Easy A(daptation): highbrow and lowbrow critiques of cultures of popular misogyny
Easy A (2010) is far from the only modern movie adaptation of a classic text, and I’d be hard-pressed to argue that it’s the “best” one, but it is my favorite. Credit where credit is due to more faithful or more critically acclaimed films that have adapted classic literature, but Easy A effectively modernizes a piece of classic literature for a wider audience in a way that is not only appropriately faithful to the source material, but also manages to make the fact that it is a pop culture reimagining of a high culture text central to both the movie and the book’s messaging. Easy A effectively plays with the relationship between “high” culture and popular culture by turning a classic novel into what one might call a “chick-flick”, all while retaining the original message of the source material and adapting it to impart its message to a contemporary audience.
The Scarlet Letter, a piece of classic literature that nearly every American tenth-grader is forced to read, is a critique of colonial Puritan society that follows the story of a woman named Hester Prynne who is forced to affix the eponymous scarlet letter (‘A’ for adulterer) to her clothes as a form of public humiliation as penance for her sin — sleeping with a man who isn’t her husband. Easy A is about a seventeen-year-old girl, Olive Penderghast who, through an overheard rumor and the judgment of the student body (spearheaded by a devout Christian girl), suffers the slut-shaming wrath of a community just as critical as the Puritans: her very average high school. Hester is forced to wear the A; Olive, who is reading the book in class, dons it proudly as the rumors circulate, owning her reputation and even turning it into a business, as she’ll sell the myth that she slept with various boys who, for their own reasons, want the school to think that they’re not virgins. Easy A, like The Scarlet Letter, criticizes a society that punishes women it deems promiscuous and criticizes the hypocrisy of the power structures that orchestrate that societal ostracization.
As Zeisler illustrates, the “male gaze” is “the idea that when we look at images in art or on screen, we’re seeing them as a man might” (Zeisler, 7). And this is an unavoidable facet of examining the movie, which was directed by a man, and the book, which was written by one. This means that neither text can say that it operates through the “women in positions of power” (Zeisler, 20) tract of feminism in pop culture that Zeisler discusses. That aside, both texts attempt to combat the idea that a woman’s choices should be entirely governed by the religiously moralizing society around her, and both are “representations of women and agency” (Zeisler, 15). With regard to Zeisler’s commentary on “feminist reclamation” (Zeisler, 20) of pop culture and Hollywood, both The Scarlet Letter and, more firmly and more obviously, Easy A, take the route of feminist praxis via representation.
The movie itself is very much of its time and genre. The soundtrack, the dialogue, and the casting of Emma Stone (as Olive) and Amanda Bynes (as Olive’s number one adversary) all scream chick-flick from 2010. Easy A does not try in any way to pass itself off as highbrow. It openly and unabashedly wants to be entertaining first and foremost, and entertaining it is.
That being said, it is still unambiguously a movie with a message, and it unambiguously pulls its message from its source material. “Ironically,” Olive narrates to her webcam, discussing the time in her life in which this all went down, “we were studying ‘The Scarlet Letter’.” When the student body starts slut-shaming Olive, she affixes a red A to all of her clothes (clothes which her father, played by Stanley Tucci, notes make her look like “a high-end stripper”). The message of Easy A, like the message of The Scarlet Letter, isn’t just “slut-shaming is bad”, or “sometimes people who pride themselves on being good people are, in fact, not good people”. It’s a critique of the hegemonic politics of sexuality that permeated society back in the times of the Puritans and somehow still haven’t gone the way of their sartorial choices.
