Tag Archives: television

You don’t have to add diversity—just stop erasing it! (part 2)

writing, , ,

I wrote recently about why having queer characters in books, particularly science fiction, isn’t about pandering or finding a good reason to include us, but rather simply of matter of not excluding us. The real world has queer people (a lot more than most people think), and there is no good reason that fictional worlds wouldn’t have just as many of us.

There’s an interesting post going around Tumblr that gathered together this series of facts (originally tweeted by Andrew Wheeler @wheeler) about some current or recent works of fiction based on historical characters. The historical facts are verified, I’m not merely repeating. I include a bit more context on each than Wheeler was able to fit in a short series of Twitter posts:

  • Leonardo da Vinci was almost certainly gay, but the series Da Vinci’s Demons portrays him as (barely) bisexual who seems to be exclusively attracted to women.
  • Alexander the Great was gay, and was known to be gay to the extent that the greek historian Plutarch wrote extensively about the moral way Alexander behaved toward the various men he had loved. The great love of Alexander’s life was a man, Hephaestion. When Hephaestion died, Alexander mourned him for months, refusing to eat for days, and nearly killed himself. The only movies that have ever included Hephaestion doesn’t even hint at the relationship, let alone even showing them kiss.
  • Alan Turing, the genius who decrypted Enigma among other things during World War II, has sometimes been described as the greatest gay hero of the modern age. He was convicted of indecency (and forced to take drugs to repress his libido) because he confessed to being in a long term relationship with his boyfriend. In the recent movie which tried to portray him as a hero, he is instead caught with a male prostitute and portrayed as a loner who had no love in his life.
  • The epic love of Achilles and Patroculus is a keystone of the legends of the Trojan war, but in the recent movie Troy they’re portrayed as simply buddies.
  • John Nash, the mathematician, was sexually active with men throughout his life, getting arrested a few times for it. He was married twice, though both relationships were problematic, and it’s unclear how many of the issues in the second marriage were due to his struggles with mental illness as opposed to his frequent same sex dalliances. A Beautiful Mind omits the first marriage and child completely, and also completely erases the same sex liaisons, which due to the arrests, played a significant role in the tragedies of his real life.

This list focuses on men because Wheeler’s point was that television and movie executives are extremely squeamish about showing men being seductive or explicitly romantic or in any way physically intimate with other men. But it isn’t just “Hollywood” that has that problem.

Lots of people cite the Marvel Comics character Deadpool as an example of a bisexual character. The creators of the character frequently claim that he is bisexual, but the kindest way you can describe those claims is that they are being very bad writers by telling us rather than showing. The more accurate description is that it is a queer-baiting lie. Oh, yes, Deadpool makes all sorts of sexual jokes toward other men, and he seems to be particularly obsessed with Spiderman, but that is all we ever see in the stories: jokes. Deadpool has never ever been shown actually in a relationship with another man. He has had a lot of romantic relationships with women in the comics; loves of his life that have died tragically and so forth, but not one single man.

None.

That isn’t diversity, that’s queer-baiting.

Slightly better is DC Comic’s John Constantine, who in the comics had at least one significant same sex romantic relationship (in additional to several opposite sex romances), and said same sex relationship was integral to the plot of one of the longer story arcs. He’s also been portrayed flirting with men, seducing other men, and so forth. All well and good. Until we get to the television series (which, alas, was canceled last year after only 13 episodes), where there isn’t even a hint of his bisexuality, and the producers and writers said off-screen that he was not bisexual.

And don’t get me started on the epic amount of queer-baiting the creator and producer of the Teen Wolf television series has been doing for six years!

So, to sum up: when we call for diversity in books and movies and television shows, we aren’t asking to be pandered to. We aren’t asking you to shoehorn something into the story. We’re asking you to be realistic. We’re asking you to write believable stories.

Appendix: This blog post, in which a writer explains why he is re-writing some really old sci fi stories by swapping genders and such as his NaNoWriMo project provides some other good points about erasure in fiction: Get Bent – Why Bother?

