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Poor Bette
OMG there is no poor Bette. Il n'y a pas de poor-Bette. That bit where she rang Tina to say she was thinking about sleeping with Dana Delaney? So that she could screw with Tina's head as much as if she'd actually fucked Dana Delaney, but simultaneously claim to be holding onto the moral high ground?
Interesting that you still feel claustrophobic around Carmen, Flyboy. She seems to be straightforwardly good for Shane, now, so I've revised my opinion about her being a terrifying stalker* - and actually, speaking of Bette, Tangent pointed out yesterday that they slipped in, really subtly (it took us a few days to notice) a nice little compare-and-contrast between Bette/Tina and Carmen/Shane, who both had fights over their conflicting career-related schedules on the same night - but Bette fucked it up spectacularly, and Carmen/Shane resolved it very happily. Nice!
Actually, Bette is the least convincing middle manager ever (why would you hire someone with NO PEOPLE SKILLS to be your fund-raiser/pitch-maker?) so there's another parallel with Carmen, as the least convincing DJ ever.
*That was based on last season, where she appeared to be going omg we are meant for each other why won't you open up to me??? on the basis of a couple of casual fucks with Shane, which was pretty scary. At the time Mr Disco pointed out that the L-Word seems to have a lot of stuff happening offscreen, so we're always only making partial judgements: the more I see of it, the more I really like that way of storytelling. It means the characters are unpredictable and inconsistent, like real people, so you get to know them in the same sort of way you get to know people in real life: not building up one consistent picture, but different in different contexts. It's like with Alice having completely lost it: I wouldn't have predicted it, from the way she'd behaved in S1 and S2, but it feels right somehow. So... it's funny, because I'm usually quite fannish about characters: I can get quite invested in seeing them a certain way, and become very annoyed when the show's makers change them in ways which annul my emotional investment in them, but here I'm just quite happy to go 'Oh, okay, I was wrong about Carmen'. All my judgements feel provisional and endlessly open to revision, and I like that; I also think it's very clever to actually structure that into the texture of a soap, as I think they have.
Am I the only person who's excited about Ariel Schrag being on the writing staff, btw? And if so, had I better start an Ariel Schrag thread in Comics?
Oh, so much more to say, but I'd better stop there (except for a brief squee about the manny - Angus? - who is indeed lovely, and has just made a gloriously intergenerational pass at Kit!! Yayy!!! Also, looking forward to seeing how the Moira/Max strand develops.) Glad this thread has kicked off now. |
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