A marriage or a career? You tell me. I don’t know. The cookie-cutter house and cookie-cutter life was not for me.”
The thing is, Martha Stewart’s ability to create exceptional cookies has placed her in a unique position in which she embodies girlboss-era feminism (see: capitalism) while maintaining the persona of an ideal hostess/maker/cook/baker/kindly grandmother. She’s a brand and a persona and a business machine. She’s obviously a force, and I respect that. But I also respect the ocean in that I will not go near it, because what it does on its own time is its own business.
(How does it work? Where does it go? Why is it like that? Not for me to find out!)
A lot has been written about Stewart’s brief prison tenure and her collaborations with Snoop and her Sports Illustrated cover, and all of it’s fine. But what intrigues me most about Stewart is the way she carved out a space in a seemingly harmless industry yet showed us how competitive and demanding it is simply by being able to stay in it. She is home and garden’s Anna Wintour; a billionaire who’s the subject of a Netflix documentary, and one who’s managed to maintain some semblance of mystery despite being world-famous. That shit scares me. I’m fundamentally concerned whenever I cross paths with anybody who’s equated to an actual empire.
Especially since, while Martha Stewart is interesting subject matter, being the first “self-made female billionaire” is a bleak descriptor when juxtaposed atop the current social and financial reality for most. Is it cool that Martha Stewart parlayed her name into a bona fide corporation? Sure! But I worry that this documentary will launch a new era of girlboss rhetoric in which we choose to admire a person because they’re rich. I want a new spin on Martha. I want to know the person behind the trademark logo. I want to know if Martha is going to feature the SNL sketch where Ana Gasteyer runs around topless in a dickie, pretending to be her.
I just don’t want to go into a Martha Stewart-themed haunted house, where I know every shirt wrinkle on my person will be pointed out.
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