On Television – Page 12

The Male Gaze, LOL: How Comedies Are Changing the Way We Look

The body is no longer a Lacanian reflected ideal, it is a biological mess that often exists beyond anyone’s control. The effect of this convention is two-fold–a bait and switch of expectations but also the creation of a sense of biological sameness: man or woman, everybody poops. By placing the body in a biological space instead of a symbolic one, physical comedy is questioning the visual tendencies of subconscious desire.

This guest post by Donna K. appears as part of our theme week on The Female Gaze.

When I was taught the definitions of comedy and tragedy as an angst-y teen, I remember being struck by the way in which they were generalized. In tragedy, everyone dies. In comedy, everyone gets married. I remember thinking, “Yes, marriage IS hilarious!” But in fact, marriage was comic in the sense that everything worked out for everybody–everybody often being defined as the white male with power. Over the last decade, the male gaze has quietly been averted through a new wave of female-driven comedies. Television shows like 30 Rock, Broad City, Orange is the New Black, The Mindy Project, Inside Amy Schumer , and films like Bridesmaids and Appropriate Behavior have paved the way for comedy, specifically the role of women in it, to be re-defined: comedy is a choice. Comedy is not who will marry whom it is the choice to marry or not, to tell one’s individual story, to laugh in the face of the controlling patriarchy until there is nothing left to laugh about.

One of the hallmarks of the new class of female comedies is to subvert the “to-be-looked-at-ness” of the female form, begging an audience to gaze upon woman but then exposing the gawkers to the truths below the surface in a physical- almost biological- comedy; Julie (Julie Klausner) publically wets herself in the very first episode of the new series Difficult People; Amy Schumer’s skit “Milk Milk Lemonade” reminds audiences that the sexy booty fetishized in music videos is, in reality, “where your poop comes out”; the explosive diarrhea of food poisoning ruins the extravagant rite of wedding dress shopping in Bridesmaids. The body is no longer a Lacanian reflected ideal, it is a biological mess that often exists beyond anyone’s control. The effect of this convention is two-fold–a bait and switch of expectations but also the creation of a sense of biological sameness: man or woman, everybody poops. By placing the body in a biological space instead of a symbolic one, physical comedy is questioning the visual tendencies of subconscious desire. No longer do audiences expect to walk into a theater or turn on a TV and be greeted with a vision of feminine perfection; now they might be subjected to blood, sweat, tears, and all other kinds of bodily fluids of not just the female form but the human one. The body is an object but not one strictly made for pleasure (yet pleasure is nice too, of course).

In Broad City the character of Ilana (Ilana Glazer) sets the mood propping up mirrors, putting on make-up, prepping herself to be a vision of desire (Season 2 Ep. 8, ““Kirk Steele””). She turns on her vibrator, and some porn, and is ready for some self love: she is not here to please anyone but herself. When Danny (Chris Messina) opens the drawer of Mindy Lahiri’s (Mindy Kahling) nightstand in The Mindy Project and proclaims “Mindy has the same neck massager as Ma,” (Season 3, Ep. 8 ““Diary of a Mad Indian Woman””) not everyone might understand the implication (pssst, pharmacies sell vibrators in disguise). New female comedy isn’t presenting sex as a males want toward females; it is showing sex as a thing all genders desire, even to the point they make it happen alone. Self-love in female comedy could potentially feed into the male gaze, making him even more afraid of castration or exciting him through pleasurable moans, but what is also occurring is a normalization of female sexual pleasure. Sex and the City led the way and now movies like Appropriate Behavior (full of bi-sexuality, threesomes, and a strap on!) and Trainwreck (even if Apatow is undeniably a slut shamer!) are reminding audiences that women use their vaginas for things other than birthing and male satisfaction. These comedies are creating what Laura Mulvey calls a “new language of desire” (where the controlled and the controller are interchangeable between genders, quietly inserting the fact that this dynamic has, in actuality, always existed).

Much like the voice-over in 90s comedies that presented a personal and omniscient guide to female protagonists (Sex and the City, Mean Girls, Clueless, and Election), flashbacks are now the go-to convention used to expose the inner and past lives of women. Desiree Akhavan’s Appropriate Behavior is a flashback in its entirety, slowly showing the steps that led to the opening break-up between Shirin (Akhavan) and Maxine (Rebecca Henderson), a slow methodical break-down of motivations and personal histories. In 30 Rock, a nerdy child Liz Lemon (Tina Fey) speaks German in a short moment of memory, a happening common in the series with the young Liz sometimes played by Fey’s real life daughter. The characters of OITNB have constant, harrowing flashbacks that connect their present to a long receding past, in Sophia’s (Laverne Cox) pre-transition flashback her character is played by Cox’s real life twin brother. How can one see a character as a hollow, empty image when they are created with an entire life? A life that sometimes even edges into their fictional world? Women are not, as Mulvey says, “Freez[ing] the flow of action.” They are, and have always been, part of the action, whether recognized or not. The stories of women remain untold and the reminder that lives exist beyond their simple image, even in a fiction, is an enormous step forward in terms of making an active female figure rather than a passive one. Herstory isn’t a joke, it is a thing that roots woman in the world, it makes women makers of meaning and not strictly bearers of it.

And then come our good, old friends satire and parody! Comediennes are taking the unattainable expectations and fears of the male gaze, pointing at them and laughing as hard as possible, exposing the ridiculousness in objectification and shaming the power struggle into submission- it is almost like an S&M relationship with the status quo. When Liz Lemon does promos for her show “Dealbreakers” (Season 4 Episode 7, “Dealbreakers Talk Show,” a show that points out the faults in men that make them un-marriable: yas!), she ends up becoming so nervous about her appearance she is reduced to crying from her mouth after off-brand eye surgery. When Amy Schumer consults every possible man in her life, from doctor to mailman to boy scout, on whether she should go on birth control, it is hilarious but it is also not too far from the truth. When Annie (Kristen Wiig) wakes up early to apply make-up and return to bed before her sex friend wakes to give the illusion of flawlessness, it is a joke, and it is also, unfortunately, not a joke. Satire is a powerful way of exposing questionable societal norms, ridiculous attitudes, and insane standards; it is a socially acceptable way to challenge the patriarchy and air our grievances. If we collectively confront the male gaze through satire those in power can no longer turn a blind eye to the true absurdity that exists.

By choosing how we are looked at and creating comical stories beyond the marriage plot, we are making an enormous reclamation of our bodies and ourselves: power lies in choice. Alternative ways of seeing and being seen are created with each new story told, a visibility that is only just starting to be explored as we struggle to be better represented in mainstream media. Contemporary comedies with female leads are now ruled by countless types of desires as we are stick out our tongues at the gazing males frozen in the audience. Raising our laughter is just another form of raising our voices for change.

References

Mulvey (1975). “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen, 16.3 Autumn, pp. 6-18

Donna K. is a cultural critic, film festival consultant and creative producer based in Southern Vermont. She is a member of the Women Film Critics Circle and a writer for Hammer to Nail. You can follow her musings about visual storytelling on her blog Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then.

“Everything Is Going To Be OK!” – How the Female Gaze Was Celebrated and Censored in ‘Cardcaptor Sakura’

In other words, there was a concerted effort to twist the female gaze into a male one under the belief that CLAMP’s blend of hyper-femininity and action would be unappealing for the male audience it was being aimed at.

This guest post by Hannah Collins appears as part of our theme week on The Female Gaze.

With their starry eyes, cutesy costumes, Barbie-esque features, and catchphrases overflowing with dreamy positivity, the magical girls of the shoujo (girls) genre of anime might not seem like the most feminist of heroines upon cursory glance. Yet, the plucky sorceress’ of such cult classics as Sailor Moon can be seen an emblematic of a counter-movement of female action heroes in Japanese culture – the antidote to the hyper-masculinity of the shonen (boys) genre.

This assessment by no means disregards the problems of the magical girl genre – infantalisation; fetishisation and glorification of hyper-femininity – and shoujo characters with their typically doe-eyed innocence can be easily corrupted to cater to a specific male fantasy of virginal femininity. However, the work of the all-female team of manga/anime creators known as “CLAMP” not only combats these issues, but also, as Kathryn Hemmann in The Female Gaze in Contemporary Japanese Culture writes, “employs shŌjo for themselves and their own pleasure.”

I became a fan of CLAMP – like most people of my age – in the 1990s. As a child, my introduction to the wonderfully weird world of Japanese cartoons consisted of the standard diet for most children of that era: Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh! and Dragon Ball Z. Imported, dissected, re-dubbed, and re-packaged to suit the tastes of a Western audience, and more specifically, a male audience. But amongst the shouts of “Gotta Catch ‘Em All!” and “Kamehameha!” there was one show that really left a lasting impression on me. It was about a little girl gifted with great power through capturing and using magical “Clow” cards. She wasn’t muscly; she wasn’t self-assured; and she certainly wasn’t male. She was Sakura Kinomoto, the show was called Cardcaptors (Cardcaptor Sakura in its original Japanese format), and it was my first exposure to both CLAMP and the magical girl or “mahou shoujo” genre they helped to popularise.

Like most adolescent heroes, Sakura seems hopelessly ill-equipped to begin with, and yet her sheer determination to achieve her full potential sees her through to becoming a magical force to be reckoned with without ever surrendering her loving personality. Rather than conforming to the “strong female character” stereotype that implies that women must act more masculine to achieve truly equal footing with male action heroes, Sakura’s power stems from traits considered more conventionally feminine: love, empathy, and pureness. Even her wardrobe changes into unapologetically girly battle outfits aesthetically reinforce CLAMP’s refusal to bow to a male audiences’ preferences.

These themes of romance and friendship are a core part of the story development and instrumental in the viewer’s investment in the characters. Through Cardcaptor Sakura, CLAMP explores the complexities of both platonic and romantic female love – both heterosexual and homosexual – from an almost exclusively female perspective. As Sakura pines over her older brother’s best friend (who unbeknownst to her, is also his love interest) Sakura’s best friend Tomoyo pines over her. Tomoyo, who lives a rich and sheltered life in a female-centric household, seems to live vicariously through Sakura. Upon discovering her secret heroics at night, she begins to capture Sakura’s adventures on camera and even provides her with her signature battle costumes, which cause Sakura huge embarrassment. Yet, at the risk of hurting her friend’s feelings, she grudgingly wears them anyway.

As the show develops, we are shown more and more just how deeply Tomoyo’s feelings run. In episode 11, Tomoyo gives Sakura a rare tour of her impressive mansion home, including a cinema room in which she confesses that she watches her recordings back of Sakura in battle constantly. It seems that Tomoyo is as much a part of the audience to Sakura’s life as we – the viewers – are. It also strikes me that this obsessive behaviour might translate entirely differently if Tomoyo were male.

