Medium – Bitch Flicks

Motherhood in Film & Television: Hey, Let’s Do Some Mommy Issues! (Babies Not Required)

This is a guest post from Glosswitch

Imagine this:

You are a beautiful single mom. You get on well with your baby’s father – indeed, perhaps you are still in love with him – but you’ve decided it’s not to be. You’ve been offered a dream job on the other side of the Atlantic, in a country where they don’t even speak your language, and you’ve decided to go for it.

Do you:

a. go through a great deal of soul-searching about uprooting your daughter, taking her away from her father and managing on your own, then stoically board the plane clutching both your child and a ton of crap toys which will keep her entertained for about five seconds on a transatlantic flight.

b. go through a great deal of soul-searching because, basically, you still want to rip the clothes off your baby’s daddy, then stoically board the plane looking cool and stylish. Your daughter is off somewhere or other, maybe already in France with your mom or something. Anyhow, that’s all a bit boring. So boring, in fact, that when you have another change of heart you get off the plane and don’t give a second thought to the fact that little Emma might already be waiting, “Mommy” sign held pluckily aloft, at Charles de Gaulle airport.

Rachel (Jennifer Aniston) from Friends

Did you answer a? If so, we have established that you are not in fact Rachel from Friends. Well done, you (after all, if you were, you’d be all barren and pining for Brad Pitt by now, with all your other rom-com achievements mere ashes at your feet).

Here is another scenario:

You are a beautiful single mom (again), but this time working in a crime lab. Perhaps you are called Catherine Willows and in another life a woman called Marg Helgenberger will portray you in a biopic of your life. Anyhow, you have a daughter, possibly called Lindsey, and she can, to put it mildly, be a bit of a pain in the ass.

Do you:

a. use any and every opportunity to remind your colleagues that you’re a mom and therefore understand certain things that only a mom can understand. Stuff like other moms being sad if their kids get murdered, that sort of shit. You know about this because you’re a mom. And also because you finally got rid of that bitch Lindsey by shoving her in some posh private school.

b. tend to shut up about being a mom while you’re in the workplace. It wouldn’t do you any favors come the next round of promotions.

So, what did you pick? Was it b? Me too. That’s why no one’s offered either of us a job in the Las Vegas crime lab to date.

Catherine (Marg Helgenberger) from CSI

Now look, I’m not stupid. I know that TV comedies are meant to be funny, and dramas meant to be dramatic. It isn’t real life. That’s why we don’t see characters needing to take a piss in the middle of an important monologue, or stumbling over their words when pronouncing the dic vead, sorry, the vic dead. It’s all made up. I bet everyone working in the real Las Vegas crime lab is ugly as sin and that they all hate each other and are useless at solving crimes. Actually, that’s probably not true either. It’s probably a lot more boring than that. They probably all just plod along, solving some crimes, not solving others, then go home, watch a bit of TV (not CSI – I’m sure they hate that) and then just go to bed. No one would want to watch that. So why does this unrealistic portrayal of mommies end up annoying me so much?

The thing is, I wouldn’t mind if characters like Rachel and Catherine were just like all the other characters – ridiculously gorgeous and ace at their jobs, yet somehow flawed and kooky at the same time – while also being mommies, albeit ones whose lives aren’t that much impinged on by having a child. I wouldn’t mind that. It’s just that Rachel and Catherine seem to have MOMMY tattooed in big letters across their botoxed foreheads. You can almost hear the sound of scriptwriters patting themselves on the back. “Hey guys, relax! We’ve done the “mommy issues” bit! Now let’s send everyone off to Central Perk.” This creates an environment in which it no longer seems legitimate to assert that motherhood still doesn’t really exist as a theme in our TV programmes. But by and large it doesn’t. You wouldn’t have to do much. You don’t literally have to show shitty diapers or a woman crying her eyes out at 3am with engorged breasts and a howling newborn. It’s just the little things. Perhaps you have women who aren’t able to go to the bar with colleagues at the drop of a hat. Women who don’t always have childcare issues magically resolved by a grumpy ex who’s half new man, half self-pitying passive aggressive bully. Women who work part-time. Women who are, most of the time, in the company of children, not for one “doing the issues” childcare episode, but all the time. You can still have humor and drama in that. Let’s face it, children can be total lunatics; there’s loads of humor and drama in that.

Abby (Maura Tierney) from ER

In ER (yeah, another oldie) Abby has a full-on dramatic birth, followed by lots of trauma caring for a sick child and then gradually going back to work. See, that’s quite good. They sure milked the drama from that. But then she just goes back to being another TV mom with an invisible child. Said child is useful for hostage situations and for making the Abby character “softer” than all the other female leads, but not for affecting the actual structure of the plot itself. That would just be too messy.

