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NBC’s Hannibal pt. 1
In Red Dragon Hannibal Lecter has already been apprehended and tried. He is a bit character to whom Will Graham turns for help as he searches for this new killer. During their interactions the reader/audience learns that Lecter had served as a consultant for the FBI and that Graham was instrumental in catching him. The television show functions essentially as back story for Red Dragon by showing the audience Graham and Lecter’s relationship while Lecter was killing. As such, by choosing to make Hannibal Lecter the titular character and focus the show on his relationship with the FBI the writer’s have built in a finite timeline for their show. Eventually, within a season or two, Lecter has to be caught and the show either risks having to re-tell/revise Red Dragon, or trying to re-tell an already established book and movie. While Will Graham is certainly an essential element of this show, had the writer’s chosen to begin with him, to make his character or Jack Crawford, the central element of the show, they could have bought themselves a longer time line.
The other thing the writer’s have done is contemporized the story. Characters have cell phones and iPads, and that has led to other important changes that are problematic, and make the show a prime example of embedded feminism. Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs were products of the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, and while it might not seem that long ago, the period is important to their stories. Red Dragon is a boys club of a novel. Jack Crawford entices Will Graham back to the FBI to solve one more case. Graham visits Lecter, consults with psychologist Dr. Alan Bloom, and works with a reporter Freddie Lounts to help entice the Red Dragon to attack in order to catch him. The only major female characters in Red Dragon are Francis Dolarhyde’s dead domineering Grandmother and his co-worker Reba McLane. This boys club is important for two reasons – one it is an accurate representation of the time, and two it lends importance to Clarice Starling’s appearance on the scene in Silence of the Lambs.
Starling’s struggle to break into this boys club is one of the most essential elements of Silence of the Lambs. For me, the two most striking scenes in the film the opening shot of Jodie Foster making her way to Jack Crawford’s office and entering the elevator with a crowd of men towering over her, and when she explains to Crawford that how he treats her in front of local law enforcement officials matters. His treatment of her is important because it demonstrates to the other men how to treat a woman in a male dominated field.
NBC’s show is populated by a nearly equal number of men and women. Dr. Alan Bloom has become Dr. Alana Bloom, Hannibal’s own psychiatrist is a woman, Freddie Lounts is also now a woman, of the supporting cast of technicians a woman has also been added, and in the FBI classes Will Graham teaches also represent a gender parity. This parity in representation functions as embedded feminism, making it appear that women have at the very least achieved significant representation in the work place. This is problematic for me because the universe this show is establishing does not pave the way for Clarice Starling in Silence of the Lambs. Starling’s gender set her apart from the rest of the investigators, and it is what gave her the insight and ability to find Buffalo Bill. In the world this show is creating, those elements would not be essential in the same way.
Finding a muse
The most amazing thing happened this week! I met my good friend Dr. D, who is so like me it is eerie, for lunch. Apparently being born in 1973 led to some pretty twisted personalities. In addition to getting our Ph.D. in the same field (at different institutions with different specialties), Dr. D and I share a love of crime novels, BBC crime/mystery shows, Discovery ID, and a healthy fascination with serial killers.
The idea of a healthy fascination with serial killers could seem like an oxymoron, but hear me out. While she and I will both spend hours watching Discovery ID and Biography specials, reading mystery novels, etc, each of us maintains an empathy for the victims, and neither of us is going to start writing letters to prisons any time soon.
As I have written before, though perhaps not here, I believe my fascination with serial killers stems from having grown up in the Pacific Northwest. Although Bundy had been caught in Florida by the time my family moved to Washington, the stories about Bundy and his preference for girls with long straight hair parted down the middle were still omni-present. Those stories also held a particular fascination for a 10 year old girl with long straight brown hair that parted in the middle. I’m not saying any of his victims really looked like me,
but they did present a window into what I could look like when I grew up. By the time we moved from Minnesota/Canada Bundy’s Washington siege was over; however, Green River Killer victims were being found at an alarming rate through a good part of my childhood.
Dr. D, I learned that first day we spent getting to know each other, grew up in Atlanta during the Atlanta Child Murders. While she did not fit the victim profile for those murders, the similarity between our likes and fascinations seemed to bolster my opinion that growing up in the shadow of an active serial killer leaves a mark. It is not any one thing I can describe clearly, but I do not believe the similarities between Dr. D and I are that odd when you take into account our formative environments. Children pick up on so much more than we give them credit for, and I couldn’t even guess at the consequences this contemporary melange of misogyny, sex, and violence will have.
