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 "Gray Hour"

I'm going to start this review in a weird place; I'm going to start it with why I don't like Jane Eyre. Well, there are a lot of reasons why I don't like Jane Eyre, actually. Much of the book left a bitter taste in my mouth, and because of that I was surprised that I loved Wide Sargasso Sea as much as I do. I'm definitely an Austen girl. But back to the topic at hand. If you haven't read Jane Eyre, and are interested in doing so, skip this part. I'll let you know when to come back:

I hate Jane Eyre because of the ending. Yes, I hate how Jane ends up with Rochester again, because I'm forced to ask, "Why is she with him?" just like I do when I watch crappy romantic comedies like 27 Dresses or Knocked Up. And that sucks, but the real reason I hate it is because Charlotte Bronte tries to make both Jane and Rochester equal in the end. She gives Jane an inheritance so she isn't in a subordinate economic position to Rochester. And Rochester? Well, he loses a hand and his eyesight in a fire caused by his insane wife. In order to make the characters equals, Bronte gives Jane money, and cripples Rochester. For me, that isn't really a twist that supports gender equality. And here's where I'm starting to develop a bit of a problem with Dollhouse. In "The Target", it is only after Boyd is shot and out of the save-the-day picture that Echo-Jenny is able to step up and take care of business. And for that one episode, I was more than alright with that; it flew completely in the face of Jacki Lyden's assertion that Echo-Jenny needed a man to save her, because she didn't. All she needed was a gun, and she was able to save herself, and the man. However, this same sort of situation played out in "Gray Hour" as well. Walton gets skewered, and only after he gives Echo the means to escape does she rescue herself - and him.

Now, I'm down with this sort of thing happening once, but twice in two episodes is a little much for me. Especially when Whedon's never needed to do it before. Buffy didn't need any of her guys to be knocked down before she was able to kick ass - and before anyone says "vampire slayer", think "Helpless". She's able to rescue herself and her mother with just her wits about her, and Giles remains unharmed. Hell, he even gets a bit of the credit by dusting a surprise vampire. Zoe didn't require Mal to be hurt before she was able to take up arms and shoot some people dead. And by doing it that way, by having both men and women able to save each other and save themselves without the traditional rescuer being incapacitated, there was a much stronger message of gender equality. Women could rescue men, even when the men were at their full and manliest of strengths. Much better than the Jane Eyre way of male-female power relations.

***If anyone actually stopped reading, it's safe now. After ranking the episodes for John, I'm kind of forced to conclude I was a bit off. I had them ranked "The Target", "Gray Hour", "Stage Fright", and then "The Ghost". I think "Grey Hour" may have fallen a bit in my second watching, and my excitement over the plot overrode my ability to judge the episode on its other merits (or lack thereof). I also caught about the last 10 or 15 minutes (probably closer to 10, but felt more like 15) of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and although I love Summer Glau muchly, it was still pretty painful. Thus, the comparison between "Gray Hour" and what came before made "Gray Hour" seem brilliant by comparison.

The script was lacking; there are no other words for it. There were no cool twists of dialogue like there were in "Stage Fright". There were no truly rememberable lines, sans "You are a talking cucumber"; and I think that line was really made by the delivery instead of the actual writing. And there was very little Boyd-Echo connection. The midwife scene in the beginning didn't resemble reality. And as Lauredhel says,

There are fields of endeavour in which the vast majority of experts are women. those women possess knowledge gained through years of study and experience, and they bring something very worthwhile to the world. One of those fields of endeavour is midwifery.

It seems exponentially problematic that a male feminist would not recognize this and either consult with a midwife about proper procedure, or just research the thing. I mean, if we can get that there is no noise in space right for Firefly (ignoring the many other sciencey issues), then could we get a good birth scene? Apparently not.

This isn't to pick on Joss. Well, not entirely. And the bloom is not off the Dollhouse rose. I still really enjoyed the episode. It just wasn't as good as I first thought, and that realization was a bit disappointing. I'm going to mention two other aspects of this episode that bugged me, and then move on to what I did like. First, there is Whedon's notorious time issue. There have been write ups about the time issues in otherwise excellent episodes like "Passion"; I'm not saying he's as bad as the Sherman-Palladinos having multiple fridays in their weeks on Gilmore Girls, but it does sometimes throw me. Like last week, when Crazy Stalker Dude first constructs his crutch-gun. What stopped him from firing it at that show? Why did we see him construct the entire thing, and then not see him try to use it until the next concert? And this week, with the 45 seconds it would take the guards to breech the vault once the alarm had been sounded. I don't care how fast he moved, if Vitas isn't secretly Superman, there's no way he would be able to construct a barricade out of that much art in 45 seconds - and still have time to remind Echo of his breaking-broken people theory.

