A Certain Slant of Light

This week's excursion to the theater took me to Battle of the Sexes, a movie about the 1973 tennis match between women's tennis all-star Billie Jean King and former tennis champ (and self-proclaimed male chauvinist pig) Bobby Riggs - who, spoiler alert (is it a spoiler if it's history?), got his ass comprehensively handed to him, which is extremely satisfying.

(And even though I knew at the outset that King wins, the tennis match is nonetheless quite tense to watch. You know it's going to come out right, but all the same I was sitting on the edge of my seat, because WHAT IF IT SOMEHOW WENT WRONG AND HE WON?)

Although actually the filmmakers did something quite clever, in that they had a secondary antagonist, head of the Lawn Tennis Association Jack Kramer, who kicks Billie Jean and her tennis buddies out of the LTA when they walk because he refuses to pay the women equal prize money, even though their matches sell as many tickets as the men's. This freed the filmmakers up to explore Bobby Riggs' character, and thus make him more sympathetic - he's one of those boisterously charismatic people that it's hard to loathe even if you really want to - without undermining the film's condemnation of sexism.

In fact, I think it actually strengthens it. Kramer's is a far less in-your-face and flamboyant sexism than Bobby Riggs - but it's even more insidious, because Kramer genuinely doesn't seem to see it for what it is. He's not dashing around telling women to get back in the kitchen like Bobby Riggs, so in his eyes, he's perfectly reasonable.

But this perhaps makes the movie sound preachy, when really it's an excellent example of a movie that unfolds its social message organically. You never get the feeling that the characters have suddenly turned into mouthpieces for the authors: they always seem like themselves, and even when they directly discuss things like sexism they're always genuinely talking to each other, not at the audience.

Also, I just really enjoyed the story of King and her band of eight plucky top women's tennis players forming their own tennis league to say "screw you" to all the organizers who refuse to pay women tennis players as much money as they deserve. There's a delightful League of Their Ownishness about it; it's delightful to watch them all playfully rag on each other and on their take-no-prisoners organizer, Gladys, blunt, droll, chain-smoking, but passionate about women's tennis.

The one problem with the movie - well, it isn't really a problem with the movie, per se; the one problem is that I just really do not like infidelity plotlines, even if the unfaithful character has a really good excuse like "being a lesbian but stumbling into a heterosexual marriage because society is so homophobic that she had been attempting to repress her true sexuality, but then she meets this girl..."

Fair enough I guess, but I still don't enjoy watching it happen. There's a terribly sad scene where Billie Jean's husband finds her new girlfriend's bra in the hotel bathroom - while Billie Jean sits in the other room, watching him in the mirror - and he just puts it back down (although he knows what it means, and Billie Jean knows he knows), and comes back to Billie Jean and kneels down to help ice her knees, and neither of them says a damn thing about it. BOTH OF YOU. WHY. I mean, I know why. BUT WHY.

He's so supportive of Billie Jean and her career, and it just seems so unfair - although really I don't think you can measure affairs of the heart in terms of fairness. You can't earn love; you can't buy it with good deeds any more than you can with money. It is and has to be a gift.