True Blood: It Hurts Me Too

Content warning: This post contains discussions about True Blood through season three, episode three, ‘It Hurts Me Too.’ It also discusses violent sexuality that occurred in said episode. If you’d like to skip it, you can read ‘Glee and the Great Dichotomy,’ today’s feature post.

I don’t think I want to do a True Blood writeup every week, but two things happened this week that I want to touch upon: The direction that they are taking Tara Thornton, and That Scene at the end of the episode with Bill and Lorena. For the benefit of those who don’t want to read about/discuss That Scene, that will be the second half of this post so that you can read about Tara and then move on.

So, Tara. Let’s talk about Tara, because I am not at all happy with the way that they are shaping her character. She was introduced as a kind of troped character with a streak of potential, and I had inklings of hopes for her. Let’s not forget that we are introduced to her reading a book on the job and that in the first few episodes of the show, she often carried books, after all. She seemed like a character who could potentially grow and develop in interesting directions, breaking out of the double-trope box that a lot of Black women on television find themselves in.

I started getting more and more uneasy last season, and this season, that unease is settling in more deeply. Tara appears to be turning into the best friend who always has inappropriate boyfriends and needs rescuing. Franklin is clearly Bad News Bears, no matter what his deal is, and I’m deeply troubled by the way that Tara seems to be headed.

I liked the initial depiction of grief and distress over Eggs. I thought it was honest, and a nice departure from conventional depictions of grief where a character is sad for an episode and then gets over it. Alan Ball does have some experience here, what with Six Feet Under. Even the decision to turn to Franklin for casual sex didn’t trouble me that much, because, well, that is one response to grief. It is valid. It does happen. But I feel like Tara is being turned completely helpless, in need of rescuing and shepherding by other characters, and I am not liking this at all. I feel like this is a common trap that female characters end up in, the sidekicky best friends, and it feels untrue to Tara, who seems like a strong, resourceful character.

I also see a lot of Tara-hate going on, with people calling her character ‘needy’ and ‘whiny’ and I assume that this is going to escalate this season. Whatever is going on with her and Franklin, I think it is going to end in tears and recriminations, and I can’t wait for people to start referring to her as whiny over it.

Now, for That Scene. My reading on this scene appears to be pretty different from that I’m seeing in other discussions of this episode. I agree that it’s gratuitously violent and horrifically misogynist and disgusting. It really does, as I was telling Annaham last night, put a whole new level on ‘hatefuck.’

But, I think it’s pretty obvious that Lorena put the whammy on Bill in that scene. Are we forgetting that Makers have total control over their children? That she can literally order Bill to have sex with her, ‘release’ from last season or no? Who wants to bet she had her fingers crossed on that one? I’d agree it’s a rape, but not of Lorena—of Bill. He is not consenting in that scene and it’s pretty clear to me that the violence is the expression of his lack of consent. I personally would have preferred, uhm, a less misogynistic way of expressing that. He could have been wooden and toneless, he could have cried through the scene, he could have been as passive as possible, there were lots of ways to depict that. That would have conveyed both that he is being forced, and that he is really, really unhappy about it. It also would have allowed the show to retain his humanity, which seems to be what they are trying to do, given that it is an overarching theme of the show. Having him do what he did was completely alienating and disgusting. I don’t really see how the show, or Bill, is supposed to come back from that.

Lorena is a character who is stripping Bill of his humanity, and maybe that’s what they were trying to enforce with that scene, that the dynamic between the characters is so toxic that it can only express in violence and dehumanisation. The scene made me deeply, viscerally uncomfortable, though. There would have been other, healthier ways to depict that. Bill is, when you get down to it, an increasingly dislikable character for his actions on the show, and if the series plans on including one of the scenes from the book this season is based on, he’s going to become even more unlikeable, real fast, in a couple of episodes. True Blood would not be the first show to have a character who is fundamentally wrong as the lead, but is it a good move? Will the show be able to walk the line, or will we end up with a fetishisation of the character instead of a condemnation?

Speaking of hating on female characters, I also see a lot of people hating on Lorena. I personally love her. Not the character herself, but how she is played. In the books, she’s not really a very active character. She is just sort of on the sidelines as a cartoon villain. The decision to turn her into a real character that plays a role, an ugly sickening one, is, I think, a really good one. People say that she’s ‘flat,’ but she’s not flat, she’s cold. She is inhuman. She is evil. That’s the whole point. Lorena gives me the heebie jeebies every time she is on screen and she is supposed to do that. She is supposed to provoke revulsion. It would be preferable if that expulsion didn’t have to express itself on screen in the form of horrific violence against women, and I’m pretty unimpressed with Alan Ball for that particular decision.

Related reading: The Feministe True Blood roundtable and the Racialicious True Blood roundtable.

29 June, 2010 – 6:15 pm | By s.e. smith | Posted in social justice, television | Tagged , , , |

Glee and the Great Dichotomy

So. Let’s talk about Glee now that we’ve had a bit of breathing room without new episodes being crammed down our throats every week.

The argument that I most commonly see used to ‘explain’ the show to people like me who don’t like it, or people who like it but don’t like the depictions, is that Glee is meant to be satire. In fact, a lot of the things I said about Arrested Development yesterday are also said about Glee. We aren’t meant to laugh at the depictions and the jokes. We are meant to read them as critiques of the society we live in. Glee is holding the mirror up to society and demanding us to explore our own complicity.

Why are some folks not reading Glee that way? Why are some folks feeling like the show is not meeting the standard when it comes to presenting oppressive concepts in a way that is meant to deconstruct them?

