Due South: Pilot
Aug. 19th, 2007 07:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyDue South, Pilot
Original airdate: April 23, 1994
Favorite line:
DESK SERGEANT: You like pigeons?
FRASER: I don't have much experience with them.
[...]
DESK SERGEANT: It's not that they're dirty. It's just that I'm starting to question their loyalty.
Spoilers for all four seasons of Due South below the cut.
The thing that fascinates me about Due South is the way it shifts between realism, surrealism, contrarealism, and a constantly undercut and destabilized pararealism.
I probably need to explain that, huh?
When I first heard of Due South, back when it was on the air, I dismissed it as a sitcom. A Mountie with a wolf in Chicago. Obviously pararealism of the sort that sitcoms specialize in, which claims that everyone is beautiful and rich and no one ever has a problem that can't be solved in half-an-hour. The same sort of pararealism that asks us to believe in a southern California as predominantly white as the Midwest. (That's the easiest way to distinguish between various kinds of nonrealism: in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the contrarealism is the vampires and demons and whatnot, the surrealism is the satire of high school (e.g., Principal Snyder, and the Mayor in Season 3 combines the two, being both surreal and contrareal), but the pararealism is the things we aren't supposed to question but that don't match up with the real world. Ethnic homogeneity for one, or how is it exactly in Season 6, when Buffy's lack of money is a PLOT POINT, that she's maintaining the same standard of living she had in the previous five seasons?)
I was unmoved by a sitcom about a Mountie. I remember saying to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
heresluck at one point that I'd be more interested if the Mountie was a werewolf. And find it less implausible to boot.
Contrarealism turns my crank. Surrealism can, although it's not as reliable. Pararealism does not. Mostly, I admit, realism doesn't either.
I was introduced to Paul Gross via Slings & Arrows, and promptly developed a Thing for him that made me willing to reassess my judgment of Due South. And then I discovered that my grasp of the premise was flawed.
It's not a Mountie with a wolf in Chicago.
It's a Mountie, who is haunted by his dead father, with a deaf half-wolf, in Chicago.
I gotheresluck to lend me the DVDs.
The thing that fascinates me about the pilot, both on first and second watchings, is the way it sets up Benton Fraser, not merely as a character, but as a narrative device. We start in the Canadian wilderness (the opening shots make me think of Peter Jackson's love affair with the New Zealand mountains in The Lord of the Rings), and we're introduced to Fraser through the opinions of his fellow Mounties.
They think he's certifiable.
They also think that what he's doing is impossible, and this is only the first of countless times that Fraser will do the impossible and make it look easy. But the really interesting thing here is the way that Fraser plays to their preconceptions. He dumps his captured felon, says, "The last time he'll fish over the limit," and walks off, exactly like the hero of a Western. In the interview with his superior officer, he lets the man walk into the trap, endures the chewing out for the moment when his unwitting straight man feeds him the line he wants. How far over the limit? Four and a half tons over the limit. And control of the conversation is squarely in Fraser's hands.
Paul Gross has a slightly flatter than deadpan delivery in this scene--which fills me with delight because it reminds me inescapably of how Batman sounded in the cartoons of my childhood. And the interesting thing is, that's not actually how Fraser speaks. Not all the time. It's a role which he uses deliberately and with somewhat malicious aforethought. Inspector Moffat's speech about being underestimated is utterly preaching to the choir, because that seems to be the only way Fraser has to work the interface with society.
And one of the things the pilot proves is that actually, his strategy works very well.
He does the same thing to Ray Vecchio in their first meeting. ("The dead Mountie was my father.") Once again, the moral high ground and control of the interaction is in Fraser's hands. Which is where Fraser wants them.
(One of the things I'm watching for, since I'm watching the whole series for a second time--at a more reasonable rate than the whole thing in a week--is a hypothesis I have about the difference between the two Rays. Ray Vecchio complains and kvetches and talks a good fight, but he never argues with Fraser. When Fraser whistles, Ray comes running. He's second fiddle, and he knows it--their conflict in "Red, White, or Blue" isn't about Ray's place in their quasi-pack, it's about Ray not feeling appreciated for his place in their pack. Ray Kowalski, who does not start out wrong-footed by Fraser's conversational legerdemain, insists on being treated as an equal. Hence he argues and disagrees and demands that Fraser follow him at least some of the time. We'll see how my hypothesis stands up to a second time through.)
So Fraser might be considered a pararealistic figure, but the problem with that is that the show constantly calls attention to his pararealism, and the point of pararealism, as I began to suggest earlier, is that it lurks in the givens. Once you call attention to it, the whole thing unravels. But Due South foregrounds the issue. It sets Fraser up as a superhero (and the soundtrack to the pilot tells you exactly how intentional that is: "Tarzan / Wasn't a ladies' man"), and then it starts taking its superhero apart.
If, asmatociquala says, Farscape could be subtitled The Rape of John Crichton, then I think the first two seasons of Due South could each separately be subtitled The Destruction of Benton Fraser (the second season in quite a different mood from the first, mind you). Partly this destruction is a matter of urban America vs. Canadian wilderness culture clash, but it's also a matter of taking a heroic figure and inflicting reality on him. And the first blow has nothing to do with America at all, except for the hired killer. It's a Canadian crime committed on and against Canandian soil, and the criminal isn't merely a Canadian, he's a Mountie. One of Robert Fraser's friends. (The father figure parallelism is made explicit in "Bird in the Hand" (DS 2.4) when Fraser says that as a child he wished Gerard was his father.)
Betrayal is a theme here, as is role playing.
"Like you," Fraser says to Ray Vecchio the first time they meet, "he is pretending to be someone he's not." And there's a whole fistful of directions that comment could be pointed. One of the questions the series asks, and keeps asking, is whether it can be pointed at Fraser himself.