I guess that messiness is a big part of the problem. Motherhood is portrayed as a women’s issue – a thing to be picked up, examined then dropped – rather than as something that structures the flow of life and shapes the plots we all live out. This is as true for real life as it is for fiction. Mothers have to fit in around everyone else’s plots, plots in which no one in paid employment really has children and no one who isn’t paid employment is ever believed to be working.

When did you last see a TV programme that treated having a job or having grandparents or being male as an “issue” to be covered? They’re not; they’re just long-term ways of being, which might sometimes be the cause of issues but without being issues in themselves. Being a mom ought to be like that. Instead, it’s “a thing.” A thing that can be covered in a half-hour show, including ad breaks, before Mommy puts her invisible child back in the closet and heads back out to spread the fake mommy wisdom that, thankfully, doesn’t prevent her heading off to an all-night club with friends at the end of the evening.

Lois from Family Guy

In Family Guy we see Lois frequently exploiting the trope of the put-upon Mommy whom no one values. Hey, good issues coverage, guys! The fact that Lois leaves her baby in the care of the family dog whenever it seems appropriate doesn’t even come into it. And yeah, this is a cartoon, and it’s silly and surreal and why should I even bother worrying about that? But the trouble is, we then get the “I am Peter, hear me roar” episode in which Lois ends up taking on hardcore feminist Gloria Ironbox and dramatically asserting her own “choice” to be a mother and homemaker. It’s here that you start to feel the scriptwriters are taking a little too many liberties. How many issues can you squeeze from a portrayal of motherhood that isn’t even remotely realistic? Despite the catfight and the stripping and the sex with Peter at the end, there’s something horribly serious and sanctimonious about Lois’s little outburst. It’s like having Cleveland and Loretta solemnly discussing affirmative action, albeit with them only being permitted to be “actively” black 10% of the time.

Allison from Medium

Of all the shows I’ve seen in (fairly) recent years, the only one where I find the portrayal of motherhood even vaguely satisfactory is Medium. That is, I’ll admit, a little weird. Motherhood, for me, has not yet involved having crazy psychic dreams and then passing “the gift” on to my sons, and them getting all stressed about it, and me having to comfort them because, hey, it’s okay; it might seem distressing now but later on you could solve crime, just like Mommy! No, my experience of motherhood has not been like that. But what I like about that show is that underneath it, there still seems to be quite a lot of “normal” mess. The scriptwriters have allowed motherhood to invade the plot. Alison puts her children to bed and strokes their heads and it’s just what happens, not the chance for some once-in-a-lifetime monologue. Alison goes into the kitchen in the morning and there they are, making a mess of the kitchen table and demanding more food. In normal TV-land, she’d have the kitchen to herself, at least assuming no one was having a psychic crisis at the sight of the Cheerios. I found Medium difficult to watch while pregnant, not because it gave me funny dreams, but because I’d think “Wow! That parenting thing looks like hard work!” In truth, it’s not as bad as all that. It’s probably worse if your nights are interrupted not just by kids, but by pesky dead people. If it were that bad, I’d probably run away to France, just like Rachel. Or shove my kids in some private school, like Catherine. But hey, if I did that, you shouldn’t judge me too harshly. I’d just be following the plot.

Disclaimer: Most of the shows referred to here are from over four years ago. I’m sorry. I had a couple of those “real” babies in the interim. If only I’d had a plot device child, all this would be way more up to date.

Glosswitch is a mother of two living in the UK, hence the unfortunate mixture of US and UK spellings in this piece. She blogs at http://glosswatch.com about feminism, motherhood and anything that annoys her (i.e. anything).

