Due South: "Starman"
May. 9th, 2008 04:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepenny"Starman" (DS 2.11)
Original air date: February 22, 1996
Favorite quote:
RAY: How do I get out of this town?
MOTEL CLERK: Left at the corner.
RAY: Well, I don't have a car.
MOTEL CLERK: Then you have a problem.
RAY: You have no idea. Is there a car rental agency?
MOTEL CLERK: Apollo Thirteen Rentals.
RAY: How about a bus?
MOTEL CLERK: Last one went through an hour ago.
RAY: Does the space shuttle fly over any time soon?
MOTEL CLERK: Ask Bob.
RAY: I'd rather gouge my eyes out with a dull spoon.
[she offers him a spoon]
RAY: No, no, it's just an expression.
Spoilers.
I find Ian MacDonald every bit as annoying as Ray does, so my love for this episode is not vast, but I do think it's extremely interesting--and not for the X-Files parody, either. "Starman" returns to the same questions that "You Must Remember This" and "Victoria's Secret" posed, about what romantic love is, and isn't, and although it softens the blow slightly at the end, it is a scathing and sometimes cruel critique of ideas about love that both Fraser and Ray have voiced.
The critique can be divided into two parts. First is Ian's description of what love means: "A woman as precious as you, as gentle as you, should be cherished and nurtured, treated like a hot house flower. Protected and preserved in the delicate warmth of her own . . . humidity. [...] Because when you love a woman, when you really love a woman, that's what you do. Because that's what you should do." Notice that while Audrey is little and blonde and very pretty (and I can't shake the idea that she's named after the spectacularly dimwitted Audrey to whom Seymour is so devoted in Little Shop of Horrors) she does not need to be protected or nurtured. She's a scientist working with the military, and she's the person in charge. The Colonel rebukes her, but she's the one giving the orders to the other scientists. She's a professional. Far from having been abducted, she simply says to Ian, "I had to go to work." And when we look back at Ian from this perspective, we see how ridiculous his whole cloud castle is, because Ian is nobody's idea of a stalwart protector. ("No, take me," he says, "I'm the dominant species," which is both ridiculous and insulting. First of all, Ian MacDonald isn't the dominant anything; secondly, Audrey's just as much the "dominant species" as he is; and thirdly, if he means that, as a man, he's the dominant gender, well, see above re insulting.)
And we've seen this before. Ray tries to protect Suzanne; she turns out to be a Fed, and in fact ends up protecting Ray by not reporting that he tried to let her go. Fraser tries to protect Victoria; she turns out to be actively framing him for murder. In all three cases (Suzanne, Victoria, Audrey), the woman doesn't need to be protected. The man's offered protection is both useless and ludicrous. Even worse is the case of Irene Zuko, in which Ray's attempts to "protect" her result in her death.
So that's point one. Point two is the idea of love at first sight--or first encounter, since Fraser is focused on Victoria's voice rather than her face. But otherwise, the parallels are again painfully clear. Ian describes it: "The minute I saw her, it was magic. Like summer lightning. I knew, I knew, the minute that I saw her, that this was the woman I would spend the rest of my life with." Compare with Ray in "You Must Remember This": "What about love? What about that moment when you know that this is the woman you want to spend every waking hour with for the rest of your life?" What turns Ian's story from cliché to critique is that Ian is, unexpectedly, being literally truthful. As Audrey says at the end of the episode, "For me, it takes more than forty-two minutes." Ian's grand passion for a woman he has literally just met is ridiculous and we are encouraged to see that it is ridiculous, to see that this model of romantic love does not work. Ian trots out all the appropriate clichés to defend himself:
IAN: I knew everything I needed to know about her, okay?
RAY: Like what?
IAN: Like who she was inside. I didn't have to ask her a bunch of stupid questions. I took one look at her and I knew who she was. In here.
Compare the mutual recriminations between father and son in "Victoria's Secret":
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.
