It took me a long time before I was able to love Grease. It’s so confusingly gay — even for a musical — that it was difficult for me to understand as a child why it was supposed to be a good thing that Danny and Sandy eventually started touching one another. It took reaching adulthood before I was finally able to appreciate it on its own merits.
Grease is the movie you would get if you had three hours to explain the concept of camp and 30 seconds to explain the concept of heterosexuality to a race of aliens that can only reproduce homosexually. So there’s some mixed messages in it. The women are all roughed-up looking toughs in their 40s, all eyeliner and cigarettes and sun-damaged and wobbling in their wedges, ready to punch a guy in the face if he looks at them cock-eyed; the men are all greased-up dandies who don’t know what sex is. You could very easily recast Grease with drag queens as the Pink Ladies and drag kings as the T-birds (I’m thinking Ivan and the butch mechanics from season 1 of The L Word) without sacrificing anything. Gender Studies majors could keep the academy going for another twenty years on the strength of the Greased Lightning scene alone, which makes the “Playing With The Boys” volleyball sequence from Top Gun look like heterosexual pornography.
But it’s Frenchy and Rizzo that make up Grease‘s true, gay heart that lies beating somewhere under a few inches of pomade and leather. It doesn’t hurt that the design for Rizzo’s character was apparently “Remember the Beebo Brinker Chronicles? That.”
Rizzo is the platonic ideal of the 1950s butch — she’s mouthy and she’s a rebel but somewhere underneath it she’s all marshmallow. Give her the chance to be a gentleman, and she’ll take it. Her big number is basically The Ballad of The Stone Butch:
I don’t steal and I don’t lie / But I can feel and I can cry / A fact I bet you never knew / But to cry in front of you / That’s the worst thing I could do.
I mean, sure, she’s singing the song because she thinks she’s pregnant from a big old dollop of male sperm, but *waves hands about vaguely* it’s still stone cold stone butch. This is not a woman who sits around mooning over some wet-haired idiot who looks like Bobby from The Brady Bunch a few years out of puberty. Rizzo is a dyke, and I mean that in the absolutely most complimentary sense imaginable. The other girls carry purses. Rizzo tucks a pocketbook under her arm. The other girls ride on the side. Rizzo drives her own car. She doesn’t walk, she struts. She doesn’t chew gum, she pops it. She doesn’t sit down, she sprawls along the bench. She takes up space and she doesn’t apologize for it. You tell me it’s an accident her character has the same name as Dustin Hoffman’s male hustler in Midnight Cowboy. Go ahead. Tell me it’s a coincidence. I’ll wait.
While everyone else is in tweed and and cardigans and pink jackets, Rizzo’s the only girl who wears all black. She’s Pink Lady on the outside, T-bird on the inside. She’s at least 47 years old and I love her.
You look at this mise-en-scene and tell me I’m supposed to buy Rizzo and Kiniecke together.
Kiniecke’s leather jacket is off. Rizzo’s leather jacket is on. The two of them practically have the same haircut. Frenchy sits patiently in the corner, a pop of color waiting to come out from hiding under that scarf. That is not a picture of a girl with her boyfriend and a good pal sitting around at the end of dinner. That is the picture of a butch waiting for her beard to get the hint and scram so the real date can get underway.
May I take a moment to write a brief aside to studs and butches everywhere? Butches, I love you. Studs, never change. Your forearms are perfect and I love watching you walk. End aside.
And Frenchy! Loveable, dim, loyal Frenchy. She’s everything that is lovely about the femme, who on first blush looks cousin to the straight girl but is in fact her own coy, wonderful species. (“Femme is perpetually misunderstood and remains cloaked in silence and invisibility. Femme is a glitter-filled explosion of the gender binary.”) Lest we forget one of her first lines to Sandy:
Men are rats, listen to me, they’re fleas on rats, worse than that, they’re amoebas on fleas on rats. I mean, they’re too low for even the dogs to bite. The only man a girl can depend on is her daddy.
