At the Movies With Nezua: Battlestar Galactica Breakdown Season 2 (a)

HERE IS MY WRAP-UP of Season Two of Battlestar Galactica, the Re-Imagining. Episodes include (among others) Epiphanies, Scar, Sacrifice, Lay Down Your Burdens (Pts 1&2). Thank you for joining us here in our dim, warm, popcorn-scented meeting space!

Last post I focused specifically on problematic uses of the Cylon character. » I also talked in general about the use of Sci-Fi and the practice of analyzing Sci-Fi through a socio-cultural/racial and “Feminist” lens. »

In this post I am going to continue talking about those ideas and add instances to them, as well as note overall narrative/character observations I had about the show this season. I will introduce, this time, places I find a Conservative view being espoused, as well as a Anti-Abortion message, a pro-war/anti-protest message, and a Faith over Science paradigm. Some of these may have nuanced elements and not be as directly endorsing or opposing as others, and as always, feel free to chime in with your perception and reading. Finally, I will note a few sound design and cinematography elements that interested or pleased me. This will be spread over two entries, at least. This is part A.

ALL LOOK SAME

Now you truly can't be blamed for not being able to tell them apart.

As a friend puts it, “the most ravaging aspect of racism and bigotry is that they allow the racist or the bigot to strip away all nuance of humanity from entire groups of people.” Related, with blacks and Asians especially, there is a longstanding meme that “they all look the same.” We could muse on why this is—does the mind accustomed to seeing features designated by the dominant culture as valuable and Right simply refuse to invest energy into differentiating those of the “lower rungs?”—but such threads are not the focus of this site. All that matters to us here is that this is a feature of (what we call the act of) Othering, and it does exist in the image and thought pool that the US references and it is one aspect of the mindset we call “racism,” which by its nature, tends to blur individuals into one abstracted group. And that’s enough for us. This opening shot in every episode’s opening sequence plays on this, obviously. There are a number of Cylons we have seen up to this point. And yet, the Asian was chosen for both this scene, and the consequent title card. One more time about intent: I don’t for a second think the writers were consciously doing this. I think that the racist resonance of certain ideas/images simply made certain choices “make sense” or “feel right” to a mind acculturated in this society.»

ANGER PROBLEMS AND IRREDEEMABLE SPIES
In watching Season Two for how Boomer/Sharon/the Asian Cylon was used, I didn’t see much to sway me from earlier insights. Certainly not the following clip, from Season Two’s Epiphanies, where it is made clear that certain types are never to be trusted:

Let me use the quote once again from the last post, where I talked about the issues that arise time and time again when the dominant US culture tries to envision people of color as crewmembers on these types of shows:

Picard employs “inferential racism” (Hall, 1990) in his dealings with Worf, inviting the latter to constantly prove his loyalty to Starfleet. This stereotyping always functions to buttress hierarchy in Star Trek. In fact, this ritualistic avowal of loyalty is expected and enacted in most American narratives as the high percentage of ‘immigrants’ in U.S. society demands a stricter coherence to the concept of an imagined community than is required in more secure forms of nationalism. Thus ‘minorities’ are routinely urged to prove their allegiance to their adopted U.S.A. (e.g. the sacrifices made in The Deer Hunter).»

And not this clip, where Helo informs Boomer that President Roslyn has decided her pregnancy is to be terminated:

Do you already know what I’m going to point out? Two lines. One is I’ve held back my anger. The other is I’ve tried to show them that all Cylons are not the same.

I don’t think I need to say more on the “all the same” tip!

On the first line, here’s this quote from Lela Lee, the creator of Angry Little Asian Girl:

I’m sure the first part is a statement many women can identify with, this idea that they must suppress their anger to appear beautiful, reasonable, or sane. We don’t like to see it from them. And Asian women? They are under the double-whammy, as we are (culturally) terrified of Asians being angry in general. Pearl Harbor and Vietnam still haunt us, you see. And China looms quietly. When do we allow someone of Asian appearance or background to present as unequivocably angry, it would of course have to be either a fictional enemy alien in a cage, or an imperialist warmongering interment-defending right-wing NeoConduit who’d rather be compared to Ann Coulter than called “Asian.”

A reader (Pinky) summed up the crux of what I learned after making my short piece Skinthing at NYU.» My mental shorthand notes are basically “what you put in a frame exists as its own world.” Pinky put it this way:

I wholeheartedly agree that Boomer’s cylon character plays on many stereotypes of Asian Americans, which is problematic esp since each model of the cylon supposedly represents an archetype of humans. The “roles” you listed as specific to boomer are totally then displayed as asian characteristics, even if bsg is supposedly a universe where race doesn’t exist as it does here.

