Due South: "Victoria's Secret: Part 1"
Nov. 30th, 2007 09:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyDue South 1.20, "Victoria's Secret: Part 1"
Original airdate: May 11, 1995
Favorite quote:
ROBERT FRASER: I arrested your mother once.
BENTON FRASER: You did not.
R. FRASER: Honest to God. I gave her a speeding ticket.
B. FRASER: You knew it was her car, and you pulled her over anyway?
R. FRASER: Yeah--I was right there in the passenger seat.
B. FRASER: Get out!
R. FRASER: She was doing forty-five in a thirty.
B. FRASER: Mom?
R. FRASER: I kept telling her I was going to do it, but every time I did, she kept speeding up. Made absolutely no sense.
Spoilers? You betcha. Also for Part 2, although it will get its own post here sometime. Hopefully soon. And I should mention that the truth about [noun redacted] is a SERIOUS spoiler, not just the whodunit type of spoiler usual with DS episodes. You Have Been Warned.
Before I get down to the serious business of my analysis, I want to point out--like a prelude or an appetizer--what this episode is doing with the register of romance. "It was as though I had known her forever," Fraser says. "Across a thousand lifetimes." Now, Part 2 is going to deconstruct this idea and kick it to death with combat boots (prefigured by what Jolly says to Fraser: "You think you know her? You don't."), and I want to leave the question of knowledge vs. love for that. Here, I want to observe that the series is taking another crack at the conventions of romance and romantic comedy and that when he wants to Fraser can play this game like a champion. He can hold a conversation on two levels; he can do charming banter (assuming that you're willing to be charmed by geekiness, and I sure as heck am):
FRASER: What can I do?
VICTORIA: Can you stir?
FRASER: It's one of my areas of abiding interest.
None of the maladroitness or naïveté he manifests when confronted with Frannie or Katherine Burns or any of his other female admirers is in evidence. He's a little odd--he's still Fraser (and for this I love him)--but he's in the game. He knows what he's doing. (The thing with her fingers, omg.) Victoria and Fraser do a very good romantic comedy routine, including wacky hijinks with the television and the ObHitchcock reference (North by Northwest, of course it's North by Northwest, not only ObHitchcock, but ObHamlet!), and they do a very good straight romance as well, both with the sex and with the declaration in front of the polar bears:
VICTORIA: I'm not exactly a trusting person. People tend to let me down.
FRASER: Not this time.
(And--as always--Fraser's got it backwards. He's promising that a woman can trust him, when what he really needs to be doing is asking if he can trust her.) We're revisiting the tropes of "You Must Remember This" (which is, remember, the episode in which Fraser tries to tell Ray about Victoria, and this is what you get, Ray, for falling asleep when your friend is pouring out his heart to you), setting them up so that Part 2 can tear them apart.
And now, the meat of the matter.
I have a theory about Victoria Metcalf.
My theory is that Victoria Metcalf is Benton Fraser's Id. With a side of Jungian anima thrown in for good measure.* The episode is very explicit about structuring Fraser and Victoria as yin and yang. He is snow, and she is fire--starting with the segue from the burning cabin to the snowglobe of Chicago, and persisting through his dream/memory/vision of her (and the wonderfully surreal and creepy effects of snow falling in his apartment), her thing for candles, her remark about going to Dallas or Austin--"warm sounds good to me"--and even the otherwise mundane exchage when she wants him to close the window:
VICTORIA: Aren't you cold?
FRASER: No.
They are opposed to each other, and also connected. And more than that, the episode encourages us from the beginning to see Victoria as an otherworldly figure, not entirely real--in sharp contradistinction to the ghost of Robert Fraser, who eats french fries and steals his son's Stetson and could not be more prosaic and mundane and grounded in concrete reality.
Victoria's disappearing acts (and notice that the paranoid cabbie never actually answers Fraser's question about whether there was a woman in the car) make it possible, in the opening acts, that she is no more than a figment of Fraser's imagination, and Father Behan makes the metaphor explicit:
FRASER: Oh, I guess I'm not realy sure if I saw her or I just wanted to see her, or maybe I saw her because she's the one person I can't face.
FATHER BEHAN: Why?
FRASER: Because of the decision I made.
FATHER BEHAN: Come back to haunt you, so to speak.
FRASER: Yes.
FATHER BEHAN: Son, I'm a Catholic from Belfast, and any good decision there is usually wrong. Each one's impossible, but you still have to make them. You learn to live with it, and then try to forgive yourself.
(And, parenthetically, I love with a mad adoring passion the segue from Fraser making confession to Father Behan to Fraser receiving absolution, which he does not accept, from his own father.)
