Chuck vs The Women

My monday evening routine is to wait anxiously for 8 o'clock to roll around so's I can watch some Chuck goodness on NBC. Typically, I then go on-line and look up all of the music I want to get that I heard on Chuck, get it, load it onto my Chuck playlist, and then stare and my iPod in confusion when, on shuffle, one of those songs is independently played. Because, sometimes, hearing Hall & Oats without any explanation is just odd. Actually, that should be an "always".

However. Loving Chuck is problematic. It's problematic for a multitude of reasons. Chuck had ten characters credited during the theme for its first two seasons, and then nine in its third season. Three of the ten were women in the first two seasons. Two of the nine are women in the third season. This isn't good. For me, and in general. Sure, one of the central three characters is a woman, and she gets a decent amount of attention focused on her. And yet, purely by the function of who she is and what her character brings to the series, we know very little about her. And so, we're left with 3 women who function as accessories to the male characters, as love interests and, for one, simultaneously as a sibling.

Because there are, at most, three women on the show, they don't often interact. And when they do interact, the moments don't typically pass the Bechdel Test. Sarah and Ellie discuss Chuck; sometimes, Sarah and Ellie discuss Devon (aka, Captain Awesome); Sarah and Anna discuss Morgan; a couple of times, Anna flips out on Ellie about Morgan. They talk about weddings and boys, and once, how Sarah had never been close to a gun before. But they don't talk about anything else, and thus we learn almost nothing about them. We know that Jeff and Lester enjoy playing in their band, Jeffster. We know more about Morgan than is necessary, including that he sleeps in the nude. But we don't learn much of anything about the women that does not in some way connect to the men.

But there is another issue with Chuck, almost a more serious issue. A lot of shows don't have great male-to-female ratios. A lot of shows don't have the women talking about much else but the men in their lives. It wouldn't be great, but I would be able to live with it. But Chuck fails women far more egregiously than simply not being able to pass the Bechdel Test.

Chuck, as a show, suffers from an almost chronic urge to delegitimize threats women face in the world and the workplace. It often uses stalking as an impish thing these specific guy characters do. And no other character calls these stalkers out on it. In Chuck vs Tom Sawyer, we (and Chuck) are given witness to Jeff's music video dedicated to Anna Woo, complete with stalker-footage from when Anna is leaving the women's bathroom. Later in the episode, Jeff's request that Anna fan him while wearing a hula skirt is granted. And both Chuck and the store's manager Emmett make no mention to Jeff about the completely illegal and inappropriate actions he has taken. No one mentions the tape to Anna, so she can press charges (not that she would, because stalking is totally cool!). Later in the season, Morgan begins stalking Anna as well, in vs The Best Friend. And although Chuck calls him out on it after both Anna and a group of mobsters discover him, Chuck's reasoning is less about shaming Morgan for his actions toward his ex-girlfriend than trying to save his life. Afterward, he even complains that he had to sacrifice Morgan's dignity in order to protect him. Chuck doesn't even begin to contemplate that stalking your ex is a pretty solid way to demonstrate you've given up much of your dignity anyway.

Stalking isn't just relegated to the creeps of the show, either. Chuck, himself, has been known to stalk his fake girlfriend Sarah. The one day she has off, he follows her as she goes to meet her father, because she had the temerity to not alert him to her plans. And when she discovers him, she doesn't yell at him or give him the cold shoulder. She doesn't discuss how following her is completely ignoring a boundary she has set for her own personal reasons. She invites him to stay.

And the stalking is just one part of the equation. From Morgan and Jeff and Lester using the store's electronics to get video footage of various (faceless) girls' butts and cleavage, to Jeff and Lester setting up a casting couch and then exposing various models to Jeff's penis, the show takes a light-hearted "boys will be boys" mentality when it comes to violating the various women who make the mistake of working, shopping, or knowing someone at the Burbank Buy More.

It is that light-heartedness that makes this all the worse. If the behavior was seen and treated as wrong, as being a violation of these various women's autonomy, if it were called out as being inherently disrespectful to women, then the show may be something other than regressive. Unfortunately, that is not the case. Morgan, Jeff, and Lester are seen as weird, losery guys, but they're also portrayed as lovable (in the case of Morgan), unthreatening (in the case of Lester), loyal (in the case of Jeff (and Morgan)) guys. These guys, the show demonstrates, are doing little wrong. After all, the women don't complain about it! These guys, the show demonstrates, are impotent geeks that girls don't have to worry about!

