Due South: "Victoria's Secret: Part 2"
Dec. 3rd, 2007 09:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyDue South 1.21, "Victoria's Secret: Part 2"
Original airdate: May 11, 1995
Favorite quote:
RAY: Don't you have things to do in Hell or wherever you are?
GHOST OF RAY'S FATHER: Purgatory. For my sins, I gotta watch you make stupid mistakes.
Spoilers. And again, the truth about [noun redacted] is an important and major spoiler, so click through at your own peril. Also, smaller spoilers for Diana Wynne Jones's YA novel, Aunt Maria.
Part 1 discussion.
I'm going to circle back around to the discussion of Victoria as Fraser's Id, but I want to start by talking about love and knowledge and need, because if Part 1 is the romance between Victoria and Fraser, and Part 2 is its deconstruction, these are the grounds that the deconstruction takes place on.
It starts back in Part 1, with Jolly telling Fraser, "You think you know her? You don't." But the meat of it is in a conversation between Fraser and his dead father:
ROBERT FRASER: She's not coming back.
BENTON FRASER: You don't know her.
R. FRASER: Neither do you.
B. FRASER: I'm in love with her.
R. FRASER: Doesn't mean you know her.
B. FRASER: Did you know Mom? I mean, did you know who she really was, or did you know what you wanted her to be?
R. FRASER: I knew who she was in her soul. That's what I loved.
B. FRASER: Come on, Dad. You weren't around long enough to call her by name.
There's a collision of two quite different issues here, as Fraser is going to go on to admit explicitly in a minute:
B. FRASER: You want to know something? You never saw her. You never saw who she was. You never saw her when she was angry, you never saw her when she was frightened, you never saw her when she was brave or when she was petty. You. Never. Saw her.
R. FRASER: She was a good woman. She deserved better.
B. FRASER: No, she didn't. She deserved you. And I'm not going to make the same mistake. Victoria is in trouble. Now, she scares the hell out of me, I don't even know if I can help her, but I know I need to be here. And I know who she is.
Notice the way his argument has shifted ground. He's gone from the question of knowing someone to the question of being present, which is something his father is just catastrophically bad at. (Even dead, Bob is only around when Fraser doesn't want to see him, and even dead, he's frequently distracted, talking at cross-purposes with his son.) Fraser is very invested in not making his father's mistake, just as he's invested in not repeating his own mistake. So invested, in fact, that he can't see Victoria at all, just as he accuses his father of not being able to see his mother.
(Parenthetically, one of the things I love about the interactions between Fraser and his father is the way that Bob's relationship with Caroline comes shining through. It's obvious that Fraser's childhood memories are partial and biased, as childhood memories inevitably will be, and that the sum of his parents' relationship is far greater than the parts of it he saw. Bob does know Caroline, not just "who you wanted her to be." I think the tragedy there isn't that he wasn't a good husband in his own eccentric way, but that he wasn't prepared or equipped to be a father, or to fit into a family. And in avoiding that image of himself, he shut his wife and son out of his life.)
There are a lot of things wrong with Fraser and Victoria's relationship. One of them is that Fraser (like Antony Green in Diana Wynne Jones' Aunt Maria) is trying to force Victoria to be trustworthy by trusting her. All this gets him (again like Antony Green) is betrayal. And what this episode proves, painfully and inarguably, is that Fraser does not know Victoria. It's the inverse of "You Must Remember This," in which Ray falls in love with a criminal who turns out to be a Fed. For all the romantic claptrap Ray spouts, he doesn't know Suzanne at all. And no matter how hard Fraser tries to make Victoria be who he wants her to be, he doesn't know her. What's worse is that Victoria makes Ray not know Fraser and Fraser not know himself. Ray says furiously to the I.A. investigators, "You don't know this guy!" and Ray is as sure he knows Fraser as Fraser is sure he knows Victoria--more sure, even, because Ray has experience to back up his knowledge. And he's willing to gamble, to stake Fraser's bail:
FRASER: . . . You'd have to mortgage your house.
RAY: You gonna skip on me?
FRASER: No.
RAY: Then there's nothing to worry about.
And then, in one of the loveliest exchanges in Fraser and Ray's friendship:
FRASER: You should take the deal.
RAY: I haven't been offered one.
FRASER: You should take it anyway.
[Fraser starts to get out of the Riv]
RAY: Hey, Benny! [he waits until Fraser is looking at him] Not in your lifetime.
And the terrible, terrible thing is that Ray is wrong. Just as Fraser is wrong. Because Fraser is, in the end, willing to sacrifice everything, including himself, for Victoria. The most telling moment, I think, isn't the moment on the platform; it's the moment when the mugging victim accost him:
MUGGING VICTIM: A man just stole my purse. Can you help me, please?
FRASER: No, ma'am, I'm afraid I can't.
Sure, you can talk your way around this in a way you can't talk your way around the moment on the platform, but for me this is the moment that hammers home just how much of Fraser, as we have come to know him, is a deliberate, conscious choice. He can turn the Mountie on and off like a tap. And therefore he chooses every day to get up and turn the Mountie on; the important thing, the true thing, about Fraser isn't the Mountie. It's the choice to be the Mountie. Because when he doesn't make that choice, he's somebody else.