Original airdate: April 23, 1994
Favorite line:
DESK SERGEANT: You like pigeons?
FRASER: I don't have much experience with them.
[...]
DESK SERGEANT: It's not that they're dirty. It's just that I'm starting to question their loyalty.
Spoilers for all four seasons of Due South below the cut.
The thing that fascinates me about Due South is the way it shifts between realism, surrealism, contrarealism, and a constantly undercut and destabilized pararealism.
I probably need to explain that, huh?
When I first heard of Due South, back when it was on the air, I dismissed it as a sitcom. A Mountie with a wolf in Chicago. Obviously pararealism of the sort that sitcoms specialize in, which claims that everyone is beautiful and rich and no one ever has a problem that can't be solved in half-an-hour. The same sort of pararealism that asks us to believe in a southern California as predominantly white as the Midwest. (That's the easiest way to distinguish between various kinds of nonrealism: in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the contrarealism is the vampires and demons and whatnot, the surrealism is the satire of high school (e.g., Principal Snyder, and the Mayor in Season 3 combines the two, being both surreal and contrareal), but the pararealism is the things we aren't supposed to question but that don't match up with the real world. Ethnic homogeneity for one, or how is it exactly in Season 6, when Buffy's lack of money is a PLOT POINT, that she's maintaining the same standard of living she had in the previous five seasons?)
I was unmoved by a sitcom about a Mountie. I remember saying to
heresluck at one point that I'd be more interested if the Mountie was a werewolf. And find it less implausible to boot.Contrarealism turns my crank. Surrealism can, although it's not as reliable. Pararealism does not. Mostly, I admit, realism doesn't either.
I was introduced to Paul Gross via Slings & Arrows, and promptly developed a Thing for him that made me willing to reassess my judgment of Due South. And then I discovered that my grasp of the premise was flawed.
It's not a Mountie with a wolf in Chicago.
It's a Mountie, who is haunted by his dead father, with a deaf half-wolf, in Chicago.
I got
heresluck to lend me the DVDs.The thing that fascinates me about the pilot, both on first and second watchings, is the way it sets up Benton Fraser, not merely as a character, but as a narrative device. We start in the Canadian wilderness (the opening shots make me think of Peter Jackson's love affair with the New Zealand mountains in The Lord of the Rings), and we're introduced to Fraser through the opinions of his fellow Mounties.
They think he's certifiable.
They also think that what he's doing is impossible, and this is only the first of countless times that Fraser will do the impossible and make it look easy. But the really interesting thing here is the way that Fraser plays to their preconceptions. He dumps his captured felon, says, "The last time he'll fish over the limit," and walks off, exactly like the hero of a Western. In the interview with his superior officer, he lets the man walk into the trap, endures the chewing out for the moment when his unwitting straight man feeds him the line he wants. How far over the limit? Four and a half tons over the limit. And control of the conversation is squarely in Fraser's hands.
Paul Gross has a slightly flatter than deadpan delivery in this scene--which fills me with delight because it reminds me inescapably of how Batman sounded in the cartoons of my childhood. And the interesting thing is, that's not actually how Fraser speaks. Not all the time. It's a role which he uses deliberately and with somewhat malicious aforethought. Inspector Moffat's speech about being underestimated is utterly preaching to the choir, because that seems to be the only way Fraser has to work the interface with society.
And one of the things the pilot proves is that actually, his strategy works very well.
He does the same thing to Ray Vecchio in their first meeting. ("The dead Mountie was my father.") Once again, the moral high ground and control of the interaction is in Fraser's hands. Which is where Fraser wants them.
(One of the things I'm watching for, since I'm watching the whole series for a second time--at a more reasonable rate than the whole thing in a week--is a hypothesis I have about the difference between the two Rays. Ray Vecchio complains and kvetches and talks a good fight, but he never argues with Fraser. When Fraser whistles, Ray comes running. He's second fiddle, and he knows it--their conflict in "Red, White, or Blue" isn't about Ray's place in their quasi-pack, it's about Ray not feeling appreciated for his place in their pack. Ray Kowalski, who does not start out wrong-footed by Fraser's conversational legerdemain, insists on being treated as an equal. Hence he argues and disagrees and demands that Fraser follow him at least some of the time. We'll see how my hypothesis stands up to a second time through.)
So Fraser might be considered a pararealistic figure, but the problem with that is that the show constantly calls attention to his pararealism, and the point of pararealism, as I began to suggest earlier, is that it lurks in the givens. Once you call attention to it, the whole thing unravels. But Due South foregrounds the issue. It sets Fraser up as a superhero (and the soundtrack to the pilot tells you exactly how intentional that is: "Tarzan / Wasn't a ladies' man"), and then it starts taking its superhero apart.
If, as
matociquala says, Farscape could be subtitled The Rape of John Crichton, then I think the first two seasons of Due South could each separately be subtitled The Destruction of Benton Fraser (the second season in quite a different mood from the first, mind you). Partly this destruction is a matter of urban America vs. Canadian wilderness culture clash, but it's also a matter of taking a heroic figure and inflicting reality on him. And the first blow has nothing to do with America at all, except for the hired killer. It's a Canadian crime committed on and against Canandian soil, and the criminal isn't merely a Canadian, he's a Mountie. One of Robert Fraser's friends. (The father figure parallelism is made explicit in "Bird in the Hand" (DS 2.4) when Fraser says that as a child he wished Gerard was his father.)Betrayal is a theme here, as is role playing.
"Like you," Fraser says to Ray Vecchio the first time they meet, "he is pretending to be someone he's not." And there's a whole fistful of directions that comment could be pointed. One of the questions the series asks, and keeps asking, is whether it can be pointed at Fraser himself.