And there's even an implicit echo of Fraser's further condemnation of his father--"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."--in the repeated description of the moment at which Ian put his mother's ring on Audrey's finger. Ian says (and Ray will later pick up the line): "The minute I slipped it on her finger, her eyes, they lit up, like a kid at Christmas." When as viewers, we know that's not true. We saw Audrey's reaction, which was nervous bafflement. Ian doesn't see her, any more than Ray saw Suzanne (or Irene), or Fraser ever saw Victoria.
And that's what Ray is admitting when he finally blows up at Ian:
IAN: What, you don't think she's crying her eyes out right now?
RAY: Not unless she's cutting onions.
IAN: You're harsh, man. You're really harsh.
FRASER: Ray . . .
RAY: Look, sooner or later, he's got to face the facts, a'right? No, look, kid, you're not the first guy to be taken to the cleaners.
FRASER: What Ray is trying to say--
RAY: What Ray is trying to say is, a girl sees a guy in a bar, namely you. She's got maybe a half hour to kill. Now you're not the best looking guy in the joint, but compared to the locals, you're Brad Pitt. She bats her eyelashes, she gets you into bed, and after your fifteen minutes are up, she takes your ring on the way out as a souvenir. It happens. We both been there, we all know the drill.
This is completely unlike his rhetoric in "You Must Remember This." (It's tempting, when Ray says "We both been there," to think that that's actually what he's referring to, just as he's clearly referring to Victoria, since there's no other "there" that Fraser has been.) He's in fact swung to the opposite pole. But his cynicism isn't the answer, any more than Ian's starry-eyed romanticism is. Fraser, who may actually have learned from his mistakes, points out the crucial thing to Ian: "You see, she didn't tell you anything." This model of love which Ian is espousing and Ray is eviscerating, as I said in talking about "You Must Remember This", is all about how the man feels about the woman. Ian, like Ray, and like Fraser, hasn't given the woman a chance to say anything. (One of the early points made by feminist critics about Petrarchan love poetry, which is one of the roots of this kind of idealizing, chivalrous, unequal love, is that the poems leave no room for the beloved's subject position. She is always and only an object. Due South won't let its heroes get away with that. Victoria has a subject position that has nothing whatsoever to do with Fraser's idealization(/objectification) of her.) Fraser--surely on the model of "those who can't, teach"--is advocating talking to Audrey, giving her a chance to speak for herself.
And when she does, the last of the scaffolding comes crashing to earth:
AUDREY: You know, when we met--
IAN: It was like magic, like summer lightning. You took one look at me and you knew right away that I was the man that you were going to spend the rest of your life with.
AUDREY: No. I thought you were cute. Y'see, for me it takes more than forty-two minutes.
Notice first of all the way Ian interrupts her, the way he literally tries to put his words in her mouth. And secondly, the way that she--who is not a hot house flower and does not need his protection--rejects his words. Flatly. The object of Ian's romance (a.) is not romantic and (b.) has other concerns which to her are far more important. The episode back-pedals by having Audrey hold out hope to Ian--and in a way which reinscribes the gender roles that we've just spent forty-five minutes demonstrating the invalidity of--by promising to let him buy her a drink. (which frankly, if I were Audrey, I would not do, because he is clearly a PSYCHO NUTJOB and prime stalker material). But it's an offer of a second chance, nothing more. Of course, the idea of a second chance is also fraught and ambiguous in Due South. Fraser's "second chance" with Victoria really counts as an Epic Fail, as does Ray's implicit "second chance" with Irene. (Second chances are less romantic and more successful in Seasons 3 and 4, cf. particularly "Eclipse" and "Ladies' Man.") But the episode ends, ridding us of Ian MacDonald, before we have to worry about any of that.
And, finally, notice that the people who actually have contact with the numinous in this episode aren't the scientists or the eternally self-aggrandizing Ian. They're the old couple who were simply trying, in no matter how insane a way, to reconnect with their lost son.
