Torchwood 201: Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang Scene Analysis
This is the first of a series of four Torchwood scene analyses based exclusively on the actors' body language. I am not concentrating on what the actors are saying, but what using what their bodies are doing to tell me what they are feeling. I will occasionally refer to the dialogue, but the dialogue is not the main point here.
Please note that I will be showing lots of pictures, discussing dialogue, and having video clips. The very nature of this analysis is spoilerly--I can't discuss any particular scene in any kind of detail without the context of the story. MASSIVE PLOT, CHARACTER, THEMATIC, AND SITUATIONAL SPOILERS FOR KISS KISS, BANG BANG WILL FOLLOW. You have been warned.
We begin with the Date scene from Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang. If you haven't watched it recently, I suggest you go here and have a look. I will be referring frequently to this scene by the time...e.g. Billy falls out the window at 0:33. Since this is a body language discussion, I suggest you watch it through once with the sound and once with the sound turned off. I really like this scene, and I'm using it as my first discussion piece since I think it was exceptionally well done. The acting is quite believable and the directing is spot-on.
Scene By the Numbers
0:01-0:06 When the boys enter the office building, Jack goes through the door first, Ianto about 3 feet behind him. This is appropriate for a boss/employee where the boss is leading. Jack immediately moves off, but keeps his head turned to Ianto--Ianto is the focus of his attention.
0:07. Jack keeps moving off to the far side of the room. He never takes his eyes off Ianto, not once, but his body is turned to the side away from Ianto. Ianto isn't really paying Jack much attention, he's focused on the desk in front of him.
0:12. Jack has made his comment about photocopying your butt. Ianto, who is crouched over, finally looks up at him. This is the first time Ianto has looked at Jack in this scene. Jack is leaning in, showing that he is interested in Ianto, but he is shielding his body behind a pillar and a desk. He's feeling vulnerable and nervous and is using the furniture to shield the vulnerable parts of his body. Edit to Add: This is not correct. Ianto looks at Jack at 0:06. This is the second time he looks at Jack. My bad.
0:16-0:23. Ianto looks away from Jack and slaps his hands on the desk. This motion means "enough." He's not wanting to listen to what Jack has to say. He stands up, facing away from Jack. Jack leans in, listening, head down, mouth open, and he looks worried. Ianto tells Jack that they need to search the floor and the roof, and uses his hands to emphasize the floor and the roof. His back is very straight, almost rigid, he's not looking at Jack, and at when he finishes speaking, he turns his back to Jack and walks around the desk. He is looking down at the desk as he walks around it, even though Jack is right there. He is telling Jack loud and clear that he is 100% not interested in what Jack has to say and has no intention of participating in the conversation.
0:26. As Ianto moves closer to him, around the desk, Jack shrinks back away from him and--watch him--slides his torso behind the pillar. His left arm is folded across his body. He's really, really, really nervous right now, and staying well out of Ianto's personal space. We get a face shot of Jack, where Jack is blinking quickly. He's surprised at how quickly he was shut down.
0:28-0:30. Ianto gives him a short reply, then turns his back on Jack and moves away. As Ianto moves away from him, Jack comes out from behind the pillar. Jack does not attempt to get any closer. Ianto goes to a desk across the room and starts shuffling through files. Unlike in the beginning, he is now alert to everything Jack says, but alert as in suspicious and wary. He doesn't want to be close to Jack, and uses the desk as a physical barrier. Even if he were to move, Jack would not be able to enter his personal space.
0:33-0:42. Jack is now talking about what he was thinking when he was away. He has stepped back from the pillars, putting more distance between himself and Ianto, and even though he is talking to Ianto, he's not actually looking at Ianto any more. He's looking at anything but Ianto. This is another sign that he's feeling vulnerable--to look directly at Ianto right now would expose him too much. Ianto is pacing back and forth, always keeping his back to Jack. He's confused and doesn't have any idea what's going on, but is still trying to signal to Jack that he's not interested in whatever Jack is saying by keeping his back to Jack.
0:43-0:48. This scene can be summed up as Ianto Says, "What the fuck?"
Seriously. Watch him. The only possible thing his body could be saying is WTF??!!! He spins around so fast it's a wonder that he doesn't have whiplash. It's not a fright-surprise reaction, since he's not trying to cover his torso. He is so shocked that he is absolutely wide open at the moment. The fact that his suit jacket is open emphasizes this fact. He uses a fairly large (for Ianto) hand gesture to get Jack to clarify, and that particular gesture opens his torso even more. He gapes like a fish for a second, then leans in slightly towards Jack when he says "Are you asking me out on a date?" At 0:48, Jack says, "Interested?" Jack tips his head back, exposing his throat, and looks straight at Ianto. Jack is at his most vulnerable here, almost sure he's going to get rejected, but he's standing his ground.
0:50-1:03. Ianto is still surprised, so much so that he can't even answer right away. He spins away from Jack, trying to recover, spins back to face Jack, then spins away and walks off very quickly. He moves over to a desk and immediately starts digging through stuff. He's surprised and is trying to get back onto familiar, comfortable ground. Ianto crouches down in front of the desk and digs in a drawer.
