The first season was a self-funded passion project and as it got more popular they managed to crowd fund the second season so that they could pay actors and crew; the girls did not pay themselves. They have successfully secured funding from New Zealand on Air to pay for the upcoming third and fourth seasons that should air sometime this year and I really can’t wait.
I want to tell you about a gem of a web-series that I discovered recently. It is called Flat3and it is made in a small country in the South Pacific more famous for its big-budget fantasy epics (Lord of The Rings, The Hobbit) than for small, interesting character-driven comedies. Although let us not forget Flight of the Conchords.
How to describe Flat3… It is basically everything I have ever been looking for in a web series. Smart, funny, engaging, a little bit weird, a little bit bleak, and little bit hopeful all at the same time. The show illustrates perfectly that talented Asian women can make a show that is funny and doesn’t rely on painful self-deprecation or crapping on other minorities. Ally, JJ, Perlina, and Roseanne (the director) have said that they set out to make a show that they would want to watch. It isn’t about hitting you over the head with their Asianness, it is about three women whose lives haven’t turned out quite the way they planned and how they deal with that. For me the show really captures the pain and humour of your mid-20s, post-university, now what do I do with my life phase. Think something like what Girls would be like if it was about people you actually knew. There is considerable talent at play here. Roseanne Liang is the show’s director and writer as well as wearing the co-producer hat. She was the first ever Chinese New Zealander to theatrically release a film and her movie My Wedding and Other Secrets was the highest grossing locally made film of 2011. Co-producer and cast member JJ Fong is currently starring on South Pacific Pictures’ Go Girls, one of the highest-rated locally produced shows on New Zealand television.
Ally, JJ, and Perlina
The show follows the misadventures of three flatmates–two of whom have graduated with degrees in the creative industries and are trying their best to make it in this recession-heavy world. First there is Lee, the quietest one of the three who is trying to figure out what she can do with a degree in fine art and how to date when you have never really done it before. Next there is JJ, a beautiful promo girl/actress/waitress who is struggling with what it means to be valued solely for your looks and how to be taken seriously as an actress when your big break comes from shilling feminine hygiene wipes. Then there is Perlina, straightforward and upfront yet worried that she is unlikeable and struggling to connect with her work colleagues. In the first episode that centers around her, Perlina spends her time trying to be more likeable and goes to the point of interviewing her ex-boyfriend to figure out what she did wrong and how she can improve. Despite this, it is Perlina who normally saves the day because of her ability to see through bullshit and get to the crux of an issue.
I think what I like most about Flat3, aside from the fact that it is both well-written and well-acted, is that I relate to it. In JJ, Lee, and Perlina, I see many of my friends and parts of myself. They throw awkward house parties where no one turns up and you end up getting drunk and doing stilted skits while your one cool friend looks on in horror because it seems funny at the time. Their relationships seem real to me, not weirdly competitive, just sometimes a bit fucked up with a dash of drama because sometimes people go through stuff and make bad choices, especially in your 20s when you aren’t really sure who you are and what you should be doing. It is female friendship as I recognise it: chatty, supportive, fun, and sometimes complicated.
Perlina and her friend seeking vengeance on an ex’s underwear drawer
If you have seen Flight of the Conchords you might like this, but I mean that in the generic sense of, well if you like offbeat sort of comedies that are slightly awkward but not so cringe-y that you have to close your eyes for half the episode you might like this, because really that is where the similarity ends. Highlights from the series have included: a post-coital scene that includes the clean-up of fluids (something of a unicorn on television), the line that semen tastes like “a million potential offspring crying out – and then silence,” a hitchhiker who dispenses wisdom and LSD, a fancy dress party a little bit reminiscent of Eagle vs Shark, trust exercises for accountants, and much much more.
The first season was a self-funded passion project and as it got more popular they managed to crowd fund the second season so that they could pay actors and crew; the girls did not pay themselves. They have successfully secured funding from New Zealand on Air to pay for the upcoming third and fourth seasons that should air sometime this year and I really can’t wait.
The only thing that I actively dislike about the show is the size shaming and the dehumanizing of fat people. It is so so tired for women, especially Asian women on television, to be preoccupied with their weight and the fat jokes seem out of place with the freshness of the rest of the writing. They can do much better than this and they usually do. Fat jokes make up a tiny percentage of the humor on the show (there are many more accountant jokes) and it is not enough to stop me watching but I could certainly do without them, they aren’t funny and they contribute to the marginalization of fat people generally. I am hopeful that the next two seasons will continue to bring the excellent writing and talented acting that we have seen, hopefully minus the boring fat jokes.
Ally, JJ, and Perlina
If you are looking for a fresh comedy that is silly and sometimes awkward then this is definitely the show for you. To watch, head to http://www.flat3webseries.com/ and prepare to be thoroughly entertained!
Tonight, ‘How I Met Your Mother’ will end its nine-year run with a one-hour season finale. A show that spawned countless catchphrases and running gags, ‘How I Met Your Mother’ will be remembered for its nonlinear storytelling and its portrayals of romance and friendship.
It will also be remembered as one of the most misogynistic sitcoms on TV.
Tonight, How I Met Your Motherwill end its nine-year run with a one-hour season finale. A show that spawned countless catchphrases and running gags, How I Met Your Mother will be remembered for its nonlinear storytelling and its portrayals of romance and friendship.
It will also be remembered as one of the most misogynistic sitcoms on TV.
Okay, I admit it – I’m exaggerating a little to make a point. I haven’t seen enough shows to determine whether or not it’s one of the most misogynistic sitcoms. But over the years, How I Met Your Mother has devolved into a show rife with anti-woman nastiness, making me grateful that the program is finally coming to an end.
I’m also saddened by the devolution in the show over the years, because once upon a time, I would have considered How I Met Your Mother a more progressive sitcom than most.
Robin (Cobie Smulders) and Ted (Josh Radnor) on their first date
In the first few seasons of the show, I was impressed with the show’s different take on stereotypical gender roles. I liked that Ted was the hopeless romantic who wanted nothing more than to settle down, get married, and have children, while Robin was the more pragmatic, career-minded person who wanted a more casual relationship. I liked that, even in the context of Marshall and Lily’s super-sweet relationship, Marshall was still the more sentimental of the two. I was moved by Lily’s “career vs. romance” subplot in the end of the first season because the show recognized the emotional weight of what she was feeling. I liked that Lily and Marshall’s wedding followed a typical “bride freaks out on a wedding day” plot with an unexpected and very funny “groom freaks out EVEN MORE on wedding day” plot with Marshall shaving part of his head.
Robin Scherbatsky, journalist and career woman
Even Barney, the most problematic character on the show through a feminist perspective, wasn’t so terrible in the first two seasons. Back then, Barney’s womanizing wasn’t the only aspect of his character. Barney was just a person who wanted to make every night legendary no matter what, whether it involved creating elaborate stories to get women to sleep with him, licking the Liberty Bell, paying Robin to say ridiculous things on camera, inventing a drink called the “Thankstini,” setting Ted’s jacket on fire to stop him from drunk-dialing. His treatment of women wasn’t okay, but it didn’t come from a place of showing complete contempt for anyone around him.
Somewhere along the line, all that changed.
Barney became a person whose primary goal was to trick as many women as possible into sleeping with him, and his behavior toward them became increasingly nasty and downright criminal. In season three’s “The Bracket,” he admits to having sold a woman, and in season eight’s “The Fortress,” he shows the feature of a “Ho-Be-Gone” system which wheels one-night stands into a wall. And we’re supposed to be happy that Robin married this man.
Barney (Neil Patrick Harris) and his bracket
Unfortunately, the misogyny that has pervaded How I Met Your Mother isn’t just limited to Barney. Here’s a list of just some of the most memorable misogynistic moments from the show’s history:
– Season five’s “Of Course”: Jennifer Lopez appears as a character whose sole purpose is to peddle the “Power of No.” Because we need more characters who affirm the stereotype that women like “playing hard to get.”
– Season five’s “Say Cheese”: Lily, angry that Ted has brought yet another date no one knows to her birthday party, shows him a photo of a previous year’s celebration and asks him to “name that bitch.” Not wanting strangers to attend your birthday party: fine. But what did these women do to Lily to warrant being called “bitches?”
– Season five’s “The Playbook”: All of it. But I’ll get to that later. (/SagetTed)
Barney and his “scuba diver” scam
– Season six’s “Baby Talk”: Marshall worries about having a daughter because he remembers the way he and his high school classmates used to be sexist towards the female students. (Sexual harassment is bad when it’s happening to women you care about, boys, but random bitches are free game and THEN cat-calling is hilarious!)
– Season six’s “Canning Randy”: the men leer at the day-after-Halloween parade of women walking down the street in costumes, guessing at their one-night stands. Could have been a funny gag if it had been the entire gang watching a parade of men and women returning from one-night stands, but as it was, it was just a bunch of guys snarkily judging women.
Ted, Barney, and Marshall (Jason Segel) leer at women
– Season seven’s “The Slutty Pumpkin Returns”: Lily has pregnancy brain and Marshall and Robin treat her like she has the intelligence of a two-year-old, and they prove to be right when Lily gives a stapler to a kid on Halloween.
– Season seven’s “Now We’re Even”: Barney delivers what’s supposed to be a moving monologue about the difficulties of dating a stripper and how it makes him feel to know that Quinn is dancing naked for other men, and we’re actually supposed to feel sorry for him after years of him treating women like dirt.
– Season eight’s “Lobster Crawl”: Robin acts like a simpering idiot when she’s desperate to win Barney back. She continues to be mean to poor Patrice for no reason and it’s supposed to be funny (probably because Patrice is fat).
– Season eight’s “The Final Page”: Barney proposes to Robin after a long con of making her believe that he didn’t want her, and it’s one of the most glaring examples of emotional abuse disguised as romance in recent memory.
