So here’s the latest facet of American culture that I’ve been pondering: cross-dressing. Specifically, cross-dressing as either a comedic or non-comedic element of movies and television. While watching a comedy sketch in which a man was playing a female character, Jim and I got to discussing the popularity of men playing women in comedy sketches and the relative unpopularity of women playing men.

Certainly this phenomenon can be partially attributed to the disproportionately high number of men in comedy groups – when you’re using your entire female cast in a sketch and still need another female character, or when your entire cast is male, the obvious solution is to have one of the male cast members dress up as a woman. But this can’t be the sole explanation, since there have been plenty of times on SNL when a man has played a female character and there was no shortage of available female cast members. Furthermore, when a man dresses up as a woman for a sketch, he is rarely simply playing a woman; he is mugging for the camera, playing a grotesque caricature.

The fact is, there is something intrinsically funny (at least to most Americans) about a man dressing up as a woman, but the same is not true of a woman who dresses up as a man. If this statement doesn’t seem intuitively correct to you, I think I can demonstrate it by cataloguing some of the more popular instances of cross-dressing in films. (more…)

I’ve been looking forward to the New York Times review of the movie Bratz for the past five weeks, which is to say ever since I first saw the trailer before Ratatouille, turned to Melissa with my mouth agape, and said “I think I’m going to throw up.”

Alas, the review came out today, and it seems that the grey lady saw fit to devote only three paragraphs to this cesspool of popular culture. I was hoping A.O. Scott would heap abuse upon the movie and all that it signifies for a good two or three pages — especially given the Times’ time-honored “Kids today!” tradition — but instead we have the same predictable criticism that could have been levied against any other movie intended for preteen girls: the movie promotes an ultimate ideal of physical attractiveness; the diversity of the cast is belied by an underlying reliance on stereotypes; the movie promotes the very materialistic paradigm it pretends to question; the script is dull and unoriginal.

I’m unsatisfied with the three-paragraph treatment. I loathe Bratz dolls (which I see as a sign of the impending apocalypse if ever there was one), but more than that I loathe the laziness that seems to accompany modern preteen cultural production, where “Why bother cooking dinner when they’ll eat stale pork rinds?” seems to be the reigning motto. So I think Bratz deserves a more thorough takedown, one that impugns not only the quality of the movie but of the cultural beliefs that inform its success.

To that effect, let’s begin with a breakdown of the trailer. I’d recommend you watch the trailer first, if only so you can see how much it resembles an SNL skit. So go ahead, watch it. When you’re done banging your head against the wall, come back here.

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