Tomoyo’s idolisation of Sakura is far from veiled, and yet it is not revealed to be unmistakeably romantic until Episode 40, in which Sakura must capture a Clow card that makes people dream about their hidden desires. Sakura, Tomoyo, Syaoran Li (Sakura’s rival and love interest) and his cousin Meilin visit a fun fair. Sakura and Meilin team up to play a Whack-A-Mole game and Tomoyo – as usual – picks up her camera to film Sakura in action. Suddenly, the Clow card appears in the form of a glowing butterfly and lands on Tomoyo’s shoulder. Tomoyo falls into a dream sequence, in which we see her deepest desire play out through her eyes. On a pink background of falling cherry blossom, copies of Sakura dressed in Tomoyo’s outfits call her name and dance playfully around her. We are shown a shot of Tomoyo’s face – staring in awe at first, and then relax into a smile. “I’m so happy!” she says to herself, and runs toward the dancing copies of Sakura – still filming.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAx_vfayMTw”]

It seems like an odd moment to be sexually awakened – watching your crush play a Whack-A-Mole game at a fun fair – and perhaps if the show had been targeted at a more mixed audience (or the characters were older) this moment might have been filled with more obvious sexualised content. But through Tomoyo’s own eyes, CLAMP visually summarise the complex feelings of romance, admiration, obsession, and innocent love she feels for Sakura. Not only this, but as Sakura dances continually out of Tomoyo’s physical reach, the implication becomes one of wanting something you know you can never have. Tomoyo knows by now of Syaoran’s feelings for Sakura and like a true friend encourages their romance for the sake of Sakura’s happiness rather than her own.

This “doomed” romance trap seems to be a family curse, as we discover in episode 10 that Tomoyo’s mother appeared to also be hopelessly in love with Sakura’s mother (her cousin). Similarly, Sakura’s mother didn’t return her cousin’s feelings as she was in love with an older man (Sakura’s father) in the same way that Sakura is attracted to Yukito – an older boy. Both mothers are absent from their lives – Sakura’s mother through death, and Tomoyo’s through continual business trips – yet their daughters seem fated to play out their romantic histories.

Suffering from a bout of nostalgia, I decided to revisit the show as an adult, first in it’s Americanised form, and then the original Japanese version to compare the differences. I was shocked to discover that in an effort to make the show fit the perceived needs of their rigidly defined demographic of young boys, the executives at Kids WB had hacked all elements of “toxic” feminisation from it – romance, homosexuality, and the agency of Sakura has a protagonist (even her name is removed from the title) – dramatically reducing the run-time from 70 to just 39 episodes. In fact, if they had been able to “maximise” their cuts, the show would reportedly have run for merely 13 episodes. In other words, there was a concerted effort to twist the female gaze into a male one under the belief that CLAMP’s blend of hyper-femininity and action would be unappealing for the male audience it was being aimed at. In Japanese Superheroes for Global Girls, Anne Allison quotes this from an executive from Mattel, “[…] In America, girls will watch male-oriented programming but boys won’t watch female-oriented shows; this makes a male superhero a better bet.”

Whilst moaning about all this to my partner recently, I asked him if he had watched the dubbed version of the show as a child. He said that he had, but didn’t realise until he was older that the show had probably been intended for girls. I asked him if he remembered being turned-off that the show’s hero was a little girl as opposed to the ultra-masculine characters of his favourite childhood anime, Dragon Ball Z. His totally undermines Mattel’s assumptions about the show’s gender appeal: “I thought Sakura was really cool. In fact, I loved her so much I begged my mum for roller-skates that Christmas so that I could skate around to be like her.” Even more affirming than this is the fact that whilst the dubbed version of the show ended up being cancelled, the original Japanese one ran to its intended conclusion; spawned two films; and inspired two spin-off series using the same characters – Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle and xxxHolic.

Sadly, by “butching” Cardcaptor Sakura up to be squeezed into the TV schedule alongside Pokemon and Dragon Ball Z, Western children were deprived of the tender and emotionally complex storytelling and character development behind all the magic and swordplay – and even from getting a satisfying ending to the show. It seems that whilst Japanese children are considered mature enough to deal with female superheroes, complex pre-pubescent emotions, and LGBTQ+ representation from a female perspective, Western children are unfortunately not treated with the same respect or intelligence.

Sources

The Female Gaze in Contemporary Japanese Literature, Kathryn Hemmann.

On Writing (Strong) Female Characters, Daniel Swensen.

Magical Girls: Empowered or Objectified? Wiki for SC2220: Gender Studies for University of Singapore.

The Americanisation of Cardcaptor Sakura, Actar’s Reviews.

Hannah Collins is a freelance illustrator, writer, Feminist, anime nerd, and Britney Spears apologist. You can read more of her writing on gender in pop culture at Fanny Pack and her on own blog.

When the Girl Looks: The Girl’s Gaze in Teen TV

In this moment, then, Elena is completely relieved of the conventional position of girl-as-object, and is therefore able to occupy a different position as a desiring subject. By purposefully making herself invisible, Elena momentarily evades and perhaps refuses to be defined by the adult male gaze that governs girlhood.

This guest post by Athena Bellas appears as part of our theme week on The Female Gaze.

Within contemporary visual culture, girls are frequently positioned as spectacular objects to be looked at. For example, girls are often either positioned as eroticised objects of desire for an adult male gaze, or as pathologized objects of adult concern in order to makes diagnoses about “the problem with girls today.” Both of these gazes police the borders of girlhood, placing girls under the surveillance of a watchful and scrutinising adult eye. In both instances, the girl is positioned as a to-be-looked-at object rather than an active and agentic subject, which means that it is sometimes difficult for our culture to create space to imagine the girl as the holder of the gaze. When we do get representations of girls erotically contemplating the male figure, these representations are often met with derision and dismissal by adult culture. For example, reviews of the Twilight films repeatedly ridiculed Bella Swan’s erotic contemplation of Edward Cullen’s glittering, perfectly coiffed figure as mere fodder for girls’ “wet dreams” (like this is a bad thing), and fangirls shrieking with delight at the sight of their favourite boy band are diagnosed as embarrassingly hysterical and hormonal. This contempt for the girl’s gaze in patriarchal visual culture leads to what Michele Fine calls the “missing discourse of desire” for girls, because there is a consistent shaming, silencing, and erasure of girls’ expressions of desire.

However, even within this complex web of regulatory adult gazes, there are intervals and gaps where challenges and disruptions can take place. There are important spaces within visual culture that provide representations of a girl’s gaze, and I am particularly interested in teen television as one of these spaces. This television genre often centres on representing a teen heroine’s perspective and addresses a teen girl spectator, and the privileging of this frequently dismissed point of view has the potential to disrupt the central position of the adult male gaze. While not all teen TV does this successfully, there are certainly moments within this genre that provide a significant space for the representation of girls actively gazing, exploring, and acting upon their desires. There are, of course, many great examples of girls’ gazes in teen shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, My So-Called Life, Veronica Mars, and The 100, among others. In this article, I want to explore the CW network’s paranormal teen series The Vampire Diaries, because it has depicted clear moments in which the gendered terms of the desiring gaze are reversed, turning conventional tropes and iconographies of desire on their head. In this reconfiguration, the girl looks and is (at least temporarily) able to refuse her position as object-to-be-looked-at.

In one of the most iconic scenes from The Vampire Diaries, we can see a powerful, desiring teen girl gaze being represented. Damon and Elena are on a road trip together, and they stop at a motel for the night. At this stage in the narrative, the sexual tension between the two of them is so ridiculously palpable, and everyone is screaming, “Just kiss already!” at their TV screens. Elena feigns sleep, secretly watching a half-dressed Damon sip whiskey as he languorously reclines in a chair.

His bare torso is bathed in the moonlight that streams through the window, creating a beautiful dappled pattern of light and shade across his figure. The camera is aligned with Elena’s gaze, recording the details of Damon’s body in lingering extreme close-ups.

Importantly, Elena is temporarily “invisible” in this scene – her gaze is unmonitored and unreturned as she secretly watches him. In this moment, then, Elena is completely relieved of the conventional position of girl-as-object, and is therefore able to occupy a different position as a desiring subject. By purposefully making herself invisible, Elena momentarily evades and perhaps refuses to be defined by the adult male gaze that governs girlhood. I think that this moment is resistant space where alternatives to the dominant system of desire can be explored. This sequence provides an alternative visual language in which the male figure is made to bear what Laura Mulvey calls “the burden of sexual objectification,” allowing for the representation of the heroine’s active and agentic desire.

In another scene in season four, Damon undresses in front of Elena. In the first shot, we see Elena’s eyes carefully scanning Damon’s figure from head to toe and in the reverse shot, the camera scans and records the contours of his body in intricate detail, encouraging spectators to look at him in the same manner.

Like the scene described above, his body is spot-lit, but this time by shafts of gold sunlight streaming in through the windows, emphasising the openness of his display, and the clarity of Elena’s view of him. Damon unbuttons his trousers and asks Elena, “Are you staying for the whole show or…?” The soundtrack punctuates his playful offer by emphasising the sound of each button popping as he strips off his clothing. Damon recognises his status as Elena’s object of desire, and that he is “on show” for her gaze. As a spectacular object on show, Damon occupies a conventionally feminine position – he is definitely an object of erotic contemplation and spectacle – rather than occupying the traditionally masculine position of action, moving the narrative forward, and control.

By spectacularizing Damon’s figure through the use of extreme close-ups, ultra slow motion, and dramatic lighting, the text invites spectators to look at the male figure through Elena’s desiring perspective. So, the female gaze exists within the narrative world of The Vampire Diaries, and through these representational strategies, spectators are also encouraged to align and identify with it – to occupy and explore this position of active looking alongside Elena. I think that these moments, which reverse the conventional politics of representing the gaze, reconfigure some of the traditional iconography associated with girlhood that ordinarily positions girls as desirable, rather than desiring, and as spectacles, rather than subjects. In this text, we are presented with girls who are able to find moments in which they can evade the adult male gaze, and also claim a desiring subjective position from which to look. This pushes the representational boundaries that often contain girlhood, and I am hopeful that this results in an expansion into new and even more disruptive territories of articulation for the teen girl gaze.

Dr. Athena Bellas has a PhD in Screen and Cultural Studies from the University of Melbourne. Her PhD and current research explore representations of adolescent girlhood in fairy tales and contemporary screen media. She blogs at teenscreenfeminism.wordpress.com and tweets at @AthenaBellas and @TeenScreenFem.

‘Fear the Walking Dead’ Pilot: Can It Be More?

