Tag: Connie Britton

Lies The Government–and Movies–Tell Us: ‘(T)ERROR’ and ‘Me and Earl and the Dying Girl’

To see a portrait of the inner workings of the FBI we have to look to films like the new documentary, ‘(T)ERROR’ co-directed by Lyric R. Cabral and David Felix Sutcliffe, showing this Sunday, June 14 as part of the Human Rights Watch Film Festival. In a highly unusual coup, an FBI informant Saeed aka “Shariff” (who used to be Cabral’s neighbor) agrees to be followed by the camera (though he complains to Cabral during closeups “You’re always getting the fucking headshots”) as he talks about his past cases and sets up a current one.

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In most movies, US government agents, whether they are from the FBI, like Mulder and Scully, or from the CIA, like Melissa McCarthy’s character in Spy, invariably play the hero (or heroine) thoughtful, competent, and above all, ethical. The news tells a different story; FBI protection was a key factor in organized crime head Whitey Bulger escaping prosecution for his crimes (which included murder) for decades. When the FBI was investigating the Boston Marathon bombing they interrogated an unarmed immigrant friend of the bombers, and even though he was not implicated in the crime they shot and killed him. Just last week, after targeting a Boston-area Muslim man with surveillance for a number of months, the FBI (teaming with local police) stopped him near a CVS parking lot to “talk” to him. They ended up shooting him dead right there–at 7 a.m. on a workday morning.

To see a portrait of the inner workings of the FBI we have to look to films like the new documentary, (T)ERROR, co-directed by Lyric R. Cabral and David Felix Sutcliffe, showing this Sunday, June 14 as part of the Human Rights Watch Film Festival. In a highly unusual coup, an FBI informant Saeed aka “Shariff” (who used to be Cabral’s neighbor) agrees to be followed by the camera (though he complains to Cabral during closeups, “You’re always getting the fucking headshots”) as he talks about his past cases and sets up a current one.

Saeed is an older Black American Muslim whom we see pull up stakes from his home (so he is away from his young son) and his job as a cook in a high school cafeteria to move to a strange city with his dog and his weed, working on getting entrée into the life of a younger American jihadi who makes inflammatory YouTube videos but seems not to do much else. We see Saeed haggling with the FBI about money (he does not seem to earn much–at all–for his efforts) and admonishing them to stop being so obvious about setting this guy up.

Meanwhile, the jihadi, using Google and a piece of mail he sees on Saeed’s car dashboard figures out his FBI connection early in their acquaintance. We find out later that Saeed started his career with the FBI because he himself was charged with a crime, and then set up a man who was a friend of his to escape punishment, a chilling reminder of the questionable use of informants in the US justice system. This cycle perpetuates to the end of the film–someone barely getting by (the jihadi lives in public housing and does not to have a car) preyed upon by someone nearly as desperate, Saeed, as the FBI eggs him on. Saeed seems unrepentant about his targets, saying, “I don’t have no feelings for them. You making the Islam look bad, you gotta go,” but as he smokes blunts and bakes a succession of cakes he seems bent on convincing not just the directors and us, but himself too.

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The lie the designated Sundance “breakout” movie Me And Earl And The Dying Girl (which opens this Friday, June 12) tells is familiar–that the experiences of white, straight guys are the only important ones; the main white guy can learn valuable lessons thanks to women and people of color, but nothing they do or say could possibly be as fascinating to us. The “me” of the title is Greg (Thomas Mann) a senior in high school, quirky in that cliché movie way that never crosses into weird or creepy and creative (he makes films at home with pun titles of famous works). His only friend is Earl (RJ Cyler), the Black best friend as stereotype: Earl’s main attribute is his repetition in more than one scene of the word, “titties.” Greg’s mother (Connie Britton) (she along with Nick Offerman who plays Greg’s Dad and Molly Shannon, who also plays a parent in this film, wrest what they can out of the script which bestows no human qualities on them, just more quirks) commands him to visit a girl, Rachel (Olivia Cooke), newly diagnosed with cancer, saying, “You might be someone who could make Rachel feel better.” He hasn’t hung out with Rachel since grade school and she greets him at her house by saying, “I don’t need your stupid pity,” but the two begin a friendship anyway.

Too bad Rachel is really the manic, pixie, dying girl (the one way the movie doesn’t fall into predictability is that she and Greg never embark on a romance) since we find out, too late, she is an artist as well, but her aspirations and thoughts get short shrift. Olivia Cooke does well with a limited role and gives us a glimpse of how much better the movie could have been in one scene when she gives Greg a pep-talk about his future, but when he asks about hers, she suddenly goes quiet.