When you put a character into a frame, the world you create is one confined by those four frame lines, even if you do drag in cultural references and resonances (wittingly or unwittingly). To rephrase the blockquote above, if there is no other Asian in the show (I think I caught one super quick glimpse of an extra, a cleaning woman in the background), then what you show as traits specific to one person become emblematic to that type of person in that Universe-Within-A-Frame. Walking around in our midst is this Enemy. We have close ups of the (ethnic) face, we have everyone (a White everyone) looking at her in shackles or in a cage with scorn, repulsion and distrust. We have caged the only Asian appearance, made the only Asian appearance hostile and duplicitous and weak, and it becomes symbolic in that world.

More of what we talked about last time, violence against women, bound women, blooded women, aka Rape Culture aesthetic.

Wardrobe Malfunction Dept: In this tussel, you can see the seam of her fake belly.

FILM vs TV:
Regarding the violence: I would very probably look at a single movie differently than I do a series like this. A movie can have a story, an incidence of violence contained as a necessary part of telling that story, not be available as regular TV fare (and thus occupies a different place in our collective conversation) and the violence would weigh differently, even if the same in content. A series that chooses to showcase violence against women, bound women, bloody women—and in every show for differing [narrative] reasons? That says an entirely different thing than a story that features violence, and I hope the ‘why’ of it is clear just in the framing of this paragraph.

SHOW ME
Early in the episode Epiphanies, we witness a neat bit of direction and editing that I’d like to point out. »

The Doctor informs Laura her cancer has spread. Scene ends.

CUT TO: Amorphous Black Entities move about in the center of a light blue space.

Black shapes thicken and grow, taking over more and more of the blue space.

Remember, the idea of “showing not telling” (aka “Cinema”)  does not include the notion that it will all happen slowly enough or plainly enough that the uninitiated will notice! A true visual/narrative metaphor can be defined as one that does not need to be understood literally to work on you. That is the point. In this instance, the black shapes (that are the reflection of the person with cancer) present metaphorically as the cancer, growing in mass and taking up the clear, blue area.

CAMERA TILTS and tracks what soon are seen to be reflections on water. We TILT UP to find a woman's foot in the water.

CAMERA TILTS up to settle on Laura Roslyn. Directly behind her are trees.

So this is actually a very interesting and jampacked little sequence. We have the doctor telling a scared» woman she is ailing. He is the clear authority, she knows nothing, she is receiving the information and powerless. We then see a visual/metaphorical manifestation of what the doctor just told her, and that abstract symbol is connected directly to the cancer victim (foot in water/reflection). We rise upward (camera). We find her. She is touched by fate/love/beneficence/divinity (light on back of head, glow on hair) and the (supersaturated) green of the tree directly behind her head tells us that she is not gone yet, life is strong within her. And then, intercut with this and possibly some of the next scene where she is being wheeled on a gurney, we get the WS » of her sitting in that spot, head back, rather relaxed. She is in a fountain. I feel the fountain» and the tree» are foreshadowing that her cancer will be cured. Further, the idea that she will be healed as well as her connection here to water as well as plant life ties her to the very ideas of Earth and Mother Nature, which of course is part and parcel of her role as the human race’s spiritual and actual guide back to Earth.

It is also part of a thread that I’ve seen running through this season: Faith Trumps Science.

PAINTING WITH LIGHT
 

The DP lets her face go blaring white, 4 or 5 stops over, as she passes under the overhead lights. When detail is lost here, her face takes on the appearance of a mask, a skull-type visage.

Wheeled on a gurney as her sickness deepens, the idea of the President’s impending death is underlined by letting the light overexpose and wash her features (identity/self) away, replaced momentarily by a death’s head.

The lighting in the ships immediately calls to mind the lighting in the West Wing show.» Aside from rooms with more balanced lighting, there are many spots from overhead with no fill; pools of light that hit the actors’ faces at 2 or 3 stops over. »

All the light is motivated » , and yet of course a DP could still fill in shadow areas. I love when DPs (I always use Connie Hall as my example, but there are many) venture into areas you typically are not “Supposed to” such as eschewing fill light and letting the main actors (women, too!) end up with black eyesockets (a no-no).

The spots overhead Laura on the gurney are even keyed up higher than the normal light that falls on character’s heads when in the many areas where there are lamps overhead, such as passageways or lounges, even. Clearly, the mask effect was desired and intended. We don’t even need to consult the Inverse Square Law of Light (one piece of the math we had to learn as cinematographers! Passionate Mechanics indeed!) to know right away that a spot which is two stops over on a standing person’s face will never be even two stops over at waist level, let alone four or five stops. Those are different lights on her, of course.

This is not even an extreme moment of darkened eyesockets, yet still a good example of my point.

Yet, I think to myself this must be a good director. In the sense that all the actors trust her/him with their image so much. You see, specular» light coming straight down with no fill/bounce will highlight every wrinkle, pimple, sag, and imperfection. An actor’s nightmare—unless they are in their early 20s and/or preternaturally beautiful. But that’s what a lot of the light used in BSG is, and I respect the choice! Far better than faked out, gauzy, wraparound closeups which are not motivated by external settings, instead by ego or asthetic.

Adama, with his scarred face, is more often shown in softer lighting, but it is motivated by either the President’s lamplit room, or the bridge (Con? Com? Deck?), which has many small sources of light that provide a more diffused sourcing. Yet, he is not spared either.

Roslyn holds one of the hardest positions in the acting world, that of a beautiful woman who is visibly aging. The DP seems to afford her a bit more care. » We do have to consider character and context of culture, though. It’s not all about vanity. Adama is the wartorn, scarborne soldier. His scarred face here is part of his character. And in fact, this is actually not usually the case with acne-scarred actors, who are usually used as criminals or undesirable characters. Of course, Edward James Olmos is his own genre!

President Roslyn is a woman in a patriarchically defined society as well as industry. Softening her age/face helps us feel the way we are supposed to about her, just as Adama’s scars help us feel the way we are supposed to about him. Were the director to completely disregard the cultural context (and he doesn’t always keep her in soft light, just more often than others), typical audiences in the US might overwhelmingly read her as mean, or unattractive in spirit. That is not her fault, that is our (sexist and ageist) society.

Pragmatically? If you want to be well-loved by your actors and have them trust you enough to emote fully, you make them happy about how they look whenever possible. Women especially will appreciate this from a DP/Director.

WHEN ITS NOT A WAR OF WORDS

Protest and Civil Disobedience are posed as alternately ridiculous as well as dangerous.

As you’d expect, shows chock-full of military types tend to reflect the military opinion of demonstrations, protest, and civil disobedience. I’ve had personal experience with these things, and have been locked up behind them as well. I have seen firsthand the police/military opinion of these acts and the people who commit to them. They have reacted along a continuum accurately reflected in BSG: it’s a vacillation between scorn and rage, based on feelings/thoughts that frame protest, etc, as anything from a self-indulgent waste of shared time and resources to a direct threat to society. It is generally at these moments that I say “Whoa, what was I almost identifying with there?”»

A great shot aligning multiple cocked head axes for a collective expression of WTF?

I certainly don’t think this is unintentional, and in fact is germane to the storyline and characters within it. However, when only one side of an issue is presented respectfully, and it is the side that our protagonists take, we know as viewers the writers have no interest in being open or fair or intellectually exploring both sides, nothing like that. No, we can be assured they themselves mean to promote a pro-war, pro-force, anti-protest agenda. Here, we see Starbuck’s bemused expression which echoes the marines in body armor who drag the protestor away. Incidentally, the protestor shouts something to the effect of “The Cylons are not the problem, Adama’s squadron of death is!”

Adama, who will toe the line on almost all matters of discipline, ethics, and law, sees no problem choking an unarmed non-violent member of the anti-military faction.

Clearly, the Cylons are a huge problem. Only a fool would assert that it is the military who, in this instance, is the actual (and only) problem. So, given our current political US situation, this scene can easily be seen as an analogy of anti-GWOT protests. Yet the complaint that our punitive, polar, military stance on terrorism (complete with invasions of uninvolved nations) is making things worse as well as not addressing the actual causes of the problem is falsely reduced in the TV metaphor as one that claims the ONLY problem is the military stance. Which renders the entire argument both ludicrous and dangerous, of course—and consequently attempts to do the same with the attached metaphor.

The problem is that in an instance like the one the BSG world deals with, the argument against this type of protest is wholly impossible to analogize with our current situation. As is the entire situation. The human race is 6 billion strong now. In BSG world it is barely 40,000. The Cylons are in no way comparable to Al Qaeda, as many times as they are analogized as such^*» .

Cylons actually embody the breadth and depth of the threat that the GOP has always posed Al Qaeda as: looming everywhere, able to infiltrate even the deepest quarters of government, science, and media, able to bring violence to bear that could wipe out civilization rapidly, etc. But Cylons are fantasy, just like the show 24. They are not reality. And yet, by setting up parallel arguments, it is easy for a viewer to simply absorb the equivalence without a lot of thought.