And then that is the other edge of this sword. There have been two girls who have been Nerd Herders (the Geek Squad of the Buy More). Both of them have been subject to sexual comments and what would be, in the real world, sexual harassment. They were Herders at two different times, so women have never made up more than 1/4 of the Herder staff. But what really seems to be happening here is the show doesn't only go for the "boys will be boys" and "stalking really isn't that serious" and "harassment is just playing", but is either negatively commenting on the nerdish men among us or - and I think it is the second one - giving one nerdish perspective on women and men. Perhaps it shouldn't be that surprising that only two of the nine writers are women.

A large portion of the Chuck series has been full of geekish and nerdy delights, too many to count. And that, along with Chuck being absolutely adorkable most of the time and zany writing, is one of the things that makes me love Chuck oh so very much. Well, that, and a propensity of the writers to rip off whole scenes from their other series, The O.C., and have those scenes play for more often than not comedic value. And that makes the marginalization of women within their world even harder to bear. Because it isn't just that women are absent, or that women get to discuss parts of their lives other than the men; if that were the case, this post could have (and almost was) been called Chuck vs The Bechdel Test. No, it goes deeper than that. It goes to having geeky guys consistently treat women as sexual objects, and as something other than the norm. As a girl, as a geek, and as a nerd, it feels less than welcoming to have that play out as a theme on this show that I love.

A Post In Which I Review Dollhouse's "Echoes"

Story time:
A long time ago, when Stephen Colbert was still only a correspondent for The Daily Show, I loved him. I'm pretty sure he was the guy who did my favorite bit the show offered, that being someone who went to the Deep South to root out anti-Northern sentiment and came back fully indoctrinated in the fight against Northern Aggression. He had a map that looked something like this (stolen from here; the rest of the site is pretty cool, by the way):
he discussed the different tactics and strategies, denied the North had won, referenced different "territories", and was hilarious. But then he got his own show in 2005, and I hated it. My friends love it. My parents love it. I can sometimes hear them laughing hysterically in the other room when The Colbert Report is on. But then I walk in, and stoney silence ensues. I am a Colbert killer. He just isn't funny when I'm there. Frankly, I'm not convinced he's ever that funny; I certainly haven't seen it. The reason for this tale of Colbert-woe on a post about Dollhouse? Well, I was starting to think my parents were Dollhouse killers, though that moniker doesn't flow quite as well as Colbert killer. I came to this conclusion because my parents only see alternate weeks of Dollhouse; I watch it with my best friend, and we switch off houses. Week 1, with "Ghost", my house. Week 2, with the awesome "The Target"? Best Friend's house. And so on and so forth. And inevitably, the episodes we watched at my house were weaker. So when this week's episode started with the cringe-worthy dialogue and acting of the fly scene, I was a bit concerned. When Echo/Alice's story started, I told them they weren't allowed to watch the show any more.

I realize that this isn't truly their fault; Palidone made this astute observation:

"When Whedon is on, he’s capable of producing amazing television, but when he’s off, it’s a bit like watching a talented dancer start off on the wrong foot."

That pretty much sums everything up. For every "Restless", there is a "Where the Wild Things Are". For every "Objects in Space", there is a "Shindig". For every "Once More with Feeling" there is, well, much of the other scenes in season 6 (and I like season 6). The trade off isn't equal; the good greatly outweighs the bad, or the not-up-to-par. Also, I'm willing to watch subpar episodes because they are generally still enjoyable and I think it is important to acknowledge that sometimes ideas just fall flat. But while I love the thought behind a lot of the Dollhouse episodes, the themes the show is exploring, the actual execution has just been, for the most part, okay-to-good. I like the show, but it wasn't truly magically brilliant. Last week's episode was the turning point, and - death by glass window aside - this week's episode was a continuation of that. My parents? Apparently not Dollhouse killers. Which is good to know, because I rather like my house and my television and not having to drive 45 minutes at the end of the night.

Let me make it clear; for the drugged Topher-DeWitt interactions alone, this episode is made of win. Seriously. Adelle bouncing on the trampoline was hilarious, and Topher keeping it semi-together without pants was incredible. Don't believe me? Watch this:

And this:

I think my favorite thing may be DeWitt climbing over the bar, and the fact that both she and Topher do it later in the episode as if there is no other way to get down and up to that portion of the facility.

