Due South: "Some Like It Red"
Jul. 8th, 2008 01:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepenny"Some Like It Red" (DS 2.12)
Original air date: March 28, 1996
Favorite quote:
RAY: Tuktoyaktuk, Runamuckluk, what's the difference?
FRASER: About two thousand kilometers.
RAY: Is that necessary?
FRASER: Not entirely, no.
Spoilers
[Before we start, one last comment about the end of "Starman": the thing that Audrey accomplishes by agreeing to let Ian buy her a drink is that she prevents him from making her into his Beatrice/grail again. It gives her more control over what his ever-fertile imagination is spinning. This is a more benevolent world, yes, but Audrey's choice there does have some pragmatic benefits as well.]
Let us admit from the beginning that in the real world, Benton Fraser (or any man with Paul Gross's physique) would have an extremely difficult time passing as a woman. It's the shoulders. And the show is well aware of this--witness the joke about Wanda and Tiff uncovering Miss Fraser's secret: she's Canadian. Thus, Due South addresses this issue of parareality (we're being asked to accept something relatively implausible vis-a-vis our own knowledge of the world) in its customary fashion: by bringing the audience in on the joke. I also suspect that the selection of that particular wig is meant to be a reminder of the meta level. As Melissa says, the color is wrong, and so is the texture. The show doesn't want us to forget that this is a man dressed up as a woman.
On the other hand, Gross-as-Fraser does a magnificent job, and one of the things I love about this episode (and I should admit, I do love this episode) is that it entirely eschews the usual jokes about men in drag. Fraser never wobbles on his heeled shoes, his make-up is perfectly applied, and (possibly my favorite detail of his performance as Miss Fraser) he doesn't go for the Monty-Python-esque falsetto. Miss Fraser's voice is the high end of Fraser's normal range, and I think what makes her voice convincingly feminine is that it's soft. Fraser's voice is always pitched to carry, even in conversation. Miss Fraser's isn't. And notice that the one point where Sister Anne catches him out (the tag on his wig) isn't actually a point about his performance per se; it's a detail. And it's less embarrassing than, for instance, tucking one's skirt into the back of one's pantyhose, which people biologically gendered female sometimes discover they have done. (I also love the bit of business where Fraser pulls the tag off and, for lack of anywhere to put it, tucks it in his cleavage.)
The other thing about Miss Fraser is that what Fraser tells Melissa at the end is perfectly true:
MELISSA: You lied to me.
FRASER: About what?
MELISSA: Being a woman.
FRASER: Oh, yes, that. Well, yeah. Yes, I did lie about that. Those weren't my clothes, that wasn't my hair.
MELISSA: Those weren't your breasts.
FRASER: No, those weren't my breasts. But other than that, everything I said was the truth.
And it was. The really, intensely beautiful thing about Miss Fraser is that Fraser doesn't make any effort not to be himself. All women are our sisters, Ray, he's going to say in Season 3, and this episode makes it clear that for Fraser that isn't just a cliché. He sees no reason why Miss Fraser can't have his knowledge of "the principles of aerodynamics, wind displacement, and trajectory," nor any reason why she should be any less ready than he is to lick things in public. He doesn't have, in other words, any prejudices about what women can and can't do, or what women can and can't be interested in. He assumes and performs sexual equality.
But. At the same time, he's also perfectly willing to use sexual inequality to his advantage. He buffaloes the evil antiques dealer with "You wouldn't hit a woman, would you?" and he demands from Ray the same courtesy he extends to Inspector Thatcher, even though he has to race her to the door of his office to do it:
FRASER: Ray! Manners!
RAY: You know, Benny, there's a limit.
FRASER: A limit? To good etiquette. I think not, Ray.
RAY: Just get in the car before I beat you with your purse.
Fraser is as old-fashioned a lady as he is a gentleman. And this is actually thematic, because it's the same ethic underlying the subplot between Ray and Sister Anne, in which Ray is trying to figure out which blame and how much he has to shoulder:
FRASER: Is there something on your mind, Ray?
