Blog: Resurrected

I've been meaning to revive this blog for... let's see: February, March, April... about eight months now. I may or may not ever get around to writing about Sherlock Holmes or anything else that's happened in the interim, but I figure for today I'll just pick up with now, and go from there.

And the topic for now is House. I am loving the House/Cuddy relationship almost enough to make me ignore my annoyance with the medical story in this past week's episode, "Selfish." Almost.

Here's the setup: the patient of the week is a teenage girl who is very active and accomplished, and her brother is a teenage boy who has some kind of muscular dystrophy that means he is not expected to live much past twenty-five. It is established early in the episode that the girl wants to sort of make up for some of the things her brother isn't able to do, and that he does to an extent live vicariously through her. By the end of the episode, the scenario boils down to a choice between the girl dying or accepting the donation of part of a lung from her brother, which would save her life but shorten his.

There were two huge things that bugged me about this. First, while both kids were clearly intellectually competent teenagers, it was assumed by all the adults in the story that this choice should be made entirely without the kids' knowledge or input. Excuse me? I guess I could imagine some parents taking that position, but the doctors didn't blink; not only that, but Cuddy seriously advocated that House not even inform the parents that the partial lung transplant was an option! Sure, it's an awful choice (impossible, as House says) to have to make, but to deny the family the choice would have been unconscionable (and indeed House does tell the father despite Cuddy's admonition not to). To want to leave the kids (i.e. the most affected parties) out of the discussion was, I think, similarly idiotic.

Second, and even more egregious in my opinion, was that when the kids figured out what was going on and talked to each other about it (as they should have been doing from the start), the brother's position was basically that his life was pretty worthless and meaningless anyway and that's why his sister should accept his donation.

I was incensed at this. It's one thing to have medically silly scenarios, or oversimplifications or convoluted relationships and plots that are only there for dramatic tension. I am absolutely willing to put up with factual stretching for the sake of narrative truth... but this, to me, was just lazy storytelling, and that's unforgivable. The writers had established that the brother probably wouldn't live past his mid-twenties. Wouldn't it have been even more dramatic and noble if he wanted to make the donation and shorten his already-short life despite having every reason to want to live, out of love for his sister? To offer to maximize her potential at the sacrifice of his own? Instead, the implication was that he felt basically no sense of self-worth, that he was just a spectator to her more worthy life, and that was why he wanted to save her.

I'm getting more disgusted than ever just writing about it.

It was a very short scene, and I suppose it's possible that I misinterpreted it, but I don't think so. I think the House writers messed up an opportunity for a pretty great bit of drama, and instead gave us a degrading, two-dimensional portrayal. Sigh.

To cheer myself up, I will finish by remembering the last bit of the episode, in which House grabs Cuddy's butt as they're waiting for the elevator. She reaches back to remove his hand, and then smoothly interlaces her fingers with his. It sums up the delightfully complicated nature of their relationship, and I can't wait to continue watching as that relationship progresses.

If the House writers can elevate the medical stories even close to the level of the relationship arc they're developing, I will be an extremely happy viewer. If not, well, I guess nothing motivates a blog like the desire to complain.

FOLLOW UP: Several people have had similar comments to the one below: it sounds like my interpretation of the scene was a minority one, which is actually a good thing. As I said to one person, I thought the brother was saying that he wanted to donate time to his sister partly because he wasn't really using it anyway... But I agree that at least his comment about not wanting to live without her needn't have anything to do with how worthwhile he was feeling his life to be. If that makes any sense.

Into the unknown...

It's possible no one will really read this blog anymore, since my class is over, but I think it would be fun to keep it going at least for a while.

So for today, here's a link to a great NPR blog entry about "How a thorough de-gazing saved CBS's The Big Bang Theory." In other words, how making their female lead into a three-dimensional character instead of an objectified cardboard cutout allowed the show to thrive. The writer, Linda Holmes, sums it up nicely in this way:

• [The] changes in this particular show make for a great example of the fact that you don't just avoid empty, cliched versions of women (or men, and I am looking at you, Sex And The City) because they're offensive or infuriating or anything like that. The best creative reason to avoid them is that they make your show bad.

Hear, hear!

Next up: reviews of Zombieland and Sherlock Holmes. Big surprise: I loved them both :)

It's Final Project Time!

Our final projects are due tomorrow, and we're supposed to write a summary as our last official blog post. So here it is: for my project, I created a website called "Educational Resources for Studying Disabilities in the Media."