The second of these two issues is Ivy. I liked Ivy as a character, and I appreciate Joss (slowly) becoming more multicultural in his casting. However, I would have liked Ivy all the more if she hadn't been like Chuck's Anna with her funky-cool clothing. As much as I coveted her tights, I would have preferred Ivy being more Willow and less Buffy. Barring that, I would have liked a slightly longer skirt because hers was far from "serious". And yes, Topher wearing crazy "Xander" outfits and drinking out of juice boxes isn't very professional either, but my issue is less with the lack of professionalism than it is with the sexualization of the character. It all goes back to girls can be anything, even nerds/geeks, as long as they are beautiful and dress like they know it. I expect better from the guy who gave me Willow and Fred and Kaylee, even though all of whom were beautiful. They were all allowed to be beautiful, and be sexy and sexual, and yet still not always dress the part of the sex kitten.

What I did like, I liked a lot. I think an episode like "Gray Hour" was necessary to fully introduce Echo, who she is and what she has to offer even as a "blank slate". Echo's evolution from "Shall I go now?" to someone with a bit more range of emotion than her normal Dollhouse Active persona was interesting to watch, as was her interactions with the two different philosophies in the room. While Topher was probably right to be concerned about sensory overload being dangerous for a newly wiped Active, that florescent lights and forceps would be jarring, there also seems to be an undercurrent here; without conflict, without things that challenge us and people who make us think, we don't grow - or at least, we don't grow as quickly. Echo developed more of a personality in the course of 31 minutes than she does during her routine in the Dollhouse. Part of it is probably that she was interacting with other people who had a full range of emotions at their disposal in a way that the other Actives do not. But part of it had to be the lack of throw pillows and crunchy lettuce. Part of it had to be that Echo had to evolve, because to not evolve when confronted wouldn't be the way to survive. And yet, at the same time this trauma of being wiped and rewiped is on display as a fairly bad thing. If it is so traumatizing, it cannot be good to do over and over again to a person. In this way, Echo's declaration, "I'm not broken" is both a clarion call of strength, and yet also an implicit demonstration of what Echo and the other Actives lack, what they have stolen from them time after time. They aren't broken, and that is part of what disrupts their evolution. It is so much more tragic than "I'm Buffy the Vampire Slayer; and you are?" is, than "No more running; I aim to misbehave is", than "My turn" is. This is a show without the truly triumphant moment.

I also liked the mystery. Why would Alpha wipe Echo in the middle of an incredibly dangerous assignment? Why would Adelle DeWitt so readily believe Topher after he kept screwing up by doing things like calling the Active and her Handler?

The other thing, the actual mythos, seems to be solidifying. "Michelangelo believed his sculptures already existed, inside the marble. Waiting to be freed" could be describing the Actives themselves, existing in these blank slate states, just waiting to actually be allowed to develop. Instead of having the Actives be an actual example of tabula rasa, Whedon seems to be going more toward his Buffy the Vampire Slayer "Tabula Rasa" way; in other words, people aren't blank slates. You can wipe away their memories, the traumas and conflicts and joys that work to refine each person into who they are; but in many ways, the essence of the person remains. This is a little more extreme than BtVS' "Tabula Rasa" in the wiping of everything, but it seems clear that there are minute yet important differences between the Actives, even in their programed state. Lurker said, "Eliza Dushku and Dichen Lachman even sounded alike when they portrayed Taffy. Insanely awesome acting!" I don't disagree. But I still found myself thinking of their Taffys as two different people. Echo-Taffy was, and it could have just been a product of the atmosphere, more hyped up. She was more impassioned, wilder. Sierra-Taffy was cooler, just as confident, but seemed to have a different sort of edge. She was calmer, and exuded more control than Echo-Taffy, even though Echo-Taffy was the on with Taffy Standard Time. Still excellent acting, and the two did create very nearly the same character. But the people underneath still influenced - I think - the formation of that character; because you can never truly clean a slate, and there is still something present underneath.

Grade: B-/B

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.

Nerds: How Far We've Come

This is the second of (hopefully) three blog posts stemming from a comment my friend made on a post I wrote about Danica McKellar's books attempting to reconcile girls with math. McKellar mentioned that girls are less likely to find math appealing both because it is associated with being nerdy and being a boy, and my friend says:

I take issue with the fact that nerdy is such a horrible insult now. The "I heart nerds" t-shirt is pretty big, not to mention the success of Comic-Con, all the superhero movies and television shows that feature nerdy characters. Maybe in middle school it still is, but nerds populate so much entertainment now that it's uncool not to be a nerd.