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This film could use a lot more “girl” (Olivia Cooke)

 

Alfonso Gomez-Rejon directed the script by Jesse Andrews based on his own YA novel; future filmmakers of similar material should note that no one over 20 gives a shit about high school social hierarchy. The film has great art direction and soundtrack selection (with artists like Brian Eno and vintage Velvet Underground), but nothing can disguise or improve its white-guy narrative of “Person unlike me who changed my life for the better,” which seems more fitting for an undergrad college entrance essay than the basis for a film.

Earl has received puzzlingly decent reviews and its trailer seems to have piqued the interest of people who should know better, To try to understand how retrograde this film is, think if it were instead Me, The Girl and Dying Earl. The “me” would still be the white guy, his best friend a white girl who says “balls” a lot (which actually would make her a more nuanced character than most teenaged girls in movies, including this one) and Earl would be a variation of The Magical Negro, this one with terminal cancer who, as a last good deed, gives Greg precious guidance–and a plot that shows us all what a great guy Greg is. No one would hesitate to call bullshit on that film, so I’m unsure why no one is complaining about this one. I was also disappointed that a contemporary film that takes place in the suburb of a large American city doesn’t include any queer students in its high school especially since Greg, Rachel, and Earl would all be more interesting–and their sexless bond more true-to-life–if one or more of them were queer.

As I sat through Me and Earl I couldn’t help thinking of the Sufjan Stevens song “Casimir Pulaski Day” which covers some of the same ground–dying high school girl, quirkiness and a straight-guy narrator–but in less than six minutes reaches depths of feeling this film never comes close to. To equal the duration of this film you could instead listen to that song about 17 times–and save yourself $12.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qfmAllbYC8″ iv_load_policy=”3″]

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing, besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender

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The Feministing Five: Melissa Silverstein and Kathryn Kolbert, Athena Film Festival Co-Founders by Anna Sterling via Feministing

Reproduction & Abortion Week: ‘American Horror Story’ Demonizes Abortion and Suffers from the Mystical Pregnancy Trope

Warning: if you have not watched all of American Horror Story Season 1, there are massive spoilers ahead!

American Horror Story co-creators Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk wanted to create a TV series that truly scared people. And they’ve definitely succeeded in their goal. But why the hell are they so afraid of abortion and women’s reproduction?

