Confessions of a Liberal Puritan

From a quick scan of my FL, I gather that while I've been agonizing over the incredibly important matter of procuring a new acceptable VCR, a whole lot of fhannish stuff has hit some sort of fan. Regarding any controversy currently raging, my name is (temporarily, at least) "Schultz": I truly know nothing, and I'm not sure how much I want to know.

That said, on to my own trivial concerns, followed by some recent Thoughts on the Virgin Mary and Sci-Fi Heroines:

I stupidly put off replacing my VCR until Friday afternoon, thinking -- in my total ignorance -- that VCR's would only have gotten better and cheaper since the last time I had to shop for one in 1999. Wrong! The electronics shop at the outlet mall where I bought my last two VCR's had only 3 models on the shelf (apart from the DVD/VCR combos, which I didn't need), and since I have a preference for the Quasar/Panasonic brand (which have always lasted longer for me), I agreed to take home the only Panasonic VCR they had left, which was the shelf model. So far, so good. I had to be ready to go to the Performing Arts Center to see a play soon after 6 PM, but I got home with my new VCR before 5 PM, so I had plenty of time to install it, program it to record the Sci-Fi Channel lineup, and change clothes, right?

'Fraid not. When I finally got the new VCR hooked up, all I could get the TV to show me was a jumping blue screen. CRAP! Am I obsessive enough about my TV viewing to push my luck by trying to squeeze in another round trip to the mall in rush-hour traffic to get a replacement VCR and set it up within the next 40 minutes? You bet I am (especially with a cliff-hanger last week on SG1). They have a JVC model for the same price, which I can take with a minimum of paper work, so I agree. I finally manage to get it home and hooked up at 5:50 PM, and already I hate, hate, hate it. If I ever meet the person who designed the programming software, I resolve to rip out their large intestine and throttle them with it, as an act of public service. But at last I have the machine programmed to fill up the last three hours on my tape with glorious Sci-Fi adventure.

And look! I still have two whole minutes to change my sweaty clothes for something suitable for the theater. Piece of cake.

I get home from the theater at 11 PM and turn the TV to Stargate: Atlantis, just in case, and check my tape at the first commercial break. The VCR has recorded nothing since I set it at 6 PM. How . . . interesting!

Before I drop-kick it into a low parking orbit, I double-check the programming (all correct), experiment in recording Atlantis and BSG, discover that I have only a few minutes left on my tape instead of another hour plus, and -- as a last resort -- I read the directions. Turns out this machine only records in SP and EP, to begin with, and it has a dreadful feature which is supposed to ensure that you get your whole show recorded, by figuring out how much tape is left and automatically shifting from SP to EP if necessary. The corollary to this, as I discover, is that if the machine knows you don't have enough tape left to record the whole time slot even at the slightly slower speed, it records nothing at all!

I revise my "throttle with their own large intestines" list to include everyone responsible for the design and software of this machine. Then I blow nearly all day Saturday between doing research on the internet into VCR models and prices and advertised specials from discount stores, etc., and then actually returning the much-hated JVC to the store, driving to a different mall, checking inventory and prices at multiple stores, and getting a different Panasonic model at Best Buy (for $5 more than their website had advertised, but I'm too tired to make a fuss).

I still don't like my new machine half as well as my old one, but it does what I tell it to do, so I forebear. And I face the awful truth that I have just bought My Last VCR Ever. By the time this one breaks down, they will probably have stopped making separate models altogether, and I'll be forced to buy a DVD/VCR combo or change over to satellite TV and TiVo. I would shed a sentimental tear about this, but I'm too irritated with the crappiness of this year's VCR's in general to bother. I feel a curmudgeon moment coming on, as I kvetch about the decline in manufacturing standards and customer service, etc., etc..

Okay, I'm over it. And my sister called today and says she's pretty sure she hasn't taped over this week's SG1 yet, so she'll mail me the tape . . . if I finally sit down and read the first few chapters of her novel which she sent home with me at Christmas and give her some feedback. I respect her skillful use of blackmail, and so I have found the pages and put them on top of my 'to-read' pile for later tonight.

