Below is an article I wrote for university, in the style of writing for the
F-Word
CHUCK
VERSUS THE F-WORD
Is Sarah
Walker an Icon or a Stereotype?
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| Sarah Walker |
Secret Agent
Sarah Walker. She works for the CIA,
she’s blonde, she’s attractive, she’s badass, she’s pretty much every single
walking stereotype of a female secret agent that you can think of (if you think
of that sort of stuff). She’s slim and
wears tight-fitting leather clothing with high heeled boots, she’s an
intelligent fighter, an intelligent agent, and an all-round intelligent
woman. And she’s a hero, but is she a
feminist icon or a problematic stereotype?
 |
| Chuck Bartowski |
Sarah Walker (if that
is her real name), played by Yvonne Strahovski, has been assigned to look after
dorky computer-whiz, Chuck Bartowski (Zachary Levi), along with an NSA agent,
John Casey (Adam Baldwin). Chuck’s life
is turned upside down when an old friend turned nemesis, Bryce Larkin (Matt Bomer), sends Chuck an email on his birthday which
contains all of the government’s secrets - later to be known as the
intersect. It turns out Bryce now works
for the CIA and is quite clearly a secret agent (judging by the suit and the
blood). When Sarah turns up at the Nerd Herd (a parody of Best Buy’s Geek
Squad) she makes Chuck do a double-take when she arrives, her presence
undermining his expectations of a regular Nerd Herd customer. Likened to Batman’s Vicki Vale (a quick Google Image search actually brings up
Yvonne Strahovski), blonde, slim, and classically beautiful, Sarah is instantly
shown as a possible-but-definite love
interest. During their entire interaction, Sarah is filmed with a softer and
brighter camera edit that makes her stand out from the grey-ish backdrop of the
Buy More. Chuck’s best friend, Morgan
(Josh Gomez), clearly wants his buddy to try and get a date with this beautiful
blonde, but Chuck sees her as out of his league, but what he doesn’t know, is
that he’ll soon fall victim to having no choice but to date her.
When we
first encounter Sarah, a lot of us would be forgiven to assume she’s just going
to be the pretty blonde love interest (minus the phone call she’s having about
Chuck with her superiors) but she turns out to have a whole level of different
characteristics that makes her such a genuine character. Yvonne Strahovski is an incredibly beautiful
blonde and attractive Australian young woman (though Sarah is American) and she
definitely fits in with what a lot of us see as “ideal beauty”, so is it really
that surprising that she is our main female protagonist? As Karin E
Westman says in the opening lines of her chapter in Geek Chic, “[female geeks] must often carry a passport for public
acceptance: the passport of beauty”.
This defines Sarah, because while she may not be a stereotypical geek,
she is knowledgeable in her field to such an extent that she is incredibly
smart and well-looked upon by her superiors, and, of course, she has that ever
important passport.
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| John Casey |
The way Yvonne
portrays Sarah is as a strong woman, she is independent and she is wise, but we
do see a softer side to Sarah in quite a lot of episodes. She becomes attached
to Chuck and is far more emotional than her male partner, Casey, who is very
much portrayed as incredibly macho and masculine, often taking control of the
situations they encounter. I feel that
they used Sarah and Casey to be “good cop, bad cop” and took Sarah as being the
woman to make her the “good cop”, but there was no real reason for this to be
the case. Casey could just have easily
have been the “good cop” of the duo, but gender stereotypes don’t necessarily
allow strong jawed, scarred face men to be the “good cop”. Of course, if the creators wanted the spectators
to like her and become invested in her and Chuck’s “relationship” then she had
to be likeable, otherwise we wouldn’t have wanted nice-guy Chuck to be with a
“bad cop” bitch (because, at the end of the day, mean or assertive women are often seen to be a bitch).
For example Sue Sylvester, from Glee, is a woman who wants to get stuff done but is portrayed as a
woman who is undesirable and unlikeable.
Cersei Lannister from Game of Thrones is a powerful character, but again, is unlikeable
in many ways due to the way the character has been written. So would we, as spectators, have wanted Sarah
to be a bitch? I’m not saying Sarah is
always sweet and kind, she certainly has a darker side to her at times (don’t
we all?) but if she were to be like Cersei, we certainly wouldn’t be invested
in Chuck and Sarah’s ‘will they, won’t they?’ romance story arc, which is
constantly present.