Inspired by The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby and The Shining, the creepy, eerie and phenomenally acted and well-written show follows the Harmons — cellist Vivien (Connie Britton), psychiatrist Ben (Dylan McDermott) and their daughter Violet (Taissa Farmiga) — as they move from Boston to Los Angeles to heal over past traumas of a stillbirth and infidelity. They move into an old haunted mansion in this “violent, erotically charged horror story about a troubled family.”
American Horror Storysucked me in immediately. Besides passing the Bechdel Test many times, strong, clever, interesting women abound. The performances by Connie Britton, Jessica Lange, Dylan McDermott, Frances Conroy and Taissa Farmiga are outstanding. 
Britton, who co-headlines the first season, wanted Vivien “to be somebody that was accessible, somebody who was strong and not victim-y. Which is something that’s always really important to me, no matter what I’m playing.” Britton almost didn’t play Tami Taylor in the TV show of Friday Night Lights didn’t want to merely play a coach’s wife on a show “dominated by men” and have her character “fall into the background.” Murphy has called the bravura Constance (Jessica Lange) a “survivor” and according to Britton, he called Vivien “‘a heroic character’ and describes American Horror Story as a horror for women.”
A horror for women? Sounds promising. Ahhhh but not so fast! If the show is for women, why do we see women objectified, conflating sexualized images with rape, assault and violence. And why the hell is it obsessed with demonizing abortion and pregnancy?? 
In the series premiere, we first encounter Vivien in a gynecological exam (after a brutal stillbirth) and her doctor prescribes her hormones. Eco-friendly Vivien, who uses organic products and doesn’t like using anything synthetic, responds:
“I’m just trying to get control of my body again, especially after what happened.”
That line might just be the most prophetic in the series. The female characters’ bodies are continuously invaded, brutalized and dominated. 
In the series premiere, Vivien is raped by the Rubber Man, thinking she’s having sex with Ben but who’s really ghost Tate. At the end of the episode, we learn Vivien’s pregnant…with twins…by two different fathers. It’s crystal clear that as soon as Vivien gets pregnant, she’s having a “mystical pregnancy” and will give birth to a demon baby. Vivien has a nightmare that she can see a hand (paw or claw??) moving underneath her swollen pregnant stomach. In “Open House,” the obstetrician tells Vivien and Ben that “every woman worries she’s got a little devil inside her.” We’re also told several times that one of Vivien’s twins is growing at an alarmingly rapid rate. Vivien eats cooked offal and later ravenously devours raw, bloody brains, paralleling the liver-eating scene in Rosemary’s Baby. Murphy attributes this to the baby having “demonic cravings.”Angie, the ultrasound technician, faints when conducting Vivien’s ultrasound. When she meets with Vivien later in a church, Angie tells her that she saw the devil on the sonogram, “the unclean thing, the plague of nations, the beast.” 
As the fabulous Anita Sarkeesian at Feminist Frequency, in her outstanding “Tropes vs. Women” video series, writes:
“It’s common practice for Hollywood writers to have their female characters become pregnant at some point in their TV series. These story lines are almost always built around women who have their ovaries harvested by aliens or serve as human incubators for demon spawn – basically the characters are reduced to their biological functions.”
Sarkeesian goes on to quote Laura Shapiro who called the Mystical Pregnancy “a type of reproductive terrorism:” 
“…It makes becoming pregnant seem disgusting, frightening and nightmarish…The problem from my point of view is that pregnancy and birth are natural processes that are being distorted into torture porn, ways of punishing women and exploiting their terror to up the dramatic stakes.”
After she learns of Vivien’s pregnancy, Hayden (Kate Mara), Ben’s student who he had an affair with (and who’s killed after she tells Ben she’s keeping their baby), becomes obsessed with stealing Vivien’s baby. And if one babystealer wasn’t enough, Constance and former house dwellers Nora (Lily Rabe) and Chad (Zachary Quinto) conspire to steal Vivien’s unborn baby too. Babysnatching! Cause that’s what all women and gay men do. Oh wait, that’s what all “crazy” women do…Wait, aren’t all women “crazy???” (The show’s treatment of mental illness is a topic for a WHOLE other post). 
As each of these characters can’t procreate (Constance due to her age, Hayden and Nora as they’re dead, Chad a man…who’s now dead), they covet Vivien’s capacity for reproduction. They objectify Vivien, reducing her to a vessel, an incubator for the baby these characters so desperately yearn to possess.
Vivien’s pregnancy is in many ways the crux of the show. Even on the poster, a pregnant Vivien arches her back seductively as the Rubber Man hovers above with outstretched hands, as if waiting to pluck the baby from her womb. 
In “Piggy Piggy,” Leah, Violet’s former bully, tells Violet the devil is real. She discloses information in the Book of Revelations from the Bible:
“In heaven, there’s this woman in labor, howling in pain. There’s a red dragon with 7 heads, waiting so he can eat her baby. But the archangel Michael, he hurls the dragon down to earth. From that moment on, the red dragon hates the woman and declares war on her and all her children. That’s us.”
In “Spooky Little Girl,” medium Billie Dean tells Constance that a child conceived by a human and a ghost (Vivien and rapist Tate) would result in the antichrist and would bring about the apocalypse. In the penultimate episode, when Vivien gives birth, scenes flash between the horrific current situation of Vivien dying — a scene inspired by the film Demon Seed — and Vivien and Ben’s joyous delivery of Violet 16 years earlier. But Vivien dies in childbirth, giving birth to one baby who lives (and who’s a murderous sociopath) and one who dies. 
In fact the entire season, from the first episode to the last, revolves around Vivien and her pregnancy who inevitably becomes the allegorical “Woman of the Apocalypse.” Hmmm, so we should all fear women because they could at any moment incite the end of the world. 
According to American Horror Story, we shouldn’t just be terrorized by pregnancy. All aspects of reproduction should scare the shit out of us, including abortion.
In the title sequence for each episode, we see jars of aborted fetuses on the shelves in the basement –again fueling the fire of fear and disgust surrounding abortion. It feels like the messages implied here are “good” women don’t get abortions and abortions are gross and scary. Don’t believe me? Trust me, it gets reinforced over and over again. In fact, because of the macabre show’s obsession with abortion, Feminist Film renames it “American Abortion Story.”
Abortion is discussed throughout the series. Vivien and Constance (who says her “womb is cursed”) talk about abortion after Vivien worries something’s wrong with her baby. After the Harmons move to LA, Ben returns to Boston to accompany Hayden to get an abortion. We witness her emotional instability after Ben checks his phone (because you know, no one in their right mind would choose to get an abortion…eyeroll!). Then Hayden changes her mind and decides to keep the baby…which she never has since she’s murdered.
In the 3rd episode, when Vivien takes the “Eternal Darkness” house tour,” she discovers the history of the Montgomerys and Charles’ “Frankenstein complex.” In 1922, surgeon Charles Montgomery and his socialite wife Nora lived in the house. When they need more money to pay their bills, Nora arranges for Charles to perform illegal abortions on young women. 
The “Eternally Damned” tour guide also condemns the Montgomerys’ performing abortions: “But the souls of the little ones must have weighed heavy upon them as their reign of terror climaxed in the shocking finale in 1926.” Reign of terror? Is that what you call abortions?? At first I thought I must have missed something…perhaps the girls were being murdered. But nope. The abortions are the “reign of terror.” Lovely. 
As Tami at What Tami Said astutely points out, the inception of the house’s evil, its pull in harboring pain, despair and tortured souls, all stems from one person: an abortionist. Oh and to hammer home the point that abortion equates to evil, the episode is entitled “Murder House.”
In another episode, we learn in a flashback that one of the women’s boyfriends, angered by her abortion, kidnaps Nora and Charles’ baby Thaddeus and murders him. Charles “reconstructs” Thaddeus (aka the “infantata”) with the baby’s body parts, animal parts and the heart of one of the aborted fetuses. Nora tells Charles she tried to breastfeed him but it wasn’t milk the baby was craving. We witness bloody claw marks above her breasts. Nora goes on to say:
“We’re damned Charles because of what we did to those girls, those poor innocent girls and their babies.”
So basically Murphy and Falchuk are saying, “Fuck you, reproductive justice!”
Think Progress’ Alyssa Rosenbergfinds American Horror Story “seems to suggest that the end of a pregnancy before term, whether by miscarriage, abortion, or murder, is the ultimate expression of evil. Abortion Gang’s Sophia rightfully condemns the series as an “abortion horror story” and “anti-choice propaganda at its worst.” Tami at What Tami Said criticizes the series for its “conservative and anti-choice messages” including “doctors who perform abortions are bad;” “women who receive abortions are promiscuous and selfish, therefore bad;” “abortion = murdering babies.” 
By portraying Charles and Nora as greedy, preying on young girls reinforces the notion that all abortion providers are greedy, evil predators. And American Horror Storyisn’t telling us that illegal, back-alley abortions are bad. No, it’s telling us ALL abortions are bad. 
The most terrifying aspect of American Horror Story isn’t the shocking gore or gasping plot twists. When our reproductive rights face a daily barrage of attacks, it’s frightening that the series so blatantly perpetuates myths surrounding the fear, stigma and shame of abortion and pregnancy. Reducing women to their reproductive organs, we’re told women’s sexuality and reproduction should scare us and as a result, women’s bodies should be punished and controlled. I’m getting so fucking sick and tired of ignoring sexism, misogyny and anti-choice bullshit just to watch TV.