RAY: Nah. . . . Well, since you asked--if my name does come up--now I'm not asking you to twist her arm or anything, but I'm just kind of curious what she thinks of me, you know, if she's holding a grudge or anything.
FRASER: A grudge?
RAY: Yeah, well, you know, Sister Anne and I, you know we used to be boyfriend and girlfriend--I mean, before she was Sister Anne--and you know, things were going along, and I wanted to get a little more . . . intimate, you know, do more of the boyfriend and girlfriend stuff, if you know what I mean.
FRASER: [with deepest disapproval] All too clearly.
RAY: Okay. So. C'mere. So. There we were, doing a little bit of this and a little bit of that, and all of a sudden her old man comes bursting through the door and he blows up like Krakatoa. He starts calling me all kinds of terrible names and forbids her ever to see me again. It was ugly, Fraser.
FRASER: I can imagine.
RAY: All right. So, the question is, do you think that someone can get over that, you know, take it in stride and move on with their lives?
FRASER: Ray, are you asking this question because--
[Ray winces]
FRASER: And you think that she became--
[Ray nods]
[Fraser huffs the sort of huff that goes with the exclamation "Men!" and walks off]
RAY: Knew it! . . . Thanks.
This conversation is, of course, in and of itself a trope: a character asking a friend of the opposite sex to explain the behavior of a romantic interest. (Willow and Xander have this conversation about Oz in "Wild at Heart" (Buffy the Vampire Slayer 4.6), for instance.*) But the interesting thing is Anne's perspective on it, when Ray finally screws up his courage to ask her:
ANNE: It must feel awful to think you're responsible for the waste of a perfectly good woman.
RAY: I am?
ANNE: No, Ray. Look. I wanted to go to Nicky Stengler's basement just as much as you did. But after we got caught, I let you take all the blame. I'm the one who owes you an apology, Ray.
RAY: Really?
ANNE: Yeah. I was a coward. After that, I decided never to be afraid of my own feelings again. That's what led me here.
RAY: So I'm not gonna get struck down by lightning?
ANNE: No. Not this time. Be a waste of a perfectly good man.
This is another deconstruction of the solipsistic phallocentric idea (which Ray also expresses in "You Must Remember This") that women's existences revolve around men. But what interests me particularly in the context of this episode is that the teenage Anne was gaming the system in the same way that Fraser does with his "You wouldn't hit a woman, would you?" (followed, of course, with a punch). It's an unfair advantage in a world where women no longer suffer all of the disadvantages that same system entailed, and I think it's interesting that that issue does not play itself out among the teenagers. Celine's boyfriend is the cause and center of a lot of trouble, but none of it of that particular variety. It's possible to argue that Celine is trying that card when she protests that Todd knew where the door to the vault is and she doesn't, but if she is, we note that it is immediately and totally ineffective. This may be mere happenstance, or it may be a subtle comment on the generation gap--as may be the disco. The boy asks Melissa to dance, and she drags him right onto the dance floor. Fraser gets trapped by his own ideas about etiquette into dancing with the short, skeevy guy, and Ray does in fact save him:
RAY: You owe me.
FRASER: For what?
RAY: For saving you from dancing with a guy.
FRASER: Well, it would appear that I still am dancing with a guy.
And this theory is bolstered by, again, the explicit commentary--as Ray and Fraser are disco-ing:
RAY: Who still does disco?
FRASER: The Saint Fortunata School, apparently.
(Also notice that Fraser can dance--you can argue that his complete inability in "Mountie Sings the Blues" (DS 4.7) is a continuity lapse, or you can argue that it's part of the persona that Fraser feels is necessary to maintain with Ray Kowalski--which is obviously an idea that I'll be returning to later).
The times, they are a-changing. Teenagers' lives are still all about the relationships between boys and girls (Celine and Todd, Melissa's angst), but the parameters are shifting.
