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Dowdy Tina Fey

This Vanity Fair profile of Tina Fey, written by Maureen Dowd, has been making a big splash in the blogosphere the past couple of days, mostly because the thesis, boiled way down, seems to be that Fey's only made it big since she lost weight and prettied up her look while keeping her decidedly non-diva personality. For the most part, as a huge Fey fan, I lapped up the profile uncritically. What struck me, though, were the accompanying photos (to echo Nina's point about the power of a magazine's art department). Annie Leibovitz styles Fey as Wonder Woman-ish on the cover and Sasha Fierce-era Beyonce in the music video shots—obvious Glamazon girl power images. Then there are the shots of Fey in a low-cut white button-down and killer red pumps, which are supposed to be Fey as her own sexy librarian self, right? But I couldn't get rid of the feeling it was another reference to, perhaps, another tart social critic who's gotten a lot of buzz for using her feminine wiles to her advantage—the outfit and pose look an awful lot like a Maureen Dowd pastiche. So what's Vanity Fair trying to say—is it just a clever reference to their smartly assigned byline? Or are they explicitly setting up Fey as the new, updated version of Dowd, the smart, pretty woman all the dorky girls want to become? (For the new millennium: now younger, more neurotic, on TV instead of in those dying newspapers.) I trade 30 Rock lines with friends the way I e-mailed them Dowd's columns a few years ago. Fey certainly was the woman with the most incisive political satire this election season, and that's not even her day job. But did she only get to supplant Dowd in that role because she became more Dowd-y than dowdy, someone for whom the attendant sexy self-possession of a Beyonce reference isn't so crazy?

The piece closes with these lines:

Everybody wants to be Tina Fey, I tell her. Who do you want to be?

"I don't want to be somebody else," she says.

And why would she?

I'm not sure Vanity Fair entirely agrees.