The name on everybody’s lips is gonna be… ROXIE
So the other day I screencapped the movie Chicago, and posted a link to the gallery on my screencaps twitter with the caption, “Chicago is a story about horrible people being rewarded rather than punished for their crimes, thank god that never happens anymore.” I suppose it’s not hard to tell what I was thinking about real-life wise when I wrote that, but I was also thinking about Roxie Hart and how incredibly, inhumanly awful she is.
But then, casting my mind back over the whole movie, I suddenly had a thought. Wait…. is she?
Chicago begins with Roxie, who has the cunning of a snake and also the dubious street smarts of one, cheating on her husband with another man. So far, not great. But then one day her lover hits her, hard, while shouting about how he lied to her so she’d sleep with him. He also threatens that that hit won’t be the last one if she continues to displease him. (“Touch me again, I’ll put your lights out.”) So Roxie, sobbing furiously, grabs a gun and shoots him dead. Okay, obviously killing someone is not great either. Obviously. However, mitigating factors there, right?
Roxie then tries to get her husband Amos to take the blame for everything by having him claim he shot a burglar, which wouldn’t be punishable by death. It doesn’t go to plan. Roxie’s terrible treatment of her husband is the biggest mark against her in the movie I think, even more than the murder. But during this scene we get Amos saying of Roxie, “She wouldn’t hurt a worm, not even a worm!” and that makes me wonder, did she really pull the wool over his eyes that much, or was she a geniunely more sweet-natured person pre-affair?
Once she’s imprisoned, Roxie acts incredibly naively, and I don’t think that’s all an act. She really doesn’t seem to have a lot of idea of how the world works. When asked what she plans to tell the jury she says “I just figured I’d tell them the truth” which indicates that she geniunely doesn’t believe killing her abusive lover was that bad a crime. (And based on the Cell Block Tango, most of her fellow prisoners would agree with her.)
Roxie conducts herself perfectly in prison, acting deferential to just about everyone. And when she geniunely tries to become friends with Velma, Velma rudely rebuffs her. Roxie, who must surely count grudge-holding among her biggest flaws, hates her from that moment on. Eh, I guess that’s fair, considering.
Roxie then acquires the services of lawyer Billy Flynn, who has the good looks of Richard Gere but is also a grotesque, greedy bastard. She doesn’t like him and indeed she has no reason to, since he’s arguably even more morally corrupt than the actual murderers of this story. But she does take his advice (despite him very obviously not giving a shit about her, just her husband’s money) and he gets her declared innocent. After all the press photographers hastily leave to cover other murders Roxie laments that her fifteen minutes of fame are over in a voice which is legit baffled, as she still doesn’t seem to have twigged how this world she lives in works. That’s probably incredibly narcissistic but I guess not completely terrible, and also Amos leaves her at this point which thoroughly serves her right.
Then Roxie goes on the audition circuit, and at this point of the film it occured to me that she actually thanks the people who turn her down, and thanks her piano player too. This is a big contrast to Billy, a man who finds it acceptable to kick those “beneath him” without giving it a second thought.
In the end Roxie does get the stardom and fortune she so desires, via begrudgingly teaming up with Velma, but it seems like a Pyrrhic victory when you think about it. Because although she’s famous now and presumably rich, she has no-one left in her life who actually loves her and her closest ally is a woman who utterly hates her guts.
In conclusion: Roxie is not a nice person in the slightest, and she absolutely did not deserve any fame whatsoever… but she’s not anywhere as near as outright evil as I thought. If you’d had been there, if you’d had seen it, maybe you would have done the same?
