You Play The Girl: On Playboy Bunnies, Princesses, Trainwrecks and Other Man-Made Women

Carina Chocano

Virago, £14.99

Review by Susan Swarbrick

MY dawning consciousness of the gaping chasm between how men and women are portrayed in pop culture began during a cinema outing to see the 1984 film Supergirl.

Even to the untrained eye of a seven-year-old it was a glaringly poor and underwhelming stable-mate to the early trio of Superman films starring the late Christopher Reeve.

Visiting a toy shop afterwards I walked straight past the small collection of Supergirl merchandise to the next shelf. I picked out a costume. I would be Superman. Because girls didn’t get the good parts.

It is a theme at the heart of You Play The Girl, a collection of essays by former LA Times film and television critic Carina Chocano.

The idea took root when the author began to ponder the influences that fictional female role models were having on her young daughter Kira. This, in turn, got Chocano thinking about the many women from screen and print who had shaped her own formative years.

In 2017, we are led to believe that women have never had it so good. Yet, chip away at the facade and the reality of progress becomes somewhat more questionable.

Chocano holds a mirror up to all of this. The title of the book comes from a throwaway line in an interview with the actor Isla Fisher. Asked how playing the breakout role in comedy Wedding Crashers changed her career, Fisher replied that it hadn’t.

Instead, she had realised “there aren’t that many comic opportunities for women in Hollywood”, adding: “All the scripts are for men and you play ‘the girl’ in Hot Rod ...” (The latter a nod to Fisher subsequently being cast as a love interest in the Andy Samberg-led film Hot Rod).

The Girl – as we learn – is a complex bundle of contradictions; a sexed-up sidekick, helpless princess waiting to be saved or nagging shrew/humourless, straight woman to the goofy, fun-loving and charming leading man. And that is merely the tip of the iceberg.

Chocano takes us on a journey through her grandfather’s meticulously curated Playboy collection; to the cult-like domesticity and self-abnegation of The Stepford Wives: and what she describes as the inverted Madonna-and-whore paradox in Pretty Woman.

She tackles the conflicting, multi-layered themes of the modern-day Cinderella story (Fifty Shades of Grey being one such example) and laments strong female leads being diminished to passive and weak as they appease “anxious, highly strung, insecure and haplessly neurotic” male counterparts.

Case in point: Samantha from the sitcom Bewitched who tried hard to “behave” and “supress” her magic powers out of love for her husband Darrin.

There is searing analysis of a tale of two celluloid women called Alex. The first is Alex in Flashdance – played by Jennifer Beals – a welder in a steel mill by day and a talented dancer by night who has “a boy’s name, and a man’s job, and holds her own in an all-male environment”.

Then we have “obsessed, psychotic, child-endangering bunny boiler” Alex, as brought to life by the peerless Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction. Neither protagonist is particularly appealing as a role model.

As Chocano so aptly puts it, Alex No. 1 is portrayed as “a feral princess”, resisting domestication until a dashing hero tames her, while Alex No. 2 provides “a cautionary tale” to any single-minded career woman boldly forging her way through life ignoring the conventions of marriage and children.

Chocano is undoubtedly a clever, sharp and extremely witty writer, yet there are moments when her all-hail-the-sisterhood proclamations ring a little hollow.

Not least when she describes finding herself watching Pretty Woman “in aggrieved silence” with a group of acquaintances who were fans of the film. “That afternoon, the women enacted for me my greatest fears about womanhood,” she writes. “I resented them for it.”

Rather than enlightening them to her take on the movie’s alleged crimes against feminism, Chocano instead “sulked” in the corner, coming across as needlessly patronising and glib.

Another gripe would be that, although the book is beautifully written and unflinchingly close to the bone, I came away bereft of the many answers I hoped You Play The Girl would proffer.

Yes, women in popular culture are variously idealised, infantilised, sexualised, ignored, trivialised, dehumanised and objectified, but how do we alter that skewed perspective?

The road to empowerment is paved with hope and soul-sapping disillusionment in equal measure.