Due South: A Hawk and a Handsaw
Sep. 6th, 2007 03:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyDue South 1.12, "A Hawk and a Handsaw"
Original airdate: Jan. 19, 1995
Favorite line:
RAY: Fraser, there's a guy on my corner who asks me every morning if I've seen God. Do you think he really expects me to point him out?
FRASER: Well, you know, if you did, Ray, perhaps he'd stop asking.
Spoilers.
I'm gonna say right up front that this episode hits a lot of my kinks. There's the meta-thing and the Hamlet-thing and the riddle-thing (which they do twice! twice in one episode!) and the thing there isn't a word for but where Fraser is faced with two contradictory stories, one told by a mental patient (which story seems impossible) and the other told by the people in authority (which story is eminently reasonable), and discovers the evidence that the mental patient is telling the truth--if you understand what he's saying, which leads us back to the riddle-thing. I love this stuff.
I love the self-awareness of this episode and the ways in which it calls attention to the show's inherent fictionality, highlighting the things it chooses to show incorrectly:
WALTER: A Mountie? Yeah, you don't look like a Mountie.
FRASER: Well, you know, the red uniform? It's really mostly for special occasions. Although they seem to insist that I wear mine more than--
WALTER: You always get your man, then.
FRASER: You know, that's a popular misconception. It really isn't our motto. It was invented by a writer of an early black and white movie. Our actual motto is Maintain the right, which admittedly may not be as--
RAY: Benny!
FRASER: Uh, yes. Yes. We do often get our man.
Also highlighting its convenient coincidences, both by simply throwing them at the characters:
RAY: All right, all right. If somebody jumped, where's the body?
FRASER: Well, I'm sure it'll show up.
ELAINE: [radio] Vecchio. They just fished a body out of the Chicago River near Michigan. Lieutenant says he'll meet you down there.
RAY: On the way. [to Fraser] Look, this doesn't prove anything, okay? Bodies turn up every day in this city.
FRASER: Oh, I'm sure that's the case.
And by offering utterly ridiculous, utterly deadpan explanations, such as
RAY: How long has that been in there?
FRASER: Two and a half hours.
RAY: Don't those things dissolve?
FRASER: The key is to control your saliva ducts.
Or:
FRASER: I sharpened my buckle.
RAY: You anticipated cutting your way out of a rubber room?
Instead of asking the audience to ignore the narrative implausibilities, the episode asks us to revel in them and love them, and never moreso than in my favorite piece of meta in the entire four season run:
PSYCHIATRIST: So you're a Mountie, are you?
FRASER: A constable, Royal Canadian Mounted Police, yes.
PSYCHIATRIST: Here in Chicago.
FRASER: Well, you see, I used to live in the Yukon, but I uncovered a plot that involved drowning caribou, and then some men who were dressed in white came after me with homicidal intentions. It's a rather long story--it takes exactly two hours to tell--but the upshot of it is that I was sent here. I think I embarrassed some people in the government.
PSYCHIATRIST: Do you have anyone who can vouch for you here?
FRASER: Well, yes, there's my wolf, although I'm not sure he would vouch for me. If you know anything about lupine behavior, you know how moody they are, and on top of that he's deaf.
PSYCHIATRIST: Name?
FRASER: I'd rather not say.
The pilot, of course, is two hours long, so we have the same kind of meta here that you get with Hamlet's "While Memory holds a seat in this distracted globe"--the character's awareness, not merely of being a character in a story, but of the conditions under which that story is being told. Then there's the part where everything Fraser says is perfectly true; it just sounds insane, which is a kind of meta bringing the para- and surreal up against strict realism and commenting on the show's refusal to be mimetic. And then there's the meta level on which Fraser is aware--perfectly, even excruciatingly aware--of how other people perceive him. He tells the exact truth, including the fact that he'd rather not give his name, but he tells it in such a way as to make it sound like a series of delusions. Fraser knows. He knows how insane his life is; he knows how his relationship with Diefenbaker looks; he knows how to manipulate the absolute truth to get the desired result. And he does it with the same perfect insouciance with which he walks through the hospital corridors in white pajamas and his Stetson.
