CHUCK VERSUS THE F-WORD

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?

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.

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.

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.

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?

Anna Wu

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?