Robin reacts to Barney’s manipulative proposal
– Season eight’s “The Fortress”: Like I said – Ho-Be-Gone.
– Season nine’s “The Broken Code”: Robin realizes she has no female friends and acts astonishingly rude to the women around her, finally confirming that she and Barney really are meant for each other, since she hates women just as much as he does.
And those are just a few.
But the biggest examples of misogyny are, of course, Barney’s two books: The Bro Code and The Playbook. Two books that are actual books that people can now buy.
And The Playbook? Is a pick-up artist’s wet dream.
Before anyone argues that it’s “just a joke,” keep in mind that there are actual websites out there dedicated to coaching men on tricking women into sleeping with them – and some of these sites actually use the character of Barney Stinson as a role model.
Yes. This book exists.
How I Met Your Mother isn’t entirely hopeless even at this late stage. The writers handled Robin’s infertility with respect. Season eight’s “The Time Travelers” was one of its best episodes, truly romantic and poignant. Marshall and Lily’s renewed vows were moving. I love everything about the Mother herself and Ted’s relationship with her, proving that this show still has a soul. But the stink of misogyny has tainted what was once one of my favorite sitcoms.
And if, at the end of tomorrow’s finale, it turns out that I dealt with all that anti-woman crap on a weekly basis only to find out that the Mother is dead in the future…if that is the direction the writers have decided to take…then burn it, burn it to the ground.
Ted and the Mother (Cristin Milioti), who had better NOT be dead
Lady T is a feminist blogger, sketch comedy writer/performer, and author of Fanged, a young adult novel available for purchase today.
Mainly though, the movie’s release has reminded us of all the supposedly simple and universal the show portrayed so well, the things that shouldn’t be notable in today’s movies and TV, but somehow are: a platonic male-female relationship, a strong friendship between teen girls who never came to blows over looks or boys, a willingness to hold its heroine accountable for her flaws, and above all, an amazing father-daughter relationship.
Frequently repeated lines:
Keith Mars: Hey…who’s your daddy?
Veronica Mars: I hate it when you say that
If you’re anything like me, you’ve read countless tributes. 1000 words here, 500 there on the class wars , miscarriages of justice and police corruption on the show that got us talking, agonizing and gleefully applying story lines to our own political climate. Tumblr raves praising the series for taking its audience seriously: delivering compelling season-long mysteries as well as episodic ones, developing character far beyond labels of good and bad, rich and poor, and committing to a dark, noir tone not often seen on a teen drama. As explored elsewhere on Bitch Flicks, Veronica Mars was also unprecedented for putting a rape survivor at the centre of a high school-set series.
Mainly though, the movie’s release has reminded us of all the supposedly simple and universal things the show portrayed so well, the things that shouldn’t be notable in today’s movies and TV, but somehow are: a platonic male-female relationship, a strong friendship between teen girls who never came to blows over looks or boys, a willingness to hold its heroine accountable for her flaws, and above all, an amazing father-daughter relationship.
No matter what, Keith will always support Veronica
Sadly neglected in the movie, where Keith Mars (Enrico Colantoni) stepped in periodically to guide Veronica (Kristen Bell) between set pieces, their relationship was notable for the great deal of understanding within it. Throughout the series, Keith was a great friend to trade sarcasm and snark with, a colleague to discuss investigations with, a partner to help make major life decisions, but never forgot his role as a parent. Even when it led to fights and weeks of radio-silence, Keith was capable of stepping out of his friend role to dish out groundings, forbid self-destructive and often criminal antics, and (attempt to) quash romantic and platonic relationships he believed capable of robbing his bright, shining daughter of her light. He always respected Veronica and her interests, independence and what’s more, genuinely liked and appreciated her as a person. Back in season one, the depth of Keith’s unconditional love was clear when we learned he had been unsure whether Veronica was biological daughter for quite some time though never let the uncertainty color his feelings for her.
It bears repeating that nuanced, complicated and respectful relationships between fathers and daughters are disturbingly rare on our screens these days. As most of us know from our everyday lives, there’s no shortage of great stories within the father-daughter (or father figure-daughter) dynamic.
Sure mother-daughter stories are important too and there are so many movies, so many TV shows that have given us mother-daughter relationships to cherish. And in every variation: jealously of the daughter’s youth coming from the mother, jealously of her mother’s independence from the daughter, disturbing romantic rivalry, close friendship that borders on symbiosis, a mother’s disappointment that her daughter is not a mini-version of herself and the mother who worried that her daughter will make the same mistakes she did (Lauren Graham seems to have made a cottage industry out of these roles in Gilmore Girls and Parenthood), and many more. You name a variation and someone’s made something about it.
All the talk about the Veronica Mars Movie got me thinking about the kind of story lines we generally see between fathers and daughters. The general population of TV dads are bumbling idiots, who don’t know their kid’s bedtimes or whether or not to give them sugary snacks. As a group, they lag behind TV mothers, who are most often called upon to play bad-cop against the over-grown man-children they married.
Fatherhood in movies brings to mind disapproving curmudgeons, gruff off-duty cops wielding a shot gun on their daughter’s dates or an absence commonly used as a ham-fisted explanation of why the female character likes older men or works as a stripper. In a growing sub-genre of action movies, it falls to a father to get revenge for his daughter’s rape or murder or try to save her (Taken, The Limey, Traffic ). 2010’s Winter’s Bone was notable for reversing this common narrative.
A young woman’s relationship with her father is rarely the focus of a narrative unless the mother is out of the picture. Usually she’s been killed off, sometimes she left the family or is somehow ill, often she chose to focus on work over family (a plot line used to make a negative point about women in the workforce).
It seems like his role is only allowed to be prominent in his daughter’s life if he is the sole parent, he can shape her only if there are no other options. Most often the single father as a character is used to explain why the female lead is a tomboy or to delve into his discomfort addressing the sex talk and menstruation. As a character, it’s unusual for the married father to do the heavy lifting or even do his share in an equal partnership. Sadly these story lines may mirror mainstream ideals of real life, where a man taking care of his children or showing an interest in his daughters is seen as effeminate or labelled as “Mr. Mom”.
Thinking about this, I made a list of notable and interesting father-daughter relationships, presented here in no particular order. Got any additions to the list? Let me know in the comments.
Atticus and Scout
Scout and Atticus Finch, To Kill a Mockingbird: Atticus Finch (Gregory Peck) is really a prince among fathers. Determined to teach his children to be good citizens who believe in fair treatment for all and are willing to take a stand for it, Atticus provides a great example. As a father to Scout (Mary Badham), he respects her tomboy identity and tries hard to allow her to have a childhood fun of innocent games, in the midst of important lessons. But he knows the way to raise her right is not shield her from tragedy and allow her to be naive about the injustice in the world. Notably for the time period, he doesn’t hold Scout and his son Jem to separate standards or unduly protect Scout as a member of the ‘weaker sex’. He holds both his children to a high standard and expects them use what they have learned in the adult world.
Howard and Samantha Newly, Samantha Who: In a twist on a common rift between fathers and daughters, Howard (Kevin Dunn) explains to an adult amnesiac Samantha (Christina Applegate), that they stopped being close when she hit puberty and stopped being the bright eyed little girl who followed him around and wanted to inherit his chicken farm one day. Unfortunately for Howard, the changes in Samantha went further than a concern for boys and fashion and she became a truly vile person, attempting to humiliate her parents at every opportunity. Rebuilding her life and trying to becoming a better person, Samantha must make amends with her father and gradually teach him to trust her again.
Richard and Olive
Richard and Olive Hoover, Little Miss Sunshine: Though he’s striving to be a motivational speaker, Richard (Greg Kinnear)’s greatest challenge may be supporting his seven-year old daughter, Olive (Abigail Breslin), who wants nothing more than to be a beauty queen. Like every father, he wants to believe his daughter is the most beautiful little girl out there, but the very fact of a beauty pageant makes it clear to him that she can’t compete and he’s certain she will be humiliated. But Olive has a trick up her sleeve, a risqué dance performance and the uproar caused by it, leads Richard to abandon his worries and join her on stage, preventing official from stopping her. Richard truly becomes a supportive father, after, when instead of lecturing Olive, he tells her how proud her late grandfather would be of her.
Tony and Meadow
Tony and Meadow Soprano, The Sopranos: Tony (James Gandolfini)’s relationship with his daughter is complex: on one hand, she’s his smartest, most hard-working child, the one who reminds him of all the things he likes about himself, but on the other, she’s the girl. In the world of old-fashioned, frequently misogynistic values Tony inhabits, this means she’s always going to be second best and must be kept virginal. Like other fathers with Tony’s value system, protecting his daughter drives him to do despicable things, like threatening her half jewish, half black boyfriend. But the degree to which Tony values Meadow (Jamie-Lynn Sigler) and sees her as his great hope for a legacy (he dreams of her becoming a pediatrician), is one of the areas where he chafes against his mob lifestyle throughout the course of the series.
Mel and Cher Horowitz, Clueless: As a modern day update of Jane Austen’s Emma, Beverly Hills schoolgirl Cher (Alicia Silverstone) plays nursemaid to her father (Dan Hedaya), reminding him of his high cholesterol, planning his wardrobe and his birthday parties. A successful litigator, he scares and intimidates nearly everyone he comes into contact with, except Cher, who has learned to use negotiation tactics against him and usually gets her way. As no mention is made of Cher’s college prospects or the value she personally sees in good marks, her efforts to raise her grades seem intended to make him proud of her, something she values above all else.
