LJ Archive: Farscape
Jul. 30th, 2011 04:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
labingiFarscape Master Post
In preparation for the day LJ expires, I'm moving some old posts I'd like to archive elsewhere. Below the cut is assorted Farscape meta.
Scorpius and Tauza (April 29, 2006)
I’ve commented at various times that Scorpius derives many of his attitudes from Tauza's upbringing. In fact, he gets almost every attitude from Tauza, and thus, the ideological traits that differentiate Scorpius from "the Scarrans" also differentiate Tauza from many of her fellow Scarrans. I conjecture that Tauza's ideology may be more female-identified than the Scarran norm (or dominant ideology) and, therefore, that Scorpius's world view might be described as very close to a "progressive female Scarran" world view.
Scorpius does not disagree with most of Tauza's attitudes. He expresses some sense of injustice at the brutality of his upbringing, but I suspect that these feelings are secondary: an excuse to further dislike a person and society he already dislikes. He comments in "Incubator" that Tauza's training was useful. I'd argue that from a Scarran point of view, this training was essential to Scorpius's survival (and Scorpius knows it). Scarran society is not tolerant of weakness, and Scorpius is physically very weak by Scarran standards. To compensate for this weakness, his endurance and his will must be considerably greater than the average Scarran's--and the average Scarran has a lot of endurance and will. The tortures that Tauza inflicts on him, therefore, though they don't make him fond of her, are lessons he may need in order to survive in Scarran society. Tauza is, as she says, teaching him to be "Scarran"; if he can't compete with full Scarrans, he's be "nothing." Quite literally, he'll be dead.
Scorpius's core problem with Tauza is not that she physically abused him but that she lied to him by telling him that his mother was a Scarran raped by a Sebacean instead of vice versa. This lie not only breaks the trust between them but makes Tauza complicit in the abuse of his mother. (She is, after all, working for the breeding project that produced him.)
Ironically, the very content of Tauza's lie teaches Scorpius to detest her complicity. She tells him his mother was raped by a Sebacean so she can ensure that he has no loyalty to the Sebaceans. But who teaches him that rape is wrong? Who teaches him enforced childbearing is wrong? Tauza. Scorpius's hatred for the Scarrans is a direct inversion of the hatred Tauza raised him to have for the Sebaceans. When he discovers the truth, the only substantial change in his attitude is that the Scarran and Sebacean roles get flipped. He still follows the values Tauza taught him, with the exception that he doesn't accept utter Sebacean inferiority (a difference that makes sense given that he is half Sebacean and has good reason to sympathize with them).
That Tauza should choose to tell him the Big Lie is curious. It's a precarious story. Scarrans are so much stronger than Sebaceans that the idea of Sebacean male being able to rape a Scarran female sounds far-fetched. And even if it happened (as I'm sure there are ways it could), harping on it does not seem the best way to indoctrinate a child in the gospel of Scarran superiority/Sebacean weakness. Moreover, there's no real reason for Tauza to take this line just to win Scorpius's loyalty. She could as easily have raised him to believe that Scarran breeding programs are moral and necessary and that he should be proud to be part of one. Having a natural need to believe something good about his existence, he would probably have swallowed that line.
So why did Tauza concoct this story? Perhaps she herself was not comfortable with the truth. Perhaps she had qualms about the breeding program she worked in. She clearly regards rape (at least of Scarrans) as wrong. And it seems reasonable to suppose that a female might identify with the awful fate of other females kept in such program (even if she does regard herself as a genetic superior who's not really "like" them). She claims to have been present at Scorpius's birth; he remembers her face from infancy. Thus, she was probably present at his mother's death. The way she digs at Scorpius for causing it suggests, minimally, a gut-level awareness of its nastiness. Tauza may, thus, represent a minority view among the Scarrans that questions the legitimacy of their breeding program, on an emotional if not an intellectual level. This view is probably more prevalent among females than males: both because females would be more inclined to identify with other females and because Scarran medicine seems to be largely a female field, which means that females would get to see the majority of the grisliness.
Scorpius, then, is an example of this "progressive female Scarran" ideology excised from a belief in Scarran superiority. His identification with his Sebacean side works like Tauza's identification with the female: to allow him to see the victims as "us." "Our" Scarran superiority ceases to feel genuine. His loss of faith in Scarran superiority knocks the moral pillars out from under such a breeding program: the victims can no longer be dismissed as "inferior others" and the "superiors" can no longer be accepted as infallible authorities working for the greater good. Once Scorpius guesses that his mother was Sebacean, the sympathy for his mother that Tauza taught him collapses his ability to "other" the Sebacean species. And as soon as these victims cease to be "others," Tauza's moral training supplies the ideology that Scorpius needs to repudiate the Scarran breeding program and turn against the Scarrans.
Indeed, Scorpius's primary moral objection the Scarrans is their endorsement of enforced reproduction. This is the signal characteristic in which they differ from Peacekeeper society. (Both societies are authoritarian empires; both sanction torture, enslavement, and even mind rape.) Scorpius's moral center is opposition to a crime that is uniquely practiced against females (though males can certainly be harmed by it, as Scorpius himself is). His primary identification is with female experience. Raised as a child of rape under the influence of a female who taught him to condemn rape, he is always on "his mother's side" whether he believes his mother to be Scarran or Sebacean.
(The above is a run at what might become part of an academic essay, so academic-like feedback--as well as other feedback--is welcome. I'd be especially interested to hear of any academic texts that might seem relevant to these issues.)