I read in a few places that "Echoes" is Dollhouse's "Band Candy", and I find myself agreeing in a large way. Both episodes deal with an altered state among the population usually in charge. Both episodes use this altered state to bring the hilarity. But as much as I love "Band Candy" (teenage Giles rocks my socks, as does teenage Snyder), I think this episode became, by its very nature, more complex than "Band Candy" could ever boast. In sharp contrast to the antics of Adelle and Topher are what the individual Dolls go through. Last week's discovery that Hearn was raping Sierra delved to new depths when we see Sierra 'glitch' to that traumatic event. It was horrific, both in content and delivery. Special Agent Victor's memory of a wartime trauma was also devastating. And the two of them reacting to each other, both oblivious to and complicit in the reinforcement of those traumatic memories, was tragic. This is where the show, I think, is; the aftereffects of the events are still seared into the Dolls, still present and not dealt with. They cannot escape it, but at the same time, they don't know that past exists. And yet, Sierra is still a rape victim; and the show does not shy away from that. It would be easy to. Given the very nature of the show and the wiping process, it would have been incredibly simple to just let that moment fade, a one-shot meant to make a point about the nature of the Dollhouse. But Joss and Company didn't go that route, and I am appreciative of it. That decision also goes to the heart of what the show can be, what I hope it is and what I see it as being.

What the show can be is also being demonstrated through witnessing the recruitment process. I'm still of the mind that Eliza Dushku is not a good actor. The recruitment scene with DeWitt is painful for me to watch, and not solely because Caroline's very autonomy is being stripped from her. Part of it may be a result of the dialogue in those scenes; but part of it is Dushku's semi-mouth breathing acting style therein. Even with that, the whole "they signed up for this" argument pretty much falls by the wayside. Caroline's tenure as a Doll was coerced; as was Sam's. They both may have had opportunity to refuse, though Caroline was kept in a room for two days with no "frickin' idea where" she was and DeWitt had been tracking her for two or so years; those facts kind of fly in the face of free and autonomous consent. And even if Sam had the ability to refuse, to walk away, DeWitt knew which buttons to push in order to facilitate his acquiescence. The assumption of free will falls by the wayside. Yes, the soon to be Actives make choices; and no, the choice they make may not be the best one for the situation in which they find themselves. But that choice, and the actions that brought them to the Dollhouse's attention, still is not reason enough to turn them into objects to be used. What's more, DeWitt seems to recognize this; her reaction to Caroline/Echo is interesting. She specifically works to keep Echo off of the campus. In her own way, she seems to realize that a severance package and promise of monthly stipends does not limit the evil doings of the organization.

Speaking of evil-doings, Topher continues to demonstrate his amorality with his drug rant:

Could be phases, could be... a little thing I like to call body chemistry. We're all our own little cesspools of hormones, enzymes, chemical reactions. It's the same as any drug - herion, cocaine, caffeine, how your body reacts depends on a multitude of indefinable factors. You snort horse once, don't like it, you go back to your organic tea, have a nice life. I do it once, whoo. I'm doing two bags a day for 20 years. One toot for you, adios, amigo. That's what's so exciting about drugs!

The scene reminded me strongly of an exchange on Buffy the Vampire Slayer:

GILES: Grave robbing? That's new. Interesting.

BUFFY: I *know* you meant to say gross and disturbing.

Except Topher isn't Giles, and doesn't have someone like Buffy to pull him back to the moral side of the argument. This isn't a momentary lapse into sciency giddiness. This is who he is. Topher is scientific mind run amuck, like the Operative was government run amuck in Serenity. It is dangerous, and more than slightly scary even if Topher cannot perform the physical feats of The Operative. Perhaps it is even more scary because of that. Instead of coming after you himself, he can just program someone to do it for him. And lose no sleep over it. Which is why his reaction to N-7316 is so intriguing.

Assuming that Fran Kranz can act (as I do), Topher is the one who remains closest to himself and his own goals throughout the course of the episode. DeWitt is still primarily herself, but she becomes incredibly unfocused and like bouncing on the trampoline. Dominic experiences a guilty conscience over his attempt to burn Echo alive (after all, "who does that?") and asserts that there is more to him than what we see. Boyd loses Echo and plays the piano. And yet, although somewhat affected and pantsless, Topher maintains his focus on the issues at hand with only somewhat distracted by his drawer of inappropriate starches. A good friend of mine thinks that's because Topher's a closet druggie. But I wonder if it is because he is less of an adult. He has less of a developed moral code than the others. He seems to have little impulse control, and no ability to stop the ramblings that trickle out of his mouth. He needs his juice boxes. His wrong-doings cannot be explained away by his less than adultishness; in fact, that very thing could be a condemnation. I was interested in that aspect, even though it shot my own theory that Topher may have been a Doll to hell. In its own handbasket.

