TV, Women, and LGBT People: What is and isn't there.
This is the part where I talk about this entry.
To preface this entry: I don't know if this is everything I want to say, or even how I want to say it. This doesn't flow as smoothly as I wish I could make it go. This feels, to me, more like thinking via my fingers than the actual essay someone else might make out of the same ideas.
I also think I should note that I spent much of the morning being teary-eyed about Sarah Connor Chronicles. Just so you know where I'm coming from.
You should also know there are spoilers in this entry. I've put them behind a cut, but if you've come here via a link that takes you directly to this entry's page, you might not notice the warnings.
This is the part where I talk about women.
I've been saying that all my reading about race, racism, and anti-racism has resensitized me to issues of sexism, but that's not really true. My resensitization started before that, with Leverage's "The Stork Job." In "The Stork Job," Parker leaves the orphans and goes outside to fight the bad guy. At one point, he has his arm across her neck, and, given that I watch a lot of TV and understand TV show formulas, that's where I expected Eliot to swoop in and save her. But that's not what happens. Parker saves herself. She has the action skills to win the fight and lead the orphans out of there. It's only when she's taking the kids down the stairs that the team shows up to help her, and it's Sophie, not one of the men, who directs her the right way. I was surprised, in a good way, that Eliot didn't show up while Parker was being choked. But it also made me realize that everything else gets it wrong. Of course the woman who's been a successful thief on her own for Rogers only knows how many years should be able to get herself out of a fight. But that's not what happens on TV. My Google Alerts yesterday brought me to oyceter's post about Leverage, in which she says, "It's relaxing and funny and doesn't require me to keep my brain on for too much, and it does so without being horribly offensive! I realize the last bit sounds like damning with faint praise, but given the state of almost all TV I see, it seems to be much more difficult to achieve than one would think." I think I've been so burnt out on so many things for so long that I forgot to notice, or even how to notice, the things that are horribly offensive, and seeing something done that wasn't made me remember how much other things are.
One of the many things that's been bothering me about Dollhouse is how often Boyd rescues Echo. If she's supposed to be our heroine, shouldn't we see her saving the day? She saves the day this week, but she has to do it via asking a man to give her an identity that will make her able to do it. I almost want Eliza Dushku to be a smokescreen and Sierra to be our main character; she's become much more interesting and sympathetic over the last couple of episodes. But, again, the thing that makes her most sympathetic is that she's a victim.
I continue to think FBI Guy is the creepiest thing about this show, which makes me question Joss's motives because it seems like maybe we're supposed to be rooting for him. (Honestly, outside of the treatment of women issues, the biggest problem with this show as a show is that I don't know who I'm supposed to like and consequently don't like anyone. Bad signaling, Joss.) In my last post about the treatment of women on Dollhouse, I mentioned how creepy I thought it was for him to say "I like taking care of you" to Mellie. After I made that post, I talked about the ep with my mom, who pointed out that it's especially off because he doesn't; she takes care of him. This week, he learns she's a doll and continues his sexual relationship with her anyway. Creepy.
norwich36 pointed me to a pair of coffeeandink's posts about Sarah Connor Chronicles. In one of them, she makes the point that SCC doesn't eroticize women's suffering and Dollhouse does, which, I think, is part of what makes Dollhouse look even worse in comparison to SCC. (As of last week, by the way, I take back anything good I might have said about Dollhouse.) It's also something I haven't consciously noticed but which has probably contributed to my SCC enjoyment. (The other post is this one, which is also interesting, but not connected to anything else I'm saying in this post.)
I was thinking about it during last night's ep, though, when Cameron takes off her top and has John feel for her power source under her breastplate. That was just an amazing scene, so amazing that I (or maybe you) could write a whole series of posts deconstructing it. The eroticism of it is fascinatingly complex. First of all, there's this incredibly beautiful creature taking off her top for John to look at her, which she's done before to no effect. Then there's the fact that just before she does it, John compares her to his mother. That's a connection that's solidified when the potential source of death is in her breast, just where Sarah's potential cancer is, and in the way that what looks like the prelude to a sexual encounter is actually a check for danger, which is exactly how things went down with Sarah and Charley in "To the Lighthouse." Writing about it now, it occurs to me that Cameron's power source is also in the same place as a human's heart. There's the fact that for everything else he is, John is a teenage boy being confronted by a half-naked woman. There's the part where she's a cyborg and he's clearly turned on by her being naked and by reaching up into her. And then there's John's overall complicated relationship with Cameron. This whole season has been about two things: First, John learning what it means to be a leader. From sitting with Charley after Michelle dies to Derek telling him "You made the call. This is what living with it means" to "If you pretend not to know me, I might shoot you in the head" to "Everyone dies for me, right?" everything's been teaching him what it means to be John Connor. And once that was pretty firmly in place, the second thing this season did was strip people away from him. By the time we get to John feeling up the inside of Cameron's chest, she's the only one left with him. If they get a third season, it's going to be fascinating to see what it means for John-the-leader to be suddenly dumped into the middle of a bunch of people who can be his support system but don't know him as a leader. Not to mention what it means for Sarah to be Sarah Connor without John Connor.
