Katherine Murray – Page 6

Marshmallows and Promises: ‘Veronica Mars’ and the Hard-Boiled Heroes of Neptune

The ‘Veronica Mars’ movie delivers on many of the promises made to fans of the TV series, but less so on the promises of the hard-boiled detective story at its core.

Written by Katherine Murray

The Veronica Mars movie delivers on many of the promises made to fans of the TV series, but less so on the promises of the hard-boiled detective story at its core.

Warning: This review contains partial spoilers for both the movie and the TV show.

When Veronica Mars premiered in 2004, the conceit of the series was simple – it was a classic, hard-boiled detective story, moved to a high school setting, where the role of the cynical, world-weary gumshoe was played by a cute teenage girl. What made the series stand out is that, rather than treating the premise as a joke, the writers took it completely seriously and used the conventions of the genre to build a topical, neo-noir world in which the corruption of the justice system comes through in its treatment of women and people of colour, and class struggle comes through in bullying that begins in the schoolyard.

Veronica is introduced to us as a rape survivor whose claims were never investigated by the police, which goes a long way toward explaining her prickly demeanour and suspicion toward the authorities. Her father, Keith Mars, is a P.I. who lost his position as Sheriff after accusing the town’s most powerful man of a crime. Together, they spend most of the first season investigating the murder of Veronica’s best friend, Lily Kane – a case that reveals the ways that the wealthy have tried to conceal the truth. When Lily’s killer is eventually caught and sent to trial, he’s found Not Guilty, in part because the jury is convinced not to believe Veronica’s testimony for reasons of suspected promiscuity. It’s clear that the only kind of justice in Chinatown Neptune is the justice you make for yourself, and the show successfully mixes the tropes of the hard-boiled detective with depictions of very real social and political injustice to create a story that resonates.

In the second season, Veronica investigates a bus crash and uncovers an even deeper spread of corruption, culminating in the discovery that the mayor is a pedophile, and Veronica’s rapist is one of the boys he molested. Families that appear to be normal and wholesome are revealed as harbouring child abuse, and Veronica loses the person she loves and the scholarship that would have let her go to Stanford as the price for trying to do the right thing.

The third season drops the plot a little, but ends on a suitably downtrodden, hard-boiled note – Keith, who regained his position as Sheriff, is about to be kicked out of office again, and Veronica returns to her status as a social pariah after some rich boys make and distribute a sex tape of her. Despite trying, for three years, to help Neptune’s underclass find justice, the Mars family is back where it started, and the powerful forces against them are still gaining strength.

The movie checks in with Veronica nine years later and, while it does fans (who funded it through Kickstarter) a solid by giving them a chance to reconnect with the characters and tying up loose ends, Veronica Mars the movie is considerably less interested in all of this grimdark sociology stuff.

It turns out that Veronica walked away from the detective business after the series ended and started a new, normal life, attending law school, and moving in with her bland third season boyfriend, Piz. When she gets a call from her more exciting ex, Logan Echolls, she does what we want her to do – she throws Piz and her burgeoning career as a lawyer away and returns to the seedy underworld of Neptune to continue the doomed fight for justice as a P.I. The voiceover frames this as an addiction – to Logan (who has lost all of the personality traits that made him addictive and dangerous in the TV show) and to the adrenaline rush of living in the gray zone between light and dark. There’s a subtext, though, in which this is also a moral decision – Veronica was about to “escape” from Neptune at the price of working for the very, very rich, who’re holding everyone down; when she sees the corruption in Neptune’s police force, she realizes that this is where the battle’s being fought and, therefore, where she needs to stay.

The A-plot of the story concerns Veronica trying to solve a murder for Logan, which reconnects her both with her passion for him and her passion for solving crimes. The B-plot, though, is where the hard-boiled detective story lives, and it’s living on life support – barely hanging in there from beginning to end.

In the B-plot, the police force of Neptune has become even more blatantly (and ham-fistedly) corrupt than before. They’re conducting stop and frisk searches, planting evidence, and making wrongful arrests. One of the best and most topical scenes in the film occurs when Keith and Veronica see the police Taser a teenage boy and Keith gets out of his car to make sure they know that he’s filming it all on his phone. This is how the little people fight back in 2014, and it’s a moment that resonates both with contemporary culture and with the hard-boiled aesthetic of the series.

Veronica’s sometime-friend, Weevil, is later shot and booked for a crime on false evidence, after he stops to help someone in trouble. In the TV series, Weevil was Veronica’s primary criminal contact – a gang leader with a conscience who carried out a violent form of justice for the underclass. He left the gang when they lost the mission, but ended up in jail. When the movie checks in with him, we learn that, like Veronica, he’s been a law-abiding citizen for years, with a job, and a family – carefully building a life for himself that distances him from his origins. After the events of the film, the last we see of Weevil is that he’s gone back to the gang. Like Veronica, he puts on his old costume and gives up the idea of walking away.

