How I Stumbled into Whatshername: on the romance of invisible women
First a quick summary
As expected, Mosby (from the ancient Celtic for “manipulative douchebag”) met “The Mother,” whose initials are TM, just like “Ted Mosby,” or “The Mother,” or “OH MY GOD YOU ARE SO ADORABLE YOU CAN DO SO MUCH BETTER” and they fell in WUV TWOO WUV. She died of cancer six years back (so probably, like, THE WEEK before Ted chained those poor kids to the couch and started YAPPING) and the kids are like “you hardly talked about Mom at all! This story is actually all about YOU and how you are STILL PINING over the woman you ACTUALLY started telling this story about BACK DURING THE REAGAN ADMINISTRATION PROBABLY, even though she RIGHTLY ditched your ass for trying to humiliate her emotionally for hurting your pweshus fee-fees by being TOO INDEPENDENT at you” - I’m paraphrasing a little - “GO GET HER!!” and the last shot of the show is him standing outside Robin’s window with a blue horn.
So, “The Mother” lived long enough to pop out and mostly raise the kids Robin couldn’t and didn’t want to give him and then had the grace to die of OTP-block-itis, while still young and doe-eyed enough to inspire Ted’s not-so-eternal devotion.
I give a lot more credit than most, I think, for deconstructions, attempted deconstructions, or even relatively mild critique of some storytelling conventions. The HIMYM finale provided a crystal-clear object lesson as to why. HIMYM, while certainly not in the same quality tier as the media I usually talk about, has been quite an influential part of popular culture over the last few years. When a show like this ends up cheerfully dependent on misogynist tropes, it tends to get an aw-shucks, what-do-you-expect boys-will-be-boys response, one which we would never give to a narrative which at least draws attention to the casual dehumanization inherent to those tropes. I think it is a mistake, when we decide that tropes are only as problematic as they are considered by the narrative in which they are used. HIMYM, in its apparent dewy-eyed innocuousness, is a great deal more dangerous than such popular targets as the discomfiting Game of Thrones or the intentionally feminist Dollhouse, or even the historically blatantly appalling Supernatural.
Sadly, I started thinking about this post three or four weeks ago, when I read this article and reacted by rolling my eyes and thinking "I should have known." I should have known HIMYM would mistake the cheap sentimentality of male tears over the death of a beautiful woman for legitimate poignancy. Tracy isn't quite a case of WiR, which usually involves making a pornographic spectacle of immediate grief. She's more like one of those frozen victims you see on crime procedurals once in a while.
Perhaps in context of a less stunningly offensive story, the problem of time would not matter quite so much. As the finished work stands, though, Tracy has only had a physical presence for 11% of the show's run; she only had a name for the last twenty minutes or so. Moreover, what little time Ted does bother to discuss Tracy is no more guaranteed to be reliably narrated than the absurdist encounters with Blah Blah or the world's most satisfying "sandwiches." Ted is describing a (likely fading) memory, a nostalgic shadow of his own desires and mannerisms. Tracy must be dead for the same reasons saints must be dead: only the dead can be perfectly static, because they can never talk back.
A man without a name is an enigma. A woman without a name is a corpse.
Just as, Robin's wedding was all about how Ted met Tracy, Tracy's life story becomes all about how Ted fell for Robin. The interesting thing about Robin's and Ted's interactions has been how her honest embrace of her own identity has, time and again, put the brakes on his self-involved efforts to Nice Guy her into compliance with his desired idea of her. The conservative, paternalistic nature of Ted's "affection" for Robin has been a clear issue on the show for years - and yet it is ultimately implied to be rewarded.
Robin got the shaft from more than just Ted, though. Barney sabotages their marriage out of resentment at her career - the career he's been her most reliable cheerleader on for years. As awful as Barney has been throughout the years, his love for Robin, who was so far out of the madonna/whore dichotomy he eventually proves as susceptible to as Ted, showed the character as someone who could move beyond such reductive views of women. As Nicole pointed out on Tumblr, Barney's ~redemption through fatherhood was particularly unsavory given Robin's infertility: as many times as she seemed to support or even (ugh) inspire his growth as a person, the only experience that could spur him into lasting change was something she was not only reasonably unwilling but actually unable to provide.
Barney's ultimate descent into a new kind of grossness far outlasts his breakup with Robin. The daughters-and-wives construct of "respect" for women that the character eventually embraces is at least as disrespectful and objectifying as the dudebro leering to which Barney has subjected hundreds of women over the years we've known him, and as he eventually proves, they are but two sides of the same coin. His innocent precious infant talisman never bespoils her status with characterization of her own; the child's mother is identified only as "Thirty-One," for being the 31st woman Barney slept with in a month.
My problem with all this is not necessarily that it was sexist and bleak, it's that the narrative ultimately is so oblivious about being these things. HIMYM is basically America's most popular romcom, running for 80 hours of screen time and nearly a decade of cultural influence, and it both reveals and reinforces a horrifying cultural prioritization of men's desires over women's identities, with a smile on its face and a song in its heart.
So I'm opening this post up for rage! However: I understand and sympathize with the frustration of people who sincerely liked the show and were disappointed by the quality of plot or characterization. I haven't kept up with the last few seasons regularly enough to be able to comment on those things. I am talking about the philosophical and social ramifications of the storytelling devices used. Even if this were the most exquisitely-written episode of television this century, these criticisms would stand. Complaints about the aesthetic and/or technical failings of THE RITURRZZZ are off-topic here.
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