Post on 15-Jan-2023
Reclaiming Feminism in Popular Culture:
Subversive Humor and Satirical Reappropriation of Female Stereotypes in the
Film Comedies Pitch Perfect and Pitch Perfect 2
by
Archontia Leivada
A dissertation submitted to the Department of American Literature and Culture,
School of English, Faculty of Philosophy of the Aristotle University of
Thessaloniki as partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master
of Arts.
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
November 2016
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements .……………………………………………………………….... ii
Abstract ...…………………………………………………………………………… iii
Introduction …………………………………………………………………………..1
CHAPTER ONE:
Deconstructing Film Comedy and its Sexist Stereotypes: Satire, Mockery, and
Feminist Subtext in Pitch Perfect ...………………………………………………….16
CHAPTER TWO:
Reclaiming the F-word: Elizabeth Banks’ Pitch Perfect 2 ...………………………..49
Conclusion ...…………………………………………………………………………77
Work Cited ...………………………………………………………………………...83
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
First, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor Dr. Domna
Pastourmatzi for her continuous support and guidance throughout the course of this project as
well as for her mentorship throughout my studies at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.
I would also like to thank the professors that I have had the luck to work with during the
course of this truly inspiring for me graduate programme. Despite the practical difficulties of
the recent years, they have managed to make the four semesters of my studies a genuinely
creative and exhilarating experience that has enhanced my understanding of literature and
culture, among other things, and has shaped my professional aspirations and ethics for the
times to come.
Moreover, I would like to thank my MA family, my classmates and companions in the
journey of this constructive experience, who have- free of charge- provided me with their
always welcome and life-saving psychotherapy. I would like to thank my closest friends for
their ongoing support the last 15 years of my life, and during the writing of the MA thesis
when I was utterly insupportable. Thank you guys and gals.
I would particularly like to thank my family and acknowledge the support of my
grandparents. Thanks to them I have managed to complete my MA studies as well as fulfill
many more dreams of mine that would have remained dreams without their help and support.
Last but not least, I would like to express my gratitude to my parents who have faith in me
even when I do not understand why, who support, encourage, and help me rediscover the
strength they have instilled in me, even when I think I have lost it. Thank you for everything.
This thesis is dedicated to all the empowering women who have influenced me, my
female role models whose strength has provided me with the inspiration for this project and
who I hope will continue to inspire me for the projects to come.
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ABSTRACT
In my MA thesis I examine the recycling of Hollywood female stereotypes in the popular
American film comedies Pitch Perfect (2012) and Pitch Perfect 2 (2015). I investigate the
cinematic narrative as well as the style of the directors, who appropriate these stereotypes and
turn them into a form of satire which aims at their deconstruction and at the subversion of
patriarchal assumptions of femininity. Employing feminist, cultural, and film theories, I argue
that the female director, producer, screenwriter and the all-female cast of these two movies
collaborate to provide a feminist statement. Together they subvert the conventions of the
comedic genre and at the same time they construct positive messages about female
independence, women’s empowerment, and social equality. In this way they resist against the
established Hollywood sexism that traditionally excludes female voices and experiences both
in front and behind the camera. I also comment on the fact that because of their success these
two movies have initiated and contributed in opening a public dialogue about feminism in
Hollywood and popular culture; a dialogue about the rare existence of female filmmakers that
has been recently exposed as a real problem that underlines an entrenched sexism in the
reigning Hollywood studios that form and shape the biggest part of the film industry and
influence audiences worldwide. Lastly, I argue that these two film comedies have opened up
a cinematic space in the genre of popular comedy, a space for the promotion of a female
and/or feminist comedic tradition. In other words, women’s comedic art can be the source of
a cultural revolution.
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INTRODUCTION
Popular comedies with an all-female cast, written, directed and produced by women
are a rare phenomenon in Hollywood. However, in recent years Elizabeth Banks (a director)
had the courage to produce two female-driven comedies that had great success in American
society. Pitch Perfect (2012) and Pitch Perfect 2 (2015) proved to be highly successful at the
box office and very popular in the United States. The original movie was written and
produced by women but had a male director. The sequel was written, directed, and produced
mainly by women. The popularity and impact of these two movies can be seen in the fact that
they have inspired an active fan base comprised of American young girls who call themselves
“Pitches”; these fans communicate with each other on numerous occasions, mainly on social
media but also during the fan conventions they organize themselves, to discuss how these two
movies have helped them feel empowered and accepted. The unexpected but overwhelming
success of these two movies, as well as the rare, almost exclusive, participation of women in
front and behind the camera have inspired me to investigate the reasons why they have had
such an appeal to female audiences and to discover the political message underlying the
representation of the female characters in each film.
It is well-known to filmmakers that popular Hollywood comedies depend heavily on
female stereotypes. These stereotypes are most of the times outrageously sexist and racist
because they try to satisfy patriarchal assumptions about gender and cater to the male gaze
that they usually address. The Pitch Perfect movies appropriate the recycled female
stereotypes of Hollywood in order to foreground their sexist implications and to gradually
deconstruct them through a subtle yet potent satire. Besides criticizing the persistence of
sexism in popular cinematic culture, these films recognize the need for positive
representations of diverse femininities, for the inclusion of a variety of female voices, and for
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the empowerment of the female audiences they address. They use satire to challenge sexist
cultural assumptions about femininity. Through the emphatic and hyperbolic performances of
the actresses, these films subvert the Hollywood stereotypes and provide a space for the
construction of alternative models of femininity, usually absent from popular cinema, which
very often conforms to the patriarchal expectations of gender roles.
Lois Weber, the first female director of a feature film and a woman who is still
considered one of the most important directors in the American film industry, firmly believed
that “film could change culture” (qtd. in Dowd). This is why she has directed movies about
female issues (such as contraception in the early 20th century), although addressing such
topics could easily have her burned at the stake. The main reason why I chose the Pitch
Perfect movies as the subject of my thesis is because I share Weber’s conviction about
popular movies and their powerful impact on contemporary American culture. As Rob
Schaap asserts, “for the cultural theorist Hollywood is a producer of culture” (152).
Considering this, I strongly believe that the Pitch Perfect films constitute a significant chapter
in recent Hollywood history. They are movies created by women who consciously choose to
multiply the number of women not only of those appearing on the screen as characters but
also of those working behind the camera. They address a female audience and deal with
issues affecting women’s lives, undermining at the same time the ridiculous Hollywood myth
that women filmmakers do not earn money for the film industry. With their films, the creative
minds behind the Pitch Perfect movies—Elizabeth Banks (the director) and Kay Cannon (the
scriptwriter)—have contributed to the recent phenomenon in the film industry to talk about
female issues and raise awareness about the importance of feminism. Partly why I find it of
great importance to critically analyze the two movies from a feminist perspective is the fact
that they belong to a period in Hollywood when highly successful actresses (like Patricia
Arquette, Meryl Streep, Viola Davis, and Jennifer Lawrence) began to address feminist
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issues; for instance, job opportunities and wage equality in Hollywood. These women actors
connect the importance of wage equality in the film industry with women’s wages in other
businesses. They share the belief Madeline Berg expressed in Forbes magazine that “with
powerful visibility and an ability to spark public debate, Hollywood has an opportunity to set
an example for every industry.” This is the Hollywood era of Lena Dunham, an actress,
writer, and director, who struggles to make feminism both popular and accessible through her
Lenny newsletter which focuses on women’s issues and which has a huge following by an
online community of women from all over the world. This is the era of the world-renown
actress Emma Watson, who is the key person of HeForShe—a solidarity movement for
gender equality initiated by UN women. This is the era when Gloria Steinem’s documentary
(titled “Woman” and exploring how violence against women around the world drives global
instability) airs on popular television and earns an Emmy nomination. Such events have
produced a newly carved, friendlier environment for female filmmakers who create female-
driven movies to empower their audiences. These women filmmakers reclaim feminism as an
urgently needed and positive political movement to fight gender inequalities and deconstruct
the popular culture backlash of the early 2000s in the United States, a backlash that perceived
the women’s movement for equal rights and equal pay as socially aggressive and dangerous.
Considering that meaning production takes place in the interaction between “viewer or reader
and social context,” as Janet Lee comments (88), I argue that the Pitch Perfect movies are an
important social phenomenon and cinematic products with meaning-making strategies that
are essential in the newly feminist phase in Hollywood. Whether this feminist phase will last
for years to come or be short-lived, whether it will bring change in Hollywood practices or
not, at the present moment it is helping create a popular female tradition in the movie
industry that may serve as a source of feminist resistance and positively affect and empower
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the women who go to the movies. In the last four years a considerable number of female-
driven film comedies have had unexpected box office success.
The reason why I want to focus on the cinematic genre of comedy is because it has
largely ignored or systematically objectified women for many years. As Janet Lee notes, in
Hollywood comedies women are frequently the butt of jokes; besides being objectified, they
are “considered to be humorless”; they learn that “they are not supposed to be funny” (90). In
contrast, the Pitch Perfect movies belong to a small but significant group of recent
Hollywood films which disrupt such obsolete and sexist convictions. This is precisely the
reason why they deserve to be critically analyzed. Although these two movies have greatly
affected American contemporary culture, film theorists and critics regularly dismiss them as
“inappropriate scholarship” because they belong to “mass culture” (Lee 88). However, such
statements have “purist ideological leanings that smack of elitism” (Lee 88). Popular cinema
is drenched with misogyny; it should not be theoretically dismissed precisely because of its
popularity and impact on a large number of people who massively consume the negative
representations of women. Traditionally, popular comedies associate feminism “with sexually
aggressive behavior, glamorous styling, and provocative posturing” (Genz and Brandon 98).
In contrast, the Pitch Perfect movies subvert such representation and offer positive images of
both women and feminism. It is my contention that Elizabeth Banks’ comedies deserve to be
approached seriously because they are rare examples of popular comedies with a feminist
message, because they subvert Hollywood conventions and because they foreground the
sexism that plagues contemporary American popular culture.
I have said that a serious critical analysis of this type of movies is almost non-existent.
But the recent Hollywood phenomenon of female-driven comedies has not been ignored by
newspapers and online cinema portals, where one can find regular references and articles.
The financial success and wide popularity of comedies like Pitch Perfect and their
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transformation into brand names give people the opportunity to talk about feminist issues in
the film industry, issues that have been ignored for too long. Berg, for instance, wrote in
Forbes magazine an article titled, “Everything You Need to Know about the Hollywood Pay
Gap,” in which she points out that although movies featuring female characters are
successful, the money paid to the actresses is comparatively less than the wages of their male
counterparts. Berg includes some statistics which reveal the depressing situation women
filmmakers find themselves in: women make up only 1.9% of the directors, 11.2% of the
writers, and 18.9% of the producers in Hollywood; the scarcity of women in key positions in
the Hollywood film industry seems to be the main reason behind the outrageous pay gap.
Berg also refers to actresses who have recently taken a stand in favor of wage equality and to
the findings of a report with the conclusion that “in productions where women held key
positions off-screen […] the films featured women more often, and in less sexualized roles.”
Similarly, Maureen Dowd underlines the importance of more women behind and in front of
the camera in her New York Times article, “The Women of Hollywood Speak Out.” Dowd
mentions Pitch Perfect 2 as one of the movies that made a difference for Hollywood
executives, since it has proven that a female-driven comedy directed by a woman “can make
a ton of profit.” Other articles include Melena Ryzik’s “Female Cinematographers, not
Content to Hide behind the Camera” in the New York Times and “The Black List and Women
in Film Create TV Lab for Women Writers” in Forbes. The Internet overflows with such
writings which attest to the fact that there is a recent feminist turn in Hollywood and that the
women working in the film industry are trying to fight sexism by producing films with
positive representations of womanhood and by asserting their right for equal pay.
In my thesis I will take into consideration articles in the American press regarding
the two Pitch Perfect movies because they underline the feminist leanings of both the
cinematic artifacts and their creators, and highlight the fact that feminism in contemporary
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popular comedy has become an important issue. It thus requires serious critical analysis and
investigation. I will argue that comedies like Pitch Perfect deconstruct the feminist backlash
that characterized the comedies of the early 2000s. As part of the endeavor of women
filmmakers to combat the sexism in popular cinema, Elizabeth Banks includes a feminist
undercurrent in the narrative of the first Pitch Perfect movie and then offers a more
straightforward feminist message in the sequel. One of her strategies is the employment of
subversive humor which aims to counter the anti-feminist discourse of Hollywood film
comedy. Necessary to my analysis and feminist approach are the theories of feminist humor:
in Unruly Woman, Kathleen Rowe talks about the kind of humor feminists use to undermine
patriarchal norms; Domnica Radulescu expounds a theory of female comedy as social
revolution and refers to cultural theorists who associate popular cinema with the female
spectators and the attempts on behalf of women filmmakers to empower their audiences
through easily accessible feminist discourses. Moreover, I will argue that the Pitch Perfect
movies resist the discourse of the typical Hollywood comedies which treat sexism against
women as harmless humor. While elaborating on this point I will depend on the cultural
theory of Susan J. Douglas in The Rise of Enlightened Sexism in which she pinpoints the
importance of reopening feminism as well as of unmasking harmful stereotypes of women in
popular culture. In short, feminist theory and film theory will help me demonstrate that the
mission behind the Pitch Perfect films is the reinvigoration of a feminist discourse and a
feminist political stance. Because of their wide popular appeal these cinematic narratives
have the potential to change the sexist Hollywood habits, practices, and conventions that have
endured for too long.
The story of Pitch Perfect revolves around an unsuccessful all-female a cappella
group which struggles to survive in the world of collegiate a cappella by following the
tradition of the previous generations of women who sang only conservative, woman-
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appropriate songs that accentuate the feminine and reserved nature of young women
performing in a cappella competitions. Specifically, it focuses on a first-year college student
called Beca, who joins the group, manages to revolutionize its conservative mentality, and
leads it to its long-due triumph against male rivals. In order to succeed, the girls must form a
strong bond and build a powerful sisterhood that is based on and strengthened by their
individuality. This sisterhood is promoted as a support system that is “for life.” Pitch Perfect
2 is set three years after the events of the first movie. It deals with the team’s efforts to
reinstate its lost status and right to perform. For the most part it focuses on the established
sisterhood between the girls and transmits the message that women should support each other
on the road to self-empowerment, a message only subtly implied in the first movie. In this
political satire, Elizabeth Banks plays with the patriarchal assumptions about femininity. Her
different style in directing the second movie is evident. Whereas in the first movie the focus
is mainly on the actions and aspirations of one central female character (Beca), in the sequel,
Banks makes an effort to include as many women as possible in each and every shot, scene,
and sequence.
Having read a non-fiction book on the unknown world of collegiate a cappella, called
Pitch Perfect: The Quest for Collegiate a Cappella Glory (2008) by Mickey Rapkin,
Elizabeth Banks brought the idea for a film to Kay Cannon, the scriptwriter. Cannon wrote
the script for Pitch Perfect that was produced by the independent Gold Circle Films
production company. As the producer, Banks closely participated in the making of the film
but decided to let Jason Moore direct it. Pitch Perfect premiered in September 2012,
distributed by Universal Pictures, and became a sleeper hit, a term used in Hollywood to
describe the kind of movie that becomes a huge success despite its small budget and
inadequate promotion. Very quickly the movie attracted a lot of attention because it is a very
rare occurrence for a comedy with an all-female cast and targeted to a female demographic to
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achieve such numbers in the box office, usually dominated by films featuring male stars. In
many reviews, the first movie was characterized with the ever intimidating for Hollywood F-
word. Many saw it as an example of feminist comedy. Finally, here was a movie with an all-
female cast, with a woman scriptwriter and a woman producer, featuring a plurality of
different female voices, emphasizing the importance of sisterhood and offering an
empowering message to its female audiences and at the same time was successful
financially.
According to Banks and Cannon, however, the two women did not conceive of Pitch
Perfect as a feminist statement resisting the sexist treatment of women found in popular
Hollywood comedies right from the beginning. Banks has stated in an interview by Caitlin
Hobbs, that what they achieved with Pitch Perfect is very rare and as a result “it is perceived
as being this sort of this politically feminist statement.” She said, “we made a movie about a
group of women—and because nobody makes those movies—we are a feminist statement,
just by our existence”. Her reluctance to categorize the first movie as a feminist statement is
undoubtedly connected to the fear and negativity attached to the F-word in Hollywood. The
assumption is that feminism repels the male audiences, traditionally thought of as the
demographic that defines the box office hits or failures. Most men would definitely avoid
watching any movie if it were labeled as a feminist statement, before it became a hit.
However, despite the anxiety that F-word may bring, a close look at the first movie reveals
that there is a feminist subtext of empowerment in the narrative and that both Banks and
Cannon felt the need to resist and subvert the sexist representations of women in cinematic
comedy. The obnoxious stereotypes of women that the movie appropriates (the promiscuous
bimbo, the weird fat girl used just for laughs, the controlling “mean girl”) are subtly
undermined in the last half hour. This is done not with the traditional exterior makeover of
the young protagonist who tries to win her guy, but with a discourse makeover that
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distinguishes the film from its genre. Hollywood popular comedies usually conclude with a
romantic happy ending. In Pitch Perfect the happy ending is achieved when the young girls
embrace their individuality and manage to create a true strong sisterhood, characterized by
mutual support, understanding, and acceptance. Instead of the typical Hollywood scenario
that positions women against each other and treats them as competitive “bitches” always
ready to engage in a “cat fight,” usually in a pool of mud, Cannon and Banks provide a
narrative that solidifies female bonding and empowerment.