1:05-1:08. Jack begins to move back toward Ianto, but keeps his body turned away from him and doesn't face him. His voice quivers like he's still very nervous. He isn't sure if he's been shot down or not. Jack follows Ianto's lead and moves the conversation back into work mode. Ianto lifts his head to hear what Jack has to say, then assumes control of the work-related situation.
1:10-1:15. Ianto is feeling more comfortable. He stands up and faces Jack, hands on hips, body open. He's teasing Jack very slightly, but Jack hangs back and waits for Ianto to continue. Ianto tells Jack to go to the roof, emphasizing the roof with a point upwards, then turns his body away from Jack. It's a dismissal, and Jack takes it as such. He leaves the second Ianto tells him to. Ianto turns around and walks away from Jack.
1:16-1:20. Ianto turns around and calls for Jack. Jack faces him. Now it's Ianto's turn to ask Jack a question, and Ianto is feeling vulnerable. He is standing behind a desk and a pillar in the office. His face tenses up--whatever he's about to ask is something he wants to know but he's nervous. Ianto's entire body is turned to Jack, and his hands are held such that his torso is open. Ianto might be feeling vulnerable, but he's hoping that an honest question (in body language) will get an honest answer.
1:21 Freeze on this frame and look at the expression on Jack's face. He's nervous here.
1:22-1:30 Jack answers Ianto honestly, but in a very "boss" way. His tone brooks no argument, and the curt nod at the end of it says that he is finished with the conversation. He looks Ianto full in the face with his body open. He's telling the truth. Then he turns and walks out the door, ending the conversation. Ianto watches him for a second, then correctly interprets that sign and goes back to work.
1:30-1:35. Jack turns back around to Ianto, and the tentativeness is back in his posture. His body is turned away, but he's looking directly at Ianto. He asks Ianto whether he meant yes or no. Ianto spins around, never quite turning his body completely to Jack, but he looks at Jack. He's feeling uncomfortable again, but not doesn't immediately shut Jack out.
Analysis of the Interaction
Jack is the single character in Torchwood about whom we know the most. We got that from Doctor Who. We know that he was a con man only concerned with himself before he met the Doctor and Rose, and that they managed to turn him from a coward (his own words) into a man who would willingly throw away his life to save the universe. He's the hero, the avenging angel, the one who swoops in a the last second guns-a-blazing to protect the innocent. He's led armies, destroyed attacking fashion robots, faced down cyberwomen, and challenged demons to the death, and even had enough chutzpah to sass talk a band of Daleks with murder on their minds.
Asking Ianto on a date has got Jack scared out of his wits.
Jack is afraid of rejection, and based on the way Ianto cuts him off at the beginning of the scene, justly so. He's nervous and vulnerable and shy, which is completely different from the Jack Harkness that we're used to seeing. Once the bravado and larger-than-lifeness is gone, he stutters and stammers and hides behind furniture. He wants to have a relationship with Ianto so badly that it outweighs the fear of rejection.
Ianto isn't having an easy go of this either. He and Jack already have a pretty messed-up relationship...between a half-robot ex-girlfriend, gun to the head, betrayal over the rift, abandonment, secrets...and now Jack's psycho ex-boyfriend has shown up claiming to have stuff that will destroy half of Cardiff. Jack told Ianto he'd come back for him, then got caught up with the ex (who already told Ianto they'd been partners in every way--that was territory-marking if I ever saw it), and now Jack is asking him on a date. Small wonder he's confused and can't make up his mind whether to laugh or cry or say yes or run away.
I think one of the neatest things Gareth David-Lloyd does in this scene to convey just how surprised Ianto is is show huge variations in how he uses his hands. Ianto's character, in everyday mundane stuff, is not given to large sweeping gestures of, well, anything. Even when he's roaring at Jack in Cyberwoman or shooting Owen, his hands tend to stay close to his body and his movement is economical. In FOOTR, when he is taking Gwen and Owen to the movie theatre, he announces "The Elektro!" verbally like he's thrilled, but his hands stay in his pockets and arms stay close to his body. Jack, by contrast, would have had his arms spread out wide. Before Jack asks him on a date, his hands stay close to his body. Immediately after Jack asks him out, and later how he indicates that he will stay on the office floor and Jack can go to the roof, his hands are practically flying around him. It's another sign of just how completely far out of his comfort bubble Jack has thrown him. He couldn't be more surprised if a pink glittery winged pig were to jump up in front of him. (And since he works for Torchwood, well, the pig is just day-to-day business.)
Two things happened in this scene: Ianto set boundaries for their work relationship and their personal relationship, and they two of them made an honest effort at rebuilding the damaged trust between them. In the first instance, Ianto's repeated reminders that they were on work time, both verbal and nonverbal, established that Ianto wants to keep work and private stuff well separate. He doesn't want a relationship with Torchwood or to have servicing the boss be part of his regular routine. If he's going to do this, he's going to do this on his own terms. Jack accepts that rule when he makes the comment about drawer, bin, plant pot, and then leaves when Ianto tells him to. The second thing that happened is that Ianto asked Jack an honest question, and was so humble about his request that you think he's going to cry. The unspoken question, of course, is "Why are you asking me out but doing all this for your ex? Is it me you really want?"
