Cate Blanchett in leather and ruthlessness. Rihanna as a genius black girl hacker. Helena Bonham Carter being Helena Bonham Carter. What could possibly go wrong? An all-star cast of incisively hardcore women, doing the things hardcore women might do – robbing and invincible safe space of rich people. Standard heist fare (of a standard heist franchise) except this time, cast with an Oscar and Grammy-winning cast of incomprehensibly charismatic women at the core.
Suffice to say then that mediocrity would have been a relief here – it wasn’t just mediocre, it was the kind of ruinously disappointing faux-dacity that is what happens when you take powerful women, and give their stories to men.
The biggest star of Ocean’s 8 was Anne Hathaway’s tits. And that was not by accident.
The male disease of sexualising the fact that women, you know, occupy space with their tits sometimes, is not a new one. Most recently, it’s been underlined in our country with the Case Of The Breastfeeding Woman. A lady on the cover of a magazine was featured breastfeeding a baby. This so offended the moral sentiments of a kindly chap I’ll call Mr God Forbid I Do Anything Useful With My Time, that he raised the matter in a high court. That high court is made up of of Uncles Protectorate, whose job it is to ensure that the bastion of progressivism is mostly very confused and quoting, of all the misbegotten relics of the past, bloody Dalrymple, on the inherent erotic acceptance of Indian culture.
Of course, it didn’t occur to any of these gents that the subject of obscenity doesn’t necessarily have to arise at all when tits are involved. But to the lads, if a certain something else is arising, the possibility of obscenity naturally must follow. It followed then, that a man seeing a woman breastfeeding – with a breast out, as is required, told another bunch of men – listen, you get this right? We’re all a bit turned on right? Not on, is it? And those other men went, buddy, you’re right. We are in fact, all a bit turned on. But being turned on is okay! Don’t stress out about it! Look at the sexy bitches at Ajanta, eh?? The Indian psyche has been so mature for ages that it could see the sensuous even in the sacred.
I imagine this is what the director of Ocean’s 8 had in mind when he took eight effective goddesses, and set up an altar to their sex appeal. Now don’t get me wrong – there are some women in this movie who are not sexualised at all. In fact, they’re not sexualised so much that they are almost desexualised, and made effectively invisible as a result. Awkwafina is a woman who literally shouted from the rooftops, “Awkwafina’s a genius / And her vagina is 50 times better than a penis” in her legendary viral anthem parodying toxic masculinity by celebrating her vag.
She was reduced to a blank teenage prop whose biggest statement was asking for a…metro card? Helena Bonham Carter, one of the most staggeringly talented women of a generation, became a hot-mess talentless design hack whose main narrative arc was speaking French under duress, and crying.
Rihanna, Mindy Kaling, Sarah Paulson – geniuses apparently – are made sister, daughter, mother. Carefully seeded throughout are our main characters, whose sex appeal is an unspoken given – Cate Blanchett and Sarah Bullock, with a teasing almost-but-not-quite-subtext of Sapphic love – and guess which ladies are literally wearing the pants in this film. Blanchett’s sex appeal is a Bowie-esque androgyny with a frankly incomprehensible lack of personality to back it up. And Bullock’s narrative pivots around her need to get back at the man what did her wrong, with the soaring possibilities of her genius reduced to a bunch of deus ex machina.
Through all of it, an expansive and celebrated performance focussed on and delivered deftly by the director to the immediate eyeline of the audience – Anne Hathaway’s tits. Anne Hathaway’s tits play the role of a ditzy, self-absorbed diva, orgasmic at the touch of diamonds, utilitarian in their seduction to get what she wants. At one point, Anne Hathaway is wretched by the prospect of looking fat, and is comforted when someone points out – “You have the best neck in the business.” Too bad then, that slightly earlier in the film, our leading protagonists more honestly, literally, say yeah. It’s her tits. The tits, somehow, will justify the heist. Can you imagine the same going for George Clooney? The mind boggles.
In case you might have missed it, the director shoves his intent sexualisation in your face in the triumphant shot of the heist’s conclusion. It features every last one of these vastly diverse female characters, dressed in their penultimate, powerful glory – dressed up sexy. For absolutely no actual discernable reason. They were all in functional required clothing before, much like the men in this film, who incidentally manage to portray the major part of the system’s they’re trying to break. Camera Security Guy, Body Guard Guy, Cartier’s guy, even Press Guy. None of these men are sexy or unsexy – they’re just men playing their roles, which all magically survived the sexy/unsexy binary. Crucially, the entire story’s end hinges on the help of a man – the perennially unsexy and still somehow, magically powerful James Corden.
The same system that looks at Grihalaxmi’s magazine cover and passes judgement on whether it is sexy enough to be cancelled, is the system that centres sexiness at the heart of a story about women subverting their way through a world of men. And conversely, if a woman inhabits her body – a body the world insists on sexualising, regardless of what she is doing with it – it follows that her sexuality is an affront to masculinity, and must desperately be controlled or made malleable, unthreatening.
In hope, however, we see the change if we know where to look. Anne Hathaway in real life, was made to feel resoundingly good about her body by her girls, and in the magic manner of women, it didn’t feature a single unsavoury word. Gilu Joseph, the lady from the magazine cover, simply said, “My body is my pride and my right.” And eventually, slowly, movie by movie and cover by cover, we’re going to get our own back.
Sexy Sadie’s just a girl who likes a good time. Every week, she’ll be talking about sex.