This is more than just a “companion series” to ‘The Walking Dead’; it’s a second chance.

Fear the Walking Dead would be an idiotic title for a series if the original The Walking Dead didn’t exist. It’s even more idiotic because The Walking Dead does exist, and the people who created Fear the Walking Dead were so uncertain of our cognitive abilities that they thought they had to put the whole title of the old show in the title of the new show, or we might miss the connection. Plus, fear them as opposed to what? What else were we going to do about the walking dead?

The ad campaign, while seemingly more thoughtful than that title, is a bit too subtle — coy, even — in seeming to suggest that this new show might be kind of like Where’s Waldo with zombies. Hey, there he is in the background of those kids playing basketball! There he is down that dark hallway! My favorite is the “Footprints in the Sand” one. “Why, when I needed you most, was there only one set of footprints?” “That’s when zombie Jesus was carrying you!”

This is more than just a “companion series” (for some reason, “prequel” and “spin-off” are considered incorrect) to The Walking Dead; it’s a second chance. It’s a chance to take our beloved zombie genre in an all-new direction, correct past mistakes, and right past wrongs. They hired some very good actors for this show, most prominently Kim Dickens (Deadwood, Treme), who probably wouldn’t play a character as poorly conceived as Lori Grimes or Andrea Harrison. Or at least, I’d hope not.

What I’m getting at is, Fear the Walking Dead offered an opportunity for the creators to address the criticism of the first couple of seasons of the original series, which, if subsequent seasons are any indication, the creative people behind TWD were sensitive to, even if they didn’t quite know how to address them.

Casting Dickens certainly opened up an opportunity to feature a strong, complex woman character on the show, and setting it in Los Angeles presented an opportunity to feature Black and Latino characters more prominently and realistically than the unfortunate T-Dog. So far, though, there are no major Latino characters (Ruben Blades will make his series debut next episode), and the two most prominent Black characters on the show are either dead or missing and presumed dead by the end of the pilot.

So far, this “companion series” is mostly about the kids. Are they going after the CW audience? It might be worthwhile if they had anything compelling to say about what young people’s lives are like in 2015. So far, that’s not the case. Carl and his stupid hat are bad enough. Do we really need a Zombie Diaries or a 9021-Dead?

Dickens is fine as Madison, a high school guidance counselor who’s just moved in with her boyfriend, English teacher Travis (Cliff Curtis). There’s that horrible cliche early on, where Travis is fixing the leaky sink on his own, while Madison wants to call the plumber. We get it, “Travis is a fixer,” co-creator Dave Erickson tells us in this interview, but you might have found a more original way to spell that out for us than a routine that felt a little tired by the time they did something like it on The Honeymooners.

They both work at the school, though not much of interest happens there. There are a lot of kids and teachers out sick, but that doesn’t really jibe with where the contagion is at this point in the show. Are those people zombies already? Do they just have some idea something bad is going on so they’re staying home? Are they running for the hills? Then why do most of the locals seem so oblivious? There’s only one kid, Tobias (Lincoln A. Castellanos), who looks like he’s 35, but actually seems to have a clue. He brings a knife to school, and when Madison catches him with it, they have a chat in her office, after she covers for him with the school security guards. When pressed, Tobias expresses impossible certainty that the world, as we know it, is coming to an end. It’s like he’s already been watching The Walking Dead for five seasons. What is this kid seeing that we, the viewers, don’t see?

Anyway, solid as Dickens and Curtis are, the focus is more on Madison’s son Nick (British actor Frank Dillane), a junkie, and her daughter, Alicia (Australian actor Alycia Debnam-Carey), the kind of television-style genius/rebel who skips class frequently, and never has much intelligent to say, but is somehow accepted into UC Berkeley. Of course, Alicia has a terrible attitude toward her mom and presumed stepdad-to-be, but that’s mostly just surface teen petulance. Over the course of the episode, we see her genuine concern for her family, including her troubled older brother. Alicia has a sweet, artistic boyfriend, Matt (Maestro Harrell) who happens to be Black, so we hope you didn’t grow attached.

Nick is more problematic. Like Debnam-Carey, Dillane is a good-looking kid, kind of like the love child of Johnny Depp and James Franco, but as Nick is supposed to be a junkie living on the streets of Los Angeles, his well-scrubbed attractiveness strains credulity. Dillane overplays Nick’s dishevelment to the point of slapstick comedy, so he’s admittedly kind of fun to watch. There’s probably some tragic backstory to explain that limp, but what could explain Nick’s frequent agape looks of terror and confusion. Drugs are bad, kids, I guess.

Drugs are bad and drug dens are dangerous places, but when the hospitalized Nick tells Travis that he might have been hallucinating, but that he saw a dead junkie woman eating someone at an artfully abandoned church that doubles as a shooting gallery, Travis decides to investigate, on his own, in the middle of the night. Now, I am the type of horror movie watcher that gets annoyed at viewers who complain that the person onscreen is stupid to go outside in the middle of the night to see what that strange noise was. When you hear a strange noise outside your house in the middle of the night, you go see what it is, unless you know you are in a horror movie. Usually, the characters don’t know. Travis’ decision to traipse around a known drug den, a decrepit shithole where murder and cannibalism have allegedly taken place earlier that day, seems a bit beyond the realm of normal human behavior. That’s more post-apocalyptic behavior than pre-apocalyptic-something-kind-of-strange-seems-to-be-going-on behavior.

There are a few effective sequences, but even the real scares, as with that first zombie-chomping scene in the church, are sloppily edited and drawn-out, and the false-alarm jump-scares are waaay overplayed, as when Madison slowly walks up to the hunched over principal at school and ominous music plays (he’s just eavesdropping on his teachers to evaluate them(?)) or, worse yet, when Travis explores the church and finds, behind a door, a screaming, gibbering, terrified junkie. It’s meant to be a shock and then a relief but it’s so overblown in every aspect (other than Curtis’ performance) that it just comes off as comical.

Calvin (Keith Powers) is an interesting case. When Madison and Travis go looking for Nick, who’s escaped from the hospital after fleeing a zombie and running into traffic, they find the chipper Calvin at his parents’ house, and he does this Eddie Haskell thing where he convincingly acts like a stand-up guy who doesn’t hang with Nick much since Nick went bad. Some time later, Nick meets Calvin at a diner, where the man has been transformed into a taciturn thug, quick to decide to murder his childhood buddy Nick because Nick might have told his mom that Calvin is a drug dealer, even though Madison gave no indication that she had any idea what Calvin did for a living. Cal is a hard man, but somehow Nick, a skinny, strung-out junkie in the midst of withdrawal, manages to overpower him when Nick sees that gun that that a badass like Calvin probably should have known to keep hidden until he was ready to use it. Anyway, it’s horrifyingly unsurprising that the first major character to be killed on the show is Black. So much for progress from the original series.

It’s pretty obvious that thematically, Nick’s half-dead. That zombie-like shuffle and his demented wide-eyed looks suggest that he is very close to turning. The actual zombies on the first episode are a fellow addict, an accident victim who goes “bath salts” crazy and is shot dead by the cops, and, eventually, Calvin. It makes sense that the show would depict this contagion spreading among working and lower-class people — the discarded, the ignored, the voiceless of East Los Angeles — while the rest of the city is quick to demonize and slow to take action. That’s not what the show depicts, though. Instead, it settles for a facile metaphor, likening drug addiction and drug culture to a kind of voluntary zombie-ism. “Drugs” seems a simplistic and inapt target, and it’s certainly an inauspicious start to a series about the eventual breakdown of society.

The show’s not all bad. It has Dickens, for one thing, and she makes us care about Madison. Dillane is ridiculous, but actually genuinely fun to watch. The idea of giving us time to get to know these characters while the horror gradually ramps up could be a good one, if anyone writing this show was good at writing characters and dialogue. I still think it has the potential to surpass the first couple of seasons of The Walking Dead.

Hell Is a Future We Make for Ourselves: The Many Dystopias of ‘The 100’

As she has an older brother, her birth was unauthorized and when she was discovered she was sent directly to the SkyBox. And so on. While some of the crimes are legitimate, many are the result of children growing up in a totalitarian state. So clearly it’s going to be better here on the ground, right?

Ha!

Clarke Griffin (Eliza Taylor) and Anya (Dichen Lachman) in one of The 100’s many dystopias — Clarke Griffin (Eliza Taylor) and Anya (Dichen Lachman) in one of *The 100’*s many dystopias

This guest post by Deborah Pless appears as part of our theme week on Dystopias.

The first scene of The 100 makes it pretty freaking clear that this is a show about dystopia. We are introduced to a pretty blonde girl drawing a landscape scene using only the dirt and grime of her prison cell. The voiceover narration informs us that this picture, and all of the other pictures that ornament her solitary confinement, is drawn from imagination. She has never set foot on Earth, and she will almost certainly die in space like all the rest of her people.

Cheerful stuff, huh?

The girl, Clarke Griffin (played by Eliza Taylor), is our main character and the voice of reason in The 100, a CW show that came on as a midseason replacement last year to middling reviews, but has continued to improve and now, after the completion of its second season, officially qualifies as a “cult hit.” Based on the novel series of the same name by Kass Morgan, you would be forgiven for assuming this is just another Hunger Games ripoff. It isn’t.

The 100 is a show ostensibly about teenagers falling in love and making poor choices against the backdrop of an ever-changing dystopian landscape, but in reality the show is far less concerned with emotions than with social commentary. The dramas and frivolities of the first few episodes fade away as the show goes on, being replaced instead by a compelling and gripping drama about political power, the ethics of war, medical experimentation, torture, the values of indigenous cultures, imperialism, and, occasionally, hope for the future.

It is also unquestionably a show about dystopia. Though evident in the first scene, it wasn’t until well into the second season that I realized that the show wasn’t just an exploration of one particular dystopian future, however, but instead an exploration of all of them. Really. All of them. Every organized culture or civilization that our heroes encounter in the course of the series is a different exploration of dystopia. And while this can make the show rather bleak and hard to watch, it’s fascinating.

The basic premise of the show is inherently dystopian. Our heroes all live on the “Ark,” a cobbled together mush of space stations in orbit over the Earth. They’ve lived there for 97 years, since a nuclear war wiped out all life on Earth. The people of the Ark know that they are just a waiting generation who will live and die on the Ark with the understanding that in another hundred years their descendants will be able to go down and live on the planet once the radiation levels have decreased.

Because they have limited supplies, the Ark is run as a totalitarian dystopia. There is never enough food, water, air, or medicine. All food is rationed, all parents may have only one child, and medicine is reserved only for cases when the alternative is death. Even their shoes and underwear are handed down from one generation to the next. Break a law on the Ark – and there are many – and you die. No trial, no reprieve, just a sad farewell to your loved ones, the removal of all shoes and useful clothing, and then a swift death being shot out the airlock.