It's a good question. This is Jack Harkness, who is a fifty-first century kind of guy after all, who Tosh established from Day One that Jack will shag anything that's gorgeous. John is somewhere running around, emphasizing that point, and it wasn't so long ago (like, an hour, maybe) that Jack came crying back to him after running away for some other guy. For once in his life, Jack gives exactly the right answer ("He's a reminder of my past. I want him gone."). He's willing to help John so it will get John away from him and the people he loves. Ianto isn't convinced, but then Jack turns around and asks him again yes or no. Ianto is still overwhelmed and confused, but at some level he is registering that Jack really is serious.
Jack's Point of View
At this point, I'm going to break away from analysis of this specific scene and dig a little deeper into Jack's character. This is a big change for Jack, so in order to appreciate what is going on here, we need to look at this scene in the context of Jack's character.
When we meet Jack in Doctor Who, Jack is about to destroy London for a cheap buck. He's a lying, cheating, womanizing (and manizing and alienizing and whatever-izing) scoundrel, and at one point the Doctor himself was ready to kill Jack, no questions asked. When given a chance to fix his mistake, though, he did so, and started on a classic redemption storyline. You know, Awful Bastard of a Man meets a Special Woman who makes him see the Error of His Ways and sets him firmly and unerringly on the Path to Goodness. Only in Jack's case, it wasn't a woman, it was the Doctor. Rose would have been just another conquest had it not been for Nine, whom Jack recognized as an almost godlike authority. For the first time in his miserable adult life, Jack fell in love. He fell in love with both the Doctor and Rose, to the point where he willingly made himself the last line of defence between the Doctor and a horde of Daleks. And then he got simultaneously made immortal and abandoned.
That's a hefty kind of psychological blow. The kind that leaves people broken and mad.
Throughout his hundred and sixty years or so of waiting for the Doctor, including some experiences that would really screw up your head and getting killed more times than he can count, he had exactly one emotionally intimate relationship (as opposed to physical relationship) that we know of, Estelle. Despite the fact that he clearly loved her, he couldn't handle the emotional intimacy, went to war, got himself killed, and ran off. The fact that he actually died (legally causing the separation) is beside the point. After that, we see evidence of friendships (Alex in Fragments), but no other evidence of an emotionally intimate partnership. Yes, I know about Real!Captain Jack, but that was more of an intensely emotionally intimate moment rather than an intensely emotionally intimate relationship. Attraction? Yes. Last kiss for a dying man? Yes. Truly loving intimate partnership? Never had a chance.
When he saw the Doctor again, the being who had quite literally saved his life and inspired his love (and I'm convinced that on some level, Nine loved Jack in return) was gone, replaced by a different man who would just as happily throw Jack out with yesterday's garbage. He subjects Jack to all kinds of great and petty insults, from leaving him lying dead on the ground after the TARDIS stopped at the end of the world (with the strong implication that he'd abandon Jack again right then and there had Martha not stopped him) to reviling Jack's involvement with Torchwood. When Jack fires right back at the Doctor about Torchwood and what Jack has done since Canary Wharf, the Doctor doesn't apologize, even when Torchwood's Archangel Network eventually becomes the mechanism to save the Doctor and the world. In the meantime, Jack gets chained in an engine room--I work on ships for a living, and trust me, there is NOWHERE worse to be than the hot, filthy, noisy, smelly confines of an engine room. That alone means that he will never have a moment of silence, enduring pain that can be eardrum-shatteringly loud, subject to noxious fumes, and dealing with near-constant sweltering heat. It's one more layer of torture the Master inflicted on Jack. After Lucy shoots the Master, after Jack has dealt with all this and the emotional trauma inflicted on Tish and Martha and all, he gets to watch the man he literally died for once and a thousand times cry over the body of a man who would have destroyed the world.
Imagine that--somebody you love enough to throw your life away, telling you and showing you in the most irrefutable way in the universe that you don't matter enough to even consider what you've been through. He's just had the one long-term emotional commitment of his life get shattered in a heartbeat. He was physically abandoned at the Game Station; he was irrevocably emotionally abandoned by Ten on the bridge of the Valiant.
Now enter John.
John is a living, breathing, swaggering relic of how Jack was before he met Nine. He's mad, bad, and dangerous, and it's clear as day that Jack used to be the same way. John is the vehicle by which the writers try and tell us the extent of Jack's redemption. Jack waits hesitantly in front of John, and John initiates the kiss. Then they have a fight, which was a nice metaphor for highly physical sex, some gunplay, and a drink. At least, John has a drink. Jack is pretty disgusted, cracks a few jokes, and then tells John to get the hell out. He's an emotionally battered, seriously messed-up puppy, but even after all that he's not willing to go back to where he came from. John's reaction to Jack suggests that John had an emotional commitment to Jack, but Jack's downplaying their relationship (2 weeks instead of 5 years) suggests that there never was much of an emotional commitment to John on Jack's part. This would be consistent with his pre-Nine lifestyle.
