this has really got to stop.
Apparently meta Mondays are now extending to Fridays as well. Oh dear, as Fraser would say.
In the first meta, the one I didn’t post, I found myself thinking about Fraser as a study in contrasts between openness and restraint. He's so trusting (he lends complete strangers money for their children, and offers belief even to pathological liars: he always believes in people's better natures), and he genuinely cares about people, but in an almost impersonal way, if that makes any sense. Ray says--I forget which episode--that it's Fraser's feelings that get him into trouble, but by and large, that isn't true, because those feelings are almost...detached. By that I mean that they don't seem to impinge on his self in any way--and maybe that's because his principles protect him: he acts for, is motivated by, justice and fairness and the law, not for himself or even for those personal feelings that he has. Which is why his caring seems so limitless, maybe: it's driven by an almost external energy; it's truly selfless in the sense that his self isn't involved.
And another part of that open/restrained dichotomy is the physical aspect. Benton Fraser is an intensely physical person, in that he's so active, knows his body so well, trusts it as he's flinging himself out of windows and through glass: he moves so wonderfully, precise and instinctive and integrated. But he's (often, if not always) practically unaware of his body as either a desired or a desiring object: he completely fails to notice that body's effects on women, doesn't see sex at all. In the same way that his emotions don't quite seem to reside in him, he doesn't quite seem to reside in his own body, which is why both "The Deal" (in which he gets beaten up, and then treated for his wounds) and the events of "Victoria's Secret" and "Letting Go" are so startling. In "The Deal," Benton himself seems startled--not at being wounded, since he's been there countless times (what with all the flinging himself out of windows and tracking down criminals in the frozen North), but at being asked to talk about his body--to register his pain, to remember his scars. He is literally vulnerable, I suppose--but more so because he's emotionally vulnerable. And in "Letting Go," when he's in the hospital recuperating from the events of "Victoria's Secret," he's genuinely detached--trying not to be a part of the world, looking out at it with blank, heavy-lidded eyes (instead of that intense, noticing focus he usually has); trying to ignore the fact that he has a body, because bodies hurt and betray you. Trying not to connect to people, not to care, not to want to help--taking a leave of absence, as he says. And it's physical therapy--being forced back into that body he wants to ignore--that has to help him.
I started thinking about Fraser and his uniform thanks to the odd combination of “We Are the Eggmen” (in which he removes his red tunic onscreen) and “Some Like It Red” (in which he dresses up like a woman, with absolutely no fuss whatsoever). And I’ve been wondering, in S2 so far, about how much Fraser is being the Mountie, at any given moment, and how much he’s playing the Mountie. Which is to say: how aware is he of himself and how he comes across, and does he use that for his own advantage? (There are certain moments when he clearly does: “Juliet is Bleeding,” for example, where he plays the literal-minded Mountie for all he’s worth, refusing to react to Frank Zuko’s jibes about his scars. And we see self-awareness, if you think about it, back in “Hawk and a Handsaw”: when he gets himself committed to the asylum, he does so merely by telling the absolute truth [and engaging in a little meta-television regarding the pilot and how he wound up in Chicago: “It’s a long story, it takes exactly two hours to tell”], which means that he has to be aware of how he appears to the outside world. “Much madness is divinest sense,” as Miss Emily would say: Fraser’s madness here is only in the eye of the beholder who isn’t acquainted with his life. And he knows that, which is why he’s confident he’ll be able to use that story to get admitted.)
Anyway, what grabbed my attention this time was Fraser’s willingness to submit to an order, which even becomes erotic--or reveals its usually latent erotic dimensions?--in “Eggmen,” when Inspector Thatcher orders him to remove his red tunic without explanation. His face and his manner there are a study in opposing impulses: there’s something about his too-crisp gestures, in undoing buttons and belt, that almost seems an attempt to displace the actions he’s making--to hyper-focus on the performance of those actions rather than to what those actions tend. It’s as though he’s carefully keeping himself from wondering or asking what she wants him to do.
