After all the justified disgust at Vanity Fair’s drooling, sexist profile of Margot Robbie, I thought the folks at “Saturday Night Live” might say to themselves, “We could make her appearance the focal point of a sketch, or multiple sketches, but let’s not. Let’s think about it for more than five seconds and do better.”
Then, the first post-monologue scene of the night arrived:
Yeah, it has a couple laughs. Matt Shatt (new featured player Mikey Day), the penis-less, puppeteer husband of Robbie’s incongruously appealing character, comes off as amusingly, impossibly undesirable. Kenan Thompson knows how to get laughs from disbelief (I like him as Steve Harvey as well). But it took “SNL” virtually no time to resort to just saying, “Let’s all make googly eyes at our host and leave it at that.” If the goal was to comment on the media’s fawning over Robbie, it didn’t come off that way because the joke is the impossibility of the pair, not the judgment of the reporter and anchor. The sketch should have created a situation in which the media was grossly focusing on her appearance instead of anything she said and did, without any extenuating circumstances. Instead, the bit just seemed like another example of writers letting their eyes do the work their brain is supposed to do.
I am going to repost my interview with the Australian actress here, as I’ll always remember her saying this about hating the word “bombshell”:
“I really hate that you can do a project with people like Martin Scorsese and some of the best filmmakers in the world, and some of the DPs I’ve worked with and editors and things that, and the“I remember when I dyed my hair brown for a role; I remember thinking, ‘Thank God, no one’s going to call me bombshell now.’ And the next headline I read was, ‘Brunette bombshell!’ I was like, ‘What?! Why is this happening?’ ”
“I remember when I dyed my hair brown for a role; I remember thinking, ‘Thank God, no one’s going to call me bombshell now.’ And the next headline I read was, ‘Brunette bombshell!’ I was like, ‘What?! Why is this happening?’ ”
No one is denying Robbie’s attractiveness or the emphasis on physical beauty in Hollywood. Sexism is rampant in society, not just regarding this one actress. But so much discussion was had so recently about how revolting it is when someone (almost always an actress, not an actor) is instinctively described as looks first, talent second, that I thought “SNL” would be smarter about that.
Robbie had more to work with later in the show, and, as Keira Knightley, got to comment on the limited types of roles offered to women.
But it’s no excuse for the obliviousness of the initial sketch, made worse because it was first. Sigh.
