“Daisy Jones & the Six” and the Commodification of Free-Spirited Women

The series’ protagonist is depressingly one-dimensional, despite being modelled on Stevie Nicks. But Amazon is still betting that women will want to look like Daisy—because they want to feel like her.
Riley Keough  Sam Claflin in Daisy Jones  The Six.
Riley Keough and Sam Claflin in “Daisy Jones & the Six.”Photograph from Alamy

At the end of the first episode of “Daisy Jones & the Six,” a series on Prime Video about the crescendo and subsequent dissolution of a fictional nineteen-seventies rock band, the titular character, Daisy (Riley Keough), fumes at the idea of being someone’s inspiration. “I’m not interested in being anybody’s muse! . . . Not yours, not anybody’s,” she shouts at a male companion. “I’m not the muse, O.K.? I’m the somebody.”

Oh, the irony. In its trailers and promos, “Daisy Jones,” based on the best-selling novel by Taylor Jenkins Reid, sold its female lead as a formidable creative force: a boundary-pushing, driven woman with undeniable talent. Daisy’s lyrical gifts are discovered by a producer, who pairs her with a floundering band, The Six, and the group is buoyed by her songwriting prowess and stage presence, becoming an overnight sensation. But, as the series progresses, it becomes clear that despite her central position within the band and the show, Daisy’s character is disappointingly, and irritatingly, impotent. Rather than composing a complex vision of a female artist, “Daisy Jones” lazily acquiesces to an established archetype of feminine desirability: the free spirit.

Right off the bat, Daisy’s bohemian aesthetics signal her priorities. She wears crochet tops with no bra and has long, wavy red tresses. (Keough has spoken about the extensive thought that went into Daisy’s look: “We were discussing the color of her hair, if she’d have bangs or if she wouldn’t, her gold earrings, her hoops,” she recalled in a TikTok earlier this month.) In her actions, Daisy is almost comically uninhibited. Before her first writing session with Billy Dunne, The Six’s front man, she brings her unwitting collaborator to their producer’s home, then scrounges around in the garden, looking for a key. “Why do I get the feeling that we’re breaking the law?” Billy says warily. “That’s not very rock and roll, Billy,” she teases. The camera pans lovingly over a large pool in the back yard—the show’s Chekhov’s gun. Viewers know, instinctually, that Daisy will end up in the water, likely naked or barely clothed, a preordained choice meant to demonstrate her character’s spontaneity, her freedom. Once inside the house, Billy asks about her songwriting process. Daisy, having just poured herself a drink, says, “You’re looking at it.” Soon, there’s a splash, and Daisy is gliding through the pool, sylphlike, in a sheer white tank and underwear, a common enough fantasy. This is how hits are made.

The series takes a careless stab at giving its heroine a backstory, constructing a poor-little-rich-girl narrative: Daisy grew up with money, but she was unloved. “No one wants to hear your voice,” her mother tells her, when she’s young—a line so blatantly expository that it barely counts as dialogue. More distressingly, the show casually slots a sexual assault into Daisy’s past; the scene is tossed at the audience and then never again discussed. The writers would rather focus on the confused aftermath of this trauma, which manifests in gratuitous scenes of Daisy drinking, snorting cocaine, and chasing pills with bottles of champagne.

The result is a depressingly one-dimensional character, despite a balanced performance from Keough, who does her best to enliven the mostly monotone material. There are opportunities for dynamism baked into the structure of the show: the scenes set in the seventies are paired with documentary-style interviews from two decades later, after the band breaks up. But, even in those interviews, the older version of Daisy is tiresomely consistent with the younger one. Twenty years of a life gone by, and her sense of self has not matured, nor has her understanding of action and consequence. She maintains the same irreverence and disdain for authority.

The muse of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s original novel was Fleetwood Mac. “I started by listening to ‘Rumours,’ ” Reid recounted in a video interview. “It’s an album, but it’s also a soap opera.” Daisy, with her flowy dresses and platform boots, is an obvious stand-in for Stevie Nicks, a creative genius and nonconformist idol—although comparing the two women ends poorly for Daisy, who lacks the complexity of her progenitor. According to Jenkins Reid, the dynamic between Daisy and Billy, which ricochets between hostile and sexually charged, was directly inspired by the romantic relationship between Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, Nicks’s songwriting partner and the guitarist for Fleetwood Mac. (Reid reimagined the relationship by making Billy a married man when he and Daisy meet.) While Nicks and Buckingham were breaking up, they recorded “Rumours,” which is widely considered one of the greatest albums of all time. One of the songs written for the album, which was ultimately left off the record, was “Silver Springs,” which many Fleetwood Mac devotees consider a message from Nicks to Buckingham after their split. Nicks sings, “You’ll never get away from the sound of the woman that loves you / Time cast a spell on you, but you won’t forget me.” Nicks is a devotee of love and an iconoclast; her evocative lyrics are both mythic and grounded in reality. Compare this to the song that Daisy writes after Billy strings her along: “Meet me in the corner where you keep me / I’ll do anything you please . . . You regret me and I’ll regret you.” Nicks haunts Buckingham whereas Daisy pleads with Billy.

