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mouseworks at 12:58pm on 20/02/2010
mouseworks at 12:58pm on 20/02/2010As someone on the Television Without Pity forum noticed, the situation Neal Caffrey finds himself in is on one hand a fantasy of the good life and on the other, being a charity case taken in by a kind widow and given a dead man's shoes and clothes to wear. I sometimes was thinking, as I read the comments, that the forum was giving the writers too much credit, and that some of what was going on was sloppy writing (though some of the problem appears to have been that episodes were out of order).
I think what I'd like to see in future episodes is Neal and the returning lesbian character developing a genuine friendship, with both of them checking out women, warning each other of possible problems, and perhaps working out the Kate issue. Another thing I'd like to see is the Burkes buying Neal something he genuinely likes and can't quite afford legally at this point. Neal's done enough for June by now to have the obs less in her favor.
The slash -- the stuff damned_colonial recommends tends to be mostly in character (exaggerated a trifle beyond the show along the axis of Neal being a very bad boy); some of the other stuff tends to be much less in character as I understand the character.
The third thing is the amazing amount of promo for the show--and the use of various net forums (Facebook, Twitter, the web site, YouTube) to promote the series. Much of this is quite low-budget compared to print media advertising and the various broadcast television intra-network of a couple of decades earlier. I rather wonder how genuinely egalitarian this is, how much the show personnel interacting on Twitter take the fans seriously, how much this may be a move toward the audience having more egalitarian relationships with the people creating their entertainment. Big Entertainment tends to be Big Budget and fairly top down.
I know for most t.v. and movies, the people who do the commercial work are scrupulous about avoiding the amateurs, using agents outside their own organizations as a screening device. The fear is being sued for stealing ideas. The fan fiction seems to be operating in an interesting space as fan fics flag that the show is doing well, with watchers or readers invested in the characters. Good fan fiction tends to point out more interesting shows playing with cultural archetypes (captain/trusted subordinates who compliment his personality). I'm not sure popularity always depends on playing well with cultural archetypes, but doing theme and variation on common cultural tropes seems to be a necessary condition for things being slashable. And gay themes seem to be haunting many of those common cultural tropes by their absence.
Samuel R. Delany wrote about reading with an eye as to what was missing in erotic descriptions in poetry and fiction, and finding hidden gay writers this way (Hart Crane was one example). I noticed as a teenager that Whitman on guys was believable in a way that wasn't true of Whitman's erotic descriptions of women. I was only 15, but I could tell what was forced and what wasn't.
The other thing was that it was easier to find gay male eroticism than gay female eroticism (We, Too, Won't Last was my 14 year old self's introduction to queerness in women, but it wasn't Naked Lunch. Reading recent slash, I realized, "Wait, there's no PiV sex in this." A woman from the Beat Era, Diane diPrima, who'd been sandwich between two guys who weren't admitting any attraction to each other, , wrote that she was quite aware that she was a way for them to feel each other through her (details in her autobiography, Memoirs of a Beatnik). The non-penis sex had the flavor of using men in ways that were gay women's ways of having sex. Not that this can't be done in RL, of course.
The challenge in writing sexually active scenes isn't making them hot. It's making them intellectually intriguing and part of the narrative as well and keeping a frisson if not a turn on while doing that. One of the problems is that sex tends to either derail other narrative elements or become the narrative in ways that tend to be simplistic (as in bad OOC slash). But that difficulty is our culture's difficulty with making the erotic positively part of life, seeing its potential for exploitation (and that's not just for m/f pairings), its power to take us out of ourselves, and the pleasure. Sex positive is not anti-feminist. Orientation isn't just about sex, as I realized when I saw my widower father bond to a woman he wasn't sleeping with because of illness in old age (I wouldn't have begrudged them pleasure had they wanted it).
The cool thing about White Collar is that it's finally has women characters who weren't just there for the boys, who had characters of their own. The FBI agent's wife wasn't a cliche of either brainless defense of her husband's every act (more 50s and all too common in real life) or handwringing over the missed dinners and danger. The bad girls weren't working for their lovers. The FBI agent's wife had a career, but no children. I'd like someone to get that children as complete dependents are a short part of their parents' lives. After first grade, the relationship becomes more complex but quite a great deal less dependent unless the parents homeschool.
The uncool thing is that the only obvious Southern accent came from a bad guy. I am so tired of this, but I did like catching the subtle Texas accent of our not so bad guy. When people lay out the privilege bingo card, they miss that white people who speak with Southern accents get minus white points (working class whites in general are often seen as failed white people who were too stupid to use the privilege) and are rarely portrayed favorably on television. Not all of us voted for Bush or McCain, thank you very much. A southern born s.f. writer and physics professor said that speaking with a Southern accent costs you 30 IQ points in the estimation of your listeners. On commercial television, it makes male characters lose their morals and female characters lose their sanity.
I am so happy, though, that so far, all the academic females (one) on White Collar are focused on research and not teaching and know how to use guns. If they bring in a warm fuzzy woman teacher or a warm fuzzy therapist, I'll spew.