On the other hand, the thing that does remain constant is the question about friendship and what it means--which Ray and Fraser are going to come back to again in the last six episodes of Season 2 (especially, of course, in "Red, White, or Blue" (DS 2.17). In this episode, the theme is put into play by Ray and Fraser:
FRASER: I'm sure if the situation were reversed, you'd do exactly the same for me.
RAY: Not in a million years.
FRASER: Really?
RAY: I'd never be caught dead in drag.
This is not a terribly serious conversation--we suspect that, if push came to shove, Ray might swallow his masculine pride for Fraser's sake--but it gets picked up again in the A-plot:
ANNE: She thinks she's protecting her.
FRASER: That's what friends do for each other.
Melissa, in explaining her friendship with Celine, unknowingly also articulates one of the series' ongoing preoccupations: "She's the only one here I trust. I mean, nobody's who they say they are." (Cf. way back in the pilot: "Like you, he is pretending to be someone he's not.") And, of course, the person she's saying this too is Exhibit A for the prosecution. But the problem is that Celine is really not worthy of Melissa's trust:
CELINE: You're my best friend, aren't you?
MELISSA: Of course I'm your best friend.
CELINE: And best friends, they stick together, right?
This is clearly installment 939 in the on-going serial of Celine wrapping Melissa around her little finger by invoking the talisman of "best friends." Here is the correlation with the theme of using sexual etiquette as leverage; Celine is doing the exact same thing, just with a different magic word--not "You wouldn't hit a woman, would you?" but, "You're my best friend, aren't you?" But the difference between this installment and the 938 previous installments is that Melissa finally has some perspective: somewhere to plant her feet that isn't her identity as Celine's best friend. Or "best friend." Wanda's cruel comment about Melissa being Celine's gofer is cruel precisely because it's more true than not. But Melissa has finally seen the truth; Celine pulls out the line, again, about how running away is going to be good for both of them:
MELISSA: No, Celine, this is going to be good for you. Miss Fraser's my friend, and I'm not leaving.
And it's still about loyalty to friends. But Melissa has recognized that that loyalty has to run both ways, and that Miss Fraser gives more than Celine ever has--just as Fraser and Ray give to each other.
---
*WILLOW: Things with Oz are weird. I talked with Buffy, but I have a feeling we're in guy-ville ... Like I need a translator from the Y side of things.
XANDER: Last time I checked I had the creds. Hit me.
WILLOW: What does it mean when a girl wants to ... you know.
XANDER: If you're doing it, I think you should be able to say it.
WILLOW: Make love.
XANDER: Wild monkey love, or tender Sarah McLachlan love?
WILLOW: Any kind. But what if the girl wants to and the guy doesn't? That's a bad sign, right?
XANDER: Could be. Or the girl caught the guy in one of the seven annual minutes he's legitimately too preoccupied to do it.
WILLOW: Well, say the girl's been noticing--
XANDER: Will, I've deciphered your ingenious code.
WILLOW: Oh.
Original air date: March 28, 1996
Favorite quote:
RAY: Tuktoyaktuk, Runamuckluk, what's the difference?
FRASER: About two thousand kilometers.
RAY: Is that necessary?
FRASER: Not entirely, no.
Spoilers
[Before we start, one last comment about the end of "Starman": the thing that Audrey accomplishes by agreeing to let Ian buy her a drink is that she prevents him from making her into his Beatrice/grail again. It gives her more control over what his ever-fertile imagination is spinning. This is a more benevolent world, yes, but Audrey's choice there does have some pragmatic benefits as well.]
Let us admit from the beginning that in the real world, Benton Fraser (or any man with Paul Gross's physique) would have an extremely difficult time passing as a woman. It's the shoulders. And the show is well aware of this--witness the joke about Wanda and Tiff uncovering Miss Fraser's secret: she's Canadian. Thus, Due South addresses this issue of parareality (we're being asked to accept something relatively implausible vis-a-vis our own knowledge of the world) in its customary fashion: by bringing the audience in on the joke. I also suspect that the selection of that particular wig is meant to be a reminder of the meta level. As Melissa says, the color is wrong, and so is the texture. The show doesn't want us to forget that this is a man dressed up as a woman.