I don't know if I agree with that. Nerds are certainly better off now than they were before Steve Jobs and Bill Gates blew the doors off of the tech revolution; the kids who were members of my school's AV club certainly weren't being harassed in the halls. No one got their butt taped together, Breakfast Club-style. But I wouldn't necessarily call nerds the new cool. The old cool still remains pretty prevalent; and whatever in-roads nerds have made in popular culture, those 'nerds' tend to resemble the beautiful people more than any nerd I've ever seen does. Take, for instance, Chuck Bartowski:He is a veritable nerd (and geek; though there is a lot of overlap in populations, the terms tend to refer to two different types of knowledge, interest, etc.). He works for the Nerd Herd (which is the equivalent to Best Buy's "Geek Squad"), and in his eponymous show, he has a computer downloaded into his brain. And yet, Zachary Levi is in not really representative of the Every Nerd. His best friend Morgan comes closer:
but he isn't the star. He is allowed to look less Hollywoodesque and more like a real person due to that fact. However, his girlfriend, Anna -who is also a member of the nerd herd- is still incredibly, almost unreachably, beautiful. And a bit of a fashionista herself to boot. I'm not saying that there is anything wrong with a girl-nerd (I kind of loathe the term "nerdette") being both nerdy and fashion-conscious. There is nothing wrong with making girls who are nerds sexual and sensual and exciting and beautiful. We've come a long way from Velma -poor, sexless, Velma- being the premiere nerd among girls.

In 1997, Willow Rosenberg of Buffy the Vampire Slayer declared, "Nerds are in!" And she was kind of right. After all, Willow was a nerd; and although she was played by Alyson Hannigan, who is herself incredibly -almost unreachably- beautiful, Willow was nerded up in her softer side of Sears outfits and otherwise weird clothing choices. And Willow got a boyfriend in season 2, when she was still very much into the science and math and computer thing -and when she still had kind of awkward clothing choices. But Willow is the exception rather than the rule in terms of geeky girls. And even Willow lost some of that nerd sensibility as she got more conventionally attractive -though her odd clothing choices remained a staple, the type of "odd" shifted away from "nerd" and toward "new age". And as her clothing shifted, so too did Willow. She became more overtly sexual and sensual (and gay!) as she moved closer to the magical arts and further away from ze book-learning. And this is something that happens again and again; men are allowed to be nerdy without being Hercules, like Morgan or Rusty from ABC Family's Greek. But girls, even and especially nerds, still occupy a very narrow range of acceptable looks. Rory Gilmore could be considered a nerd. But she was also played by someone who had previously been a model -and was never formally "outed". Most of the characters on Bones are nerds, but they mostly look like they've walked out of a fashion magazine too. Zack Addy is the one character who looked like a (still attractive) normal individual -and his luck with women was not so much of the good. But much of the rest of television and popular culture is still divided into boys being nerds and girls loving them. I must admit that I've never seen an "I Heart Nerds" t-shirt on a guy. Shows like The Big Bang Theory, Greek, and even Chuck still tend to follow the plot of "nerdy guy pursues beautiful, non-nerdy girl".

Are these things problems? I can see a criticism of this assessment being that television shows depict the beautiful, and we have to generally take their nerdom on faith rather than looks. I can also see a criticism being that nerds come in all shapes and sizes, and to proclaim that nerds should actually look nerdy is to just play to old stereotypes. And both of those are correct. Nerds should be portrayed as looking like Chuck and Morgan and Sheldon and Leonard. But I don't think girls get that option very much. The default for "girl" is still almost always "beautiful", even if she's got Velma's brain. And I believe fictional girl nerds are not only in short supply, but they are also quite uniform in appearance. And that's really no good either. Because it pushes the idea that a girl can be interested in math and science only if she also takes care to remain hyper-feminine.

Which becomes an issue I have with Danica McKellar's book. She dresses it up in hyper-feminine fare in order to beat back the boogyman of becoming the "Velma". But she -and our society as a whole- doesn't take the time to foster the idea that being a "Velma" is a pretty cool thing indeed. And that guys will still come a-knockin'. And also, that Velmas can knock as well. But mostly, it denies that sex appeal doesn't stem from make-up and hair dos and clothing; after all, Chuck is attractive in his Nerd Herd attire. Willow is cute and crush-worthy in her Inuit costume. We need to have more girl nerds in the media, and a bigger range of them. But we also need to take a good look at why the fairer sex needs all this get-up, from make-up to fancy underwear, in order to actually be feminine and attractive. And that is the part Danica McKellar is missing, and that is the part these girls (and their parents) who flock to these books need to know the most -more than even algebra.