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There is already a thread here with some discussion of Season One and the opening of Season Two, but I thought I'd start a new thread so that I can talk to people about the show as it airs in the UK - can we keep this thread spoiler-free for anything after what has shown on Living TV so far, please? We could use the other thread for spoilers, or [severely] just wait.
[clears throat] Okay, I'll begin. As is clear from the other thread, I wasn't that impressed with Season One to begin with, but by the end I was completely loving it and had to buy a bootleg DVD from Hong Kong on ebay so I could watch it MORE. In the other thread, Mister Disco wrote this:
this is the first time I've seen a confused 'straight' girl in a lesbian romance coming out smelling of greed, manipulation and deceit rather than sweet, innocent, blameless confusion
which I can only echo. The development of the whole Jenny plot in S1 was a fantastic play on viewerly expectation: because of the conventions MrD alludes to, I sort of started out thinking I was meant to like Jenny, and thus being very squicked by her red-nosed weeping and fuckwittery. Imagine my delight when I realized that (a) she was being presented as manipulative, deceitful and annoying, and (b) the series was not editorializing on her behaviour. The lack of a Sarah-Jessica-Parker commentary is a major - and much-appreciated - difference from Sex in the City, but further, this is a show where you genuinely don't feel the presence of a writerly superego guiding you firmly through the rights and wrongs of the character's behaviours. It's really exciting (and quite rare in American TV, or at least the American TV I've seen).
And now a similar thing seems to be happening with the girl Jenny's dating. She was introduced at the end of S1 and I sort of thought she was too good to be true (though also hott. A lot of the minor or second-string characters seem to be allowed to be attractive within a wider range of "attractive" than the leads - there are some beautiful strong-featured and/or older women showing up in smaller roles). But now! It turns out that she is in fact eevil - showing up at Jenny's work, during her first shift, to break the news that Jenny's ex has tried to kill herself, then hanging around to tend Jenny in a psychotic Munchlesbian-by-proxy way.
And this keeps happening. I keep being delighted by instances where the show follows lines of thought that I share but don't really expect to see on the telly, because they go against the usual dramatic/ideological conventions - so I get the double pleasure of having my expectations confounded and my world-view confirmed all at the same time. This doesn't always happen - f'rex, I was a bit grumpy about the lesbian boy in S1 whose desire to fuck Alice with a dildo, rather than with his penis, was overruled and not taken seriously. That worried me, because I thought he might have all sorts of reasons for not wanting to fuck people with his penis, and those should be respected... but anyway, apart from that and a couple of other instances, The L Word pretty consistently seems to share my assumptions about the world and how it works. And that seems to me to be the most important thing about the politics of representation: not what ("I feel totally excluded by The L-Word because I'm a disabled bi-dyke in an intergenerational relationship and I don't see myself reflected in it!") but how ("I feel recognized by The L-Word because it understands gender and age in the same way that I do!")
Diva (lesbian UK magazine) is very ambivalent about The L-Word, and its readers consistently give it the thumbs-down in polls, surveys, etc. Don't know if this is representative of the lesbian media, but I'd be interested to know what other people have seen... and any theories on why this is so. I have a theory, which is an extremely ungenerous one: the criticisms I've seen of the L-Word are often focussed around the idea that straight men might get pleasure out of it ("it's not real lesbians, it's just male fantasies..."). I'm a slash writer, so it would be vastly pot-calling-the-kettle-black for me to get upset about straight men getting off on (representations of) f/f sex... but anyway, it seems to me that the term "lesbian" is sometimes mobilized in a very non-queer way (in Eve Kofosky Sedgwick's sense of the word queer, ie sites where gender, sexual orientation, fantasy, preferred sex acts, familial affiliation, etc, etc, don't all line up together). I've come across a few instances lately where people have wanted "lesbian" to mean something very clear and very well-aligned: you are a woman, you want to have sex with women, there can be no complications or kinks, the "lesbian" guarantees identity and desire. So I wonder whether something like that is going on with some resistances to The L-Word (though obviously not all resistances, and not even all resistances that criticize it in the name of "the lesbian").
Okay, back to the L-Word And Things Deva Loves About It. Two more things:
(1) the Ivan/Kit romance. The scene at the end of S1 where Ivan lip-synched to I'm Your Man is one of the two most erotic things I have ever seen on TV (the other is the couch scene in 'Pressure Point' [episode of B7]). (This is partly because I have an overidentification with Uncle Len going back to the age of 11, when I was pissed off that my voice wasn't going to break and I was never going to be able to sing like that for real, and also have always harboured vague fantasies of doing a drag show, but oddly never put the two together and could never decide what song I would lip-synch if I ever were to bring my inner boy out onto the stage... so this scene granted a lot of never-quite-made wishes for me). And I'm on tenterhooks to see where it'll go - will it be like Lisa, the lesbian man, and piss me off, or will it go in an interesting direction?
(2) The butches. I should explain (a) that I have a slightly idiosyncratic definition of butch/femme - butches are Yang personality types, femmes are Yin - and (b) that I was late to realize my own butchness, so coming-to-butchness is one of my favourite character arcs. That's actually why I ended up having some sympathy for Jenny: she's a butch (no, really. The biggest clue is the way she interacts with her best friend in S1: when she's away from potential sexual partners, she becomes much more relaxed and assertive) who has learned to get what she wants through pathologically femme behaviour (manipulation, emotional blackmail). But as she comes into her butchness, she will learn other, more butch ways, of getting what she wants, which will hopefully be less pathological. Though of course not necessarily! Because look at Bette! Her tragedy is that she has pathologically butch coping mechanisms, as revealed in this week's episode (though I recognized it last season too): "I thought I had to absorb your pain and ignore my own". Ah, the classic (stone) butch- taking responsibility for everything in her eternal quest to make everything nice for the femme, and ending up fucking everything up by exploding bottled-up emotions all over the place!
Actually, this reminds me of something Ganesh and Flowers have both said before: that one of the key things about representation of othered sexualities is just to have more gay/bisexual characters - and, crucially, more than one. You can kind of tell how necessary that is from the pathetic overexcitement with which I greet a TV show with more than one way of being butch.
Trivia question: Does anyone know if this is the first soap to have the word "fuck" in its theme song? |
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) When that scene finished you could practically see the post-coital smoke coming out of my nostrils. It had all the things that are practically cliches about What Makes A Good Sex Scene among slash writers - there were moments of awkwardness rather than unrealistic physical smoothness; it moved the narrative along; and it was in-character, but also revealed more about the characters than we knew before. Oh, and the awkwardness was EVEN BETTER in contrast to the awkward and abortive Jenny/Dana sex scene last season, because Dana hasn't got any less awkward but this time it was JUST RIGHT! Because it was with the right person! (See, Dana is endogamous. She should have sex with people she knows well. The exogamous sexy stranger thing is not for her. She is the anti-Shane.)