There has been a spate of attacks recently in which women have smashed up cars with a baseball bat. Your correspondent has noticed an uptick since the release of Beyoncé’s ‘visual album’ Lemonade in 2016. The video for the song ‘Hold Up’ shows Beyoncé in varying degrees of happiness in a Los Angeles street scene, wearing a bright yellow dress designed by Roberto Cavalli and carrying a baseball bat. Intercut with scenes of children playing on the streets and a bursting water hydrant are shots of Beyoncé taking the baseball bat to a car. The car does not come off well.
This scene came to mind this week when Rakewell caught up with episode two of All’s Fair, a shockingly slight drama – though visually alluring in the manner of a fashion advert – about divorce lawyers in Los Angeles that stars Kim Kardashian and is produced by the master of a certain sort of television, Ryan Murphy.
Kim Kardashian’s character, Allura, is an all-powerful divorce attorney, who, in an ironic twist no one saw coming, is cuckqueaned by her husband. She drives to the offending adulteress’s house and enjoys a fantasy of smashing up her car while wearing a bright yellow dress. The baseball bat is a matching yellow in the Kardashian/Murphy fantasy, because why not?
Many critics have commented that the scenes in Lemonade are indebted not only to Janet Jackson’s video for ‘Son of a Gun’ (2001), in which she carries a baseball bat through the Millennium Biltmore hotel in downtown LA, but also Pipilotti Rist’s Ever Is Over All (1997). Rist’s piece consists of two projections, one of a field of flaming torch lilies, the other of a woman, portrayed by Rist, carrying a single lily and using it to smash the windows of parked cars. There is something gleeful and wicked about this unabashed show of power and destruction.
The yellow baseball bat might be a slick touch too far, detracting from the feminist message and turning it into product placement, but it might also be a necessary flourish. It helps differentiate it from the baseball bat attack in the BBC’s Riot Women, in which Kitty (Rosalie Craig) takes a wooden bat to her lover’s car for lying to her. This takes place in Hebden Bridge rather than LA so the bat is made of wood – though Rakewell struggles to imagine many baseball matches taking place in the Yorkshire Dales.
In the end, Kitty is carted off by the police – a fate that does not befall Allura when she re-enacts one of the great art-directed videos of the last decade. Perhaps she knows that if you want to be taken seriously rather than as a danger to society then a bit of slickness doesn’t go amiss, and the best political statements come when they are well dressed.