"The Perfect Couple," internalized classism, and women's place

The line we're walking is über-thin, and we're constantly policing each other to stay on it

**This essay contains spoilers for The Perfect Couple.

In the opening episode of the miniseries “The Perfect Couple,” Amelia—a working class, seemingly naive bride-to-be from somewhere, Pennsylvania—is about to marry Benji—heir to a large family fortune. But while Benji seems to be the groom we all might wish to marry, his mother—Greer, played by Nicole Kidman—is presented as the evil mother-in-law one would hope never to have to cross paths with.

It’s largely through the gaze of the mother-in-law that we see Amelia at first. That gaze is reprimanding, the gaze of the rich and powerful over the naive, uneducated behaviour of the middle- and working class. Whatever Amelia does elicits Greer’s contempt and reprisal, whether that’s showing up in her bra on the morning of the rehearsal party to free a lady bug, or eat a croissant the day before her wedding.

Amelia is walking a very thin line. Always about to slip, she’s cajoled into conforming to an unlimited set of unwritten rules, even when it’s obvious that nothing she could ever do will make her worthy of the family she’s marrying into. Because it’s her origins she’s being punished for: it’s who she is, not what she does.

Recently a video by a young woman by the title, “What you wear matters” went viral on TikTok. In it, the young woman claimed that she’d known to pick the right type of dress: the kind that signalled that she would “add value to the yacht,” she was invited to board, while on a walk in the Monte Carlo marina.

As Heidi N. Moore wrote in her Twitter thread,

“inviting young women with no money onto yachts is the equivalent of "ladies night" at a bar. The young women—in any dress—are there to bring the old men in. This is what happens when young women are told that Old Money is an aesthetic you can buy through clothes, rather than a set of rigid and unspoken social codes that you instinctually understand.”

Heidi N. Moore, Oct. 13th, 2024

Moore goes into further details in her thread about the sophistication of the fashion etiquette of Old Money, and also points out that, in fact, Monaco isn’t the right place to conform to that specific set of norms. Most yacht owners head to the Principality to boast their wealth: a sure sign they’ve recently acquired it.

But there’s also the question of being invited onto a fancy boat as an aspiration. Ana Geranios writes about visiting another Marina, this one in Puerto Banús in southern Spain, as a form of socialization. In her new book Verano sin Vacaciones, las hijas de la Costa del Sol (2024), she discusses the touristification of Southern Spain and its implications for the lives of the women born in the region. A key step in that process, as she points out, involves heading to the harbour and taking pictures with the yachts: a kind of rite of passage that tempts the local into imagining the luxury that surrounds them is for them. When in fact, it might some day be for them to clean.

Puerto Banús, as Geranios explains, is named after entrepreneur José Banús Masdeu (1906-1984), whose construction firm was involving in the building of Valle de los Caídos, a monument and burial site—over 30,000 sq. meters large—that is considered today as the most representative symbol of Franco’s dictatorship (As well as one of the most divisive ones). The work was in fact carried out by political prisoners and workers, but Banús, whose company was responsible for building the road that leads to the site, made a name for himself thanks to the project. And, subsequently, a fortune. In the 1960s, he moved to Andalucía, where he came up with the idea of transforming the area now known as Costa del Sol into a tourist spot of international appeal, complete with a wealthy, luxurious marina. You guessed it: Puerto Banús.

Puerto Banús is thus the jewel in the crown of an “entrepreneur” who profited from a dictatorship that is responsible for an estimated 130,000 people going missing. But whereas Puerto Banús was a success for him, it was not as much of a success for the women (and men) living in the region.