And now for something completely different . . .

keswindhover drew my attention last Thursday to this thought-provoking post by brynmck, on Sci-Fi's kick-ass heroines and sensitive guy heroes. It's a fascinating post, with a great discussion continuing in the comments. Of course, being a confirmed busybody who can't resist joining in whenever she overhears an interesting conversation, I had to throw my 2 cents in, which I've revised and expanded below:

The comment reply by brynmck to which I initially responded was this:

'This still doesn't answer, though, why male protagonists are displaying so many traditionally "female" traits. Maybe the Kick-Ass Chick and the Sensitive Male aren't really a reversal; maybe they're just an attempt to give the characters greater depth, to look at sides of them we're not used to seeing (or we were not, back when this was a new idea), and like most genre fiction elements, they're falling into a formula.'

I had to agree that she and the others who were commenting seemed to be onto something important when they wrote about both the 'sensitive male hero' and the 'kick-ass-heroine' as attempts to develop more fully rounded characters who aren't automatically cut off from half of all human emotions and abilities by virtue of their genitalia.

But from my research on the topic of "kick-butt heroines" and their increasing popularity since the late 1980s, and from the responses I've read from other people over the years, I had to suggest that there does seem to be some particular need or hunger in our society and our psyches that only the female action hero can begin to satisfy.

Maybe it's a return to goddess archetypes (Kali the mother-destroyer, or Brigid the mother goddess who also oversees the forging of weapons in some Celtic tales, or the various female warrior gods and 'chaos-monsters' of the ancient Near East) too long suppressed in the dominant Western culture. Or maybe it's the infant's leftover need to reconcile the warm, nurturing mother (the so-called 'good breast') with the mother whose separateness and potential for anger arouses so much anxiety (the 'bad breast' of some theorists). James Cameron, at least, seemed to be pretty clearly working out his mother issues and ambivalence about powerful, independent women in Ripley of Aliens and Sarah Connor of T2 (or even the water-controlling, destruction-threatening angelic aliens of The Abyss) -- the mother figure whose aggression and power and anger are all directed outward, toward protecting her children from the even-worse monsters (destruction always in service of her nurturing instinct, which makes it therefore tolerable, if not quite 'tame' or entirely 'safe').

In her reply, brynmck drew my attention to a fascinating post by thassalia comparing Aeryn Sun to the goddess Athena in the Western tradition. Actually, I had thought of Athena, but she doesn't fit in as well with the mother-destroyer goddess archetype, since she's not generally seen as a mother, and is noted for not even having a mother herself (springing fully grown and armed from Zeus' head, and all). Otherwise, who could resist talking about the goddess of war, wisdom, and weaving, when discussing kick-ass heroines?

(As a side note, I always thought it was interesting on Xena: Warrior Princess that Athena -- the one god among all the Olympians whom I always thought Xena might possibly have liked and identified with and expected some help from -- never put in an appearance until season 5, when she was introduced as Xena's main adversary. And all the conflict between the two of them centered around Xena's motherhood and Athena's resolve to kill Xena's daughter, Eve. From where I'm sitting, it's very interesting that the mostly male X:WP writers chose Athena to be the chief opponent of "Xena: Warrior Mother"! Talk about some ambivalence being expressed, there!)

But since the psychological theories I have to utilize in my work tend to link creation and destruction, or "nurturing mother" and "devouring monster," as an outgrowth of the infant's ambivalence toward the mother who provides all good things but occasionally fails to satisfy, I'm sticking pretty close to the 'fierce mother goddess' archetypes in my research, for the most part. And in that context, I think it's interesting how so many of our 'kick-ass heroines' in Sci-Fi end up being portrayed as mothers, in one sense or another (even Buffy, who in season 5 of BtVS becomes a de facto mother to Dawn, her 'daughter' through a peculiar form of monkish immaculate conception). But that's an issue for another discussion, probably.