I think that there are a couple of things going on here, and one of them is Glee’s stated intent. For the most part, I’m not that interested in creative intent. I am interested in how I read a show, and in the embedded messages it contains. This is whether or not the embedded content was intentional. In fact, I think it’s more telling when that content wasn’t meant to be there and ended up there anyway, illustrating how much of this stuff becomes internalised for us.

However, I make an exception in the case of Glee because the show is claiming to be doing something revolutionary. It’s congratulating itself for breaking down stereotypes and confronting social attitudes. Every week, it claims to be, well, ‘a TV show dedicated exclusively to the idea of inclusiveness and acceptance for all.’ That’s Ryan Murphy, talking about Glee. And the show is being widely referred to as living up to these values. It is winning awards for it. That means that I hold the show to a higher standard.

And, to my eye, there are two things going on here. One is that Murphy’s brand of humour is very particular. Some people like Murphy’s humour. Others do not. Many have pointed out that Nip/Tuck also has some extremely troubling content, which suggests that Murphy has kind of a bad track record here. It’s worth exploring that when considering how shrilly Murphy is presenting Glee as some sort of groundbreaking show. For me, I don’t find his humour enjoyable. I feel that it is oppressive and exploitative and it is very clear, to me, that oppressive things on the show are intended to be read as amusing. Not that oppressive things are presented and then taken down, but that they are presented without comment or actively praised.

Which brings me to the second problem with Glee, an issue that I noticed getting bigger and bigger with the last few episodes of the season. And that’s that the show does not have a very consistent tone. Indeed, one could safely show that the show is all over the place, and this is making the situation worse, in my opinion. If Glee could settle into being an earnest and fresh-faced teen show that is trying to teach people lessons, I would respect that. Hell, The Secret Life of the American Teenager is basically that, and I watched a few episodes on a recommendation from a friend. Not my cup of tea, not something I’m that interested in, but it is a genre, and some people like that.

Some people like their saccharine life lessons presented in nuggets of clear and crisp learning experiences. Kurt’s dad lecturing Finn on his language use. Mercedes accepting and embracing her size. And I note, casting my eye back on previous Glee reviews, that I consistently singled out these scenes to discuss because at the same time that they got a lot of praise from the media, they made me really uncomfortable. These Serious Learning Experiences feel totally out of place because they are bracketed by ‘parody’ that would be more accurately described ‘exploiting people in marginalised bodies to make people laugh.’

These moments don’t fit in with the tone of the show. Glee is presenting itself as snarky, fun, biting satire. And, for the most part, that is what it is trying to be. I don’t read the satire the same way that I do on Arrested Development because I feel like it doesn’t quite take the next step of satirising itself; when Glee does get meta, it’s usually to be snide about the people who criticise the show, as seen with some of the comments Mercedes makes about her characterisation. But that is what it is trying to be, and that’s why these Serious Learning Experiences feel so stilted and awful.

Glee is straddling a divide, and it’s doing it very badly. It cannot make its mind, flipping desperately between two very different modes. The show is trying to take itself seriously, and instead it just comes off as clumsy. I think that I might, actually, like the show if it could pick a consistent tone, clean house a bit, and stop taking itself so fucking seriously. The problem with Glee is that it presents these representations not in a way that challenges the viewer, but in a way that affirms it, and then it tries to insert Life Lessons, some of which are really bad lessons to learn, like ‘wheelchair users should just accept that they will never be dancers and move on with their lives.’

And this is why I get frothy with rage at people praising Glee. Because they point triumphantly to the Learning Experiences to negate the arguments being made by the show’s detractors. And the point that they are missing is that these Learning Experiences convey some very harmful and problematic attitudes sometimes. I criticise the show both for the humour, and for the serious, especially the Serious Learning Moments with Artie that, in my opinion, reinforce everything terrible I can imagine about disability.

That’s Glee’s problem, for me. The show cannot decide what it wants to be and it puts the onus on the viewers who challenge it. People can say they like it ‘despite the problematic content’ because of the way the show is positioning itself and being celebrated for it. They can feel comforted by familiar social attitudes that they wrap around themselves like a warm blanket while assuring themselves that they are fighting the power.

Either Glee is engaging in one of the longest payoffs ever with some of these representations, or it’s a pile of self-important shit that, aside from being problematic television, is just bad television. Raising the question of why Fox renewed it for, not one, but two seasons.

29 June, 2010 – 10:26 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in television | Tagged , , , , |

Salacious Bassoons

Scott Henry at Creative Loafing: The Atlanta Way not always best

But letting corporations take the lead in civic matters isn’t an all-purpose solution. The planned Center for Civil and Human Rights is an example of a great opportunity misplaced — literally.

Matthew McDermott at Treehugger: Commercial Hunting Just One of Many Problems Facing Whales: Oil Exploration, Pollution, Fishing Nets

At another presentation, Reuters reports on the many other hazards whales face–from noise and chemical pollution, to being caught up in fish nets, to climate change–and how these issues have been sidelined of late in the public discussion around whale conservation.

Anthea Lawson at The Guardian: Comment is free: West’s financial system must stop flow of dirty money

Many of the poorest countries could lift their populations out of poverty with their natural resource revenues. One of the biggest things stopping them is the willingness of the international financial system to accept looted funds.

Clare Murphy at BBC News: Major deficiencies in artificial feeding, inquiry finds

A catalogue of problems were uncovered while reviewing questionnaires and case notes from England, Wales and Northern Ireland, the “Mixed Bag” report found.

Marc Perton at Consumerist: Brits May Challenge Visa’s 2012 Olympics Exclusivity

In fact, thanks to a contract between Visa and the International Olympic Committee, Visa has been the only credit or debit card allowed at the Olympics since the Seoul games in 1988.

29 June, 2010 – 10:07 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in interesting | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , |