Farscape: narrative convention and cliche
Apr. 22nd, 2005 10:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyI bet y'all are as tired of Kekropia as I am.
So I'm going to talk about something else.
Mirrorthaw and I are watching Farscape (while![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
heres_luck's DVDs are around for us to borrow) and enjoying it very much. We watched "The Hidden Memory" (1.20) last night, and my conversation about it this morning with h.l. hit some unexpected turbulence, which I thought might make an interesting post--as opposed to the reiterative, recursive, narcissistic bitching and whining that's been most of the content of my blog lately.
WARNING: We are watching in order. I know nothing about what happens after episode 1.20. If you spoil me (as h.l. says), I will beat you to death with a shovel. A vague disclaimer is nobody's friend.
I said to h.l., "We watched the second half of the Farscape two-parter last night, and I failed entirely to be sorry when Gilina kicked it."
And h.l. looked at me funny and said, "I liked Gilina."
Whereupon I promptly felt twelve years old and stupid, and failed entirely to explain myself properly.
Because the thing is, I liked Gilina, too. She was blonde and cute and mondo tech-savvy, and the actress is from New Zealand, which gets her automatic Peter Jackson points. But I still wasn't sorry when she died, and that for two reasons: one to do with narrative convention, and the other to do with narrative cliché.
Cliché first. I get deeply irritated, to the point of being jarred out of a story, when the heteronormative binary assumption that a MAN must choose ONE of two WOMEN (or a WOMAN must choose ONE of two MEN) is used to motivate the plot. Gilina's all, "Do you love her, John? I can't come with you if you don't love ME. Aeryn, do you love him? Do ya? Do ya? Do ya?" and I'm sitting there thinking, You know, a little applied polyamory would solve this problem, and I'm betting Aeryn would even be relieved. I'm not saying that this isn't a legitimate barrel to be stuck over, and I'm not saying it doesn't hurt like a son of a bitch, but I hate the way our thinking, culturally speaking, is so far inside the box that we don't even know the box is there. I hate the way everyone, from characters to writers, assumes that, yes, of course, Crichton has to CHOOSE. He can't love them BOTH, oh GOD no.
I can't buy this situation as End Of The World Tragedy any longer, because although I'm monogamous myself, I know people who are polyamorous and happy and loving and in valued and valuable relationships. It's not that I think everyone is "really" polyamorous, or ought to be; it's that my awareness that there are other options, that there are ways of negotiating this situation, makes me feel that such total blindness to those other options as this episode presents as SOP is actually creepy and a little dysfunctional. I'm not putting this well. But I don't like the way it's accepted as a given that Gilina's right, that the matter is entirely Either/Or, always has been, always will be, world without end, amen. I don't like binary thinking in any context, because there are so many things it prevents us from seeing.
Love is not a zero-sum game.
There's also something terribly high school about the whole situation, and I can't help finding that tedious, either. Gilina, sweetie, if you stay here, you are going to be TOAST. You know it, we know it, John and Aeryn know it. So why don't you save your ass FIRST and THEN worry about whether your boyfriend loves you, okay?
Which brings me to the other reason I wasn't sorry when Gilina died.
I'd been expecting it for three episodes.
In "PK Tech Girl," I was expecting her to die (well, first I was expecting her to be Evil, but that was me trying to impose a set of narrative conventions the Farscape writers aren't interested it--I tried it in "Nerve," too, and it didn't work there, either), and I was pleased when she didn't, because Boy Meets Girl, Boy Loves Girl, Girl Dies Horribly, is another narrative cliché I'm not real fond of.
But from the moment she appeared in "Nerve" (and especially once they'd shown she wasn't Evil and the thingy she got for Aeryn was the good thingy, not any of the myriad bad thingies it could have been), I was expecting her to die. Every time one of the main characters separated from her, I was expecting Scorpius to be the next person in the shot. Partly this is because I'm cynical and pessimistic and always assume worst-case scenario, but partly it was because the narrative itself was signalling Gilina's imminent demise.