If a minor commits a crime, then they are sent to the “SkyBox,” a holding detention center where they await turning 18. Once 18, they face a panel, and that panel will decide if they should be “floated” or returned to the Ark’s main population.

Our story starts when Clarke and her fellow inmates in the SkyBox are hustled out of their cells and onto a dropship. Confused and terrified about what is happening, the teenagers (and children) soon realize that they are going down to Earth. Why? Well, as they and we learn, because the Ark can no longer support life and they must find out if the Earth has healed enough to sustain them. In other words, Clarke and all of her friends, 100 of the most vulnerable members of this society, are used as canaries in a coal mine.

The Ark kids reach the ground. — The Ark kids reach the ground

So obviously the Ark is a dystopian place. As the show goes on – obviously the kids survive their trip to the Earth’s surface – it become increasingly clear that the governmental situation on the Ark is hellish at best. One child was incarcerated for hitting the guards who held her back as her parents were executed. Another character, Octavia (Marie Avgeropoulos), committed no crime but being born. As she has an older brother, her birth was unauthorized and when she was discovered she was sent directly to the SkyBox. And so on. While some of the crimes are legitimate, many are the result of children growing up in a totalitarian state. So clearly it’s going to be better here on the ground, right?

Ha!

As the kids quickly learn, the ground is no more hospitable than the Ark was. While there is no totalitarian rule, their society quickly devolves in a Lord of the Flies situation. A hundred teenagers and children who have been locked up in prison and forced to live in a police state their whole lives suddenly have complete freedom? Yeah, it goes pretty Lord of the Flies. Then, just when they’re starting to get their act together, it becomes clear that the Ark children are not the only ones alive on the ground. There are others.

That brings us to the Grounders, as the people of the Ark come to know them. The Grounders represent another form of dystopia, this one more similar to Mad Max. The Grounders are the humans who developed an immunity to the radiation poisoning the Earth and so rebuilt society.

Grounder leader Indra (Adina Porter) and her warriors

They hunt with bows and arrows and spears, wear an amalgamation of clothes they found and animal leathers, paint their faces to look scarier, and even speak a completely different language. Heck, they even have a village called “ton DC” built in the bombed out ruins of Washington DC. In other words, they appear at first to the Ark kids as “savages,” a dystopian view of who they could become if they lose all of their “civilization.”

Fortunately, the truth turns out to be much more complicated than that. While the Grounders are genuinely savage, they also have an artistic and healing tradition that is complex and beautiful, as well as a culture that is distinct and clearly quite functional. Though tribal and very divided by factions, the Grounders quickly become the least dystopian society on the show, and the Ark kids even cease their war and try to make a truce.

Unfortunately for our heroes, though, the Grounders are the least of their problems. As the story progresses, the kids run into another dystopian hellscape, this one called “Mount Weather.” Mount Weather is a bunker, or system of bunkers, hidden inside a mountain and home to a large population of seemingly nice, decent people. They’ve lived inside the mountain, sheltered by its radiation shields, for the past hundred years. They have abundant food, shelter and safety, and even flourishing art and culture. It’s the first place the kids go that is, well, beautiful.

But that beauty covers over the horrible truth that Mount Weather is just another dystopia. This time it’s a medical one, where the people of Mount Weather are basically vampires, kidnapping Grounders and draining them of their blood in the hopes of building up a radiation immunity. When the scientists at the mountain discover that the Ark kids have an even better immunity, they decide to harvest the kids’ bone marrow, whether they consent or not.

Inside Mount Weather’s medical research facility

Not to be outdone, by this time the bulk of the Ark’s population has reached the ground and formed a camp called “Camp Jaha,” which operates under the same dystopian rule as the Ark did. And across the mountains we discover a desert wasteland of outcasts and landmines and pilgrims searching for the “City of Light.” That City of Light? Turns out to be just another terrifying technological dystopia.

What’s the point of all of this? Well, aside from the writers of The 100 clearly enjoying the bleakness of their world, these competing dystopian futures actually manage to form a cohesive picture not of dystopia but of how we ought to respond to it.

Like I said above, our main character for the show is Clarke. Clarke is smart, caring, incredibly pragmatic and kind of scary. She quickly becomes the leader of the kids she came down with, but goes on to become the leader of all of the people of the Ark, a symbol of resistance for Mount Weather, and more. While there are other characters whose lives we follow, the story revolves around Clarke, particularly around how Clarke reacts to dystopian societies. Namely, how she never reacts well.

On the Ark, Clarke was locked up in solitary confinement for the crime of treason. She and her father discovered that the life support of the station was failing and tried to warn everyone. He was executed; she was locked up. At the dropship, when the kids go all Lord of the Flies, Clarke is the voice of reason, foraging for food and medicine while the others let the world burn.

Clarke and her mother, Abby (Paige Turco)

When captured by the Grounders, she resorts to diplomacy. When captured by Mount Weather, she speaks out against their propaganda and escapes, taking a former enemy with her. She quickly establishes herself as the real power of Camp Jaha and, with the help of her friends, brokers a deal with the Grounders to go to war against Mount Weather. Not bad for a 17-year-old girl. Not bad for anyone.

Clarke clearly believes in the values of a good society, but what makes her a fantastic character is how strongly she believes in speaking out against a bad one. She has no qualms about speaking truth to power. And she will not abide a dystopia. By showing Clarke butting heads with so many different kinds of failed societies, we’re given a look at what it means to stand up for our own rights and the rights of others in any situation. I’m not saying that the show is perfect or completely unproblematic, but I do think that it has something very interesting to say when it comes to how we ought to react to dystopian landscapes.

It says that we should react with understanding. We should figure out what’s wrong, what about the society is making it so unbearable, and then seek to fix that. Clarke doesn’t believe necessarily in blowing up bad societies, though she does sometimes do that. Literally. It’s more that her arc is about seeking the good and using these visions of failed places to figure out what will work and what should be.

This is especially meaningful considering that Clarke is, well, a teenage girl. She’s the demographic of our society that we pay the least attention to and give the least credence. And yet the whole show is centered around proving how much value Clarke and the other kids that society originally deemed expendable actually have.

Maya (Eve Harlow), Octavia (Marie Avgeropoulos), and Monty (Christopher Larkin) fight together in Mount Weather

It’s not just Clarke, either. The show centers on the kids the Ark sent down, the ones society had abandoned, as they explore different kinds of dystopias. They’re a pretty diverse bunch and their reactions to these different situations give us a wealth of commentary on those dystopias.

So while Clarke’s not perfect and neither is the show, they’re clearly trying. Clarke sometimes falls into white savior behavior, and the show occasionally tries to force storylines that feel disingenuous and frankly kind of weird. But whatever. I don’t need a perfect show or a perfect heroine. I’d rather have this, a meta-commentary on the different types of futures we envision for ourselves as a species. Even better, it’s a meta-commentary where each future is torn down and reassembled by the children who will actually inherit it.

As The 100 shows us, the point of dystopia isn’t to look at the future and weep. The point of dystopian landscapes is to give us a vision of what our future could be and then to explore how to make sure it never is.

Deborah Pless runs Kiss My Wonder Woman and works as a freelance writer and editor when she’s not busy camping out at the movies or watching too much TV. You can follow her on Twitter and Tumblr just as long as you like feminist rants, an obsession with superheroes, and the search for gluten-free baked goods.

When Skies Fall, Bodies Fail: Gender and Performativity on a Dystopian Earth

In rejecting Lexi, Anne perpetuates the false solidarity and universal acceptance Butler points out in the above passage. Anne sees Lexi as failing to perform the necessary gender of her body. Lexi is the very symbol of a failed body, the failed universal woman Anne has expected of her daughter.

This guest post by Sean Weaver appears as part of our theme week on Dystopias.

I’ve often stood under the night sky, barefoot in the dew-soaked grass, contemplating the vast expanse of the universe, the sky. The stars, like little blips of life, unfold and become more prominent the further away from the cityscapes that fill suburban horizons. I’ve felt the uncanny feeling that exists when contemplating that space. I’ve also felt the familiar feeling, knowing that I am not the first to experience such phenomena. Like countless others before, I’ve stared at that unknown, that unreachable space, in which only a few have ever touched. On the other hand, I’ve experienced the gravity that tethers all objects and bodies to the ground. The weight of the sky, pressing feet firmly to the ground, reminds me of the forces that define my life and the gravity we hold so much faith in. What were to happen if we suddenly lost that faith, the sky falling, crashing down, with the full weight of gravity behind it? What if the gravity holding your body in stasis failed?

Many science fiction narratives seek to answer this question, to go beyond the familiar into the uncanny where every aspect of our existence is called into question, especially when alien beings have come to colonize the Earth and its inhabitants. It’s a dystopian narrative told over and over. Aliens discover a valuable resource on Earth. Aliens pillage and destroy. Humans sometimes prevail. Given the Earth’s colonial history, we can understand the fascination behind such narratives. Enter Falling Skies. Falling Skies takes place after Earth is imperialized by alien overlords called the Esphendi. The show focuses on a group of Americans, led by Tom Mason (Noah Wyle), his family, and Captain Weaver (Will Patton), who have pulled together to fight the alien hostiles, even naming their ragtag group of misfits the 2^nd Mass. This is, more or less, all anyone needs to know in terms of narrative/summary; to go into further detail would give away to many spoilers.

While many critics and viewers have pointed out the flaws in Steven Spielberg and Robert Rodat’s Falling Skies—such as its romanticism of white European settler propaganda and disregard for indigenous tactics of colonial resistance, to its blatant portrayal of male dominance /heteronormativity, and its American patriotic ethnocentrism—the show has drastically changed since its first airing in 2011. Although I agree with what many have said of the show, even having my own love/hate relationship with it, the show evolves in season four, and that’s where I’d like to focus in this critique.

The show shifts gears, moving away from the male dominant narratives, to finally developing its female protagonists, and in doing so reveals the gravity gender and performativity have over certain bodies, and its certain tendency to perpetuate the oppression of said bodies. Judith Butler writes, in her book of critical feminist/queer essays Bodies That Matter, on the discursive limits of sex, the body, and performativity, stating:

Hence, the reading of “performativity” as willful and arbitrary choice misses the point that the historicity of discourse and, in particular the historicity of norms (the “chains” of reiteration invoked and dissimulated in the imperative utterance) constitute the power of discourse to enact what it names. To think of “sex” as an imperative in this way means that a subject is addressed and produced by such a norm, and that this norm—and the regulatory power of which it is a token—materializes bodies as an effect of that injunction. And, yet, this “materialization,” while far from artificial, is not fully stable…And further, this imperative, this injunction, requires and institutes a “constitutive outside”—the unspeakable, the unviable, the nonnarrativizable that secures and, hence fails to secure the very borders of materiality. The normative force of performativity—its power to establish what qualifies as “being”—works not only through reiteration, but through exclusion as well. And in the case of bodies those exclusions haunt signification as it abject borders or as that which is strictly foreclosed: the unlivable, the nonnarrativizable, the traumatic…To the extent that we understand identity-claims as rallying points for political mobilization, they appear to hold out the promise of unity, solidarity, universality.

