testament to the ironies of Hollywood
that Moss has built her career on these
kinds of roles while remaining a mem-
ber of the Church of Scientology.) And
for anyone who doesn’t care to stream
the whole of Mad Menor the whole of
The Handmaid’s Tale, you can get a
sense of the secrets of her stardom in the
latest movie version of H. G. Wells’s old
sci-fi tale The Invisible Man, which
recenters a story that usually focuses on
the disappearing scientist by making the
woman he stalks and torments the pro-
tagonist instead.
Unlike some other Me Too–era gender-
rolereversals, this one works pretty
well, mostly because it’s true to the orig-
inal story concept, which assumed that
invisibility would breed sociopathy.
And Wells’s idea of a scientific break-
through allowing adepts to pursue invis-
ible surveillance is also easily updated
for an age of digital anxiety: Here the
sociopath is named Adrian and played—
though he barely appears—by Oliver
Jackson-Cohen, and his character is
some sort of tech gazillionaire (“He’s a
world leader in the field of optics,”
someone says—hint, hint) who lives in a
cliffside home near the world capital of
paranoia, San Francisco.
As the movie begins, his Bluebeard’s
castle has become a prison for his wife,
Moss’s Cecilia, whose sleeping-pill-
abetted escape past various video cam-
eras takes up the taut opening scene and
delivers her to the dubious safety sup-
plied by her sister (Harriet Dyer) and the
ranch house of their policeman pal
James (Aldis Hodge) and his daughter
Sydney (Storm Reid).
Cecilia is sure that Adrian will find her,
but instead he (apparently) kills himselfand leaves her all his money through the
offices of his lawyer brother (Michael
Dorman), who seems as cowed and trau-
matized by his late sibling as Cecilia was.
For a day she’s happy, wealthy, and free,
and then—well, then the stalking begins,
the creepy shots of “empty” rooms, the
flickers and soft noises and puffs of frosty
breath as the not actually dead husband
circles her, terrifies her, and makes all her
friends and loved ones believe that she’s
gone mad.
Watching Moss’s character walk the
path from terror to relief to greater terror
and then finally make the inevitable
horror-movie transformation where she
discovers a capacity to fight back, you can
see in microcosm the strengths that have
made her an icon on TV. And the chief of
these, I would submit, is the mutability of
her face, which, with its strong nose and
cheekbones and deep-set eyes, can shift,
depending on setting and makeup and
emotion, between being striking and
being forgettable, between being blithe
and being harrowed, between resilience
and brokenness, between looking youth-
ful and looking middle-aged, much more
sharply and dramatically than the blandly
lovely visages of many movie stars.
Because of this the persecuted Moss
and the ascendant Moss, the trauma-
tized Moss and the cucumber-cool
Moss, don’t just feel like different vari-
ations in a performer’s repertoire; they
feel like very different people who are
contained within a single actress’s range.
The Invisible Manis finally just a dis-
posable thriller, but it has enough qual-
ity in its writing and plotting to show
what television viewers knew already:
Its star is most unusual, and her stardom
is unique.E
LISABETHMOSSfirst entered
cultural consciousness as the
audience surrogate in the first
season of Mad Men: the frumpy,
awkward, innocent, and entirely unready
for Madison Avenue secretary to whom
all the ways of late-1950s advertising
culture needed to be explained, and
whose eventual transformation and
ascent made her an ideal avatar for view-
ers who wanted to simultaneously luxuri-
ate in the glamour of America before the
social revolutions and imagine them-
selves as trailblazers who would have
fused the old cool with the new female
empowerment. A shot from the final sea-
son, of Moss’s Peggy Olson leaving one
job for another in sunglasses and a bright
late-Sixties outfit, trailing a cigarette
from the corner of her mouth, became
one of the most widely trafficked girlboss
GIFs: You’ve come a long way, baby,in
one image, one character arc.
That was pre-Trump Moss; post-
Trump Moss became a different kind of
audience surrogate, playing Offred in
Hulu’s immensely successful adaptation
of The Handmaid’s Tale. In that show the
arc of Mad Menis reversed: Instead of
watching a talented woman rise through
and despite the patriarchy, we watch the
patriarchy take its revenge on upper-
middle-class feminism, with Joseph
Fiennes’s friendly but finally malignant
Commander replacing Jon Hamm’s
flawed but fundamentally supportive
Don Draper as the archetype of masculin-
ity, and literal physical torture replacing
the social slights and cruelties that
Peggy Olson once survived. And then,
of course, once the show (unfortunately)
leaves Atwood’s book behind we get to
watch Offred fight back, using a different
set of gifts from the ones Olson used in
her ascent, becoming not a trailblazer or
a transformer but a raging revolutionary.
It’s a testament to Moss’s skill set as
an actress that she works in both of these
roles—as the naïf-turned-girlboss and as
the martyr-turned-avenger. (It’s also a
SPONSORED BYNational Review Institute 51ROSS DOUTHATFilm
A Mutable
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