Tag: Caitlin Moran

Women in Sports Week: Bend It Like Bynes: Ambivalent Empowerment in ‘She’s the Man’

Everybody has a secret …
This is a guest post by Caitlin Moran.
The first time I saw She’s the Man, I was in the middle of a 23-hour band trip bus ride, and probably in the first stages of delirium. I had low expectations for the movie, and even lower expectations for what remained of my sanity—and yet, when one of the chaperones popped in the She’s the Man DVD, I found myself loving it. I was sitting next to my best friend and varsity soccer teammate, and we were both loopy enough from extended time on the road to enjoy the goofier moments of the movie while still reveling in the extended soccer scenes. Still, I wasn’t sure what to expect when I returned to the movie seven years later to examine its depiction of high school sports—watching Amanda Bynes change clothes and genders on a Spin the Apple carnival ride can only be funny so many times, right? (Wrong—I will never not laugh at that scene.) But whether the rest of the movie would uphold the integrity of the female athlete was a different story altogether.

Justin and the rest of the Cornwall boys. You’re gonna regret this, bro.

Like that other perennial high school favorite set on an unbelievably beautiful campus, She’s the Man is based loosely—loosely—on Shakespeare, in this case Twelfth Night. Bynes plays Viola Hastings, a high school soccer star, living out the last days of summer playing the beautiful game with beautiful people, including her boyfriend Justin (Robert Hoffman), on the beach. But the start of school brings unwelcome surprises: in the first ten minutes of the movie, Viola and her teammates discover that their school, Cornwall Prep, has eliminated the girls soccer team, leaving them without a way to showcase their skills for prospective college scouts. (Viola harbors dreams of wearing the Carolina blue at UNC Chapel Hill, no doubt a nod to the women’s soccer legends like Mia Hamm and Kristine Lilly, among others, who played there.) If this were a very different movie, Viola would have brought a Title IX claim against Cornwall, and we would have been treated to courtroom montages instead of training scenes. But Viola takes a different route: after Justin laughs in her face at the idea of the girls trying out for the boys’ team—and gets himself epically dumped—Viola hatches a plan to impersonate her twin brother Sebastian (secretly in London with his bandmates) at rival high school Illyria, make the boys’ soccer team there, and beat Justin at his own game. Literally.

Hell hath no fury like a girls soccer team scorned

Complications ensue, as they must. Viola-as-Sebastian finds herself in the middle of a messy love triangle between her hunky roommate Duke (Channing Tatum, at his most bro-with-a-heart-of-gold) and Duke’s object of affection, Olivia (Laura Ramsey), who begins falling for “Sebastian” during intimate chats over dissected animals in science lab. Circling this sticky wicket are Monique (Alexandra Breckinridge), the real Sebastian’s horrid girlfriend who refuses to be dumped, and Viola’s mother (Lynda Byrd), who cherishes dreams of seeing her little tomboy walk across the stage as a debutante. Oh, and there’s a tarantula.
Even in the midst of all the hullabaloo, the movie does manage to devote a fair amount of time to soccer. Viola tries out for the boys’ team and makes second string, after informing Coach Dinklage, played by real-life footballer/testicle-grabber Vinnie Jones, that she is unable to play on the “skins” team in shirts v. skins because she is “allergic to the sun”—and yes, you can buy that phrase on a hoodie. Second string, however, isn’t good enough to get Viola on the field against Cornwall, so she strikes a bargain with Duke: he’ll help her up her game enough to make first string in time for the Cornwall game, and she’ll convince Olivia to give Duke a date. They both succeed, but when the real Sebastian returns from London the night before the big game, Viola’s tangled web begins to unravel. But still—I’m sure you can guess where this is going, in the end, right down to the final game-deciding penalty kick awarded to Viola against—surprise!—Cornwall goalie Justin.
Who is that handsome fellow?
 
