Barbelith Underground > Film, TV & Theatre

Well one could say the only woman with a more frequent and longer-standing voice is Kima. And she's basically written in the same mold as the men of the show by the writers and then they put some lesbian references and the actress manages to pull it off beautifully – I’m not trying to say that "she acts like a man" or any gender stereotyping, only that she’s basically the same "character voice" as McNulty or Bunk; could be a breaking of gender expectations and stereotypes, but it seems to me to be the exact opposite. It's hard to judge a character that way, since most characters aren't really all that brilliantly sketched, they're almost as if shallow vessels walking the plot and illustrating social points (I'm sure some Sopranos fans would say that). But that's not to say you don't engage emotionally with them at all. I have to say I did felt for Kima immensely when she was taking her first homicide bonus to Cherryl and the kid, and the new girlfriend arrives and is revealed she had just passed the test Kima never took (and always promised she would -- and was basically the defining story that summarized the ruin in their relationship). There were very few moments of emotional punch in the series for me, but Kima's was one of them. In the same strength as other characters portrayed in the same way, seeing Bunk drinking more and more, Jimmy getting his shit together, seeing Daniels laughing out loud for the first time with his new girlfriend, or Carver trying to take care of the neighborhood kids in the 3rd season, Randy in the 4th and giving the kids grief in the final montage after having to let go of Randy (of course, none of these were as heart-breaking as seeing those kids falling, but getting way off the track here). But even if the show managed to put me in her shoes and feel for her, it's still the only woman, still shallow and basically a lesbian McNulty (job-obsessed, marital infidelity, self-destructing, same behavior and "voice"). Please don't take this as gender stereotypes expectations, I'm not being able to express myself properly (so if you'll cut me some slack here in this bit that's not really the point). Just saying that it's not the first time it was pointed a lack of empathetic imagination in reaching for putting voices and words in females characters and suitable representations in the show.

From memory I can remember quite a few icky portrayals.
- There's McNulty's ex-wife ("nagging" "ball-busting" keeping him away from his kids and the implication that she was with a rich lawyer just because he was a rich lawyer and that's it, no more on that).
- D'Angelo's wife (can't remember if she'd push him into the life, but there's the whole "staying with the richer man who killed her husband to stay financially safe").
- The hooker that baited Marlo into an assassination attempt with sex (and the god-awful way she was killed).
- Nicky's wife, also being one that would nag at the husband, and basically "pushing him into the life of crime".
- Brianna, that sold her son out to jail to stay on the inside and keep the life.
- The lazy dreadful mother of the corner-boy (Wee-Bey's wife) in the 4th season, beating the kid’s balls off at every chance and pushing him into every bad corner in his life so she wouldn’t have to work ("you didn't want to go into baby-booking, boy? What's wrong with you, little pussy!?");
- the portrayal of all the single moms at the gym after Cutty (it felt so out of place that you could sort of read the script, "they don't care about anything about their sons, they really just want sex -- women wanting sex are...").

But again, it's an ensemble piece of characters with a high number of disgusting folks, men and women. But overall, it seems at least iffy. Maybe there's far more dramatic engaging and righteous characters that are men than are women (or even if these men not being noble, they’re still written as being more relatable, interesting, compelling and understandable than the women who are not so noble goody-tissue). From what I remember, even in Marla Daniels there was a slight suggestion of a "career-climber" (initially just career-foccused) and dropped Cedric when he didn't climbed that ladder like she wanted him to. Overall, there's a feeling of sex and relationships too close with objectification, money, trade, ownership, deceit and business.

On nicer portrayals, IIRC, there's:
- Kima.
- Rhonda.
- Marla (?).
- Brianna (?).
- Snoop (ruthless and horrible, but not in a classical misogynist manner -- a rare relatable female characters while not being goody-goody noble, like much of the males characters).
- Beadie.
- Terri (? -- iffy because besides she being a talented career-foccused woman, she's basically shown as an unhumane castrating woman and has a "homewrecker" scene after Tommy becomes mayor. Less noble male characters are generally still relatable and doesn't have any particular attention from such stereotype-male's perspective).
- D'Angelo's/ Freamon's stripper girlfriend (?).

