#he kept saying “it snew’’

[thebigcj]

I had a friend and his partner ask me for something recently, and they started saying pretty please, but then he said “beautiful please” and I really haven’t been able to stop thinking about it

[aion-rsa]

Shameless Season 11 Episode 3 Review: Frances Francis Franny Frank

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This Shameless review contains spoilers.

Shameless Season 11 Episode 3

“Gender’s a social construct.”

Shameless is a series that’s always been very interested in how its Chicago neighborhood influences its characters. Coming as a remake from a UK series, Shameless’s new environment becomes one of its most important changes. This series constantly labels characters and tells them what they can and cannot do, while this perception internalizes and festers. This final season has taken an even greater interest in these themes and “Frances Francis Franny Frank” specifically filters them through gender norms. 

This is hardly the first time gender has been examined on Shameless, but this episode repeatedly challenges ideas that would have been accepted back during the series’ earliest seasons. Ian and Mickey kickstart this discussion, but it’s something that becomes unavoidable, whether it’s through the pretense of a beauty pageant, Carl’s new female training officer, or even Frank’s quick aside that Franny is “like Rain Man…but a girl.” Shameless’s final season looks forward to the future of not just the Gallaghers, but all of the South Side, and episodes like “Frances Francis Franny Frank” highlight just how much they’ve grown.

Each episode of this season has shown some new kind of relationship problem crop up in Ian and Mickey’s post-marriage life. This may be Shameless’s plan for the two of them this season, which is an energy that works for the show, but “Frances Francis Franny Frank” involves what’s by far Ian and Mickey’s simplest problem to date. This episode’s quest to answer who is the “man” in their relationship is extremely low stakes and territory that would have been inherent to the two of them pretty quickly into their romance. It’s used as comedic relief here more than it’s meant to prompt any big changes between the two of them, but it does pry into the episode’s larger theme of gender roles. 

Both Ian and Mickey turn to different circles that weigh in their perspectives on what makes a “man” and a “woman,” to therefore figure out which of them can be slotted in these roles. There’s no major revelation here, but it gets characters talking about broader topics that feel representative of the entire South Side’s points of view. These opinions hang over some characters more than others and Ian reaches his breaking point at his job. His frustration is honestly understandable after what he’s put through, but Ian’s fresh vulnerability allows the dynamics between him and Mickey to once again transform. Mickey lucks into some new work helping out Kevin and V with their money laundering and their humble drug operation continues to grow. 

It makes sense for Mickey to align with Kevin and V’s new revenue of business, much like it did for Frank. However, other than this new partnership, this material is rather dreadful. Any tension that existed between Frank, Kevin, and V from last week is completely erased as Kevin gets lost in the glory of expendable income. Kevin flaunts all of this in such an irresponsible manner where he’s practically asking to get robbed. The past few seasons have shown Kevin in a greater need of validation, but he should absolutely know better and not require the approval of these random strangers. He 100% deserves to get robbed in the manner that he does and it’s seriously depressing that he’d jeopardize his family’s income like this. Hopefully Mickey will also be used to make sure that something like this doesn’t happen again.

Ian and Mickey aren’t alone with their work-based stress and transitions. Carl gets a new training officer after his previous one remains in intensive care and at death’s door. There’s immediately a connection as Carl’s new gung ho partner doesn’t belittle him and uses a very empowering attitude to inspire good work. Her “Billie” nickname that she gives him because of how Carl resembles Billie Eilish is also maybe the funniest thing that Shameless has done in years. This relationship is so compelling because the values of Carl’s partner aren’t necessarily broken, but she’s hardened to the point where she has no patience for unnecessary bullshit from either the public or her profession. She makes it clear that she views herself as a cop and a dispenser of justice more than she brings her race or gender into the equation.

Carl’s glee over his progress at work is really satisfying. He hasn’t looked this happy in a while and it’s so freaking adorable that he shares a picture of his first arrest with his family. It’s a welcome change of pace to see Carl’s fulfillment come from his work rather than his romantic fling for the season. It definitely reflects a maturity in Carl that would have seemed impossible years ago. However, it also looks like Carl may already be conflating work and romance as he potentially builds an infatuation towards his new partner.

Carl works hard to build a version of the South Side that his future children would be proud to live in, but Lip and Tami grow consumed over much more personal doubts about the future. Lip and Tami appear to be in a healthy place for the time being, but they learn that Brad and Cami’s baby has developed considerable heart problems. It’s a difficult situation that’s not really fair to Lip or Tami. Tami is clearly lost in panic and Lip would obviously do what he can to help, but $65,000 might as well be one million dollars to him. The Gallaghers have never had that much disposable income in their lives. 

It’s all very manipulative melodrama, but it may lead to something productive for Lip. He may begin to get steady contracting work after people notice the renovations that he’s done to his house. Lip’s life has taken some seriously surprising turns over the course of the series. This would be a development that doesn’t only make sense, but also be a smart way to turn the former burden of Lip and Tami’s home into something that allows their lives to become enriched in a totally different way. It works even better that it’d be growth that happens purely because of the level of dedication that Lip puts into his work.

Throughout everyone’s respective crises, this whirlwind of chaos scatters the Gallaghers in different directions. A prolonged passing of the buck results in a neglected Franny ending up in Frank’s care, which turns into one of the first real bonding experiences between these different generations of Gallagher. Frank needs to help Franny get to school, which is a super benign storyline, but it might as well be getting Franny to the moon for how high Frank is when he inadvertently volunteers himself for this task. The decision to make Frank perpetually high this season while he tests product for Kevin and V is a nice touch to all of this and Macy clearly has fun working this into his performance. 

The distance that’s been previously kept between Frank and Franny makes their dynamic together feel fresh and exciting. It should really be sickening to see Frank use Franny as an asset on his drug runs as he naturalizes her to this level of grifting. Strangely, Frank’s misconduct blossoms into a place of sweetness where he can strip away all of his charlatan tactics and just genuinely enjoy the company of his granddaughter. Franny’s decision to wear her dress to please Debbie because of something that Frank tells her is an extremely tender conclusion and shows that he’s left a good impression on her, despite everything. I’m genuinely mystified over how Frank may currently be this season’s best character.

Frank’s technical success with Franny only makes Debbie feel worse about the failures that she’s recently faced. She screws up in a colossal way in this episode where a litany of irresponsible reasons result in one of her clients getting robbed. It’s actually appreciated and perhaps necessary that Debbie gets called out in the way that she does. She’s offered no sympathy and is forced to confront the consequences of her actions. Hopefully Lip’s harsh words will be able to prompt some change in her life.

Debbie is also caught up in a dangling storyline about the Little Miss South Side pageant that doesn’t really amount to much. It’s there to facilitate the episode’s final emotional beat where Franny helps her mother feel better. It’s a strange way to go about all of this, especially when considering the previous episode’s Debbie and Franny material, but it never steals too much focus away from the episode’s many other plots.

Despite the smaller scenarios that consume “Frances Francis Franny Frank,” things spiral out of control in a way where characters are left in various places of stability and instability as the episode comes to a close. Everyone is in fine form here, especially Frank and Carl, but at times this installment feels more like a collection of smaller pieces than it does a cohesive story, even if there is a unifying theme to tie it all together. There are many half-plots going on that I assume will receive payoffs in what’s to come, but Liam’s cafeteria revolution from before seems to be over, so it’s hard to say. 

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Shameless episodes always feel incredibly crowded and it typically doesn’t work in the show’s favor. It shouldn’t be afraid to leave characters out of the spotlight or find more ways to bring characters together rather than jump between a mess of disparate threads. The season is getting better in this department, but there’s still a ton of excess when it comes to characters and stories. Shameless needs to focus and figure out where it wants its characters to end up more than it needs to worry about who is the man or woman. 

The post Shameless Season 11 Episode 3 Review: Frances Francis Franny Frank appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[dream-love210]

In 1933, Prince Charles was eighteen and Disa, Duchess of Payn, five. The allusion is to Nice (see also line 240) where the Shades spent the first part of the year; but here again, as in regard to so many fascinating facets of my friend’s past life, I am not in the possession of particulars (who is to blame, dear S.S?) and not in the position to say whether or not, in the course of possible excursions along the coast, they ever reached Cap Turc and glimpsed from an oleander-lined lane, usually open to tourists, the Italianate villa built by Queen Disa’s grandfather in 1908, and called then Villa Paradiso, or in Zemblan Villa Paradisa, later to forego the first half of its name in honor of his favorite granddaughter. There she spent the first fifteen summers of her life; thither did she return in 1953, “for reasons of health” (as impressed on the nation) but really, a banished queen; and there she still dwells.