Monsters Are People, Too – more of why I love sf/f

genre, , , , , ,

Promotional photo for the Munsters,
Promotional photo for the Munsters, © Universal Studios and CBS.
The Munsters premiered on CBS the night before my fourth birthday. I don’t remember if we watched it from the beginning. I’m fairly certain we didn’t watch it the first season because the first few months it was up against the Flintstones, and then Jonny Quest moved to that time slot. I suspect we did watch it a few times, and for a while during season two, until Batman! premiered with its twice-a-week format one of which was against the Munsters.

Like a lot of other genre-related shows, The Munsters went into syndication fairly quickly after being canceled, and promptly gained loyal audiences outside of primetime. I suspect most of my memories of the show are from this era… Continue reading Monsters Are People, Too – more of why I love sf/f →

Computerized Clods and Squeamish Scoundrels: more of why I love sf/f

genre, science fiction, , , , , ,

Lost in Space, 20th Century Fox Television & CBS Broadcasting
Lost in Space, 20th Century Fox Television & CBS Broadcasting (Click to embiggen)
The first episode of Lost In Space aired on CBS in September of 1965, and I was glued to my set. It debuted less than two weeks before my fifth birthday, so I don’t remember a lot about my feelings about the first episode. If you aren’t familiar, the show follows the adventures of the “space family Robinson” (Professor John Robinson, his wife Dr. Maureen Robinson, their grown daughter Judy, and younger children Penny and Will; their pilot, Major Don West, and their robot called B-9 in the early episodes) who were sent off to be the first colonists of the Alpha Centauri system, except their ship is thrown off course due to the bumbling actions of the stowaway/saboteur Dr. Zachary Smith, who ends up trapped on the ship when it takes off.

Lost In Space is not remembered as being serious science fiction, or even as a serious series. Though this is primarily because of the second and third season. The first season was intended as a serious action adventure series giving a science fictional spin to the early 19th Century novel, The Swiss Family Robinson, which had itself been inspired by the 18th Century novel, Robinson Crusoe. Like those novels, the early episodes focused on the crew as castaways trying to survive in a hostile environment. Some of the sci fi notions of some first season episodes were pretty silly by modern standards, but mostly because they were attempts to adapt the sort of complications that might appear in a western series or a contemporary slice-of-life series and put a spacey spin on it… Continue reading Computerized Clods and Squeamish Scoundrels: more of why I love sf/f →

Invisible? Refusing to see what’s already there…

culture, , , , , , ,

Kissing otters
Ah, love!
I was having a discussion about a movie with some friends on line, and two of us were commenting upon the possible romantic relationships between some of the characters. Because one of the pairs under consideration were two male characters who had not explicitly been portrayed as non-heterosexual, another friend in the conversation commented that he never understood why people do that.

At the time, I decided to keep the conversation light, and simply said that we saw it because it was obvious. The real answer is a lot more complicated and serious than that. I didn’t feel up to explaining the unconscious homophobia underlyng the very question, and sometimes, frankly, I’m just tired of being disappointed in people.

But the problem persists, far beyond the people involved in that conversation. And yes, it is a problem, a very real and serious problem. What is the problem, you ask? Some people say the problem is invisibility or cluelessness, but…

In this way the writer can present his cowardice, laziness, and lack of imagination, as artistic integrity. “I couldn’t write gay characters; I didn’t have any.” Hand-to-forehead; the tortured auteur.
—Andrew Wheeler, writing for Comics Alliance

It’s actually about erasure and willful blindness. As I’ll explain further…

Continue reading Invisible? Refusing to see what’s already there… →

Saving the world once a week

television, ,

© and ™ Turner Entertainment Network, Inc.
© and ™ Turner Entertainment Network, Inc.
A lot of TV shows could be summed up (jokingly or not) as being about Saving the world every week. Some of my favorite shows of all time (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, for instance), could be described that way. One such show this winter was The Librarians, where they embraced the idea so much that there was a running gag of different characters sometimes making a reference to saving the world every week.