There's another suggestion of ghostliness, of returning from the grave, in the mention of Victoria's sister, who died a month after Victoria got out of prison (this particular suggestion will get even stronger in Part 2, when we discover that Victoria used the occasion of her sister's death to swap identities with her: in one register, Victoria Metcalf is dead). And when Victoria finally stages the meeting with Fraser, she says, "I thought I saw you standing in the middle of the road. I wasn't sure if I was just seeing things." Turning it around, offering the momentary possibility that it's Fraser who's the ghost, the mirage. And of course, there's the fact that no one sees her except Fraser. Ray doesn't meet her until after Diefenbaker is shot, and the other characters never meet her at all. She almost could be nothing more than Fraser's imagination.
Victoria isn't a ghost; she does in fact have material and concrete reality. But at the same time, her reality is weirdly partial and entirely focused on Fraser. And she is his double in the same way that Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar argue in The Madwoman in the Attic that Bertha Rochester is Jane Eyre's double: the dark double who can act out desires Jane can't even admit to.
Victoria is fire; Fraser is snow. Fraser, we might even say, is frozen (frozen in the Mountie form of his own Super-Ego), and we know what fire does to ice: it melts it. Fire is traditionally associated with passion, also, and we can see that at work with Victoria as well. And there's the theme of food to reemphasize the point: after the snowstorm nearly kills them--and factor that in, too: Fraser himself admits that snow and ice can kill, and that it's Victoria who saves him, as much as he saves her:
Victoria is associated with ravening hunger:
FRASER: Can I see you again?
VICTORIA: When?
FRASER: Now.
VICTORIA: You hungry?
FRASER: Starving.
Like a fire, she is consuming. Food, sex . . . money. Victoria wants. And like the Id, she sees no reason why she cannot have. On this level, it is intensely important that Fraser put her in prison; it explains everything about Benton Fraser as we have seen him thus far. His Id is frozen and chained and shut away in the dark. And Victoria's fury at him--and the way that fury turns to passion--makes thirteen kinds of breathtakingly brilliant sense if you understand her as his Id. (Also, if she's the Id, of course she has to shoot Diefenbaker, who is the guardian of Fraser's soul, of the shy and fragile Ego whom we almost never see.) Her anger at being betrayed is the anger of someone betrayed by herself, specifically the anger of the Id, which is always in some ways a child, unable to understand the abstractions of the Super-Ego:
VICTORIA: Did you think that we could just pretend that it didn't happen? . . . How could you do it? How could you do that to me, huh? . . . How could you do it? [As Fraser moves to embrace her] No!
[but neither of them lets go]
FRASER: I'm sorry.
Of course she hates him. Benton Fraser's Id has every right and reason to hate his Super-Ego. But of course she loves him, too. Because he's her, just as much as she's him. (One way to read her elaborate scheme is as an attempt to rid herself of Benton Fraser once and for all. And even Victoria can't quite go through with it.)
And observe the effect that the Id has when it finally gets its claws into the Super-Ego again. I mentioned the ravenous consumption of food earlier; Fraser goes from letting his dead father steal his french fries to sharing two meals in a row with Victoria, including shopping for provisions--and notice that, having failed in his quest for cilantro, what does he bring? Ice-cream. Then, of course, there's sex, which the episode tactfully suggests Fraser and Victoria are having a great deal of. And for the first time in recorded history, Fraser skips work:
RAY: Consulate said you didn't show up, so I figured you had to be pretty sick. You all right?
FRASER: Yeah, I'm fine.
RAY: So you're not sick.
FRASER: No, I'm fine.
RAY: But you didn't go to work.
FRASER: Must've slept in.
RAY: Huh. . . . Are you in some kind of trouble?
FRASER: No. No. No, no, no.
(Although, of course, Fraser is in trouble. He just doesn't know it yet.) It takes Ray a long time to wrap his head around the idea that Fraser can miss work without being sick--and it's telling that his immediate conclusion is that Fraser has to be in trouble. (I do love Ray for his teenage-boy delight when he figures out that Fraser has finally gotten laid.) This is not Fraser as we know him, made even clearer by the ensuing exchange with Victoria:
VICTORIA: Do you really have to go to work?
FRASER: Yeah.
VICTORIA: So I guess you need this? [starting to unbutton his red uniform tunic, which is very likely the only thing she's wearing]
FRASER: Kind of. Although I do have something like eighty-two sick days coming to me.
VICTORIA: I think you should go straight to bed.
The profanation of the uniform is itself a big freaking clue, and especially combined with the fact that Fraser is completely comfortable and unapologetic about playing hookey. The overflowing abundance of flowers and balloons and get well wishes cramming his office in the next scene is also testimony to how aberrant this is. Fraser never skips work.
But maybe Benton Fraser wanted to.