Another point of interest was Echo's reaction as Alice; for the first time, we see her truly go off-mission. Before, she was always on task, though adapting to the requirements of that task in a way that alarmed Dominic. This time, she up and leaves Tie Boy and makes her way to the college. She has access to traumatic memories before coming in contact with the drug. She is driven to an attempt to fix what had previously gone wrong, and as she tells Sam, "I just have to listen to myself". That is what she has been denied; that is what she is starting to retain.

Final Grade: A

Line I Will Be Quoting: "You're not overwhelming me with specificity".

(Fictional) Feminist Icon: Xander Harris

Although I myself tend to focus more on feminist women, I think that feminist men are a valid - and more than that, necessary - part of the feminist movement. Feminists need to be of both genders; and they are. Feminism, after all, isn't about just getting women a piece of the pie we call life, what with crazy requirements like rights to equal pay and freedom from sexual harassment; it is about baking an entirely new pie, and it is about challenging and reshaping gender expectancies and norms. In other ways but especially this way, men are a vital part of the movement. Without men who both respect and like women who challenge gender roles and identify as feminists and challenge gender roles themselves, half of the battle will never truly be won. As long as engaging in feminine activities is still seen as mock-worthy or less-than, we will not have truly succeeded in becoming an equal sex instead of just the second sex. In this way, Xander Harris makes an exceptional feminist icon, because in order to change the world we don't just need girls like, say, Matilda. We need boys who are not only okay but appreciative of girls like Matilda, and other feminists of different strands and strengths and interests. We need boys who don't feel the need to be a macho man, and who are willing to have a woman as a leader.

Xander Harris is one of Buffy Summers' two best friends.  From the beginning, Xander has no problem accepting Buffy's role as the group's primary (and in the first season, really only) fighter. He responds to Buffy's position as a Slayer with nary a comment about the extraordinary circumstances of a girl being a fighter or a leader. Instead, he just accepts it, telling a captured friend, "It's cool; Buffy's like a superhero". The show also demonstrates some of Xander's feminist credentials by his casual acceptance of and outward gratitude for Buffy's frequent rescues, thanking her in some instances and in another saying, "I have a plan. We wait. Buffy saves us". Xander is both aware and comfortable with his role as back up, understanding that the majority of the fighting will be done by Buffy herself. He is able to enthusiastically be a "slayerette" and not the lead, going so far as to declare that "I laugh in the face of danger. Then I hide until it goes away." And he is incredibly aware that his strength is not brute force but something different. Xander has several shining moments on the show in terms of fights; but they normally revolve around either being around as back up, or as playing to his own strengths. A Chandler-esque character, Xander is more verbal than physical. And so some of his greatest moments in the series in any light reflect that particular trait. He is able to talk a recently zombified classmate out of blowing up the school, telling the delinquent that, "Being blowed up isn't walking around and drinking with your buddies dead. It's little bits being swept up by a janitor dead and I don't think you're ready for that" while standing in front of the only exit. He isn't overly macho in the scene, or full of bravado. As he says, "I like the quiet".

His verbosity comes in handy in other, more intimate cases as well. He is at times angry and tempestuous; he isn't a perfect guy or friend. But when the chips are down, he is there when it counts. And he is unafraid of showing the full gamut of emotions and opening up to friends. He bucks up Buffy by saying, "Let me tell you something, when it's dark and I'm all alone and I'm scared or freaked out or whatever, I always think 'What would Buffy do?' You're my hero." His sexual escapades also align him with what would be considered the typically feminine response, and the show does not belittle or mock him for it. The show in general is more about sex within the confines of an emotionally satisfying relationship than simple bed-hopping, and Xander does not buck the trend. The first time he has sex, he is the passive party. The second time he has sex, Anya, his eventual girlfriend, disrobes in front of him as he gets her a cran-apple juice box. She explains that they should have sex and then move on to their separate lives. Xander, in a bit of shock tells her, "It's just we hardly know each other. I mean I like you. And you have a certain directness that I admire. But sexual interc-- What you're talking about, well -- and I'm actually turning into a woman as I say this -- but it's about expressing something. And accepting consequences". Although the speech contains some problematic language, it is made less so by the fact that "woman" is not a less-than in the circle Xander runs in. Women and womenly emotions are not derided or seen as weak. Xander accepts and verbalizes that for him, sex is more than simply physical sensations. It is an example of Xander both exemplifying a stereotypical feminine quality and highlights how that is not a negative.