Anyway, I think you can see why Dr. D told me I needed to watch Hannibal and tell her what I thought. It might also explain why I broke through my television ennui to actually do it. Dr. D’s recommendation, and my love of the characters in Thomas Harris’ series, led me to go so far as to get the NBC app to catch up to where the series is now. Having admitted to my love of this particular set of Harris’ characters, I also have to give this disclaimer – that love doesn’t extend to some sort of desire for utter faithfulness to Harris’s world or vision. While I enjoyed the book Hannibal, I think there are some important ways the movie is better, which is also true of Silence of the Lambs. All of which could be the topic of a different set of posts.
The television ennui I mentioned above extends over the whole of my life. Being truly done, having finally received my Ph.D., left me at some fairly significant loose ends. Sure, there is more time to fill, but I haven’t had the drive to fill it with anything. The last two weeks I have spent poking at things – starting crochet projects instead of finishing the ones I already have, whacking snakes in Tapped Out, looking at the mess of a desk I still need to clean up, and wanting to write a blog post here or there – but not feeling like I had anything to say. So, something pretty amazing happened as I began watching NBC’s Hannibal, I realized I had something to say. I won’t make any promises about the speed in which I will write these posts, but I do know there are at least two different posts coming about this show.
Slow re-entry
After re-posting my Rizzoli & Isles pieces, I’d hoped to jump back into posting. As you can see, however, that jump has taken a little longer than expected.
Perhaps it is the space I’m in. Once again on the threshold – graduating, but not done with formatting for the graduate school – which really makes it feels like stasis. Since the defense people have started referring to me as Dr., but it doesn’t feel like I am there yet since I’m still making corrections.
Well, I guess that leaks what could have been the first major announcement of this re-boot. Yes, I successfully defended my dissertation! No, I have no idea what I will do now.
Here are just a few of the questions to which I have no answers:
- What happens with my job? What about the significant budget cuts the state just announced?
- Do I want to go on the market?
- If I do, what kind of job do I want? Where do I want to be?
- Do I want to stay in Academia?
- What do I want to do with this blog? What do I want to write about? Do I want to continue to write with a pseudonym? Do I want to attach my name to this space?
- What am I going to do with all my “free” time?
The only thing I can tell right now is that I need to keep writing. For at least two weeks now I have barely looked at my computer. Any online presence I’ve had has been through my phone or iPad, and the only writing I’ve done has been at work, for work.
While this abscence has been cathartic in a way, I also think it has led to my ennui in other areas. I haven’t really been crocheting or watching television or walking or anything but playing games on the iPad. None of that is good for me. The other day, while the DH and I waited in the Dr.s office for 2 hours, I said to him I need to do something – take a dance class, try growing vegetables again, anything. What I realize now is that I also need to start writing again. As you can probably tell that means this space will probably be fairly introspective for a while as I try to determine where to go from here, but I will try to keep the navel gazing to a minimum.
To my surprise I have actually found myself returning to academic research. I expected at least a summer long moratorium on reading anything remotely academic. However, this week I have been to the library twice, and this morning started reading again. I started with Walking and Talking Feminist Rhetorics: Landmark Essays and Controversies. I’ll let you know how it goes.
Re-run – Rizzoli & Isles Pt. 2
Having vented a little of my general frustration with Rizzoli & Isles, I can actually be a little more articulate about what it is that bothers me about the show. Rizzoli & Isles is a textbook example of embedded feminism being used to mask enlightened sexism. Susan J. Douglas’s book Enlightened Sexism: The Seductive Message that Feminism’s Work is Done, needs to be on your reading list already, put it there. Douglas defined embedded feminism as “the way in which women’s achievements, or their desire for achievement, are simply a part of the cultural landscape” (9). Embedded feminism is partly achieved through the representational parity numbers game. The networks can say, “Look at all the women doctors, lawyers, cops, etc. on tv, clearly women can be anything they want now.” Networks can claim that airing shows with strong women in professional careers some how makes up for the blatant misogyny in a show like Two and a Half Men, or the only slightly more subtle misogyny in Big Bang Theory. If you are, like me, a little crime show obsessed, Dr. Kimberly DeTardo-Bora’s 2009 article in Women & Criminal Justice, “Criminal Justice ‘Hollywood Style’: How Women in Criminal Justice Professions Are Depicted in Prime-Time Crime Dramas,” is a fascinating read. The short summary is that women are over-represented on television compared to their actual presence in the criminal justice field.