This is all relatively benign; I think in general we can agree that it would be good for Fraser to let himself off the leash a little more often. But things start to escalate, and we are reminded, vividly, of why it's bad to let the Id run the show. Because the Id isn't nice and it doesn't care about other people. And it causes Fraser to forget his obligation to Ray.
"Obligation" is a harsh word, and not exactly what I mean. But when someone is your best friend, you do have a responsibility toward them, and Fraser just completely boots it. (1.) he forgets Ray's pool night (which is also in itself a small betrayal, a betrayal of what Ray shared with him by telling him that one good thing about his father), and (2.) he forgets to repay the loan Ray gave him at the beginning of the episode (which in turn makes that pool night even more of a disaster than it was doomed to be from the beginning). This, as Ray Kowalski would put it, is not buddies. Now, we might suspect that Fraser was regarding Ray's pool night with a certain amount of dread, but our regularly scheduled Fraser would never breathe a word of reluctance, much less simply fail to show. That's the Id. Self-centered, self-focused, self-indulgent. And when Ray comes to tell Fraser off, I think it's important that he finds Dief exiled to the hall: "Three's a crowd, huh, Dief?" Fraser is surrendering to Victoria, and he's doing it on purpose. "I made a mistake once," he tells Ray, "and I can't make it again." He followed the Super-Ego and ended up frozen; the Id promises to keep him warm.
There is, of course, a problem with fire; Part 2 is going to demonstrate it, but we've already seen it, in the fate of Fraser's father's cabin. The metaphorical level of the episode is trying to warn us, and to warn Fraser--just as, oddly, Victoria does herself:
VICTORIA: This is my favorite movie. I've always wanted to be Eve Kendall.
FRASER: But she sends Cary Grant to be killed.
VICTORIA: She has no choice.
She gives other hints, all of which Fraser misses, whether willfully or not (another matter for the Part 2 discussion). The Id hates the Super-Ego, but it can't stop loving it either. She has to warn him. And perhaps he has to not hear. He talks about owing her, about his guilt, and I think there's a way in which he has to leave himself wide open for her to hurt him.
VICTORIA: I'm sorry.
FRASER: S'all right. I probably deserve it.
VICTORIA: You do.
Fraser's Super-Ego has turned on itself. It demands its own punishment. And this fits in, with painful perfection, with his Ego's desire for love.
Which we will talk about in Part 2.
---
*N.b., I am using Freudian terminology very loosely in this analysis. The Ego is the self, the "I"; the Super-Ego is the conscience, the devotion to duty and justice; the Id is what wants. It is greedy and selfish and always hungry.
Original airdate: May 11, 1995
Favorite quote:
ROBERT FRASER: I arrested your mother once.
BENTON FRASER: You did not.
R. FRASER: Honest to God. I gave her a speeding ticket.
B. FRASER: You knew it was her car, and you pulled her over anyway?
R. FRASER: Yeah--I was right there in the passenger seat.
B. FRASER: Get out!
R. FRASER: She was doing forty-five in a thirty.
B. FRASER: Mom?
R. FRASER: I kept telling her I was going to do it, but every time I did, she kept speeding up. Made absolutely no sense.
Spoilers? You betcha. Also for Part 2, although it will get its own post here sometime. Hopefully soon. And I should mention that the truth about [noun redacted] is a SERIOUS spoiler, not just the whodunit type of spoiler usual with DS episodes. You Have Been Warned.
Before I get down to the serious business of my analysis, I want to point out--like a prelude or an appetizer--what this episode is doing with the register of romance. "It was as though I had known her forever," Fraser says. "Across a thousand lifetimes." Now, Part 2 is going to deconstruct this idea and kick it to death with combat boots (prefigured by what Jolly says to Fraser: "You think you know her? You don't."), and I want to leave the question of knowledge vs. love for that. Here, I want to observe that the series is taking another crack at the conventions of romance and romantic comedy and that when he wants to Fraser can play this game like a champion. He can hold a conversation on two levels; he can do charming banter (assuming that you're willing to be charmed by geekiness, and I sure as heck am):
FRASER: What can I do?
VICTORIA: Can you stir?
FRASER: It's one of my areas of abiding interest.
None of the maladroitness or naïveté he manifests when confronted with Frannie or Katherine Burns or any of his other female admirers is in evidence. He's a little odd--he's still Fraser (and for this I love him)--but he's in the game. He knows what he's doing. (The thing with her fingers, omg.) Victoria and Fraser do a very good romantic comedy routine, including wacky hijinks with the television and the ObHitchcock reference (North by Northwest, of course it's North by Northwest, not only ObHitchcock, but ObHamlet!), and they do a very good straight romance as well, both with the sex and with the declaration in front of the polar bears:
VICTORIA: I'm not exactly a trusting person. People tend to let me down.
