Family matters
Sep. 9th, 2005 08:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gwynI don't normally talk about articles we publish or the magazine here, but I proofread a story yesterday that I think everyone interested in the arguments for/against staying in Iraq should read. A lot of times, I shake my head at the crap we publish, but the past few weeks I've been proud of the range of topics and the questions people ask in their pieces, and this one really blew me away in how carefully he stays away from an opinion on the overarching issue, while focusing his piece on one specific problem. It's a psychologist's take on The Sunk-Cost Fallacy of Bush's latest idiotic statement on Iraq.
******
I have been remiss in my birthday greetings this week: I wish to rain felicitations down on the wonderful![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
monanotlisa, nandibble, and justacat.
******
I've mentioned in a couple others' journals about my insane love for Numbers (I know, I know, backwards 3, but right now I am just so damn tired that I can barely hit the caps key, let alone keep typing it that way, so for now... it's been a very, very bad week for me, work-wise and personal-wise, and I just can barely move my fingers), and while a lot of it is definitely the Don/Billy Cooper slashiness that suddenly hit me last week, for the run of its season, it's been about all about the family characters for me. The work stuff is interesting as a backdrop, but that isn't what I come for -- it's the Charlie and Don interaction, it's the family stuff with Alan, their dad, and the greater family with Peter MacNicol's character and Ravi Nawat (my Dana from 5th season Angel!).
And I realized the other day, when I was pondering my love for the series and the only other two new series I enjoyed this past year, that they all have something in common: family. While I love Veronica Mars as a character and the other high-school kids around her (at times) like Wallace and Mac and Logan and Weevil, especially, I've never been a fan of shows about teens (I didn't like other teenagers even during my teenagehood). Buffy was an anomaly for me; it was never ever the teenness that I enjoyed about it, but rather its extreme adultness. What I adore about VM is the relationship between Veronica and her father, Keith. It helps that I liked Enrico Colantoni already, but he imbues the character with a lot of fatherly love and concern, and the way he fought for her in the season finale just hit every button I have. I like Veronica's fucked-up relationship with her fucked-up mother (and I love that actress, too, because of her role in Big Eden), because it's real -- people aren't perfect on this show, not by a long shot. Veronica herself makes a lot of mistakes, does the wrong things often by acting on her heart rather than her very bright head. And her dad gives her balance and wisdom. TV shows rarely give me the sniffles, but when Veronica finally gets the answer about her parentage, I did actually find myself crying.
And the other newish show that I loved this past year is about a larger family, but still family: Battlestar Galactica. The fact that these survivors are the only real family (and of course, there are heavy allusions to the family of man) they all have left was brought home recently this season when Adama says that he wants to bring this family back together; like any real family unit, they have been split apart by differences over and over, but they have a connection, something far deeper than ideology or politics, that by necessity must keep them together. The greater storyline is mirrored in Adama's fatherly love of Starbuck and his conflicts with his own remaining son. Adama's name of course is the clearest sign that he is the patriarch of this family, which makes his struggles with his own private family all the more poignant.
Charlie and Don on Numbers I find myself especially drawn to, because they remind me more than a little of my sister and I, although the roles switch around. She often thought I lived in my own little bubble world; I was the one who had to take care of my mother when she had cancer; she was the "special" one my parents tended to be softer on, more forgiving and understanding while I was a furstrating mystery to them. It's clear Charlie and Don love each other, need each other, but there's also a slight element of mistrust there: Charlie because he knows Don doesn't talk much about the stuff Charlie needs to hear; Don because he doesn't think Charlie can handle real life or be trusted with important stuff. And I love that. They also portray a family of men in a way I don't think I've ever seen on television, and it's very clear that this is a Jewish family, but there's no "oh, look, Jews on TV!" that I've often seen on other shows and hated. There is deep love and respect among this group of men, they talk about feelings to a degree, but they also act like guys really do act. I've often hated the fan misconception of "real men never show feelings" because that's just not true. Guys have just as wide-ranging a set of behaviors as women do.
The odd thing for me about this connection to shows with strong family stories is that this all came up for me when I lost my own family. We were never what I thought a family should be like; as twins, my sister and I tended to fight and struggle to establish our own identities rather than get into the twin thing too much. My parents weren't lovey-dovey. In fact, even though my dad is still here, we're more like a fairly close uncle and niece than a father and daughter, and people who've seen us together often remark that we don't seem like family. It's just always been that way. Wednesday was the six-month mark of when my sister died, and I have felt that emptiness acutely lately, that sense that I have no family anymore. When her friends tell me they are able to move on because they have the love of their family, I get bitter and think, "well, that's nice for you, I don't have a family anymore." So it makes a strange kind of sense to me that what I never had in abundance, and what I now see in front of me on three separate TV shows that I love, is one of the things I'm missing most. I had grown closer to my sister in the year before for her death than I'd ever been before, for a lot of reasons, so it's kind of overpowering, this emptiness, and even though there are struggles and problems and issues that these TV families have to work out, they are there, and they are working on them, and struggling together. All of that hits a chord with me, big time.
