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thedogsled · 5 years ago

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You seem to be having a not a great day today, so here's a light-hearted ask. I'm having a good day, curled up in pjs with cuddly pets watching Leverage with my sister. Leverage is one of my favorite shows, because it's smart and fun and has great characters that grow over the seasons. Besides Supernatural, what's a show you really enjoy and why?

Thank you so much for the ask! I’m sorry I didn’t reply to it sooner, I’ve come down with a head cold and this is really the first day in several I’ve been able to compose more than a tweet about how much it sucks (swallowing = a knife jammed right into my inner ear, it’s super fun). But I did want to answer your question so I’ve been musing on it since your ask came in.

If it was just “what’s your favorite show right now” it’d be an easy answer: The Boys. The Boys, back to front, front to back, upside down and inside out. The first season was fantastic, and it felt like it woke me up to being excited about TV again after my interest in The Walking Dead waned mid-season. Everything new has seemed very plastic recently, and even The Mandalorian, which is super cool, is kind of like the Cartoon Network dub of Dragonball Z, so Disneyfied in its bloodlessness that although I’m enjoying it it feels even more synthetic as a result. The Boys was the opposite of that, and also just whoever invented Karl Urban, period, just deserves a nobel prize for that masterpiece. He pronounces twat wrong (okay okay it’s a dialect thing) but you can’t have everything =D

So instead (and because it’s cheating that I can pimp The Boys and wax lyrical about loves of old) I interpret your question as sort of like “Which show is your comfort food?” Which show do I go back to when I’m feeling like TV needs to give me a cuddle. I had a good think about it, because there’s a few…

(aside: I shouldn’t have put that gif in before I started writing. ahem.)

There’s been a few over the years, for sure. As a thirteen year old I used to watch and rewatch Buffy episodes, mostly season 2 (baby Spike!). At eighteen, it was old VHS of Deep Space Nine, my favorite ep was “Wrongs Darker Than Death or Night” which I watched repeatedly and think about constantly even today.

But the show I keep coming back to is due South.

This post is a long post, it also deals with discourse (because my relationship to entertainment is so often mired in it, so please don’t proceed if you’re rather avoid it) and this is where it begins:

Okay, so fun fact: I watched due South the first time it aired with my parents (I was about 9) and then when it was on TV again as a repeat, I recorded it on VHS by RUSHING home every single day from school with nothing else on my mind but sitting on the floor two feet from the telly to watch it. Quantum Leap was on right after, and I had an entire different set of VHS tapes to record that on, so had to quickly switch between them. I’d stop recording at every break so that I could get more episodes on a tape. It’s not unsurprising to me now that both shows vibed with me as a young person who hadn’t yet really accepted that she was queer; due South’s main character is coded as Other both to the Americans whom he lives with, and his fellow Canadians, while Quantum Leap explores a straight white man jumping into the lives of Others, and living through them some of the hardest moments in their lives. Even though both keep it exceedingly, textually hetero, one has two men riding off into the snowy sunset together (leaving behind a straight lover to do so) and the other features a love between two men that in the original framing of the finale would have seen God/fate reconnecting the two of them even though one was lost in time, and the partner’s wife begging him to go.)

Of course young me didn’t give a shit about that, or didn’t realize that’s what she cared about. Young me loved the buddy-cop partnership of both shows. Young me liked the half-wolf, and the episodes where they ride horses, and honestly just waiting with bated breath to find out where Sam would jump to this time. “Oh boy!” Retrospectively, these shows (especially QL) are a lot more oh boy in a yikes context now than they used to be, but it’s good that shows age into yikes territory because it means that society is steadily advancing. Particularly, pointing out that these shows both feature white straight guys like…welcome to the nineties.

I was introduced to queer coding in part by watching due South. The show is laden with it. With writers, actors, and ultimately an executive producer who was all three, it makes you wonder if they would have gone there if they could; certainly the ending reads that way. They couldn’t, of course, because it was the nineties (and it was CBS that revived it after enormous international fan demand). Still, there was just nothing else analogous to what we have now that was going there on TV at the time. If you were queer (or discovering your queerness) then watching the show meant everything, as it did to me. So I snuggle up on the couch often these days and go back to that, because it gave me such joy, and because I was left with the opportunity to decide for myself how deep the relationship was. There was no promise of anything, because the context at the time was of course you can’t go there, nobody can go there. Queerbaiting was a word that simply hadn’t been breathed. There was no intent, no companies behind the curtain pulling strings going “Yes, make it more gay, we want those queer dollars”, just invested people slipping what they could past the studio censors.

