Trauma – Bitch Flicks

‘Mockingjay – Part One’: On YA Dystopias, Trauma, and the Smokescreen of the “Serious Movie”

Though we get a sense of District Thirteen’s manipulations in the novel, Katniss savvily negotiates with them, resists their orders, and remains distrustful of their motivations, in contrast to her comparatively slight unease in the film. While these changes leave most of the major plot elements intact, they undermine our sense of Katniss as an intelligent political actor who is connected to and moved by the revolution itself, rather than just her personal stake in the events.

This guest post by Charlotte Orzel appears as part of our theme week on Dystopias.

Mockingjay: Part One, the latest instalment of the massively popular Hunger Games series, begins with a terrified Katniss Everdeen huddled in a corner, muttering frantically to herself in a tearful fit, before being dragged off and sedated. Even for a series whose subject matter is children killing each other for sport, from its opening moments the film presents itself as noticeably darker than its predecessors. Director Francis Lawrence paints a grim portrait as the film explores the consequences wrought by the earlier events of the series, touching on torture, the large-scale destruction of warfare, violent suppression of insurrection, the mechanics of war propaganda, and the trauma the series’ violence has inflicted on its characters. But Mockingjay’s dark trappings mask the way the film foregrounds Katniss’ desperate romantic plight at the expense of both other aspects of her character and coherent dystopian critique. In doing so, Lawrence spins the illusion of a gritty, realistic criticism of war and propaganda headed by an independent, emotionally complex female character without truly providing the substance of either.

In Mockingjay, Katniss is at the centre of a political maelstrom, being urged by District Thirteen, the military leaders of the rebellion, to help create the propaganda material it needs to incite a revolution against the totalitarian Capitol. Katniss is suffering from PTSD and distraught about the capture of Peeta Mellark, her partner and love interest from two previous rounds in the Hunger Games. But when Peeta is forced to broadcast his demands for a ceasefire by the Capitol, Katniss concedes to take on the role of the revolution’s figurehead to ensure his immunity should the rebels win. Desperate to protect him from harm, Katniss must negotiate both District Thirteen’s subtle machinations and the violent retaliation of President Snow as she becomes entangled in the representational politics of a national war.

This is a significant departure from the way these events play out in the source material. In the first half of the novel, Katniss makes several decisions that within Lawrence’s film, are influenced or made for her by the rebel government and her handlers. For instance, the novel opens on Katniss having chosen to return to return to her firebombed home district against the wishes of President Coin’s strategy team. What she witnesses there causes her to react passionately against Peeta’s coerced call for a ceasefire and willingly adopt the role of Mockingjay. She does this not to ensure Peeta’s immunity, but to do what she can to strike back against the President Snow’s regime after the violent Capitol oppression she has witnessed and experienced. After witnessing a strike on the hospital in District Eight, it is Katniss who actively seeks out the cameras to make a speech to inflame the districts against President Snow’s regime. In the film, these events are reframed as ideas conceived by the rebels and their propaganda machine to maneuver Katniss into furthering their cause. Though we get a sense of District Thirteen’s manipulations in the novel, Katniss savvily negotiates with them, resists their orders, and remains distrustful of their motivations, in contrast to her comparatively slight unease in the film. While these changes leave most of the major plot elements intact, they undermine our sense of Katniss as an intelligent political actor who is connected to and moved by the revolution itself, rather than just her personal stake in the events.

But the most important difference from the novel is the absence of Katniss’ voice from Mockingjay. The novel, told in first-person, gives the reader a clear sense of Katniss’ desires and emotional state. Both verbally and cinematically, the film often fails to articulate her feelings about the proceedings, outside a sense of generalized trauma, vague unease about District Thirteen and her mounting concern for Peeta’s well-being. Part of this problem is the reduced role played by Gale Hawthorne, who is not only a love interest to Katniss, but her best friend since childhood. In earlier films and the novels especially, Gale’s function as a character is not only to create romantic conflict, but to also advocate for the necessity of the revolution and articulate the violence enacted by the Capitol, including how it extends beyond the Games to the oppression of the districts. By cutting down his role and changing the content of his conversations with Katniss into arguments about Peeta, Mockingjay squanders a valuable opportunity to allow Katniss to voice her perspective on the political environment she finds herself caught up in. It also seems to do so to up the romantic stakes at the expense of portraying a more nuanced relationship between these characters that includes but is not limited to romantic love. Without allowing Katniss to express her viewpoints on these broader issues, through her relationship with Gale or another character, the film feels directionless except in moments where Peeta’s safety is at risk.

