Pigs in Space

By David Templeton

Writer David Templeton takes interesting people to interesting films in his ongoing quest for the ultimate post-film conversation. This column is not a review; rather, it’s a freewheeling, tangential discussion of life, alternative ideas, and popular culture.

Randy Blume, who’s seen the effects of sexual harassment plenty of times before–both on the ground and in the air–wasn’t planning on discussing that particular subject today.

As a former airline pilot and flight instructor, Blume frequently encountered discrimination at the hands of condescending supervisors, flight trainers, and countless non-female fellow pilots. As revealed in her delightful, semi-autobiographical novel, Crazy in the Cockpit (DK Ink; $21.95), Blume, in her travels from the airports of Boston and San Francisco to the runways of Japan and Guam, has seen women demeaned, stereotyped, put down, objectified, humiliated, and ignored.

The last place she expected to encounter such stuff was in a muppet movie.

“That was awful,” Blume gasps, re-entering Earth’s orbit after the noisy, G-rated Muppets from Space. With a disbelieving smile and a shake of her head, she adds, “There’s a lot to be offended by in that movie.”

Bummer.

This longtime Muppet enthusiast–I, not she–is forced to agree that the film, while showing plenty of loopy wit and patches of sweetness and charm, is a veritable parade of gender stereotypes and demeaning portrayals of women–when women are present at all. Here’s the story: Gonzo, the weird critter with the beaklike nose and a fondness for chickens, comes to believe he’s a space alien, long ago orphaned on Earth; when he is abducted by a crazed government operative, Kermit the frog and friends set out to save their friend.

Aside from the token female, Miss Piggy–who’s less interested in helping Gonzo than in using him to get a reporter’s job at a UFO-oriented news show–the few non-males that do show up spend their brief time either in engaging in petty one-upmanship and catfights (that’s Andie MacDowell trying to tear Piggy’s eyes out) or in serving as attractive diversions. Piggy does beat the stuffing out of one cocky FBI goon–“And what kind of message is that?” Blume wonders–but her main response to trouble is to dress up in slinky, cleavage-revealing outfits and seduce people. When Kermit and the boys are given cool crime-fighting gadgets like invisibility juice (sprayed from a rubber ducky) and something called Door-in-a-Jar, it’s the magic mind-control perfume–it overpowers all who whiff it–that is issued to Piggy.

Most jarring of all is the sight of Sam the American Eagle shamelessly ogling the bared midriff and bouncing bosom of a buoyant bikinied teenybopper.

“I’m not sure that kind of thing belongs in a Muppet movie,” I confess.

“Well,” shrugs Blume, “it doesn’t belong anywhere. Does it?”

“I remember when Miss Piggy was a big deal,” Blume says over lunch, “but I can’t say I ever understood it. She certainly wasn’t much of a role model in this movie. The Columbia logo, that really pissed me off, too,” she adds. “They recently redesigned her. She used to be more ‘Rubinesque.’ Now she’s skinnier, shapelier. I’m really mad about that.”

Randy Blume, clearly, cares deeply about these issues.

As the daughter of famed children’s author Judy Blume, she was raised with powerful examples of what women could accomplish. When she was hired as a Continental Airlines pilot 10 years ago, she was among the meager 1 percent of airline pilots that were female. That number has grown to 5 percent, in part owing to legal action against airlines, including the successful class-action suit that Blume help fight against United Airlines. She’s since retired from flying to write full-time and raise her son.

“I once wrote a research paper on ‘tokenism,’ ” she muses. “I interviewed women airline pilots and air traffic controllers, and they talked about why there aren’t more women in non-traditional roles and why they don’t make it above the glass ceiling. One of those reasons was that mentoring, among women, doesn’t really exist. Since there are so few women in those non-traditional roles, there are almost no role models for the women that do come along,” she says.

“On the other hand, at least in America there are female pilots around. There aren’t any female pilots on commercial airlines from Japan. When I was flying back and forth from Japan to Guam, all the passengers would come into the cockpit with their cameras, wanting a picture of the woman pilot.

“I was a novelty,” she laughs.

And who knows?

“Maybe,” I suggest, “unknowingly, you were a role model for some young passenger on one of those planes. Spying you at the controls of the plane, some Japanese girl might have taken inspiration. Even now, she could be gearing up to become her country’s first commercial airline pilot.”

“I really hope so,’ Blume replies, brightly. “I hope I’ve been a role model to the women I’ve trained, when I was working as a flight instructor. I hope they see that I did what I wanted to do, without playing games that were beneath me.”

Hmmmm. Maybe Miss Piggy should take a few lessons from Randy Blume.

From the date-date, 1999 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Cinema Interruptus

Critic David Thomson is kept waiting for ‘Eyes Wide Shut’

By David Templeton

Writer David Templeton takes interesting people to interesting films in his ongoing quest for the ultimate post-film conversation. This column is not a review; rather, it’s a freewheeling, tangential discussion of life, alternative ideas, and popular culture.

“HMMM,” I am thinking as I stand on the corner of Mission and Sixth in downtown San Francisco, surrounded by 275 anxious people clutching press kits and backpacks. “If a large airplane fell from the sky right now, and crashed right here, it could eliminate every Bay Area movie critic in one incredible instant.”