Jack craves acceptance. He wants to be accepted for who he is and everything he is, and given how complex Jack's life has been, that's a tall order. Even aside from the immortality, his past as a sociopathic con man is a burden he knows he will bear for the rest of his life, and he is terrified that if he tells anybody about it, they will reject him. When he tells Toshiko about his being a bad guy in CJH, you can see that it is a highly emotional moment for him. Fragments makes it clear why he tells Tosh--she has her own skeletons in the closet, and she is more likely to accept that people make mistakes. The immortality makes things even worse. He was so terrified that Estelle would reject him because of his "disability" (the metaphor of one intimate partner becoming disabled is an apt one here) that he preemptively rejects her. I think that is why Jack is so willing to forgive just about anybody for just about anything...he's hoping that if he forgives them, that they will forgive him for his misdeeds. The way he ran off to sacrifice himself to Abbaddon said two things to me: first, that he was actively suicidal (as opposed to being murdered by his team) because the way his team turned against him as a whole hit every raw nerve about rejection there was, and he was both desperate to end his life and (judging by the expression on his face) hoping beyond hope that this would be the end of it all. Second, the way he threw himself at Abbadon supports the notion that if Jack throws his own life away to save the world, maybe he'll be worth something and somebody will love him. That is a heartbreaking way to live, especially for the man Jack has become. He is worth a damn, worth a whole lot of damn, in fact, but deep down inside he still considers himself trash. Wow. The sheer breadth and depth of this pain and isolation and despair are so huge and appalling that I have tears in my eyes as I write this, and normally I am not one to cry when reading a book or watching a movie or whatever. The emotion has to be hurricane-strength intense--such as the scene in the opera Fidelio when the prisoners are released--for me to react.
The upshot of all that is that Jack has the emotional development level of a teenager. Probably somebody around 15 or 16, enough that they've started to figure it out, not enough to have any confidence in their abilities. I wouldn't have any confidence in my abilities either, if the only people I'd ever truly loved had thrown me away like that! He's physically confident and sexually confident, but tremendously weak and vulnerable emotionally.
Ianto poses his own prickly issues for Jack, ones that take Jack's acceptance issues and already shaky emotional foundations and chip away a little more. First, he's Jack's employee. Any relationship they have will be extra tricky because of that. I'm not categorically against office relationships--people are people, and these things will happen. Office relationships do, however, require an extra layer of delicacy and care that other relationships do not. Whether it's Jack/Ianto or a married couple who run a small business, the couple has to be more careful and put more work into the partnership than otherwise. Second, Jack is older than Ianto. Much, much, much older than Ianto, with all of the wisdom, knowledge, and implicit authority of old age over youth. We raise cultural eyebrows and May-December weddings for a couple of reasons; the largest of which being fertility and childrearing, but also the implicit suggestion of whether the older partner is a lover figure, a parent figure, or both. Third, Ianto came within inches of whoring himself to get a job and hid a cyberwoman in Jack's basement. Jack kissed Ianto like a lover before running off with another man. Trust between them is shaky at best in this scene in KKBB (although Ianto makes it very clear that he trusts Jack professionally as a leader). Those three issues combined mean that Jack will have to exercise every little bit of emotional skill that he has, and with his track record, he's not sure that he even has that skill. It speaks volumes about how much Jack must really, really, really want Ianto, and not just as a sex toy, for him to brave all those obstacles in spite of his near-overwhelming fear of rejection. The fact that Jack immediately obeys the rules Ianto sets forth (e.g., not in the office) hammers that home. At this point I wouldn't say Jack was in love with Ianto, per se, but he is embarking on a long journey to emotional commitment.
Back to the acting: John Barrowman has to take all of that and wrap it up into Captain Jack and somehow act it in such a way that we, the audience, actually believe it. That's a rather herculean task! I don't act and I don't know many people who do, but I did have a friend years ago who did roles in a local theatre company and I know that she would spend literally days discussing characters, reading scripts and lines, and trying to figure out how to get into the "skin" of a character. JB, by the time KKBB was shot, had plenty of experience with Captain Jack, but never had the experience of Captain Jack in a shy and vulnerable but absolutely open moment. Even when he kisses Rose and Nine goodbye in POTW, he moves quickly and stiffly, leading the entire interaction, steeling himself for what he knows is certain extermination. Jack is as far out of his element as he's ever been, and JB has to capture that. I think he did a great job. Head-tossing, shaky motions, hiding behind things, looking away, staying out of Ianto's space--those are all things that people do in real life when they are exposing themselves emotionally.
Gareth David-Lloyd has a challenge as well. He's a much younger, less experienced actor than JB, who had been on stage for almost longer than GDL has been alive, and Ianto's character is rather tricky. He's not outgoing like Gwen or Owen, nor does he quietly demand respect like Toshiko. He's never going to be the life of the party. Ianto is also a pretty screwed up puppy--Canary Wharf would do a number on anybody--so he had to spend the whole of S1 acting depressed and grieving, as well as do convincing mortal terror in Countrycide and deadly anger in Captain Jack Harkness. (I didn't like that scene, but as Burn Gorman didn't do any better job, and I both know they can act the hell out of a scene, I'm laying that more at the feet of the directors. The directors backed off a lot in S2 and let the actors work more freely, and it shows.) It's a tough, tough, tough job for such a young actor. The date scene was a big challenge for him as he had to take an already established character and make him act out of character. He did that primarily with his hands and the rapid opening and closing of his body, but also wonderful facial expressions and grabbing at his hair.
The next scene analysis will be from Day in the Death, starting where Jack relieves Owen of his post and goes through to Ianto and Owen at the coffee machine.
Please note that I will be showing lots of pictures, discussing dialogue, and having video clips. The very nature of this analysis is spoilerly--I can't discuss any particular scene in any kind of detail without the context of the story. MASSIVE PLOT, CHARACTER, THEMATIC, AND SITUATIONAL SPOILERS FOR KISS KISS, BANG BANG WILL FOLLOW. You have been warned.
We begin with the Date scene from Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang. If you haven't watched it recently, I suggest you go here and have a look. I will be referring frequently to this scene by the time...e.g. Billy falls out the window at 0:33. Since this is a body language discussion, I suggest you watch it through once with the sound and once with the sound turned off. I really like this scene, and I'm using it as my first discussion piece since I think it was exceptionally well done. The acting is quite believable and the directing is spot-on.
Scene By the Numbers
0:01-0:06 When the boys enter the office building, Jack goes through the door first, Ianto about 3 feet behind him. This is appropriate for a boss/employee where the boss is leading. Jack immediately moves off, but keeps his head turned to Ianto--Ianto is the focus of his attention.
0:07. Jack keeps moving off to the far side of the room. He never takes his eyes off Ianto, not once, but his body is turned to the side away from Ianto. Ianto isn't really paying Jack much attention, he's focused on the desk in front of him.
0:12. Jack has made his comment about photocopying your butt. Ianto, who is crouched over, finally looks up at him. This is the first time Ianto has looked at Jack in this scene. Jack is leaning in, showing that he is interested in Ianto, but he is shielding his body behind a pillar and a desk. He's feeling vulnerable and nervous and is using the furniture to shield the vulnerable parts of his body. Edit to Add: This is not correct. Ianto looks at Jack at 0:06. This is the second time he looks at Jack. My bad.
0:16-0:23. Ianto looks away from Jack and slaps his hands on the desk. This motion means "enough." He's not wanting to listen to what Jack has to say. He stands up, facing away from Jack. Jack leans in, listening, head down, mouth open, and he looks worried. Ianto tells Jack that they need to search the floor and the roof, and uses his hands to emphasize the floor and the roof. His back is very straight, almost rigid, he's not looking at Jack, and at when he finishes speaking, he turns his back to Jack and walks around the desk. He is looking down at the desk as he walks around it, even though Jack is right there. He is telling Jack loud and clear that he is 100% not interested in what Jack has to say and has no intention of participating in the conversation.
0:26. As Ianto moves closer to him, around the desk, Jack shrinks back away from him and--watch him--slides his torso behind the pillar. His left arm is folded across his body. He's really, really, really nervous right now, and staying well out of Ianto's personal space. We get a face shot of Jack, where Jack is blinking quickly. He's surprised at how quickly he was shut down.
0:28-0:30. Ianto gives him a short reply, then turns his back on Jack and moves away. As Ianto moves away from him, Jack comes out from behind the pillar. Jack does not attempt to get any closer. Ianto goes to a desk across the room and starts shuffling through files. Unlike in the beginning, he is now alert to everything Jack says, but alert as in suspicious and wary. He doesn't want to be close to Jack, and uses the desk as a physical barrier. Even if he were to move, Jack would not be able to enter his personal space.
0:33-0:42. Jack is now talking about what he was thinking when he was away. He has stepped back from the pillars, putting more distance between himself and Ianto, and even though he is talking to Ianto, he's not actually looking at Ianto any more. He's looking at anything but Ianto. This is another sign that he's feeling vulnerable--to look directly at Ianto right now would expose him too much. Ianto is pacing back and forth, always keeping his back to Jack. He's confused and doesn't have any idea what's going on, but is still trying to signal to Jack that he's not interested in whatever Jack is saying by keeping his back to Jack.
0:43-0:48. This scene can be summed up as Ianto Says, "What the fuck?"
Seriously. Watch him. The only possible thing his body could be saying is WTF??!!! He spins around so fast it's a wonder that he doesn't have whiplash. It's not a fright-surprise reaction, since he's not trying to cover his torso. He is so shocked that he is absolutely wide open at the moment. The fact that his suit jacket is open emphasizes this fact. He uses a fairly large (for Ianto) hand gesture to get Jack to clarify, and that particular gesture opens his torso even more. He gapes like a fish for a second, then leans in slightly towards Jack when he says "Are you asking me out on a date?" At 0:48, Jack says, "Interested?" Jack tips his head back, exposing his throat, and looks straight at Ianto. Jack is at his most vulnerable here, almost sure he's going to get rejected, but he's standing his ground.
0:50-1:03. Ianto is still surprised, so much so that he can't even answer right away. He spins away from Jack, trying to recover, spins back to face Jack, then spins away and walks off very quickly. He moves over to a desk and immediately starts digging through stuff. He's surprised and is trying to get back onto familiar, comfortable ground. Ianto crouches down in front of the desk and digs in a drawer.
1:05-1:08. Jack begins to move back toward Ianto, but keeps his body turned away from him and doesn't face him. His voice quivers like he's still very nervous. He isn't sure if he's been shot down or not. Jack follows Ianto's lead and moves the conversation back into work mode. Ianto lifts his head to hear what Jack has to say, then assumes control of the work-related situation.
1:10-1:15. Ianto is feeling more comfortable. He stands up and faces Jack, hands on hips, body open. He's teasing Jack very slightly, but Jack hangs back and waits for Ianto to continue. Ianto tells Jack to go to the roof, emphasizing the roof with a point upwards, then turns his body away from Jack. It's a dismissal, and Jack takes it as such. He leaves the second Ianto tells him to. Ianto turns around and walks away from Jack.
1:16-1:20. Ianto turns around and calls for Jack. Jack faces him. Now it's Ianto's turn to ask Jack a question, and Ianto is feeling vulnerable. He is standing behind a desk and a pillar in the office. His face tenses up--whatever he's about to ask is something he wants to know but he's nervous. Ianto's entire body is turned to Jack, and his hands are held such that his torso is open. Ianto might be feeling vulnerable, but he's hoping that an honest question (in body language) will get an honest answer.
1:21 Freeze on this frame and look at the expression on Jack's face. He's nervous here.
1:22-1:30 Jack answers Ianto honestly, but in a very "boss" way. His tone brooks no argument, and the curt nod at the end of it says that he is finished with the conversation. He looks Ianto full in the face with his body open. He's telling the truth. Then he turns and walks out the door, ending the conversation. Ianto watches him for a second, then correctly interprets that sign and goes back to work.
1:30-1:35. Jack turns back around to Ianto, and the tentativeness is back in his posture. His body is turned away, but he's looking directly at Ianto. He asks Ianto whether he meant yes or no. Ianto spins around, never quite turning his body completely to Jack, but he looks at Jack. He's feeling uncomfortable again, but not doesn't immediately shut Jack out.
Analysis of the Interaction
Jack is the single character in Torchwood about whom we know the most. We got that from Doctor Who. We know that he was a con man only concerned with himself before he met the Doctor and Rose, and that they managed to turn him from a coward (his own words) into a man who would willingly throw away his life to save the universe. He's the hero, the avenging angel, the one who swoops in a the last second guns-a-blazing to protect the innocent. He's led armies, destroyed attacking fashion robots, faced down cyberwomen, and challenged demons to the death, and even had enough chutzpah to sass talk a band of Daleks with murder on their minds.
Asking Ianto on a date has got Jack scared out of his wits.
Jack is afraid of rejection, and based on the way Ianto cuts him off at the beginning of the scene, justly so. He's nervous and vulnerable and shy, which is completely different from the Jack Harkness that we're used to seeing. Once the bravado and larger-than-lifeness is gone, he stutters and stammers and hides behind furniture. He wants to have a relationship with Ianto so badly that it outweighs the fear of rejection.
Ianto isn't having an easy go of this either. He and Jack already have a pretty messed-up relationship...between a half-robot ex-girlfriend, gun to the head, betrayal over the rift, abandonment, secrets...and now Jack's psycho ex-boyfriend has shown up claiming to have stuff that will destroy half of Cardiff. Jack told Ianto he'd come back for him, then got caught up with the ex (who already told Ianto they'd been partners in every way--that was territory-marking if I ever saw it), and now Jack is asking him on a date. Small wonder he's confused and can't make up his mind whether to laugh or cry or say yes or run away.
I think one of the neatest things Gareth David-Lloyd does in this scene to convey just how surprised Ianto is is show huge variations in how he uses his hands. Ianto's character, in everyday mundane stuff, is not given to large sweeping gestures of, well, anything. Even when he's roaring at Jack in Cyberwoman or shooting Owen, his hands tend to stay close to his body and his movement is economical. In FOOTR, when he is taking Gwen and Owen to the movie theatre, he announces "The Elektro!" verbally like he's thrilled, but his hands stay in his pockets and arms stay close to his body. Jack, by contrast, would have had his arms spread out wide. Before Jack asks him on a date, his hands stay close to his body. Immediately after Jack asks him out, and later how he indicates that he will stay on the office floor and Jack can go to the roof, his hands are practically flying around him. It's another sign of just how completely far out of his comfort bubble Jack has thrown him. He couldn't be more surprised if a pink glittery winged pig were to jump up in front of him. (And since he works for Torchwood, well, the pig is just day-to-day business.)
Two things happened in this scene: Ianto set boundaries for their work relationship and their personal relationship, and they two of them made an honest effort at rebuilding the damaged trust between them. In the first instance, Ianto's repeated reminders that they were on work time, both verbal and nonverbal, established that Ianto wants to keep work and private stuff well separate. He doesn't want a relationship with Torchwood or to have servicing the boss be part of his regular routine. If he's going to do this, he's going to do this on his own terms. Jack accepts that rule when he makes the comment about drawer, bin, plant pot, and then leaves when Ianto tells him to. The second thing that happened is that Ianto asked Jack an honest question, and was so humble about his request that you think he's going to cry. The unspoken question, of course, is "Why are you asking me out but doing all this for your ex? Is it me you really want?"
