What’s With All the Hats?: The Ryan Evans Story

Posted by Maggie August 22nd, 2007 at 11:36am In Uncategorized

Even I’m getting a little sick of me taking High School Musical too seriously. I promise after this I’ll direct my brain-beams at something a little more worthy. For example, The Pick-Up Artist is now officially my second-favorite reality show after Project Runway. What? Not brainy enough? [Side note: Four years ago, I never would've thought I could utter the phrase "second-favorite reality show." The thought of even watching one would make me break out in hives. Ah, how times change.]

So. Ryan Evans. Ryan, as I assume you know if you’ve made it this far in the post, is Sharpay’s super-sparkly, super-awesome, super-gay (coded) brother. This is the Disney Channel, after all, so none of the characters could actually be gay, but of all the likely candidates (cough-CRÈME BRÛLÉE-cough [another side note: Where's Crème Brûlée in movie #2? Is he at culinary school? What, is the actor too good for the Disney channel now? And jeebus, crème brûlée has a lot of accent marks]), Ryan is the most likeliest. And I think Disney is kind of okay with that.

So how does Disney tell us they’re okay with it, in their subtle way? It’s not the fact that he performs in the musical; Troy performs in the musical, and he is the epitome of Disney’s manly men. I mean, Troy totally wants to kiss Gabriella. Like, seriously. The fact that he keeps letting circumstances come between himself and the kiss doesn’t mean he’s not way into it.

It’s not the fact that Ryan loves jazz squares, either. That’s just his way of annoying his sister. And besides, jazz squares are awesome. As he so aptly put it, “Everyone loves a jazz square.” You can’t argue with that.

No, it’s not the musical or the jazz squares. It is, simply, and quite literally, that he wears a lot of hats.

To be honest, I did not notice the hat phenomenon until I watched the High School Musical pop-up edition. The pop-ups kept track of the hats for you, numbering them as the movie went on. This, strangely, gave me the impression that young girls across the land were independently keeping their own hat count, gossiping about their favorite hats, and cataloguing such hat iterations obsessively; I assumed the pop-ups were merely settling some long-debated sleepover question that had plagued girl-kind for months. Whether or not this is the case is still up for debate, but I feel like I understand Disney’s focus on the hats a little more after the second movie.

In the first movie, the hats are pretty much the beginning and end of Ryan’s characterization. Sure, he encourages/supports Sharpay’s evil/stupid schemes, and he inserts jazz squares where Sharpay would prefer to have them left out. At the celebratory end, I think he ends up dancing with the hip hop girl? No? Throughout it all, he doesn’t really appear to have any sort of inner life. Except for the hats.

What does it say about Ryan, that the only way he can express himself is through the medium of sparkly hats? Well, obviously, he is downtrodden. Anyone with Sharpay as a sister must have been subjected to a lot of mental anguish in the service of her well-documented (by me, thank you) quest for perfection. Maybe hats are Ryan’s way of asserting himself in what has to be a stifling partnership. I picture Ryan standing in front of an enormous closet covered with mirrors and filled to the brim with hundreds of hats. Sharpay has laid out his outfit for the day, but the choice of hat is his alone, a small sliver of independence in a world full of blind obedience.

The fact that I can picture Ryan doing that owes a lot to the extremely talented Lucas Grabeel. I’m not sure Ryan would’ve ended up saving the day like he did in the second movie if it weren’t for Grabeel’s sympathetic and funny portrayal.

In the second movie, Ryan takes the hat thing a step further — into the wonderful world of metaphors. Now, not only does he wear a lot of hats, he wears a lot of hats. He plays baseball. He choreographs. He makes his own decisions. He’s fun to hang out with! It’s satisfying to see the character who was known solely for his hats develop into a person with his own ideas and opinions, and it feels totally natural. Obviously a man so in tune with hats would eventually become a decent person. Duh.

Oh my god, what does this have to do with Ryan being gay? Seriously. I’ve lost my train of thought.

Ah yes. The hats are also Disney’s way of letting us know that something’s different about Ryan, and that difference is probably okay (check with mom and dad first, kids). They point out Ryan’s hats in the pop-up version the way that we (grown-ups) look for clues of his homosexuality. They can’t tell us that Ryan likes dudes, even though he totally does, so they create a hat-based character and expect us to fill in the blanks.

The hats are Ryan’s only outlet for his personality; in a Sharpay-controlled world, they’re the only thing that sets him apart. They’re the thing that lets Disney admit he’s gay, in their own subtle way. The hats end up defining him in other ways, too, when he escapes from Sharpay’s clutches and chooses the side of good. He doesn’t feel like he has to do just one thing. He can wear many hats. He’s had a lot of practice.

So, who’s next? Stoner basketball dude who’s in love with Mrs. Darbus? Troy’s terrible, terrible father and his horrible, soul-sucking advice?

Just kidding. I’m stopping now. For this show, at least.