Torchwood Children of Earth - spoilerrific
Last weekend I saw Torchwood Children of Earth (CoE). In case it wasn't clear from the subject line, the following has spoilers.
Immediately after watching I was left stunned, slightly nauseated, and utterly incapable of commenting intelligently on it. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean it was bad; I had a similar response to Amistad, Requiem for a Dream, and Crash, all of which are generally thought to be excellent (if each in its own way slightly flawed) films and all of which I'm glad I saw. It's just that I tend to process fiction in a very organic/unanalytical way, swallowing it whole and then digesting, so fictional depictions of human nature at its worst tend to hit me hard. As a result, when I watch or read fiction for fun, I tend to prefer things that have sympathetic characters and a happy ending.
A big part of why I like Torchwood is the development of and interaction between sympathetic characters (particularly Ianto and Tosh), and I've spent the past several weeks since finishing watching the second season saying, "They can't kill Ianto!" So when I finally watched CoE, [PKG] was downright puzzled by my lack of reaction to Ianto's death, especially considering that Tosh's death got to me considerably more. The thing is, two things I like about Torchwood are that it's very clear that extending life isn't always a good thing, and that what makes life worthwhile is striving to apply ingenuity and teamwork to eliminate sources of others' suffering. However, there are several episodes that feature the team dealing with the symptoms, and unable to address the source, of a problem (Small World and Adrift come to mind), and for all that those tend to involve less death than other episodes, they're among my least favorites because the ending isn't really "happy" - the problem isn't solved. Similarly, Tosh died cleaning up a mess caused by a source of suffering, not eliminating the source itself, and I was seriously not pleased. Ianto, however, died exactly as he would have liked, working to strike a direct blow to those who put their own interests above the suffering of others.
Torchwood always tends to be heavy-handed with its moralizing (*coughMeatcough*). The "beat you over the head with it" point of CoE was very Arendt - people aren't good or evil, but the choices we make produce good or evil actions. Lois was a "good guy" because she was more concerned with others than with her own well-being, and acted accordingly. PM Green was a "bad guy" because the reverse was true. I think that what bothered me most about CoE was the fact that it ended with Jack, in the face of (once again) losing all those he loved, just...giving up, effectively putting his own interests (not feeling the pain of losing everyone he loved) above others'. In a sense that's very true to life - sometimes people run away from problems, get burned out, and/or respond to loss by changing their lifestyles. But for me, it meant that the series ended with the antithesis of catharsis.
Also, on another level (this argument may be a stretch, I haven't decided yet), I think that the struggle in CoE paralleled the struggle to get the mainstream to address the AIDS epidemic. Ianto is very visibly gay in CoE. Not only do we see more commentary on his and Jack's relationship than we do in the rest of the show put together, but he even has a freaking scarlet letter on his cheek proclaiming (in the form of a lambda) his queerness! As for the disease, that's the 456. The first to be sacrificed to the 456 are a small number of people who "won't be missed", and even when the numbers grow the government attempts to continue hiding the problem by offering the 456 rejected asylum-seekers and other "undesirables". Similarly, HIV/AIDS wasn't even labeled until the 1980s when it began affecting Westerners. Then, the 456 demanded 10% of the population. Even with so many people affected, policy makers decide that it's better to sacrifice this portion of the population, and specifically target those who don't "help build the future generation of our society". The use of the 10% figure is an obvious parallel to gay issues, and the way that the 10% to be handed to the 456 are described is similar to rhetoric used to deny equal rights to G/L/B folk. And of course, it's Ianto, branded with his queerness, who says that rather than sacrifice the ten percent of the population that's least powerful for the sake of not jeopardizing the majority, they should fight back. In the end, he dies of a virus and his lover stops fighting for the least powerful.
I can't comprehend how in the post-Holocaust world any educated person can fail to understand that horrible things can happen when people are willing to sacrifice others out of fear for their own well-being. That part of CoE, while nauseating, didn't leave that much of a mark for me. Neither did Ianto dying - he went the way he wanted to, fighting the good fight. But Jack leaving, for me, is like disrespecting Ianto's life and death, not to mention a huge part of what I liked about the show.
EDITED TO ADD: Part of me wants to say that Jack using Stephen was also him giving up (why didn't he keep working until the very last minute to find an alternative to using any child!). But given that TW makes it very clear that sacrificing your interests for the sake of the greater good is much different than sacrificing a minority for the sake of the majority, I'll take the thing with Stephen as a demonstration of the fact that, even if one is "good" and the other "evil", both are tragic.
I don't know how clear any of this was, but I don't think it's going to get any clearer as the hour gets later, so that's it for now. eumelia linked to a a queer discussion of CoE that I'll check out tomorrow...Now that I've attempted to sort through my thoughts a bit more, I'm curious how that analysis does or doesn't agree with my own.
EDITED TO ADD: Having listened to the podcast, I found the Canadian woman consistently irritating and the U.S.-ian man somewhat so at the end. Luckily, you can spare yourself their idiocy by just reading this post by the British man, who was the most insightful of the three anyhow.