I MEAN. Oh, and the fights simmering just below the surface between the two of them — is there a more classic setup than the baby butch who feels initially confused and resentful by her femme’s relationship to straight girls? Frenchy takes a shine to Sandy right away and Rizzo can’t stand it. She even experiments with femme drag at the emotionally-fraught slumber party during “Look At Me”, as if to ask Frenchy You really like this? You really like girls like this? Fine. I can do it too.
It’s both a clumsy attempt to connect and a bit of a warning: Don’t go looking for someone else too far afield. I’ll follow you.
Also, Principal McGee and her assistant Blanche are totally doing it. This isn’t really related to the Rizzo-Frenchy relationship, but it’s important for me to point out that they are totally doing it. Principal McGee went to Smith, and they share an apartment together, and they are totally doing it.
Once Rizzo realizes that Frenchy’s not looking for a femme-on-femme escapade, she relaxes around Sandy considerably, content to mostly shake her head at her weird Australian antics. And her scenes with Frenchy are the most vibrant, touching, sweet, realistically sexually charged scenes in the entire movie, everyone else’s leather-clad hip-flinging notwithstanding. Riz is tender with Frenchy, even though she’s a little slow. She’s considerate, she’s relaxed, she laughs. There’s some hasty, messy making out with Kiniecke at the end of the movie once she reveals she’s not actually pregnant, but we all saw who she got on the Ferris wheel with, and it wasn’t a boy. She took the ride with Frenchy.
Tags: beebo brinker, butches, femslash fridays, grease, lesbians everywhere, lgbt, movie musicals
Is Femslash Friday now going to be a regular thing again? If so, yay!
I’ve never actually seen this film but now I have to.
I ONLY EVER MISSED A COUPLE OF WEEKS YOU GUYS
How have you NEVER SEEN GREASE?
Grease virgin! It’s a good thing you’ve read this first. My little 8-year-old friends and I saw this movie when it came out in 197- and of course we loved John Travolta and wanted to be ONJ, blah blah blah.
Then I saw it again a few months ago with my family and couldn’t believe what a crap message the “main” love story conveyed – girls, you totally have to change who you are to get your man, even if he’s a dickbag.
So now, armed with Mallory’s brilliant insights, I can see the movie as ahead of its time, and enjoy the Rizzo-Frenchie relationship. (They’re the best characters anyway.)
While it could def be taken that way, coming from a very repressive religious upbringing, my take was more that it’s okay to be sexual. The world will not end, and you might even get a flying car! (I did not get a flying car.)
Rizzo MADE me a lesbian (I think I was 7 when I first saw grease?). THANK YOU FOR THIS, MALLORY.
Femslash Friday is like looking at a picture of a bookcase only to realize that you’re looking at an actual bookcase. This is too good for Twitter, it must be Facebooked. Thanks ME.
*whispers* actually, it’s a ferris wheel
Also I need to rewatch this movie because Rizzo made me really confused as a young girl, and I was also not buying the pregnancy subplot because it just didn’t make any sense.
New canon accepted.
Rizzo is the best character in Grease. Hands down…
(can we talk about how Fannie Flagg is in Grease for ~30 seconds?)
Thank you for this information. Oh my god.
it just queers it up even more, ya know?
I WAS JUST ABOUT TO MENTION THIS.
So important, never forget.
“You could very easily recast Grease with drag queens as the Pink Ladies and drag kings as the T-birds (I’m thinking Ivan and the butch mechanics from season 1 of The L Word) without sacrificing anything.”
Someone needs to get on this, stat.
would watch (repeatedly). Moar Ivan pls
She’s at least 47 years old and I love her.
Accurate.
We watched this in 5th grade at my Catholic school. To this day, I have no idea why or how.
Oh my god. It was the Road Trip Standard at my girl’s school. It made me SO CONFUSED, because … SO CONFUSED.
