Why Bratz makes me say “omg!”
August 3rd, 2007I’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.â€
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.
Now here’s what I will from now on call the Elise Treatment.
-We open on four girls with arms linked. We have: a blonde, a redhead, a black girl, and an ambiguously “ethnic†girl who could be interpreted as Asian, Latina, or some blend of the two. So we’ve got our racial diversity covered.
-The narrator describes the girls as “inseparable friends.†As evidence of this, we are shown the girls performing a group handshake while shouting “BFFs!†and giggling. This ritualistic performance of their friendship will no doubt come up later.
-The girls show up to their first day of high school, which is apparently very different from middle school, as evidenced by their collective “Whoa.â€
-And here we have the villainess. She is blond and perky, as villains in preteen girl movies are wont to be. She is obviously vain — she wipes lipstick off her teeth — and socially manipulative – she extends a hand as though to shake, then retracts it. Oh, dis!
-The villainess controls the school by maintaining “48 distinct cliques.†She describes some of them, accompanied by camera shots. Hasn’t this been done before? Except in a vastly funnier and more accurate way? “Disco dorks� Seriously?
-The Bratz are unmoved by this explanation of how high school social dynamics work. Unmoved! They want to sit together. This distresses the villainess, but she is not concerned: “the system is flawless,†and nature will have its course.
-Sure enough, we now discover that the four Bratz not only span the set of race but also the set of types of female teenagers. We have: the nerd (the ambiguously Asian one — unsurprising), the jock (the blond one — progressive!), the cheerleader (the black one — whoa, I wasn’t expecting that!), and the loner (the redhead, dressed in hippie clothes — I was kind of expecting that). The Bratz separate, each joining their appropriate clique (except for the loner, who has a clique of one).
-Musical montage! Each Brat hangs out with her clique. The villainess rejoices. In her pool, because she is rich, as blond, perky villainesses are wont to be.
-Food fight montage! One Brat accidentally spills her lunch over a balcony onto another Brat, and somehow in midair the food morphs into about ten pounds of cooked spaghetti. More people throw spaghetti. Someone in stiletto heels slips in a kiddie pool’s worth.
-Oh ho, the gloves come off. The loner yells “You stupid cheerleader!†at the cheerleader, making manifest the resentment that this system of cliques foments. Gosh, and they used to be BFFs.
-More throwing of spaghetti. The villainess is, naturally, unharmed, having honed her spaghetti-dodging skills in previous school-wide food fights.
-Okay, this shot I’ll admit I kind of like. The visual shock of transitioning from a fight to the four Bratz sitting totally still in a classroom is nicely accompanied by the change in music. I promise that is the only nice thing I will say about this trailer.
-My appreciation is short-lived. Scenery-chewing commences. “What happened to us?†asks the nerd. “It’s the cliques,†the loner states. “We’re all in them,†she adds, apparently in denial about her own situation. The Bratz have come up with a solution: they should be themselves. Brilliant!
-The loaded gun in the first act goes off in the second. “BFFs!†Followed by giggling.
-The Bratz start to fight back. They refuse to follow the villainess’s clique system; in retribution, she tells them that they can’t go to her Super Sweet Sixteen unless they’re in a clique. (Does this mean that the Disco Dorks can go? Suh-WEET!)
-The Bratz undermine this form of control as well, showing up to the circus-like Sweet 16 dressed as… Oktoberfest prostitute waitresses? Ah yes, this harkens back to that well-known phrase, “The best revenge is serving drinks at the party you weren’t invited to, while dressed in an inexplicable but slutty costume.â€
-This means war! And the final showdown is the talent show, which the villainess has apparently won three years running. Here we learn that the loner Brat is actually a singing loner. The Bratz perform in the talent show wearing surprisingly conservative clothes, although there is some stripperesque chest-shaking. I think we can guess who wins the talent show. (HINT: The movie is called Bratz, not Blond, Perky Villainess.)
-And we end with another musical montage, this one set to Avril Lavigne. Shots of the Bratz in their natural habitats (sports, cheerleading, science, singing) and then of them strutting around and posing. The villainess AND HER DOG get their hair washed at a salon.
-Finally, we reach the title screen, and we discover that the movie is titled “bratz.†This is the part where I originally fell out of my seat.
-Then we have what I’ll call the kicker scene (the little two-second clip at the end of a trailer that is supposed to solidify your desire to see the movie): an elephant knocks the villainess into a pool, and she screams. The Bratz laugh and shout “Oh my god!†The screen goes to black and “omg!†appears. I cry myself to sleep.
Okay, recapping that was only moderately painful, although watching that one actress struggle with the line “It’s the cliques. We’re all in them!†multiple times hurt my soul a little.