Matt with Alex and Scottie
Matt and Alex and Scottie King, The Descendants: It takes an accident that leaves Elizabeth, his wife, comatose to bring Matt (George Clooney) together with his daughters. Alex (Shailene Woodley), his elder daughter is a rebellious teenager that he was previously unable to understand, while Scottie (Amara Miller) behaves inappropriately with other children. The real story of the movie, is Matt’s connection to Alex which strengths through the tragedy as he comes to respect his daughter and she her as a person independent from him. In the search for Elizabeth’s lover, Alex reveals her ingenuity and her continuing loyalty to him even when their bond was troubled. Ultimately restructuring their family as a three-person unit, the King’s learn to rely on each other and find solace even in the hardest times.
Mac and Juno MacGuff, Juno: Mac (J.K. Simmons) supports Juno (Ellen Page) through two adult situations she is in no way prepared for: having a baby and falling in love. He’s always there for her and his wise, though ornery talks help her to work towards mature decisions and provide turning points for her character. He has a sense of humor about everything that’s happening, something he’s clearly passed down to his daughter and provides just the right balm to soothe, (though realistically not eliminate) her pain.
Homer and Lisa
Homer and Lisa Simpson, The Simpsons: Homer (Dan Castellaneta)’s struggles to connect with Lisa (Yeardley Smith), lead to some of the most heart-warming episodes of the series. Homer is cartoonishly dumb even for a cartoon and Lisa’s genius IQ and sophisticated interests make her completely alien to him. On several occasions he breaks his back to make her dreams come true, notably taking a demeaning second job to get her the pony of a little girl’s dream. When he becomes temporarily intelligent after removing a crayon from his brain, Homer is able to see what Lisa’s life is like and comes to respect her strength in a way that was impossible before. Likewise, in each Homer-Lisa episode, Lisa gains a new appreciation of the sacrifices Homer makes for her happiness. However, because of the show’s format, any progress Homer and Lisa make understanding each other, resets by the end of the episode.
Clancy and George Lass, Dead Like Me: It is only after her death that grim reaper George (Ellen Muth) comes to understand her father, a man she hasn’t given a lot of thought to since she was a child. Sitting in on the poetry class he teaches, she comes to understand him as a person and to identify with him. Clancy (Greg Kean) is never shown as a great dad, already introverted to a fault, his grief over George’s death leads him to shut everyone out and ultimately, he has an affair and leaves his wife and surviving daughter. But George’s glimpse of him as an imperfect person, who loved her very much but had no idea how to show it, mirrors the realizations many of us have about our parents at some point as we grow up.
Jack and Andie
Jack and Andie Walsh, Pretty in Pink: To a teenager’s mind, anything wrong in her life her parents’ fault. As the chief conflict in Pretty In Pink is Andie (Molly Ringwald)’s status as a girl from “the wrong side of the tracks”, it’d be easy for her to see her underemployed father as a one-dimensional villain, keeping her from a better life. But through a painful confrontation scene, it becomes clear that Jack (Harry Dean Stanton) is still depressed about Andie’s mother leaving them and is so broken he is unable to move on and give his daughter what she needs. So far in her life, Andie has been the more mature of the pair, the one who’s forced to take care of him. It’s a difficult situation, but it’s an honest one and Jack and Andie’s conversation gives hope that things might get a least a bit better in the end. As Andie prepares her new look for prom, attempting to change her life, it’s clear Jack has also changed, symbolically moving on from his wife by putting her picture in a drawer.
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.
So, how does one of the most successful Kickstarter projects ever fare when it’s all said and done? I’m gonna go with: meh. Though the premise itself wasn’t bad and I loved being back in that world, the creator and director, Rob Thomas, just tried to cram too damn much into 107 minutes.
I’ve been a fan of the Veronica Mars TV show for the last 10 years, so it’s only fitting that I was inordinately excited about the Veronica Mars movie, where Veronica comes back to her hometown of Neptune for her 10 year high school reunion to clear her ex-boyfriend, Logan Echolls, of murder charges. The film aired in select theaters on March 14 (and is now available for digital download on Amazon and iTunes). In anticipation of the film release, I wrote a review last November called “Why Veronica Mars is Still Awesome.” Face it: I’m a marshmallow.
In reference to the pilot episode, Veronica Mars fans are lovingly called “marshmallows”
So, how does one of the most successful Kickstarter projects ever fare when it’s all said and done? I’m gonna go with: meh. Though the premise itself wasn’t bad and I loved being back in that world, the creator and director, Rob Thomas, just tried to cram too damn much into 107 minutes. For the show, Thomas had three years and three seasons, comprising 64 episodes at roughly 43 minutes a pop to build the story, the mystery, the relationships, the characters, the drama, and the amazing humor. 107 minutes isn’t nearly enough time to catch us up after 10 years away, to solve a crime, to build that rapport between beloved characters, and to give all the fans everything they wanted. It’s just too tall of an order.
The VMars team is back with Wallace and Mac
Because they were trying to do too much, the character interactions ended up falling flat. Who have these people become, and why have they changed? Where is the biting sarcasm of Logan Echolls? He joined the military, which seems symbolic of a huge personality shift, or is it just an excuse to show him in a military uniform (whites no less)? Where’s the kinship between Veronica and Wallace or the abiding love between Keith and Veronica?
Not enough smart, sassy ladies killing it
Perhaps in part because of the lackluster character interactions, the plotlines are also lacking in luster. The mystery is half-baked, and even the obligatory Veronica Mars love triangle is a weak dud of a plot point with passion being largely absent from the players (Veronica, Piz, and Logan).
Logan takes Veronica “the long way home” per her request
The Veronica Mars movie is even a bit too gimmicky. Logan in military whites, the endless stream of celebrity cameos, and the massive wet t-shirt boy fight are all a bit over the top. Now, I like celebrity cameos, and I did laugh at the outlandishness of the lengths the movie went just to give us a glimpse of Logan in a drenched v-neck, but, dammit, VMars has come dangerously close to jumping the shark.
Gender role reversal with boys in a wet t-shirt fight? Check.
Dare I confess it? I also missed the clothes. Long have I loved Veronica Mars’ fashion sense, and long have I worked to emulate her sassy ensembles.
At least the purse made an appearance…
Because of a certain baby bump actress Kristen Bell was sporting, the costumers had to get creative with her wardrobe, which left us with a lot of blazers and muted colors. Don’t get me wrong; I’m grateful that Kristen Bell decided the project was important enough to film during her pregnancy. However, both Veronica and I have aged 10 years, and I was hoping to get some tips from the master on how to stay sassy into my 30s.
Blazers everywhere all the time.
On the up side, the Veronica Mars movie did its damnedest to include all the important faces from the past like Dick Casablancas, Keith Mars, Madison Sinclair, Mac, Wallace, Weevil, Leo D’Amato, Deputy Sacks, Celeste Kane, Corny, and on and on. The film also saw fit to include some not-so-important faces like steroid trafficking baseball player, Luke Haldeman, and son-of-butler poker cash stealing Sean Friedrich, but it’s comforting to know that literally everyone wanted to come back to reprise their Veronica Mars roles. Not only that, but the movie is lovingly packed with a barrage of in-jokes for the long-time fans who’ll catch on to every wink, nudge, and nod.
Madison Sinclair finally gets her comeuppance
From a feminist standpoint, it’s about damn time Veronica finally saved herself all by herself from the scary, sticky situation she gets herself into hunting a murderer in Neptune. The film also leaves some mysteries open and sets up a new Veronica Mars future with the possibility of a new Veronica Mars spin-off (please don’t let it be a bumbling Dick Casablancas detective agency show). Since I’m a marshmallow, I’ll cherish this last hurrah in the world of Veronica Mars and keep my fingers crossed for a spin-off, but from the objective viewpoint of a film/TV critic, the Veronica Mars movie just isn’t up to snuff. There was simply too much ground to cover, too many gags, and not enough character development to let the movie live up to its legacy as the best kind of storytelling, characterization, humor, and wit television had to offer.
The super fun drinking game that I came up with for the show still works pretty well for the movie: Vodka Tonic with a Lime Twist & Veronica Mars. I hope you’ll play! [End shameless plug.]
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.
‘Strangers with Candy’ (Peter Lauer, et al., 1999-2000) is one of the most wildly subversive shows I’ve ever seen on television (most subversive shows are canceled before long–see ‘Wonder Showzen’ (Vernon Chatman and John Lee, 2005-2006, which features segments with David Cross), and it feels like I’ve waited a long time for an opportunity to rave about its hilarious characters and its clever writing. When this delightfully dark show aired on Comedy Central, I was old enough to understand that it appealed to a somewhat alternative audience, yet I was too young to fully comprehend or appreciate the satirical wit and unyielding sense of hopelessness the show conveyed to audiences. Jerri Blank (Amy Sedaris) tirelessly strives for the acceptance of her “peers” in high school, from the snooty cheerleaders and the lusted after jock to the kooky assortment of teachers, which includes Mr. Noblet, played by the wonderful Stephen Colbert, and Jerri’s ironically unsympathetic guidance counselor, Ms. Pines, played by the always funny Janeane Garofalo.
Strangers with Candy (Peter Lauer, et al., 1999-2000) is one of the most wildly subversive shows I’ve ever seen on television (most subversive shows are canceled before long–see Wonder Showzen (Vernon Chatman and John Lee, 2005-2006, which features segments with David Cross), and it feels like I’ve waited a long time for an opportunity to rave about its hilarious characters and its clever writing. When this delightfully dark show aired on Comedy Central, I was old enough to understand that it appealed to a somewhat alternative audience, yet I was too young to fully comprehend or appreciate the satirical wit and unyielding sense of hopelessness the show conveyed to audiences. Jerri Blank (Amy Sedaris) tirelessly strives for the acceptance of her “peers” in high school, from the snooty cheerleaders and the lusted after jock to the kooky assortment of teachers, which includes Mr. Noblet, played by the wonderful Stephen Colbert, and Jerri’s ironically unsympathetic guidance counselor, Ms. Pines, played by the always funny Janeane Garofalo.