FRASER: Not this time.
(And--as always--Fraser's got it backwards. He's promising that a woman can trust him, when what he really needs to be doing is asking if he can trust her.) We're revisiting the tropes of "You Must Remember This" (which is, remember, the episode in which Fraser tries to tell Ray about Victoria, and this is what you get, Ray, for falling asleep when your friend is pouring out his heart to you), setting them up so that Part 2 can tear them apart.
And now, the meat of the matter.
I have a theory about Victoria Metcalf.
My theory is that Victoria Metcalf is Benton Fraser's Id. With a side of Jungian anima thrown in for good measure.* The episode is very explicit about structuring Fraser and Victoria as yin and yang. He is snow, and she is fire--starting with the segue from the burning cabin to the snowglobe of Chicago, and persisting through his dream/memory/vision of her (and the wonderfully surreal and creepy effects of snow falling in his apartment), her thing for candles, her remark about going to Dallas or Austin--"warm sounds good to me"--and even the otherwise mundane exchage when she wants him to close the window:
VICTORIA: Aren't you cold?
FRASER: No.
They are opposed to each other, and also connected. And more than that, the episode encourages us from the beginning to see Victoria as an otherworldly figure, not entirely real--in sharp contradistinction to the ghost of Robert Fraser, who eats french fries and steals his son's Stetson and could not be more prosaic and mundane and grounded in concrete reality.
Victoria's disappearing acts (and notice that the paranoid cabbie never actually answers Fraser's question about whether there was a woman in the car) make it possible, in the opening acts, that she is no more than a figment of Fraser's imagination, and Father Behan makes the metaphor explicit:
FRASER: Oh, I guess I'm not realy sure if I saw her or I just wanted to see her, or maybe I saw her because she's the one person I can't face.
FATHER BEHAN: Why?
FRASER: Because of the decision I made.
FATHER BEHAN: Come back to haunt you, so to speak.
FRASER: Yes.
FATHER BEHAN: Son, I'm a Catholic from Belfast, and any good decision there is usually wrong. Each one's impossible, but you still have to make them. You learn to live with it, and then try to forgive yourself.
(And, parenthetically, I love with a mad adoring passion the segue from Fraser making confession to Father Behan to Fraser receiving absolution, which he does not accept, from his own father.)
There's another suggestion of ghostliness, of returning from the grave, in the mention of Victoria's sister, who died a month after Victoria got out of prison (this particular suggestion will get even stronger in Part 2, when we discover that Victoria used the occasion of her sister's death to swap identities with her: in one register, Victoria Metcalf is dead). And when Victoria finally stages the meeting with Fraser, she says, "I thought I saw you standing in the middle of the road. I wasn't sure if I was just seeing things." Turning it around, offering the momentary possibility that it's Fraser who's the ghost, the mirage. And of course, there's the fact that no one sees her except Fraser. Ray doesn't meet her until after Diefenbaker is shot, and the other characters never meet her at all. She almost could be nothing more than Fraser's imagination.
Victoria isn't a ghost; she does in fact have material and concrete reality. But at the same time, her reality is weirdly partial and entirely focused on Fraser. And she is his double in the same way that Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar argue in The Madwoman in the Attic that Bertha Rochester is Jane Eyre's double: the dark double who can act out desires Jane can't even admit to.
Victoria is fire; Fraser is snow. Fraser, we might even say, is frozen (frozen in the Mountie form of his own Super-Ego), and we know what fire does to ice: it melts it. Fire is traditionally associated with passion, also, and we can see that at work with Victoria as well. And there's the theme of food to reemphasize the point: after the snowstorm nearly kills them--and factor that in, too: Fraser himself admits that snow and ice can kill, and that it's Victoria who saves him, as much as he saves her:
It snowed for a day and a night and a day, and when I couldn't talk anymore, I took her fingers and put them in my mouth to keep them warm. I don't remember losing consciousness, but I . . . I do remember being aware that I was dying. And then I heard her voice. She was reciting a poem, over and over. I couldn't make out the words, but I couldn't stop listening. She had the most beautiful voice. It was as though I had known her forever. Across a thousand lifetimes. Um, the storm finally broke, and we were alive. And after a day, we found my pack. We ate everything--everything--I had. In one meal.
Victoria is associated with ravening hunger:
FRASER: Can I see you again?
VICTORIA: When?
FRASER: Now.
VICTORIA: You hungry?
FRASER: Starving.
