We so often view films through the Male Gaze with camera shots that are more interested in capturing the way a woman’s body looks under the guise of “sex sells” that it’s become somewhat of the norm. While ‘Working Girl’ is appreciative of the beauty between Sigourney Weaver and Melanie Griffith, it employs a “female gaze” so to speak with Harrison Ford.
In any other film (9/10 times at least) just reading the synopsis of this movie would have greatly aggravated me and, to be frank, still did a little. There aren’t many films about women competing that paint the characters in question as anything more than shrewd, conniving and petty. Working Girl, much to my delight, doesn’t do that. Or, at least, it isn’t the main character’s objective. Hers is to simply find success and prove to herself and others that she has the talents and the skills to be more than what meets the mind.
The she in question is Tess McGill (Melanie Griffith), who lands a job as a secretary at a big company with a powerful woman, Katharine Parker (Sigourney Weaver) as her boss. At the start Tess is utterly enamored with Katherine, seeing her as a woman to look up to and admire, someone who has already achieved what she’s seeking and, in another film, I would have loved to see a buddy work comedy between the two, because who doesn’t want to be friends with Weaver? Of course, this isn’t to be because movies don’t like it when women are friends and instead, Katherine steals ones of Tess’s ideas and passes them as her own, leading Tess down a path of claiming her agency as a business woman looking to make a mark in the working world. What’s interesting is to see that despite her mounting disdain towards Katharine, Tess still adopts her mannerisms of how she operated in a work environment from the way she dresses and cuts her hair, playing a part to imbue herself with confidence she’s not sure she has yet. The difference is she’s coming at the role with a sense of selflessness and ambition, opposed to Katharine’s selfish nature.
Part of this is impacted by the actresses performances in the roles. Griffith who had been known for much more flightier characters brings a warm sense of empathy to Tess and a thread of naturalism as she too was undervalued as a performer until this Mike Nichols film gave her a bigger break out chance. Weaver, meanwhile, had at this point already played one of cinema’s greatest badasses in Ridley Scott’s Alien as Ripley, and her screen presence was one that captured attention; Weaver to this day is effortlessly enigmatic and it’s easy to understand why someone — real or fictional — would want to follow in her footsteps.
The contrast is one of the stronger aspects of the film which, to its benefit, never pits the characters against one another due to petty or contrived reasons. Tess is never aiming to purely undermine Katharine or trying to steal her position, but rather using Katharine’s absence to pursue her own career, even if it’s through dubious means.
The added element that solidifies the difference between Working Girl and other workplace dramedies — something that more fully flips the script?
Enter Jack Trainer.
A film that understands Harrison Ford’s beauty (and, frankly, exploits it) and treats it as such is a winner in my book automatically (Raiders of the Lost Ark — hello) and late 80’s Ford was on a roll as it is in taking more challenging work with some of cinema’s greatest talents, Mike Nichols being a wonderful addition to that list. While he certainly isn’t played strictly for eye candy (that would be something) he is, in a way, played a “prize” between the two women while also having his own role to play. We so often view films through the Male Gaze with camera shots that are more interested in capturing the way a woman’s body looks under the guise of “sex sells” that it’s become somewhat of the norm. While Working Girl is appreciative of the beauty between Weaver and Griffith, it employs a “female gaze” so to speak with Ford. So much so that there’s a scene that goes to great lengths to express this as he changes in his office and women looking in through the window catcall and whistle.
Perhaps it’s not enough to turn convention on its head, but it’s a welcome change of pace.
Also a change of pace is the fact that by the end of the film, Katharine and Tess aren’t fighting over Jack. They’re fighting over their place in the working world and, to narrow it down to a single moment, they’re fighting over a great idea that Tess had, one Katharine wishes she could have come up with and resents Tess for.
I wouldn’t call Working Girl a feminist call to arms and this is largely due to how broadly Katherine’s character is painted towards the end of the film. At the start she’s written to be calculated, sure, but not the caricature that she becomes halfway through and if she’s distrustful of other employees there’s sense to that too, considering she’s found herself in a sea of suits, in a position of power that’s so at odds with what society had dictated she be. There’s reason to her hostility even but then, rather than exploring her further to make the dynamics between she and Tess more intriguing, the film takes the rather easier route and lets Katharine remain in the two dimensional realm with Weaver doing everything in her might to make her into something more.
Add to that the lack of diversity and there was definitely room to grow — a lot of room.
Writer Kevin Wade and director Mike Nichols crafted a film that is both celebratory of the female experience while also skewering the system that placed them in gendered boxes in the first place. The biggest success of the film isn’t the romance or the drama, but the implications of what lead the characters to their positions in the first place. Katharine fought for the position she has and Tess fought to catch up and achieve the same goal. It’s imperfect, but ambitious, just like its leading ladies.
Lois Lane represents a more achievable kind of strength for us mere mortals. Tenacity, self-reliance, and quick wits – these are the weapons of choice for the archetypal career woman bent on “having it all.” … Any writer that reduces Lois Lane down to little more than human Kryptonite thoroughly misrepresents her rich 75-year history as an important pop cultural icon to women.
This guest post written by Hannah Collins originally appeared at Fanny Pack. It is cross-posted with permission.
Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice may have been a disappointment to many, but I think most comic book fans – and feminists – can agree that Gal Gadot’s strong performance as Wonder Woman was a much-needed bright spot. It’s a shame, then, that the film’s other significant female character – intrepid reporter Lois Lane (Amy Adams) – doesn’t get the same treatment. Though she plays a fairly significant part in advancing the story, and enjoys some (weird) bath-time fun with Clark Kent (Henry Cavill), that’s pretty much all she’s there for – little more than a plot device, a shoulder to cry on, and even worse, a constant distraction to Earth’s greatest hero.
This may seem like a trivial complaint but as someone who fell in love with comic books before feminism, Lois Lane – along with Wonder Woman, Catwoman and Storm – was instrumental in shaping my understanding of what it meant to be a woman in a man’s world. And in a world filled with Gods, magic, time-travel and President Luthor, you’ve got to be one heck of a dame.
Here’s why The Daily Planet’s ace reporter is far more than just Superman’s victimized girlfriend.
A Damsel Not in Distress
The ‘woman in peril’ theme is one that has unfortunately persisted throughout literature and pop culture, from ancient Greek maidens like Andromeda and her hero Perseus, right the way through to Princess Zelda and her hero Link in Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda. It’s no surprise then that the Superhero genre – the modern-day equivalent to Perseus – has also been oversaturated by the damsel/hero dynamic.
Superman is the world’s first Superhero and Lois Lane his eternal damsel in distress. No matter how many Pulitzers she wins or oranges she juices at her Daily Planet desk in her personal war on cigarettes, that core underpinning will never change. But throughout her 75-year history, her determination to fight this definition has never waned.
From her solo comic title, Superman’s Girl Friend, Lois Lane (1954-1974) to her top billing in TV’s Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman’(1993-97), and recent YA novel series Fallout by Gwenda Bond, Lois has proven that she is not only a superior journalist to Clark Kent and Superman’s equal partner, but can carry a story on her own. More often than not, when Lois finds herself in need of rescue from the Big Man in Blue, it’s from a sticky situation of her own making. Rather than wait around to be scooped up by a dragon like a hapless medieval maiden, Lois seeks out trouble in the name of journalism.
Even better is when – thanks to a mix of her “military brat” upbringing and some Kryptonian martial arts – sometimes she gets to even save herself.
[youtube_sc url=”https://youtu.be/5Q8SkwskHPM”]
Because Women Are Strong as Hell
Ever since William Moulton Marston blessed us our first feminist superwoman, Wonder Woman, the Superhero genre has been filled with gutsy, gladiatorial women. But whilst these goddesses represent a masculinized ideal of brute force, Lois Lane represents a more achievable kind of strength for us mere mortals. Tenacity, self-reliance, and quick wits – these are the weapons of choice for the archetypal career woman bent on “having it all.”
But Lois Lane’s fierceness didn’t just grow from the necessity to reflect the changing role of women in society; creators Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel embedded it within her character from the very start. Her personality was borrowed from fast-talking fictional reporter (and owner of The Most 1930s Name Ever) ‘Torchy Blane’ who starred in a series of Warner Bros. films in the 1930s. Her tagline was ‘The Lady Bloodhound with a Nose For News!’ and she was one of the few positive examples of career-driven women on American cinema screens at the time that rivaled – or bested – her male equivalents.