After Jerri’s father is eaten by rabid dogs, a doctor tells Jerri, “Your father was dead on arrival. No matter what I did, he just kept getting deader.”
I learned rather recently that Jerri Blank is based on a real person: Florrie Fisher was a motivational speaker in the 60s and 70s who traveled to high schools and discussed her history as a prostitute and heroin addict. The series was inspired by Fisher’s public service announcement “The Trip Back,” allowing the birth of Strangers from a fairly dark origin. The “uglification” of Sedaris as she transforms into the recovering addict, Jerri Blank, is possibly most noticeable to new fans of the show. Those who worked on the show’s costume and aesthetics seemingly left no stone unturned in their attempt to make Sedaris as hideous and repulsive as possible. Jerri is a middle-aged woman who returns to high school with a sordid past of drugs and crime–much of which is left to the imaginations of viewers. With a ridiculously exaggerated overbite, strategically placed padding, and several layers of heavy makeup, Jerri is all teeth, hair and hips. Sedaris has done much in the way of writing, feminism, and DIY projects, and she has even been featured on the cover of Bust magazine.
Mr. Noblet talks with his class about the historical role of the clown, a catalyst for Jerri overcoming her grief.
Any fan of the show who is somewhat cognizant of LGBTQ visibility in television and media studies will undoubtedly pick up on the deeply closeted homosexual relationship between Mr. Noblet (Colbert) and Mr. Jellineck (Paul Dinello–whom Sedaris dated for several years). Chuck Noblet is cold, disconnected and married to a woman he loathes while Geoffrey Jellineck, Flat Point’s caring art teacher, is sensitive, sweet, and vulnerable. Although the pair are desperately in love, Chuck continually disappoints Geoffrey in a variety of twisted and unimaginable ways throughout three seasons of absurdity. Besides his refusal to publicly recognize their love, Chuck flees a romantic picnic planned by his lover as Geoffrey is hit by a car, rendering him a faceless monster for the majority of the episode. What we take away from this stagnant relationship is a model for the most dysfunctional gay romance I’ve encountered in a comedy series.
Jerri befriends a blind boy at school and blindfolds herself in an attempt to better understand him.
After exploring all her riveting career options upon graduation, Jerri tells us, “If you’re gonna reach for a star, reach for the lowest one you can.” Jerri lacks the support of her family; her flippant mother would gladly throw her middle-aged daughter under a bus, and Jerri’s closeted brother Derrick is fueled by teen angst and the desire to somehow disparage a woman who has already been defeated a thousand times over by life’s difficulties. Like most protagonists of TV dramas, Jerri is supposed to learn a significant life lesson at the end of each episode, yet the obvious message is forever lost on Jerri. In a two-part episode entitled “Blank Stare,” Jerri joins a cult that has infiltrated Flat Point. After Jerri’s teachers and principal rescue her from the brainwashed gang who are lodging at “Safe Trap House,” they force the 46-year-old high school student to look into a mirror and admit that the cult is merely a group of liars because they’ve told Jerri that she’s beautiful. Furthermore, I don’t think Strangers fans actually want Jerri to evolve and become a better person, because then she simply wouldn’t be Jerri Blank anymore.
Jerri tries out to be a cheerleader but is taunted once the squad discovers that she’s illiterate.
What’s difficult to admit about Sedaris’s character is that Jerri is truly a bad person; she hurts animals, she demonstrates the pinnacle of racist and sexist ideologies and behaviors, and she has clear predatory tendencies toward the high school girls we encounter throughout the show’s run. Jerri is obviously bisexual, and the aggressive fashion in which she proves this to us may cause more conventional viewers some discomfort. In short, Jerri violates gender roles. Sitting outside of Principal Blackman’s (Greg Hollimon) office, Jerri asks a pretty redhead, “Hey Red, carpet match the drapes?” Due to her ability to play a genuinely likable character with such transgressive traits, Sedaris is an important figure for the evolution of women and comedy; we root for Jerri even as we’re hoping she falls. Fans of the show may find themselves disliking her racist behavior, such as calling her best friend Orlando, a sweet Filipino boy, a “monkey,” while also finding that this behavior works for the character and situates her as a feminist anti-hero on Comedy Central. Sedaris successfully satirizes the traumatic high school experience–cliques, bullying, and tough teachers–and de-stigmatizes the negative “sexually aggressive woman” archetype while boasting an identity that has been socially constructed around sex, drugs and alcohol. While Jerri expects us to believe that she’s better for experiencing this depressing lifestyle and then recovering from it, the show’s writers trust us to believe that Jerry is actually a static character throughout Strangers with Candy. How, then, can a television show maintain viewership when a character fails to learn or grow? Simple: we tune in to Strangers to discover the new and twisted ways in which Jerri will fail, sink, and back-pedal; Jerri’s failures are her triumphs. This observation then points up the question: Are we sadists for watching this show? No, because I think we recognize our own flaws in the caricature nature of Jerri, and we find comfort in the onscreen marriage of these flaws and the hilarity of brilliant writing and acting talents like Amy Sedaris, Stephen Colbert, and Paul Dinello.
Jenny has a Master of Arts degree in English, and she is a part-time instructor at Alvernia University. Her areas of scholarship include women’s literature, menstrual literacy, and rape-revenge cinema. You can find her on Pinterest and WordPress.
After years of special-effects heavy, testosterone-infused, end-of-the-world dramas, your Roland Emmerichs and your Michael Bays, lately there’ve been a lot of apocalyptic comedies. Still though, not much has changed. These comedies take place on the larger scale, with big effects and big death tolls and more disconcerting, a lack of prominent or believable female characters. ‘This Is the End’ was a bro-fest, ‘The World’s End’s lone female was a love interest, and ‘Seeking a Friend for the End of the World’ delivered another Manic Pixie Dream Girl to the list.
‘It’s a Disaster’ is a quiet, low-budget comedy about four couples, friends gathered for a monthly brunch, who become trapped in a house together when they hear that a terrorist attack nearby has spread deadly nerve gas in the air and they will all soon experience excruciating deaths.
It’s a Disaster film poster
After years of special-effects heavy, testosterone-infused, end-of-the-world dramas, your Roland Emmerichs and your Michael Bays, lately there’ve been a lot of apocalyptic comedies. Still though, not much has changed. These comedies take place on the larger scale, with big effects and big death tolls and more disconcerting, a lack of prominent or believable female characters. This Is the End was a bro-fest, The World’s End’s lone female was a love interest, and Seeking a Friend for the End of the World delivered another Manic Pixie Dream Girl to the list.
It’s a Disasteris a quiet, low-budget comedy about four couples, friends gathered for a monthly brunch, who become trapped in a house together when they hear that a terrorist attack nearby has spread deadly nerve gas in the air and they will all soon experience excruciating deaths. But the movie isn’t even really about the end of the world. It’s an extended character study wearing the clothes of an apocalypse story. It’s a story about commitment and friendship and love, and how they’re all tested when disaster strikes and all lines of communication are down.
The group is stunned to hear the news and displays a range of conflicting emotions and reactions
The spectacle of the disaster takes place off-screen, we hear snippets over the radio and from the few people from outside who interact with the people in the house. Instead, the movie examines human nature and the disaster is just a catalyst that opens up the characters and strips away all pretense of civility. It’s the cheapest end-of-the-world movie, but it’s probably the most realistic; the characters, as narcissistic and bourgeois as they are, having their private brunches and mourning over watching The Wire, resemble people we all know, at least in the broad strokes.
Of the eight main characters, the cast’s four women are interesting and dynamic. They aren’t love interests, but equal protagonists, who get to tell their own stories and suffer their own break-downs. Emma and Peter Mandrake (Erinn Hayes and Blaise Miller), control-freaks with a seemingly perfect marriage who hide their plans for a divorce, are hosting the brunch. Their guests include Buck and Lexi (Rachel Boston and Kevin M. Brennan), a pair of free spirits with an open marriage and Shane and Hedy (Jeff Grace and America Ferrera), a conspiracy theorist and high school chemistry teacher who’ve been engaged forever with no wedding in sight. Completing their friend group is Julia Stiles’s Tracey, a neurotic doctor who complains that she’s always dating guys who turn out to be crazy.
As it always is in movies with large groups of friends, the viewer is forced to suspend disbelief to buy that all these people are close friends. Though the characters are all stereotypical, the ways they behave and react to each other and the apocalypse ring true. These are close friends kept together by their rituals; the monthly brunches that everyone feels obligated to attend hang like a millstone around their necks, but no matter how much they dread brunch, none of them feels comfortable ending a tradition. Especially as it means admitting they’re no longer as close as they were. With the news of the disaster, along with the hidden resentments, lusts and rages that come to the foreground, so does the news that many of them don’t actually like each other. For instance, Peter tells Tracey that after his divorce, he doesn’t want her to contact him any more as he can’t see them being friends.
Tracey and Glen, a new couple on their third date, arrive at the Mandrakes’ house for their monthly brunch
Our initial vantage point on the group is that of an outsider. Tracey’s new boyfriend Glen (David Cross) is meeting her friends for the first time. In a foreboding twist, Tracey is more anxious about introducing Glen to her friends than he is about meeting them. This is only their third date and poor Glen is completely alienated by her friends and caught in the middle when the chaos begins. The awkwardness is made worse by the intense gender segregation of the gathering, where men convene in one room to watch sports, while the women gossip in another.
It’s easy to see It’s a Disaster as two different films, split by the characters’ awareness of the attack. If you started watching it without reading any synopses, you might not know it’s an apocalypse movie until the Mandrakes’ neighbor, Hal (writer-director Todd Berger) comes by wearing a Hazmat suit and informs them.
