‘Broad City,’ which first appeared as a web series in 2009, shows us two women who lack ambition in a way that is almost radical—if only because we rarely see women acting irresponsibly without being punished for it.
Let me first make it clear that the title of this post is intended as a celebration of two things: 1) Amy Poehler, who, in addition to being a brilliant comedy writer, performer, and founder of Smart Girls at the Party, is the executive producer of the new Comedy Central series Broad City and 2) That we finally have some representations of funny women on TV who get to be every bit as guiltlessly unmotivated as their male counterparts. The characters that Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer created and depict are silly, charming, and always have each other’s backs—no matter how absurd or ill-advised the scenario. On its face you might think that another show about best friends in their 20s living in Brooklyn and Queens will cover familiar territory, thanks to Girls. You would be wrong. Most of the women in Lena Dunham’s world are not unlike some of our other (beloved!) women characters like Leslie Knope, Liz Lemon, and Mindy Lahiri in that they are wrestling with personal and professional issues that can often be traced to the anxiety inherited by women over whether they can “have it all.” Sure, Hannah Horvath might be lazy at times, but she is nothing if not driven by ambition to establish herself as a writer. Broad City, which first appeared as a web series in 2009, shows us two women who lack ambition in a way that is almost radical—if only because we rarely see women acting irresponsibly without being punished for it.
I say “punished” because Abbi and Ilana get away with a lot on Broad City, and we get to enjoy the thrills of their bad decisions and improbably mild consequences. In the first episode, we see Ilana sitting bored at her job, where she makes it clear to her boss that since the paychecks are delayed, she has no intention of staying to work. However, she does have her sights set on one particular goal: to make enough money for a night out for her and Abbi to go to Lil’ Wayne show (she also plans to seduce him). Her hope is to raise $200—for tickets, drinks, and weed—and she needs to convince her best friend to blow off her custodial job at a gym to help execute her plan. Abbi is the less reckless of the two (she tells Ilana that she’s might not be up for the show that because she’s “really excited about a cashew stir fry” she made for the week), but willingly capitulates to her best friend’s scheming (as she does throughout the series).
Their first attempt to earn money takes the form of bucket drumming in Central Park, where their only fan is Ilana’s friend-with-benefit Lincoln, played by Hannibal Buress (one the best stand-up comics working today). When busking proves fruitless, Abbi and Ilana must resort to Plan B: cleaning creepy Fred Armisen’s apartment in their underwear while he luridly gazes upon them from behind drapes. Did I mention that he’s also wearing footie pajamas? This scene is brilliant physical comedy, and refreshingly turns what could be humiliating into something aggressively funny. Without spoiling too much of the rest of the episode, let’s just say that Ilana and Abbi end up back where they started: video-chatting with each other as they nurse hangovers.
In addition to being great writers, Jacobson and Glazer are a delight to watch, (as is both the supporting cast and cameos performances Rachel Dratch and Janeane Garofalo). Abbi and Ilana’s is a female friendship in which both women enable and affirm the other even as they make ridiculous choices—which is what friends are for.
Continually insisting that rapists can only be unfathomably monstrous Others and virtual strangers who physically brutalize their victims serves to hide who the real rapists are: brothers, sons, fathers, husbands, friends, and colleagues. Anna’s bruises serve to delegitimize the experiences of survivors who don’t bear a physical mark of the absence of their consent. We need a wider representation of the range of survivor experiences when it comes to rape and sexual assault so that we can begin to dismantle rape culture and develop a system that is capable of identifying rapists and that values the stories of survivors.
Building off my recent critique Rape Culture, Trigger Warnings, and Bates Motel, I have a bone to pick with Downton Abbey‘s infamous rape of its beloved character, the lady’s maid Anna Bates (Joanne Froggatt). I’m not alone in my sentiments that Downton Abbey handled the rape scene poorly. However, where most simply question the use of rape as a plot device, I think that showing rape is an important, underrepresented part of the human experience (particularly the female experience), but I question the value of the way in which the show depicted Anna’s rape as well as its aftermath. Not only that, but Anna’s rape was not the first on Downton Abbey (more on that later).
For context, Mr. Green temporarily enters the Downton household as the valet of Lord Gillingham, a guest of the estate. He and Anna immediately have an easy, flirtatious friendship of which Mr. Bates, her husband, is wary because he’s suspicious of the quality of Green’s character. While the household is occupied by an opera performance, Green corners Anna, beats her, and rapes her. Anna keeps it a secret for much of the season due to her fear of what her husband will do in retaliation, and she even lies about the circumstances of the incident once the rape comes to light, claiming it was an anonymous burglar.
Anna pleads with Mrs. Hughes to keep her rape a secret to protect her husband, Mr. Bates
Like my critique of Bates Motel, I feel strongly that Downton Abbeyshould have included an explicit trigger warning prior to the episode. Though Downton warned that there would be “violent” content, that’s not really illustrative enough to let rape and sexual assault survivors know what they’re in for. Even though friends had warned me that there was a rape in Season 4, I was taken off-guard by the scene. Like with Bates Motel, my PTSD was triggered, and I had to turn off the show. After a couple of weeks, I forced myself to finish the season because I’m a Downton fan, and I really hoped that the writers would develop the aftermath of Anna’s brutalization in an honest way that would add to the conversation about sexual assault and give a voice to the experience of survivors. That said, our culture needs to start showing a bit more sensitivity towards survivors by notcasually re-traumatizing us or putting us in danger of being triggered. Even though I’m the most vocal protestor of spoilers, I still say, “Fuck the surprise of drama; give me the choice of whether or not I want to watch triggering media. Give me the choice of peace of mind.”
Anna, bruised and beaten, after she was raped
Anna’s rape is excessively, unrealistically violent. Mr. Green cuts, bruises, and bloodies the face of a highly visible lady’s maid. How does he think she will explain away those bruises? The bruises act as a symbol to the viewer that Anna did not give consent; they are a testament to the truthfulness of her claims, a mark on her body that reflects the horrors that were done to her. Many women don’t have those kinds of marks, but their claims are no less truthful. Anti-rape campaigner Bidisha ShonarKoli Mamata says, “You can’t just insert a scene like this into a cosy drama. You have to treat rape sensitively, rather than use it as a plot device…Instead of focusing on the impact of the violence on Mrs Bates, it repeated basic rape myths, such as the idea rapists are always creepy guys. In fact, they are normal people and are often related to the victim.”
Mr. Green dragging Anna by the hair
Continually insisting that rapists can only be unfathomably monstrous Others and virtual strangers who physically brutalize their victims serves to hide who the real rapists are: brothers, sons, fathers, husbands, friends, and colleagues. Anna’s bruises serve to delegitimize the experiences of survivors who don’t bear a physical mark of the absence of their consent. We need a wider representation of the range of survivor experiences when it comes to rape and sexual assault so that we can begin to dismantle rape culture and develop a system that is capable of identifying rapists and that values the stories of survivors.
The writers selected Anna to be raped because her character is beyond reproach, and no one would doubt the authenticity of her claims. The Telegraph describes Anna as “a model of respectability, stoicism and goodness.” There still exists the niggling subtext that she was “asking for it” because of her flirtatious relationship with Mr. Green despite Mr. Bates’ spider senses tingling about how Green was a bad dude.
Anna gives Mr. Green a defiant kiss in front of Mr. Bates
Though Downton Abbey punishes Anna for being flirtatious and for not listening to the wisdom of her husband’s judgement, the show wanted to depict an uncomplicated rape where Green was an outsider and villain while Anna was without a doubt the victim of a heinous crime. Now that, my friends, is lazy storytelling. If Downton Abbey wanted to be true to its time (and our time, for that matter), it would’ve created a scenario in which the the victim was generally not believed and in which the perpetrator was someone she knew and would have to encounter on a regular basis. In the Express article, “Brutal truth behind that shocking Downton rape scene,” Dr. Pamela Cox observes: “A maid who complained of rape displayed knowledge of things she was not supposed to know about and was liable to be thought partly to blame.” It would’ve been better storytelling that reflected more realism if another servant or one of the house’s lords had attacked Anna. Though Green comes back a few times, this is a device solely to torment Anna and ramp up the drama rather than give a realistic depiction of a woman being forced to interact with her rapist on a regular basis, which happened all too often back then and continues to happen all too often now.
Mr. Bates comforts his wife after learning that she was raped
Season 4 of Downton Abbey actually has a couple of character interactions that could have more realistically ended in sexual assault. The relationship between Mrs. Braithwaite and Branson could have been fruitful territory for exploration of themes of rape, victim blaming, and the sheer unlikelihood of false accusations of rape. Branson’s new lord-like status makes it harder for a servant to say “no” to him without facing repercussions. What if Braithwaite changed her mind about her scheming, and a drunken Branson took advantage of her? I thought he behaved disgustingly after the incident, without a sense of his own responsibility in the affair, and he is only “redeemed” because Braithwaite was manipulating him all along. What if she hadn’t been, though? In the end, the fact that she’s a social climber doesn’t make a difference when it comes to consent, but perhaps Downton could have shined a light on its audience’s internalized prejudices and victim-blaming propensities with a nuance-rich storyline.
Braithwaite and Branson
Another relationship that nearly ends in rape is that of Jimmy and Ivy. He tries to force himself on her at the end of a date, claiming that she owes him for how well he’s treated her and for the things that he’s bought for her. Having Jimmy be a rapist and a relatively well-liked part of the household, whom Ivy would be forced to interact with daily would be a more compelling, realistic scenario than that of Anna’s rape.
Jimmy and Ivy’s romance sours when he tries to rape her
The aftermath of Anna’s rape was full of painful truth in the way in which the violation haunts her. In an agonizing, heartbreaking scene, Anna says to Mr. Bates, “I’m spoiled for you, and I can never be unspoiled.” I was, however, disappointed by Bates’ obsession with his own revenge as if Anna is his property and he must exact justice. In fact, the aftermath of the rape is almost entirely about Mr. Bates. Anna seeks to protect him from the knowledge for fear of what he will do. Once he finds out, Bates ignores her wishes and kills Green, ostensibly to avenge his wife’s “honor”, but doesn’t it matter that Anna explicitly asked him to leave it alone? The rape happened to her; she should be the one who decides how she wants to deal with it. Only Season 5 will tell, but it seems like Anna’s distress completely dissipates with Green’s death, which is a ridiculous simplification of the arduous road to recovery from PTSD that Anna must face. If Season 5 does not continue to chart Anna’s struggles with PTSD, Downton will have failed to bring to light an important and timeless point about the psychology of human beings, in particular survivors of traumatic events.