Unlike Hester, Olive actively feeds into the allegations flying around. Because, of course, unlike Hester, the stakes are a lot lower. The only thing at risk is her social life, not her literal life. Olive pretends to sleep with guys who are seen as undesirable for money, accepting gift cards to department stores in exchange for a rumor that she engaged in some kind of sexual activity with them. The movie admittedly fumbles its way through handling the ostracization of those boys, making clumsy statements on homophobia, racism, and body image, but it does at least try to express that bullying is, obviously, bad, and that it’s not fair either for these boys to be made fun of nor is it fair for them to use Olive’s bad reputation to their own personal gain. In short, Easy A, like The Scarlet Letter, illustrates that, generally speaking, in critical societies like Puritan New England or a high school in California in 2010, men get second chances, and women do not.
At the end of the movie, Olive teases the school watching her livestream of her narration of her side of the story by telling them that she won’t let them see what happens next when she rides off into the sunset with her love interest. We see clips of viewers expressing their frustration at the screen that they aren’t permitted this window into Olive’s life. In this way, Olive quite literally refuses to exist inside the male gaze any longer, and the movie comes full circle back around to the message and theory imbued within it.
All this being said, it’s important to keep in mind the idea of popular feminism as illustrated by Banet-Weiser. Popular feminism, she tells us, is the idea that “feminism becomes a sort of product” (Banet-Weiser), something consumable instead of something political. It would be a lie to say that Easy A doesn’t exploit popular feminism in order to sell itself. This is all in spite of the fact that it engages directly with popular feminism’s counterpoint, popular misogyny. Popular misogyny is the gateway to anti-feminist political action (Banet-Weiser) just as Olive’s high school’s zeitgeist of popular misogyny is the gateway to her public shaming, and just as Hester’s society’s zeitgeist of popular misogyny is the gateway to hers. This interplay of popular and commodity feminism and popular misogyny is present both within the texts and within the broader distribution of Easy A in the real world.
One of the most compelling aspects of this adaptation is the fact that the merging of high and low is, I’d argue, the entire point of the movie, and reinforces its engagement with feminism in pop culture and the culture of popular feminism versus popular misogyny. Most modern-day people would classify The Scarlet Letter as stuffy classic literature and Easy A as entertaining, fluffy, and possibly even trashy. The message of Easy A is that even in modern times, no matter how much things have changed over hundreds of years, women get outcast from society due to their perceived sexual deviance. In Hester’s case, The Scarlet Letter illustrates the hypocrisy of the clergy and the absurd structures governing social life in Puritan society. In Olive’s case, Easy A illustrates the hypocrisy of judgmental Evangelicals and the absurd structures governing social life in the most difficult to navigate ecosystem of them all: high school.
Works Cited
Banet-Weiser, S. (2015). Popular misogyny. Culture Digitally
Gluck, W. (Director). (2010). Easy A [Movie]. Sony Pictures Releasing.
Zeisler, A. (2008). Feminism and pop culture. New York, NY: Seal Press.
By Anna O’Neill-Dietel: I agree with you that both Easy A and The Scarlet Letter both are a feminist reclamation of sexuality that exist in largely misogynist cannons (respectively teen comedies and classic American literature). However, I want to push back on your characterization of Easy A as a “chick flick” and as a “fluffy” movie. It is commonplace in our society disregard anything that focuses on women or is created by women to be unserious or trashy. Laura Penny wrote in We Can Be Heroes: How the Nerds Are Reinventing Pop Culture wrote that, “Women's stories, just like women's lives, have long been assumed to be less serious.” I believe that calling a movie a “chick flick” does exactly that. The term reduces a movie about a woman and trivializes it into something less serious. In fact, Easy A fits into a genre of highly successful, raunchy coming of age comedies, from Super Bad to American Pie. I feel that it is because it centers around a woman, and around female sexuality that you categorize it as a chick flick, something I do not think you would call either of the aforementioned movies which star men. I think Laura Penny would encourage you to peel back the layers of societal standards with which we regard popular culture, and invite you to find the value in Easy A, just as she invites readers to consider the value in fan fiction. As you write, Easy A and The Scarlet Letter are about interrogating the absurd, judgmental practices we learn from societal standards. I think you should apply this to looking deeper into Easy A.
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