Like a fire, she is consuming. Food, sex . . . money. Victoria wants. And like the Id, she sees no reason why she cannot have. On this level, it is intensely important that Fraser put her in prison; it explains everything about Benton Fraser as we have seen him thus far. His Id is frozen and chained and shut away in the dark. And Victoria's fury at him--and the way that fury turns to passion--makes thirteen kinds of breathtakingly brilliant sense if you understand her as his Id. (Also, if she's the Id, of course she has to shoot Diefenbaker, who is the guardian of Fraser's soul, of the shy and fragile Ego whom we almost never see.) Her anger at being betrayed is the anger of someone betrayed by herself, specifically the anger of the Id, which is always in some ways a child, unable to understand the abstractions of the Super-Ego:
VICTORIA: Did you think that we could just pretend that it didn't happen? . . . How could you do it? How could you do that to me, huh? . . . How could you do it? [As Fraser moves to embrace her] No!
[but neither of them lets go]
FRASER: I'm sorry.
Of course she hates him. Benton Fraser's Id has every right and reason to hate his Super-Ego. But of course she loves him, too. Because he's her, just as much as she's him. (One way to read her elaborate scheme is as an attempt to rid herself of Benton Fraser once and for all. And even Victoria can't quite go through with it.)
And observe the effect that the Id has when it finally gets its claws into the Super-Ego again. I mentioned the ravenous consumption of food earlier; Fraser goes from letting his dead father steal his french fries to sharing two meals in a row with Victoria, including shopping for provisions--and notice that, having failed in his quest for cilantro, what does he bring? Ice-cream. Then, of course, there's sex, which the episode tactfully suggests Fraser and Victoria are having a great deal of. And for the first time in recorded history, Fraser skips work:
RAY: Consulate said you didn't show up, so I figured you had to be pretty sick. You all right?
FRASER: Yeah, I'm fine.
RAY: So you're not sick.
FRASER: No, I'm fine.
RAY: But you didn't go to work.
FRASER: Must've slept in.
RAY: Huh. . . . Are you in some kind of trouble?
FRASER: No. No. No, no, no.
(Although, of course, Fraser is in trouble. He just doesn't know it yet.) It takes Ray a long time to wrap his head around the idea that Fraser can miss work without being sick--and it's telling that his immediate conclusion is that Fraser has to be in trouble. (I do love Ray for his teenage-boy delight when he figures out that Fraser has finally gotten laid.) This is not Fraser as we know him, made even clearer by the ensuing exchange with Victoria:
VICTORIA: Do you really have to go to work?
FRASER: Yeah.
VICTORIA: So I guess you need this? [starting to unbutton his red uniform tunic, which is very likely the only thing she's wearing]
FRASER: Kind of. Although I do have something like eighty-two sick days coming to me.
VICTORIA: I think you should go straight to bed.
The profanation of the uniform is itself a big freaking clue, and especially combined with the fact that Fraser is completely comfortable and unapologetic about playing hookey. The overflowing abundance of flowers and balloons and get well wishes cramming his office in the next scene is also testimony to how aberrant this is. Fraser never skips work.
But maybe Benton Fraser wanted to.
This is all relatively benign; I think in general we can agree that it would be good for Fraser to let himself off the leash a little more often. But things start to escalate, and we are reminded, vividly, of why it's bad to let the Id run the show. Because the Id isn't nice and it doesn't care about other people. And it causes Fraser to forget his obligation to Ray.
"Obligation" is a harsh word, and not exactly what I mean. But when someone is your best friend, you do have a responsibility toward them, and Fraser just completely boots it. (1.) he forgets Ray's pool night (which is also in itself a small betrayal, a betrayal of what Ray shared with him by telling him that one good thing about his father), and (2.) he forgets to repay the loan Ray gave him at the beginning of the episode (which in turn makes that pool night even more of a disaster than it was doomed to be from the beginning). This, as Ray Kowalski would put it, is not buddies. Now, we might suspect that Fraser was regarding Ray's pool night with a certain amount of dread, but our regularly scheduled Fraser would never breathe a word of reluctance, much less simply fail to show. That's the Id. Self-centered, self-focused, self-indulgent. And when Ray comes to tell Fraser off, I think it's important that he finds Dief exiled to the hall: "Three's a crowd, huh, Dief?" Fraser is surrendering to Victoria, and he's doing it on purpose. "I made a mistake once," he tells Ray, "and I can't make it again." He followed the Super-Ego and ended up frozen; the Id promises to keep him warm.
There is, of course, a problem with fire; Part 2 is going to demonstrate it, but we've already seen it, in the fate of Fraser's father's cabin. The metaphorical level of the episode is trying to warn us, and to warn Fraser--just as, oddly, Victoria does herself:
VICTORIA: This is my favorite movie. I've always wanted to be Eve Kendall.
FRASER: But she sends Cary Grant to be killed.