If you were going to judge the movie on just its first part, it’d be a cliche, just whining hipsters complaining about their relationships, but the film’s second half causes the viewer to look back and reassess, noticing how the characters try to hide their problems and pretend everything is fine.
Hal, a neighbor, who’s prepared for anything, arrives to inform the group about the disaster (and berates them for not inviting him)
There’s also the foreshadowing. They lose cellular signals, the cable and internet go out, and sirens recur in the background. Originally none of these things appear abnormal; the sirens seem like ordinary background noise, there could be issues with weather and then Emma and Peter fall into a tense fight, each believing the other didn’t pay the bills because of their divorce. All that comes before the reveal is imbued with a sense of impending doom as most viewers are aware going in of what the movie is about. Part of the fun of the movie is watching each small detail grow into a larger conflict which builds into convincing character development.
Though we begin the movie posed from Glen’s point of view, as the film progresses, it moves from Glen’s perspective to a more general, fly on the wall view of the action. Because the shift doesn’t happen exactly at the point of the reveal, viewers go seamlessly from outsiders entering a place we don’t understand and being forced to participate, to watching action we are not involved in.
Like the characters, there’s very little we know about the actual disaster. Insulted that he wasn’t invited to their brunch, Hal informs them that bombs have gone off downtown and they have to remain inside, before leaving them to their own devices. For a great deal of the film, the characters aren’t sure if the reports they’ve heard are real or how bad things are outside, so it isn’t until the very end that they start to think of concrete plans. The movie isn’t about how they’re going to survive the disaster (eventually they just decide they’re all going to die); instead, it’s about how they slowly learn to deal with each other and air their long-suppressed grievances.
For Emma and Peter, the disaster brings back them together, allowing them time to relax and listen to music in the car, reconnecting in a context far from their everyday problems. Lexi and Burt play around on an acoustic guitar, wear bedsheet togas and eventually realize they don’t have much that bonds them together; that in all their experimenting they were only trying to find something novel to share. Hedy, whose chemistry knowledge makes her hyperaware of what’s going to happen to them, stops caring about anything. She breaks up with Shane and then spends the day drinking and mixing chemicals to make ecstasy, feeling that they can at least go out having fun. Later, when a suicide plot is considered, Hedy’s extensive knowledge of all the symptoms they will run through before they die, is what convinces them that it’s the best option.
The group meet in the living room for an impromptu sing-along that turns into an escape planning session
Throughout the afternoon, the group had mentioned another couple who were supposed to attend the brunch, but who always show up late. Near the end of the movie, these friends arrive, clearly suffering from the effects of the toxin and everyone inside the house refuses to let them in. Tracey in particular, shuts them out, and even as they die on the porch and are eaten by crows, maintains that they deserved it for being late. Their inhibitions have been so loosened by the disaster that rules of order and civility have completely broken down. Things that were mere annoyances, like their friends’ habitual lateness take on outsized importance when the stakes are raised.
Meanwhile, Tracey and Glen bond fast and appear to have a real love connection, the conventional romantic comedy relationship set against a disaster. However, in the eleventh hour, Glen proves himself to be a religious fanatic and anti-Semite, when he serves everyone wine laced with rat poison. He believes they should all die together before the rapture begins and though the others don’t agree with his beliefs, they consider drinking the wine to spare themselves a painful death.
Glen, who is meeting the group for the first time, is an outsider, alienated by their relationship problems
It’s an interesting, albeit abrupt, twist as Glen originally appeared to be the most logical one in the group. However, it does seem like a bit of a betrayal when the character whose perspective we were aligned with at the start turns out to be crazy and is suddenly shut out of the group as an outsider. Glen’s status as a “religious nut job” is the glue that binds the friends back together, allowing them to bond over laughing at him. It is also a form of redemption for Tracey as she explained earlier that her friends never believed her when she told their that her other boyfriends were crazy.
In the end, everyone has their own belief systems–among them science, superheroes, and the wisdom of crowds and they hesitate to drink the poisoned wine. They’re afraid of being wrong, of killing themselves a minute before help arrives. The film abruptly ends (recalling an earlier conversation between Tracey and Glen) with everyone poised to drink. Whether you believe they do or not depends on your opinion of each character and who they would be in real life.
The ending shows that no matter how much they try to change, the tightly wound taking a risk and dancing around in togas, the free spirits trying to think in concrete, logical terms, they’re all going to continue to be the same types of people until they die.
In the film’s final tension-filled moments, the characters must decide whether or not to drink the poisoned wine and spare themselves a painful death
Though I had many good things to say about the movie, there are also some criticisms that shouldn’t be ignored. It’s great that the movie focused equally on female and male characters, but as in most films, women’s characters are explored only insofar as they are as parts of couples. I have to wonder if screenwriters can conceive of a woman in a context outside of a romantic relationship. In addition, starting the film from a male character’s POV, even though he doesn’t end up playing a more significant role than anyone else, sets him up as a default protagonist.
Though this may be an attempt at satire, the characters refer multiple times to the destruction of multiple American cities as the end of the world. As they speak to a call centre worker overseas who is not experiencing anything out of the ordinary, it’s clear that only the US is affected and the characters’ occasionally self-centered view extends to their conception of the world.
It’s a Disaster is a unique twist on the disaster movie. The point of the movie isn’t the apocalypse, but the character’s relationships. Whether or not they’re going to survive isn’t the point either. It’s a disaster movie that isn’t a disaster epic, instead it’s a captivating and often hilarious comedy of manners.
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.
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.
“Hey we’ve come this far, haven’t we? This is just the beginning.”
“The beginning” was in 1980, when this feminist comedy classic was released. Dolly Parton belted out the title song, which features a “boss man” who is “out to get her”–it’s an uplifting song, though, that echoes the closing celebratory sentiment: this is just the beginning. Things are going to change.
Well how have we done in 34 years?
9 to 5
Written by Leigh Kolbas part of our theme week on Women and Work/Labor Issues.
“That equal pay thing–that’s got to go.”
At the end of 9 to 5, the Chairman of the Board comes to visit Mr. Hart to congratulate him on his division’s success. He applauds the creative workplace choices that upped productivity by 20 percent. Job sharing policies allowed people to work part time, and an on-site day care, flex time, and equal pay boosted morale and created a “splendid environment,” according to the Chairman. But the equal pay? He whispers to Hart that that has to go.
In reality, Violet (Lily Tomlin), Judy (Jane Fonda), and Doralee (Dolly Parton)–three of Hart’s employees who waged war on him, their “sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical, bigot” boss–were the ones who made the changes in the workplace.
Hart is promoted to a job overseas, and the power trio take their place in his office, toasting their success (in both the workplace and in getting rid of Hart) with champagne.
Judy and Doralee express concern over the lack of equal salary policies, but Violet interjects:
“Hey we’ve come this far, haven’t we? This is just the beginning.”
The beginning was in 1980, when this feminist comedy classic was released. Dolly Parton belted out the title song, which features a “boss man” who is “out to get her”–it’s an uplifting song, though, that echoes the closing celebratory sentiment: this is just the beginning. Things are going to change.
Well how have we done in 34 years? While President Obama signed the Lily Ledbetter Act in 2009, the National Women’s Law Center reports that “American women who work full-time, year-round are paid only 77 cents for every dollar paid to their male counterparts.” Roughly half of employers offer flextime and only about a third of the “best companies to work for” offer child care, even though these policies–as shown in 9 to 5–can increase productivity, profit, and worker morale.
Bummer.
Of course, these policies are typically only available to professional workers at large companies. For working class women, the situation is more dire, and the fighting is up a steeper hill. Domestic workers, retail workers, home care workers, and restaurant workers are fighting hard and “leaning in” (without rich white women telling them to), but the fight is still necessary.
The House and the Senate are gridlocked over raising the federal minimum wage. Of workers who earn minimum wage, two-thirds are women.
That beginning sure has lasted a long time, Violet.
While the fact that 9 to 5 is still so timely is depressing, there’s much to celebrate in this female buddy comedy. For a comedy, the women are complex and well-written, embodying female stereotypes without becoming stereotypes (and at times dismantling them). They work hard, they play hard (what a great scene, when Doralee, Violet, and Judy are drinking and getting stoned), and they get into a bunch of trouble, but they win in the end.
Meanwhile, commentary on misogynist bosses, anti-family workplaces, patriarchy, and sexism and harassment in the workplace is woven throughout the film.
When they get high, the women have separate revenge fantasies about how they would murder Hart. Violet’s is accompanied by animated birds and woodland creatures, and she, Doralee, and Judy end victorious–in princess costumes waving atop their castle, addressing their adoring subjects who they’ve freed from the oppressive (“sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical, bigot”) reign of Franklin Hart. They rewrite the princess narrative something fierce.
And how are we doing, in terms of women and comedy blockbusters, 34 years later?
As Bitch Mediapointed out in an article about great female buddy comedies:
“‘Who knew a bunch of ladies could create comedy gold?’ was a common refrain when Bridesmaids first came out. The answer? Oh, I don’t know, maybe ask the millions of moviegoers who made 9 to 5—the 20th-highest-grossing comedy ever?”
It’s a fun comedy that has stood the test of time–which again, is also pretty depressing. What also strikes audiences is how completely female-centric the comedy is, and how much it works. We can imagine for once what it must feel like to watch a film that examines women’s lives and only has one featured male character–who is an (all too realistic) caricature. I can’t speak for male viewers, but I imagine the experience of viewing a film like this is quite similar to what women audiences are faced with constantly. Unfortunately, comedies with women and women’s stories at the helm are still as rare as on-site daycare.
Rewatching this 1980 classic reminds us that women’s lives are complex and have the potential to be made into blockbusters. We’re also reminded that in regard to women in the workplace, we stil have a long way to go. Violet was right–this was just the beginning. Why does the happy ending seem so far away?