A few weeks back my husband came into the room while I was in the middle of an episode, and after watching less than a minute, he asked if it was a Warehouse 13 knock-off. I had to point out that the series was a continuation of a set of movies which pre-dated Warehouse 13 by several years. The first movie, The Librarian: Quest for the Spear was broadcast in 2004, five years before Warehouse 13 (the entire trilogy of Librarian movies were made and released before the first episode of Warehouse 13). Both the Librarian and Warehouse stories owed a big debt to Raiders of the Lost Ark and the other Indiana Jones properties, of course… Continue reading Saving the world once a week →

About waiting…

culture, , , , , , , ,

andy-warhol-waitingI get reminded in weird ways how old I am, sometimes. For instance, there was a discussion happening between some of my online acquaintances about Star Wars, specifically about the original movies (where young Luke Skywalker is the protagonist). I made a comment about what a freak I was considered to be by classmates because I had seen the show more than 13 times. And the comment made no sense to the people in the discussion.

So I had to explain that I was talking about when it first came out, and was only available in theatres. This was in 1977, when I was a teenager. Worse than that, it didn’t play in any of the theatres in the smallish town where I lived until about four or five months after it first came out. The closest place that had a big screen and a decent sound system where the movie was playing was more than an hour drive away—not only not in the same town were I lived, but not in the same state!

When you’re a high school student you don’t have a lot of disposable income, so the gas money and cost of tickets wasn’t a trivial expense. I carpooled (either using my old beater car or letting one of my friends drive) twelve times over the course of the first summer the film was out in order to see it. And then in the fall I went once to the truly crappy local theatre that finally got it, dragging a few friends I had never been able to talk into taking the longer trip.

Also at that time period, while home VCRs technically existed, they cost thousands of dollars and were huge, heavy things. Video rental stores didn’t become a common type of business for a few more years, when the technology got a little cheaper. And even then, the players were expensive enough that many people would rent both some movies and a machine from the store in order to have a movie night at home.

Cable television existed only in cities and larger towns. When cable first came to our small town, I was 19 or 20 years old, and it consisted of 15 regular channels, plus the premium channels of HBO or Showtime (Cinemax, Stars, and the like didn’t exist, yet). I write “or” because while very few people I knew had cable at all, most of those who did had only the 15 basic channels, and no one splurged on more than one movie channel. No one.

And, of course, DVDs literally didn’t exist, yet. Let alone the internet.

I had to wait three years before The Empire Strikes Back came out—by which time I was a freshmen in college. Then another three years after that before any of us got to see Return of the Jedi.

I saw all three of those movies, during their respective opening weeks, in the same big theatre in Beaverton, Oregon. It was like a religious pilgrimage for me, by then. I’d been hooked at 17 years old, and the passion still burned with the intensity of a billion suns when I was 23.

This is one of the reasons that, when I hear some of my friends complaining about how many months it will be before the new season of My Little Pony comes out, I don’t always give them as much sympathy as I probably ought.

On the other hand, I’m just as bad. The last episode of Justified season five aired eight months ago, in April, and I’ve been dying while waiting for season six to begin… which it will in January 2015. That’s less than 30 days from now. Inside, 23-year-old me is laughing so very hard at current me because I’m agonizing over having to wait merely months for the next chapter in a saga. And this is hardly the only series or movie that I have such lamentations about.

So, while part of me rolls my eyes at younger fans, another part of me is rolling my eyes at me, too.

Of course, we should remember that 173 years ago, back in 1841, people are said to have lined up for blocks in London waiting for a new edition of a weekly magazine called Master Humphrey’s Clock so they could read the next chapter of Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop. Even more fun were the stories of people meeting English travelers disembarking from ocean liners in New York at the time, to ask whether Little Nell lived, since American publication of the stories was several weeks behind the British chapters.

As they say, times change, but human nature doesn’t.

Comedy reveals the truth

society, , , , ,

It’s less than a minute and a half, and well worth your time. A reminder of the real relationship between politicians, business, and the people—and also how good one particular show was sometimes capable of being.

Roseanne owns state rep on fair wages, taxes, labor rights, and plight of the middle class:

(If embedding doesn’t work, click here.)

They don’t all have to be heroes, but…

writing, ,

ZoeHellerQuoteSo one of the new shows I’m watching this year is a very soap opera-ish murder mystery that has a season-long story arc. And despite the heavy use of flashbacks, I enjoyed the premiere, so I let my Tivo keep recording it, but I didn’t watch the next several of episodes because I was busy, and I devoted what TV time I had to other shows. But I kept reading good things about the show from people I like.

