I'll bet Tamara Jenkins feels dumb. The Oscar-nominated screenwriter responsible for The Savages must feel like she wasted all that time learning how to write, when she could've been stripping.
That goes for Sarah Polley, and Nancy Oliver as well; the two other women nominated for Best Original Screenplay this year. In fact, all the feminist hoopla over the record number of women nominated in that category at this year's Academy Awards has since amassed into a low, Janis Ian-like roar in praise of the Bettie Page-banged hipster who brought home the trophy. The new face of feminism is apparently, Diablo Cody, who wrote 2007's breakout indie comedy, Juno. And in case you haven't heard, she used to be a stripper.
In truth, I don't really care what Cody did to pay her rent before she became Hollywood's punk rock friend-with-benefits. Vanessa Williams lost her Miss America crown because she posed nude, and her dethroning worked out in her favor. And if I have pornography to thank for Traci Lords's genius comic sneer-turn in Cry-Baby, just let me know where to send the Thank You note. But Cody's Oscar win is not only without merit, in my opinion, but also the result of a marketing campaign that fed on a culture that can't resist a chance to gawk at a topless lady.
Juno is not the worst film of the year, but its script is by no means Oscar-worthy. Its characters are painted with cartoonish broad strokes, the dialogue is packed with Kevin Smith-grade, cringeworthy slang, and the overall sentiment of the film is false and twee. To call it great is to give Cody the backhanded compliment that she's "funny, for a girl."
In the months preceding Juno's theatrical release, the press ate at the studio's marketing trough like starving sows. Even the Gray Lady couldn't resist the pitch: its cheeky screenwriter used to be a stripper. David Carr, in a profile of Cody titled Off The Stripper Pole & Into The Movies competes with Juno's dialogue for squirm-inducing turns of phrase.
"She may have once made a living letting [her hair] fall in the faces of her lap-dance clients," Carr drools. "But Ms. Cody has mastered the fan dancer's art of showing much and revealing little."
Still don't get that Diablo used to take her clothes off for money, but now she writes films?
Carr continues: "Ms. Cody... did not pretend that her life was anything other than a fairy tale, albeit one where the role of the glass slippers is played by a pair of stripper's stilettos."
In case you're still lacking for a sense of what Carr's trying to say, here's another way to put it.
"If you are a fan of the indie version of the human drama, it would be tough to top the one about the plucky Midwestern girl who used a stripper pole to shimmy her way up and out of a drab office cubicle and grab her piece of the Hollywood dream."
Get it? She was a stripper!
Whether or not Cody chose to strip because she found it empowering or kitschy, like the burlesque performers who don pasties at venues like Jumbo's Clown Room, is beside the point. I'm reminded of the Onion headline, Ironic Porn Purchase Leads To Non-Ironic Ejaculation. Which is to say that, whether you have dice tattooed on your calf or you've never heard of Camille Paglia, a stripper is still a stripper in our society. And even if a woman sees her choice to take off her clothes as an empowered, post-feminist decision, the sad reality is that society still defines women not by their actions or the reasons behind them, but by how they are perceived.
The studio jumped on this, making use of the maxim from Gypsy that, to promote yourself, "You Gotta Get a Gimmick." The Times was only one of many papers hot to trot on the angle that Juno's press agents pressed. Then, predictably, sex sold tickets to this otherwise sleeper-scale indie film about a sarcastic teenager who gets pregnant and decides to carry the baby to term.
That the slyly anti-abortion message of Juno isn't the main reason why its success is bad for women speaks volumes to the thickheadedness behind the media's glorification of Cody's sultry past, and Hollywood's subsequent notion that this film is the best thing that's happened to women since suffrage.
I know I'm not the first to point out how suggestible people in show business are, but news of this flick being a hot one spread like Hep-A on the West Coast, and it was all because of its marketing. Put the stripper-turned-screenwriter in the Times, get the soundtrack in Urban Outfitters, and litter the movie with so many eccentric props (Sunny-D! The Hamburger Phone! Orange Tic-Tacs! Juno's Pipe!), it'll make Napoleon Dynamite look like Lawrence of Arabia.
On the other hand, you have relatively unsung screenwriters like Polley, Oliver & Tamara Jenkins, who, in my opinion, wrote the best screenplay of the year for The Savages. Her film, which she also directed, told the story of two estranged siblings coping with the messy, awkward task of caring for a dying father, and Jenkins's script brims with specificity, surprising humor and unsentimental warmth. By no means just a "woman's movie," The Savages tapped the frailties and comic-tragic foibles that dapple the process of growing up.
Sadly, the marketers of Juno exploited a society that continues to hold its female writers and artists to a lower standard. They knew that our collective prurient imagination would be drawn to a sizzling pitch, and that the legend of the harlot-turned-scribe was sensational enough to distract from Cody's ersatz screenplay. That Diablo Cody's success is championed as a victory for women, while Tamara Jenkins, a truly gifted screenwriter who happens to be female, goes unsung, is truly a shame. All Jenkins did was keep her clothes on and write a beautiful film.
Posted February 27, 2008 | 04:36 PM (EST)