If you want a fun, sexist blast from the past, read this New York Times film review of 9 to 5. Workplace policies may not have changed enough since 1980, but I’d like to think that the feminist blogosphere would have eviscerated a review like that. Progress.
At 22, recent Syracuse grad Amy Anderson is sure she is already a great poet, like her hero, Sylvia Plath, the voice of her generation even. She’s going to be discovered any day now and everyone will realize, as an ‘artiste’ she shouldn’t need to worry about getting a job or paying rent or paying car insurance. She is sure the creation of her art should transcend all responsibility.
When success doesn’t immediately find her, she complains ad nauseam, that she did everything right: getting good grades, staying true to her art and refusing to get distracted by trivial things like parties and guys, so she deserves it more than anyone else. She doesn’t just want to be a successful famous poet (her father jokes that she will one day win a Pulitzer) but to be a wunderkind, a success before 23.
Adult World film poster
At 22, recent Syracuse grad Amy Anderson is sure she is already a great poet, like her hero, Sylvia Plath–the voice of her generation even. She’s going to be discovered any day now and everyone will realize, as an “artiste” she shouldn’t need to worry about getting a job or paying rent or paying car insurance. She is sure the creation of her art should transcend all responsibility.
When success doesn’t immediately find her, she complains ad nauseam that she did everything right: getting good grades, staying true to her art, and refusing to get distracted by trivial things like parties and guys, so she deserves it more than anyone else. She doesn’t just want to be a successful famous poet (her father jokes that she will one day win a Pulitzer) but to be a wunderkind, a success before 23.
Of course, where Amy really lives and dreams all her grandiose dreams, a bubble of middle class ennui, stacked accomplishment and precociousness, is far from the real world and it’s the real world she finds herself inadvertently tumbling into as she struggles to keep her head above water post-graduation.
Adult World, named after the mom-and-pop adult video store where Amy (Emma Roberts) finds herself underemployed, follows Amy as she stalks her “favorite living poet” Rat Billings (John Cusack), a morose, misanthropic literary superstar, and attempts to force him into being her mentor. Directed by Scott Coffey and written by Andy Cochran, the film treads similar territory to recent disappointed-artist-post-graduation stories like Tiny Furniture and Frances Ha, but delves further into the realm of character study, pulling no punches in its portrayal of a self-absorbed character’s slow, belabored entry into adulthood.
With her hero, Sylvia Plath, looking over her shoulder, Amy contemplates suicide
Amy is a corollary to the kind of self-absorbed man-child character on which entire film genres are built. As a character she’s fairly unique, to the best of my knowledge, her only real kin is the similarly entitled and egotistical Hannah Horvath of Girls, and it’s both refreshing to watch her and depressing to be able to relate.
Similarly to how Hannah’s parents cutting her off provided the impetus for Girls, Amy’s father’s admission that he has serious financial worries and cannot continue to bankroll her lifestyle kickstarts her journey. Poetry, like other arts, is a vocation easily available only to the very wealthy and Adult World positions Amy at the difficult intersection of middle class reality and leisure class values. Unemployed and living in her parents’ house at the film’s start, Amy has $90,000 in student loans, frequently spends thousands on submission fees for poetry contests, and compares riding the bus to going through a war zone. She cancels her car insurance (with a poem), sure that paying submission fees is important in the grand scheme of things.
With her wall of blue ribbons, Amy is clearly not used to failure
Throughout the film it becomes clear Amy expects that being a successful poet will allow her to opt out of all the parts of life she considers tedious and believes anything she has to do in the meantime, such as working at Adult World, is worthy of contempt. She embarrasses and runs off customers by criticizing their sexual interests and in one incidence where she is zoned out, allows a man to steal several things and run off. Her belief that she will be famous one day soon is so pervasive that she believes they are lucky to be graced with her presence and that at the end of the day, she doesn’t really need the job anyway.
Early in the film, Amy visits her college friend, Candace, who is participating in an Occupy protest, but declines either joining in or paying any attention to their message. Though presented as an anarchist and activist, Candace, like Amy, has a supreme sense of entitlement, announcing that the only house in Amy’s price range is a shithole and with a hint of glee, that her parents would be horrified if she lived there. Amy’s response, saying to the landlord, “We’re bohemians,” suggests an attempt at romanticizing poverty.
Both girls are sheltered to a level that is cringe-inducing, something that is shown most clearly through the character of Rubia, a transvestite Amy meets at Adult World, the most exotic figure sheltered Amy can imagine. When she first encounters her in the bathroom, Amy gawks and runs out to tell the other people in the shop, like she just saw a unicorn. Later, Candace complains that as they are not children, but not yet adults, they are an oppressed minority and the camera cuts to Rubia, a real member of an oppressed minority, rolling her eyes (her default mode with Amy).
Amy’s difficult relationship with Rat Billings keeps her from being a cartoon character or drawing the audience’s hatred
As Amy’s reluctant mentor, Rat Billings is jaded and sarcastic, constantly putting her down. Under the belief that he will promote her to the right people and praise her brilliance, she works as his unpaid assistant, cleaning his house, curating his papers and assisting him in his lectures. Though Amy believes this is perfectly normal because “he doesn’t believe in money,” it’s clear to the audience that he’s taking advantage of her.
In her interactions with Rat, a sympathetic dimension of Amy’s character emerges.
She’s a young ambitious woman whose idol turns out to be a jerk but she can’t see it, who believes he has to be impressed just like all her teachers were, who believes him when he sarcastically calls her is muse. It’s incredibly refreshing to have a female character who isn’t a shrinking violet, who stalks her idol to get him to look at her art and without shame or the back stepping that most women are raised to do (“I think it’s pretty good” or “People have told me I’m good”) speaks without a qualifier, insisting “I’m good.” When Candace tells her she is getting published in Anarchist Quarterly, the first time she’s ever submitted writing anywhere, Amy goes off into her room, closes the door and screams.
Throughout the film, Amy’s lack of sexual experience is glaringly apparent. In the first scene, she develops feelings for a boy in her poetry class because he compliments her poems and when she discovers he had friends hiding in the closet filming their make-out session, he knows her well enough to try to use art as an excuse. When she first enters Adult World after seeing the Help Wanted sign, unaware of what the store is, she is scared and embarrassed. Recoiling from a vibrator as if she expects it to attack her, she runs back to her car and sits there for several minutes, shivering as if trying to get the filth off of her.
Job hunter Amy runs from Adult World just as she runs from adult responsibility
Amy uses feminism as an excuse for her discomfort and within the narrative; her views that the videos are sexist and models are being objectified are connected to insecurity over being a virgin, rather than true conviction. She is uncomfortable with people who are secure in their sexuality, looking down on Le Passion magazine’s cover model because her breasts are biggest than Amy’s head, and compensates by placing herself above them, superior as an artist. Holding this view is convenient for Amy as it allows her to dismiss a suggestion by her coworker, Alex (Evan Peters), that she write erotica based on her sexual experiences for the magazine, saying it is a bad idea because she feel anything sexualized is anathema to art not because she doesn’t have any experiences.
To this end, Amy assumes a serious mentorship involves a sexual relationship and one night, Rubia gives her a makeover so she can go seduce Rat. Dressed “like a prostitute,” Amy’s idea of seduction involves, speaking in 40s movie dialogue and tossing her head like cat, preening, while Rat sits watching her like a zoo animal. Here she becomes truly pathetic in his and the film’s eyes, admitting her virginity to him and describing sex in laughable poetry metaphors, a budding delicate flower and a grand voyage, in a stark contrast to the seedy sexuality sold in the store where she works.
Rat does not take her seriously when she insists she is a woman not a child. It’s difficult to watch her throw herself at him, a grown man moaning over his second-hand embarrassment for her and alternately patronizing and laughing at her.
In the film’s most disturbing scene, Amy begs Rat to “deflower her”
At this stage in her life, Amy is young enough that her life is still marked by what she hasn’t done. Even as a poet who idolizes Sylvia Plath, Amy does not understand depression, putting it on as a theatrical costume meant to inspire poems, before quickly shedding it to eat a grilled cheese sandwich brought to her by her mother. As such, she constantly measures herself against artists she admires, antagonizing that Rat became famous so much younger than she is now, and in the darkly comic opening scene, sticks her head in the oven and then wonders if this is suicidal plagiarism. Immediately after announcing that she doesn’t do drugs, she does pot because Rubia suggests it is something a poet would do.
Having not had any real pain in her life, nor love or anything exciting or dangerous, it is unclear what Amy has to write about. She is shocked when Rat tells her he made up his poems about heroin when he didn’t use it, feeling that one should only write about what they know. Rat’s admission ultimately leads her to try her hand at writing erotica, a place where her speculative purple prose makes her a mild success.
It’s uncomfortable how the movie surrounds clueless Amy with three men–Rat, Alex and her father–who always know better than her and constantly call her out on her naiveté. Viewers are clearly meant to see Amy as a satirical character and not take her seriously, sharing Rat’s view of her as a silly little girl following him around. When they are trading off quotes and he ends off without attribution, “You’re dumb but you’re not stupid,” she stands there silently for a beat, mulling it over, trying to find something flattering in it. It’s unclear whether we meant to laugh at her submissiveness or feel pity for her as she is being taken advantage of?
Still a child in many ways, Amy throws a temper tantrum after learning of Rat’s deception
She is overjoyed when he accepts her poem into an anthology mostly out of pity, not realizing that he never said he liked it or thought it was good, just that it was uniquely her. The pinnacle of Rat’s cruelty occurs when he reveals that the anthology he published her in is of “hilariously awful” poetry meant for reading on the toilet. Amy’s response, a temper tantrum wherein she breaks his things and screams about how special she is, proves only that she is even less mature than he thought.