(Another parenthetical aside: I love the fact that there are thirteen years of Fraser's adult life, of his service with the RCMP, that we know almost NOTHING about. We have no idea what it took to build the Mountie, what it cost him. I have a personal theory--for which I have no evidence I can point to, just a sense of the way the show works and the way Fraser works--that the reason Fraser doesn't drink isn't that he's pure and innocent, it's that for some of those thirteen years, he was an alcoholic. And he is now a recovering alcoholic, which is another choice you have to make. Every. Single. Day.)
This is what romantic love does, the show says. It is a destructive force. It tears your life apart--worse than that, it makes you tear your own life apart, as Fraser tears apart the Vecchio house looking for the locker key. And it leaves you standing in the rubble with nothing left to hold onto (Fraser's apartment in "Burning Down the House"): Fraser and Victoria. Ray Vecchio and Irene. Ray Kowalski and Stella. Romantic love (by which I mean love that follows the conventions of romance--and all three of these pairs are following very recognizable conventions of romantic love) is a destroyer. The show puts this in opposition to love based on partnership, which Bob will tell Fraser is like a marriage--and in fact I think the thing I like best about the glimpses we get of Bob and Caroline's marriage IS that sense of partnership, that they were partners as Fraser is partners with his Rays (and you may discuss among yourselves whether Fraser and his Rays also have the erotic component to their partnerships that Bob and Caroline did--I'm gonna admit I find the homoerotic subtext with Ray Kowalski persuasive, and frequently close to text). In fact, the anecdote Bob tells in Part 1 about giving Caroline a speeding ticket has a direct analogue in "The Blue Line," which begins with Ray winding Fraser up by turning left without signalling. With that as context, plus an elementary knowledge of Bob Fraser, I think I know exactly why Caroline kept speeding up, and it has nothing to do with her being a woman and everything to do with her being Bob's partner.
But Victoria is not Fraser's partner, although interestingly, and ironically, she gets described as such:
DIAMOND GUY: I warned your partner. She doesn't seem to place too high a value on your life, does she?
FRASER: Apparently not.
I don't think Victoria is capable of thinking in terms of "partner." "Sub," maybe. "Catspaw," definitely. She loves Fraser when she can play him, and hates him when she can't. (FRASER: I'll do it. VICTORIA: I do love you, you know.) And his love for her . . . it's not irrelevant, and it's not even futile. It just doesn't help.
R. FRASER: She's not coming back to you. And why in God's name would you want her to?
B. FRASER: Because . . . Because I . . . Because I need--oh god . . .
R. FRASER: You're not going to get it. Sometimes in life all you need is that second chance. It's the one thing you're not going to have.
It's worth noticing here that Bob finishes Fraser's sentence, and while Fraser doesn't correct him (being in the middle of a meltdown and all), a second chance is not the only thing Fraser might conceivably be trying to articulate a need for. But Bob's right about one thing. Whatever it is Fraser needs, he can't have it.
And this brings us back to the idea of Victoria as Fraser's Id (I also just realized, she is a TEXTBOOK case of the return of the repressed), as a part of his psyche that he has been ruthlessly repressing, but that he does need. And it brings us back to the imagery of snow, both with the snowglobe Victoria hides the key in, and with the very odd exchange between Fraser and his father:
R. FRASER: Is it snowing out, son?
B. FRASER: What?
R. FRASER: Is it snowing out?
B. FRASER: No.
R. FRASER: No, I don't suppose it would be. It's almost summer. I don't know why I brought this coat.
This exchange--which is incredibly disconcerting--does several things, a couple of them on the meta level. Since "Victoria's Secret" originally aired on May 11, yes, it is, literally, almost summer. But, of course, it's television; it can be any time of year the producers want, and they've been playing with that, playing with the audience and how it's trained to read cues like Victoria's long coat. Or Bob's coat. So this exchange emphasizes the fact that Fraser's snow throughout the two parts of the episode is symbolic, which I think is important to know at the end, as it starts snowing on him and Ray and Welsh. Fraser can light candles, but he can't stop snowing, not on his own.
And his Id isn't in the mood to help. "This woman really has it bad for you, doesn't she?" Ray says, and this conflation of love and hate is exactly what Victoria admits to:
FRASER: You must really hate me for what I did.
VICTORIA: Yeah. Hate. Love. Those two emotions about cover it.
The way Victoria stages this confrontation--as, we are beginning to understand, she has staged EVERY encounter between the two of them--reveals a hell of a lot. The choice of a strip joint ("And, Ben? Bring a lot of quarters.") suggests that Victoria feels she has prostituted herself to Fraser (suggesting another reason for her anger, too: from this perspective, she put out and he didn't pay up), also that she's going to make him pay (... and pay and pay ...) for betraying her (as she sees it), also a message to Fraser, that he can look, but not touch, that on some level, that's been the truth all along: another way of saying "you don't know me." Possibly a way even of trying to rub his face in that, to force him to admit she isn't who he wants her to be. Or conversely, that she herself feels like there's a pane of glass between them, like he's the one who's out of reach.
What the Id wants most of all is for the Super-Ego to notice it, to love it, but it doesn't know how to achieve that, and it doesn't know how to express what it wants--and frustration makes it cruel. There's also that streak of pure selfishness that is the truth of Victoria Metcalf, the darkness that Fraser talks about in "YMRT":
FRASER: What do you want, Victoria?
VICTORIA: You.
FRASER: No, you don't.
VICTORIA: Why do you think I did all this?
FRASER: Revenge.
VICTORIA: Maybe. But I need you. I want you to go away with me.
