Gender In The Film 'The Pink Ladies'

label” (Barnes 96). Her character is always eating, and her love interest even tells her at one point that “there's more to you than just fat”, as if this is a compliment. Marty is another member of the Pink Ladies and the film characterizes her as a boy crazy teen. Her storyline revolves around having multiple boyfriends, gaining the attention of the older Vince Fontaine and at the girl’s sleepover attempting to enlarge her breasts. The film stresses the ideology that “women are defined by their sexuality and exist for men's enjoyment” (Barnes 90). The film does this with the portrayal of the supporting characters as well as continuously defining Sandy and Rizzo as the contrasting virgin and whore, while shaming them both for their individual
The first song in the musical and possibly one of the most well-known tells the story of how Sandy and Danny met. “Summer Nights” perpetuates gender essentialism as Sandy romanticizes her version of the story while Danny performs an emotionally unattached masculine recount. Danny sings lyrics such as “she got friendly down in the sand” and “she was good, you know what I mean” while Sandy sings more innocently about drinking lemonade and holding hands. The contrasting lyrics as well as the differing responses from the two friend groups sends the audience a message that men refer to women as objects and focus on sex, while women indulge in the romance. “Summer Nights” portrays gender as extremely binary and uses essentialist beliefs while reducing Sandy to plaything for
The silly and quick song shows the entire cast having fun, running around and enjoying the carnival. “We Go Together” is one of the many entertaining songs in Grease that has talented voices and impressive dancing, and really showcases something “that our day-to-day lives don’t provide” (Dyer 20). The exciting scenes in the film such as the school dance sequence or the drag racing sub-plot encourages the audience to escape reality and visit a world where social tensions such as race or class are nonexistent. After all “class, race and sexual caste are denied validity as problems by the dominant (bourgeois, white, male) ideology of society. We should not expect show business to be markedly different” (Dyer 27). Is this perhaps how the genre remains so popular, yet so replete with patriarchal values? Barnes argues that the female audience is reluctantly aware that what they are viewing is for the male audience and have accepted the fact that what men wish to see over powers what the actual female fans would enjoy viewing. She goes on to point out how this is another “imbalance of power contained within the structure of the male gaze” (89). The critical awareness of the messy gender politics displayed in Grease and many other musicals do not have to take away from the actual enjoyment when