I think it's worth noting that SCC and Dollhouse are both the brainchildren of men: Dollhouse is Joss Whedon's and SCC is Josh Friedman's. I skimmed the list of writers on IMDb's full cast and crew pages for each of them, and Dollhouse has more women writers than SCC, both by numbers and proportion. Extra interesting to me is that the two pieces of SCC fan fic that I've read that were absolutely incredible (I have to admit to not having read much, just most of the things at Yuletide and a handful of other miscellaneous things, and most of it tends to blend together) were both written by a man: "Cinderella, Made of Steel" and " Seven Sunday Mother-Daughter Mornings," both by David Hines. You can't end oppression without involving the oppressors. The Egyptians are God's people too. (Happy Passover.)
For me, in some very real ways, the season finale of SCC marks the end of this TV season. With that done for the season (or possibly forever), there isn't anything I'm going to look forward to in quite the same way. But I've also been busying myself with watching the first episodes of a bunch of midseason shows.
This is the part where I talk about lgbt people.
One of the shows I watched the first two episodes of was Cupid. I have vague memories of seeing the ads for the Jeremy Piven version, but I don't think I ever watched it. I thought I'd watch this version because I really like both Bobby Cannavale and Sarah Paulson. Then the first episode had both Sean Maguire (I had no idea he was actually British) and Marguerite Moreau, both of whom are pretty and I like. But there's a moment when the other characters turn from the bar to look at Marguerite's character and she's talking to another woman, and I thought, "Oh, she's a lesbian!" But, no, she isn't. She falls in love with Sean's character, of course, and they have a happy ending I really liked. But. But. I've watched two episodes and every couple has been straight, both the ones that work and the ones that don't. And knowing that this is TV, and even more, knowing that this is ABC, I don't have a lot of hope for lgbt love stories. But oh, how do I want them. How amazing would it be for Cupid to get credit from the Gods for helping an lgbt love story have a happy ending?
I've been thinking about characters who are retconned into being straight, both because it's one of the things that happens to the lgbt superheroes on Perry Moore's list and because minkhollow brought it up in brown-betty's book discussion. The one that's bothering me the most in this TV season is Pamela Barnes from SPN. The moment we met her, I thought, "She's a dyke!" Kripke didn't even let me enjoy that for more than a moment or so before we find out she has a man's name tattooed on her ass. And then, of course, she dies helping Sam and Dean.
The only actual lgbt main character on anything I've watched this year is Jack on Kings, and talk about problematic. Yikes. One of the things I like about it is that Silas says, "You can't be what God made you." But how bad do things have to be when Silas not calling him an abomination is worth noting?
I'm also curious about how other people read his asking to be hit in the fight in "First Night." To me, with my slasher's mind, he was asking for punishment for sending away his sort of boyfriend guy, but I worry that it came off to others as him asking for punishment for being gay.
SCC had a trans character, which was interesting to me because I read her as reluctantly trans because of the way she says, "I'm a man living as a woman." io9 had a transwoman (oddly not the one who works for them, but an outsider) comment on the trans character, and she really liked the character, and then said something to the effect that you still have dead tranny syndrome but that it's mitigated by the formula of SCC where every guest star with valuable information dies.
One of the midseason shows I watched the first ep of this week is The Unusuals. If I could choose only one midseason ensemble cop show about a rich kid who became a cop, it would be this one (over Southland, but I'll watch another ep or two of that because Ben McKenzie did sell it at the end and Regina King is hot), although that's not much of a rec. It's not as funny as the ads made it look, and Amber Tamblyn is the kind of cute-pretty that they should be doing something with (in terms of the character) rather than ignoring. Anyway, I bring it up now because the other woman, Detective Beaumont, gives her a quick rundown of the other detectives, and tells her, about her new partner, something like, "He doesn't stare at my breasts. But I've got great breasts, so why isn't he looking?" The obvious answer to that should be that maybe he's gay, and yet that doesn't seem to have occurred to Shraeger (or anyone else) yet. I don't think it's going to, either, because the picture she gets of Walsh says, "What's his secret?" and the set-up is for him to be working for IAB or the FBI or the mob, not for him to have a personal life no one knows much about.
