BSG: Razor (wherein I am sad and angry)
Okay, so, I'm a bad BSG fan, and I haven't watched the premiere yet (though I hear it's good!) and I only got around to watching Razor yesterday, because I was told it would hurt me and so I put it off as long as possible.
But now I have watched it, and am sad and angry, and I have to write it all down, as one does. I assume that there are a dozen rants on the internet already that are just like the one you're about to read, but I want to articulate it anyway, because Razor . . . did hurt me. But if you know of any good rants on this subject that already exist, please let me know.
I. Introduction: the context of BSG and why it makes Razor especially offensive
There are two things that particularly disgust me about this . . . let's call it "episode," for convenience' sake. One is that, while I have seen more horrific portrayals of queer characters, most of them were not contemporary - i.e., I saw most of them in The Celluloid Closet, representations of lesbian vampires and the like. I did not see them as they emerged from the desk of an executive producer who famously criticized Star Trek for not having any gay characters. The fact that the show creators know the history of gays in space and still present something like this is, to my mind, more disgusting than simple ignorance. (background on this here re: BSG and here re: Star Trek, where Ron Moore used to work). I would bet cash dollars that they congratulated themselves on showing lesbians in space, both in Razor and in the third season episode with the oh-so-radical threesome with two hot robot girls and one human boy in the middle.
The second thing that particularly upsets me about these portrayals in this context (which I'm getting to in a moment, I promise) is that BSG is, very often, very good at female characters. I love Starbuck with all my heart, and while I wish that Kat didn't have to have the addiction plotline that she did (really, guys? The woman of colour gets the addiction plotline?) I loved her too, while she was there. And they get points, so many points, for Roslin, and for Dualla, and for Sharon (though, again, I wish the woman of colour weren't the othered one. But still, Sharon's plotline is fascinating and rich). There are often lots of plotlines on BSG where women talk to each other, and not about men - where women have lots of sex and don't get punished for it - where women have plotlines that aren't about them being women. So it seems like the problem that BSG has is not that women are icky and awful and need to be punished; rather, it is that queer women - under certain definitions of queer that I will shortly come to - are icky and awful and need to be punished. And it really depresses me to have to think that these women - Starbuck and Boomer and Roslin and Kat and Dualla - that these women, who I love, only got cool plots and non-offensive treatment because they were written as demonstrably heterosexual.
So, okay, that's a really long introduction. But here's the meat.
II. Evil Lesbian Robots!
So, Admiral Cain is a bad guy. She is presented as someone with many motives and perhaps excuses, but she is a bad guy. As giandujakiss elucidates, she was not forced into a situation where she had no choices but bad ones; she chose to take a campaign of revenge and guerilla warfare to the cylons. She is presented in the show as a foil for Adama, as an example of the road that the BSG crew didn't take, because they were too moral to take it. So, she's a bad guy.
She's also the only person on the show ever to exhibit same-sex desire. I mean, canonically; interpret canon at your pleasure, as always. This is always the issue: when there is only one black guy on the show, and he is a drug addict and pimp, that is racist. When there are five black guys on the show (I can think of maybe two shows ever like that that weren't sitcoms, but whatever), and one of them is a drug addict pimp, and one is a cop, and one is a janitor, and one is a stockbroker, and one is a hairdresser, that is less likely to be racist. It's not that queer characters cannot be evil on tv; it's just that you are only allowed to do that if you have more than one. A lot more. At least one for every evil queer character in the history of tv and film.
But, to get back to the title of this section: Cain's desire - the only same-sex desire ever on BSG, because I do not count the Six/Gaius/Three Girls Gone Wild threesome - is wrong. Here is why it's wrong: her desire is not human. It is not natural. Her desire is always overwritten by the audience's knowledge that Gina is a cylon; she is not an appropriate object of Cain's desire, and their relationship is staged to creep us out from the start.