That story about how Neptune is losing the war against corruption, and how its heroes are drawn back to the darkness to fight it? That story that engages with the genre concerns of the series and invigorates them by making them relevant and part of a morally complex world? That should have been the A-story.

What we get instead, for most of the film, is a throwback to Veronica’s high school days (framed by her ten-year reunion). The mystery concerns her wealthier classmates (some of whom we know and some of whom we don’t) and the discovery of a crime that may have been committed in their youth. It’s totally disconnected from the police corruption story and mostly serves as an excuse to get the band back together, leading to scenes like Veronica punching out one of the high school mean girls, and plot points concerning invitations to parties and after-parties, or who’s dating whom. In terms of fan service, this makes sense – in superficial ways, it gives us more of the show we loved: more high school; more of our favourite characters; more cute, funny moments between them. In terms of letting us visit with old friends, Veronica Mars delivers in spades.

In terms of giving our old friends something of interest to say, the movie delivers less. While the bar was admittedly set pretty high by the series, the movie doesn’t reach the same heights in terms of using the genre to say something meaningful about the world we live in. Veronica is still a great character, but the movie loses touch with her hard-boiled roots and gets lost in nostalgia rather than digging for the gritty, hard-to-stomach truth.

In the end, there’s plenty of laughter, and tense final scenes with the killer – and the movie is crammed full of in-jokes, and nods to the fans – but something’s still missing. The spark that made it relevant is gone, and now it’s just a trip down memory lane with someone who happens to be a detective.

Read Also at Bitch Flicks: A Long Time Ago, We Used to Be Friends: The Veronica Mars Movie

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies and TV on her blog.

‘Rescue Me’ and Being Treated Like Everyone Else

Consider this a late addition to the Women and Work Week, if you like. This plot line aired on ‘Rescue Me’ almost ten years ago, but it was so interesting and so frustrating that I haven’t forgotten it since.

Written by Katherine Murray.

Consider this a late addition to the Women and Work Week, if you like. This plot line aired on Rescue Me almost ten years ago, but it was so interesting and so frustrating that I haven’t forgotten it since.

Rescue Me is an hour-long drama/comedy about a group of New York City firefighters that aired on FX from 2004 to 2011. I stopped watching after the third season (for scheduling reasons, rather than the content of the show) but, up until that point, it was a weird Libertarian blend of conservative and progressive ideas wrapped in a blanket of swearing.

The show stars and was created by Denis Leary, and you can hear his voice very clearly in the writing – which is to say that it’s sometimes very funny, but it’s also hostile toward anything it perceives as “political correctness.” Leary and Rescue Me are both invested in honouring the work that firefighters do (Leary has raised a great deal of money to support fire departments in real life), and the show is also invested in portraying a particular image of (predominantly white) working class masculinity. The straight men on this show call each other “fag,” use violence to solve their problems, and transmute any vulnerable emotion into an outward display of anger. The show is sympathetic to them without (usually) idealizing their behaviour.

The portrayal of women on Rescue Me is a lot less thoughtful, and usually falls under the heading of “bitches be crazy,” but there’s an absolutely fascinating story during the first two seasons where a female firefighter named Laura joins the team and the guys are really mean to her. It’s fascinating (and frustrating) in part because the show takes such an agnostic approach to the conflict – it doesn’t firmly side with either Laura or the guys who hate her guts. Instead, it acknowledges that she has good reasons for being upset, but takes the position that there’s nothing anyone can really do about it. It’s unfortunate, but she’s entered the masculine space of the firehouse, and she doesn’t fit in. Period.

The most important moment in this conflict comes early in season two, when Laura finally files a complaint because one of the senior firefighters, Lou, calls her a stupid twat while they’re responding to a call. I’m going to go into a painful level of detail describing that exchange to you now, because there are so many layers to what’s going on that it makes for one of the best and most nuanced portrayals of gender discrimination I’ve ever seen on television, and it gives us a good jumping off point to talk about what we mean when we say we want to be treated “like everyone else.”

That Time Lou Called Laura a Twat
The conflict between Lou and Laura begins in the episode “Balls” (for real; that’s what it’s called), when the crew responds to a call at a burning building. Lou goes into the basement of the building with Laura and a male firefighter named Garrity. They find someone passed out on the floor, and Lou tells Garrity to carry that person outside. Laura misunderstands that thinks that she’s supposed to help Garrity, so she stays behind while Lou goes into the basement alone, thinking that Laura’s behind him. He doesn’t realize what’s happened until he asks Laura for help and finds out that she’s not there. He’s understandably freaked out by this – being in the middle of a fire by himself – and, when he gets back outside, he finds Laura and reams her out for abandoning him. In the process of doing that, he yells that she obviously never learned to do her job, and calls her a stupid twat.