Mockingjay appears to justify this shift in narrative purpose through Peeta’s capture itself. The choice to continuously orient Katniss’s decision-making around Peeta suggest that it is his capture that is the major source of her trauma, the trauma that pulls her attention continuously away from the political scene. As other reviewers have argued, it’s refreshing that Katniss is permitted to show emotionally vulnerability as the heroine of a major action film. But not only does much of Katniss’ trauma stem from issues unrelated to Peeta—growing up in the Capitol’s oppressive society where she lived on the edge of starvation; being subjected to violence and forced to perpetrate it within the Games; witnessing the violent repression of resistance to the regime; the destruction of her home district—these traumatic events are precisely the reasons she should be (and in the book, is) compelled to fight back against the Capitol. It would be remiss not to mention that these aspects of her history and the film’s political themes would have also have benefitted by portraying Katniss as a woman of colour, as she is strongly implied to be in the novels. In this volume of the series, doing so would have drawn our attention to the powerful social and psychological effects of racism, and the way its violences intertwine with capitalism. This choice would have also given more potent, layered meaning to Katniss’ newfound position as the “face of the revolution.” Ignoring these important elements of Katniss’ experience and the way they affect her decisions diminishes the particularity of her pain and the complexity of her character. And framing the progression of events in this way suggests that even if we do see more political action from Katniss in the next film, it will be incited by Peeta’s victimization by the Capitol and not her own experiences of oppression and violence.

To a certain degree, Katniss is also incapacitated by Peeta’s capture in the novel. The key difference, however, is that Katniss’ mounting fears about Peeta’s torture lead to a direct conflict between her personal and political goals: any action she takes to spur on the revolution will be met with physical harm to the boy she has grown to love. This internal struggle makes Katniss feel like a whole person with a range of concerns, but it also generates the kind of narrative momentum that drives effective stories.

Making Peeta’s capture and rescue Mockingjay‘s central concern also considerably deflates the film’s dystopian themes. Mockingjay purports to have something interesting to say about capital, war, propaganda, and trauma, but without Katniss’ perspective on these issues to anchor us, they lack both nuance and coherence. Lawrence draws parallels between the propaganda produced by District Thirteen and the spectacle of the Hunger Games, but while this gives us a broad sense that we should distrust President Coin and understand that war propaganda is bad, it fails to articulate this connection in a meaningful way. The film treats Katniss’ trauma as a cue that the film is dark and serious, while simultaneously using it as an excuse for avoiding a clear stance on its political issues. Unfortunately, these problems prefigure similar issues in the final half of Collins’ book that will likely make their way onscreen in the next film.

The problem with Katniss’ detachment from the political action becomes most acute in the last portion of the film, when the rebels launch a risky mission to rescue Peeta from the Capitol. In an effort to distract the Capitol forces, Katniss speaks directly to President Snow via video feed, telling him she never asked to be in the Games or become the Mockingjay, and that she only wanted to save her sister and Peeta. She begs him to release Peeta, offering to give up her role as figurehead and disappear. Then, conceding that he’s won, she pleads to let her exchange herself for Peeta. These statements seem like fundamental betrayals of the struggle Katniss has been growing into throughout the series, but film makes Katniss’ sincerity disturbingly unclear, especially in light of the ambiguity of her political stance earlier in the film. Is she just telling Snow what she believes he wants to hear, or is she truly so desperate to save Peeta that she will sacrifice the revolution itself for his safety?

