Let me get this out of the way early. Hairspray bored me to tears.
Hairspray 1988 Trailer
HAIRSPRAY Official Trailer 2007
(*winces* And it looks like the newer one worse than the first)
Oh, I get that it was deliberately kitschy and pastel because it was satirical. I did like the fact that the lead character was fat and comfortable with it and that that her mother was played by a drag queen. (More of that PLEASE in today’s entertainment!) The dancing was ok and the pastel colors weren’t all that bad. But I like witty banter with great puns and the writing was nowhere near that ideal. In addition, the racial politics therein espoused has been done to death. The whole “white saviour” thing might have been fresher in 1988, but after years and YEARS of the popularity of that genre of movie (see The Blindside and the upcoming The Help), I’d just had enough of it. This stuff was metaphorical porridge, when I have been jonesing for baked chicken for years. In brief, I don’t think the political comedic potential was fulfilled, and having read the articles, my disappointment was even more profound.
Apparently this whole thing was based on a true story in which a group of kids organized to invade a real life segregated dance show called “Buddy Deane Show”. It’s a good story, and rather hilarious too. Its plot in Hollywood movies is also clichéd, milquetoast and overdone. It’s comfortable, doesn’t challenge enough. Its comfortable to think you might have been that brave girl from the privileged majority who went against tradition and led the liberation of those poor people. Its easier to erase the work that groups of marginalized people did, going through hell and back to make the majority listen and pay attention. “See! Not all the majority were bad! And I would have been the right one! “
The problem is that I have seen that dynamic before. All those Great! White! Teacher/Moms/Social Workers/Police Officers/ everything else that have located their consciences and worked on behalf of people of color! Their stories get told and retold time and again in the movies. Heck, Sandra Bullock just won an Oscar for another darn iteration of the theme. I? Am bored. Bored bored bored bored. I don’t CARE about that one privileged person seeing the light. I care about the stories of those people of color collectives and heroes that were doing the work long before the spotlight fell on the white hero, and kept on doing it while that spotlight continued to shine on him/her/zie and will continue to do it long after that person is off elsewhere. I’ve seen enough solitary, outsider heroes come to save us all.
I also want groups and their dynamics to be focused on. You want drama? THERE is drama. Drama between the people, different ideas for achieving stuff, egoes, intersectionality clashes (disability vs racism vs sexism etc and god help the people inhabiting multiple intersections of the road). I want to hear about the people who did the heavy lifting, because mark my words, liberation tends not to come courtesy of the outsider no matter WHAT the stories from Hollywood and agenda-driven commentators and politicians say. The people affected do the most work, because no one else tends to care. And then they open the eyes of some privileged person who jumps in and due to said privilege gets the attention and the write up and the movie biographies and the book deals. And in many cases the work is made easier, the radical edges filed off, the message diluted so it can resound to a wider audience. Again, I say, I am bored.
Mr. Waters himself does seem to be an intelligent and fascinating person from his interviews though. I like his civic mindedness (he votes!! Really? And has intelligent things to say about politics! WHUT!) and I appreciate the fact that he clearly puts some thought into his films and their messages. I am not interested in the eating of dog-shit, but I do appreciate that his films seem to champion the non-glamorous, the normal and sometimes weird people who are rarely celebrated on film, especially today. I think it is encouraging that he continues to get funding for said films, but I found it interesting that Broadway seems to be where he met with most of his monetary success. I wasn’t aware that a career on Broadway had the possibility to be that prosperous! And it is in the articles focusing on him that I found fruitful topics for possible conversation.
Useful Questions:
1. The theme of trangression and reinterpretation and rebellion in John Waters work, how does in show up in Hair Spray?
2. Does hearing that Hairspray is based on a true story affect the way you look at the film?
3. Do you think Hairspray is relevant to today’s racial political climate? (If you have watched the reboot, maybe do a compare and contrast between political climates then and now?)
4. What do you think of how fat characters are portrayed in Hairspray, as opposed to today’s portrayal of fat characters, especially women, in television and the movies?