Laura approaches Lou later and tells him in a reasonable tone of voice that, while she understands that she made a mistake, the way he spoke to her wasn’t acceptable. Lou initially pretends that he doesn’t remember what he said, but then he calls her a stupid twat again, and condescendingly refuses to apologize, saying, “I don’t think so, honey.” Laura tells him not to call her “honey,” either, and says that she doesn’t want to make a big deal out of it, and will consider the issue closed if he just says he’s sorry. Lou refuses to say he’s sorry.

Laura makes a formal complaint against Lou, and what follows is two episodes in which the other guys try to convince her that she has no right to feel upset, before they all get sent to mandatory sensitivity training (which is a joke). The guys take the position that Laura’s choosing to work in a male-dominated field, and that this is how men talk to each other – like it or lump it. They don’t see any difference between what Lou said to her and the kind of trash talk they exchange on a daily basis, and they clearly think that she’s being too sensitive and asking for special treatment by making a big issue out of it.

The male characters remain completely oblivious to the context in which the comment was made. It’s different to tease someone or to use rough language in the spirit of camaraderie when your relationship is fundamentally based on respect. In Laura’s case, she’s well aware that the guys don’t want her there – the very first thing they do (at Lou’s suggestion, it bears mentioning) is freeze her out by refusing to speak to her when she arrives. She has to fight to get a private bathroom (so that she can shower separately) and, once she does, they take turns leaving the foulest things they can in her toilet. Laura tries various strategies to break the ice and make herself part of the group – ranging from an ill-advised decision to bring in baked goods to taking on assignments that no one else wants to do – but she’s frustrated to discover that they treat her with contempt no matter what. Within that context – the context of having been specifically rejected, excluded, and bullied because of her gender – having someone scream a gendered insult at her lands a little differently. It lands differently than the insult would land in the context of an otherwise respectful relationship, and it lands differently than a non-gendered insult, like “asshole,” would land.

The men also ignore the attitude with which the comment was made. In the episode “&#!&,” Franco, who’s Puerto Rican, tells Laura that it’s totally fine for the other guys to call him a “spic,” and therefore she shouldn’t be mad about specifically gendered insults. What we see in practice, though (in season two and, later, in season three), is that, while Franco seems okay with people saying “spic” in casual conversation, he’s definitely not okay with it when Lou (again) uses that word in anger. In fact, Lou ends up apologizing when he does that, because he understands it wasn’t cool. If Lou were using derogatory terms to refer to women in casual conversation, it still wouldn’t be a great thing to do, but it would come across differently than when he uses those words deliberately as a weapon to hurt Laura.

The men on this show don’t display any awareness of those contextual differences, though, and they instead do an awful thing that men sometimes do in real life where they make themselves the arbiters of what’s offensive to women. These characters, with their limited imaginative powers, don’t feel like they would be offended if they were Laura, so she can’t be offended, either.

To the show’s credit, Laura’s reaction to these well-meaning lectures on How Guys Talk to Each Other and Why It’s Totally Not a Big Deal is to look angry, hurt, and frustrated at being ganged-up on again. She points out, at various moments, that she would be doing a disservice to the women who come after her if she just ignored this kind of thing, and that she didn’t create the problem by reporting it – Lou created the problem by saying something inappropriate in the first place. She never changes her mind about whether she’s right to be offended, but she comes to see that she’s not going to get the result she wants. It’s a lose-lose situation where nothing she says or does is going to make any difference.

Lou, in the meantime, never apologizes. After Laura files her complaint, he’s called into a meeting with his superiors where they tell him that, because it’s his word against Laura’s, he should just deny that he said anything and get the other guys to make her miserable enough to transfer out. That suggestion seems to sober him a little bit, and he chooses to go on record saying that he did call her a name, which leads to the sensitivity training. He talks to Laura again after and tells her that the (chauvinist) world inside the firehouse is the only thing in his life that’s stayed constant and that, if she forces that to change, he won’t even know who he is anymore. Laura says that she’ll accept that as an apology, even though Lou doesn’t want her to.

I’m not going to say that the show succeeds in dramatizing both sides of this particular argument because, while I feel sorry for Lou, I also think his “side” – the side where he wants his workplace to be a safe space for him to say whatever awful thing he wants without having to hear a complaint about it – is just wrong. That’s not how we share society with other people. What the show does do successfully, though, is portray the clash of worldviews taking place in the struggle for gender equality.