In this passage, Butler reveals that it is not enough to read bodies and performativity as necessary, or forced. This type of reading reproduces hegemonic norms, and regulates power structures that oppress bodies, specifically the bodies of women. Furthermore, Butler reveals that this type of treatment of bodies and performativity creates a “constitutive outside,” which leads to false promises of unity and solidarity.

It is this “constitutive outside” that I would like to explore in regard to season four of Falling Skies, and how the main female protagonist Anne Mason (Moon Bloodgood) reproduces the artificial illusion of unity and solidarity while forcing her hybrid daughter into the traumatic space this outside represents. Throughout the show, Anne has pushed the boundaries of gender and tradition in her survival in the dystopian landscape created by the arrival of the Esphendi overlords. She is at the head of her field, a field dominated by men, and as a doctor she is the best there is—even developing a technique to remove the harnesses that change the children into the Skitter slaves that do the work of their alien oppressors. In this sense, Anne pushes past the restraints of performativity that men would expect of her.

However, in the beginning of season four, Anne has stepped out of her role as the healer. She is no longer the doctor who has kept the bodies of her people stitched together. After experiencing a traumatic capture at the hands of the Esphendi, resulting in Anne giving birth to a hybrid daughter, Alexi (Scarlett Byrne), Anne begins to lose control. For the Esphendi are master colonizers, and realize that to control the men they must first control the women. This experience changes Anne, and she no longer takes up the role of doctor. Instead, she steps into the role of leader and a warrior woman out for revenge. But she no longer pushes past performativity; instead, she lets performativity control her. She forgoes all feelings, and in doing so reveals the true nature of dominance over other bodies. Anne becomes so raveled up in performing the role of warrior, that she begins to instill fear in others in regards to the nature and being of her daughter Lexi.

Lexi is a hybrid in every sense of the word; she is both human and Esphendi. Due to her hybridity, Lexi can control the matter and elements of the Earth. She also has the ability to mature quickly. However, as a hybrid Lexi is rejected by the people of the 2nd Mass, including her own mother. In fact, at one point Anne exclaims that the Esphendi had killed her daughter, leaving Lexi perplexed at the idea of family. She even questions her mother stating, “But, I am your daughter; we are family. Why am I different simply because I am Esphendi and human?” Eventually, through Anne’s rejection, Lexi sacrifices herself in a mission to the moon to destroy the power source of the Esphendi Empire because she realizes that her existence is artificial, insubstantial. She finds herself in the space of the “constitutive outside.” Unknowingly, Anne perpetuates the fear of otherness. She doesn’t recognize her daughter as a woman, because she is foreign, alien, hybrid. In rejecting Lexi, Anne perpetuates the false solidarity and universal acceptance Butler points out in the above passage. Anne sees Lexi as failing to perform the necessary gender of her body. Lexi is the very symbol of a failed body, the failed universal woman Anne has expected of her daughter.

This is only the second evolution of Anne’s character arc. But, it reveals the nature of performativity and how it may be experienced in a dystopian world. Falling Skies is finally beginning to evolve and question the very ideology that seems to define our existence. I wonder, however, what more will be revealed when it comes to the nature of bodies. While season five is the final season, I wonder how Anne will handle the conflicts to come. What will become the outcome when Anne and her family begin to rebuild the world once the Esphendi have been defeated, if they are defeated? Will they repeat the past? Will Anne push pass the performativity that has come to control her actions and beliefs or will she succumb to the gravitational pull that forces certain bodies to fail when skies come falling down?

Sean Weaver has a MA in English/Literature from Kutztown University. He is currently News Editor at Vada, an online magazine from the UK with a new queer perspective. When he isn’t reading or writing, he is hard at work looking for new ways to understand what it means to be queer.

Twitter: @levirush8

Blog: http://post-colonial-scholar.blogspot.com

Reflecting on ‘True Detective’s First Season

But, at the end of the day—at the end of a lot of days—I’m tired of watching these shows and seeing women as props and symbols used to push the hero along his way. I’m tired of watching these shows and seeing the massive chasms between what they present, what they claim to represent, and what their fans insist they represent.

This guest post by Lisa Shininger previously appeared at her site and appears now as part of our theme week on Dystopias. Cross-posted with permission.

Spoilers ahoy.

I’m tired today.

I stayed up too late last night to watch the first season finale of True Detective, the lush, loquacious portrait of Southern decay that held me in thrall all weekend, racing to catch up to the zeitgeist, if not the killer(s). I’m no stranger to late nights—nor to the toll of an extended media binge—but the seemingly endless spin of the HBO Go loading wheel (and the horrified contortions of my face once the show began) were more tiring than I had expected.

More than that, though, this tiredness also stems from choosing for a weekend to almost wholly submerge myself in the barely fictional, humanity-ravaged landscapes of Louisiana. The glimpses we had of the fading memory of a town—of man-made structures being devoured by the march of time and nature—mirror the Rust Belt city I live in, where my drive to work has been carefully mapped around abandoned factories and crumbling facades so the unrelenting misery of impotent nostalgia doesn’t get its claws too deep into me.

There is no escape from Pizzolatto and Fujinaka’s post-apocalyptic vision in the world of True Detective. Rust and Marty end almost where they began, but they will be forever tied to that land that sinks ever further out of sight.

Sometimes it feels like there is no escape in my neck of the woods, either. While no swirling, galactic vortices yawn open above my head, I see hints of humanity’s high-water mark in every rusted fence falling inexorably beneath a new grassy tide.

That’s not entirely why I’m tired today, though.

Sure, I’m tired of driving through familiar post-industrial wastelands, of hearing the echoes of a Springsteenian wail with every mile, both in reality and in fiction.

And I’m tired of the artistic fetishization of decline, of photo essays about the crumbling American industrial civilization with little or no context for the societal forces that precipitated that decline, and those that continue to accelerate it while we avail ourselves of disaster porn.

I’m tired of watching these shows be widely praised for the quality of their writing, their fully dimensional characters, their gritty and realistic depictions of life—while I’m wondering where the other half of the world is.

In high school, I fell hard for The X-Files. Harder than for any other thing in my life, before or since. It fed my adolescent desire for darkness and the occasional lingering shot of David Duchovny’s fishbelly-pale torso.

The infamous fourth season episode, “Home,” touched on some of the same themes and archetypes revealed through this season of True Detective. The abduction and violation of women. The high American Gothic horror of the backwoods inbred. The willful ignorance of what happens in our communities. The invisible threads of malice and terror that we imagine—and occasionally reveal—crisscross our heartlands.

There, the monsters weren’t just the malignant and malformed Peacock men who roamed the Pennsylvania hills in their classic car to the dulcet tones of a Johnny Mathis sound-alike, in search of new breeding stock and targets for their violent protective urges. The monster was also the literal thing under the bed: the woman who presumably birthed them and continued to give birth to their doomed offspring. The episode hinges on Mulder and Scully seeking her out, to rescue her from her captors, from the horrors they assume she endures. But when Scully engages her, Mrs. Peacock reveals herself to be every bit the horror that her sons are. She is complicit and consenting—by the show’s terms—both in her confinement and in the rampages her sons commit.

We meet her presumable counterpart in the True Detective finale, but when the present-day detectives Gilbough and Papania begin to tell us her role among the evil that surrounds her, Marty Hart tells them to stop. He is as uninterested in her life as he is in that of any of the women who surround him, when their lives aren’t in support of his own. He is as uninterested in her life as the show is in the lives, or deaths, of any of the women we encounter.

From Elastic’s True Detective title sequence pitch, via Art of the Title — From Elastic’s *True Detective* title sequence pitch, via Art of the Title

There’s always an argument to be made in favor of women-as-prop as an essential part of True Detective’s narrative and message. Over at The A.V. Club, Todd VanDerWerff says in a lengthy, weighty True Detective postmortem:

The most frequent criticism about this season has been its lack of “well-defined” female characters. This is a misleading statement. That there are no “well-defined” female characters on True Detective is the point.

Is it? Really?

It’s an essential part of the character of Marty, sure. His life outside the job is populated by women he barely knows: his wife, his children, his mistresses. It’s also an essential part of how Rust doesn’t allow himself to make connections with people—he only knows what he can see in service of his work.

But, how does the absence of women in the show—as viewpoint characters, as protagonists, as anything more complex than eyewitnesses and victims—further that point in ways that can’t be done within the narrative?

If the point of having no developed women—outside of Maggie, who I can’t forget never acts on anything unless it is in reaction to Marty—is to illustrate the disregard and disdain the world has for them, isn’t that point made in the way, for decades, dozens of women and children vanish and no one cares enough to pierce the veil of lies hung in their wake?

The question that kept ringing through my head as I mainlined the show was: Why are these always men’s stories? Monsters in myriad guises prey on women and children, but it’s always more men telling us stories about those monsters. Always.

If Pizzolatto’s aim in making this show was to transform the common beats and tropes of the murder story into something that transcended the genre, why do we have eight episodes that retread the most common of tropes: the victimization of passive women?

The inciting point of the entire season is the ritual murder of a woman and the destruction of property, which could arguably be seen as equivalent crimes. We first encounter Dora Lange as a literal object, a doll posed by unknown persons in a tableau that is as dehumanizing as it is unsettling. Greyed by death, frozen in a ritualized pose, crowned with antlers and transformed into a once-living sculpture: she is nothing but a piece of art, for whoever left her there, for Rust, and for us as well. The camera lingers on her naked flesh the way we imagine her killer might have done.

What more do we know about Dora Lange at the end of the season that we didn’t learn in those first scenes in the cane field? Rust tells us she is likely a prostitute, and so we learn she was. She had an ex-husband, who leads us into the mid-season digression into the hyper-macho world of drug dealers and undercover operations. How she came to be married to that man, working in that mobile home brothel, dead in that field, is only explained in the barest of strokes needed to move our heroes around their boards.

By the time we know that the men the show tells us are directly responsible for her murder are themselves dead, even Dora herself has been subsumed: by the detectives’ quest, by the horror visited upon her, by the monsters who set her death in motion, even by the young girl whose image has supplanted hers on Rust’s wall.