Despite Banks and Cannon’s reluctance to openly promote their original film as a
feminist comedy, there are two reasons why it was very easy for critics to classify Pitch
Perfect as feminist: first, it was the feminist background of the women creators and second it
was the independent status of the film. As Radner and Stringer clarify, films independently
produced “offer an alternative discourse” to the type-driven narratives of Hollywood popular
cinema (2). Before collaborating with Banks to write the script for Pitch Perfect, Cannon
worked as a writer and producer for the NBC television series 30 Rock (2006-2013); in this
show, Cannon cooperated with one of the most well-known feminist comedians, Tina Fey,
whose alter ego in the series was the self-reflective, idealistic comedy writer and feminist Liz
Lemon (Mizejewski 26). With Fey as her teacher, it was of great importance for Cannon to
continue in Pitch Perfect what Fey perfected in both 30 Rock (2006-2013) and in her
infamous feminist SNL (1975-) skits. Following in her footsteps, Cannon created a popular
comedy with female characters that attracted people’s attention with the things they said and
not with the way they looked. The Pitch Perfect films had a huge success because Cannon
worked together with the well-known feminist Banks who was involved in their production
and later directed the sequel herself. Being a Hollywood actress, Banks aspired to become a
director in order to help create for women in the business the job opportunities that the
entrenched sexism of the film industry had denied them. She participated in movies (for
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example in The Hunger Games) known for their powerful feminist subtext and has on
numerous occasions talked about the importance of feminism for her:
I just felt like the label [feminism] was being maligned—the way
that the patriarchy still wants to do with the things when it comes to
women. I just want to remind people what it was—this is what
feminism is. It's a belief system that hopefully gets us parity in the
world. (qtd. in Kramer)
More importantly, Banks has been very active and has used her privileged position in the film
industry to offer female comedians opportunities to rise in their profession. She also has
worked hard to demonstrate that there is a need for subversive, feminist humor which
disrupts the patriarchal norms and sexist practices that permeate popular comedy. She has
created a site called “Whohaha” in order to foster the talent of female comedians and has
given it the subtitle, “Spotlight on Funny Women.” As Ann-Christine Diaz has noted in
AdAge magazine, Banks’ platform with its female-driven content made its appearance “as
women issues reach critical point in marketing, advertising, entertainment, and tech.” In this
way, Banks joins the efforts of many other women who work in the genre of comedy to make
gender an irrelevant factor in the human capacity to generate laughter. Like other
contemporary feminist comedians (Amy Schumer and Melissa McCarthy), Banks transmits
empowering feminist messages through her efforts to support funny women in the movie
business and change the game rules for women involved in the production of popular
comedy. As Banks has explained:
I was told growing up, 'The world is your oyster and you can be
whatever you want.' The fact of the matter is, that is empirically
untrue for most women. We need those barriers to be broken down
by young people, as well as us seasoned pros. (qtd. in Diaz)
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Taking into consideration the feminist and activist dimensions of her public persona, it was
hard for film critics to ignore the presence of Banks in the production of the Pitch Perfect
films; her presence was a factor that legitimized the classification of these movies as feminist
narratives. Such empowering feminist discourses, with their “scathing and often exhilarating
humor” have begun to “transform the intractable historical realities of women’s lives” and
indeed affect contemporary American culture and the female spectators; their new, positive
representations of women on the screen are a refreshing moment in Hollywood history
(Modleski, Feminism Without Women 57).
I have mentioned that independent films are taken to be “alternative” discourses to the
conventional Hollywood comedies. Although Banks has managed to have her movie
distributed by Universal Pictures, one of the big six film studios in Hollywood, in order to
achieve a more extended release in cinemas all over the United States, she collaborated with
the independent production company Gold Circle Films to make her first film. Such
independent film companies give the opportunity to filmmakers to “challenge and/or deviate
from classical Hollywood conventions” without assuming that such practices are risky and
may not “attract a broader audience” (Schreiber 179). In contrast to the big film studio system
which relies on mega-blockbusters that are “overwhelmingly male dominated,” independent
production companies give filmmakers the chance to question everything that seems to be
wrong with Hollywood (Lane and Richter 189). According to Ferniss and Young, the annual
film production is always dominated by male-oriented and male-driven films that address the
supposedly “most attractive demographic,” meaning male spectators (119). As a
consequence, the female characters on the screen are confined to stereotypes and supporting
roles. Because independent film companies do not abide by the Hollywood rules, they are
more likely to include women professionals in decision-making positions and to show an
interest in producing female-driven movies with a feminist agenda. In fact, they are
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indifferent towards the obsolete Hollywood marketing practices that give primacy to the male
presence both in front and behind the camera. Furthermore, independent film companies do
not have to obey the white, middle-aged, male executives who rule Hollywood; thus they
allow filmmakers to produce cinematically social realities that do not distort the female
experience and do not aim to satisfy the patriarchal gaze. The Pitch Perfect movies belong to
this category of films. Banks had the opportunity to construct new models of femininity and
to challenge the stereotypical images of women one finds in popular and financially
successful cinema. Moreover, free from the interference of male executives, Banks took
advantage of the independent status of her films to critique the entrenched sexism in
Hollywood, employing a subversive feminist humor which also constitutes an obvious
political stand in her films. Independent or not, popular comedies are still cinematic
commodities for consumption and they need to make a profit in order to be considered
successful and worthy of production. Particularly, female-driven comedies that resist sexism
must prove that they can hold a strong position in the American market. Not to risk the
financial prospects of the first Pitch Perfect film, its makers opted for a feminist subtext in
the narrative but promoted the movie as a common entertaining comedy; they did not want to
repel the spectators with any kind of a feminist threat.
In the first chapter of my thesis I will analyze critically the original Pitch Perfect
movie, directed by Jason Moore. I will argue that its discourse avoids explicit references to
feminism and instead it exaggerates and overemphasizes the female stereotypes so common
in Hollywood comedies with the ulterior motive to undermine them gradually and offer a
very subtle critique against Hollywood sexism. I will also show that by using irony as an
empowering device, the first movie takes a stand in favor of a sisterhood that transcends the
cinematic space. By focusing on the stereotypes of the fatty, the oversexed bimbo, and the
black lesbian, I will illuminate the techniques with which the director visually manipulates
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them and eventually mocks them because they reduce the cinematic female presence to sexist
caricatures and ignore the authentic experiences of such women. In my view, Pitch Perfect is
a political satire which provides the space for the deconstruction of sexist norms as well as
gives visibility to positive representations of femininity which hopefully will empower the
female spectators and encourage the creation of an explicitly feminist tradition in the genre of
cinematic comedy. I am basing my arguments on theories that deal with the representation of
women in cinema, with the effects of postfeminism on popular culture, and on theories that
explain cinematic female humor as a subversive tool with which women filmmakers can
attack Hollywood sexism. Moreover, I will take into consideration interviews given by the
women involved in the film because when they were explicitly asked about the feminist
nature of the film, they expressed their position on feminism in Hollywood.
In the second chapter, I will analyze the sequel, Pitch Perfect 2, directed by Elizabeth
Banks, who took advantage of the space created by the first movie and of its financial success
to provide a much more explicit feminist stand. I will refer to the promotion tour which
preceded the sequel’s release and which was dominated by a feminist discourse, revealing the
contributors’ political agenda. Although the F-word is a red clothe in Hollywood, once a
cinematic product starts making a profit, Hollywood hypocrisy kicks in and allows the F-
word to be used as a label. I will try to make clear that whereas the sequel downplays the
visual exaggerations of the first movie, it relies on a more explicitly political humor to
express the creators’ concerns about sexism in popular cinema and about their own
responsibility, as decision- makers, regarding the circulation of sexist stereotypes. Through
the analysis of the Latina (a character added in the sequel), I will demonstrate that Banks has
exploited the space for positive femininities established by the first movie in order to expand
the ethnic character of the female cast and reject both sexist and racist Hollywood
conventions. Banks’ directorial choices, such as the “muffgate” montage sequence, indicate
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her effort to showcase the responsibility of the American media when they indulge in sexist
comments, scrutinize and humiliate women on a daily basis. Moreover, I will refer to the
screen-transcending Pitch Perfect sisterhood that the two movies help launch, as evidence
that in American society there is a great need for popular feminist narratives created by
women filmmakers, meant to empower female audiences. The many newspaper articles and
reviews written about the sequel give a good picture about the enthusiasm with which the
release of the second movie was greeted and about the openly feminist discussions that the
contributors engaged in when talking about the films. To strengthen my argument I rely on
theories that explain the politics of female comedians and feminist humor as sources of social
revolution. Feminist filmmaking takes into account “representational categories and gendered
subjectivity […] identification and spectatorship practices […] cultural authority and
historical (in)visibility” (McCabe 1). As a feminist discourse meaning to attack Hollywood
sexism, Pitch Perfect 2 can be seen as a trailblazer in popular cinematic comedy; its positive
female images, its ethnically diverse feminine models and its inclusive sisterhood challenge
some of the expectations of contemporary conservative culture in the United States.
The financial success of both Pitch Perfect movies and their huge popularity (easily
observed in the social media that immensely define what is considered part of the popular
culture nowadays) have encouraged a more open conversation concerning feminism and
female empowerment in Hollywood. More and more actresses call themselves feminists and
talk about sexism in the film industry and the wage gap between male and female actors; they
also engage in movements that support women, draw attention to the need for self-
empowerment, and discuss what feminism really means. The people working in the
entertainment industry are the faces who (whether we like it or not) influence many young
girls around the world. Women directors like Elizabeth Banks, through their positive
messages about female independence, women’s empowerment, and social equality (things far
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from being givens even today) offer an alternative worldview. The success of her films seems
to be ushering a new era in Hollywood; several production companies have announced more
comedies with all-female casts, written, produced and/or directed by women. The aim is to
represent as many types of women as possible and to depart from the usual sexist stereotypes
of popular comedies that reduce femininity to a prop used for reasons of embellishment.
Nowadays, only 1.9% of the directors of top-grossing films are women. People in Hollywood
have just started to talk about this depressing number publicly and to expose it as a real
problem that underlines an entrenched sexism in the reigning studios (qtd. in Berg). Movies
like Pitch Perfect—created and produced by women—have proven that women
cinematographers can also conquer the box office. Box office success and wide popularity
have definitely a lot to do with this sudden urge in Hollywood to discuss about the need to
include more women both in front and behind the camera. This could mark the beginning of
an authentic female and/or feminist Hollywood tradition.
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CHAPTER ONE
Deconstructing Film Comedy and its Sexist Stereotypes: Satire, Mockery, and
Feminist Subtext in Pitch Perfect
It was Elizabeth Banks, one of the producers of the film, Pitch Perfect (2012), who
came up with the idea to transform the original material of the book Pitch Perfect: The Quest
for Collegiate A Cappella Glory (2008) written by journalist Mickey Rapkin into a cinematic
comedy. Banks pitched the idea to her screenwriter friend Kay Cannon, who later wrote the
movie’s script and hired Jason Moore to direct it. A cappella has evolved from glee clubs and
has become a very popular tradition in America. In the United States there are more than
1,200 collegiate a cappella groups. Because of its popularity, any work of art—either book or
film— that has a cappella as it main theme will do well at the box office. What is different
about the movie, Pitch Perfect, is the fact that there is a feminist subtext in its cinematic
narrative. However, neither in the movie nor in its advertising campaign do the creators
mention the F-word (that is feminism) because it still has a negative charge in the minds of
conservative or mainstream audiences. Anxious to make their film attract the attention of
American moviegoers, at the same time include a feminist subtext in the cinematic narrative
as well as deliver a feminist message to the female viewers, the creators have used a much
more subtle approach. After the unexpected success of the first movie, the script of the sequel
will be more forward and openly feminist in its perspective.
Pitch Perfect is an independent, low-budget endeavor. This means its creators were
obliged to play by Hollywood’s rules and follow its long-established conventions in order to
be able to produce it. Although during the promotion period of Pitch Perfect, the creators
were asked questions about the empowering feminist subtext, they strategically decided to
address the issue of feminism in the most subtle way possible and shift the focus to the genre
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of comedy and to their proposition that women can also be good comedians and make people
laugh with them and not at them. It is evident in the way Elizabeth Banks chose to market her
idea that she is well aware of the fact that “challenging the norm from the center has the
potential to wield much greater force than questioning the norm from the margins”
(Chambers qtd. in Genz and Brandon 62). Banks could not disregard the timing of the
movie’s release. Pitch Perfect opened in theaters across the United States, having behind it a
long period of backlash against feminism and of apologetic postfeminist discourse.
Feminism had become a dirty word and concepts like “equality” and “emancipation” had
“lost their innovative appeal” (Genz 1). Moreover, labels like feminism or lesbianism still
intimidate traditional Hollywood, which fears that any film associated with these labels will
have a limited movie audience (Ferniss and Young 111). Thus, because of Hollywood’s
hostility and suspicion against feminism, films with a straightforward feminist frame or
message are not considered effective or worthy projects and could be easily shut down for
fear of being box-office flops. To allay such fears and ensure that her film would not be
considered a risk or a threat, Banks and Cannon chose to do three things: 1) to construct a
semi-traditional story that poses no explicit threat; 2) to blend in the scenario a feminist
subtext of empowerment and a subtle message of resistance; and 3) to subvert the sexist
representations of women which are prevalent in Hollywood comedies and thus challenge the
biased assumption that the genre of comedy is a boys’ club only.
To ensure that independent, summer releases like Pitch Perfect will be successful and
profitable, the producers cannot depart very far from the established comedy conventions.
Therefore, their strategy is to overemphasize the female archetypes which appear in popular
comedies, and reproduce the sexist stereotypes which work against women in order to
undermine them. As McCabe states, although Pitch Perfect employs the regular
conventions—which legitimize Hollywood’s entrenched sexism, a sexism that also
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characterizes popular culture and deprives women from the “chance to see themselves
culturally through their own eyes” (6)— the film transcends them through the use of a
subversive context and empowering irony.
In this chapter, my main argument is that Pitch Perfect recycles the ordinary female
stereotypes that appear in Hollywood comedies in order to expose, criticize, and subvert
them; simultaneously, it provides a new locus not only for the accepted femininities so
prominent in popular comedy but also for alternative models of femininity. It achieves this
through a female-driven and female-oriented discourse; it takes a political stand for the need
of a strong sisterhood and imbues popular culture with a feminist message. Its main goal is to
unite and empower women viewers against any form of sexism they are taught to perceive as
harmless humor. The first movie might not have the explicit feminist discourse of the sequel
(directed by Elizabeth Banks), but it subtly yet powerfully criticizes the sexist traditions of
cinematic comedy when it comes to the representation of women. It bravely promotes female
empowerment and initiative in the male-dominated world of Hollywood and popular culture.
Three obnoxious stereotypes of women—the promiscuous bimbo coveted by males, the weird
fat girl used just for laughs, and the black butch threatening masculinity—are all satirized
throughout the movie and then subverted in the last half hour. This subversion occurs not
with the traditional exterior makeover that the girl in popular movies typically goes through
to win the guy, but with a discourse makeover that differentiates the movie from its genre.
The happy ending is achieved when the girls come “out of the closet” as something more than
the one-dimensional caricatures flourishing in Hollywood comedies. Thus Pitch Perfect
enables the female characters both to embrace their individuality and to create a colorful
sisterhood cemented by solidarity, understanding, and acceptance.
Instead of the typical Hollywood scenario, which positions women against each other
and treats them as competitive “bitches,” Cannon, Banks, and Moore provide a narrative
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which solidifies female bonding and empowerment. First, they expose and then satirize the
objectification of women, typical in movies of this genre. Mainstream comedies usually
include two or three classic female stereotypes as the butt of the joke. In contrast, Pitch
Perfect takes pains to include almost every single stereotype portrayed in popular Hollywood
comedies and base its comedic intentions on the strategy of exaggeration. This strategy gives
the impression to those failing to understand its intention to satirize and critique its own genre
that the movie is sketchy and hyperbolic. The stereotypical representations of women as well
as the emphasis on their hyperbolic amplification constitute satire the most effective weapon
of the movie. Pitch Perfect is deliberately not plot heavy because it wants to guide the
viewers’ attention to the exposure of the sexist conventions of the comedic genre and to mock
the representations of women in comedy. Thus the film reacts against and dismisses the
passivity of women and comedy’s dependence on female stereotypes; in fact it reclaims the
F-word. Kathleen Rowe claims that “much film comedy follows this tendency and either
excludes the feminine or subsumes it in its male figures” (Rowe 102). Rowe explains that
popular culture is “deeply conventionalized,” and “comedy even more so, many of its most
familiar elements having dured for centuries” (102). However, feminist comedy “contests
patriarchal power” (Rowe 102). By exaggerating the comedic conventions prevalent in the
genre of popular Hollywood comedy, Pitch Perfect exposes this deeply conventionalized
kind of cinema that ignores the dangers of its own sexism and uses the negative
representations of women as sources of laughter and comedy. To counter this tendency
toward sexism, Pitch Perfect relies on satire, slapstick, and mockery; it cleverly defies
comedy’s conventions that reduce women to objects of laughter or the sexy comedic props in
the service of the male gaze. As Jane Caputti has said, “popular culture serves as a repository
of ancient and contemporary mythic […] images and narratives […] and archetypes” which
reproduce distorted and yet fixed images of femininity (qtd. in Ferniss and Young 207).