No matter which is the case, Snow’s answer – “It’s the things we love most that destroy us.” – comes across as an interpretation of the outcome of Katniss’ efforts that, strangely, the film seems to validate. Pushed by Capitol torture into a distorted reality where Katniss is a dangerous enemy, the star-crossed lovers’ reunion results in an extended, disturbing sequence where Peeta wrestles Katniss to the ground, violently choking her. She escapes the encounter, and in a final sequence, watches him in a psychiatric ward, her reflection imposed over his thrashing body on the glass that separates them, as President Coin announces the successful outcome of the rescue at a political rally. This final, ghostly image of Katniss’ tortured face is a far cry from the expression of defiance that closed Catching Fire.

This sequence might have played differently had Katniss’ efforts to protect Peeta been only part of her focus in Mockingjay: Part One, or if this plot point had only been the midpoint of an adaptation of the entire novel. But as an ending, even to a film that promises a sequel, it seems bizarrely punitive and, frankly, horrifying. The film has spent two hours leading its audience alongside Katniss as she gives all her energy to Peeta’s rescue, only to tell both her and us that not only have her efforts been useless, but her loving sacrifices have only served to weaken her against her enemies. Of course, part of the rationale for this is to set up challenges for Katniss and Peeta to overcome in the next instalment. But the film should be able to offer a narrative experience that stands on its own and can thematically justify its existence, particularly if we’re meant to pay upwards of twelve dollars to see it. Obviously, we are not supposed to agree completely with President Snow, who is essentially the embodiment of pure evil in the film’s universe. But the story’s mixed messages offer us little alternative to conceding his victory.

The success of The Hunger Games’ franchise and its dystopian imitators such as the Divergent series or the CW’s The 100 seems to suggest that Hollywood is catching on to the idea that young audiences are willing to pay to see complex female leads and meatier social criticism. Mockingjay’s marketing implores us to embrace it as a gritty critique of oppression, propaganda, and war, and a feminist blockbuster led by a powerful teenage girl with more on her mind than romance (think about both propaganda-inspired posters and Jennifer Lawrence’s press tour pullquotes about how Katniss has too much on her plate to worry about who her boyfriend is). The problem with Mockingjay is not that either Katniss’ trauma or her love interest make her an uninteresting or weak female character. It’s that the film hypocritically champions its own success as female-driven, serious social critique, while in reality treating both these aspects with little depth or care.

As Mockingjay: Part Two looms on the horizon, we should remember that Hollywood’s willingness to deliver stories packaged to appeal to certain kinds of social consciousness does not mean filmmakers will engage beyond a surface level with the issues they use to sell their films. Teenage girls, as much as any audience, deserve complicated female characters, coherent and responsible social criticism, and well-crafted narratives in their media. As critical-minded viewers, we need to continue to demand and support substantive stories within and outside mainstream Hollywood and continue to identify those movies that only lay trendy glosses over empty promises.

Charlotte Orzel will take KA Applegate over Suzanne Collins any day of the week. Her interests include YA war stories, film exhibition, marriage dramas, and making fun of True Detective. She is a Master’s student in Media Studies at Concordia University in Montreal and tweets about life and film at @histoirienne.

The Courage to Cry: Men and Boys’ Emotions in ‘Naruto’

However, when boys are told that “boys don’t cry” and that men should “man up,” their emotions are not respected, and they often internalize this stigma, sometimes with devastating consequences. Of course, simply crying won’t cure a condition as severe as PTSD, but men being shown that they are not “weak” for experiencing emotions and needing help will undoubtedly aid in the road to recovery.

This post by Jackson Adler previously appeared at The Windowsill and appears here as part of our theme week on Masculinity. Cross-posted with permission.

CONTAINS SPOILERS for the Naruto franchise.