To preface this entry: I don't know if this is everything I want to say, or even how I want to say it. This doesn't flow as smoothly as I wish I could make it go. This feels, to me, more like thinking via my fingers than the actual essay someone else might make out of the same ideas.
I also think I should note that I spent much of the morning being teary-eyed about Sarah Connor Chronicles. Just so you know where I'm coming from.
You should also know there are spoilers in this entry. I've put them behind a cut, but if you've come here via a link that takes you directly to this entry's page, you might not notice the warnings.
This is the part where I talk about women.
I've been saying that all my reading about race, racism, and anti-racism has resensitized me to issues of sexism, but that's not really true. My resensitization started before that, with Leverage's "The Stork Job." In "The Stork Job," Parker leaves the orphans and goes outside to fight the bad guy. At one point, he has his arm across her neck, and, given that I watch a lot of TV and understand TV show formulas, that's where I expected Eliot to swoop in and save her. But that's not what happens. Parker saves herself. She has the action skills to win the fight and lead the orphans out of there. It's only when she's taking the kids down the stairs that the team shows up to help her, and it's Sophie, not one of the men, who directs her the right way. I was surprised, in a good way, that Eliot didn't show up while Parker was being choked. But it also made me realize that everything else gets it wrong. Of course the woman who's been a successful thief on her own for Rogers only knows how many years should be able to get herself out of a fight. But that's not what happens on TV. My Google Alerts yesterday brought me to oyceter's post about Leverage, in which she says, "It's relaxing and funny and doesn't require me to keep my brain on for too much, and it does so without being horribly offensive! I realize the last bit sounds like damning with faint praise, but given the state of almost all TV I see, it seems to be much more difficult to achieve than one would think." I think I've been so burnt out on so many things for so long that I forgot to notice, or even how to notice, the things that are horribly offensive, and seeing something done that wasn't made me remember how much other things are.
One of the many things that's been bothering me about Dollhouse is how often Boyd rescues Echo. If she's supposed to be our heroine, shouldn't we see her saving the day? She saves the day this week, but she has to do it via asking a man to give her an identity that will make her able to do it. I almost want Eliza Dushku to be a smokescreen and Sierra to be our main character; she's become much more interesting and sympathetic over the last couple of episodes. But, again, the thing that makes her most sympathetic is that she's a victim.
I continue to think FBI Guy is the creepiest thing about this show, which makes me question Joss's motives because it seems like maybe we're supposed to be rooting for him. (Honestly, outside of the treatment of women issues, the biggest problem with this show as a show is that I don't know who I'm supposed to like and consequently don't like anyone. Bad signaling, Joss.) In my last post about the treatment of women on Dollhouse, I mentioned how creepy I thought it was for him to say "I like taking care of you" to Mellie. After I made that post, I talked about the ep with my mom, who pointed out that it's especially off because he doesn't; she takes care of him. This week, he learns she's a doll and continues his sexual relationship with her anyway. Creepy.
norwich36 pointed me to a pair of coffeeandink's posts about Sarah Connor Chronicles. In one of them, she makes the point that SCC doesn't eroticize women's suffering and Dollhouse does, which, I think, is part of what makes Dollhouse look even worse in comparison to SCC. (As of last week, by the way, I take back anything good I might have said about Dollhouse.) It's also something I haven't consciously noticed but which has probably contributed to my SCC enjoyment. (The other post is this one, which is also interesting, but not connected to anything else I'm saying in this post.)
I was thinking about it during last night's ep, though, when Cameron takes off her top and has John feel for her power source under her breastplate. That was just an amazing scene, so amazing that I (or maybe you) could write a whole series of posts deconstructing it. The eroticism of it is fascinatingly complex. First of all, there's this incredibly beautiful creature taking off her top for John to look at her, which she's done before to no effect. Then there's the fact that just before she does it, John compares her to his mother. That's a connection that's solidified when the potential source of death is in her breast, just where Sarah's potential cancer is, and in the way that what looks like the prelude to a sexual encounter is actually a check for danger, which is exactly how things went down with Sarah and Charley in "To the Lighthouse." Writing about it now, it occurs to me that Cameron's power source is also in the same place as a human's heart. There's the fact that for everything else he is, John is a teenage boy being confronted by a half-naked woman. There's the part where she's a cyborg and he's clearly turned on by her being naked and by reaching up into her. And then there's John's overall complicated relationship with Cameron. This whole season has been about two things: First, John learning what it means to be a leader. From sitting with Charley after Michelle dies to Derek telling him "You made the call. This is what living with it means" to "If you pretend not to know me, I might shoot you in the head" to "Everyone dies for me, right?" everything's been teaching him what it means to be John Connor. And once that was pretty firmly in place, the second thing this season did was strip people away from him. By the time we get to John feeling up the inside of Cameron's chest, she's the only one left with him. If they get a third season, it's going to be fascinating to see what it means for John-the-leader to be suddenly dumped into the middle of a bunch of people who can be his support system but don't know him as a leader. Not to mention what it means for Sarah to be Sarah Connor without John Connor.