Like this:

Sigh. A less enlightened time. =P (Incidentally fun meta here but this was after a conversation where Ray suggested that communication in a relationship should be intuitive, like breathing.)

So I guess in part I escape back there because none of that representation was ever as loaded as it is today. It doesn’t require me to judge it, or weigh it against the harm it does - because the politics of the time meant I thought it was doing good (retrospectively, and only through the lens of someone who had nothing to lose). It seemed to scream out into an unyielding universe to force it to move. It did a fraction of that, because of course it did. It was the nineties. It stole indigenous narratives and romanticized colonialism just as much as it beat the drum of environmentalism and kicked at the doors of corporate greed and racism. Old shows are inherently problematic. Today’s shows are too. Being able to examine them doesn’t mean not loving them, but it lets you say “Okay, so what do I expect from the things I watch today? What do I expect from the things I watch in five years time?”

All that aside, the show is just damn good. It’s watchable and rewatchable. It struggles to age because it was already so out of pace with the age it was made in–despite its flaws in representation, it was better than other shows at the time that demonized, tokenized, or outright killed minorities to push white narratives on their own shows (Kendra being murdered on Buffy, for example). It’s standalone enough that you can go back and watch any episode you like because overarching story arcs were way less of a staple as they are today. It’s witty, fast paced, full of action and moral dilemma, do gooding and the consequences of it. Although still severely unbalanced, and very, very white, it did still have indigenous actors playing indigenous characters, and minorities portrayed in stories about them. There’s a dog. There’s classic cars. And it’s all put to the soundtrack of Canadian bands and singers.

tl;dr ahead for rambling about subtext and being a disaster queer, but please scroll past for more gifs.

Queer me needed this show, in a world where I’d been taught to look and see myself in straight white male protagonists, it felt like A Lot to see all this on screen. It wasn’t, but it was all I got when I was growing up. I envy the good fortune of kids who can see themselves on screen these days while they try and figure themselves out (and hopefully more so in the future) with far less of having to negotiate through the confusion of looking at it through confusing fractals of different lenses and instead just see someone who looks like them showing them that their POV is normal, heroic and wonderful. Those lenses fucked me up big time. Like I’m not even sure right now what flavor of queer I am. I cling to bi like a lifeline of sense in my life, but it is complicated because I overwhelmingly desire the company of women way way more. But also I was was taught to look through the lens of a white dude in order to see myself universally, taught to be both desirous of the female body and humiliated by it, ashamed by sex, taught men were awful, and taught that I was supposed to marry one anyway. I look at my sexuality/romanticism like it’s a meta puzzle that I haven’t figured out yet, wondering how to put it on paper, how to break apart the different influences I experienced as a youngling and as an adult to try and negotiate if I’m misreading my own impulses. How I was brought up, who I’ve known, the relationships I’ve experienced and seen in real life and on TV. I’m 34 and I’m still no more certain. Subtext is both my friend and my enemy. I hate it, and I owe everything to it.

So when I need a rest from giving a shit about any of that noise, I go back to my comfort food. I go right back to subtext, which gave me the tools I needed to desire romance that wasn’t heterosexual, that somehow was more intimate because it relied on longing stares and never stepping foot out of the closet, that was just someone liking another person without any expectation of sex just because they have opposing genitals, and their colleagues hassle them a lot. There’s nothing wrong with the sex, I write a lot of consommation of the feelings that I see bubbling under the surface. I have even grown to appreciate het romance when it’s done in a way that doesn’t reduce the woman to a love interest–I was thrilled when Simon Baker’s Patrick Jane got together with Teresa Lisbon in The Mentalist. Their relationship was filled with subtext too. Subtext isn’t a queer thing, it has a role in all well written romance. Hell, it has a role in terriblebad tropey misogynistic romance, too. And just you know basically all storytelling (and more).

