Critical Social Thought and Waitress
Waitress is a 2007 film that focuses on the life of a small-town diner waitress named Jenna. Working at Joe’s Pie Diner, Jenna is an artistic pie guru, making new, original pies daily from scratch. Simultaneously, she is controlled and manipulated by her deadbeat husband, Earl. While Jenna is trying to save up enough money to run away from Earl, she discovers that she is pregnant. An affair with her doctor, a married man, quickly complicates her life even further as the film explores countless themes central to the world of critical social thought. I will explore the themes of critical social thought, seeing-through, cause for justice, and cause for change, while addressing the filmmakers’ intentions with the film.
Seeing-through, formulating a principle of justice, and strategizing for change.
To begin, Jenna and her fellow waitresses view the world from a Marxian standpoint in that work equals money, equals life. They believe that they live in an unfair world where, as waitresses, they’re forced to work their feet off for mediocre pay, just to stay alive through the purchase of commodities. The interests of the diner’s owner, in this case, are at odds with those of the diner’s waitresses who would prefer better working conditions, greater compensation, and more dignity. Jenna develops dreams of opening her own pie shop, and winning a small fortune in the regional pie baking contest. In the southern US, where the film is set, Jenna’s husband Earl maintains an archaic mindset that socially places men above women. This macrosocial identity that Earl grew up with shapes his microsocial interactions with his wife, and propels him to treat her as a lesser being. Seeing through the perspective of Jenna brings to light the macro structure that helps shape the social world she faces: the status-role.
Earl became a different person after he married Jenna, and at one point in the film his fear of being alone emerges as he tells Jenna, “you’re the only person to ever belong to me” (Waitress, Jeremy Sisto). Earl forces his wife to have sex with him and to prepare his dinner for him. He rationalizes that Jenna needs to “treat him like a man” each night because he provides her with everything she needs, such as clothes, food, and shelter, despite the fact that she works full time and that he takes her paycheck from her each week to do with as he pleases (Sisto). His true insecurity emerges when he discovers that his wife is pregnant, and forces her to promise him that she will always love him first, and the baby second, all the while proclaiming that jealousy is below him. These are just a few examples of the expectations placed on Jenna because of her position in their relationship.
Jenna’s controlling husband will not allow her to participate in any baking contests, and won’t let her drive a car, even while she’s pregnant. He does this because he doesn’t want Jenna going anywhere other than between work and home, and so he makes her take the bus. An intense hatred within Jenna continues to build as the film progresses, and as a consequence, Jenna at one point even considers selling her newborn baby for money that she can use to run away from Earl. Earl harnesses his power on the premise that he is the man in the relationship. As is the state of present sociological affairs, this premise is no longer sufficient to maintain power in a mixed-sex relationship, however Earl is able to effect his reign regardless.
Status role emerges in Waitress in another light as well, however. Once Jenna learns of her own pregnancy, she is quick to swear her waitress friends to secrecy from telling her supervisor. She expects that if her supervisor finds out that she’s pregnant, she will be fired. The expectation here is that, as a pregnant woman, Jenna won’t be able to do her job as quickly, and so the supervisor will need to satisfy the expectations of his own role by finding a replacement for her.
In essence, the producers of the film wanted to portray an image of a poor, increasingly desperate woman who is bound to relationships with both her husband and her work. Marx would have been proud of Jenna, however, for she enjoys her work, and finds joy in baking pies that all the diner’s customers can enjoy. In slight contrast to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s standpoint that work should produce joy and independence, Jenna’s work only produces joy, and no independence. Her marriage is the limiting factor to her independence, for even her own wages are kept from her in an 1800s fashion.
The filmmakers also did justice in shedding light on the strictures that some women face in their relationships with male counterparts. The illustration of the status-role in this film was very classic, with Jenna’s husband always trying to assert his dominance and use her to make him feel more secure about himself. The producers’ real objective, though, was to emphasize the principle that all human beings should be treated with equal respect and opportunity. Near the end of the film, Jenna finds the courage to leave her husband, and her employer tells her that she can keep her job for as long as she wants. I felt the film thrust upon me the notion that Jenna shouldn’t have to be afraid to walk away from her husband, and that she shouldn’t need to worry about losing her job just because she’s become pregnant. In fact, it is these members of society that need the most care, rather than neglect as they are often served. This was the true message the filmmakers delivered, and it was done so magnificently.
A social care system similar to France’s, for example, is really what individuals like Jenna need. Working as a waitress provides her with a minuscule income, all of which she’s not even allowed to keep because her husband takes it away. Besides the physical needs necessary to the sustainability of life, Jenna also needs emotional support. With a jerk of a husband, she is deprived of the nurturing and caring experience any person needs to cope with the hard things in life. Ultimately this deprivation is what leads her to have an affair with her doctor. There exist one or two characteristics of Jenna’s life that, if removed, would make it much more bearable. Her husband is a product of American society that has gone bad, and whom cannot connect with the larger whole that follows a more social ethic. Jenna’s happiness is determined by her status-role in both her marriage and her job. The change necessary here is to eliminate the source of Jenna’s unhappiness, primarily her husband Earl. Patricia Lengermann and Gillian Niebrugge call will and desire “people’s capacity for agency, for knowing their own minds” (Lengermann and Niebrugge, “Class Notes Addams,” Page 3). Jenna is stuck in the rut that is the status-role, however, and cannot command her own will and desire.
Works Cited
Lengermann, Patricia and Jill Niebrugge-Brantley. 2005. “Class Notes Jane Addams as a Critical Social Thinker, Spring 2008 American University, Washington D.C.” (https://blackboard.american.edu/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab_id=_2_1&url=%2Fwebapps%2Fblackboard%2Fexecute%2Flauncher%3Ftype%3DCourse%26id%3D_43370_1%26url%3D).
Waitress. Dir. Adrienne Shelly. Perf. Keri Russell and Sisto, Jeremy. DVD. 20th Century Fox, 2007.
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