Also woven into Lois’ DNA was real-life pioneering journalist and inventor Nellie Bly. Not only did Bly famously travel the world in a record-breaking 72 days, but also she feigned mental illness in order to write an exposé on life inside a mental institution – redefining investigative journalism and making the rest of us feel desperately lazy.
From Meg in Disney’s Hercules to Spider-Man’s Mary-Jane Watson, every “feisty” damsel worth her salt owes a debt of gratitude to Lois.
Lois Isn’t Holding Out for a Hero
Saying that Lois and Clark are one of your favorite couples in fiction is kind tantamount to saying the same about Romeo and Juliet. In other words, woefully mainstream. But as much as I really do believe they deserve a place amongst literature’s greatest love stories, Lois has proven many times that she can function perfectly well without her fated other half, as the panel above illustrates.
This was exemplified on-screen recently in the much-maligned Superman Returns (2006). Picking up after Superman II (1980), the film starts with Superman (Brandon Routh) returning to Earth after a 5-year absence to find that Lois (Kate Bosworth) has not only moved on to someone else, but also raised a son with him.
Inevitably as the story progresses, Lois finds that her feelings for the Man of Steel are not as buried as she’d thought, and I’m sure the abandoned sequel planned for 2009 would have seen my favorite reporting duo back together. Nonetheless, I was still impressed that rather than pull a ‘Bella Swan’ and throw herself off of a cliff in a fit of angsty despair, Lois Lane wipes away her tears, wins her damn Pulitzer, finds another great guy, raises a child, and foils Lex Luthor’s dastardly plans.
Because not even Earth’s strongest hero can break her that easily.
Keep Lois Out of the Refrigerator
Despite her development over the years into a competent and important player in the DC Universe’s canon of heroines, too many landmark stand-alone stories in Superman’s history hinge not on the strength of Lois Lane, but on her death. Kingdom Come, Superman: Kal, Flashpoint, and Injustice: Gods Among Us all sacrifice Lois (in some pretty fucked up ways) simply to motivate Superman to lose his shit. And judging from the teasers nestled in Batman v Superman:Dawn of Justice, we may be in danger of seeing one of these stories on screen soon.
This is a variant of the ‘Damsel in Distress’ trope known as ‘Women in Refrigerators,’ coined by comics writer Gail Simone to “describe the trend of female comic book characters who are routinely brutalized or killed-off as a plot device designed to move the male character’s story arc forward.” (The term originates from Green Lantern #54, in which Green Lantern discovers his murdered girlfriend’s body in his fridge.)
Look, I get it. Superman only has two weaknesses: Kryptonite and Lois Lane. (Well, three weaknesses if you include his susceptibility to magic.) Same goes for practically every other superhero trying to balance saving the planet with getting laid. It’s a character-building shortcut that’s become inherent to the genre. But the problem with this is that while the male character (and they are nearly always male by default) benefits from this dynamic by having his big, brooding ego balanced with a touch of human emotion, the female character gains nothing other than bearing the weight of the inevitable choice he will have to make between her life and the lives of others. What does it tell you about the value of a female character if she adds more to the narrative in death than in life? Plus, this constant stream of stories that use violence against women as a plot device harmfully perpetuates the real-world stereotype of women as helpless victims and men as their patriarchal saviors.
Any writer that reduces Lois Lane down to little more than human Kryptonite thoroughly misrepresents her rich 75-year history as an important pop cultural icon to women. I can only wait and hope that Snyder’s future Justice League movies treat her a little better than just a sacrificial lamb with a reporter’s badge. In the immortal words of Kate Beaton (of Hark, a Vagrant fame): “If Lois isn’t super rad all the time, then I don’t even want to hear about it.”
Hannah Collinsis a London-born writer and illustrator fascinated by the intersection between pop/visual culture and feminism. Her interest in the movement grew during her time studying Fine Art & Creative Writing at Lancaster University where she discovered writers and artists such as Laura Mulvey, Orlan, Marina Abramovic and Donna Haraway, who opened her eyes to the huge significance – often detrimentally – that the artifice of gender plays in our culture and society. In particular, Haraway’s Cyberfeminist Manifesto linking gender to science fiction had such an impact on her that she constructed the bulk of her dissertation around it. On the blogging scene, Hannah has attracted over 1 million readers to her blog on gender representation in pop culture. By day, she is currently a freelance illustrator for children’s books and comics, and by night (and any other available hour) she contributes to the Cosmic Anvil and Fanny Pack blogs, as well as her own.
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.
On screen, we often see the demonization of women with professional power and/or ambition. These women are usually portrayed as callous, frigid (or conversely hyper-sexual), masculine, and even unnatural. These women tend to be fiercely competitive with other women in their field. All this tells viewers that women don’t belong in high-power positions.
Our February Theme Week for 2014 will be Women and Work/Labor Issues.
Women in the workplace has continued to be an incendiary topic in the U.S since WWII. Before that, Marxist thinker Frederich Engels formed the basis of Marxist Feminism when he wrote about gender oppression in 1884, insisting that class is the basis for the oppression of women. Wikipedia describes Engels theories from his book The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State:
Women’s subordination is a function of class oppression, maintained (like racism) because it serves the interests of capital and the ruling class; it divides men against women, privileges working class men relatively within the capitalist system in order to secure their support; and legitimates the capitalist class’s refusal to pay for the domestic labor assigned, unpaid, to women (childrearing, cleaning, etc.). Working class men are encouraged by a sexist capitalist media to exploit the dominant social position afforded to them by existing conditions to reinforce that position and to maintain the conditions underlying it.
We see this even now, 130 years later, with the limited opportunities that women have within the work force, the lack of value placed on the labor of women as evinced by the continuation of the unpaid child-rearing system, and the fact that women consistently earn less than men for performance of the same job (and that positions typically held by women tend to be compensated at a lesser wage).
On screen, we often see the demonization of women with professional power and/or ambition. These women are usually portrayed as callous, frigid (or conversely hyper-sexual), masculine, and even unnatural. These women tend to be fiercely competitive with other women in their field. All this tells viewers that women don’t belong in high-power positions.
Conversely, there are a lot of stories about working class women who are filled with gumption and fortitude (if not a lot of education), which lionize the women who scrape to get by, keep their family fed, and struggle to improve their working conditions.
This month, we’d like to explore representations of women in the work force. Some questions you may want to think about are: How does being a woman affect the character(s)’ relationship with work? How does class intersect with gender oppression (or other kinds of oppression)? What does her job (skilled or unskilled labor) say about her? How does she relate to other women in her field? How does her job affect her interactions with men?
We’d like to avoid as much overlap as possible for this theme, so get your proposals in early if you know who or what you would like to write about. We accept both original pieces and cross-posts, and we respond to queries within a week.
Most of our pieces are between 1,000 and 2,000 words, and include links and images. Please send your piece as a Microsoft Word document to btchflcks[at]gmail[dot]com, including links to all images, and include a 2- to 3-sentence bio.
If you have written for us before, please indicate that in your proposal, and if not, send a writing sample if possible.
Please be familiar with our publication and look over recent and popular posts to get an idea of Bitch Flicks’ style and purpose. We encourage writers to use our search function to see if your topic has been written about before, and link when appropriate (hyperlinks to sources are welcome, as well).
The final due date for these submissions is Friday, Feb. 21 by midnight.
A sampling of films/shows that highlight women & work/labor issues:
1) Number one and most important of all, I’m thankful this movie was written and directed by a woman and that it’s a story about a strong, smart, interesting woman.
Director and screenwriter Lake Bell at the Sundance Film Festival
I am incredibly thankful about that.
2) I’m thankful this movie stars an actress who doesn’t look like every other Hollywood actress. Yes, Bell is beautiful, but she also doesn’t have the button nose, full lips, perfect posture, and blond hair that has become so annoyingly ubiquitous among our female movie stars.
Louis (Demetri Martin) and Carol Solomon (Lake Bell) sing their guts out in In a World …
And neither do her co-stars…
Louis (Demetri Martin) and Cher (Tig Notaro) watch Carol Solomon (Lake Bell) record a voice-over.
(You also gotta love a movie that has both Tig Notaro and Geena Davis.)