Anyway, as I've pointed out here in a previous post, Gerard Jones in Killing Monsters offers still another way to look at the rise of kick-ass heroines as an attempt to restore some balance, supplement some lack in our cultural diet. Jones notes how young males seem to be increasingly looking to female superheroes like Wonder Woman and Buffy and Xena as role models, as they seek ways to be more fully human than the rigid stereotypes of male heroism normally allow. Boys in contemporary American culture want to identify with powerful characters, it seems, but they also want those powerful characters to be able to express a wider range of emotion than Batman or Superman were ever allowed.

That could explain how the sci-fi industry, whose writers and decision-makers are still more likely to be male, keeps coming up with kick-ass heroines: maybe it's because those are the characters that men want to identify with. Or else there's something in the combination of male and female heroes who between them cover the full range of human emotions and abilities that satisfies a long-felt need in all of us for more fully human role models.

Which leads me to (at long last) the connection in my twisty mind between Buffy and her sister action heroines, on the one hand, and the Virgin Mary in Western Christianity during the patristic and medieval periods, on the other hand.

You see, I had an interesting discussion in the Divinity School library on Friday afternoon with an older woman student enrolled in a course on "Marian" theology in the Christian tradition. Her professor had given the students an assignment to look for the 'unexpected' or 'hidden' appearances of the Virgin Mary archetype and imagery in popular culture, and this student was seeking help from the reference librarians. Once again, I couldn't help butting in -- especially when I heard one of the librarians suggesting several recurrences of Marian imagery in the Lord of the Rings movies (I got excited and had to jump on board and suggest that Samwise carrying Frodo up Mount Doom could be seen as a "pieta," the classic depiction of Mary cradling the broken body of Christ after his crucifixion, with Sam in the role of the virgin mother). Whereupon the librarians and grad students at the reference desk seemed to evince great relief in being let off the hook, as they turned the student's inquiry over to me. As we talked, I discovered that this student loved the movie "Buffy" but had never seen the TV series -- so I naturally suggested she take a look at the films of James Cameron (which she was familiar with) and at Buffy in season 5 and especially "The Gift," to start with (after reading summaries of the preceding four seasons on line in order to get up to speed with BtVS.

But our discussion reminded me of various theories about why the Virgin Mary had become so important in Western Christianity in the first place (to the point where an ecumenical council in 451 C.E. or thereabouts -- sorry, I'm too tired to look it up right now! -- decreed that she should be called theotokos or "Mother of God," rather than just christotokos or "Mother of Christ" -- and there were monks in the streets of Chalcedon willing to bust heads to make sure that "Mother of God" won the vote).

One of the most popular theories for Mary's rise to be a semi-official female face of God deals with that whole idea of the need for balance and for a more undeniably human link to God, someone with whom humans could more easily identify and who would remain approachable, even as she was imbued with more and more power by the faithful and the Church. As Christ (who had started out as the mediating figure, the fully human/fully God-who-loved-the-world-so-much-that-he-gave-his-only-Son-etc.) came more and more to be seen as the stern divine Judge, separating the sheep from the goats on the last day, and thus as increasingly remote and inaccessible (and a couple of good plagues sweeping through Europe apparently helped to reinforce the idea of Christ as disciplinarian whom you don't want to mess with), his mother Mary seemed to become a sort of Christ-figure whose humanity and compassion would always stay in the forefront, and thus she would 'naturally' be every sinner's "go-to" deity of choice, at least for a time.

All of which seems to fit in rather well with Gerard Jones' claims about little boys' increasing preference for female superheroes, it suddenly occurred to me. As well as with the discussion on brynmck's LJ about an apparent re-apportionment of compassion and power between male and female heroes in science fiction TV shows, of late.

And yes, I couldn't resist suggesting to that divinity student that Buffy in "The Gift" could be seen as embodying both the Virgin Mary and Christ, at various points in that episode, and that when she finally fulfills her Christly role and lies broken on the pavement at the end of the episode, the mantle of "grieving mother" in that final scene seems to devolve upon Spike -- the nakedly grieving person, slightly apart from the undisputed "disciples" of the Scooby Gang.

Yes, Spike becomes the Virgin Mary at the end of BtVS 5.22, going into the beginning of season 6. You heard it here first! (I sincerely hope.)