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Through its comic effects, Pitch Perfect attacks American myths that legitimize sexism as
humor and oversimplify femininity or femaleness as conditions that serve Hollywood’s
patriarchal agenda. McCabe clarifies that “Hollywood cinema has over time repressed
women through categorizing female types in film” (7). To offer a feminist critique of this
arbitrary categorization, the film exploits standard comic and satirical elements. We should
bear in mind that comedy can be a powerful force; therefore, it “should not be overlooked as
a weapon of great political power,” precisely because of “its revolutionary potential as a
deflator of the patriarchal order and an extraordinary leveler and reinventor of dramatic
structure” (Rich qtd. in Rowe 9). The creators of Pitch Perfect appear to be well-aware of
comedy’s political power; they structure their movie in such a way that it can address and
stimulate the female spectators in through the disruption of the traditional norms governing
the male-dominated world of film comedy. They do not simply reject these norms and invent
new ones, but they also adopt the languages they inherit from the comedic genre, along “with
their inescapable contradictions, before transforming and redirecting them towards [their]
own ends” (Rowe 4). In Pitch Perfect, the goal is to expose the deeply rooted sexism
characterizing the discourse of popular Hollywood comedies and to create a space for
gynocentric movies (that is comedies with an all-female cast) made by female creators. Such
cinematic products can be as successful and popular as male-oriented films; simultaneously
they can include positive representations of diverse and empowered femininities, offering
thus the opportunity to the contemporary female viewers to enjoy a positive identification
with the heroines on the screen. In contemporary American society, movies like Pitch Perfect
made by women’s rights activists like Elizabeth Banks can promote the message and
discourse of feminism as positive alternatives to patriarchal assumptions about women,
especially when their scenarios encourage discussion about feminism and sexism in cinema
and popular culture.
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Featuring a plethora of female caricature-like characters reflecting the most common
models of femininity in popular comedies, Pitch Perfect steps within the domain of the
conventional and stereotypical representations. The young slut, the daring tomboy, the
aggressive and masculine lesbian, the obnoxious fatty, the outwardly Asian, the uptight mean
girl, the naïve or stupid girl, all these images of women are appropriated in the most
hyperbolic and comically excessive manner. They facilitate what Heather Brook calls a
“subversively satirical” discourse, which mocks the absurdity of female stereotypes in the
comedic genre and which works as social commentary on the ever-present sexism in cinema
and popular culture (229). “Comedy celebrates excess not only as an end in itself but as a
means of liberating the social world of structures grown so rigid and unyielding that they
threaten its very existence” (Rowe 107). The women of Pitch Perfect engage in this satirical
discourse through performances that protect them from being perceived and treated as sexual
objects or the butt of jokes, as it usually happens in film comedies. Whereas women in
Hollywood comedies have to look sexy and are thus trapped in the role of sex objects, in
Pitch Perfect they act as subjects of comedy. They are the ones who cause laughter with their
excessive performances and indirectly discredit the female stereotypes of Hollywood. Hence,
the way Pitch Perfect positions and promotes its female characters enables the underlying,
yet subtle, feminist act of subversion in its narrative. As Rowe argues, comedy can be used as
means of “reauthoring the notion ‘woman’” (49). Indeed, the excessive performances in the
movie function as a comedic device; they parody a set of genre conventions, whose mockery
opens up a space for a new dialogue about the problematic iconography that Hollywood
recycles (Genz and Brandon 119). A careful analysis reveals that the female characters in
Pitch Perfect appropriate extensively used comedic tricks in order to subvert fixed
stereotypes and offer new models of womanhood as well as new positive representations of
diverse femininities. On a superficial level, the movie upholds Hollywood’s sexist
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iconography, but on a deeper level it takes advantage of the models of femininity typically
presented in the genre of comedy, as “a means to its undoing and its resignification” (Genz
and Brandon 119).
Before indulging in the process of resignification, Pitch Perfect deliberately flaunts
the conventions of its genre to ensure that as a cinematic commodity it will be both familiar
and marketable to its potential audience. It features an unsuccessful female a cappella group
which struggles to survive in the competitive world of collegiate a cappella by following the
tradition of the previous generations of women who sang only conservative, woman-
appropriate songs that are supposed to accentuate the feminine and reserved nature of the
women performing in relevant competitions. When almost all the members of the group
graduate, Aubrey and Chloe (the group’s veterans now in their senior year), decide to recruit
new ones with the hope that their new group would be able to compete and finally even win
the long-postponed title and recognition they deserve in the collegiate a cappella world, a
world which treats them as a laughing stock. Singing a cappella is a very demanding task; it
requires great talent, since apart from having excellent voices, the members of the group must
know how to read a music sheet, must be able to harmonize with each other and to replace
sounds made by musical instruments with those made by their own throats and mouths. When
the two senior girls talk about the difficulties in finding appropriate recruits, Aubrey
anxiously, in an almost confession-like disposition, says that what they are really looking for
is “eight super-hot girls with bikini-ready bodies.” Aubrey represents the old mindset and the
discourse which needs to change in the movie. She represents all those people in
showbussiness who objectify young girls by making them obey the absurd and sexist
demands of the business, part of which is incarnating the spectacle of the so-called
‘femininity,’ behaving as bait to capture the male gaze or playing the role of the sex object
ready to fulfill the sexist fantasies of men. Early in the film, the creators pinpoint the way
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“dominant filmmaking practices transmitted the ideological codes of patriarchy to construct
an image of women as somehow fixed” (McCabe 17). To Aubrey’s comment, the filmmakers
juxtapose Chloe’s hesitation to agree. This lack of agreement forces Chloe to rephrase
Aubrey’s comment to “how about we just find good singers instead.” With this short scene,
the movie introduces one of its main anxieties to the audience: the conventional and sexist
representation of women in cinematic comedy, disguised with the metaphor of the collegiate
a cappella world. The creators of the film communicate their desire and responsibility to
construct a discourse that will revolutionize the image of women and at the same time resist
the sexist stereotypes that marginalize, vilify, or objectify women in popular culture. So they
bestow their gynocentric comedy with a self-reflexive moment, which refers subtly to the
actual obstacles Elizabeth Banks and other female creators face when they pitch ideas for
female-centered comedies with an undercurrent of female empowerment and an implicit
feminist message.
The film shows that when no one else but eight misfits show up, the two college girls,
Chloe and Aubrey, are forced to accept them in order to renew their group. Unfortunately,
these newcomers do not have the “bikini-ready” bodies that Aubrey has hoped for. Then the
new Bellas are invited to make their first appearance in a fraternity celebration. They put on
makeup and they wear high heels and tight pencil skirts; such attire makes them look like
seductive air-hostesses and caters to a very popular fantasy where the male gaze is at work.
The movie taps into this popular fantasy of sexy dames luring the male gaze with their
feminine bodies only to poke fun at Hollywood’s beauty standards. Instead of their bodies,
the camera focuses on the girls’ faces to capture expressions of surprise and indifference and
to imply that these young women are very far from the dictated beauty standards. When the
new Bellas try to imitate the feminine spectacle of the old Bellas (that is be sexy girls with
conventional beauty), the outcome is ridiculous. They stumble upon each other; they are not
Leivada 24
synchronized; they feel uncomfortable in this tight, feminine old-Bellas skin; they seem
ignorant about what they are supposed to be doing. With this scene, Pitch Perfect begins the
slow process of subverting the genre’s expectations concerning the traditional female
presence in comedy, signaled by Aubrey’s call for exclusively hot and “bikini-ready” ladies.
The call does not quite go as Aubrey has expected, so when the new group performs for the
first time the result is hilarious. Representing the executives of mainstream Hollywood, as
well as the gaze of the male audience, the fraternity guys are absolutely disgusted by the new
unconventional Bellas: “I wanted the hot Bellas, not this barnyard explosion,” the frat boy
tells Aubrey, throwing them out of the “cool college event.” The fraternity boys indicate that
they are not going to tolerate any deviations from the established conventions. According to
McCabe, one of the oldest cinema conventions constructs “the cinema spectator as male
while the object of that gaze is female” (27). Reacting against it, Pitch Perfect exposes the
typical treatment of femininity as spectacle that reduces women into sex objects, obliging
them to look a certain way in order to please the male gaze. Hence, the movie points to the
genre’s atmosphere as a domain “resolved to objectify” the female characters (Lane 134).
This objectification is rife in popular comedy. In the era of “postfeminism” women’s
shameless sexualization goes hand in hand with what Susan J. Douglas calls “enlightened
sexism” (9). According to Douglas, enlightened sexism refers to the postfeminist claim that
thanks to feminism women nowadays have it all, including gender equality, “so now it’s
okay, even amusing, to resurrect sexist stereotypes of girls and women” and use them as
sources of laughter for the male-dominated audiences which apparently control the
“Hollywood game” (9). This attitude is precisely what the narrative of Pitch Perfect attacks.
The film gives the opportunity to these traditionally objectified female characters,
through the shift in its discourse, to retain their individuality, their strength, their autonomy in
order to fight against the forces of mass culture, which, according to Tania Modleski, reduce
Leivada 25
“women either to total absence or to an unthreatening, anorexic presence” (Feminism Without
Women 36). As I have already mentioned, the female characters in Pitch Perfect achieve
success not through the common postfeminist tactic of external makeover that aims at the
improvement “of the self through cultivation of the body and its appearance in accordance
with norms dictated by consumer culture” (Radner 26). On the contrary, Pitch Perfect
subverts this tactic by emphasizing independence from rather than conformity to the
traditional models of femininity imposed on the Bellas. The girls underline their differences
and thus provide new expressions of femininities. In fact, the Bellas manage to gradually
improve themselves as performers. When they appear together on the stage for the final
show, they signal their acceptance of their different personalities through the choice of their
clothes. Commenting on the absence of a makeover sequence in Pitch Perfect, Elizabeth
Banks has said that the scenario tries to subvert the sexist habits of popular cinema:
One of the things I love about this film is that no one apologizes for
themselves. No one talks about what they look like, there is no
makeover sequence, no one’s talking about the clothes they are
wearing. It’s not about boyfriends; it’s about regular girls of all
shapes, sizes, and ethnicities and just the wonderful chemistry
between them. (qtd. in Perrins and King)
This is visually communicated to the viewers through the lack of the traditional, uniform
Bellas’ costume and via the decision of the girls to wear whatever expresses their uniqueness.
The Bellas’ colors are maintained in their clothes, but these colors now represent their female
community and sisterhood. Their final performance solidifies their individual expressions of
womanhood and transmits the feminist message of emancipation. The scenario rewards the
girls’ initiative by allowing them to win the championship they have been striving for. Their
victory allows Banks to communicate an empowering feminist stance, which, as Modleski
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explains, derives from the “liberating departure from the stifling convention[s] of femininity”
(Feminism Without Women 133). Popular culture traditionally confines women into a fixed
idea about what femininity is supposed to look like. For decades it has objectified women for
the benefit of the male gaze. In contrast, the women in Pitch Perfect are shown to break free
from this sexist confinement in their last performance, thanks to their sisterhood and
acceptance of each another.
The main strategy of the film is to first expose the recycled comedic sexist
conventions that it means to subvert. To do so, it appropriates commonly used cinematic
apparatuses (camera angles and shots, meaningful cuts and edits, the clothes of the a cappella
singers, the performances of the actresses) but employs them in such a way that they expose
the sexist stereotypes which the traditional comedic discourse often justifies as humorous.
For instance, when Beca and Chloe, two of the film’s most important characters, are shown in
the shower together, the film deliberately positions them in this sexualized environment to
satisfy a common comedic convention which places two “hot college girls” in a pseudo-
lesbian context that has absolutely nothing to do with the girls’ sexual identities. Such scenes
are meant to satisfy a sexual fantasy by attracting the male gaze to stare at the girls through
the camera. The cinematic apparatus is involved in workings that objectify the female body
and “deny the female spectator and gaze any subjectivity or desire of her own” (Farrimond
84). In popular Hollywood comedies, the women engaged in similar pseudo-lesbian
situations are depicted in ways that emphasize their position as sex objects for the male gaze.
The camera never treats them as people “in control of the look they create”; rather any power
they might have had “is removed from them as soon as they fall under the attention of the
male gaze” for whose pleasure such scenes are created (Waters 84). The male spectators
never misunderstand such a set-up as genuine homoerotic interest between women. It
becomes obvious then that when the camera in some scenes concentrates on the actresses’
Leivada 27
looks and bodies, it does so to address the male gaze and seek its approval. Scenes with
sexual content affirm the “renewed and amplified objectification of young women’s bodies”
and show the influence of “enlightened sexism” (Douglas 10). The primary goal of this
discourse is to offer visual pleasure to male viewers through the cinematic exploitation of
female sexuality and a packet of good laughs since feminism has allegedly achieved its goal
of equality.
However, in the shower scene of Pitch Perfect, things unfold a little differently. When
she hears Beca sing, Chloe enters the shower room to hold an on-the-spot audition. Though
reluctant, Beca has to sing for Chloe if she wants her to leave the bathroom. Frustrating the
expectations of the male audience, the film does not show the girls to engage in sexual
activities with one another; it does not even show them naked, thus refusing the male gaze to
feast on their bodies and disrupting another quite popular practice in Hollywood comedies.
The scene is intentionally not sexy; the camera’s close-up shows only the heads of the two
women and then cuts to their feet, implying that they may be naked because of the shower
setting. Moreover, the scene is awkward and embarrassing. It lacks background music. It
confronts the male spectators with a curious silence and the surprised look of the two girls,
whose behavior seems to emphasize the fact that they have no idea of what to do and how to
react in this completely absurd situation. The film takes the male gaze inside the shower only
to undermine its power. It shows a nameless man enter Beca’s shower on purpose to “check
her out.” His facial expression reveals a macho confidence and a self-proclaimed right to
access the girls’ showers. However, Beca and Chloe do not follow the traditional Hollywood
strategy that wants women to engage in sexual practices to please the male gaze. On the
contrary, they treat the man as an unwanted intruder; their faces express repulsion and
disbelief. The man is forced to leave unwillingly as Chloe gently pushes him outside. Hence,
the fully dressed man who looks at naked women as a cinematic spectacle is placed at the
Leivada 28
exact same self-conscious position as girls are placed in similar scenes. He is made the butt of
the joke, being turned into a spectacle instead of a gazer. The audience is expected to laugh at
his ridiculous and quick retreat from the shower room and to understand that he has no
authority in there. As Rowe states, discussing the cinematic subversive techniques of certain
feminist discourses, such scenes work as “a kind of mimicry, or masquerade, a parodic
performance of the feminine that makes visible what is supposed to remain concealed” (6).
In comedies created by women, the male gaze is exposed as absolutely ineffective; this
specific scene has no reason of existence, since it neither helps the plot unfold nor does it
actually offer satisfaction to the male gaze for which it is supposedly included in the movie. It
is rather a ridiculous and hyperbolic scene which caters to the movie’s aim to use “comedy
with its exaggerations, hyperbole, and assault on the rational,” as a means to expose
“strategies of danger” like the commonly held comedic “technique” of compromising women
as sex spectacles (Rowe 5). Through this scene, Banks comments on the objectification of
female bodies in Hollywood comedies and targets both the ever-hungry gaze of men along
with the cinematic compulsion to satisfy it with sexually charged fare. Shot from the point of
view of the girls, this scene does not allow the camera to focus on female nudity or make the
female body a fetish. The emphasis is on the performance of the actresses in the shower room
and not on delivering femininity as a spectacle, as it happens in the mainstream
representations of Hollywood films.
One of the most common female characters used in comedy to turn femininity into a
spectacle is that of the obnoxious fatty. The visible difference of the obese female body from
the “normal” body is accentuated through the cinematic iconography, the director’s “visual
constructions” and the performance of the plus-sized actress (Mosher 19). To be more
specific, the director makes sure that not only the bodily size is emphasized through special
lenses, specific lighting, and low camera angles that visually augment the obese female
Leivada 29
physique, but also the performance of the actress is contrived so as to meet the requirement of
“fat behavior” (Mobley 64). As Rowe explains, “through her body, her speech, and her
laughter especially in the public sphere,” the fat, unruly woman “creates a disruptive
spectacle of herself” (31). This “fat behavior” is usually depicted on the screen through an
oversized woman with low self-esteem, undisciplined eating habits, emotional
maladjustment, conspicuous promiscuity, a masculine-like physique and a way of talking that
“does not abide by gender roles” (Mobley 64). Faithful to the cinematic tradition, Pitch
Perfect features the stereotype of the fatty in the character of Fat Amy. She exhibits “fat
behavior” on numerous occasions. For instance, Fat Amy assumes that some guys, although
completely indifferent to her, actually desire her, so she decides to force-give them her
number. “All right I’ll give you my number,” she says. The audience is expected to laugh at
the all too typical fatty who fantasizes that every man wants her. Obese actresses in comedies
usually indulge in bodily gestures, loud voices, pratfalls and experience physical humiliations
so that the film can exploit “the fat body’s deviance to comic effect” (Mosher 47). Such
slapstick depictions of fatness accentuate the “grotesque and infantile” eccentricities of the fat
female character primarily for humor (Mosher 57). In other words, the oversized actress
emphasizes her bulkiness through the performance of “fat behavior” and projects her
cinematic self as pathological; this self exists only to be laughed at and to be entertaining.