Then later really confident, to the administration’s lasting dismay. 😀
There is this pervasive belief that Grease is family entertainment, and I have no idea why. When I was in 9th grade a Grease tour came to the theater in my hometown, and our theater teacher whipped us in a frenzy to get ready for it. We watched the movie, we learned the songs, we learned who Sally Struthers is so we could be impressed by her playing Miss Lynch. (We tried to get her autograph after, but she closed her door in our hopeful little faces.)
But when you come down to it, most of Grease is about dumbass, disrespectful teenagers who bully each other and their supposed authority figures–as I’m sure our teacher became painfully aware in the first scene. The actors came on stage holding boards to look like a schoolbus that said RYDELL HIGH on the sides; then they flipped their boards so that the bus had been graffiti’d with GO TO HELL LICK MY THIGHS. (My prim 14yo self was aghast and deeply embarrassed to be sitting next to an adult at that moment!)
The play version of Grease is much grittier than the movie…and it makes a lot more sense, too, because play-Sandy transfers from Immaculata, not Sydney.
I was so fixated on Rizzo that I never gave a second thought to any canon or implied relationships in the movie. Rizzo was enough because Rizzo was everything, but this makes perfect, intuitive sense in retrospect. I’m too milquetoast bisexual to pull off either end of the butch/femme spectrum (too femme for my ex-girlfriends’ friends to take me seriously, too big and butch for my also-queer husband’s people to not assume we’re mutual beards), but Rizzo’s eyeliner and fuck-you guidance has served me very well in the past. With, you know. Ladies. And exactly one dude, but there are always outliers.
Ooo, “milquetoast bisexual” hit me right in the bi-invisibility-guilt place. I feel ya.
yep. yep. sigh.
sigh +
Mallory, as far as I’m concerned, this is your magnum opus. Rizzo was my style icon from 8th grade on. I only wish I’d heard this phrase before college: “Femme is perpetually misunderstood and remains cloaked in silence and invisibility. Femme is a glitter-filled explosion of the gender binary.” I’d have had that printed on business cards to give out to guys in bars and every mom of all my guy friends who looked at me and went, “Wait, what?”
I was obsessed with Rizzo as a kid. And the Pink Ladies were ALL so much cooler than the dudes that I never bought any of them together.
Yes! I always just assumed they were never serious about the boys, the Pink Ladies just went with the guys because they were there and why not?
went with the guys out of pity
“Grease” the movie came out as I was entering eighth grade and I was the perfect setup for a huge crush on Travolta. So, naturally I saw it a few times, but there was something frustrating about the movie itself that my 13-year-old self – hell, my college-age self years later – couldn’t put a finger on.
I did notice years later that the only time the movie bore ANY resemblance to reality, and was at all satisfying, was when Rizzo was on-screen. Channing had/has that old-time movie star presence, very much like Barbara Stanwyck or Joan Blondell (who has a minor part in “Grease, I think her last role). Her presence makes everyone acting opposite her straighten up and fly a little righter. I still think Travolta is a good actor, and he’s funny as hell in that movie, but he’s never better than when he’s opposite Channing. Even my mom had kind words for Channing’s performance and she pretty much hated the movie and almost everyone in it.
I am queuing up this flick tonight for a queered rewatch. Can’t wait. Thanks Mallory. 🙂
YES! All yes. This femme dyke needed to read this today. So much of what I read and hear gets femme gender and sexuality SO WRONG. And it hurts my feelings. But not this. <3 you.
Femmeslash Friday: Rizzo/The Toast Commentariat
She also had the best voice
I’m pretty sure Rizzo is wearing Kiniecke’s jacket in that one scene, which makes it even better in this context, I think.
Hm, now I have to figure out how this fits in with my personal head canon of To Everyone’s Surprise Including Her Own, Rizzo Makes It Through High School and Community College, Gets Into Med School and Ends Up Married To President Bartlett. Though if it’s an open marriage and she’s off having lots of lovely affairs with girls that would explain why she’s only in one episode in five.
