Mining comedy out of surviving sexual abuse
At the beginning of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, when the title character (Ellie Kemper) is rescued from the underground apocalypse cult in which she’s been captive for the past 15 years, Mr. Bankston (Mike Britt), the neighbour of the cult leader, gives an interview to a local television station that gets Auto-tuned and goes viral, landing Kimmy and her fellow survivors on the Today Show.
The bit is an homage to the famous remix of Charles Ramsey, who helped rescue three women imprisoned in a Cleveland basement, explaining the incident to reporters. It’s also a thesis statement for the series.
“White dudes hold the record for creepy crimes,” Bankston says, “But females are strong as hell.”
Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt — the sitcom from Tina Fey now streaming on Netflix — has attracted a lot of attention for its treatment of post-apocalyptic cults. But that’s not actually the most radical or unusual thing about it.
Instead, it’s that this weird, lively little show that has the audacity to tell a story about surviving sexual trauma, is a comedy, rather than a competitive exercise in how far and how fast television can descend into the gritty darkness.
It’s fairly common for dramas to have rape plots, whether to explain aspects of a female character’s personality, or to draw her more directly into a cycle of violence and retribution.
These stories can be done well, as with the reveal in The Americans that KGB spy Elizabeth Jennings (Keri Russell) was raped during her training. Or they can be handled so poorly that showrunners aren’t even aware they’ve told us a story about a rape, as was the case on the last season of Game of Thrones, when the series’ creators seemed surprised that audiences saw an encounter between Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey) and her brother Jaime (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) as a sexual assault.
It’s much more rare for comedies to take on rape. The 1970s sitcom All In the Family, which had a strong focus on social issues, had two story arcs about the attempted rapes of Gloria (Sally Struthers) and her mother Edith (Jean Stapleton). Punchlines yielded to the real fear and anger Gloria and Edith felt about being attacked.
It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, an FX comedy with a sense of humour that’s as dark as the void of space, approaches the subject with its typical scabrousness. In the first season, friends of Charlie Kelly (Charlie Day) become convinced he was molested by a gym teacher; Charlie’s friend Mac (McElhenney) got jealous that he hadn’t been attacked as well; and the whole thing turns out to be a lie.
Unlike these other shows, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt conceals its bitter pills in shark gummies.
In keeping with Kimmy’s own response to her trauma, the show is vague about what she actually experienced in captivity. “Yes, there was weird sex stuff in the bunker,” she tells Titus irritably in the pilot.
Kimmy goes out with the elderly Grant Belden (John McMartin) a wealthy, elderly veteran because he is so senile that she can confess all her secrets to him without fear of judgment. “Sometimes the reverend would braid our hair together,” she tells him with disgust.
“Within the show itself, we don’t physically see the things that went on during that time,” Kemper says. “The focus is, instead, on overcoming that, and how you move forward from something as traumatic as that.
“Because while this is certainly severe in its degree of intensity, everyone has horrible things that have happened. Whatever coping mechanisms she called on to get her through this terrible time, they were effective.”
I have mixed feelings about the decision Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt makes to elide Kimmy’s actual experiences in the bunker, a primness that seems like a potential holdover from the time when it seemed like the show would air on NBC rather than on Netflix.
It’s a choice that saps some of the power from the trail of Kimmy’s kidnapper later in the season, making him seem charming and weird. At the same time, it’s a choice that forces us to abide by Kimmy’s decisions about how she’ll see herself. We can’t define Kimmy by the abuse she experienced if we don’t know exactly what happened.
Some of the best jokes in the show grow out of the fact that Kimmy’s so naive that she doesn’t always recognize when she’s been harassed. In one episode, her sunny response to a construction worker who catcalls her so befuddles the man that he ends up questioning his own sexual orientation. Later, when she’s saved from wandering into an unmarked van to buy alcohol, she tells her rescuer, “I finally have a bra that fits right, thanks to that bra salesman in the other van!”
These bits are simultaneously incredibly dark and utterly triumphant. Returning to the world doesn’t mean Kimmy will never be harassed or attacked again. But at least out in the free world, Kimmy’s optimism is a kind of superpower. This isn’t just a matter of Kimmy toughening up to survive in New York: Her outlook on the world transubstantiates sexist harassment into entertaining adventures.
“I was kept in a bunker for 15 years by an insane preacher. I thought the world had ended. I thought I would die there,” Kimmy tells her boss, Jaqueline (Jane Krakowski). “But I survived, because that’s what women do.”
By the end of the first season of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Kimmy’s life is her own again, not the Reverend Richard Wayne Gary Wayne’s (Jon Hamm) and certainly not ours.
No wonder she wants to spend her new-found freedom looking for a guy who will bring her “the traditional meat and flowers of Indiana courtship” rather than slogging through television’s prescribed period of trauma and recovery. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is the rare show that recognizes you don’t have to break a heroine on screen just to show how strong she really is.