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Sep. 12th, 2006 03:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
trinityvixenMy Entertainment Weekly, of all places, offered up its pick as the No. 1 high school movie, The Breakfast Club, for feminist analysis.
Having just listened to "Don't You Forget About Me" on my iPod, I am back in the zone without having to watch the movie again.
The issue specifically brought up by EW is the makeover that Ally Sheedy's character, Allison, gets that wins her the attention and affection of the jock heartthrob, Andy (played by that steamy, dreamy Emilio Estevez). It may seem like a time to beat up either the strawfeminist or the strawanti-feminist about reading too much into or dismissing too much of that scene, respectively, but it's not. It's actually really hard to take a realist feminist read on Allison or Andy's behavior regarding her makeover.
For starters, it's obvious that underneath the mop of unwashed hair and the mu-mu clothes she wears, Ally Sheedy is a beautiful (not to mention skinny yet shapely) girl. It's hard to muck up a lot of sympathy for the fake-ugly girl in movies. Popular entertainment applauds and celebrates gorgeous, starved celebrities who bulk or ugly themselves up by giving them awards and attention and then breathing a sigh of relief when Renee Zellweger shows up back in a size four and Charlize Theron has her $10K smile and bronzer tan once more. It's no secret that women are more harshly judged when they fail a certain standard of beauty because they are simply judged by more standards. There are more ways to tell a woman she has room for improvement--physically--than there are for men. Weight isn't even the worst one. There's shaving--that's something guys can get away without doing; a woman like Monique shows off a hairy leg and it's disgusting!
Ahem, point is, Ally Sheedy is beautiful. The question then is this: Is Allison beautiful? Part of the enduring brilliance of The Breakfast Club is that all of the kids stuck in detention that Saturday are beautiful (and not because of the aforementioned reason of them all being celebrities in the first place). Brian, Bender, Andy, Allison, and Claire (care to guess how many of those names I had to look up? Answer: two) are all beautiful and ugly in the way that most people are. Each of them shares the ugly or the beautiful up front to a point--Bender's free spirit is both his ugliness and his beauty; Claire and Andy are both physically attractive yet emotionally fairly disgusting in ways; Brian and Allison are at the fringe, observing people who are cooler than them (their lack of selfconfidence being their 'ugly') while putting a brave face on their lonliness (their beauty) which is harder than many of the problems the others face.
And that is what makes Allison a hard read. Like Bender, she doesn't have a problem with how people perceive her, but unlike him, she does want their approval and craves to be found interesting because no one ever considers her period. Even Brian gets consideration--people see him and know that, if nothing else, he's smart, and got that going for him. When she empties her purse onto the table, Allison shocks the others with her offering because they assumed that she would prefer keeping it to herself. Allison doesn't want the attention that Bender gets for being so independently willed, but she does want attention, so she's unsure of how to go about it.
So, in that light, Allison's makeover, which, although it attracts for the shallower reason that she is pretty and people will look at her, is emotionally healthy and acceptable because it makes people see her. While using physical attractiveness and the popularity or coolness of her clothing to judge her as worthy of engaging in conversation is a despicable habit, it is one that most people have and she will have to work around in order to command anyone's attention. She can still be herself, too; all she has to do is find a style within her idiom (assuming her idiom to be akin to goth here, I'd say there is plenty of room to branch out within her interests) that is most flattering to her beauty. It helps that she starts off as Ally Sheedy, sure, but if watching Project Runway has taught me anything, it's that you can always flatter the nonperfect figure since that's what 99% of us have, men or women.
The opposite argument takes us back to Allison and her bag. She dumps the contents of her purse on a table and invites inspection. When inspection curdles her cool, she snaps at the others and wants to retract her attempt to reach out to them because she didn't consider the downside of having all eyes on her. The items go back into the bag, and that bag--which is Allison--is zippered away. The way to bring Allison out is to put Allison away and to layer Claire on top of her. Because Ally Sheedy is softer in her features and attitude than Molly Ringwald, the effect is to create an innocent naif out of an acerbic, eccentric girl. It's not a makeover; it's a reprogramming. The positive reinforcement Allison gets from Andy (with his electric and patently obvious sexual attraction to the new Allison) provides all the impulse needed for Allison to abandon Allison in favor of the Allison-cum-Claire that is obviously much more desireable. That Allison's biting carelessness about the opinions of others is exposed to be as false as it is in all the characters in the film (save the janitor, who seems to have it all sorted) underlines that her front of independence is just that, and that Claire and Andy are basically taking advantage of her insecurity to make her one of them--albeit as the odd one they keep around like a pet to feel better about themselves.