But at the same time, the episode also has some very serious things to say. Communication is thematic: "You know, Ray, all communication is a code of one kind or another. If you don't understand the language, well, it makes no sense." Fraser and Dief share a code; Fraser and Ray ... sometimes. Ray chides Fraser frequently for not "speaking the lingo," making jokes about American and Canadian being different languages. Ray wants Fraser to do all the learning, all the translating. (This issue is going to come back big-time with Ray Kowalski, although as per usual, the two Rays approach the problem quite differently. Ray Kowalski wants to be a duet.) Ray does not want to get dragged into Fraser's surreality and is very resentful when the world works according to Fraser's rules. He doesn't want to learn Fraser's code, although he's picking up some of it despite himself.
That word "lost" shows up again; Fraser says, "You know, I looked into that man's eyes when I was on that ledge, Ray, and saw a man who was lost. You can lose your job, you can lose your home, and it can be devastating, but if you lose yourself, you have nothing." Which, to me, immediately calls up the end of "Victoria's Secret," and Fraser lying on the platform. Lost.
The epistemological question about consensus reality (Fraser seems insane because his reality doesn't match up with the consensus reality represented by the psychiatrist) comes back and entwines itself with the question of grief:
FRASER: It's a curious thing, reality, isn't it?
WALTER: Yeah.
FRASER: So much of the time it just seems to be a matter of what you believe. If a lot of people believe in something, then that becomes reality, at least for them. And then some people find it easier to make a new reality, especially if the truth is too painful.
And maybe it's because my mind flagged the word "lost" earlier, but this makes me wonder about what new reality Fraser might have constructed for himself, and how much of his Mountie-self and what I call the Batman voice is really part of a reality he made in the wake of the losses that make up his bildungsroman (starting with his mother and ending with Victoria). Fraser's story about his father's grief (which will be echoed at the end of the episode when Walter shaves off his beard) is also, of course, a story about Fraser's grief:
WALTER: Sometimes I think it would've been easier if I'd killed myself.
FRASER: Maybe it would've been. ... You know, my mother died when I was very young. I don't remember a lot about that time, except ... except my father's beard. I don't remember him crying or talking about her. I just woke up one morning, and I noticed that he had a beard. And it kept getting longer and longer, and he got thinner, and he stopped going to work. ... My mother died, and my father stopped living. ... And then one morning I woke up, and there was a breakfast waiting for me at the table. Oatmeal, and a sliced banana. And he was clean-shaven, and he was crying.
WALTER: Boy, your dad was a very strong man.
FRASER: He just woke up, and the wind was from the south, and he found he still knew the difference between a hawk and a handsaw.
One thing going on here is the way that a purely meta, surreal moment, in which one patient asks another where Fraser's gone, and the second patient consults a compass and says, "North by northwest"--which, remember, we're going to find out is Victoria's favorite movie--is turned, via Fraser's alchemy, into something very serious, something about the nature of grief and living. The refrain in this story is of waking up: Fraser wakes up and notices his father has a beard; Fraser wakes up and finds his father clean-shaven; Robert Fraser wakes up and discovers that his life is continuing despite his wife's death. (And, we might add, although this is not at all the way Fraser couches the story, notices his neglected child.) Waking up is the opposite of being lost.
Original airdate: Jan. 19, 1995
Favorite line:
RAY: Fraser, there's a guy on my corner who asks me every morning if I've seen God. Do you think he really expects me to point him out?
FRASER: Well, you know, if you did, Ray, perhaps he'd stop asking.
Spoilers.
I'm gonna say right up front that this episode hits a lot of my kinks. There's the meta-thing and the Hamlet-thing and the riddle-thing (which they do twice! twice in one episode!) and the thing there isn't a word for but where Fraser is faced with two contradictory stories, one told by a mental patient (which story seems impossible) and the other told by the people in authority (which story is eminently reasonable), and discovers the evidence that the mental patient is telling the truth--if you understand what he's saying, which leads us back to the riddle-thing. I love this stuff.