It’s still pretty rare to see boys and men cry in TV and film. Male characters shedding a tear or two has become slightly more common (thank you, Scandal), but rarely anything more, even when a character is grieving over the loss of a loved one. TV and film, with or without intention, often spread the stigma against men and boys expressing powerful emotions in healthy ways such as crying. According to Dr. Christia Brown in her Psychology Today article “Boys Who Cry Might Have It All Figured Out,” “For boys, they are taught that sadness is not okay, and expressing sadness is definitely not okay. But emotions don’t evaporate, they have to be expressed somehow. For boys, an acceptable emotion is anger. They can fight, [and] show aggression.” If emotions are channeled into verbal or physical violence, such as when men with PTSD become physically abusive to their partners or spouses (such as in the case of Sir Patrick Stewart’s father), the consequences can be absolutely devastating, and sometimes fatal. This is not to say that anger should be ignored or that anger cannot be expressed in a healthy and non-abusive manner. For example, righteous anger at injustice leads many into lives of activism in which they create positive changes in their communities. However, when boys are told that “boys don’t cry” and that men should “man up,” their emotions are not respected, and they often internalize this stigma, sometimes with devastating consequences. Of course, simply crying won’t cure a condition as severe as PTSD, but men being shown that they are not “weak” for experiencing emotions and needing help will undoubtedly aid in the road to recovery.

For these reasons, I am proud of Kishimoto Masashi, the man who created the Naruto manga series, for creating male characters who unabashedly cry, and who are emotionally supported by their peers when they express their emotions in this way. His manga series, which will conclude on Nov. 10, has since been adapted into two anime series (Naruto and Naruto Shippuden) and several animated films. In Naruto, a story that is set among militarized warrior states and focuses on the ninja who act as their soldiers, men and boys, whether soldiers or civilians, experience severe trauma and great loss. Most of the scenes when a male character cries take place when that character is grieving over the loss of a loved one, but a number also take place when a character is emotionally touched, when they are pleading for the protection of a loved one, when they are seeking forgiveness, when they are lonely, or when they are tortured, persecuted, bullied, or ostracized. When these characters express their emotions through crying, they are not emasculated in the slightest. Heroes, villains, gray-area characters, top-notch soldiers, political leaders, medical professionals, and average civilians all cry in Naruto.

Even the most powerful and intimidating of characters are told by their peers that it is all right for them to cry, and are shown empathy and support. In Naruto Shippuden in the episode “Disappearance,” the characters Itachi and Kisame, elite members of the terrorist organization Akatsuki, receive a false report that Itachi’s younger brother has been killed. When Itachi steps out into the rain for what seems to be a private moment, Kisame says to Itachi, “I don’t know what someone as cold as you could be thinking right now, but from here, you look as though you are crying.” Far from mocking him, Kisame goes on to say, “It’s too bad about your younger brother,” and expresses that it must be lonely for Itachi to be “the sole survivor of [his] clan.” Though Itachi then reveals that he knows the information they received is false, it is a surprising moment of closeness and support between characters whose professions are so violent.

The storyline of the Naruto franchise is an action/fantasy one about a boy named Naruto, who trains to be a ninja and to serve his country. Like Naruto, many of the characters in the story are children who have been affected by war and are trained to become child soldiers. Though the story is written for children, and even contains a fair amount of slapstick and goofy humor, it certainly does not shy away from serious content. “War is hell,” one character says. Many of the child characters experience severe trauma, often, but not always, from war, long before they are permitted to fight in combat. Naruto’s grows up rather alone, even being ostracized and otherwise bullied by his community, and the second main character, Sasuke, who is Naruto’s friend and rival, and Itachi’s younger brother, witnessed the murder of his parents and the genocide of his clan when he was very young.

Naruto wears his heart on his sleeve, and cries often in the story, which frequently stems from his great amount of empathy and love for others. Naruto cries in the first episode when he overhears his teacher Iruka say to another teacher that he believes in Naruto, and Naruto realizes that someone cares about him after all. Sasuke cries much more rarely, often feigning indifference instead, but frequently channels his emotions into rage or violence. Much of the story revolves around Naruto and other characters trying to help Sasuke to heal, to connect with others, and to let go of rage, violence, and an all-consuming, overwhelming, and relentless quest for revenge. Sasuke and a number of other characters in Naruto either start the story with signs of PTSD or develop symptoms of it along the way.