I don't quite buy it, though. Until that point, Allison remained at a distance--reaching out to reassure Claire that she, too, was a virgin only after being certain she wasn't alone. Allison understands, as she is not the norm or one of the collective cool, that you can only have so many things be strange about you before you go from just eccentric to being irredeemable (a la Carrie White). Yet she carries the bizarre behavior out to a degree where she doesn't seem she should be able to return and be considered equal, and it is only after she shares the parts of herself that cannot be seen that the rest of the kids reach back. The point is, she shares her person first, establishes herself as a person first, and an interesting one at that--someone different from the prom queen princess but not all that much.
Do I dislike Andy finding her physically attractive only once she's been made over? Sure, but the reason The Breakfast Club is so special as a film is that it was more important to establish he saw her as a person he could relate to as a person before he considered relating to her as a boy to a girl. And that, my friends, several paragraphs later, is why The Breakfast Club doesn't fail the feminist test. Yes, Andy finds the remade Allison attractive, but it's Allison--the basketcase--he likes.
That felt good. Surprised me, too, that I came to that conclusion after my knee-jerk initial reaction. I don't think I'm even done with this movie, though. I really do love The Breakfast Club. The stereotypes that showed up weren't entirely deconstructed or proven to be false--some people really are brains, some really are jocks, and that's why we have those stereotypes in the first place--just that they're shown to be the simplistic labels we assign people who aren't worth (to us) learning more about. It begs the question, "Well, what if you were forced to learn more about them?" Would you make it a positive experience? Would it matter if it was a positive experience if nothing changed? (I have always been dying to know whether Claire did say "hi" to Brian in the halls, or if Andy would ever put his jacket around Allison's shoulders, but at the same time, if I had the answers, I'd be upset that they were too easy, so it's better, perhaps, to wonder.)
Having just listened to "Don't You Forget About Me" on my iPod, I am back in the zone without having to watch the movie again.
The issue specifically brought up by EW is the makeover that Ally Sheedy's character, Allison, gets that wins her the attention and affection of the jock heartthrob, Andy (played by that steamy, dreamy Emilio Estevez). It may seem like a time to beat up either the strawfeminist or the strawanti-feminist about reading too much into or dismissing too much of that scene, respectively, but it's not. It's actually really hard to take a realist feminist read on Allison or Andy's behavior regarding her makeover.
For starters, it's obvious that underneath the mop of unwashed hair and the mu-mu clothes she wears, Ally Sheedy is a beautiful (not to mention skinny yet shapely) girl. It's hard to muck up a lot of sympathy for the fake-ugly girl in movies. Popular entertainment applauds and celebrates gorgeous, starved celebrities who bulk or ugly themselves up by giving them awards and attention and then breathing a sigh of relief when Renee Zellweger shows up back in a size four and Charlize Theron has her $10K smile and bronzer tan once more. It's no secret that women are more harshly judged when they fail a certain standard of beauty because they are simply judged by more standards. There are more ways to tell a woman she has room for improvement--physically--than there are for men. Weight isn't even the worst one. There's shaving--that's something guys can get away without doing; a woman like Monique shows off a hairy leg and it's disgusting!
Ahem, point is, Ally Sheedy is beautiful. The question then is this: Is Allison beautiful? Part of the enduring brilliance of The Breakfast Club is that all of the kids stuck in detention that Saturday are beautiful (and not because of the aforementioned reason of them all being celebrities in the first place). Brian, Bender, Andy, Allison, and Claire (care to guess how many of those names I had to look up? Answer: two) are all beautiful and ugly in the way that most people are. Each of them shares the ugly or the beautiful up front to a point--Bender's free spirit is both his ugliness and his beauty; Claire and Andy are both physically attractive yet emotionally fairly disgusting in ways; Brian and Allison are at the fringe, observing people who are cooler than them (their lack of selfconfidence being their 'ugly') while putting a brave face on their lonliness (their beauty) which is harder than many of the problems the others face.