3) On a related note, I’m thankful Bell’s protagonist, Carol Solomon, doesn’t always act like a leading lady—she shuffles, lurches, and acts generally spazzy. She doesn’t always look glamorous either—she doesn’t always wear makeup or look perfectly primped and often wears regular-people clothes (sweatpants, thermal underwear, t-shirts, football jerseys, overalls, ill-fitting dresses, etc.)—just like the rest of us.
Louis (Demetri Martin) and Carol Solomon (Lake Bell) hatch plans to take over the voice-over industry.
At the same time, I’m glad Carol looks attractive when she wants to without looking trashy or showing off all the goods.
4) I’m also thankful that several men are attracted to Carol even though she doesn’t know how to dress or stand up straight (and that the men who are drawn to her are attractive but not perfect either).
Carol Solomon’s love interest, Louis (Demetri Martin)
5) I love, too, that this film shows an intelligent, driven, attractive young female protagonist in a relationship, but it isn’t what defines her. Let me say that again: Thank God her relationship doesn’t define her!
I was equally thrilled that Carol had casual sex with some random guy she met at a party and celebrated it. And that she didn’t end up regretting her actions or have something bad happen to her as a result. In this movie, sex was just part of life—no big deal—much like it is in real life.
Louis (Demetri Martin) and Carol Solomon (Lake Bell) karaoke the night away in In a World …
6) I was also head over heels over the fact that the two sisters—Carol and Dani—were so close and leaned on each other for everything.
Carol Solomon (Lake Bell) and her sister, Dani (Michaela Watkins)
I was glad, as well, that the person who had an “affair” in this movie was a woman (rather than a man) and that she didn’t actually go all the way.
7) I really appreciate, too, that this movie shows a young person living at home with a parent and that she isn’t doing so because she’s a lazy, lost, unmotivated slacker.
Carol Solomon (Lake Bell) and her father (Fred Melamed) argue about her career.
And I was truly blown away by the film’s characterization of Carol’s family—a real family having down-to-earth, regular problems.
No, nobody is dying of cancer, nobody is mentally ill or disabled, nobody is in prison, nobody is an alcoholic. The characters in this movie are just average people with average problems—like jealousy, resentment, miscommunication, and selfishness.
I am very grateful about that.
Carol Solomon (Lake Bell) and her father (Fred Melamed) on the way to an industry party.
8) I’m thrilled about several things relating to Carol’s job…
I’m relieved Carol works in a non-glamorous industry that we don’t usually see featured in movies—the voice-over industry.
Carol Solomon (Lake Bell) records a voice-over.
I love, too, that she cares so much about her work even though it doesn’t pay the bills.
And I’m glad that the film shows her having some success in that field without totally dominating it a la every other movie ever made (Erin Brockovich, Jerry Maguire, The Devil Wears Prada, Working Girl, etc., etc.).
9) I’m downright ecstatic about the fact that Carol didn’t have to trip or fall to make us laugh, avoiding the ridiculous formulas that often dominate movies about women.
Carol Solomon (Lake Bell) surrounded by her work notes in her bedroom at her father’s house.
Thank you for that, Lake Bell!
Tangentially, it was also awesome that Carol was irritated by stupid people doing stupid things and didn’t apologize for that.
10) And last but not least, I’m incredibly thankful this movie made me laugh and feel and, for God’s sake, think.
“If you haven’t binge-watched Sports Night within one weekend, then you haven’t seen Shakespeare the way it was meant to be played.”*
This nuanced end-of-90s sitcom offers a peek behind the scenes of a cable sports news show, all the while mixing genuinely serious story arcs with brilliantly written characters and conversations. Captivating on many levels, the series experienced an untimely cancellation after just two seasons, which, for the most part, when it comes to television, is a sign of high yet underappreciated quality.
Taking a closer look at the female characters of the show, it is palpable that, while Sorkin views women as crazy, neurotic and flawed individuals, he sees all people as such.
This is precisely the reason why the show, not unlike his other shows, is said to be exceptionally well-written. While Sorkin is known to write most of his material himself (though it has been said that he is stingy when it comes to the sharing of writing credit), it is unsurprising that he has achieved just about cult status amongst fans for recycling whatever works. And work they do, the female characters of Sports Night–as women, as professionals, but most of all as believable human beings.
Felicity Huffman as Dana Whitaker and Sabrina Lloyd as Natalie Hurley in Sports Night
Like A Boss
On this show, it is the women who are in charge. The main characters besides the two male news anchors are Dana, the producer of Sports Night, and Natalie, her second-in-command and associate producer. They literally run the show, and not just on their network. From time to time, this is noted on a meta-level. At one point, after there has been a bomb threat to their office building, it is the guys who are freaking out, whereas the women remain calm.
As Dana tells them to pull themselves together, she concludes, “We’re in charge. We’re women in charge. And we’re keeping it together. That’s what we do.” Casey replies, sullenly, “Well, we’re men, and we’re petrified. That’s what we do.”
Dana meets with Casey (Peter Krause) and Isaac (Robert Guillaume)
Similarly, Natalie holds an important position and is well aware of it. She never seems hesitant with regard to decision making or apologetic about being in a position of control. As they are already dating, Jeremy playfully notes, “You’ve taken to bossing me around a lot, you know that?”
The following conversation ensues:
Natalie: Yes. You know why?
Jeremy: ‘Cause you’re my boss?
Natalie: Bull’s-eye, Jerome.
There is a mutual understanding about who’s boss, and there isn’t a moment in the series’ two seasons where women’s authority is questioned or dishonored.
Dana and Natalie are a team both on and off the air. They are not just coworkers but also very close friends and have a very strong bond akin to sisterhood. Team spirit is big on Sports Night as it is but, what is more, there is a very tangible solidarity amongst women. Not once do we see a cat fight, a trope so frequently employed in realms of television where women are involved. Arguments overflow with emotions at best, but never do they result in pettiness. They are invariably based at the very least on mutual respect and dignity.
Even Dana’s interactions with her coworker Sally Sasser, who turns out to be “the other woman” for both Dana’s long-time friend (with coveted benefits) Casey and her fiancé Gordon, are not spiteful but professional. The one time Dana attempts to confront Sally in rage results in the realization that it is not her place to reproach her. Halfway through her tirade, she ends up apologizing and they reconcile.
Natalie and Dana
Another particularly remarkable aspect is that these women are in no way portrayed as “butch,” highlighting the (seemingly little-known) fact that characteristics typically associated with femininity (physical and otherwise) and a genuine passion for sports are, in fact, not contradictory.
Between garbage can basketball and obsessing over stats, there is no way they could be mistaken for anything but authentic sports geeks. This is especially accentuated by the recurring role of Jenny, an adult film actress with a keen interest in sports and a solid command of baseball trivia.
While being the boss and being a woman do not pose a discrepancy on the level of the show itself, funnily enough, it is Dana, who, at one point, says:
“You know, you’re the boss all day long, and you’re barking out these orders and you just want… I don’t know. A check on your femininity, when you’re done.”
Coming from Dana, this is somewhat surprising, as it has never seemed to bother her in this particular way. She has always been the epitome of the gorgeous, desirable woman who just happens to be a sports nut (a type of person Sports Night is heavily populated with). As a matter of fact, just a few episodes prior, Dana appears in a revealing leather outfit, as she is on her way to a “biker chick” themed bachelorette party. While putting on her high heel boots, she asks Natalie:
“Tell me something. Why would the nickelback have set up five yards off the line on third-and-one inside the 50 and they’ve been going off-tackle all day?”
Clearly, this is a reference that only outright American Football enthusiasts would get. Her cascade of a monologue in sports jargon illustrates that her in-depth knowledge of sports goes hand in hand with her femininity, despite popular belief on and off television.
The cast of Sports Night (Joshua Malina as Jeremy Goodwin on the left)
Dana doesn’t just run the show that she produces, she actually runs the show everywhere else, as well. You might call her a bit of a control freak that, in all her neurotic ways, evokes comparison to Monica Geller on Friends. Dana is the center of the group who often speaks up for or makes decisions for others. Of all the women in charge in her group of friends and coworkers, she is without a doubt the leader. Just as she calls the shots on Sports Night, Dana does so in her private life. This is especially the case with her best friend Natalie, who looks up to her, and her long time love interest Casey. During the budding of Dana and Casey’s flawed romance there is barely a moment where Casey asserts himself. As he finally asks her out after 90 days of pondering, he receives a slight scolding for having waited too long.
