Once A Thief rewatch (ongoing)
Jun. 28th, 2019 08:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowscastHere's a happy thing that's happening in my life right now: I'm doing two parallel Once a Thief rewatches, with two local friends who are also fannish. Yesterday, for the first time, scheduling and our places in the respective rewatches allowed all three of us to get together in my living room to watch episodes 14 - 16. It was delightful!
I am so very happy and fortunate that when my brain decided it was time to get re-obsessed by a two-decades-old TV show (with no active fandom), two of my friends were up for coming along for the ride.
Anyway, during the rewatch I have (naturally) been having various thoughts about the show. I think I'll post some! Perhaps another day, I will post some more. Who knows? Whatever seems like fun at the time.
Okay, so here's a thing that I'm really noticing on this rewatch, which I can't remember pinging me so much on previous viewings: the Director's continual sexual harassment of Mac. Just ... wow.
It's happening from his first day on the job, when she gets him to take off all his clothes so that she can stare at him and intimidate him. (Seriously. This is in the pilot.) Lots of little touches and comments in the briefing room. One day she playfully nibbles his ear. Nibbles his ear. Just incidentally, in the middle of explaining what the mission is. She brings him to a kinky sex club, of which she is a founding member (totally legit, they're working, Vic is there too!), and in the middle of discussing their plan of action, she suddenly grabs Mac's hand, puts it on her breast, and asks him to appreciate the stitching of her hand-made leather bustier. (So hot. So wrong. Oh, show.) And then there's the time that she expresses her displeasure with Mac's performance at work by entering his apartment in the middle of the night (I would say "breaking in" but the Agency owns his apartment so she probably has a key and feels entitled), going into his bedroom where he's sleeping, crawling into his bed wearing nothing but lingerie under a trench coat, and having a conversation about his work while running her fingers slowly up and down his naked belly. Can I just say, I would be very disturbed if my boss did that to me? Oh, this show.
I think I'm noticing it more this time around for two main reasons. Firstly, we as a society have been having a lot of long-overdue discussions about workplace sexual harassment in recent years. Just two years ago, my own workplace developed a government-mandated 40-page policy on the prevention of sexual violence, which I and all of my colleagues were invited to read carefully and give feedback on before it went into force (and I did). Secondly, I'm older now. (It happens!) I'm now closer in age to the Director than to the agents—and I now have the experience of being in a position of authority in my workplace. I think that when I watched the show for the first time, in my early twenties, I saw the Director almost as a capricious force of nature. Now I'm in a position to identify with her in some ways, and therefore I'm more inclined see her as a person who makes choices, and who has responsibilities towards her employees.
I don't think that the show ever meant to portray the Director's behaviour as unproblematical. Remember her context; the Agency as a whole is definitely depicted as highly problematical. They mostly seem to be dedicated to saving the day and protecting the public, but then we have, for instance, the episode where we find out about the non-consensual chemical mind-control experiments (which for her part the Director claimed to oppose on practical, rather than ethical, grounds), and assassins are deployed against innocent citizens who know too much. (Man, "Wang Dang Doodle" is a dark episode. Goofy, but dark. This show is tonally weird.)
I think that the dynamic between Mac and the Director was meant to be read as sexy and subversive (and a little funny), as well as unbalancing and threatening. I think that if their genders had been reversed, it would have read as super-duper creepy and inappropriate even in 1997, and it wouldn't have been written that way.
I think that the fact that Mac clearly is turned on by the Director was meant to cue the audience that the Director's behaviour was not really abusive. I think that the conversation on consent has come a long way in the twenty-plus intervening years, so that nowadays the fact that the Director wields the power of life and death over Mac (and throws it in his face frequently) would clearly put them in a position where consent is impossible. And actually, anyway, he doesn't consent. Whenever she physically invades his space, he seems to try to retreat about three inches below the surface of his own skin. (Credit tothe_shoshanna for the wording of that particular insight.)
So hey, if you're interested in watching a fanvid about the Director/Mac pairing, let me recommend Mean Woman Blues byjetpack_monkey. Glory in the highly problematic hotness. (They're fictional characters; it's okay.)
Link to AO3: Mean Woman Blues
Vidder's summary: It's "Director" with a capital "D" and "Mac" with a lowercase "s".
I am so very happy and fortunate that when my brain decided it was time to get re-obsessed by a two-decades-old TV show (with no active fandom), two of my friends were up for coming along for the ride.
Anyway, during the rewatch I have (naturally) been having various thoughts about the show. I think I'll post some! Perhaps another day, I will post some more. Who knows? Whatever seems like fun at the time.
Okay, so here's a thing that I'm really noticing on this rewatch, which I can't remember pinging me so much on previous viewings: the Director's continual sexual harassment of Mac. Just ... wow.