In Pitch Perfect, Rebel Wilson (the new Hollywood sensation) plays the role of Fat
Amy, a young overweight college student, who gives herself this nickname “so twig bitches
don’t do it behind [her] back.” Amy’s nickname is the first sign the movie uses to signal her
visual difference from the rest of the traditionally slim female characters to the viewers. This
label underlines Amy’s size hyperbolically and functions as a comment on the comedic
genre’s obsession to constantly expose and aggressively ridicule the physical difference of
the “fatty.” Thus, by choosing to exaggerate the presence of Fat Amy, Pitch Perfect criticizes
Leivada 30
the cinematic apparatuses of mainstream comedy that exploit the oversized woman as a
source of laughter. The film prevents other people from mocking Amy by giving her an
offensive nickname; instead, it empowers the obese woman by having her choose it herself,
and in this way allowing her to have absolute control over her identity. Aware of the
demeaning representations and treatment of oversized women in comedy, the actress Rebel
Wilson exaggerates her performance in order to expose and mock Hollywood’s absurd
conventions. Her performance is a rare example of an empowered fat woman, who does not
allow the camera to exploit her as a comedic prop. Usually, the cinematic genre of comedy
imposes on the fat female character a specific framework. Rebel Wilson is known to be one
of those female comedians who do refuse to be limited to prescribed roles. Domnica
Radulescu calls such a woman comedian, a “creator of [her] own parts,” an improviser and a
“creator in performance” (9). Thanks to her ability to improvise, Wilson uses comedy’s set of
conventions to give a voice to her personas; in her hands laughter becomes a powerful
weapon of self-definition and feminist appropriation. Wilson’s Fat Amy reflects the power of
the female grotesque and renders the female subject as the source and not the butt of laughter,
thus challenging the social and symbolic systems that keep women in their place. Rowe
points out that quite often “the conventions of both popular culture and high art represent
women as objects rather than subjects of laughter” (3). The character of Fat Amy, however,
succeeds through her “masquerade” (Rowe 7) of the typical fatty to challenge the
conventional norms of comedy and the sexism that pervades Hollywood’s popular movies.
She conducts herself independently; she uses humor to her own benefit; she convincingly
conveys her own control over her cinematic representation.
Hollywood’s prescriptions about the way an oversized female body is supposed to
appear on screen are overdone when the character of Fat Amy uses her body to provoke
laughter. Fat Amy’s hyperbolic performance aims to exaggerate the cinematic conventions
Leivada 31
and explode them by over-fulfilling the audience’s expectations. To foreground the fact that
obese female body is treated as spectacle, Fat Amy, during her first encounter with the “twig
bitches” of the a cappella group, makes sure that she leaves a grotesque last impression of
herself. In this scene, the girls ask her to perform. Fat Amy proves she can “match pitch” and
that she is actually a very good singer. Making smart humorous comments is not enough for
the comedic discourse; so Fat Amy indulges in a physical performance that would make
people laugh at her oversized female body making a spectacle of itself. She throws herself on
the ground, doing what she calls the “mermaid dancing,” a routine in which she has to clasp
her knees together and move her body like a fish, pretending that she is a mermaid. It may be
easy to claim that all Pitch Perfect does with this scene is to once again represent an
oversized woman as an obnoxious, crazy fatty, who is there only to be laughed at because of
the awkwardness of her unconventional body. Visually, the “mermaid dancing” stresses the
comedic prop status of Fat Amy and implies a weird personality that matches this
unconventional body. The deviance from the normal female body is further augmented when
the director places Fat Amy within the chic and girly space which forms the background and
visually contrasts her to the two hot leaders of the a cappella group. Such facile interpretation
of this scene covers only the surface level.
There is a deeper level in which Pitch Perfect comments on the problematic
iconography of the genre of comedy concerning the representation of women. If one pays
close attention to the way the movie develops Fat Amy’s character and takes into account
certain directorial decisions that are antithetical to the early visual treatment of Fat Amy (in
scenes such as the “mermaid dancing”) one will realize that Pitch Perfect does not fall into
the trap of caricaturing women just for laughs. Gradually, the film constructs Fat Amy as a
well-rounded character and a strong woman, capable of making smart points and displaying
high intelligence and wit, qualities that according to the director the actress Rebel Wilson
Leivada 32
brought to this character. Visually, the mermaid dancing does not really humiliate Fat Amy
because it is based on hyperbole; this hyperbolic exposure of the oscillating fat body wants to
make the viewers notice the absurdity of Hollywood stereotypes, which belittle specific
groups of women and reduce them to comedic props. Pitch Perfect deviates from the
established expectations by creating comic effects through positive female representations.
Implicit in these representations are the creators’ feminist anxieties and concerns about the
way women are represented in the genre of popular Hollywood comedy.
There is a series of shots through which the director of Pitch Perfect hints that
characters like Fat Amy serve only as comedic props, but then he goes on to disrupt this
assumption by highlighting her intelligent and empowered persona. This set of shots are
linked to the sequence presenting the girls’ a cappella initiation. All the girls have to take a
sip of the “blood of the sisters” so as to become real members of the a cappella sisterhood.
Having drunk once, Fat Amy is heard saying, “I want some more of this.” Then she is shown
to head towards the wine, to open her mouth widely and to gulp it down. In this shot, the
camera positions her at the foreground so that the viewers can notice her grand appetite and
lust for drinking, in contrast to the rest of the ‘normal’ girls who appear at the background
talking and having no interest for the wine whatsoever. The audience is expected to giggle at
the expense of the fat girl who runs to get more wine; even the ‘normal’ girls are amused
when Fat Amy makes a spectacle of herself. The cinematic apparatus depicts Fat Amy as the
stereotypical fat girl who is driven by an impossible-to-suppress urges to eat and drink
excessively; such “fat behavior” is expected to cause laughter, especially to the male viewers,
since Hollywood’s fatty is regularly made the butt of the joke and used as the means “to
expose flaws about femininity” (Mobley 32). These flaws, according to Susan Bordo, are
attached to the obese female body, to its uncontrollable appetites, and to its “disgusting
hungers,” which undoubtedly connote dangerous sexual desires that do not fit in with the
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cultural prescriptions of the ideal woman (8). Fat Amy is temporarily depicted as the
embodiment of a problematic femininity because she is shown to have unrepressed appetites
and unladylike sexual urges. In combination with the earlier shots that put the focus on Fat
Amy’s big body, indulging in ridiculous activities such as the mermaid dance, the shots that
expose her feminine flaws are supposed to elicit condescending giggles from the male
viewers. But Pitch Perfect does not stop there, it goes on to frustrate the audience’s
expectations by repositioning Fat Amy in subsequent shots that place her at the center of the
screen next to the protagonist. The director uses a close-up to present both the protagonist and
Fat Amy as central characters—occupying equal visual space—thus bypassing the comedic
convention that wants the fat woman to be the funny sidekick to the hot protagonist. We hear
Fat Amy say, “I still can’t believe they let my fat sexy ass in” with a humble smile on her
face. Fat Amy’s comment signals the fact that she is aware that an unconventional body like
hers can be a problem in the collegiate world and in Hollywood. Contrary to popular belief
and to the conventions of comedy, Pitch Perfect’s fatty exhibits reason and intelligence
instead of being plagued by ignorance and arrogance. Foregrounding her mild facial
expressions and normal voice pitch, this close-up contradicts the camera’s earlier visual
structuring of Fat Amy as a crazy, obnoxious sidekick whose only function is to be the target
of humiliating comic effects. As I have mentioned before, in the course of the movie, Fat
Amy develops into a full, rounded character that resists the stereotype of the obese nut. With
these subtle maneuvers the film reduces the visual significance of the fat female body as the
“most crucial aspect of her identity” (Orbach viii).
In another scene using a long shot, the director focuses on Fat Amy’s full body doing
a crazy dance meant to make viewers giggle. In this dance, Fat Amy tries to be sexy. By
alternating between a conventional representation of the fatty archetype and a revisionary
depiction, Pitch Perfect tries to subvert the comedic conventions and possibly to deconstruct
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the way popular cinema exploits the oversized woman as a comedic spectacle. No matter
which of the two kinds of shots is at work, the film makes clear that the humor derives from
the Wilson’s satiric performance as Fat Amy, a performance that ensures that the obese
woman is constantly in control, even when framed in typically oppressive situations that
objectify and shame women who look like her. Adding hyperbole to the stereotype of the
fatty and placing Wilson’s powerful performance as the center of the comedy, Pitch Perfect
disrupts the conventions of the film’s own genre. According to Rowe, cinematic comedies
usually position women as the “joke’s passive butt” (68), and harbor a misogynistic and
sexist attitude that “alienates women from the tradition of comedy” (69). Patriarchal
discourses locate women in the position of the comedic objects who are there to embellish the
cinematic narrative, but they never allow the actresses to manipulate the narrative through
their own performances.
In Hollywood comedies, women are not supposed to make the jokes; they are there
only to trigger male laughter. In other words, Hollywood-style comedy is a very hostile genre
for women, precluding women to create their own female tradition of comedy (Rowe 68).
This Hollywood “habit” of alienating women from comedy and directing misogynistic jokes
against them is mirrored in Pitch Perfect, which places a male commentator in the a cappella
competition. Called John (played by John Michael Higgins), this commentator is the main
expositor of the sexist conventions of Hollywood comedy. Through his absurd, misogynistic
comments, the movie exposes the genre’s entrenched sexism, which can be found even in the
most contemporary or supposedly female-driven scenarios. Pitch Perfect satirizes the
commentator’s misogynism by having him voice hyperbolic and irrelevant sexist comments.
John serves absolutely no purpose in the movie’s plot; he is there only to be mocked as the
sexist male authority who thinks of himself as a wise expert, when in fact he is an irrelevant
sexist caricature. To be more specific, Gale (the female commentator played by Elizabeth
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Banks) asks John why he thinks “it’s taking so long for an all-lady group to break through
that a cappella glass ceiling.” John responds with a most ridiculously pompous face: “The
women typically cannot hit the low notes, which really round out an arrangement, thrill the
judges, and that can really hurt them in competition.” This comment on women’s natural
inferiority in a cappella is matched by an even more absurd and sexist follow-up comment
which solidifies his sexism: “Women are about as good at a cappella as they are at being
doctors.” The dialogue between the two commentators functions as a trick that barely
disguises the real question Banks is asking to the supposed male authority, that is why it is
taking so long for women to break through comedy’s glass ceiling. This scene offers a self-
reflexive moment. Through the scenario of Pitch Perfect, Elizabeth Banks (one of the
movie’s creators who has publicly proclaimed herself as feminist) poses this hot question.
Since the question is not really about a cappella, the answer John provides indicates that the
sexist attitude of the male authorities in Hollywood is the main reason why women do not do
well in comedy both as characters and creators.
In order to satirize the patriarchal logic behind Hollywood’s explanations why
female-driven comedies are a rarity, Pitch Perfect structures John’s comments to reflect the
ubiquitous male bias. John invokes ‘natural’ or rather biological reasons why women are not
good leaders or doctors, reasons that most of the time put the blame for female incompetence
on hormones. Natural hormonal imbalances render women unable to become good doctors
and also make it impossible for them to be good at a cappella. Therefore, women are
‘naturally’ inferior to men who thanks to their masculine nature (the presence of male organs)
do well in this kind of competition and are equipped to “hit the low notes.” It becomes
obvious that one of the film’s main goals is to expose such sexist logic by highlighting the
absurdity of John’s explanation. The words uttered by this a cappella “male expert” sound
nonsensical and are delivered in the most pompous and ridiculous manner the actor could
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devise. The fact that Elizabeth Banks makes an appearance in this scene and reacts with facial
expressions that exude contempt for John’s misogynistic comments verifies that the film
intends to satirize sexist assumptions about women. The camera is used to create what
Modleski calls a shot of “disapproval” (Feminism Without Women 123), in which Banks
communicates through her performance her disdain for John’s misogyny. Banks’ silences and
pauses in this scene are performance characteristics, very essential to “comic delivery”
(Margolin qtd. in Radulescu 174). The movie allows John to express his sexist views in order
to indicate what Melanie Waters calls “the stubborn resilience of conventional conceptions of
gender within the seemingly enlightened context of postfeminist culture” (70). Ultimately,
what prevails in Pitch Perfect is the feminist subversion of sexism and misogyny. Not only
do the girls triumph in a cappella, but also the character played by Banks scolds John by
saying, “you’re a misogynist at heart, there was no way you would ever bet on those girls.”
To this reprimand John replies “absolutely.” It is through this short dialogue that the
cinematic narrative critiques and mocks the pervasive sexism in the discourse of the popular
comedic genre.
In the comedic agenda, patriarchal notions of gender also inform the stereotype of the
young slut which is based on the “centrality of sex” and its strong connection with femininity
(Rowe 104). As Farrimond clarifies, the “unexamined assumption that the role of sexual
performer is the only source of agency available to the pretty teenage girls” is an integral part
of Hollywood comedy and underpins its representations of femininity (80). In contemporary
popular comedies, the stereotype of the young and promiscuous femme fatale is seldom
absent from the scenario. Sexualized to a high degree, she is presented as an object of desire,
meant to embellish the narrative with her “outwardly conventional ‘sexiness’ and apparent
sexual availability” (Farrimond 79). She is thought to be a moral threat to the traditional
American family, because she tempts the men with her sex appeal and often renders them
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unable to resist her. By representing her as a desirable, oversexed young woman, who will
stop at nothing to get what she wants, Hollywood comedies stress woman’s “seductive
danger, while playing down any concern for her personal wellbeing” (Farrimond 79). Her
presence aims to generate a number of comedic situations and complications; but she is never
permitted to use either her performance or her subjectivity to the source of laughter. Rather
the male characters manipulate her and make her the joke’s passive butt. Being cast as a
naive person, she treats sex casually and barely understands the sexual innuendos she is
communicating or the message she is projecting of being an “easy access.” In conventional
scenarios, the postfeminist strategy of using sex as a source of empowerment for women is
undermined by the “patriarchal iconography of the films structured around titillating images
of threesomes [and] pseudo-lesbian sex” constructed to satisfy the male gaze (Farrimond 79).
They reduce the sexy girl to a sexual object, to a comedic prop, or an embellishing technique,
signaling at the same time that men can have full access to her sexuality. As Farrimond puts
it, the sexual woman as a postfeminist icon of female empowerment, is in fact portrayed in
comedy in a way that “is best understood as a figure that occupies the liminal territory
between sexual empowerment and patriarchal objectification” (79). Consequently, it is very
easy to transform empowerment into objectification. Barely in control of her subjectivity, the
sexualized woman surrenders any power that she may be invested with as soon as she
becomes accessible to the male gaze as the stereotype of femme fatale.
The objectification of the beautiful, sexy women in comedy and generally in cinema,
has a long history. Recently, women producers of comedies have articulated concerns about
the sexist iconography this genre promotes. Elizabeth Banks via Pitch Perfect expresses her
own anxieties about the representation of women in the comedic genre, by including in her
film conventional depictions of femininity and recycled stereotypes and subsequently
exposing their absurdity. Besides the stereotype of the obnoxious fatty, Pitch Perfect also
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includes the stereotype of the young slut who is often heard to say things like, “I’ll do
whoever it takes.” This distortion of the commonly used phrase, “I’ll do whatever it takes,”
functions as a Freudian slip meant to emphasize her sexual promiscuity and obsession with
sex and to create giggles in the audience. In Pitch Perfect, the stereotype of the young slut is
incarnated in the character of Stacie, who is a member of the a cappella group. She can sing;
she is, as expected, sexy and expresses her sexuality through provocative dance moves,
through the way she talks, and through her sexually forward conduct. However, the actress
delivers the oversexed character of Stacie on the screen via a hyperbolic performance; thus
she aids the film to parody the stereotype of the sexy girl in comedy and to comment on her
objectification as well as on the categorization of women as either morally loose and sexually
accessible broads or morally sound girls. Using mockery, hyperbole, and irony, Pitch Perfect
subverts the stereotype of the female seductress who uses sex for her benefit. The scenario
has Stacie constantly talk about sex, make sexy comments and hint about her sexual urges,
but it never actually shows her in the company of a man. To further emphasize the fact that
the biased viewers will rush to unsubstantiated conclusions about Stacie, although they do not
see her “in action,” the scenario includes a scene in which Stacie admits to the other girls that
she has had a lot of sex. Unsurprised, the group replies, “yes we know.” Then Stacie
responds, “only because I just told you.” The viewers can see that Stacie is annoyed by the
fact that the girls rush to assume that she is promiscuous based only on her looks. Moreover,
the actress who performs Stacie most of the time is shown to be on the verge of bursting into
laughter because of the absurd things she says. Apparently, the character of Stacie is there to
expose the conventional iconography of the genre and to mock the sexist stereotype, which
serves no cinematic purpose other than to objectify women and please the sexually hungry
male gaze.
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Stacie is depicted as an equal member of the sisterhood. She belongs to the girls’
team; she never becomes the sex toy of boys. To everyone’s surprise she is one of the main
characters who actually shows no love interest for men. She is probably unaffected by the
institution of compulsory heterosexuality which directs the lives of most sexy girls in
comedy. Adrienne Rich defines compulsory heterosexuality as a patriarchal institution that
erases the lesbian existence and disempowers women (21). Although cast as femme fatale
and overstating her passion for sex, Stacie is never shown in the company of a man. On the
contrary, she is visually paired with Cynthia Rose, the character who embodies the stereotype
of the black butch. Stacie is supposed to be indifferent towards Cynthia Rose but in the
slapstick scenes, which aim to ridicule the stereotype of the black butch, Cynthia Rose makes
advances on her. Stacie is shown to enjoy the company of Cynthia Rose. During the “serious”
moments of the movie presenting the strong bonds of sisterhood (their meeting in Beca’s
room, the riff-off or the scene of triumph after their final performance), the two girls throw
affectionate looks and smiles of friendship at each other. The comradeship between Cynthia
Rose and Stacie has a touch of homoeroticism, which could be interpreted as the movie’s
comment on the heterosexuality that is imposed on the stereotype of the femme fatale. By
limiting the femme fatale’s sexuality to the heterosexual model, Hollywood comedies provide
men with the justification to claim their ‘natural’ right over women. As Adrienne Rich points
out, compulsory heterosexuality functions as a “means of assuring male right” (50) and male
accessibility to the female body. Once more, Pitch Perfect uses the conventions of the
comedic genre in order to showcase their limitations. At the same time, it exposes and
critiques the entrenched sexism in the representation of women through visual and verbal
hyperboles. Stacie as a traditionally feminine and sexy woman must be dumb and alluring.