The web address is https://sites.google.com/site/disabilitymediastudies/

My intent was to make something that could be a resource for people teaching disability studies, or media studies, or anything in between. It's sort of a fancy annotated bibliography, in that in that I've listed a whole bunch of websites, movies, tv shows, books, and articles that might be relevant to educators, with occasional comments or suggestions about possible class activities. I linked to several existing resources on this topic on the main page, and I also included brief introductions to the concepts of disability studies, media studies, and neurodiversity; but the bulk of the site is devoted to media representations of different areas of disability. I fully acknowledge that organizing the site in that way is problematic, because it defines people in terms of disability labels (buying into the "medical model" in some ways). However, I feel that for pragmatic purposes it is the most straightforward way to initiate the site. I am completely open to the idea of rearranging it at some point in the future. Indeed, I hope that I can keep the site active, adding to it, changing it, reorganizing it as I discover new things or get suggestions from users. (I don't know if there will actually be any users, but I can always hope!) In this way I see the site as a work in progress.

In addition to presenting the site to my classmates tomorrow, I'm fortunate to have the opportunity to share it on Friday with the U of M's Interdisciplinary Graduate Group on Disability Studies, which is currently working to develop a Disability Studies graduate minor. I expect I will get lots of useful feedback from both of these audiences, so the site should get off to a dynamic start right away!

Video Clip Analysis: The Mentalist

Our assignment for this week was to take two different analytical approaches to a video clip of our choice. The array of analytical approaches included Marxist, feminist, psychological, deconstructionst, racial, rhetorical, postcolonial, etc. The possibilities being almost endless for this assignment, I settled on analyzing something I saw quite recently: a scene from last week's episode of The Mentalist. The clip is here (sorry if there's a commercial at the beginning).

For those of you unfamiliar with the show, the blonde man is the title character, Patrick Jane (Simon Baker), a civilian consultant who works with the fictional California Bureau of Investigation. The woman in this clip is Agent Teresa Lisbon (Robin Tunney), the CBI team leader; the other guy's role is pretty self-explanatory.

Let's start with a race-oriented analysis. The main characters in this scene, as in most TV shows, are white; their race is pretty much never commented on. (One of the other series-regular characters is Korean, a fact that has been portrayed as relevant to his life a few times over the course of the show.) The third character initially speaks in Spanish-accented English, but then switches to unaccented English partway through the scene. (In this case I think language serves as the only clear racial marker for the character, since his physical appearance seems racially ambiguous.) The character uses a non-native accent to reinforce his low-status facade; once it is clear that he has power relative to the other characters, he drops the accent. This is actually a somewhat layered situation, in that it is a choice of the character, the Fixer, to play on stereotypes in his portrayal of a harmless, blend-into-the-background janitor. However, this being fiction, the choice of the character is ultimately the choice of the creators; I don't know whether the language change was written into the script or was a contribution of the actor, but nevertheless it was a deliberate choice. By switching to the same speech register as the main characters, the Fixer demonstrated that he believed his accented speech had caused them to underestimate him. If non-native-accented speech did not serve to reduce perceived threat, the character would not have bothered to assume it as part of his disguise.

A slightly less convoluted interpretation is that the language shift simply served as an additional signal to the audience that the Fixer was totally different than he appeared. He was not simply a janitor who had been paid to snoop at the office, for example. In other words, it could have been used as a practical short-hand in a busy scene to make sure that the audience could understand what was going on. But even so, the underlying implications about status, power, and language remain pretty much the same.

For my second analytical approach I'll take a feminist perspective. I was actually pleasantly surprised by a couple things in this scene. In the bad old days of TV, it would've always been the woman who was physically menaced by the bad guy, while the male hero watched anxiously and/or attempted to save her. In this scene, however, it is the male lead who is placed in direct physical jeopardy. The Fixer threatens Jane in order to disarm Lisbon, whose gun made her a specific physical threat. The interactions in the scene are primarily defined by the characters' roles: i.e. cop, civilian, and criminal, rather than by the characters' genders. This continues throughout the rest of the clip, as Jane hesitates to chase the dangerous guy after he leaves, and Lisbon is the one to run up to the car after the crash. From a feminist perspective this seems very refreshing: it's not that the characters' genders are ignored or suppressed, just that they are somewhat irrelevant compared to the other dynamics at play in this particular scenario.

There are other aspects to consider with regard to gender portrayals, such as Lisbon's hairstyle and choice of clothing, but relative to other TV shows The Mentalist seems pretty egalitarian. For example, Lisbon generally wears practical shoes rather than heels, and Jane's coiffure is at least as impressive as that of the female regulars.

