I Tonya Tells the Story of Someone Who Was Actually Cancelled

 

 

With the passing of Sinead O’Connor in the last month many on this blog have been arguing – fairly convincingly, I should say – that she might have been the first victim of what we now refer to as ‘cancel culture’. Having heard her story told in the recent brilliant documentary Nothing Compares as well as my own memories of that era, it is hard to fault this argument. However, I believe this ignores a real caveat. 

For all of the abuse the worst parts of our society inflicted upon her, for all of the fact that she was driven out of the public eye, at least O’Connor was allowed to continue with a career, however truly truncated it was.  I think there is a very real possibility that the first true unadulterated victim of cancel culture was Tonya Harding.

I speak of this as someone who remembers this particularly well. My mother was  and remains a rabid figure skating fan.  The earliest memories I have as a child of a sporting event going on in my home were the Olympics in the 1980s.  I probably was not then – and probably not now – ever able to appreciate the glory of what I was witnessing at the time, but I sure as hell was aware of the major figures involved.  It is likely I knew who Brian Boitano and Katarina Witt were before I knew who Roger Clemens and Cal Ripken were; I certainly knew who Kristy Yamaguchi and Kurt Browning were before I was aware of John Elway or Dennis Rodman.

That meant I certainly saw and was very aware of who Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan were well before the 1994 Olympics.  I vividly remember how they were talked about at the Albertville Games in 1992 Games when Kerrigan took the  bronze medal and Harding finished fourth.  And I may have been far more aware of the implications of what was going on in the months leading up to Lillehammer. It was certainly more of a deal of my house in January than the NFL playoffs.

And I am very aware of how the world took sides in every thing involving Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding afterward. It is worth noting that Harding was the first woman in skating history to land a triple axel. But even before ‘the incident’, the world had already decided who they were rooting for. In a sense when I finally saw I, Tonya earlier this year I was reminded vividly that we as a society had made it clear well before  the Olympics in 1992, that Tonya was the ‘bad girl’ and Nancy was ‘the good girl’

It's worth noting I had a vague sense of Harding’s story. In the summer of 1994 Comedy Central released a five-minute ‘biopic’ called Spunk: The Tonya Harding Story.  Tina Yother of Family Ties played the title role.  Given the length and the network it aired on, you can imagine it did not take the subject seriously. In hindsight, however, I think it probably treating Harding with far more dignity and respect than, well, everybody else at the time.

Yothers plays Harding as ridiculously naïve and ambitious. All of the performers around her, including Kerrigan and her husband are generally horrible. The movies suggests that Kerrigan staged the attack herself too :”Get those candy-ass judges on her side” and when we see the parody of the video afterward, Kerrigan shouts: “Why me? Why not that creepy Nancy Kwan girl? Is she annoying or what?” Harding comes across as someone who is regarded as white trash; Kerrigan is a snob and an elitist and everyone else is pretty much a bastard or an idiot. (The actor playing Shawn thinks that if he attacks Kerrigan, “maybe Jodie Foster will finally answer my letters.” Knowing the truth about him, we almost wish he was that much of a madman.)

By this point Tonya Harding had essentially become the fodder of late-night comics for months and would be for years after the fact. Even more than a decade later Robin Williams went out of his way to use her as an example of how an athlete should react when they were cheated out of a medal. “Give me that medal, you French whore,” he shouted, imitating her beating one of the judges. And even though it was dated material it still resonated  because in our collective opinion, Harding deserved to still be a figure of ridicule.

In that sense I am inclined to view I, Tonya as both of the biography Harding deserves and a vindication of her.   Craig Gillespie goes out of his way to treat the subject as a comedy – and considering the players involved and how everything transpired, it’s hard not to think it that way – but he always treats Harding with seriousness.  And while she was a victim of almost every aspect of our society, Harding comes across as a survivor.

Looking back on Harding’s life before she gets to the Olympics, you can just see all of the hypocrisy in every aspect of our society: sports, institutional sexism, the Olympics, the American dream. Because the story of Tonya Harding when you hear it told should have been the model of all of those  inspirational narratives NBC loves to tell about Olympic athletes working their way up from nothing to compete on the world’s greatest stage.

Harding’s mother LaVona is a monster to both her and everyone around her. From the moment she drags her four year old daughter on to the ice and demands a coach for her, there is not a single moment where she demonstrates human behavior to anyone. She seems embarrassed for herself rather than Tonya when the six year urinates on the ice. Tonya’s father is the only person in her life who loves her, but eventually LaVona drives him off and he abandons her. LaVona always pushes Tonya to the point where nothing is good enough, no matter how many trophies she wins.

