An Extraordinary Rendition of History; Items in Warehouse 13 that Don't Belong in "America's Attic"
First, let's continue the series:
Warehouse 13 is a fluffy little show on the network formerly known as SciFi in which a team of Secret Service agents rundown "artifacts" with strange powers and store them in a massive warehouse in South Dakota. As I said before, it's a mishmash of very familiar ideas thrown together for some crazy-happenings-of-the-week adventures.
Artifacts can have various effects, on people and their surroundings; and it's not exactly clear how they have those effects. The pilot was deliberately (and endearingly) vague about how everything worked except to say that it does and it's very dangerous. In the most recent episode, "Claudia," there was a little bit more of an explanation: "Every artifact in this warehouse is an extension of a person."
But for whatever reason, artifacts don't just come from any person; they come from special persons, great persons-in most cases historical persons. And, this being a TV show, the artifacts often have a connection to the historical tidbit that the person is most known for. And when the particular person to whom an artifact is connected is unknown, the artifact corresponds to a culture and era in history (as with the "Aztec blood stone").
In short, these artifacts are history.
And the United States is intent on rooting out history, "neutralizing" it, and locking it away where nobody will ever find it.
That's a problem, for a lot of reasons.
For one, the United States often holds itself up as the pinnacle of civilization (which is, of course, Western civilization, because other civilizations aren't really civilized enough to count). As a result, Americans lay claim to pretty much anything they want to in Western civilization. We use psychiatry in America, right? And trigonometry? So the people who helped bring those things to the world obviously belong in America's cultural history.
Of course, Americans don't just take others' history wholesale. No, Americans take the best. (And anything that's left over, well they can keep that so that we can identify them if it comes to that.)
Warehouse 13 also treats the idea of history being powerful, dangerous, and relevant today as a crazy, fantastical notion. "Who would think that? Doesn't everyone know that the past is something we tear down and lock away in the attic to make room for the new?" Well, it turns out that not everybody does think that way. Especially people, like indigenous peoples throughout the Americas and other victims of imperialism throughout the world, who had their language and/or history and/or culture and/or lives forcibly removed by colonizing powers. A power like, say, the United States government.
And while the show often focuses on the "danger" posed by artifacts, that danger comes from their power. And the agents of Warehouse 13 (particularly Artie, the senior agent) do often use the artifacts. (Benjamin Franklin's lightning rod made an appearance as a tool in the most recent episode.) Some artifacts do seem to exist simply to sow chaos (at least, as far as the U.S. government is concerned), but others are just very useful tools. Why take those away? And do they even bother with the due compensation that would accompany an eminent-domain seizure?
And now that we've seen artifacts explicitly removed from other nations, we move further into politics. Why would agents of the United States government feel authorized to steal powerful aspects of culture directly from that culture? Is it, perhaps, because the United States is afraid of these artifacts, wielded by those who actually have a claim to them, being used against the United States?
If so, it's a startling extension of the Bush Doctrine. "Hey, guys, we think that your culture is a threat to us, so we're just going to go in and take it, and lock it away forever, for our own safety. We'll take very good care of it." Warehouse 13 is only a playful attic of imagination for the Americans who get to maintain it, for everyone else-including, most likely, many Americans-it's a cultural Gitmo where the United States government holds your history and uses it for their own ends, in secret and with no appeal.
An extraordinary rendition indeed.
And all of this really just scratches the surface of the many levels of wrong underneath Warehouse 13's affable surface. There's also a whole bunch of crazy inaccuracies as well; I'll have to write about what an "Aztec bloodstone" might be another time. In fact, I'm probably going to keep harping on Warehouse 13 for a while.
Why? Aside from all the fail, it's charismatic and affable on the surface, as long as you don't start to actually think about what's being shown. It's almost a pleasant show to viciously hate. (Is this what fans of Stargate Atlantis feel like?)
The majority of artifacts presented thus far have been either American (White American, to be specific) or European, so this may not appear to be related to , but the concepts of cultural imperialism and Americentrism are very important to thinking about race. This also ties in with this year's optional theme "Global" (in an albeit faily way).
And you know, there's still the pilot and that "bloodstone" to deal with.
(This is a manual crosspost of a post on Dreamwidth. You can leave a comment there.
