Being Human
Feb. 8th, 2010 03:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI'm getting increasingly annoyed with this show, and it's for two interlinked reasons, or maybe three. The Bechdel fail, women only talking to each other about a man, which as far as I remember has been true in every episode except the one Nina and Annie conversation. And the fact that the more I watch George and Mitchell the more I think they're doing it wrong, partly because I'm sympathising with and seeing the whole situation from the point of view of the women they meet. Plus the way that the whole ghost, werewolf, vampire thing has from the start been easiest to read as a metaphor for mental health problems, agoraphobia, addiction, whatever the hell they're giving George this week about repressed rage leaking, but the further they go towards the literal side and taking the supernatural stuff seriously the more they close off the appropriate courses of action for the stuff I was reading it as. Specific examples go under the cut.
The women talking to women thing... okay, first of all, if there's a random dead body, is it going to be a woman? Even the time there was a couple and one was dead and one only injured (to start) the dead one was a woman. Dead men seem to be standing there as ghosts thus far. It's bugging me. But mostly, women talking to women: they don't. There was one conversation with Nina and Annie about Nina being a werewolf that only intermittently mentioned George. And today there was the conversation with the mum and the baby and Annie. If the baby had been a baby girl then that would have been an intermittent pass, because the mum was going off to date a fireman so half the conversation was about that, but the other half was about the baby and it was a baby boy so hey, another conversation between women about men. And when else do women talk to women? I think there's a "you can see me" line once in a crowd scene. That's about it. So women exist in a matrix of men, relating to men, talking about men, have lives that revolve around men. I thought maybe the first season was about Annie getting over that, but no, not even. She keeps on meeting male ghosts. Why was it Sykes, a man, who taught her how to close doors? If you swap the players around and keep the emotions between last week and this week you have a more interesting story. A mother who wouldn't cross over because she failed her children, and didn't want to teach Annie because she was afraid she'd fail her. Make the children girls and you have a story actually about women. And then this week if you had a father turning up with his baby because he wanted to go date a firewoman then that's a perfectly worky story, and you can add fun at the edges where Annie is all a fizz about hunky guy and then he abandons the baby for a couple of days and she realises he's useless, and then she wants the baby and not the father, and then we'd have a parallel to what's going on with George. Which if present this week was a bit weak.
At the moment presence of paedophile in a story where George is hanging around with a little girl gives us a parallel that's probably going to bite later, given the whole 'paedo' on the outside of the house getting mentioned this season thing. Eeew.
George and what's up with him just gets more annoying. He has an infectious condition that he passed to his girlfriend, but she doesn't tell him because he'll be upset. He should be upset! He should have mentioned it before there was sex-with-biting, even if it was just her clothes. Does he know he has to be wolf shaped to change people? No he does not. Building up to realising no he actually does not would be an interesting season. But my point is, Nina had a plenty good reason to be annoyed with him just with that right there, but it took the house full of killers covering up a murder thing to get her to leave, which takes the focus off the bits actually done to her. Looked at from Nina's point of view, George is a jerk. Just because it was done to him against his will doesn't mean he should ignore it to the point of passing it on. No stigma, but not just ignorance and messing other people up. Granted he broke down crying about it, but, is that enough? He should be taking precautions.
So then George tries all the things people think of to deal with werewolf changes, all the things Buffyverse did for Oz really, the cage and the tranquilizers and all. And it looks like sensible management of a difficult condition. Yaay.
But then the story says no, you can't cage the wolf, it just gets worse... and here is where this being a mental health metaphor fucks things up big time. Because if you want to play with werewolves you do indeed have to keep the condition active and say you can't just cage him conveniently. But if it's a mental health metaphor what it reads like is: he tried one set of meds and got restrained during a bad time once, and it made his condition worse, so now he's going to give up on the entire possibility of medication, and possibly the entire possibility of restraints. That's fucked up. Instead of managing his condition the story is trashing the possibility of ever managing. Great.
And then he beats the crap out of someone. And threatens them to keep them quiet.