It's happening from his first day on the job, when she gets him to take off all his clothes so that she can stare at him and intimidate him. (Seriously. This is in the pilot.) Lots of little touches and comments in the briefing room. One day she playfully nibbles his ear. Nibbles his ear. Just incidentally, in the middle of explaining what the mission is. She brings him to a kinky sex club, of which she is a founding member (totally legit, they're working, Vic is there too!), and in the middle of discussing their plan of action, she suddenly grabs Mac's hand, puts it on her breast, and asks him to appreciate the stitching of her hand-made leather bustier. (So hot. So wrong. Oh, show.) And then there's the time that she expresses her displeasure with Mac's performance at work by entering his apartment in the middle of the night (I would say "breaking in" but the Agency owns his apartment so she probably has a key and feels entitled), going into his bedroom where he's sleeping, crawling into his bed wearing nothing but lingerie under a trench coat, and having a conversation about his work while running her fingers slowly up and down his naked belly. Can I just say, I would be very disturbed if my boss did that to me? Oh, this show.
I think I'm noticing it more this time around for two main reasons. Firstly, we as a society have been having a lot of long-overdue discussions about workplace sexual harassment in recent years. Just two years ago, my own workplace developed a government-mandated 40-page policy on the prevention of sexual violence, which I and all of my colleagues were invited to read carefully and give feedback on before it went into force (and I did). Secondly, I'm older now. (It happens!) I'm now closer in age to the Director than to the agents—and I now have the experience of being in a position of authority in my workplace. I think that when I watched the show for the first time, in my early twenties, I saw the Director almost as a capricious force of nature. Now I'm in a position to identify with her in some ways, and therefore I'm more inclined see her as a person who makes choices, and who has responsibilities towards her employees.
I don't think that the show ever meant to portray the Director's behaviour as unproblematical. Remember her context; the Agency as a whole is definitely depicted as highly problematical. They mostly seem to be dedicated to saving the day and protecting the public, but then we have, for instance, the episode where we find out about the non-consensual chemical mind-control experiments (which for her part the Director claimed to oppose on practical, rather than ethical, grounds), and assassins are deployed against innocent citizens who know too much. (Man, "Wang Dang Doodle" is a dark episode. Goofy, but dark. This show is tonally weird.)
I think that the dynamic between Mac and the Director was meant to be read as sexy and subversive (and a little funny), as well as unbalancing and threatening. I think that if their genders had been reversed, it would have read as super-duper creepy and inappropriate even in 1997, and it wouldn't have been written that way.
I think that the fact that Mac clearly is turned on by the Director was meant to cue the audience that the Director's behaviour was not really abusive. I think that the conversation on consent has come a long way in the twenty-plus intervening years, so that nowadays the fact that the Director wields the power of life and death over Mac (and throws it in his face frequently) would clearly put them in a position where consent is impossible. And actually, anyway, he doesn't consent. Whenever she physically invades his space, he seems to try to retreat about three inches below the surface of his own skin. (Credit to
the_shoshanna for the wording of that particular insight.)So hey, if you're interested in watching a fanvid about the Director/Mac pairing, let me recommend Mean Woman Blues by
jetpack_monkey. Glory in the highly problematic hotness. (They're fictional characters; it's okay.)Link to AO3: Mean Woman Blues
Vidder's summary: It's "Director" with a capital "D" and "Mac" with a lowercase "s".
(no subject)
Date: 2019-06-29 05:51 pm (UTC)As it happens someone else on my flist just did a rewatch of the entire run of Supernatural in order to catch up with the series before its final season. (Like me, she stopped watching at a certain point). So it was interesting to see her reaction to it which was also to realize how much she didn't like certain issues, many of them relating to women and toxic masculinity.
Not that many, many people weren't well aware of these problems at the time but I do think it's interesting to look back at stuff from our own time in fandom to see how differently some things come across now.
Mind you, I think that sexual harassment of men is still not taken at all seriously, particularly when done by a woman. (And given the relatively few women in positions of power, with even fewer willing to do so, it doesn't surprise me that it's not common). I just saw some Netflix ads for Lucifer last month which would have had people up in arms were it a woman and not a man being that panderingly objectified.
I mean, the examples you give are outrageous no matter what show it was on, but I think that this particular show was so erratic in what it displayed as normal in every other sense as well that it probably didn't even stand out other than just being another shade of crazy.
Now I'm in a position to identify with her in some ways, and therefore I'm more inclined see her as a person who makes choices, and who has responsibilities towards her employees.
Plus you have had power over not just students as an instructor now, but them also as head of your department, and that age gap has also grown.
Goofy, but dark. This show is tonally weird
Yes, just what I was trying to say above.
I think that the conversation on consent has come a long way in the twenty-plus intervening years, so that nowadays the fact that the Director wields the power of life and death over Mac (and throws it in his face frequently) would clearly put them in a position where consent is impossible.
Yes! That to me is the critical distinction between now and then is that it isn't so much about giving consent, but we've begun to discuss how meaningful consent isn't possible in many situations.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-06-29 10:24 pm (UTC)Now, interestingly, those are issues where I've been finding that Once A Thief actually holds up really well, and in fact does better than a lot of contemporary genre shows. Women show up in lots of roles (including as villains and henchpeople), never fail to have agency, and get to fully participate in the fight scenes (none of this women-only-fight-other-women nonsense that's really common in action flicks). I particularly appreciate the fact that the initial Li Ann-as-prize setup is immediately subverted and soon emphatically discarded; Li Ann is having none of that nonsense. And other than Michael, I can't really think of any toxic masculinity happening.