Then Tonya meets Jeff, who will become her first husband. This very quickly devolves into an abusive relationship, where Tonya fears for her life.  The world seems designed to blame her for it and eventually Tonya gets away from him. In 1991, she achieves immorality in her profession. America should have made her the favorite going into Albertville.

But as the film makes clear, the world had deciding going into Albertville that in the Kerrigan-Harding rivalry, they were going to come down on the side of the girl who had everything rather than the one who worked her way up from nothing.  Kerrigan does not appear much in the film, but she always comes across as stiff and pretentious.  I think that is a fair representation of her: I have no memories of Kerrigan being anything but stiff and snobbish. Even when she tried to be funny on Saturday Night Live not long after Lillehammer,  she still looked like someone doing an imitation of an amicable person.

Tonya thought her career was over after her fourth place finish, and she did go back to waitressing for a while.  She had never gone to college and she had no real skills beside skating.  When the Olympics announced that it was having its next winter event in 1994, it was a shot at redemption and she trained for it.

There is a scene in the film, which is probably fictionalized in which, after another in a long line of prelims where Harding has been performing well but not receiving the scores she thinks she deserves, she confronts one of the judges. He tells her that he’ll deny it if asked but that Harding’s scores are not entirely about performance but rather image.  Kerrigan looks wholesome; Harding is trash. He urges her that they need her to act like someone who has family values. When Harding tells him with utter honesty that she never had a loving family, the judge just shrugs.

Part of me, for the record, is inclined to believe that even if this scene is not real, the ideas behind are.  For the entirety of its existence the Olympics has been far more  about what it looks like it represents rather than what it actually represent.  Even thirty years ago, the hypocrisy of holding the 1936 Olympics in Hitler’s Berlin or continuing the Olympics in Munich in 1972 while the Israeli team was being held hostage and then killed should have truly told us all we needed to know about the Olympics moral compass.  During the Cold War, the Olympic games were shown as a proxy fight between America and Communism: figure skating itself had been part of those battles. America had to show the image of being a city on a hill, and those who said otherwise were stomped down. (Witness the Mexico City Olympics and how Carlos Leon and Tommie Smith were punished for doing a Black Panther Salute on the podium while the national anthem played.) Even after the Cold War ended, America still believe that it was the wholesome American athlete that should stand on the podium. That this might end up costing America more medals and that it was hypocritical to the idea of amateur sports was doubtless never considered.

I, Tonya makes all of this clear well before: ‘The Incident’, as all the major characters refer to it before it is discussed. What the movie also makes clear is that even thirty years after the fact, some of us genuinely still seem to believe Harding basically put a hit out on Kerrigan. In truth, Harding was the victim of her husband Jeff and Shawn, the buffoonish bodyguard who was one of Jeff’s friends who was hired to protect her.

Harding received a death threat and Shawn was hired back to protect her. Jeff thought that as a warning, someone should write threatening letters to Kerrigan. He gave money to Shawn to do so. Shawn seems to have decided completely on his own to hire two goons to attack Kerrigan. When Jeff learns about this in the film (after the attack) Shawn freely confesses to his part saying that he chose to do this so that he would get more skaters to hire him as their bodyguard. He also tells Jeff that he called in the death threat in the first place. We constantly see Shawn making outlandish and ridiculous claims through the film and standing by them even after they are repudiated. (In the film Shawn is hysterically played by Paul Walter Hauser and there’s an odd synchronicity between this role and the one he plays in Black Bird in which Larry is a serial killer who freely confesses even to murders he didn’t commit – which makes it hard to prove the ones he did.)

Tonya’s entire involvement in this seems to have come down to whether or not she told Jeff wher3e Kerrigan was training.  She clearly thought Shawn was a buffoon, was completely blindsided when she learned the FBI came to question her and Jeff and was astounded to learn both the depths and stupidity of the everyone involved. At no time did the authorities really think that Tonya herself ordered the attack. But because she publicly refused to play the victim, the press and America completely turned against her. In a sense, this is worse than what happened to O’Connor.  O’Connor was excoriated for standing by her beliefs, but she had at least committed some action.  Harding’s real ‘offense’ seems to be her decision not to take responsibility for something she hadn’t done. As Harding says in the film her treatment in the media “was like being abused all over again.”

And its worth noting the Olympics attitude at the time matched the hypocrisy it always had. By any rights while Harding was facing criminal charges she should not have been allowed to compete. But because the Olympics was never going to deny the possibility of the world-wide audience of a Harding-Kerrigan competition on prime-time, they persuaded the authorities to let the hearing wait until after the Olympics. It worked by the way: the face off between Harding and Kerrigan had the highest Nielsen ratings of any sporting event in history to that time, outdoing the Super Bowl and the World Series.