He has now lost all my sympathy. He should now be going through the courts and getting either prison or treatment as appropriate. He's a danger to himself and others, and he's not managing it, and at this point society should step in.
The whole story with Mitchell is about making it impossible for society to step in. And that fucks up the addiction story kind of bad. In real life, if someone has an addiction and does crime to feed it, that doesn't mean everyone like them getting killed. Mitchell told the paedophile he should be in prison, that guy said he'd get treatment, great, sensible, the way systems should work. And exactly where the vampire thing breaks the story. Because the vampires have a parallel social structure starting to support each other, which is interesting in its way, but the whole rest of society is trying to kill them, which is a mess. If taken as a metaphor it reinforces not going for help, which is bad. Does society treat any kind of addict that way? That paedophile seemed to think so. Moral panics about drug users seemed to think so. But it isn't the way systems should work. Every last one of those vampires should get locked up where they can do no more harm. That's the basic problem of telling the story at all, if they're free range they're doing it wrong.
And then there's the last way the addiction story has taken a loop that brings me back to my first point. Looked at from Mitchell's point of view, finding a woman who'll inspire him to stay sober seems reasonable. Looked at from Lucy's point of view I nearly cheer her on to stake him. Prison would be better. But setting yourself up to keep someone else sober never works. It's going to bite her. Probably literally. Get involved with a violent man and sooner or later he'll be violent to you. That's just how it is.
And I think the show will show and has shown that. Because, don't get me wrong, they're showing these things mostly on purpose, and mostly following through the consequences.
But everything they're doing with the setup keeps it personal. It's Mitchell who protects his little group of addicts, not a system with people who won't have their own lives fucked up by working in it. It's Lucy he turns to as a girlfriend, not as a doctor, personal not professional let alone social systems level. George has to sort out his own treatment, the only treatment being tested kills people, and that's fucked up. No system in place, no doctors, no help. Everything is kept so small, and that just messes people up. Great drama, if you like watching people fall.
And what are they doing with Annie? I could read the first season as agoraphobia brought on by domestic violence and hence being scared of people, and then she got all visible and powerful and yaayful. And then... they took it away. And now she's not scared, she's still powerful, but only among ghosts, and by the way, nobody can see her, so now it's not agoraphobia it's just invisibility. And if I read that as a metaphor it's going to come out as the victims of domestic violence going invisible, and yet apparently it's meant to be a balance of the universe thing, part of how the rules work, and that's just... beyond annoying. So what's her story now? What's she got to overcome, who can she help, what is she doing? Mitchell has an arc, George has an arc, Annie has... being threatened by the bad mens and staying home looking after a baby... and no job because apparently that would be upsetting to the universe... and how is this to be read that isn't really really annoying? Plus that bit with the baby 'I left it too late' 'you weren't to know'... what's up with that? It doesn't sound like regret 'it's too late' it sounds like responsibility and choices. Which is a mess. Everything happening to Annie is about options being taken away, and if you add it to the other stuff about women it just reads all wrong.
Also, there have been a couple of people identified as having real and ordinary mental health problems. And they were both ghosts that attacked Annie. Apparently evil uses mentally ill people, and people with addictions, and it uses them to hurt women.
I know this is a horror story but without Annie's gentler kind of mental illness then all the metaphor and non metaphor people are violent to others, and, well, no.
So I don't know.
As a vampire story it follows through on the setup in solid consequences and with real grounding in the real world, follows the power dynamics, makes things make sense. Great vampire story. Uses all the symbols of real world addiction and subverts or leaves behind many of the old school vampire things. Yet states it isn't an addiction, it's cowardice, it's keeping on doing the wrong thing because otherwise you have to face within yourself that it was always wrong. That's a very strong vampire story indeed.
But then you hit the question, why aren't they being dealt with like other addicts, like other murderers? If they can tolerate sunlight and don't need to drink blood it's even simple. Why aren't they in the prisons? Why doesn't everyone know about them? Because they've just been that much in control? But there's the police and the coroner and the vampire hunters with stakes. And it just sets them up to be a kind of organised crime that is so absolutely infallible they've persuaded the world they never did exist, and that's... difficult.