***
The Sci Fi Pregnancy Motif (April 26, 2006)
Watching/discussing Farscape has got me to thinking about the pregnancy motif in TV/film science fiction (and fantasy), a motif I find annoying because it usually reinforces a discourse in which it is “normal/natural” for women to be denied reproductive choice (and men, too, but they’re less intimately affected). This denial of choice relates to both contraception and abortion.
The default position in SF TV is that contraception cannot be expected to work. It usually does, insofar as there are few pregnancies among the many characters who are having sex. Yet when it fails, very rarely does anyone evince surprise. This would be only mildly strange if birth control were as (un)reliable as, say, a contemporary condom. But in societies with holodecks, faster-than-light travel, and nanotech, in which women are almost always presented as “equals” (at least to the extent of not being breeding-machine slaves), we have to assume that they have rather more advanced contraception than this. I mean, with the pill, Norplant, surgical sterilization, etc., even the 20th century did. In societies with things like advanced micro-neuro-surgery, the easiest possibility is that they’d simply use surgical sterilization, which would be absurdly easy to reverse. It’s already 99+% effective for both men and women in our society. If you have both men and women using it, it would be, for all intents and purposes, 100% effective. Alternatively, such a society might use contraceptive antibodies that remain in the body until another agent is introduced to remove them. (And, no, the Peacekeepers wouldn’t use suspended pregnancy as a substitute for contraception, not when even suspended pregnancy makes their females more vulnerable [ex. to Scarran heat probes] and when their society is obsessed with eugenic control, which implies a need for easily regulated contraception.) In such societies, an unintended pregnancy would be nothing short of miraculous.
Yet no one ever asks Aeryn how she got pregnant. Aeryn herself doesn’t seem to regard the event as peculiar. And who could forget DS9, where Cassidy explains that she got pregnant because Sisko forgot to take his monthly shot. Yes, in the 24th century, both the man and woman have to promptly take a new shot each month in order for their birth control to work. No one regards this as peculiar either. In Revenge of the Sith, it’s implied that Padmé got pregnant by accident, given Anakin’s evident surprise and their discussion about how difficult parenthood will be to work into their secret lives together. Yet, once again, no surprise, no hint that this is an odd event, not even a “Well, given what happened to your mother, maybe we shouldn’t be surprised.”
The subtext is that pregnancy (and parenthood) is simply unavoidable. It’s not something you plan as a life choice. It’s just something that happens--and once it happens, you just live with it. Because abortion is not an option.
The world of TV science fiction/fantasy (at least in America) is pro-life in that it rejects discussion of abortion. The pro-life position is, in essence, the position of “no discussion”: abortion is wrong, murder; it should be illegal; any properly educated moral person would see this; such a person would no more consider aborting a fetus than she’d consider throwing an innocent child out of her space ship’s airlock. The pro-choice position, in contrast, is the position of discussion: I may find abortion morally wrong; you may find is morally acceptable; different people will have different views; it will be talked about.
In most of these TV shows, there is no talk: there is a tacit assumption that once a woman is pregnant, whether the pregnancy is planned or unplanned, wanted or unwanted, that’s it. She’s stuck with it. Welcome to motherhood. Let’s take a look at various unplanned pregnancies: Scully in The X-Files: no discussion; Aeryn in Farscape: no discussion; Cassidy in DS9: no discussion; Padmé in Star Wars: no discussion. Now, in all of these examples, the women are clearly presented as wanting their babies; I’m not saying they shouldn’t want them. But there’s no discussion, not even a passing, “So are you going to keep it?” from a Chiana-like third party!
There are exceptions: the new BSG is starting to discuss abortion rights as an abstract issue, and I hope that more personal discussion will follow. Way, way back in ST:TNG, there was a glorious nanosecond in which Worf suggested aborting Troi’s weird alien offspring (Ian). And across the Pond, Space Island One had another glorious moment in which Kaveh (very much the show’s moral center) suggests that Harry should consider abortion. (Unfortunately, this moment was undermined by the show’s never alluding to Harry’s potential choices again.)
Now, in some of these shows, the lack of discussion--indeed, the whole scenario--makes sense. Signally, The X-Files. This is a good example of how to do an unexpected-yet-wanted pregnancy story right. Scully’s feelings about having children are set up years in advance: after she loses her daughter, Emily, and discovers that the aliens have rendered her sterile, she comes to realize that she deeply wants to be a mother. She goes through fertility procedures that don’t work. Her grief and frustration at her childlessness makes perfect sense: her forced sterilization is a violation of her bodily integrity; the loss of her daughter is, of course, a source of great grief; even her big-family Catholic upbringing helps explain why motherhood feels so important to her, especially as other family members (father, sister) are dying around her. Then, bingo, she finds out she’s pregnant: of course, she’s going to regard this as a miracle and blessing. Of course, she’s going to keep the baby, even knowing that it’s probably an alien hybrid and that nefarious forces will be out to get it. And, in this case, the unexpectedness makes sense: we know from long-established X-Files canon that getting random human women pregnant is something the aliens do. (The idea that Mulder is the father is stupid and illogical, but that’s a topic for another essay.)
But this kind of well-thought-out plot is the exception. And every time we see contraception inexplicably not work (and not be expected to work), followed by an absolute assumption that the mother must keep (and want) the baby, we see a reinscription of an ideology that refuses women the right to plan their families, an ideology that assumes that motherhood is simply a “natural” occurrence that could happen to any of us at any time and will always be welcomed with open arms because that’s what it means to be a “woman.” As a woman who never wanted to have a baby, I find this very, very disturbing. In fact, as a citizen of a vastly overpopulated planet, I find it disturbing. And I hope that BSG will mark a watershed that turns the discourse toward more open discussion (or any) of mature family planning.