Nevertheless,
we do end up liking Sarah, despite
her not being sure if she’s still in love with Bryce or if she genuinely has
feelings for Chuck (we can’t forget about a good love triangle, am I right?),
or if she’s just with him purely for cover.
Now, my thoughts and opinions on Sarah/Chuck might be slightly biased as
I have watched all five seasons twice and am currently re-watching a few
episodes on and off, and I’ve also seen all of the blooper reels for all of the seasons, so I like the actors and
actresses off-screen as well as their on-screen characters. Part of the reason I’m so invested in Sarah
is because of how much I have become attached to this programme, and I am
constantly waiting for my friends (who are either forced, encouraged, or bribed
into watching Chuck) to eventually
like Sarah.
On her very
first - fake - date with nerdy Nerd
Herder, Chuck, we see the classic getting-ready-montage-sequence where it cuts
between Sarah and Chuck preparing for their date. While Chuck rummages around contemplating
different outfits, we see Sarah placing hidden weapons on her body - gun
holsters round her thighs, secret knives round her shins - while also wearing
very delicate, lacy underwear. There is
no denying Sarah is an intelligent and strong woman, but I am still undecided
on the way she is represented sometimes, is it satire or is it misogyny? Women in the action genre are often seen
through this “underwear cam”, so it’s nothing new to spectators, but I’m not
sure that it was a necessary motif to use in this programme. It undermines Sarah’s strong character, to a
point where she is seen only as her beauty.
 |
| Devon "Captain Awesome" Woodcombe |
One internet blogger, Abigail Nussbaum, has called Chuck
one of the “most regressive genre series of the last few years” when it comes
to gender. Whereas I disagree, and feel
that the female characters of the show are the strongest ones on there. There is a smaller proportion of female
characters to male, but where there are women, they are definitely always the
strongest characters portrayed. Weak,
nerdy, unlikable males are scattered around the show, but the females always
tend to be three-dimensional, well-rounded and strong. In terms of the “underwear-cam” that Nussbaum
speaks of, it is problematic, Sarah
is often seen in her underwear and getting ready for various trips and outings,
and while this can be seen as female objectification, it could also be argued
that it is liberating. Captain Awesome
(Ryan McPartlin) is often seen roaming around his house topless while doing
various exercise regimes and Sarah is by no means the only character (of any
gender) who is gazed upon while they are wearing less clothes than usual. However, Captain Awesome has chosen to be seen this way, whereas
Sarah is being seen in a voyeuristic manner.
Nussbaum says that Sarah’s sole purpose
on the show is to be Chuck’s love interest, which I wholly disagree with. She was assigned to be Chuck’s handler and to
look after him as he gets used to the CIA world, so to say that she is a
character who has no real purpose is incredibly insulting. She represents a strong female woman who has
an ambiguous and sad past; the show would not be what it is without her
there. The chemistry between Levi and Strahovski
is clear in the Chuck and Sarah moments, and there are lots of them. They make a good team and Sarah, Chuck and
Casey are all necessary characters because they all bring different things to
the table so to say that one of them is unnecessary is almost as if the
dynamics of the show haven’t been understood.
The first
season is filmed with female objectification very in mind, and with very little
documentation on this series, the only demographic information I can find is that the show is
targeted towards 18-49 year olds, with no specific gender. I would assume the show is targeted mainly
towards males (due to the female objectification) but the strong female
characters, especially Sarah, might entice women to watch the show too. The programme itself is an action-comedy, one
that was nearly cancelled after it’s second season, and it’s renewal was never
certain for the following seasons, and IMDb’s reviews really show the mixed opinions on Chuck (in the end it ran for a total of
five seasons). A lot of times when Sarah
walks into the Buy More, we see either a complete stereotype or a satirical
parody of other media from the action genre.
We see her feet and her legs first, while the camera slowly pans up to
her face, and more often than not her hair is being dramatically wafted around
by a wind machine somewhere off-screen and in the distance. Whenever I see her entrances take that format,
I can’t help but giggle to myself - what were Josh Schwartz and Chris Fedak
(the creators) actually trying to achieve here?