Taking its name from the two lead women, Rizzoli & Isles clearly establishes a kind of embedded feminism; it also establishes a “look how far we’ve come” ethos by subtly calling Cagney & Lacey to mind. I’d love to do a stronger comparison between the two shows, but I don’t have many clear memories of Cagney & Lacey, and haven’t seen an episode since I was nine. Both titular characters are strong women, and have achieved success in their careers, and really that is about it for feminism in Rizzoli & Isles.
Douglas says, a constant companion to embedded feminism is enlightened sexism, which is “[the insistence] that women have made plenty of progress because of feminism – indeed, full equality has allegedly been achieved—so now it’s okay, even amusing, to resurrect sexist stereotypes of girls and women” (9). This explains why we are supposed to laugh when Rizzoli is tricked into a dress and a date by her mother. Her inability to conform to accepted modes of femininity, while clearly embodying those forms, is constant fodder for humor in the show. Nothing is funnier than trying to get Rizzoli in a dress, but … damn, if doesn’t she fill out a dress perfectly.
But what about Dr. Isles she is amazing at her job, and manages to do it all in style with perfect hair, fashionable clothes, and always, always in killer heels. I’d have to go through episodes again, but I’m pretty sure we’ve never seen Dr. Isles (even mid-autopsy) in scrubs. I’m pretty sure I don’t have to explain the absurdity of that. Even if I’m wrong about the scrubs, the bigger issue is that despite the fact that she is clearly smart, and feminine, she can’t keep a date because she only looks feminine. She drives men away because she cannot hide her intelligence.
At their very core, these two characters, who are supposed to embody at least one feminist goal (having a career), are played for laughs for all the ways they do not conform to cultural stereotypes about women. Yet, because it is couched in humor, and we’re supposedly smarter than buying into the stereotypes, if we find the show’s treatment of its titular characters offensive, it is because we don’t know how to take a joke.
Re-runs
In an effort to get back into the swing of blogging, I read through some of my previous posts. I think these two posts about Rizzoli and Isles deserve a re-run. I will re-post them over the next couple of days.
As a fan of Tess Gerritsen’s books, when I learned TNT was giving two of Gerritsen’s central characters a show of their own, I was excited, and set my dvr accordingly. Then, I set about waiting to see who had been cast in the titular roles. Don’t ask, it never really occurs to me that I could, you know, use the internet to find out stuff like that in advance. It was obvious from the first commercials I saw that whatever TNT’s Rizzoli & Isles was going to be, it wasn’t going to be too much like the books. For about 7 books I’d imagined Rizzoli, as she is described, with a mop of unruly dark curls, and as good looking, but in a unconventional way; Dr. Isles was, as she is often described, the queen of the dead, a little goth, with red lipstick and straight black hair cut in a bob with straight bangs – which is, as it turns out, how Ms. Gerritsen looks (well, not exactly goth, but you get the idea). While there was never any doubt in my mind these women would be beautiful in their own ways, um … Angie Harmon and Sasha Anderson were not exactly the faces that lept into my mind as I read these books.
To paraphrase Mr. Gump, casting is as casting does. It was silly to have any hopes that these women might be cast differently. This is a review of the show not the books, so this is the last comparison I will make between the two. One of the most compelling aspects of these characters as written are their insecurities, and Jane Rizzoli’s insecurities are tied to her place in a male profession, and what she sees as her inability to meet feminine standards of beauty; it is impossible to make those insecurities play when the woman playing Rizzoli is Angie Harmon.
Like I said, although I’d initially hoped for something a little different, this review isn’t about comparing the television show to the books. The characters, stories, and tone of each is distinct enough that a real comparison is impossible. The books are detective fiction, pure and simple. The television show walks the genre lines between serious police procedural and comedy. It is almost as if the producers really wanted an hour long comedy, and knew stretching a sit com that long would grow tedious, so they decided to incorporate a police procedural to bump up the story. I’ve never seen an episode of Nash Bridges, so I could be wrong, but Rizzoli & Isles makes me think it is like a female version of that show.
