So today I’ll actually be getting down to the analysis. The pieces that I’ll be looking at today are: the article “So Tired of Being Sexy: The Female Musician’s Body Politic” by Sonja Eismann and the book Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan.
I will provide a quick breakdown of the novel for the purposes of this analysis but there is a complete overview of the book here for those who have not read the book. Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist gives an synopsis of a night in Manhattan, New York. The clubs are the backdrop to the book, the bands account for the music tracks, and the girls are the biggest players in the book. The clubs are packed and open all night, the bands play loud, the musicians are into liquor, drugs, and girls and the girls are always beautiful. I’ll be looking at the beginning of the book where there is more than one girl to look at. The rest of the book resembles a messed up chick flick which very little communication between Norah and any other female.
The article by Sonja Eismann is very appropriate with the title “So Tired of Being Sexy: The Female Musician’s Body Politic.” This article looks at how pop music has always been obsessed with the female body and how groups of female musicians are being chosen today based on their looks rather than their talent. The article goes on to show how teenagers are affected by the “all pervasiveness of porn strategies” and how this leads them to compete for boys’ attention. At the end the article states that “[w]hen a female musician is up on stage, the audience sees a woman, whereas when there is a man, they see a musician” (Eismann, 273). Eismann gets across the idea that women, whether they are musicians, teenagers, or professors, are all being over-sexualized and objectified. As well that all of this, the stripping, the skanky clothes, etc. all of this is being done in the name of “‘empowerment’ feeling good and confident about oneself and one’s body” (269). I think we can extend many of the concepts in this article to all women because who hasn’t felt the pressure to be perfect and who doesn’t want to feel empowered. I want to look at how much of this book could truly be called empowerment and how much is peer pressure when empowerment would be to dress how you want and act like you want. This is portrayed really well within the context of the book, Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist.
There may not be female musicians in Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist but all the girls feel the pressure of having to look a certain way and act a certain way and if they don’t they will be ignored. When comparing all of the girls in this book it is easy to see where Norah places herself in this group. There is Caroline “beautiful Caroline with the long caramel hair, the big cherry Tootsie Pop lips, the juvenile delinquent arrest record... She’s the one, not me, who meets their expectation of what the daughter of an Englewood Cliffs-livin’, fat-cat record company CEI should be; wild” (Cohn and Levithan, 10). Then there is Norah “[p]lain Jane, comfy-flannel-shirt-wearing, tousled bowl-head-haircut-courtesy-of-a-$300-salon-visit-with-Mom-(Bergdorf’s)-and-a-$5-can-of-blue-spray-paint (Ricky’s), straight-edge responsible valedictorian bitch daughter” (10-11). The last girl who is a main part of Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist (and truly has a bigger part that Caroline does, at least in the book) is Tris. Tris is described as doing a ”strut with her big boobs sticking out in front of her, wiggling her ass in that way that gets the instant attention of every dumb shmo in her wake” (12). Tris is dressed in a “short black leather skirt with buckles up the side, mass-produced ‘vintage’ Ramones T-shirt, and piss-yellow leggings with some horrible pair of pink patent-leather shoes” (14). At least this is how Norah would describe her Nick on the other hand sees her as wearing an “H&M-meets-S&M miniskirt” (22). These girls areal competing for boys attention at these clubs, except for Norah who is there for Caroline and because she likes the music. The authors empower Norah by not only making her the main character of the novel but by also having Norah be the only character who at the end of the night has a serious relationship. She has managed to make this work despite being the plain character.
One of the things that I really enjoy about this book is how much the main character differs from the other two characters. Tris and Caroline are girls acting under peer pressure and social pressure. As Eismann states in her article there are two roads women can take they can either be “these highly sexualized ‘bimbos’ as the fetishized Other of a deeply misogynistic society that offers women only the opportunity to be the bimbo and thus be sexually desired by men [this would be Caroline and Tris], or to laugh at the bimbo and be one of the men [a.k.a. Norah]” (Eismann, 268). Norah doesn’t just reject being the bimbo, as Eismann puts it, but she takes an equally critical look at both women and men. She doesn’t exactly despise Caroline or Tris, the former being her best friend and the latter being her ultimate frenemy, but it can be taken that as she grows through the book she can start to feel sympathy for them when at the beginning of the night they feel sympathy for her. At the beginning of the night Norah recalls a conversation Caroline and herself often have. The conversation, which is done teasingly but rings true, starts with Caroline.