On the other hand, Gross-as-Fraser does a magnificent job, and one of the things I love about this episode (and I should admit, I do love this episode) is that it entirely eschews the usual jokes about men in drag. Fraser never wobbles on his heeled shoes, his make-up is perfectly applied, and (possibly my favorite detail of his performance as Miss Fraser) he doesn't go for the Monty-Python-esque falsetto. Miss Fraser's voice is the high end of Fraser's normal range, and I think what makes her voice convincingly feminine is that it's soft. Fraser's voice is always pitched to carry, even in conversation. Miss Fraser's isn't. And notice that the one point where Sister Anne catches him out (the tag on his wig) isn't actually a point about his performance per se; it's a detail. And it's less embarrassing than, for instance, tucking one's skirt into the back of one's pantyhose, which people biologically gendered female sometimes discover they have done. (I also love the bit of business where Fraser pulls the tag off and, for lack of anywhere to put it, tucks it in his cleavage.)
The other thing about Miss Fraser is that what Fraser tells Melissa at the end is perfectly true:
MELISSA: You lied to me.
FRASER: About what?
MELISSA: Being a woman.
FRASER: Oh, yes, that. Well, yeah. Yes, I did lie about that. Those weren't my clothes, that wasn't my hair.
MELISSA: Those weren't your breasts.
FRASER: No, those weren't my breasts. But other than that, everything I said was the truth.
And it was. The really, intensely beautiful thing about Miss Fraser is that Fraser doesn't make any effort not to be himself. All women are our sisters, Ray, he's going to say in Season 3, and this episode makes it clear that for Fraser that isn't just a cliché. He sees no reason why Miss Fraser can't have his knowledge of "the principles of aerodynamics, wind displacement, and trajectory," nor any reason why she should be any less ready than he is to lick things in public. He doesn't have, in other words, any prejudices about what women can and can't do, or what women can and can't be interested in. He assumes and performs sexual equality.
But. At the same time, he's also perfectly willing to use sexual inequality to his advantage. He buffaloes the evil antiques dealer with "You wouldn't hit a woman, would you?" and he demands from Ray the same courtesy he extends to Inspector Thatcher, even though he has to race her to the door of his office to do it:
FRASER: Ray! Manners!
RAY: You know, Benny, there's a limit.
FRASER: A limit? To good etiquette. I think not, Ray.
RAY: Just get in the car before I beat you with your purse.
Fraser is as old-fashioned a lady as he is a gentleman. And this is actually thematic, because it's the same ethic underlying the subplot between Ray and Sister Anne, in which Ray is trying to figure out which blame and how much he has to shoulder:
FRASER: Is there something on your mind, Ray?
RAY: Nah. . . . Well, since you asked--if my name does come up--now I'm not asking you to twist her arm or anything, but I'm just kind of curious what she thinks of me, you know, if she's holding a grudge or anything.
FRASER: A grudge?
RAY: Yeah, well, you know, Sister Anne and I, you know we used to be boyfriend and girlfriend--I mean, before she was Sister Anne--and you know, things were going along, and I wanted to get a little more . . . intimate, you know, do more of the boyfriend and girlfriend stuff, if you know what I mean.
FRASER: [with deepest disapproval] All too clearly.
RAY: Okay. So. C'mere. So. There we were, doing a little bit of this and a little bit of that, and all of a sudden her old man comes bursting through the door and he blows up like Krakatoa. He starts calling me all kinds of terrible names and forbids her ever to see me again. It was ugly, Fraser.
FRASER: I can imagine.
RAY: All right. So, the question is, do you think that someone can get over that, you know, take it in stride and move on with their lives?
FRASER: Ray, are you asking this question because--
[Ray winces]
FRASER: And you think that she became--
[Ray nods]
[Fraser huffs the sort of huff that goes with the exclamation "Men!" and walks off]
RAY: Knew it! . . . Thanks.