Reproduction and Abortion Week: Friday Night Lights

In many shows, pregnancy is a simplistic and glossed-over story line, a plot device that comes nowhere near to a realistic depiction of a woman’s experience. How many times have you seen a woman in a television show or movie throw up and know: She’s pregnant! Then you see montages, baby bumps, pregnant women behaving like silly pregnant women, birth, happiness. The end. 
In five seasons on the air, Friday Night Lights featured at least three characters who had to make difficult choices about pregnancy: Erin, Tami Taylor, and Becky Sproles. (Mindy Collette is another character who struggles with pregnancy in the show.) We’ve published pieces about Friday Night Lights before, but I want to talk about the show’s excellent handling of pregnancy and abortion in regard to these three particular characters.
Tamara Jolaine as Erin
Erin

When Jason Street has a blind date with a woman who has an odd fetish related to men in wheelchairs, waitress Erin comes to his rescue–giving Jason a hiding place and telling his date that he left the restaurant. Jason and Erin hit it off, spend the evening together, and end up having what she believes to be a one-night stand. At this time Jason thinks he’s sterile due to his injury, and the two throw caution to the wind and have unprotected sex. 
When Erin turns out to be pregnant, she tells Jason and he immediately pressures her, saying that this may be his “only chance” to be a father. Erin, a very minor character who isn’t even given a last name (as far as I know), nails him on his attempt at emotional manipulation:

You need to stop … You do not get to put that on me. I’m not some experiment for you to prove your manhood, Jason. This is my body. I am going to make the ultimate decision.