I think Dr Bartlett would be the Eleanor to POTUS’s FDR. That just makes good sense.
It has been awhile since I’ve seen this movie. I really want to got to the Sing-A-Long “Grease” event they do at the Castro Theater in SF (or is it Dolores Park during the summertime?) because I’ve heard that is a spectacular fun time.
Yep, even as a kid I remember thinking that Rizzo having a boyfriend was confusing and annoying. Yeah right.
I will never look at this movie the same way again, I loved loved loved this. Amazing Mallory!
It’s the imagined pairing of Rizzo and Frenchy, it’s the only slash worth reading, it’s brilliant, it makes so much sense.
In high school, I petitioned hard for Grease as our musical because I knew knew knew I’d be cast as Rizzo, which would have been the absolutely peak of my high-school drama career or, y’know, entire life. (See also: Audrey in Little Shop of Horrors, though that was less of a lock: I’d have been a possible choice for Audrey, but I was the only choice for Rizzo.) Sadly, the director nixed it. (See also: Little Shop of Horrors.)
And I never really thought about how deeply I identified with Rizzo from childhood, or why, or what it said about me. Rizzo may well have been the first character that brought up in me the confusing question “Do I want to be that person or kiss that person?”
And the confusing answer “YES.”
Ha, I once referred to that on my blog as “the be/fuck dilemma”, just being silly, and immediately about about 30 queer women going, omg YES. I wasn’t expecting it to strike such a chord!
I don’t even get to ID as queer; I’m a woman who married a man, promised a lifetime of monogamy, and then figured out that my desire to date women was not just a whim or a passing curiosity. (We are blissfully happy; it’s just a thing, not A THING.)
But the be them/fuck them tension is a big one for everyone, I think.
I’m in a similar boat. *fistbump of solidarity* (And how do you tell whether you want to be someone or kiss them? It’s confusing!)
i saw this referred to on tumblr as “life her or wife her.”
p.s., Stockard Channing forevah <3 <3 <3 Can you do Abbey Bartlett/Amy Gardner next?
UM CJ/ABBEY (cj/abbey/amy?)
I just love the frisson between Abbey and Amy in the second half of this scene and, y’know, every scene ever. (Excluding Sorkin et al.’s misjudged “skanky ex-girlfriends” crack.) But that’s no excuse; I love the frisson between Stockard Channing and everyone.
Also, I may have been unconsciously saving C.J. for… um… me.
I do not want Amy with anyone. I just did not like or enjoy her character much. However, CJ is another story altogether!
Although, I think I want to BE CJ Cregg more than I want to be WITH CJ Cregg.
I cannot find the clip of Abbey, Amy, C.J., and Donna all in evening gowns grabbing a coupla bottles of wine and taking off from the inauguration to go lounge around and get sloshed, and that means my life is woefully incomplete.
“I don’t even like cats… I guess I could learn to like them.” (as an official member of the Church of Allison Janney, I understand reserving Claudia Jean for yourself. Although a friend and i have a standing date to get drunk and write CJ/Ainsley fanfiction… I just have a LOT of West Wing feelings.)
I just thought about C.J. being even taller than I am, and the whole back of my neck went hot and cold.
It’s in Dead Irish Writers, if that helps (which is a largely excellent episode).
YESSS THIS. Also, I was sorting West Wing characters into Hogwarts houses the other day and housed both Abbey and Amy with me in Slytherin.
DON’T HOLD BACK ON THE REST, let’s discuss this.
Fun trivia about SC: She did the voice narration for the Pearl Harbor USS Arizona tour. It took me the whole tour to place the voice, then I was so excited. Less so, my fellow tourists.
I AM SO FULL OF JOY IN THIS MOMENT
Really want to re-watch Grease with new eyes…brilliant as usual Mallory!
One time this woman I was dating asked, when we were first getting to know each other, “Are you Good Sandy or Bad Sandy?” and I said “I’m Rizzo.” in, like, .02 seconds. Instinct!