FRASER: You know I can't do that.
VICTORIA: Why not? You don't have much to stick around here for. You won't like prison.
FRASER: I'm sorry.
VICTORIA: I'm sorry, too. Because I need you to make an exchange. If you don't, there's a key. This key fits a locker. In the locker is twenty-five thousand dollars in sequentially numbered bills. The key's at your friend Ray's house. You have one hour to decide, and then I call Internal Affairs and tell them where to find it.
Fraser's "You know I can't do that," is the quintessential reply of the Super-Ego to the Id, but the Super-Ego is already losing ground.
I mentioned The Madwoman in the Attic in my post on Part 1, and I want to come back to the idea of doubling, of Victoria as a double for Fraser in the same way Bertha is a double for Jane. The thing about Bertha as Jane's double is that the things she does are not things that Jane, as a conscious rational adult, wants to do--they're what her wretched inner two-year-old self, neglected, unloved, and powerless, wants to do. Acts of violence and destruction, directed at things (like Rochester) that the adult Jane loves and wants to protect. In the same way, Victoria expresses the nihilistic despair and fury that Fraser can never even admit to. In Part 1, she induces him to skip work and to blow off Ray's pool night. She shoots Diefenbaker (whom Fraser loves, but whom he also finds incredibly frustrating). And, if we read Dief as the guardian of Fraser's Ego, his self, it only makes sense that things get worse and worse in Part 2. Victoria causes Fraser a completely uncharacteristic outburst of grief and pain (things the Super-Ego does not admit to feeling); she forces him to visit a strip joint; she causes him to COMPLETELY TRASH Ray's house; she coerces him into being her accomplice in an exchange that isn't only illegal in and of itself but is also dishonest even on that basis; and finally she persuades him to run away with her, which would leave Ray holding the bag on a plethora of ghastly problems, starting with the mortgage on his house and working its way up from there. This is the unchecked Id at work, and it demonstrates a lot of hostility, particularly towards Ray and towards the house that is the symbol of everything Ray has and Fraser doesn't. So I'm not saying that Fraser wants to betray Ray; I'm saying that the dark foundations of the psyche, represented here by Victoria, has its own emotional calculus. It wants to destroy what it can't have. "You never should have introduced me to your friends," Victoria says to Fraser. She is trying to destroy Fraser's life both because she hates him and wants him to suffer and because she loves him and wants to own him, because her love can only be selfish. The Id doesn't have any other way to love.
But that doesn't mean her love isn't real, even if it's selfish, even if it's self-serving. She can't shoot Fraser any more than Fraser can shoot her:
VICTORIA: You son of a bitch, you set me up. I should've shot you.
FRASER: And I should have let you go.
VICTORIA: Well, you're going to this time.
FRASER: Sorry.
[he takes the gun she's pointing at him away from her]
VICTORIA: Then shoot me, because I'm getting on this train. No? Okay.
[and then one last terrible change of heart]
Ben, come with me! Come with me! You're gonna regret it if you don't. Fraser! Come with me!
[and Fraser starts to run; in a minute, Ray will shoot him by mistake]
There are several possible endings from the moment when Victoria asks Fraser to come with her:
1. Fraser escapes with Victoria, which is a completely self-destructive ending, both for Fraser and for Due South.
2. Fraser stands firm--or, even better/worse, apprehends her and sends her back to prison. The Super-Ego wins, and there's going to be nothing left of Fraser but the Mountie. A kind of Death-in-Life.
3. Ray shoots Victoria. We fall right back into the romantic clichés Part 2 has been dismantling and wallow around and have "Juliet Is Bleeding."
4. The actual ending. Ray shoots Fraser.
I like the way they make it perfectly crystal clear that Ray shoots Fraser by accident--and not just one layer of accident, but two: (1.) he's not aiming for Fraser, he's aiming for Victoria, and (2.) he thinks Victoria has a gun--and the ostentatious plainness (the over-determination, even) of the accidental nature of the shooting makes it possible to note that this was the only way Ray could stop Fraser, and that in an episode that has worked by making external and active the latent desires of the Id, Ray has as much reason to be hostile to Fraser as Fraser has to be hostile to Ray. The logic of the show exposes these reasons even as it makes explicit the fact that they are not Ray's motivation.
I also like the way that Fraser running for the train evokes the tropism of Fraser running after cars, which he does again and again--including in both Part 1 and Part 2 of this episode. And he does actually catch her; they connect before Ray stages his semi-inadvertent intervention. Symbolically, this is hopeful, just as it is symbolically hopeful that Victoria does escape, suggesting that maybe Fraser won't keep his Id repressed and frozen for the rest of his life. This is why Fraser cannot bring Victoria to justice; because to do so would be to sacrifice his entire self to his Mountie Super-Ego. She has to escape. She has to carry Benton Fraser's freedom.
"I should be with her," he says to Ray (which Ray deliberately suppresses in talking to Welsh), and while this is patently untrue as far as the romance of Fraser and Victoria goes (how long would it be, Benton, before she did shoot you?), for the Ego bereft of its Id, it is entirely true. He should be with her because they are two incomplete parts of one psyche, and the question is, without her, what's left?
This is the culmination of the destruction of Benton Fraser, the larger-than-life Fraser we met in the pilot. He's gone toe to toe with reality, and reality has kicked his ass. He's betrayed himself in every way imaginable, including this demonstration in front of Ray and Welsh and Huey and Gardino that he isn't perfect, that he's weak and fallible; he's lost the only woman he's ever loved (as he himself described her) and the only thing we've ever heard him admit to needing; he's been shot in the back by his best friend.
