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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Date: 2007-11-30 06:40 pm (UTC)I would recommend, if you haven't seen it,