all right, boys and girls
I argued the other day , every movie is about gender. Or, at least, every movie tells us something about gender. West Side Story mostly upholds the usual gender binary. Men are men (or boys are boys) and Women are women (or girls are girls). Anita is quite... what's the polite way to call her pushy? She can hold her own against Bernardo. (She also justifies the boys fighting as them having "Too much feeling." The fact that Baby John cries is highlighted, but then again, his name is Baby John. Not the most manly name. One character that exists on a sort of brink between male and female is Anybodys. She dresses like the other boys, but the Jets mostly dismiss her because she's a girl. I think it's Action who responds to her request to be in the gang, "How else is she gonna get a guy to touch her?" It's also Action who later calls her a "freak." And Graziella calls here "an American tragedy." But, it's actually quite progre...