The Naruto manga series ends in only a few weeks, and has culminated in a confrontation between Sasuke and Naruto. They each have the same goal – to make the world a better, more loving, and more peaceful place. Sasuke believes that he has to take the fate of the world on his own shoulders, and that he cannot ask for help. Naruto hopes to help Sasuke to see that he does not have to face all the pain and hatred in the world, and in himself, on his own. Many men are afraid to ask for help or support when they need it because of the stigma that they are weak if they do. Their emotions and healthy expressions of them are often ignored or mocked. Naruto sets a good example for everyone – that crying, that suffering, and that asking for help do not make a person weak. Naruto is also a good example of someone who shows empathy and support for others’ emotions and needs. I certainly hope that more people emulate Naruto and reach out to those is pain, and that those is pain start to feel comfortable asking for help and expressing themselves in a healthy way. Naruto is a hero who cries, who suffers, and who helps others. If there were more heroes like that in the media, maybe the stigma against men crying or asking for help would cease.

Jackson Adler is a transmasculine aromantic bi/pansexual skinny white middle class dude with an Auditory Processing Disorder and a Weak Working Memory who enjoys cartoons, musical theatre, and vegan boba drinks. Jackson has a BA in Theater, and is a writer, activist, performer, director, teacher, and dramaturge.

I’m Sick to Death of Talking About Rape Tropes in Fiction

Aside from being lazy, careless depictions like this are dangerous. They desensitize people to an issue that is still very pressing. It’s not that rape shouldn’t exist in fiction, but they must be framed responsibly. Fictional female characters are forever being raped as retribution against the ills of the men they’re connected to, or as punishment for not being submissive to the men around them. And this happens time and time again across genres and media. So while the denotative reading of these acts might be that “evil men rape” the connotative interpretation over time becomes “rape is a valid punishment for women.”

This guest post by Cate Young previously appeared at her blog BattyMamzelle and is cross-posted with permission.

I’m sick of talking about rape.

Forcible rape, date rape, grey rape, acquaintance rape, spousal rape, statutory rape and now fictional rape. I’m sick to death of explaining why the callous rape of women and girls in media is a very bad thing for our culture and why we should cut it out. *wags finger*

This Game of Thrones storyline is just the latest in a long line of excuses and equivocations for why the depiction of brutal and gendered violence against women is a storytelling necessity. People are sticking their heels in on both sides but to me the moral position is clear: there is nothing to be gained from lazy representations of rape in a media landscape that already devalues women and reduces them to objects and property.

Now I’ve read the arguments in favour of the narrative value of Sansa’s rape. That it showed that Ramsay was a sadist. That it would help Theon come back to himself and help Sansa escape. That it would motivate Sansa to seek vengeance. But it’s all bullshit.

What did that scene add that we didn’t already know? Did the writers think that cutting Theon’s penis off was too subtle to indicate Ramsay’s sadism? Did they think the brutal murder of her mother and brother were not strong enough motivators for Sansa to want revenge against the Boltons? Could they not conceive of a single other way in which Theon might be able to mentally recenter himself? What about this particular rape scene added such probative narrative value that it had to be transposed from one character to another even as the original victim is excised from the story? All it was is more rape on a show already replete with rape, for the sake of having rape. None of this is new information.

And it’s not that rape should never be represented in fiction. Rape is everywhere. It’s unfortunately an all too real danger of the world we live in. But it’s not as though there is some dearth of rape representation in media. Using rape as a narrative tool is lazy, and especially so when it’s invoked this many times in the same show. We are now at three female characters (all of whom are considered major point of view characters in the novels) who have been raped in the series, two of whom weren’t raped in the source material. It’s just rapes on rapes on rapes up in this bitch…

And then to add insult to injury, the framing of the scene takes the emphasis off of Sansa and her trauma and places it firmly on Theon and his anguish and having the witness the act. That slow close up to Theon’s face as we hear Sansa scream and cry in the background places him and his emotions squarely at the centre of the scene. We see not, Sansa’s emotional turmoil at being humiliated and degraded by her new husband, but Theon’s tortured face as his guilt consumes him. So on top of Sansa being raped in the first place, that violation is used not to make us feel sympathy for her, but for a man who betrayed her and her family. She doesn’t even get to be the subject of the violence that is happening to her. Her pain instead gets used as a device to advance a man’s character arc instead of her own (the perils of which I talked about back in December in this essay about the rape plot in the CW show Reign).