And the metaphors and the other characters and the gaps and the way that really, even pretty Mitchell should be in prison for the rest of forever...
I don't want to follow this story round these corners. I don't particularly feel the need to watch addicts go wrong and drag others with them again. Especially when mostly the ones getting hurt are women.
Even if the point of the show is to show that, I've about had enough with watching it.
But we're up to 5/8 already apparently, so odds are I'll watch the rest of the season on inertia.
It's good, it's well written, it's just that mostly I am reaching the point where I want to lock up the guys and give the women pamphlets on codependency, and it's just not fun.
On Buffy there were a bunch of problems, but then women kicked arse and fixed them.
I was still frustrated that it was left to individuals, but it seemed to have a useful view of what the problems were.
Also, strong women kicking arse. I miss that. Where'd they go?
The women talking to women thing... okay, first of all, if there's a random dead body, is it going to be a woman? Even the time there was a couple and one was dead and one only injured (to start) the dead one was a woman. Dead men seem to be standing there as ghosts thus far. It's bugging me. But mostly, women talking to women: they don't. There was one conversation with Nina and Annie about Nina being a werewolf that only intermittently mentioned George. And today there was the conversation with the mum and the baby and Annie. If the baby had been a baby girl then that would have been an intermittent pass, because the mum was going off to date a fireman so half the conversation was about that, but the other half was about the baby and it was a baby boy so hey, another conversation between women about men. And when else do women talk to women? I think there's a "you can see me" line once in a crowd scene. That's about it. So women exist in a matrix of men, relating to men, talking about men, have lives that revolve around men. I thought maybe the first season was about Annie getting over that, but no, not even. She keeps on meeting male ghosts. Why was it Sykes, a man, who taught her how to close doors? If you swap the players around and keep the emotions between last week and this week you have a more interesting story. A mother who wouldn't cross over because she failed her children, and didn't want to teach Annie because she was afraid she'd fail her. Make the children girls and you have a story actually about women. And then this week if you had a father turning up with his baby because he wanted to go date a firewoman then that's a perfectly worky story, and you can add fun at the edges where Annie is all a fizz about hunky guy and then he abandons the baby for a couple of days and she realises he's useless, and then she wants the baby and not the father, and then we'd have a parallel to what's going on with George. Which if present this week was a bit weak.
At the moment presence of paedophile in a story where George is hanging around with a little girl gives us a parallel that's probably going to bite later, given the whole 'paedo' on the outside of the house getting mentioned this season thing. Eeew.
George and what's up with him just gets more annoying. He has an infectious condition that he passed to his girlfriend, but she doesn't tell him because he'll be upset. He should be upset! He should have mentioned it before there was sex-with-biting, even if it was just her clothes. Does he know he has to be wolf shaped to change people? No he does not. Building up to realising no he actually does not would be an interesting season. But my point is, Nina had a plenty good reason to be annoyed with him just with that right there, but it took the house full of killers covering up a murder thing to get her to leave, which takes the focus off the bits actually done to her. Looked at from Nina's point of view, George is a jerk. Just because it was done to him against his will doesn't mean he should ignore it to the point of passing it on. No stigma, but not just ignorance and messing other people up. Granted he broke down crying about it, but, is that enough? He should be taking precautions.
So then George tries all the things people think of to deal with werewolf changes, all the things Buffyverse did for Oz really, the cage and the tranquilizers and all. And it looks like sensible management of a difficult condition. Yaay.
But then the story says no, you can't cage the wolf, it just gets worse... and here is where this being a mental health metaphor fucks things up big time. Because if you want to play with werewolves you do indeed have to keep the condition active and say you can't just cage him conveniently. But if it's a mental health metaphor what it reads like is: he tried one set of meds and got restrained during a bad time once, and it made his condition worse, so now he's going to give up on the entire possibility of medication, and possibly the entire possibility of restraints. That's fucked up. Instead of managing his condition the story is trashing the possibility of ever managing. Great.
And then he beats the crap out of someone. And threatens them to keep them quiet.