Original air date: February 22, 1996
Favorite quote:
RAY: How do I get out of this town?
MOTEL CLERK: Left at the corner.
RAY: Well, I don't have a car.
MOTEL CLERK: Then you have a problem.
RAY: You have no idea. Is there a car rental agency?
MOTEL CLERK: Apollo Thirteen Rentals.
RAY: How about a bus?
MOTEL CLERK: Last one went through an hour ago.
RAY: Does the space shuttle fly over any time soon?
MOTEL CLERK: Ask Bob.
RAY: I'd rather gouge my eyes out with a dull spoon.
[she offers him a spoon]
RAY: No, no, it's just an expression.
Spoilers.
I find Ian MacDonald every bit as annoying as Ray does, so my love for this episode is not vast, but I do think it's extremely interesting--and not for the X-Files parody, either. "Starman" returns to the same questions that "You Must Remember This" and "Victoria's Secret" posed, about what romantic love is, and isn't, and although it softens the blow slightly at the end, it is a scathing and sometimes cruel critique of ideas about love that both Fraser and Ray have voiced.
The critique can be divided into two parts. First is Ian's description of what love means: "A woman as precious as you, as gentle as you, should be cherished and nurtured, treated like a hot house flower. Protected and preserved in the delicate warmth of her own . . . humidity. [...] Because when you love a woman, when you really love a woman, that's what you do. Because that's what you should do." Notice that while Audrey is little and blonde and very pretty (and I can't shake the idea that she's named after the spectacularly dimwitted Audrey to whom Seymour is so devoted in Little Shop of Horrors) she does not need to be protected or nurtured. She's a scientist working with the military, and she's the person in charge. The Colonel rebukes her, but she's the one giving the orders to the other scientists. She's a professional. Far from having been abducted, she simply says to Ian, "I had to go to work." And when we look back at Ian from this perspective, we see how ridiculous his whole cloud castle is, because Ian is nobody's idea of a stalwart protector. ("No, take me," he says, "I'm the dominant species," which is both ridiculous and insulting. First of all, Ian MacDonald isn't the dominant anything; secondly, Audrey's just as much the "dominant species" as he is; and thirdly, if he means that, as a man, he's the dominant gender, well, see above re insulting.)
And we've seen this before. Ray tries to protect Suzanne; she turns out to be a Fed, and in fact ends up protecting Ray by not reporting that he tried to let her go. Fraser tries to protect Victoria; she turns out to be actively framing him for murder. In all three cases (Suzanne, Victoria, Audrey), the woman doesn't need to be protected. The man's offered protection is both useless and ludicrous. Even worse is the case of Irene Zuko, in which Ray's attempts to "protect" her result in her death.
So that's point one. Point two is the idea of love at first sight--or first encounter, since Fraser is focused on Victoria's voice rather than her face. But otherwise, the parallels are again painfully clear. Ian describes it: "The minute I saw her, it was magic. Like summer lightning. I knew, I knew, the minute that I saw her, that this was the woman I would spend the rest of my life with." Compare with Ray in "You Must Remember This": "What about love? What about that moment when you know that this is the woman you want to spend every waking hour with for the rest of your life?" What turns Ian's story from cliché to critique is that Ian is, unexpectedly, being literally truthful. As Audrey says at the end of the episode, "For me, it takes more than forty-two minutes." Ian's grand passion for a woman he has literally just met is ridiculous and we are encouraged to see that it is ridiculous, to see that this model of romantic love does not work. Ian trots out all the appropriate clichés to defend himself:
IAN: I knew everything I needed to know about her, okay?
RAY: Like what?
IAN: Like who she was inside. I didn't have to ask her a bunch of stupid questions. I took one look at her and I knew who she was. In here.
Compare the mutual recriminations between father and son in "Victoria's Secret":
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.