This conversation is, of course, in and of itself a trope: a character asking a friend of the opposite sex to explain the behavior of a romantic interest. (Willow and Xander have this conversation about Oz in "Wild at Heart" (Buffy the Vampire Slayer 4.6), for instance.*) But the interesting thing is Anne's perspective on it, when Ray finally screws up his courage to ask her:
ANNE: It must feel awful to think you're responsible for the waste of a perfectly good woman.
RAY: I am?
ANNE: No, Ray. Look. I wanted to go to Nicky Stengler's basement just as much as you did. But after we got caught, I let you take all the blame. I'm the one who owes you an apology, Ray.
RAY: Really?
ANNE: Yeah. I was a coward. After that, I decided never to be afraid of my own feelings again. That's what led me here.
RAY: So I'm not gonna get struck down by lightning?
ANNE: No. Not this time. Be a waste of a perfectly good man.
This is another deconstruction of the solipsistic phallocentric idea (which Ray also expresses in "You Must Remember This") that women's existences revolve around men. But what interests me particularly in the context of this episode is that the teenage Anne was gaming the system in the same way that Fraser does with his "You wouldn't hit a woman, would you?" (followed, of course, with a punch). It's an unfair advantage in a world where women no longer suffer all of the disadvantages that same system entailed, and I think it's interesting that that issue does not play itself out among the teenagers. Celine's boyfriend is the cause and center of a lot of trouble, but none of it of that particular variety. It's possible to argue that Celine is trying that card when she protests that Todd knew where the door to the vault is and she doesn't, but if she is, we note that it is immediately and totally ineffective. This may be mere happenstance, or it may be a subtle comment on the generation gap--as may be the disco. The boy asks Melissa to dance, and she drags him right onto the dance floor. Fraser gets trapped by his own ideas about etiquette into dancing with the short, skeevy guy, and Ray does in fact save him:
RAY: You owe me.
FRASER: For what?
RAY: For saving you from dancing with a guy.
FRASER: Well, it would appear that I still am dancing with a guy.
And this theory is bolstered by, again, the explicit commentary--as Ray and Fraser are disco-ing:
RAY: Who still does disco?
FRASER: The Saint Fortunata School, apparently.
(Also notice that Fraser can dance--you can argue that his complete inability in "Mountie Sings the Blues" (DS 4.7) is a continuity lapse, or you can argue that it's part of the persona that Fraser feels is necessary to maintain with Ray Kowalski--which is obviously an idea that I'll be returning to later).
The times, they are a-changing. Teenagers' lives are still all about the relationships between boys and girls (Celine and Todd, Melissa's angst), but the parameters are shifting.
On the other hand, the thing that does remain constant is the question about friendship and what it means--which Ray and Fraser are going to come back to again in the last six episodes of Season 2 (especially, of course, in "Red, White, or Blue" (DS 2.17). In this episode, the theme is put into play by Ray and Fraser:
FRASER: I'm sure if the situation were reversed, you'd do exactly the same for me.
RAY: Not in a million years.
FRASER: Really?
RAY: I'd never be caught dead in drag.
This is not a terribly serious conversation--we suspect that, if push came to shove, Ray might swallow his masculine pride for Fraser's sake--but it gets picked up again in the A-plot:
ANNE: She thinks she's protecting her.
FRASER: That's what friends do for each other.
Melissa, in explaining her friendship with Celine, unknowingly also articulates one of the series' ongoing preoccupations: "She's the only one here I trust. I mean, nobody's who they say they are." (Cf. way back in the pilot: "Like you, he is pretending to be someone he's not.") And, of course, the person she's saying this too is Exhibit A for the prosecution. But the problem is that Celine is really not worthy of Melissa's trust:
CELINE: You're my best friend, aren't you?
MELISSA: Of course I'm your best friend.
CELINE: And best friends, they stick together, right?