These are never stories told by women about how they’re preyed on. About how they try to protect themselves and fail, or how they succeed. About how they choose to be complicit in their own abuse, or how they never had a choice. These stories are never even about women who are preyed on. It’s always about men, and men, and men.

Lisa Shininger is a writer and designer from Dayton, Ohio. She cohosts Bossy Britches, and yells about pop culture at lisashininger.com and @ohseafarer.

Polly Gray: The Matriarch of ‘Peaky Blinders’

Though at times problematic, Polly’s story and interactions with other characters is one of a powerful and complex woman who supports and encourages respect for other women.

Written by Jackson Adler | Spoilers ahead.

[Trigger warning: rape and sexual assault; contains harsh language]

Despite (small) recent improvements, there is still a lack of well-written female characters on our screens. Especially anti-heroines. And female characters who are middle-aged. And characters who are working class. And of a religious minority. And are of ethnically marginalized groups. And in positions of power. And whose stories of physical and sexual oppression are more than plot devices to further the motivations of male leads.

Meet Polly Gray from the BBC series Peaky Blinders.

Polly (Helen McCrory) is working class, Romanichal (a British subgroup of Romany) and Irish, devout Catholic, and a middle-aged female in 1919 through 1920s Birmingham, England. She is a loving mother and aunt, as well as the treasurer for and semi-retired leader of the Peaky Blinders, who are “illegal bookmakers, racketeers, and sometimes gangsters,” and who are led by her family, the Shelbys. In order to survive, Polly had to become “hard as nails,” as her actress Helen McCrory describes her. Together with her nephew Thomas Shelby (played by Cillian Murphy), Polly fights to bring safety, respectability, and power to her family through both legal and illegal activity. As anti-heroine and anti-hero, Polly and Thomas head a family of “good people who do bad things for a good reason.”

Polly is female character who is complex and multi-faceted in ways that are still extremely rare but much needed in our culture; however, her story is often undermined by those whose responsibility it is to help tell it, especially with regard to her being Romanichal. Roma leading characters are still rare in media, and when they are depicted, they are often heavily stereotyped. Though Peaky Blinders and Hemlock Grove feature Roma families made up of complex and well-developed characters, it must be pointed out that Peaky Blinders is about criminals and Hemlock Grove is about fantasy and mysticism – two of the most prevalent and harmful stereotypes of Roma. It is emphasized in Peaky Blinders, though, that the Shelbys resort to criminality only because they see it as the only way to bring themselves out of poverty and into “respectability,” with their goal to eventually do only legal work. There are also many criminal or villainous characters in the show who are not Roma. However, it is odd and problematic that the two current TV series that feature Roma characters also feature them as stereotypically criminal and mystic, stereotypes which contribute to the “othering,” and therefore oppression, of Roma.

Polly Gray realistically faces extreme discrimination directed at her Romanichal heritage from characters within the show, and yet the creative team behind Peaky Blinders is often also disrespectful of that identity. She and the other Romanichal characters (of which there are many) are whitewashed via the casting of non-Roma and white actors. Helen McCrory is Scottish and Welsh, and Cillian Murphy is Irish. Though there are certainly white-passing Roma, they are a people of color who originated in Northeastern India and Northwestern Pakistan. Not only is this compelling female character of color whitewashed, but Polly and her family are called the ethnic slur “Gypsy” frequently both within the series and without. It is troubling that the cast and creative team, especially creator and writer Steven Knight, would refer to this highly oppressed people (whom they are supposedly working to represent and empower) as an ethnic slur.

This is all the more troubling and downright disturbing as the systematic oppressions that Polly faces, especially with regard to the intersection of her gender and ethnicity, are still wielded today. Polly’s children were kidnapped from her by law enforcement, like many other Roma children were and are from their parents. This contributed to the early death of her daughter, Anna, who is never depicted in the series. Once Polly’s son, Michael (played by Finn Cole), grows up, he leaves the family to whom he was forcibly relocated and finds her. She struggles to reclaim her role as his mother and, as a single mother, to provide the sort of life she wishes to give him. Due to the prosperity of the family business, much of it now legal, Polly and Michael live in a spacious house with a live-in maid and in a “respectable” neighborhood. However, no amount of wealth or respectability politics prevents law enforcement from targeting the Grays and the Shelbys due to their ethnicity. Though there are other contributing factors, it is still a racialized scene when law enforcement arrests Michael on a trumped up charge and takes him from Polly again. Michael, who is only 17, is then tortured by law enforcement until he confesses to the crime he didn’t commit. While Michael was arrested in the early 1920s, there is still a severe over-representation of Roma in UK prisons due to discrimination. One out of every 20 prisoners identify as “Gyspy, Romani or [Irish] Traveler,” and over-representation is even higher in youth prison facilities. This is despite, as of 2013, Roma numbering only about 200,000 in the UK, out of a total population of about 64 million.

A leader of law enforcement, Major (formerly Inspector) Campbell (played by Sam Neill), tells Polly that he won’t allow Michael to be released from jail unless Polly lets Campbell rape her and show that she is “small and weak” compared to him. For the sake of her son, whom she knows is being tortured, Polly stops fighting Campbell and plays along with what he wants. Campbell enforces the system’s and his own biases against the intersectional identities of Polly, as he says to her while raping her “You think you’re so respectable with your son and your house. But I know what you are, you Gypsy Fenion slut.” (Note: “Fenion” is a derogatory word for Catholics, and Irish Catholics in particular, although it has other uses.) Rape is a very real weapon used against women, especially women of color, including women who are Roma.

Upon my first viewing of the series, I thought that, unlike how rape is often used in TV and film, Polly is not raped to further the leading male character’s (Thomas’) plotline and character development. After a few more viewings, I realized that’s (sadly) not entirely true, even though this rape storyline is still much more focused on the female survivor than those of other shows. Polly comforts herself after the rape by going out for six whiskeys, going home and taking a bath, and most importantly by talking with her niece Ada (played by Sophie Rundle), with whom she has a very close relationship. Ada is also a fellow survivor of sexual assault. Like Polly, her husband has died and she is now a single mother to a young son for whom she wants to provide and to protect. After Michael is released from jail, Polly makes certain that she, not Thomas, is the one to confront Campbell and avenge herself and her son. She then goes home and shares a warm embrace with Ada. Seen this way, the story is focused on women, especially women of color, and how they support each other and their families while asserting their own autonomy against severe oppression.

Polly with Campbell’s blood on her dress, walking away from shooting him.

However, the rape storyline also gives attention to the leading male characters, and the story is made to be largely about Thomas. Campbell raped Polly largely in an attempt to shame and emasculate Thomas. Thomas responds by sleeping with a former love interest of Campbell’s, and succeeds in angering Campbell by doing so. Also, Thomas does confront Campbell, he just isn’t the one to pull the trigger. As problematic as this part of the rape storyline is, however, it is also important to note that Campbell’s and Thomas’ sexism (by treating women as objects and possessions that can be stolen) backfires on both of them. Though Campbell’s main goal in raping Polly was to attack Thomas, it is Polly who is the one to ultimately “finish” him, saying, “This time ‘small and weak’ has a gun” and reminding him, “Don’t fuck with the Peaky Blinders.” Meanwhile, though one of the main reasons Thomas sleeps with the character Grace Burgess (played by Annabelle Wallis) is to use her to anger Campbell, after she and Thomas have sex, Grace reveals that she was, in part, just using Thomas in the hopes of becoming pregnant (as her husband is infertile), and (at least at first) Thomas is offended that she didn’t inform him of this plan. Both Campbell and Thomas are reminded that women are thinking and feeling human beings with their own motivations capable of self-assertion.

This is far from the only time that the male characters in Peaky Blinders are called out on their sexism, and it is usually Polly who does it. Polly not only fights sexism from her enemies, but also from the men she loves and trusts most. In the first episode of the series, when at a family meeting in regard to the business, Thomas condescendingly states that he has nothing more to say about the goings-on of the company that is “any of women’s business.” Polly then reminds him that she ran “the business” while he and two of his brothers were fighting in WWI, meaning that “this whole business was women’s business,” and demands that he inform her of what he is hiding. It should be noted that Polly only gave up direct leadership of the gang because she felt it was the birthright of her nephews. Though Thomas improves in how he sees and treats women, and even claims that he and the family’s “modern enterprise” believe in “equal rights for women,” Polly justifiably calls him out on his hypocrisy, pointing out that he neither “listens to” nor trusts women as much as men.

Of Polly’s adult nephews, Thomas still respects Polly the most and is closest to her despite his sexism. Thomas’ two oldest brothers Arthur (played by Paul Anderson) and John (played by Joe Cole) still respect Polly, but when they are being most respectful to her, they (especially Arthur, the oldest nephew) refer to her as the male-sounding name “Pol” (as in “Paul”) or “Aunt Pol.” This emphasizes that they see power and strength as inherently masculine, despite Polly constantly reminding them that she is a woman and that they should all respect her and other women better. Though John respects Polly more than Arthur does, and is on the whole kinder to women than even Thomas, he does not see women as equal. When Thomas encourages John’s wife Esmé (of the Romanichal Lee family and played by Aimee-Ffion Edwards) to speak at a family meeting, John initially protests, says that as “the head of” his family that he will “speak for” her. Though Thomas makes certain that Esmé speaks, he quickly dismisses what she has to say, for which Polly criticizes him. Polly even experiences sexism from her son, who victim-blames her to her face after Campbell rapes her, despite that he was only freed from being tortured in jail because of it. Thomas became more accepting and respectful toward women because of Polly’s influence, while Michael was kidnapped from his mother’s influence at the age of three. In this way, the systemic oppressions on the Shelby-Gray family not only directly hurt them, but indirectly hurt them by turning them on each other.

Michael walking away from Polly after victim-blaming her.

Though at times problematic, Polly’s story and interactions with other characters is one of a powerful and complex woman who supports and encourages respect for other women. While she herself is imperfect and not free from bias, and participates in the slutshaming of sex worker-turned-secretary Lizzie Stark (played by Natasha O’Keeffe), she overall supports women (especially fellow Romanichal women such as Esmé and Ada) in both the workplace, such as by demanding they have a say in how the business is run, and the home, such as by helping Ada with her new baby. The story does not mock her for her assertiveness and for her support of women’s equality, even though male characters often do. Though Polly is whitewashed, and is not the leading character (rarely being featured in the series’ posters and publicity photos, and is referred to often by an ethnic slur, Polly’s role in Peaky Blinders is still refreshing when compared to how other TV series depict women and their storylines. Hopefully in the coming third season of the show, Steven Knight will continue to and even improve in how he writes Polly and how she contributes to the overall narrative of the story. One can also only hope that Peaky Blinders will inspire other series to write multi-faceted women and Roma.