Some Scattered Thoughts on Detective Shows and Geniuses

I often joke here about my obsession with streaming Netflix television shows from 1992. Sometimes I find myself wondering what I actually did during the nineties that made me miss so much television, and then I remember I was hanging out with truancy officers, drinking Zima underage, angsting over my first boyfriend, and coming one horrible grade shy of flunking out of high school. Memories. But maybe it’s ultimately a good thing that I let myself get a little media literate before escaping into the mind of pop culture circa 1992. It’s fun to consume an unacceptable amount of television under the guise of “no really, I’m critiquing this shit in my mind, which is important, so it’s totally fine that I haven’t spoken out loud in three days or showered.” See, I work a second-shift job, while everyone I know works a first-shift job, so I often find myself awake in the wee hours with my good friends Adrian Monk, Cal Lightman, and most recently, Allison DuBois. (The reality is that all these shows first aired between 2002 and 2010, so the fact that I think the 90s are the 00s suggests an even larger problem, like, who am I and what year is it.)My routine looks something like this: If I had a crappy day, I like to start my TV marathon with something light, like an episode or two of Monk (which first aired in 2002). For those of you who don’t know, Adrian Monk is a former homicide detective who had a severe nervous breakdown when his wife, Trudy, was killed in a car bomb explosion. He was discharged from the police force because he was so distraught he couldn’t leave his house for three years, and his breakdown brought on a slew of intense phobias associated with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. He eventually goes into business on his own as a consultant for his former colleagues on the police force, but not without a woman slash assistant slash nurse slash babysitter who follows him around everywhere handing him antibacterial wipes and driving him to and from crime scenes (among other degrading tasks). The show is usually hilarious, mainly because of Tony Shalhoub’s brilliant portrayal of Monk, but it certainly contributes to pop culture sexism (and in turn, real life sexism).

After an episode of Monk, I spend some time with Cal Lightman from Lie to Me, a current show in its third or fourth season that centers around an agency called, The Lightman Group, which specializes in reading facial expressions. Apparently, we all have these things called “micro-expressions” that betray us when we’re lying, but only highly-trained people can catch and decode these micro-expressions, (e.g. the employees at The Lightman Group). Dr. Lightman is literally a human lie detector, and it’s fun to watch him get up in the faces of liars and act like a cocky British bad-ass. He, too, works with women who, while brilliant and talented in their own right, spend a significant amount of their screen-time playing sidekick to Lightman and cleaning up his messes.

All this boy drama started to become stifling, so I browsed Netlix and found Medium (which first aired in 2005), a show I’d seen a few episodes of—and liked—but that I never really pursued, probably because of my embarrassing fear of the occult. Medium centers around Allison DuBois, a woman who can communicate in various ways with the dead, and who also has some psychic ability, such as knowing when a person might die, or experiencing creepy flashes of the horrible shit people have done in their pasts. DuBois interests me because, in addition to holding a job as a consultant for the district attorney (similar to Monk’s role in some ways) she’s also a mother of three young girls and has a rocket scientist husband who gets fed up on a regular basis with her mind-reading, afterlife communing talents. He admires her crime-solving abilities but deep down wishes she’d continued to pursue her law degree instead, in the name of normalcy. In this show, the man slash husband plays sidekick.

These three detective characters are similar in that their main role on their respective television shows is to catch criminals. All three of them aid the police force. All three of them often endanger themselves in the process of tracking down criminals. All three of them always succeed (which is the formula for crime dramas), and we’re led to believe that the criminals wouldn’t have been caught without the help of these characters. Monk, for instance, even with all his quirks and the accommodations he requires, is hailed as an absolute genius by his colleagues and is constantly referred to as “the greatest detective in the world” by his assistant. And he is, in fact, a scary good detective, and it’s for that reason that his quirks and his often abusive behavior (while played for laughs) is forgiven—the audience is led to believe that Monk wouldn’t be a genius detective without these eccentricities. (An episode where Monk takes an antidepressant for his phobias and subsequently becomes useless as a detective confirms that theory.)

Cal Lightman, too, might be one of the most egotistical characters I’ve seen on television, and he’s immensely likeable. He breaks all the rules and consistently does pretty much the opposite of what anyone tells him to do. His lack of respect for authority often helps him win his cases; his immediate contempt for and suspicion of The People in Charge sends him in unusual directions to solve crimes, so the audience is treated to episodes where he (hilariously) and deliberately does things like checking himself into a mental hospital, or going undercover as a coalminer and threatening to blow up the place if he doesn’t get answers—but we, and his colleagues, respect him more for his unorthodox detective work. Yes, he may step all over the people around him, but that’s just how he does things; who are they to get in the way of a genius in his element? But Cal inevitably leaves some sort of mess behind when he operates outside the box (i.e. pisses off so many authority figures), and it’s no surprise that his colleague, Dr. Gillian Foster, a psychiatrist who partnered with him to start The Lightman Group, gets stuck making amends on his behalf. (I’m very much reminded of the Dr. House/Dr. Cuddy dynamic here from the television show House.)

Interestingly (or not), both Monk and Lightman find motivation and success in their careers because of dead women; Monk is literally obsessed with finding Trudy’s killer (which is the one crime he hasn’t been able to solve), and Lightman wasn’t able to save his mother from killing herself; he watches old video tapes of her, repeatedly pausing them to read and reread her micro-expressions. This “I’m avenging the death of my [insert relationship to woman here]” theme shows up in, like, every movie about a man who achieves anything. In these shows and movies, even the dead women exist as nothing more than plot points to drive the narrative forward. It’s sick and demeaning to women. In fact, I should make a list of the films and television shows in which this trope exists and call it the “I’m Avenging the Death of My [Insert Relationship to Woman Here] Trope.” (I’m doing it.)