Now, there are the obvious crimes against humanity that this movie commits. The first is its unoriginal and amateurish screenplay: more than anything, the trailer seems like a cobbling together of every possible teen-movie cliché that the writers could think of. The second is its terrible acting: was this really the best cast they could find?
Third is the problematic message that the New York Times reviewer brings up: sure, you can flout social conventions and rebel against the popular kids, provided you are skinny and beautiful and like to show off your boobs. The four Bratz may have different hair and skin colors and vaguely different “personalities†(read: hobbies), but they all look essentially identical. I’m surprised that romantic subplots don’t seem to play much of a role, but there’s no way I’m going to see the movie in order to determine whether that’s actually the case.
And there are the mixed messages about materialism, which are also hinted at by the Times reviewer. The villainess is obviously supposed to be very wealthy, and her characterization relies heavily on depictions of excess: her lounging in her pool, her (obviously spoiled) dog who gets its hair done at a salon, her Super Sweet 16 with acrobats and circus animals. Equating profligate wealth with immorality is nothing new. But the ways in which the Bratz defeat the villainess and save the day are equally materialistic, though in a subtler way: they dress in elaborate matching costumes and learn to “walk the walk†of the Southern California culture in which they no doubt live. And, of course, the movie is named after a popular line of dolls, a tenuous brand tie-in that clearly serves no purpose except to sell more movie tickets and more dolls. (The movie has nothing to do with the dolls and was probably written before the brand tie-in even existed, like a sinister Super Mario 2.)
But the thing that bothers me the most about this movie is what some might call its saving grace: its message about cliques. While the movie suggests (or seems to suggest based on the trailer) that cliques are evil because they keep people from interacting with people who are different — a message that has been trumpeted time and again and still hasn’t made a lick of difference — it doesn’t question the underlying assumption that people — particularly females — are easily categorizeable in the first place.
The four heroines do not struggle with questions of identity but rather with the dilemma that, given their identities, they are expected to sever ties with their former friends. In order to be able to hang out with their friends, they must destroy the entire clique system: their identities are discrete and immutable, so instead of changing who they are they need to change the social system that “forces†them to hang out with the people exactly like them.
This depiction is symptomatic of a larger fragmentation of the female self. I’ve spent many hours studying oral contraceptive ads, and a recurring theme is the idea that the contraceptive in question meets the needs of three or four different “types†of women (and those “types†are surprisingly consistent). But watch any commercial for Viagra or Cialis, and you’ll notice that the appeal is directed toward “guys†or “menâ€: the collective is united, homogeneous.
There are countless popular depictions of sets of different “types†of women, from The Babysitter’s Club to Sex and the City. (There are also the ensuing online quizzes which invite women to determine which character they are — are, not most resemble.) Men are almost never represented in such groups of complementary types; if they are categorized, it is usually according to some binary principle such as “bad boy†vs. “nice guy,†where it is not that different men are different types but rather that there is some characteristic that some men possess and others do not. When men are categorized as “types,†it is in the company of women — e.g. The Breakfast Club, any movie about cliques — and the focus is on types of people, not types of men.
You may be wondering why this is problematic. After all, I just said that men are depicted as a homogeneous collective, which is arguably just as bad as being subdivided into different types, right? Well, I don’t think so. When “men†are treated as a homogeneous group, individual differences can still exist: to refer to “men†as a group is not to imply that all men are the same but rather that they share some characteristic (namely maleness).
To refer, explicitly or obliquely, to “types†of women, is to imply several things: one, that women can be broken down into a finite (and usually small) number of categories; two, that these categorizeable differences exist along only one or two dimensions — that is, women differ in their marital status and their occupation, or in their intelligence and their promiscuity, or, in the case of Bratz, in their ethnicity and their hobbies. Three, it implies that no woman is by herself a complete person, but rather a fragment of some ur-woman that comes into being only when complementary fragments put on identical outfits in different colors and dance at a talent show, or get together to drink some Cosmos and talk about fellatio.
It is my uneasiness with this paradigm that makes me hate Bratz, a movie that tells girls that they can be good at science or good at sports or good at singing, and that their choice determines the type of person they will be — the type of woman they will be. It’s one-dimensional, and it’s lazy.
Unlike elephants shoving villains into pools; now that’s priceless.
August 3rd, 2007 at 4:00 pm
Very nice essay. Your question about why our culture’s received wisdom subdivides women into superficially different “types” is fascinating.