Alex, Amy’s love interest, also gets a moment to criticize her work, yelling at her for thinking she’s better than the store, a place where good people work hard to support themselves.
Visiting Alex’s house, she learns he is a talented painter, but unlike her, is also an adult. He works a day job and makes the most of it, he never brags about being an artist, and he doesn’t see fame as his ultimate goal. He sees the purity of art, in making things for yourself, not to share with other people, something Amy realizes, shocked, that she has never experienced.
It’s a little unsettling for the film’s female lead to be contrasted with a man, a love interest, who is presented as superior to her in every way. Amy’s entire identity, as a talented artist, though it was probably inaccurate, is taken from her by these men in her life and she is utterly shattered by them.
Alex and Amy take a quiet moment while working at Adult World to feed their mutual attraction
However, regardless of who delivered these lessons, they were ones Amy needed to be a complete person and an adult. Rat turns out to be the kind of mentor she needed, as he makes her a better writer and gives her a harsh, but necessary wake-up call. She isn’t a bad poet, but she isn’t a good one either, to be anything she needs to go out into the world and experience it.
Alex, though unsettling as both her new role model and first sexual partner, teaches her to be responsible and accept the life she is living now as real life, not just something she’s doing to kill time while waiting to become famous.
Though it was men that taught her these crucial lessons about herself, the film succeeds by presenting the ultimate proof of Amy’s growth as self directed. She doesn’t become an adult by losing her virginity, getting a job, or by getting published, but by reading her shit poem and being able to laugh at it, already so much more grown up that she wonders how she could have ever been so naive. In the last shot, she is an adult reading words she wrote so recently as a child.
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.
Wendy has fantasies of setting up Lenny in bucolic quarters in the mountains of Vermont where he can live with independence and comfort. But given the level of Lenny’s dementia and their lack of resources, Wendy has to let go of those dreams and settle for the facility Jon selects, which is far more modest, in Buffalo, with costs covered by Medicare. Another director might have tried to seize the dramatic content of such a conflict, as there’s no downplaying the seriousness of what it means to provide comfort and care to the beloved elderly one’s family. Jenkins, however, brings the funny rather than the dour. When Wendy and Jon take Lenny to a high-end facility for an interview to see if his mental acuity meets their criteria for admission, Wendy attempts to coach her father into giving the correct answers to such questions as “What city are you in right now?” That Lenny doesn’t know is sad, but Wendy’s earnestness to help him cheat is, somehow, delightfully absurd. Jon gets annoyed at his sister, but recognizes the difficulty she’s having with the situation and gently lets her be.
I’ve loved Tamara Jenkins since the first time I saw her film The Slums of Beverly Hills, the 1998 coming-of-age story that put Natasha Lyonne on the map. In addition to being a great movie with top-notch performances by Lyonne, Alan Arkin, and Marisa Tomei, Jenkins shows off her talents as a writer/director willing to show the unsightly, awkward, deeply sad and at once hilarious parts of growing up on the economic margins. The funny moments are made even more so because you don’t seem them coming. As unlikely as you’d be to find a comedic film set in Los Angeles that explores what it means to be a lower-middle-class teenage girl, it would be even more of a rarity to encounter one that delves into what it means to be lower-middle-class adult siblings coping with an estranged parent’s descent into old age and dementia. But that’s just what Jenkins gave us in her 2007 follow-up, The Savages.
If you’re looking to catch up on any Philip Seymour Hoffman films since we lost him earlier this month then that’s reason enough to watch this film—but only one of many. Here’s another: Hoffman plays opposite Laura Linney, who’s always amazing to watch. The two are Jon and Wendy, brother and sister who must wearily confront the necessity of managing the last days of their father’s life. From the first scene we are faced with the reality of the ugliness that is mental and physical decline: we see their father, Lenny, played by Philip Bosco, being castigated by a home health aide, Eduardo, for not flushing the toilet. We then watch as Lenny walks to the bathroom, and then an uncomfortable amount of time passes until Eduardo goes to check on him, only to find that Lenny’s written the word “Prick” on the wall with his feces. From this point forward it is clear that Jenkins is going to put us front and center with the unrelenting intimacy created when family must deal with each other’s shit.
Shortly after the fecal incident we meet Wendy, a woman in her later 30s sitting in a drab office in Manhattan at what can only be a temp job. Like any aspiring artist stuck at a desk, she is surreptitiously pirating postage, photocopying, and miscellaneous office goodies to service her application process to win grant funding; Wendy’s a playwright shopping around a semi-autobiographical work about her childhood called Wake Me When It’s Over. A combination of her life’s accoutrements tells us she’s not where she wants to be: the temp job, Raisin Bran for dinner, a married man whose dog accompanies him to her apartment when he can steal away for a tryst. We very quickly learn that Wendy is not well-practiced at being honest with herself—or those closest to her. She knows the art of telling people the half-truth if it will earn her some sympathy and/or avoid being scrutinized. Wendy gets a call from Arizona to find that her father, Lenny, is “writing with his shit!” (as she exclaims on the phone to Jon), and her overly righteous response tells us even more about her: she wants to rise to the occasion and save the day by caring for her father who never cared for her.
Jon is far more pragmatic and less willing to give too much compassionate ground to a parent whose absence meant he had to step up and doing a lot of the emotional heavy-lifting for his younger sister. Like Wendy, Jon studies theater, but from an academic side as a professor in Buffalo, New York—a contrast that Jenkins beautifully maps onto their personalities, but with a light touch. Wendy and Jon are far from types, and their sibling dynamic is one marked by distant respect for each other without the pretense of fully understanding the other’s choices. They are not entirely free of judgment and resentment, but they demonstrate ease and kindness toward one another far more often than ire. At the core of their tense moments is the central issue they must reckon with: their father has dementia and they must put him in a nursing home and watch him die.
Wendy has fantasies of setting up Lenny in bucolic quarters in the mountains of Vermont where he can live with independence and comfort. But given the level of Lenny’s dementia and their lack of resources, Wendy has to let go of those dreams and settle for the facility Jon selects, which is far more modest, in Buffalo, with costs covered by Medicare. Another director might have tried to seize the dramatic content of such a conflict, as there’s no downplaying the seriousness of what it means to provide comfort and care to the beloved elderly one’s family. Jenkins, however, brings the funny rather than the dour. When Wendy and Jon take Lenny to a high-end facility for an interview to see if his mental acuity meets their criteria for admission, Wendy attempts to coach her father into giving the correct answers to such questions as “What city are you in right now?” That Lenny doesn’t know is sad, but Wendy’s earnestness to help him cheat is, somehow, delightfully absurd. Jon gets annoyed at his sister, but recognizes the difficulty she’s having with the situation and gently lets her be.
When the inevitable does happen, and Wendy and Jon are free of the obligation that brought them together in a shared purpose, they quietly return to their lives. As is often the case in real life, there is no redemption in their father’s death. Jenkins does give us a kind of postscript wherein Wendy and Jon are still themselves, still trying to do the work that defines them, but they are somehow lighter after having endured Lenny’s illness and death. For one thing, they both make progress moving ahead in ways they were previously stalled (I know that’s vague but I don’t want to spoil too much). Most importantly, though, they have arrived as siblings who want to stay connected even without the anchor of obligation; rather than need each other to fit an idea of family, they just want each other to be happy.
The general premise of ‘Someone Marry Barry’ is that every group of friends has a “Barry, “or someone who is wildly inappropriate and generally fails at life. Barry’s friends decide the best approach to mitigating Barry’s awfulness is to find him a girlfriend, because I guess he’ll be “tamed” by having regular sex with the same vagina and/or having someone to wash his boxers for him? Their plan backfires when Barry gets into a relationship with Melanie (Lucy Punch), who is just as inappropriate and obnoxious as he is (also even more funny, from the viewer’s perspective).
I am sometimes exhausted by being a “film critic,” if you’ll allow me to be so bold as to claim that title for myself. My dad used to say, “It’s hard to be Robin” when I’d get worked up into a lather over what seemed to him like minor infractions. And those little frustrations have a tendency to mount until you’re mad as hell and not gonna yadda yadda. Feminist burnout is real.
Someone Marry Barry film poster
So sometimes I just want to turn off my critical brain, set aside my gender lens, and enjoy a comedy if it makes me laugh despite whatever failings it might have, either as a work of cinema or as an artifact of gender in culture. And that’s what I did with Someone Marry Barry.
I watched Someone Marry Barry on a break from my 2014 Oscars Death Race (™ Sarah D. Bunting) which has been a particular challenge this year not only because of the bleakness of this year’s crop (and its inclusion of The Wolf of Wall Street, which I hate hate hated) but because of my limited access to recent releases in South Africa. Someone Marry Barry is one of those movies that is “in theaters” (allegedly) at the same time it’s released to on demand video services. So maybe I’m extra on it’s side because of the populism of it’s release structure? Or maybe I just needed to laugh at a romantic comedy.
Lucy Punch and Tyler Labine making Someone Marry Barry look much sweeter than it is
The general premise of Someone Marry Barry is that every group of friends has a “Barry,” or someone who is wildly inappropriate and generally fails at life. Barry (Tyler Labine, whose career path has gone from “Burnout Teen” to “Loser Manchild,” which he can hopefully ride out until he’s of sufficient vintage to play “Dirty Old Man”) ruins funerals, gets his friends fired by inappropriate talking about the boss’s daughter, and is a bad influence on their children.
Barry (Tyler Labine)
Barry’s friends decide the best approach to mitigating Barry’s awfulness is to find him a girlfriend, because I guess he’ll be “tamed” by having regular sex with the same vagina and/or having someone to wash his boxers for him? Their plan backfires when Barry gets into a relationship with Melanie (Lucy Punch), who is just as inappropriate and obnoxious as he is (also even more funny, from the viewer’s perspective).
