There’s a new ad for a television program called THE GLADES, for which the very nice writer Lee Goldberg has written. So please be clear, this is not a critique of the television show, only its ad.
A beautiful woman in a red bikini floats in a swimming pool under a gorgeous sky. A peppy traditional version of “Blue Skies,” the old Irving Berlin* tune, plays. POV shifts, we are seeing the body from beneath the water, we can’t hear the music, hands appear to be reaching for the woman. Back to the above-water world. The hands are a CSI tech (I’m guessing), fishing the gorgeous woman’s body out of the pool while a handsome detective (I’m guessing) stares at the now-ironic (I’m guessing) blue sky.
(I thought I could find this on Youtube, but I couldn’t. I did find an ad where “Blue Skies” plays while an orange gets shot. The orange spews blood. I found another promo where the main character kneels next to a dead woman on a chaise, noting that the corpses smell worse in Florida’s nice weather. But aside from her pallor and the marks on her face and neck, she looks pretty good for a corpse. Her death is less graphic than the orange’s.)
Anyway, every time I see this ad, I flash on an old Stokely Carmichael quote: The only position for women in SNCC is prone.
Sometimes, I feel that the primary position for women in crime fiction is prone. No, I realize lots of men are killed in crime fiction, maybe more than women. One thing of the many things I admire about the work of George Pelecanos is that he’s examining violence by and against men, that it’s grounded in the larger context of what masculinity is.
But there is still a lot of crime fiction where women show up only to die, although preferably after having sex with the protagonist. It happens in a lot of bad books, but it happens in some otherwise good books, too. Years ago, I interviewed a writer who had done well in other genres who was taking a flier on crime fiction. His main character had sex with almost everyone woman who crossed his path; at least one was murdered immediately afterwards. I said: “Your character has a lot of sex.” He agreed. I asked: “Does he wear a condom?” (It was the early ’90s.) He was truly nonplussed.
Later, he switched to YA crime.
I haven’t seen a lot of corpses, but I’ve seen a few. None of them were gorgeous. None wore red bikinis, come to think of it. I’ve seen a young man, only 24, dead of heart attack suffered in the middle of a job interview at a department store. He was large and fleshy and blue. I’ve seen three girls flattened by a train; the justice of the peace, who pronounced people dead in McLennan County, Texas, noted that they were wearing clean underwear, which meant they were nice girls. (Some things I am NEVER going to forget.)
There is much to love about Kate Atkinson’s STARTED EARLY, TOOK THE DOG, but one of its great strengths is that it insists on humanizing its female victims, some of whom are prostitutes and not very nice ones at that. Of course, Atkinson makes every character vivid, even the titular dog. Shouldn’t we all aim that high?
Feel free to yell at me, tell me to lighten up, etc., in the comments. Meanwhile, I’m not the least bit objective, but I thought the violence in this week’s episode of Treme was handled wonderfully. And I’d credit the performer who had to carry the weight of those scenes, but — no spoilers here.
*An earlier version incorrectly credited Gershwin with this song. Thanks to Katharine Weber for setting me straight.
It really helps when you know the character, when you know what she’s brought to that moment. So often the victims on TV are faceless people.
I loved Khandi Alexancer in THE CORNER and I love her in TREME. I would watch that show for the music alone but the stories just rip open my heart.
Ditto on the Treme scene. My compliments to the chef.
There was one detail I’m interested in discussing, however. When y’all decide the spoilers are OK, I’ll come back.
I second Patti’s and Nance’s comments. I think the Treme scene haunts–it doesn’t wink at what happens. There is incredible simpatico between the script and a breathtaking performance by KA. Her scenes in the hospital and at home with her husband are incredibly nuanced, complex, compelling, and heartbreaking.
Comments are now open to spoilers. Don’t read past this comment if you don’t want Treme spoiled for you.
OK, here’s my two cents: LaDonna isn’t raped because she’s a strong woman. The guys don’t know her. They consider her an extremely vulnerable woman because she’s alone at a late hour in a bad neighborhood.
There are other strong women in Treme. Toni, the lawyer. The magnificent Phyllis Montana LeBlanc, who plays Desiree. Even Janette is pretty strong, as she will demonstrate later this season. Would it be better to have Annie or Sofia raped?
Khandi Alexander deserved an Emmy for The Corner. She wasn’t even nominated. The winner that year was Halle Berry for playing a . . . movie star. Big stretch!
And give this to Silence of the Lambs: It has richly imagined the lives of at least one of its dead victims and the girl in the pit is a total ballbuster.
Sarah, I thought “homance” was something else that would be even more offensive. I saw it in your Twitter feed.
I’ve got STARTED EARLY waiting at my library, and the last 2 Netflixed discs of TREME season 1 waiting at home. For me, the series is too rich and tasty a cultural/character/musical gumbo to suffer from plot spoilers.
Let me say this about Khandi Alexander…the first glimpse of her in the first episode is from the rear, as she sashays toward the light at the entrance to her bar…AND I RECOGNIZED HER right away! FROM BEHIND! Even though it’d been a good while since my last viewing of THE CORNER.
I agree that Silence of the Lambs is extra good on giving nuance to the girl victims.
Blue Skies is NOT Gershwin! Irving Berlin.
Thanks for the correction, Katharine. I should have checked it. But that’s how we roll here at TMP. I’ll annotate it above.
I was infuriated reading a cozy, recently, where the author killed a woman off, just to advance the plot. There wasn’t any character development or consequences, it just seemed convenient to the author. The author was a seasoned female and I thought she should have known better.
I don’t like it when an author uses gratuitous violence to create tension, either, even in hardboiled books. On the other hand, I�ve been very impressed by Karen Slaughter, who has used violence very deliberately to illicit a reaction from the reader and to make a point, that rape isn’t a sexual act, for example.
I’ll tip my hat to David Corbett, who also uses violence very deliberately and shows the consequences.
Laura has also done a great job of showing the consequences of a crime. The reader can have a viceral reaction, that sticks with them. It certinly did for me. I thhink I have a better understanding and compassion for survivors of certain crimes.
I always felt guilty reading those fun serial killer books where the bodies of dead women served no purpose other than the next clue in the cat and mouse game between cop and killer. We write about violence and should do so in real ways. If we insist on getting the grotesque details of rigor mortis and lividity accurate, it seems we owe the reader some obligation to show the real costs of violence, which means the real lives that were lost to it. Brava, sista!
It kills me not to be more specific, but given that TREME is an HBO show and has a lot of leeway, it blew me away that it went for a very restrained approach to the violence it depicted. I watch the show like a civilian, more or less, and the funny thing is that I was onset the day that they filmed the aftermath scenes, saw the actor in makeup, but then forgot. (There are benefits to having a crummy memory.) So I kinda knew what was coming and it was all I could do not to put my hands over my eyes as I watched, restrained as the scene was.
What I loved about that TV show, Homicide, was that they tried to keep it real. In one of the early episodes, they were investigating a dead body. You could hear the flies buzzing and the officers were covering up their mouths with hankies. I have never seen a dead body (not counting funerals) but I have smelled one, and it’s pretty nasty. (That episode also had one of the funniest lines ever on TV. The person they were questioning said something like “well my wife, Aunt Esther…” Still cracks me up.)
Any show where every single woman (dead or alive) is always perfectly coiffed will irritate me after a while. (I’m thinking of Bones or House.)
One of the reasons I became a thriller writer was because, partly, of the very thing you discuss here. My goal is to write about strong, very-much-alive women who drive the plot rather than fill the scenery.
This is exactly, EXACTLY, what Sara Paretsky gathered a group of women crime writers together twenty-five years ago to talk about. From that meeting came Sister in Crime. And a quarter century later, here we still are. No, please DO NOT lighten up.
John Fowles’ THE COLLECTOR is the only book I ever physically threw down at the end because ti creeped me out so viscerally. The reason: Fowles spent the entire middle of the book humanizing Miranda so vividly her death became a terrible, gut-wrenching shock. And when, at the end, you realize Freddy, the nebbish killer, has rationalized her death so tidily and has figured out who he should pick next, it just chilled me, haunted me. And then (as we writers say), years later, while working as a PI, we had two serial killer cases in which the psychopaths used THE COLLECTOR as a kind of handbook for the abduction and torture of women. It’s disturbing and almost mind-numbing to realize that no matter how hard you try to humanize your characters, someone will dismiss it and get to “the good bits.” But that’s no excuse to treat your characters as little more than thematic baggage. I realize the phrase “pornography of violence” is considered outr� in some quarters, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t apply to far more fiction than I’d care to admit. And like Dina, I write fiction precisely to speak to what violence really is, and what it really does, to all involved.