A (homespun, and therefore somewhat half-baked) theory:
Every group not perceived as ‘mainstream’ goes through a fairly consistent series of steps towards assimilation.
a. First it is reviled as alien. “The Irish are subverting our honest, Protestant way of life with Papism, drunkenness, and poverty.”
b. Later it is neutered by caricatures, and rendered funny instead of frightening (which may mean simply that the mainstream enjoy reveling in the *shared* perception that the strangers are frightening, but which is nonetheless a step towards acceptance.) “Paddy O’Irish drinks, beats his wife and his eleven kids, and serves as a great comedic addition to any joke or Vaudeville act.”
c. As the alien group becomes more familiar, the caricatures and stock-characters are refined into subcategories, each of which highlights just one of the stereotypical traits associated with the group. “Some Irishmen are worthless drunks. Some are lusty, fiery-tempered women with red hair. Some are gentle-hearted policemen, and some are corrupt priests.”
d. Finally, the subcategories are subdivided again and again until the traits being associated with representative group members are extremely specific, whereupon the joke stops being “the Irish are different from the rest of us!” and becomes “Look at this single particular familiar characteristic, which you recognize from Irishman jokes but also from some of the WASPs in your everyday life!”
I would estimate that for most Americans, Muslims and Scientologists are still in stage a of this process, gays are in stage b, Jews are in stage c, and Italians have reached stage d. By the time a group has been around long enough to have reached the end of this hazing process, it is more or less assimilated - of course the stereotypes remain as faint memories, maybe with enough currency to power a joke from time to time, but without any real memory of the fear and alienness that had originally given them cache.
Of course, the alien group may to a certain extent embrace and even internalize the caricatures of themselves that they discover are current among the mainstream. Jews are famous for having done this; black minstrel performers and ultraflamboyant gays are probably a part of the same phenomenon.
I can think of two factors that can make this process more difficult. First, when different subsets of the mainstream have different levels of experience with the alien group, the alien group may be assimilated to a different degree in different regions or subcultures.
Second: when an alien group is more omnipresent, it isn’t assimilated in the same way - rather, both groups are large enough to consider themselves to be mainstream and therefore to develop caricatures of one another, which may in turn be accepted on some level by the other group, and which in any case vastly complicates the assimilation process. This is definitely the case with the mutual black-white assimilation. (It’s probably also the case with, say, Chasidic Jews, who are clustered heavily enough that they are able to maintain a sense of being an alternate mainstream.)
Both of these complicating factors apply to the assimilation of females into the modern Western mainstream, as do a third factor and a fourth factor and a fifth factor unique to the female assimilation. The vast majority of mainstream-identifying males cannot possibly just ignore women; females play an integral role in their lives. Also, mainstreamer males are forced to reach conclusions about females while the males are young. I may not meet an Irishman until I’m 25, and I may not find his contribution or his detriment to the social fabric interesting until I’m 16, but I’m going to meet girls when I’m 2 and I’m going to want to reach conclusions about what they’re like when I’m 11. Immature people like oversimple conclusions even more than mature people do.
(Fifth and finally: the genuine differences between male and female are much greater than the genuine differences between ethnicities or religions, so these immature mainstreamers have even more reason to imagine that females are irreconcileably unlike themselves.)
So what does all this mean? I dunno; I’ve just been rambling. But it’s possible to me that because it is by and large immature mainstreamers who are making conclusions about what females are like - and because women are omnipresent enough that they are perceived as having their own (incomprehensible) culture, which is harder to melt down and incorporate into the mainstream - the assimilation process has in a sense stalled. Females are understood to be somewhere in stage c (different subcategories of female embody different stereotypical female traits).
And this understanding has so much inertia - and mainstream boys (who in the case of a different alien group would question the received understanding) are so intellectually unable to posit new and more complicated conclusions about what women are like - and so many females themselves internalize and accept the culturally-received definition of what women are like (in large part because they, too, are asked to reach conclusions about what female identity means at a more malleable age than they are asked to reach conclusions about, say, racial identity) - that evolution out of stage c is glacial or nonexistent.
Which of course is part of why movies like Bratz are so pernicious.
Would you say that, on the whole, the categories into which women are assigned are at least becoming more complex and more identifiable with generally human habits? “Samanthas, sassy ones, naive ones, and lesbian ones” seems less mysterious and more identifiable to me than “maidens, matrons, and crones” or “virgins and whores”.
August 3rd, 2007 at 5:11 pm
I think it’s interesting that you start from a place where females are considered non-mainstream — you are lumping them together with minority groups over whom the “mainstream” has either a spatiotemporal or popular primacy (i.e. “We were here first” or “There are more of us”). Most minority groups were introduced to Western culture after it had already been firmly established, either through enslavement or immigration, and so the perception of them as strange and scary makes sense.
Women, on the other hand, have been around for just as long as men have, in populations just as large. So I think it’s problematic to start from the assumption that women are non-mainstream, since a pretty big question is how they got there in the first place. I don’t have an answer for that, of course, but I think it’s something that needs to be taken into consideration before one can perform an archaeology of female “assimilation.”