Sarah Seltzer, writing for RH Reality Check, nicely analyzes this moment:

Erin pinpoints the way women’s bodies are so often used as battlegrounds for men trying to advance an agenda, personal or political. Jason’s injury has made him so desperate for a chance to be strong and important and yes, masculine again, that he loses any sense that she is a person, too. Jason can’t control his own body, so he wants to control hers.

While Erin does decide to carry the pregnancy to term, and later marries Jason Street (after he experiences a string of improbable successes), it isn’t without debate and discussion. We don’t see much of Erin’s pregnancy, but Jason seems to be a supportive partner in the matter. While happily ever after for these two isn’t the most realistic storyline, the way the unplanned pregnancy is handled isn’t particularly groundbreaking, but it’s not too bad for a network show supposedly about small-town high school football.
Connie Britton as Tami Taylor
Tami Taylor
In the final episode of the first season, an already-frazzled Tami (dealing with an impending move for her husband’s job, among other things) fears she might be pregnant. She enters a Planned Parenthood clinic and asks for a pregnancy test. Though she doesn’t have an appointment, nurse Corinna Williams sees the distraught woman, takes her back, gives her the test, and tells her, in an excited voice, that she is, indeed, pregnant.

“How pregnant do you want to be? Because you’re extremely pregnant.”

When Tami looks less than happy about the news, Corinna asks her, “Do you want to be pregnant?” A teary-eyed Tami responds:

Do I want to be pregnant? Do I want to be pregnant? I don’t know. […] We planned it, like, thirteen years ago. And then twelve years ago, and then eleven years ago, and then ten years ago. 

Even though Tami is financially stable, married, educated, has a job as a guidance counselor, and already has a teenage daughter–is the example of success and stability in the community–her answer to Corinna isn’t an unequivocal yes. Why? Because choosing to have a child, when it’s unplanned, is always a difficult decision. Tami struggles to even have the conversation with her husband, busy as he is with the state football championship. The pregnancy affects the entire family, too, something else for which FNL deserves praise.

The show skips most of Tami’s actual pregnancy (it occurs during the break between the first and second seasons), but picks up the story and closely follows her experience as a new mother, even if it is her second time around. With all her privilege and advantages, balancing work, family, and her own personal life is still a challenge. Her teenage daughter proves less than supportive, her husband is largely absent due to work, and she certainly could have benefited from some on-site childcare when she returns to her job at the school. Overall, Friday Night Lights does an excellent job of portraying a family that believed it was complete dealing with an unplanned pregnancy and a new baby.



Madison Burge as Becky Sproles

Becky Sproles

In season four (my personal favorite), Becky, a 10th grade girl who has a one-night stand with football star Luke, chooses to have an abortion. This is the only abortion featured in the show, and was one of the few on network television since Maude in the 1970s (Roseanne took on abortion in the 1990s, too). That alone is a bold statement about choice, but the show also handles the story line very well. Becky tells Luke, and seeks advice from Tami (who at this point is the principal of East Dillon High). In a most careful and professional way, Tami lays out Becky’s options, mentioning support available for teen mothers, adoption, and, only when Becky mentions not wanting to give birth, some pamphlets available for that (she doesn’t speak the word “abortion”). Becky’s decision is deeply personal, and she chooses to go through with an abortion with the support (one could argue pressure) of her mother, a single woman who gave birth to Becky when she was a teenager.

Becky struggles with her choice, and goes back and forth with her decision, wondering if she could actually care for a child. The show allows her to explore her conflicting feelings and emotions; in another talk with Tami, Becky says:

We don’t have any money. I’m in the 10th grade, and it’s my first time. And I threw it way, and I don’t want to throw my life away. It’s just really obvious that my mom wants me to have this abortion. Because I was her mistake and she has just struggled and hurt everyday, and she wanted better and I knew better. And then I was just thinking, you know, forget what she wants, like, what do I want? And maybe I could take care of this baby, and maybe I would be good at it, and I could love it and I would be there for it. And then I was just thinking how awful it would be if I had the baby and then I spent the rest of my life resenting it, or her.