That is a dangerous idea to be spreading.

As author Robert Jackson Bennett puts it in his brilliant short essay on the subject:

“Now instead of raping a buxom, weeping young woman, your Extremely Bad Dude is now raping a terrified six year old boy. Does it still feel like it deserves to be there? To use the usual fictional rape apologist arguments, there’s no reason this scene shouldn’t exist. Child rape exists, and no doubt happens in times of war. It probably happens even more in third world countries that are at war. Historically speaking, I’m sure there have been thousands of child rapes since the dawn of humanity. Maybe millions. Practically speaking, it would be remiss not to include a child rape scene or two, right? It happens. We must be truthful to reality. It’s our duty. Or, wait – is it possible you’re using this horrific, degrading, monstrous act as window dressing?”

Why is it that sexual violence against women is the only kind of violence seen as such an inevitability that not including it raises suspicions?

And for all the people who keep harping on about how much worse Jeyne Poole’s fate was in the novels, you’re missing the point. We’re at the juncture now where the series will likely deviate wildly from what George R. R. Martin wrote in the novels and from what he intends to write in the future. This gives the show’s writers enormous latitude to readjust the moral compasses of these characters. Evil men will stay evil, and good men will stay good. But how evil and good they may be is up to them. I find it very upsetting and frankly offensive that in all the retooling that was done to this storyline, the rape scene was the one thing that just had to stay. We’re literally talking about an entirely different character with a different history and experiences, but she just had to get raped because…. “realism?” It’s amazing to me that we can accept a fictional world where dragons are real and men kill their brothers by shadow proxy, but a world without rape (or even just a little less rape!) is unfathomable to some people’s imaginations.

But when it comes down to it, I’m sick of talking about rape because it’s exhausting. I don’t think the men who are disingenuously barging into these conversations understand how truly exhausting this new cultural trend can be for female viewers. And often they bring up the many, many murders on Game of Thrones as a counterpoint, but that isn’t a 1:1 comparison. For one thing, nothing is preventing men from “making a stink” about the excessive violence of these shows. We as women aren’t required to not care about something that affects us because men don’t care about something that affects them. But I digress…

In our daily lives, murder is not something that most people are actively protecting themselves against. For most men, unless they’re in the people-killing business, getting murdered is not exactly a daily, top of mind concern. But for women? Getting raped is a daily concern. Women have whole routines built around not making ourselves vulnerable to rapists and sexual predators even for a second. Every day we have to think about getting raped. We self-police what we wear, where we go, when we go, how we go, with whom we go, all in an effort to make sure that we’re taking every possible precaution against being raped. And then we’re raped anyway and society tells us it’s our own fault for not having a more effective rape routine.

So for women to then come home, (hopefully having managed to not get raped) and have to watch ALL THE TV SHOWS be about women getting raped? It’s too much. The men defending Sansa’s rape don’t get that this depiction is yet another reminder that rape is everywhere, there’s no escape and that we could be next.

If you really to make a leap, we can see this uptick is the engagement of rape tropes as an element of social control. Because it isn’t just Game of Thrones that’s doing this. From House of Cards to Scandal to Reign, lots of shows are adding rape “for flavour” and it serves as a constant reminder of danger. When we look at it like that, is it really too much to ask that creators are at least responsible with their use of rape in fiction? When you’ve created a scenario where an entire segment of your audience is actively debating whether or not Sansa was even raped because “she chose to play the Game of Thrones” you’re being irresponsible with your craft. These discussions are not fun rhetorical games. They have an active effect on our lives as women. It’s disheartening as a feminist lover of television to find that this is the new status quo. Rape your women, king your men. And watch TV behind your fingers.

I gotta say, I don’t know how many more television shows I can watch while quietly mumbling “please don’t rape her please don’t rape her” under my breath.