Immediately after watching I was left stunned, slightly nauseated, and utterly incapable of commenting intelligently on it. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean it was bad; I had a similar response to Amistad, Requiem for a Dream, and Crash, all of which are generally thought to be excellent (if each in its own way slightly flawed) films and all of which I'm glad I saw. It's just that I tend to process fiction in a very organic/unanalytical way, swallowing it whole and then digesting, so fictional depictions of human nature at its worst tend to hit me hard. As a result, when I watch or read fiction for fun, I tend to prefer things that have sympathetic characters and a happy ending.
A big part of why I like Torchwood is the development of and interaction between sympathetic characters (particularly Ianto and Tosh), and I've spent the past several weeks since finishing watching the second season saying, "They can't kill Ianto!" So when I finally watched CoE, [PKG] was downright puzzled by my lack of reaction to Ianto's death, especially considering that Tosh's death got to me considerably more. The thing is, two things I like about Torchwood are that it's very clear that extending life isn't always a good thing, and that what makes life worthwhile is striving to apply ingenuity and teamwork to eliminate sources of others' suffering. However, there are several episodes that feature the team dealing with the symptoms, and unable to address the source, of a problem (Small World and Adrift come to mind), and for all that those tend to involve less death than other episodes, they're among my least favorites because the ending isn't really "happy" - the problem isn't solved. Similarly, Tosh died cleaning up a mess caused by a source of suffering, not eliminating the source itself, and I was seriously not pleased. Ianto, however, died exactly as he would have liked, working to strike a direct blow to those who put their own interests above the suffering of others.
Torchwood always tends to be heavy-handed with its moralizing (*coughMeatcough*). The "beat you over the head with it" point of CoE was very Arendt - people aren't good or evil, but the choices we make produce good or evil actions. Lois was a "good guy" because she was more concerned with others than with her own well-being, and acted accordingly. PM Green was a "bad guy" because the reverse was true. I think that what bothered me most about CoE was the fact that it ended with Jack, in the face of (once again) losing all those he loved, just...giving up, effectively putting his own interests (not feeling the pain of losing everyone he loved) above others'. In a sense that's very true to life - sometimes people run away from problems, get burned out, and/or respond to loss by changing their lifestyles. But for me, it meant that the series ended with the antithesis of catharsis.
Also, on another level (this argument may be a stretch, I haven't decided yet), I think that the struggle in CoE paralleled the struggle to get the mainstream to address the AIDS epidemic. Ianto is very visibly gay in CoE. Not only do we see more commentary on his and Jack's relationship than we do in the rest of the show put together, but he even has a freaking scarlet letter on his cheek proclaiming (in the form of a lambda) his queerness! As for the disease, that's the 456. The first to be sacrificed to the 456 are a small number of people who "won't be missed", and even when the numbers grow the government attempts to continue hiding the problem by offering the 456 rejected asylum-seekers and other "undesirables". Similarly, HIV/AIDS wasn't even labeled until the 1980s when it began affecting Westerners. Then, the 456 demanded 10% of the population. Even with so many people affected, policy makers decide that it's better to sacrifice this portion of the population, and specifically target those who don't "help build the future generation of our society". The use of the 10% figure is an obvious parallel to gay issues, and the way that the 10% to be handed to the 456 are described is similar to rhetoric used to deny equal rights to G/L/B folk. And of course, it's Ianto, branded with his queerness, who says that rather than sacrifice the ten percent of the population that's least powerful for the sake of not jeopardizing the majority, they should fight back. In the end, he dies of a virus and his lover stops fighting for the least powerful.
I can't comprehend how in the post-Holocaust world any educated person can fail to understand that horrible things can happen when people are willing to sacrifice others out of fear for their own well-being. That part of CoE, while nauseating, didn't leave that much of a mark for me. Neither did Ianto dying - he went the way he wanted to, fighting the good fight. But Jack leaving, for me, is like disrespecting Ianto's life and death, not to mention a huge part of what I liked about the show.
EDITED TO ADD: Part of me wants to say that Jack using Stephen was also him giving up (why didn't he keep working until the very last minute to find an alternative to using any child!). But given that TW makes it very clear that sacrificing your interests for the sake of the greater good is much different than sacrificing a minority for the sake of the majority, I'll take the thing with Stephen as a demonstration of the fact that, even if one is "good" and the other "evil", both are tragic.
I don't know how clear any of this was, but I don't think it's going to get any clearer as the hour gets later, so that's it for now. eumelia linked to a a queer discussion of CoE that I'll check out tomorrow...Now that I've attempted to sort through my thoughts a bit more, I'm curious how that analysis does or doesn't agree with my own.
EDITED TO ADD: Having listened to the podcast, I found the Canadian woman consistently irritating and the U.S.-ian man somewhat so at the end. Luckily, you can spare yourself their idiocy by just reading this post by the British man, who was the most insightful of the three anyhow.