Class Questions:
1. Explore the idea of “reinterpreting what events should have been like”, John Waters making a movie that tells history the way he wishes it should have been?
2. Subversive Entertainment: John Waters is obviously something of an social activist in his films. Talk about the balance between entertainment and getting in political points without coming across as preachy.
3. John Waters says be believes that personality is an important part of his movies. What personality in Hair Spray stands out to you and why?
4. Mean pretty girls vs fat but pleasant girls in movie cannon. Tired of the stereotypes? Can fat and thin girls live together in harmony in our media, or at least with no body policing and boyfriend stealing? Yes this is reality, but shouldn’t we also strive to portray a better way too? Afterall, the comedies would have us think that any schubbly guy can get a drop-dead gorgeous girlfriend, and this is not exactly prevalent in real life. Why not have more movies in which women are friends regardless of weight and boyfriends?
5. Humor as political weapon, change the world by confronting unsettling realities using humor? Is that ever inappropriate? Careful; in case we end up reinforcing hierarchies instead of deconstructing them using humor.
I’d like to talk for a bit on the capacity of humor to effect social change or reinforce the existing hierarchy. Currently, there is some cultural conversation about political correctness in humor. There is a view that films that promote humor based on denigration of the marginalized are “edgier” than films like Hair Spray, which focus their fire on the privileged. I would like to register why I think this line of argument is bunkum. Humour has been used as weapons by both the marginalized and the privileged alike in the everlasting war for and against social justice. I recently found out, for example, that nursery rhymes, which I had considered harmless bits of funny fluff, had actually started life as trenchant critiques of social injustices and societal mores and well as current news. They were rhymed and coded by their authors in order to protect themselves from backlash from the subjects of their critique. On the other hand, racist, sexist, ableist and homophobic humor is part of the arsenal that the privileged humorist uses to keep up the wider societies disapproval of those and other facets of identity. When you can laugh at a person for who they are, you help to dehumanize that person, and thus you contribute to that person’s oppression.
But note that there is a great deal of difference between laughing at a person with institutional power backing them up, and laughing at someone who doesn’t have that. Laughing a greedy rich white man’s bungles doesn’t leave him as vulnerable as laughing at a transgender woman for being a transgender woman. One person is already being pummeled with messages by society that they are fundamentally wrong and thus society is well within its rights to harass and hurt and sometimes kill them. They are extremely vulnerable and the humor used helps to keep them that way. The other person has institutional power, including the privileges of the relative good will of wider society, and the money and power to insulate himself from even well-deserved critique. And he is usually the one issuing threats to people’s lives (hello Congress and unethical corporations), not receiving them, but if he does receive them he can be sure of having his complaints addressed by the justice system; unlike the aforementioned transgender woman. She runs the risk of being laughed out of the police station, or being abused or killed by the police themselves.
Put another way, the Social Psycology Lab has a blogpost which talks about research into sexist humor. I am pretty sure that the results apply to any other –ist humor:
Social Consequences of Disparaging humour
In our research we’ve focused to this point on the social consequences of exposure to sexist humor. Our findings demonstrate that sexist humor is not simply benign amusement. For men who have sexist attitudes it can create a perceived social norm of tolerance of discrimination against women, and as a result, increase personal tolerance of discrimination against women and even increase willingness to engage in sexist behavior without fears of disapproval.
Humor that attacks the marginalized is not edgy, because the status quo is that the marginalized deserve to be abused for being born that way. What those humorists are doing is reifying and supporting this mainstream society view. Laugh at “niggers” and “trannies” and whoever else, and you have dehumanized them in your mind. When stuff starts happening to those people, your capacity for empathy has already been undermined. Films like Hair Spray, for all its faults, are edgy because they are challenging the status quo. Make jokes about the privileged nonsense, and not only is it an escape valve for the stress that minorities face as a result of the system, it helps to illuminate the issues with that system and brings minorities up instead of keeping them down.
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