III. "Pain, yes. Humiliation. Degradation. Shame."
The above quotation is the order that Cain gives to her officer regarding Gina, after it comes out that she's a cylon. This queer woman - who is too strict as a commander, evil, and a murderer - orders her ex-lover raped and tortured. And she orders this done, specifically, through humiliation, degradation, and shame. And she comes to look at Gina afterward, to look at Gina's battered and raped body. I can't . . . I can't even write about this part anymore. It's horrific. Surely anyone can see that it's horrific, and surely anyone can see why it's a negative portrayal of a queer character. Surely anyone can see that a queer woman ordering her ex lover to be raped and tortured and humiliated, to be made to feel shame about her own rape and torture, is awful, and painful to watch. Surely.
I say that, but then, either the show creators didn't see it or, what's worse, they didn't care.
This is what always happens to queer characters, of course: they get raped, they get tortured, they die (sometimes by murder, sometimes by suicide). What's particularly, shall we say, innovative of Razor is that in this case it's a queer woman on both sides of that rape and torture: she does it to herself, in a way, she orders herself raped and tortured, because she cannot deal with the idea that she could have loved so wrongly, could have loved a thing.
And of course the knowledge that we have from the series bears this out, because Gina is the one who kills Cain; a perfect mirror image of queer women debasing each other.
IV. Dangerous influence: Kendra (and Starbuck)
In the show, Starbuck threatened to fall under Cain's influence; she was set up as a new authority figure for Starbuck, a new commander for her to rally under. And this was, of course, bad, because Cain is evil etc. So Starbuck is called upon, by Adama, to kill Cain. I thought this was beautifully written at the time, but looking back on it now, I get a bad taste in my mouth.
Because Kendra is also a product of Cain's dangerous influence, and must therefore be limited, killed. She is, as we are told more than once, Cain's "legacy," her inheritor, her child (produced, queerly, without a heteronormative parental structure, but more on that in a moment). She has picked up Cain's beliefs, has become a hardass like Cain, and must therefore be gotten rid of by the end of the episode. It's like Razor was specifically designed to resurrect Cain so that they could kill her again, while demonstrating that, not only are women in charge evil, they are also evil lesbians. It's every offensive stereotype ever, all crowding in together!
Of course, there is a long history of rhetoric on homosexuals and their scary potential "influence" - they'll make you like them, it's a sickness and you'll catch it, they'll seduce you, they'll coerce you, they'll recruit you. So of course Kendra has to die; the Cain-ness of her has to be killed over and over and over again so that the show can demonstrate that she is other, that she is evil, that she is dangerous.
Also, the sin that Kendra has to repent is her murder of "families" - note how that is portrayed differently than "civilians." The soldiers think one thing of killing civilians, and another of killing families - heteronormative units of fathers and mothers and daughters and sons. She threatens heterosexuality; she, in fact, destroys it. And so she is queer, under Cain's influence, and must be destroyed at the end. In fact, in one of the great old Celluloid Closet cliches, she decides to commit suicide in order to redeem her sins. Fucking fabulous.
V. Adama's heterosexual male privilege
At the end of the episode, Adama Sr has a little speech in which he wraps everything up, with his mournful little "there but for the grace of gods" speech that giandujakiss objected to so strongly. And in it, he details the differences between himself and Cain: he had Roslin and Tigh and - this is the point that he dwells on - he had Lee. Bill Adama says, to his son, the son who is the rightful inheritor of Cain's Battlestar:
"You don't have any children, so, you might not understand this, but you see yourself reflected in their eyes. And there are some things that I thought of doing, with this fleet, but I stopped myself because I knew that I'd have to face you the following day."
Compare this to Cain's "legacy," as it lives and dies in Kendra. There is, you see, a category of morality open to Bill Adama that is not open to Admiral Cain; he is capable of seeing himself reflected in the eyes of his children. Because he has produced children, he is capable of thinking about the future, is capable of a morality that Cain is excluded from on two levels. Not only is it heterosexual privilege, the idea that Adama is superior to Cain because his form of love and desire produces children, it is also male privilege, for I doubt very much that women in command of Battlestars take a lot of time off to bear children. Adama's wife, conveniently, is long gone - though, she did bear him two fine sons first, serving her purpose before she was erased from the story. Cain, by Adama's criteria, is therefore not fit for command. Her "lifestyle choices" - same sex desire and military power - are immoral, because they exclude her from the category of "parent," and thus from the moral vision that Adama benefits from.
