Midnight Train to Georgia and The Letter

As the posters in my ninth grade health class said: "What is popular is not always right. What is right is not always popular."

Today's critique will contrast two songs, "Midnight Train to Georgia," and "The Letter." Disclaimer: I like both of these songs, especially Midnight Train to Georgia. I'm not going to stop listening to them. Heck, if I refused to listen to any song that encouraged gender roles, I would lead a sad and quiet life. But I can enjoy the songs without wholly embracing their messages, and as I have said, I believe there is value in examining our culture for the gendered patterns that are so ubiquitous.

L.A. proved too much for the man,
So he's leavin' the life he's come to know,
He said he's goin' back to find
Ooh, what's left of his world,
The world he left behind
Not so long ago.
He's leaving,
On that midnight train to Georgia,
And he's goin' back
To a simpler place and time.
And I'll be with him
On that midnight train to Georgia,
I'd rather live in his world
Than live without him in mine.
He kept dreamin'
That someday he'd be a star.
But he sure found out the hard way
That dreams don't always come true.
So he pawned all his hopes
and he even sold his old car
Bought a one way ticket
To the life he once knew,
Oh yes he did,
He said he would
Be leavin
On that midnight train to Georgia,
And he's goin' back
To a simpler place and time.
And I'll be with him
On that midnight train to Georgia,
I'd rather live in his world
Than live without him in mine.
Go, gonna board, gonna board,
Gonna board the midnight train.
Gotta go, gonna board
Gonna board
Gonna board the midnight train
(repeat, fade)

Give me a ticket for an aeroplane
I ain't got time to take a fast train
Lonely days are gone
I'm going home, because my baby just wrote me
a letter

I don't care how much money I've got to spend
I've got to get back to my baby again
Lonely days are gone
I'm going home; my baby just wrote me a letter

(x2):
Well she wrote me a letter, said she couldn't live without me no more
Listen mister, can't you see I've got to get back to my baby once more?
Anyway, yeah,
Give me a ticket for an aeroplane
I ain't got time to take a fast train
Lonely days are gone
I'm going home, because my baby just wrote me a letter

My baby just wrote me a letter

These songs talk about similar things. The speakers both describe going somewhere to live with their lovers. Yet they are different, and their differences in my opinion subtly encourage gender roles.


Where are the speakers going? The man in The Letter is going home. He is returning somewhere familiar. It doesn't say what he was doing before, but apparently he has been lonely. The woman is going to a strange place. She's never been there before; it's "his world," not hers. The difference is key. While the man is going somewhere familiar and safe, the woman is following the man somewhere strange, somewhere she doesn't necessarily want to be, for him. The woman's sacrifice is greater here. Both situations are presented uncritically.


Why are the speakers traveling? The man is going because his lover, who is at home, wrote him a letter to say that she "couldn't live without him." There doesn't appear to have been much communication in the first song. The woman is going simply because the man is going. There needed to be an impetus for the man in The Letter to go; just his lover being there wasn't enough. She had to ask. Not so for the woman in Midnight Train to Georgia.


What do the songs narrate? Both songs choose to narrate the story of the man involved. The verses in Midnight Train to Georgia are all about the man's journey, what happened to him, why he came to LA and why he's going back to Georgia, what he did in between, and so on. Only in the chorus does the woman talk about herself, and her motives are centered on him, whereas the motives of her lover do not appear to have anything to do with her. The man has a life independent of her; the woman might as well not--if she did, she doesn't care and she's giving it up anyway.

For The Letter, though, we are in the situation with the man. He's talking about his situation, addressing the man at the ticket booth. The song is framed in terms of him: what he has to do, what he wants, what happened to him. Again, the woman is mentioned only in relation to the man, and she can't even live without him. Nothing's said about how he's holding up without her, but it certainly seems that if she hadn't asked, he wouldn't be going home just yet.

So yeah, I would say that these songs talk about men who have lives apart from their lovers and women who don't, women who are passive and men who are active, and find men's lives more worth talking about than women's.

Remember: It could have been different, but it wasn't.

Hunchback of Notre Dame

Ever seen The Hunchback of Notre Dame? Probably the darkest movie Disney has ever done. ("And now all Paris is burning because of you!") Also one of my favorites (Bells of Notre Dame? EPIC)

It's also a movie that has the potential to be very socially conscious. Sexism, racism, religion, deformity, class awareness--this movie touches on it all. Sadly, it fails to follow through on these issues.

Esmerelda. She's pretty cool. A little cliched, the highly sexualized spunky girl with a heart of gold. Still, she's a fun, talented, brave woman.

But did you notice that she was basically the only woman in the movie? Racking my brains for other women, I come up with 1) Quasimodo's mother, 2) that little girl in the purple dress, and 3) Laverne the gargoyle. Either way, note that she is the only adult human woman alive during the actual story.

Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that the three other main characters are all attracted to her. Quasimodo is helplessly in love with her, Phoebus finds her exciting, and Frollo has unholy desires for her. Did anyone else notice this? It's kind of freaky.

Because, okay, here's the thing. Only having one female character is bad. Women make up half of the population and that's about what it takes to satisfy me. A scarcity of women results in situations like we have with Esmerelda the Only Woman Available, and also the beginning of the movie.

Quasimodo's mother, as she must be defined, for her character gets its importance only from her relation to a man, dies in the first four minutes of the movie. She dies a heroic death in the service of a male, and that's what makes her likable. This may be the only situation like this that has been pointed out to you, so you may think I'm coming out of nowhere on this one, but I'm starting to get pretty tired of women who we approve of because they make sacrifices for men.* (Harry Potter also made a pretty big deal out of this.) I'd like to see someone we approve of because they make a sacrifice for a woman.

You may say "But this is bullshit! Quasimodo's mother (whose name we do not know) would have done the same thing for a daughter!" Well, that's the thing. She didn't have a daughter. Quasimodo was a male. (So was Harry Potter.) This is what happens when you have almost every character be a man: women don't get a chance to interact with each other.

And interacting with other men, Esmerelda is always in a subordinate role (Clopin's assistant, the archdeacon's, um, advice-taker, the soldiers' victim) or in a sexual one. There's probably some really nasty stuff to unpack here given that she is not just a woman but a woman of color, and that the men who love/fetishize her are all white, including Quasimodo who should be a man of color but is distinctly not--but I'm not as familiar with the patterns of racial oppression. Suffice it to say that I think it adds to the creepy.

One more thing that annoyed me was the climax. Esmerelda is a fierce, competent woman and would have been at least as valuable an asset as Phoebus in fighting Frollo and his soldiers, but instead she is incapacitated. First she is tied to that whole burning stake, putting the woman in danger so that the man can find his character development. Then, she is unconscious, making it look like the woman is dead so that the man gets extra emotion for the fight. She is completely put out of commission, and robbing such a strong character of the chance to be in the final battle, except as an object of motivation for the man, is lame. This is, like, the gypsy princess here. Can she get some action?

Le sigh. Some things they did right:
1. Phoebus does not beat Esmerelda in their fight in the cathedral.
2 Laverne is just as likable as the other two gargoyles, and not defined by her sex.
3. Esmerelda ends up with Phoebus, not Quasimodo.
4. Clopin is the shit.

*Arwen is pretty much the gold standard for this phenomenon.