Anna and Bates trying to forget about her rape for an evening
Now, earlier I mentioned another rape, and it’s probably been killing you trying to figure out what I’m talking about, which is a problem in and of itself. Mary Crawley’s (Michelle Dockery) “illicit affair” with Mr. Pamuk was also a rape, but it slides under the radar because she’s not violently attacked and she takes responsibility, as many victims do, for what has happened to her. Mary actively and repeatedly denies consent to the man who forces a kiss on her and later steals into her bedroom determined to get what he wants regardless of her protestations.
The rape of Lady Mary is actually a type of rape that I think mainstream media should show more often: a rape in which there is no hitting or screaming, the victim says “no,” and because of her initial attraction to him, feels as if she’s led him on or that it is somehow her fault. Points for Downton then? Um, no. Though Mary is the victim of sexual assault, the show itself doesn’t read her as such. Though the audience is led to recognize the inequality women face and the cruelty inherent in a woman’s single indiscretion perhaps ruining her future and good name, Downton Abbey does not focus on the fact that a man broke into her room and didn’t listen to her when she repeatedly said, “no.” Also, what a missed opportunity to show Mary and Anna share survivor stories and comfort, forming their own healing community together.
Mary is horrified when Mr. Pamuk comes into her room
Downton Abbey and its writers are guilty of a gross negligence that is all too common. If someone says “no” to sex, then it is rape. Period. There is no nuance when it comes to consent. This is what Hollywood has such a hard time with and why they insist on only showing shockingly violent rapes that virtual strangers perpetrate. Why? Because if we acknowledge that rape occurs within many contexts needing only the criteria that the victim say “no”, how many men would then be rapists? How many women and others would then be survivors of sexual assault or rape? How many people would we have to now believe when they claim they were raped? A shocking number. A staggeringly, shocking number. In the US alone, 1 in 5 women will be raped. Three percent of men will be raped. An estimated 1.3 million women will be raped each year, and 97 percent of rapists will never see the inside of a jail cell. Pretending there’s not a problem doesn’t make the problem go away. Instead, it becomes more ubiquitous and insidious until it’s a pandemic. I don’t want to live in a world where rape is the norm and survivors are liars who were asking for it, and I mean, really, do you? We’ve got a long battle ahead of us, but each of us can start by acknowledging that rape culture exists, accepting that survivors are never asking for it, and believing that survivors are telling the truth.
Amanda Rodriguez is an environmental activist living in Asheville, North Carolina. She holds a BA from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio and an MFA in fiction writing from Queens University in Charlotte, NC. She writes all about food and drinking games on her blog Booze and Baking. Fun fact: while living in Kyoto, Japan, her house was attacked by monkeys.
The HBO series ‘Looking,’ which focuses on the lives of gay men (co-created by the gay writer-director Andrew Haigh who made the art-house film ‘Weekend’; two of the main cast members, including the lead, are also out gay men) occupies a ground somewhere in between, in which women do exist, though only in supporting roles–but those roles are cast and, written with an acuity that transcends their brief time onscreen.
Warning: This review contains spoilers for the first seven episodes of the first season of HBO’s Looking.
No matter how much is written about the series Girls, “wives and girlfriends” could be the de facto description of most speaking roles for women on television and in film. Because women are the plus-ones in the script we’re not surprised that their parts, when compared with the male characters have fewer lines, less complexity and less variability–in age, race, body type and conventional attractiveness. The uncomfortable truth is: the only reason women are in these many of these shows and films (besides for decoration, to act as a kind of talking furniture) is to communicate that even though the male characters seem to spend most of their time and emotional energy interacting with each other– and the audience can’t help noticing the homoerotic tension between them–they’re not queer.
So what happens to women’s roles when the main male characters are queer? In some cases, like the excellent recent release Stranger By The Lake, women aren’t in the picture at all–not surprising, since the film takes place in a cruising ground. But the absence of women also reflects the strata of gay men whose social circle is made up almost entirely of other gay men, even outside of sexual situations. In the case of the execrable American version of Queer As Folk the token woman couple were written alternately as villains or annoyances: their erratic behavior providing the flimsiest of excuses to propel the storylines of the male characters.
The HBO series Looking, which focuses on the lives of gay men (co-created by the gay writer-director Andrew Haigh who made the art-house film Weekend; two of the main cast members, including the lead, are also out gay men) occupies a ground somewhere in between, in which women do exist, though only in supporting roles–but those roles are cast and written with an acuity that transcends their brief time onscreen.
Dom and Doris
The most prominent example is Doris (Lauren Weedman) who is the best friend, roommate and long ago ex-lover of one of the series main characters, Dom (out gay actor Murray Bartlett). Unlike other fictional f*g hags, Doris isn’t secretly still in love with Dom (as the Meryl Streep character was with the Ed Harris character in The Hours) nor is she a woman so desperately unhappy with her own life that she can’t stop meddling in and monopolizing Dom’s. She has a challenging career as a pediatric nurse, and although she is much less glamorous than most of the other women on television, we see her making out with Dom’s male coworker during Dom’s birthday party (though just once on TV or in a movie I’d like to see the relatively common occurence of a f*g hag going with her friends to the gay bar, picking up a woman there and going on to forge a queer identity of her own). Instead Doris plays the role usually given to “The Gay Best Friend” in a romantic comedy. She has all the best lines and an acid delivery but is also a loyal friend and the voice of reason.
When Dom wants to contact an abusive ex-boyfriend (who was, at one time, also a meth addict but has since become a successful realtor) Doris warns him off doing so, but when Dom sees the guy anyway, tells him she understands why.
Doris asks, “Did you at least ask him for your money back?”
“No,” Dom answers.
Doris then asks “Why not,” and her tone has no anger in it, just a sad compassion that seems to illustrate a long history between the two friends.
In the most recent episode (Episode 7, the penultimate of this season, but the series has just been renewed for a second season, with Weedman becoming a cast regular) we finally got to meet the mother of the main character Patrick Murray (Jonathan Groff). His mother has been something of a bogeyman since the first episode when Dom advised Patrick to stop dating only the men he thought his mother would approve of. Patrick, who designs video games, then pursued and eventually became boyfriends with Richie (Raúl Castillo) a Mexican American barber. With Richie and Patrick’s relationship, Looking is able to touch on some class and race schisms that exist in the gay men’s community–but also beyond–that other series and movies rarely show.
Richie and Patrick spend an idyllic day together
Patrick isn’t a racist exactly (his best friend is Latino–and also a main character–wanna-be artist, Agustín, played by Frankie J. Alvarez), but, except for most of one idyllic all-day date that takes up the whole of Episode 5 (directed by Haigh, it echoes the structure, if not quite the emotional sweep of Weekend) he can’t seem to stop himself from saying racially and culturally insensitive things to Richie, which nearly prevented he and Richie from getting together in the first place. Patrick’s awkwardness with Richie is a result of his moving in mostly white, affluent (or at least artist-class) circles and shows a reality rarely seen on TV or in movies: that white people, even the ones who say they aren’t racist, often have no idea how to be in interracial relationships–and aren’t very good at learning from their mistakes. The show also captures tensions within the Latino community, when college educated, Miami-raised Cuban American Agustín accuses Patrick of “slumming” with working class, Mexican American Richie.
In Episode 7, Richie was supposed to finally meet Patrick’s mother (Julia Duffy from Newhart) at his sister’s wedding,but after a morning full of disasters: spilled coffee on a dress shirt, a parking ticket, Patrick’s mother’s misplaced phone (which the hotel won’t give to Richie because, he says, “I guess I don’t look like a ‘Murray'”) Richie and Patrick argue, and Richie says he thinks it’s too soon to meet Patrick’s family. So Patrick goes to the wedding alone.
Patrick and Richie
Making the excuses familiar to those of us who have fought with our partners right before or during major social events (“food poisoning” Patrick says), Patrick meets up with his mother, a persnickety and perpetually dissatisfied woman (she complains about the state of the grass on the grounds of the wedding site) who calls Richie “Richard” and “friend” instead of “boyfriend.”
At the end of the festivities (scenes of cake pops, bad dancing to the B-52s and the groom removing the bride’s garter will elicit groans of recognition among any queer who has felt alienated at a straight wedding) Patrick tells his mother, “You’re the real reason Richie isn’t here,” blaming the argument he had with Richie (ostensibly because Richie suggested Patrick smoke a joint in the car to relax before the wedding) on his mother’s lofty expectations.
But Patrick’s mother herself is munching on a pot-laced Rice Krispie treat (Patrick’s family is from Colorado, where marijuana is legal) and tells Patrick, “I don’t think you can blame me for Richie. If he’s not here, that’s on you, sweetie.” She also tells him that marijuana has helped her since she went off Lexapro, which Patrick had no idea she was taking.”If you asked me how I was doing every now and then,” she counters, “you’d know.” And with just a few lines (and an expert reading from Duffy) Looking turns an “evil” and “unreasonable” mother character into a sympathetic person with wants and needs of her own. And echoes the experience of so many of us as we strive to become people different from who our mothers see us as. Our mothers change too and become different people from the ones we wanted so badly to distance ourselves from.
With Blue Is The Warmest Color, Concussion, and Stranger By The Lake, this past year has been a great one for queer characters’ stories on the big screen–and Looking has now brought that same depth and quality to the small screen. I can’t wait for Season 2.
Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing has appeared in The Toast,xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.
TV families are generally presented as aspirational. They usually live an upper middle class livestyle and frequently live comfortably on a single salary, have college degrees and wealthy backgrounds.
Usually when characters work menial labor or minimum wage jobs, they are presented as being in a transitory period. This is the stage before the character gets their life together, when the artist waits for a big break or where a youth supplements their allowance with their earnings. It’s rare that this work is presented as the character’s real life, how it will likely always be.
Written by Elizabeth Kiy as part of our theme week on Women and Work/Labor Issues.
Raising Hope title card
TV families are generally presented as aspirational. They usually live an upper middle class livestyle and frequently live comfortably on a single salary, have college degrees and wealthy backgrounds.
Usually when characters work menial labor or minimum wage jobs, they are presented as being in a transitory period. This is the stage before the character gets their life together, when the artist waits for a big break or where a youth supplements their allowance with their earnings. It’s rare that this work is presented as the character’s real life, how it will likely always be.
Raising Hope is centered the “lower lower middle class” Chance family, Virginia (Martha Plimpton), a maid, is married to Burt (Garret Dillahunt), a struggling landscaper. They have a twenty-something son Jimmy (Lucas Neff), the result of a teen pregnancy, and act as caregivers to Maw Maw (Cloris Leachman), Virginia’s senile grandmother whose house they all live in. Their lives are decidedly unglamorous and everyone lacks maturity. That is, until, in a wacky series of events, Jimmy has a one night stand with a serial killer who gets pregnant, gives birth and is then executed, leaving the baby to the Chances to raise.
Family events like a camp-out on their lawn keep the Chances together and showcase their heart
The baby, Hope is the catalyst for the maturation, not only of her young father, but of his parents who now have a second chance to fix some of their mistakes. Helping them along is Sabrina Collins (Shannon Woodward), Jimmy’s love interest and later girlfriend and wife, who works at the local grocery store, Howdy’s and comes to view Hope as her daughter.
