(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.
Sorry this is going to seem very random but do you have a sister name kelsey who went to Aidan Montessori in DC ?
ReplyDelete