Neil Finn’s song, “She Will Have Her Way,” is used in the Season 2 premiere as well as multiple times throughout the season. And, as is always the case with Dana, she will have her way. Right up until she doesn’t. On the night of what should be their first date, Dana claims to have had an epiphany and presents her new “dating plan”: instead of the two of them going out on a date as planned, they will postpone it, while Casey has to date other women for 6 months. The logic of this eludes everyone but Dana herself, yet she will not let go of the idea until it blows up in her face, as Casey finally decides to move on with one of the women he went on a mandatory date with.
Natalie in Sports Night
With regard to Natalie, one might point out that she has certain qualities of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. On looking more closely, however, it becomes clear that her character can rather be seen as a deconstruction of the trope. Bearing in mind that Sports Night premiered in 1998, a full seven years before the term was coined, Sorkin seems to have unwittingly been very much ahead of his time.
Besides being a stunningly beautiful and intelligent woman, she is portrayed as slightly quirky (though hardly any crazier than the rest of Sports Night‘s main characters). She often resorts to bizarre, impulsive behavior and clearly serves a purpose for Dan’s troubled character on several occasions. However, she is very well aware of her captivating charm and peculiarity and alludes to it every now and then. As for her relationship with Jeremy, she does partly hold the position of the vivacious, upbeat character that struggles to grab Jeremy by the hand, teach him to embrace life and, essentially, “live a little.” Yet, instead of reducing her to this function, Sorkin depicts her as an independent woman. It becomes clear that she is mainly looking out for her own interests. On an equally important note, Natalie doesn’t succeed in her efforts to get Jeremy to savor life and step out of his comfort zone until ultimately this is the reason they break up.
A Big Thing Badly
Sports Night experiences a crisis in one of the first few episodes, as Natalie is sexually assaulted by an athlete. In general, not a lot of backstory on Natalie is revealed in the course of the series, whereas we learn quite a bit about the family members of the rest of the ensemble cast. Consequently, this episode highlights her character in quite a meta way. It is established early on that Natalie prefers not to talk about private matters. She tries to dismiss the incident and only mentions it to her staff as they find out elsewhere.
The cast of Sports Night watches a game
The incident poses a conflict on many levels. It is Dana who sends Natalie to do a pre-interview with a football player who happens to be a convicted felon. The objective is to question him about the off-limits topic of domestic violence against his girlfriend. Instead of sending Jeremy, Dana uses Natalie to “provoke a better response to the questions.”
As the assault is revealed, Dana exploits this to get an exclusive story. Realizing the highly problematic nature of her decision, she nonetheless makes a deal with the athlete’s representatives, having the ratings of her television show in mind:
Dana: “Despite a mountain of fairly immutable evidence, I am prepared to believe that what happened to Natalie didn’t happen to Natalie. And I’m confident I can persuade Natalie to see it the same way.”
In exchange for their discretion they would get 5 minutes of air time touching on the topic that would otherwise have been off limits.
Eventually, Dana calls off the interview altogether only three minutes before the show in an effort to do the right thing after all. Ultimately, the prospect of an exclusive news story makes way for decency regarding this sensitive subject.
Natalie and Dana hug it out
Interestingly, the incident provokes a particularly adverse reaction in Jeremy, who at that time already carries a torch for Natalie. While the knight in shining armour attire certainly isn’t tailor-made for a type like Jeremy, he nonetheless feels compelled to take the athlete aside and warn him: “You touch her again, I’m gonna have you killed.” In a comment evidencing the show’s capacity to treat serious subjects with sharp and subtle humor, he goes on to say, “Do you understand what I’m saying? I’m gonna pay someone $50 to have you killed.”
Following the assault, Natalie gets death threats of her own. She literally gets slut shamed in the subsequent episode when a hateful message reaches her via email, saying “Dear slut, You should never have been in that locker room where men have just played the game of football.”
Felicity Huffman as Dana Whitaker in Sports Night
In the mean time, she receives special treatment from her co-workers. Initially, the crew wants to shelter her by giving her the rest of the night off. “Am I being fired?” she asks, assuming the position of being doubly victimized. As Natalie is distracted and makes mistakes later on, her staff is very understanding and refrains from calling her on it – very much to her distaste:
“Why not? Why aren’t you laughing at me? Why aren’t you mad at me? (…) Look, all I want is to get it right, and when I don’t, I expect to be treated like a professional. I expect to be yelled at. I want to be treated like the show is still important. I want to be treated like my job is still important!”
She sees her career in jeopardy, which she later explains to be the reason why she’d rather not have the public know about the incident. Natalie refers to a Boston Globe reporter whose story of sexual assault by an athlete was exposed, and asserts: “There isn’t a female sports journalist that didn’t learn their lesson from it.”
Josh Charles as Dan Rydell and Peter Krause as Casey McCall in Sports Night
Clearly, being a female sports reporter bears certain considerations that being a male sports journalist generally doesn’t.
From parents’ disapproval (as Dana quotes her mother: “sports is no place for an educated woman”) to more serious issues as the one mentioned above, there are a myriad of reasons to become a woman working in the field of sports, to prove them all wrong, step by step, and take on this patriarchal society of ours.
* For those unfamiliar with the series: One of Aaron Sorkin’s many clever one-liners that keep resurfacing in his shows and are referred to as “Sorkinisms.”
Artemis Linhart is a freelance writer and film curator with a weakness for escapism.
(Spoilers ahead for the last couple of seasons of the Friday Night Lights TV show – if you haven’t seen it already, I’ll wait while you watch all five seasons of the show, then watch the movie and read the book. Trust me; it’s worth your time. Also, warning: links to TV Tropes. Do not click if you have anything else to do for the next 24 hours.)
Jurnee Smollett-Bell as Jess Merriweather in Friday Night Lights
A long time ago, movies, books and TV shows figured out how much emotion there is to harness in stories about sports. Sports are driven by dreams, hope, love, hate, anger, exhilaration and devastation. There’s power in that kind of passion – power that leads Rocky Balboa to knock out the mighty Ivan Drago, and Friday Night Lights’ Vince Howard to throw 60-yard bombs. Portraying them this way is truth in television; heart and love of the game really are major factors in athletic achievements, and it makes for some incredible narratives.
This says something about the fact that so many sports stories (fictional ones, and coverage of real-life ones) are male-dominated. It tells us what depths of emotions society ascribes exclusively to androgens. There are some exceptions to this rule – movies like Bend It Like Beckham, Million Dollar Baby, and A League of Their Own come immediately to mind.
Jess, equipment manager, stands on the field with the football team
For all its well-written female characters and feminist storylines, Friday Night Lights is, overall, not one of those exceptions. It would be unrealistic if it were; it’s about a small Texas town that idolizes its football team, and small Texas towns do not idolize (or, often, have) female football teams. The show offers us complex, three-dimensional female characters like Tyra Collette, Lyla Garrity, Tami Taylor and Becky Sproles, but Jess Merriweather is the only character who demonstrates that love of sport (in a story in which “sport” = “football,” the be all and end all of sport in that town) isn’t reserved for men.
In season four, Jess strode into that hyper-masculine domain with every bit as much passion as the male characters, and the extra savvy, self-awareness, and anger that comes from being a woman in a man’s world. She became a cheerleader because it was the only way for a girl like her to get close to the sport she grew up teaching to her much younger brothers, but as she gets older, that’s not enough for her. Helping her little brothers and running drills with her football star boyfriend isn’t enough; she wants to be involved for herself. She convinces Coach Taylor to let her be an equipment manager, with the intention of someday becoming a high school football coach.
Jess argues with her boyfriend Vince (Michael B. Jordan) in the locker room
Jess’ storyline is consistent with FNL’s aversion to creating caricatures; the people around her are not divided into evil, misogynistic villains and helpful, sympathetic allies. Coach Taylor, the compassionate hero of the show, dismisses her completely at first and has to be talked into giving her a chance. Her boyfriend, Vince, is portrayed as an essentially good guy, but he gets angry and protective when his teammates start messing with her. He was raised in a culture that makes him feel emasculated and threatened by having a girlfriend who handles herself among the boys, and the show realistically portrays Jess’ frustration at having to reconcile her feelings for Vince with the way his issues hold her back.