Unlike creator Greg Garcia’s previous blue collar series, My Name is Earl, characters in Raising Hope are not presented as criminals or cons. The criminal acts undertaken by the Chances, such as illegally selling popular Christmas toys or switching price stickers at the grocery store gain the audience’s approval as they are undertaken merely to survive. For the most part, they’re happy with their lot in life, they complain about their jobs only in the usual way people complain about their jobs, and daydream only idly about winning the lottery or making it as a rock star. They’re are uneducated, but intelligent and they have a cramped house, but its full of love, the way the Chances see it, it could be worse.
The Chance most often live in Maw Maw’s small house, but have lived in their van at times
Comedy with working class protagonists is difficult. There are serious problems in their lives that cannot always be easily and in all good conscience laughed at and the stakes are always high. The show, though allowed some degree of comedic license, could be criticized for its portrayal of a “lower lower middle class” lifestyle as full of charming eccentricity, rather than more realistically as a degrading experience. Indeed, most of the problems faced by a family like the Chances could not be solved in a half hour comedy or dealt with in a manner that could leave the viewer in a good mood after the credits. Thus, the show is to often outlandish, existing in a world of quirky characters, mythical town limits, unlikely resurrections and logical paradoxes, the same world enjoyed by other blue collar families on TV, like The Simpsonsand Family Guy’sGriffins.
Except, it’s a live action show where the naked faces and emotions of the family are always on display, keeping it solidly grounded in a sense of reality unavailable to the working class cartoon. Burt, Virginia, Jimmy, Sabrina, Maw Maw and Hope are real people, played by real actors and it is to the show’s credit that every once and awhile, the greater reality behind the comedy-creating challenges in their lives is exposed. Under the coat of absurdity, Raising Hope is often a trojan horse of a sitcom, leading viewer to think about poverty and social issues, instead of mere escapism. The Chances didn’t have health insurance for Jimmy’s entire childhood because they couldn’t afford it, they have one GED shared between them, no one was properly educated on safe sex, they’ve lived in their van for prolonged periods and frequently acknowledge that they would be homeless if not for mooching off Maw Maw.
What’s refreshing about the show is that the women are the most intelligent characters, though because the show is a comedy, their intelligence manifests itself in complicated schemes and manipulations. Due to this, Virginia’s frequent use of words like “philostrophical” becomes an adorable quirk, especially as she is one of the show’s shrewdest characters. Virginia and Maw Maw are geniuses when it comes to scheming, usually to help their family members overcome a character flaw, get revenge on someone who has hurt someone they care about and make mild improvements to their lives and Sabrina has learnt from their example. Burt and Jimmy are well-meaning man-children, generally getting easily swept away by their wives’ plans.
Burt and Virginia prepare for wealthy guests, pouring box wine into empty bottles in an attempt to appear well-off
Virginia and Burt are each other’s soul mates and have an egalitarian relationship where financial and childcare responsibilities are shared. However, Burt frequently takes care of handiwork in the home, while Virginia does the cooking and takes care of Maw Maw. They both also work in extremely gendered professions, highlighted by Virginia’s pink maid uniform and all female crews (though a male superior is sometimes glimpsed). While Burt is passionate about lawn work and is shown to have an encyclopedia knowledge of different mosses, Virginia sees her work as pure drudgery, and uses self deprecating humor as a means of coping. In her off hours, she has no shortage of things she is excited about, most of them blue collar passions straight out of reality TV. She’s a hoarder, she believed in the 2012 prophesy, is a doomsday prepper and collects like figurines of pigs dressed up for different jobs. Her great achievements are the small things that make her feel important, such as getting her granddaughter in the church nativity scene and winning the town’s annual bake-off, the sorts of community involvement usually portrayed as the past times of wealthy housewives who don’t have to work.
Virginia works as a maid for Knock Knock Knock Maid Service, cleaning the homes of wealthy families
In a recent episode, Virginia refused a promotion because of a fear of confrontation and the stress that comes from it. Like many women, she has been raised to be non-confrontational and like many lower class women, she does not have any confidence that she move up in the ranks and make her life better. When she ultimately takes it and becomes crew chief, she finds she is good at the work and enjoys it. As the show displays time and time again, though she lacks formal education, Virginia is seriously talented in relating to people and figuring out how to serve their needs.
With her new salary, Virginia is no longer stressed financially and suggests she and Burt could now afford their own apartment. This development counteracts the earlier seasons of the show, which suggest that the Chances could never expect to be better off than they are, by showing that Virginia was one promotion away from being able to support them satisfactorily. It’s a troubling message, suggesting that the poor could easily build themselves up if they just decided to stop being lazy.
But the Chances have shown multiple time that they don’t particularly desire to move up in the world. In one episode, the family is saving money for a new toilet after theirs breaks, they are given an expensive model worth two thousand dollars by a wealthy friend. This appears to be the beginning of the familiar sitcom plot where someone receives and expensive gift and struggles with the morality of accepting it, with the blue collar twist that the luxury item in question is a toilet. Instead, Burt and Virginia worry that having a luxury item will begin to move them to a social strata they don’t belong in and give them a taste for the finer things in life, things they cannot afford. It’s played as a triumph (scored by a song repeating “don’t care about being a winner”) when they return it and come home with a grungy, used model.
Though Burt and Virginia are originally fascinated by the expensive toilet, they ultimately decide such luxuries aren’t for them
They’re comfortable with who they are and luxury just not for them. Virginia, even in her unbridled fantasy, dreams of being given imitation diamonds sold on an infomercial by Fran Drescher for her anniversary.
There are always conflicts when the Chances encounter someone wealthy or well-educated. Hope’s serial killer mother, Lucy’s college degree is frequently brought up as evidence that she was too good for him. Several episodes explore the long standing rivalry between Virginia and her successful cousin Deliah, who often teases her about being poor. In another episode the family struggles to decide whether they can be friends with a rich family whose house Virginia cleans.
Most notably, in the second season, the Chances discovered that Sabrina’s family is extremely wealthy and she has chosen her working class life by refusing to accept their money. When Jimmy and Sabrina attend a party thrown by her father, it is clear that Sabrina assumes her wealth former friends are jerks and feels justified in mocking them. However, after spending time with them, Jimmy concludes that they are trying hard to be kind and include him even though he can’t relate to their stories of their lives. Sabrina, who feels she’s making a stand, the outsider exposing their gross entitlement, is the one who’s really being judgmental as she assumes her rejection of their lifestyle makes her superior. Here, Jimmy realizes that Sabrina is severely insecure and goes through life thinking she is superior to the people she meets, particularly her co-workers at Howdy’s who were born working class and did not make a choice to reject their privilege.
The Chances learn Sabrina is from a wealthy family when Burt sees this picture of her in a client’s house
Though its uncomfortable for a man to point out her flaws and force her to work through them, within the context of a sitcom, it’s refreshing. Raising Hope has a male character, Jimmy at its centre, but the female characters never become axillary figures, merely his wife and mother. In fact in recent seasons, it functions more as an ensemble, where each character has multiple flaws pointed out by everyone around them. Sabrina is not just the hot chick that Jimmy, himself an anxious mess of neuroses (he eats his eyebrows when stressed) has a thing for, but an actual human being. She’s overly competitive, combative and sleeps with a “pantyho” over her head to keep out the spiders. The very things she feels makes her a hero are her character flaws, whereas the things she takes for granted: her unconditional love for her adopted daughter, her enduring friendship with Jimmy within their romantic relationship, her deep affection for his family even when they become embarrassing and her often comically misguided desire to do good are what make her likable.
In one episode, Sabrina leads Occupy Natesville. The Chance family aren’t the kind of people to discuss economic theory or the wide-ranging social and cultural inequities that make their lives a constant struggle. Jimmy takes the protests message as a comfort, letting him know that isn’t their fault they’re poor. None of the family take an interest in what it means on a broader level to be part of the lower levels of the 99% or get involved in working for institutional change to the lives of the working class, but of course, their world is solidly a comedic one where a serious exploration of poverty would be out of place. As often happens in life, it is privileged Sabrina who fights for the lower class, claiming to speak for a group in which she has only tenuous membership. This brings to mind the idea that economic discussions often exclude perspectives of the very people who need them the most, because their voices are stifled by things like lack of education or free time to attend discussions.
In early seasons, Sabrina is a tourist, she exists in their world but doesn’t belong in it. She always be differentiated than the Chances, as she has her rich parents as a safety next. If she is ever desperate for money or in a situation where she just couldn’t take being poor anymore, she always has the option of accepting the money her father would willingly give her. The stakes for her are neither high nor impossible to transcend so she is able joke around at work, drawing faces on fruit and changing product labels.
Sabrina and Jimmy work together at Howdy’s Market
Though coming from a background of more privilege than the average viewer, she functions as an audience surrogate: correcting the Chances when they make mispronounce worlds or misinterpret historical events and showing amusement at the ways they have had to improvise to keep their heads above water. The entertainment she gains from observing the Chances and participating in their traditions can border on exploitative. She views them as a sideshow, a carnival act, even a television show. Her marriage to Jimmy, mandated by her grandmother’s will in exchange for a house, appears to bridge the gap between the Chances’ poverty and the Collinses’ wealth. Instead, it turns Jimmy into what Sabrina was, a tourist who frequently drops in on his parents’ hardscabble lives, but goes home to an expensive house he and his wife own outright. Though the series features lots of craziness and amplified reality, I feel this turn is where the show becomes really unrealistic.
Sabrina and Virginia are two women from very different backgrounds who ended up in a similar place. Though the series is an unrealistic portrayal of working class life, the women of Raising Hope are intelligent, dedicated to their families and coworkers and always well-meaning. The circumstances of their lives are far from ideal, but they way they manage to find reasons to be happy is admirable.
Throughout the series, Virginia is always looking for positive female role models for her granddaughter. Hope could do worse than do adopt some of these qualities from her mother and grandmother.
Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and freelance journalist living in Toronto, Ontario. She recently graduated from Carleton University where she majored in journalism and minored in film.
Jessica, Rachel, and Donna are all women working in a male-dominated industry. Jessica has overcome the sexism in the workforce by out-thinking it and by dominating the competition. Rachel has chosen to forego any help from her father, in favor of trying (and failing) on her own. And Donna has seen the patriarchal systems of power, and used them to her own advantage.
Suits poster
This guest post by Deborah Pless appears as part of our theme week on Women and Work/Labor Issues. It previously appeared at Kiss My Wonder Woman.
