Over the weekend, I saw I, Tonya, which is an amazing film that I can't get out of my head. Margot Robbie, Allison Janney, and Sebastian Stan gave incredible performances, which I'm excited to watch over and over. But I think what's so captivating about this movie for me is the way it presents Tonya Harding's relationship with fame. She's not the sort of star we ever see - especially from the world of figure skating (which I don't believe has really produced a mainstream star in the past 15 years [maybe Johnny Weir, but that's pushing it]). She's unglamorous; has a poor, working-class background that she never left behind, and never seemed to be ashamed of (not that she should leave it behind or be ashamed of it); and hung around some deadbeat people. Despite all this, she was beloved (for a brief period of time) for being exactly who she is in a field that celebrated posturing and pretension.
Tonya has a line in the movie where she says that she always wanted to be famous, but once it happened to her, she hated it. This reminded me a lot of a line from Monster where Aileen Wuornos (played by Charlize Theron) says something about how she knew that she was always going to be famous, she was just waiting around for someone to come whisk her away to stardom. This makes me think about how poor, working-class women are sometimes elevated to star status (granted, Aileen and Tonya became famous for very different reasons), but remain tragic figures.
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