***
Rewriting John and Aeryn (April 23, 2006)
I’ve been reengaging with Farscape these past few days. Pretty much everyone knows that one of my great FS discontents is J/A. If I could rewrite FS, here’s what I do with them...
The problem with J/A is that Aeryn was created to be John's ideal woman. And when, realistically, she wouldn't be, because the values she's been raised with are too different, the writers shunt those values aside and make her behave like a good late-20th century Western love interest. A few examples: she comes from a promiscuous culture that regards monogamy as perverted, but she never "cheats" on John. She comes from a society that views sex as one's first, best means of eliminating sexual tension, but she spends most of the series finding weak excuses not to have sex with John. She comes from a society that views marriage as both primitive and perverted, but by S4, she's committed to being John's wife (with all the engagement ring trappings). She comes from a society in which illegitimacy is a meaningless concept, yet she's apparently so bent on not having an illegitimate child that she wants to get married while giving birth. She comes from a society that is founded on a discourse of genetic superiority, yet it takes her about one cycle to determine that we're all good, Enlightenment "created equals." And it's hard for me to invest in a relationship that is founded on undermining the character of one of its principal participants.
So, if I could rewrite the series, I'd use Aeryn's Peacekeeper cultural difference (rather than illogical soap opera clichés) as a basis for crisis and tension between Aeryn and John. The first couple of seasons would play much as they do but with Aeryn less resistant to having sex with John. They would probably be regularly having sex by midway through the second season. To John, this would mean they're a couple--and he'd be constantly disturbed by the fact that Aeryn doesn't seem to regard them as such and keeps trying to keep her emotional distance. He'd be trying to teach her to "love" and getting hurt when she tells him it's just sex, and, yes, she cares about him--but no more than she does for any of the others on Moya (yes, this would be a lie).
To Aeryn, sex would be the obvious way to deal with her disturbing and unPeacekeeperly emotions toward John by dulling the passion and tension. She's still be learning to have more loving relationships, as she does with everyone on Moya. But she would be terribly frightened by the idea of being passionately in love with John (especially given her experience with Velorek). Of course, she'd be disturbed by the fact that the passion isn't all that dulled by the sex. Her first line of defense against this too-passionate affair would be to start sleeping with someone else: stop relying on John as her only lover, reduce the "tension" even more.
By the end of season 2, this would push her toward Crais. Crais wants her. They have a great deal of common understanding: they're both ex-PKs but PKs with unsettled backgrounds (Crais as a conscript and Aeryn with her parent issues). They've both lost their PK lives (unwillingly) and have conflicted feelings about that. They both love Talyn and have a somewhat suppressed rivalry over him. Add to that their initial antagonism, and they have the setup for awesome chemistry.
So let's say Aeryn comes back from the dead at the start of S3, and she's frightened by the depth of John's feelings (and her own), and she doesn't want to judgment to be "faulty," so she flees into Crais's arms to try to get her balance back. This creates difficulties for everyone. John feels "cheated on" and brokenhearted and won't sleep with her anymore. Crais feels his old, pre-PK background reasserting itself and finds he really wants a "relationship" with Aeryn, but his PK background tells him this is silly--and anyway, he knows she's really in love with John. Aeryn is trying to figure out where everything backfired: now she's lost John and Crais is uncomfortably emotionally intense--but he still makes more sense than John, so she sticks with him like comfort food.
There is no M-John/T-John "he dies yet he lives" cop out. If it is essential to have John in every single episode, we'd just keep the whole cast together (at least as much as they were in S2). There is no pregnancy (it never did make sense, contraceptively speaking). Season 3 rattles along with John and Crais having an increasing rivalry and Aeryn getting increasingly pissed off at both of them. But when Talyn starts to go bonkers, Crais and Aeryn come together like two good parents to try to help him and John feels really frozen out (rather as M-John does after T-John's death). Then Crais dies heroically, and Aeryn is traumatized (as by T-John's death). She hadn't realized how much she'd come to care for him till he's gone.
So she goes away to find herself at the end of S3, and pops up in S4 with Scorpius in tow. By this time, she realizes that she can't be the good PK with just "sexual friends" anymore. She really is in love with John and she wants to be his life partner, but she's as creeped out by his marriage and family dreams as Chiana is by D'Argo's farm. So throughout season 4, John and Aeryn learn to articulate their feelings while being unsure how to pursue them in a way that can satisfy them both. Is this even possible? In the finale, Aeryn asserts that she loves John and will always be there for him, but he can't put her in a cage. If he wants her to be his partner, he has to leave her free: to go off and do her own thing sometimes, to sleep with other guys sometimes--and she's really not sure about having kids. It kind of sounds good, but she also has no background whatever in nuclear family motherhood; she's not sure if it's really what she wants. John replies that he's not sure he can deal with all that. Giving her space: okay. Letting her sleep around: really difficult. And he really wants kids. But, hey, they love each other, so they'll make it work somehow. Smash: they're atomized by Eidelons.
So in PKW, they're back as a kick-ass team. D'Argo dies, and John and Aeryn mutually decide to have a baby in memory of him: to bring life out of death. Plus, for a Human/Sebacean kid, "D'Argo" can work as either a boy's or girl's name. And they sail off into the sunset.
(Note: the emotional crisis points really aren't that different from the way the series plays. I've just tried to tie them to motivations that arise out of character rather than cliché. Anyway, there's my two cents.)