However, the movie portrays her as a quick-witted, perceptive, and self-aware woman, who
conducts herself according to the effect she is expected to have on the male gaze. Because
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she is not really dumb but has to give the impression that she is to the viewers, Stacie
indulges in comments that impose stupidity on her personality. This tactic further emphasizes
the movie’s intention to point out the constructed nature of Stacie’s character and to parody
the dumb bimbo stereotype. Soon the film reveals that Stacie is not what she seems to be,
undermining the spectators’ assumptions about her.
In popular Hollywood movies female beauty is often connected with stupidity. As
Yael D Sherman states, “if the performance of femininity requires one to hide intelligence
and intention, then beauty will be associated with frivolous, seemingly stupid women” (82).
Undoubtedly, Pitch Perfect structures the personality and reactions of Stacie’s character in
such a way as to poke fun at the established figure of woman as dumb slut. In a scene, Alexis
Knapp (the actress who plays Stacie) has to frequently utter phrases like “why can’t we figure
this out?” when the girls have difficulty deciding whether they will chant “on three” or “after
three,” but she does so in a hyperbolic manner that she almost trembles. Because they can’t
decide, they end up messing their chant. The impression the viewers get is that they are
incapable of resolving even the simplest problems without the help of a male authority. While
the camera focuses on the curves of her chest, Stacie nags like a spoiled child, exaggerating
her rendition of the dumb beauty, who is often infantilized in film. She grins and wins at the
camera and by extension at the female audience. This is a purposeful narratological sign with
an empowering potential. Irony often works by “making fun” of retrograde, sexist images
“with a wink” (Douglas 241). Thus, the audience is directed to laugh not at the expense of the
dumb slut but with Stacie who manipulates the sexist stereotype to deliver a harsh critique.
Actually, the way she performs the sexy bimbo is meant to resist the sexist labels forced upon
her by the comedic genre. Traditionally disliked and hated by women, the femme fatale relies
on her performance to establish an understanding between herself and the female viewers. By
having Stacie “the slut” attack her own label, the film tries to convince the female viewers to
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be on her side. Stacie deserves sympathy because she is an important member of the
sisterhood, who tries hard to be there for her girlfriends rather than associate with guys and
let them use her as a sex toy. She offers a new empowered version of the femme fatale, who
actually refuses to “cater to what men want” (Douglas 156). Stacie uses her external
appearance to mock the conventional expectations of her. She positions her body in a
typically male posture, while sitting in a chair; she keeps her legs wide open as men do; she
points at her genitalia and refers to her reproductive organs with male pronouns. As
Radulescu explains, such unbecoming behavior foregrounds women’s “invisible physicality”
in comedy and renders visible women’s hidden sexual organs through the use of male
pronouns (189). Stacie exercises a subversive control over her image as a slut and mocks the
stereotype of the sexually provocative and loose girl, resisting thus its degrading power.
Another regularly exploited female figure that the comedic genre uses as a narrative
convention and a source of laughter is the unfeminine lesbian, the butch, who often times is a
black woman. Pitch Perfect also features a black butch and constructs it along the same lines
to perfectly resemble the type of woman depicted in popular cinema. Her name is Cynthia
Rose. She is a black college student who decides to audition for the all-female a cappella
group. She shows up at the audition wearing baggy clothes, a style linked to singers of hip
hop, and a baseball cap that covers her face, intentionally misleading both the female and
male a cappella groups to assume that she is a guy. Her female identity becomes known only
when she takes off the cap. Apart from unfeminine clothes, she wears her hair very short, and
walks and performs like a hip hopper. Conventionally, the butch is threat to white male
masculinity (Fenwick 93). This particular scene underlines this threat through the expressions
of surprise and disgust shown on the faces of the members of the male a cappella group. The
guys are repulsed when they realize that Cynthia Rose is neither a guy who has come to
audition for their group nor a sexy feminine woman who would at least entertain their gazes.
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She is not a sexual spectacle. After her initial appearance on the screen, Cynthia Rose is
expected to amuse the audience through her inability to control her urges towards her female
teammates. At first glance, it seems that Pitch Perfect represents Cynthia Rose, the black
lesbian, “solely in terms of [her] sexuality” (Fenwick 98), as an aggressive, oversexed black
beast, who poses a threat to heterosexuality, to masculinity and to male desire because she is
interested in all the hot, preferably white, girls. She is constantly seen “checking the girls
out”; she always finds excuses to touch their breasts or kiss them. In one scene, she attempts
to force CPR on the fully conscious Fat Amy just to get her to make out. In another scene,
she tries to inappropriately touch Stacie, making the girl blow her rape-whistle. The
cinematic apparatus deals visually with such scenes using quick cuts, edits and the
appropriate background music that position the black lesbian in a slapstick environment.
Having her run after girls, it appropriates her sexuality to serve the comedic conventions.
One could claim that the inclusion of the black lesbian in a popular Hollywood
comedy is a step forward since it makes visible a female persona ignored in previous decades.
However, Pitch Perfect, does not intend simply to include a black lesbian in its narrative, but
goes a step further. It comments on the tendency of popular comedy to exploit a character
like Cynthia Rose as a traditional comedic caricature, bypassing the ignorance and racism
that this stereotype implies. The stereotype of the black butch is expected to frighten men, to
aggressively flirt with women and to make the audience laugh. Pitch Perfect constructs
Cynthia Rose as a replica of this caricature but has her conduct herself not as a homosexual
woman but rather as a conventional heterosexual man who objectifies women with his gaze
and gestures, who makes sexual advances and who exhibits a sexist attitude toward female
sexuality. Comedies like Pitch Perfect are usually released in cinemas during the summer
months when the box office is supposed to be dominated by male audiences (Genz and
Brandon 127). This type of films usually adds gay and lesbian characters to its cast in order to
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give “edge, risk, and sexiness to products that are often associated with straight men and
traditional sexism” (Genz and Brandon 127). The creators of Pitch Perfect are obviously
aware of the trend. In their movie, they employ the stereotype of the black butch not to please
the male audience but instead to mock their expectations by molding Cynthia Rose into a
caricature of a sexist straight “dude” rather than into a genuine homosexual woman. The
movie achieves what comedian Norma Bowles does in her subversive, feminist performances
targeting male audiences, namely to “destabilize [the] male audience members’ attachments
to macho ideas, by putting a lot of their old-fashioned, sexist behavior and discourse into the
mouth of someone they would want to distance themselves from” (qtd. in Radulescu 220). By
appropriating the image of the black lesbian caricature of popular cinema, the movie uses
Cynthia Rose to satirize macho behaviors, to subvert the male gaze and to criticize sexism.
As Martin Zeller-Jacques says, “the mainstreaming of lesbian representations has significant
[…] implications for the discourse around lesbian visibility” (103). Pitch Perfect raises the
issue of lesbian visibility in comedy and highlights the offensive practices linked to the
representation of lesbian identity in popular cinema and in the comedic genre. Hollywood
assumes it has the right to ridicule female sexualities and objectify women for the sake of
humor. Mainstream cinema usually falls short in representing women’s “desire for equal
treatment, for social status, for alternative ways of living,” and implicitly or explicitly
“equates lesbian identity to lesbian sex” (Zeller-Jacques 107). To expose the practices of its
own genre, Pitch Perfect avails itself of the comedic discourse to first recycle the image of
the black butch and then to transform it into a positive female presence in a new comedy.
According to Ferniss and Young, positive images are better understood as transformations of
popular forms, which can be effectively communicated through the standard mechanisms that
operate to produce humor and comedy (135). The discourse of Pitch Perfect does exactly that
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and then proceeds to deconstruct and finally redefine lesbian femininity in an empowering
way.
The transformation of Cynthia Rose takes place through the cinematic devices of the
movie. The performance of the actress Ester Dean (a lesbian in real life) is crucial. She
enhances and contributes to the hyperbolic performances of the other actresses who portray a
set of female archetypes staple in comedies. Ester Dean gives life to Cynthia Rose and
performs the role in an exaggerated manner to subvert the image of threatening black butch.
The film’s female-driven narrative and original depiction of femininities gives the actresses
the opportunity to bring the “authenticity and sparkle of their own identities and experiences”
(Radulescu 37). Its indirect critique of the fixed iconography and stereotypical portraits
becomes obvious to those viewers who are perceptive enough to detect the ironic tone of
Pitch Perfect and the feminist intentions of its creators. But one has to admit that the
subversion of the stereotype of the black butch does not occur as explicitly as the
undermining of the stereotype of the fatty. The latter is shown to have more control of her
otherwise oppressive situation. At moments Pitch Perfect seems uncertain about how to
handle the case of the black lesbian. This could be explained if we take into account the
white, heterosexual background of its creators; they seem reluctant to completely make over
the identity of a black homosexual woman for the sake of their feminist agenda. When the
plot nears its resolution and the happy ending is but a few minutes away, the viewers notice
that the representation of Cynthia Rose changes to fit a politically correct stance. Although
subtle, this change in cinematic discourse is quite obvious. Up to this point, the character of
Cynthia Rose appears to solidify a common-held belief that popular cinema is a discourse
that “[usually] fails to adequately represent lesbian sexuality as something other than a
transitory experiment and a deviation from the expository norm” (Radner and Stringer 4).
After the transformational moment, Cynthia no longer tries to harass any of the girls; she is
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no longer distracted by their feminine curves or attracted to external signs of femininity she
cannot resist. The movie stops positioning Cynthia Rose as a comedic prop at whose expense
the audience is expected to laugh. It no longer ignores the outrageous and sexist implications
of such a depiction. The shift is visible in the way the actress replaces her exaggerated
performance with a more subtle one that does not emphasize her threatening sexuality but her
individuality as a lesbian woman. At the end, the Bellas accept each other’s individuality and
cement an ever-lasting female bond. Then they go on to conquer the male-dominated field of
collegiate a cappella.
In addition, Pitch Perfect surprises the audience with a climactic scene in which
Cynthia Rose finally comes out of the closet not as a confirmed lesbian but as a person with a
gambling addiction. With this scene the movie undermines the expectations that want
Cynthia Rose to confess her lesbianism and takes a political stand against the positioning of
her sexuality as the center of the cinematic spectacle. Right before the plot’s resolution,
Cynthia Rose casually mentions a girlfriend while talking about her gambling addiction, but
refuses to link every piece of information about her person to her sexual orientation. At this
point, she overcomes the comedic conventions that construct her and has firm control over
her subjectivity and identity. She does not even allow her friends to compromise this moment
of empowerment but expresses indignation when Fat Amy attempts to exploit comically
Cynthia Rose’s reference to her girlfriend and make her admit her homosexuality. This is the
first time when Cynthia Rose resists actively and does not let her sexual identity to be either
ridiculed or used to provoke laughter let alone fulfill some male fantasy. During their
winning number, she takes the lead in two songs and interacts with Stacie like a true sister,
helping her to stand up after they have finished dancing. This scene is diametrically opposite
to the previous visual construction of their relationship, when Cynthia holds the position of
the gazer and Stacie is stuck as the spectacle. In other words, Pitch Perfect offers an
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empowering and positive version that contradicts the sexist depiction of the lesbian. During
the riff-off, the girls and the boys compete in order to be crowned as the university’s best
singing a cappella group. When the Bellas join this unofficial, street competition they are still
new as a group, so they lag behind the boys. Everybody expects them to perform a female-
appropriate song, so they are surprised when they sing a hip-hop song that leads them to
victory. Ester Dean, the actress who plays Cynthia Rose, is also a real life hip-hopper, a
musician and a songwriter. She is central to this hip-hop performance by the Bellas. Their
performance makes everybody stand on their feet, applauding the girls for their brave song
choice and their excellent rendition. The space of hip-hop is traditionally a sexist space that
both objectifies women—especially black women—and promotes violence against them.
Pitch Perfect appropriates this male space, places an all-female group center stage, and
remakes the hip-hop spectacle. The black female presence is no longer objectified as a sexy
exhibit, but is shown to be a performer who manipulates the spectacle that takes place on the
stage. The films allows the girls to redefine themselves; they are “no longer victims but
champions, no longer muted but mouthy,” as Douglas explains when talking about the
feminist reappropriations that sometimes occur in popular culture (98).
The first successful appearance of the girls as unified sisterhood is visually solidified
when they have control over the performance that leads them to their conquest of the male-
dominated space of a cappella. Foreshadowed by their success in the hip-hop arena, this
infiltration into the male domain not only solidifies their bonding but also signals that they
are “no longer trapped by patriarchy but challenging it” (Douglas 98). Visually their success
is presented on the screen with a shot that foregrounds their spectacular hip hop performance;
in this shot the camera positions the group at the center of the screen, and thus at the center of
the spectators’ vision, displaying diverse types of femininity which are usually ignored or
objectified in popular culture. The fierce glances that the girls exchange with each other in
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this scene offer an empowering moment to the female audience. Feminism has emboldened
women to overthrow the sexist ideology that “primarily serves the interests of white
heterosexual masculinity” (Modleski, Feminism Without Women 134). The women creators
behind Pitch Perfect take a feminist stand in favor of sisterhood; they hope that women will
be able to break the glass ceiling of the male-dominated genre of comedy, and make a
difference in the way Hollywood portrays women in popular comedies and in the way it
treats then when they are behind the camera.
The feminist message in Pitch Perfect can be detected in a) the representation of each
female character as an individual of equal worth, b) the depiction of a strong, empowering
sisterhood, and c) the happy ending, when the girls are named national a cappella champions.
As my analysis has shown, despite its subtle feminist approach, Pitch Perfect pinpoints the
need for positive representations of femininities and for the inclusion of a variety of female
voices which will empower the female audience in the genre of comedy and popular cinema.
Pitch Perfect challenges the sexist cultural assumptions that regularly marginalize, vilify, and
objectify femininity in American popular culture. Through its subversive satire, its parody of
fixed gender roles, and its deconstruction of the sexist norms, the film constructs a new space
for the representation of diverse models of femininity, usually absent from popular cinema.
The strategy of recycling Hollywood’s sexist archetypes and then exploding them through
hyperbole and exaggerated performances seems to be very effective. The political stand of its
creators in favor of a strong sisterhood constitutes Pitch Perfect a feminist discourse with an
agenda to empower the female viewers, while they are enjoying the film. Having established
the importance of sisterhood in the original film, the producers take a much more forward
feminist stand in the sequel, Pitch Perfect 2 (2015), directed this time by an “out and proud”
feminist Elizabeth Banks. Thanks to the financial success of Pitch Perfect, the sequel is
“legitimized” as an openly feminist discourse. Hollywood may be male-dominated but that
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does not mean that no cinematic space can be found for female-centered movies, created and
produced by women for women. The original film and its more daring sequel have made the
first steps toward reclaiming this cinematic space, favorable to the formation of a feminist
tradition in the genre of comedy.
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CHAPTER TWO
Reclaiming the F-word: Elizabeth Banks’ Pitch Perfect 2
Although an independent production and a gynocentric comedy created by women,
with a scenario focusing on a group of female students trying to break into the male-
dominated world of collegiate a cappella, the original film, Pitch Perfect, did exceptionally
well in the box-office. Its financial success surpassed all expectations and was quite a
surprise considering the movie’s small budget. What put Pitch Perfect in the limelight was
the rave reviews on the Internet; these reviews talked about Cannon’s “brilliant characters”
(qtd. in Clarke), or about girls who are shown to be “funny, weird, real, and most excitingly,
confident” (qtd. in Beck). Such comments followed a pattern set by the filmmakers; with
subtle hints they pass a positive message regarding the importance of popular, female-driven
movies that promote sisterhood and female empowerment. In this pattern one talks around the
F-word but never explicitly states it. The reviews and discussions that flooded the Internet
soon transformed the film, Pitch Perfect, into a popular phenomenon. This unprecedented
popularity on the web helped the actresses, Rebel Wilson and Anna Kendrick (two new and
impressively prolific stars) to enter Hollywood. In addition, the movie’s most popular song—
the Cups song—became viral and dominated the Billboard’s top 10 for weeks. The movie
won a number of Teen Choice Awards proving its appeal to female teenagers and young
adults. All these events led to the announcement of a Christmas album to further financially
exploit the brand of Pitch Perfect; the movie’s soundtrack became the bestselling album of
2013. Most importantly, the film’s success led to the production of a sequel.
Pitch Perfect 2 (2015), directed by Elizabeth Banks (her first major feature film),
confirmed the huge impact of the original movie within three days of its release. According to
the Walt Street Journal, it earned the top spot in the domestic box-office with $69.2 million,
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an unprecedented number considering its independent status (qtd. in Ayers). It was estimated
that 75% of the audience was female and 62% under the age of 25 (qtd. in Ayers). These
numbers further suggested the great appeal of the movie to young female adults and
teenagers. In a review the commentator stated that “Elizabeth Banks makes Pitch Perfect 2 a
feminist dream and one of the fiercest movies of the year” (qtd. in Semigran). Apparently, the
sequel’s bold feminist position was easy to detect. This meant that the film’s discourse could
be labeled as feminist without the anxiety that accompanied the first film.