When the Zemblan Revolution broke out (May 1, 1958), she wrote the King a wild letter in governess English, urging him to come and stay with her until the situation cleared up. The letter was intercepted by the Onhava police…

Eventually he managed to inform her that he was confined to the palace. Valiant Disa hurriedly left the Riviera and made a romantic but fortunately ineffectual attempt to return to Zembla…She flew back to her perch in a mood of frustration and fury (mainly, I think, because the message had been conveyed to her by a cousin of hers, good old Curdy Buff, whom she loathed). Several weeks passed and she was soon in a state of worse agitation owing to rumors that her husband might be condemned to death. She left Cap Turc again. She had traveled to Brussels and chartered a plane to fly north, when another message, this time from Odon, came, saying that the King and he were out of Zembla, and that she should quietly regain Villa Disa and await her further news. In the autumn of the same year she was informed by Lavender that a man representing her husband would be coming to discuss with her certain business matters concerning property she and her husband jointly owned abroad. She was in the act of writing a letter...She looked up--and of course no dark spectacles and make-up could for a moment fool her.

Since her final departure from Zembla he had visited her twice, the last time two years before, and during that lapse of time her pale-skin, dark-hair beauty had acquired a new, mature and melancholy glow. In Zembla, where most females are freckled blondes, we have the saying: belwif ivurkumpf wid snew ebanumf, “A beautiful woman should be like a compass rose of ivory with four parts of ebony.” And this was the trim scheme nature had followed in Disa’s case. There was something else, something I was to realize only when I read Pale Fire, or rather reread it after bitter hot mist of disappointment had cleared before my eyes. I am thinking of lines 261-267 in which Shade describes his wife. At the moment of his painting that poetical portrait, the sitter was twice the age of Queen Disa. I do not wish to be vulgar in dealing with these delicate matters but the fact remains that sixty-year-old Shade is lending her a well-conserved coeval the ethereal and eternal aspect she retains, or should retain, in his kind noble heart. Now the curious thing about it is that Disa at thirty, when last seen in September 1958, bore a singular resemblance not, of course, to Mrs. Shade as she was when I met her, but to the idealized and stylized picture painted by the poet in those lines of Pale Fire… I trust the reader appreciates the strangeness of this, because if he does not, there is no sense in writing poems, or notes to poems, or anything at all.

She seemed also calmer than before; her self-control had improved. During the previous meetings, and throughout their marital life in Zembla, there had been, on her part, dreadful outbursts of temper. When in the first years of marriage he had wished to cope with those blazes and blasts, trying to make her take a rational view of her misfortune, he had found them very annoying; but gradually he learned to take advantage of them and welcomed them as giving him opportunity of getting rid of her presence for lengthening periods of time by not calling her back after a sequence of doors had slammed ever more distantly, or by leaving the palace himself for some rural hideout.

In the beginning of their calamitous marriage he had strenuously tried to possess her but to no avail. He informed her he had never made love before (which was perfectly true insofar as the implied object would only mean one thing to her), upon which he was forced to endure the ridicule of having her dutiful purity involuntarily enact the ways of a courtesan with a client too young or too old; he said something to that effect (mainly to relieve the ordeal), and she made an atrocious scene. He farced himself with aphrodisiacs, but the anterior characters of her unfortunate sex kept fatally putting him off. One night when he tried tiger tea, and hopes rose high, he made the mistake of begging her to comply with an expedient which she made the mistake of denouncing as unnatural and disgusting. Finally he told her than an old riding accident was incapacitating him but that a cruise with his pals and a lot of sea bathing would be sure to restore his strength.

She had recently lost both parents and had no real friend to turn to for explanation and advice when the inevitable rumors reached her; these she was too proud to discuss with her ladies in waiting but she read books, found out all about our manly Zemblan customs, and concealed her naive distress under a great show of sarcastic sophistication. He congratulated her on her attitude, solemnly swearing that he had given up, or at least would give up, the practices of his youth; but everywhere along the road powerful temptations stood at attention. He succombed to them from time to time, then every other day, then several times daily--especially during the robust regime of Harfar Baron of Shalksbore...Curdy Buff--as Harfar was nicknamed by his admirers--had a huge escort of acrobats and bareback riders, and the whole affair rather got out of hand so that Disa, upon unexpectedly returning from a trip to Sweden, found the Palace transformed into a circus. He again promised, again fell, and despite the utmost discretion was again caught…

What had the sentiments he entertained in regard to Disa ever amounted to? Friendly indifference and bleak respect. Not even in the first bloom of their marriage had he felt any tenderness or excitement. Of pity, of heartache, there could be no question. He was, had always been, casual and heartless. But the heart of this dreaming self, both before and after the rupture, made extraordinary amends.