It doesn’t look that good.

The images that make the intro also has in them a image of a opening blouse of a woman who hooked up with the kingpin for financial security after he killed her husband; and another shot is a woman's eye giving a sexualized look followed by a hand offering money (followed by water-gliding shot); and a prostitute undressing (in context, paid to bring Cutty back to crime and drugs to make him feel at home). I'd think it's enough for at least to bring it up.

And let’s not forget that season 2 had that whole "Women in Containers" (instead of comics' "Refrigerators").

The show smells like a gym locker to its last core at times. At times, it works as disarming and somewhat familiar scenario like a high-school drinking night; at times it's masturbatory male power fantasy of guns and danger (Omar even had a wild west scene while the show acknowledged at another scene he was the new cowboy for kids); at others it's an illustration of the overall institutional patriarchy (and how all of these blend). But at times the "illustration of patriarchal mechanisms" (among other things) can feel a bit like it’s there just for plausible deniability.

I wouldn't even put these questions into the table (including weird/problematic racial vibes) or consider them when others put it on the table if this one bit hadn't got stuck in my mind: Rawls at the gay club. I was expecting for it to be a closet-case plot, political leverage against him, subtle closet jokes or anything at all. After nothing came out of this, I realized that bit was just so viewers could laugh at him ("Hahaha, the ball-busting asshole tough boss with unconscious nazi-aspirations is gay. Hahaha! He's gay!"). Omar'd naturally make me dismiss the homophobia, but I'm thinking if maybe his appeal to some (and maybe the creators) might be that he's "teh dangerous ugly savage man-eating wild ghey neghro!" (in Brazil's film culture that's almost as stereotype as the "magic negro"). So the iffy things I rejected earlier suddenly felt like "hmmm... shit."

And reading this one post on Occasional Superheroine on the (I think it was the) president of HBO and another one about Deadwood, I fear somewhat that you could find a certain misogynistic pattern on HBO shows. You can call it a more faithful and unbound portrayal of reality or that it's courageously admitting to certain things, but when it pretty much always comes down to "it's not tv, we can go taboo with no censors = violent power fantasies + ethnic slurs + strippers + prostitutes (sometimes being related to power fantasies -- Sopranos) + violence on women + rapes", it sort of makes you wonder...

But even if the show has signs of misoginy (which I wouldn't say it has with complete certainty), it doesn't necessarily make for a case to get into panic and a witch to be burn at the stake or that its viewers are disgusting people who should act like somebody spotted a booger on their nose.

(and I find odd the suggestions that a product with misogynistic undertones would automatically burn the skins of any female viewership and send them away because they couldn't appreciate the value of the other portions left -- so any product with iffy undertones could never have women righteously watching and liking and that if they're watching that proves it's all crisp and clear)

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Because I certainly know I wasn't originally interested

It's odd, it sure doesn't seem like an interesting show at all when you hear about it. Police and drug dealers. "*snore* Are you kidding me?". With slow cases and brutal depiction of burocracy and petty politics. "*snore*Are you totally fucking kidding me?". It shows the failure of the 'war on drugs' from its very concept, of the homeland security surveillance culture, of the 'no child left behind', the abandonment of the working class, the oppression against the most poor sectors in modern urban scenario, the drug business as if straight from The Godfather, a gay urban wild west gangsta-bandido robin (from da) hood, a heroine addict culture, legalization of drugs, politics, and the cast is so decentralized that a main character like the white Irish McNulty sometimes doesn't even appear for whole episodes so we can see the business in drug dealing, all this with an unflinching camera.
"Are you fucking kidding me, when can I see it?"