Queer romance existing only in the subtext, though? It’s heartbreaking explicitly because it feels like a story that isn’t finished, and that’s where subtext reliant shows can hand off the story to be finished by fandom itself. In due South, as I mentioned before, Ray and Fraser jump into a dogsled and ride off over the snowy horizon to “Find the hand of Franklin, reaching for the Beaufort sea”. It’s where I chose my meta name, as I’ve mentioned before, because that ending - that ending - handed us all the subtext so far and said “Here, take it, it’s yours now. Do with it what you like”–and we did. But that was twenty years ago. I loved that ending (I still think it was a very elegant solution) and it was expected and appropriate for a show that in itself is a “Faves Are Problematic” show, but that’s also why I get so passionate about discussing the subtext in Supernatural.

It’s younger than due South. While it may have begun back when Willow from Buffy had her first girlfriend, it is ending now, not at the turn of the century where a dogsled was still good enough to get the point across and none of us had Twitter. My own experiences, my lifelong queer confusion make it so I feel pretty damn bad for people trying to use Supernatural as a medium for their own self-exploration, using characters from SPN as their lenses. A show these days that makes bank on those tropes and doesn’t inform its audience (positively or negatively) is doing so irresponsibly because of the modern context in which the show presently (not historically) sits, and the increasing awareness of the issues surrounding it. Networks, then, are ultimately responsible for that, but they are in a way which is entirely different and far more directly culpable than they were 20 years ago, because people are out there making money out of those intentional subtextual devices. They chose to do it; took a deep breath and backed right up away from Gamble’s problematic queerbashing tropes, chewed it over, then hired gay writers and dived right back in with more grown up, progressive, and less shitty subtext–but still subtext.

This show that ended 20 years ago was able to cross way more lines with subtext in one episode than Supernatural has done sometimes in an entire season. It did so despite and because of it’s international audience, on a conservative network that would late purchase Paramount, and Star Trek, and ended with a powerfully subtextual ending. Supernatural, of course, is under a far more powerful microscope from the bigots than those oblivious to subtext back in the 90s could have ever produced. due South, like SPN was just “wholesome family entertainment” to a conservative audience that was completely oblivious by all accounts, yet was laden heavily with queer innuendo. It was also blissfully short, and existed in a social media world which consisted of Yahoo groups and not much else.

In modern context, Supernatural gets a fox in the henhouse treatment from that same audience, and acts accordingly (when it’s not using that same subtext to deliver earnest Fuck You’s to that audience). While I expect Supernatural to bravely - even considering this scrutiny - deliver a dogsled subtextual ending on a good day, there are bad days, too, because the queer subtext has been underlined so loudly that everyone can see it, because it’s “practically text”, because the bottom line is increasingly more concerned with satisfying those bigots (even while they mock them), and because queer fans are “too loud” about what they want. How dare they. /s The pushback caused by being loud about things you care about, the bigots actually seeing subtext in front of their noses, isn’t bad because now they know what we’ve been doing all along, and we won’t be able to get away with it any more; it means they’re becoming more aware of narratives other than their own. Yes, some people will push back, but “when you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression”, and they can shove it right up their asses.

All I ever ask of myself when I interrogate my present day viewing experience, is this: when I sat as a youngster watching due South thinking “This subtextual ending is enough for me”, did I truly believe it was okay to be watching a show about two white guys with a subtextual ending 20 years later? Was that the future I dreamed of and aspired to? Would I be disappointed? The answer is yes, I am disappointed. No matter the whys, the fundamental and societal reasons–I am disappointed. I still love the show probably more than I should, but I am disappointed in the society it sits in - which is increasingly capitulating to far more powerful global financial powers than a couple of red state homophobes - and I’m disappointed in the way we’re treating each other for even caring, and I’m disappointed in myself, too, for being naive and imagining we would be much further down this road now than we are. But we are a capitalistic society, and being both the commodity and the customer should be a surprise to literally nobody at this point. It doesn’t mean you have to like it.

