Lady Business: Vice, Women Dancing, and Being Muslim On-Screen
Hello and welcome to Lady Business, a weekly newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the fifty-fourth issue, published January 10, 2019.
Dancing and Praying
Welcome back, and happy 2019! Thanks so much to those of you who signed up over the holiday break, which now feels like a distant but glorious oasis of rest. (Am I ready for the return of the likability wars over women running for office? I am not.)
I spent my holidays catching up with family and friends and filling my brain with entertainment of varying quality. Such as Vice, or Mansplaining: The Movie. I wasn’t expecting much, to be honest, but boy was I bored; writer/director Adam McKay, trying for his best Michael Moore, took everything that was tedious but understandable about his mortgages-for-dummies explainer style in The Big Short and cranked it up … for a subject that’s not nearly as complicated, and also pretty memorable recent history for everyone who’s going to see it!
And it was just so lazy. I’m certainly no Dick Cheney fan, but did you know that every bad thing that’s happened in America since 2000 is Cheney’s fault? Or that women who enjoy the Fast and the Furious movies are ruining this country, with our shallow disengagement from politics and other Serious Issues? (Guilty. So, so guilty.)
Which is why I felt particularly seen by this Manohla Dargis column about reviewing movies while female, and the casual slights she’s learned to ignore in order to enjoy much of Hollywood. She specifically cited McKay, and the two moments in Vice that particularly irritated me:
Other male filmmakers either forget female viewers or don’t care that we’re watching, and at times their carelessness can jolt me out of their stories. That happened several times while I was watching “Vice,” Adam McKay’s movie about Dick Cheney.
… McKay also bookends the movie with what I think of as cinema’s Universal Bimbos, those young, dumb counterparts to the mean old ladies with puckered mouths whose clucking is meant to symbolize small-town hypocrisy or whatever. In “Vice,” some women dancing in slow motion and a female fan of the “Fast and Furious” franchise pop onscreen, symbolizing American decline.
Yep, women dancing: definitely a sign of apathy and political decline!
The other main thing I watched over the holidays was Amazon’s Jack Ryan, which I enjoyed much more, albeit with asterisks. No matter how much it tried to be sensitive to jingoism or give screen time to Muslim characters, it still wound up being a story about a white American dude who hunts a Muslim terrorist, you know? And similarly to Bodyguard, the series’ focus on thwarting “the next Osama Bin Laden” feels like a particularly tired plot for thrillers these days, in the era of Brexit and Trump and poisoning Russian spies and white gunmen targeting government officials and schoolchildren and journalists.
I did appreciate how much Jack Ryan allowed an observant Muslim woman to be a protagonist, even if most of her story involved misery porn. Saudi actor Dina Shihabi plays Hanin, the Syrian wife of the aforementioned terrorist, who wants to leave him (and protect her children from his influence). A lot of bad things, and a few deus ex machinas, happen to her as a result.
One of the things I liked about Hanin was Shihabi’s wardrobe, and the series’ commitment to it; she wears a headscarf and full dress for most of her on-screen time, aside from a brief, obligatory-feeling nude scene. (One that Shihabi’s father, a well-connected Washington operator with ties to the Saudi government, publicly criticized.)
Muslim women who wear the hijab, or headscarf, are still rare on American television -- so much so that it was only in February that a TV station hired the first hijabi woman to be an on-air reporter in this country. It’s pretty similar in fiction; despite our era of Peak TV, and the resulting outlet for a plethora of diverse viewpoints and experiences, religious Muslim women who wear hijabs are mostly confined to shows about terrorists (Quantico, Homeland, Bodyguard, and now, of course, Jack Ryan).
That’s changing, slowly: The Bold Type has featured a hijabi woman, Grey’s Anatomy incorporated a doctor’s hijab into its medical shenanigans, and Paul Feig’s company is producing a web series about two Muslim-American women. Yet it's a weird, and specific, blind spot in our glut of entertainment options; at a time when Muslim men like Hasan Minhaj and Aziz Ansari are making headlines for television grounded in their identities, where are the Muslim women’s stories?
Especially since these women are more visible than ever as U.S. power players. In the past week, the first two Muslim women elected to Congress made several headlines, for what they wore (including one woman's hijab) and for what they said. When the House of Representatives is more innovative than fiction, surely it’s time for Hollywood to catch up.
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