As for your last question, yes, I would agree that the categories are at least becoming more complex — but I don’t know that the syntagms of female typology have changed all that much at all, especially since I wasn’t alive in the 16th century. Typologies nowadays still seem to exist only along two dimensions at a time — the virgin/whore axis could be paired with, say, the masculine/feminine axis, to neatly summarize the Sex and the City four: the masculine whore, who is promiscuous and emotionally distant “like a man” (Samantha); the feminine whore, who sleeps with lots of men in her search for Mr. Right (Carrie); the masculine virgin, who prizes career over romance (Miranda); and the feminine virgin, whose romantic ideals keep her waiting for The One (Charlotte).
So, yeah, it’s great that women have TWO axes now instead of one, but two-dimensional isn’t much of an improvement over one-dimensional. Especially when those axes are not a continuum but rather a set of discrete possibilities.
August 3rd, 2007 at 8:53 pm
New groups of aliens aren’t always encountered through immigration or abduction. Gays have always lived among the mainstream, but the extent to which they made their presence known has increased over time, to the point that now the mainstream is working on assimilating them. Isn’t that more or less analogous to the experience of American females, who have been increasingly willing to insist on participating in public discourse?
I agree that gradual cultural assimilation isn’t a perfect metaphor for the slow propagation of the perception of gender equivalency.
Both, though, are variations on the more general process by which a self-identified mainstream goes from thinking “these people are unlike us” to thinking “these people are like us”. That general process is the process I meant to approximate; both cultural assimilation and perceived gender equivalency are instances of that process.
You and I have sometimes disagreed on the extent to which (and the forms in which) sexism survives, but we agree, I think, that (in the recent West, a large proportion of) pop sociology and culturally-received wisdom is understood to be from a male point of view. You’ve even talked of a variation on DuBois’ “double consciousness” wherein a modern female American simultaneously sees herself both as a subject, and as the object of what she imagines male vision must be like. Have you changed your mind - or am I oversimplifying something - or do you agree that (empirically, at least) female perspectives are not considered mainstream perspectives?
You’re completely right to wonder about the *origins* of that sense of alien-ness, but that it exists, I think, can’t be denied.
(One oversimplified possible origin: even if at one point the cultural mainstream hadn’t used to consider female perspectives to be alien, the very fact that women and girls worried that their voices weren’t considered mainstream might have *caused* them to act differently from the mainstream, which might in turn have fostered a general sense that they were different. A more likely oversimplified origin: the republican tradition, so seminal in modern Western thought, has never really considered the perspectives of non-heads-of-households (and the custom that males be heads of households almost certainly traces back to prehistoric economic expediency).)
On to the second point of contention. You’re an academic and a genius, and so the fact that you so easily and so naturally assign the four Sex in the City characters to four categories along two orthogonal axes does very little to convince me that most of the population sees the show in the same nuanced way. If a significant proportion of viewers watch the show and think, “Hmm, Samantha sure is a masculine whore” I’ll eat my hat. I’m willing to bet that most viewers think, “Samantha is a man-eater. Carrie is a go-getter. Miranda is a career woman. Charlotte is a romantic naif.” Which, of course, isn’t exactly a wide range of identities to choose from, but which is closer to “some Irish are drunks, some Irish are cops, some Irish are hot women” than to “Irish are drunken, poor, stupid, and Catholic.”
August 3rd, 2007 at 9:05 pm
In my last post, I should have made it clearer that I’m positing that the same process by which a mainstream group comes to feel similar to a group of strangers is recapitulated in the process by which an individual can come to feel he is similar to a group of strangers.
Just as a mainstream culture takes a few generations and upgrades “they’re scary!” to “since we all find them scary in the same ways, we can bond over calling them goofy!” to “look at all the discrete ways they’re goofy!” to “look at all these identifiable characteristics we see in them!” - so too can an individual’s thinking progress through analogous stages.
A boy might, over the course of his adolescence,
a) spend a few years (7-9?) securing his own identity by reveling in the differences he sees between himself and girls - and identifying those differences by calling them disgusting; then
b) spend a few years (10-12?) bonding with friends by caricaturing the traits they’ve commonly identified in girls; then
c) spend a few years fixating “maturely” on the perceived differences between the genders (isn’t this a popular and cool topic of conversation between boys and girls aged 14-17?); then
d) possibly mature to the point where he interacts with girls primarily as individuals rather than as instantiations of various feminine archetypes.
All introspection, theory, and psychobabble; but nonetheless all plausible to me.
August 7th, 2007 at 3:08 am
Man, can girls have a movie they can enjoy? Why does the movie have to speak out against materialism?
Not all girls are unhappy identidy-searchers. Some are content and love their parents and do well in school.
The messages of friendship, loyalty, and freedom just aren’t your priority which are female fragmentation and anti-materialism (?).
Asymmetric movies