It's a good question. This is Jack Harkness, who is a fifty-first century kind of guy after all, who Tosh established from Day One that Jack will shag anything that's gorgeous. John is somewhere running around, emphasizing that point, and it wasn't so long ago (like, an hour, maybe) that Jack came crying back to him after running away for some other guy. For once in his life, Jack gives exactly the right answer ("He's a reminder of my past. I want him gone."). He's willing to help John so it will get John away from him and the people he loves. Ianto isn't convinced, but then Jack turns around and asks him again yes or no. Ianto is still overwhelmed and confused, but at some level he is registering that Jack really is serious.
Jack's Point of View
At this point, I'm going to break away from analysis of this specific scene and dig a little deeper into Jack's character. This is a big change for Jack, so in order to appreciate what is going on here, we need to look at this scene in the context of Jack's character.
When we meet Jack in Doctor Who, Jack is about to destroy London for a cheap buck. He's a lying, cheating, womanizing (and manizing and alienizing and whatever-izing) scoundrel, and at one point the Doctor himself was ready to kill Jack, no questions asked. When given a chance to fix his mistake, though, he did so, and started on a classic redemption storyline. You know, Awful Bastard of a Man meets a Special Woman who makes him see the Error of His Ways and sets him firmly and unerringly on the Path to Goodness. Only in Jack's case, it wasn't a woman, it was the Doctor. Rose would have been just another conquest had it not been for Nine, whom Jack recognized as an almost godlike authority. For the first time in his miserable adult life, Jack fell in love. He fell in love with both the Doctor and Rose, to the point where he willingly made himself the last line of defence between the Doctor and a horde of Daleks. And then he got simultaneously made immortal and abandoned.
That's a hefty kind of psychological blow. The kind that leaves people broken and mad.
Throughout his hundred and sixty years or so of waiting for the Doctor, including some experiences that would really screw up your head and getting killed more times than he can count, he had exactly one emotionally intimate relationship (as opposed to physical relationship) that we know of, Estelle. Despite the fact that he clearly loved her, he couldn't handle the emotional intimacy, went to war, got himself killed, and ran off. The fact that he actually died (legally causing the separation) is beside the point. After that, we see evidence of friendships (Alex in Fragments), but no other evidence of an emotionally intimate partnership. Yes, I know about Real!Captain Jack, but that was more of an intensely emotionally intimate moment rather than an intensely emotionally intimate relationship. Attraction? Yes. Last kiss for a dying man? Yes. Truly loving intimate partnership? Never had a chance.
When he saw the Doctor again, the being who had quite literally saved his life and inspired his love (and I'm convinced that on some level, Nine loved Jack in return) was gone, replaced by a different man who would just as happily throw Jack out with yesterday's garbage. He subjects Jack to all kinds of great and petty insults, from leaving him lying dead on the ground after the TARDIS stopped at the end of the world (with the strong implication that he'd abandon Jack again right then and there had Martha not stopped him) to reviling Jack's involvement with Torchwood. When Jack fires right back at the Doctor about Torchwood and what Jack has done since Canary Wharf, the Doctor doesn't apologize, even when Torchwood's Archangel Network eventually becomes the mechanism to save the Doctor and the world. In the meantime, Jack gets chained in an engine room--I work on ships for a living, and trust me, there is NOWHERE worse to be than the hot, filthy, noisy, smelly confines of an engine room. That alone means that he will never have a moment of silence, enduring pain that can be eardrum-shatteringly loud, subject to noxious fumes, and dealing with near-constant sweltering heat. It's one more layer of torture the Master inflicted on Jack. After Lucy shoots the Master, after Jack has dealt with all this and the emotional trauma inflicted on Tish and Martha and all, he gets to watch the man he literally died for once and a thousand times cry over the body of a man who would have destroyed the world.
Imagine that--somebody you love enough to throw your life away, telling you and showing you in the most irrefutable way in the universe that you don't matter enough to even consider what you've been through. He's just had the one long-term emotional commitment of his life get shattered in a heartbeat. He was physically abandoned at the Game Station; he was irrevocably emotionally abandoned by Ten on the bridge of the Valiant.
Now enter John.
John is a living, breathing, swaggering relic of how Jack was before he met Nine. He's mad, bad, and dangerous, and it's clear as day that Jack used to be the same way. John is the vehicle by which the writers try and tell us the extent of Jack's redemption. Jack waits hesitantly in front of John, and John initiates the kiss. Then they have a fight, which was a nice metaphor for highly physical sex, some gunplay, and a drink. At least, John has a drink. Jack is pretty disgusted, cracks a few jokes, and then tells John to get the hell out. He's an emotionally battered, seriously messed-up puppy, but even after all that he's not willing to go back to where he came from. John's reaction to Jack suggests that John had an emotional commitment to Jack, but Jack's downplaying their relationship (2 weeks instead of 5 years) suggests that there never was much of an emotional commitment to John on Jack's part. This would be consistent with his pre-Nine lifestyle.