Geranios goes on to write:

“The process of socialization, for many of us, was: head to Puerto Banús, watch the yachts and the Ferraris, take a picture with either or both, and, when relatives came for a visit, bring them to the harbour (according to Barbara Stiegler, Philosopher, “yachts are a symbol of neoliberal predation, of everything that’s obscene in the world.”) […] When you are a fifteen-year-old teen living in San Pedro (a few miles from Puerto Banús, ndr.) (with all of your uncertainties, compounded with your desire to discover your place in the world), you find yourself in a place where what’s appreciated is almost inevitably that which costs lots of money, something to which you’ll never have any access. Everyone seems to assign greater value to material goods, to luxury, and you end up feeling that you’re near things that are not for you. You see how people dress and act in the world that surrounds and shapes you, in that world you get to go for a walk in during week-ends, and you end up believing or being told or feeling that the people you’re watching are better than you are. And thus, you tell yourself, for a moment, that you want to be like those people, because you don’t know who you are yet. And given how much the power of money and social status is normalized in the world you inhabit, finding out who you are becomes extremely challenging. It’s possible that, later on—in order to stay close to that world and those people—you’ll settle for serving them a bottle of cava in the VIP room of the club with swimming pool you’re working at.

Ana Geranios,Verano sin Vacaciones. las hijas de la Costa del Sol (2024), p. 163-164

The feeling—this wanting to be like those in power—feels very relatable. And yet, it lives in this contradiction between belonging and authenticity: this being close to that which is not for you—something to which you don’t belong—and wanting to change yourself so you can be worthy of it.

But in this changing yourself, who’s watching? Who is the subject, who is the object?

In her documentary Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power, Nina Menkes points out how the use of subject/object, framing, lighting, camera movement, and narrative position in movies is used to transmit the idea of women as passive objects. As the film maker and director pointed out in her viral essay, “The Visual Language of Oppression: Harvey Wasn’t Working in a Vacuum,” referring to Hollywood and the film industry:

Within this system, men are subjects and young women are objects for gratification/consumption.

Nina Menkes, Oct 30, 2017

But, one could say, the same process is at play if one applies it to other areas of oppression, including along class lines.

In fact, in a recent interview in The Cut, “What’s it like to work on a Megayacht,” that’s right there in the first line:

Q: Working on a yacht, you’re in a very intimate space with these extremely wealthy people. What is that like?

A: You’re a fly on the wall, but it’s very one-sided. You learn so much about the owners and guests, and they’re not learning anything about you. As a stewardess, I was doing food service and housekeeping and going through people’s personal belongings, folding their underwear and putting it away. I would overhear conversations, on the phone or in person. This is kind of graphic, but you even learn stuff like how frequently they poop. In yachting, anytime somebody washes their hands, the stewardess dries out the sink afterward. If they put something in the trash, you empty it right away. Every time you go check the bathroom, you make it look untouched. So you learn all their habits. With my previous boss, I would get a sense, like, “oh, he hasn’t eaten in a few hours. He probably wants a snack.” And I would put together a snack for him, and he’d come out and say, “Oh, I was just about to ask you for this.”

Charlotte Cowles, The Cut, Oct. 17, 2024

What’s at play, then, is a kind of invisibility. The oppressed—the women, the poor, the migrant, the working class—are allowed to step into the light and be seen only as objects. Else they’re to hide.

Unless, of course, they’ve outstepped their place.

And this is also what happens in The Perfect Couple, with Amelia outstepping her place: from working class girl to bride about to marry into wealth.

And who is there to keep her in her lane?

The mother-in-law.

The subtext throughout the series is that Greer is wealthy and educated, but, (and here comes the spoiler) we learn, at the end of the series, that Greer is as much (or more) of a social-climber as Amelia ever was.

And this, in a way, changes the dynamic. Because the fact that Greer, as we learn, comes from the very social class Amelia comes from, means that the former’s policing of the latter is a form of internalized classism.

It’s still “the elite’s control of the lower classes,” but handed out from a formerly lower-class woman to another. Complying with the goals of the patriarchy and capitalism—and keeping power firmly in the hands of the few—this form of internalized control takes the shape of behaviour control, so that Amelia can learn how to conform to the unspoken, unwritten, difficult-to-make-sense-of rules of Old Money.

It’s the more experienced woman picking the “right” dress for the less experienced one, so that the latter can “add value to the yacht,” and become that which the patriarchy needs for her to be: compliant, servile, docile.

The consolation prize? That’s not Amelia’s ambition.

Nor should it ever be any of us.