He ends up lying on the platform in his own personal snowstorm, reciting Gerard Manley Hopkins's poem, "The Windhover" (which among all its other myriad amazements, is a sonnet):
I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, - the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.
Both times Fraser tells the story of Fortitude Pass (in "YMRT" and "VS pt 1"), he says he couldn't make out the words of the poem Victoria was reciting. So this perhaps is Victoria's final cruel gift: the memory of something he never had.
Original airdate: May 11, 1995
Favorite quote:
RAY: Don't you have things to do in Hell or wherever you are?
GHOST OF RAY'S FATHER: Purgatory. For my sins, I gotta watch you make stupid mistakes.
Spoilers. And again, the truth about [noun redacted] is an important and major spoiler, so click through at your own peril. Also, smaller spoilers for Diana Wynne Jones's YA novel, Aunt Maria.
Part 1 discussion.
I'm going to circle back around to the discussion of Victoria as Fraser's Id, but I want to start by talking about love and knowledge and need, because if Part 1 is the romance between Victoria and Fraser, and Part 2 is its deconstruction, these are the grounds that the deconstruction takes place on.
It starts back in Part 1, with Jolly telling Fraser, "You think you know her? You don't." But the meat of it is in a conversation between Fraser and his dead father:
ROBERT FRASER: She's not coming back.
BENTON FRASER: You don't know her.
R. FRASER: Neither do you.
B. FRASER: I'm in love with her.
R. FRASER: Doesn't mean you know her.
B. FRASER: Did you know Mom? I mean, did you know who she really was, or did you know what you wanted her to be?
R. FRASER: I knew who she was in her soul. That's what I loved.
B. FRASER: Come on, Dad. You weren't around long enough to call her by name.
There's a collision of two quite different issues here, as Fraser is going to go on to admit explicitly in a minute:
B. FRASER: You want to know something? You never saw her. You never saw who she was. You never saw her when she was angry, you never saw her when she was frightened, you never saw her when she was brave or when she was petty. You. Never. Saw her.
R. FRASER: She was a good woman. She deserved better.
B. FRASER: No, she didn't. She deserved you. And I'm not going to make the same mistake. Victoria is in trouble. Now, she scares the hell out of me, I don't even know if I can help her, but I know I need to be here. And I know who she is.
Notice the way his argument has shifted ground. He's gone from the question of knowing someone to the question of being present, which is something his father is just catastrophically bad at. (Even dead, Bob is only around when Fraser doesn't want to see him, and even dead, he's frequently distracted, talking at cross-purposes with his son.) Fraser is very invested in not making his father's mistake, just as he's invested in not repeating his own mistake. So invested, in fact, that he can't see Victoria at all, just as he accuses his father of not being able to see his mother.
(Parenthetically, one of the things I love about the interactions between Fraser and his father is the way that Bob's relationship with Caroline comes shining through. It's obvious that Fraser's childhood memories are partial and biased, as childhood memories inevitably will be, and that the sum of his parents' relationship is far greater than the parts of it he saw. Bob does know Caroline, not just "who you wanted her to be." I think the tragedy there isn't that he wasn't a good husband in his own eccentric way, but that he wasn't prepared or equipped to be a father, or to fit into a family. And in avoiding that image of himself, he shut his wife and son out of his life.)
There are a lot of things wrong with Fraser and Victoria's relationship. One of them is that Fraser (like Antony Green in Diana Wynne Jones' Aunt Maria) is trying to force Victoria to be trustworthy by trusting her. All this gets him (again like Antony Green) is betrayal. And what this episode proves, painfully and inarguably, is that Fraser does not know Victoria. It's the inverse of "You Must Remember This," in which Ray falls in love with a criminal who turns out to be a Fed. For all the romantic claptrap Ray spouts, he doesn't know Suzanne at all. And no matter how hard Fraser tries to make Victoria be who he wants her to be, he doesn't know her. What's worse is that Victoria makes Ray not know Fraser and Fraser not know himself. Ray says furiously to the I.A. investigators, "You don't know this guy!" and Ray is as sure he knows Fraser as Fraser is sure he knows Victoria--more sure, even, because Ray has experience to back up his knowledge. And he's willing to gamble, to stake Fraser's bail:
FRASER: . . . You'd have to mortgage your house.
RAY: You gonna skip on me?
FRASER: No.
RAY: Then there's nothing to worry about.
And then, in one of the loveliest exchanges in Fraser and Ray's friendship:
FRASER: You should take the deal.
RAY: I haven't been offered one.
FRASER: You should take it anyway.
[Fraser starts to get out of the Riv]
RAY: Hey, Benny! [he waits until Fraser is looking at him] Not in your lifetime.
And the terrible, terrible thing is that Ray is wrong. Just as Fraser is wrong. Because Fraser is, in the end, willing to sacrifice everything, including himself, for Victoria. The most telling moment, I think, isn't the moment on the platform; it's the moment when the mugging victim accost him:
MUGGING VICTIM: A man just stole my purse. Can you help me, please?
FRASER: No, ma'am, I'm afraid I can't.