Viola’s conquest of her gross ex is facilitated through this penalty kick, on a pitch where the winners and losers are clearly delineated. This isn’t a symbolic victory: Viola literally puts the winning point on the board. Unlike the weak, intolerable Monique, who is destined to storm in and out of scenes in a constant state of prissy frustration, Viola uses soccer to transcend her status as a girl, which otherwise would mark her as an idolized object of desire (Olivia), a walking punchline (her unfortunately headgeared classmate Eunice), or tokens of sexual conquest (her former teammates Kia and Yvonne, who pretend to be her desperate exes to increase her cred with the Illyria boys). Through her athletic talent, Viola gets to vanquish the boy who insulted and belittled her on a playing field where the subsequent victors are easily recognizable.

Amanda Bynes as Viola in She’s the Man

Interestingly, although Justin almost immediately becomes the villain who Viola must overcome, it didn’t start out that way. In fact, the first lines of the movie are Justin’s, emphatically celebrating Viola’s goal during the beach soccer game, before telling her that she’s better than half the guys on his team. Here is a perfect example of the affirming boyfriend that sunny, sassy Viola deserves. It’s only when Viola threatens to encroach on Justin’s (literal) turf that he changes his tune, agreeing with Cornwall coach Pistonek that girls can’t play sports at the same level as boys. Obviously we’re meant to revel in the downfall caused by his misogyny, and I certainly did, but we’re also meant to celebrate the willingness of Duke—and Coach Dinklage—to give Viola a spot on the team despite her gender once she’s found out. Yet I find myself unable to believe that the eminently “no homo” Duke we met in the first half hour of the movie would have reacted any differently than Justin did, if he knew that “Sebastian” was a girl all along.
In the end, She’s the Man is ambivalent about the role of soccer in Viola’s life. On one hand, Viola does prove that she can play with the boys, and at times even exceed them. She conquers Justin and Coach Pistonek, who doubted and mocked her. But everything about her soccer career is irreparably tangled up with her relationships with boys. When she decides to impersonate her brother, she’s doing it just to stick it to Justin—no UNC Chapel Hill scouts will come to see her as a boy. Even the side volley she uses to score on Justin in the final game wouldn’t have been possible without a setup from Duke (who taught her the move in the first place).

Viola (aka Sebastian) hanging with the guys

The last shot of the movie shows Viola and Duke together on the field in Illyria red, seemingly bearing out Coach Dinklage’s rather touching commitment to equality on the pitch. But whether this equality can be sustained long term—especially on a team of guys who were so impressed when Viola-as-Sebastian cruelly humiliated Monique in front of an entire restaurant—remains to be seen. And even if it can be, what happens to the rest of Viola’s former teammates, still stuck at Cornwall without a team or a twin brother to impersonate? Don’t they deserve a revenge penalty kick as well? For real-life Violas—and Kias and Yvonnes—the importance of Title IX protection can’t be overstated. What the movie could have done was show that all female athletes—not just the ones good enough to play with the boys—deserve their day on the pitch. Perhaps there will be a sequel—She’s the Man: Title IX Lawsuit. Now that’s a sports movie I would pay to see.
Caitlin Moran is a textbook editor with a penchant for sassy footnotes. After spending many years battling Western New York winters, she now lives in Queens with a cat and too many books for her apartment. Her work has appeared in Post Road, Pleiades, Pure Francis, and the Women’s Media Center blog.



Motherhood in Film & Television: Laura Petrie of ‘The Dick Van Dyke Show’

Laura (Mary Tyler Moore), Richie (Larry Matthews), and Rob (Dick Van Dyke) in The Dick Van Dyke Show

This is a guest post from Caitlin Moran

Before Mary Tyler Moore tossed her beret to the Minneapolis sky as Mary Richards, she was the sunny princess of sitcom wives and mothers as Laura Petrie on The Dick Van Dyke Show. Laura Petrie was a different kind of TV mom. She was young, only 17 when she married on-screen husband Rob. She was perpetually fresh-faced, nimble-footed and smart, a perfect foil for the gangly, handsomely goofy Van Dyke. Laura was the young mother that young mothers wanted to be. I grew up watching reruns of Dick Van Dyke on TVLand with my parents, who had grown up watching it when it originally aired in the sixties, and we all could agree that Laura Petrie was the paragon of feminine charm.
Oh, and did I mention the capri pants? She wore capri pants. She not only wore them, but she rocked them. And she not only rocked them, but she was the first housewife to wear pants on television. The credit for that style decision goes to Moore, who has stated in interviews that while TV shows were constantly showing stay-at-home moms in dresses and aprons and heels, “woman don’t wear full-skirted dresses to vacuum in.” While it may be tempting to brush aside Laura Petrie’s forward-thinking style, her lack of skirt caused a minor flap with the network censors when the show first aired in 1961 (“but how will we know she’s a woman if she’s wearing the pants???” some capris-hating misogynists may have wondered). Laura Petrie’s signature look launched capris into the 1960s fashion zeitgeist, and earned her a spot in InStyle magazine’s Top Ten Most Stylish TV Housewives of All Time.