Also, it’s funny how the white shirt, for the formal uniform, and the khaki shirt, for the brown one, come to stand in for Fraser’s body--the white shirt more than the khaki, I think, though the khaki is still often a mark of informality, and you probably could make an index of when he rolls up his sleeves or doesn’t. But the white shirt is far more of a stand-in because we see it so seldom--when he’s playing basketball in “The Deal,” when he’s changing out of his dress in the back of Ray’s car, in the egg storage unit with Inspector Thatcher. It’s like the commonplace about Victorian novels, or at least costume drama: because the rules of behavior and dress are so rigid, seemingly small gestures and touches, as deviations from those rules, take on an intense emotional/erotic weight. (I know this horse is dead, but it’s another problem with P&P3; there are no rules, so nothing means anything. I get that the filmmakers were attempting to portray emotional openness or vulnerability, with “Darcy” wandering around on the moors or whatever it is he’s doing, in just a shirt and trousers, but because they hadn’t established any sartorial or behavioral rules in the earlier parts of the film--what with Bingley just springing in on Jane in her nightclothes and nobody batting an eye--it actually fails to have much of an impact beyond bedragglement.) Seeing the white shirt seems quite a vulnerable, bodily thing (possibly more so than seeing Fraser’s actual body, because that happens mostly in necessary contexts, like getting his wounds treated, or during physical therapy), even more so than the red pajamas--which are private, but not always (or even often?) vulnerable: in “One Good Man,” perhaps, where he’s being threatened in the hallway, but not usually. The embarrassment we might expect Fraser to feel at being caught in his pajamas, in “Mask,” is actually nicely deflected: he admits to embarrassment, as he heads into his phone booth, I mean closet, to change quickly into his uniform, but it turns out to be embarrassment at being “caught out” as a poor host to the people invading his apartment. Anyway, the white shirt is startling all out of proportion to the amount of skin it actually reveals--which is none, unless he happens to push up the sleeves. It still feels revealing.)
Another revealing element, another way in which S2 deconstructs the Mountie, is that Fraser makes jokes. The idea that Fraser has a sense of humor and tells jokes also seems to be one of the things that seems to point to a certain self-awareness, because sometimes the jokes have to play off of the perception of him as stoic and literal-minded--though I sometimes find it hard to be 100% certain about whether he’s being literal, so it’s hard to say. When he offers to jump out of Ray’s car when Ray says he won’t drive him in “One Good Man,” for example--I find it hard to be certain that, if Ray hadn’t protested and told him to shut the door, Fraser wouldn’t have rolled out of that moving vehicle. He’s done stranger things.
But literal or not, we get more evidence in “Eggmen” that Fraser’s sense of humor is just not like that of other mortals. We see (well, mostly hear--he’s half behind a barn or something) him chortling about some remembered chicken mishap, when his grandfather tried to introduce to incompatible breeds, and he presents it as the kind of fond memory one just has access to: “Well, you can imagine.” And probably the poultry farmer can imagine these avian hijinks (so Fraser is using this story to put the man at ease: ‘I’m one of you,’ it says)--but we can’t, despite Fraser’s blithe presentation of it as something self-evident, something that doesn’t have to be described because it’s common knowledge.
The other joke in “Eggmen” is when he mimes electrocution while trying to get the electric lock mechanism to release, scaring Inspector Thatcher, and then explains, “Joke.” It’s such an oddly boyish thing to do, and an apparently uncontrollable urge if movies and TV are to be believed (doesn’t Tim do that in Jurassic Park?), and Thatcher is left staring at him in consternation, like she’s thinking “I didn’t know he could do that.”) Perhaps the most indicative joke so far, though, is in “The Promise,” when Ray asks Fraser if he knows what the word “sap” means, and Fraser says, of course he does, it’s from the Latin sapire. That joke, I think, has to play off of the perception of Fraser--which, again, means that he has to recognize the perception in order to make the joke--as the guy who always knows definitions and completely ludicrous facts, so that Ray almost believes him--especially because it actually is like Fraser, to take a rhetorical or figurative question (do you know what the word “sap” means?) and answer it totally literally.
But we also get that lovely, tender little moment with Melissa (“You want me to file my teeth?” “It’s a thought”--and the way he discounts it quickly with that little half-smile). Probably I could write a separate entry on Fraser’s gestures and movements, when he’s playing a woman, but suffice it to say that what’s notable about “Some Like It Red” is how little Fraser changes his behavior--perhaps because he’s always such a fish out of water, wherever he is, that adding a dress can do little to make him more strange. He’s a little...softer, in voice and gesture, but that’s about it that’s marked as specifically “womanly.” What I find interesting is that connection he manages with Melissa, because he probably wouldn’t have been able to manage it without being a “woman”--we might compare “Chicago Holiday” in this regard--but it’s built on Fraser’s essential self. Just before this, there’s that story he tells of his/her childhood: “I used to watch the girls in the village--I mean, the other girls...” It’s a slight but telling verbal detail, because it flags the moment as something that’s an authentic memory for Fraser, a story he launches into and then has to add a word to make it fit his current persona, not something he makes up to establish a rapport. (And in the memory he’s watching, apart, not talking to the girls himself--trying to analyze them, figure them out, which seems very Fraser, and not just with girls.) As Fraser says later, everything he told her as “Miss Fraser” was true. He’s possibly being a bit willfully obtuse there, in responding to Melissa’s “You lied to me” with a slightly puzzled “About what?” (“About being a woman!”--although I suppose it’s also fully possible that he’s just not thinking about that; you can never tell which details Fraser will think are the salient ones). But at the same time, it really doesn’t matter; gender isn’t essential. When Ray says that his “type” is a woman who is actually a woman, and Fraser admonishes him, “That’s picky, Ray,” it sounds like a typical, slightly loopy Fraser-ism--ignoring reality, the way the world “really” is, because usually gender is presented as the first box that needs ticking, not something that marks Ray as too “nice” (in Henry Tilney’s definition) in his distinctions--but it makes sense, from the episode’s perspective and from Fraser’s: gender is almost accidental.
