The commonest criticism of the pilot, on the fan-site
linked-to above, was that all the baffled mystery about the woman’s identity
was silly if in fact she’d been a Navy SEAL. There aren’t a lot of them; a simple phone-call could have cleared things up. Plus, there aren’t any female
SEALs.
True; but unfair, since that point did not escape the
screenwriters. The FBI folks themselves mention the (thitherto) presumed non-existence of female
SEALs, and wonder aloud why, if she’d been one, her fingerprints aren’t on
file. Answer (completely
acceptable in televisionland, and not implausible in any case): these would not be available if she had
been in a “black” program under the umbrella of the SEALs.
And no sooner does that episode air, then fiction becomes
prospective fact. Nor is
this development evolving out of internal military necessity, but rather is in
response to social pressures such as (precisely) the sort of gynocentric
fantasies catered-to by “Blindspot”:
Losey states upfront that putting
women in the commando jobs is not expected to increase the units' ability to
fight in combat. In fact, he said, the effort to integrate the units and change
the culture "will channel focus and energy away from core combat readiness
and effectiveness efforts."
He said that while there may be
"external" pressure to adjust the standards so that women can
successfully pass, it's not likely that would succeed. The standards, he said,
have been honed over the past 50 years, and that 70 percent of men fail.
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nation-world/ct-navy-seals-women-20150925-story.html#
~
Whack-a-Male
[We continue with our analysis of the “Blindspot” pilot.]
An obstacle towards guys’ enjoying the show is the grating
Twofer Boss. Her role is to serve
as the mallet in Whack-a-Mole -- the moles being the males. As:
(1)
* Labcoated Science Guy quickly
discovers what pharmaceutical is responsible for Jane Doe’s amnesia. Briefing his boss and FBI Guy, he
pronounces the long chemical name, and adds “commonly known as” (the
acronym). Impeccable. But
she slaps him down: It may be
“common” in the hoity-toity circles you
move in, “doctor”, but for the rest of us… Against all plausibility, the
dramatic logic somehow has the male doctor wrong-footed.
(2)
FBI Guy tools off to the Statue of Liberty, which (as he has
figured out) is about to be bombed by a terrorist. In any approximation of reality, the Bureau along with
the NYPD would deploy dozens of agents and officers for this op; but the program sets it up so that FBI
Guy is seemingly about to go in alone.
-- Now, that is the annoying scenario so frequently recycled by masscult
so that the male hero can do some heroics heroically and not have to share the
limelight with anyone; it is the
narcissistic/solipsistic Rambo motif, and it appeals to eight-year-old boys
(and to the less intelligent among the nine-year-olds). In recent years, the tired trope has
been retooled with a sex-switch;
it is supposed to appeal to grown women.
But, interestingly, neither of these flavors of that motif
are the goal here.
FBI Guy is not quite alone; over his own objections, he brought along Jane Doe, at the
insistence of his Twofer Boss.
Still, he tells Jane to wait back at the car (the patriarchal beast!) while he singlehandedly Saves
the Day(**); but again, Jane insists, and accompanies him into the Statue. They meet up with the perp, and,
in an extremely badly choreographed bit of sciamachy, the screenwriters
maneuver FBI Guy, helpless and unarmed, into the grip of Perp, and only a
head-shot by Jane saves his life and his bacon.
[**Footnote to laypersons and residents of Mars: SWAT teams, Special Forces, and FBI on
a takedown-attack do not actually
bring along tourists, bystanders, or embedded journalists along for the ride,
regardless of the relative genders.]
Now, simply as an action sequence, that was incredibly inept,
and likely to disappoint an average audience (let alone a more instructed one); and yet a large well-funded team of
producers and writers had plenty of time to craft the scene just-so, to help
define the series in the pilot. To
make sense of it, we must proceed precisely as does a Freudian confronted with
a Fehlhandlung: as a symptom of something deeper, not as a random goof.
And the Trieb here
finding expression is soon seen to be:
Feminine Revenge. For:
* Back at headquarters, he reports
to Twofer: Jane saved his life,
plus captured the perp. Yet then,
in an astoundingly implausible switch -- really, like a rift in the screenplay,
as though someone had forgotten to delete his immediately previous remarks --
he shends his boss, saying Jane is our most valuable asset ever, and you almost wasted it by letting her go
out into the field. Why ever
would he say that? So as to set up
the comeback: Twofer then acidly replies:
“She saved your life.” As though Guy had been unaware of that,
or had been churlishly ungrateful.
It reminds me of softball for the
Pee-Wee League, where the kids are too young to hit a pitch. You position the ball motionless atop a
rubber pedestal, and let the kid take his time and swing. Only, here the softball is FBI Guy’s
head.
With this perspective, we revisit (1). Here, it is beyond possibility to
imagine this scene, the female boss’s putdown of the male boffin, with genders
reversed, in modern Medialand. (Just
try to run such a scenario as an experiment in your head; you will shrink back as from a hot
stove.) Moreover, the putdown is truly gratuitous, and indeed off (acronyms being in handy breezy use among laymen). So what is the meaning of this exchange,
absurd on the face of it? An analyst refuses to accept things as
merely, meaninglessly absurd. Again our Freudian: It makes perfect sense on the underside of it. It is
revenge for an (imagined or remembered) scenario with genders reversed.
For exposition of a similar gender-squelch, cf. this:
~
The commercials chosen to accompany this show online, bear
out the analysis.
In one, a demure, appealing, somewhat mousy carrot-top sits in
a droning business meeting.
