I was all set to hate the ABC show Pan Am, except for the clothes. I am a closet sixties girl in style,
and wish those styles were back (without the girdles, of course). I thought Pan Am was going to be
another Playboy Club (Playboy Club? Really?) with all the caricatures of the
sixties, and a flimsy premise to show off scantily clad girls. Either that or a Mad Men WannaBe.
But it isn’t.
The characters are fleshed out, each with his or her own
backstory that makes you like them and feel sympathy for them. The episodes are well written, well
acted and are not over blown. The
scenes that have sexism in them are exposing the sexism for what it is, and it
isn’t underhanded or covert. It is
right there, exposed as stupid, and ridiculous. In one episode, Christina Ricci’s character, Maggie, is
groped by a drunk passenger, who thinks he has the right to do so simply
because she is nice to him. That
is, after all her job. She
responds by telling him that she “is not included in the price of your (his) ticket,”
and pokes him with the carving fork, drawing blood.
The audience and the other stewardesses are on her side
immediately, and we see the dilemma as they keep the story from the
pilots. Alas, the jerk wants her
fired, and complains to the co-pilot, who offers him a free whiskey and tells
him she will be talked to.
Unfortunately, during the sixties, the scenario that played out in the
script was probably a pretty real situation, and happened more than once to
more than one girl. Due to the
magic of Hollywood, however, Christina Ricci gets to have her say, and points out
the sexism for what it is, and how the consequences play out when she replies
to the co-pilot, “What you just did was give that jerk permission to grope
someone else, and feel as if he is entitled to it.”
There it is.
Right there. The sexism is
pointed to, named, and the consequences of his actions exposed. The co-pilot is responsible because he
colluded in the oppression inherent in those times. It could have been stopped if he had just stuck up for Maggie. But, due to male privilege, it does not
occur to him to do so until after she says it.
Another episode, set in Berlin, shows the backstory of the
French Stewardess Collette. She
was three when the Nazi’s came for her parents. They were killed with other Jews in one of the internment
camps. She was forced to learn
German and years later, still hates the Germans. Ironically, is it her trilingualism that earns her the job
with Pan Am. This displays not
sexism, but the awful racism of the times in Europe and how much backlash
remained, even in those who did not want to feel that way. She says, “I came back to Berlin to
forgive. But I found that I still
hate them. And I don’t know how to stop.”
Still a third story takes place in Paris. In this episode the Pilot searches for
his lost love through a male friend in famous Parisian nightclub. He brings along Collette to help
translate for him. She asks the maitre’d,
who owns the place along with his boyfriend, for information about the lost
love. He replies that the lost
love “like me, Bridget likes her boyfriends, but loves her husband more.” Aha. The Pilot is just a boyfriend and the sexual tables are
turned. Sexuality is now brought
in, and the casual affair considered normal, but still clandestine. We see this again in episode four, when
Katie (another stewardess) is shown sleeping with a lover, and in the first
scenes of episode one when Colette sleeps with a lover she does not know is
married. This is definitely a
showing of how it was but how it wasn’t in the sixties.
The sixties were a time when sexism and racism were rampant.
Pan Am does a good job of showing the times as they were, as well as the times
as they changed. Young women only
had so many options, white or otherwise, and this show still points to the
weigh-ins and girdles as silly, and mentions the guideline that Stewardess
needed to be single. Even going so
far as to make an issue out of all three.
There is a Pilot of color, and Indian man named Sanjay. We have not seen his backstory yet,
although we have with the other two men in the cockpit. It will be interesting
to see what they do with Sanjay, and the rest of the storylines. The other remarkable part is when
looking up the writers and the fact checkers one discovers that many of these
storylines are taken from the real lives of the people who worked for Pan
Am. So the realization of sexism
and racism was taking place in a very real way. Normally when we think of the sixties and racism/sexism we
think about the civil rights movement, not the upper class white privilege of PanAm.
It is important to separate the historic moment from the
sensibilities of today. You can’t
show what wasn’t in the historic moment, but you can point to and expose what
was. In Pan Am, sexism is pointed to, shown and discussed within the confines
of the show. This is a pretty neat
trick. Is it perfect? No television show is the feminist
paragon we would like it to be.
And so the question becomes, do we deny and turn up our noses at a
historic moment that contains the things we are now fighting against, or do we
recognize it for what it is, what it was and learn from our history.
Is there a difference between sexy and sexism? HELL yes. This sexy show shows sexism
to be abhorrent.