It only takes a single look at the posters to know that Suits, USA’s little darling show about inordinately attractive people doing morally ambiguous things, is a man’s show. Or, maybe more accurately, a show about men. The plot revolves around two white, straight, attractive men: Harvey Specter (Gabriel Macht), an egotistical but talented lawyer, and Mike Ross (Patrick J. Adams), his brilliant but undereducated associate.
The hook is that Mike doesn’t actually have a law degree. He was kicked out of Columbia and never finished college, and spent the last few years taking the LSAT for money. But Mike is smart–crazy smart–and Harvey knows that. Since Harvey needs to hire an associate (kind of like a baby lawyer assistant thing) when he’s promoted to Senior Partner, and because he hates all the other candidates, Harvey hires Mike, and they both collude to hide Mike’s real background.
Sounds catchy, right? But definitely a show about men. The central conflict is whether or not anyone will figure out that Mike is a fraud, and all the episodes revolve around a case that can only be fixed by one of the two men. Even the main antagonist, the divinely slimy Louis (Rick Hoffman), is a man.
What’s notable here, though, isn’t that a USA show chose to make the main conflict and storyline center around attractive white men (shocker), but that there are, as it turns out, so many female characters of worth in the show–women who are just as developed, interesting, and integral to the plot as the men. I’m not saying the show is a bastion of feminism, but I do think it’s worth noting how much the creator, Aaron Korsch, seems to have attempted to say here, specifically on the topic of women in the workforce, and how race, class, and gender all intersect to create a vision of discrimination, and, in some cases, triumph.
Jessica Pearson (Gina Torres), founder and managing partner of Pearson-Hardman
Pearson-Hardman (and later, Pearson-Darby), the firm at which most of the show’s action takes place, is represented as a top Manhattan law firm, pretty typical in its practices, gender dynamics, and hiring habits. What makes the show unique is that it criticizes these hiring habits: the firm’s conceit is that they always hire lawyers and associates with Harvard Law degrees, because presumably Harvard is the best. What this means, other than that Mike is doubly screwed because he didn’t go to law school anywhere, but he has to fake having gone to a school that everyone knows every detail about, is that there is an implicit class bias built into the hiring strategies at Pearson-Hardman. Harvard is a hard school to get into, yes, but it’s an even harder school to pay for. As a result, most of the lawyers at Pearson-Hardman are from privileged families, and used to trading on that privilege.
And when I say privileged, what I mean is that most of the men we see on the show, all of the associates, most of the lawyers, even most of the background characters, are young white men. While this seems like the casual whitewashing we can usually expect in shows like this, it actually appears to be something a little deeper.
Mike’s introduction as a lower-class, undereducated character is the first blow to this image of upper-class white male supremacy, but he’s certainly not the last or the most important. When it comes down to it, the intersectional struggle on the show is defined not by Mike, but by the women they work with. By their boss, Jessica Pearson (Gina Torres), a black woman who runs the top law firm in Manhattan, commands the respect of everyone she meets, and mentors the male lead (Harvey). By their coworker, Rachel Zane (Meghan Markle), a talented paralegal who desperately wants to be a lawyer, but can’t quite make the cut. And by their subordinate, Donna Paulsen (Sarah Rafferty), a seemingly all-knowing assistant who remembers exactly where the bodies are buried, can cry on cue and isn’t afraid to use it to her advantage, and who seems content to be the “power behind the throne.” All three characters represent very different images of what it means to be a woman at work in one of Manhattan’s top firms. And all three characters are vitally important to an understanding of women’s role in the workplace. Besides, did I mention? They’re all friends.
Gina Torres as Jessica Pearson
I first mentioned Jessica Pearson (Gina Torres) because, well, who wouldn’t mention Jessica first? She’s by far the most exceptional woman on the show, and also the most politically charged. By that I mean not that the character herself is political – she appears to have the same laissez-faire attitude towards politics that the show itself has, and has no moral compunctions about the extreme wealth and moral quandaries to which her occupation lends itself. Rather, I mean that making Jessica Pearson both a woman and a character of color is in itself a political statement.
Let’s talk implicit backstory, shall we? Now, we know from the very get-go that Jessica is both a powerful woman, and a smart one. We know that she’s the managing partner and co-founder of Pearson-Hardman and then later Pearson-Darby (note that it’s her name on the firms’ letterhead), and that she’s Harvey’s mentor. She found him in the mailroom and sponsored him all the way through Harvard, his first job at the DA’s office, and on until he made senior partner. Jessica is a tough lawyer, and she taught Harvey everything he knows.
That would be reason enough to stand up and cheer, since platonic female-male mentorships between non-relatives are virtually non-existent, but it’s not all. What we really want to get at here is the simple fact that Jessica, an African-American woman in her 40s, is the co-founder and managing partner of a top law firm in Manhattan. That means that not only did she achieve great things relatively early in her life, but also that she was the daughter of second-wave feminism, fighting her way through law school as it was only just starting to open up to women, and that she faced immense gender and race discrimination. She’s amazing. There’s no two ways about it.
Meghan Markle as Rachel Zane
And then we have Rachel Zane (Meghan Markle), a paralegal who’s been with Pearson-Hardman for years, but who longs to be a lawyer. Rachel has the money and the talent to go to law school, but she’s held back by a test anxiety that makes taking the LSAT virtually impossible. Still, Rachel perseveres and eventually manages to get a solid score on the test, only to later be turned down by Harvard Law School.
Rachel is also Mike’s closest friend in the firm, the first face he meets there, and one of the very few to know his secret. She later becomes his girlfriend, a relationship which seems to be good for both of them. She’s classy, well-educated besides her test anxiety, and a foodie. She has quirks. She’s complex. And she’s a biracial woman working in a highly sexist and more than moderately racist environment. But while Jessica is implied to have really worked her way up to the top with some help from her mentor, Daniel Hardman, Rachel is actively trying not to trade on her family name. It’s established that her father is a celebrated attorney, and that Rachel has intentionally chosen to go her own way through the legal world, not trading on her name, but doing it the hard way. That she fails is actually a more interesting story than if she were (at this point, the story’s not over yet) successful. She’s a woman working in a man’s world, trying to walk in her father’s shoes, and not really succeeding. Which is OK.
Sarah Rafferty as Donna Paulsen and Gabriel Macht as Harvey Specter
Rounding out the threesome, then, is Donna Paulsen (Sarah Rafferty), Harvey’s long-time assistant. Donna is arguably the least realistic female character we’re given, in that she’s presented as a submissive genius: beautiful, cunning, resourceful, and yet totally willing to subsume her career into Harvey’s, to devote her life to his success. I’m not saying that there aren’t women who do this, just that it’s a little unrealistic to think that with Donna’s skills, which are shown to be many and varied, she’s decided to be content with making Harvey the best lawyer he can be. It seems even that her character, by adhering to so many tropes of the white, attractive, submissive secretary, is a fetish object rather than a character in her own right. But, that’s not exactly the case here.
Donna is an interesting character. Her devotion to Harvey is actually matched by his devotion to her. When he made the leap from working as the Assistant Defense Attorney to working at Pearson-Hardman, he did so with the caveat that she came with him. He was the one who paid her salary until he made partner and the firm officially allowed him a legal secretary. And, while it is sometimes hinted that their relationship could tip over into romantic, it has stayed firmly platonic, making them life-partners without a sexual undertone, something hard to find on television.
What makes Donna compelling on the show, however, is her place in the world of Pearson-Hardman. It’s much harder to define than Jessica’s or even Rachel’s. Because Donna is a secretary, she’s under the radar most of the time. Like furniture. And she unabashedly uses that to her advantage. She acts sweet, she dresses sexy, she lets people underestimate her, and then she helps Harvey to destroy them. Donna is aware of the ways in which her sex and chosen profession try to limit her, but she has chosen to use those limitations to her advantage.
Donna Paulsen (Sarah Rafferty) and Rachel Zane (Meghan Markle) conspiring together
And, really, that’s what makes all of these women interesting. That’s what makes the show interesting. Jessica, Rachel, and Donna are all women working in a male-dominated industry. Jessica has overcome the sexism in the workforce by out-thinking it and by dominating the competition. Rachel has chosen to forego any help from her father, in favor of trying (and failing) on her own. And Donna has seen the patriarchal systems of power, and used them to her own advantage.
It’s no accident that the female characters we’re given represent a wide spectrum of female experience. Sure, Mike and Harvey are the nominal main characters on Suits, but they’re not the reason you should watch it. And I’m not saying the show is without its problems. By no means is this a feminist utopia of a show. But it’s interesting. It’s trying. And that’s more than you can say for most shows.
Deborah Pless runs Kiss My Wonder Woman and works as a freelance writer and editor in Western Washington, when she’s not busy camping out at the movies or watching too much TV. You can follow her on Twitter and Tumblr just as long as you like feminist rants, an obsession with superheroes, and sandwiches.
It is the overwhelming drive for excellence that makes the women on the show so real. It sometimes feels that this kind of ambition is not allowed to exist on TV. Sure, women can have high-powered careers and be very successful. But this is different. This is a show that not just portrays ambitious women, but is actively about professionally ambitious women and how they relate to each other and society.
Grey’s Anatomy poster
This guest post by Erin K. O’Neill appears as part of our theme week on Women and Work/Labor Issues.
Let’s talk about women and professional ambition.
But first, let’s talk about our first impression of Meredith Grey.
Grey’s Anatomy opens with a montage of surgery with a voice over talking about how it’s all called “The Game.” And then, it smashes into Meredith Grey, wrapped in a blanket, sneaking away from a man she very clearly had sex with the night before. And what does she tell him?
“Look, I’m gonna go upstairs and take a shower, OK? And when I get back down here, you won’t be here.”
She’s late for her first day of work and has the small problem of having to kick a man out of her house.
And herein lies the fascinating and symbiotic relationship between the soapy plotlines and genuine examination of female professional ambition in Grey’s Anatomy. There’s lots of sex, lots of absolutely crazy medical cases and an unlikely amount of death, and a bunch of personal relationships that get so improbable that they could break the laws of physics. And yet the show somehow manages to stay grounded in one thing: Meredith, Cristina, Izzie, Bailey, Ellis, Callie, Addison, Lexie, Teddy, April, Erica, Arizona, Jo and just about every other female character on the show are all hell-bent on being great surgeons.
And not just great surgeons. The greatest surgeons.
Cristina and the “heart box”
It is the overwhelming drive for excellence that makes the women on the show so real. It sometimes feels that this kind of ambition is not allowed to exist on TV. Sure, women can have high-powered careers and be very successful. But this is different. This is a show that not just portrays ambitious women, but is actively about professionally ambitious women and how they relate to each other and society.
“It’s like candy! But with blood! Which is so much better.”
There is a constant emphasis on winning. Winning the chance to do the best surgery, to get to treat the most interesting or dangerous injury. Everything from diagnosing rare diseases to eating a pile of hotdogs is an intense competition. Being the best, of anything and everything, is built into the fabric of the show’s narrative.