On the one hand, there’s the worldview that says, “All people have equal worth as human beings and are entitled to the same base level of respect,” and, on the other hand, there’s a worldview that says, “All people are arranged into a single hierarchy, and your position on the hierarchy is determined by how well you measure up to the standards of the dominant group.” That means that, depending on your worldview, “I want to be treated like everyone else” can either mean, “I want to be treated respectfully, as all people deserve to be treated,” or “I want to be measured against the same standard as everyone else, never mind if the standard is biased.”

The way that the men on this show reject Laura is more complicated than saying, “No girls allowed,” because the second worldview – the one they appear to subscribe to – allows that women can enter the dick-measuring contest; it just guarantees that they’ll lose.

The male characters in Rescue Me completely believe that they’re treating Laura “like everyone else” by being meaner to her than they are to men in the same position (we see this, for example, when male firefighters transfer into the house and are welcomed with open arms, or when a male firefighter makes a mistake on the job and is instantly forgiven). They’re treating her according to where they think she falls on the hierarchy and they’re annoyed by what they perceive as her demanding respect that’s unearned.

These are men who’ve worked hard to measure up to the masculine ideal – to earn respect that they don’t feel was afforded to them just for being people. They’re not suddenly going to change their minds and decide that that was all for nothing. Instead, they defend what they perceive as their territory, by telling Laura that she’s wrong for upsetting the balance.

It’s awful, and it’s frustrating both for Laura and for the audience, but it plays out in a very realistic way. It’s scene after scene of Laura by herself against everyone else in a battle that’s years away from being won. It’s painful, but it’s really good television.

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about TV and movies on her blog.

Jeannie Van Der Hooven: Unlikable Woman Done Right

So far, this is Kristen Bell’s season to shine as the hard-hearted Jeannie Van Der Hooven on Showtime’s ‘House of Lies.’

So far, this is Kristen Bell’s season to shine as the hard-hearted Jeannie Van Der Hooven on Showtime’s House of Lies.

Whether we’re talking about the characters on Girls or (confusingly) the adorable lead on The Mindy Project, it seems like being “unlikable,” at least when we’re talking about women, has come to mean “having a personality that not everyone likes.” Far from being the sociopaths that carried Breaking Bad and Dexter, “unlikable” female characters are often women who basically mean well, but come off as being disagreeable, self-centered, or rude.

That’s unfortunate, and it raises a whole slew of questions about the way we watch television – like, “Why are we, as viewers, less prepared to love a woman who says ugly things than a man who cuts people up with a chainsaw?” – but it also distracts from the really unlikable women on TV – the ones who don’t really mean well, who hurt other people on purpose – and the challenges of telling a story about them.

House of Lies, which is now midway through a surprisingly strong third season, has lately devoted a lot of time to the really unlikable woman in the form of Jeannie Van Der Hooven (Kristen Bell), a calculating, manipulative business management consultant who’s not only willing, but happy to destroy whoever she has to as part of her climb to the top.

House of Lies has always traded in unlikable characters – in fact, one of the problems with the first season was that there was no one to cheer for. The heroes are a team of management consultants who bullshit their clients (equally unlikable representatives of corporate America) into paying them outrageous sums of money for absolutely nothing. They sometimes crush the companies they work with, order massive layoffs, and knowingly promote products and services that are dangerous, fraudulent, or exploitative. Advertising for the third season has tried harder to frame the show as a contest between evil and evil, where we cheer for Jeannie and her one-time boss, Marty (Don Cheadle), because they’re smart and the people they’re screwing over are often equally bad. Since the start of season two, the show has worked to clarify that it isn’t a big ode to capitalism and that it’s aware of its characters’ failings.

That’s been a successful strategy overall, but things really clicked this season when Jeannie, who was never that soft to begin with, hardened up into a white-collar sociopath. It’s a move that takes all of Kristen Bell’s unflappable, charismatic charm, and transforms it into the calculated veneer of a cold-hearted snake, and it’s the most thrilling thing I’ve ever witnessed on this show.

Having split off from Marty at the end of season two, Jeannie begins season three on a high. She’s been given a big promotion at the management firm and heads her own team of consultants. She’s got the boss in her pocket, and one of the first things we see her do is steal a major account from one of her peers.

In what’s probably a nice bit of foreshadowing, Marty has a trippy dream right around the same time in which Jeannie, who’s come to kill him, is so consumed with getting revenge, and so certain of her impending triumph, that she doesn’t see danger sneak up from behind.

The next thing we know, Jeannie walks into work to discover that the firm has re-hired an old enemy of hers, a misogynist jerk called The Rainmaker. Jeannie got him fired in the first season by confessing that she slept with him to further her career (the confession itself was a calculated attempt to save her own job), and now he’s replacing pocket boss, and starting a boys club for boys with the guy she stole an account from.