And even that is only interesting to certain portions of people, I'd imagine. It's too ‘boring’, slow, social (and maybe lefty -- or lefty just by simply being social) and unsatisfying for whoever likes to see CSI and cop shows. And it has too many cop shows qualities to interest others that don’t like shows like CSI, Law & Order or your weekly dose of “Crime, Punishment & Urban Fear”.

Kima is not a non-female character just because she's tough and has a girlfriend.

I don’t think anyone is saying that (and I’m sorry if I didn’t expressed myself properly earlier, please don’t take my words there above as saying that I'm expecting a gender stereotype from a character or anywhere else). I don't know if it's a matter of Kima being a "masculine lesbian" (I'm not equalizing "tough" with "masculine", mind you). I don't really think she's "masculine" at all -- part of the appeal of the character, it seems, was that she was handled as a tough lesbian cop without acting like a prejudicious portrayal of a “butch” figure nor pandering to men’s lesbian fantasy (though there are moments that could be taken as fantasy aspect in one or two scenes). But I hold that to be mostly because of Sonja Sohn’s delivery and not so much for how Kima is written. The show even sort of gets out of its way to tell us she’s going through the same path that Jimmy took before the divorce. Now, to make that judgment of the character (“Lesbian McNulty”) simply on that alone – the thought that she couldn’t possibly have the same trajectory of McNulty just because she’s a woman and lesbian – it’d be pretty, well, dumb and based on many stereotyped presumptions.

But IF (a big if) there are so many possible women-fearing stereotypes to serve as context to Kima -- and that she might be the coincidental exception -- you get the feeling that the writers themselves weren't aiming at pulling the carpet on wronged gender roles assumptions all that much (‘cause that would take knowing how to write women beyond rigid pre-established caricatures – misogynistic or not) and that they were almost (I’m being hyperbolic here) just replacing the words "McNulty 2.0" with "Kima" on the writing software in their heads, almost if for a token effect, without much empathetic imagination for nuanced details of one’s particular problems and one’s life*, and that the actress was the one who managed to pull it off (the entire plot with Kima being unsatisfied with Cheryl because of the kid was something as if straight from a possible McNulty past storyline -- but we never catch a glimpse of how hard it must've been for them as a lesbian couple to adopt the boy, if one wished to portray a big toll their relationship was facing). But again, just because she doesn’t have such stories in 50 hours, doesn’t mean anything (and it’d be stupid to make a conclusion on the even stupider basis of them having too many similarities because they couldn’t “since she’s a woman and lesbian”).

Again, I don't think Kima is so much "a male character played by an actress". I just think that all (even male) characters aren't sketched so roundly (almost vessels to further plot and social points), and that it might show more clearly on the secondary female characters to a point where they become somewhat of an iffy nature, and that those iffy portrayals, if there, could provide further context to how this character is truly drawn out.

*In the same way that Omar’s sexuality is, at first, really cool basically because it’s just a passing mention. He’s not defined by his sexuality – it’s just something he is and that’s it. But later on I got the feeling that the passing mention is the gist because of a lack of ability to go anywhere more nuanced and deep, and that his sexuality is just a passing mention not because they don’t see anything much to it, but because they wouldn’t really deep themselves into it, and that his sexuality was supposed to be a – if not the – defining quality (a bandido, yes. But a gay bandido). So the brief mentions (some of them amidst the homophobia of the “players”) end up becoming that it is about him being gay. So it comes off as the sexuality version of “hey, I don’t see colors, I’m colorblind”. I’m not saying it should be completely different because he’s gay (as with Kima), but I’m saying that maybe it’s not different because of a lack of effort – so the appeal would be a continuous “he’s gay, but manly and tough” – a caveman’s perspective if that’s a reason for surprise -- or “he’s gay… and not a mincing caricature” and it freezes in that one point beyond.

Brianna is no less morally problematic, to me, than Avon.”

