Running (From Dinosaurs) in Heels

(contains spoilers) 

I liked Jurassic World. I went in expecting to be entertained and I was. Sure, it had plenty of ridiculous elements, but I figured they just came with the summer blockbuster territory. Chief among them: Claire’s heels. Claire, played by Bryce Dallas Howard, is in charge of overseeing the entire titular theme park. And as we’ve come to expect from women in positions of authority in action movies, she’s kind of a drag. Uptight, humorless, career-obsessed. A real icicle-in-the-mud. Of course she eventually melts under the influence of Chris Pratt’s warm heart and hot body. Of course she loosens up and finds her inner badass in time to save the park from a giant hybrid lizard monster on a killing spree. But before, during, and after all that happens the heels stay on, through hours of sprinting across mud and rocky terrain. The heels themselves are a plain conservative beige. In fact they’re very much like Claire: boring, but surprisingly resilient.

I noted the absurdity of the heels while watching the movie. So did Chris Pratt’s character, Owen, calling them “ridiculous” at one point. But honestly I didn’t think about it too much. It didn’t really bother me that her character was a blend of cold-hearted power player and damsel-in-distress. That she needed Owen to rescue her, and in doing so inform her that dinosaurs are animals, not attractions, and that her nephews are good kids that she should try to get to know better. I figured that retrograde gender roles were part of the tradition they were working out of, that it was just a silly movie after all, and honestly who cares. But then Jurassic World broke box office records on its opening weekend, and as the reviews flooded in it became clear that a lot of people cared about the rebooted franchise’s “woman problem.” At the center of the controversy: those heels.

Some laughed them off as standard popcorn flick improbabilia. Some raged against them as a metaphor for Hollywood’s ongoing negative associations and unrealistic expectations of women. Others defended them as a testament to the strength and toughness of the woman whose feet they were on.  Megan Garber puts all these perspectives in a cultural context in an article for the Atlantic.  

We can’t agree on how to feel about Claire’s heels because we never really decided how to feel about heels in general. Are they modern day foot-binding? Or symbols of power and stature? When a woman wears heels, is she demonstrating her financial independence, sexual autonomy, and high pain tolerance? Or succumbing to a male-dominated culture that wants her to flaunt her ass and slow down? It’s been over fifty years since the invention of the stiletto, and we still can’t decide whether high heels are friend or foe to the modern woman. Even Sex and the City – surely television’s greatest high heel evangelist – acknowledged their dark side. Carrie may have felt empowered and fabulous strutting through Manhattan in her sky-high Manolo’s, but her “addiction” to them left her borderline bankrupt. When she realized (after losing the financial support of one boyfriend) that her shoe collection had left her with no savings, she ran to another boyfriend for help. If it weren’t for all those shoes, she wouldn’t have needed the men at all.

As for Claire’s predicament – what were her alternatives? Could she have gone barefoot? Did she have a sensible pair of commuting sneakers stashed away in a locker somewhere? I was genuinely surprised when the movie ended without a Romancing the Stone homage in which Owen hacked off the spikes of Claire’s heels thus freeing her from her self-imposed handicap (although if they really wanted people applauding in the theaters, they would have had Claire do the hacking herself.) But let’s assume, on some level, that she kept them on by choice. Howard herself took this position, arguing that Claire was the kind of woman who insisted she walked better in heels than without them. Suppose those beige pumps did something to Claire’s psyche, making her feel ready to take on the day: to run a major theme park, give presentations to high-powered investors, and if need be go head-to-head with an escaped hybrid lizard monster. After all, this is the reason many women give for spending crazy amounts of money on impractical footwear: it makes them feel superhuman.

This is what it boils down to for me: are the heels the will of a fictional woman who just feels more competent and capable with them on? Or the will of a real-life male director who wants his female lead to stay vulnerable and fuckable no matter what? It all comes down to choice. This was the issue at Cannes this year when the film festival’s directors tried to enforce a bizarre policy that all women wear high heels on the red carpet. Most women wear high heels on red carpets anyway, and that’s fine. But something about being told that they have to changes the game completely. If battling a hybrid lizard monster in heels is just Claire doing Claire, that’s one thing. If her inhuman ability to do so is more about the studio’s failure to see women as actual humans, then yes, Jurassic World has a problem.