He dreamed of her more often, and with incomparably more poignancy, than his surface-life feelings for her warranted; these dreams occurred when he least thought of her, and worries in no way connected with her assumed her image in the subliminal world as a battle or a reform becomes a bird of wonder in a tale for children. These heart-rendering dreams transformed the drab prose of his feelings for her into a strong and strange poetry, subsiding undulations of which would flash and disturb him throughout the day, bringing back the pang and the richness--and then only the pang, and then only its glancing reflection--but not affecting at all his attitude towards the real Disa.

Her image, as she entered and re-entered his sleep, rising apprehensively from a distant sofa or going in search of the messenger who, they said, had just passed through the draperies, took into account changes of fashion; the Disa wearing the dress he had seen on her the summer of the Glass Works explosion, or last Sunday, or in any other antechamber of time, forever remained exactly as she looked on the day he had first sold her he did not love her. That happened during a hopeless trip to Italy, in a lakeside hotel garden--rose, black araucarius, rusty, greenish hydrangeas--one cloudless evening with the mountains of the far shore swimming in a sunset haze and the lake all peach syrup regularly rippled with pale blue, and the captions of a newspaper spread flat on the foul bottom near the stone bank perfectly readable through the shallow diaphanous filth, and because, upon hearing him out, she sank down on the lawn in an impossible posture, examining a grass culm and frowning, he had taken his words back at once; but the shock had fatally starred the mirror, and thenceforth in his dreams her image was infected with the memory of that confession as with some disease or the secret aftereffects of a surgical operation too intimate to be mentioned.

The gist, rather than the actual plot of the dream, was a constant refutation of his not loving her. His dream-love for her exceeded in emotional tone, in spiritual passion and depth, anything he had experienced in his surface existence. This love was like an endless wringing of hands, like a blundering of the soul through an infinite maze of hopelessness and remorse. They were, in a sense, amorous dreams, for they were permeated with tenderness, with a longing to sink his head onto her lap and sob away the monstrous past. They brimmed with the awful awareness of her being so young and so helpless. They were purer than his life. What carnal aura there was in theme came not from her but from those with whom he betrayed her--prickly-chinned Phrynia, pretty Timandra with that boom under her apron--and even so the sexual scum remained somewhere far above the sunken treasure and was quite unimportant. He would see her being accosted by a misty relative so distant as to be practically featureless. She would quickly hide what she held and extend her arched hand to be kissed. He knew she had just come across a telltale object--a riding boot in his bed--establishing beyond any doubt his unfaithfulness. Sweat beaded her pale, naked forehead--but she had to listen to the prattle of a chance visitor or direct the movements of a workman with a ladder who was nodding his head and looking up as he carried it in his arms to the broken window. One might bear--a strong merciless dreamer might bear--the knowledge of her grief and pride but none could bear the sight of her automatic smile as she turned from the agony of the disclosure to the polite trivialities required of her. She would be canceling an illumination, or discussing hospital cots with the head nurse, or merely ordering breakfast for two in the sea cave--and through the everyday plainness of the talk, through the play of the charming gestures with which she always accompanied certain readymade phrases, he, the groaning dreamer, perceived the disarray of her soul and was aware that an odious, undeserved, humiliating disaster had befallen her, and that only obligations of etiquette and her staunch kindness to a guiltless third party gave her the force to smile. As one watched the light on her face, one foresaw it would fade in a moment, to be replaced--as soon as the visitor left--by that impossible little frown the dreamer could never forget. He would help her again to her feet on the same lakeside lawn, with parts of the lake fitting themselves into the spaces between the rising balusters, and presently he and she would be walking side by side along an anonymous alley, and he would feel she was looking at him out of the corner of a faint smile but when he forced himself to confront that questioning glimmer, she was no longer there. Everything had changed, everybody was happy. And he absolutely had to find her at once to tell her that he adored her, but the large audience before him separated him from the door, and the notes reaching him through a succession of hands said that she was not available; that she was inaugurating a fire; that she had married an American businessman; that she had become a character in a novel; that she was dead.

