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The Surprisingly Feminist and Deeply Silly Legacy of ‘Charlie’s Angels’
The franchise is profoundly, intentionally stupid, but it’s also a document of shifting generational attitudes toward feminism
At every phase in my life, I have been the wrong sort of person for Charlie’s Angels.
I missed the original TV series, which aired before I was born. I missed the campy 2000 reboot with Lucy Liu, Drew Barrymore, and Cameron Diaz, because I was a pretentious liberal arts college student who considered myself to be above that sort of thing. Now I’m going to miss the 2019 version, because I’m a middle-aged mom who has trouble scheduling babysitters. And yet, after spending the past day or so binging the 2000 movie and the scattered 1970s TV episodes I can find online, here I am, passing judgment on the franchise.
But my unfamiliarity with Charlie’s Angels (until this week) won’t prevent me from writing about it. I’ve discovered that a major theme of the franchise is “women doing things they aren’t strictly qualified to do.” The franchise has always been perversely feminist. Its existence rests on a core tension: Women can be kick-ass professionals who succeed in a man’s world against all odds, and women can look super hot in bikinis. Charlie’s Angels shrugs, asks, “Why…