There are aspects of Fraser that read as very “male,” very heroic--and he’s depicted as very desirable to women. But at the same time, putting him in a dress doesn’t, as one might expect, point up the ways in which he’s super-masculine, by means of the contrast. Aside from a little pantyhose humor (which is more observational, and even Ray takes it in stride), the episode doesn’t spend a lot of time pointing to the supposed ridiculousness of our manly hero in drag. (I keep wanting to compare the episode to What Women Want, except that I have tried to block most of that movie out of my memory. Still, I think we’re meant to see Mel Gibson’s character as ridiculous in the pantyhose, because he’s such a scotch-drinking, cigarette-smoking, Sinatra-listening man’s man--and the filmmakers bring in his daughter and her boyfriend just to give him an audience to be humiliated in front of. “Some Like It Red” is doing something else.) Likewise, his earlier concern over whether teal is “his color” isn’t played, as one might expect, as his getting dangerously caught up in the fiction of cross-dressing (and I think WWW does just that, as Nick freaks out about suddenly being all girly and crying and stuff), but simply his being Fraser; when Ray asks, “who cares,” Fraser says, “Well, I do,” because he always cares about the details, because if something is worth doing, it’s worth doing well. The episode gets a fair amount of comedy mileage out of Fraser in a dress, because he looks awkward in it, but not because there’s something inherently funny about his being in a dress, it seems to me. There’s a refreshing lack of compensatory posturing.
In the first meta, the one I didn’t post, I found myself thinking about Fraser as a study in contrasts between openness and restraint. He's so trusting (he lends complete strangers money for their children, and offers belief even to pathological liars: he always believes in people's better natures), and he genuinely cares about people, but in an almost impersonal way, if that makes any sense. Ray says--I forget which episode--that it's Fraser's feelings that get him into trouble, but by and large, that isn't true, because those feelings are almost...detached. By that I mean that they don't seem to impinge on his self in any way--and maybe that's because his principles protect him: he acts for, is motivated by, justice and fairness and the law, not for himself or even for those personal feelings that he has. Which is why his caring seems so limitless, maybe: it's driven by an almost external energy; it's truly selfless in the sense that his self isn't involved.
And another part of that open/restrained dichotomy is the physical aspect. Benton Fraser is an intensely physical person, in that he's so active, knows his body so well, trusts it as he's flinging himself out of windows and through glass: he moves so wonderfully, precise and instinctive and integrated. But he's (often, if not always) practically unaware of his body as either a desired or a desiring object: he completely fails to notice that body's effects on women, doesn't see sex at all. In the same way that his emotions don't quite seem to reside in him, he doesn't quite seem to reside in his own body, which is why both "The Deal" (in which he gets beaten up, and then treated for his wounds) and the events of "Victoria's Secret" and "Letting Go" are so startling. In "The Deal," Benton himself seems startled--not at being wounded, since he's been there countless times (what with all the flinging himself out of windows and tracking down criminals in the frozen North), but at being asked to talk about his body--to register his pain, to remember his scars. He is literally vulnerable, I suppose--but more so because he's emotionally vulnerable. And in "Letting Go," when he's in the hospital recuperating from the events of "Victoria's Secret," he's genuinely detached--trying not to be a part of the world, looking out at it with blank, heavy-lidded eyes (instead of that intense, noticing focus he usually has); trying to ignore the fact that he has a body, because bodies hurt and betray you. Trying not to connect to people, not to care, not to want to help--taking a leave of absence, as he says. And it's physical therapy--being forced back into that body he wants to ignore--that has to help him.