Also realistic is how personal Jess’ storyline is. She isn’t a feminist crusader; she’s a reminder to feminist crusaders of who they’re fighting for: high school girls who find their dreams limited by rules they didn’t ask for or create. She’s a girl with her own ambitions and goals, and she’s interested in systemic issues only to the extent that they get in the way of those goals. When Coach Taylor tells her there are no female football coaches, she goes home and prints off a story about the first female high school football coach in America (even though, as Coach Taylor points out, it’s only a story because there isn’t a second one). The point of Jess’ storyline is that she shouldn’t have to do this kind of feminist campaigning; the path to her dreams should be no less clear than it would be if she were male.
Jess as a cheerleader
FNL offers us some feminist crusaders; Tami Taylor takes on higher-up perpetrators of systemic injustices on issues of education and abortion and lobbies her husband in defense of Jess’ right to work in football-related jobs. Citing Tami as an inspiration, Tyra Collette ends the series by expressing a desire to go into politics, so she can make a difference on a larger scale. Jess, however, is not in it for the politics. She’s in it for her own rights, and systemic political issues just happen to be in her way.
Jess starts the show defined by her relationships to the male characters; she’s a love interest for Landry Clark and Vince Howard (and a catalyst for issues between the two of them), and her status as a cheerleader makes playing a supporting role to boys a central aspect of her life. However, even when her only important storylines were romantic, she was known mostly for not taking shit from the male characters. In a culture in which most students, especially female ones, let the football players get away with anything, she stands up to Landry for destroying her bike, and calls Vince out on going back to his life of crime.
Jess talks to Landry (Jesse Plemons) at her locker
Jess’ autonomy develops far beyond simply filling a “sassy” love interest role, as her own, independent storyline really starts in season five. She talks to Tami Taylor about her frustrations with going back to being a cheerleader after spending all summer working with her boyfriend, Vince, on his football skills. She refuses to be a “rally girl,” whose job it is to take care of her football player by wearing his jersey and presenting him with baked goods every week.
This is when Jess, with some help from Tami, begs Coach Taylor for a job as an equipment manager. Coach Taylor doesn’t understand why this is important, but he lets it happen. She faces expected sexist jabs that come from being a girl in the boys’ locker room, but what makes her angrier is the way Vince tries to control her and keep her out of there. By the end of the series, her romantic storylines are subplots to her dream of becoming a football coach, just as most of the male characters’ stories are focused on their own dreams.
Jess and Vince
Jess’ other relationships show us how she got the way she is. She grew up poor, and she takes on a lot of responsibility, working long hours at her dad’s restaurant and taking on a parental role to her younger brothers. She gains maturity beyond her years, which shows in all aspects of her life. It’s incredibly refreshing to see a teenage female character who’s emotionally aware and straightforward about her feelings. She breaks stereotypes about game-playing girls by being upfront and honest with Vince and Landry in her romantic relationships and shows similar assertiveness with her father.
All this backstory should leave us unsurprised that Jess is willing to take on the odds and fight for what she wants, as she’s spent her whole life doing that. She fights her father when his hatred for the game of football emotionally harms his son. She fights Vince when he displays juvenile, sexist behaviour, and her refusal to take this from him leads to the end of their relationship. It’s implied that growing up female in a man’s world (and with dreams of existing in a very male-dominated part of that world), and poor and black in a world dominated by the more affluent, mostly white side of town, is what’s made her as strong as she is.
Jess stands with members of the football team
However, one of my favourite aspects of Jess’ character is that she manages to be mature and savvy without being unrealistically stoic, the “strong female character” who shows no real weakness or emotions. Her feelings for the boys she dates are genuine, her love for her brothers and parents is obvious, and most of all, her passion for the game of football is overwhelming. She doesn’t always know the perfect way to fight, and she gets as angry, frustrated, depressed, and excited as anyone else. We see her cry sometimes, and not in the media’s common “it turns out the ice queen is really just an emotional woman all along” way, but in a “she has emotions – strong, weak, positive, negative, often nuanced and mixed, just like all the other male and female characters” way. Her emotions don’t make her weak or unlikable, but realistic and relatable, so you (or, at least, I) can’t help but root for her.
It’s Jess’ ability to be strong while still being emotionally realistic and flawed, and having nuanced relationships while still having her own goals/agenda and an independent storyline, that put her in the rare, coveted category of a truly three-dimensional female character. The fact that her storyline involves struggles against systemic sexism, perpetrated in a realistic way by well-meaning people around her, is icing on the cake to make her a feminist’s dream. We never see Jess score a touchdown, but she’s one of my favourite fictional feminist sports figures.
Sarah Stringer is a psychology student in Ontario, with an interest in the political aspects of pop culture.
The US iteration of The Office concluded its nine-year run last week with a somewhat mawkish but nevertheless emotionally satisfying finale. We left these characters in a place of personal fulfillment—Dwight and Angela marry, Dwight is regional manager of the Scranton branch of Dunder Mifflin, Andy has turned his embarrassing experiences into something positive and returned to the site of his glory days, Kelly and Ryan foolishly and selfishly run off into the sunset, Erin meets her birth parents. And Jim and Pam, the emotional core of the series, leave Scranton together for Austin so Jim may rejoin the sports marketing startup he and Darryl began working for earlier this season.
In case you haven’t been watching The Office in its autumn years, Jim and Pam’s relationship has followed the push and pull of the conflict between their commitment to each other and their own personal dreams. In season 5, aspiring artist Pam moved to New York for a graphic design program. The series mined the pressures of long-distance relationships for both comedy and drama, but Jim and Pam’s partnership stayed strong and they got engaged at the gas station midpoint between Scranton and New York. Shortly thereafter, Pam left New York “the wrong way” because she failed a class and doesn’t want to remain in the city for another three months to retake it. She insists it is not because of Jim, but because she doesn’t actually like graphic design, but the viewer knows it is a complex combination of those two forces.
Pam and Jim after the birth of their first child.
This dynamic is flipped in the final season when Jim joins a friend in Athlead, a new venture connecting famous athletes to sponsorship opportunities. With Athlead, Jim is finally able to work a job he feels passionate about, in stark contrast to his years as a paper salesman. But Jim’s new job puts an immense strain on his marriage with Pam—with whom he now has two children—as he divides his time between Philadelphia and Scranton and has less attention to give to his family.
Pam is driven to tears by the growing conflict between her and Jim
This is exacerbated by a lack of communication as Jim inexplicably keeps his initial involvement with Athlead from Pam, and increases his commitment to this new job without consulting her several times over. Jim and Pam’s relationship reaches the breaking point, and Jim finally decides to leave Athlead and return to Scranton full-time to save his marriage.
Pam is wracked with guilt and fears that she is “not enough” to justify Jim abandoning his new career direction. Notably, we saw nothing of this type of guilt in Jim when Pam left art school. With the help of the documentary crew that is finally explicitly woven into the story in this finale season, Jim presents Pam a video montage of their relationship and tells her “not enough for me? You are everything.”
The series finale is set some time in the future, after the documentary has aired on PBS and Jim and Pam’s relationship is as important to in-universe fans as it is to those of us watching The Office in the real world. During the public Q&A at a reunion panel, several women criticize Pam for stifling Jim’s career. Jim does a satisfactory job of dissuading these questions, but they clearly affect Pam. She’s also moved by seeing the success and happiness Darryl, who has followed Athlead (now Athleap) to Austin. So she secretly sells her and Jim’s house (secrecy is a recurring and frustrating undercurrent in their relationship; this is the same house Jim bought without consulting Pam first) and tells Jim it’s time for them to move on from Dunder Mifflin and relocate to Austin.
Pam and Jim decide to move on from Scranton
From a Doylist perspective, this gives the audience closure; without Jim and Pam present, the story of The Office feels complete. But on the Watsonian side of things, it means Jim’s career path decidedly beats out Pam’s after many years of back and forth, which puts a damper on my personal satisfaction as a viewer.
My personal life is clearly influencing my reaction to this storyline: I moved 8,000 miles away from home so my partner could accept his dream job. Obviously, every couple needs to resolve these issues on their own, and it is dated and heteronormative to think this is always going to be a gendered struggle. But for many mixed-gender couples, gendered expectations of whose career matters more and the importance of career vs. family often play a part. And it’s a bit of a let down to see one of the iconic on-screen couples of the last ten years fall into the traditional resolution of the man’s career coming first.
Robin Hitchcock is an American writer living in Cape Town who works out her personal issues by writing about sitcoms.
Guest post written by Carleen Tibbets.Warning: Spoilers ahead.