Barry’s scheming bros (Thomas Middleditch, Damon Wayans, Jr., and Hayes MacArthur)
And man, if I had my feminist Wheaties this morning maybe I could explain how this is a subversive rejection of the Apatow-ian trope of “boys will be boys, good thing there’s all these shrews around to crack the whip.” Or maybe reject it because being given a LadyChild alongside the ManChildren doesn’t really resolve the issues inherent to that archetype. And is also not particularly groundbreaking (see Bad Teacher, in which Lucy Punch had a supporting role, or anything else Lucy Punch has been in, really).
I could also take Someone Marry Barry to task because the other women in the movie are… actually I have no idea what the other women in the movie do other than have shiny hair. One of them is really bitchy and her doormat boyfriend is inspired by missing Barry to leave her… I think?
Barry and Melanie’s inappropriate love.
What I do know: Someone Marry Barry made me laugh A LOT. As much smack as I’ll talk about Tyler Labine and Lucy Punch always playing the same characters, this really is perfect casting and it pays off. Lucy Punch in particular is at the top of her game. While the movie has pretty weak story structure and character arcs and all those other things we should fairly expect from actually good movies, it has a lot of hilarious dialogue delivered with gusto. Even the shiny-haired bitch, playing the most tired of roles, cracked me up several times (I will be stealing her whiny expectant delivery of “Juice. I need juice.” for all my future demands of my partner).
So I’m just gonna give my critical side a break and give Someone Marry Barry my stamp of approval.
Clueless’s Travis Birkenstock expresses my feelings for me
(THAT SAID: Why on earth is this movie not called Somebody Marry Barry? Why waste this perfect opportunity for delightful assonance when there is literally no difference in meaning between someone and somebody? Is there are short film from 1917 called Somebody Marry Barry? There’d better be a suitable explanation for this. Ugh, it IS hard to be Robin.)
Robin Hitchcock is an American writer living Cape Town, South Africa.
I’m a 90s kid, and I can vividly remember watching Disney’s ‘Heavy Weights’ (Steven Brill, 1995) and cracking up over Ben Stiller’s performance as the deranged Tony Perkis. Stiller’s hysterical role as Perkis is clearly an early preface to his infamous role as White Goodman in ‘Dodgeball’ (Rawson Marshall Thurber, 2004), a film that contains the same elements of fat-shaming and the subversive power of owning your own happiness. Brill’s film examines fat culture and American boyhood, a theme I don’t think we see enough in mainstream film today (more recently, see ‘The Kings of Summer’ (Jordan Vogt-Roberts, 2013)).
I’m a 90’s kid, and I can vividly remember watching Disney’s Heavy Weights (Steven Brill, 1995) and cracking up over Ben Stiller’s performance as the deranged Tony Perkis. Stiller’s hysterical role as Perkis is clearly an early preface to his infamous role as White Goodman in Dodgeball (Rawson Marshall Thurber, 2004), a film that contains the same elements of fat-shaming and the subversive power of owning your own happiness. Brill’s film examines fat culture and American boyhood, a theme I don’t think we see enough in mainstream film today (more recently, see TheKings of Summer [Jordan Vogt-Roberts, 2013]). When we invest ourselves in the cinematic experience of growing up as a boy in America, audiences can better understand how young boys relate to girls, and how gender expectations are developed and executed amongst characters who are attempting to become comfortable in their own bodies–a task many adults are still mastering. This Disney film provides this binary, along with plenty of campers who simply won’t be defeated due to their plus-size status.
Co-written by Judd Apatow, HeavyWeights contains many elements that are signature of his trademark humor, filtered by the film’s friendly Disney rating. However, the narrative flirts with solemn issues surrounding body image, gender relations, and American adolescence. Upon meeting, Roy (the still very funny “fat kid” Kenan Thompson) tells Gerry that at fat camp, “everybody’s the fat kid.” The camp allows the boys to avoid the stigmatization associated with obesity, which often results in bullying and issues with self-esteem. Here, we see boys rather than girls being fat-shamed and pressured to lose weight. In fact, in the opening scene, Gerry’s father refers to his son’s weight as a “problem” they need to “nip in the bud.”
Jerry is skeptical as he views the promotional video for Camp Hope with his parents.
Although Gerry’s fat and he knows it, he still claims he doesn’t want to spend his summer with “a bunch of fat loads”–pointing up the idea that even overweight people are quick to point to other “fat loads” as being undesirable company. The central idea behind the movie seems to be a male version of the 2010 ABC television series Huge (2010), developed by Winnie Holzman, who also created the amazing series My So-Called Life (1994-1995), starring Hairspray’s (Adam Shankman, 2007) plus-sized Nikki Blonsky. The show’s Camp Victory is akin to the Camp Hope we find in Heavy Weights, both names implying that obesity is a problem that must be solved. While Huge only lasted one season, and I was never a viewer since I found its previews to be alienating and overzealous, I’m assuming that Camp Victory was not governed by a fitness lunatic attempting to profit from child obesity.
Pat is Jerry’s only source of comfort when Tony takes over and Jerry’s family dismisses his complaints.
The only woman of any importance we see throughout the film is Julie (Leah Lail), the camp nurse and love interest of long-time camper and counselor, Pat (Tom McGowan). Pat has the boys’ best interests in mind as he encourages them to adopt a healthier lifestyle rather than determining their identities according to their weight and ages, as Tony does. What strikes any vigilant, feminist viewer is that there are no portrayals of fat women in HeavyWeights either–provided, yes, it is a boys’ camp, but Pat’s girlfriend is a petite redhead, who merely serves as a prop to prove that a beautiful, thin woman can love chubby, run-of-the-mill Pat. Due to this noticeable absence, and after watching the film about a dozen times, I’m still mildly surprised to see a dance filled with beautiful young girls, along with our socially awkward bunch at Camp Hope.
The boys cower as a pretty girl asks where the bathroom is.
“Tony’s arranged a dance with the girls’ camp so he can humiliate us into losing weight,” Gerry writes in a letter to his grandmother. The girls are visibly agitated, and body weight rests at the forefront in this scene. When one girl snaps, “Why don’t those guys just lose weight?” another girl quickly retorts, “Why don’t you tell them how to throw up after meals like you do?” This fleeting exchange points up the idea that these girls–and many girls and women like them everywhere–are no better than the boys of Camp Hope. Indeed, the negative feminine archetype highlighted here is one of denial and joylessness, yet the tone of this dance scene is comedic, not tragic. While bulimia is obviously no joking matter, Heavy Weights crystallizes the preference for a fulfilling life that includes go-carting, summer friendships, and yes, food, as opposed to an existence that’s based on appearances, defensiveness, and self-loathing. After Tony abruptly ends the dance after he sees that he’s failed at embarrassing the boys, he tells the girls, “I appreciate your efforts–I know this hasn’t been easy,” meaning that this group of girls is far too attractive to have any degree of fun with “a bunch of fat loads.”
Although an adult, Pat is just an uncomfortable around girls as his teenaged counterparts.
While Tony advocates dangerous methods of fitness and weight loss, and represents many unattainable ideals in America, we laugh because he’s a harebrained caricature of that gym teacher we had in school, the family member we must deal with, or the misinformed fitness fanatic who can never get enough. I’m almost tempted to brand him an “anti-hero” because, quite honestly, I want to see him succeed. Combined with a balanced diet, we could all benefit from some Perkisizing.
The boys’ failure to lose weight reflects poorly on Tony and impedes his business venture.
What’s entertaining about Stiller’s dramatic character is that he’s essentially starving his new campers as the new owner of Camp Hope, while any sensible person knows that abstaining from eating actually encourages the human body to store fat so that it can survive. I think what also makes this film easy to laugh at is the fact that both our campers and villain are males. Just like my last post on Deuce Bigalow, I’ve spent maybe a bit too much time wondering how this movie would work if the protagonist and other cast members were predominantly female, or if it would work at all. Would our girl campers be caught eating fast food in the bathroom stalls like we see in Heavy Weights, or would we observe them sticking their fingers down their throats?
Even Tim, the “skinny guy” who they boys tease, participates in the food orgy that takes place once Tony’s rule is overthrown.
So, although 20 years old, does this Disney film reinforce today’s stereotypes about fat culture? Sure, it does. Fat people are jolly and likable while those who are beautiful with glistening abs of steel are shallow, like the boys’ rival camp across the lake, Camp MVP; thus, the stereotypes attached to those who are “fit” are equally damning and ridiculous. The film’s exclusion of women is not what I would call offensive, however. The marked absence of women by no means amounts to sexism on the parts of Apatow or Brill. Heavy Weights does not purport to be a feminist masterpiece, but it’s certainly not anti-feminist either; rather, it offers the idea that fat-shaming does not discriminate based on sex, gender, or age.
Tony organizes an over-the-top presentation to introduce himself to the campers.
We can appreciate that the film’s message is not to lose weight if you are unhappy with your body. Instead, you should be mindful of nutrition, exercise, and a healthful lifestyle. Indeed, Gerry’s mother is happy to hear that her son “feels good,” while “he looks the same,” according to his mildly disappointed father. Although Heavy Weights focuses exclusively on childhood obesity in boys, this theme reflects on girls as well, and the female campers we meet are placed within the narrative to illustrate the quintessential boyhood issues–typically overshadowed by girlhood studies–of gaining and maintaining self-confidence, discovering one’s body, and navigating how to interact with the opposite sex, through the lens that identity, both adult and adolescent, is mistakenly constructed from digesting the bullshit fed to us by a body-obsessed culture.
Jenny has a Master of Arts degree in English, and she is a part-time instructor at Alvernia University. Her areas of scholarship include women’s literature, menstrual literacy, and rape-revenge cinema. You can find her on Pinterest and WordPress.