Laura and Rob Petrie had one child together, a son named Richie. Because Richie is in elementary school for the whole of the show, Laura’s role as a mother focuses on the challenges of raising a small child. She worries that he might be sick when he refuses a cupcake, and helps Rob explain why Richie’s middle name is Rosebud. (It’s an acronym for the names that their parents and grandparents suggested for the baby. Unsurprisingly, that was Rob’s idea.) In the episode “Girls Will Be Boys,” Richie comes home from school three days in a row with bruises on his face, and admits that a girl has been beating him up. After Rob’s visit to the suspected lady bully’s father turns up empty, Laura goes to the child’s house to get to the bottom of the strange beatings. After the girl’s mother insults and dismisses her, Laura refuses to leave until she’s said her piece. “You may not be the rudest person I’ve ever met,” she declares with her trademark quiver, “but you are certainly in the top two.” Door slam, and our girl storms off with the moral high ground and not a hair out of place in her perfect coif.

Laura was never afraid to stand up to her husband when Richie was involved. In the memorable episode “Is That My Boy??” Rob believes that he and Laura have brought home the wrong baby from the hospital. Laura, just days removed from giving birth, attempts to be the voice of reason to her emotionally overwrought husband and, when that fails, plants herself as a barricade in front of the cradle as Rob answers the door to let in the couple he believes took home his actual baby. The ending of the episode, of course, is the most famous of the entire series—the couple that Rob has invited over, the Peters, is black, and the surprise caused one of the longest uninterrupted laughs from a studio audience in sitcom history. Laura herself has a good laugh with Mr. and Mrs. Peters at Rob’s expense, and domestic peace is restored.

Laura pouring Richie a glass of milk

That doesn’t mean that The Dick Van Dyke Show’s treatment of Laura Petrie is without its problems. It is more or less assumed throughout the show that she is a mother and a housewife above everything else, leaving her former aspirations of a dancing career behind. In season three’s “My Part-Time Wife,” Rob is woefully unable to handle Laura stepping in as a secretary at his office, even though she performs her tasks at work deftly and still keeps up the house and supports Richie. When Rob throws a grown-man tantrum over her abilities, Laura apologizes and concedes that she has been “flaunting her successes.” Everyone groan on the count of three.

And the show isn’t exactly subtle when it compares Laura’s domestic bliss with Rob’s cowriter Sally’s romantic woes. Brash, hilarious single girl Sally’s search for a fella is a constant punch line for coworker Buddy, and a source of pity for Laura. Why oh why can’t Sally just find a nice man and have a kid or two of her own? It’s bad enough that Sally writes detailed letters about her cat, Mr. Henderson, to her Aunt Agnes in Cleveland, but does Mr. Henderson have to be named after a former fiancé? Do you have to kick her when she’s down? In many ways, The Dick Van Dyke Show is a product of its era, and its obvious glorification of Laura’s married motherhood over Sally’s career life speaks to a time before the women’s liberation movement, before NOW and Gloria Steinem and certainly before Mary Richards. The tension between career, marriage and motherhood has by no means disappeared (witness the recent debacle over Hilary Rosen’s criticisms of Ann Romney), but to see it played for laughs so openly is disheartening.
Though it has its faults, The Dick Van Dyke Show remains a monument to early-60s Kennedy-era optimism (in fact, the first episode aired on the very day Kennedy was sworn in as president), and no character represents the youthful promise of Camelot more than the Jackie-esque Laura Petrie. In his memoir Dick Van Dyke: My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business, Dick Van Dyke describes her charm thusly: “The first time I stood across from here in rehearsal and heard her say, “Oh, Rob!” I thought, That’s it, we’re home.”
Laura Petrie is a TV mom we’d all like to come home to.