Election, the 1999 film directed by Alexander Payne and based on the novel by Tom Perotta, chronicles type A personality Tracy Flick’s (Reese Witherspoon) quest to become student body president and the unraveling of her social sciences teacher, Mr. McAllister (Matthew Broderick) as he attempts to thwart her campaign. Released on the heels of the Clinton-Lewinsky sex-scandal, Election explores power, corruption, and moral gray area in the “wholesome” Midwest — seemingly representative of all that is safe, suburban, and pure.
Although he admits to taking pride in guiding his students and receiving “teacher of the year” honors several times over, McAllister has relatively little control over his personal life. He’s unable to impregnate his wife, Diane (Molly Hagan), commits adultery, and is ultimately done in by a student wound just as tight as her blonde curls. Tracy Flick makes her first appearance preparing for her campaign dressed in preppy sweater vest and loafers, yet despite the twinkle in her blue eyes, we soon learn that she’s much more calculating than she lets on. In her narration over the various clips of her high school curriculum vitae thus far, Tracy admits, “I volunteered for every committee as long as I could lead it.” We gain some insight into Tracy’s unwavering work ethic: she was raised by a single mother who taught her that being a woman meant that she would have to work twice as hard to actualize her dreams.
In McAllister’s civics class, Tracy obnoxiously and confidently thrusts her hand in the air when he asks the class to differentiate between morals and ethics, and McAllister is put off by her self-assuredness. The root of McAllister’s disdain for Tracy stems from the fact that she had an affair with his friend and colleague, Mr. Novotny (Mark Harelik). Novotny begins genuinely mentoring Flick, admiring her as a human being, and telling her, “Sometimes people like you have to pay a price or their greatness, and that price is loneliness.” However, this soon led to Novotny (seemingly) taking advantage of Tracy, as he puts “Three Times a Lady” on his stereo and leads her into the bedroom he shares with his wife, Linda (Delaney Driscoll). He confides in McAllister that their relationship has turned sexual. This is quickly discovered by her mother and the school administration, leading to Novotny’s forced resignation, divorce from Linda, and relocation to a different state. Sure, Tracy can accurately define and differentiate between ethics and morals, but she fails to exemplify them.
Determined to throw a monkey wrench into Tracy’s presidential win, which he refers to as a possible dictatorship, McAllister convinces naïve quarterback hero with a heart of gold Paul Metzler (Chris Klein) to oppose Tracy in the race. Despite Paul’s protestation to taking any votes away from Tracy, McAllister assures Paul of his being a “natural born leader.” Tracy accosts McAllister at his car after school with her list of signatures required to run, he drives off and throws it in a dumpster, certain Paul stands a fighting chance. Tracy’s chipper personality quickly falls away when she notices that Paul is now her opponent and she demands to know who put Paul up to challenging her.
We are then introduced to Tammy Metzler (Jessica Campbell), Paul’s adopted lesbian sister, a sophomore who decides to join the race for student body president after her girlfriend throws her over for Paul. In the assembly where each candidate pitches their platform to their peers, Tracy gives anecdotal accounts, Paul struggles to read his promises off an index card in a labored monotone, and Tammy gives an anarchy-fueled speech, capturing the “who cares?” mentality of most high schoolers, which results in the overwhelming support of the teen constituents.
Tammy’s unorthodox speech doesn’t bode well with the principal, who refers to her as a “little bitch” he wants out of the election. Fed up with Paul and Tammy detracting from the election she feels she deserves to win, Tracy has a meltdown and destroys her running mates’ posters. McAllister rightly suspects Tracy’s culpability, bringing up her near-destruction of Novotny in his interrogation. Tracy retorts with underhanded comments about McAllister’s infertility and Novotny getting mushy and attached to her. Yet, Tammy confesses to McAllister that she defaced the posters in hopes of getting sent to an all-girls school, is expelled, and taken off the ballot.
The night before the big vote, Paul prays for others, including his sister, while Tracy insists that she win, and truly believes she will. She even hand-frosts dozens of cupcakes with “Pick Flick” to hand her constituents. When it comes time to vote, Paul selflessly votes for Tracy, and she votes for herself. Meanwhile, McAllister’s personal life is completely in shambles, having spent the night in his car outside the home of his Novotny’s ex-wife and being thrown out by his own wife upon her learning of their affair. He must count the votes after two members of student government complete their tally, but mid-count he notices Tracy snooping around the classroom, jumping around giddily when one of the vote-counters gestures to her that she is the victor. Tracy wins by a single vote (presumably the vote she cast for herself), yet disgusted by her glee, McAllister wonders just how many people Tracy will step on in her ascent to the top. But why shouldn’t she rejoice in her victory? Is she not deserving?
He decides she must be stopped and throws two of her votes in the trash, declaring Paul the next president. That night, surrounded by all her trophies, medals, and inspirational posters, Tracy sobs uncontrollably. Her mother’s attempt to comfort her only comes out as criticism when she suggests Tracy might have won had she had better posters and slips her an anti-anxiety pill. Tracy’s misery is short-lived, however, when her missing votes are discovered. McAllister is called on the carpet for his attempt to take Tracy down, and resigns.
Tracy gets her wish to be president, topping her extensive list of extracurriculars, and earns a scholarship to Georgetown, where she expects to be surrounded with diligent worker bees such as herself. However, her expectations of finding those on her wavelength come crashing down when she realizes most students coast through on their parents’ dollar and with minimal effort.
McAllister encounters Tracy sometime later as she chats with a Republican representative and gets into his limo.
The film closes with McAllister, now a museum tour guide, being confronted with a miniature Flick-in-the-making on a school field trip shooting her arm up to answer a trivia question he poses to the group.
Election depicts several types of women from overachiever alpha-female Tracy to slacker Tammy to long-suffering, passive Diane and desperate Linda. Yet, what does it really tell us about how a woman should conduct herself? Are men afraid of driven women? Is society? Does being an ambitious woman who knows what she wants mean that she will indeed be lonely at the top?
Election also brings up the fact that in American society, qualified and talented women are perceived as a threat to the male status quo. Thirteen years after this film’s release, although Secretary Hillary Clinton’s displayed poise during the Lewinsky scandal and her own strides and accomplishments apart from Bill were quite remarkable, she did not earn the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008. Instead, she is ridiculed for her haircut and wardrobe choices. Republican VP nominee Sarah Palin’s beauty pageant days and “hockey mom” persona worked against her. Despite First Lady Michelle Obama’s humanitarian efforts, her every outfit is scrutinized by the media and her defined forearms are just as relevant as her Ivy-League credentials. Does it have to be one or the other? Must women be “frumpy” or asexual to be taken seriously in the political arena? Are attractive women less-qualified leaders? Why do we care whether the First Lady wears Manolo Blahniks or J. Crew pumps?
The saying “Behind a great man is an even greater woman” is thrown around regarding women in the political spotlight, but why are they lauded as pillars for their male counterparts to lean on instead of leaders in their own right? Can a woman wield clout regardless of with whom she’s linked romantically? I suppose what it all boils down to is what and whom a woman is willing to sacrifice and what labels she can live with in order to carve out a place for herself in a world still uncertain how to handle her success.
——
Carleen Tibbetts is a writer living in San Francisco. Her work has appeared in various publications including Word Riot, , and other journals.
You know what I’d like to see more of on television? Stories about women who are successful in their professional lives, but whose personal lives are a complete mess. I especially want to see more of these stories about female doctors.
Take Emily Owens, M.D., for example. Starring Mamie Gummer, Emily Owens, M.D. tells the story of a medical intern who discovers that life in a hospital is just like high school. In the first episode, she confesses to her old high school crush that she likes him only to be shot down, and realizes that her high school nemesis is interested in her high school crush, but she also diagnoses a condition and performs a life-saving procedure during her first day on the job.
Or let’s look at Mindy Kaling’s new sitcom. The Mindy Project, recently picked up for a full season, tells the story of Mindy Lahiri, a gynecologist whose dating life is a mess. In the first episode of the show, she rudely interrupts an ex-boyfriend’s wedding and drives a bicycle into a pool, but by the end of the pilot, she’s heroically delivering a baby to a patient who doesn’t have health insurance – even interrupting a date to do it.