I started thinking about Fraser and his uniform thanks to the odd combination of “We Are the Eggmen” (in which he removes his red tunic onscreen) and “Some Like It Red” (in which he dresses up like a woman, with absolutely no fuss whatsoever). And I’ve been wondering, in S2 so far, about how much Fraser is being the Mountie, at any given moment, and how much he’s playing the Mountie. Which is to say: how aware is he of himself and how he comes across, and does he use that for his own advantage? (There are certain moments when he clearly does: “Juliet is Bleeding,” for example, where he plays the literal-minded Mountie for all he’s worth, refusing to react to Frank Zuko’s jibes about his scars. And we see self-awareness, if you think about it, back in “Hawk and a Handsaw”: when he gets himself committed to the asylum, he does so merely by telling the absolute truth [and engaging in a little meta-television regarding the pilot and how he wound up in Chicago: “It’s a long story, it takes exactly two hours to tell”], which means that he has to be aware of how he appears to the outside world. “Much madness is divinest sense,” as Miss Emily would say: Fraser’s madness here is only in the eye of the beholder who isn’t acquainted with his life. And he knows that, which is why he’s confident he’ll be able to use that story to get admitted.)
Anyway, what grabbed my attention this time was Fraser’s willingness to submit to an order, which even becomes erotic--or reveals its usually latent erotic dimensions?--in “Eggmen,” when Inspector Thatcher orders him to remove his red tunic without explanation. His face and his manner there are a study in opposing impulses: there’s something about his too-crisp gestures, in undoing buttons and belt, that almost seems an attempt to displace the actions he’s making--to hyper-focus on the performance of those actions rather than to what those actions tend. It’s as though he’s carefully keeping himself from wondering or asking what she wants him to do.
Also, it’s funny how the white shirt, for the formal uniform, and the khaki shirt, for the brown one, come to stand in for Fraser’s body--the white shirt more than the khaki, I think, though the khaki is still often a mark of informality, and you probably could make an index of when he rolls up his sleeves or doesn’t. But the white shirt is far more of a stand-in because we see it so seldom--when he’s playing basketball in “The Deal,” when he’s changing out of his dress in the back of Ray’s car, in the egg storage unit with Inspector Thatcher. It’s like the commonplace about Victorian novels, or at least costume drama: because the rules of behavior and dress are so rigid, seemingly small gestures and touches, as deviations from those rules, take on an intense emotional/erotic weight. (I know this horse is dead, but it’s another problem with P&P3; there are no rules, so nothing means anything. I get that the filmmakers were attempting to portray emotional openness or vulnerability, with “Darcy” wandering around on the moors or whatever it is he’s doing, in just a shirt and trousers, but because they hadn’t established any sartorial or behavioral rules in the earlier parts of the film--what with Bingley just springing in on Jane in her nightclothes and nobody batting an eye--it actually fails to have much of an impact beyond bedragglement.) Seeing the white shirt seems quite a vulnerable, bodily thing (possibly more so than seeing Fraser’s actual body, because that happens mostly in necessary contexts, like getting his wounds treated, or during physical therapy), even more so than the red pajamas--which are private, but not always (or even often?) vulnerable: in “One Good Man,” perhaps, where he’s being threatened in the hallway, but not usually. The embarrassment we might expect Fraser to feel at being caught in his pajamas, in “Mask,” is actually nicely deflected: he admits to embarrassment, as he heads into his phone booth, I mean closet, to change quickly into his uniform, but it turns out to be embarrassment at being “caught out” as a poor host to the people invading his apartment. Anyway, the white shirt is startling all out of proportion to the amount of skin it actually reveals--which is none, unless he happens to push up the sleeves. It still feels revealing.)
Another revealing element, another way in which S2 deconstructs the Mountie, is that Fraser makes jokes. The idea that Fraser has a sense of humor and tells jokes also seems to be one of the things that seems to point to a certain self-awareness, because sometimes the jokes have to play off of the perception of him as stoic and literal-minded--though I sometimes find it hard to be 100% certain about whether he’s being literal, so it’s hard to say. When he offers to jump out of Ray’s car when Ray says he won’t drive him in “One Good Man,” for example--I find it hard to be certain that, if Ray hadn’t protested and told him to shut the door, Fraser wouldn’t have rolled out of that moving vehicle. He’s done stranger things.
But literal or not, we get more evidence in “Eggmen” that Fraser’s sense of humor is just not like that of other mortals. We see (well, mostly hear--he’s half behind a barn or something) him chortling about some remembered chicken mishap, when his grandfather tried to introduce to incompatible breeds, and he presents it as the kind of fond memory one just has access to: “Well, you can imagine.” And probably the poultry farmer can imagine these avian hijinks (so Fraser is using this story to put the man at ease: ‘I’m one of you,’ it says)--but we can’t, despite Fraser’s blithe presentation of it as something self-evident, something that doesn’t have to be described because it’s common knowledge.
