I, Tonya

      In the 1980s I enjoyed watching women's figure skating competitions.  The gracefulness and beauty of the skaters appealed to me, but I never thought about the behind the scenes dramas probably going on, the competitiveness leading to jealousy, resentfulness, or a skater's frustration with judges.  By the time of the Nancy Kerrigan-Tonya Harding drama of the U.S. Figure Skating Championship in Detroit in January 1994, I had ceased to pay attention to the sport, but I remember getting off a plane, going to a grocery store with my friend who picked me up, and seeing tabloid photos and headlines showing the biggest news story in the United States:

     Some creep had whacked Nancy Kerrigan's lower right thigh with a telescopic baton, causing acute pain and baffled distress from the champion skater.  At first, her main American competitor, Tonya Harding, appeared to have had nothing to do with the assault, but as the truth unfolded, it came about that Harding's husband, Jeff Gillooley, had conspired with his friend, Shawn Eckardt, to do something nefarious to Kerrigan, so as to benefit Tonya Harding's chances in the 1994 Lillehammer Olympics the following month.  Eckardt received a thousand dollars from Gillooley and hired two "hit men," Derrick Smith and Shane Stant,  Stant the one carrying out the assault on Nancy Kerrigan.  Gillooley thought Eckardt would send threatening letters to Kerrigan, unnerving her and giving her performance anxiety, but he apparently didn't know Eckhardt would resort to commissioning a violent act.  Tonya Harding herself didn't know about any of this, but her name got tied to the weird and idiotic affair.  The tensions resulting from all this madness, with Gillooley's paranoia mounting, led perhaps to Tonya's disastrous Olympic performance when she ran into trouble with her shoelaces, causing her jumps and landings to be affected badly.  She won no medals, but a recovered Kerrigan won the Silver Medal.  

     This extraordinary tale of differing classes and their treatment in the esteemed world of high profile professional skating was given screen treatment in the 2017 film, I, Tonya, directed by Craig Gillespie.  Margot Robbie, who can skate very well, plays Tonya Harding, a girl from Oregon, her mother a waitress, her father (divorced from her mother) a factory worker.  She has a drive to skate from the age of four, attracts the attention of a coach.  Tonya's mother is a hard, chain-smoking and bitter woman with ugly glasses, drab brown hair, and the demeanor of a confirmed pessimist.  

     Tonya works at her skating diligently, meets Jeff Gillooly in high school.  They get married.  He beats her regularly, flies into sudden rages, hits her apparently because he has no self-respect of his own.  Played by Sebastian Stan, the actor is unrecognizable compared to his role as Bucky in the Captain America films.  He does a good job playing this real life shit, and yet the humor throughout the film alleviates what could have been a grim story about losers, but losers, too, have big dreams.  

     Jeff's friend, Shawn (Paul Walter Hauser) is a fat young man living with his parents.  When he isn't eating he's offering hints of his "counter-intelligence background."  He has "connections," two of which prove to be the morons who carry out the assault on Nancy Kerrigan, which leads to the ruination of Tonya Harding's skating career.

     The movie unfolds with Tonya's story for an hour before the infamous "incident" of January 6, 1994, is depicted.  Afterwards, FBI men ask many questions of Jeff, Tonya, and Shawn, the latter coming across as a decidedly unskilled counter-intelligence operator--I guess he made up that biographical detail, ha ha.

     The G-men give Shawn the task of wearing a wire to get Jeff to confess his participation in the plot.  Jeff proves he's smarter than Shawn, not falling for Shawn's clumsy attempts to get him to incriminate himself.  Tonya's mother, pushed into it by the FBI probably, tries to get her daughter to confess, but Tonya sees through it and shoves her out of her house.

     The documentary-like scenes have Jeff, Tonya, her mother, Shawn, and a journalist from Hard Copy, the news program, commenting on the events of the movie as they unfold.  Their viewpoints don't always match with what we're seeing in the narrative, as when Jeff claims that Tonya knew all along about the conspiracy against Kerrigan.  In the end, Tonya says, "What's the truth?  Everybody has their own truth.  There is no truth."

     One of her poignant statements is about Nancy Kerrigan, who, Tonya observes, didn't look grateful or ecstatic when being awarded the Silver Medal at the '94 Olympics.  This gets into a deep aspect of the film, which as an analysis of class in America, is an important thing to contemplate when studying the Tonya Harding story.

     She was what's called in American slang, "poor white trash."  With parents in the working poor category, Tonya worked her own artistry on the ice to be great in her field.  She was the first figure skater to ever perform in competition a triple axel--spinning three and half times and landing it perfectly.   For a few years, Tonya Harding was one of the great figure skaters.  Nancy Kerrigan, too, had the chops needed to be a great skater, but she had a higher rating in the American class system.  A college graduate, Kerrigan had a modest background, but, as Tonya observes in the movie, the one time Nancy was ever hit was by Shane Stant.  Tonya points out that she herself got hit all the time, by her mother and by Jeff, and now, "by you," meaning the public, judging her in the wake of the assault on Nancy.

     Harding's skating was as good as Kerrigan's, but the judges she faced were snobs.  In the film, one of them explains to Tonya, "It's not your skating, Tonya, it's your presentation."

     Tonya made her own outfits, sewing them, working hard at creating costumes she believed were good enough to wear in her performances, but this activity was regarded as somehow pathetic.  Tonya's perspective was, "My skating should be the only thing worth examining."

     In the end, my sympathies are with Tonya Harding.  As Jeff's punching bag, she did nothing to deserve any slap or hit he delivered to her.  Her mother (Allison Janney) was a cold bitch with never a word of encouragement, except when she was secretly taping her for the fucking FBI.  Margot Robbie's performance overcomes the fact that she looks nothing like Tonya Harding, but in the credits we see footage of the skater's 1991 performance when she did the record setting triple axel.  After all the craziness and drama, it's good to find the real Tonya Harding in her element--to see that she really was a great figure skater.

Vic Neptune