It’s Hereronormativity: The Musical!
You know, kind of. I doubt anybody explicitly set out to make it that; few artists intend to make propaganda unless it’s their primary mission. As far as they know people just write their values; confronted with a story that doesn’t seem quite happy, a writer might make it happier, as they understand it. A story about a desperately poor young woman with an unusual gift who found fame and the admiring man who happily hitched his star to hers becomes a story about a woman who learns to stifle her gifts to mollify her lover’s pride. A marriage of apparent equals becomes a marriage of a woman winning love by holding herself back, and a man who magnanimously allows her to do so. So it goes.
Annie Oakley performed in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, as does the fictional Annie in Annie Get Your Gun, and it’s appropriate. Buffalo Bill’s show was entertainment, but it also existed to streamline the western frontier, full of messy contradictions, into something safe and consumable. Sitting Bull performs alongside white lawmen, and they all get along. Safe, happy, free of mess: that’s America as we like to tell it (and sell it) to ourselves.
Similarly, Annie Get Your Gun is entertainment about a famous American who people at the time still remembered and admired, but it also existed to force a strong-willed, sometimes messy and angry working woman who embodied the frontier’s contradictions into the mold of a good straight wife. Likewise, the Sitting Bull of the film turns from a complex freedom fighter who made difficult compromises with white power into a benevolent old surrogate uncle for white womanhood, eager to give it the stamp of authenticity and approval (if it’s heterosexual in the right ways). So it goes. You can even see this dialectical battle between spiky conflict and heterosexual calm in this musical’s songs: contrast “Anything You Can Do (I Can Do Better)” with “You Can’t Get a Man With a Gun.” The second one wins out. For the real Annie and her husband Frank, it didn’t. So it goes.
I don’t think inaccuracies are bad; it’s a narrative film, and before that a play. It’s not a history lesson, and it’s okay for it to meet narrative needs first. But what story is being told here, and why? Why do we have to tell it this way? I first saw this film when I was very small, and I felt mildly uncomfortable with it at the time. Now it makes me deeply sad; not for the real Annie, who was apparently fine, or for her husband Frank who happily played second fiddle to her for the rest of their lives. But I do feel sad for little girls who maybe saw Annie Oakley as a heroine, who thought she needed to pretend to be worse at something when she was better than anyone at it. She never had to do that, and I hope those little girls found that out eventually.
“Anything You Can Do” still, unfortunately, slaps. So it goes.