Cristina Yang is the obvious exemplar of this. She eats the giant pile of hot dogs the fastest. She hip checks Izzie on the way to a surgery so she gets there first. She graduated first in her class from Stanford’s medical school. She’s aggressive, abrasive, hostile, and she packs tequila in her bug-out bag. She is obsessive. She is driven.
And no one calls her less of a woman for that.
Cristina Yang
There are few shows that would let a female character, much less a married woman, have an abortion because her life plan is not to be a mother, but to be the best cardiothoracic surgeon in the world. Cristina knows she has no desire to have children, and while this eventually breaks up her marriage, she is conscious of doing the right thing by her own desires as well as her partner’s.
“You will be the surgeon of your generation,” Dr. Thomas (the former Mr. Feeney!) tells Cristina. “I knew it as soon as I met you. People will try to diminish you as they did me, but they will fail.”
“You are my person.”
Meredith Grey and Cristina Yang are best friends: the “Twisted Sisters.” They prioritize their friendship and each other over all other relationships — which is certainly saying something, considering that much of the non-career-related shenanigans that drive the emotional component to the show. Meredith was the first person Cristina told when she was pregnant, both times, and Meredith told Cristina about her post-it wedding to McDreamy before anyone else. Cristina needed Meredith to literally come back to life after drowning so she could tell her about her engagement. They ditch their romantic partners to motivate and support each other.
Their relationship is the most important relationship in the show because both women define themselves as surgeons first. The romantic entanglements, as distracting as they may seem, are secondary to their respective identities. For all the “pick me, choose me, love me” going on, the prominence and importance of Meredith and Cristina’s indicates that their professional ambitions are valid, and worthy life choices that deserve validation and realization.
“Happy Thanksgiving.”
There’s a great episode in season two, “Thanks for the Memories,” wherein Dr. Miranda Bailey — the no-nonsense, hard-core, and most-skilled resident on staff — runs circles around a visiting attending surgeon who believes the hot-shot resident with a stellar rep and called The Nazi is a man. Skillfully playing this assumption against him, Bailey scores herself all the fun, juicy trauma surgeries for herself while relegating the sexist attending to sutures in the ER.
Miranda Bailey
This episode deliberately acknowledges and then knocks down the stereotypes that can keep women from succeeding and excelling in the workplace.
“Pretty good is not enough. I want to be great.”
Meredith’s mother, Dr. Ellis Grey, was one of the greatest general surgeons of all time until she gets Alzheimer’s. Dr. Addison Montgomery Shepherd is a world-class neonatal surgeon, who in her first appearance describes herself as one of few surgeons who can separate fetal blood vessels. Dr. Callie Torres gets tapped to give a TED talk. Dr. Miranda Bailey almost single-handedly rallies support and opens a free clinic at the hospital.
Here’s the really cool thing about Grey’s Anatomy: these are women who succeed. They’re smart, and driven, and willing to suture bananas until they get the sutures right. And they grow and succeed. They pass their exams. They study and learn complicated procedures. They fail, a lot. It’s 10 seasons later, and the women who entered as interns are now attendings and fellows who do cutting-edge research and achieving the excellence that they have striven for.
They mentor and teach each other — the show made a point in the early seasons of having Bailey, Callie and Addison, among others, in positions of power and mentorship. And, as seasons go on, the students become teachers themselves and start the cycle over again. Later in the series, when Meredith and Derek adopt Zola, Callie tells Meredith not to feel guilty for going to work and being away from her child, since it’s good for Zola to see her mother work and be successful. And Bailey, who was Meredith’s supervising resident when Meredith, Cristina and the gang were interns, gives Meredith a list of her babysitters. This is how women support each other in the workplace.
Meredith and Cristina coo over Zola
“We screw boys like whores on tequila.”
Grey’s Anatomy has its detractors. And sure, it’s soapy and not all that realistic about how a hospital actually works. But it takes ambition seriously, making the professional ambition of its female characters the driving narrative force and is massively successful and at one point even the center of the zeitgeist. Even though the show is more well-known for its love triangles and melodramatic disasters and tragedies, it is deserving of consideration for its advancement of the idea that women can choose to be devoted and defined by their professional success.
Erin K. O’Neill is an award-winning writer, photographer, visual editor, and web editor currently located in Schenectady, New York. A devotee of literature, photography, existentialism, and all things Australian, Erin also watches too much television on DVD and Netflix. Follow her on Twitter, @ekoneill.
People who don’t work in the arts don’t realize how much work goes into it. Writers write hundreds of pages before any reader (who isn’t a blood relative) loves their work. Musicians practice for countless hours and write a lot of shitty songs before they compose a tune that makes someone want to sing along. Moms Mabley, the Black, queer woman comedian born in 1894 in the Jim Crow south, ran away at age 14 to become a performer and spent much of the next 66 years onstage, performing and polishing her own comedy routines. Her long experience may be why her work, nearly 40 years after her death, still elicits laughs.
People who don’t work in the arts don’t realize how much work goes into it. Writers write hundreds of pages before any reader (who isn’t a blood relative) loves their work. Musicians practice for countless hours and write a lot of shitty songs before they compose a tune that makes someone want to sing along. Moms Mabley, the Black, queer woman comedian born in 1894 in the Jim Crow south, ran away at age 14 to become a performer and spent much of the next 66 years onstage, performing and polishing her own comedy routines. Her long experience may be why her work, nearly 40 years after her death, still elicits laughs.
Whoopi Goldberg Presents Moms Mabley (original title, Moms Mabley: I Got Somethin’ to Tell You) shown on HBO and also as part of the Athena Film Festival, is a remembrance of Mabley, who died in 1975 (at the age of 81). Moms (“Jackie” was the original first name she chose to perform under) was popular, at one time making $10,000 a week (in mid-20th century dollars) on the chitlin’ circuit and for years putting on five shows a day(!) at The Apollo in Harlem (she and the other performers would have their barbecues in The Apollo’s courtyard between sets). During the 60s and early 70s she released 18 comedy albums (albums were the equivalent of cable television specials for comedians in those days). Unlike Redd Foxx, another African American comedian who experienced some of the same strictures of segregation-era America (and who also put out a lot of popular comedy albums), Mabley never got her own late-in-life television show, so her name if largely forgotten–undoubtedly the reason Whoopi Goldberg’s name became part of the film’s title.
The project seems to be a labor of love for Goldberg, who, before writing and performing in her own one-woman show (the vehicle which first brought her to prominence in the 80s) performed a one-woman show as Mabley, working from Mabley’s own material. Goldberg directed the documentary as well as narrating it. This film is only the second directing credit in Goldberg’s long career and her inexperience shows. Goldberg tells us early on that we don’t know much about Mabley’s early life, but Mabley’s Wikipedia entry contains more coherent information than is in this disjointed documentary.
The reason to see the film is not for the interviews with bleary-eyed Famous People Who Saw Mabley Perform Live or even the interviews with comedians (including Eddie Murphy, Arsenio Hall, Joan Rivers and Kathy Griffin) whose work she influenced, but to see Mabley’s work itself. She always played an old woman onstage, even when she was young, with the costume of a brightly patterned housedress, equally colorful, Gilligan-style bucket hat and kneesocks, ugly, big, flat shoes (almost like a clown’s) and for the crowning touch she removed her dentures, so as Eddie Murphy states she “was like someone in your family.” She (like other Black performers) wasn’t allowed to appear on television in variety, awards or talk shows until the 60s and 70s–when she had become old in real life, but was still a vital performer. The film also plays routines from her albums, delivered by a Flash-animated Moms.
Moms Mabley in offstage attire.
For those who think queer identity began at Stonewall, or was for white people only, we see old black and white photos of Mabley in the men’s clothing she wore offstage. A dancer who shared a dressing room with Mabley at the old Apollo confirms that Mabley surrounded herself with young women, unlike her onstage persona who often talked about her preference for “young men.” The dancer says that in those days she didn’t think of Mabley as “gay” or “lesbian” but as “Mr. Moms.”
We see clips of Mabley on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and on Merv Griffin: she seems like she would be a better–and funnier–guest than most of the people we see on talk show couches today. As the documentary points out, performers who came from a vaudeville background (as Mabley did) had to know how to dance and sing as well as be funny. We see her in a ridiculously campy Playboy television special with centerfold models and their sideburned dates in formal wear, stiffly swaying to the music as she sings (in her usual onstage costume) a sincere version of “Abraham, Martin and John” (as is pointed out in the film, she actually knew two of the dead men she was singing about). That cover of the song originally sung by Dion became a top 40 hit making her the oldest person (she was then in her 70s) to be on the charts.
We also see clips from her last movie Amazing Grace (she had made her debut in 1933, in The Emperor Jones which starred Paul Robeson), but the film does not seem like the best use for her talents. This documentary made me wish she had done a concert film to preserve her work, the way Richard Pryor (who also counted her as one of his influences) was able to preserve his own routines.
Still we can laugh at the audio of her performances even as the animated Moms, like the white comics’ impressions of her in interviews, sometimes skates dangerously close to stereotype. What may be most remarkable about Mabley’s career is: even as she was playing a loudly dressed, toothless character, her work never descended into self-hatred, though for much of her career, women comedians, like Phyllis Diller, made themselves the butt of every joke, and racist images of Black people were what was “popular” in comedy. In the 50s before Mabley was allowed on television–even though she had an established career by then–Amos and Andywas a huge hit. Her influence also stretches beyond those who name her as one. As she said herself, “Every comedian has stolen from me except for Jack Benny. He was an original. The same for Redd Foxx. He’s a born comedian.”
We see a clip of her toward the end of her life at The Grammys co-presenting with a very young Kris Kristofferson and she seems just what that moribund show could use right now. Breaking up the inane cue-card patter, she takes out her teeth (on camera) and she and Kristofferson give each other a loud kiss on the lips.
Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing has appeared in The Toast,xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.
Phoebe and Paige’s evolution through their working lives is particularly poignant to the millennial ‘Charmed’ audience; many people I know grew up watching the three (or is it four?) sisters flitting from job to job in their quest to find purpose and fulfillment. And we don’t even have daily demon attacks to contend with!
Charmed poster
This guest post by Scarlett Harris appears as part of our theme week on Women and Work/Labor Issues.
Despite all the midriff tops and high heels worn while fighting supernatural beings, and despite the damaged household items, buildings and cars which seem to miraculously be fixed by the next episode, if not before, Charmed is a lesson in work/life balance.
Throughout the eight seasons, which culminated in 2006, the Halliwell sisters struggle to balance demon fighting with romance, employment, study, and family.
The Charmed Ones spellcasting
Oldest sister Prue (Shannen Doherty) was killed off at the end of season three but not before she ditched her demon-dwelling auction house job at Buckland’s for freelance photography and bowed out of the dating game to focus on magic. As the head of a household whose mother died young, Prue was a maternal figure to her sisters, always concerned with putting family first, at the detriment to her love life and, ultimately, her actual life.