It might surprise you, but the light nature of the show is not really what bothers me. A lot of police procedurals err in the opposite way, taking themselves too seriously. What bothers me about Rizzoli & Isles is that the light tone is achieved at the expense of the title characters. At every turn the show undermines the power of two strong women working together, and becoming friends by making every second conversation between the two about getting, or having, a relationship, every third conversation about the case – as if their jobs are an afterthought, and the remaining conversations about clothes and shoes. There has to be some sort of heterosexual romance for at least one of the women in nearly every episode because the writers are working overtime to ensure that it is clear Rizzoli & Isles are not lesbians. (Well, except for those episodes where they pretend to be lesbians – you know, for laughs. Because apparently that is funny.) As a viewer it is impossible to take either Rizzoli or Isles seriously because at every turn we are reminded that Rizzoli can’t get a man because she is not feminine enough, and that despite looking like a fashion plate Isles can’t function socially because she is just too smart.
I keep watching, hoping, for that moment when instead of going for the obvious – undermining women stereotype or joke, the writers will surprise me, but it never comes.
Change of Pace
I am still working more at night, but it has been a little bit of a trade off. The more I work at night, the less likely I am to get up in the morning. Since I’ve been good about writing on my lunch break at work, and I’ve gotten at least two hours of work in each night, I’m okay with that.
I’m still getting up a little early, which is good because then if I need to switch back to the 5 am writing it won’t be so tough. The problem, however, is that I’m usually left with about 15 minutes between the time I’m ready and the time I need to catch the bus. In the summer, I might just head down to the bus stop and use the time to get in some extra reading. It is too cold to spend any extra time at the bust stop right now. And, while I am a master at writing in small chunks here or there, 15 minutes isn’t really the best at this point in the morning. The answer: morning blog posts?
Maybe, but you’ll probably have forgive some missing words and grammatical errors, since I won’t have much time for revision. Just chalk it all up to stroke-brain, and we’ll get along just fine.
The Evening Stand
I’ll be over reporting in about the standing business soon, I promise. For now, it is really all I have to write about.
One of my hopes when creating this standing space was that it would motivate me to move away from the couch/television, and get some work done in the evening. Having spent 8 hours at work sitting in front of a computer screen, the last thing I want to do is come home to sit in front of yet another computer screen. For some reason the television is different. I think it has something to do with those pretty moving pictures. 😉 My thinking was that being in a different position in front of a computer screen might help.
For tonight at least, I was right. Once I’d sat down to eat my dinner it was difficult to get back up. However, once I stood here for a while working on the dissertation, I felt a lot better. True, that might have more to do with making progress on the dissertation than standing, but I do think my change in latitude had a little to do with it.
I got quite a bit of work done tonight, which will hopefully help me sleep a little better.
Standing Day 1
This morning was the first time I tried working from a standing position. It will probably take a little adjustment, but I think that I will like it. To get everything at the right height, I bought three, two shelf closet organizers from Target. Two are 31inches long, and one is 24, and I left the top shelf off of one of each. It gave me just enough room to stack up some books to get the right height for the monitor and keyboard.
What I noticed working today was that having the ability to fidget just that little bit actually helped me to stay a little bit more focused than typically. There are two things I do not really like about this set up. First, I have to keep my laptop shut and tucked away on a shelf to make room for the keyboard and monitor. This means I lose the two monitor set up, I’d grown to really like. Second, I no longer have enough room to keep a document holder set up to easily see the papers I’m working with. I’m sure I’ll figure something out eventually, and if I keep this up for three months or more then I’ll spring to make a real set up with stuff from Ikea. When I do that I think I’ll get back some of the space that I’ve lost.
Here is a picture of the current set up. Ignore the rest of the mess.
New Year
I may have dropped off the grid a bit in November, but this year will eventually see more consistent posting from me. I am not sure when, but eventually.
Right now I’m trying out a standing desk hack. The way I have it right now will work for tomorrow morning, but I think I’ll need to make a couple of adjustments for long term use. When I have it really workable, I will post pictures.
Salvage
Once again, this is a weekend in which not enough will happen. Sure, it is quite early on a Sunday to making such a declaration, but enough chores need to be done that I know dissertation writing will fall by the wayside. Well, it will at least not get the full 15 hours of attention it needs to make up for the last week. However, instead of beating myself up about this, I’m trying to take some of the advice I’ve been dole-ling out to everyone else this week. I’m trying to give myself permission to do my chores and to NOT feel bad about the lack of writing.
In order to help myself in this process, I decided to salvage what I could of this train wreck of a process. Today, instead of the incessant whining about the dissertation, I give you some bullets of any good that had come from working on my dissertation.
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D5 Creation