And there's even an implicit echo of Fraser's further condemnation of his father--"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."--in the repeated description of the moment at which Ian put his mother's ring on Audrey's finger. Ian says (and Ray will later pick up the line): "The minute I slipped it on her finger, her eyes, they lit up, like a kid at Christmas." When as viewers, we know that's not true. We saw Audrey's reaction, which was nervous bafflement. Ian doesn't see her, any more than Ray saw Suzanne (or Irene), or Fraser ever saw Victoria.
And that's what Ray is admitting when he finally blows up at Ian:
IAN: What, you don't think she's crying her eyes out right now?
RAY: Not unless she's cutting onions.
IAN: You're harsh, man. You're really harsh.
FRASER: Ray . . .
RAY: Look, sooner or later, he's got to face the facts, a'right? No, look, kid, you're not the first guy to be taken to the cleaners.
FRASER: What Ray is trying to say--
RAY: What Ray is trying to say is, a girl sees a guy in a bar, namely you. She's got maybe a half hour to kill. Now you're not the best looking guy in the joint, but compared to the locals, you're Brad Pitt. She bats her eyelashes, she gets you into bed, and after your fifteen minutes are up, she takes your ring on the way out as a souvenir. It happens. We both been there, we all know the drill.
This is completely unlike his rhetoric in "You Must Remember This." (It's tempting, when Ray says "We both been there," to think that that's actually what he's referring to, just as he's clearly referring to Victoria, since there's no other "there" that Fraser has been.) He's in fact swung to the opposite pole. But his cynicism isn't the answer, any more than Ian's starry-eyed romanticism is. Fraser, who may actually have learned from his mistakes, points out the crucial thing to Ian: "You see, she didn't tell you anything." This model of love which Ian is espousing and Ray is eviscerating, as I said in talking about "You Must Remember This", is all about how the man feels about the woman. Ian, like Ray, and like Fraser, hasn't given the woman a chance to say anything. (One of the early points made by feminist critics about Petrarchan love poetry, which is one of the roots of this kind of idealizing, chivalrous, unequal love, is that the poems leave no room for the beloved's subject position. She is always and only an object. Due South won't let its heroes get away with that. Victoria has a subject position that has nothing whatsoever to do with Fraser's idealization(/objectification) of her.) Fraser--surely on the model of "those who can't, teach"--is advocating talking to Audrey, giving her a chance to speak for herself.
And when she does, the last of the scaffolding comes crashing to earth:
AUDREY: You know, when we met--
IAN: It was like magic, like summer lightning. You took one look at me and you knew right away that I was the man that you were going to spend the rest of your life with.
AUDREY: No. I thought you were cute. Y'see, for me it takes more than forty-two minutes.
Notice first of all the way Ian interrupts her, the way he literally tries to put his words in her mouth. And secondly, the way that she--who is not a hot house flower and does not need his protection--rejects his words. Flatly. The object of Ian's romance (a.) is not romantic and (b.) has other concerns which to her are far more important. The episode back-pedals by having Audrey hold out hope to Ian--and in a way which reinscribes the gender roles that we've just spent forty-five minutes demonstrating the invalidity of--by promising to let him buy her a drink. (which frankly, if I were Audrey, I would not do, because he is clearly a PSYCHO NUTJOB and prime stalker material). But it's an offer of a second chance, nothing more. Of course, the idea of a second chance is also fraught and ambiguous in Due South. Fraser's "second chance" with Victoria really counts as an Epic Fail, as does Ray's implicit "second chance" with Irene. (Second chances are less romantic and more successful in Seasons 3 and 4, cf. particularly "Eclipse" and "Ladies' Man.") But the episode ends, ridding us of Ian MacDonald, before we have to worry about any of that.
And, finally, notice that the people who actually have contact with the numinous in this episode aren't the scientists or the eternally self-aggrandizing Ian. They're the old couple who were simply trying, in no matter how insane a way, to reconnect with their lost son.