VICTORIA: She has no choice.
She gives other hints, all of which Fraser misses, whether willfully or not (another matter for the Part 2 discussion). The Id hates the Super-Ego, but it can't stop loving it either. She has to warn him. And perhaps he has to not hear. He talks about owing her, about his guilt, and I think there's a way in which he has to leave himself wide open for her to hurt him.
VICTORIA: I'm sorry.
FRASER: S'all right. I probably deserve it.
VICTORIA: You do.
Fraser's Super-Ego has turned on itself. It demands its own punishment. And this fits in, with painful perfection, with his Ego's desire for love.
Which we will talk about in Part 2.
---
*N.b., I am using Freudian terminology very loosely in this analysis. The Ego is the self, the "I"; the Super-Ego is the conscience, the devotion to duty and justice; the Id is what wants. It is greedy and selfish and always hungry.
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no subject
Date: 2007-11-30 06:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-30 06:40 pm (UTC)I would recommend, if you haven't seen it,
no subject
Date: 2007-11-30 07:14 pm (UTC)I never realized how ironic/foreshadowy this actually is until now. And Victoria as Id - oooh.
Have been enjoying your dS posts very much!
no subject
Date: 2007-11-30 07:22 pm (UTC)Ouch. Yes.
no subject
Date: 2007-11-30 08:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-30 10:50 pm (UTC)So, what think you of Ray K.? And do you read dS fanfic?
no subject
Date: 2007-12-03 03:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-30 11:27 pm (UTC)Now, you're reminding me of all the good, thoughtful, wonderful things about the show. Thank you.
no subject
Date: 2007-11-30 11:47 pm (UTC)FRASER: What can I do?
VICTORIA: Can you stir?
FRASER: It's one of my areas of abiding interest.
God, I swoon. Fraser is so smooth and yet so dorky.
no subject
Date: 2007-12-01 05:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-12 03:51 am (UTC)Being unspoiled going in made Part 2 astoundingly painful; it was really the contrast that did it.
no subject
Date: 2008-09-12 04:35 am (UTC)(Because I am a geek like this, I'm reminded of something Stephen Booth says in one of his Shakespeare essays, about seeing King Lear some ridiculous number of times in the space of a couple months and realizing, the fourth or fifth, that EVERY SINGLE TIME, he was hoping that this time, Cordelia would be saved. Yeah. EVERY SINGLE TIME, I hope that this time, Victoria won't do it.)
no subject
Date: 2008-10-06 11:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-11-04 11:09 am (UTC)This post got way too long
Date: 2008-12-18 08:27 am (UTC)This is why I find Lady Shoes in the fourth season episode "Odds" interesting, because Fraser is different with her too. He's attracted to her at first sight, which is odd enough to start with, but he then ignores RayK's warning and carries on something of a flirtation with her all episode - they even kiss! - until, with nary a backward glance, he turns her into the cops. And this makes sense, because Lady Shoes is in the Victoria mold. She's a femme fatale, she's charming, she's scared, and she's trying to use Fraser as part of a revenge plot. I think it's a real measure, either of how over Victoria Fraser is by then or how not over her he is, that he uses his Victoria-related attraction to Lady Shoes to completely fool her and play her at her own game, and isn't even bothered by it. And then there's the exchange at the end, after she falls off a building and he's holding her by her wrist: Lady Shoes says "You could let me go," and Fraser replies, "Who says I won't let you go now?" and fake-drops her before catching her again. The exchange echoes one at the end of Victoria's Secret: "I should have let you go." "Well, you're going to now." It's a rare moment of genuine cruelty from Fraser, and it could be a sign that in Season 4 he's still not over Victoria. On the other hand, the fact that he readily turns Lady Shoes in suggests that he's forgiven himself for what he did to Victoria.
Anyway, back to Victoria's Secret. In a way, I understand why Victoria acts the way she does. I don't think it's pure, blind revenge, I think there's a point to it. Victoria loves Fraser, and like she said, she needs him with her, but her problem is that she also hates him, and even if she were the type to forgive people, she can't forgive him for stealing ten years of her life. So she goes for revenge - not, I think, just for its own sake, but because revenge is the only adequate substitute for forgiveness she can find. If she wants any kind of future with Fraser, she has to even the balance between them - she has to pay him back for what he did to her, because no amount of apologies are going to be enough to make her stop hating him. And I do think she wants a future with him; I think the getting him to run away with her is as much a part of her plan as everything else. I also think it's important that her plan is aimed at destroying his honor, since that's what came between them in the first place. If she takes that away, her revenge is very specific and poetic, but it's also practical: destroy his honor and reputation, make him a criminal like herself, and there's no reason for him to betray her or leave her again. It's not the sort of plan I'd go for, but it's rational in a way. It's the unstoppable force and the immovable object: Victoria's love for Fraser and her hatred of him can't coexist, and she can't let go of either emotion, so being the incredibly screwed up person that she is, she's kind of stuck.