Jack craves acceptance. He wants to be accepted for who he is and everything he is, and given how complex Jack's life has been, that's a tall order. Even aside from the immortality, his past as a sociopathic con man is a burden he knows he will bear for the rest of his life, and he is terrified that if he tells anybody about it, they will reject him. When he tells Toshiko about his being a bad guy in CJH, you can see that it is a highly emotional moment for him. Fragments makes it clear why he tells Tosh--she has her own skeletons in the closet, and she is more likely to accept that people make mistakes. The immortality makes things even worse. He was so terrified that Estelle would reject him because of his "disability" (the metaphor of one intimate partner becoming disabled is an apt one here) that he preemptively rejects her. I think that is why Jack is so willing to forgive just about anybody for just about anything...he's hoping that if he forgives them, that they will forgive him for his misdeeds. The way he ran off to sacrifice himself to Abbaddon said two things to me: first, that he was actively suicidal (as opposed to being murdered by his team) because the way his team turned against him as a whole hit every raw nerve about rejection there was, and he was both desperate to end his life and (judging by the expression on his face) hoping beyond hope that this would be the end of it all. Second, the way he threw himself at Abbadon supports the notion that if Jack throws his own life away to save the world, maybe he'll be worth something and somebody will love him. That is a heartbreaking way to live, especially for the man Jack has become. He is worth a damn, worth a whole lot of damn, in fact, but deep down inside he still considers himself trash. Wow. The sheer breadth and depth of this pain and isolation and despair are so huge and appalling that I have tears in my eyes as I write this, and normally I am not one to cry when reading a book or watching a movie or whatever. The emotion has to be hurricane-strength intense--such as the scene in the opera Fidelio when the prisoners are released--for me to react.
The upshot of all that is that Jack has the emotional development level of a teenager. Probably somebody around 15 or 16, enough that they've started to figure it out, not enough to have any confidence in their abilities. I wouldn't have any confidence in my abilities either, if the only people I'd ever truly loved had thrown me away like that! He's physically confident and sexually confident, but tremendously weak and vulnerable emotionally.
Ianto poses his own prickly issues for Jack, ones that take Jack's acceptance issues and already shaky emotional foundations and chip away a little more. First, he's Jack's employee. Any relationship they have will be extra tricky because of that. I'm not categorically against office relationships--people are people, and these things will happen. Office relationships do, however, require an extra layer of delicacy and care that other relationships do not. Whether it's Jack/Ianto or a married couple who run a small business, the couple has to be more careful and put more work into the partnership than otherwise. Second, Jack is older than Ianto. Much, much, much older than Ianto, with all of the wisdom, knowledge, and implicit authority of old age over youth. We raise cultural eyebrows and May-December weddings for a couple of reasons; the largest of which being fertility and childrearing, but also the implicit suggestion of whether the older partner is a lover figure, a parent figure, or both. Third, Ianto came within inches of whoring himself to get a job and hid a cyberwoman in Jack's basement. Jack kissed Ianto like a lover before running off with another man. Trust between them is shaky at best in this scene in KKBB (although Ianto makes it very clear that he trusts Jack professionally as a leader). Those three issues combined mean that Jack will have to exercise every little bit of emotional skill that he has, and with his track record, he's not sure that he even has that skill. It speaks volumes about how much Jack must really, really, really want Ianto, and not just as a sex toy, for him to brave all those obstacles in spite of his near-overwhelming fear of rejection. The fact that Jack immediately obeys the rules Ianto sets forth (e.g., not in the office) hammers that home. At this point I wouldn't say Jack was in love with Ianto, per se, but he is embarking on a long journey to emotional commitment.
Back to the acting: John Barrowman has to take all of that and wrap it up into Captain Jack and somehow act it in such a way that we, the audience, actually believe it. That's a rather herculean task! I don't act and I don't know many people who do, but I did have a friend years ago who did roles in a local theatre company and I know that she would spend literally days discussing characters, reading scripts and lines, and trying to figure out how to get into the "skin" of a character. JB, by the time KKBB was shot, had plenty of experience with Captain Jack, but never had the experience of Captain Jack in a shy and vulnerable but absolutely open moment. Even when he kisses Rose and Nine goodbye in POTW, he moves quickly and stiffly, leading the entire interaction, steeling himself for what he knows is certain extermination. Jack is as far out of his element as he's ever been, and JB has to capture that. I think he did a great job. Head-tossing, shaky motions, hiding behind things, looking away, staying out of Ianto's space--those are all things that people do in real life when they are exposing themselves emotionally.
Gareth David-Lloyd has a challenge as well. He's a much younger, less experienced actor than JB, who had been on stage for almost longer than GDL has been alive, and Ianto's character is rather tricky. He's not outgoing like Gwen or Owen, nor does he quietly demand respect like Toshiko. He's never going to be the life of the party. Ianto is also a pretty screwed up puppy--Canary Wharf would do a number on anybody--so he had to spend the whole of S1 acting depressed and grieving, as well as do convincing mortal terror in Countrycide and deadly anger in Captain Jack Harkness. (I didn't like that scene, but as Burn Gorman didn't do any better job, and I both know they can act the hell out of a scene, I'm laying that more at the feet of the directors. The directors backed off a lot in S2 and let the actors work more freely, and it shows.) It's a tough, tough, tough job for such a young actor. The date scene was a big challenge for him as he had to take an already established character and make him act out of character. He did that primarily with his hands and the rapid opening and closing of his body, but also wonderful facial expressions and grabbing at his hair.
The next scene analysis will be from Day in the Death, starting where Jack relieves Owen of his post and goes through to Ianto and Owen at the coffee machine.