After Pitch Perfect was embraced as a cultural phenomenon, it was no longer necessary
to be reticent about its feminism. Banks (a feminist herself) decided to direct the sequel Pitch
Perfect 2. According to Variety, she made a point of making female empowerment the
movie’s “mission statement” (qtd. in Lodge). In the second movie, Banks focuses on the
already established sisterhood between the female characters. Through her directing style, she
proposes a democratization of screen time; Banks avoids the typical convention of
Hollywood comedies to foreground one protagonist; instead she includes a greater number of
named female characters and allocates more time to female talk. The screen time given to the
male characters is almost non-existent compared to the first movie. The romance that
monopolized the interest in Pitch Perfect is given secondary importance. Banks’ directing
style is more confident in the sequel when it comes to the portrayal of the girls. The male
gaze is still harshly criticized in many sequences that now point towards Hollywood’s sexist
tendencies in a more obvious way. The plurality of female voices included in the sequel is
more about providing positive images of femininities in popular cinema and less about
satirizing the sexist ones, as was the case with the first movie. The point is to make female
empowerment the central statement of Pitch Perfect 2; a statement accompanied (before and
after the movie’s release as well as during the promotion tour) with relevant comments on the
part of Elizabeth Banks. Both the director and the movie’s cast openly discussed women’s
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rights and proclaimed themselves as feminists. Banks stated on many occasions (when asked
about the movie’s message) that she is a champion of feminism: “And I am a feminist: I am
not afraid of that word. I love it and I spend a lot of my time fighting for women and also
trying to lead by example,” she once said to Caitlin Hobbs of Edge magazine. Within this
more straightforward feminist discourse, she revealed that it was very important for her to be
the producer of both movies in order to ensure that the women working for them would earn
the same pay as the men when performing the same assignments. Banks began participating
in many “Women in Film” conferences and offering messages of empowerment and strength.
She constantly encouraged women to fight for equality in the movie industry and all
professions in general. At a Sundance “Women in Film” breakfast she said to an audience full
of young women:
We are up against something which is the entirety of human history
women have never had equality in the world, not even here in the
great United States. We still don’t have it. That’s a big thing to
overcome. It’s not going to happen overnight, so we gotta have these
models for the new generation. (qtd. in Siegel)
That sexism still plagues Hollywood and the American film industry is well documented.
That feminism, or the F-word, are suspicious in Hollywood and in many conservative social
quarters in the United States is also an indisputable fact. In this hostile environment, films
with a clear feminist message are not expected to be box-office hits. That is why the two
films produced by Elizabeth Banks are so significant; they dare articulate a message that
challenges the fixed beliefs of the mainstream culture and the conventions of Hollywood
comedy, bravely taking a stand in favor of feminist discourse in popular cinema.
Pitch Perfect 2 uses popular cinema as an appropriate locus for the promotion of
empowered female models, diverse female voices, and a variety of femininities. At the same
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time, it encourages young girls who consume popular Hollywood products to feel good about
who they are. Banks, Cannon, and the female protagonists adopt a bolder humor, more
forward in its critique of sexism. By playing down the female stereotypes and by criticizing
via humor the categories women are pushed into in Hollywood comedy, the creators of this
second film give a more serious dimension to their cinematic narrative. The ironic
reappropriation of female stereotypes so characteristic of the first movie is minimized in the
sequel. Banks devotes more visual space and time to the development and growth of the
characters as empowered women. She showcases a more mature and brave feminist criticism
in an attempt to actually offer alternatives to sexist stereotyping. Banks is aware of her own
responsibility when circulating sexist stereotypes to provide a satire and harsh critique of
sexism. In the first movie she underlined the existence of sexism in popular comedy in order
to critique it; in the sequel, Banks moves forward to solutions and is more straightforward in
the feminist message she broadcasts, a message that is needed more than ever in popular
culture. As Linda Mizejewski has suggested (in 2015) “women’s comedy has become a
primary site in mainstream popular culture where feminism speaks, talks back, and is
contested” (6). In my view, Banks’ Pitch Perfect 2 undoubtedly contributes to this recent
phenomenon. As I have already stated, during the promotion of the movie Banks used a more
direct feminist discourse to send a brave message about feminism. More importantly, Banks
made feminism and female empowerment her movie’s thesis, which is supported by her
directorial style, the visual representations, the editing mode, and the performance choices.
Directorial choices like the “muffgate” montage sequence or the quick edits used in the girls’
pillow fight scene in combination with the powerful development of certain female
characters, with the discursive “coming-out” of Beca as a feminist, and with the addition of a
Latina to the female cast as a source of political humor, all make the sequel an example of
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feminist cinema, which tries to empower its female spectators by allowing them to visually
consume more diversified images of girls.
Whether they explicitly express it with words or not, cinematic young women who are
independent, confident, intelligent, and beautiful, who assert their individuality and have an
active persona are considered feminists. Mary Ann Doane has pointed out that there is an
episteme surrounding the cinematic presence of women; it assigns them “a special place in
cinematic representation while denying [them] access to this system” (179). By establishing
and promoting herself as the movie’s producer and director and by developing her characters
as independent cinematic subjects, each with their own story, Banks subverts this systemic
exclusion of women. It is women directors like Elizabeth Banks who inscribe an alternative
worldview into popular cinematic discourses through the circulation of positive messages
about female independence, women’s empowerment and social equality (things far from
being givens even today). Both her strong presence as a filmmaker associated with the Pitch
Perfect movies and the success of these movies have proven that women can also thrive in
popular comedy cinema. As a consequence of the financial success and widespread
popularity of these movies, and because of the films’ either obvious feminist text or hidden
feminist subtext, Hollywood now finds itself forced to discuss issues that can only be
characterized as feminist: the wage gap, the need for more women behind the camera, the
need for more roles for women from racial minorities or for older women. In other words, the
need to put a stop to the entrenched Hollywood sexism which popular cinema usually
promotes as the norm or at the very best as harmless humor.
Before proceeding with the analysis of Pitch Perfect 2 it is necessary to summarize
the plot. The sequel is set three years after the events of the first movie, closer to the real time
of the film’s release. It begins with the Bellas (now successful) performing at Kennedy
Center in the presence of the President of the United States, Barack Obama. The President is
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added digitally in the sequence; his presence, although obviously fake, solidifies the Bellas’
recent success and their prestige in the a cappella world. Unfortunately, their performance
ends in complete disaster—in true Bellas fashion—so the rest of the movie presents the
team’s efforts to reinstate their lost status and right to perform. For the most part, however, it
actually focuses on the key to this re-instatement, which is none other than the strengthening
of the bonds of sisterhood. This plot allows Banks to construct her feminist message: women
should support each other on the road to self-empowerment and success; a message only
subtly implied in the first movie directed by Jason Moore. The comedic style of the movie is
the vehicle of this message.
In her political satire, Banks plays with the patriarchal assumptions about femininity.
Her different style in directing the sequel is evident; it deviates from the first movie’s typical
focus on two or three central female characters. Instead Banks makes an effort to include as
many women as possible in each and every shot, scene, and sequence. Moreover, she
undermines the traditional comedic structure that moves from disaster to resolution and
reaches its happy ending through the conventional journey of a heterosexual couple towards a
typical marriage. In the sequel, Banks does offer a happy ending but of a different kind; it is
female friendship and female bonding. Both discursively and visually Banks projects a sense
of solidarity and community, aspects significantly central for a typically feminist
consciousness that the movie seems to adopt (Modleski, Feminism Without Women 17). One
of the ways that Banks, as a director, encourages feminism and female empowerment is
through the feminist performances of the actresses. To define “feminist performance” I will
use Radulescu’s theory. Radulescu construes feminist performance as a performative and
narrative style that “pays attention to women” (120). This means that the narrative is
preoccupied with issues concerning “women’s status in society, from sexuality, to
motherhood, to relations with men, to violence against women” (Radulescu 120). According
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to Radulescu, feminist narratives place the female voice and presence at the center of the
viewer’s attention through “performative and discursive techniques” which represent the
female individual as “subject and not as object of the male gaze” (120). In Pitch Perfect 2,
the female presence is placed center stage. Unlike the first movie, where the male presence
was more evident—with Jesse being the obvious male protagonist and love-interest of Beca,
the female protagonist—the sequel minimizes the romantic element and confines Jesse to the
background as supporting character. This change in the film’s script makes Banks’ comedy a
narrative that deals primarily with women’s issues. An intelligent move on the part of the
director, it creates the space and time needed, so that Banks can include straightforward
commentary about problems that women—especially in her industry—face on a daily basis. I
am specifically referring to the “muffgate” incident and Banks’ scathing montage right at the
beginning of the movie which forecasts her intentions to dress the sequel with an even more
transgressive humor. According to Radulescu, transgressive humor is the appropriate means
to transcend traditional sexist positions and treat patriarchal values sarcastically in order to
legitimize a feminist critique as the only way to expose and eliminate such practices that
permeate the industry of Hollywood (120).
In the introductory scene of the sequel the Bellas face yet another public humiliation
that is even worse than Aubrey’s projectile vomit in the first movie. In a transgressively
risqué acrobatic dancing routine for a plus-sized woman, Fat Amy faces a wardrobe
malfunction while she balances through sheets that hang on the roof. The malfunction results
in the revelation of her private female organs in the “historical Kennedy Center” (as the
commentators say) and in the presence of President Barack Obama. Banks cuts this hilarious
scene (which features the two commentators, John and Gale, describing the events that occur
on the stage as a disaster) with a visual transition to a quick montage of real-life American
media and morning television personalities reporting on the incident as the ultimate scandal
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that shocked America’s morality. The scandal is named “muffgate” by the media; the news
people discussing it make the following comments: “All the authorities have ruled out
terrorism as a motive”; “Filth. Women who sing is just another example of cultural decay and
loose morals”; “It’s a national disgrace.” Banks includes sets that mirror America’s morning
television in order to associate gossip and the vilification of women who appear in the public
sphere with morning TV shows making a living by scrutinizing people’s lives. By people I
mean celebrities and by celebrities I mean female celebrities. As McCabe observes, the
American media construct women as sex objects (7). But it is not only sexism in the media
that Banks is after. In this scene where an all-female group takes center stage at Kennedy
Center, an incident like “muffgate” constitutes a subconscious threat to American morality; it
projects a liberating empowerment with an American woman publicly showing her hidden
privates that should be reserved only for motherhood. Such an exposure of the female
genitalia can be interpreted as a social threat, as an indirect way to corrupt the minds of
young and innocent American girls. Banks constructs this montage to mirror the American
media culture, capturing the moment when accidental exposures of the female body result in
“girls [being] vilified from all sides” (qtd. in Lodge). As Kristen Page-Kirby notes, the way
Banks construes this incident “echoes real life celebrity wardrobe malfunctions and society’s
obsession with control of the female form” (qtd. in Curtotti). Bank bases her scene and
montage on comical exaggeration; she shows a collegiate a cappella female group performing
at Kennedy Center with the Bellas putting on an extravagant performance that includes
fireworks and acrobatics. Then she shifts the audience’s attention to the media furor; the
news people transform an obvious accident into a terrorist attack. Through these visual and
discursive exaggerations, Banks means to expose the “media-fueled ‘outrage culture’”
against women who hold public positions (qtd. in Lodge).
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It is well known that Banks is a Hillary Clinton supporter. During the 2008
presidential campaign Hillary Clinton was constantly “demonized” by the American media,
which focused on her external appearance and her age; because she was a feminist and a
woman who dared to appear and speak in public, she was made an object of derision
(Douglas 269). Banks mirrors this media outrageous reaction against Hillary Clinton in her
film. In Pitch Perfect 2, Banks utilizes bold and transgressive humor, the kind that Radulescu
classifies as humor that “resists and denounces” entrenched patriarchal values (231). Banks’
montage is meant to make her female audience laugh at the hyperbolic and outrageously
familiar reality of the vilification of women in pubic space by the sexist American media. As
Radulescu observes, “it is largely the women at the audience who laugh wholeheartedly: first
because they recognize the scripts of their inequities, secondly because they experience
satisfaction at seeing these scripts subverted” (160). The film’s introductory sequence signals
the director’s intention to use humor both as an empowering and soothing device and make
the female audience recognize many of the social issues and imposed limitations that they
have to face every day. Moreover, through humor Banks exposes the sexist practices of the
movie industry and its tendency to marginalize and objectify women. In this way, Banks
pinpoints the need for more feminist popular movies like her own, movies that are female-
inclusive and subversive so that they can shake the Hollywood status quo.
Far more straightforward politically and explicitly feminist, the montage sequences in
the sequel reveal Banks’ intention to engage the audience with feminism openly. One way
that gender issues are visually translated in cinema is through the subversion of particular
female representations or with the inclusion of spaces and performances that sometimes blur
the “boundaries between actor and character” (Radulescu 188). This is exactly what Banks
does in the case of Beca, a major character in the sequel. Played by the actress Anna
Kendrick, Beca is represented as a constantly-unimpressed-by-college-life girl who aspires to
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become a successful music producer. Her performance includes some eye-rolling and very
few to almost non-existent smiles. This character resembles Kendrick’s public persona.
Kendrick usually appears in interviews and on red carpets as a woman who does not abide by
Hollywood’s expectations of princess-like actresses who just smile and make cute comments.
On many occasions Kendrick’s stance brought media fury upon her person. Whether it was a
twitter war or a morning television debate, people argued about Kendrick’s numb facial
expressions and her now-more-famous-than-her-performances “resting bitch face”; this
phrase was used by various media to describe Kendrick’s neutral pose in photographs for
which she posed with her arms crossed and without a smile. Banks exploits this media
scrutiny of Kendrick in the sequel by having the actress project her resting bitch face as
emphatically as she can. Even in the movie’s promotion poster all the other girls surround
Kendrick, who stands at the center with her arms crossed and dons the expression of a bitch.
In the film, Kendrick recreates her infamous pose during the graduation photo. In a
subversive move which blends her real personality with that of the fictional character, the
actress emphatically broadcasts her denial to yield to media expectations and to web bullies
who try to police her image. Kendrick performs Beca as the young woman who remains
unimpressed with college life and eschews any behavior that signals fragile femininity. Beca
is a source of laughter because she deliberately subverts the directives of her gender. As
Russell argues, women who possess a transgressive confidence, are openly antagonistic, and
make an audience laugh with their wit are perfect vehicles with which to challenge the notion
of an “appropriate femininity” (Mizejewski 16). Both Banks and Kendrick collaborate to
challenge the traditional feminine model by presenting Beca as an intelligent woman who
refuses to go by the rules and who opposes the culture-specific expectations that want
females to have wide and pleasant smiles on their faces, as well as a feminine body posture,
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when seen in public. The construction of Beca’s character as an “out and proud” feminist has
had a positive response.
Besides Kendrick’s emphatic performance in the film, the character of Beca became a
trend on the Internet via a popular “crusade”; girls began recreating Beca’s fierce resting
bitch face and posting it on Kendrick’s twitter profile with the worldwide trending hashtag
#BecaEffinMitchell. This reaction on the part of the fans constitutes a strong commentary
against the public policing of women, be they actresses or ordinary women. The spontaneous
participation of the female audience and the effort to express their support both to Beca and
to Kendrick prove that the cinematic sisterhood has transcended the movie screen. The fact
that the Pitch Perfect movies became a popular phenomenon testifies that women both desire
and need positive popular discourses that bring feminist concerns back to the surface and
reject any postfeminist claims that in the contemporary American society there is no longer
any reason to support feminism. Kendrick’s ascent to stardom can be seen “as an interactive,
ongoing experience in which the desires of audiences create new energies” (Mizejewski 213).
In the case of the sequel, the energy triggered by the audience points to the fact that women
do want to identify with non-traditional female models, do appreciate narratives that express
their frustrations, and do enjoy transgressive feminist humor that celebrates female “wit and
comedy over marginalization or contempt” (Mizejewski 213). That there is a widespread
need for positive, smart, funny, feminist female voices in cinematic comedy that will
revitalize the notion of sisterhood is also evident in the reaction of the fans. The cinematic
sisterhood featured in the Pitch Perfect films has triggered the formation of an off-screen
group of fans who, in an effort to establish a group identity, call themselves “Pitches.” This
fact not only speaks volumes of the movie’s feminist agenda and its influence on the
spectators, but also reveals that the premature dismissal and media derision of feminism has
left women without connecting bonds. As Annete Kuhn states “the potential of female or
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feminist audiences as communities is an issue of obvious relevance to questions of feminism”
(197). Because the Pitch Perfect movies try to reinstate feminist discourse as relevant to
women’s lives they have a strong appeal to female audiences. Moreover, I strongly agree
with Andi Zeisler who suggests that popular culture cannot be dismissed as being “just”
entertainment (4). There have been many occasions throughout pop culture’s history when
people assembled in movie theaters and concert arenas, or attended readings by authors or
demonstrations by artists, or gathered to discuss their favorite shows, movies, and books
(Ferniss and Young 132). The same has happened on several occasions with the “Pitches”;
anxiously waiting the release of the sequel they never failed to share their enthusiasm on the
personal sites of either Banks or of the actresses in the social media. As Ferniss and Young
explain, “such gatherings make concrete […] cultural practices that link people across a maze
of different and competing social positions” (132). The “Pitches” fans are important for the
Pitch Perfect movies and confirm the assertion that such “performances create communities
through laughter” (Radulescu 1). The producers make an effort to include the fans during
screenings, conferences, and other public events because they realize that non-traditional
comedies can facilitate the spectators’ response “to the insults and injuries inflicted upon
women through sexist humor and to various forms of gender inequity in society at large”
(Radulescu 1). Pitch Perfect 2 can easily be classified as a feminist discourse which uses
humor to raise women’s awareness, offers positive images of femininities, and encourages
women to rebel against the sexist practices that belittle them (Radulescu 218). The financial
success of the first movie in combination with the establishment of a community of sisters
beyond the screen attests to the fact that Banks’ feminist message that targets Hollywood
sexism and her efforts to construct alternative models of femininities seem to be widely
appreciated by American women.