Or let’s go back in time a few years to a show called Grey’s Anatomy, the drama that won’t die (even when most of its characters do). Ellen Pompeo plays Meredith Grey, an intern who accidentally sleeps with her boss the night before her first day. (By “accidentally sleep with,” I mean that the sex was intentional, but she did not know the man was her boss.) She struggles with a patient, but gets a sexy love interest and a guy crushing on her forlornly from the minute he meets her. She’s also the intern who makes the miraculous discovery of what’s wrong with her patient, and figures out how to help a fellow intern’s patient.
Am I mess or a rock star intern? I can’t remember! | Meredith Grey (Ellen Pompeo) in Grey’s Anatomy
Now, pretend you’ve been living under a pop culture rock for the last few years and know nothing about these three shows or the actresses who play these characters. Based just on the descriptions, would you be able to tell which program was the satire/comedy and which two programs took the “professionally skilled, personal mess” trope seriously?
…Okay, so maybe the bicycle in the pool was the giveaway. Fair enough. The point remains that television continues to have a problem with professional women. Showrunners don’t seem to know how to write professional women characters without turning them into neurotic messes who can control nothing about their personal lives, and lately, female doctors are getting the brunt of that particular cliche.
I like comparing these female doctor characters to a character like House on House, M.D. or Dr. Perry Cox on Scrubs (who has been compared to House by other characters on Scrubs, amusingly enough). These men are professional geniuses whose personal lives are also fraught with drama, but we’d never call them neurotic. They’re curmudgeonly assholes who bark perfectly crafted sarcasm at their professional inferiors, colleagues, and bosses. Their personal lives are messes because they’re misanthropic, or because they’re masking years of built-up pain. Women doctors have messy personal lives because they overanalyze and are neurotic and always pick the wrong men.
I don’t know if showrunners write women doctors this way because they lack imagination, or because they’ve internalized sexist stereotypes, or because they don’t know how else to make a professionally competent women sympathetic to an audience. “We’ve got a woman doctor here, because women can be doctors now, but women who are TOO put-together will be a turnoff, so we’ll make her a mess outside of work! INSTANT EMPATHY!”
Fortunately, Mindy Kaling is aware of this cliche, and the episodes of The Mindy Project following the pilot have veered away from “professionally competent, personally messy” plots.Show-Mindy is often portrayed as less neurotic and more of a jerk, and Kaling is more interested in making the character funny than making her likable. Show-Mindy is several steps in the right direction, and I hope we start seeing more characters like her, soon.
But not too soon, because I want there to still be a market for my own pilot about a professionally competent, neurotic female doctor. Doctor Love tells the story of Hilarie Love, a young physician who can’t seem to get her personal life together. In the pilot episode, Hilarie goes on her first date since high school, where her prom date stood her up to go have sex with the cheerleader. Unfortunately, she winds up wearing an outfit where none of the clothes match, and gets so nervous that she throws up on her date in the middle of a restaurant, and almost accidentally kills him when she stands up and knocks the table on him. Then she gets called into work, and performs a miraculous, life-saving surgery (even though she’s not a surgeon) on a young blind boy who’s been shot, removing the bullet with her bare hands and donating her own blood to rejuvenate the child. This catches the attention of a handsome attending physician who finds her competent and pretty, and is still intrigued by Hilarie even after she throws up on him, too.
What do you think? Do we have a hit?
Oh, I get it. It’s butterflies in the…er, ribcage. | Mamie Gummer in Emily Owens, M.D.
Lady T is an aspiring writer and comedian with two novels, a play, and a collection of comedy sketches in progress. She hopes to one day be published and finish one of her projects (not in that order). You can find more of her writing at The Funny Feminist, where she picks apart entertainment and reviews movies she hasn’t seen.
You know what I’d like to see more of on television? Stories about women who are successful in their professional lives, but whose personal lives are a complete mess. I especially want to see more of these stories about female doctors.
Take Emily Owens, M.D., for example. Starring Mamie Gummer, Emily Owens, M.D. tells the story of a medical intern who discovers that life in a hospital is just like high school. In the first episode, she confesses to her old high school crush that she likes him only to be shot down, and realizes that her high school nemesis is interested in her high school crush, but she also diagnoses a condition and performs a life-saving procedure during her first day on the job.
Or let’s look at Mindy Kaling’s new sitcom. The Mindy Project, recently picked up for a full season, tells the story of Mindy Lahiri, a gynecologist whose dating life is a mess. In the first episode of the show, she rudely interrupts an ex-boyfriend’s wedding and drives a bicycle into a pool, but by the end of the pilot, she’s heroically delivering a baby to a patient who doesn’t have health insurance – even interrupting a date to do it.
Or let’s go back in time a few years to a show called Grey’s Anatomy, the drama that won’t die (even when most of its characters do). Ellen Pompeo plays Meredith Grey, an intern who accidentally sleeps with her boss the night before her first day. (By “accidentally sleep with,” I mean that the sex was intentional, but she did not know the man was her boss.) She struggles with a patient, but gets a sexy love interest and a guy crushing on her forlornly from the minute he meets her. She’s also the intern who makes the miraculous discovery of what’s wrong with her patient, and figures out how to help a fellow intern’s patient.
Am I mess or a rock star intern? I can’t remember! | Meredith Grey (Ellen Pompeo) in Grey’s Anatomy
Now, pretend you’ve been living under a pop culture rock for the last few years and know nothing about these three shows or the actresses who play these characters. Based just on the descriptions, would you be able to tell which program was the satire/comedy and which two programs took the “professionally skilled, personal mess” trope seriously?
…Okay, so maybe the bicycle in the pool was the giveaway. Fair enough. The point remains that television continues to have a problem with professional women. Showrunners don’t seem to know how to write professional women characters without turning them into neurotic messes who can control nothing about their personal lives, and lately, female doctors are getting the brunt of that particular cliche.
I like comparing these female doctor characters to a character like House on House, M.D. or Dr. Perry Cox on Scrubs (who has been compared to House by other characters on Scrubs, amusingly enough). These men are professional geniuses whose personal lives are also fraught with drama, but we’d never call them neurotic. They’re curmudgeonly assholes who bark perfectly crafted sarcasm at their professional inferiors, colleagues, and bosses. Their personal lives are messes because they’re misanthropic, or because they’re masking years of built-up pain. Women doctors have messy personal lives because they overanalyze and are neurotic and always pick the wrong men.
I don’t know if showrunners write women doctors this way because they lack imagination, or because they’ve internalized sexist stereotypes, or because they don’t know how else to make a professionally competent women sympathetic to an audience. “We’ve got a woman doctor here, because women can be doctors now, but women who are TOO put-together will be a turnoff, so we’ll make her a mess outside of work! INSTANT EMPATHY!”
Fortunately, Mindy Kaling is aware of this cliche, and the episodes of The Mindy Project following the pilot have veered away from “professionally competent, personally messy” plots.Show-Mindy is often portrayed as less neurotic and more of a jerk, and Kaling is more interested in making the character funny than making her likable. Show-Mindy is several steps in the right direction, and I hope we start seeing more characters like her, soon.
But not too soon, because I want there to still be a market for my own pilot about a professionally competent, neurotic female doctor. Doctor Love tells the story of Hilarie Love, a young physician who can’t seem to get her personal life together. In the pilot episode, Hilarie goes on her first date since high school, where her prom date stood her up to go have sex with the cheerleader. Unfortunately, she winds up wearing an outfit where none of the clothes match, and gets so nervous that she throws up on her date in the middle of a restaurant, and almost accidentally kills him when she stands up and knocks the table on him. Then she gets called into work, and performs a miraculous, life-saving surgery (even though she’s not a surgeon) on a young blind boy who’s been shot, removing the bullet with her bare hands and donating her own blood to rejuvenate the child. This catches the attention of a handsome attending physician who finds her competent and pretty, and is still intrigued by Hilarie even after she throws up on him, too.
What do you think? Do we have a hit?
Oh, I get it. It’s butterflies in the…er, ribcage. | Mamie Gummer in Emily Owens, M.D.
Lady T is a writer with two novels, a play, and a collection of comedy sketches in progress. She hopes to one day be published and finish one of her projects (not in that order). You can find more of her writing at www.theresabasile.com.
I’ve never planned a wedding and I’ve never been engaged. Yet I can relate to the The Five-Year Engagement’s premise. My dream is to move to NYC and become a writer. While my partner is incredibly supportive of me, he loathes NYC and has a life in Boston. So what do two people do when their careers take them in two opposite directions? Who yields? Who compromises? That’s what the romantic comedy The Five-Year Engagement explores.