It’s still OK if we introduce old rich white men just to kill them, right? I mean, we bump off the ones that represent what we fear, so…
To jump on SJ’s comment, when a leading online publication can casually publish an article – by a woman! – about women in romantic comedy and call it “homance”, then we really are at much the same place as we were 25 years ago when Sisters in Crime was founded…or perhaps even further back.
Loved your post. Long overdue, I’ve read many mystery books whose authors incorporate ‘eye candy women’. TV programs – it’s the norm. I’m not sure its intentional by some writers because some who do so are worth reading despite this lapse – selling tool? pressures from editors/publishers? who knows?, but I’m happy you have chosen to write about it.
Hope I don’t wander off a cliff as I add that this is just what manages to bubble up to the professional level. While doing coverage for company based on the web, I read a couple of hundred scripts written by aspiring screenwriters. During this time, I came to realize that crazy people don’t write manifestos anymore. They write screenplays. I was regularly creeped out by the scary brains of people who were not only deranged in terms of their depravity and aggression towards other human beings (especially the ladies), but were also disturbingly functional and organized enough to finish a script and use credit cards. For a while, I was grateful for the opportunity to gently counsel the next Quentin Tarantino that ultra-realistic rape, sadism, and graphic child mutilation/murder scenes might not be as marketable as they anticipated, thus possibly sparing Hollywood and the general public in future. So very sad – this was a form of self-expression for these folks and well, this was what they wanted to say. I recall there were one or two that had me pacing the floor, wondering if I should call the police to warn them somehow.(This coincided with the release of the violent writings of the Virginia Tech shooter, I recall.) I finally gave up the work. It consumed too much of my brain. But I still think about it and how some people don’t recognize their own…darkness. And I now realize that for every insensitive piece I see or read, there is something 10 times worse out there that is sitting in a “read” pile.
I’m probably the only weirdo who can read horrible things but can’t watch them. “Silence of the Lambs” comes to mind…..book didn’t bother me a bit, but the scene where Hannibal has been moved and before his escape has still gone unwatched by moi.
Ditto for animal cruelty. The movie “Sideways” was absolutely ruined for me when I watched the deleted scenes.
Have never seen “The Accused.” Can’t do rape scenes. In fact, there are a lot of movies I just can’t watch.
Treme had me pacing around the living room, ready to bolt. Thank god for the editing. But that scene has upset women who claim that it’s always the strong, independent types who are “put in their place” by rape. I get their point, but let’s be real here…rape plays that role in the larger society. Writers didn’t invent it.
People do horrible things to one another, that is a fact. This should be documented. I just can’t watch it.
I didn’t pick up on that continuity detail. I think — it’s hard to be sure because hindsight muddies things for me — that I knew the rape was inevitable when they didn’t take her purse and run.
The “sexification” of murders (I know that’s not really a word) is the one thing that’s guaranteed to ruin a good murder mystery for me. My favorite authors are those who can present murder victims as real people and draw you into the story with compelling characterization (and plot too, of course) — not treat victims as literary blow-up dolls. Frankly, given that an estimated 70% of mystery readers are women, you’d think writers would be more sensitive to this.
I suppose it’s just following the trend we see everywhere in popular culture. For example, one of my secret guilty pleasures is the CW show “Nikita,” even though at 32 I assume I’m way out of the target age range. I think Maggie Q, the actress playing the titular character, is a very good actress, and she’s fantastic in the fight scenes (she has a lot of stunt experience). This is a show with increasingly compelling plot lines, a talented actress, and kick-butt fight scenes. Yet every single episode has to have a gratuitous Nikita bikini/underwear/half naked scene. It irks me to no end.
Can I just say that it’s been great fun having new posts here almost daily? I thank you for it. I don’t get out much.
Contemplating an actual memory post later today if I finish my proofing. But also contemplating a celebratory lunch.
I knew she had been raped when I saw her feet sticking out from behind the bar, and her very trim jeans were drooping around the ankles. That was a deft way to announce it without anyone having to see any more.
I did wonder how her rescuer managed to get her pants back up, though.
I also appreciated that the writers called for her to have been severely beaten, too. It’s a very violent crime.