#45, 2017 Skandies
“I was the second most known person, behind Bill Clinton, in the world,” says the movie version of Tonya Harding, and for two months in 1994, that was true: when a hitman bashed figure skater Nancy Kerrigan in the knee a few weeks before the start of the Winter Olympics, and that hitman was linked to Kerrigan’s rival Tonya Harding, the story received saturation coverage of the sort that the O.J. Simpson case would receive a few months later. It’s kind of fascinating, the sheer volume of information you absorb just by being alive. I didn’t even follow this story particularly closely, but as I watched, the names all came back to me like lyrics to a song I didn’t like but couldn’t escape: yep, there’s Jeff Gillooly, there’s Shawn Eckardt, there’s Shane Stant… meaning that, yeah, for nearly thirty years now I have had brain cells dedicated to remembering the name of a figure skater’s ex-husband’s friend’s henchman. Meanwhile, I can intensively study actually important historical events, and the details don’t stick in the same way. The power of osmosis!
I think one of the things that made this story so compelling back when it was first unfolding was the fact that, ultimately, it was a sports story. We knew that it was going to come down to a showdown on the ice at a set time and date, and we didn’t know how that showdown would turn out. That’s the main thing sports have going for them: in the vast majority of scripted entertainment we know the heroes are going to win in the end, and even the exceptions generally follow some sort of narrative logic, but sporting events hold genuine suspense. I have to admit, I was curious enough to tune my little senior-year dorm room TV to CBS, adjust the rabbit ears, and watch Tonya Harding start her routine—only to give up, skate over to the judges’ table, put her foot up on it, and cry about her broken shoelace. It’s an immortal Olympics moment now, and we had no idea it was coming.
But just as the O.J. case captivated the country primarily because of the way it spoke to a number of demographic fault lines in this country—race chief among them—the Tonya Harding vs. Nancy Kerrigan story would probably not have dominated the airwaves night after night for weeks had it not been for another demographic fault line, one that serves as the focus of this movie: social class. Figure skating, at least on the women’s side, is part sport, part beauty pageant—a showcase for the grace of well-bred young ladies whose families could afford the expense of coaching and costumes and travel and whatnot. Hell, Disney tried to turn Nancy Kerrigan into one of its princesses. But Tonya Harding—well, as the movie version of her says flat out in one of the fake documentary segments, she was a redneck. She’s wearing a denim jacket, cowboy boots, and a gaudy belt buckle, sucking on a cigarette in a kitchen whose floor is still linoleum. As a kid, when a competition requires skaters to wear fur coats, Tonya shows up in a coat stitched together from the pelts of rabbits she’d shot herself. As an adult, she spends six hours a day training and the rest of her waking hours running a forklift and doing some welding. She had succeeded in the figure skating world through sheer athleticism—her claim to fame prior to “the incident” was that she had been the first American woman to attempt and land a jump called a “triple Axel” in competition, which won her the U.S. championship in 1991—but, in a sport scored not by reaching a finish line or putting a ball in a goal but by winning the approval of a panel of judges, achieving that success was always an uphill battle. In the movie, the judges freely admit that Tonya just doesn’t project the image they’re looking for. Figure skating is a sport that virtually nobody cares about except for a couple of weeks, during the Olympics, when it gets all wrapped up with nationalism. A figure skater’s job is to represent the flower of American maidenhood on the world stage. The judges don’t want a hick in that role, even if she can land all the jumps.
This makes it sound like I, Tonya is the underdog story of a spunky gal from the wrong side of the tracks taking on the princesses. And, to a great extent, it is—the film took some criticism for showing so much favor to someone who, after all, had pled guilty to a role in a plot to literally kneecap one of her opponents. But it also took criticism from the opposite direction, with some charging that the movie was itself encouraging the audience to laugh and/or sneer at the “white trash”: at Tonya’s mother, cursing at Tonya from rinkside while clutching a lit cigarette in one hand and pouring booze into her coffee with the other; at Jeff Gillooly with his hillbilly mustache and pick-up line of “So, do you like food?”; at Shawn Eckardt, all 300+ pounds of him, claiming to be a top figure in counterespionage even though he lives with his parents. So are we supposed to be feeling sympathy or scorn?, the critics ask. You can’t have it both ways! But the thing is, these people in particular are trash human beings. Tonya’s mother is a nightmare, relentlessly hateful toward humanity in general and her daughter in particular, whose sole moment of non-monsterhood is that she actually is taken aback when the knife she throws at Tonya draws blood. Gillooly beats Tonya incessantly and stalks her when she tries to leave him. Eckardt hires goons to assault a woman. Of course, physical and emotional abuse are devastatingly common in rich families as well as poor. But pouring misery into a system generally means you will get misery out, and the misery of poverty is positively correlated with rates of domestic violence and child abuse. So you kind of have to have it both ways. One of the best arguments for a less medieval wealth distribution is what poverty turns people into.
I’m reminded of The Grapes of Wrath and the way that John Steinbeck portrays his working-class Okie heroes, the Joads, as stupid and often disgusting. As I put it in that article, “it’s valuable and even brave of Steinbeck to take the characters he wants readers to sympathize with and unflinchingly portray just how far short they fall of the standards of polite society. By making it so easy to see why middle-class Californians recoil from the Okies, Steinbeck is better able to make clear that he’s calling for acceptance of the common humanity of all even when it’s hard, not just when it’s easy”. I would add that, yes, it’s brave, but it’s also necessary, if you don’t want your argument to be proven hollow by the first reality check your audience receives. For instance: as I write this, there is an initiative on the ballot in California, Proposition 30, that would raise taxes on the rich in order to fund infrastructure for zero-emission vehicles. Sounds progressive, right? But in fact there is a chunk of the left that has come out against it, saying that continued support of infrastructure for any types of cars, no matter how green they might be, should be opposed in favor of mass transit. You can watch all sorts of videos about what a better world it will be when we’re all taking trains instead of driving around in electric cars, and they’re all very convincing until you actually step onto a train. I mean, it was bad enough when the biggest problems with the trains were that they were stuffed with trash, and that people smoked on them and blasted loud music on them with impunity, and that the rows of seats at the end of the cars tended to be taken by passed-out drunks sprawled across them, and that open masturbation on public transit was common enough to have become a standard punch line on the monologues of late night talk shows. But they’re getting worse. The last time Ellie tried taking the train to the airport to come visit me, she was physically assaulted by some loon who was walking around the train punching passengers in the head. So long as mass transit advocates fail to acknowledge that the experience of taking it is dystopian and set forth steps to fix the problem, their position is the equivalent of trying to warm people up to Grampa Joad or Tonya Harding without acknowledging that they’re crass.
#50, 2017 Skandies
Dunno why my past self put this on the list, but I couldn’t finish it. It’s a movie that bounces back and forth between two time periods. In 1927, a deaf girl travels to New York to find her mother, and these sequences are filmed like the silent movies whose final heyday was that year. In 1977, a boy deafened in an accident travels to New York to find his father, and these sequences are filmed to look like movies from the ’70s. I do not care about cinema as a medium enough for these stunts to really mean much to me, and the story did nothing for me, so I quit about 45 minutes in.
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