Violet (the AMAZING Emily Blunt), a psychology PhD grad, and Tom (Jason Segal, who I will forever think of as HIMYM’s adorbs Marshall), a sous chef in an upscale restaurant, are madly in love. They get engaged and begin to plan their wedding with comedic results. When Violet gets a fellowship in another state, trials and tribulations strain and challenge their bond.
I was uber excited to see it. I mean, a film with Emily Blunt, Jason Segal, Alison Brie, Chris Pratt AND Mindy Kaling?? I’m in! Blunt and Segal, who are friends in real-life, have an easy rapport and an effortless chemistry. The movie shines when it focused on wedding preparations: San Francisco vs. London for the wedding locale, religion in the wedding, including Tom’s “Jewish drawer.” While the beginning and ending were cute, albeit predictable, the movie dragged on. But what bothered me most was the subtly anti-feminist message.
When Violet is awarded a fellowship in Michigan (and they both live in San Francisco), Tom is incredibly supportive of Violet. He tells her that it’s her dream so of course they’ll move to Michigan. And it’s only for 2 years. No biggie. Until the 2 years turns semi-permanent when funding for Violet’s post-doc is extended. Then Tom tells her that he hates Michigan (totally understandable…I hate a lot of places too). Then things unravel quickly.
Violet tells Tom she doesn’t want to give up her career and resent him like her mother did when she quit her career after she married her father. Later, when Violet confronts Tom about his disappointment in his career, Tom tells her, “Men and women are different. We don’t sit around and discuss our feelings!” Oh I’m sorry, was someone quoting the book, that fount of wisdom, Men Are From Mars, Women From Venus??? Tom then tells Violet that as the man he should be supporting her. Kill. Me. Now.
“A lot of people say, ‘Why would Tom move across country and give up his job so she can pursue her dreams?’ but you would never in a million years ask that question if the roles were reversed. I think it’s actually quite sexist to even ask that question. It’s what we would expect a woman to do for her husband, so why wouldn’t we expect a husband to do it for his wife?”
Wait, he declares something sexist?? Swoon! And he’s absolutely right. Not only do people expect women to follow the men in their lives for their careers, film and TV shows often reflect that too. But Violet, an intelligent, hard-working academic couldn’t have critiqued his retro machismo? She couldn’t have called out his bullshit? Really?? Not buying it.
And don’t even get me started on the fucking hunting scenes. Tom befriends a hunter (Chris Parnell) and starts hunting too. Did we really need a “gag” about an innocent dead deer falling off the roof of the car so he then has to stick the deer in the passenger seat with its head going out the sun roof?? Spare me. Is the hunting supposed to be some kind of reinforcing of Tom’s masculinity? Especially since his fiance’s career is taking off more than his because he chose to follow her to Michigan for her career? Is supporting the woman you love follow her dream really supposed to be emasculating??
Near the beginning of the movie, in a toast at their engagement party, Violet’s sister Suzie (Alison Brie) says she doesn’t “believe in marriage or kids.” But after seeing how perfect Violet and Tom are for each other, she “understands the whole institution.” SPOILER!!! -> As soon as Suzie gets pregnant after a drunken one-night stand with Tom’s best friend Alex (Chris Pratt), she marries Alex, a guy who seems to repulse her and who she barely knows. They have the baby, nary a discussion of abortion or adoption.
A shot-gun wedding, really? Did we take a time warp back to 1942?? That’s right, all women really want to get married and have babies! And the fact that Suzie JUST said that that she didn’t want to get married or have kids; she’s not even going to think about abortion for one moment?? <-END SPOILER Thanks, Hollywood for erasing women’s reproductive choices.
Hands down the funniest scenes is when Violet and Suzie talk in Cookie Monster and Elmo voices (ADORBS!!), asked to talk in Sesame Street character voices by Suzie’s daughter. For one brief moment, Suzie admits that she gave up her career as a kinesiologist and now cleans up poop. Women talking to each other about sacrificing their goals? Yes! But that’s it. That’s as far as it goes. No rousing pep talk by her sister, no advice about following her dreams. Even this brief exchange subtly reinforces the notion that women’s careers shouldn’t matter nearly as much as men’s aspirations.
Hollywood notoriously erases female friendships. Violet never really spends time with female friends. Really? She doesn’t have any close female friends besides her sister? Tom has his best friend Chris Pratt. While they do talk about Violet, they also make jokes and talk about their careers. Yes, Mindy Kaling is Violet’s post-doc friend Vanetha and the two briefly (so briefly, you’ll miss it if you blink) talk about psychological experiments. And yes, we see Violet and her sister talk too…almost exclusively about weddings and men. That’s right, ladies…our lives revolve around men.
Sisters Suzie (Alison Brie) and Violet (Emily Blunt)
Speaking of revolving around men…when SPOILER!!! -> Violet’s professor kisses her in a bar, she tells Tom a few weeks later. Infuriated, Tom tells Violet that she must have done something that made him think it was okay to kiss her. Can we say rape apologism?? Now, I know what you’re probably thinking. You’re thinking how the hell did she jump from a kiss to rape?! But hear me out. It’s the same victim-blaming logic that tells women that their behavior brings rape, sexual assault, domestic violence, street harassment on themselves. <- END SPOILER Rather than questioning the doucheiness of the professor, Tom immediately blames Violet’s behavior.
Lest you think we’ve evolved passed all this machismo bullshit, the professor reminds Tom (and the audience) that we’re all just “cave men acting on impulse” when he justifies kissing Violet. To top it off, SPOILER!! -> Violet’s academic career is completely undermined when we learn that not only was she chosen to become a faculty member over another candidate because she was dating the professor, but he never would have even entertained her psychological experiment had another post-doc student suggested it. <- END SPOILER
I liked that The Five Year Engagement didn’t fall prey to many of the usual rom-com clichés and stereotypes. I liked that Violet was never demonized or portrayed as villainous for pursuing her career (nor should she be). I empathized with both Violet and Tom because I could relate to both sides. The movie shows how easily relationships can unravel and how there is no perfect moment to get married. I really appreciated the film’s message that a perfect fairytale ending is just that: a fairytale. But…
SPOILER!!!-> While I loved, loved, loved that Violet re-proposes to Tom, <-END SPOILER the ending seems to undo the overarching anti-fairytale theme. Violet and Tom don’t resolve or even discuss their problems. They don’t address the breakdown of trust. We don’t know where they will live or if they agree on having or not having children. But it doesn’t matter…love conquers all! Is it really so cynical to think that sometimes love just isn’t enough?
Talking about how many films contend with couples’ competing “career trajectories” either “complicating or ending romantic relationships,” David Edelstein at NPR criticized The Five-Year Engagement, as its “interpretation is reactionary, told largely from the perspective of a man victimized by feminism.” The New York Times’ A.O. Scott liked the film but echoes Edelstein’s complaint:
“It is certainly possible to raise a feminist eyebrow at the way The Five-Year Engagement ultimately answers this question, which is to say with a timid and slightly cynical traditionalism…”
I expected a hilarious skewering of wedding rituals and traditions a la Bridesmaids. Yes, funny moments are sprinkled throughout the movie. And clearly Segal recognizes sexism. But that’s not the sense I got after leaving the theatre. Instead, the movie bore the implication that feminism strains relationships.
Now, it’s easy to dismiss romantic comedies as they’re fun, sentimental and not overly serious. I mean this is just a silly wedding movie, right?? But as the fabulous Chloe Angyal wrote at Jezebel, “they are powerful pieces of popular culture:”
“Rom coms furnish us with ideas and expectations about some of the most important things in life: love, work, friendship, sex, gender roles. And some of those ideas are worryingly sexist and regressive.”
The Five-Year Engagement raised incredibly valid questions regarding gender, career, expectations, goals and sacrifice. But it never answers them or even provides commentary critiquing sexism. Instead it ends up inadvertently reinforcing sexist stereotypes. Over and over again, we’re told men are cave men hunters and women shouldn’t give up their careers. Oh wait…no, they should or their relationships will be fucked up.
Relationships are hard. Unpacking and dismantling gender stereotypes is incredibly hard too. But The Five-Year Engagement doesn’t indict patriarchy. Sadly, while it attempts to explore gender role reversal, it ends up condemning enlightened men and empowered women.