He has now lost all my sympathy. He should now be going through the courts and getting either prison or treatment as appropriate. He's a danger to himself and others, and he's not managing it, and at this point society should step in.
The whole story with Mitchell is about making it impossible for society to step in. And that fucks up the addiction story kind of bad. In real life, if someone has an addiction and does crime to feed it, that doesn't mean everyone like them getting killed. Mitchell told the paedophile he should be in prison, that guy said he'd get treatment, great, sensible, the way systems should work. And exactly where the vampire thing breaks the story. Because the vampires have a parallel social structure starting to support each other, which is interesting in its way, but the whole rest of society is trying to kill them, which is a mess. If taken as a metaphor it reinforces not going for help, which is bad. Does society treat any kind of addict that way? That paedophile seemed to think so. Moral panics about drug users seemed to think so. But it isn't the way systems should work. Every last one of those vampires should get locked up where they can do no more harm. That's the basic problem of telling the story at all, if they're free range they're doing it wrong.
And then there's the last way the addiction story has taken a loop that brings me back to my first point. Looked at from Mitchell's point of view, finding a woman who'll inspire him to stay sober seems reasonable. Looked at from Lucy's point of view I nearly cheer her on to stake him. Prison would be better. But setting yourself up to keep someone else sober never works. It's going to bite her. Probably literally. Get involved with a violent man and sooner or later he'll be violent to you. That's just how it is.
And I think the show will show and has shown that. Because, don't get me wrong, they're showing these things mostly on purpose, and mostly following through the consequences.
But everything they're doing with the setup keeps it personal. It's Mitchell who protects his little group of addicts, not a system with people who won't have their own lives fucked up by working in it. It's Lucy he turns to as a girlfriend, not as a doctor, personal not professional let alone social systems level. George has to sort out his own treatment, the only treatment being tested kills people, and that's fucked up. No system in place, no doctors, no help. Everything is kept so small, and that just messes people up. Great drama, if you like watching people fall.
And what are they doing with Annie? I could read the first season as agoraphobia brought on by domestic violence and hence being scared of people, and then she got all visible and powerful and yaayful. And then... they took it away. And now she's not scared, she's still powerful, but only among ghosts, and by the way, nobody can see her, so now it's not agoraphobia it's just invisibility. And if I read that as a metaphor it's going to come out as the victims of domestic violence going invisible, and yet apparently it's meant to be a balance of the universe thing, part of how the rules work, and that's just... beyond annoying. So what's her story now? What's she got to overcome, who can she help, what is she doing? Mitchell has an arc, George has an arc, Annie has... being threatened by the bad mens and staying home looking after a baby... and no job because apparently that would be upsetting to the universe... and how is this to be read that isn't really really annoying? Plus that bit with the baby 'I left it too late' 'you weren't to know'... what's up with that? It doesn't sound like regret 'it's too late' it sounds like responsibility and choices. Which is a mess. Everything happening to Annie is about options being taken away, and if you add it to the other stuff about women it just reads all wrong.
Also, there have been a couple of people identified as having real and ordinary mental health problems. And they were both ghosts that attacked Annie. Apparently evil uses mentally ill people, and people with addictions, and it uses them to hurt women.
I know this is a horror story but without Annie's gentler kind of mental illness then all the metaphor and non metaphor people are violent to others, and, well, no.
So I don't know.
As a vampire story it follows through on the setup in solid consequences and with real grounding in the real world, follows the power dynamics, makes things make sense. Great vampire story. Uses all the symbols of real world addiction and subverts or leaves behind many of the old school vampire things. Yet states it isn't an addiction, it's cowardice, it's keeping on doing the wrong thing because otherwise you have to face within yourself that it was always wrong. That's a very strong vampire story indeed.
But then you hit the question, why aren't they being dealt with like other addicts, like other murderers? If they can tolerate sunlight and don't need to drink blood it's even simple. Why aren't they in the prisons? Why doesn't everyone know about them? Because they've just been that much in control? But there's the police and the coroner and the vampire hunters with stakes. And it just sets them up to be a kind of organised crime that is so absolutely infallible they've persuaded the world they never did exist, and that's... difficult.
