Pan Am takes flight

From Pan Am's pilot ep. - Maggie (Christina Ricci) and Laura (Margot Robbie). (ABC)

It’s impossible to talk about the wave of retro television this season without mentioning the ABC series Pan Am. The pilot episode debuted to good ratings, but opinions are mixed about the show’s quality. I found that Pan Am has a lot of awkward dialogue and unnatural conversations. The first scene, featuring a Pan Am flight preparing for take-off, takes entirely too long to reach a conclusion, capping in at 12 minutes. And yet, I think Pan Am is doing a much better job of showcasing the historical period of social change than The Playboy Club is. Unlike The Playboy Club, Pan Am doesn’t credit the stewardesses with revolutionizing the place of women in the workplace, but simply recognizes them as one part of a bigger whole. Of course, this doesn’t stop the show from glorifying them. The iconic last shot of the pilot episode features the backs of the four main female characters, wearing their stewardess attire and waving, as a little girl flashes them a reverent smile. The Pan Am stewardesses represented a combination of the traditional perfect woman, and a new, glamorous ideal: the career woman.

At MSNBC.com’s Overhead Bin, former real-life Pan Am flight attendants tell their stories and critique the show’s mostly accurate depiction of the airline. Helen Davey, who worked as a Pan Am stewardess from 1965 to 1986, tells Overhead Bin, “…we all thought we had lucked into the best job in the world.” Within the show itself, a male pilot even states that the women of Pan Am were ahead of their time: "They don't know they're a new breed of woman. They just had an impulse to take flight." But if the Pan Am stewardesses were the prototypes of the ‘modern woman,’ they were members of an elite club – a very tightly controlled one. As reflected on the show, the women of Pan Am had to be 5’2, single, skinny, and were regularly checked to make sure their girdles were on properly. And, of course, only white women were able to step into the revered position. Thus, like The Playboy Club, the ticket to liberation for women was a pretty face.

But what stood out to me most is that I found the female characters to be so much more endearing than the leads in The Playboy Club. I really liked Laura, the newest stewardess who ran away from a marriage her mother was pushing her into (although, what’s with the ‘new girl’ in both this show and The Playboy Club being blonde? Is it supposed to add to their naïve ‘everygirl’ appeal?). Laura’s sister, Kate, is also a stewardess, and is using her position to work with the CIA. I really hope the series explores the relationship between the sisters, because Kate is the person who helped Laura decide not to get married and to live for herself. Despite this, their relationship is already being tested by Laura choosing to become a Pan Am stewardess, putting Kate’s secret mission in jeopardy. I also found Colette, a fellow stewardess with a funny French accent who has an affair with a married man, to be a very sympathetic character. And as an ensemble cast, the women of Pan Am are convincingly interesting. At the very least, Pan Am makes a fairer case for the women of the 1960s than The Playboy Club does: they were controlled, objectified and trivialized, but they were also learning how to take their destinies into their own very capable hands.

A Review of The Playboy Club - "As Long as They're Still Sexy."

This Monday, the NBC series The Playboy Club debuted to mediocre ratings and even worse reviews. Critics complained about the series use of ridiculous plotlines and bad writing. Case-in-point, the first five minutes features Maureen (played by Amber Heard), the newest ‘bunny’ at the infamous Playboy Club, killing a mob boss with her stiletto after he tries to rape her. But even with its convoluted premise, The New York Times notes that The Playboy Club, along with several other shows debuting this season set in the Mad Men era, offers a setting that demonstrates to viewers the raging sexism of the time:  these series can help showcase how far along we’ve come. The narration, done by Hugh Hefner himself, even credits the club with the shifting political atmosphere: "The world was changing. And we were the ones doing it." Protestors and bra burning be damned – women earning the right to equal pay? That was all Playboy.

A scene from The Playboy Club. Photo by Matt Dinerstein (NBC).

Unfortunately, even with the opportunity to portray the strong females who pioneered social and political change, The Playboy Club hasn’t quite taken that chance up. Lingering camera shots display the bunnies’ best assets, while the script doesn’t miss the opportunity to show the girls at a party in their pajamas. But this is to be expected – after all, female objectification is the standard for Playboy. What really bothers me is that for every displayed bunny tail, the series never stops to show the strengths these women supposedly posses.  For example, when lawyer Nick Dalton says that Maureen is “smart,” the audience hasn’t really seen Maureen showcase her intelligence – the only reason we know this is because someone (and more importantly, a man) thinks she is. Kate, a fellow bunny, also mentions how “nice” Maureen is, even though she hasn’t done anything beyond flash a pretty smile.  If Maureen is supposed to be a stronger alternative to the stereotypical ‘blonde bombshell,’ she’s failing miserably – she just feels undeveloped and flat. At least we know she can do the bunny hop.

After finishing the first episode, I have to question the whether this ‘wave’ of retro-era television series is really a good thing. Sure, these shows could teach younger generations about the inequalities of 1960s America. They allow us to collectively cringe at our transgressions of the past. But when a series does nothing but adhere to traditional gender roles, without offering anything new, isn’t that just glorifying those ‘good old days?’ If Hef’s narration is any indicator, then perhaps The Playboy Club is doing just that: “It was the 1960s, and the bunnies were some of the only women in the world who could be anyone they wanted to be.” But really, this quote needs to be modified to be closer to the sad truth. Within the world of The Playboy Club, the bunnies can be anyone they want to be – as long as they’re still sexy.

The All-American Girl

From a young age, I became interested in gender roles and how women are represented in media. When I was in the 8^th grade, I remember watching an episode of the MTV show Made. The premise of the episode was that a girly cheerleader, with blonde hair and blue eyes, wanted to be transformed into a skateboarder. When the show’s crew interviewed the girl’s mother, she said her daughter was ‘the all-American teenage girl.’ During this time, I had been learning about genetics in my science class. I had learned that having blonde hair and blue eyes were both recessive genes. As soon as I heard that comment, I thought ‘Then I guess there aren’t too many all-American girls.’ As someone who is both African-American and Hispanic, it was almost biologically impossible for me to be the ‘all-American’ girl. I thought about my female friends, who are all different ethnicities, and realized that though several had blonde hair and a few had blue eyes, none had both. I began to feel as though the girls on television and in magazines not only didn't represent me, they didn't represent anyone.

Celebrities Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon both appeal to the public as the 'girls next door.'

From that point onward I started to pay more attention to the casts of television shows, and I became increasingly disheartened to find that the majority of the leading female roles on television shows and in movies were blonde, even going all the way back to the 1960s (The Brady Bunch, anyone?). Of course, I've always known that blondes are considered a sex symbol in American culture, and seeing a blonde female, whether in real life or on-screen doesn't bother me at all. It's the disproportion of blondes in media in comparison to every other hair color that bothers me, since it's not reflective of real life.

It's funny that this is such a bothersome issue for me. There's obviously an underrepresentation of minorities in media; usually television shows and magazines will throw in a 'token black' to appeal to multicultural audiences (such as the inclusion of a black angel in the new Charlie's Angels). And I've never exactly been skinny, yet only seeing females who weigh far less than me on-screen doesn't bother me. But I think this issue of the 'all-American' female bothers me because it doesn't just offend me personally, it offends me as a female. It makes me think about all of the women out there who have come to believe they are not 'normal.' I think of all the young women who run out to buy the best hair dye and eye contacts they can afford, just so they can finally be 'regular.' I get angry at the media machine for creating an illusion that traps females. And I always hope that I'll never be one of those girls.