thuvia ptarth (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
thuviaptarth) wrote2010-02-04 03:02 pm
thuviaptarth) wrote2010-02-04 03:02 pm
Entry tags:
Bodily objectification and subjectivity in Fringe
I have no cool title for you, sorry! Originally I just called this "Brief note on Fringe," but then it ended up not so brief.
There were all these things I wanted to say about Fringe while I was vidding and had to keep quiet, and now I have forgotten most of them. Next time I will take notes.
One thing I remember: The show, post-pilot, considerably de-glamorizes Olivia's looks--and, simultaneously, emphasizes her practicality. Anna Torv is still beautiful, of course, but she is much less prettified. The most striking example is the contrast between the make-up, costuming, and staging for Olivia's immersion in the isolation tank in the pilot vs. 109 "The Dreamscape":
In the pilot, Olivia is glammed up -- Anna Torv is clearly wearing make-up (and entirely artificial cheekbones), she is wearing a plain but sexy (and probably push-up) black bra that displays her breasts, her face is contained and deliberately inexpressive. When she lies back in the tank, it is gracefully and submissively. When Olivia prepares to enter the tank, we get shots of her disrobing and of her nearly naked body, and the preparations emphasize submission, vulnerability, and helplessness: Peter and Walter attach the instruments to her and inject her with drugs, and she is sedated so heavily she has to be held up by Peter and then assisted across the lab to the tank because she is unable to walk on her own.
In "The Dreamscape," by contrast, Olivia wears a concealing bathrobe during most of the preparation, she attaches some of the instruments to herself, and she protests with a visible and more human reaction of pain when she is injected; we see her stripped down to her underwear only at the point she enters the tank, and her bra is a sports bra, which does much less to showcase her breasts for someone else's gaze and much more to enable an FBI agent who spends a lot of unscheduled time running after suspects and performing unexpected athletic acts. When she lies back in the tank, her expression is more anxious, but also more determined; there is a lot more visible emotion.
I can come up with plausible character reasons for some of these changes--in 109, Olivia knows Walter and Astrid much better than she knew Walter and Peter in the pilot, and has a much better idea of what to expect in the tank, and can feel free to display more emotion--but others, like the makeup and costuming, strike me as more related to the production's decisions about gaze and framing than in-universe explanations. I can find an in-universe explanation for the bra/make-up if I reach--in 101, Olivia is in a relationship and might be dressing up to feel sexy or to please her lover; in 109, she's single and in mourning, probably not disposed to dressing up even for herself--but she is considerably less made-up even in the flashbacks to pre-pilot events. In the pilot, her hair is down in almost all the scenes, even when she's running or involved in an FBI raid and everyone around her is in featureless black; in later episodes, when Olivia is working or on a raid, her hair is usually tied back in a ponytail or a braid. (As someone who has had long hair, I can tell you which one is more practical when you're just walking briskly, let alone carrying out a dangerous attack in hostile territory.)
I have to admit that I love glammed-up Olivia and her artificial cheekbones. I think she looks gorgeous. But I ended up going with plain Olivia for the first full view of Olivia in "Etheric Messages" because the simple substitution of that clip made the first sequence feel like Olivia was considerably more active and in control than it did with glamourous Olivia, which made the sequence feel like the experiment in the isolation tank was something that was done to her, instead of an active step she decided to take in pursuit of her goals.