The writers help us to cheer for Jeannie by reframing The Rainmaker’s actions as sexual harassment (something that wasn’t made clear in the first season) and by showing us that, regardless of what might do, she’s always going to be on the outs as a woman. They used a similar strategy with Marty in season two, highlighting the racism he faced as a Black man, and, in both cases, it’s an effective way of bringing us around to the characters’ sides. Although they’re both very greedy, conniving people, they’re also at an unfair disadvantage. It doesn’t erase our disapproval of their methods, but it helps us to celebrate their wins.

With only a few hours to process The Rainmaker’s threatening return, Jeannie completely changes her strategy, screws over Marty, steals a major client from the firm, and uses it as leverage to get equity in Marty’s private consulting company. As a parting “fuck you” to the firm, she convinces one of her subordinates – the naïve, gentle-hearted Benita, who sees Jeannie as a mentor – to torch her own career by reporting details the firm’s shady dealings to the press. To underscore what a cynical, self-serving move this is, Jeannie gives what initially appears to be a sincere speech about how she admires Benita’s principles – how they remind her of the girl she used to be – that gradually starts to turn sour as we realize she’s setting Benita up.

We can practically hear the music from Game of Thrones start to play as Jeannie climbs into the elevator, so ruthless is her victory. The following episode finds her reunited with Marty, at Kaan and Associates, where she wastes no time in alienating one of her new subordinates, Caitlin. When a client makes inappropriate sexual comments to Caitlin during a meeting, Jeannie appears to stand up for her, only to reveal, later, when Caitlin tries to thank her, that her only motive was to align herself with the client’s more decorous business partner. This is followed by an impatient, condescending lecture about how much Caitlin sucks at her job, to which she can only say “wow.”

What’s interesting about the scene – other than the fact that it passes the Bechdel Test with flying colours – is that the show allows Jeannie to be correct in the substance of what she’s saying at the same time as being bankrupt of any human warmth or compassion. It’s not an “awkward moment” kind of unlikeableness, where maybe she meant to say something nice but was hampered by some minor personality flaws – she’s being harsh on purpose. And, in back to back episodes, we see this come out specifically in situations where we might normally expect her to nurture, encourage, or support other women who look up to her. It’s a dynamic we don’t often see on TV (especially not from this side), and it’s fascinating to watch.

Jeannie finishes the episode off by going home early, and making sure that Marty sees that she’s going home early, in order to remind him that he’s not in charge. Marty, who’s been trying to make peace with Jeannie, and sees her as being somewhat of a friend, explains in a fairly heartfelt way (while still trying to re-establish control) that he worked very hard all his life to have something that was his, and that she should appreciate what it means that he gave her half of it. Jeannie rejects him and says, “You didn’t give me anything. I took it.”

The moment she says it, we know that it’s true. Everything she’s done makes sense from a practical point of view, but there’s a meanness, and an anger underneath. This is a woman who knew she was taking half of his dream and did it, in part, just to hurt him.

Jeannie’s story line this season isn’t just interesting because of the way it characterizes women, but because it represents House of Lies becoming what I think it wants to be — evil versus evil; the smart and the mean outfoxing each other; what Marty and Jeannie have made themselves into, to take things from people they hate.

I’m loving this season more than I thought I could love House of Lies, and it’s all down to one of the worst people I’ve ever seen. A woman I would never want to be in the same room with, who’s vindictive, and greedy, and mean, at the heart of a story about power and people who scrape themselves raw just to get it.

I’m excited to see how this ends.

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about TV and movies on her blog.

‘Battlestar Galactica’: The Show Where All of the Women Die

Taken in the larger scope of what’s available, it’s so rare to find a TV show with so many great parts for women – so many characters who are interesting and smart and competent and vital to the stories they live in – that it’s kind of a bummer when all of them die. That said, I do think there’s a case to be made for why this may not be a horrible choice.

Um… spoilers for Battlestar Galactica.

What Battlestar Galactica is
To recap for anyone who isn’t familiar with the show but still wants to hear about death, Battlestar Galactica (2004) is a remake of the original series, in which humanity lives on a ragtag group of spaceships because robots are trying to kill everyone. The robots are called Cylons, and they look like human people, and it’s a metaphor for how the Other is really the same as we are, and that’s a lesson we need to learn to make peace.

In practical terms, there are twelve models of humanoid Cylon and multiple copies of each. So, whenever a Cylon dies (with a few specific exceptions) he or she downloads into a new, identical body and gets to come back again.

The main story line is about how the ragtag band of humans tries to find a mythical planet called Earth with the Cylons acting (mostly) as antagonists along the way. There’s also a supernatural/religious element in which there are prophecies and angels, and God has a special plan to save both the humans and Cylons by making the most vile man in their number his prophet.