I think it's worth noting that SCC and Dollhouse are both the brainchildren of men: Dollhouse is Joss Whedon's and SCC is Josh Friedman's. I skimmed the list of writers on IMDb's full cast and crew pages for each of them, and Dollhouse has more women writers than SCC, both by numbers and proportion. Extra interesting to me is that the two pieces of SCC fan fic that I've read that were absolutely incredible (I have to admit to not having read much, just most of the things at Yuletide and a handful of other miscellaneous things, and most of it tends to blend together) were both written by a man: "Cinderella, Made of Steel" and " Seven Sunday Mother-Daughter Mornings," both by David Hines. You can't end oppression without involving the oppressors. The Egyptians are God's people too. (Happy Passover.)
For me, in some very real ways, the season finale of SCC marks the end of this TV season. With that done for the season (or possibly forever), there isn't anything I'm going to look forward to in quite the same way. But I've also been busying myself with watching the first episodes of a bunch of midseason shows.
This is the part where I talk about lgbt people.
One of the shows I watched the first two episodes of was Cupid. I have vague memories of seeing the ads for the Jeremy Piven version, but I don't think I ever watched it. I thought I'd watch this version because I really like both Bobby Cannavale and Sarah Paulson. Then the first episode had both Sean Maguire (I had no idea he was actually British) and Marguerite Moreau, both of whom are pretty and I like. But there's a moment when the other characters turn from the bar to look at Marguerite's character and she's talking to another woman, and I thought, "Oh, she's a lesbian!" But, no, she isn't. She falls in love with Sean's character, of course, and they have a happy ending I really liked. But. But. I've watched two episodes and every couple has been straight, both the ones that work and the ones that don't. And knowing that this is TV, and even more, knowing that this is ABC, I don't have a lot of hope for lgbt love stories. But oh, how do I want them. How amazing would it be for Cupid to get credit from the Gods for helping an lgbt love story have a happy ending?
I've been thinking about characters who are retconned into being straight, both because it's one of the things that happens to the lgbt superheroes on Perry Moore's list and because minkhollow brought it up in brown-betty's book discussion. The one that's bothering me the most in this TV season is Pamela Barnes from SPN. The moment we met her, I thought, "She's a dyke!" Kripke didn't even let me enjoy that for more than a moment or so before we find out she has a man's name tattooed on her ass. And then, of course, she dies helping Sam and Dean.
The only actual lgbt main character on anything I've watched this year is Jack on Kings, and talk about problematic. Yikes. One of the things I like about it is that Silas says, "You can't be what God made you." But how bad do things have to be when Silas not calling him an abomination is worth noting?
I'm also curious about how other people read his asking to be hit in the fight in "First Night." To me, with my slasher's mind, he was asking for punishment for sending away his sort of boyfriend guy, but I worry that it came off to others as him asking for punishment for being gay.
SCC had a trans character, which was interesting to me because I read her as reluctantly trans because of the way she says, "I'm a man living as a woman." io9 had a transwoman (oddly not the one who works for them, but an outsider) comment on the trans character, and she really liked the character, and then said something to the effect that you still have dead tranny syndrome but that it's mitigated by the formula of SCC where every guest star with valuable information dies.
One of the midseason shows I watched the first ep of this week is The Unusuals. If I could choose only one midseason ensemble cop show about a rich kid who became a cop, it would be this one (over Southland, but I'll watch another ep or two of that because Ben McKenzie did sell it at the end and Regina King is hot), although that's not much of a rec. It's not as funny as the ads made it look, and Amber Tamblyn is the kind of cute-pretty that they should be doing something with (in terms of the character) rather than ignoring. Anyway, I bring it up now because the other woman, Detective Beaumont, gives her a quick rundown of the other detectives, and tells her, about her new partner, something like, "He doesn't stare at my breasts. But I've got great breasts, so why isn't he looking?" The obvious answer to that should be that maybe he's gay, and yet that doesn't seem to have occurred to Shraeger (or anyone else) yet. I don't think it's going to, either, because the picture she gets of Walsh says, "What's his secret?" and the set-up is for him to be working for IAB or the FBI or the mob, not for him to have a personal life no one knows much about.