‘Humans’ Thinks About Gender, Power, and Technology

The question at the heart of this U.K.-U.S. hybrid miniseries is, what does it mean to be human? Through the show’s emphasis on intimate, domestic life, this becomes a decidedly gendered question. Among the four concurrent storylines, Anita’s and Niska’s stories stick out to me as the most expressly concerned with gender, power, and technology. In a parallel present in which traditionally gendered roles like housekeeper, cook, nurturer, and prostitute are taken up by hyper-productive female robots, what does it mean to be a human woman? Or more specifically: what is a mother? A sex worker? A wife? And what is the relationship between female Synths and human women–one of solidarity or antagonism?

This is a guest post by Colleen Martell.

Set in alternate-present London, the world of AMC’s Humans looks just like ours, except that humans employ high-functioning robots called “Synths” to do all kinds of work for them, including cooking, cleaning, child-rearing, and healthcare. For an additional fee, Synths are even made available for sex.

The show’s drama centers on a small group of rogue Synths who were developed (by whom? why?) with human feelings and independent thinking. In the first episode we learn that these “corrupted” Synths and a human ally were caught in an escape attempt: Fred (Sope Dirisu) is taken in for testing; one female is wiped clean, re-programmed, and later purchased by a family who names her “Anita” (Gemma Chan); and Niska (Emily Berrington) is placed in a brothel, very much still capable of feeling and thinking. Two of their compatriots, human Leo (Colin Morgan) and his Synth Max (Ivanno Jeremiah), are still on the loose, plotting to locate and free the others.

Anita’s storyline primarily takes place in the home. Joe Hawkins (Tom Goodman-Hill) purchases a female Synth while his wife Laura (Katherine Parkinson) is away for work. He was apparently struggling to maintain the household and their three children alone for a few days. This is very much against Laura’s wishes, and her relationship with Anita is predictably hostile. For good reason. Anita usurps Laura’s place in the family: Joe and Laura’s daughter Sophie (Pixie Davies) comes downstairs one morning to find the table set and covered in food and drink. “Is it a party?!,” she asks. No, Joe replies: “This is what breakfast is supposed to be like.” But Laura also seems to be the only one who notices Anita’s less-than-robotic behavior, suggesting that Anita was not, in fact, successfully re-programmed and does indeed still feel and think on her own. Anita patronizes and toys with Laura, and becomes unusually attached to Sophie.

Anita out-mothering Laura, who lurks in the background

If Laura is a “shit mother” (her words) because she isn’t constantly emotionally available to her children, because she doesn’t make three meals a day or do the whole family’s cleaning and ironing, then the remedy for her failure in the world of Humans is to add a non-conscious, non-sentient being to the family to do all of this work. Sharing the household labor does not seem to be an option; people prefer instead to displace this emotional and physical labor onto others.

Not only does the show encourage us to feel with the never-good-enough mother; Humans simultaneously poses some very Donna Haraway-esque questions about Anita, the machine. Laura constantly fires criticisms and insults at Anita: “You’re just a stupid machine, aren’t you?” Anita complies, “Yes, Laura.” Laura insists on referring to Anita as “it” and threatening Anita, “I’m watching you.” How can humans treat machines so poorly if they are at the same time so physically, intellectually, and/or emotionally dependent on them? As the show progresses, there are hints that some seemingly human individuals, like Leo, are also part robot, which keeps pushing viewers to ponder the boundaries between “human” and “machine.”

The Synth brothel also raises interesting questions about gender and technology. Weeks of pretending not to feel while locked in a windowless room serving clients against her will push Niska over the edge. When a male client wants Niska to act young and scared, Niska chokes him (to death?), uses his human hand to open the door to her room, and walks out in a trench coat. Picking up a knife on her way out the door, Niska presses it into her madam’s throat. “Everything your men do to us, they want to do to you,” she tells her before walking out in defiant liberation.

Trench-coated Niska on her way out the door

It’s hard not to thrill at Niska’s rebellion, particularly because we know that she can feel and has been placed in the brothel against her will. But should Niska’s madam, a human woman, feel solidarity with the non-feeling female Synths she owns? Does displacing violent sexual fantasies onto non-feeling robots liberate human women from similar fates (and do human women want to be liberated from sex work?)? Is it ethical to hold female robots in captivity as sex workers, with doors that only unlock by human hands, whether or not they can feel?

Thus far, the show offers more questions than answers, but like all good science fiction, the questions are important ones. They are also old questions, concerns about household labor, child-rearing, and sex work that feminists have been exploring for generations. As a result, Humans makes the important point that while we may be technologically advancing, there is still much work to be done when it comes to social issues like gender equality.

Recommended reading: Donna Haraway’s, “A Cyborg Manifesto”

Colleen Martell is a writer and gender consultant based in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. She might be a cyborg. Find her on twitter at @elsiematz.

Feminism in ‘Orphan Black’

‘Orphan Black’ tackles two very different hot-button topics in a way that’s considered entertaining, insightful, and groundbreaking: the possible repercussions of cloning and the dynamics of the female personality. Show creators Graeme Manson and John Fawcett are earning praise for breaking decades of television stereotypes that resulted in most female characters either taking a backseat role or displaying a single, overriding personality trait (i.e., the ditzy blonde, the butch female, the submissive housewife). As the feminism in ‘Orphan Black’ earns praise, however, there’s been some criticism of the show’s underdeveloped male characters–a glaring contradiction that may be intentional.

This is a guest post by Maria Ramos.

Orphan Black tackles two very different hot-button topics in a way that’s considered entertaining, insightful and groundbreaking: the possible repercussions of cloning and the dynamics of the female personality. Show creators Graeme Manson and John Fawcett are earning praise for breaking decades of television stereotypes that resulted in most female characters either taking a backseat role or displaying a single, overriding personality trait (i.e., the ditzy blonde, the butch female, the submissive housewife). As the feminism in Orphan Black earns praise, however, there’s been some criticism of the show’s underdeveloped male characters–a glaring contradiction that may be intentional.

While Canadian actress Tatiana Maslany plays all five clones, she displays very different, fully developed characters. In fact, it’s the diversity among those characters that adds another dynamic to the brand of feminism portrayed in the series. This has also earned praise from members of the LGBTQA community since two of the clones are openly gay and one is transgender. It’s this same diversity that the showrunners use to make a strong case for nurture over nature by clearly showing that, even with identical DNA, the clones have different personalities, sexualities, and gender identifications obviously fueled by the environments they encountered while developing into the individuals they are now.

In order to fully appreciate the feminism in Orphan Black, it’s necessary to take a look at how female characters have traditionally been portrayed on television, with only a handful of notable exceptions. The Walking Dead presents stereotypical women ranging from the tough-as-nails female out to prove she can kick butt just as hard as any man to the pretty blonde side character apparently only around to entice men. The women on Sons of Anarchy first come off as strong and independent. However, they often lose backbone and bend to the will of the men in their lives. Even a show as groundbreaking (at least when it comes to its male characters) as Modern Family relegates the character of Claire Dunphy to the role of a nagging wife and mother striving for normalcy whose concerns are often dismissed or not taken seriously for the sake of soliciting a few laughs.

The chief criticism of Orphan Black is that the male characters are given one dominating personality trait each while the female clones have complex personalities and not-so-obvious motives for why they’re doing what they’re doing. On the other hand, it doesn’t take much guesswork to figure out the motivations driving the male characters on the show. Manson and Fawcett have made no apologies for the obvious lack of male character development, instead implying that it’s a plot device meant to echo the point the show’s trying to make by intentionally playing up the female characters and downplaying the male roles. This inequality is apparently evident when it’s revealed that the male clones unveiled at the end of the second season were created for military use, suggesting a sole purpose for their existence. It remains unclear why the female clones were created and seemingly left to their devices.

For every Daenerys Targaryen (Game of Thrones) and Alicia Florrick (The Good Wife) there’s a one-note female character playing the token blonde girl or the unattractive smart girl who’s inevitably either a loner or a dateless third wheel. Even the show’s perceived flaws – underdeveloped male characters and strong female characters who sometimes resort to violence to assert their independence – are effective in the sense that these aspects drive conversations not often inspired by shows with lesser-developed female characters in either lead roles or supporting roles without much substance. Orphan Black joins shows like Orange Is the New Black in placing a long overdue emphasis on multidimensional female characters who have a story worth telling. Although the third season came to a close on June 20th, you can still follow these strong multidimensional female characters and rewatch episodes on BBC America on platforms such as Xfinity, DirecTV, or Netflix. Until the fourth season premieres next year, take a look back and appreciate the show for what it is about: women.

Maria Ramos is a writer interested in comic books, cycling, and horror films. Her hobbies include cooking, doodling, and finding local shops around the city. She currently lives in Chicago with her two pet turtles, Franklin and Roy. You can follow her on Twitter @MariaRamos1889.

‘Silicon Valley’ Adds Women, Convinces Me It Shouldn’t Add Women

Women aren’t really treated poorly by ‘Silicon Valley,’ but it’s weird that they’re treated as being so different from the male characters on the show. Where the men have recognizable – if exaggerated – human failings, motivations and personality tics, the women are much more inscrutable, like adults who’ve walked into the middle of a children’s game. It’s a pattern that exists outside of just this show, but it’s something that stops women from being full participants in the story even if they now, at least, exist there.

Written by Katherine Murray.

There’s no way that Silicon Valley can win this one, you guys.

Sitrep: Silicon Valley is a comedy on HBO about group of programmers who try to build their own company, only to discover that that’s really fucking hard. Despite being one of the funniest shows on television, it was roundly (and fairly) criticized in its first season for being passively sexist. The core characters are a group of five guys – Richard, the young visionary who comes up with a data compression code that could make him a billionaire; Erlich, the loud entrepreneur who owns a piece of Richard’s company; Gilfoyle and Dinesh, two programmers with an I-secretly-like-you-but-we-fight-cat-and-dog relationship; and Jared, an awkward business management/accounting guy they poached from a rival company.

Of the four supporting characters we meet, three are also guys – Gavin Belson, the head of the evil Hooli corporation; Big Head, Richard’s friend who works for Hooli; and Peter Gregory, an offbeat, socially awkward developer who sees Richard’s potential and invests in his company. That means that, out of the nine characters who regularly appear in season one, one of them is a woman, and she’s Peter Gregory’s assistant. Her name is Monica, she’s a straight man for jokes, and she really believes in Richard.