This is clearly installment 939 in the on-going serial of Celine wrapping Melissa around her little finger by invoking the talisman of "best friends." Here is the correlation with the theme of using sexual etiquette as leverage; Celine is doing the exact same thing, just with a different magic word--not "You wouldn't hit a woman, would you?" but, "You're my best friend, aren't you?" But the difference between this installment and the 938 previous installments is that Melissa finally has some perspective: somewhere to plant her feet that isn't her identity as Celine's best friend. Or "best friend." Wanda's cruel comment about Melissa being Celine's gofer is cruel precisely because it's more true than not. But Melissa has finally seen the truth; Celine pulls out the line, again, about how running away is going to be good for both of them:
MELISSA: No, Celine, this is going to be good for you. Miss Fraser's my friend, and I'm not leaving.
And it's still about loyalty to friends. But Melissa has recognized that that loyalty has to run both ways, and that Miss Fraser gives more than Celine ever has--just as Fraser and Ray give to each other.
---
*WILLOW: Things with Oz are weird. I talked with Buffy, but I have a feeling we're in guy-ville ... Like I need a translator from the Y side of things.
XANDER: Last time I checked I had the creds. Hit me.
WILLOW: What does it mean when a girl wants to ... you know.
XANDER: If you're doing it, I think you should be able to say it.
WILLOW: Make love.
XANDER: Wild monkey love, or tender Sarah McLachlan love?
WILLOW: Any kind. But what if the girl wants to and the guy doesn't? That's a bad sign, right?
XANDER: Could be. Or the girl caught the guy in one of the seven annual minutes he's legitimately too preoccupied to do it.
WILLOW: Well, say the girl's been noticing--
XANDER: Will, I've deciphered your ingenious code.
WILLOW: Oh.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-07-08 07:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-08 07:59 pm (UTC)*hopes wistfully*
no subject
Date: 2008-07-08 08:10 pm (UTC)This is the thing I absolutely adore about this episode and have harped on it at length with friends. Fraser's version of drag respects women, instead of mocking them, as most drag on TV does. (Not all, just most- it's nearly always played for laughs and the joke is usually on women.)
no subject
Date: 2008-07-09 01:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-08 08:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-13 04:52 am (UTC)Similarly, there's also the rehash, in the season 3-or-4,-depending episode "Odds", of Fraser's poker skills. I'm inclined to give the writers the benefit of the doubt here as well, and say that Fraser's pulling his coworkers' legs by pretending not to know how to play when we've seen him in action in "You Must Remember This" - surely the fact that he can recite the whole etymology of the word "poker" kind of makes his "crowded home"s unlikely? Still doesn't explain why Huey isn't mentioning that past game, but hey, maybe they had a side bet running.
BTW, I'd like to say how very much I've enjoyed reading through these recaps/analyses. I made a throughly undignified yipping noise when I saw you'd posted a new one: looking forward to the next, but in the meantime, thanks for all the awesome.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-30 08:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-02 06:09 pm (UTC)Oh, you said that "Due South" doesn't seem to *do* continuity. I was wondering if you might write a piece on that. How is DS lacking in continuity? How does this affect the series for better or worse?
no subject
Date: 2011-10-15 03:52 pm (UTC)So we have an ongoing conversation in our household about when it stopped being funny to simply stick a guy in a dress. Because our reaction to the standard old version of that trope is not, "That's NOT FUNNY," it's, "Huh. That's not funny." And you see movies from the '30s and '40s where it's clearly enough that, hahaha dudes! in dresses! And they don't need to do anything else to make it funny.
I think this episode is an interesting mile-marker in that conversation, because, as you say, it skips all the usual shtick. But also: the bits that are funny about it are self-aware of what they're doing. It's funny, not that Fraser is wearing makeup and earrings with his uniform, but that he has only done half of the necessary coding switch and is comfortable enough that he's forgotten. It's funny in the same way that it would be funny if I was changing out of a two-piece ball gown and into casual clothing and had a flannel shirt over a taffeta skirt. And oh my, does that ever look like social progress from here.