In comparison to The X Files, to which it owes a lot of its themes and aesthetic, Fringe seems to me to have a lot less torture porn, although I haven't attempted to do any scientific comparison on a scene-by-scene or episode-by-episode basis. But Fringe's most objectifying view of the victims of experimentation comes in 102, where we get all too many serial-killer-eye views of struggling women whose near-nudity is emphasized and whose fear is eroticized, and where the camera-eye and the audience identification are located with the (male) killer's view in the familiar cinematic conflation of masculinity and sexualized violence. Fringe returns to the serial killer plotline later, but with significantly less dwelling on the killer's luxurious control of a trapped female body and with camera work that does much more to emphasize the violation and the resistance of the subjects. It also presents as many male victims of medical violence as female--maybe more? I have to admit I didn't count, but when I went looking for clips of this related to the mytharc, it wasn't hard for me to find examples almost entirely made up of men. And, to get back to the idea of torture porn, there is a lot more emphasis on the expressions and outrage of the victims--whether it is Olivia, Peter, or a victim of the week--and on medium shots of their generally clothed bodies than you get in The X Files, where the focus is on nudity and close-ups of isolated body parts, whether the victim is Mulder, Scully, or a victim of the week. I don't think these techniques inherently have a particular political effect, but I think these particular combinations of them tend to sexualize violence and dehumanize the victims, giving us an inside view of the perpertrators' heads, in The X Files, and tend to result in more of a focus on the victims' resistance and attempts to retain bodily integrity and autonomy in Fringe. I can think of many reasons to choose fragmented views of violence, of body parts, that would reinforce the perspective or perceptions of the victims of violent crimes rather than perpetrators, and I can also think of many reasons to focus on the perpetrators in art; but I know which view is omnipresent to the point of exhaustion in popular culture, and what effect I think it generally has on social attitudes towards violence and surviving violence, and it's not the one that I particularly feel like watching for entertainment right now.
There were all these things I wanted to say about Fringe while I was vidding and had to keep quiet, and now I have forgotten most of them. Next time I will take notes.
One thing I remember: The show, post-pilot, considerably de-glamorizes Olivia's looks--and, simultaneously, emphasizes her practicality. Anna Torv is still beautiful, of course, but she is much less prettified. The most striking example is the contrast between the make-up, costuming, and staging for Olivia's immersion in the isolation tank in the pilot vs. 109 "The Dreamscape":
In the pilot, Olivia is glammed up -- Anna Torv is clearly wearing make-up (and entirely artificial cheekbones), she is wearing a plain but sexy (and probably push-up) black bra that displays her breasts, her face is contained and deliberately inexpressive. When she lies back in the tank, it is gracefully and submissively. When Olivia prepares to enter the tank, we get shots of her disrobing and of her nearly naked body, and the preparations emphasize submission, vulnerability, and helplessness: Peter and Walter attach the instruments to her and inject her with drugs, and she is sedated so heavily she has to be held up by Peter and then assisted across the lab to the tank because she is unable to walk on her own.
In "The Dreamscape," by contrast, Olivia wears a concealing bathrobe during most of the preparation, she attaches some of the instruments to herself, and she protests with a visible and more human reaction of pain when she is injected; we see her stripped down to her underwear only at the point she enters the tank, and her bra is a sports bra, which does much less to showcase her breasts for someone else's gaze and much more to enable an FBI agent who spends a lot of unscheduled time running after suspects and performing unexpected athletic acts. When she lies back in the tank, her expression is more anxious, but also more determined; there is a lot more visible emotion.
I can come up with plausible character reasons for some of these changes--in 109, Olivia knows Walter and Astrid much better than she knew Walter and Peter in the pilot, and has a much better idea of what to expect in the tank, and can feel free to display more emotion--but others, like the makeup and costuming, strike me as more related to the production's decisions about gaze and framing than in-universe explanations. I can find an in-universe explanation for the bra/make-up if I reach--in 101, Olivia is in a relationship and might be dressing up to feel sexy or to please her lover; in 109, she's single and in mourning, probably not disposed to dressing up even for herself--but she is considerably less made-up even in the flashbacks to pre-pilot events. In the pilot, her hair is down in almost all the scenes, even when she's running or involved in an FBI raid and everyone around her is in featureless black; in later episodes, when Olivia is working or on a raid, her hair is usually tied back in a ponytail or a braid. (As someone who has had long hair, I can tell you which one is more practical when you're just walking briskly, let alone carrying out a dangerous attack in hostile territory.)
I have to admit that I love glammed-up Olivia and her artificial cheekbones. I think she looks gorgeous. But I ended up going with plain Olivia for the first full view of Olivia in "Etheric Messages" because the simple substitution of that clip made the first sequence feel like Olivia was considerably more active and in control than it did with glamourous Olivia, which made the sequence feel like the experiment in the isolation tank was something that was done to her, instead of an active step she decided to take in pursuit of her goals.