Daisy falls short when compared with real-life musical individualists such as Nicks and Patti Smith, but she does call to mind other fictional characters. One example is Penny Lane, played by Kate Hudson, in Cameron Crowe’s film “Almost Famous.” Unlike Daisy, Penny isn’t in a band; rather, she’s a groupie, but the two characters have aesthetic similarities and are linked by an impulsiveness, as well as an interest in living a life that is free of responsibility, a life driven by sensuality and strength of feeling.

This recurring fantasy of womanhood engendered perhaps the most maligned iteration of the free spirit onscreen: the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. The term, first coined by the culture writer Nathan Rabin in a 2007 review of “Elizabethtown” (another film directed by Cameron Crowe), refers to women who exist primarily to bring the male lead to greater understanding about himself, so that, at the end of the story, he can go on to achieve his dreams, likely leaving her behind. (A Manic Pixie Dream Girl might, for example, drag the male protagonist to a midnight migration of bioluminescent plankton, thus inspiring his eventual novel.) These women are defined by their enchanting joie de vivre, their spontaneity, their nonconformity—and their fundamentally valueless desires. There is typically little to no attempt to explore their interior motivations. Some of the most famous examples of the trope include Kirsten Dunst’s character in “Elizabethtown,” Claire, the quirky flight attendant whose annotated maps rescue Orlando Bloom’s character from deep despair, and the titular character in “(500) Days of Summer,” played by Zooey Deschanel, whose will-o’-the-wisp nature enchants and subsequently devastates her boyfriend, who picks himself back up and pursues his goal of becoming an architect.

It’s notable that Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, who adapted “Daisy Jones” for television, wrote the screenplay for “(500) Days of Summer.” Daisy is not a perfect Manic Pixie Dream Girl, but she has some of the trademark characteristics. A sexually liberated woman, she exists as a foil to male responsibility: she’ll teach Billy the value of an unfettered approach while also instructing him in the risks of his own desires. He is drawn to her because she helps him understand himself. She is the caretaker of his catharsis and little else.

Ultimately, Daisy is not the focus of “Daisy Jones & the Six.” Her shallow, jejune motivations are significant only so far as they indicate her powerlessness. But Amazon clearly sold the series via Daisy’s character, who is front and center in the show’s promotional material. Amazon also released an album alongside the show, and Keough has repeatedly dropped hints at a possible “Daisy Jones & the Six” tour. Meanwhile, Daisy’s likeness is plastered across advertisements for a “Daisy Jones & the Six” capsule collection with Free People. For just a hundred and forty-eight dollars, you, too, can live out your bohemian dreams in an embroidered peasant top called the Joni. Daisy’s indignant quote from that first episode—“I am not the muse, I am the somebody”—is blazoned across the clothier’s Web site next to an image of Keough in a three-hundred-dollar maxidress. Amazon is betting on the idea that this free-spirited persona is both marketable and desirable—that women will want to look like Daisy because they want to feel like her. This commodification of womanhood is dispiriting, albeit unsurprising.

And so, Daisy is, depressingly, the muse. She’s Billy’s muse, and Amazon’s. And she’s the muse for those viewers who will watch her swan about and feel an erotic charge based on her unpredictability. All of this might be easier to swallow if her character had any agency, but, through the show’s ten episodes, she remains the equivalent of a cardboard cutout shuffled from scene to scene. For all its posturing about Daisy’s independence and creative drive, “Daisy Jones” is myopically obsessed with the will-they-won’t-they dynamic between Daisy and her tortured paramour, and within that dynamic, Billy retains all the power; the show’s dramatic fulcrum rests on his decisions. In the final episode of the series, released today, we learn that Billy stays faithful to his wife and child, remaining married until—of course—his wife dies from a terminal illness, but not before she bestows her final blessing: “Give Daisy Jones a call,” she says, smiling sadly but serenely. In the final scene, Billy approaches a large door ringed with pink flowers, behind which Daisy has presumably been waiting years for this exact moment. He surrenders nothing and ultimately gets everything: his family, his honor, and his passionate lover. Daisy is the conduit to his deliverance. ♦