And if you don’t feel that way, that’s okay. We all come from different places. We have different perspectives. We need and want different things, for different reasons, and find joy in different things for different reasons. Variety of opinion is as much a wonderful thing as it is completely terrifying.

I’ve wandered somewhat off topic, so I’m going to go back to the show I love, my chocolate pudding and custard comfort food TV show, and the long stares and the beautiful uncomplicated subtext.

And sign off with half a dozen gifs.

Eye fucking:

Conversations in closets and bathrooms:

Going down with the ship

Intuitively understanding each other without a word spoken

His hobbies humiliate me in public

“Do you find me attractive?”

Sulking in the corridor while you reunite with your ex

This whole ep with original Ray:

And his wolf approving of both

Not pictured “I love you” “And I you”, “Get out of the closet”, actual hand holding when it’s unnecessary, formally handcuffing your buddy, getting stuck in an ice crevasse and a mini submarine together–and so so much more. I invite you to watch the show if you can find it (I have it on a really nice set of DVDs, but there’s some dodgy ones out there that look like they recorded the DVD straight off a VHS, so do check reviews) or else try and find it online. There was a Canada promoting YouTube channel which published both due South and shows like Slings and Arrows, which I recommend as well (It’s not actually bury your gays if the ghost of your gay best friend haunts you, right?) so you should be able to poke around and find a legit copy somewhere. I’ve bigged it up and talked it down, and wandered a long way off topic (that describes my relationship with every show, but especially when I recommend them) but I hope somewhere along the line I also answered the question. The way I hear it Leverage is a similar sort of comfort food, though I haven’t seen it. Sounds like I should put it on my To Watch list.

#due south #dogsled replies #queerbaiting #subtext #destiel #about me

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visceralcreature · 7 years ago

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By ROXANE GAY

It can be very difficult to separate the art from the artist. In the case of Roseanne Barr and her critically acclaimed television show based on her life, it is nearly impossible. I wasn’t going to watch the reboot because I find Ms. Barr noxious, transphobic, racist and small-minded. Whatever charm and intelligence she brought to the first nine seasons of her show, a show I very much loved, are absolutely absent in her current persona, particularly as it manifests on Twitter. She is a supporter of Donald Trump, vocalizing her thoughts about making America great, claiming that with her vote, she was trying to shake things up. She tweets conspiracy theories, rails against feminism and shares Islamophobic opinions.

Where once she was edgy and provocative, she is now absurd and offensive. Her views are muddled and incoherent. She is more invested in banal and shallow provocation than engaging with sociopolitical issues in a thoughtful manner. No amount of mental gymnastics can make what Roseanne Barr has said and done in recent years palatable.

Nonetheless, I was curious about what Roseanne Conner, her famous television alter ego, has been up to. The original “Roseanne” was a smart, hilarious and groundbreaking show that covered a lot of important ground in prime-time television. I wanted to see how the Conners were doing 20 years later.

What I found is that the tensions in the TV show — which more than 18 million people watched, a network TV high since 2014 — are the same tensions that shape this current political climate. Roseanne the character voted for Donald Trump because he talked about “jobs.” For that she sacrificed so many other things. The promise of jobs and the myth of the white working class as the only people struggling in this country, which animates so much of our present political moment, are right there, in this sitcom.

In many ways, the first two episodes of the “Roseanne” reboot are excellent. It is difficult to admit, but nearly everything about the production is competent. There is the familiarity of the Conner house, still well-worn, the iconic couch taking center stage in the family room. The original cast returned and their faces are pleasantly familiar — though not as aged as they could be, given the benefits of wealth, good skin-care regimens and, perhaps, medical intervention.

Darlene, the middle daughter, has moved back home with her two children, Harris and Mark, the latter of whom is gender nonconforming. D.J., the Conner son, was in the Army and has recently returned home from a tour in Syria. His wife, we learn indirectly, is still in the military, serving abroad, and D.J. is raising their daughter, who is black, while she is away. Roseanne and her sister, Jackie, played by Laurie Metcalf, have been estranged for a year because of the 2016 election, and when Jackie shows up, she’s wearing a “Nasty Woman” T-shirt and a pink pussy hat. Of course she is.

