The mainstream media is an extremely powerful tool that is used to inform the thoughts and actions of our society at large. It is infamous for it's role in shaping our spending habits, but it has controversial aspects as well. For example, Miley Cyrus' wardrobe and dance moves have been a source of debate amongst adults because her fan base is comprised of young girls and preteens. If you're interested in learning more about the ideas that the mainstream media projects, Sociological Images is a haven of examples.
As much as media can be used to propagate images that reinforce a narrow idea of what is normal and what are natural behaviours and ideals, I also believe it can be used to introduce new, inclusive ideas to a not always receptive audience. Finding these examples can be challenging; but today, I found one in The Hot Chick.
A 2002 Rob Schneider flick about a teenage girl named Jessica who swaps bodies with a 30 year-old criminal and her misadventures while trying to get her body back. Hidden within the physical gags are two story lines I was surprised to find. The first is about Ling Ling, Jessica's friend, and the second is about Booger, Jessica's younger brother.
The running gag with Ling Ling is that her Chinese mother, who works at a nail salon, always seems to show up just in time to embarrass her. However, what adds depth to this gag is that Ling Ling is mixed race, and can easily pass as black, and her mother seems to show up whenever she is with other black characters as if to "out" her. This is exemplified by a face shot of the black character either rolling her eyes or giving Ling Ling "a look" after her mother appears. The story line ends at the prom, when Ling Ling, after being berated by her black friends for her treatment to her mother, tries to apologize to her mom, who replies by saying that Ling Ling is actually embarrassed about her identity not her mother, before driving off in a hydraulic car, gangster music blaring.
Even though Ling Ling's story has less than five minutes of screen time in the film, it was able to successfully represent the character's struggle to find her own identity between two distinct communities. Philip Roth explored this struggle in his book The Human Stain, and it's really cool that a film that Roger Ebert considered "too vulgar for anyone under 13, and too dumb for anyone over 13" would even hint at the identity crisis that mixed race people experience.
The second story line revolves around Booger, and his scenes in the film. We are first introduced to Booger while he is wearing lipstick and pretending to wear Jessica's bra. He has a black eye, a common occurrence, from a classmate, and Jessica covers it with foundation or concealer. At the beginning of the film, Jessica thinks he's a weirdo, and tries to discourage this behaviour in him. After she has switched bodies with the criminal, Clive, she pretends to be the family's gardener to get easier access to her bedroom. Over the course of the film, Booger realizes that their gardener is in fact Jessica, and he is the only character in the film who readily recognizes Jessica in a man's body. When he finally confronts her, when she is dressed up in her prom dress and sobbing on her bed, he does not ask her how she got into a man's body. Instead, he says that he would and could accept her no matter how she looked.
Booger's identity within the film could be interpreted as being either that of a transgendered person. The transgendered community is not often represented in the media, and when they are, they are not always portrayed in a good light. As a community, they are marginalized, often being targets of violence, and at risk of drugs, and prostitution. Furthermore, there aren't many normalized representations of transgendered persons, by which I mean that there aren't many primary or secondary characters in stories that are simply in the story as characters and their struggles as transgendered individuals is not the main story line.
Booger is simply Jessica's brother. By the end of the film, not only has she come to accept him for who he is, but his parents have as well (while entering the police vehicle, his father calls to him as he runs to the car in bright red stilettos, "If you want to wear them, you have to learn how to run in them.") The story hints towards the violence that he experiences, but it does not dwell on it. He is represented as the most open and accepting character of them all.
Regardless of the caliber of the film, it's admirable that the writer and producers included the presence and experiences of these two characters. One might even argue that it's even better to have these characters in low-ball fluff films rather than serious oscar-nominated films because of the breadth of the audience who will watch this sort of film. Normalization of the experiences of marginalized communities for the purpose of creating acceptance by society at large doesn't mean throwing an idea into everyone's face and making them accept it. It is the slow erosion of ideas that reinforce dominant hierarchies of power by the inclusion of multiple, diverse, complex characters.
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