How do ordinary people become television protagonists? Lately the answer often seems to be “they knew someone who died.” Usually, that dead someone is a woman, a child, or both. I understand, of course, that death is transformative not only for the dead, but also for the living. Mourning is tremendously powerful. And I’ve found many tragedy-motivated characters to be tremendously powerful and effective. A protagonist’s acute personal pain is likely to be a source of interest because it’s something we can sympathize or empathize with. (Although I hasten to add that personal tragedy does not, alone, make a protagonist interesting, and it’s lazy to assume it might.) So I understand the impulse to use an off-screen death as an on-screen motivator.
But it’s problematic, too, for a bunch of reasons. Here are a couple: First, it humanizes
the protagonists at the expense of dehumanizing the victim. Second—and this is at least as big a deal to
me, but I don’t see it discussed as much—it implies that heroism can’t be
motivated by anything other than personalized tragedy. And I take issue with that. I think lots of interesting everyday (and
not-so-everyday) heroes are motivated by wanting to fix things, wanting to help
others, wanting to address unfairness…some people just want to make the world a
better place. I don’t think that an
innocent has to die for a hero to get their wings. It’s a narcissistic version of the world,
where people wouldn’t choose to help if not for the death of a woman or a
child. Even worse, it’s a version of the
world where the deaths of women and children are generatively useful, and where
we need to find the victim innocent before deciding whether their death is
sufficiently tragic to merit a hero’s attention. (See also, "why do the families of television detectives experience a higher than average crime rate.")
Hence the title of this post. In a recent sendup of this trope, the last
season of Kroll Show created a few segments of parody procedural “Dead Girl Town.” In it, Kroll plays a swaggering police detective in a town full of girls whose
only characteristic is “dead.” The
detective’s sliver of humanity only emerges, a few episodes in, when he lets us
know that all of his female relatives have been murdered. (It’s worth noting that Justified’s Erica Tazel gives a beautifully understated performance as his competent partner.) Embodied in these clips we can see how the
trope objectifies victims by turning them into devices, and redirects the
actual pain and suffering away from victims and toward the protagonists who
observe them.
This is a close corollary, by the
way, to the deeply unnerving trope (which I may come back to in a future post)
that a woman can’t demonstrate her personal strength or heroism except as a
survivor of some terrible event in her past (a/k/a, "how do you make a strong
woman? Tell the audience that she’s a
survivor of rape or abuse"). It’s also a
close cousin to the well-observed trope of “manpain,” in which a usually female
victim suffers or dies purely to motivate and/or demonstrate the humanity of a
usually male protagonist. (The vid “The Price” by ThingsWithWings critiques the trope well).
So:
here are a few shows where women or children have to die for the stories
to start. Some of them work well. Some less so.
CSI: Cyber (CBS, new. Law enforcement procedural.)
Watched: first two episodes
Premise: Forensic investigators solve internet-based
crimes.
Promise: In order to get around the “watching people
type is boring” problem, this show has gone overboard with the real-life
consequences of cybercrime, complete with shootouts, tanks, chase scenes,
beating people up, guesswork, and “your toaster is watching you” scare
tactics. It’s also made the lead as much
of a profiler as a cyber forensics expert.
Which means this show feels more like Stalker than a show with a title
like CSI: Cyber really should feel.
But it’s a relatively easy generic
procedural to watch, so I won’t push too hard on the premise. Here’s what I will push on: the gender issues. I liked Arquette and her character. And I would have liked her just as much if she didn’t change a
diaper in the pilot, and just as much if she didn’t seem to operate on an
empathetic radar sense that offsets the techno-savvy of the office. Even more, I would like her just as much if
she didn’t explain that she went into this work because she “knows how it feels
to be violated.” (It turns out that she
was a psychologist whose computer network was hacked, and as a result one of
her female patients was killed, which motivated Arquette’s character to do this
work. See above re: can a woman become a
hero without “being violated” and can a hero exist without a woman dying?) And—here’s another trope I think I’ll
dedicate a future post to, the de-fanging of STEM-inclined women through
infantilization—I would have liked the female hacker character just as much as
if she weren’t dressed like a punk child.
And finally, I would have liked the show just as much if Arquette were
actually in charge, rather than having to report to a man in the main
office. But I get the sense that CBS
doesn’t trust us with women running offices, doing tech, and being childless in
our 40s. Or at least it doesn’t trust us
enough not to cut those “intoxicating” ideas with baby powder.
Verdict: Not the best of the CSIs, and not appointment
television, but not a terrible procedural.
Dig (TNT, new. Limited Series. Long-form conspiracy/mystery)
Watched: five episodes
Premise: Murder/conspiracy mystery in modern Israel, driven
by Da Vinci Code-meets-Kabbalah mysticism.
Promise: Tim Kring
has a type, and this is it. There’s a
lot going on here, with at least three independent stories happening in
parallel and virtually nothing connecting them except faith that they will
collide at some point. What I’m saying
is, it’s like a season-long episode of Touch (complete with the Jewish mysticism
that drove much of that show), but without the autistic kid, and with a whole
lot of foot chases centering on the search for mystical totems. So I guess it’s Touch meets Indiana
Jones? Our main characters are a couple
of police officers investigating a young woman’s death—including one whose
involvement in the whole thing is driven by the fact that the victim looks like
his daughter who died. (Yep, see above
again. Except this time there are
slightly creepy sexual overtones to his manpain that I don’t want to think too hard
about. This is the woman who, on the
poster, is literally portrayed as a bloody key.)
There is so much going on, in fact,
that I could easily have included this review in my “Why don’t they just talk with each other” and the “Bewilderer” posts.
And it fits into another growing category: the “people trying to
engineer biblical prophecy” category. It’s
hard to believe that’s actually a thing, but between Zero Hour, Sleepy Hollow,
Touch, and Dig (and possibly others?) it’s hard to deny that it’s real. That said, I find the supporting characters
interesting, particularly the Israeli officer who’s working on the case, and
there’s enough mystery to the conspiracy that I’ve been sort of swept
along. I just wish that we were given
more guidance about why these two other random stories (one about a cow in
Norway and the other about a bizarre Christian compound somewhere in the US) were
relevant. But at least we know we’re not
supposed to know, yet.
Verdict: Not particularly deep, but can sweep the
viewer in.
American Crime (ABC, new. Crime drama.)
Watched: first two episodes
Premise: The aftermath of a home-invasion murder for
the suspects’ and victims’ families.
Promise: Someday, I’ll go on my rant about how I can’t
stand the naming convention that just throws “American” in front of a noun and
says that’s a title. It doesn’t tell us
anything about what the show is or does, and it immediately turns me off. But that’s a rant for another day.This show
undeniably tackles complicated problems and tells heart-wrenching stories. It’s hard drama, full of people whose
tragedies are bleak and whose anger is justified. Their reactions to their tragedies are
understandable but, on the whole, unsympathetic, and are probably all the more
realistic for it. (To wit: Tim Hutton’s character’s reaction to his son’s
death here is surely more realistic than his character’s reaction in Leverage,
albeit less fun-generating. But I think
we can all agree that the decision to become a con man is seldom a realistic
reaction to a child’s death.) It’s had a lot of critical acclaim, in large
part because the performances feel genuine and raw.
But I have to admit that it isn’t
working for me. I’m a bit embarrassed by
this, to be frank, because the show is so critically lauded and because it
tackles issues I care about. But there’s
something about the way the story is constructed—with so many different people
on so many different trajectories—that I’ve found it very difficult to follow. After two episodes, I still didn’t know how
most of the characters were connected to most of the other characters. I believed that I could probably figure it
out if I went back and watched again, but I had found it hard enough to watch
the first time and didn’t want to go back.
And here’s the thing: I don’t
think that’s on me, I think that’s on the show.
When a story has a lot of things going on at once, it has to work extra
hard to make sure we know how they’re related to each other. In Dig, there are a bunch of mostly-unrelated
stories happening, and we know we’re not supposed to know quite how they
connect. But here, there are a bunch of related stories going on, and we’re
clearly supposed to know how they connect, and the show’s job to show us. Maybe that swirl was intentional—we’re
supposed to feel the fog of war, not knowing who did what or why they’re part
of the story, because that’s how the world works. But it left me in the dust, feeling like I wanted
a bath to wash all that dust off.
Verdict: Good performances tackle hard issues, but the
connective tissue is missing for me.
iZombie (CW. Banter procedural.)
Watched: first three episodes
Premise: Young medical resident is turned into a
zombie, gets a job at the morgue, and uses the psychic flashes she gets from
eating brains to solve crimes.
Promise: this show revels in its quirky, comic book
feel to create what’s essentially a cross between Veronica Mars and Dead Like Me. A side effect of becoming a zombie seems to be
the sort of snarky fatalism that fueled those shows, which makes this show and
its characters seem younger than they are—much like the characters on The Flash,
they’re grownups, but interact in ways we’ve come to expect from high school
students. But if you let that dissonance
wash over you, the characters are generally interesting and the mysteries just
intriguing enough to propel each episode.
Arc-wise, the show is chewing up plot at a remarkable pace, which means
we’re not left with lingering questions for very long, and the characters will
probably develop into multi-dimensional people relatively quickly. (As they must, since this season only has a 6
episode order.) One blessing and curse of the show is that the
heroine takes on certain traits of the person whose brains she’s eaten, so in
addition to psychic flashes she also gets some personality quirks. This is a nifty device (and shows off some of
the actress’s skill at portraying subtle character differences), but it also means
we don’t get to see a consistent character in our protagonist, and her emotional
arc therefore necessarily moves slower than those of the people around
her. That’s a relatively small critique,
though, and I like the little world the show has created.
This show is also a really
interesting counterpoint to the others’ use of death as catalyst for
heroism. Here, death is just as much a
catalyst for heroism, but here we don’t leave the victim behind as mere
instrument—we follow her past her death as she becomes the hero. And it’s remarkable, when the young woman isn’t
just left bleeding out on the floor, just how much she has to offer.
Verdict: Definitely worth trying.
On the
DVR/Unreviewed: Agent Carter, Empire, 12 Monkeys, Better Call Saul, The Royals,
Olympus. (And more, but these for sure).