The Conners are still dealing with many of the economic struggles they have always faced. Darlene has lost her job. Roseanne and Dan are getting older and, like many Americans, cannot afford adequate health care as they try to share various medications. Becky, the oldest Conner child, is going to become a surrogate and sell her eggs to make $50,000. Darlene’s son, Mark, is being bullied at school for his gender presentation. The show isn’t shying away from difficult topics, and that is both what works and doesn’t. The Conners are portrayed as a typical working-class family and their problems are relatable, but it also feels as though the show is working through a checklist of “real issues” it wants to address, to demonstrate how the Conners are a modern American family.

The presence of D.J.’s daughter, Mary, is particularly awkward. When she appears, one of these things is clearly not like the other, but the show makes no mention of it as if to suggest how at ease the Conners are with difference. But Mary has no lines and very little camera time. We are given little information as to how she became part of the Conner family and what life for her is like in a small, predominantly white Illinois town where everyone, seemingly, voted for Donald Trump. Young Mary is just there, a place holder, tokenized and straining the limits of credulity.

When a lot of the mainstream media talks about the working class, there is a tendency to romanticize, to idealize them as the most authentic Americans. They are “real” and their problems are “real” problems, as if everyone else is dealing with artificial obstacles. We see this in some of the breathless media coverage of Trump voters and in a lot of the online chatter about the “Roseanne” reboot. What often goes unsaid is that when the working class is defined in our cultural imagination, we are talking about white people, even though the real American working class is made up of people from many races and ethnicities.

During a Television Critics Association panel promoting the show, Ms. Barr said, “it was working-class people who elected Trump.”

This myth persists, but it is only a myth. Forty-one percent of voters earning less than $50,000 voted for Mr. Trump while 53 percent voted for Hillary Clinton. Forty-nine percent of voters earning between $50,000 and $100,000 voted for Mr. Trump while 47 percent voted for Mrs. Clinton. The median income of these voters was $72,000, while the median income of Hillary Clinton voters was $61,000. A significant number of middle-class and wealthy white people contributed to Trump’s election.

In the show, during an exchange about their political disagreement, Roseanne tells Jackie one of the reasons she voted for Mr. Trump is because he “talked about jobs.” And that was all the political ideology we got. If we are to believe the circumstances of this character’s life, a few vague words about “jobs” was more than enough to compel Roseanne, with inadequate health care, with vulnerable grandchildren, and struggling to make ends meet, to vote for Mr. Trump.

How do you reach people who make dangerous political choices grounded in self-interest? When Roseanne and Jackie finally reconcile, Roseanne never apologizes or concedes. She merely tells Jackie, “I forgive you,” and Jackie acknowledges how hard that was for Roseanne. Clearly, we cannot reach people who make dangerous, myopic political choices. We concede, as Jackie does, or we resist, as hopefully the rest of us will.

In my book “Bad Feminist,” published in 2014, I wrote about giving myself permission to be flawed but feminist. I wrote about how sometimes I consume problematic pop culture, knowing I shouldn’t, knowing how harmful that pop culture can be. I still believe there is room for that, for having principles and enjoying things that challenge those principles. But in the ensuing years, I’ve also been thinking about accountability and the repercussions of our choices. I’ve been thinking about how nothing will change if we keep consuming problematic pop culture without demanding anything better.

As I watched the first two episodes of the “Roseanne” reboot, I thought again about accountability. I laughed, yes, and enjoyed seeing the Conner family back on my screen. My first reaction was that the show was excellent. But I could not set aside what I know of Roseanne Barr and how toxic and dangerous her current public persona is. I could not overlook how the Conner family came together to support Mark as he was bullied at school for his gender presentation, after voting for a president who actively works against the transgender community. They voted for a president who doesn’t think the black life of their granddaughter matters. They act as if love can protect the most vulnerable members of their family from the repercussions of their political choices. It cannot.

This fictional family, and the show’s very real creator, are further normalizing Trump and his warped, harmful political ideologies. There are times when we can consume problematic pop culture, but this is not one of those times. I saw the first two episodes of the “Roseanne” reboot, but that’s all I am going to watch. It’s a small line to draw, but it’s a start.

#roseanne

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