Caitlin Moran is a graduate of Boston College with a degree in English and creative writing. After spending many years battling Western New York winters, she now lives in New York City with a cat and too many books for her apartment. Her work has appeared in the Women’s Media Center, Post Road, Pure Francis, the Susquehanna Review, Winds of Change magazine, HerCampus, and other outlets.

Animated Children’s Films: The Hunchback of Notre Dame

This is a guest review by Caitlin Moran. 

Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris is not the sort of book I would even remotely consider turning into a children’s movie, so I give the Disney studios credit for trying. Whoever read that dark, unsentimental tale of attempted rape, torture, lust, revenge, kidnapping and execution, and decided, “Yes, this would make a swell children’s movie” has a greater imagination than I do. Much of the book’s R-rated material has been watered down or removed, but the grim core remains in Hunchback of Notre Dame, making this the darkest film of the 1990s Disney Renaissance.

Hunchback follows the lonely life of the titular hunchback, Quasimodo, who was forcibly taken from his mother and ensconced in Notre Dame by Frollo, a sanctimonious, scheming, positively vile judge (he adds “lecherous” to that litany by the end of the movie) whose sole purpose in life is to wipe the gypsy population of Paris out of existence. Quasi is tender and kind despite his exterior (which, while it is decried as hideous multiple times, is at worst a little disproportional and at best kind of cute), and longs for a life outside the cathedral. He gets his wish, of course, and ends up teaming up with Esmeralda, a gypsy, and Phoebus, a pretty-boy soldier hunk to save the gypsies from Frollo and Notre Dame from destruction.

Like most Disney movies, Hunchback only gives us one female character with anything to do: Esmeralda, the smokin’ hot gypsy dancer who seduces every man who so much as looks at her. (Full disclosure: I had not one but two full Esmeralda costumes as a child, an Esmeralda action figure and an Esmeralda Barbie doll). Esmeralda may be the only hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold to ever appear in a Disney movie. She gives a rousing Medieval pole-dance at the Festival of Fools, but is the only onlooker moved by Quasimodo’s brutal humiliation after he is turned on by the crowd (she also follows up a stirring call for social justice by beating the crap out of Frollo’s soldiers). She dances in the street for money, but gives the most humble, heartfelt prayer for her people out of all the worshipers in Notre Dame, who only pray for money or fame, during the lovely “God Help the Outcast.”

And unlike Ariel in The Little Mermaid, whose tribulations are almost exclusively caused by her own narrow-minded pursuit of a dreamboat she’s never spoken to, Esmeralda is street-smart and clever; her eventual capture is facilitated accidentally by Phoebus and Quasimodo, who both see themselves as her male protector and likewise rush to save her, though she was doing perfectly well on her own, thank you very much.

So did Disney finally break away from the flimsy, strong-but-need-a-man-to-save-me heroines so ensconced in their tradition? Not quite. Because never before has a Disney heroine been so objectified as a symbol of lust. In fact, Disney gives Frollo an entire song, “Hellfire,” to explore how much he wants to bang her, complete with a giant blazing fireplace and hooded harbingers of damnation. I remember sitting in the theater as a seven-year-old with my mom, a Sour Patch Kid frozen halfway to my mouth. At the time my only thought was “They’re saying Hell in a Disney movie! Cool!” but upon rewatching the movie in high school I could only marvel at how much “Hellfire” serves as the most perfect rape apologia in all of animated film. “It’s not my fault,” Frollo sings, “I’m not to blame. It is the gypsy girl, the witch who set this flame.”

Dear God.

This is the fundamental problem with the movie, which purports to leave us with the message that what is on the inside is more important than what’s on the outside, but can’t resist having a sexpot heroine whose fundamental awesomeness (she crowd surfs! she wears a knife in her garter! she vanishes in puffs of smoke!) is overshadowed by fact that she’s a 15th century pin-up who ultimately needs to be saved (twice) by the men in her life.

Esmeralda, girl, you deserved better.

—–

Caitlin Moran is a recent graduate of Boston College. She lives in New York with her cat and a mini-donut maker. Oh, and a human roommate. She’s pretty cool too.