Sure, you can talk your way around this in a way you can't talk your way around the moment on the platform, but for me this is the moment that hammers home just how much of Fraser, as we have come to know him, is a deliberate, conscious choice. He can turn the Mountie on and off like a tap. And therefore he chooses every day to get up and turn the Mountie on; the important thing, the true thing, about Fraser isn't the Mountie. It's the choice to be the Mountie. Because when he doesn't make that choice, he's somebody else.
(Another parenthetical aside: I love the fact that there are thirteen years of Fraser's adult life, of his service with the RCMP, that we know almost NOTHING about. We have no idea what it took to build the Mountie, what it cost him. I have a personal theory--for which I have no evidence I can point to, just a sense of the way the show works and the way Fraser works--that the reason Fraser doesn't drink isn't that he's pure and innocent, it's that for some of those thirteen years, he was an alcoholic. And he is now a recovering alcoholic, which is another choice you have to make. Every. Single. Day.)
This is what romantic love does, the show says. It is a destructive force. It tears your life apart--worse than that, it makes you tear your own life apart, as Fraser tears apart the Vecchio house looking for the locker key. And it leaves you standing in the rubble with nothing left to hold onto (Fraser's apartment in "Burning Down the House"): Fraser and Victoria. Ray Vecchio and Irene. Ray Kowalski and Stella. Romantic love (by which I mean love that follows the conventions of romance--and all three of these pairs are following very recognizable conventions of romantic love) is a destroyer. The show puts this in opposition to love based on partnership, which Bob will tell Fraser is like a marriage--and in fact I think the thing I like best about the glimpses we get of Bob and Caroline's marriage IS that sense of partnership, that they were partners as Fraser is partners with his Rays (and you may discuss among yourselves whether Fraser and his Rays also have the erotic component to their partnerships that Bob and Caroline did--I'm gonna admit I find the homoerotic subtext with Ray Kowalski persuasive, and frequently close to text). In fact, the anecdote Bob tells in Part 1 about giving Caroline a speeding ticket has a direct analogue in "The Blue Line," which begins with Ray winding Fraser up by turning left without signalling. With that as context, plus an elementary knowledge of Bob Fraser, I think I know exactly why Caroline kept speeding up, and it has nothing to do with her being a woman and everything to do with her being Bob's partner.
But Victoria is not Fraser's partner, although interestingly, and ironically, she gets described as such:
DIAMOND GUY: I warned your partner. She doesn't seem to place too high a value on your life, does she?
FRASER: Apparently not.
I don't think Victoria is capable of thinking in terms of "partner." "Sub," maybe. "Catspaw," definitely. She loves Fraser when she can play him, and hates him when she can't. (FRASER: I'll do it. VICTORIA: I do love you, you know.) And his love for her . . . it's not irrelevant, and it's not even futile. It just doesn't help.
R. FRASER: She's not coming back to you. And why in God's name would you want her to?
B. FRASER: Because . . . Because I . . . Because I need--oh god . . .
R. FRASER: You're not going to get it. Sometimes in life all you need is that second chance. It's the one thing you're not going to have.
It's worth noticing here that Bob finishes Fraser's sentence, and while Fraser doesn't correct him (being in the middle of a meltdown and all), a second chance is not the only thing Fraser might conceivably be trying to articulate a need for. But Bob's right about one thing. Whatever it is Fraser needs, he can't have it.
And this brings us back to the idea of Victoria as Fraser's Id (I also just realized, she is a TEXTBOOK case of the return of the repressed), as a part of his psyche that he has been ruthlessly repressing, but that he does need. And it brings us back to the imagery of snow, both with the snowglobe Victoria hides the key in, and with the very odd exchange between Fraser and his father:
R. FRASER: Is it snowing out, son?
B. FRASER: What?
R. FRASER: Is it snowing out?
B. FRASER: No.
R. FRASER: No, I don't suppose it would be. It's almost summer. I don't know why I brought this coat.
This exchange--which is incredibly disconcerting--does several things, a couple of them on the meta level. Since "Victoria's Secret" originally aired on May 11, yes, it is, literally, almost summer. But, of course, it's television; it can be any time of year the producers want, and they've been playing with that, playing with the audience and how it's trained to read cues like Victoria's long coat. Or Bob's coat. So this exchange emphasizes the fact that Fraser's snow throughout the two parts of the episode is symbolic, which I think is important to know at the end, as it starts snowing on him and Ray and Welsh. Fraser can light candles, but he can't stop snowing, not on his own.
And his Id isn't in the mood to help. "This woman really has it bad for you, doesn't she?" Ray says, and this conflation of love and hate is exactly what Victoria admits to:
FRASER: You must really hate me for what I did.
VICTORIA: Yeah. Hate. Love. Those two emotions about cover it.
The way Victoria stages this confrontation--as, we are beginning to understand, she has staged EVERY encounter between the two of them--reveals a hell of a lot. The choice of a strip joint ("And, Ben? Bring a lot of quarters.") suggests that Victoria feels she has prostituted herself to Fraser (suggesting another reason for her anger, too: from this perspective, she put out and he didn't pay up), also that she's going to make him pay (... and pay and pay ...) for betraying her (as she sees it), also a message to Fraser, that he can look, but not touch, that on some level, that's been the truth all along: another way of saying "you don't know me." Possibly a way even of trying to rub his face in that, to force him to admit she isn't who he wants her to be. Or conversely, that she herself feels like there's a pane of glass between them, like he's the one who's out of reach.