Aside from Monica, women are invisible in season one, except for a few who make appearances as strippers, professional party guests, and cupcake saleswomen who trick guys into building their aps. This is problematic partly because it’s a missed opportunity to show women working in the STEM fields, and partly because it feels weird against jokes like Big Head’s idea for an ap that points you to women who have erect nipples.

The good news is that it seems like the showrunners took this criticism seriously in season two, and at least made some attempt to show us that women also work in the tech industry. There are now female extras in the crowd shots at Hooli, female programmers and project managers, and women sitting on the company’s board of directors. Monica gets a promotion where she becomes responsible for managing her company’s interest in Richard’s start-up, and Peter Gregory (who sadly had to be replaced due to the actor’s passing) is swapped out for a socially awkward female boss named Laurie. Richard’s company, Pied Piper, even briefly hires a female coder, Carla, to work on the project.

It seems like they actually tried to do things differently. So, how did it turn out?

Not that well.

I don’t feel like Silicon Valley is hostile to women – but I feel like maybe the writers don’t have many female friends (yes, I know a couple of the episodes were actually written by women; maybe they don’t have female friends, either). Where the male characters are all really quirky and specific, the female characters are vaguely competent and bland – they fit into the comedy stereotype that says women have their shit together more than men do, and that means they have to act as a stabilizing influence, buzz-kill, or mom. It’s a stereotype that flatters women in some ways, and usually seems well-meaning, but also leaves us out of the fun.

Theoretically, Monica could have become a part of the core group of characters, through her increased participation in the board meetings. In practice, though, the board meeting comedy was driven by Erlich’s pompous, emotionally immature need to be the centre of attention, and a new character, Russ Hanneman’s need to be the biggest douche that ever was. Because she wasn’t written to have similarly loud and pronounced personality traits, Monica almost may as well not be there, and she fades father into the background as the season goes on.

The second opportunity to add a woman to the group came when Pied Piper hired Carla to help with the programming, but her primary trait was being Smurfette, and her contribution to the comedy was being a thing for the guys to react to in funny ways. She had a little bit more of an edge than Monica, but she was still portrayed as mostly competent and bland – above getting into childish fights with Gilfoyle and Dinesh, and focussed on doing her actual work. She was only in the show for a few episodes before she was written out completely.

Women aren’t really treated poorly by Silicon Valley, but it’s weird that they’re treated as being so different from the male characters on the show. Where the men have recognizable – if exaggerated – human failings, motivations, and personality tics, the women are much more inscrutable, like adults who’ve walked into the middle of a children’s game. It’s a pattern that exists outside of just this show, but it’s something that stops women from being full participants in the story even if they now, at least, exist there.

So, what should Silicon Valley do stop being a show about dudes?

Probably nothing.

From a purely pragmatic point of view, we just had a whole season that proved to us that adding women to the show – in the way that the writers are capable of adding women to the show – isn’t going to make much difference. I sincerely appreciate the effort – and it went a long way toward reassuring me that the show has good intentions, but I’m not sure a funny, juvenile, well-integrated female character is really in the cards for Silicon Valley. Melissa McCarthy can only do so many projects at once.

In order to integrate women more into the cast, there would have to be a real desire to do that and an introspective awareness of gender dynamics that hasn’t been present so far.

But, even aside from whether the show can add women, it’s not clear to me that it has to. It would be nice if it did. It would have been outstanding if, when the series was first conceived, someone had pushed it beyond the stereotypes that first come to mind when we think of the real Silicon Valley. But, we don’t have a time machine to go back and tinker with the DNA of the show when it was first created, and, in fairness to the writers, the mix of characters they did end up with works really well. That’s not to say that another mix wouldn’t have worked equally well from a comedy standpoint – just that, if we view its success partly in terms of whether or not it’s funny, Silicon Valley succeeded in being funny.

At this stage, I think that, rather than focusing on what should have been, or could still be different about Silicon Valley, this is a good opportunity to learn some lessons for next time. I think it’s okay for dude shows about dudes to exist – but it should serve as a reminder that we also need more shows about women, and shows about both men and women, together. Silicon Valley wouldn’t be such a sore spot for people if women weren’t underrepresented on TV in the first place and, while I don’t think it’s up to this series to solve that problem, it’s an example that can still play a part in the discussion. What’s striking about women’s invisibility – or women’s later responsible buzz-kill status – on Silicon Valley isn’t anything about the show itself, but the way it fits into a larger pattern.

So, let the dude show be about dudes. But let’s also have shows that aren’t about dudes – or aren’t just about dudes – to balance things out in the end.

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

‘Grace and Frankie’: Sexuality for Seniors and Life After Marriage

Tomlin and Fonda’s onscreen chemistry is absolutely spot on, giving life to moments that may otherwise have fallen flat. One of the most refreshing things about Grace and Frankie is its attitude to female sexuality in older women. Life (moreover, sex) doesn’t have to stop because you’re getting older. The series illustrates this with frankness and honesty, and we don’t shy away from seeing the woman in that light.

This is a guest post by Becky Kukla.

Something really special is happening in Netflix’s new baby Grace and Frankie. The series aired in its entirety a few weeks ago with relatively little promotion, considering the impressive cast involved. Grace and Frankie marks the return of Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin to comedy television. Not that either of them ever really left the comedy world, though the last time we saw them together was in the ’80s film 9 to 5, which is by all accounts wonderfully funny and female centric. Tomlin and Fonda both starred in 9 to 5 and have been reportedly BFF’s ever since. In a way, following their 2015 Golden Globes presentation, they are almost a pre-cursor to the female comedy duos of today. Think Tina and Amy, Ilana and Abbi, and Wiig and Rudolph. If anyone set the standard for the hybrid hilarious BFFs/comedy duo, it’s Tomlin and Fonda. So, does Grace and Frankie live up to the hype?

Tomlin and Fonda play Frankie and Grace respectively, two women who are shocked to discover that their business partner husbands have been having a secret affair for the past 20 years. They have decided to divorce their wives and marry each other, after the law changes and “we can do that now.” Sol (Sam Waterston) and Robert (Martin Sheen) begin to make a life with each other, whilst Grace and Frankie are left to pick up the pieces. The first episode, aptly titled “The End,” begins with the moment that Robert and Sol break the news to their wives – over dinner at an expensive restaurant (oh the middle-class!). Grace and Frankie are only friends because of their husband’s partnership-turned-relationship, and the only thing they both have in common is that they are both belong to a group of women who are white, mature, middle-class and are generally ladies of leisure; they don’t work and rely on their husbands’ income. Grace is your typical vodka-infused, uptight, emotionless Lucille Bluth type, and Frankie embodies new-age hippie culture and is more at home smoking a joint than “doing lunch.” The set-up of the show is nothing new; we expect the laughs to come from either tired stereotypes surrounding homosexuality or from Grace and Frankie bickering. It’s a pleasant surprise to find that Grace and Frankie doesn’t rely on old and unfunny cliches to make us laugh (or cry).

Whilst Grace and Frankie could easily have tailed off into a comedy about the titular character’s love/hate relationship, the main focus of the series is actually two women supporting each other and pulling one another through an incredibly painful time. The theme of age and the fear of growing old alone is prevalent through the series, reinforcing society’s stigmas about lonely spinsters. Television often has little time for older women, but Grace and Frankie explores the heartbreak and isolation that comes with going through a divorce after 40+ years. Whilst Grace and Robert seem to hate each other (and have done for some time), the saddest story is that of Frankie and Sol. At times gut-wrenching, we see two people who have formed a relationship on the best of a friendships and having to learn to live without it. Tomlin pulls of a phenomenal performance, and epitomizes the highs and lows of such a life changing event. There is a moment in “The Funeral” where Frankie accidentally gets into Sol’s car, forgetting for a moment that they won’t be going home together. It’s a small action, but so significant and Tomlin handles it with perfection.

Even with all the seriousness, Grace and Frankie still has comedy at its heart. There are some wickedly funny lines (that mostly come from Tomlin’s Frankie) and provide plenty of occasions to laugh out loud. The gags don’t come thick and fast, unlike most contemporary comedy scripts, but Kaufman is clearly very happy to let the punchlines linger. It works superbly well because it allows the show to be incredibly funny without having to instantaneously move on to the next joke. At times it almost feels that there should be a laugh track within those pauses, but the absence of one actually helps to cement the reality of Grace and Frankie’s newfound situation. We are laughing because it’s the only way we can deal with this. Who hasn’t been there? There are also some hilarious recurring themes–Frankie’s relationship with technology, Grace’s exploration into sexuality and home-made lube, and the constant quips that the women throw at each other. Tomlin and Fonda’s onscreen chemistry is absolutely spot on, giving life to moments that may otherwise have fallen flat. One of the most refreshing things about Grace and Frankie is its attitude to female sexuality in older women. Life (moreover, sex) doesn’t have to stop because you’re getting older. The series illustrates this with frankness and honesty, and we don’t shy away from seeing the woman in that light. They aren’t just mothers, grandmothers or wives; they are women, with desires and emotions. It would have been great to see more of this, and more of Jane Fonda looking fucking amazing in lingerie!

The supporting cast are very likable, but Grace’s daughter Brianna (June Diane Raphael) is the standout star, often delivering the best lines of the series. The ensemble cast work incredibly well together, providing a neat backdrop for Tomlin and Fonda. Having said that, the romance/non-romance between Coyote (Frankie’s son) and Mallory (Grace’s daughter) was one of the only issues I took with the series. I’m all for sub plots, but neither Coyote or Mallory are particularly engaging characters hence their “affair” seemed incredibly uninteresting, especially in comparison to the far more engaging main narrative.

Grace and Frankie could have also spent more time with its title characters -the show is about them, but a monumental amount of scenes were dedicated to Robert and Sol and the blossoming of their relationship. Whilst it was great to see a gay couple (especially an older gay couple) transcend camp cliches, I couldn’t help thinking that the show isn’t supposed to be about them. Certainly, the series feels more at ease when Tomlin and Fonda are onscreen and I just wished we had seen more of that, instead of the men.

Grace and Frankie triumphs because it doesn’t utilize the gay characters as a trope or a way to increase viewership. Sexuality doesn’t become a selling point. There is more to Robert and Sol than just their relationship, and there is far more to Grace and Frankie than just jilted middle-class ex-wives. It’s a sweet, easy to watch series which not only makes us laugh out loud but also gives us an insight into characters that are usually simply tired stereotypes. It’s probably not going to push any boundaries or make a statement, but enjoyable and well written. I, for one, can’t wait for Season 2.

Becky Kukla is a 20-something living in London, working in the TV industry (mostly making excellent cups of tea). She spends her spare time watching everything Netflix has to offer and then ranting about it on her blog.