Laura Roslin is the president, Kara “Starbuck” Thrace is the hotshot viper pilot, and there are videos on YouTube that recap the first three seasons if you want to know what happens.

As other Bitch Flicks writers have previously discussed, there are a lot of really good, well-written, interesting female characters, human and Cylon alike. And almost every single one of them gets killed.

Teach the Controversy: What We Mean When We Say “All of the Women Die”
As the show was winding down in its final season, Slate ran an article by Juliet Lapidos called “Chauvinist Pigs in Space” that criticized several aspects of the way women are filmed and portrayed on BSG. Among other points, Lapidos argued that, “The main female characters are all dying, dead, or not human” and that this trend sent the unintentional message that “women…just can’t hack it when the going gets rough.” The piece prompted several responses, including this one from Slant, but Lapidos wasn’t the only one saying it; similar comments were popping up on message boards and blogs (by which I mean Live Journal, because that’s where we all hung out in 2009, amirite?), especially after the series finale aired, and both Starbuck and Roslin were down for the count.

One common response to Lapidos’ article, and to the more general complaint that so many women die on this show, is to either start listing all of the male characters who died – and, since the overall death toll on this series was high, it’s a very long list, or to argue that, hey, there are still cylon women alive at the end of the show, and they’re women, too, goddammit. The problem is that comparing the number of dead characters, or human versus Cylon characters, doesn’t get at the real issue. A better way to ask the question is, “Who, of all the characters on the show, was able to survive four whole seasons without getting killed?”

On the men’s side, we’ve got all three of the leads (William Adama, Apollo, and Gaius Baltar), several important secondary characters (including Chief Tyrol, Colonel Tigh, and Helo), and a few other randoms who we never got to know that well. On the women’s side, we’ve got more randoms and (probably) a minor character named Seelix who does not appear in the final episode.

That’s all.

All of the non-Seelix women we know, including all of the lead female characters, have died. The human women are gone, and every Cylon woman left standing at the end died on screen earlier in the series. Tyrol and Tigh are also Cylons, and they didn’t have to die ever.

While I don’t like her phrasing that much, I have to agree with Lapidos that there’s a sense in which this doesn’t sit well. A sense in which it seems like, intentionally or not, the show is telling us that capable women need to die, either as a warning to the rest of us (“the price for being good at things is that you won’t survive”), or as a way of making the audience feel safe around them. Sort of like how you feel safe at the end of a monster movie when the monster gets swallowed by lava – like, don’t be afraid! These women are not roaming the Earth, continuing to be really awesome. They’re dead, like Xena, and the threat is contained.

Um… spoilers for Xena: Warrior Princess.

On a personal note, as a woman who’s watching TV, it’s also just kind of a downer. Taken in the larger scope of what’s available, it’s so rare to find a TV show with so many great parts for women, so many characters who are interesting and smart and competent and vital to the stories they live in – that it’s kind of a bummer when all of them die.

That said, I do think there’s a case to be made for why this may not be a horrible choice, so…

Why This May Not Be a Horrible Choice
Like almost every TV show, Battlestar Galactica is a mixed bag when it comes to storytelling. Some of the women die stupid deaths, but some of them die pretty good ones that follow from actively participating in the world in which this story takes place.

Starting on the Bad Death side, the main example that Lapidos focuses on is Chief Tyrol’s wife, Cally, and how she gets murdered by Tyrol’s Cylon mistress on her way to commit suicide. That’s a fair death to focus on, because it’s probably the worst, especially when paired with the mistress’ murder (by Tyrol!) in the series finale, which was just a WTF moment that got buried in all of the other explosions and stories that came to a close.

After she’s married to Tyrol, Cally is almost completely defined by her relationship with him and, even before they get married, it sometimes feels like her only role in the story is be jealous because he’s with someone else. Her death happens firstly as a surprise switcheroo for the audience, and secondly as a way to complicate Tyrol’s relationship with his boring, boring mistress who was never that great of a character, either. The show does this last minute thing where it tries to take us inside Cally’s experience when she finds out her husband’s a Cylon, but it’s really too little, too late.

Also in the not-such-a-great-death category are popular secondary characters Dualla (who shoots herself in the head out of nowhere during the final season) and Kat, who gets a very special, very manipulative episode all about her, so that we can learn about her backstory and feel bad when she gets radiation poisoning, which she gets by addressing a problem that also only exists in that one episode.

In fairness to the show, though, there are plenty of pointless, annoying, cannon fodder, and/or emotionally manipulative deaths to go around for both men and women. Starbuck has a dead boyfriend who exists only to create tension between her and Apollo, and she’s lost some male pilots just so she’ll feel bad about what a crap teacher she was. Roslin’s sidekick Billy gets offed pretty randomly when he no longer serves the story, and the whole point of his death is to show us that Dualla and Apollo were mean to him on the last day that he was alive (and he was too gentle to live in this world, or something).

