Margot Robbie is ready for take off in Pan Am.
* * (out of five stars) Pan Am. Created by Jack Orman. On ABC, Sundays at 10pm.
The old Eastern Airlines used to call itself “The Wings of Man”, but that might just as well have been the slogan of America’s unofficial flagship carrier, Pan Am. At a time when air travel was still largely the prerogative of the well-to-do, Pan Am exemplified the privilege and exoticism of the early air age. Headquartered in a massive New York skyscraper that literally sat athwart the symbol of old-style travel—Grand Central Terminal—Pan Am inaugurated many of the standard features of the business, including pressurized cabins, jet engines, wide-body aircraft, and computerized reservations. When American GIs flew commercial from Vietnam, they were booked on Pan Am. Such a powerful symbol of American enterprise aloft did it become that when Stanley Kubrick wanted a corporate logo for his fictional space shuttle in 2001, Pan Am’s blue globe was the logical choice. Alas, the airline itself never lived to sell trips to space, filing for bankruptcy in 1991.
Pan Am was “the wings of man” is another, spicier sense, for it had some now-notorious criteria for employment as flight attendants (or, as they were once known, “stewardesses”). These women had to be younger than thirty-two, single, and adhere to certain standards of appearance, including mandatory corsets and weight limits. Going “wide-body” was a discipline-worthy offense. That, and the rule against marriage, were clearly designed to appeal to the airline’s core customer—the businessman with the martini and the skinny tie, probably married himself, but desperately attuned to possibilities of sexual adventure on the road.
The gender politics sound antediluvian, but as ABC’s new series Pam Am tries to show, the job had its compensations. As one of the show’s “core four” characters, Christina Ricci’s Maggie, tells a beatnik friend, “You may not have to see the world to change it, but I do.” That’s the premise of the series, and its potential appeal—to show how, in what seems like a career posing as eye-candy, some women seized the opportunity to educate themselves, and maybe muss the skinny ties of the patriarchy in the process. “How do you keep ‘em down in the typing pool when they’ve seen Paris?” Pan Am wonders. Better shows have been based on less.
Three episodes in, though, the theory still sounds better than the reality. The show has its retro appeal, to be sure: like Mad Men, it finds poignance, and even some charm, in the pre-ironic futurism of the early sixties. In the pilot episode, the Pan Am building (with its rooftop heliport, now defunct) and the Pan Am Terminal (now the Delta Terminal) at JFK get the full CGI treatment, restored to their antique glories like the Forum in Gladiator. The glamor takes off as the four girls (Ricci, Margot Robbie, Karine Vanasse and Kelli Gardner) cross the terminal like cat-walking models, their tight sky-blue uniforms set off with crisp white gloves. In this, someone has clearly done their homework—nobody, except maybe the 1970’s Avon Lady, ambulates so unnaturally without training, hips swinging and arms cocked upward like a swan boat in skirts.
But it’s obvious that Pan Am is not Mad Men as soon as the characters open their mouths. When someone declares, “They’re a new breed of woman! They just have an impulse to take flight. So don’t ground ‘em!”—the phrase on the nose doesn’t really cover the awkwardness. As HBO and the other premium cable networks have shown, though the CGI and the period-perfect details can be fun, there just no substitute for the writing. This series is going nowhere without it.
The major networks reportedly got a deluge of concepts for similar “gurl power” shows after the publication of Hanna Rosin’s much-discussed Atlantic Monthly 2010 article “The End of Men.” In it, Rosin charts the decline and fall of the American male from his position of dominance in almost every field of endeavor, to his current state of wretchedness, where he lags behind his sisters in his prospects. “Is the post-industrial society simply better suited to women?” asks The Atlantic. The question is rhetorical, because with the decline of US manufacturing, construction, defense—in short, all the fields where males have tended to predominate—the men have disproportionately suffered. True, the guys still control the upper echelons in government and big business, but as Rosin argues, the glass ceiling is showing some cracks. Pretty soon the historic role reversal will be complete, with the “house-husbands” staying home to raise the kids and their wives out running the world. Our fascination with the early ‘60’s therefore presents a “two-fer”—a way for downsized men to indulge their nostalgia for the gin-and-tonic patriarchy, and for women to revisit the dawn of the Age of Woman. Mad Men, after all, is as much about Peggy and Joan as it is about Don Draper.
Rosin’s thesis has struck a deep chord, but it may still be wrong. While it may be true that, for instance, more women are getting college degrees than men now, it’s also true that college degrees aren’t exactly the keys to the executive washroom anymore. If women are gaining in the workplace, it’s because the workplace is a lot less rewarding that it used to be. If women are more highly valued for their “consensus-building” social skills, maybe it’s because “get along, go-along” types are a lot easier to serve pink slips than alpha males.
What Rosin sees as a historic shift in gender relations is really just the cherry on top of a shit sundae of bad economic prospects. To adapt a phrase, of the two genders, the female is the best-looking horse in the glue factory. So what’s worse than a job as a glorified waitress obliged to wear a girdle? Maybe no job at all.
© 2011 Nicholas Nicastro
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