I squeezed the second episode into my schedule, and I found the characters and the story still engaging, despite some quibbles with the cases-of-the-week that were being used as a means to propel the longer story and make the show appeal to people who might be less invested in big story arcs. But I didn’t watch the other episodes already on the TiVo right away.

Suddenly there seemed to be an explosion of people raving online about how much they liked where the show was going, so the next time I had a few hours, I got caught up. The story is still very intriguing, the dialog is snappy and believable, and the characters are getting fleshed out. The problem? I hate just about every one of them.

Just a handful of episodes into the first season, they have managed to make every character that is more than a walk-on extremely self-serving, detestable, or utterly loathsome.

To be fair, for decades it’s been the practice of soap opera-style shows to give every character major personality flaws and some sort of secret. But it’s a technique originally resorted to by writers who had to create episodes about the same cast of characters five times a week, fifty-two weeks a year, for dozens of years. Which means it can be most charitably described as an act of desperation.

As soon as one raises the question of likability in literary circles, someone will present the counter-argument that characters who are perfect in every way—always cheerful, and always lovable—are unrealistic and boring. The sort of reader or viewer who wants characters to be likable is characterized as unsophisticated, vapid, or even mentally deficient. But the only mental deficiency in question here is the sort of person who thinks the only alternative to making every character wholly repulsive is for characters to be unbelievably good.

In fact there is a wide spectrum between entirely abhorrent and absolutely flawless. In other words, not every character has to be a hero, but if the spotlessly pure character is unrealistic and boring, so are the characters who lack any redeeming qualities whatsoever.

Nobody is perfect. Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone lets their worse instincts get the better of them sometimes. Everyone has some personality quirk or habit that at the very least annoys someone else. Every person has done something in their life of which they ought to be embarrassed or ashamed. I understand all of that, and I get that sometimes you want to tell a story about the things we hope people will regret later. I do.

Lord knows I love a good villain, and my protagonists are never what anyone would call perfect people, but at a minimum characters need to be relatable. I don’t want to despise, pity, or disdain every single character. Give me something to admire about at least one of the characters. Give me a hint that some of them might be redeemable.

Give me someone to root for.

Sarcasm and sardonic detachment

television, , ,

I took a break from writing one night and went into the other room to see what my husband was doing. He was watching an animated show I’d never seen before, and I wound up watching the rest of the episode with him. Since the show was more than half over, I didn’t completely follow all the ins and outs of the plot, but it made me laugh a couple of times.

Another night I was channel surfing on my own, and happened across the same show. The episode was more than half over, again, but I enjoyed it. This happened several times; I never saw a complete episode, always catching it midway through. Also, as often happens, though I saw the show seven or eight times, I had only seen parts of maybe three episodes, because I kept happening across re-runs of episodes I’d already seen parts of.

This obviously happened back before I owned a TiVo, because what I would do now when I happen across a show like that is set the TiVo to record some episodes for me so I can watch more and see if I really like the show.

But back then I would have had to remember when the show was broadcast and make an effort to be free when it was one, or manually set a VCR to record it. Which I never did.

For several years after it went off the air, there were no re-runs…

Continue reading Sarcasm and sardonic detachment →

Not out to sea

culture, , , ,

The television version of the Doris Day Show was one of the most schizo programs ever.
The television version of the Doris Day Show was one of the most schizo programs ever.
One day in middle school, in one of the boys-only classes1 one of the guys was going on about some actress he really had the hots for. Several of the other guys agreed. And then a general discussion of other actresses that guys thought were hot got rolling. I don’t remember any of the actresses in question. I remember that at least a couple of them were on shows that my family never watched, so I had only the slightest idea who they were.

Eventually one of the guys turned to me and asked which actress I thought was hot. It was asked in a fairly challenging tone of voice which clearly communicated that the topic of the conversation was shifting to What-stupid-thing-can-we-get-him-to-say. It’s one of the more subtle forms of bullying, asking the kid no one likes a question that to the ears of an adult who might be listening sounds like an attempt to include you in the conversation, but all the kids know that this is really just another test. Can you come up with an answer that isn’t going to result in derision and teasing?3

I knew where this was going, and I knew no matter what I said my answer would be wrong in some way. But ignoring the question could go even worse, so I quickly scoured my brain and said, “Doris Day.”

Even I was a little surprised when that name came out of my mouth.

Continue reading Not out to sea →