I want to believe that they are doing it satirically, and they’re not
actually just objectifying the beautiful Yvonne Strahovski, but sometimes I
doubt their intentions and my - maybe too naive (are we seeing Retro Sexisim in Chuck?) - reading of the sequence.
I never really take Sarah’s wind-swept entrances as a serious portrayal,
I see it more as something that should make me smile a little bit, and it does
- Sarah’s over the top entrances are always just so silly (in a good way). “[Chuck
was] more playful [than 24], had a lot more fun with it, had a
lot of silliness with it, more heart” says Strahovski in this Blogcritics interview.
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| Morgan Grimes |
Sarah’s scenes are
nearly always shot with the softer and brighter edit, where she looks instantly
more feminine and girly in a predominantly male and relatively grey TV
programme. There are also a lot of
girl-on-girl fights in the first season; Sarah still fights males, too, just
less frequently. When Sarah does fight
other women, they tend to be filmed in a manner that focuses on female objectification,
in the way that they’re filmed and the noises they make (they sound a lot like
female tennis players, and we all know how that sounds). But does cinematography really have that much
of an effect on how spectators read a character? The short answer is: yes. We see characters exactly how the creators
want them to be seen, by adding a few lighting or editing techniques they alter
the reading entirely and, even though it is fictional anyway, add a sense of
artifice. We see Sarah objectified by
the camera nearly every the time she enters the Buy More, so I assume we’re
seeing her through Morgan, Jeff or Lester’s eyes. But whenever Chuck sees her
we read her in a different way, she’s still portrayed as beautiful (Strahovski
can never really be seen as anything else) so are the creators just showing us
how different characters see her or is the whole show misogynistic? It’s a question I’ve never been able to
answer, even after watching each episode twice (at least) but I find the
programme itself incredibly enjoyable.
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| General Beckman |
Who is Sarah Walker? She is Chuck’s love interest, she is a secret
agent, she is an intelligent woman, with an ambiguous past, and she is a
fighter. She is an emotional human
being, but Chuck proves that just
because she has and shows emotions, it doesn’t make her any weaker than her
male co-characters. Essentially, she is
complex, contradictory but well-rounded and convincing. Sarah isn’t the only female character in the
show, there’s Anna, a co-worker of Chuck, Ellie, Chuck’s doctor sister
(girlfriend of Devon “Captain Awesome” Woodcombe”), General Beckman, Casey and
Walker’s big boss, and there are many female guest actresses who the team
encounter, some wonderful, some mean, some evil, some kind, but all of them are
equally badass. While females in Chuck may seemingly be misrepresented in
some respects, I personally believe that the cinematography and editing is just
showing spectators how characters in the show see them, not how they
necessarily think we should see them.
None of the characters are really used as plot devices - apart from the
occasional baddie who is so incredibly two-dimensional it hurts, but that one
works with both genders. I feel that the
creators have managed to create well thought-out women who are believable (were
the story at all believable) and feel like they could be women you come across
on a day-to-day basis. There are many powerful women in this show and very few,
if any, weak ones, so can it really be that misogynistic?
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| Anna Wu |
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| Ellie Bartowski |
I am still
undecided on whether or not Sarah is a feminist icon or a problematic
stereotype. It all depends on an
individual's reading, at the end of the day; there is no right or wrong
answer. The way she is represented on
screen is far more problematic than the character herself. So that essentially makes the show
challenging, not the character. I firmly
believe Sarah Walker is a well-rounded, well developed character, but I
disagree with the way she is presented.
At the same time, she could be seen as a role model to girls for being
strong, but also being able to show an emotional side, she is powerful and
kind, and she is a fighter but she is soft.
She is neither one extreme nor the other, and for that she is a modern
feminist icon, who is represented in a challenging way. Sarah could essentially have been created
with deliberate ambiguity; to let the spectators make their own mind up
regarding her difficult character representation. Sarah Walker could be the start of something
new, and there is nothing wrong with a female character who is represented as a
strong, sexy, intelligent woman, but when will we see the average geeky girl
save the day?
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