I love the self-awareness of this episode and the ways in which it calls attention to the show's inherent fictionality, highlighting the things it chooses to show incorrectly:
WALTER: A Mountie? Yeah, you don't look like a Mountie.
FRASER: Well, you know, the red uniform? It's really mostly for special occasions. Although they seem to insist that I wear mine more than--
WALTER: You always get your man, then.
FRASER: You know, that's a popular misconception. It really isn't our motto. It was invented by a writer of an early black and white movie. Our actual motto is Maintain the right, which admittedly may not be as--
RAY: Benny!
FRASER: Uh, yes. Yes. We do often get our man.
Also highlighting its convenient coincidences, both by simply throwing them at the characters:
RAY: All right, all right. If somebody jumped, where's the body?
FRASER: Well, I'm sure it'll show up.
ELAINE: [radio] Vecchio. They just fished a body out of the Chicago River near Michigan. Lieutenant says he'll meet you down there.
RAY: On the way. [to Fraser] Look, this doesn't prove anything, okay? Bodies turn up every day in this city.
FRASER: Oh, I'm sure that's the case.
And by offering utterly ridiculous, utterly deadpan explanations, such as
RAY: How long has that been in there?
FRASER: Two and a half hours.
RAY: Don't those things dissolve?
FRASER: The key is to control your saliva ducts.
Or:
FRASER: I sharpened my buckle.
RAY: You anticipated cutting your way out of a rubber room?
Instead of asking the audience to ignore the narrative implausibilities, the episode asks us to revel in them and love them, and never moreso than in my favorite piece of meta in the entire four season run:
PSYCHIATRIST: So you're a Mountie, are you?
FRASER: A constable, Royal Canadian Mounted Police, yes.
PSYCHIATRIST: Here in Chicago.
FRASER: Well, you see, I used to live in the Yukon, but I uncovered a plot that involved drowning caribou, and then some men who were dressed in white came after me with homicidal intentions. It's a rather long story--it takes exactly two hours to tell--but the upshot of it is that I was sent here. I think I embarrassed some people in the government.
PSYCHIATRIST: Do you have anyone who can vouch for you here?
FRASER: Well, yes, there's my wolf, although I'm not sure he would vouch for me. If you know anything about lupine behavior, you know how moody they are, and on top of that he's deaf.
PSYCHIATRIST: Name?
FRASER: I'd rather not say.
The pilot, of course, is two hours long, so we have the same kind of meta here that you get with Hamlet's "While Memory holds a seat in this distracted globe"--the character's awareness, not merely of being a character in a story, but of the conditions under which that story is being told. Then there's the part where everything Fraser says is perfectly true; it just sounds insane, which is a kind of meta bringing the para- and surreal up against strict realism and commenting on the show's refusal to be mimetic. And then there's the meta level on which Fraser is aware--perfectly, even excruciatingly aware--of how other people perceive him. He tells the exact truth, including the fact that he'd rather not give his name, but he tells it in such a way as to make it sound like a series of delusions. Fraser knows. He knows how insane his life is; he knows how his relationship with Diefenbaker looks; he knows how to manipulate the absolute truth to get the desired result. And he does it with the same perfect insouciance with which he walks through the hospital corridors in white pajamas and his Stetson.
But at the same time, the episode also has some very serious things to say. Communication is thematic: "You know, Ray, all communication is a code of one kind or another. If you don't understand the language, well, it makes no sense." Fraser and Dief share a code; Fraser and Ray ... sometimes. Ray chides Fraser frequently for not "speaking the lingo," making jokes about American and Canadian being different languages. Ray wants Fraser to do all the learning, all the translating. (This issue is going to come back big-time with Ray Kowalski, although as per usual, the two Rays approach the problem quite differently. Ray Kowalski wants to be a duet.) Ray does not want to get dragged into Fraser's surreality and is very resentful when the world works according to Fraser's rules. He doesn't want to learn Fraser's code, although he's picking up some of it despite himself.