This
Date: 2019-07-09 12:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-07 05:38 pm (UTC)An intriguing thing about this episode for me, but which I may be over-thinking, is the suggestion that Fraser is Catholic--the confessional scene, first, and then the Hopkins poem. I may be wrong about this, but I feel like very few non-Catholics read Hopkins much, and in any case the choice of *that particular poem* ("to Christ Our Lord"?) to associate with Fraser's doomed love seems significant.
But really it's the confessional scene. Are the writers self-conscious enough about this to realize that (a) only a Catholic would be at confession in the first place and (b) it's extremely strange that he would choose to do it behind a grille *and* with someone he knows. The grille/box thing has been discouraged for forty years, in favor of an open conversation; the standard setup is to have a second chair in the priest's half of the "box" if there's no special room, but often you just sit in a pew with a priest, or do it in the rectory living room, or go for a walk with them in a place where you won't be overheard (I've done it walking around a track, for example). Confession's gotten much closer to therapy and this is both a cause and an effect of the recommended change of venue.
There are only two reasons to choose not only the box but the grille. One is if you want real anonymity, in which case you'd also go to a priest you didn't know. And the second is if you're so self-conscious and ashamed of what you're talking about that you literally can't look the priest in the face. Obviously Fraser's case is closer to the second. And the thing that suggests to me that I might *not* be overreading the choice of the grille is that the other time he makes this confession--to Ray on the stakeout--he *also* can't look him in the face, or even look the *camera* in the face--we have to see him reflected in the window.
Or possibly they don't know about what the grille signifies to contemporary Catholics, and just used it as a visual shorthand, recognizable to almost everyone, for "Fraser's confessing".
And of course the old name for what we now call the sacrament of Reconciliation was the sacrament of Penance. It seems to me that most of what Fraser's doing in this ep--as in the pilot, and unlike in much of the rest of the first season--has more to do with Penance than Reconciliation. As you note, he won't accept the absolution offered him by Bob. I wonder what he said to the priest.
So far I've only seen the first season; I'll be interested to see if any more Catholic references pop up, to see if this is a one-time fluke or an actual character thing.
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Date: 2009-04-07 05:54 pm (UTC)We know that Ray is Catholic, if not particularly observant. My assumption about that scene has always been that Fraser isn't Catholic, but that he needs desperately to talk to someone, and the ritualized structure of confession--especially with the box and the grille--makes it possible for him to do so. Cf. your comments about being self-conscious and ashamed. And, of course, as the segue to Bob shows, he's searching for a father figure, and Father Behan is the best he can do. (Can you imagine him telling this story to Welsh?)
I would be interested, though, to know if an educated eye spots other Catholicisms in Fraser. He certainly offers a number of parallels to monastic observance (aside from the almost complete celibacy, he certainly practices austerity throughout the series).
About Hopkins--
1. Wouldn't that tend to indicate that Victoria is Catholic, not necessarily Fraser?
2. fwiw, I was taught Hopkins in a public high school. And I adore him. Since I am an atheist, my fondness for him has nothing to do with the theology, and everything to do with the prosody and word play. "The Windhover" makes me drunk on words (as Lord Peter Wimsey says about reading Donne--another poet whom I love without sharing his religious beliefs). So I think the fact that Hopkins is a Catholic poet is relevant, given the other Catholic imagery in the episode, but I'm not sure it points conclusively to anything.
no subject
Date: 2009-04-07 09:08 pm (UTC)The Vecchios are a pretty typical Italian-American Catholic family--Ray wears a crucifix, but they're mostly unobservant, they're focused around the mother and the home not the church, and probably Ma Vecchio does the lion's share of religious practice on behalf of the whole family. Once upon a time the daughters would have been more observant too, but that's dropped off significantly for Frannie's generation.
Fraser is a Scottish name, right? There were tons of Scottish Catholics that emigrated in the 18th century, I think, but also plenty of Presbyterians. With any other show I would have assumed the writers didn't know what they were doing, but due South is just smart enough to make it possible, though if I had to actually put money down on it I would agree with you that I'm overreading. It's fun, though. It *is* interesting that they leave out the "for I have sinned" part.
Another thing they might not know is that a priest would not hear the confession of a non-Catholic. Speak to them, counsel them, pray with them, certainly. But the sacraments, no. If I were writing fanfic based on the assumption that the writers know what they're doing, I'd have to assume that Fraser was canonically Catholic.