VI. Concluding vitriol
A friend of a friend of mine, sineala, reports that Razor actually aired with a GLAAD ad at the end. My reaction when I learned of this is perhaps better imagined than described. For this - for all these dead, evil, self-torturing, self-raping, dangerously influential, power-mad barren queer women - for this they want a goddamn medal. For this they want a pat on the back. For this they want to be seen as forwarding the cause of GLBTQ rights.
I don't have anything else to say.
eta: Um, I have something else to say. :) Someone pointed out to me that I had misspelled Kat's name (as Cat) and written Eight when I meant Three (I've since fixed these mistakes). This may have given you guys the impression that I haven't seen the whole show, or am not a fan of it, or something? I hope that this isn't something that has led to you guys feeling defensive about the show; I know I get defensive about my fandoms, including this one, when I read someone who isn't a fan criticizing it. Let me assure you that it's not that I'm not a fan; it's that I haven't seen Kat's name written down in a while (I am more of a watcher-fan than a writer/reader-fan of BSG), and that I mix up Three and Eight all the time because, uh . . . their names are numbers. If Three had a commonly used name like Boomer or Athena does, I'd be okay, but I just cannot remember the numbers.
Since this gaff seems to mean that I have, suddenly, to establish my fan credentials: I have watched every single episode of BSG ever produced, at least twice (uh, excluding Razor, which I've seen once). Some of them more than twice. I think I watched the end of S2, the start of the occupation, roughly one bazillion times. Actually, my main mode of engagement with BSG fandom is through vids (another reason I'm fuzzy on non-visual details of a show I haven't watched in a year). My current favourite BSG vid is SuperKC's "Meant Well," which I have been humming nonstop for two weeks now, and which I think captures beautifully the whole story of the occupation. My other main engagement with the show, other than watching it and discussing it with people and watching vids, was reading Jacob's wacky reviews on TwoP, which are often weird but always interesting. So, actually, I've probably seen Kat's name written down dozens of times; I just forgot how to spell it. I made my father watch the show, I made five good friends of mine watch the show, and last year I gave it to one of my best friends as an example of what I love about scifi, to get him into scifi as a genre.
Is that enough? Are we cool? Do I need to produce a registered letter from a notary public whom I've converted to watching BSG, or do I have cred now?
But now I have watched it, and am sad and angry, and I have to write it all down, as one does. I assume that there are a dozen rants on the internet already that are just like the one you're about to read, but I want to articulate it anyway, because Razor . . . did hurt me. But if you know of any good rants on this subject that already exist, please let me know.
I. Introduction: the context of BSG and why it makes Razor especially offensive
There are two things that particularly disgust me about this . . . let's call it "episode," for convenience' sake. One is that, while I have seen more horrific portrayals of queer characters, most of them were not contemporary - i.e., I saw most of them in The Celluloid Closet, representations of lesbian vampires and the like. I did not see them as they emerged from the desk of an executive producer who famously criticized Star Trek for not having any gay characters. The fact that the show creators know the history of gays in space and still present something like this is, to my mind, more disgusting than simple ignorance. (background on this here re: BSG and here re: Star Trek, where Ron Moore used to work). I would bet cash dollars that they congratulated themselves on showing lesbians in space, both in Razor and in the third season episode with the oh-so-radical threesome with two hot robot girls and one human boy in the middle.
The second thing that particularly upsets me about these portrayals in this context (which I'm getting to in a moment, I promise) is that BSG is, very often, very good at female characters. I love Starbuck with all my heart, and while I wish that Kat didn't have to have the addiction plotline that she did (really, guys? The woman of colour gets the addiction plotline?) I loved her too, while she was there. And they get points, so many points, for Roslin, and for Dualla, and for Sharon (though, again, I wish the woman of colour weren't the othered one. But still, Sharon's plotline is fascinating and rich). There are often lots of plotlines on BSG where women talk to each other, and not about men - where women have lots of sex and don't get punished for it - where women have plotlines that aren't about them being women. So it seems like the problem that BSG has is not that women are icky and awful and need to be punished; rather, it is that queer women - under certain definitions of queer that I will shortly come to - are icky and awful and need to be punished. And it really depresses me to have to think that these women - Starbuck and Boomer and Roslin and Kat and Dualla - that these women, who I love, only got cool plots and non-offensive treatment because they were written as demonstrably heterosexual.
