Drifting thoughts (LFN related)
May. 17th, 2010 08:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nell65I've been thinking that one of the great challenges of 'making sense of canon' in plumbing the relationships among the women - Adrian/Madeline, Adrian/Nikita, Madeline/Nikita....and to a lesser degree all the rest...is making sense of their fights.
That the very male nature of the script writers -- who, credit given where credit is due -- were really trying I think to write an interesting mix of male *and* female characters, and came so close to getting it right, led them to fall back on their inner thirteen year olds when it came to scripting dialogue for women arguing with *each other.*
The insults they have their otherwise intelligent, mature, capable women fling at each other in moments of high rage - which, cool - they got *real anger* - were so juvenile, and so stupidly inane and off topic and, well, just plain inaccurate, that they present real problems with how to incorporate them into canon as a fully integrated part of the women who mouthed them.
I mean - these women are cold blooded killers, schemers who have both disrupted and saved the world-as-we-know-it multiple times, held the lives of others in their hands, tortured, maimed, loved and healed as they could and would - and when they are really angry with each other the nastiest thing they can think of is a wordy version of 'slut' (Adrian) and 'bimbo' (Madeline) and some-kind-of-impossible-to-summarize weak tea 'on this one day you did something odd' (Nikita)?
What in the ever loving hell is that?
There has been a lot of meta of late on female characters and the writing of the same.... and so I started thinking about how, among many other things, there are no good models for how to write women fighting *not over a man* which is what these women were doing, and the show runners *had no freaking clue* what words to put in their mouths.
Because, I suspect, we have no larger cultural scripts for how women do that, fight/argue about something that really matters that is not - and has no relationship too - who they, or someone else, is fucking.
And so TPTB put really stupid words in as place holders. And it nearly undoes all the cool work of Adrian's Garden, and does, I think, so unbalance FLYF that it severely weakens the rest of the episode.
So - what words should they have used?
That the very male nature of the script writers -- who, credit given where credit is due -- were really trying I think to write an interesting mix of male *and* female characters, and came so close to getting it right, led them to fall back on their inner thirteen year olds when it came to scripting dialogue for women arguing with *each other.*
The insults they have their otherwise intelligent, mature, capable women fling at each other in moments of high rage - which, cool - they got *real anger* - were so juvenile, and so stupidly inane and off topic and, well, just plain inaccurate, that they present real problems with how to incorporate them into canon as a fully integrated part of the women who mouthed them.
I mean - these women are cold blooded killers, schemers who have both disrupted and saved the world-as-we-know-it multiple times, held the lives of others in their hands, tortured, maimed, loved and healed as they could and would - and when they are really angry with each other the nastiest thing they can think of is a wordy version of 'slut' (Adrian) and 'bimbo' (Madeline) and some-kind-of-impossible-to-summarize weak tea 'on this one day you did something odd' (Nikita)?
What in the ever loving hell is that?
There has been a lot of meta of late on female characters and the writing of the same.... and so I started thinking about how, among many other things, there are no good models for how to write women fighting *not over a man* which is what these women were doing, and the show runners *had no freaking clue* what words to put in their mouths.
Because, I suspect, we have no larger cultural scripts for how women do that, fight/argue about something that really matters that is not - and has no relationship too - who they, or someone else, is fucking.
And so TPTB put really stupid words in as place holders. And it nearly undoes all the cool work of Adrian's Garden, and does, I think, so unbalance FLYF that it severely weakens the rest of the episode.
So - what words should they have used?
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Date: 2010-05-18 01:13 am (UTC)Yes - I think there are all kinds of reasons why Sian Phillips made those lines sing. And she did. I also actually like the last line a great deal, and read it the same way you do, as in, not cat-fightish at all, which is why the earlier slagging on Madeline's sex life reads -- from outside - as so juvenile.
And if Adrian wanted to slag off on Paul, surely there are more straightforward, and more deeply cutting ways than telling him that his pursuit object sleeps around, cause, yeah, Paul already knows that. It's just too "sexual women wanting sex are icky, right, Paul?" blechch.
Bimbo strikes me as just such an utterly weak and paltry word, from someone like Madeline who usually uses words so well - if what she means is 'you're too stupid to judge me' - why not say it? If she wants to call her an acting out teenager? Why not say that?
But - most cutting of all, if blood was what she wanted, she could have said "you're just like me now, and you always were weren't you?" That would have cut like hell. Or, "I was right. You never really loved Michael Samuelle, did you?"
I think the bimbo isn't "Madeline" speaking - it's scriptwriters who couldn't forget that this was 'women' facing off, as opposed to two characters fighting.
Also - yeah - Nikita's line in that scene wasn't insult so much as judgement, but, man -- could it have *been* any stupider? (to channel Chandler Bing?)
I forget exactly what Nikita said to Madeline before cold-cocking her (great moment!) but I was all like, see! see! they're working together, otherwise Madeline would be dead now!!!111!!! so I wasn't really paying attention to the quality of the zingers! LOL!