Landman and Land Women, Or Why Angela is Just the Female Version of Edward Cullen

 I saw the Instagram video about the “hot-crazy” axis for dating women. Women in the top corner of both (9-10 hot and 9-10 crazy) were called the "danger zone", the region where your car gets keyed or you end up in jail or broke. “We don’t want that”, is what the presenter said. With Angela, and to a lesser degree Ainsley, Landman seems to take that advice and throw it out the window. Really crazy and really hot? Yes! This is true love! If you’ve been watching Landman, you’ve seen Angela’s antics: throwing over a table at a family dinner, taking nursing home residents gambling, drinking and to strip clubs (and getting a high school boy— possibly a minor— to strip for one of the elderly women), spending like there’s no tomorrow, assaulting a government employee, letting a boy spend the night with Ainsley in Ainsley’s room, talking about details of her sex life with Ainsley, and openly criticizing and mocking Billy Bob Thornton’s character— whom she claims to love— almost nonstop. And this is sold to the audience as a love story. She’s presented as the woman a man should want to hold onto. But when I watch Landman, I feel stressed out for him every time he picks up the phone and it’s done new crisis with Angela— on top of the already enormous amount of stress of his job in oil. The writers are telling us this is what true love and a dream wife is like— but the evidence they show in the episodes doesn’t hold up to that.

Her time at the nursing home — which involves giving alcohol to senior citizens who are taking multiple medications and helping her daughter convince a boy who might still be 17 to strip for one of the senior women— seems like it’s an attempt to try and counter all the evidence they have provided to the contrary. (I approach character development much like a legal case, as you probably already figured out. If you are presenting a case that your character is something— a hero, a villain, an amazing love interest worth holding onto, etc.— you need to provide convincing evidence that your character is that type of person.) Same thing with Ainsley crying for her dad’s horrible childhood after his mother’s funeral. She is presented as being materialistic, obsessed with appearances, uses sex to manipulate her boyfriend into stripping for a senior citizen, and she’s awful to her brother for no apparent reason— mocking and criticizing him because he’s a working man who gets dirty in the oil fields— and one scene of crying over her father’s childhood is supposed to counter all that. 

It’s somewhat odd that they can’t manage Ainsley and Angela’s characters considering how well the relationship between Cooper and Arianna is developed— despite the fact that it starts out on all the wrong feet seeming like a rebound for Arianna and the couple meeting at her late husband’s funeral. (I don’t think the “meet-cute” concept should be overlooked here. When you ask a couple how they met, how would it sound if they said they met at the woman’s late husband’s funeral? That would sound suspicious and inappropriate.) There’s enough evidence that they supply— like the wedding album scene and the exchange with carrying the groceries in and her going to his grandmother’s funeral— that it seems plausible. An odd start to a relationship, but plausible for their characters.

The annoying thing is that the “hot, crazy dream girl” trope is just another version of the “hot, dysfunctional dream guy” trope which is used endlessly in romance novels with its “rich guy” variant and in Hallmark Christmas movies and other romances with its “poor guy opposite rich guy” variant in which the woman has two hot men (one poor and one rich) who are in love with her and she chooses the poor one. (Huh, somewhat Marxist overtones there.) The “hot, poor, dysfunctional dream guy” may not have steady employment (or owns a bakery or Christmas tree farm) and may or may not be emotionally stable. The rich, hot guy is frequently cold and distant and may even have some sort of attachment issues or be abusive in some way. Edward Cullen is the prime example of this. He’s rich and hot but cold, distant and emotionally unavailable, even leaving Bella when things get bad in the second book. He keeps encouraging Bella to leave and go to college out of state in the fourth book, but then turns around and decides to marry her. (If it’s such a great love story, why does he want her to leave the state?) The sex scenes emphasize pain and injury (which is why it wasn’t a very far jump from Twilight to Fifty Shades of Grey). And this is sold to the reader as what the ideal man is like.

I think what they may have been going for was something like the vivacious and impulsive woman who brings fun and color to a serious man’s life, I’m not sure if they believe the fun and magic can be had without the toxicity and dysfunction though. For all his faults as a writer, LDS author Jack Weyland did this very well with his book Charlie. Charlie (short for Charlene) is fun loving and pulls a lot of impulsive, but harmless tricks on her boyfriend and later husband, Sam. (Like paging him over the PA system at the grocery store as if he was a child that got lost, “trapping” him on the Ferris wheel because she bought a ton of tickets for it, going out as a married couple but pretending to have an affair with the ante up that whoever laughs first has to change the baby’s diapers for a week.) She also demonstrates a care for others though, like making sure that the woman in the bed next to her in the labor room gets a priesthood blessing as well. She loves her husband and her son and cares for them. I have personally known women through work and church who are great at throwing parties and organizing activities, who are upbeat, “light up a room” types, but they love their husbands and kids and don’t criticize them and do their best to support them, even in challenging circumstances. The types of effervescent women the writers seem to want are out there and they hold down jobs and households, manage their own behavior, and are kind to the men in their lives, no toxicity is required. 

I am encouraged by the signs of growth for Ainsley’s character that the story with the roommate showed. Based on the last episode of the most recent season though, I don’t think they’re going to figure out Angela’s character. She’s still going to be hot and crazy and the writers are going to lie to themselves and us and tell us that bailing your ex-wife out of an arrest after she endangers senior citizens is what true love looks like.