***
Scarrans, Evolution, Laughter (March 23, 2006)
To the best of my recollection, we never hear a Scarran laugh. (I could be forgetting something, and if I am, then this essay is invalid, but what the heck?) Since we don't see a whole lot of the Scarrans throughout the series, the narrative emphasizes this peculiarity through Scorpius (he's only half Scarran, but we see him a lot). Now, Scorpius clearly has a sense of humor. Take two examples: in "Prayer," he jokes about using wormhole technology to destroy Earth; John's right that it's not funny, but it is a joke. He also smiles at Rygel smashing his cooling rods (a real Avon smile, that). But though he smiles and finds things funny, he doesn't laugh. The nearest he gets is a sort of sharp exhalation. This, I'd argue, functions as the laugh of someone physiologically incapable of laughing, and since Sebaceans can laugh and Scarrans apparently don't, I'm assuming that's a Scarran trait.
So why don't/can't Scarrans laugh? To answer this, I want to start with why humans laugh. Grinning (I believe) in all apes but humans is a sign of aggression/self-defense. It seems reasonable to suppose, therefore, that smiling/laughing in humans began the same way. So how did it become a sign of sharing jolly fun? I'd conjecture that the origin of humor is aggression and self-defense. Consider that humor almost always includes some element of unpleasantness. Take the two Scorpius examples: 1) destroying Earth; 2) destroying cooling rods. Now, Scorpius is a fairly dark and aggressive guy, so let's look elsewhere too. Tim in The Office joking about what a great catch he is: the joke's based on his being a quitter who lives in a crappy town with his parents. How about Blake joking that the teleport is like your property when Vila's around: suddenly it's somewhere else; the joke's based on the fact that Vila steals your stuff. Or how about a joke as benign as Sam Gamgee's pun about "dropping off [to sleep/of a flet]": it's based partly on the image of tumbling out of a tree to near certain death. Now, there may be exceptions, but in general, humor is based on things going wrong. That's why we find bloopers funny.
Humor is a means of defusing the tension surrounding bad things. If I admit that I've made a fool of myself, I've beaten someone else to doing it. If I can share "the humor" of a serious situation with someone whose views on that situation are diametrically opposed to mine, we have a decent chance of getting along amicably, even if we honestly believe that each other's aims and means are destructive. And if we get on amicably, we stand a better chance of working through our differences.
Humor requires intellectual distance: it demands that we take a step back, put things "in proportion," and distinguish the serious from the silly (even in the same event). This is true even in the most basic "low" humor. When we laugh at someone slipping on a banana peel, we're distinguishing between the overall silliness of a person embarrassed/taken down a notch and the potentially serious issue of someone really getting hurt. Humor requires a level of self-reflexive awareness and sophisticated empathy consistent with "higher" thought processes. It's the "thinking animal's" solution to social strife.
Since most Farscape aliens laugh like humans, including Delvians, Baniks, Luxans, and Nebari, I'm going to assume a principle of parallel evolution (or maybe some sort of Star Trekian mixed genetics) that indicates a similar basis for laughter in these species.
Now, Scarrans, we know, have advanced brains because Chrystherium flowers accelerate their neural development. Without this intervention, they are primitive, brutish, existing presumably on the "find it; kill it" level of a conscious--but not highly self-conscious--aggressive predator. Chrystherium allows their brains to process information much more quickly and efficiently. But it's reasonable to assume that it doesn't replicate millions of years of evolutionary development. Thus, while Scarrans can reason logically, they don't have much of a sense of humor. Evolutionarily, they never reached a stage of developing one. This seems consistent with what we see of Scarran behavior. Akhna, when she calls that lower caste Scarran "my love," seems (to me) to be sarcastically mocking his (inappropriate?) use of the term to her. But if this is humor, it's pretty heavy-handed, genuinely angry humor, difficult to distinguish from straightforward aggression. Even smiling seems uncomfortable for Scarrans: the lower castes (with their puppet faces) can't really do it; Staleek tries it with John, but it ends up looking more like a menacing leer. Even Scorpius's (half-Sebacean) sense of humor is a bit subdued: how deadpan is that joke about destroying the Earth?
This lack of humor correlates with Scarran brutality. Harvey (I believe) comments/implies that the Scarrans would never have become a big imperial power without Chrystherium. The subtext is that their vastly powerful, vastly oppressive and torturous empire is not "natural," not sustainable under "normal" conditions of interspecies interactions. Under "ordinary" circumstances (the PKs may be an example), a species with sufficient mental development to form an interstellar empire will have sufficient mental development, at least, to "look on the lighter side" and avoid some messy social confrontations by laughing them off. Totalitarian torture states may still result, but there's some intrinsic check to the extent of their horror, at least a theoretical ability to sit down and share a laugh with someone. The Scarrans lack this check. For them, everything is deadly serious, every move a calculated ploy to gain power, prestige, etc. without that "higher" self-reflexiveness that allows us to take a step back and put what we're doing "in proportion." Thus, Harvey is correct: the Scarrans really are a "lower" species artificially granted a type of cognitive power they are not equipped to manage, any more than humanity is equipped to manage wormholes.
In preparation for the day LJ expires, I'm moving some old posts I'd like to archive elsewhere. Below the cut is assorted Farscape meta.
Scorpius and Tauza (April 29, 2006)
I’ve commented at various times that Scorpius derives many of his attitudes from Tauza's upbringing. In fact, he gets almost every attitude from Tauza, and thus, the ideological traits that differentiate Scorpius from "the Scarrans" also differentiate Tauza from many of her fellow Scarrans. I conjecture that Tauza's ideology may be more female-identified than the Scarran norm (or dominant ideology) and, therefore, that Scorpius's world view might be described as very close to a "progressive female Scarran" world view.
Scorpius does not disagree with most of Tauza's attitudes. He expresses some sense of injustice at the brutality of his upbringing, but I suspect that these feelings are secondary: an excuse to further dislike a person and society he already dislikes. He comments in "Incubator" that Tauza's training was useful. I'd argue that from a Scarran point of view, this training was essential to Scorpius's survival (and Scorpius knows it). Scarran society is not tolerant of weakness, and Scorpius is physically very weak by Scarran standards. To compensate for this weakness, his endurance and his will must be considerably greater than the average Scarran's--and the average Scarran has a lot of endurance and will. The tortures that Tauza inflicts on him, therefore, though they don't make him fond of her, are lessons he may need in order to survive in Scarran society. Tauza is, as she says, teaching him to be "Scarran"; if he can't compete with full Scarrans, he's be "nothing." Quite literally, he'll be dead.
Scorpius's core problem with Tauza is not that she physically abused him but that she lied to him by telling him that his mother was a Scarran raped by a Sebacean instead of vice versa. This lie not only breaks the trust between them but makes Tauza complicit in the abuse of his mother. (She is, after all, working for the breeding project that produced him.)
Ironically, the very content of Tauza's lie teaches Scorpius to detest her complicity. She tells him his mother was raped by a Sebacean so she can ensure that he has no loyalty to the Sebaceans. But who teaches him that rape is wrong? Who teaches him enforced childbearing is wrong? Tauza. Scorpius's hatred for the Scarrans is a direct inversion of the hatred Tauza raised him to have for the Sebaceans. When he discovers the truth, the only substantial change in his attitude is that the Scarran and Sebacean roles get flipped. He still follows the values Tauza taught him, with the exception that he doesn't accept utter Sebacean inferiority (a difference that makes sense given that he is half Sebacean and has good reason to sympathize with them).
That Tauza should choose to tell him the Big Lie is curious. It's a precarious story. Scarrans are so much stronger than Sebaceans that the idea of Sebacean male being able to rape a Scarran female sounds far-fetched. And even if it happened (as I'm sure there are ways it could), harping on it does not seem the best way to indoctrinate a child in the gospel of Scarran superiority/Sebacean weakness. Moreover, there's no real reason for Tauza to take this line just to win Scorpius's loyalty. She could as easily have raised him to believe that Scarran breeding programs are moral and necessary and that he should be proud to be part of one. Having a natural need to believe something good about his existence, he would probably have swallowed that line.
So why did Tauza concoct this story? Perhaps she herself was not comfortable with the truth. Perhaps she had qualms about the breeding program she worked in. She clearly regards rape (at least of Scarrans) as wrong. And it seems reasonable to suppose that a female might identify with the awful fate of other females kept in such program (even if she does regard herself as a genetic superior who's not really "like" them). She claims to have been present at Scorpius's birth; he remembers her face from infancy. Thus, she was probably present at his mother's death. The way she digs at Scorpius for causing it suggests, minimally, a gut-level awareness of its nastiness. Tauza may, thus, represent a minority view among the Scarrans that questions the legitimacy of their breeding program, on an emotional if not an intellectual level. This view is probably more prevalent among females than males: both because females would be more inclined to identify with other females and because Scarran medicine seems to be largely a female field, which means that females would get to see the majority of the grisliness.
Scorpius, then, is an example of this "progressive female Scarran" ideology excised from a belief in Scarran superiority. His identification with his Sebacean side works like Tauza's identification with the female: to allow him to see the victims as "us." "Our" Scarran superiority ceases to feel genuine. His loss of faith in Scarran superiority knocks the moral pillars out from under such a breeding program: the victims can no longer be dismissed as "inferior others" and the "superiors" can no longer be accepted as infallible authorities working for the greater good. Once Scorpius guesses that his mother was Sebacean, the sympathy for his mother that Tauza taught him collapses his ability to "other" the Sebacean species. And as soon as these victims cease to be "others," Tauza's moral training supplies the ideology that Scorpius needs to repudiate the Scarran breeding program and turn against the Scarrans.
Indeed, Scorpius's primary moral objection the Scarrans is their endorsement of enforced reproduction. This is the signal characteristic in which they differ from Peacekeeper society. (Both societies are authoritarian empires; both sanction torture, enslavement, and even mind rape.) Scorpius's moral center is opposition to a crime that is uniquely practiced against females (though males can certainly be harmed by it, as Scorpius himself is). His primary identification is with female experience. Raised as a child of rape under the influence of a female who taught him to condemn rape, he is always on "his mother's side" whether he believes his mother to be Scarran or Sebacean.
(The above is a run at what might become part of an academic essay, so academic-like feedback--as well as other feedback--is welcome. I'd be especially interested to hear of any academic texts that might seem relevant to these issues.)
***
The Sci Fi Pregnancy Motif (April 26, 2006)
Watching/discussing Farscape has got me to thinking about the pregnancy motif in TV/film science fiction (and fantasy), a motif I find annoying because it usually reinforces a discourse in which it is “normal/natural” for women to be denied reproductive choice (and men, too, but they’re less intimately affected). This denial of choice relates to both contraception and abortion.
The default position in SF TV is that contraception cannot be expected to work. It usually does, insofar as there are few pregnancies among the many characters who are having sex. Yet when it fails, very rarely does anyone evince surprise. This would be only mildly strange if birth control were as (un)reliable as, say, a contemporary condom. But in societies with holodecks, faster-than-light travel, and nanotech, in which women are almost always presented as “equals” (at least to the extent of not being breeding-machine slaves), we have to assume that they have rather more advanced contraception than this. I mean, with the pill, Norplant, surgical sterilization, etc., even the 20th century did. In societies with things like advanced micro-neuro-surgery, the easiest possibility is that they’d simply use surgical sterilization, which would be absurdly easy to reverse. It’s already 99+% effective for both men and women in our society. If you have both men and women using it, it would be, for all intents and purposes, 100% effective. Alternatively, such a society might use contraceptive antibodies that remain in the body until another agent is introduced to remove them. (And, no, the Peacekeepers wouldn’t use suspended pregnancy as a substitute for contraception, not when even suspended pregnancy makes their females more vulnerable [ex. to Scarran heat probes] and when their society is obsessed with eugenic control, which implies a need for easily regulated contraception.) In such societies, an unintended pregnancy would be nothing short of miraculous.
Yet no one ever asks Aeryn how she got pregnant. Aeryn herself doesn’t seem to regard the event as peculiar. And who could forget DS9, where Cassidy explains that she got pregnant because Sisko forgot to take his monthly shot. Yes, in the 24th century, both the man and woman have to promptly take a new shot each month in order for their birth control to work. No one regards this as peculiar either. In Revenge of the Sith, it’s implied that Padmé got pregnant by accident, given Anakin’s evident surprise and their discussion about how difficult parenthood will be to work into their secret lives together. Yet, once again, no surprise, no hint that this is an odd event, not even a “Well, given what happened to your mother, maybe we shouldn’t be surprised.”
The subtext is that pregnancy (and parenthood) is simply unavoidable. It’s not something you plan as a life choice. It’s just something that happens--and once it happens, you just live with it. Because abortion is not an option.
The world of TV science fiction/fantasy (at least in America) is pro-life in that it rejects discussion of abortion. The pro-life position is, in essence, the position of “no discussion”: abortion is wrong, murder; it should be illegal; any properly educated moral person would see this; such a person would no more consider aborting a fetus than she’d consider throwing an innocent child out of her space ship’s airlock. The pro-choice position, in contrast, is the position of discussion: I may find abortion morally wrong; you may find is morally acceptable; different people will have different views; it will be talked about.
In most of these TV shows, there is no talk: there is a tacit assumption that once a woman is pregnant, whether the pregnancy is planned or unplanned, wanted or unwanted, that’s it. She’s stuck with it. Welcome to motherhood. Let’s take a look at various unplanned pregnancies: Scully in The X-Files: no discussion; Aeryn in Farscape: no discussion; Cassidy in DS9: no discussion; Padmé in Star Wars: no discussion. Now, in all of these examples, the women are clearly presented as wanting their babies; I’m not saying they shouldn’t want them. But there’s no discussion, not even a passing, “So are you going to keep it?” from a Chiana-like third party!
There are exceptions: the new BSG is starting to discuss abortion rights as an abstract issue, and I hope that more personal discussion will follow. Way, way back in ST:TNG, there was a glorious nanosecond in which Worf suggested aborting Troi’s weird alien offspring (Ian). And across the Pond, Space Island One had another glorious moment in which Kaveh (very much the show’s moral center) suggests that Harry should consider abortion. (Unfortunately, this moment was undermined by the show’s never alluding to Harry’s potential choices again.)
Now, in some of these shows, the lack of discussion--indeed, the whole scenario--makes sense. Signally, The X-Files. This is a good example of how to do an unexpected-yet-wanted pregnancy story right. Scully’s feelings about having children are set up years in advance: after she loses her daughter, Emily, and discovers that the aliens have rendered her sterile, she comes to realize that she deeply wants to be a mother. She goes through fertility procedures that don’t work. Her grief and frustration at her childlessness makes perfect sense: her forced sterilization is a violation of her bodily integrity; the loss of her daughter is, of course, a source of great grief; even her big-family Catholic upbringing helps explain why motherhood feels so important to her, especially as other family members (father, sister) are dying around her. Then, bingo, she finds out she’s pregnant: of course, she’s going to regard this as a miracle and blessing. Of course, she’s going to keep the baby, even knowing that it’s probably an alien hybrid and that nefarious forces will be out to get it. And, in this case, the unexpectedness makes sense: we know from long-established X-Files canon that getting random human women pregnant is something the aliens do. (The idea that Mulder is the father is stupid and illogical, but that’s a topic for another essay.)
But this kind of well-thought-out plot is the exception. And every time we see contraception inexplicably not work (and not be expected to work), followed by an absolute assumption that the mother must keep (and want) the baby, we see a reinscription of an ideology that refuses women the right to plan their families, an ideology that assumes that motherhood is simply a “natural” occurrence that could happen to any of us at any time and will always be welcomed with open arms because that’s what it means to be a “woman.” As a woman who never wanted to have a baby, I find this very, very disturbing. In fact, as a citizen of a vastly overpopulated planet, I find it disturbing. And I hope that BSG will mark a watershed that turns the discourse toward more open discussion (or any) of mature family planning.
***
Rewriting John and Aeryn (April 23, 2006)
I’ve been reengaging with Farscape these past few days. Pretty much everyone knows that one of my great FS discontents is J/A. If I could rewrite FS, here’s what I do with them...
The problem with J/A is that Aeryn was created to be John's ideal woman. And when, realistically, she wouldn't be, because the values she's been raised with are too different, the writers shunt those values aside and make her behave like a good late-20th century Western love interest. A few examples: she comes from a promiscuous culture that regards monogamy as perverted, but she never "cheats" on John. She comes from a society that views sex as one's first, best means of eliminating sexual tension, but she spends most of the series finding weak excuses not to have sex with John. She comes from a society that views marriage as both primitive and perverted, but by S4, she's committed to being John's wife (with all the engagement ring trappings). She comes from a society in which illegitimacy is a meaningless concept, yet she's apparently so bent on not having an illegitimate child that she wants to get married while giving birth. She comes from a society that is founded on a discourse of genetic superiority, yet it takes her about one cycle to determine that we're all good, Enlightenment "created equals." And it's hard for me to invest in a relationship that is founded on undermining the character of one of its principal participants.
So, if I could rewrite the series, I'd use Aeryn's Peacekeeper cultural difference (rather than illogical soap opera clichés) as a basis for crisis and tension between Aeryn and John. The first couple of seasons would play much as they do but with Aeryn less resistant to having sex with John. They would probably be regularly having sex by midway through the second season. To John, this would mean they're a couple--and he'd be constantly disturbed by the fact that Aeryn doesn't seem to regard them as such and keeps trying to keep her emotional distance. He'd be trying to teach her to "love" and getting hurt when she tells him it's just sex, and, yes, she cares about him--but no more than she does for any of the others on Moya (yes, this would be a lie).
To Aeryn, sex would be the obvious way to deal with her disturbing and unPeacekeeperly emotions toward John by dulling the passion and tension. She's still be learning to have more loving relationships, as she does with everyone on Moya. But she would be terribly frightened by the idea of being passionately in love with John (especially given her experience with Velorek). Of course, she'd be disturbed by the fact that the passion isn't all that dulled by the sex. Her first line of defense against this too-passionate affair would be to start sleeping with someone else: stop relying on John as her only lover, reduce the "tension" even more.
By the end of season 2, this would push her toward Crais. Crais wants her. They have a great deal of common understanding: they're both ex-PKs but PKs with unsettled backgrounds (Crais as a conscript and Aeryn with her parent issues). They've both lost their PK lives (unwillingly) and have conflicted feelings about that. They both love Talyn and have a somewhat suppressed rivalry over him. Add to that their initial antagonism, and they have the setup for awesome chemistry.
So let's say Aeryn comes back from the dead at the start of S3, and she's frightened by the depth of John's feelings (and her own), and she doesn't want to judgment to be "faulty," so she flees into Crais's arms to try to get her balance back. This creates difficulties for everyone. John feels "cheated on" and brokenhearted and won't sleep with her anymore. Crais feels his old, pre-PK background reasserting itself and finds he really wants a "relationship" with Aeryn, but his PK background tells him this is silly--and anyway, he knows she's really in love with John. Aeryn is trying to figure out where everything backfired: now she's lost John and Crais is uncomfortably emotionally intense--but he still makes more sense than John, so she sticks with him like comfort food.
There is no M-John/T-John "he dies yet he lives" cop out. If it is essential to have John in every single episode, we'd just keep the whole cast together (at least as much as they were in S2). There is no pregnancy (it never did make sense, contraceptively speaking). Season 3 rattles along with John and Crais having an increasing rivalry and Aeryn getting increasingly pissed off at both of them. But when Talyn starts to go bonkers, Crais and Aeryn come together like two good parents to try to help him and John feels really frozen out (rather as M-John does after T-John's death). Then Crais dies heroically, and Aeryn is traumatized (as by T-John's death). She hadn't realized how much she'd come to care for him till he's gone.
So she goes away to find herself at the end of S3, and pops up in S4 with Scorpius in tow. By this time, she realizes that she can't be the good PK with just "sexual friends" anymore. She really is in love with John and she wants to be his life partner, but she's as creeped out by his marriage and family dreams as Chiana is by D'Argo's farm. So throughout season 4, John and Aeryn learn to articulate their feelings while being unsure how to pursue them in a way that can satisfy them both. Is this even possible? In the finale, Aeryn asserts that she loves John and will always be there for him, but he can't put her in a cage. If he wants her to be his partner, he has to leave her free: to go off and do her own thing sometimes, to sleep with other guys sometimes--and she's really not sure about having kids. It kind of sounds good, but she also has no background whatever in nuclear family motherhood; she's not sure if it's really what she wants. John replies that he's not sure he can deal with all that. Giving her space: okay. Letting her sleep around: really difficult. And he really wants kids. But, hey, they love each other, so they'll make it work somehow. Smash: they're atomized by Eidelons.
So in PKW, they're back as a kick-ass team. D'Argo dies, and John and Aeryn mutually decide to have a baby in memory of him: to bring life out of death. Plus, for a Human/Sebacean kid, "D'Argo" can work as either a boy's or girl's name. And they sail off into the sunset.
(Note: the emotional crisis points really aren't that different from the way the series plays. I've just tried to tie them to motivations that arise out of character rather than cliché. Anyway, there's my two cents.)
***
Scarrans, Evolution, Laughter (March 23, 2006)
To the best of my recollection, we never hear a Scarran laugh. (I could be forgetting something, and if I am, then this essay is invalid, but what the heck?) Since we don't see a whole lot of the Scarrans throughout the series, the narrative emphasizes this peculiarity through Scorpius (he's only half Scarran, but we see him a lot). Now, Scorpius clearly has a sense of humor. Take two examples: in "Prayer," he jokes about using wormhole technology to destroy Earth; John's right that it's not funny, but it is a joke. He also smiles at Rygel smashing his cooling rods (a real Avon smile, that). But though he smiles and finds things funny, he doesn't laugh. The nearest he gets is a sort of sharp exhalation. This, I'd argue, functions as the laugh of someone physiologically incapable of laughing, and since Sebaceans can laugh and Scarrans apparently don't, I'm assuming that's a Scarran trait.
So why don't/can't Scarrans laugh? To answer this, I want to start with why humans laugh. Grinning (I believe) in all apes but humans is a sign of aggression/self-defense. It seems reasonable to suppose, therefore, that smiling/laughing in humans began the same way. So how did it become a sign of sharing jolly fun? I'd conjecture that the origin of humor is aggression and self-defense. Consider that humor almost always includes some element of unpleasantness. Take the two Scorpius examples: 1) destroying Earth; 2) destroying cooling rods. Now, Scorpius is a fairly dark and aggressive guy, so let's look elsewhere too. Tim in The Office joking about what a great catch he is: the joke's based on his being a quitter who lives in a crappy town with his parents. How about Blake joking that the teleport is like your property when Vila's around: suddenly it's somewhere else; the joke's based on the fact that Vila steals your stuff. Or how about a joke as benign as Sam Gamgee's pun about "dropping off [to sleep/of a flet]": it's based partly on the image of tumbling out of a tree to near certain death. Now, there may be exceptions, but in general, humor is based on things going wrong. That's why we find bloopers funny.
Humor is a means of defusing the tension surrounding bad things. If I admit that I've made a fool of myself, I've beaten someone else to doing it. If I can share "the humor" of a serious situation with someone whose views on that situation are diametrically opposed to mine, we have a decent chance of getting along amicably, even if we honestly believe that each other's aims and means are destructive. And if we get on amicably, we stand a better chance of working through our differences.
Humor requires intellectual distance: it demands that we take a step back, put things "in proportion," and distinguish the serious from the silly (even in the same event). This is true even in the most basic "low" humor. When we laugh at someone slipping on a banana peel, we're distinguishing between the overall silliness of a person embarrassed/taken down a notch and the potentially serious issue of someone really getting hurt. Humor requires a level of self-reflexive awareness and sophisticated empathy consistent with "higher" thought processes. It's the "thinking animal's" solution to social strife.
Since most Farscape aliens laugh like humans, including Delvians, Baniks, Luxans, and Nebari, I'm going to assume a principle of parallel evolution (or maybe some sort of Star Trekian mixed genetics) that indicates a similar basis for laughter in these species.
Now, Scarrans, we know, have advanced brains because Chrystherium flowers accelerate their neural development. Without this intervention, they are primitive, brutish, existing presumably on the "find it; kill it" level of a conscious--but not highly self-conscious--aggressive predator. Chrystherium allows their brains to process information much more quickly and efficiently. But it's reasonable to assume that it doesn't replicate millions of years of evolutionary development. Thus, while Scarrans can reason logically, they don't have much of a sense of humor. Evolutionarily, they never reached a stage of developing one. This seems consistent with what we see of Scarran behavior. Akhna, when she calls that lower caste Scarran "my love," seems (to me) to be sarcastically mocking his (inappropriate?) use of the term to her. But if this is humor, it's pretty heavy-handed, genuinely angry humor, difficult to distinguish from straightforward aggression. Even smiling seems uncomfortable for Scarrans: the lower castes (with their puppet faces) can't really do it; Staleek tries it with John, but it ends up looking more like a menacing leer. Even Scorpius's (half-Sebacean) sense of humor is a bit subdued: how deadpan is that joke about destroying the Earth?
This lack of humor correlates with Scarran brutality. Harvey (I believe) comments/implies that the Scarrans would never have become a big imperial power without Chrystherium. The subtext is that their vastly powerful, vastly oppressive and torturous empire is not "natural," not sustainable under "normal" conditions of interspecies interactions. Under "ordinary" circumstances (the PKs may be an example), a species with sufficient mental development to form an interstellar empire will have sufficient mental development, at least, to "look on the lighter side" and avoid some messy social confrontations by laughing them off. Totalitarian torture states may still result, but there's some intrinsic check to the extent of their horror, at least a theoretical ability to sit down and share a laugh with someone. The Scarrans lack this check. For them, everything is deadly serious, every move a calculated ploy to gain power, prestige, etc. without that "higher" self-reflexiveness that allows us to take a step back and put what we're doing "in proportion." Thus, Harvey is correct: the Scarrans really are a "lower" species artificially granted a type of cognitive power they are not equipped to manage, any more than humanity is equipped to manage wormholes.
no subject
Date: 2011-07-31 10:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-31 11:07 pm (UTC)I don't think that's undermining her character, that she would desire something different from PK culture once she was actually exposed to others - she has spoken of not wanting to bear a child in that world, not that she didn't want a child. And I think that while she was cock-blocked by the writers when Larraq and Dragon and Crais were available and interested, it was plausible for her not to engage with Larraq, as she was actively deceiving him; Dragon was irritating; ultimately, only the writers kept her from Crais; I agree that they had sufficient chemistry to make a really effective team, both crew and sexually, as you say.
no subject
Date: 2011-08-01 04:03 am (UTC)Anyway, I agree with you that Aeryn's backstory explains a lot of her behavior and "cultural" compatibility with John. I'm not too happy with that trope in general, regardless of how adequate it is to explaining a plotline. The trope of hero-meets-girl-who-is-exotic-in-all-the-ways-he-finds-sexy-but-has-a-special-background-that-makes-her-like-him-in-relationship-values-so-that-he-doesn't-have-to-conform-to-her-culture-or-be-responsible-for-telling-her-to-conform-to-his-or-have-to-learn-how-to-be-in-a-relationship-with-someone-who-has-values-that-conflict-with-his seems to me to support ethnocentrism (if not patriarchy), and it's a pet peeve of mine. (And I also concede that J/A is not without cultural conflict and interesting moments of organic and well-told interpersonal negotiation.) I know you get a lot more enjoyment out of John and Aeryn than I do, and I'm glad you do, as clearly the majority of FS fans do. If it works for you, then it's doing its job for you.
Thanks for reading over my old essays!
no subject
Date: 2011-08-01 04:04 am (UTC)