“Nobody should be punished for getting older”: a statement used in the newest season of “Grace and Frankie” to excuse a “senior moment” that got a character into legal trouble.
To a certain extent, it’s true. Ageism is wrong, and the show tackles the issue in a number of ways: fighting for extended walk time at a traffic light, making “senior-friendly” sex toys, and more. But what happens when the argument is used as an excuse for outdated social attitudes and political ideologies attached to older generations? While making certain desperate attempts to seem relatable and hip to the times, “Grace and Frankie” makes some pretty cringe-worthy missteps that show it’s nothing more than “fake woke.”
The season starts with Grace (Jane Fonda) and Frankie (Lily Tomlin) squatting in the beach house they sold after reluctantly moving into a retirement community last season. Almost immediately after they re-enter the house for the first time, they’re confronted by Benjamin Le Day, played by RuPaul Charles, assistant to the new owner of the house. After Grace and Frankie try to diffuse the tension and convince Le Day to get the new owner to sell the house back, things take an off-color turn.
As Frankie attempts uses her peaceful, empathic nature to her advantage, she says, proposing friendship to Le Day, “We’re gonna dish about my gay ex and my black son. How much in common do we have?” That sounds eerily like, “I have a(n) *insert race, religion, sexual orientation, etc. here* friend, so how could I possibly be *racist, homophobic, etc.*?” (I’ll call this “the ‘friend’ argument” from here on out). A microaggression this direct shocked me, but as I continued to watch, I came to realize it was part of an alarming pattern.
Later in the episode, Frankie brings back her “signature” throat-singing: a low, guttural sound (which she later refers to as “channel[ing] your inner cow”) that she attempts to do while meditating, or in this case, to interrupt a conversation. Throat-singing is a sacred practice to people in and around Central Asia, indigenous tribes in Canada, South Africa, and more; this is just one example of Frankie’s vast, continued cultural appropriation, which seems to be the a product of the worst parts of the counterculture of the 60’s and 70’s.
This is quite transparent when a few episodes later, Frankie takes Grace to an ashram, run by one of her white friends she met in the early 70’s; an ashram is “a hermitage, monastic community, or other place of religious retreat” tied to various Indian religions, including Hinduism and in the show’s case, Buddhism (though it’s never directly referenced, outside of a few Buddha statues in the background). Ironically, Frankie distances herself from the “yoga Beckys who comes [t]here, make a bracelet and calls herself enlightened” but fails to see the overall issue. The problem doesn’t start and end with Frankie, however.
Grace also has her fair share of culturally insensitive moments, usually as a facet of her revulsion towards anything and everything Frankie enjoys; at one point, she refers to Afghan food as “barf.” Don’t get why this is more than just a simple, permissible dislike of certain foods? Food-related racism comes in all different forms, such as the need for “authenticity” in different ethnic cuisines that actually favors the “white, Eurocentric experience.” You can read more about it here.
The show continues to use the “friend” argument, but with the characters and the actors themselves, as is shown in one of Grace’s biggest blunders this season:
When Grace has her first-ever “sleepover” (you know, because of her cold, loveless childhood that seems to excuse her present-day toxicity), Frankie jokingly suggests the “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours” game, noting that she gets a rise out of how uncomfortable it makes Grace. Grace’s reply seems to work on both a character and personal level of the “friend” argument, “It doesn’t make me uncomfortable. I’ve kissed a girl.”
Firstly, she’s transparently making a convenient version of the “friend” argument for her homophobia. Secondly, characters aside, she’s Jane Fonda talking to Lily Tomlin, a lesbian. Lily doesn’t seem to have an issue with any of this, and it appears as though the show is using her as their permission slip to get away with things like this. You may say “it’s just the script, it’s not necessarily how the actors feel,” but that’s not quite the case with Jane Fonda.
On their appearance on “Ellen” last week, Lily Tomlin discussed the fact that she was approached by Time magazine in 1975 to do a “coming-out” cover, not unlike Ellen’s own 1997 cover. Tomlin gave her honest reasons as to why she decided against it; then, perhaps as a poor attempt to dodge Ellen’s next question about her dating life, Fonda declared, “I’m gonna come out… If they put me on the cover of ‘Time,’ I’ll come out.” That wasn’t Grace talking to Frankie, that was Jane Fonda diminishing Lily’s, Ellen’s, mine and all other LGBTQ+ people’s struggles.
I’ve only touched upon about two or three episodes worth of insensitivity, but I’ll skip ahead to the show’s final and arguably most egregious offense:
Episode twelve ends with a hefty degree of uncertainty regarding the future of Grace and Frankie’s relationship. If I knew ahead of time what I’d see in the next episode, I wouldn’t have watched this season at all.
“The Alternative” proposes an alternate timeline where Grace and Frankie never unite and deal with the fallout of their marriages together, which turns every character into a caricature of their current, actual selves. What exactly does a caricature of a free spirited, hippie-type look like, you ask? They have dreadlocks, and they’re definitely white.
We see “alternative” Frankie with purple dreadlocks, living a life which seems to be, in more ways than one, closer to her ideal than the one she’s actually living. Is the show arguing that the dreadlocks are a decision Frankie made in an alternate timeline where her self-growth is stunted? Or is it that she would have them in her ideal world? Maybe it’s neither; the show has clearly demonstrated it doesn’t have time to worry about cultural appropriation.
It’s a shame that the show’s otherwise brilliant writing is nullified by glaring insensitivities such as these. It’s an even bigger shame that the majority of viewers will ensure that the creators, producers, writers, and actors of the show will avoid accountability for their complicity and complacency for a very long time.
When will cultural appropriation be recognized and no longer tolerated? Will white privilege always plague the entertainment industry and keep the platform for all minorities hardly big enough to stand on? When will all industry workers be held accountable for their actions, past and present?
Ask Marta Kauffman, co-creator of “Grace and Frankie” and the beloved “Friends,” a show that was problematic for numerous reasons (homophobia, transphobia and sexism, to name a few). But “Friends” is 25 years old now; that’s just how things were, right?