If you can’t be an athlete, be an athletic supporter.
I AM SO HAPPY, THANK YOU
GLITTERY TEARS OF JOY
“Butches, I love you. Studs, never change. Your forearms are perfect and I love watching you walk.”
Can’t decide if I should tattoo this on my tit or embroider it on a pillow.
Embrace the “and”…
I’ve never seen Grease (I know, I know!), but thanks to this post and all of you in this comment thread it’s now in my Netflix queue.
If we’re talking about midcentury butches, can we also talk about Annie Hayworth in The Birds? Oh, Suzanne Pleshette. With her pants and her deep voice and her lighting of Tippi Hedren’s cigarettes — and almost the same hair, too.
YES. And the way she says “Pretty” at Tippi’s nightgown. Clearly “pretty” = “let me rip that off you”.
Oh! And I vote Romy/Michele (from Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion) for a future Femslash Friday, should you happen to be taking suggestions, Mallory…
This almost makes me want to watch Grease again. Almost.
accurate, amazing, explains everything. *swoon*
Can we hear more about this glittery gender-binary smashing femmeness? I am confused, and curious, and want to learn more.
There is this pervasive belief that Grease is family entertainment, and I have no idea why. When I was in 9th grade a Grease tour came to the theater in my hometown, and our theater teacher whipped us in a frenzy to get ready for it. We watched the movie, we learned the songs, we learned who Sally Struthers is so we could be impressed by her playing Miss Lynch. (We tried to get her autograph after, but she closed her door in our hopeful little faces.)
But when you come down to it, most of Grease is about dumbass, disrespectful teenagers who bully each other and their supposed authority figures–as I'm sure our teacher became painfully aware in the first scene. The actors came on stage holding boards to look like a schoolbus that said RYDELL HIGH on the sides; then they flipped their boards so that the bus had been graffiti'd with GO TO HELL LICK MY THIGHS. (My prim 14yo self was aghast and deeply embarrassed to be sitting next to an adult at that moment!)
The play version of Grease is much grittier than the movie…and it makes a lot more sense, too, because play-Sandy transfers from Immaculata, not Sydney.
OMG MALLORY. I haven’t seen a production of Grease since I was involved in one as a 17 year old, but you know how they have Rizzo singing that song to the unnamed biker dude in the movie? SHE SINGS IT TO SANDY IN THE SHOW.
Okay, so it’s allegedly about Sandy judging her for allegedly being pregnant. ALLEGEDLY. *flails with excitement*
Is it just me or does Frenchy also look like a 1950s Willow Rosenberg? DON’T TELL ME YOU DON’T SEE IT?
Is it just me or does Frenchy also look like a 1950s Willow Rosenberg? DON'T TELL ME YOU DON'T SEE IT?
But have you guys seen this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ijy95-k97I <iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”//www.youtube.com/embed/9Ijy95-k97I” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe> This is exactly what this article reminded me of and I’m glad more people see this movie for how gay it actually is
Bless you for these posts, truly. I always get this swell of emotion (pride maybe?) from reading them. Fuck yes, femslash!
To top off the queer extravaganza that Grease is, Fannie Flagg (author of tragically ungayed-in-film-adaptation novel Fried Green Tomatoes) has a cameo as the school nurse.
But yeah, Rizzo. Ouch.
My qualms: a) McGee & Blanche clearly aren’t doing it lately – the tension seems like they’re going through a rough season; b) you used the words “Rizzo” & “platonic” in the same sentence.
I kid. This is a lovely thing.
THIS IS BRILLIANT. Thank you, Mallory!!
this should be reposted for the morning crowd because it’s even more appropriate, except maybe ship every single pink lady with frenchy because it would undoubtedly work! and omg, BLANCHE!
I literally came down to the comments to say how much that photo makes her look like Alyson Hannigan. Who could play the crap out of that character, actually (even today; she's more the age those original actors all looked).