Stuff on TV

[hazelk]

Last week I watched an old Fritz Lang movie Human Desire loosely based on Zola’s La Bete Humaine. The atmosphere was certainly Zolaesque, miserable, ground down people trapped in their miserable, animalistic lives with the industrial background an ever present metaphor. The industry in question being a railroad the metaphor was almost comically Freudian but the film positively dour, a reminder that America didn’t all miraculously turn Technicolor after the war. There was one white picket fence on show but blink and you’d miss it, looming larger on the landscape were the dead end bar where prematurely aged railway men numbed their inadequacies and the cramped hallways of domestic discontent. The cheap artificiality of the women’s lacquered hair and girdled waists managed to dim even Gloria Grahame’s sultry looks, she played the femme fatale part but came across more as a battered wife, drowning as much as luring.

In other news Heroes and the first of the Christopher Ecclestone episodes. I remember reading somewhere that he took the role because it gave him the chance to play a non-villainous Englishman on an American show and Claude gleefully defies Hollywood expectations from the bearded misanthropy to the (slightly toned down) accent straight outta Salford. I have to wonder if the pigeon-keeping were Ecclestone’s idea, in a British show it would have been a stereotype almost equivalent to having him grow giant vegetables (except that’s more a Yorkshire thing) but probably has quite different associations in the US. Alcatraz maybe? He and Peter make a wonderfully mismatched pair of birdmen.

Meanwhile I think I’ve managed to figure out a source of discontent with the Nikki/Micah/DL storyline, I’m not sure if it’s the acting writing or direction but for all that the whole plot is predicated on motherly love I don’t get the feeling, which I do with Mr. Bennet re Claire, that Nikki is looking at/thinking about Micah even when the script doesn’t require her to. As family storylines go that of the Hawkins/Saunders is in any case relatively impoverished by Micah’s being an only child. Bennet loves Claire but that obsession is rendered even more interesting by the implication that Lyle might as well be a cockroach for all he cares. The lab I did my PhD in was infested by escaped cockroaches, they used to come out every evening at 7 and hold parties in the radio. Papa Suresh abandons Mohinder in favour of a research obsession inspired by the sister he never knew and the same tendency to favouritism may have fuelled Gabriel Gray’s determination to prove himself when his patient zero status looked to be lost. Angela Petrelli names Peter her favourite in her very first scene but if Nathan knows it seems to make no difference.

The Sureshs’s understanding of basic evolutionary theory continues to amuse and appal (dude, there’s no such thing as an evolutionary imperative and if there were it would have nothing to do with the good of the species). It seems to be a problem Tim Kring has as well based on the Mohinder Unmasked documentarylet for which he hired a f***ing physicist to explain the Human Genome Project. Wierdly the wacky idea of Peter altering his DNA to match other people’s mutations, while it breaks the Central Dogma of Molecular Biology, is actually right up with the latest findings on epigenetic modification and the role played by RNA (that single helix symbol is supposed to look like an RNA molecule isn’t it).

Comments

[yourlibrarian]

Interesting comments about the sibling preferences evident in the show. I hadn't really thought about that before but it is something repeated.

[aycheb.livejournal.com]

Yes, this show seems to go in for familial triangles and quadrangles over the usual romantic ones. It's refreshing.

[selenak.livejournal.com]

Angela Petrelli names Peter her favourite in her very first scene but if Nathan knows it seems to make no difference.

Oh, I think he's clear on that (just as the late Petrelli Senior preferring Nathan wasn't a big secret), but the Petrellis manage to be more screwed up than any of the other families put together because this doesn't have the usual results (i.e. Nathan and Peter competing for the favour of a parent). Partly because of the age gap, and partly because instead, you have Angela and Nathan subtly competing for Peter, and if you take the Six Months Ago flashbacks plus the deleted scene of same, you can make a case that Peter and Papa Petrelli were probably subtly competing for Nathan. With the fraternal co-dependency beating out the parent issues any time, which isn't the case with the others.

[aycheb.livejournal.com]

I'm just beginning to see the tip of the Petrelli iceberg and am majorly looking forward to seeing Angela emerge from the closet. The Peter/Nathan relationship has both inter and intra generational aspect, you're right, and yes there's definitely that feeling that the sibling bond far outweighs their potential conflicts. In fact so far Sylar seems the nearest to a case of (metaphorical) siblings seeing one another as rivals, Lyle's not very developed as a character but Nikki and Jessica work together after their fashion and there's no sign that Mohinder resents Shanti's existence. I really like what the show does with families, it's complicated but not heavy handed.

[selenak.livejournal.com]

Run! is probably the first Angela out of the closet episode, though the far earlier Nothing to Hide (aka The One With the Family Brunch) already showed she's majorly invested in Nathan's campaign (though not in Nathan as a person). Nothing to Hide (which was episode 7) is our first extended look at the Petrelli family dynamic anyway, and argument a against the view of Peter as an innocent babe in the woods there, because it showcases that he can manipulate the hell with the rest of them, if he wants/needs to (especially with Nathan).

Regarding the other siblings on Heroes, I once wrote a ficlet called Brothers and Sisters which examines them; the sixth example is spoilery for episodes you haven't seen yet, but I think you said you were spoiled anyway?

And yes, the families in Heroes are complicated and do avoid the easy clichés.

[aycheb.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the link to the ficlet. I particularly liked the Lyle story as I suspect he's the character who will get the least shrift but they all felt very true both to the show and to sibling dynamics in general.

I'm horribly spoiled for the first season (I hope to do better for the second as there's more hope of catching it on TV in a timely fashion but my will power is like butter). It's amazing how fresh the episodes are feeling in spite of that. I liked the brunch episode a lot, not unlike watching a family of Laura Roslins, it's not that they don't feel it's that none of them can help knowing how to 'use' those feelings. Peter definitely included.

[selenak.livejournal.com]

Lyle the non-special child does indeed get short shrift in canon, though I do love the scene in the episode where he finds out about Claire's power and she persuades him not to tell. Which, it occurs to me, is also the brunch episode.

"A family of Laura Roslins" is well put, and this: "it's not that they don't feel it's that none of them can help knowing how to 'use' those feelings" sums up the Petrellis perfectly. Here's my meta on the brunch episode, aka Nothing to Hide.

[londonkds.livejournal.com]

I've just got caught up and I was surprisingly unimpressed by Eccleston, mostly because for a guy who allegedly quit Who so he wouldn't be identified with the role his performance is a bit too similar to nine. I also disliked those scenes because it seems to me that giving Peter the ability to manifest anyone's powers at any time makes him just too powerful in relation to the others and makes them sort of disposable.

[aycheb.livejournal.com]

I missed a whole chunk of Ecclestone's Dr Who episodes (everything after the Dalek one I think) so I'm not the best judge of how similar the performances were. The situation of the two characters seems quite different though, with Claude you get the impression he relishes his misanthropy and Peter is no Rose.

Wasn't the reason for leaving also to to with being overworked and underpaid? American shows supposed to be are pretty lucrative.

If it were possible for Peter to pick a power at will then that would be a problem but he seems a long way from being able to do that at the moment. More if he's lucky he might being able to stop himself going into those powers meltdowns at the tip of a hat. If what control he has is linked to him empathising with the person having the power, my guess would be that he'll be restricted to one power at a time and his ability to choose which would require more emotional control than his emo nature makes possible.