Did you think I forgot about Mrs. Allison DuBois? I love her. And oh what a difference gender makes on a detective show. In her world, she’s successful not because she’s eccentric or because she has a god complex but because she has special powers. In her world, even though she solves case after case, and sheds new light on past cases, she must always fight to be taken seriously by her boss, by her family, and often by her husband. The audience watches DuBois struggle both with solving the cases (while trying to raise a family of young daughters and keep her marriage intact) and dealing with the way her job directly impacts her interpersonal interactions. She isn’t, as is the case with Monk and Lightman, surrounded by an endless network of supportive characters no matter what; instead, her kind of “genius” is scary and unnatural and not to be trusted.

I get it. Dead people tell her shit, which is a little different than being aided by obsessive-compulsive disorder and a lucky mixture of intelligence coupled with extreme arrogance and defiance. But DuBois must decode the messages she gets, too. A dead person doesn’t just show up and say, “Hey, that dude killed me, and my body’s buried behind that dude’s house over there. Find me. Thanks.” The occult is obviously way more complex than that (eek!). While Lightman and Monk find themselves surrounded by people who worship them, she deals with the extra struggle of convincing people she isn’t crazy—but like, how many cases does she have to solve before people just admit she’s fucking awesome?

Arguably, DuBois is a much more fleshed-out character than Lightman or Monk. She has a husband, a family, a career, unacceptable sleep patterns, daycare to deal with, a possible alcohol problem, parent-teacher conferences to deal with—a life! The men, though, just kind of do the same shit every episode. Lightman does, however, have a teenage daughter, and season two ends with him flipping out about his daughter losing her virginity. I’m not joking. That’s how the entire season ends—in an episode where Lightman gets upset about his daughter not being a virgin anymore. I’m serious. It’s called “Black and White,” and it’s a horrible episode. (Seriously.)

I’m at a bit of a disadvantage in discussing Medium because I’m only familiar with the first season. Perhaps things get better for Allison in later seasons. Perhaps the men in her life stop expressing so much condescension and distrust toward her and endow her with some Lightman- and/or Monk-esque respect. Perhaps she no longer feels compelled to apologize for her own idiosyncratic crime-solving abilities and develops Lightman’s uber-masculine arrogance about it. (But don’t take that confidence too far, Allison—no one wants to work with a bitch.) At the very least, in the first season of Medium, I sort of love her husband. I mean when is a male rocket scientist ever the sidekick, hmmm?

I guess ultimately what concerns me about these portrayals of male and female detectives is that it mirrors real life. Men are geniuses. It’s a fact. I think I once heard someone refer to Sylvia Plath as a genius in a lit class, but it’s absolutely uncommon to hear a woman referred to as such. Being a (male) genius comes with perks, too. You’re forgiven your bullshit, your weirdness, your unorthodox behavior, your screw-ups, your law breaking. I always think specifically of Roman Polanski—a film director who drugged and raped a 13-year-old girl, never went to prison, and managed to garner support from thousands in Hollywood who signed a petition on his behalf. He’s a genius! He’s paid his dues! Let him come back to the U.S.!!!!! I also recall the outrage surrounding the Julian Assange rape accusations—men across the globe immediately came to his defense (including “liberals” Michael Moore and Keith Olbermann), arguing: It’s a setup! Those women are lying! He’s a genius! Kneel before Zod!

Even though I really want to end this post on the phrase “Kneel before Zod!” I’d also like to say that while I love DuBois and think she is a genius and want to see her treated as such (in the same manner as her male counterparts) I’d also love to see more regular-ass women characters achieving genius-level shit. We need and love our women with superpowers (Buffy, too, of course), but I personally want to see a woman who looks like me, who does weird and unacceptable shit like me, who sometimes goes out in public wearing sweatpants like me, achieving some genius-level shit. I truly believe, as someone who studies pop culture and media, that we’re not going to make much progress toward ending misogyny in our everyday lives if we don’t deal with the misogyny we’re bombarded with in television shows, music videos, advertisements, films, and children’s programming. If we see it reflected all around us constantly, it becomes the norm. So, we need to call this shit out and keep calling it out, even when it seems like a tiny thing—like douchebag male detectives with unorthodox methods getting a free genius pass while brilliant female detectives with unorthodox methods have to endlessly prove their competence to significantly less competent people.

That right there is fucking patriarchy in action. Now: