I don’t know whether this is a
particular trend in TV or just something I’ve noticed lately, but there have
been quite a few shows in which a character is not so much a person as they are the object of, or
impetus for, everyone else’s quest. The
character is the plot engine, and is, at least at the start, entirely generic—like
the One Ring or the Maltese Falcon, this
person might as well be a completely different person (or for that matter,
thing) and the story wouldn’t change much.
What matters is that they motivate everyone else.
There is plenty of precedent for the
idea of a human MacGuffin—discussing
this with a friend, we came up with Private Ryan and Mulder’s Sister, and no
doubt there are plenty of others. Making
the MacGuffin a person as opposed to a thing is inherently objectifying to the
person, but it’s great for storytelling, because it allows the other characters
to project their own hopes, dreams, and interpretations on something more
complex than a generic piece of rock or metal. And
it allows the story to ascribe intention to the thing, and even give it agency,
to some extent. But that only works if
the person remains a relatively blank slate.
So it’s odd that some of these recent shows (see, e.g., Blindspot, below)
make the MacGuffin itself a player, turning a search-for-thing into a
search-for-self. It seems to me that’s
going to be either inherently objectifying and debasing for the character—something
I’m much more willing to accept about an absent player than a central character—or
inherently weaker for the storytelling. It
also means starting with characters who are bland or hollow at the start, whose
only known traits are mysteries, which makes it awfully hard to care about
them. And the more pro-active they are
in pursuing their own identities and destinies, the more interesting they may
become, but the less effectively they will serve the MacGuffin function of reflecting
the other characters’ and viewers’ hopes.
So employing a human MacGuffin comes with a bind: either objectify a character in the extreme,
or hobble your storytelling.
It may well be coincidence that the
human MacGuffins in these two shows are women.
But it may not be: women are
easier to portray as mysterious, helpless, in need of rescuing. In each, the male leads are captivated by
their mystery, and that captivation and fascination serves as the impetus for
the search. It’s hard to imagine either
of these characters as men, and that bugs me, because it’s part of the larger “men
are motivated by the suffering of women” trope that not only objectifies women,
but also, in a roundabout way, justifies women’s suffering.
At the risk of oblique spoilers,
though, I will say that each of these shows comes around, at least to some
extent, to portraying its female MacGuffins as agency-having decision-makers in
their own rights. That helps, to some
extent. The question is
whether it helps enough.
Blindspot
(NBC, new Fall 2015. Law enforcement procedural.)
Watched: most episodes
Premise: A woman appears with no memory but a lot of
skills and a body covered in mysterious tattoos, and becomes a key participant in
solving cases of government corruption.
Promise: There are lots of problems with this show’s concept. Its most striking images are of an
incapacitated and objectified woman. Its
other main characters are archetypes—the “broody male detective,” the “no-nonsense
female captain”; the “nerdy/harmless tech girl”; the “troubled/fiery Latina
partner”; the “Black one.” But in
execution, it surpasses expectations, and it ends up being a decent procedural
with somewhat more complex (or at least ambiguous) characters than I originally
expected, and with a central mystery that makes me curious. It helps that the MacGuffin character has a
lot of skills and curiosity. It also
helps that the puzzle-loving tech girl is both competent and delightful. Still, there’s a lot here that doesn’t make
sense, I’m and the male lead and his bottled-up emotions get old fast. (To be clear, this is a problem with the
character, not with actor Sullivan Stapleton, who I loved in the problematic-yet-wonderful Strike Back.) And I’m sick to death of hearing people tell the
skilled central character to “stay in the car” while they go investigate
something. In fact, maybe I’ll do a
whole post on “stay in the car” sometime.
Verdict: I just wish the show realized how ridiculous
it was and had a little fun, occasionally.
I want to see a little more La Femme Nikita and a little less Luther.
The
Expanse (SyFy, new Winter 2015. Epic
space opera.)
Watched: Season 1
Premise: In a politically-tense
period long after space colonization, a woman disappears and an ice-shipping freighter
is attacked. The story lies in the complex
web connecting these two events.
Promise: This is a sprawling epic
involving massive world-building, in which the story is at once intensely
personal and galactic in scope, as it
concerns the personal consequences of large-scale political developments for a handful of people. It has enormous potential to explore, as
science fiction often does, issues of politics, equality, etc.—and this world
is particularly well-suited to that, as its fault-lines are drawn to be different
from ours; discrimination based on race, gender, family structure, and
sexuality seem to be things of the past, replaced by discrimination based on
class and planetary origin.
The show doesn’t entirely live up to
that potential, though, largely because it bites off more than it can chew,
trying to build an enormous world and tell an enormous story with too little
connective tissue to give the story a sense of forward propulsion. There’s too much “what’s going on here?” time,
at least for my taste. And even as we
near the climax of the plot it doesn’t feel entirely directional, largely
because it’s trying to tell too many stories at once. It also depends, annoyingly, on a Broody Detective
Who Can’t Be Bothered With Rules (so that’s both of the shows in this review,
if you’re counting) and has the now-de-rigueur No-Nonsense Female Police/Military
Captain (again, maybe I’ll make a whole post on her, someday). And for a world that might fancy itself post-gender-discrimination,
it relies too heavily for my taste on women’s maternal instincts to drive the
plot and the female MacGuffin’s ethereal mystery to motivate the detective searching for her. That said, it also does some wonderful and
even surprising storytelling things, and its foreign/yet not foreign world is a
great palette. I wish we had more time getting
to know the crew of the ice trawler, which is full of interesting people of
color from, it appears, different backgrounds.
Perhaps we shall, in the second season.
Verdict: An interesting enough world to make me wonder
what they’ll do with the second season.
On the DVR/Unreviewed: Even more than last time. I’m losing ground. But I’ll enjoy trying to catch up…