And the metaphors and the other characters and the gaps and the way that really, even pretty Mitchell should be in prison for the rest of forever...
I don't want to follow this story round these corners. I don't particularly feel the need to watch addicts go wrong and drag others with them again. Especially when mostly the ones getting hurt are women.
Even if the point of the show is to show that, I've about had enough with watching it.
But we're up to 5/8 already apparently, so odds are I'll watch the rest of the season on inertia.
It's good, it's well written, it's just that mostly I am reaching the point where I want to lock up the guys and give the women pamphlets on codependency, and it's just not fun.
On Buffy there were a bunch of problems, but then women kicked arse and fixed them.
I was still frustrated that it was left to individuals, but it seemed to have a useful view of what the problems were.
Also, strong women kicking arse. I miss that. Where'd they go?
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no subject
Date: 2010-02-08 02:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-08 02:58 pm (UTC)i'm in class, I'll get back to this later.
no subject
Date: 2010-02-08 03:11 pm (UTC)Hee, now I feel like I'm passing notes to you in class.
no subject
Date: 2010-02-08 03:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-08 03:36 pm (UTC)Herrick said becoming a vampire wasn't about changing someone, it was about giving them licence to give in to what was already in them. That again sounded like a paedophile ring to me - because nothing gives someone the confidence to try acts that they know to be wrong so much as seeing other people give in.
That's why I like it as a metaphor. It is really dark stuff. It is more or less the only vampire show that isn't saying 'yay, vampires' but nevertheless is presenting a real world human problem in a very compassionate light while not being forgiving of it. An addict is generally only harming themselves (leaving aside drunken attacks and so forth) but that doesn't work for vamps because vamps hurt other people, not themselves.
no subject
Date: 2010-02-09 02:13 am (UTC)I found this essay by looking at the friends (members) page of
My comment may be slightly incoherent, and I apologize in advance. It's 3AM for me, and I have so many thoughts in response to this that I can't seem to properly frame or articulate them. Plus, English is my second language and it tends to abandon me when I'm tired.
I think that your conclusion perfectly sums up the inevitable outcome of any attempt at holding a vampire protagonist to the legal and moral standards of our time:
But then you hit the question, why aren't they being dealt with like other addicts, like other murderers? If they can tolerate sunlight and don't need to drink blood it's even simple. Why aren't they in the prisons? Why doesn't everyone know about them? Because they've just been that much in control? But there's the police and the coroner and the vampire hunters with stakes. And it just sets them up to be a kind of organised crime that is so absolutely infallible they've persuaded the world they never did exist, and that's... difficult.
And the metaphors and the other characters and the gaps and the way that really, even pretty Mitchell should be in prison for the rest of forever...
I think it's very telling that Toby Whithouse, when asked about this issue, chose to address it from a storytelling point of view rather than defending the character:
For what it's worth, I think that there *has* been a conscious shift on the part of the writers from a sex addiction parallel to a pedophilia parallel. One of the main differences between the two is who the focus is on: with sex addiction, it's on the addict; with pedophilia, it's on the innocent victim.
The problem is that our society fetishizes vampires in movies and novels to the point where vampire feeding is made into an erotic act. Even with Mitchell in Being Human, it's implied that he tends to combine sex and feeding. So I think with the introduction of the pedophilia parallel, there's been a deliberate move away from the "idea of a pretty white man feeling guilty about hurting people in the past, in a way we're supposed to sympathise with," as you put it in your other post, towards the idea that vampire killings are not a cool, victimless crime.
(Now, how the pedophilia parallel is supposed to work with the also newly-introduced idea that they constantly feed so as to avoid the moments of lucidity in which they'd have to confront what they're doing - I have no idea. They've made a big mash of it.)
no subject
Date: 2010-02-09 09:05 am (UTC)But I have to say the idea of vampire KILLINGS as a cool and victimless crime is bizarre. The problem is vampires make victimisation look cool, desirable, fun. There's always victims, just with some vamps we're meant to cheer them on for picking those particular victims.
Not in Being Human.