Can we please stop raping our fictional women?

I’m all raped out.

Cate Young is a Trinidadian freelance writer and photographer, and author of BattyMamzelle, a feminist pop culture blog focused on film, television, music, and critical commentary on media representation. Cate has a BA in Photojournalism from Boston University and is currently pursuing her MA in Mass Communications so that she can more effectively examine the symbolic annihilation of women of colour in the media and deliver the critical feminist smack down. Follow her on twitter at @BattyMamzelle.

WIGS’ Flagship Series, ‘Blue,’ Offers a Surprisingly Powerful Look at Sexual Violence

‘Blue’ is either an amazing bait-and-switch or (more likely) a series that changed its mind about what it was part way through. Either way, what began as an inferior, online version of ‘Secret Diary of a Call Girl,’ has grown into a powerful, subtle, and well-acted drama about the long-term effects of sexual abuse, and the shadow that misogyny and the threat of violence casts over women’s sexuality in general. It’s also a big achievement for the WIGS channel, whose mission is to create more female-led programming.

Written by Katherine Murray.

Blue is either an amazing bait-and-switch or (more likely) a series that changed its mind about what it was partway through. Either way, what began as an inferior, online version of Secret Diary of a Call Girl, has grown into a powerful, subtle, and well-acted drama about the long-term effects of sexual abuse, and the shadow that misogyny and the threat of violence casts over women’s sexuality in general. It’s also a big achievement for the WIGS channel, whose mission is to create more female-led programming.

I wouldn’t blame you if you’ve never heard of Blue – I hadn’t heard of it until CTV starting promoting it as part of its online video service this winter. The series began life in 2012 as a group of short webisodes on the WIGS YouTube channel, before switching to an hour-long format and moving to Hulu in its third season (in Canada, it’s now on CTV Extend, along with several other WIGS series).

WIGS, in itself, is pretty cool. It’s a free, online channel that offers original programming, focused on female leads. In addition to Julia Stiles, who plays the title role in Blue, WIGS has produced shorts and web series led by Anna Paquin, Jenna Malone, and America Fererra, among others. Blue seems to be the one that’s got the most traction, and it’s fair to say that it’s WIGS’ flagship show.

The premise of Blue (and it’s not a great premise, so bear with me for a minute) is that Stiles’ character is a single mom who sometimes resorts to prostitution in order to make ends meet. All of the commercials and advertising for the show feature a clip from the series’ first webisode, where Blue, in sexy lingerie, explains to a client, “I gotta provide.” During the early episodes, there’s a sense that Blue is going to play out a lot like Secret Diary of a Call Girl – that is, it seems like the point of the show is to voyeuristically peer inside a middle class version of sex work. We watch Blue interact with a wide range of clients who are all set apart by peculiar habits and fetishes, and we watch her cagily hide this part-time job from everyone else in her life. It seems, at first, like the only major conflict the show’s setting up is a love interest slash frenemy of Blue’s who learns the truth about her job, and might spill the beans to her family. Otherwise, the story doesn’t seem like it’s going anywhere until late in the first season, when suddenly it goes everywhere – to places I haven’t seen many shows go at all, let alone in such an honest, thoughtful way.

Late in season one, after some foreshadowing has prepared us, we learn that Blue was sexually abused by one of her mother’s boyfriends when she was in middle school, and that there’s a good chance that guy is the father of her son. That revelation cracks the story wide open and, from that point forward, Blue is a lot less about watching Julia Stiles be sexy, and a lot more about watching her struggle with the long term effects of trauma – the way it interferes with her relationships, the way her lack of boundaries shapes the dynamic she has with her son, the way she blocks things out and dissociates under stress.

Blue is a series that builds up slowly, over time, rather than dropping everything on us at once. The complex social and psychological dynamics between the characters are like sediment, accumulating layer by layer, until the third season feels like a careful, complex dissertation on human behaviour.

