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.