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In the sequel, the feminist agenda is more distinguishable thanks to Kendrick’s
performance. But it is Kendrick’s actual personality and social status that have given
credibility and empowerment to the character of Beca on the screen. In the recent years,
Kendrick has become one of Hollywood’s A-list actresses, with an academy award
nomination and critically acclaimed as well as financially successful movies. She is a white,
heterosexual, abled-body woman who holds a privileged position of power and influence; a
fact which she intelligently exploits to make political comments that promote feminism,
knowing that her words will influence many young women. For instance, when she was
asked about the hate that women who identify as feminists receive, she stated:
There is a word for gender equality—and that's feminism. It's a very
female-centric word. I feel like the word can be appropriated by the
wrong people for that reason and misinterpreted by those people, but
you just have to fight back and own that word. It's practically
become a curse word. Somebody says, "Oh, you're being such a
feminist," and you're supposed to be like, "No I'm not." Why are we
afraid of that word? It exists and we can't get rid of it, so let's fight
for it and embrace it. (qtd. in Clover)
Susan Bordo has accurately noted that celebrities are never just about good or bad images on
the screen; they actually have a very emotional impact on the audience, on the people that
follow them (qtd. in Mizejewski 194). In fact, the body of a celebrity can convey
psychological and social meanings emphasizing her individuality and helping audiences
connect to it (Dyer 9). Aware of Kendrick’s star status and of her public statements on
feminism, Banks, the director, exploits the connection between Beca’s character and
Kendrick’s real life personality. By depicting Beca as an “out and proud” feminist in Pitch
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Perfect 2, Banks has the opportunity to voice explicitly feminist anxieties that burden women
both in Hollywood and in the American society.
There is a scene in Pitch Perfect 2 which mirrors the deliberately hyperbolic sexist
scenes that are ironically appropriated in Pitch Perfect to expose the entrenched sexism of
popular cinema. In this scene the Bellas engage in a pillow fight in their sorority house.
Banks deliberately sets this scene in the sorority house to reflect the conventional male-
centric Hollywood comedies that depict sorority girls as wild sexual animals ready to engage
in extreme sexual activities for the pleasure of the teenage boys—the target audience of such
movies—and for augmenting their fantasies. The pillow fight is structured as a sexualized
scene; ten girls in very short and revealing pajamas jump up and down, accentuating their
curves, and hit each other with feathered pillows. To harshly satirize such scenes, Banks uses
an extreme slow motion and transforms the pillow fight into a hilarious, ridiculous and
clownish spectacle. Like the shower scene in the first movie, the pillow fight has no
narratological or plot service. Banks includes it in order to comment on the practice of
Hollywood to systematically objectify women and reduce them to a spectacle of sexy
femininity ready to please the male gaze.
Taking advantage of Kendrick’s feminist beliefs, Banks leaves her out of the pillow
fight; instead, she has Beca walk in the middle of it and captures her reaction: Beca dons a
scolding and disapproving facial expression and wonders what she is looking at. Then she
makes her feelings clear by saying: “You know this sets women back like thirty years”; she
also performs an eye-wink. With Beca’s straightforward comment about the women’s
movement, Banks manages to assert that a feminist critique may be necessary in cinematic
discourse if women directors are ever going to eliminate the sexist stereotypes in popular
cinema. Beca’s comment would have been too blatant for the first movie, in which Banks
tries to hide her feminism and refrain from using the dreaded F-word so as not to drive
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audiences away. But the success of the original film has allowed Banks not only to expose a
harsh Hollywood reality but also to make her feminist message more explicit. As pointed out
by Mizejewski, feminism has recently regained visibility in popular culture, but it “has also
gained renewed loathing,” so we can understand the reluctance of the film’s executives to let
Pitch Perfect “come out” as a feminist comedy right from the start (25).
Another obvious change in the narrative of the sequel is the way Banks deals with the
romance between Beca and Jesse. She downgrades the male protagonist of Pitch Perfect to a
supporting, discrete, barely noticeable presence in Pitch Perfect 2. Whereas the romance
subplot accompanies the Bellas’ journey towards the a cappella championship in the first
movie, the love relationship (Beca/Jesse) recedes into the background in the sequel; Jesse is
given an almost cameo appearance, passing through Beca’s busy day and barely having any
lines. In Pitch Perfect the romance follows the typical structure: the cute interaction, the
falling in love, the crisis climax, and the resolution, leading to the happy ending. Comedies
usually conclude with a heterosexual marriage. At the end of the movie, Beca and Jesse do
not get married but they do have a typical love scene in which Beca performs the big
romantic gesture singing, “Don’t you forget about me,” a movie soundtrack introduced to her
by Jesse. Beca is the one who fights for Jesse and tries to win him back, showing that Pitch
Perfect agrees with Rowe’s point that “love is one of the few areas where Hollywood allows
women to take charge” (180). Thus, the Beca/Jesse love story ends with a big romantic kiss
in the first movie. It is a double happy ending: the Bellas win the competition and Beca wins
Jesse. In the sequel, as I have already mentioned, Banks shift the focus of the narrative to
Beca’s job aspirations and her commitment to the Bellas. Her relationship with Jesse is a part
of her life but not the dominant one. Instead of giving the audience a heterosexual love story,
Banks give them the Bellas’ sisterhood. She features female friendships and relationships as
the core of the plot and the key to the sequel’s resolution.
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Banks begins the second movie with the established sisterhood, now facing a crisis
due to the “muffgate” scandal; the sisters lose their sound and give disastrous performances.
This fact threatens to break them up and climaxes when Beca and Chloe—the two captains of
the Bellas who are very close friends—begin to fight about their commitment to the
sisterhood and to the Bellas’ aspirations. After a short separation, the Bellas are given the
typical reconciliation sequence a heterosexual couple would get, with a scene which Banks
structures as the epitome of romantic gestures for a college sorority: all the girls gather
around a fire, in a touching, bonding moment of confessions; then Beca admits that the
Bellas’ sisterhood “is for life.” Mirroring her expression of love for Jesse in the first movie,
Banks has Beca make a love confession to her Bellas sisters: “You know when I’ll look back
on this, I won’t remember performing or competing. I’ll remember you weirdos.” Her love
affair with Jesse is not even mentioned as an important part of her college life, something that
she will reminisce when she is older. Kendrick delivers these words to mimic the
performance of lovers. The performance is further accentuated by the looks she exchanges
with Chloe, with whom she has actually had many innocent homoerotic interactions
throughout both movies. Then Chloe starts singing, “When I’m gone” to Beca, the song Beca
performed in her Bellas audition. Shortly, the other girls join her in the singing. Thus Banks
brings their story into a romantic-like full circle structure.
In this scene with the girls around the fire, singing and managing to finally “find [their
lost] sound,” Banks eroticizes the Bellas’ sisterhood with the familiarly soothing campfire
iconography which powerfully provides the visual space for the brave promotion of “female
empowerment through female bonding” (Ferniss and Young 111). In other words, Banks has
the sisterhood take up the plotline of the heterosexual romance that usually monopolizes the
time and space of popular cinema. In this way, she comments on the importance of presenting
more aspects of a woman’s experience than simply focusing on the compulsive portrayal of a
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woman’s need for a man, as it happens in popular comedies. In Pitch Perfect 2, Banks resists
and takes a stand against the Hollywood promotion of “the essence of conventional
femininity” as “the pursuit of heterosexual love” (Rowe 27). Sisterhood and female support
are significant aspects of a woman’s experience and survival but have been largely ignored
by popular cinema and film comedies in particular. Banks attempts to reappropriate the space
of heterosexual romance in Pitch Perfect 2 and to display the necessity for cinematic
depictions of female relationships of support and friendship. This is further underlined by the
way she chooses to end Pitch Perfect 2; the Bellas perform in the a cappella world
championship and win it thanks to the presence of older generations of Bellas who
accompany them on stage. Thus, the happy ending is achieved through the ultimate gesture of
female solidarity and bonding. Banks overflows the stage with women of the older
generations of Bellas who appear to support the girls and help them win as a tribute to the
feminist waves. As Modleski has claimed, women need to get together and form a
“subculture” in order to “develop a system of values that will effectively challenge and
undermine an increasingly hegemonic patriarchal ideology” (Feminism Without Women 43).
This seems to be Banks’ point. The final scene unites the girls with their mothers and
grandmothers, merging together different generations of feminists. In this way, according to
The Washington Post, Pitch Perfect 2 “creates a world where feminism is simply the norm”
(qtd. in Page-Kirby).
In terms of visual representation, Banks builds this scene as a spectacle, but does not
try to impress the audience with props or choreography; instead Banks structures the final
scene plainly when it comes to visuals, focusing on emotionality, a characteristic traditionally
linked with womanhood. She uses romantic imagery, plays with light and darkness, and
centers the camera on the plurality of female faces and voices on the stage. She directs this
scene in a way that will appeal to and move her female viewers. It is a political moment of
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triumph that promotes female solidarity and displays female empowerment as the happy
ending of Pitch Perfect 2. The older generations of Bellas appearing on stage represent the
former generations of feminists who fought to create a female tradition that has now been
taken up by their daughters and granddaughters. That the young women will continue the
legacy is implied by the final shot which—with an extreme close-up and strong lighting—
centers on Emily, the youngest Bella nicknamed “Legacy.”
It becomes obvious that in the sequel, Banks counters the recurrent dismissal of
female experiences and the objectification of women in Hollywood, and proposes a united
sisterhood, regardless of age, race, sexuality, that will bring women together in the
contemporary fight for social change. One way to contribute to this fight is to construct more
positive and authentic representations of women on the screen. Another way is to employ
women in jobs behind the camera. Pitch Perfect 2 contributes to both.
In addition, Banks subverts the dominance of the heterosexual romantic couple in
Hollywood comedy. Whereas in Pitch Perfect the romance between Beca and Jesse is treated
realistically, the love affair between Fat Amy and Bumper in the sequel is visually structured
as a parody of the first movie’s romance. The sexual relationship between Bumper and Amy
is a recurring joke between Rebel Wilson and Adam Devine, the two actors portraying these
two characters in both movies. In the sequel, the two a cappella legends seem to be attracted
to each other. Bumper stages a fairytale/dream-like romantic dinner setting and in true
chivalric manner proposes to Amy to be his girlfriend. The latter quickly flees the dinner
claiming her independence. However, she soon realizes that she is in love with Bumper and
runs to find him. Unfortunately, she gets caught in a bear trap that prevents her from reaching
Bumper. The viewers, now familiar with Banks’ ironic humor, cannot help but connect
Amy’s fall into the bear trap with the movie’s comment on the entrapment of compulsory
heterosexuality. Strategically, Banks first sets up the romantic plot (which supposedly
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appeals to female viewers of popular movies), exploits the cultural assumption that a
romantic relationship is the only road to happiness for women and then proceeds to
deconstruct it by minimizing the romance and emphasizing the weird slapstick comedy. After
the bear trap incident Fat Amy still wants to get back to Bumper. On the following day, she
decides to publicly stage a grand romantic gesture, which balances between romance and
ultimate “cheesiness.” With this scene, Banks satirizes the genre’s romantic conventions as
well as Beca’s romantic gesture in the first movie (shown to publicly sing to Jesse in order to
win him back). In this ironic romantic scene, Fat Amy mimics Beca. However, Rebel
Wilson’s performance in combination with Banks’ directing choices construct this romantic
gesture as the ultimate parody of the typical romantic scenes found in Hollywood comedy.
Fat Amy is shown to sing while she is rowing a boat and crossing a street. She noticeably
loses her breath; she is almost hit by a car; she interrupts her singing to have a quick fight
with the driver. Usually, in the genre’s romantic scenes, it is a man (impeccably dressed and
glamorously good-looking) who makes the romantic gesture. To deconstruct this convention,
Banks focuses the camera on Fat Amy’s sweating body, on the shortness of her breath, and
on her rather unladylike movements. As the car that almost hits Fat Amy moves on, the
playback music magically resumes exactly from the point her song was interrupted,
demonstrating to the viewers the constructed nature of film romances. Finally, Fat Amy
reaches Bumper who accompanies her in her song. Banks cuts the song short in order to show
the two lovers hugging, kissing, and rolling in the grass in an inappropriate manner; then she
shifts the focus on their friends, who shut their eyes and walk towards the house looking
disgusted and appalled by the spectacle they were obliged to witness. By staging this
inappropriate public display of affection between Fat Amy and Bumper, Banks mocks similar
scenes of unrestrained eroticism. As Shayne Lee explains, sometimes feminist comedy may
include an inappropriately explicit sexual scene “that challenges the politics of respectability”
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and subvert stereotypes (98). Apparently, Banks targets the fairytale cinematic imagery
surrounding a romantic couple in the typical happy ending, in order to comment on the
constructed and unrealistic nature of such scenes. She stages a farce of romantic scenes, uses
hyperbole and irony, and subverts the genre’s conventions to point out that heterosexual
romance as the culmination of a movie’s happy ending sends the wrong signal to young girls
and distracts them from reality.
The focus on the love affair between Fat Amy and Bumper in the sequel instead of
the romance between Beca and Jesse has a dual function of subversion. Although not blonde,
Beca and Jesse constitute the traditional, white, beautiful, glamorous couple, Hollywood
loves to promote in popular movies. Kay Cannon, the movie’s scriptwriter, has admitted in an
interview in Salon that during the production of the first movie she was constantly “getting
notes by the studio” to add more romantic scenes between Beca and Jesse (qtd. in Silman).
Her answer was: “guys this is a movie about a group of underdog, rag-tag gals, who are
competing in this a cappella competition. This isn’t about the romance” (qtd. in Silman). In
the sequel, Cannon was able to downplay the affair between Beca and Jesse and focus instead
on Fat Amy and Bumper. Despite the fact that these two are also white, they cannot be easily
classified as the shiny Hollywood couple that producers want to see in a summer movie. Fat
Amy has a body, the kind Hollywood loves to hate or ignore. Hollywood has been reluctant
to picture fat female bodies “in the most popular stories of heterosexuality and romance”
(Mizejewski 190). According to Max Handelman, one of the movie’s producers, Banks
wanted to give Fat Amy a love story because, as he stated, “it is something you don’t see very
often with characters like that” (qtd. in Tauber and Dugan). Pitch Perfect 2 resists this
Hollywood reluctance; it positions Rebel Wilson at the core of its romantic narrative and goes
as far as to give her anti-Hollywood female body a romantically happy ending. Moreover,
Pitch Perfect 2 gives Fat Amy her heterosexual romantic ending after having established her
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(in both movies) as the kind of independent woman who knows what she wants and is not
afraid to fight to get it. Fat Amy has been constantly shown to be the sanest girl among the
Bellas, despite her crazy comic moments of screwball comedy, which Wilson used in order to
satirize the way Hollywood treats the oversized female body. She is portrayed to be the one
to call the shots in her relationship with Bumper and is never shown to compulsively seek for
a guy’s attention or approval to be who she is. This is why she at first rejects Bumper’s
romantic gesture, underlining the importance of choice for a young woman who is not
obliged to be with a guy just because he staged the typical romantic scene that supposedly
makes a woman hormone-crazy and unable to resist. Amy becomes a couple with Bumper
when she decides this is what she wants. Actually she is the one who positions herself as the
cinematic romantic hero; a space usually reserved for male actors performing the romantic
gestures. As Cannon has stated, “Fat Amy and Bumper have this romantic situation, but Fat
Amy wouldn’t talk about it with her girlfriends. And she wasn’t sharing like ‘what do I do,
should I be with him?’ or anything like that. I was purposely trying not to make it about them
with guys” (qtd. in Silman). Banks and Cannon’s insistence to include this rather
unconventional couple as the sequel’s romantic focus reveals their political intention to
subvert the romantic conventions of Hollywood films. As Rowe has noted, Hollywood often
“reinforces the ideology of traditional heterosexuality, which eroticizes an imbalance of
power based on feminine submissiveness and masculine dominance” (180). In Pitch Perfect
2, Banks resists this power imbalance by underlining Fat Amy’s strong personality, by
placing her as one of the Bellas’ leader, and by depicting her as a supportive friend to her
“sisters.” At the same time, she makes Fat Amy the heroine of the romantic story,
disregarding the limitations Hollywood narratives place on her unconventional obese body.
Thus far I have attempted to show that Banks took advantage of the first movie’s
success to include a bolder feminist message of female empowerment in the sequel, Pitch
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Perfect 2. While reluctant to make her feminism too obvious in the discourse of the first
movie, Banks now manages to touch upon Hollywood’s unreasonable fear of the F-word (a
concept that is supposedly pushing audiences away) and general frustration with empowering
female-centric popular discourses. The success of both movies has opened the way for even
more female-driven comedies that have dominated the box-office the last couple of years. In
short, whereas the script of Pitch Perfect is confined to having a feminist subtext and subtle
satire, the narrative of Pitch Perfect 2 includes a more straightforward feminist message. The
female characters of the first movie parody the way women are portrayed in comedies and
thus comment on the well-established Hollywood sexism, which is supposed to be taken as
harmless humor. The sequel, however, does not simply stick to the hyperbolic performances
and visual exaggerations that satirized the sexist classification of women in stereotypical
categories in comedies. In fact, Pitch Perfect 2 manages to propose a solution to the
stereotyping of women in film comedies; it does so by subverting the social expectations and
by providing new images of femininities, which resist the recycling of sexist female
archetypes that belittle and diminish women to sex objects and are used to entertain the male
gaze.
To the sisterhood, comprised mainly by white girls, the original movie adds a Black
and an Asian woman to achieve diversity. Both the character of Cynthia Rose—the black
lesbian—and of Lilly—the visibly Asian—are portrayed in a hyperbolic manner that mirrors,
mocks, and criticizes the Hollywood stereotypes of racially-specific females and their
containment into very specific comedic roles. On the one hand, Cynthia Rose is depicted as
the oversexualized masculine lesbian beast. On the other hand, Lilly (played by Hana Mae
Lee) stands for the “quiet, docile Asian female body” (Mizejewski 149); her quietness is
matched with an unnaturally low voice that it is very hard to hear when she speaks. Such
exaggerated cinematic representations parody the recycled stereotypes of minority females
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that appear in Hollywood films. They also target the sexist conventions which reduce women
either to “a stereotype or a cliché” (Mizejewski 132).