Perhaps my favorite thing about Xander is the fact that he is friends with a girl he has a crush on. In many shows - and in many instances in life - the relationship between a guy and his crush is not a true friendship. Instead of seeing Buffy as "a girl to hang out with on a pursuit of potential future bliss", Xander simply sees her as "my best friend whom I also have a crush on". The differences between the two positions is huge. Xander reacts less than well to Buffy's rejection, yes. But he gets over it, in the very same episode and in the very same day. He deals with her rejection without losing her friendship. He handles the fact that she likes another guy, and continues to do best friendly things with her like watch Indian musicals and hanging out at the local club and at her house and in general. Instead of disappearing or believing that Buffy "owed" him something for the friendship ( unlike Jeff Fecke's Nice Guy ®, who believes girls "used him for emotional intimacy without reciprocating, in kind, with physical intimacy"), Xander stayed Buffy's friend because he values her as something more than a potential girlfriend. He values her as a person, and he loves her both romantically and platonically. And that is seriously feminist, and kind of radical for most forms of media. An example to the contrary would be Marty on Gilmore Girls, but he is far from the only one. And that "radical" nature makes Xander one hell of a (fictional) feminist icon in my book.

(Parts one, two, and three of the series.)

Geeks Versus Nerds

About a hundred years ago (well, more like a month), I started writing a series about 'girlie' math and then responding to one of my friend's thoughts on the matter. This piece is sort of an off-shoot of the last entry I wrote about nerds, though not the final entry on the matter (I still have one percolating). One of the questions that constantly comes up is what differentiates a geek from a nerd; there are a lot of ways in which geeks and nerds are similar, and generally there is a lot of crossover between the two groups. In a Venn Diagram, the middle section of the circles overlapping would take up much of the other two circles. And although nerds and geeks are becoming more socially acceptable, there is still a social stigma attached to being one. As one of my friends writes (again, quoting without asking! But at this point, it should be expected):

Granted, people like to say "I'm such a geek/nerd/etc, tee hee!" when admitting they do something other than think about cars and sports (or clothes and makeup), but the genuine geek/nerd/dork is still a social outcast.

First, I love the "tee hee" thrown in there, because it is true. Secondly, I agree with the sentiment. I find Willow Rosenberg's remarks about knowledge gathering to be fairly on the mark:

It's just in high school, knowledge was pretty much frowned upon. You really had to work to learn anything.

 And yet, I myself think of nerds as being slightly higher on the social food chain than geeks. Why? Well, because the key difference between a nerd and a geek, for me, is their center of knowledge. Nerds are ones who are history buffs; who write code for computer programs, who make the AV system in the high school better. They are the ones who generally get all of their homework done, and while they're at it correct the school books or the handouts the teacher distributed. Nerds use their intellect in areas that may be scoffed at in high school but may one day be a venue for accumulating money, or getting the job, or becoming a premiere scholar of some kind. Geeks, however, are more... ...extracurricular in their knowledge base. Geeks can turn their passion into some form of capitalist success, but more often than not they are the ones spending their hard earned money on tee shirts and memorabilia; they are the ones, out of the two groups, to have dialogue from long forgotten and never incredibly popular television shows rattling around in their heads. These are the people who would write to JRR Tolkien to inform him that, if what Tolkien wrote was the true topography of Middle Earth, then the accompanying maps were wrong. These are people who immerse themselves in worlds of science fiction and fantasy, who learn Klingon and who know the history behind every race in Star Trek and every battle in Star Wars.

The truth is, the only thing that really separates nerds from geeks in life is the amount of respectability each can receive. Both generally exhibit the same type of obsessiveness and fanaticism; the same passion that accounts for needing to learn every facet of Shay's Rebellion is present in the need to learn the hierarchies present in the United Federation of Planets. That shared type explains the amount of overlap the two groups tend to sustain. We just happen to (eventually) praise and respect the man who can build the personal computer or deliver the iPod in a way we do not praise and respect the man who has created a multitude of complex fictional universes. Some geeks get praise; Joss Whedon is a critical darling. But most often, geeks are the ones who are depicted and seen as living within a fantasy realm because they cannot (or will not) connect to life in this realm. And that comes down to the amount of money they can make versus the amount of money society can make off of them.