No such qualms disturbed him as he sat now on the terrace of her villa and recounted his lucky escape from the Palace. She enjoyed his description of the underground link with the theater and tried to visualize the jolly scramble across the mountains… But when he began to discuss the political situation (two Soviet generals had just been attached to the Extremist government as Foreign Advisers), a familiar vacant expression appeared in her eyes. Now that he was safely out of the country, the entire blue bulk of Zembla, from Embla Point to the Emblem Bay, could sink in the sea for all she cared.) That he had lost weight was of more concern to her than that he had lost a kingdom. Perfunctorily she inquired about the crown jewels; he revealed to her their unusual hiding place, and she melted in girlish mirth as she had not done for years and years. “I do have some business matters to discuss,” he said. “And there are papers you have to sign.” Up in the trellis a telephone climbed with the rose. One of her former ladies in waiting, the languid and elegant Fleur de Fyler (now fortyish and faded), still wearing pearls in her raven hair and the traditional white manilla, brought certain documents from Disa’s boudoir. Upon hearing the King’s mellow voice behind the laurels, Fleur recognized it before she could be misled by this excellent disguise. Two footmen, handsome young strangers of a marked Latin type, appeared with the tea and caught Fleur in mid-curtsey. A sudden breeze groped among the glycenes. Defiler of flowers. He asked Fleur as she turned to go with the Disa orchids if she still played the viola. She shook her head several times not wishing to speak without addressing him and not daring to do so while the servants might be within earshot.

They were alone again. Disa quickly found the papers he needed. Having finished with that, they talked for a while about nice trivial things, such as the motion picture, based on a Zemblan legend, that Odon hoped to make in Paris or Rome. How would he represent, they wondered, the narstran, a hellish hall where the souls of murderers were tortured under a constant drizzle of drake venom coming down from the foggy vault? By and large the interview was proceeding in a most satisfactory manner-though her fingers trembled a little when her hand touched the elbow rest of his chair. Careful now.

“What are you plans?” she inquired. “Why can’t you stay here as long as you want? Please do. I’ll be going to Rome soon, you’ll have the whole house to yourself. Imagine, you can bed here as many as forty guests, forty Arabian thieves.” (Influence of the huge terracotta vases in the garden.)

He answered he would be going to America some time next month and had business in Paris tomorrow.

Why America? What would he do there?

Teach. Examine literary masterpieces with brilliant and charming young people. A hobby he could now freely indulge.

“And, of course, I don’t know,” she mumbled looking away, “I don’t know perhaps if you’d have nothing against it, I might visit New York--I mean, just for a week or two, and not this year but the next.”

He complimented her on her silver-spangled jacket. She persevered: “Well?” “And your hairdo is most becoming.” “Oh what does it matter,” she wailed, “what on earth does it matter!” “I must be on my way,” he whispered with a smile and got up. “Kiss me,” she said, and was like a limp, shivering ragdoll in this arms for a moment.

He walked to the gate. At the turn of the path he glanced back and saw in the distance her white figure with the listless grace of ineffable grief bending over the garden table, and suddenly a fragile bridge was suspended between waking indifference and dream-love. But she moved, and he saw it was not she at all but only poor Fleur de Flyer collecting the documents left among the tea things. (See note 80).

When in the course of an evening stroll in May or June, 1959, I offered Shade all this marvelous material, he looked at me quizzically and said: “That’s all very well, Charles. But there are just two questions. How can you know that all this intimate stuff about your rather appalling king is true? And if true, how can one hope to print such personal things about who, presumably, are still alive?”

“My dear John,” I replied gently and urgently, “do not worry about trifles. Once transmuted by you into poetry, the stuff will be true, and the people will come alive. A poet’s purified truth can cause no pain, no offense. True art is above false honor.”

“Sure, sure,” said Shade. “One can harness words like performing fleas and make them drive other fleas. Oh, sure.”

“And moreover,” I continued as we walked down the road into a vast sunset, “as soon as your poem is ready, as soon as the glory of Zembla merges with the glory of your verse, I intend to divulge to you an ultimate truth, an extraordinary secret, that will put your mind completely at rest.”