My educated eye (I'm a doctoral student in theology) hasn't picked up anything else. As I think you noted somewhere else, Fraser knows plenty about guilt. But a Scottish Presbyterian background could give you that just as easily as a Catholic one.
What about the grandparents? I wonder if their library in China could have been part of a mission thing. There was a ton of missionary activity in China, both Catholic and Protestant, before 1949.
oh, and
Date: 2009-04-07 09:39 pm (UTC)"It is above all a question of interdependence, sensed as a system determining relationships in the contemporary world, in its economic, cultural, political and religious elements, and accepted as a moral category. When interdependence becomes recognized in this way, the correlative response as a moral and social attitude, as a "virtue," is solidarity. This then is not a feeling of vague compassion or shallow distress at the misfortunes of so many people, both near and far. On the contrary, it is a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good; that is to say to the good of all and of each individual, because we are all really responsible for all. This determination is based on the solid conviction that what is hindering full development is that desire for profit and that thirst for power already mentioned. These attitudes and "structures of sin" are only conquered - presupposing the help of divine grace - by a diametrically opposed attitude: a commitment to the good of one's neighbor with the readiness, in the gospel sense, to "lose oneself" for the sake of the other instead of exploiting him, and to "serve him" instead of oppressing him for one's own advantage (cf. Mt 10:40-42; 20:25; Mk 10:42-45; Lk 22:25-27).
39. The exercise of solidarity within each society is valid when its members recognize one another as persons."
Yeah, that sounds familiar.
The Desert Fathers and assorted other saints (Francis springs to mind, of course) often had special relationships with one or more animals, too, and there's a long tradition of taking to the desert (=the Frozen North) to get in touch with God. Living on the margins of society, either physically or in terms of your class location, is highly resonant in the Catholic and Orthodox traditions.
And saints are well-known for being incredibly irritating to the people that know them best--the ones who have to live with them everyday. Because they just absolutely insist on doing the right thing all the time, and it does not make them easy to live with. They're charismatic--people are drawn to them--but they're profoundly un-ordinary, and thus, disruptive. This is why they're a lot easier to deal with when they're dead. Dorothy Day told people not to call her a saint, because "I don't want to be dismissed so easily."
no subject
Date: 2009-05-13 03:12 am (UTC)KSC
Wow
Date: 2019-07-09 01:03 pm (UTC)Out of the Past
Date: 2009-11-10 09:22 pm (UTC)KSC
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Date: 2012-03-31 12:51 pm (UTC)However, being Catholic does not mean that he necessarily buys into a specific set of beliefs. Perhaps he's just been raised that way, but not believed what he's been taught. Certainly he has a mystical bent, but I know for a fact that Father Behan would not administer sacrements if Fraser weren't at least nominally RC.
Fraser's mysticism however would lead him to interpret his faith in ways that diverge from mainstream anything... he is deeply sensitive to the religions of the Inuit, and expresses disapproval of the theft of their religious symbols by an anglican priest. He quietly allows them to "steal" back their masks, and says nothing.
But if he was raised Catholic (by, I presume, his grandmother, since I believe she must have been involved in missionary activity... no other white people were really active in China during the period she and her husband were there) then it has left few scars. His profound guilt is rooted before his time with his grandmother, and seems to be based around his mother's death. Even before we know that she was murdered it's obvious that something keeps it cordoned off from his mind. He lost his mother, but rarely thinks of or speaks of her. When he does, he's angry. (Witness the conversation 'you weren't around long enough to call her by name.' Ouch.)
So his guilt isn't Catholic, his world view isn't. (Although Bob's may be... eg, in BDTH... 'is this my final destination?') I think Fraser clings to the ritual here in a desperate attempt to find peace, safety. As indicated in the review, he's seeking absolution from his literal father, not the priest. But whereever he looks for it, he can't accept it. Deep down the problem isn't that he was neglected by his father, or raised a loner, it's that he feels he betrayed his mother. And that she betrayed him by dying. And every other relationship he ever has is coloured by his failure to protect her, and her (perceived on the emotional level of a child) abandonment of him.
This is another layer of pain in his relationship with Victoria. He thinks that she has come to keep him warm and safe, to 'play mother.' But she's come to expunge herself from his life, wiping away every print and stain, and then seeking to expunge him from himself, to wipe him out completely.
The least important thing about him is what his religion is.
no subject
Date: 2016-05-27 03:54 pm (UTC)Heart-breaking though. When I first saw it I lived in Toronto, and saw heaps of Due South filmed, literally, at the end of my driveway at UofT. Since then I moved back to Australia, married, and seen my beloved die from cancer just 3 years ago. The scenes of loss and memory spoke to me this time in a way that they did not when first broadcast. xx