That word "lost" shows up again; Fraser says, "You know, I looked into that man's eyes when I was on that ledge, Ray, and saw a man who was lost. You can lose your job, you can lose your home, and it can be devastating, but if you lose yourself, you have nothing." Which, to me, immediately calls up the end of "Victoria's Secret," and Fraser lying on the platform. Lost.
The epistemological question about consensus reality (Fraser seems insane because his reality doesn't match up with the consensus reality represented by the psychiatrist) comes back and entwines itself with the question of grief:
FRASER: It's a curious thing, reality, isn't it?
WALTER: Yeah.
FRASER: So much of the time it just seems to be a matter of what you believe. If a lot of people believe in something, then that becomes reality, at least for them. And then some people find it easier to make a new reality, especially if the truth is too painful.
And maybe it's because my mind flagged the word "lost" earlier, but this makes me wonder about what new reality Fraser might have constructed for himself, and how much of his Mountie-self and what I call the Batman voice is really part of a reality he made in the wake of the losses that make up his bildungsroman (starting with his mother and ending with Victoria). Fraser's story about his father's grief (which will be echoed at the end of the episode when Walter shaves off his beard) is also, of course, a story about Fraser's grief:
WALTER: Sometimes I think it would've been easier if I'd killed myself.
FRASER: Maybe it would've been. ... You know, my mother died when I was very young. I don't remember a lot about that time, except ... except my father's beard. I don't remember him crying or talking about her. I just woke up one morning, and I noticed that he had a beard. And it kept getting longer and longer, and he got thinner, and he stopped going to work. ... My mother died, and my father stopped living. ... And then one morning I woke up, and there was a breakfast waiting for me at the table. Oatmeal, and a sliced banana. And he was clean-shaven, and he was crying.
WALTER: Boy, your dad was a very strong man.
FRASER: He just woke up, and the wind was from the south, and he found he still knew the difference between a hawk and a handsaw.
One thing going on here is the way that a purely meta, surreal moment, in which one patient asks another where Fraser's gone, and the second patient consults a compass and says, "North by northwest"--which, remember, we're going to find out is Victoria's favorite movie--is turned, via Fraser's alchemy, into something very serious, something about the nature of grief and living. The refrain in this story is of waking up: Fraser wakes up and notices his father has a beard; Fraser wakes up and finds his father clean-shaven; Robert Fraser wakes up and discovers that his life is continuing despite his wife's death. (And, we might add, although this is not at all the way Fraser couches the story, notices his neglected child.) Waking up is the opposite of being lost.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-09-07 12:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-07 03:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-09 01:42 am (UTC)I cannot wait to hear what you have to say about seasons 3 and 4.
no subject
Date: 2007-09-16 02:40 pm (UTC)-Nameseeker
no subject
Date: 2007-09-16 02:53 pm (UTC)Or did you mean something else?
no subject
Date: 2007-09-16 03:43 pm (UTC)(I failed to recognize the Hamlet quote, and only twigged to it being obliquely referred to in an obscure SF novel. Makes much more sense this way, thank you.)
-Nameseeker
no subject
Date: 2007-12-11 03:36 am (UTC)In the pilot, Fraser attends to and believes the panhandler, who rewards that respect by repaying the money Fraser lends him. Everyone except Fraser dismisses the "unhinged" chess-playing secret agent in Spy vs Spy.
Just one of the reasons I love this show.
no subject
Date: 2007-12-11 04:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-03 07:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-12 12:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-12 12:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-31 01:13 pm (UTC)It makes me wonder now if that's one reason they picked the title "due South." Perhaps on a deep level the show is not just about a character who heads South from Canada, but a character who turns from "north by north west" to a more southerly direction.
Or perhaps I'm just too obsessed...
And yes, you're right... it would be interesting to see from Bob's point of view, what happened on the morning he woke up to discover his neglected child.