What the Id wants most of all is for the Super-Ego to notice it, to love it, but it doesn't know how to achieve that, and it doesn't know how to express what it wants--and frustration makes it cruel. There's also that streak of pure selfishness that is the truth of Victoria Metcalf, the darkness that Fraser talks about in "YMRT":
FRASER: What do you want, Victoria?
VICTORIA: You.
FRASER: No, you don't.
VICTORIA: Why do you think I did all this?
FRASER: Revenge.
VICTORIA: Maybe. But I need you. I want you to go away with me.
FRASER: You know I can't do that.
VICTORIA: Why not? You don't have much to stick around here for. You won't like prison.
FRASER: I'm sorry.
VICTORIA: I'm sorry, too. Because I need you to make an exchange. If you don't, there's a key. This key fits a locker. In the locker is twenty-five thousand dollars in sequentially numbered bills. The key's at your friend Ray's house. You have one hour to decide, and then I call Internal Affairs and tell them where to find it.
Fraser's "You know I can't do that," is the quintessential reply of the Super-Ego to the Id, but the Super-Ego is already losing ground.
I mentioned The Madwoman in the Attic in my post on Part 1, and I want to come back to the idea of doubling, of Victoria as a double for Fraser in the same way Bertha is a double for Jane. The thing about Bertha as Jane's double is that the things she does are not things that Jane, as a conscious rational adult, wants to do--they're what her wretched inner two-year-old self, neglected, unloved, and powerless, wants to do. Acts of violence and destruction, directed at things (like Rochester) that the adult Jane loves and wants to protect. In the same way, Victoria expresses the nihilistic despair and fury that Fraser can never even admit to. In Part 1, she induces him to skip work and to blow off Ray's pool night. She shoots Diefenbaker (whom Fraser loves, but whom he also finds incredibly frustrating). And, if we read Dief as the guardian of Fraser's Ego, his self, it only makes sense that things get worse and worse in Part 2. Victoria causes Fraser a completely uncharacteristic outburst of grief and pain (things the Super-Ego does not admit to feeling); she forces him to visit a strip joint; she causes him to COMPLETELY TRASH Ray's house; she coerces him into being her accomplice in an exchange that isn't only illegal in and of itself but is also dishonest even on that basis; and finally she persuades him to run away with her, which would leave Ray holding the bag on a plethora of ghastly problems, starting with the mortgage on his house and working its way up from there. This is the unchecked Id at work, and it demonstrates a lot of hostility, particularly towards Ray and towards the house that is the symbol of everything Ray has and Fraser doesn't. So I'm not saying that Fraser wants to betray Ray; I'm saying that the dark foundations of the psyche, represented here by Victoria, has its own emotional calculus. It wants to destroy what it can't have. "You never should have introduced me to your friends," Victoria says to Fraser. She is trying to destroy Fraser's life both because she hates him and wants him to suffer and because she loves him and wants to own him, because her love can only be selfish. The Id doesn't have any other way to love.
But that doesn't mean her love isn't real, even if it's selfish, even if it's self-serving. She can't shoot Fraser any more than Fraser can shoot her:
VICTORIA: You son of a bitch, you set me up. I should've shot you.
FRASER: And I should have let you go.
VICTORIA: Well, you're going to this time.
FRASER: Sorry.
[he takes the gun she's pointing at him away from her]
VICTORIA: Then shoot me, because I'm getting on this train. No? Okay.
[and then one last terrible change of heart]
Ben, come with me! Come with me! You're gonna regret it if you don't. Fraser! Come with me!
[and Fraser starts to run; in a minute, Ray will shoot him by mistake]
There are several possible endings from the moment when Victoria asks Fraser to come with her:
1. Fraser escapes with Victoria, which is a completely self-destructive ending, both for Fraser and for Due South.
2. Fraser stands firm--or, even better/worse, apprehends her and sends her back to prison. The Super-Ego wins, and there's going to be nothing left of Fraser but the Mountie. A kind of Death-in-Life.
3. Ray shoots Victoria. We fall right back into the romantic clichés Part 2 has been dismantling and wallow around and have "Juliet Is Bleeding."
4. The actual ending. Ray shoots Fraser.
I like the way they make it perfectly crystal clear that Ray shoots Fraser by accident--and not just one layer of accident, but two: (1.) he's not aiming for Fraser, he's aiming for Victoria, and (2.) he thinks Victoria has a gun--and the ostentatious plainness (the over-determination, even) of the accidental nature of the shooting makes it possible to note that this was the only way Ray could stop Fraser, and that in an episode that has worked by making external and active the latent desires of the Id, Ray has as much reason to be hostile to Fraser as Fraser has to be hostile to Ray. The logic of the show exposes these reasons even as it makes explicit the fact that they are not Ray's motivation.
I also like the way that Fraser running for the train evokes the tropism of Fraser running after cars, which he does again and again--including in both Part 1 and Part 2 of this episode. And he does actually catch her; they connect before Ray stages his semi-inadvertent intervention. Symbolically, this is hopeful, just as it is symbolically hopeful that Victoria does escape, suggesting that maybe Fraser won't keep his Id repressed and frozen for the rest of his life. This is why Fraser cannot bring Victoria to justice; because to do so would be to sacrifice his entire self to his Mountie Super-Ego. She has to escape. She has to carry Benton Fraser's freedom.
"I should be with her," he says to Ray (which Ray deliberately suppresses in talking to Welsh), and while this is patently untrue as far as the romance of Fraser and Victoria goes (how long would it be, Benton, before she did shoot you?), for the Ego bereft of its Id, it is entirely true. He should be with her because they are two incomplete parts of one psyche, and the question is, without her, what's left?
This is the culmination of the destruction of Benton Fraser, the larger-than-life Fraser we met in the pilot. He's gone toe to toe with reality, and reality has kicked his ass. He's betrayed himself in every way imaginable, including this demonstration in front of Ray and Welsh and Huey and Gardino that he isn't perfect, that he's weak and fallible; he's lost the only woman he's ever loved (as he himself described her) and the only thing we've ever heard him admit to needing; he's been shot in the back by his best friend.
He ends up lying on the platform in his own personal snowstorm, reciting Gerard Manley Hopkins's poem, "The Windhover" (which among all its other myriad amazements, is a sonnet):
I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, - the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.
Both times Fraser tells the story of Fortitude Pass (in "YMRT" and "VS pt 1"), he says he couldn't make out the words of the poem Victoria was reciting. So this perhaps is Victoria's final cruel gift: the memory of something he never had.
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no subject
Date: 2007-12-03 10:19 pm (UTC)Chris commented that he felt betrayed when Fraser refused to help the mugging victim.
And yes, there was no happy ending available - Ray's shooting makes for the least unhappy ending.
Oh we've really enjoyed re-watching these and then reading your thoughts.
no subject
Date: 2007-12-03 11:17 pm (UTC)This is the unchecked Id at work, and it demonstrates a lot of hostility, particularly towards Ray and towards the house that is the symbol of everything Ray has and Fraser doesn't.
That in particular crystallized a lot for me. Thank you.
no subject
Date: 2007-12-05 11:51 am (UTC)that the reason Fraser doesn't drink isn't that he's pure and innocent, it's that for some of those thirteen years, he was an alcoholic.
This thought reminded me of a story. Have you read "The Stranger Within" (http://www.squidge.org/dsa/archive/5/thestranger.html) by rushlight? Fraser confesses to Ray that he once raped a woman while he was drunk. It happened the day after he arrested Victoria.When I first read it, it jarred with my take on Fraser, but now I can see it as a remote possibility.
Thank you for writing these posts. I enjoy reading them and they always make me think.
Comment on 'snowing'
Date: 2007-12-15 01:27 pm (UTC)I've been following these excellent posts on Due South, one of my favourite TV series. I saw your note on snow and Bob Fraser's coat. I read somewhere that snow was a symbol of madness in Due South. I wonder if that's worth feeding into your analysis - that Fraser says it's not snowing, is he denying the madness of his love?
-- Mark
no subject
Date: 2007-12-18 04:53 pm (UTC)Now if only you were doing this for my other favourite shows. (Farscape? Oh, I would pay good money to read that.)
Thank you for a great deal of enjoyment!
no subject
Date: 2007-12-24 09:54 pm (UTC)Fraser sees only her outstretched hand.
At this point, though, who ya gonna believe? We know Victoria has a gun; she fired it three times in the train station. We know she doesn't believe in leaving potential betrayers behind. And Fraser's the most unreliable of unreliable witnesses just now, save perhaps for Victoria herself.
I don't mind believing Ray. Not one bit. Though I quite recognize the show is leaving it an open question.
no subject
Date: 2007-12-24 10:59 pm (UTC)Now she may have a second gun. But I don't think there's a moment at which she can draw it, and I don't think it makes any sense for her to call to Fraser to come with her and then pull the gun. Especially since she's just proved--twice--that she can't shoot him.
Ray doesn't hear her calling to Fraser, I don't think. So he makes the logical conclusion about what's happening as he sees Fraser running toward an escaping felon, and my interpretation is that he sees the gun because he expects to see the gun.
However, comma, it is a highly ambiguous moment, and I do not insist that my interpretation is the only correct one.
no subject
Date: 2010-07-18 10:37 pm (UTC)I view the ransacking of the house differently--knowing the key is there, he does not trust it not to show up. It's as if while he doesn't have the sense not to let Victoria get at him, he's much smarter when it comes to Ray--and it's good, since IA gets the call pretty much as he starts his search.
And the diamonds get him into Victoria's car so he can plant the key back on her. I see him very surprised being kicked out of the car, instead of Victoria capping him. So, he does have to turn down the mugging victim, because he's on a schedule.
Interesting ... very interesting
Date: 2008-08-06 02:00 am (UTC)On a very practical level I have always wondered why Fraser, even though he has been in the RCMP for 13 years and is, to all appearances, a strange, but useful and successful member, would never have been promoted beyond his current rank of Constable, which is the lowest rank (as far as I can ascertain this) in the RCMP. Regardless of Fraser's oddness (and he is odd even in Canada, as can be seen in the pilot episode), one would that a successful Constable might at some be promoted. This is all conjecture, of course, since I know little about the RCMP and promotion within its ranks, but it would go with your theory.
Thanks for writing these analyses.
no subject
Date: 2008-09-14 06:30 am (UTC)What a hell of a poem that is. Though knowing it is addressed "To Christ our Lord" changes the implications a bit.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-06 04:01 pm (UTC)Yes, endings 1. and 2. are psychologically untenable.
Thank you for the lens through which all that fire and ice finally amounts to something hopeful as well as beautiful.
Took me a week and a lot of work to get hold of this episode, definitely worth the wait.
no subject
Date: 2008-11-04 11:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-22 06:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-26 09:27 am (UTC)The ending makes me terribly sad, because it really brings home that Fraser has nothing else to hold on to besides that week with Victoria years ago. It's the defining point of his emotional life, and the fact that Victoria has just broken and ruined it doesn't change that, because he has nothing to replace it with. It reminds me of the opening of a chapter from Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness:
"Sometimes as I am falling asleep in a dark, quiet room I have for a moment a great and treasurable illusion of the past. The wall of a tent leans up over my face, not visible but audible, a slanting plane of faint sound: the susurrus of blown snow. Nothing can be seen...We are inside, the two of us, in shelter, at rest, at the center of all things. Outside, as always, lies the great darkness, the cold, death's solitude.
In such fortunate moments as I fall asleep I know beyond doubt what the real center of my own life is, that time which is past and lost and yet is permanent, the enduring moment, the heart of warmth."
It's a sad enough passage to start with, but how much sadder must it be when you know that the moment you're clinging to never really existed?
- KSC
no subject
Date: 2012-11-24 04:46 pm (UTC)Eventually the show becomes becomes self referential and mocks itself. For example when Franny wants to marry someone who looks exactly like Frasier, or when she shows up on Frasier's doorstep in little more than a trench coat. This should no way to be taken deeply. Just as the constant barrage of women throw themselves at Frasier is not meant to be taken very seriously. The show provides ample explanation: Frasier is shy and naive from growing up in the Yukon. Further, Frasier doesn't really have anything in common with the hordes of random women in Chicago. The differences in upbringing and cultural values serve as the necessary plot device to keep the gag going. Though it seems that by the end of the 4th season the gag is starting to wear thin and Frasier starts meeting women. McKenzie, the bounty hunter and Thatcher (when she becomes a regular character) are all explored in late Due South.
Likewise, I do not believe that Frasier, the character, can turn off the "Mountie" persona or that it is a persona at all. It is firmly established in the show that Frasier is just like his father (Bird in Hand, etc), and his father was a Mountie before anything else. The same weaknesses are shared by Frasier. While I do think that he is running away from some emotional problems by drowning himself in his work, by itself, that does not suggest that the virtuous person we see only a mask.
Perhaps the best part of the second episode is the scene with Frasier telling Victoria that she wants nothing to do with him. After that he knows what the right thing to do is and struggles with his feelings, not his virtuous character! By setting up Victoria with the key (which he could have easily discarded) shows his commitment to bringing her in. The lapse in judgment is a human one and not a sign of a suppressed alter-ego.
With the diamonds, the cash and Ray's career safe, Frasier cannot bring himself to shot Victoria. Only after pleading for him does Victoria get Frasier to chase the train with the same determination he pursued bad guys in the previous episodes. There is no question that he wants to be with Victoria, but I also believe there is no questioning the -inner- conflict between his emotions and his duty; a theme explored in the conversation with Frasier Sr. in the break room. This is what I believe happens on the platform.
Victoria is attractive to Frasier not because she is a part of him, but because she is completely unavailable and they live completely different lives. The darkness in her soul that Frasier mentions in "You Must Remember This" is ultimately the thing that makes it impossible for Frasier to really connect with her. Just as it was impossible for him to connect with his father or mother. This type of relationship is the only one that Frasier allows himself to have. The "available" women wouldn't satisfy that part of his trauma that he seems to be living over and over again. If taken into account with the types of women Frasier actually has chemistry with, I think it becomes clear that this is the case. The bounty hunter is loaded down with work, kids and moves around constantly. This makes her perfectly suited to abandon and deprive Frasier yet again.
no subject
Date: 2014-09-05 02:23 pm (UTC)If you can manage to stop shipping F/K and stop preferring Kowalski over RayV, then I will take you more seriously as an analyst of the episodes. If you keep shipping F/K, I don't think you'll be fair to RayV. Most F/K shippers are NOT fair to him, and that is annoying and stupid.
12 years later...
Date: 2019-07-09 02:38 pm (UTC)Many years ago I came across your LJ through your references to Lord Peter Wimsey & Harriet Vane. I enjoyed them & started reading your other posts, & kept coming across references to this Due South show. I had never seen or heard of it before. Not sure if I read ALL your DS posts at that time, but most of them, & it was these two, about VS, that got me intrigued enough to try to find the show. I did, watched it, fell madly in love-- with the show, with Ray Vecchio, with Diefenbaker, with Elaine, with Welsh, even a little with Gardino. OF COURSE I fell in love with Fraser. I watched VS & JIB with a knot in my stomach, knowing what was coming, but still loved it. & I got to the end of the second season & stopped for about a week, knowing that I was NOT going to adjust well to a "new" Ray. But my addiction won out & you'd written some very interesting things about Ray K. so I watched more. & by the end of Eclipse, I was also in love with Ray K., in different way. To me he's a lot like a human Diefenbaker. & while there are many shows in 3-4 that make me cringe & think WTF? (Dr Longball, anyone?), I'm very glad I finished the series. It was all worth it for Ray V's return as Armando in any case. And the show has remained a rich & full vein in my imagination ever since.
All this to say Thank You for your insights, & for introducing me to this delightful world. I've started rewatching it again for the umpteenth time & had to hunt down these posts to enjoy along the way.
Also...
Date: 2019-07-09 04:47 pm (UTC)"You can go to hell. & if you need directions, just ask the guy who's following me."