The Feminist Narratives of ‘Slap Shot’ and ‘I, Tonya’

While the downfall of figure skating icon and iconoclast Tanya Harding has long fascinated pop culture consumers worldwide, the catalyst of her demise is a simple and easy target: a stupid boyfriend and his even dumber friend—not to mention that friend’s knucklehead broskis who carry out the infamous “knee-capping gone awry.”

Much of what is refreshing about ‘I, Tonya’ is the way in which it interrogates and mocks the policing of Harding’s femininity in the buttoned-up-but-no-sequins world of figure skating. Yet another movie that takes place on ice just over 40 years earlier takes a similar approach.

‘Slap Shot,’ long hailed by hockey fans as the best movie ever made about the game—the only competition perhaps being ‘Miracle,’ Rob Lowe in ‘Youngblood,’ or something like ‘The Mighty Ducks’ if you have managed to retain your innocence—has come to embody a kind of hyper-masculinity in hockey culture, yet it was written by Academy Award winning screenwriter Nancy Dowd, who, upon closer examination, takes a feminist lens to interrogate a similar and almost symmetrical policing of masculinity among the Charlestown Chiefs.

In a cultural moment where various waves of feminism are pitted against one another—see Babe dot net author Katie Way’s scathing email to veteran TV host and legal expert Ashleigh Banfield defending her controversial and genre-blurring piece accusing actor Aziz Ansari of sexual assault on a date—somehow the arena of ice sports movies can perhaps restore continuity to these waves of feminism, whether it be high or low tide.

Margot Robbie’s performance as Harding in ‘I, Tonya’ is nearly overshadowed by that of Allison Janney, a standout alumna of ‘The West Wing’ who plays Harding’s mother, LaVona. Janney is able to embody much of what is increasingly wrong with youth sports parents, even going the extra mile to smoke her clove cigarettes on the ice. Yet her character is developed to reveal a hard upbringing by an abusive mother and absent father, not to mention her own troubled relationship with her ex-husband.

Tanya herself leaves her abusive mother only to be beaten by her deadbeat boyfriend. Her only escape comes on the ice, but even there her gender does her a disservice, with judges deducting points from perfect skating simply because her outfits are not up to snuff. A better way to situate Harding’s predicament in the film is perhaps in her gender expression or how her gender is read—not to be confused with the discourse on transgender identity. Harding presents the world what she sees as beautiful and emblematic of her daring skating style, but the judges read it as unfeminine and “white trash.” This fundamental unfairness is crafted by screenwriter Steven Rodgers and director Craig Gillespie as the original sin of what turns into one of the greatest scandals in sports history.

On the other side of the patriarchy, there is less of a top down policing of masculinity, but rather a peer-to-peer form in Dowd’s ‘Slap Shot,’ with lead actor Paul Newman undergoing a transition from the gentleman player-coach of old to an all out goon, beating the snot of out opponents just to fill seats in the arena. His sidekick, played by Michael Ontkean, is a fresh out of Princeton with a knack for scoring goals, not cracking skulls. Starting as the team’s best player, he is subsequently relegated to the bench with the arrival of the Hanson brothers, a line of three forwards who spend more time wrapping their fists in tinfoil for fights than they do stickhandling or passing.

With the team falling on hard times as the Charlestown steel mill closes—we’ll save the film’s prescience on post-industrial America for later—the Hanson brothers’ goon spirit spreads throughout the team as they go on a run of wins and record attendance, abandoning the true spirit of the game in favor of fights and cheap hits. Although the film delivers myriad punchlines and memorable images, it ultimately boils down to what the true spirit of hockey is and who hockey players truly are. On Dowd’s view, given the curation of the final scene, the spirit of goon hockey is futile. What matters instead is the final image Dowd gives: a figure skating strip tease by Ontkean as Newman looks on in the middle of another bout of fisticuffs.

Liberation, on these two films’ counts, appears to lie simply in the right to self-determination irrespective of gender expectations. It is denied to Tanya in the Olympics, but she gets redemption in her spirit of defiance. The fate of The Chiefs remains unknown, but there is hope that “old time hockey” might just have a fighting chance with a bit of feminine mystique.

Neither of these films set out to declare a treatise on intersectional feminism in 2018, but they might just help us better understand what exactly we’re fighting against in the first place when it comes to the category of gender, and to better understand who imposes it upon us.