In “Which Prue Is It, Anyway?” from season one, Prue casts a spell to produce two carbon copies of herself, which carry out tasks such as dealing with her ex-boyfriend and cop on her case, Andy, while another one works on a spell with Piper and Phoebe, and yet another goes to Buckland’s to finish up some work. Talk about being a Superwoman!
Prue, Prue, and more Prue
Piper (played by Holly Marie Combs), who turns out to be the most level-headed and conventionally “normal” of the three sisters, gets fed up with being walked over in her season one job as manager of Quake restaurant and quits to open her own club, P3. She then gets seriously involved with whitelighter Leo, whom she marries in season three, and has two children with him, Wyatt and Chris. They then separate, Piper dates other people, they get back together again… Apart from the anguish of knowing their firstborn, Wyatt, grows up to be evil, Piper’s depiction as a frazzled “working mum” with a supernatural side really is the most realistic of the four Halliwell/Matthews sisters.
Piper becomes a mother
Which brings us to Phoebe (Alyssa Milano), the youngest of the original Charmed Ones until Paige comes along in season four. She enters the show as a free-spirit with a flawed perception of the future, or so we are led to believe by Prue, who’s had her issues with Phoebe in the past. In the first season alone she works as a hotel psychic, Prue’s assistant at Buckland’s and a real estate agent. After she casts a smart spell in “The Painted World” early on in season two, Phoebe decides to expand her knowledge for good and goes back to college. After graduating in season three (I wish I graduated college that quickly!), she goes on to write a successful advice column for The Bay Mirror newspaper, which fellow independent woman Elise edits.
We can’t forget Phoebe’s tumultuous personal life–her intense connection with Cole/Balthazar turn her into the queen of the underworld and the prospective mother of his demon spawn, she moves to China with millionaire boss Jason, becoming an aunty to Wyatt and Chris and, later, a mother to her own kids and taking a sabbatical from the newspaper because she’s feeling disconnected from her work. After Prue’s death, Phoebe takes on her longing for a less magical life which becomes somewhat of a reality for her in passing on the Charmed Ones’ knowledge to rookie witch Billie (a post-8 Simple Rules but pre-Big Bang Theory Kaley Cuoco) and the next generation of Halliwell witches.
Phoebe’s column becomes famous
Half-sister Paige Matthews, played by Rose McGowan, enters Piper and Phoebe’s life as a social worker at the beginning of season four. She is unreceptive to being magical at first, and spends most of the first season trying to maintain a “normal life,” with a job, a boyfriend, and a new family who happens to be supernatural. (She, like Prue, later leaves the paid workforce to focus on witch duties full-time.) Throughout her televised tenure as a Charmed One, Paige dabbles in temp work with a magical twist, becomes a whitelighter and the principal of magic school, then marries and has kids.
Paige joins the family
Phoebe and Paige’s evolution through their working lives is particularly poignant to the millennial Charmed audience; many people I know grew up watching the three (or is it four?) sisters flitting from job to job in their quest to find purpose and fulfillment. And we don’t even have daily demon attacks to contend with! The support of their family is key in allowing the Halliwell’s to shun traditional careers in favor of part-time- and self-employment and working from home, much like Gen Y is able to save for house deposits and overseas gap years while living with their long-suffering parents.
The family that brews together, stays together
After all, that is what Charmed is all about: family—sisters who just happen to be witches, and everything that goes along with both of those roles. While the manifestation of three fully groomed and immaculately dressed sister witches each morning in the Halliwell manor, who spend their days flitting about town vanquishing demons, protecting the innocent, working their day jobs, caring for their family, going on dates, maintaining a home, studying, managing their own businesses, etc., is extremely unrealistic, the sheer magnitude of what the Charmed Ones have to go through each day is somewhat of a metaphor for what working women—especially those with an extended family who all happen to live under the one roof—go through on a day-to-day basis. And sometimes, they manage to take it in stride, just as the Charmed Ones do.
The best shows are the ones that are silly enough to make us laugh, but deep enough to make us think. ‘My Mad Fat Diary’ strikes this balance perfectly in ways that are both clever and heartbreaking. The series chronicles the life of Rae Earl (Sharon Rooney), a snarky yet painfully insecure overweight teen, as relayed in her diary after a brief stay in a mental hospital following a suicide attempt. She begins the slow process of adjusting to life back in the outside world, forming new friendships and battling old demons. As an added bonus, the show could be classified as the fetal equivalent of a period piece, taking place in the mid-90s.
The best shows are the ones that are silly enough to make us laugh, but deep enough to make us think. My Mad Fat Diary strikes this balance perfectly in ways that are both clever and heartbreaking. The series chronicles the life of Rae Earl (Sharon Rooney), a snarky yet painfully insecure overweight teen, as relayed in her diary after a brief stay in a mental hospital following a suicide attempt. She begins the slow process of adjusting to life back in the outside world, forming new friendships and battling old demons. As an added bonus, the show could be classified as the fetal equivalent of a period piece, taking place in the mid-90s. Expect a kickass soundtrack and lots of denim-on-denim. I can’t believe the decade of my childhood is now far enough away to be considered fair game for a period piece. Anyway, no matter how old you were, My Mad Fat Diary will make you giddy with nostalgia.
Sharon RooneyRooney as Rae
It’s unfortunately rare to see a show with a fat female protagonist, let alone a teen show. I find Sharon Rooney fascinating because she encapsulates all the contradictions in the media’s perception of plus-sized women. Many interviewers express surprise at how strikingly she contrasts to Rae–whereas Rae is a quintessential wallflower, shy and sulking in oversized T-shirts and baggy jeans, Rooney often wears dresses and substantial amounts of makeup. She has all the self-assurance that Rae longs for. Now approaching her mid-20s, Rooney has spoken candidly about being passed over for roles when she was younger, including the glamour-obsessed Skins franchise (which, although incorporating a few characters who weren’t stick-thin, curiously failed to feature any plus-sized characters in the main cast, despite two full cast changes and seven seasons). It’s telling and ironic that an actress as confident as Rooney got her big break playing a character whose raison d’être is a self-loathing fixation on her weight.
Rae frequently doodles about sex.
Featuring an ensemble cast–bizarrely ranging in age from 17 to pushing 30, but all supposed to be portraying 16- to 17-year-olds–the crux of the show centers around Rae struggling to overcome self-consciousness to achieve an normal social life. Rae is also unabashedly sex-crazed and makes no secret of her about her lustful fantasies in the pages of her diary. You’re compelled to laugh at Rae’s antics not because the notion of fat women’s desire in itself is humorous, but because her libido is so expansive and imaginative. Rae is even shown exploring masturbation (and enjoying it!), marking all of three times that I’ve seen female masturbation portrayed onscreen. Predictably for the teen genre, she equates normalcy to hitting various romantic and sexual milestones. She winds up giving herself her first orgasm. For all of her self-deprecation, Rae views sexual expression as well within her grasp (no pun intended), at least in the abstract.
Chloe is basically “the hot chick.”
Rae’s childhood best friend Chloe (Jodie Comer) simultaneously embodies everything that Rae wishes she was with everything she knows she shouldn’t want to be. The audience is repeatedly beaten over the head with how thin, pretty, and popular Chloe is. Chloe’s perfect physique is the inspiration for many a gloomy monologue from Rae, with the latter taking every opportunity to lament her inadequacy by comparison. Chloe reinforces Rae’s inferiority complex through subtle backhanded compliments and putdowns, firmly cementing her status as more of a frenemy than a friend. She’s actually quite a recognizable character in that I think we’ve all tried to maintain some childhood friendships that were drifting apart, only to realize that you’ve become two totally different people. Unfortunately, the show has a tendency to pigeonhole Chloe as the bitch and intertwine that with slutiness to indicate a lack of self-respect and moral depravity. She has a clandestine affair with the sleazy married gym coach (of course) and appears to be making her rounds among the boys of the gang. We’re supposed to pity her desperation, but also feel entirely unsympathetic towards her for bringing it on herself. Since Chloe serves to highlight Rae’s naivete and innocence, her characterization falls a bit flat. On one hand, Rae and Chloe illustrate that self-esteem and body image issues exist all across the size spectrum. Chloe may have the advantage of thin privilege, but her insecurities still lead her to squander the resulting opportunities.
However, it makes me uncomfortable that we are still encouraged to demonize Chloe. Why? Because she’s promiscuous? Rae is just as sexual as she is, “experience” be damned. Because she’s two-faced? Rae spends most of the first season lying to almost everyone about almost everything. Because she’s mean to Rae? Rae frequently insults and slut-shames Chloe in her diary, especially when Chloe unknowingly begins to pursue Rae’s crush. All I’m saying is that it smacks too much of the obnoxious “I’m not like other girls” Manic Pixie exceptionalism mentality. Rae and Chloe aren’t as different as Rae would like us to think. The narrative shouldn’t be using Rae as a vehicle to tell the audience what bad femininity supposedly looks like. Much like Chloe, she doesn’t need to put other people down to validate her own perspective. She’s a worthy protagonist in her own right. The whole idea of the plain Jane underdog is completely pointless if it merely flips the social hierarchy.
(Significant series 2 spoilers ahead)
Rae and Finn grow closer throughout the first season.
Despite some bumps in the road, Rae integrates with the gang and even starts a budding romance with softhearted bad boy Finn (Nico Mirallegro, my future husband, packing enough eyebrow game to kill a man). The opening scene of the second season cuts straight to the point and shows Finn fingering Rae. A sex scene between two teenagers focused exclusively on female pleasure, imagine that. Rae continues to grapple with poor self-image, exacerbated by the start of school. Her nagging anxieties force her to confront her biggest fear – how Finn, a traditionally attractive boy, could ever want to be with someone as allegedly undesirable as her. It’s definitely hard to watch her go through all the same triggering things over and over, but I guess that’s true to life when you’re dealing with lifelong psychological scars. She seems to be teetering on sabotaging her own happiness. After all the trials and tribulations of last year, it’s depressing to think of her stability as a flash in the pan. A mysterious new boy looks to be shaping up as a new love interest, because apparently a love triangle is mandatory to signify a female character’s ascension into Everygirl Protagonist territory. Barf. Romantic angst is the last thing Rae needs. Body insecurities and fear of vulnerability also prevent Rae from going all the way with Finn. On that note, I can’t think of a show that objectifies male characters as much as My Mad Fat Diary objectifies Finn. We don’t usually see the adolescent girl gaze and it’s really refreshingly weird.
What is normal, anyway?