The women face a mandatory waiting period at the clinic, which forces Becky’s mother to take another day off work–the only overtly political commentary on Becky’s own experience. The ripple effects in the community, however, quickly turn political. When Luke’s mother finds out about Becky’s abortion and Tami counseling her on the decision, she starts  a chain of events in the community that ends in the call for Tami to leave her job as principal. In her analysis of the women in the show, guest writer Lee Skallerup Bessette says:
Those around her (her mother, the mother of the baby’s father, the community) seem more upset and emotionally reactionary than Becky herself. It also seems that the extreme reactions of those around her affect her more than the abortion itself […] Abortion, it would seem, is not the issue; the hysteria surrounding it is.

Decisions surrounding reproductive choice are difficult and emotional enough without state-mandated barriers and interest groups pressuring women to carry all pregnancies to term. While Friday Night Lights had a majority of its pregnant characters give birth, and some story lines were more convincing than others, the show was careful to depict each one as an individual choice, and give the women dignity and autonomy. 

Emmy Week 2011: Tami Taylor, My Hero

Connie Britton as “Tami Taylor” in Friday Night Lights
If there is one woman in Dillon who stands head and shoulders above them all, it’s Tami Taylor. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem too hard to do. Mothers in Dillon have not been the most successful characters; they were either drunk/druggies (Mama Collette, Vince’s mother, Becky’s mother), absent (Jess’ mother, Mama Riggins, Matt Saracen’s mother), or one-dimensional (abuse victim, religious nut, etc). Is it any wonder, then, that Tami Taylor becomes the go-to woman for many of the “lost children” of Dillon?
But let’s take a step back. Even if she is a three-dimensional beacon in a sea of sub-par parenting, she is not without her faults…I just can’t think of any right now. She yelled at Julie a few times, right? And there was that one time she humiliated her daughter by showing up at the pool, pregnant to the point of bursting…Did she pressure Julie to consider a university far, far away from their home in Texas, just because Tami had gone there?
What we get to see in Tami that we don’t get to see in other “mother” characters (except maybe Mindy Riggins) is the conflict that she feels when deciding on the best course of parenting action. And this conflict is rarely ever expressed in words; instead, it is played out on Tami’s face, which can go from anger, to disappointment, to sympathy and love in the course of one short scene. Tami, from the outside, might seem like the perfect mother, making the job look easy, but Connie Britton conveys to us the difficulty her character faces in her decisions as a parent.
This final season, Tami was put through the ringer. She found out her daughter had been sleeping with her TA (the wordless confrontation between the two of them alone should win her the Emmy). She was confronted with the reality of working at an under-funded, under-privileged high school (sometimes that Southern Charm can only go so far), almost moved to Florida because of a college coaching gig for her husband, and, most importantly, she was confronted with a true and possibly devastating conflict in her marriage. At the same time Eric Taylor was contemplating coaching the united Dillon football team, Tami was offered a job as Dean of Admissions at a fictional college in Philadelphia.
The tension between husband and wife is oftentimes unbearable during the last few episodes of the season. When Tami spits at Eric, “I’m going to say to you what you haven’t had the grace to say to me:
congratulations, Eric” and takes her boots and storms off, my heart was breaking. Here is a woman who for 18 years gave up pieces of herself in the name of their marriage, their family, and her husband’s coaching career. The sacrifices that seemed so effortless throughout our time watching the show finally burst through.
Tami seemed to have limited herself. But, when a new opportunity, an unimagined opportunity presents itself, she allows herself to dream. Eric’s unwillingness to even entertain the dream is all the more insulting because of Tami’s willingness to up and move to Florida if Eric decided to take the college coaching job. When the tables are turned, Eric cannot extend to his wife the same level of respect.
At least not at first. By the end of Eric’s own trials, he sees that, on one hand, he owes it to his wife, and on the other, he loves his wife so much that he ultimately wants to do what will make her happy. It takes their daughter getting engaged–and telling her parents that they are her model–for him to realize that he would never want his daughter to give up her dreams, nor sacrifice as much for her future husband as Tami sacrificed for him (or, at least, that’s how I’d like to read it; maybe it was just all about telling Dillon to F-off). Either way, Tami is seen confidently walking across her new campus, cheerily throwing out her trademark “y’all” to those in the City of Brotherly Love.

Lee Skallerup Bessette has a PhD in Comparative Literature and currently teaches writing in Kentucky. She also blogs at College Ready Writing and the University of Venus. She has two kids, and TV and movies are just about the only thing she has time for outside of her work and family. She also contributed a piece for Mad Men Week at Bitch Flicks called, “Things They Haven’t Seen: Women and Class in Mad Men”  and a review of Friday Night Lights for Emmy Week 2011.