The other joke in “Eggmen” is when he mimes electrocution while trying to get the electric lock mechanism to release, scaring Inspector Thatcher, and then explains, “Joke.” It’s such an oddly boyish thing to do, and an apparently uncontrollable urge if movies and TV are to be believed (doesn’t Tim do that in Jurassic Park?), and Thatcher is left staring at him in consternation, like she’s thinking “I didn’t know he could do that.”) Perhaps the most indicative joke so far, though, is in “The Promise,” when Ray asks Fraser if he knows what the word “sap” means, and Fraser says, of course he does, it’s from the Latin sapire. That joke, I think, has to play off of the perception of Fraser--which, again, means that he has to recognize the perception in order to make the joke--as the guy who always knows definitions and completely ludicrous facts, so that Ray almost believes him--especially because it actually is like Fraser, to take a rhetorical or figurative question (do you know what the word “sap” means?) and answer it totally literally.
But we also get that lovely, tender little moment with Melissa (“You want me to file my teeth?” “It’s a thought”--and the way he discounts it quickly with that little half-smile). Probably I could write a separate entry on Fraser’s gestures and movements, when he’s playing a woman, but suffice it to say that what’s notable about “Some Like It Red” is how little Fraser changes his behavior--perhaps because he’s always such a fish out of water, wherever he is, that adding a dress can do little to make him more strange. He’s a little...softer, in voice and gesture, but that’s about it that’s marked as specifically “womanly.” What I find interesting is that connection he manages with Melissa, because he probably wouldn’t have been able to manage it without being a “woman”--we might compare “Chicago Holiday” in this regard--but it’s built on Fraser’s essential self. Just before this, there’s that story he tells of his/her childhood: “I used to watch the girls in the village--I mean, the other girls...” It’s a slight but telling verbal detail, because it flags the moment as something that’s an authentic memory for Fraser, a story he launches into and then has to add a word to make it fit his current persona, not something he makes up to establish a rapport. (And in the memory he’s watching, apart, not talking to the girls himself--trying to analyze them, figure them out, which seems very Fraser, and not just with girls.) As Fraser says later, everything he told her as “Miss Fraser” was true. He’s possibly being a bit willfully obtuse there, in responding to Melissa’s “You lied to me” with a slightly puzzled “About what?” (“About being a woman!”--although I suppose it’s also fully possible that he’s just not thinking about that; you can never tell which details Fraser will think are the salient ones). But at the same time, it really doesn’t matter; gender isn’t essential. When Ray says that his “type” is a woman who is actually a woman, and Fraser admonishes him, “That’s picky, Ray,” it sounds like a typical, slightly loopy Fraser-ism--ignoring reality, the way the world “really” is, because usually gender is presented as the first box that needs ticking, not something that marks Ray as too “nice” (in Henry Tilney’s definition) in his distinctions--but it makes sense, from the episode’s perspective and from Fraser’s: gender is almost accidental.
There are aspects of Fraser that read as very “male,” very heroic--and he’s depicted as very desirable to women. But at the same time, putting him in a dress doesn’t, as one might expect, point up the ways in which he’s super-masculine, by means of the contrast. Aside from a little pantyhose humor (which is more observational, and even Ray takes it in stride), the episode doesn’t spend a lot of time pointing to the supposed ridiculousness of our manly hero in drag. (I keep wanting to compare the episode to What Women Want, except that I have tried to block most of that movie out of my memory. Still, I think we’re meant to see Mel Gibson’s character as ridiculous in the pantyhose, because he’s such a scotch-drinking, cigarette-smoking, Sinatra-listening man’s man--and the filmmakers bring in his daughter and her boyfriend just to give him an audience to be humiliated in front of. “Some Like It Red” is doing something else.) Likewise, his earlier concern over whether teal is “his color” isn’t played, as one might expect, as his getting dangerously caught up in the fiction of cross-dressing (and I think WWW does just that, as Nick freaks out about suddenly being all girly and crying and stuff), but simply his being Fraser; when Ray asks, “who cares,” Fraser says, “Well, I do,” because he always cares about the details, because if something is worth doing, it’s worth doing well. The episode gets a fair amount of comedy mileage out of Fraser in a dress, because he looks awkward in it, but not because there’s something inherently funny about his being in a dress, it seems to me. There’s a refreshing lack of compensatory posturing.