Ultimately, fat-positive shows remain evasive. My Mad Fat Diary certainly has its pros and cons. Rae is indeed a smart, likeable plus-sized protagonist. Still, the message persists that self-acceptance for fat people (and fat women in particular) is only accessible by way of obligatory despair, self-hatred, and the need for constant outside validation. Hands down, Rae’s biggest obstacle is not the the prejudice of others, but her own internalized toxic mentality. It’s almost as if Rae has to admit society has broken her umpteen times before finally settling in to a niche of lukewarm tolerance. Give her some degree of agency, for fuck’s sake. The perpetual broken bird routine is wearing thin. Why can’t she just be allowed to like who she is? Rae appears to be challenging herself with that same question.
My Mad Fat Diary is a fun step in the right direction, but it still has a long way to go.
So far, this is Kristen Bell’s season to shine as the hard-hearted Jeannie Van Der Hooven on Showtime’s ‘House of Lies.’
So far, this is Kristen Bell’s season to shine as the hard-hearted Jeannie Van Der Hooven on Showtime’s House of Lies.
Whether we’re talking about the characters on Girls or (confusingly) the adorable lead on The Mindy Project, it seems like being “unlikable,” at least when we’re talking about women, has come to mean “having a personality that not everyone likes.” Far from being the sociopaths that carried Breaking Bad and Dexter, “unlikable” female characters are often women who basically mean well, but come off as being disagreeable, self-centered, or rude.
That’s unfortunate, and it raises a whole slew of questions about the way we watch television – like, “Why are we, as viewers, less prepared to love a woman who says ugly things than a man who cuts people up with a chainsaw?” – but it also distracts from the really unlikable women on TV – the ones who don’t really mean well, who hurt other people on purpose – and the challenges of telling a story about them.
House of Lies, which is now midway through a surprisingly strong third season, has lately devoted a lot of time to the really unlikable woman in the form of Jeannie Van Der Hooven (Kristen Bell), a calculating, manipulative business management consultant who’s not only willing, but happy to destroy whoever she has to as part of her climb to the top.
House of Lies has always traded in unlikable characters – in fact, one of the problems with the first season was that there was no one to cheer for. The heroes are a team of management consultants who bullshit their clients (equally unlikable representatives of corporate America) into paying them outrageous sums of money for absolutely nothing. They sometimes crush the companies they work with, order massive layoffs, and knowingly promote products and services that are dangerous, fraudulent, or exploitative. Advertising for the third season has tried harder to frame the show as a contest between evil and evil, where we cheer for Jeannie and her one-time boss, Marty (Don Cheadle), because they’re smart and the people they’re screwing over are often equally bad. Since the start of season two, the show has worked to clarify that it isn’t a big ode to capitalism and that it’s aware of its characters’ failings.
That’s been a successful strategy overall, but things really clicked this season when Jeannie, who was never that soft to begin with, hardened up into a white-collar sociopath. It’s a move that takes all of Kristen Bell’s unflappable, charismatic charm, and transforms it into the calculated veneer of a cold-hearted snake, and it’s the most thrilling thing I’ve ever witnessed on this show.
Having split off from Marty at the end of season two, Jeannie begins season three on a high. She’s been given a big promotion at the management firm and heads her own team of consultants. She’s got the boss in her pocket, and one of the first things we see her do is steal a major account from one of her peers.
In what’s probably a nice bit of foreshadowing, Marty has a trippy dream right around the same time in which Jeannie, who’s come to kill him, is so consumed with getting revenge, and so certain of her impending triumph, that she doesn’t see danger sneak up from behind.
The next thing we know, Jeannie walks into work to discover that the firm has re-hired an old enemy of hers, a misogynist jerk called The Rainmaker. Jeannie got him fired in the first season by confessing that she slept with him to further her career (the confession itself was a calculated attempt to save her own job), and now he’s replacing pocket boss, and starting a boys club for boys with the guy she stole an account from.
The writers help us to cheer for Jeannie by reframing The Rainmaker’s actions as sexual harassment (something that wasn’t made clear in the first season) and by showing us that, regardless of what might do, she’s always going to be on the outs as a woman. They used a similar strategy with Marty in season two, highlighting the racism he faced as a Black man, and, in both cases, it’s an effective way of bringing us around to the characters’ sides. Although they’re both very greedy, conniving people, they’re also at an unfair disadvantage. It doesn’t erase our disapproval of their methods, but it helps us to celebrate their wins.
With only a few hours to process The Rainmaker’s threatening return, Jeannie completely changes her strategy, screws over Marty, steals a major client from the firm, and uses it as leverage to get equity in Marty’s private consulting company. As a parting “fuck you” to the firm, she convinces one of her subordinates – the naïve, gentle-hearted Benita, who sees Jeannie as a mentor – to torch her own career by reporting details the firm’s shady dealings to the press. To underscore what a cynical, self-serving move this is, Jeannie gives what initially appears to be a sincere speech about how she admires Benita’s principles – how they remind her of the girl she used to be – that gradually starts to turn sour as we realize she’s setting Benita up.
We can practically hear the music from Game of Thrones start to play as Jeannie climbs into the elevator, so ruthless is her victory. The following episode finds her reunited with Marty, at Kaan and Associates, where she wastes no time in alienating one of her new subordinates, Caitlin. When a client makes inappropriate sexual comments to Caitlin during a meeting, Jeannie appears to stand up for her, only to reveal, later, when Caitlin tries to thank her, that her only motive was to align herself with the client’s more decorous business partner. This is followed by an impatient, condescending lecture about how much Caitlin sucks at her job, to which she can only say “wow.”
What’s interesting about the scene – other than the fact that it passes the Bechdel Test with flying colours – is that the show allows Jeannie to be correct in the substance of what she’s saying at the same time as being bankrupt of any human warmth or compassion. It’s not an “awkward moment” kind of unlikeableness, where maybe she meant to say something nice but was hampered by some minor personality flaws – she’s being harsh on purpose. And, in back to back episodes, we see this come out specifically in situations where we might normally expect her to nurture, encourage, or support other women who look up to her. It’s a dynamic we don’t often see on TV (especially not from this side), and it’s fascinating to watch.
Jeannie finishes the episode off by going home early, and making sure that Marty sees that she’s going home early, in order to remind him that he’s not in charge. Marty, who’s been trying to make peace with Jeannie, and sees her as being somewhat of a friend, explains in a fairly heartfelt way (while still trying to re-establish control) that he worked very hard all his life to have something that was his, and that she should appreciate what it means that he gave her half of it. Jeannie rejects him and says, “You didn’t give me anything. I took it.”
The moment she says it, we know that it’s true. Everything she’s done makes sense from a practical point of view, but there’s a meanness, and an anger underneath. This is a woman who knew she was taking half of his dream and did it, in part, just to hurt him.
Jeannie’s story line this season isn’t just interesting because of the way it characterizes women, but because it represents House of Lies becoming what I think it wants to be — evil versus evil; the smart and the mean outfoxing each other; what Marty and Jeannie have made themselves into, to take things from people they hate.
I’m loving this season more than I thought I could love House of Lies, and it’s all down to one of the worst people I’ve ever seen. A woman I would never want to be in the same room with, who’s vindictive, and greedy, and mean, at the heart of a story about power and people who scrape themselves raw just to get it.
I’m excited to see how this ends.
Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about TV and movies on her blog.
A lot of rapes that occur on film and TV are unnecessary and unrealistic while subtly serving to punish the rape victim, to pruriently show the dehumanization of victims (most frequently women), and to trigger audience members who are survivors. A show like ‘Bates Motel’ that so cavalierly uses a tired and painful device in its first episode is definitely not worth my time.
Bates Motel drawing
Written by Amanda Rodriguez Trigger Warning: Rape, Sexual Assault
Since I really liked Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho when I was younger, I decided to give the A&E prequel series Bates Motela try. Despite that the cinematography was rich, the actors were quality, and the atmosphere was a great mix of foreboding while paradoxically retro and contemporary, I was roughly halfway through the first episode when I turned it off and washed my hands of it. What makes me think I can give a worthwhile review of a series that I watched for only 20-30 minutes? A rape occurs in that first episode about halfway in, and I know enough about TV formulas, characterizations, and plotlines to safely determine that this rape was gratuitous. A lot of rapes that occur on film and TV are unnecessary and unrealistic while subtly serving to punish the rape victim, to pruriently show the dehumanization of victims (most frequently women), and to trigger audience members who are survivors. A show like Bates Motel that so cavalierly uses a tired and painful device in its first episode is definitely not worth my time.
The Bates Motel at night
I generally think rating systems, especially Hollywood’s, are for the birds (maybe even the Hitchcockian birds… har, har). The MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) is a joke with its Catholic priest sitting in on viewings along with its hatred of all things involving female pleasure (check out the documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated to learn more about the secret society that is America’s rating board). I’ve been known to gleefully watch trailers, waiting for the rating description only to scoff, mock, and laugh. My personal favorite is still, “Some scenes of teen partying.” However, maybe I wouldn’t mind a system that cued its viewers in a way that, say, the new Swedish rating system does by integrating the now famous Bechdel Test to judge the level of female involvement in a film. If we’re going to be given a heads up about a film or TV show’s content prior to watching it, there should absolutely be a trigger warning system. The number of survivors of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) seems to be growing every day, so the compassionate, responsible thing to do would be to let viewers know if there are scenes of combat violence, sexual assault, child abuse, etc.
Norma Bates is attacked in her home
To give you an idea of the visceral response seeing certain triggering acts on film can cause in someone with PTSD, I’m going to describe to you what happened to me while watching the scene in Bates Motel where Norma Bates was attacked and raped in her home. The former owner of the Bates property, Keith Summers, breaks into the Bates house when Norma is home alone. He attacks her with a knife, brutally beats her, and rapes her. The familiar prickling of my skin and elevated heart rate kicked in when it became clear that Keith was planning to rape Norma. My thoughts were racing; I kept telling myself that she would get away, that she would fuck his shit up because she’s a manipulative murderess, but that didn’t happen. As Keith raped Norma, I found myself in a blind panic, yelling aloud, “STOP! STOP! STOP!” while crawling across the floor to get to the TV to turn it off because I no longer had the motor functions required to walk or use a remote control. After turning off the TV, I sat on the floor, breathing heavily, staring off in a daze. I did housework then, trying to calm down, trying to lift the feeling of dark ooze filling up inside me. After several hours of this, I was lucky enough to have a kind and perceptive friend call me, discern something was wrong, and let me vent about how upsetting and unnecessary the scene was.
Norma cleans up blood.
I ask you, should anyone be forced to go through that? I’ve continued to be bothered by that scene days later and outraged enough to be compelled to write about it. If there had been a warning at the beginning of the episode that it contained scenes of sexual violence, I would’ve been prepared or, more likely, chosen to watch something else.