- A sitting chair belonging to James Braid (brought to the United States by Braid's descendants)
- The guillotine blade that beheaded Marie Antoinette (shown being surreptitiously stolen from a museum in France by American agents)
- Various personal belongings of Georg Joachim Rheticus (European mathematician)
Warehouse 13 is a fluffy little show on the network formerly known as SciFi in which a team of Secret Service agents rundown "artifacts" with strange powers and store them in a massive warehouse in South Dakota. As I said before, it's a mishmash of very familiar ideas thrown together for some crazy-happenings-of-the-week adventures.
Artifacts can have various effects, on people and their surroundings; and it's not exactly clear how they have those effects. The pilot was deliberately (and endearingly) vague about how everything worked except to say that it does and it's very dangerous. In the most recent episode, "Claudia," there was a little bit more of an explanation: "Every artifact in this warehouse is an extension of a person."
But for whatever reason, artifacts don't just come from any person; they come from special persons, great persons-in most cases historical persons. And, this being a TV show, the artifacts often have a connection to the historical tidbit that the person is most known for. And when the particular person to whom an artifact is connected is unknown, the artifact corresponds to a culture and era in history (as with the "Aztec blood stone").
In short, these artifacts are history.
And the United States is intent on rooting out history, "neutralizing" it, and locking it away where nobody will ever find it.
That's a problem, for a lot of reasons.
For one, the United States often holds itself up as the pinnacle of civilization (which is, of course, Western civilization, because other civilizations aren't really civilized enough to count). As a result, Americans lay claim to pretty much anything they want to in Western civilization. We use psychiatry in America, right? And trigonometry? So the people who helped bring those things to the world obviously belong in America's cultural history.
Of course, Americans don't just take others' history wholesale. No, Americans take the best. (And anything that's left over, well they can keep that so that we can identify them if it comes to that.)
Warehouse 13 also treats the idea of history being powerful, dangerous, and relevant today as a crazy, fantastical notion. "Who would think that? Doesn't everyone know that the past is something we tear down and lock away in the attic to make room for the new?" Well, it turns out that not everybody does think that way. Especially people, like indigenous peoples throughout the Americas and other victims of imperialism throughout the world, who had their language and/or history and/or culture and/or lives forcibly removed by colonizing powers. A power like, say, the United States government.
And while the show often focuses on the "danger" posed by artifacts, that danger comes from their power. And the agents of Warehouse 13 (particularly Artie, the senior agent) do often use the artifacts. (Benjamin Franklin's lightning rod made an appearance as a tool in the most recent episode.) Some artifacts do seem to exist simply to sow chaos (at least, as far as the U.S. government is concerned), but others are just very useful tools. Why take those away? And do they even bother with the due compensation that would accompany an eminent-domain seizure?
And now that we've seen artifacts explicitly removed from other nations, we move further into politics. Why would agents of the United States government feel authorized to steal powerful aspects of culture directly from that culture? Is it, perhaps, because the United States is afraid of these artifacts, wielded by those who actually have a claim to them, being used against the United States?
If so, it's a startling extension of the Bush Doctrine. "Hey, guys, we think that your culture is a threat to us, so we're just going to go in and take it, and lock it away forever, for our own safety. We'll take very good care of it." Warehouse 13 is only a playful attic of imagination for the Americans who get to maintain it, for everyone else-including, most likely, many Americans-it's a cultural Gitmo where the United States government holds your history and uses it for their own ends, in secret and with no appeal.
An extraordinary rendition indeed.
And all of this really just scratches the surface of the many levels of wrong underneath Warehouse 13's affable surface. There's also a whole bunch of crazy inaccuracies as well; I'll have to write about what an "Aztec bloodstone" might be another time. In fact, I'm probably going to keep harping on Warehouse 13 for a while.
Why? Aside from all the fail, it's charismatic and affable on the surface, as long as you don't start to actually think about what's being shown. It's almost a pleasant show to viciously hate. (Is this what fans of Stargate Atlantis feel like?)
The majority of artifacts presented thus far have been either American (White American, to be specific) or European, so this may not appear to be related to , but the concepts of cultural imperialism and Americentrism are very important to thinking about race. This also ties in with this year's optional theme "Global" (in an albeit faily way).
And you know, there's still the pilot and that "bloodstone" to deal with.
(This is a manual crosspost of a post on Dreamwidth. You can leave a comment there.