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
life decisions.
The film sends the patriarchal message that women should be sexually available to men, but not too available because “a woman who enjoys sex and actively seeks it out is viewed as trespassing on male territory, as sexual desire is considered attractive only in men” (Barnes 97). Music is the next aspect of Grease this paper will analyze, and how the songs use the male gaze to reduce female characters to objects and portray binary views on gender.
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
Danny. The final two songs of Grease come at the end of the film during the carnival sequence after Sandy reveals her make-over to Danny and the rest of the boys. Just prior to this scene, Frenchie asks Sandy if she is happy, to which she replies “no, not really, but I think I know how I could be”. Sandy’s decision to change her appearance reflects the belief that “in order to secure the love of a man, a woman must conform to the societal construct of beauty” (Barnes 90), or in this case what she believes Danny prefers women to look like. John Berger discusses the male gaze in his novel Ways of Seeing and writes that “men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at” (47). Sandy’s make-over is the result of the male gaze and “is a sign of her submission to the owner’s feelings or demands (Berger 52), which in this case is the assumed heterosexual male audience and male characters on the screen. Possibly the most obvious inclusion of the male gaze happens when Sandy arrives at the carnival. The camera shows the T-Birds conversing when something or someone catches their eyes and halts their speaking. The camera cuts back to what the boys see, and it is a tightly dressed, curly haired, smoking Sandy. The rest of the sequence follows these types of camera shots and displays Sandy as “an erotic object for the characters within the screen story, and as erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium, with a shifting tension between the looks on either side of the screen (Mulvey 11-12). Some may argue that since Sandy sings lyrics such as “you better shape up” to Danny, she attempts to take control, but her lyrics get lost behind the male gaze and how her makeover sends the message that “men appear to retain the right of ownership of women’s bodies, and their “look”” (Barnes 103). “You're the One That I Want” seeks to give Sandy agency, but falls short and keeps her as “bearer of the meaning, not making of the meaning” (Mulvey 7). The final song of the musical entitled “We Go Together” sends the heteropatriarchal message that women and men must romantically pair up, and as the cast sings “that’s the way it should be”.
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
viewing and therefore do not change the popularity of the genre within a female based audience. While Grease was extremely popular upon it’s initial release, the film continues to be well-known in today’s society. Fox released a made for television live remake of the film in 2016, which included many of the beloved characters and original songs. Since the remake was broadcasted almost 40 years after the original, it is interesting to explore what the directors chose to include, omit or change. After all, American society and gender roles have changed since the