In Pitch Perfect 2 Banks adds a Latina character to the sisterhood, but she chooses a
slightly different approach for this ethnic role. Flo the Latina is a senior in Barden University
and the one responsible for the gymnastics-like dancing movements of the Bellas’
choreographies. This is a rather uncommon visual association of the Latina with gymnastics,
because usually Hispanic females are shown to be excellent salsa dancers. Banks chose
Chrissie Fit, an American actress of Cuban heritage, to play the role of Flo Fuentes.
Emphasizing her status as a foreigner, Chrissie Fit as Flo speaks with a thick Hispanic accent.
Banks makes sure that when Fit performs Flo, there is nothing about the character that would
remind the viewers of the stereotypical way the Latina character is depicted in Hollywood
comedies. Flo is neither a ridiculously oversexualized girl, nor is she a sassy maid, nor a loud
hairdresser. Banks avoids both the JLo and the Sofia Vergara-like archetypes reserved for
Latinas in Hollywood comedies. She does not include extreme close-ups emphasizing Flo’s
curves, like it happens in every Jennifer Lopez movie. The director avoids constructing the
Latina as a sexy, exotic bombshell. Instead Banks presents Flo as a very intelligent young
woman, who makes harsh political comments. Flo is funny but not an object of ridicule or the
butt of jokes. In fact, she is the valedictorian of her class, shown in the graduation photo
wearing the American valedictorian golden stoles. In Pitch Perfect 2, the representation of
Flo aims to subvert the established cinematic depictions of Latina women, who are usually
reduced to exotic, sexy bodies in order to entertain the male gaze. As Mizejewski claims, Flo
is the type of character “to contend against the norm, to demand public space and recognition
for an identity that has been dismissed” or cruelly objectified in popular cinema (132). As
directed by Banks, Flo offers an alternative Latina comedic character; she captures the
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viewers’ attention thanks to her witty, funny, and strictly political comments not by her sexy
curves.
One of the functions of Flo as a subversive character is to be the mouthpiece of
politically incorrect humor through which Banks critiques white privilege. Political
incorrectness has been a “boys-only-zone” in comedy (Mizejewski 2). Banks, the director and
Cannon, the scriptwriter, decide to subvert this practice. They have Flo utter the most
uncomfortable things with the risk of offending even people who watch the movie. Fit’s
politically powerful and satirical performance allows Flo to transcend the limitations of the
material that might offend many people. Discussing similar feminist performances by female
minority actresses, Modleski notes that they “bring out the subversive potential buried within
the text” (225). For instance, Flo satirizes as unimportant an incident, which the white female
characters perceive as the end of the world. The privileged Chloe thinks that losing their right
to compete in a cappella signifies the end of her life. Flo says to her indifferently: “You
know, before coming to Barden [University], I had diarrhea for seven years. But yes, this is
terrible.” Such politically incorrect humor mocks the gravity with which the white girls face
daily problems. Actually it functions as a commentary on those white women and men in the
movie industry who still ignore the experiences of women of color and silence their voices.
Banks herself is aware that although the narratives of both Pitch Perfect movies include
diverse femininities, at times they still fail to give central stage to Black, Asian or Hispanic
characters, who traditionally are presented as supporting sidekicks and are pushed to the
background. In the romantic scene when the Bellas are sitting around a campfire and
confessing their life dreams after college to their sisters, Banks gives time and forum to Flo to
comment on Hollywood’s reluctance to deal with important feminist issues and to depict
authentic experiences of minority females. When asked about her future, Flo blatantly says:
“after I graduate I’ll probably be deported and will probably die at sea while trying to re-enter
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the country.” Banks frames Flo’s words with a shot focusing on the facial expressions of the
other girls, who are shocked and uneasy and although they acknowledge the seriousness of
Flo’s comment they do not know how to react. Scenes like this one makes us realize that
what Banks is trying to do in Pitch Perfect 2 is indeed revolutionary. As Kuhn has stated,
feminist practices of representation “embody—in the quest for a ‘new voice,’ a
transformation of vision” (205). With Flo the Latina, Banks and Cannon present a woman
with the potential to transform public opinion. In an interview Chrissie Fit herself has said
that Flo’s humor was written and performed in a way that she hoped would start a
conversation about Latinos (qtd. in Terrero). The sequel obviously resists reducing the
Hispanic woman to a sexy stereotype (the Spanish-speaking equivalent of the dumb blonde)
and instead presents a strong, intelligent female character with a voice that delivers
significant political critique. Flo is not afraid to express what she is thinking or to use her
witty humor to touch upon serious issues that would never be brought up in a conventional
Hollywood comedy. Exploiting Flo’s fierceness, Fit and the creators of Pitch Perfect 2 offer
female audiences a new image, a positive cinematic Latina figure with a politically incorrect
humor and a transgressively powerful voice.
Although classified as feminist comedies advocating women’s rights in general and
women’s positive representation in popular discourses in particular, the Pitch Perfect movies
have faced a lot of criticism based on the fact that the feminism they promote is white. Most
of the characters are white women and those of them who are not are confined to supporting
roles usually manipulated for laughs. Many people dismiss the satirical disposition of the
movies and instead find offensive and racist the way the Black, the Asian, and the Latina
women are portrayed. Personally, I disagree with these conclusions. Taking into account the
white, heterosexual, upper-middle class status of the female creators of the two movies, I
argue that they did an excellent job trying not to step in the shoes of oppressed minority
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women and pretend to fight their fights for them. They do showcase the racism against these
women in Hollywood popular comedies. By incorporating the problems of sexism and racism
within an easy-to-digest comedy, Banks and Cannon have reached many people and started a
conversation about female representation in Hollywood films, about the cinematic
representation of women of color, and about the women working in the movie industry.
Maybe, as Mizejewski states, the creators did not analyze “how whiteness functions in these
texts as an enabling condition for the privileged heroines” (81). However, with their political
satire of Hollywood racism and sexism they did acknowledge the fact that some women are
simply more oppressed than others. In Pitch Perfect 2, Ester Dean playing Cynthia Rose is
given a line that proves that both Cannon and Banks are aware that the black women in film
“are in the most marginalized position” (Modleski 220). When Cynthia Rose blames Flo the
Latina for her fall on the stage, Flo hilariously replies, “sure, blame the minority.” To which
Cynthia Rose responds, “I’m black, gay and a woman,” implying that she is a member of a
minority with a triple liability. This short exchange between the two minority females is
evidence enough that both the scriptwriter and the director are conscious of the fact that in
American society some groups of women are more oppressed than others. At the same time,
it constitutes an instance of self-criticism. The creators give this line to Ester Dean, a black
woman and real-life lesbian, in acknowledgment that even feminist Hollywood is
dangerously white and that more Black, Hispanic, Asian, homosexual female presence is
needed in order for the glass ceiling to be broken once and for all. The movie industry needs
to realize that ethnic voices and non-white female characters need to be written into cinematic
narratives and films should also be directed by non-white women, who will vouch for the
representation of authentic female experiences not compromised by white privilege.
In conclusion, Pitch Perfect 2 takes advantage of the success of the first movie to
showcase a far more daring promotion of feminism. As the film’s director, Elizabeth Banks
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achieves this through a) the construction of the character of Beca as an “out and proud”
feminist; b) the demotion of the male characters into supporting presences; c) the mockery of
the necessary heterosexual love affair and the romantic scenes of comedic discourse; and d)
the inclusion of the Latina as a subversive character who resists the stereotypical
representation and offers empowering and uncomfortable humor of political importance.
Banks comments on the hypocrisy of Hollywood to avoid a straightforward feminist message
out of fear that the F-word would send male audiences away. Once financial success is no
longer an issue, women scriptwriters and directors have the luxury to produce female-driven
movies, to promote feminism, and to appeal to the long-ignored female audiences, who
apparently do bring money to Hollywood. Moreover, the overwhelming success of Pitch
Perfect 2 and the powerful sisterhood of “Pitches” that has transcended the cinematic limits
of the film proves two things: a) that female audiences long for female-driven movies
promoting empowered women of diverse backgrounds and b) that women contrary to popular
belief can create successful comedies, the success of which is not compromised by a
powerful feminist message. Thus, Pitch Perfect 2 has indeed proven that Hollywood needs
gynocentric movies made by women. In recent years, similar cinematic discourses have
started to appear in Hollywood. However, it is hard to ignore the white privileged status of
their creators. Hollywood has a long way to go when it comes to the inclusion of the
authentic experiences of women of color in cinematic narratives and even a longer one before
it allows non-white women to fill positions behind the camera. There has been some progress
in the last two years when it comes to the number of female filmmakers and actors supporting
feminism, creating cinematic discourses that advocate women’s rights and actively
demanding equal pay and opportunities in the movie industry. Unfortunately, the number of
women of color—both in front and especially behind the camera—is very low. More than
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ever there is a need for Hollywood executives and decision-makers that come from diverse
backgrounds when it comes to gender, race, and ethnicity.
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CONCLUSION
This research project has examined the representations of female characters in the
highly successful and popular film comedies, Pitch Perfect and Pitch Perfect 2. By
examining the performances of the actresses and the strategies of the directors I have come to
the conclusion that these two films exploit the traditional Hollywood comedic conventions
and female stereotypes only to expose them as demeaning for women and in order to
construct a feminist critique of the sexism that permeates popular genre comedies. Having
analyzed the stereotypes of the fatty, the black lesbian, and the promiscuous bimbo (very
often treated as sexual objects or the butt of jokes in Hollywood-made comedies) and the way
the female comedians manipulated their satirical performances so as to prevent these
characters from being perceived as ludicrous sidekicks, I asserted that the creators of Pitch
Perfect made an effort to present these types of women as subjects who produce comedy
rather than as objects of humiliation. With their excessive performances, the actresses who
embody these female types on screen not only provoke laughter but also indirectly criticize
the feminine stereotypes Hollywood comedies tend to recycle shamelessly.
Although not as audaciously feminist as the sequel directed by Elizabeth Banks, the
original Pitch Perfect movie still makes an effort to expose and to a certain extent denounce
Hollywood sexism. The movie insinuates that the conventional humor that objectifies and
vilifies women on the screen is not harmless but rather dangerous. Hollywood popular
comedies tend to sustain to the patriarchal assumption that women are more fit as comedic
objects “precisely due to their ‘inferiority’ which brings them closer to slaves, the other type
of persons fit for comedy” (Glenn qtd. in Radulescu 90). Sexist humor has endured too long
in this popular film genre, which, because of its immense appeal, has clearly affected
American culture and has contributed to the legitimization and recycling of sexist convictions
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about women. I have argued that the positive representation of empowered young women
who support one another in Pitch Perfect goes against the old cinematic conventions and has
carved a new space in popular cinema, where women cinematographers can assert and
promote a variety of nontraditional models of femininity that are not mocked but rather
celebrated. More importantly, Pitch Perfect takes a political stand in favor of a strong
sisterhood comprised by strong women. Its feminist discourse is cleverly hidden under a
superficial romance story in a college environment which runs parallel to the competition
between the male and female a cappella groups. The film targets the Hollywood female
stereotypes and tries to empower the female viewers through a happy ending that foregrounds
the triumph of the Bellas over their male competitors. The impact that this film has had on the
female spectators is apparent in the formation of an online fan club/community called
“Pitches” who aspire to recreate the sisterhood and support system the female characters of
the movie promote.
After having established the importance of sisterhood in the original film, the
producers of the sequel, Pitch Perfect 2, took a more straightforward feminist stand and did
not hesitate to allow, the “out and proud” feminist, Elizabeth Banks to be the director. Thanks
to the financial success of Pitch Perfect, the sequel did not try to hide its feminist agenda.
The brave directorial choices and style of Banks helped renew interest in feminism and
female empowerment and served as commentary on the mass media scrutiny that female
celebrities and other good-looking women are subjected to every day on American morning
television and web sites. Through parody, satire or subversive humor, Elizabeth Banks has
managed to deflate the power accorded to the male gaze and reject the objectification of the
female characters. Furthermore, Banks relied on feminist humor, which is, as Janet Lee
claims, all about “shedding light at experience and changing the world, and about ridiculing a
social system that exploits and trivializes women” (90). Feminist humor both exposes and
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critiques the sexist practices of popular film comedy by augmenting and exaggerating their
sexist politics. The female presence behind the camera is a prerequisite for the creation of a
cinematic space that takes seriously the authentic experiences of all kinds of women, the
positive portrayal of alternative models of femininity, and the contribution of feminism in the
careers of women comedians. The hope is that the feminist turn in popular comedy may help
reduce Hollywood’s sexist practices and perhaps bring some qualitative changes in cinema
culture. As Patricia Mann has put it, “women have no choice but to attempt to rewrite
patriarchal codes of recognition by engaging in signifying practices and interactions that have
historically played to the expectations of the patriarchal gaze” (qtd. in Genz and Brandon
176). Undoubtedly, the directorial choices of Banks are an attempt to rewrite patriarchal
codes. The sequel is a good example of feminist cinema that empowers female spectators by
giving them the chance to consume visually positive and diverse portrayals of women who
resist the social and cultural prescriptions and assert their individuality.
Hollywood is undoubtedly male-dominated but the Pitch Perfect movies and their
huge success has made it clear that there is available cinematic space for female-centered
movies, created and produced by women for women. Perhaps Banks has made the first steps
toward a new Hollywood era that will permit the development of a woman-identified
tradition in film comedy, promoting the authentic experiences of women and giving them the
opportunity to use laughter as a tool of self-empowerment.
The unexpected popularity of these two films indicates that female audiences long for
female-driven movies promoting empowered women. Additionally, Elizabeth Banks has
shown that feminist directors (even when they dare to subvert the sexist conventions of male-
dominated Hollywood) can construct comedies that can bring profits and compete with male-
dominated films in the box office. Thanks to the efforts of Banks, similar cinematic narratives
have started to appear in Hollywood. Movies like Spy (2015), starring Melissa McCarthy
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(one of Hollywood’s best-paid actresses), and remakes of older popular comedies now with
an all-female cast (as in the case of the Ghostbusters released in 2016) undoubtedly point to a
shift in the movie industry. Whether the presence of women both in front and behind the
camera will have a lasting effect it is to be seen. At the present moment, when one compares
the numbers of the male-centered narratives and the male filmmakers working in Hollywood
to that of female-centered stories and women cinematographers, one is confronted with a
depressing situation. It is also hard to ignore that the women who create and profit from
popular comedies are white with privileged backgrounds. Hollywood still has a long way to
go before it realizes the feminist demand for gender and race equality. Nonetheless, there is
undeniable progress, since more and more women filmmakers and actresses have embraced
feminism and dare to raise issues that have to do with women’s rights, alerting the public to
pay attention to them. Taking into account the fact that popular cinema does influence
cultural norms, women filmmakers now have the opportunity to have a considerable impact
on both the movie industry and on their audiences. As stated in Film Comment, it is not
possible to talk about cinema, movies, and acting without talking about culture since “the
relationship between cultural performance and professional performance is symbiotic: actors
imitate what they see in the world, and non-actors […] respond to and (consciously or
unconsciously) imitate what they see on the screen” (qtd. in Enelow). Because mass-
consumed popular discourses can have an impact on culture and on the spectators, comedies
like the Pitch Perfect movies deserve a serious critical analysis, regardless of outdated and
elitist claims that the products of mass culture are unworthy of academic attention. Popular
cinema with an emphasis on positive models of womanhood and on authentic “female
experience” (Showalter qtd. in Modleski, Feminism without Women 4) is long overdue.
The cinematic world that Pitch Perfect films created has enchanted and energized
millions of women around the world. This is the reason why in the summer of 2015, only one
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month after the release of the overwhelmingly successful sequel, the producers announced
that the Bellas would return with a third installment that would premiere on 21 July 2017.
Many of the regular female stars agreed to refresh their roles, Kay Cannon agreed to write the
script, and Elizabeth Banks to produce and direct Pitch Perfect 3. However, due to
scheduling conflicts, it proved hard for Banks to direct the third movie. Thus she decided to
hire another female director for Pitch Perfect 3 and ensured that the female-centered vision of
the second movie would not be lost. On September 2016, Banks announced on her Instagram
account, where she is followed by 1.4 million “Pitches,” that Trish Sie would direct the third
movie while she would stay as the producer. The movie was recently pushed back for a
holiday season release on the 22nd of December 2017, a period called in the film industry
Oscar-bait season, meaning that this is the time when the studios release their most
prestigious films. It is very rare for an independent, female-centered, musical film comedy
created by women to be released during the Oscar-bait season. The fact that the third movie
was pushed back for a December release proves that the Pitch Perfect movies are now
considered as successful cinematic merchandise. This means that Banks no longer has to
worry about or compromise her feminist agenda or reconsider her decisions when it comes to
whom she chooses to write the story and whom she hires to direct her films.
The latest news about the making and release of Pitch Perfect 3 is an indication that
Elizabeth Banks and her team have received the message that female spectators do crave for
female-centered comedies which disrupt the established conventions of cinematography and
refuse to represent women either as sex objects or victims of ridicule, and that they are
willing to spend money to enjoy cinematic experiences that empower them. It is a great
accomplishment that Banks has opened up a space in the film industry in which professional
actresses can manipulate their performances to make a political point and influence the
perspective of the viewers, while other women behind the camera can hold decision-making
Leivada 82
positions that traditionally were monopolized by powerful men. Banks has shown that
women’s comedic art can be the source of a cultural revolution.
Leivada 83
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