Despite the fact that I was triggered by this scene, I have thought and thought about it as objectively as possible to discern whether or not the scene did have value, and my conclusion is that Norma’s rape was, in fact, a broad application of a storytelling technique that is overkill. The scene is designed to render Norma helpless and to give justification to her future actions and neuroses. Guess what? Norma was already crazy before she was raped; she may or may not have murdered her husband, and he may or may not have been an abusive asshole. She already had an unhealthily sexual relationship with her son as evinced by her jealousy, possessiveness, and physicality with him. Not only that, but home invasions are traumatic events on their own. Having her home broken into and being beaten and knifed by a man are all enough to give Norma PTSD and to incite dysfunctionality. We already have all the justification for her behavior here without having Norma raped as a cheap plot device.
Bloody Norma Bates
What is the function, then, of having Norma raped? Would this have happened if young Norman, instead, was home alone and Keith had attacked? It’s hard to see Norma’s rape as anything other than bringing a powerful woman low, turning her into an object that is acted upon, divesting her of her status as a subject. I also can’t help but see Norma’s rape as an intended lesson for Norman. After Norma told him he couldn’t go out, Norman climbed out of his window to hangout at a party with some cute girls. Knowing his mother was attacked and raped and he wasn’t around to stop it does more to service the forwarding of Norman’s feelings of responsibility and male protectiveness towards his mother, which I think still would’ve been possible if Norma suffered a home invasion and not a rape. This means Norma’s rape isn’t even about her. Talk about lack of subjectivity.
Norma and Norman after the attack
Norma’s rape is also problematic in the same way that many Hollywood depictions of rape are: they are intensely physically violent. Of course, rapes like that occur, and, of course, strangers rape people they’ve never met, but these things don’t happen with nearly the frequency their coverage by mainstream film and TV would lead us to believe. In addition to Bates Motel, some key examples of these physically brutal rapes are: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Downton Abbey, House of Cards (the rape is described by the survivor…not shown), Leaving Las Vegas, I Spit on Your Grave, and Straw Dogs (a Peckinpah film that caused massive controversy and was banned in the UK because the rape victim actually began to enjoy her rape). The list goes on and on. The problem with rape scenes like these are that they obscure and delegitimize rapes that are perpetuated without physical abuse. As far as the media is concerned, rapes where the victim is beaten are more cut-and-dry. The rape that occurs between friends or a married couple where the victim simply says “no” are apparently more questionable as to whether or not the victim “wanted it.” Depictions of such monstrous acts make it hard to see our fathers, brothers, husbands, and friends as rapists, but, most of the time, that’s who they are, not the psychotic strangers Hollywood would have use believe in.
Norma Bates meets her attacker
This mentality and this refusal to show the true gamut of situations in which rape and sexual assault occur is harmful to survivors. Because their rape didn’t involve slapping and screaming, it takes a long time for many survivors to even acknowledge and accept that they were raped. Many survivors doubt that their claims will be believed. Many survivors’ claims aren’t believed. This allows many perpetrators to go free without any consequences, and because there was no kicking and crying, I suspect many perpetrators don’t even believe that they are rapists. Isn’t that a scary thought? We value nuance and realism in film and TV characterization; why don’t we place the same value on the varied experience of survivors? Rape culture insists that we only see a narrow representation of rape because if we admit that rape occurs in so many different contexts and with so many different circumstances, then we must admit that rape is a pandemic, that survivors are telling the truth, and that we need to do something about it.
——-
Amanda Rodriguez is an environmental activist living in Asheville, North Carolina. She holds a BA from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio and an MFA in fiction writing from Queens University in Charlotte, NC. She writes all about food and drinking games on her blog Booze and Baking. Fun fact: while living in Kyoto, Japan, her house was attacked by monkeys.
The women of ‘House of Cards’ are not “Strong Female Characters.” They are well-written characters with a great deal of power, which they wield alongside the men. They are integral parts of the narrative. When female complexity and power is written into the narrative, everything else–including passing the Bechdel Test–effortlessly falls into place.
Novelist Elmore Leonard said, “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.” I think about that often when looking for or critiquing the dearth of feminist film and television. We often wring our hands over the Bechdel Test and the lack of “Strong Female Characters.”
Ideal feminist media would be like Leonard’s ideal writing–films and shows that don’t feel like they’re trying to be feminist. They just are. Complex women and women’s stories that aren’t just pieces of the whole, but are woven in seamlessly throughout the narrative–that’s what I want.
House of Cards delivers.
Last year, after season 1 debuted on Netflix to critical and popular acclaim, Amanda Rodriguez and I both wrote about House of Cards and the wonderfully complex female characters (see: “The Complex, Unlikable Women of House of Cards” and “Claire Underwood: The Queen Bee in House of Cards“). The simultaneously awful and wonderful female characters whose stories were essential to the action in every single episode. Nothing ever felt forced, and the fact that these women were both sympathetic and loathsome was an absolute delight for those of us feminist viewers who are tired of “strong female characters” who pay lip service to some kind of surface-level inequality.
House of Cards’s feminism is remarkable, because it feels wholly unremarkable.
Season 2 debuted on Feb. 14, and although Netflix doesn’t reveal exact numbers, Variety reports that the viewership in the first few hours “soared,” with many subscribers watching multiple episodes at once.
And since the only Olympic-style sport we are interested in in our home is the long-form binge watch, we were finished with season 2 by Saturday night. Within the first two episodes, I was fairly certain this was the most feminist TV drama I’ve seen–because what we want (complexity, equality, and representation) is woven in seamlessly. House of Cards is not primarily about a man. It’s not primarily about a woman. It’s about people.
In the promo materials for season 1, we saw Frank Underwood sitting alone in Lincoln’s monument. Ostensibly, he’s the show’s protagonist. And in season 1, I suppose it did often feel that way.
However, the season 2 poster features Frank again sitting in Lincoln’s seat, but Claire is sitting on top of it also. From the first shot of season 2–Frank and Claire running together–we know that Frank isn’t really our sole protagonist at all anymore.
The first two episodes tie up many loose ends from season 1, and introduce new ones for season 2. In the first episode, Claire picks up her appointment with the fertility doctor not, as we learn, to become pregnant herself, but to find out more about the drug that Gillian is on so she can threaten to withhold her insurance from her, thus getting what she wants from Gillian. “I’m willing to let your child wither and die within you,” Claire says to Gillian. Frank pushes Zoe Barnes into the path of an ongoing train, and she is killed. Frank, who has taken his place as vice president, courts Jackie Sharp to be the House Majority Whip. Why? Her military record of having to order strikes and kill people (including women and children) shows Frank that she is a bastion of ruthless pragmatism, which is how he and Claire move forward; and with this, season 2 begins.
In the following episodes, Claire faces her rapist (who assaulted her in college, and now Frank must give him an award for his military service), and honestly tells Frank how she wants to “smash things” and how much she wants to talk about it. These scenes were excellent because she didn’t let Frank be the vengeful husband. She stopped him, and then kept her power by talking about the assault. It wasn’t presented as if her sexuality was Frank’s to protect; the experience was hers. She wants to let her husband in, but she doesn’t want him to avenge her honor. That’s her job.
When she goes on national television and admits to having an abortion, she says that it was to end the pregnancy that resulted from the sexual assault. She named her attacker, and a young woman called in to the show, saying that he had assaulted her as well. This kicks off a season-long story line about a military sexual assault bill that pits women against women and shows the politics of justice as being just that: politics.
Claire bares all–in her own way–on national television.
But here’s the rub: Claire had three abortions, not one, and none were from the rape. She is matter-of-fact with her doctor and press secretary that she had three abortions, and we learn that one was during the campaign with Frank, and two were when she was a teenager. One could see these story lines as using infertility, rape, and abortion as plot points.
And you know what? It’s fantastic. I love that these typically silent or exploited topics get so much air time in House of Cards, and that Claire is more human for having gone through so much, yet she uses it all for political and personal gain. (A recent study showed that when female characters consider or have an abortion in film or TV, they are disproportionally killed or at least punished.)
When done properly, I applaud these female-specific plot points. These events are plot points in women’s lives, and they should be used well on screen. House of Cards does just that.
Historically, men have wars and external, political struggles to define and provide fodder for their journeys (both fictional and non). We see this represented with Frank’s visit to the Confederate re-enactors and his war miniatures. Women’s struggles and choices–infertility, sexual assault, and abortion–are widespread and underrepresented. To have Claire live through and use these experiences is refreshing and brilliant (and appropriately villainous).
The season goes on to show the fallout that Claire receives from admitting to having an abortion (even though she publicly says she had one after a rape), including an attempted bomb attack by a man whose wife had had an abortion, and the angry, vitriolic protesters outside her home. (She tells Megan, the young sexual assault victim at one point, “They’re loud, but I think we need to be louder.”) What a great message.
Claire is a horrible human being for many, many reasons–but her abortions aren’t included in those reasons. The show makes that clear.
Jackie–Frank’s replacement and sometimes-ally sometimes-adversary–is a force. She, in her relationship with Remy, is the one who initially isn’t interested at all in a relationship. She gets tattooed to help deal with the pain of the deaths she was responsible for in the military. She’s powerful and political, and we see her as both the enemy and ally throughout the season.
Jackie, adding on to her poppy tattoo (symbolic in its remembrance of bloodshed in war, and therapeutic in its pain).
In addition to the complex shaping of women’s stories and the characters themselves, the way the show handles masculinity and sexuality seems revolutionary.
In season 1, it’s evident when Frank goes back to his alma mater that he had had a sexual relationship with a close male friend. There wasn’t much hoopla about this, it just was what it was. In season 2, Claire, Frank, and their bodyguard, Edward Meechum, have a threesome. The next day, Frank says to Meechum as he gets in the car, “It’s a beautiful day.” And that’s all there is to it. Meanwhile, Rachel has developed a relationship with Lisa, and it’s portrayed as a loving partnership (although the camera does linger on their sex scene while it artfully pans away from the aforementioned threesome).
There’s no moral focus or panic about people’s sexuality. It just–is what it is. No fanfare. And the fact that we get to see women having orgasms (in season 2, an especially steamy scene between Jackie and Remy) is a pleasant detour from the norm as well.
“Nowadays the princesses all know kung fu, and yet they’re still the same princesses. They’re still love interests, still the one girl in a team of five boys, and they’re all kind of the same. They march on screen, punch someone to show how they don’t take no shit, throw around a couple of one-liners or forcibly kiss someone because getting consent is for wimps, and then with ladylike discretion they back out of the narrative’s way.”
The women of House of Cards are not “Strong Female Characters.” They are well-written characters with a great deal of power, which they wield alongside the men. They are integral parts of the narrative. When female complexity and power is written into the narrative, everything else–including passing the Bechdel Test–effortlessly falls into place.
This is ruthless pragmatism: feminist style, and it is excellent. In a sea of male anti-heroes on TV, it’s time that women share the stage. House of Cards shows its hand, and it’s a royal flush, with the queen right next to the king.
Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri.