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The second part of this assignment is to describe how students could apply our two analytical approaches to other related films, tv shows, etc. Here's my idea:

Each student should watch at least ten different previews for procedural/legal/mystery TV shows. These could all be for one show, or for multiple different shows; they could be from past and/or current shows. Students should make note of the race, gender, and apparent role (e.g. police officer, attorney, suspect, victim) of each character that appears in the previews. Are there any patterns within or across shows? If the shows are from different time periods, are there any noticable changes across time? Is it possible to draw any conclusions about the portrayal of race or gender in these shows from such short samples? Students should examine features such as clothing, use of language, lighting, music, body language, etc. to discuss how characters are portrayed. This is also an opportunity to discuss how TV previews are created: what choices are involved in putting together a preview, and what do these choices say about the creator, the audience, etc.? This assignment could be done individually or in groups, either during class or as a take-home assignment.

Survivor: Samoa, week 2

Well, I skipped watching the premier of Flash Forward so I could see the second episode of Survivor. I'm hoping I can catch up with FF online...

Survivor continues to be disappointing. The person kicked off tonight was one of the people I liked best: a police officer who totally saw through to the sleaziness of the loathsome villain guy. But people kept referring to her as the "weak link," implying that because she was "old" (maybe mid 40s?) she somehow wasn't an asset to the team. I would FAR rather have her on my team in one of these challenges than the tiny soft-looking twenty-somethings (although I suppose I risk dismissing them as rudely as Mr. Villain by referring to them that way...)

My hope that there would be Samoan cultural references related to the rugby-game challenge was not fulfilled, unfortunately. There were rugby-shaped balls and some scrum-like activity, but the word "rugby" was never uttered, much less any references to Samoan culture. Oh, well. I don't think the show is going to hold my attention much longer -- it's too dissatisfying on too many levels.

Survivor: Samoa

I've decided that since this is a media blog, I'm going to blog about media stuff whenever I feel like it, in addition to writing for class assignments.

Having been a Peace Corps Volunteer in Samoa, I was morally obligated to watch tonight's season premier of Survivor: Samoa. Things started off ok, with the contestants paddling to shore in traditional outrigger canoes. Also, a fair amount of the set decorations have at least vaguely Samoan-looking patterns on them. However, of the few Samoan words that were used, most were mispronounced. Saying the name of the country with an American accent is one thing, quite understandable; but one of the two main team names (i.e. a word that will be repeated many, many times throughout the series) is egregiously mispronounced by everybody. The word is "galu." The host - and consequently everyone else - pronounces this "ga LOO" with a hard /g/ as in "gap." Now, in the Samoan language, the letter "g" is pronounced "ng," as in the last sound of the word "sing." (If only I knew how to get an IPA font on Blogspot!) In addition, almost universally, the second-to-last syllable in a word gets the emphasis. So the word in question should be pronounced "NGA loo." It seems to me that it wouldn't have been terribly difficult to ask someone about this before filming... on the other hand, the show makes it look like the country is completely unpopulated aside from the contestants, so maybe asking a local for help with pronunciation would've ruined the illusion.

(Galu means "wave," by the way; the other team name is Foa Foa, which means "conch shell." They didn't say this in the show - I had to look them up in my Samoan-English dictionary, which I imagine is not a resource that most CBS viewers have readily at hand.)

There were some very pretty establishing shots of the rainforest, coastal blowholes, and lagoons. Again, no indication of any local inhabitants. This is the first time I've ever watched Survivor, so maybe it's their standard operating procedure to use their locations merely as a physical backdrop rather than showing any interest in language, culture, history, etc. On the other hand, this was only the first episode - in the preview for next week it looks like they've got some variation of rugby going on for one of the challenges, which is definitely culturally relevant.

But will I watch next week? The reasons I've never watched before still hold true: I do not find the individualist-competitive-cutthroat premise to be entertaining. In fiction, sure, but when "real" people are involved I would much rather watch something that rewards teamwork and resourcefulness (not to be confused with deviousness).

On the other hand, I am tempted to see if they manage to incorporate anything of Samoa into the show, beyond superficial design motifs and insultingly mispronounced team names (I mean, come on, if they really cared wouldn't they at least TRY to get it right, or take two seconds to explain why the names were chosen?). Also, there is an utterly loathsome "villain" participant whom I would very much like to see kicked off the show. He established clearly that he is there to manipulate and betray people. He actually called himself the "puppet master" to the camera, and refers to most of his female teammates as "dumb girls." His expressed purpose in participating is to demonstrate how easy it is to win the show with his strategies. I find myself thinking that if he wins this competition, it will prove once and for all that the universe is unjust... which provides pretty strong motivation to keep watching. No wonder this show is still on the air.

Dammit.