When Blue’s abuser returns to the picture, it’s disturbing that she doesn’t stand up to him – that he still has so much power over her – but it’s also realistic. So is the way he explains, with no trace of shame, anger, or guile, that he didn’t do anything wrong, and he’s the real victim, because she’s let other people convince her that he’s a bad person, when they both know the truth is different.

The show also takes its time in revealing how Blue’s own memory of these events is fragmented and hard for her to access. In one scene, she’ll struggle to remember anything about her childhood, and come up short on details when someone asks. In another, she’ll have a sudden emotional outburst, as she remembers that her mother betrayed her trust by leaving her alone with the man who raped her. After that, she’ll forget the outburst happened, and wonder why her son suddenly seems to be so careful and delicate about her feelings.

Depicting a character who doesn’t have a constant sense of self and doesn’t understand her own feelings, or remember her own experiences consistently, requires a great deal of patience and restraint on the part of the writers, directors, and actor. Julia Stiles has always been a pretty understated actor, and it works for her, here, as a character who’s built a protective shell so strong that it separates her from her own emotions. Blue never tells us how to interpret the characters’ feelings, but it has a keen eye for detail in how trauma can be expressed through words and behaviour, and there’s at least one sequence in which sound and video editing are used to create a pretty convincing impression of dissociation, which no explanation needed.

In the third season, Blue expands its view of female sexuality through two new characters: Blue’s sister Lara, and Lara’s girlfriend, Satya. Season three is a winner on all counts, but the introduction of these characters allows the show to add a few more layers to its sediment, and flesh out the themes that are already there.

Satya, played by Canadian singer-songwriter Alexz Johnson, is a bad news musician who systematically leaches off her partners in lieu of getting a job. When we meet her, she’s leaching off Lara (which means leaching off Blue, by proxy), and trying to track down a lowlife who owes her some money. The most terrifying scene in the show comes where Satya and Lara confront the lowlife’s friends, looking for the money he owes them, and realize too late that they’re in a locked apartment with guys who want to rape them. The scene is a lot more low-key that what you’d get on HBO, but that’s what makes it scary – a normal conversation suddenly tips into something more sinister, and, before anyone makes a move toward them, Lara runs to the door and starts screaming for help.

It’s a moment that’s powerful and disturbing, and underscores the threat of violence that runs underneath interactions between men and women. When I started writing this review, I was going to say, “Blue is bad at being a show about prostitution, but it’s good at being a show about sexual violence” – in retrospect, I think maybe it’s good at being a show about prostitution because it’s good at being a show about sexual violence, and presenting a world where no one’s choices are ever fully disentangled from the misogynist threads in our culture.

There’s an argument that says, in order to be sex-positive people, we need to stop stigmatizing prostitution, and challenge the idea that women only get into sex work because they’ve been kidnapped, coerced, or abused – that we instead need to promote the empowering idea that women can be sex workers because they choose to be, in an utterly untroubled way. And, while it’s true that some people get into sex work without any trauma or exploitation and, while I’m happy for them if they have a positive experience, the reality is that, at this point in history, most prostitutes don’t enter the profession because things are going so well in their lives. While it’s fine to have Secret Diary of a Call Girl – while that’s a legitimate experience that can be explored – it’s also important to keep telling stories like this – stories that highlight how even sex work that looks, on the surface, like it’s voluntary, is still an artefact of the same culture in which women are disproportionately the victims of sexual assault and domestic violence. Sex work doesn’t exist in a separate reality where none of the other bullshit about sex and gender affects what goes on.

On a less ideological level, Blue also pulls off a pretty risky narrative feat by building up Satya’s talent all season long – telling us that she’s this amazing musician, who’s obviously special, and captivates you as soon as you hear her play – and then delivering on that promise, when Johnson sings a song that she wrote for the show in a clear, strong voice that instantly shows us why all of these characters see something special in Satya. That doesn’t seem like such a hard thing to pull off, but look at all the times Smash and Glee tried to tell us that someone was good at singing, and see how that turned out.

If you are intrigued by complex characterization, explorations of sexual violence, or convincingly good singer-songwriter stuff, you can catch up on Blue at the WIGS website, on Hulu in the United States, or on CTV Extend in Canada.

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