representational television: SO WEIRD
N.B.: PLEASE DO NOT LINK TO THIS POST ON METAFANDOM.
so, I've been watching Boston Legal. And I am completely freaked out by it. How do people watch representational television? How do they watch shows that aren't speculative fiction, that don't do their work through metaphor? It's so strange to watch this lawyer show and see the lawyers being all, "the war in Iraq is bad!" or "we must protect this endangered species!" or "racial profiling is becoming increasingly accepted!" because guys . . . do you know what they mean by those things? They mean that the war in Iraq is bad, and that we must protect this endangered species, and that racial profiling is becoming increasingly accepted! It's not like the war in Iraq is a metaphor for the fracturing of the Earth Alliance in the year 2156, or like racial profiling is a metaphor for discrimination against aliens! It's just like . . . the show writers want to talk about something in the real world, and then they do! GROSS.
It actually does bother me - it feels so blatant, so obvious, so like I'm being lectured to all the time. I gave up police procedurals a while ago, because I find them boring and repetitive, because I believe them to be linked to a conservative trend in media, etc., but mostly because, for me, there's no there there . . . there's no fuzzy space for ambiguity, there's no joy of interpretation. How do people watch representational, naturalistic television? I can't do it. I mean, I can watch House (which is all about metaphor and has little bearing on reality) and I can watch Veronica Mars (which is a genre show), but that's as close as I can come these days.
So, okay, first, the show is really flagrantly and offensively sexist. We're all aware of that, right? I don't have to go into too many details? All the female characters are related to in terms of their sexuality and specifically as sexual objects (not subjects), the cool female characters seem to keep disappearing (Lori! Lori was my lesbian character on the show! Why is she gone? And I liked Tara a lot, and I was trying to like Sara, and I liked Chelina, and just when I start to like them, they get yanked away from me and replaced arbitrarily). This is without mentioning specific episodes, like the one where Alan asks his assistant why she couldn't just TELL him that she felt sexually harassed by him (the writers seem honestly puzzled); or the one where polygamy is held up as a great thing because it allows women to have less sex (everyone knows men want more sex than women), not because it allows hot threesomes; or the one where Tara has to flirt with a gross older man in order to win a case (rather than winning by being a lawyer); or the one where Sara has to flirt with a gross older man in order to win a case (rather than winning by being a lawyer); or any of the ones where white male privileged Alan Shore stands up for the underprivileged and gives a moving speech about them and tells them that they should believe in themselves.
Tangent: Maybe I'm sensitive to it because it feels like Aaron Sorkin syndrome - thank god all the rich white men in positions of power are so willing to stand up for the gays and the blacks and the women! I mean, god forbid those people stand up for themselves, or be shown to be successful awesome lawyers on the show, or something. See, it's okay that these are the people in authority, because they are moral and concerned and have everyone's best interests at heart! Every time one of Aaron Sorkin's emphatically straight characters goes on about how it's okay to be gay, I want to gag, and I think that I recognize the same problem here - though admittedly to a lesser extent. Also, when Boston Legal preaches to me - which it does all the time - it at least preaches positions that I tend to agree with (racial profiling is BAD, you guys!), whereas Aaron Sorkin often preaches to me about how there's no such thing as sexual harassment or how female fans are ridiculous or how it's all those homosexual republicans who are keeping gay marriage from passing in congress, or what have you. /tangent
(to be fair, Candice Bergen rocks the world, and I love her character, most of the time. Though sometimes they use her as an excuse to be able to call someone a bitch or what have you - it's okay if a woman says it, see - and that irks me. Plus she's still a sexual object - the storyline with Ivan made me cringe. But she does do a lot of being awesome a lot of the time, and she's a delight to watch, and I love seeing an actress who's sixty something getting to have such an awesome role on tv as something other than a mother. The show's actually really good at casting older actors, which makes me happy.)
(to be fairer, in the first season I really loved how the law firm was often shown to be on the wrong side, because hello, it was a giant corporate law firm: defending pharmaceutical companies against class action suits, pushing certain decisions on case A because client Q has a lot of money and wants the decision to go in a way beneficial to them, etc. I really liked that, but they seem to have stopped doing it.)
And of course I love how incredibly gay and adorable Alan and Denny are, and I love Alan much of the time because he's such a freaking weirdo, and I love the flamingos and the dancing together and the sleeping together and the being incredibly in love with each other - all of that does warm my heart, I admit it, and I admit that I smile whenever those two are on screen together. They're beautiful.
But behind that squee (and I have a lot of squee for those two, an awful lot) I can't help the knowledge that their love is the kind of male love that reinforces male privilege - it's the Eve Sedgwick Between Men kind of homosocial love. When Denny says to Alan, "Between us, we can take her" (referring to Shirley), it does have a blatant and intentional sexual connotation - which puts them together as sexual beings, which is totally gay and all, but at the same time it's the old old story of men existing together in a sexual sphere specifically in order to exclude women, beat women, take women. So every time I see them dancing together or holding hands or saying I love you - which they do an awful lot - I am happy happy happy, but at the same time, I know that we're never going to see Alan make out with a man (he pursues women aggressively and pointedly); I know that Alan and Denny's relationship will continue to be the backbone of the show, but that the gay connotations will continue to just be jokes; I know that their relationship actually maintains the heterosexual, male-privileged order of the show, rather than challenging it. So although I enjoy the two of them thoroughly, I still get that bad taste at the back of my mouth.
On the other hand, they dance together. What's a slash fan to do?
