Jeff Winger’s Little Indian Girl Story: (Delayed) Thoughts on Community 2×19 – “Critical Film Studies”

Last week on my favorite sitcom, Community fans tuned in to watch the Pulp Fiction-themed episode that NBC had been heavily promoting.  At the end of the half hour, the fans cried foul that they had been denied a real Pulp Fiction-themed episode while simultaneously adding My Dinner with Andre to their Netflix queues.

After NBC released a slew of promotional photographs with the gang as various Pulp Fiction characters, fans were likely expecting a campy, heavily referential episode along the lines of “Contemporary American Poultry” (the Goodfellas episode) and “Modern Warfare” (the action movie episode).  Instead, this was a more serious character study like “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas,” and I think the episode was stronger for it.

I feel like I could write an entire paper on the conversation Abed had with Jeff about movie references, and the amount of time people spend talking about fictional characters.  As a literary/television/movie nerd, I sometimes think that I would lose 90% of my conversation if I never made references to texts, and that thought scares me a little bit.  There’s a lot of meta genius in “Critical Film Studies” that I will have to talk about later.

For now, though, I want to talk about Jeff’s Halloween story.

As much as “Critical Film Studies” was written as another window into Abed’s impenetrable mind, we learned a lot about Jeff as well.  The episode accomplished a similar goal as “Intermediate Documentary Filmmaking”: developing a supporting character while using that character’s story to further develop the main character.  We got a glimpse into Pierce’s motives while also learning more about Jeff’s abandonment issues regarding his father.

Here, we learn even more about Jeff and his insecurities.  He reveals to Abed that he once called a phone sex hotline and pretended to be 400 pounds, wanting to hear a woman say that she still found him attractive.  Abed asked him why he would do such a thing, and Jeff burst out with, “Because I’m scared that if I were overweight, people wouldn’t like me!”

Of course.  Of course Jeff would need reassurance that he could still be attractive if he lost his figure.  This is a guy who carves notches into a table anytime someone mentions his abs, after all.

Then Jeff shares an experience from his childhood that I’m going to transcribe word-for-word, because it is brilliant:

“…And I said, ‘No, that’s a girl’s costume!’  And my mom said, ‘It’s fine!  Indian boys have long hair and braids, too!’  There was only 45 minutes left to trick-or-treat, so what could I do?  I put the damn thing on, and I went door-to-door.  And everyone was going, ‘Oh, what a pretty little girl.’  And by the third house…I stopped correcting them.  I mean, why draw attention to it?  And, honestly, once the shame and the fear wore off…I was just glad they thought I was pretty.”

It’s fitting that I watched this episode after I read half of a book about cross-dressing.  I don’t think Jeff is a secret, closeted cross-dresser by any means, but is there a chance that his commitment to his abs, his obsession with his image of hipster masculinity, is overcompensating for the time when he dressed as a little Indian girl and felt somewhat liberated?  He liked being told that he was pretty.  The Jeff Winger we know is overconfident, lazy, self-assured, and masculine.  Maybe he’s been working on that image since he was young, to make himself forget that he enjoyed that brief moment where people thought he was girl, to prove that he could still be society’s accepted version of a MAN even though he grew up without a father.

And to have this confession of Jeff’s take place in an episode where Shirley is dressed as Jules Winnifeld, complete with sideburns and looking surprisingly fierce, is the icing on the gender-bending cake.

In this season, we’ve had Annie take on the role of Hector the Well-Endowed, Abed as a shy elf maiden, Shirley as Jules, and Jeff as a little Indian girl (if only through dialogue and exposition).  By the end of this episode, Jeff makes Abed swear to keep that story a secret.  He’s the only one who can’t be open about the joy and liberation he felt in playing at another gender.  Annie is bubbly and confident, Abed uses his inability to pick up social cues to his advantage, and Shirley has no problem playing a male character when said character loves Jesus (“It’s a thirty-minute film where the heroes like dancing, cheeseburgers, and the Bible” – really?  That edited version added up to thirty whole minutes?).  But Jeff, even moreso than Britta, is obsessed with keeping his image intact.

I can’t exactly blame him.  In a sexist culture, it’s wrong for a boy to enjoy dressing as a girl, even on Halloween.  It’s so wrong that even Abed, who doesn’t understand much about human interaction, seems to recognize something “off” about the little Indian girl story.

That makes me sad for little Jeff, and for any other little boy who can’t dress up as a girl without being judged.