They can create more myteries for Veronica to work on or pump up the Logan romance, but it will be her relationship with her father and how she deals with what her mom left her to that will keep me coming back week after week. And all the nifty math-solved FBI cases that Charlie and Don work on will be fun, but not even a quarter as fun as the challenges they face in dealing with each other as brothers (and I'm thrilled to hear that there might be a little more tension this year, because it sounds like the producers -- yay Ridley! -- understand that it's the family relations that are luring people in, that it's not just another godawful procedural and shouldn't follow that pattern). One of the many things I loved about Man Hunt was that Coop's appearance in Don's life raised issues for Alan and seemed to confuse Charlie a little, forcing him to realize that he doesn't really know who Don is. Yee-haw. And while the battle to stay alive and stop the Cylons is all well and good, for me it's only the backdrop to the characters on BSG who are struggling to stay alive emotionally as well as physically, who need to love and feel connected the people around them. I have a feeling it's that familial nature that will overcome their adversity, that in the end, a greater sense of purpose and love will lead to "victory" -- I have no idea if that's what the producers intend, but I get this sense that's what they have up their sleeve. People rising from the ashes because they need to keep their family together.
There are a lot of things I have on my list to try out this fall, but I have a feeling that unless a series gives me something like Veronica and Keith's relationship or Charlie and Don's, it won't grab me in that fannish way. I can't help but think that's one thing a lot of folks responded to (besides hot guys) on Lost, as well -- makeshift families. I'm anxious to see if anything can come close to VM, BSG, or Numbers... but somehow, I doubt it. They had a magic formula, all of them, and at the core of that for me is family.
******
I have been remiss in my birthday greetings this week: I wish to rain felicitations down on the wonderful
monanotlisa, nandibble, and justacat.******
I've mentioned in a couple others' journals about my insane love for Numbers (I know, I know, backwards 3, but right now I am just so damn tired that I can barely hit the caps key, let alone keep typing it that way, so for now... it's been a very, very bad week for me, work-wise and personal-wise, and I just can barely move my fingers), and while a lot of it is definitely the Don/Billy Cooper slashiness that suddenly hit me last week, for the run of its season, it's been about all about the family characters for me. The work stuff is interesting as a backdrop, but that isn't what I come for -- it's the Charlie and Don interaction, it's the family stuff with Alan, their dad, and the greater family with Peter MacNicol's character and Ravi Nawat (my Dana from 5th season Angel!).
And I realized the other day, when I was pondering my love for the series and the only other two new series I enjoyed this past year, that they all have something in common: family. While I love Veronica Mars as a character and the other high-school kids around her (at times) like Wallace and Mac and Logan and Weevil, especially, I've never been a fan of shows about teens (I didn't like other teenagers even during my teenagehood). Buffy was an anomaly for me; it was never ever the teenness that I enjoyed about it, but rather its extreme adultness. What I adore about VM is the relationship between Veronica and her father, Keith. It helps that I liked Enrico Colantoni already, but he imbues the character with a lot of fatherly love and concern, and the way he fought for her in the season finale just hit every button I have. I like Veronica's fucked-up relationship with her fucked-up mother (and I love that actress, too, because of her role in Big Eden), because it's real -- people aren't perfect on this show, not by a long shot. Veronica herself makes a lot of mistakes, does the wrong things often by acting on her heart rather than her very bright head. And her dad gives her balance and wisdom. TV shows rarely give me the sniffles, but when Veronica finally gets the answer about her parentage, I did actually find myself crying.
And the other newish show that I loved this past year is about a larger family, but still family: Battlestar Galactica. The fact that these survivors are the only real family (and of course, there are heavy allusions to the family of man) they all have left was brought home recently this season when Adama says that he wants to bring this family back together; like any real family unit, they have been split apart by differences over and over, but they have a connection, something far deeper than ideology or politics, that by necessity must keep them together. The greater storyline is mirrored in Adama's fatherly love of Starbuck and his conflicts with his own remaining son. Adama's name of course is the clearest sign that he is the patriarch of this family, which makes his struggles with his own private family all the more poignant.