That said, because all of the women die, it makes sense that viewers would take a more critical attitude to examining how they die and to what purpose in the story.

And that’s where it starts to seem like it might not be a horrible choice because, while some of the women die stupidly, a lot of them die because women are the do-ers of Battlestar Galactica. They’re making things happen; they’re driving the story, and, when the supernatural element rears its head, they’re the prophesized saviors of the human and Cylon race.

Like a lot of militaristic stories, Battlestar Galactica measures its characters’ heroism partly through their capacity to suffer, both physically and emotionally. And unlike a lot of stories, BSG splits its heroic suffering pretty evenly between its male and female characters.

Starbuck is the action hero of the story – she goes on the dangerous missions, she gets the crap kicked out of her by robots, she has a tragic backstory with a dead boyfriend and an abusive mother, and she has a special destiny that requires her to sacrifice herself to save the people she loves. Roslin finds out that she has terminal cancer on the same day that she becomes President, and in order to lead, she has to overcome the fear that she feels for herself. During the last season, her body is falling apart just like the Galactica is falling apart, like tenuous hopes for the future are falling apart, and the question is whether any of those things will hold together long enough to find Earth. She and the beat-up old spaceship are both trying to complete their final missions by bringing the people to Earth.

Starbuck and Roslin are two of the most important characters on the show, and one could make the argument that, along with Gaius Baltar, they make up a trinity of the most important characters on the show, in terms of moving the primary story line forward. They die in the process, but it’s part the heroic journey.

Even some of the other, more perfunctory deaths come from a pretty strong place. Admiral Cain is there for three episodes before she bites it, but her character is right at the center of everything and killed as a direct result of the choices she makes as a leader (to place revenge above everything else). Athena, a Cylon, has her husband kill her so that she can download into another body on a Cylon ship and rescue her kidnapped baby – it’s pretty badass. Ellen Tigh gets murdered for betraying the humans to the Cylons. D’Anna Biers dies multiple times while investigating the identities of the final five Cylons (who are unknown to the remaining seven). The list goes on. In a universe where lots of people die as the product of doing, many female characters die because they do something that affects the story.

This is one of those instances where everyone’s a little bit right. It’s legitimately kind of annoying that, in a story full of strong, well-written women, none of them but (probably) Seelix can manage to survive. The television landscape being what it is, it makes you wonder what’s going on there. At the same time, and without this cancelling out the annoyance, a lot of the women died because they were such good characters and because the show was fairly egalitarian in determining who would drive the story.

Personally, I wish that in those last, sweeping shots of the surviving characters standing on Earth, we had seen Cally, or Dualla, or Kat, or someone we cared about who was female and lived for four years. I wish that it seemed possible, in the BSG universe, to be female and live for four years. And that feeling exists side-by-side with my joy at having such great characters to begin with.

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer and couch potato who yells about movies and TV on her blog.

When I Say Go We Go: Popular Feminism and ‘Spice World’

Some people see the Spice Girls as champions of female empowerment, and others as mindless actors in a consumerist pantomime of feminism. Like most artifacts of pop culture feminism, the Spice Girls presented an image that was neither perfectly laudable nor perfectly awful and shaming – they gave us a sincere attempt at female empowerment that wasn’t entirely free from the culture they lived in.

Some people really hate the Spice Girls. I’m not one of them.

We can’t really talk about Spice World without talking about the Spice Girls, in general, and why everybody seems to love and hate them.

Since “Wannabe” first topped the charts in 1996, the public attitude toward the Spice Girls has whipped back and forth between love and rejection faster than Willow Smith’s hair (because remember when that was a thing? This is a timely pop music joke). Some people see the Spice Girls as champions of female empowerment, and others as mindless actors in a consumerist pantomime of feminism. Like most artifacts of pop culture feminism, the Spice Girls presented an image that was neither perfectly laudable nor perfectly awful and shaming – they gave us a sincere attempt at female empowerment that wasn’t entirely free from the culture they lived in.

It’s hard to remember, because they looked so old when we were twelve, but the Spice Girls were a group of very young women (aged 18-22, when the band first formed) who wanted to be professional entertainers and answered a casting call beginning with the words, “R. U. 18-23 with the ability to sing/dance?” This is not an auspicious beginning for ground-shaking social and political work.

If you’re curious, or hungry to hear all the details of how terrible the pressure-cooker of fame really feels when the whole world is calling you fat, the one-hour documentary, Spice Girls: Giving You Everything, includes footage of the shockingly young, shockingly ordinary-looking Spices auditioning and rehearsing their first songs. It also includes some fairly well-spoken and introspective reflections on what it was like to live in the whirlwind of temporary Spice fame, and stories that should put to rest the idea that these women were mindlessly doing whatever a man said to do.

