Examining the Disappointing Gender Politics of Baby Driver
By Eliza Clark
Baby Driver is the hottest movie of the summer! Everyone loves it! Important critics love it, audiences love it, industry legends love it!
I don’t get it. I don’t get the hype, I don’t get the general lack of criticism, I don’t get what it is, exactly, that everyone else is seeing.
Baby Driver is a story about a getaway driver named Baby. The Tl;Dr version of this review is that the editing is cool, the soundtrack is cool and there are a few good lines, unfortunately the characters are bland, it’s a bit derivative and its treatment of female characters (in the year of our lord 2017, in this Post-Manic-Pixie-Sexy-Lamp discourse economy) is, frankly, embarrassing.
On its high points: Jon Hamm is good. John Hamm is always good. There’s a point where John Hamm is filmed in profile, he looks all beaten up and Baby’s ipod soundtrack produces a well-timed soft groan from a Barry White song: it was extremely relatable.
The performances in general were solid: I found Ansel Elgort a bit wet, but he carries the weight of a rather wet back catalogue. I’m prepared to accept that any perceived residual dampness may have just been bias on my part.
The soundtrack is also pretty good; the idea that the soundtrack is made up of Baby’s current favourite playlists is a really cute idea. As a fan of soul, R’n’B and the classic iPod, I was always going to find that particular aspect of the film charming. My one complaint with regard to the music is the fact that I did spend the whole film waiting for Baby Driver (as in Simon and Garfunkel) to drop and when it does drop, it’s very… yawn.
Now, to the bad:
As a film about getaway driver making heavy use of a pop soundtrack, Baby Driver was always going to find itself being compared to Drive. And though I heavily suspect Edgar Wright may have originally written the bulk of this script when he was 15, Baby Driver feels rather derivative of Drive.
Poppier, cleaner, bubble gummier, Baby gets the girl, no one gets their head smashed, but still – the similarities are too screamingly obvious to ignore, and Baby Driver falls short in comparison.
I also found myself unfavourably comparing Baby Driver to Wild At Heart, largely with regard to its central relationship.
Baby finds himself enamoured with cute, quirky, outgoing waitress Debra. Debra likes music. Debra likes Baby. Like Baby, Debra also has a dead mum. Debra is apparently pretty cool with bank robbery? You can date Debra for like… Two weeks, put her through this hellish ordeal where she’s repeatedly almost violently killed for her association with you, and she will like, totally wait for five years for you to get out of prison.
The Bonny and Clyde comparison is made on screen, but I found myself thinking about Baby and Debra’s relationship alongside that of Wild At Heart’s Sailor and Lula. Lula, like Debra, is a vulnerable young woman who has become romantically involved with a criminal. Like Debra waits for Baby, Lula waits for Sailor.
The big difference here is that Lula has a backstory and Lula has a personality. Lula is clearly shown to be a complicated, damaged young woman, who has found solace from a lifetime of emotional and sexual abuse in the arms of a dangerous man who loves her, and violently protects her. Lula’s relationship with Sailor makes perfect sense in the wider context of her character.
Debra, however, has no wider context. She has headphones and a throwaway reference to a dead mother. Why does Debra like Baby so much? Please someone watch this film, and come back with a coherent explanation as to why Debra is prepared to put herself in repeated, violent danger for Baby and then wait FIVE YEARS for him to get out of prison.
Debra is one of many tragically underdeveloped female characters in the canon of cinema. She exists to love our wet protagonist unconditionally, and we are expected to just accept that; many of us just do.
What was Debra’s relationship with her mother like? How does she feel about her skimpy diner uniform? Why is she so bad at making coffee? Is she clumsy? Does she forget about it on the burner while she daydreams? What’s her dream job? Something? Anything? Anything indicating a life outside of her relationship with Baby, a third dimension, a life even half lived in place of the pretty ghost of a girl we have on screen.
Debra (what’s her favourite colour?) isn’t the only female character to get this miserable treatment. Monica, or Darling, is a (contain your yawns) a Sexy Latina Firecracker (Never seen that before! Such an original representation of Latina women on screen! What’s a stereotype?) she’s a stripper turned addict and bank robber, and alas, has no personality outside being a Sexy Latina Firecracker who loves John Hamm. There’s a bit where she’s wearing pyjamas at like 2am, and she still has perfectly coiffed hair and a full face of makeup. There are a few bits where the camera is angled so we know she definitely has lovely legs. Then she gets violently shot to death to further John Hamm’s character development.
Again, in the year 2017, a woman is sexualised for a solid 90 minutes, then literally shot to death on screen to further a man’s character development. After all the discussion in the last few years about the sexy lamp, fridging female characters and the on-screen sexualisation of latina women, this is something an acclaimed film maker thought was Cool, and I paid money to see it.
Edgar Wright is better than this. At least, I want Edgar Wright to be better than this. I felt like Edgar Wright should be better than films that don’t pass the Bechdel test, fridge and terrorise their female characters.
Baby Driver is one of a long line of films feeding it’s female audience member table scraps. Let’s say a 15 year old boy watches this movie; he gets to see himself in three dimensions – characters with motivation, backstory, characters who are cool, witty, quirky. What does a girl see when she watches Baby Driver? She gets to see well rounded men, pulling around decorative women. She gets to see herself as she does in almost every other film; an object. A trophy to be won, a piece of meat to drool over, an old worn-out tape to mourn.
It’s 2017 and I can’t believe we’re still giving passes (and acclaim) to a film so… generic. Every now and again I feel like we make significant progress with the representation of women on screen, then something like this comes along, and people fawn over it. It boggles the mind. We clearly still have a very long way to go if people are prepared to overlook the screaming missteps with female character development just because the soundtrack is fun and the editing is quirky.
Do yourself a favour and give Baby Driver a miss.
The Female Gaze 