Might also be fun to see Caffrey, or someone like him in some future show, learning from what he didn't want for his child/honorary nephew that he really didn't want the games he'd been playing and the only way to shape the child would be to reshape the man.
I think what I'd like to see in future episodes is Neal and the returning lesbian character developing a genuine friendship, with both of them checking out women, warning each other of possible problems, and perhaps working out the Kate issue. Another thing I'd like to see is the Burkes buying Neal something he genuinely likes and can't quite afford legally at this point. Neal's done enough for June by now to have the obs less in her favor.
The slash -- the stuff damned_colonial recommends tends to be mostly in character (exaggerated a trifle beyond the show along the axis of Neal being a very bad boy); some of the other stuff tends to be much less in character as I understand the character.
The third thing is the amazing amount of promo for the show--and the use of various net forums (Facebook, Twitter, the web site, YouTube) to promote the series. Much of this is quite low-budget compared to print media advertising and the various broadcast television intra-network of a couple of decades earlier. I rather wonder how genuinely egalitarian this is, how much the show personnel interacting on Twitter take the fans seriously, how much this may be a move toward the audience having more egalitarian relationships with the people creating their entertainment. Big Entertainment tends to be Big Budget and fairly top down.
I know for most t.v. and movies, the people who do the commercial work are scrupulous about avoiding the amateurs, using agents outside their own organizations as a screening device. The fear is being sued for stealing ideas. The fan fiction seems to be operating in an interesting space as fan fics flag that the show is doing well, with watchers or readers invested in the characters. Good fan fiction tends to point out more interesting shows playing with cultural archetypes (captain/trusted subordinates who compliment his personality). I'm not sure popularity always depends on playing well with cultural archetypes, but doing theme and variation on common cultural tropes seems to be a necessary condition for things being slashable. And gay themes seem to be haunting many of those common cultural tropes by their absence.
Samuel R. Delany wrote about reading with an eye as to what was missing in erotic descriptions in poetry and fiction, and finding hidden gay writers this way (Hart Crane was one example). I noticed as a teenager that Whitman on guys was believable in a way that wasn't true of Whitman's erotic descriptions of women. I was only 15, but I could tell what was forced and what wasn't.
The other thing was that it was easier to find gay male eroticism than gay female eroticism (We, Too, Won't Last was my 14 year old self's introduction to queerness in women, but it wasn't Naked Lunch. Reading recent slash, I realized, "Wait, there's no PiV sex in this." A woman from the Beat Era, Diane diPrima, who'd been sandwich between two guys who weren't admitting any attraction to each other, , wrote that she was quite aware that she was a way for them to feel each other through her (details in her autobiography, Memoirs of a Beatnik). The non-penis sex had the flavor of using men in ways that were gay women's ways of having sex. Not that this can't be done in RL, of course.
The challenge in writing sexually active scenes isn't making them hot. It's making them intellectually intriguing and part of the narrative as well and keeping a frisson if not a turn on while doing that. One of the problems is that sex tends to either derail other narrative elements or become the narrative in ways that tend to be simplistic (as in bad OOC slash). But that difficulty is our culture's difficulty with making the erotic positively part of life, seeing its potential for exploitation (and that's not just for m/f pairings), its power to take us out of ourselves, and the pleasure. Sex positive is not anti-feminist. Orientation isn't just about sex, as I realized when I saw my widower father bond to a woman he wasn't sleeping with because of illness in old age (I wouldn't have begrudged them pleasure had they wanted it).
The cool thing about White Collar is that it's finally has women characters who weren't just there for the boys, who had characters of their own. The FBI agent's wife wasn't a cliche of either brainless defense of her husband's every act (more 50s and all too common in real life) or handwringing over the missed dinners and danger. The bad girls weren't working for their lovers. The FBI agent's wife had a career, but no children. I'd like someone to get that children as complete dependents are a short part of their parents' lives. After first grade, the relationship becomes more complex but quite a great deal less dependent unless the parents homeschool.
The uncool thing is that the only obvious Southern accent came from a bad guy. I am so tired of this, but I did like catching the subtle Texas accent of our not so bad guy. When people lay out the privilege bingo card, they miss that white people who speak with Southern accents get minus white points (working class whites in general are often seen as failed white people who were too stupid to use the privilege) and are rarely portrayed favorably on television. Not all of us voted for Bush or McCain, thank you very much. A southern born s.f. writer and physics professor said that speaking with a Southern accent costs you 30 IQ points in the estimation of your listeners. On commercial television, it makes male characters lose their morals and female characters lose their sanity.
I am so happy, though, that so far, all the academic females (one) on White Collar are focused on research and not teaching and know how to use guns. If they bring in a warm fuzzy woman teacher or a warm fuzzy therapist, I'll spew.
Might also be fun to see Caffrey, or someone like him in some future show, learning from what he didn't want for his child/honorary nephew that he really didn't want the games he'd been playing and the only way to shape the child would be to reshape the man.
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