It isn’t hard to attack them; if I were a baby feminist scholar in undergrad, still getting used to my claws, the Spice Girls would make for some easy, delicious prey. They dress really sexy; they’ve each been reduced to a single personality trait; one of them is supposed to be childlike and that’s kind of creepy; the Black one is “scary” and that feels weird; the band was forged in the fires of consumerism, and that seems pretty evil to me – I’m licking my chops just thinking about it, but wait!

To paraphrase Camille Hayes, let’s remember that not everyone has a degree in Sociology and Gender Studies. Some people are just doing their best on their own, and, rather than demonizing them for not doing well enough, let’s at least acknowledge that we’re on the same team.

Considering that they were a bunch of 20-year-olds in a manufactured pop band, the Spice Girls did a pretty good job of carrying the feminist flag. They didn’t say or do anything radical and challenging; they didn’t provide stunning new insights into gender equality. The explicit message they preached (to their core audience of tween-aged girls) was that friendship is important, and so is self-expression, and girls are just as good as boys. That’s not earth-shattering stuff, but they also modelled through their behaviour that women can be confident and ambitious – outspoken, funny, loud, accomplished – and still receive mainstream acceptance.

The Spice Girls were competent performers who made decisions that they believed would further their careers. Were they perfect? No. Is it important to discuss the ways that Spice feminism falls short, in order to shed light on larger cultural and societal problems? Yes. But they were rowing in the same direction as the rest of us, even if their strokes weren’t especially powerful, so let’s all just ease up a bit, yeah?

The Part Where I Actually Talk About The Movie
Okay, right. So, there was a movie. Spice World was filmed at the height of the band’s popularity in 1997, and released five months before Geri Halliwell announced she was leaving the group. As of this writing, it enjoys as 29 percent Fresh Rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

The film follows the Spice Girls’ fictionalized Spice adventures as they tour in a massive, double-decker Spice bus and learn lessons about the importance of friendship, etc, etc. The adventures range from the commonplace (going to a fancy party) to the outlandish (making first contact with aliens), and the whole thing is wrapped in a framing story about movie executives pitching the worst, most random, half-assed tie-in movie ever (i.e., the movie we’re watching). Add to that roughly a million cameos from other celebrities, a whole bunch of singing, and a villain who makes cryptic pronouncements under the soft cloak of darkness, and you have not yet begun to imagine all of the nonsense packed into this film.

I don’t know why so many people hate it.

It’s bad, but it’s purposely bad – it’s a campy, ironic comedy that makes fun of the idea of the Spice Girls as a manufactured, highly commercialized product. It sells the central Spice Girl fantasy – that being a pop star means hanging out with your very best friends and occasionally rehearsing in between wacky adventures – and it includes a fake Spice Girl origin story – that they began as best friends who spontaneously formed a band one day – but it also addresses many of the criticisms people had of the band in a tongue-in-cheek way. It’s actually kind of smart.

For example, one of the (valid) criticisms people have made of the Spice Girls is that, by reducing each member to a single personality trait or caricature, the band is participating in an ugly interaction of consumerism and patriarchy in which women are a commodity that comes in five types. Spice World is full of scenes that make fun of these simplified personas and highlight the fact that these women are actually whole human beings. They talk about things that have nothing to do with their Spice personalities, like chess, and manta rays; they do unflattering impressions of each other performing their Spice personalities; and they complain that everyone stereotypes them while (deliberately and obviously) acting out the stereotypes in question.

They also drive a bus over a model bridge and sleep in a haunted mansion. It’s not The Color Purple. But the movie is self-aware enough, and self-reflexive enough, that it ends up being a fun, playful story that ultimately resists the idea that there are Five Types of Women defined by specific traits.

It’s also a mainstream movie aimed at young girls where the heroes are all women who make their own decisions and who are way more concerned with their careers, their friendships, and chasing their dreams than they are with meeting some boys. In fact, the topic of boys comes up very rarely in Spice World, as though it’s possible for a woman to get through the day without raising the subject at all.

There’s this scene early on in the film, where the Spice Girls are meeting with fans, and they decide to ditch the planned trip on the Spice bus and run off to make their own fun. Mel B. says, “When I say go, we go,” and then they sprint away from the bus, dragging ten-year-old girls behind them, into adventure and freedom and Doing Your Own Thing and other big movie clichés – and maybe I’m getting soft in my old age, but I can think of worse heroes for those girls to have.

Spice World isn’t going on my imaginary shelf of Greatest Movies, but it captures a really interesting moment in pop culture history, and an interesting look at feminist ideals, as filtered through and expressed by mainstream entertainers.

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer and couch potato who yells about TV and movies on her blog.