And that is what makes Allison a hard read. Like Bender, she doesn't have a problem with how people perceive her, but unlike him, she does want their approval and craves to be found interesting because no one ever considers her period. Even Brian gets consideration--people see him and know that, if nothing else, he's smart, and got that going for him. When she empties her purse onto the table, Allison shocks the others with her offering because they assumed that she would prefer keeping it to herself. Allison doesn't want the attention that Bender gets for being so independently willed, but she does want attention, so she's unsure of how to go about it.
So, in that light, Allison's makeover, which, although it attracts for the shallower reason that she is pretty and people will look at her, is emotionally healthy and acceptable because it makes people see her. While using physical attractiveness and the popularity or coolness of her clothing to judge her as worthy of engaging in conversation is a despicable habit, it is one that most people have and she will have to work around in order to command anyone's attention. She can still be herself, too; all she has to do is find a style within her idiom (assuming her idiom to be akin to goth here, I'd say there is plenty of room to branch out within her interests) that is most flattering to her beauty. It helps that she starts off as Ally Sheedy, sure, but if watching Project Runway has taught me anything, it's that you can always flatter the nonperfect figure since that's what 99% of us have, men or women.
The opposite argument takes us back to Allison and her bag. She dumps the contents of her purse on a table and invites inspection. When inspection curdles her cool, she snaps at the others and wants to retract her attempt to reach out to them because she didn't consider the downside of having all eyes on her. The items go back into the bag, and that bag--which is Allison--is zippered away. The way to bring Allison out is to put Allison away and to layer Claire on top of her. Because Ally Sheedy is softer in her features and attitude than Molly Ringwald, the effect is to create an innocent naif out of an acerbic, eccentric girl. It's not a makeover; it's a reprogramming. The positive reinforcement Allison gets from Andy (with his electric and patently obvious sexual attraction to the new Allison) provides all the impulse needed for Allison to abandon Allison in favor of the Allison-cum-Claire that is obviously much more desireable. That Allison's biting carelessness about the opinions of others is exposed to be as false as it is in all the characters in the film (save the janitor, who seems to have it all sorted) underlines that her front of independence is just that, and that Claire and Andy are basically taking advantage of her insecurity to make her one of them--albeit as the odd one they keep around like a pet to feel better about themselves.
I don't quite buy it, though. Until that point, Allison remained at a distance--reaching out to reassure Claire that she, too, was a virgin only after being certain she wasn't alone. Allison understands, as she is not the norm or one of the collective cool, that you can only have so many things be strange about you before you go from just eccentric to being irredeemable (a la Carrie White). Yet she carries the bizarre behavior out to a degree where she doesn't seem she should be able to return and be considered equal, and it is only after she shares the parts of herself that cannot be seen that the rest of the kids reach back. The point is, she shares her person first, establishes herself as a person first, and an interesting one at that--someone different from the prom queen princess but not all that much.
Do I dislike Andy finding her physically attractive only once she's been made over? Sure, but the reason The Breakfast Club is so special as a film is that it was more important to establish he saw her as a person he could relate to as a person before he considered relating to her as a boy to a girl. And that, my friends, several paragraphs later, is why The Breakfast Club doesn't fail the feminist test. Yes, Andy finds the remade Allison attractive, but it's Allison--the basketcase--he likes.
That felt good. Surprised me, too, that I came to that conclusion after my knee-jerk initial reaction. I don't think I'm even done with this movie, though. I really do love The Breakfast Club. The stereotypes that showed up weren't entirely deconstructed or proven to be false--some people really are brains, some really are jocks, and that's why we have those stereotypes in the first place--just that they're shown to be the simplistic labels we assign people who aren't worth (to us) learning more about. It begs the question, "Well, what if you were forced to learn more about them?" Would you make it a positive experience? Would it matter if it was a positive experience if nothing changed? (I have always been dying to know whether Claire did say "hi" to Brian in the halls, or if Andy would ever put his jacket around Allison's shoulders, but at the same time, if I had the answers, I'd be upset that they were too easy, so it's better, perhaps, to wonder.)
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no subject
Date: 2006-09-12 07:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-12 08:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-12 08:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-12 08:32 pm (UTC)That and I really don't care for the music overmuch.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-13 01:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-13 02:10 pm (UTC)...and I've never actually seen The Breakfast Club. I really should, at some point...
no subject
Date: 2006-09-13 03:27 pm (UTC)And yes, do watch The Breakfast Club. It remains touching even as you realize there are a lot of convenient stuffs falling into place. Really, it's wonderful.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-13 03:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-13 02:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-13 03:29 pm (UTC)