I can not say for sure – and Gillespie doesn’t – but part of me wonders that the Olympics went out of their way to make sure that when Harding pleaded guilty to a lesser charge, they made sure that Harding would be banned from ever skating again.  It would be keeping in with the self-interest of the Olympics, which has no problem using up any of his athletes and provides them with no economic support after they retire. In the case of Harding, it would have been more personal. They never liked her to begin with and they didn’t even want the possibility of her coming near their team again. Not the image the Olympics wants, remember.

I realize I have spent all of this time talking about the movie as it relates to Tonya Harding and not the film itself. For the record, the movie is sublime. I think this film represents a clear demarcation in Margot Robie as a performer. Leading up to this Robbie had appeared in superb movies but almost always for sex appeal rather than her performance. In I, Tonya while Robie is pretty, we are always impressed by the force of her personality rather than her performance.  There is something harder in Harding’s character that we never saw in Robbie before, not even when she was playing Harley Quinn. It’s impossible to imagine anyone other her as Harding. Robbie makes it clear that even though she might be  a victim, she doesn’t want your pity and while she puts up a hard face there’s a part of her that desperately wants to be loved. That she never gets it during the film is in itself a tragedy.

Robbie deservedly received a Best Actress nomination for her work in this film. To be clear among her fellow nominees, Robbie could have said justifiably: “It’s an honor just to be nominated.” Her fellow nominees were four of the greatest actress of all time: Sally Hawkins for The Shape of Water,  Saoirse Ronan for Lady Bird, Meryl Streep for The Post and the eventual winner Frances McDormand for Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri.  Robbie’s performance is clearly at the level of her peers in retrospect and there is a clear demarcation between her performance and the caliber of films she done since. The following year, she would star along side Ronan in Mary, Queen of Scots and receive a SAG nomination for her work. She would star in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Bombshell in 2019, receiving another Oscar nomination for the latter and while she has played Harley Quinn twice more (I am personally a fan of Birds of Prey) she mirrored them by appearing in Amsterdam and Babylon. It says a lot about Robbie that while she is, in hindsight, the perfect actress to play Barbie you can’t imagine any resemblance between her and Tonya Harding.

Allison Janney deservedly won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. There were impressive performance in her category as well, including Laurie Metcalf for Lady Bird and Octavia Spencer in The Shape of Water. But no one should question that Janney deserved it because this is a character unlike any I had ever seen her play in nearly twenty years of loving her work. Every character I’d seen Janney play, mostly in TV but in movies as well, has an innate goodness in them. The most famous mothers she played before, including Bonnie on Mom and Bren on Juno can have hard facades but have something redemptive at their core. With the exception of the mother she played on Lost, this was the first character I remember watching her play with absolutely no redeeming values. (The only other time she did to such comic affect was on the brilliant TV movie Bad Education.) Janney is one of the great comic actresses of our time, no question, and few who’ve seen her work on either Mom or The West Wing can doubt her ability to demean herself for the audience’s enjoyment.  But she almost never does so for a character who never for a single moment does anything redeemable or likable. When Lavona shows up near the end of the movie to apparently offer comfort to her daughter Tonya like the audience absolutely does not trust her. Janney uses every bit of her skill to make us thing, it’s possible, maybe this is the moment of redemption…and then immediately undercuts herself in a way to make her even more loathsome. It doesn’t shock the viewer in the subtitles at the end of the film to learn that Tonya has not had contact with LaVona for decades. It’s a tribute to Janney that the viewer wanted to spend time with her in the movie.

The other performances, while not at the level of Robie and Janney are all superb. Sebastian Stan shows as Jeff that there are capabilities to his acting that we just don’t get in the MCU. Paul Walter Hauser (who I didn’t recognize even having seen Black Bird prior to I, Tonya) is hysterical every second he’s onscreen in a role that probably should have gotten an Oscar nomination. Julianne Nicholson, playing Harding’s trainers, is quietly good as possibly the only person in Harding’s career who believes in her. And Bobby Cannavale has a wonderful supporting role as the representative of the media who still can’t believe everything that happened.

Perhaps, in a way, Harding got her revenge.  Figure skating as a sport would completely fritter away all of the mass attention the Harding-Kerrigan imbroglio got it.  Nationals once received prime time network coverage; these days you can barely find them on YouTube. There are still names in figure skating, but none with the national pull that Harding or Kerrigan had would in the early 1990s.  They may still be the high point of Winter  Olympic coverage, but they have dwindled like everything else to the Olympics, certainly in comparison to the Summer Games.  Harding may still be a national joke to some – her stint boxing Paula Jones did not help – but in the final moments of the film, she tells us she refuses to be anybody’s victim or ashamed of what she does.  I, Tonya is a comedy but the reason it works is because it makes clear that while everyone else around her may be a laughingstock, Harding never was and didn’t deserve to be.