Suddenly, a cowgirl-clad mini-persona of herself leaps out of the laptop
and starts vociferously twerking:
Eve Black to the original’s Eve White, in the classic fantasy “The Three
Faces of Eve”.
Her twerking booty
then knocks over a coffee-cup into … a guy’s
lap (take
that, you nasty
phallus);
then she hits another
guy in the
eye (one of a twinned pair
of sensitive round organs; to the reader we leave the rest) with her
lasso.
Neither, of course,
remonstrates or even reacts:
they
are there to be abused by one of Eve’s daughters;
to take it, and like it.
~
In ads and trailers, prior to the series debut, NBC heavily
marketed the opening scene, in which “Jane Doe” appears naked out of a carry-bag in
the middle of Times Square; and
wisely so. For it contains a
veritable mythologem.
In literature, the best-known birth-from-a-handbag is that
of the titular character of Wilde’s “The Importance of Being E(a)rnest”; he was discovered therein, at a railway
station, provenience unknown.
The next-most-famous Railway Station birth, is that of
Paddington Bear.
For “Paddington Station”, the American update is “Times
Square”. (Note, by the way, the
universal appropriateness of that name.)
Now, if Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank had put their heads
together, they would doubtless have deemed this motif a wish-fulfillment reworking of the Birth Trauma.
The Newcomer appears suddenly in a bruising world of blooming-buzzing
confusion (as each we must); but
as compensation, this rude Awakening is Immaculate, ex nihilo, with none of the
dreadful ickiness of having been whelped by one’s parents, Mom and Dad, via
some penis-and-vagina action too terrible to contemplate.
It is a satisfying fantasy; thus Minerva, born from the brow of Zeus.
~
But now there is a twist; and it deepens things.
Born from a bag, as though from empty space, she nonetheless comes “with
baggage”, in the form of intricate enigmatic tattoos. Like Leonard, alone in his hotel room, having his (latest)
very-first moment of conscious self-awareness. Born with a mission.
He awakens each day to a
world new-made; he spots the writing with the same surprise that
Crusoe spotted footprints in the sand. He cannot really recognize it as
his own: even those he wrote himself, he stippled into the skin – it won’t
resemble his normal cursive – and others he left to the
tattoo-artist. The writing must therefore confront him like that at
Belshazzar’s feast. It is otherwordly. He is wreathed in cryptic
admonitions, some penned in a Gothic script like that of Scripture. He
might almost be forgiven for fancying himself a prophet. And yet – for
here the story is bleakly modern. He pays no mind to the source of these
writings, just takes them for granted. He simply takes the next step
forward, in his appointed task. That Mene, Mene, Tekel Upharsin has
no resonance, divine or diabolocal.
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/01/moreismenitto.html
Born with a mission.
The show so far is stupid; but I am probably going to watch another episode, simply
from the power of this underlying motif -- this motivating motif. For it applies very broadly: These amnesiacs, with their strange “Thou
must” inscribed scrolls, are like each one of us, adrift in the randomness of
this sublunary life, yet with a sense, that somehow, all of it somehow means something.
[Update 6 Oct 2015]
Literary triviabit
Viewers have remarked how odd it is, that FBI Guy ends every
other sentence addressed to Jane Doe with “… , Jane.” Odd especially since that isn’t even her real name.
Concurrently, by chance, I have been listening to an
audiobook of Jane Eyre; and
there, Mr Rochester exhibits the same the same vocative quirk, towards his
coworker/love-interest.
In both cases, the phenomenon is striking, owing to the utter asymmetry in vocatives: the senior man regularly recurs to this first-name address; the woman protege, never.
There is a slight syntactic distinction: FBI-Guy postpends the vocative ("I'm so sorry, Jane"); Rochester prepends it.
[Update 9 Nov 15]
Pellicular Wikipedia
To fans of “Blindspot”, it has by now become apparent, that
those tattoos (like some Inca inscriptions) purport to explain absolutely everything, Present Past
or (especially) Future: like Wiki
-- or rather, like Borges’s
Universal Library. All that
is known, or might ever be known,
imprinted upon her skin.
To the cold, hard core of “Memento” fans, that is
disappointing. But to the rest of
Walmartamerica, that is good news.
So -- Here is how YOU can employ those iconographic indicators to your own benefit. Take it from me, my smiling wife
Veronica and our faithful dog Spot!
Just in the past three days, we brought in this:
* Puzzled husband:
“Someone’s been swiping tomatoes from our garden again!”
Loyal wife: “ A steganographic exploitation of the inkblot
blocking the singed skin hidden beneath the bandaid on Jane’s left buttock
reveals: The perpetrator is none
other than the neighborhood raccoon!”
P. H: “Ha-ha! That furry rascal!”
* Puzzled husband:
“Omigosh, what shall we do?
Tomorrow’s our big picnic, and the weatherman is predicting
thunderstorms !!”
Loyal wife: “A previously overlooked inscription on the inside of Jane’s
eyelid contains a cipher which,
run through our Tordella supercomputers, breaks out to “21 Oct 2015”; which,
according to the Old Style (Julian) calendar, breaks out to tomorrow! And the graphic equates to an ideogram
for the Egyptian sun-god Ra!
So: It’s gonna be a bright,
bright, sunshiney day !!”
P.H.: “Woo-hoo! Packing the mayo !!!”
* Puzzled husband:
“Gosh, honey, I’ve looked everywhere! Wherever can I have left my carkeys ???”
Loyal wife: “A p-adic attack on the recursively-enciphered left-armpit image
from Jane reveals … (long technical discussion deleted) …. in the right pocket
of your grey overcoat!”