1. She's a character we weren't expecting to see again. sf/f/h shows don't generally leave a lot of leeway for minor characters to just keep coming back--unless they make it through the glass ceiling into Recurring, in which case the rules change (like Alice crossing the final brook in Through the Looking-Glass and ascending from Pawn to Queen). Crais is recurring because he's got CONFLICT written all over him in neon-pink letters; "amusing" characters (pick your irritant from a Star Trek franchise) recur. Gilina, like Durka, provided conflict for only ONE character, and thus wasn't going to make the grade. (The perennial problems Mutant Enemy had with overloading characters until you needed a scorecard to keep the casts of Buffy and Angel straight came, a lot of the time, from their inability to keep minor characters interacting with only ONE major character. People kept getting integrated into the core group because they kept developing relationships, even very small ones, with characters other than their primary respondent. Tara thumb-wrestling with Dawn in "The Real Me" is perhaps the quintessential example.) The other characters barely even know Gilina exists. She's doomed.
2. She's inconvenient--the John/Aeryn thing is clearly the trend of the future, and Gilina's continued existence is clutter. Doomed.
3. She's TOO HELPFUL. That's the real kiss of death here. Gilina has Plot Device stamped on her forehead, and from the moment they did the reveal on Gilina having gotten Crichton through the checkpoint, I knew she was doomed. And espcially when she kept on finessing the technology for them. No character that acts so very much like a combination of an All-Access Pass, a Get Out Of Jail Free card, and a Jedi mind-trick can possibly be allowed to live.
Now, admittedly, I was expecting her to meet her doom much earlier and at a much more inconvenient point for Our Heroes (see above re: cynical and pessimistic, and I was really expecting Peacekeeper Barbie to catch her sabotaging the Aurora Chair), so when Scorpius shot her (over my shrieks of Gilina! Shoot him! Shoot! Him!), my feeling was mostly, Well finally.
So it wasn't really that I wasn't sorry Gilina died. Because I did like her, even if her function in the narrative was so strictly limited by her identity as Crichton's Love Interest. (I've fulminated about that problem in regard to female characters elsewhere.) It was that I was ready, and past ready, for the uses the narrative found for her to be shut down.
So I'm going to talk about something else.
Mirrorthaw and I are watching Farscape (while
heres_luck's DVDs are around for us to borrow) and enjoying it very much. We watched "The Hidden Memory" (1.20) last night, and my conversation about it this morning with h.l. hit some unexpected turbulence, which I thought might make an interesting post--as opposed to the reiterative, recursive, narcissistic bitching and whining that's been most of the content of my blog lately.WARNING: We are watching in order. I know nothing about what happens after episode 1.20. If you spoil me (as h.l. says), I will beat you to death with a shovel. A vague disclaimer is nobody's friend.
I said to h.l., "We watched the second half of the Farscape two-parter last night, and I failed entirely to be sorry when Gilina kicked it."
And h.l. looked at me funny and said, "I liked Gilina."
Whereupon I promptly felt twelve years old and stupid, and failed entirely to explain myself properly.
Because the thing is, I liked Gilina, too. She was blonde and cute and mondo tech-savvy, and the actress is from New Zealand, which gets her automatic Peter Jackson points. But I still wasn't sorry when she died, and that for two reasons: one to do with narrative convention, and the other to do with narrative cliché.
Cliché first. I get deeply irritated, to the point of being jarred out of a story, when the heteronormative binary assumption that a MAN must choose ONE of two WOMEN (or a WOMAN must choose ONE of two MEN) is used to motivate the plot. Gilina's all, "Do you love her, John? I can't come with you if you don't love ME. Aeryn, do you love him? Do ya? Do ya? Do ya?" and I'm sitting there thinking, You know, a little applied polyamory would solve this problem, and I'm betting Aeryn would even be relieved. I'm not saying that this isn't a legitimate barrel to be stuck over, and I'm not saying it doesn't hurt like a son of a bitch, but I hate the way our thinking, culturally speaking, is so far inside the box that we don't even know the box is there. I hate the way everyone, from characters to writers, assumes that, yes, of course, Crichton has to CHOOSE. He can't love them BOTH, oh GOD no.
I can't buy this situation as End Of The World Tragedy any longer, because although I'm monogamous myself, I know people who are polyamorous and happy and loving and in valued and valuable relationships. It's not that I think everyone is "really" polyamorous, or ought to be; it's that my awareness that there are other options, that there are ways of negotiating this situation, makes me feel that such total blindness to those other options as this episode presents as SOP is actually creepy and a little dysfunctional. I'm not putting this well. But I don't like the way it's accepted as a given that Gilina's right, that the matter is entirely Either/Or, always has been, always will be, world without end, amen. I don't like binary thinking in any context, because there are so many things it prevents us from seeing.
Love is not a zero-sum game.
There's also something terribly high school about the whole situation, and I can't help finding that tedious, either. Gilina, sweetie, if you stay here, you are going to be TOAST. You know it, we know it, John and Aeryn know it. So why don't you save your ass FIRST and THEN worry about whether your boyfriend loves you, okay?
Which brings me to the other reason I wasn't sorry when Gilina died.
I'd been expecting it for three episodes.
In "PK Tech Girl," I was expecting her to die (well, first I was expecting her to be Evil, but that was me trying to impose a set of narrative conventions the Farscape writers aren't interested it--I tried it in "Nerve," too, and it didn't work there, either), and I was pleased when she didn't, because Boy Meets Girl, Boy Loves Girl, Girl Dies Horribly, is another narrative cliché I'm not real fond of.
But from the moment she appeared in "Nerve" (and especially once they'd shown she wasn't Evil and the thingy she got for Aeryn was the good thingy, not any of the myriad bad thingies it could have been), I was expecting her to die. Every time one of the main characters separated from her, I was expecting Scorpius to be the next person in the shot. Partly this is because I'm cynical and pessimistic and always assume worst-case scenario, but partly it was because the narrative itself was signalling Gilina's imminent demise.
1. She's a character we weren't expecting to see again. sf/f/h shows don't generally leave a lot of leeway for minor characters to just keep coming back--unless they make it through the glass ceiling into Recurring, in which case the rules change (like Alice crossing the final brook in Through the Looking-Glass and ascending from Pawn to Queen). Crais is recurring because he's got CONFLICT written all over him in neon-pink letters; "amusing" characters (pick your irritant from a Star Trek franchise) recur. Gilina, like Durka, provided conflict for only ONE character, and thus wasn't going to make the grade. (The perennial problems Mutant Enemy had with overloading characters until you needed a scorecard to keep the casts of Buffy and Angel straight came, a lot of the time, from their inability to keep minor characters interacting with only ONE major character. People kept getting integrated into the core group because they kept developing relationships, even very small ones, with characters other than their primary respondent. Tara thumb-wrestling with Dawn in "The Real Me" is perhaps the quintessential example.) The other characters barely even know Gilina exists. She's doomed.
2. She's inconvenient--the John/Aeryn thing is clearly the trend of the future, and Gilina's continued existence is clutter. Doomed.
3. She's TOO HELPFUL. That's the real kiss of death here. Gilina has Plot Device stamped on her forehead, and from the moment they did the reveal on Gilina having gotten Crichton through the checkpoint, I knew she was doomed. And espcially when she kept on finessing the technology for them. No character that acts so very much like a combination of an All-Access Pass, a Get Out Of Jail Free card, and a Jedi mind-trick can possibly be allowed to live.
Now, admittedly, I was expecting her to meet her doom much earlier and at a much more inconvenient point for Our Heroes (see above re: cynical and pessimistic, and I was really expecting Peacekeeper Barbie to catch her sabotaging the Aurora Chair), so when Scorpius shot her (over my shrieks of Gilina! Shoot him! Shoot! Him!), my feeling was mostly, Well finally.
So it wasn't really that I wasn't sorry Gilina died. Because I did like her, even if her function in the narrative was so strictly limited by her identity as Crichton's Love Interest. (I've fulminated about that problem in regard to female characters elsewhere.) It was that I was ready, and past ready, for the uses the narrative found for her to be shut down.
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no subject
Date: 2005-04-22 04:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-22 04:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-22 04:59 pm (UTC)I did find the Gilina plotting clunky, after the initial "Wow, she's here! What plot machinations may ensue!" The real problem I always had with her, though, was that she had such a normal personality and was so unlike Aeryn. After a while, it came to feel as if PKs were all actually all right people, and Aeryn was the only one with gross psychological problems.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-22 06:55 pm (UTC)Well see - there are just regular-folk Peacekeepers, people that come from other planets and colonies that enlist or are conscripted into the Peacekeeper ranks. I can't immediately recall the details of PK Tech Girl, but I think part of Gilina's (as a lowly tech - almost an enlisted soldier) purpose was to illustrate that divide.
Aeryn was born a Peacekeeper and raised a Peacekeeper and as such represents the elite side of things. She has gross psychological problems, to be certain, but no more than you would expect of someone being trained more than raised, finding themselves totally divorced from all standards they had previously believed in. Aeryn's journey, because of this, is all the more fraught and interesting. Being a soldier is all she, quite literally, knows. Gilina - Gilina had a life before service and can possibly easily imagine a life beyond being a Peacekeeper.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-22 07:06 pm (UTC)We don't get backstory on Gilina iirc, but I can apply the backstory we do get on Crais and guess that, yeah, Gilina's not got the whole Brave New World thing quite as ingrained in her as Aeryn does.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-22 05:22 pm (UTC)The show is incredibly heteronormative, which is a bit of a shock after the Jossverse. In its defense, Crichton is textually an All-American Boy, and a Southerner to boot. He's monogamous by default.
At this stage in the season, Aeryn would be greatly relieved if he took up with somebody else. Or at least she'd *claim* she was relieved.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-23 03:13 am (UTC)At least until Braca turns up...
no subject
Date: 2005-04-23 04:32 am (UTC)Watch the spoilers, please.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-25 11:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-22 07:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-22 08:09 pm (UTC)And h.l. looked at me funny and said, "I liked Gilina."
Well, if you'd said "...and I failed entirely to be surprised," I would have said "I know — saw that one coming a MILE away." I actually thought that it made a certain amount of sense and thus did not respond to it merely as a cliche, but sure, it was predictable.
But I think you had a much more complicated set of expectations for Gilina than I did. I could *see* you assuming she was Evil when she first showed up in "PK Tech Girl," and then assuming the synthetic nerve stuff was Evil when she gave that to John, and I thought "Huh." Because I never went there. I took Gilina entirely at face value. Naive and gullible, right here.
I also didn't find Gilina whiny, but possibly that's because I didn't think the point was her asking John to choose; for me, the point was that that "choice" had already been made, except it wasn't a choice because Gilina never factored into it. But they had no way -- and no time -- to communicate anything about the complexity of that situation. Which I found sad rather than annoying.
It occurs to me that another reason for the difference in our responses might be that I just didn't experience Gilina as the most important element of the eps -- certainly not significant enough to throw me out of the viewing experience. The notes I linked to above hardly mention her. Possibly I'm just over-aligned with John at this point: he's moved on, so have I.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-22 08:37 pm (UTC)And the problem was not so much that I found Gilina whiny, as that the inappropriateness of the moment the writers chose (they're running for their lives, the jailbreak's been discovered, Crichton's been tortured and looks and feels like shit on toast--it just didn't seem like a good time for The Talk) highlighted for me the artificiality and stereotypicalness of the roles Aeryn, Crichton, and Gilina were suddenly stuck in. (I did love Aeryn's completely nonplussed WTF? reaction.) I don't blame Gilina as a character for that.
See, if they'd gotten away clear, and then Gilina said, So. John. Is this forever or what? I would have been totally on her side, and this post would probably have been a fulmination about Crichton. Because, no, he doesn't love her any longer--if "love" is the right word, considering the mad teenage nature of the crush they had on each other, and the only way to deal with that that doesn't make him look like a total jerk is to kill her.
And Crichton's not a jerk. He's just been put in a narrative situation, him and Gilina (and poor confused Aeryn), where they can't get away from an ugly set of gender stereotypes. And I object to those stereotypes and the conventions they spawn being deployed without irony.
Or perhaps this is just an indication that I've over-aligned with Aeryn. *g*
no subject
Date: 2005-04-23 04:36 am (UTC)Yeah. Aeryn doesn't even comprehend that there *are* girly rules, far less follow them. And, as you've already begun to notice, she is not all about romance.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-23 04:37 pm (UTC)I rilly like this phrase.
---L.