Another interesting element is how the military and government (in the form of Adama and Roslyn) “refuse to bargain with terrorists” as well as refuse to negotiate with protestors or those enacting civil disobedience. They say as much. It draws a very strange parallel.

THE ANTI-ABORTION FEMALE PRESIDENT

A monstrous moment?

The issue of Abortion is definitely explored in BSG. I’d say so far, while there is a slight hair of ambiguity in the presentation, to me it stacks up as a token gesture to the Choice side of the debate with the imporant messaging being in line with the rest of the show’s conservative themes. The only ambiguity at all is in allowing the stowaway at the end of Season 2 go through with hers. The reason I call that a token gesture is because the entire surrounding narrative concerns itself with the other points I’ll make, and the only way we find out about the outcome of that event is incidentally. There is no face time/screen time, there is no discussion, no emotion. It’s only a cold fact penciled in at the margin of the living, breathing storyline.

However, the way the writers and director go about laying everything out catches my mind for sure. It’s certainly not without skillful intent and execution.

In the above scene a terribly interesting thing happens. The President calls in Adama and declares that “the Cylon pregnancy must be terminated.”  She sees the birth as a threat to mankind, and so thus, it only makes sense. She issues the order, Gaius argues, and Adama supports her decision.

So she is advocating for the purpose and benefit of abortion…it seems. That is the surface. But that is not to be the takeaway message.

Note her blanched skin. Not her half-lidded eyes. In the film’s “text,” she is ill. Her voice is raspy and curdled; sounding out from some rotted room in her stomach, and in fact, scary sounding. The Cylon pregnancy must be terminated while there is still time. The subtext, as I see it, is that this is the decree of a disease-ridden, fearful, ghoulish mind. Also note that the pregnancy is not terminated, ultimately. The mother is tricked.

It’s not simply the sound of her voice and her affect (not again replicated in any other scene, and do note the tone and delivery of “terminated”) that brought me to this conclusion, of course. It is many things. It is the fact that in this narrative (as the fetus is not aborted), abortion is not Right, even when that fetus represents, possibly, the greatest threat to Mankind. That is quite a lesson. Additionally, even though the President states that “I’ve worked all my life for a woman’s right to have control over her body,” she decrees a law against all women who have abortions or anyone who aids them. (Echoes of prosecuting terrorists and all who harbor them? Or just a (diogetic) warning to the doctors?) In this instance, the narrative choice echoes an Anti-Choice argument: that abortions deprive the world of lives that would be essential to the human race were they spared. The woman who becomes president and has the power to see a cause she has worked for all her life—one so important to a woman as “having control over her own body” as Roslyn puts it—decides that allowing that belief to remain law is a danger to the human race.

Really, the only argument one could pose to even try and suggest there is not a polarized message against abortion in the show is that the stowaway who is found on board seeking an abortion is allowed hers. However, we must again examine the context of the film, the story, what lives within the frame. And what comes to life are all the scenes where it is decided or shown that abortion is not the answer. And hers is allowed offscreen, and without comment.

'The interesting thing about being President...'

One more note: Bush’s arrogant and dismissive line of “The interesting thing about being President…” is echoed in this story at times when the person speaking it is wrong. The last time it was spoken was shortly before the Cylons hit Caprica, by the man Laura was involved with as well as working for. He was, at the moment, deciding to crush worker rights. This time it is said by a dying person who goes back on her decision.

ON THE BACKS OF OUR BROWN SISTERS
In the dominant culture that stands in 2009 here in these United States, the bodies of women of color are not only objectified, as all women’s bodies are, but they are commodified and subjugated for purposes of benefitting members of the dominant culture. They come last in line, they are often unimportant in terms of health, the owners of the bodies are derided as being subhuman, immoral, hypersexual, without the right to their own agency, and certainly not matching the value of white people. »

It is in this light that I again point out Sharon/Boomer’s cabling into her own forearms to save the fleet, as well as her fetus being used to heal the dying (white) woman…shortly before her child is stolen from her and raised by another for the narrative reason of it possibly being of benefit to society, rather than a threat.

Oh, it’s just a big ole tangle of unspoken, age-old, and caustic assumption. Even now in this unpredictable year of 2009, too often, the stagnant and toxic messages go on; bright and shiny, broadcast to millions, unexamined, and left whole.

Except for here, at the XOLAGRAFIK Theater.

Next Post: Latinos get in the mix! Also, the misogyny gets ratcheted up, and I close out Season 2 with the crew on New Caprica.