So, okay, that's a really long introduction. But here's the meat.
II. Evil Lesbian Robots!
So, Admiral Cain is a bad guy. She is presented as someone with many motives and perhaps excuses, but she is a bad guy. As giandujakiss elucidates, she was not forced into a situation where she had no choices but bad ones; she chose to take a campaign of revenge and guerilla warfare to the cylons. She is presented in the show as a foil for Adama, as an example of the road that the BSG crew didn't take, because they were too moral to take it. So, she's a bad guy.
She's also the only person on the show ever to exhibit same-sex desire. I mean, canonically; interpret canon at your pleasure, as always. This is always the issue: when there is only one black guy on the show, and he is a drug addict and pimp, that is racist. When there are five black guys on the show (I can think of maybe two shows ever like that that weren't sitcoms, but whatever), and one of them is a drug addict pimp, and one is a cop, and one is a janitor, and one is a stockbroker, and one is a hairdresser, that is less likely to be racist. It's not that queer characters cannot be evil on tv; it's just that you are only allowed to do that if you have more than one. A lot more. At least one for every evil queer character in the history of tv and film.
But, to get back to the title of this section: Cain's desire - the only same-sex desire ever on BSG, because I do not count the Six/Gaius/Three Girls Gone Wild threesome - is wrong. Here is why it's wrong: her desire is not human. It is not natural. Her desire is always overwritten by the audience's knowledge that Gina is a cylon; she is not an appropriate object of Cain's desire, and their relationship is staged to creep us out from the start.
III. "Pain, yes. Humiliation. Degradation. Shame."
The above quotation is the order that Cain gives to her officer regarding Gina, after it comes out that she's a cylon. This queer woman - who is too strict as a commander, evil, and a murderer - orders her ex-lover raped and tortured. And she orders this done, specifically, through humiliation, degradation, and shame. And she comes to look at Gina afterward, to look at Gina's battered and raped body. I can't . . . I can't even write about this part anymore. It's horrific. Surely anyone can see that it's horrific, and surely anyone can see why it's a negative portrayal of a queer character. Surely anyone can see that a queer woman ordering her ex lover to be raped and tortured and humiliated, to be made to feel shame about her own rape and torture, is awful, and painful to watch. Surely.
I say that, but then, either the show creators didn't see it or, what's worse, they didn't care.
This is what always happens to queer characters, of course: they get raped, they get tortured, they die (sometimes by murder, sometimes by suicide). What's particularly, shall we say, innovative of Razor is that in this case it's a queer woman on both sides of that rape and torture: she does it to herself, in a way, she orders herself raped and tortured, because she cannot deal with the idea that she could have loved so wrongly, could have loved a thing.
And of course the knowledge that we have from the series bears this out, because Gina is the one who kills Cain; a perfect mirror image of queer women debasing each other.
IV. Dangerous influence: Kendra (and Starbuck)
In the show, Starbuck threatened to fall under Cain's influence; she was set up as a new authority figure for Starbuck, a new commander for her to rally under. And this was, of course, bad, because Cain is evil etc. So Starbuck is called upon, by Adama, to kill Cain. I thought this was beautifully written at the time, but looking back on it now, I get a bad taste in my mouth.
Because Kendra is also a product of Cain's dangerous influence, and must therefore be limited, killed. She is, as we are told more than once, Cain's "legacy," her inheritor, her child (produced, queerly, without a heteronormative parental structure, but more on that in a moment). She has picked up Cain's beliefs, has become a hardass like Cain, and must therefore be gotten rid of by the end of the episode. It's like Razor was specifically designed to resurrect Cain so that they could kill her again, while demonstrating that, not only are women in charge evil, they are also evil lesbians. It's every offensive stereotype ever, all crowding in together!
Of course, there is a long history of rhetoric on homosexuals and their scary potential "influence" - they'll make you like them, it's a sickness and you'll catch it, they'll seduce you, they'll coerce you, they'll recruit you. So of course Kendra has to die; the Cain-ness of her has to be killed over and over and over again so that the show can demonstrate that she is other, that she is evil, that she is dangerous.