Perhaps what I should do is host a frivolous poll that completely brushes aside all of my above objections in favour of talking about big gay weirdo male leads on tv shows I watch. To wit:
Poll
so, I've been watching Boston Legal. And I am completely freaked out by it. How do people watch representational television? How do they watch shows that aren't speculative fiction, that don't do their work through metaphor? It's so strange to watch this lawyer show and see the lawyers being all, "the war in Iraq is bad!" or "we must protect this endangered species!" or "racial profiling is becoming increasingly accepted!" because guys . . . do you know what they mean by those things? They mean that the war in Iraq is bad, and that we must protect this endangered species, and that racial profiling is becoming increasingly accepted! It's not like the war in Iraq is a metaphor for the fracturing of the Earth Alliance in the year 2156, or like racial profiling is a metaphor for discrimination against aliens! It's just like . . . the show writers want to talk about something in the real world, and then they do! GROSS.
It actually does bother me - it feels so blatant, so obvious, so like I'm being lectured to all the time. I gave up police procedurals a while ago, because I find them boring and repetitive, because I believe them to be linked to a conservative trend in media, etc., but mostly because, for me, there's no there there . . . there's no fuzzy space for ambiguity, there's no joy of interpretation. How do people watch representational, naturalistic television? I can't do it. I mean, I can watch House (which is all about metaphor and has little bearing on reality) and I can watch Veronica Mars (which is a genre show), but that's as close as I can come these days.
So, okay, first, the show is really flagrantly and offensively sexist. We're all aware of that, right? I don't have to go into too many details? All the female characters are related to in terms of their sexuality and specifically as sexual objects (not subjects), the cool female characters seem to keep disappearing (Lori! Lori was my lesbian character on the show! Why is she gone? And I liked Tara a lot, and I was trying to like Sara, and I liked Chelina, and just when I start to like them, they get yanked away from me and replaced arbitrarily). This is without mentioning specific episodes, like the one where Alan asks his assistant why she couldn't just TELL him that she felt sexually harassed by him (the writers seem honestly puzzled); or the one where polygamy is held up as a great thing because it allows women to have less sex (everyone knows men want more sex than women), not because it allows hot threesomes; or the one where Tara has to flirt with a gross older man in order to win a case (rather than winning by being a lawyer); or the one where Sara has to flirt with a gross older man in order to win a case (rather than winning by being a lawyer); or any of the ones where white male privileged Alan Shore stands up for the underprivileged and gives a moving speech about them and tells them that they should believe in themselves.
Tangent: Maybe I'm sensitive to it because it feels like Aaron Sorkin syndrome - thank god all the rich white men in positions of power are so willing to stand up for the gays and the blacks and the women! I mean, god forbid those people stand up for themselves, or be shown to be successful awesome lawyers on the show, or something. See, it's okay that these are the people in authority, because they are moral and concerned and have everyone's best interests at heart! Every time one of Aaron Sorkin's emphatically straight characters goes on about how it's okay to be gay, I want to gag, and I think that I recognize the same problem here - though admittedly to a lesser extent. Also, when Boston Legal preaches to me - which it does all the time - it at least preaches positions that I tend to agree with (racial profiling is BAD, you guys!), whereas Aaron Sorkin often preaches to me about how there's no such thing as sexual harassment or how female fans are ridiculous or how it's all those homosexual republicans who are keeping gay marriage from passing in congress, or what have you. /tangent
(to be fair, Candice Bergen rocks the world, and I love her character, most of the time. Though sometimes they use her as an excuse to be able to call someone a bitch or what have you - it's okay if a woman says it, see - and that irks me. Plus she's still a sexual object - the storyline with Ivan made me cringe. But she does do a lot of being awesome a lot of the time, and she's a delight to watch, and I love seeing an actress who's sixty something getting to have such an awesome role on tv as something other than a mother. The show's actually really good at casting older actors, which makes me happy.)
(to be fairer, in the first season I really loved how the law firm was often shown to be on the wrong side, because hello, it was a giant corporate law firm: defending pharmaceutical companies against class action suits, pushing certain decisions on case A because client Q has a lot of money and wants the decision to go in a way beneficial to them, etc. I really liked that, but they seem to have stopped doing it.)
And of course I love how incredibly gay and adorable Alan and Denny are, and I love Alan much of the time because he's such a freaking weirdo, and I love the flamingos and the dancing together and the sleeping together and the being incredibly in love with each other - all of that does warm my heart, I admit it, and I admit that I smile whenever those two are on screen together. They're beautiful.
But behind that squee (and I have a lot of squee for those two, an awful lot) I can't help the knowledge that their love is the kind of male love that reinforces male privilege - it's the Eve Sedgwick Between Men kind of homosocial love. When Denny says to Alan, "Between us, we can take her" (referring to Shirley), it does have a blatant and intentional sexual connotation - which puts them together as sexual beings, which is totally gay and all, but at the same time it's the old old story of men existing together in a sexual sphere specifically in order to exclude women, beat women, take women. So every time I see them dancing together or holding hands or saying I love you - which they do an awful lot - I am happy happy happy, but at the same time, I know that we're never going to see Alan make out with a man (he pursues women aggressively and pointedly); I know that Alan and Denny's relationship will continue to be the backbone of the show, but that the gay connotations will continue to just be jokes; I know that their relationship actually maintains the heterosexual, male-privileged order of the show, rather than challenging it. So although I enjoy the two of them thoroughly, I still get that bad taste at the back of my mouth.
On the other hand, they dance together. What's a slash fan to do?
Perhaps what I should do is host a frivolous poll that completely brushes aside all of my above objections in favour of talking about big gay weirdo male leads on tv shows I watch. To wit:
Poll