Caroline says I’m frigid. Sometimes I think she’s teasing me to repeat the party line of my Evil Ex, so I clarify: You mean I’m not easy? She clarifies: No, bitch, I mean you intimidate guys with a look or a comment before they can even decide if they want a change with you. You’re so judgmental. Along with frigid (Cohn and Levithan, 15).
This shows plainly what can be seen in Eismann’s article about how much peer pressure girls are under to become sexualized beings. Yet Norah resists this peer pressure for the most part. She defines herself as ‘straight-edge’ meaning no sex, no alcohol, no drugs. This is how she sees herself and is mainly proud of herself for this fact even though society is not. The thing that Norah loves, music, is something that she also sees only being truly good if it is just as ‘straight-edge’ as she is. “[N]o alcohol, no drugs, no cigarettes, no skanks” (Cohn and Levithan, 14). Norah sticks to her guns for the most part, there is one scene in the book where she almost loses control but is snapped back. Yet compared to Tris or Caroline Norah is a saint. She doesn’t engage in one night stands, she has only had one boyfriend etc. and she doesn’t compromise how she sees herself.
To compare the book with the movie now there have been a couple changes that have made the movie more palatable to the audience. Norah, played by Kat Dennings, is not quite as plain as she is described, or describes herself, in the book but compared to the other girls she still looks quite plain by today’s social standards. The biggest change in the girls is the Tris, played by Alexis Dziena, is dressed quite differently. There is nothing S&M about Tris in the movie, she has been made more mainstream sexy. Tris has been taken from being ‘sexy’ in an empowered way, by being sexy and being different, to be sexy like the Pussy Cat Dolls, something that every guy wants.
Norah has been sexualized as well for the movie. A scene that doesn’t happen in the book but does in the movie is where Norah goes to help Nick’s friends and one of them shoves a bra at her and tells her to put it on so that it looks like she has more than one breast. This just reinforces “the patriarchal paradigm that ... the female body ... is synonymous with sexuality, that women are all matter and no mind” (Eismann, 270). To take a strong and feminine character that is not sexual in the book and sexualize her, changing the story line in the process, just to gain an audience proves how much society wants these hyper-sexual women.
Just a quick overview of where we have been. Girls have come under “even harsher discipline of the female body to be more than perfect – unbelievably thing and unbelievably curvy at the same time” (267). Looking at the three girls in the book Caroline fits under this category unequivocally, Tris does but in a different way, and Norah does not because she likes to wear flannel among other reasons. Contrasted with the movie Caroline played by Ari Graynor, and Tris easily fall into that category and Norah, to be made more palatable to audiences, is nearly there as well.
There are many other aspects of this book that I could dig into in the context of feminism and this book but I don’t have pages to go through this and I’m sure you would all get ridiculously bored.
Lady Polly
Norah has been sexualized as well for the movie. A scene that doesn’t happen in the book but does in the movie is where Norah goes to help Nick’s friends and one of them shoves a bra at her and tells her to put it on so that it looks like she has more than one breast. This just reinforces “the patriarchal paradigm that ... the female body ... is synonymous with sexuality, that women are all matter and no mind” (Eismann, 270). To take a strong and feminine character that is not sexual in the book and sexualize her, changing the story line in the process, just to gain an audience proves how much society wants these hyper-sexual women.
Just a quick overview of where we have been. Girls have come under “even harsher discipline of the female body to be more than perfect – unbelievably thing and unbelievably curvy at the same time” (267). Looking at the three girls in the book Caroline fits under this category unequivocally, Tris does but in a different way, and Norah does not because she likes to wear flannel among other reasons. Contrasted with the movie Caroline played by Ari Graynor, and Tris easily fall into that category and Norah, to be made more palatable to audiences, is nearly there as well.
There are many other aspects of this book that I could dig into in the context of feminism and this book but I don’t have pages to go through this and I’m sure you would all get ridiculously bored.
Lady Polly
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