Also, the sin that Kendra has to repent is her murder of "families" - note how that is portrayed differently than "civilians." The soldiers think one thing of killing civilians, and another of killing families - heteronormative units of fathers and mothers and daughters and sons. She threatens heterosexuality; she, in fact, destroys it. And so she is queer, under Cain's influence, and must be destroyed at the end. In fact, in one of the great old Celluloid Closet cliches, she decides to commit suicide in order to redeem her sins. Fucking fabulous.
V. Adama's heterosexual male privilege
At the end of the episode, Adama Sr has a little speech in which he wraps everything up, with his mournful little "there but for the grace of gods" speech that giandujakiss objected to so strongly. And in it, he details the differences between himself and Cain: he had Roslin and Tigh and - this is the point that he dwells on - he had Lee. Bill Adama says, to his son, the son who is the rightful inheritor of Cain's Battlestar:
"You don't have any children, so, you might not understand this, but you see yourself reflected in their eyes. And there are some things that I thought of doing, with this fleet, but I stopped myself because I knew that I'd have to face you the following day."
Compare this to Cain's "legacy," as it lives and dies in Kendra. There is, you see, a category of morality open to Bill Adama that is not open to Admiral Cain; he is capable of seeing himself reflected in the eyes of his children. Because he has produced children, he is capable of thinking about the future, is capable of a morality that Cain is excluded from on two levels. Not only is it heterosexual privilege, the idea that Adama is superior to Cain because his form of love and desire produces children, it is also male privilege, for I doubt very much that women in command of Battlestars take a lot of time off to bear children. Adama's wife, conveniently, is long gone - though, she did bear him two fine sons first, serving her purpose before she was erased from the story. Cain, by Adama's criteria, is therefore not fit for command. Her "lifestyle choices" - same sex desire and military power - are immoral, because they exclude her from the category of "parent," and thus from the moral vision that Adama benefits from.
VI. Concluding vitriol
A friend of a friend of mine, sineala, reports that Razor actually aired with a GLAAD ad at the end. My reaction when I learned of this is perhaps better imagined than described. For this - for all these dead, evil, self-torturing, self-raping, dangerously influential, power-mad barren queer women - for this they want a goddamn medal. For this they want a pat on the back. For this they want to be seen as forwarding the cause of GLBTQ rights.
I don't have anything else to say.
eta: Um, I have something else to say. :) Someone pointed out to me that I had misspelled Kat's name (as Cat) and written Eight when I meant Three (I've since fixed these mistakes). This may have given you guys the impression that I haven't seen the whole show, or am not a fan of it, or something? I hope that this isn't something that has led to you guys feeling defensive about the show; I know I get defensive about my fandoms, including this one, when I read someone who isn't a fan criticizing it. Let me assure you that it's not that I'm not a fan; it's that I haven't seen Kat's name written down in a while (I am more of a watcher-fan than a writer/reader-fan of BSG), and that I mix up Three and Eight all the time because, uh . . . their names are numbers. If Three had a commonly used name like Boomer or Athena does, I'd be okay, but I just cannot remember the numbers.
Since this gaff seems to mean that I have, suddenly, to establish my fan credentials: I have watched every single episode of BSG ever produced, at least twice (uh, excluding Razor, which I've seen once). Some of them more than twice. I think I watched the end of S2, the start of the occupation, roughly one bazillion times. Actually, my main mode of engagement with BSG fandom is through vids (another reason I'm fuzzy on non-visual details of a show I haven't watched in a year). My current favourite BSG vid is SuperKC's "Meant Well," which I have been humming nonstop for two weeks now, and which I think captures beautifully the whole story of the occupation. My other main engagement with the show, other than watching it and discussing it with people and watching vids, was reading Jacob's wacky reviews on TwoP, which are often weird but always interesting. So, actually, I've probably seen Kat's name written down dozens of times; I just forgot how to spell it. I made my father watch the show, I made five good friends of mine watch the show, and last year I gave it to one of my best friends as an example of what I love about scifi, to get him into scifi as a genre.
Is that enough? Are we cool? Do I need to produce a registered letter from a notary public whom I've converted to watching BSG, or do I have cred now?