Such an event would be worse than it sounds.

Partly, that’s because one of those critics is David Thomson (author of A Biographical Dictionary of Film and Beneath Mulholland: Thoughts on Hollywood and Its Ghosts)– whom theIndependent of London has named “the best film critic in the world”–and mainly, because we’ve only seen the first half of Eyes Wide Shut .

“And we were just getting to the ‘orgy’ scene,'” Thomson points out.

True. Talk about coitus interruptus.

It’s been half an hour since our jarring evacuation (something about “fire alarms”) from the new, state-of-the-art Sony Metreon entertainment complex. That was an hour and 15 minutes into a secret press screening of Eyes, the much anticipated last film to be directed by the late, great Stanley Kubrick. Apparently the alarm was a false one–yet here we stand, wearily watching two actors, dressed as funny monsters, attempting to cheer us up.

“So far,” Thomson remarks, “the film’s been dreadfully slow, don’t you think?” Frankly, I’ve been enjoying it–if only for the peculiar Kubrickness of the thing, and for the performance of Nicole Kidman (yes, she gets naked, but she acts too) and the inexplicable, Jerry Maguire-on-downers performance of Tom Cruise, playing a well-to-do, married New York doctor struggling with unexpected sexual conflicts regarding the fidelity of his wife (Kidman).

At last we are let back in, only to be told that we’ve missed several minutes of the orgy (the Metreon folks left the film running awhile after we were chased outside), and that the aforementioned “state-of-the-art” projection equipment is incapable of rewinding to the place we left off. We either watch the film without the missing minutes, we are told, or we start over from the beginning.

No one is eager to do that.

“This never would have happened if Kubrick were still alive,” murmurs Thomson, smiling. “The poor guy dies and efficiency goes right out the window.”

One of the movie’s put-upon publicists appears to crack under the pressure. “Mr. Kubrick, Mr. Kubrick!” he wails. “We’re so sorry!”

“It’s all right,” one woman says, attempting to soothe him. “Kubrick had a sense of humor. Wherever he is, I’m sure he’s loving this.”

She’s probably right. Kubrick never thought much of critics.

“I THINK that lots of people, critics and the general public, will make fun of this film,” predicts Thomson 90 minutes later as we sit down to a late lunch. “For all its packaging as a serious exploration of sexual obsession, Eyes Wide Shut has got a kind of built-in foolishness to it.

“That orgy scene,” he laughs, “was, I think, the orgy of a man who’s never been to an orgy.”

“What? You mean orgies aren’t like that?”

I’m crushed. The erotic gathering in question–a bizarre pageant of masked, nude women being solemnly boffed by masked men in robes and capes (while the disguised and uninvited Dr. Cruise stands around gawking)–is the favorite function of a secret New York “club,” to which only the wealthiest and most powerful men are invited. It’s exactly what we like to think goes on at Bohemian Grove.

“There’s a whole lot of fascinating sex going on in the world,” Thomson says, “sex that Stanley Kubrick, I suspect, did not know a great deal about. This orgy, at best, is wildly implausible, and at worst, is just rather silly.”

“Is it even possible to do all those things without your mask falling off all the time?” I wonder.

“Probably not,” he laughs. “And those ‘sacrificial virgins,’ dropping their clothes on demand before this roomful of mysterious men–there was a bit of old-fashioned candy porn about that.”

“Why is it,” I ask, “that filmmakers–even great ones like Kubrick–can never create on screen sexual encounters that aren’t either silly or tasteless?”

“Well, I think, in real life, sex is what’s going on inside the head,” he replies, considering the question. “For most people, the visual aspects of sex–call it foreplay, and isn’t that mainly what cinematic sex is?–is very different from the actual experience of having sex.

“If you show two people at an orgy,” he continues, “a very cold-blooded orgy scene where they don’t know each other and it’s just raw, heartless sex, and then you show a lovemaking scene between Cruise and Kidman–a married couple who know each other and love each other–those two scenes are going to look very much alike. The camera can’t get at that difference, because the camera can’t get inside the heads of the couples–which is where the true difference lies.

“Kubrick, I think, was a devout ‘watcher.’ Not a ‘doer’ so much as a committed voyeur. And it shows in the way he portrays sexual behavior.” Not that Thomson doesn’t think the film has its merits. “Kidman’s performance was very intriguing,” he agrees, “and the cinematography was quite beautifully done.” He even thinks it could find an audience. But not the audience Kubrick was aiming for.

“I think this would make an excellent midnight movie,” he suggests, laughing.

Like The Rocky Horror Picture Show?

“Yes indeed. I can see scenes where the awful dialogue would be shouted back at the screen. Entire audiences would show up dressed as the people at the orgy. I can see, in years to come, an entire midnight movie audience waiting for the last final line of the movie”–it’s a doozy, by the way, a piece of advice that is filthy and funny at the same–“so they can shout, ‘Yes!’ at the top of their voices.

“Who knows,” Thomson grins, “Kubrick may have made his most popular film ever.”

A web extra to the July 22-28, 1999 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.