In comparison to The X Files, to which it owes a lot of its themes and aesthetic, Fringe seems to me to have a lot less torture porn, although I haven't attempted to do any scientific comparison on a scene-by-scene or episode-by-episode basis. But Fringe's most objectifying view of the victims of experimentation comes in 102, where we get all too many serial-killer-eye views of struggling women whose near-nudity is emphasized and whose fear is eroticized, and where the camera-eye and the audience identification are located with the (male) killer's view in the familiar cinematic conflation of masculinity and sexualized violence. Fringe returns to the serial killer plotline later, but with significantly less dwelling on the killer's luxurious control of a trapped female body and with camera work that does much more to emphasize the violation and the resistance of the subjects. It also presents as many male victims of medical violence as female--maybe more? I have to admit I didn't count, but when I went looking for clips of this related to the mytharc, it wasn't hard for me to find examples almost entirely made up of men. And, to get back to the idea of torture porn, there is a lot more emphasis on the expressions and outrage of the victims--whether it is Olivia, Peter, or a victim of the week--and on medium shots of their generally clothed bodies than you get in The X Files, where the focus is on nudity and close-ups of isolated body parts, whether the victim is Mulder, Scully, or a victim of the week. I don't think these techniques inherently have a particular political effect, but I think these particular combinations of them tend to sexualize violence and dehumanize the victims, giving us an inside view of the perpertrators' heads, in The X Files, and tend to result in more of a focus on the victims' resistance and attempts to retain bodily integrity and autonomy in Fringe. I can think of many reasons to choose fragmented views of violence, of body parts, that would reinforce the perspective or perceptions of the victims of violent crimes rather than perpetrators, and I can also think of many reasons to focus on the perpetrators in art; but I know which view is omnipresent to the point of exhaustion in popular culture, and what effect I think it generally has on social attitudes towards violence and surviving violence, and it's not the one that I particularly feel like watching for entertainment right now.
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Thanks for posting.
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The End.
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(* I seriously thought WAT's Poppy Montgomery and Fringe's Anna Torv were the same person until someone pointed me at IMDB. Whoops.)
The X Files, where the focus is on nudity and close-ups of isolated body parts, whether the victim is Mulder, Scully, or a victim of the week.
Okay, now I'm seriously blanking. I do think of TXF as a horror show first and foremost, but are there really that many examples of nudity and body parts? Scrolling down the list of episodes...it's not the first thing I'd think about the majority of the presentations of the hundreds of murders/attempted murders. (eta)
Fringe is on my DVD list because a.) I can never ever remember that it's on and b.) oh pete I do not need to watch another show, but DVDs! Are shiny!
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When I was said "nudity," I was thinking of the Mulder torture in the spaceships in Season 7; the close-up on Scully's (Gillian Anderson's) pregnant belly in references to the abduction arc (the use of Gillian Anderson's actual body and pregnancy as an icon of horror has always horrified me in ways that were not intended and that I find difficult to articulate); to some degree of the close-ups of Mulder's torture in the Tunguska/Terma episodes, although now I have to admit a lot of that was focused on Mulder's face and probably didn't involve nudity -- I remember the wire mask over his face as particularly horrific and as creating an intense sense of nudity and personal erasure for me, but my memories may be unreliable or too personalized to illustrate anything.
I am not coming up on specific examples that illustrate nudity beyond those three, of which only two are really relevant (Mulder S7 and the S2 abduction arc). I would still argue that its camera-eye and narrative in general eroticize fear and helplessness much more than Fringe, though probably not as much as the procedurals you cite. I did recently just watch my first ever "damaged profilers hunt serial killers" show, if you don't count XF, and yeah, it comes off way worse than XF on this front and also convinces me I'm not in any rush to add a second.
If I compare "Irresistable" to Fringe's "Ability" (which is the episode where Olivia is abducted and subjected to a spinal tap against her will) or to Life's "Powerless" (which is about a serial rapist stalking Dani Reese), I see all three episodes as immensely sympathetic to the female victims/survivors of violence and all of them try to emphasize the woman's agency in the narrative; but "Irresistable" has by far the most time dedicated to the perpetrator's POV and the most camera shots. If I compare "Irresistable" to Fringe's second episode, whose name I forget, the comparison is much more level; and it's probably also much more level if I substitute "Orison" for "Irresistable."
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* Recognizing this was, like, 95% of the show, period, of course. *g*
(Ack, pushed wrong button.)
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