I don’t know. Perhaps. But while the show appears to consider her just morally skewed (except afterwards when she gains further agency), Avon is supposedly interesting in his own brand of immorality (he is interesting for other reasons, to me, but that might be because he is given more screen time). In my view Avon is far more morally problematic. We know that every step on his career-ladder was filled with people killed and used kids. Even though Avon is far more fucked up in the sense that he’s in direct contact with murdering and ordering murders, he gets plenty of “sympathetic” moments to get him a bit sugarcoated or even have a “gangsta” appeal to whoever might like it (and even if he didn’t had those scenes, I’d presume that many in the audience would still like him for being the cool and interesting Godfather and for things they’d maybe feel is appalling instead of gangsta when Snoop does it – while Brianna’s character trace for much of her participation is basically the one mistake we saw – yeah, appalling and tragic, but still… I don’t think she’s anywhere near the horrors the characters we follow around made).

Brianna had very few scenes of that type, where we see her being more vulnerable and brave in speaking truth to power and being the pulling point of the scene (thinking more specifically after Dee’s gone). But until that point she’s basically a one note character: “the woman who sold out her son” – and many of her scenes later worked with that premise as basis (but without necessarily judging her), as if she was supposed to be held more accountable and less forgivable for her actions than Avon or String. I think it’s again far more to a case concerning an actress’ delivery of the part that made her so likeable and interesting in light of the circumstances. “Less noble” female characters seem to get a different treatment (and a very different criteria to what determines their “lack of nobility”) than the “less noble” male ones (thinking now of Wee-Bay at the end of season 4 in contrast to his wife and the difference in how each treated their son – if you remember him from season 1, he was one you’d hate with disgust and fear; now, he’s an alright guy that knows and wants what’s good for his son, and sends him to Bunny. Yes, it’s not unrealistic, people can change or even make a contradictory choice like that while being the most awful person, specially on a show about grey shades in things – but it’s an oddly almost-selective constant pattern. Right? No? Still? How about Barnell and his girlfriend and the humor it was supposed to be playing at? “I can’t wait to get to prison, she won’t shut up”. Not even a double take? At all?).

Still, this brings me back to the question of why such environments, topics, & characters could not possibly be of interest to women.

I don't think anyone was actually stating it wasn’t of interest to women (specially because of such environments and topics), but my particular statement was how I felt odd at the possibly understated implication that since our female friends and girlfriends appreciate the show then that would mean it couldn't possibly hold any misogynistic values (and that if it did hold such values, they could never rightly sit and watch to appreciate the high-value of the portions left -- the, by far, bigger portion of the show). It’s also not a case that “if a show has no or less women in it” (which is not really the case -- and I know you didn't said anything to that notion), “it means it’s not aimed for women to see and that it hates them”, I don’t think anyone here believes that women or men can’t relate to or enjoy products unless there are representatives of their genders included. It’s that maybe it might have some iffy undertones in its portrayals, a too-convenient-selective side of things to what (and how) is shown and an odd pattern that repeats itself concerning female characters in a more pervasive manner that doesn’t occur so often with male ones that are far more terrible.

Isn't the idea that the ("real") female characters are a slew of nagging, emotional, one-dimensional harpies, itself a misogynist reading?

Well, but they’re not real. They’re written by someone. I’m confused to as your “the (“real”) female characters”. I believe nobody here actually sees them as “nagging” or “emotional” or “harpies”. One-dimensional, at times, yes. One-dimensional supposed to be/ written with the intention for them to come off as (to whoever will take them as) “harpies” stereotypes, just maybe.

(and I’m truly sorry for these long ass posts. It’s just that I’ve read once this review just saying something to the effect of “The Wire is misogynistic. Nope, I don’t need to say anything else. It is so, period. Lalala can’t hear you.” So after rejecting the thought so quickly because of a dumb review, I feared I could be throwing the baby out with the bath water and decided to really give a thought to it, since it's a well beloved show of mine)