Charlie and Don on Numbers I find myself especially drawn to, because they remind me more than a little of my sister and I, although the roles switch around. She often thought I lived in my own little bubble world; I was the one who had to take care of my mother when she had cancer; she was the "special" one my parents tended to be softer on, more forgiving and understanding while I was a furstrating mystery to them. It's clear Charlie and Don love each other, need each other, but there's also a slight element of mistrust there: Charlie because he knows Don doesn't talk much about the stuff Charlie needs to hear; Don because he doesn't think Charlie can handle real life or be trusted with important stuff. And I love that. They also portray a family of men in a way I don't think I've ever seen on television, and it's very clear that this is a Jewish family, but there's no "oh, look, Jews on TV!" that I've often seen on other shows and hated. There is deep love and respect among this group of men, they talk about feelings to a degree, but they also act like guys really do act. I've often hated the fan misconception of "real men never show feelings" because that's just not true. Guys have just as wide-ranging a set of behaviors as women do.
The odd thing for me about this connection to shows with strong family stories is that this all came up for me when I lost my own family. We were never what I thought a family should be like; as twins, my sister and I tended to fight and struggle to establish our own identities rather than get into the twin thing too much. My parents weren't lovey-dovey. In fact, even though my dad is still here, we're more like a fairly close uncle and niece than a father and daughter, and people who've seen us together often remark that we don't seem like family. It's just always been that way. Wednesday was the six-month mark of when my sister died, and I have felt that emptiness acutely lately, that sense that I have no family anymore. When her friends tell me they are able to move on because they have the love of their family, I get bitter and think, "well, that's nice for you, I don't have a family anymore." So it makes a strange kind of sense to me that what I never had in abundance, and what I now see in front of me on three separate TV shows that I love, is one of the things I'm missing most. I had grown closer to my sister in the year before for her death than I'd ever been before, for a lot of reasons, so it's kind of overpowering, this emptiness, and even though there are struggles and problems and issues that these TV families have to work out, they are there, and they are working on them, and struggling together. All of that hits a chord with me, big time.
They can create more myteries for Veronica to work on or pump up the Logan romance, but it will be her relationship with her father and how she deals with what her mom left her to that will keep me coming back week after week. And all the nifty math-solved FBI cases that Charlie and Don work on will be fun, but not even a quarter as fun as the challenges they face in dealing with each other as brothers (and I'm thrilled to hear that there might be a little more tension this year, because it sounds like the producers -- yay Ridley! -- understand that it's the family relations that are luring people in, that it's not just another godawful procedural and shouldn't follow that pattern). One of the many things I loved about Man Hunt was that Coop's appearance in Don's life raised issues for Alan and seemed to confuse Charlie a little, forcing him to realize that he doesn't really know who Don is. Yee-haw. And while the battle to stay alive and stop the Cylons is all well and good, for me it's only the backdrop to the characters on BSG who are struggling to stay alive emotionally as well as physically, who need to love and feel connected the people around them. I have a feeling it's that familial nature that will overcome their adversity, that in the end, a greater sense of purpose and love will lead to "victory" -- I have no idea if that's what the producers intend, but I get this sense that's what they have up their sleeve. People rising from the ashes because they need to keep their family together.
There are a lot of things I have on my list to try out this fall, but I have a feeling that unless a series gives me something like Veronica and Keith's relationship or Charlie and Don's, it won't grab me in that fannish way. I can't help but think that's one thing a lot of folks responded to (besides hot guys) on Lost, as well -- makeshift families. I'm anxious to see if anything can come close to VM, BSG, or Numbers... but somehow, I doubt it. They had a magic formula, all of them, and at the core of that for me is family.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Sunk-cost
Date: 2005-09-09 05:37 pm (UTC)Guess what we did last year. Yup, spent more money we didn't have on an in-service day nobody but TPTB wanted. 'Cause after all, they'd already spent good money on it....
Nice to see my viewpoint has some validity to more than just me & a few vocal miscreants here at work. *g* Thanks!
no subject
Date: 2005-09-09 06:08 pm (UTC)And {{hugs}} to you...
no subject
Date: 2005-09-09 06:12 pm (UTC)THANK YOU! Bday wishes! Yay! & :-)
Come and have tea with us, mmh? (Hey, you ever watch Farscape??)
no subject
Date: 2005-09-09 07:01 pm (UTC)My family experiences have drawn me toward shows that are about makeshift families, which is one of the reasons I think I loved the Joss shows so much. I think it was one of the reasons I stuck with Farscape, as well.