Gender in Post-9/11 American Apocalyptic TV Ii Gender in Post-9/11 American Apocalyptic TV
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Gender in Post-9/11 American Apocalyptic TV ii Gender in Post-9/11 American Apocalyptic TV Representations of Masculinity and Femininity at the End of the World Eve Bennett BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2019 Copyright © Eve Bennett, 2019 For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. vi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Louise Dugdale Cover image: Series, Battlestar Galactica © 2004 Universal Television Distribution, Collection Christophel / ArenaPal All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. 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Contents Acknowledgements vi Introduction 1 1 Heroic Masculinity and Its Pitfalls 11 2 The Prince Hal Narrative 55 3 Patriarchal Conspiracies and Female Victims 101 4 Twenty-First-Century Female Weapons 139 Conclusion 181 References 191 Filmography 211 Teleography 214 Index 217 Acknowledgements I am grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding the research that eventually developed into this book. I also owe my sincere gratitude to many excellent people for their help with it: Stacey Abbott and Vicky Ball encouraged me to undertake the book in the first place, Ian Hunter and Helen Wood advised on an earlier version and Johnny Walker recommended the incomparable Katie Gallof at Bloomsbury, who has been incredibly patient with a first-time author, as have Susan Krogulski and Erin Duffy. The following people were fountains of knowledge in various areas: Suzy Bird on Supernatural, Aimée Forsyth on Fringe, Erin Giannini on Dollhouse and iZombie, Katy O’Neill on The Walking Dead, Neon Kelly on videogames and Pete Falconer on Westerns. James MacDowell and Stacey Abbott gave helpful feedback on Chapter 1, as did Rhonda Wilcox, Lorna Jowett and an anonymous reviewer on Chapters 2 and 3. Bronwen Calvert is a superstar for reading the whole thing through with great care and providing some excellent final suggestions. Darren Meale was my source of free legal and IP advice, and Sue Bennett was on hand throughout, improving my grammar and elegance of expression as always. Ian Sawyer calmed me down whenever I panicked and let me talk through points I was stuck on with him. Andrea Glanz at AMC kindly gave me permission to use promotional images from The Walking Dead, Jason Kauzlarich and Dan Radcliffe let me use their brilliant artwork and there wouldn’t be a single screengrab inside the book without the help of Chris Finnamore, IT advisor and lender of equipment extraordinaire! Shout-out also to all those who helped me track down hard- to-come-by books and articles, such as Johnny Walker, Bronwen Calvert, Kate Cooper and Christoph Wagner. Finally, huge thanks to Douglas Lowndes, Paul Chavard and all my friends and colleagues for their support and cheerleading. Introduction Apocalyptic television and the post-9/11 gender backlash A major explosion hits the middle of an American city. Afterwards, a survivor, a white man in a suit (Jack Coleman), wakes up amid the rubble and wanders around dazedly. As he does so, we hear snatches of radio or television broadcasts commenting on the incident, most recommending violent retaliation against the perpetrators: ‘We have got to go and attack the enemy’, ‘tyrant and terrorist with strength not weakness’, ‘A serious threat to our way of life’, ‘We will hunt down and punish those responsible’, ‘Kill them, kill them all’ (‘Brave New World’, 1.1). Later, a video appears in which the apparent leader of a group of ‘terrorists’, as the media calls them, a non-Western man (Sendhil Ramamurthy), claims responsibility for the attack, which he says was a suicide bombing carried out by his ‘brothers and sisters’ (‘June 13th–Part Two’, 1.8). The scenes I have just described are fromHeroes Reborn, a 2015 miniseries sequel to the NBC series Heroes (2006–2010). Although I began the research for this book in 2011, and it focuses on programmes that debuted between 2002 and 2012 – including the original Heroes – Heroes Reborn shows that American television has not yet entirely got over its preoccupation with the horrific events of September the 11th, 2001. This preoccupation forms part of a wider interest in catastrophic destruction or apocalypse that has been manifest since roughly the turn of the millennium. While world destruction and the annihilation of the human race have habitually existed as threats in the science fiction and fantasy genres, on television as well as in other media, in the past they typically remained as such: threats, posed by villains whose plans would be thwarted by the heroes at the end of the episode or season. In the early twenty-first-century wave of American apocalyptic programmes, however, the threat is far more concrete. In many the apocalypse actually occurs, often in the first episode 2 Gender in Post-9/11 American Apocalyptic TV (e.g. Battlestar Galactica (BSG; 2003–2009), Jericho (2006–2008), The Walking Dead (TWD; 2010–)) or even before the show begins (Firefly (2002–2003), Falling Skies (2011–2015)), though, of course, it does not entirely wipe out the human race or there would be no show; some survivors remain to battle it out in the harsh new world. In others the apocalypse remains a threat for most or all of the show’s duration, but one that is graphically illustrated through devices such as time travel and/or parallel universes (Heroes, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (T:TSCC; 2008–2009), Fringe (2008–2013)); flashforwards (Dollhouse (2009–2010)); characters’ dreams or visions (Miracles (2003), Carnivàle (2003– 2005), The 4400 (2004–2007), Point Pleasant (2005–2006), Threshold (2005– 2006), The Event (2010–2011)); or smaller-scale disasters that seem to prefigure a larger one (Lost (2004–2010), Surface (2005–2006), Invasion (2005–2006), FlashForward (2009–2010)). My interest in this ongoing cycle of American apocalyptic television was the primary motivation for starting work on this project, but a second very important inspiration was Susan Faludi’s book The Terror Dream: What 9/11 Revealed about America (2008). In it, Faludi provides a detailed picture of the way that the American media’s representation of gender shifted after 9/11. Largely concentrating on print journalism, with some reference to television news and talk shows, she analyses the way that many media commentators’ portrayal of gender roles abruptly became more essentialist and traditional. This, she argues, was true of the depiction of the people connected to the tragedies in a concrete way, for instance, the group of men who supposedly prevented the hijacked United Airlines Flight 93 from reaching its target and also of the portrayal of President George W. Bush and his male colleagues. All of these men were repeatedly compared to ‘superheroes’ (Faludi 2008, p. 47) and ‘frontiersm[e]n’ (ibid., p. 148) in both media and government rhetoric. Women affected by the attacks, on the other hand, were portrayed ‘largely as vulnerable maidens’, despite the fact ‘that the fatalities [on 9/11] were three-to-one male-to-female’ (ibid., p. 5), while lifestyle columnists circulated rumours (never substantiated with any hard data) that American women in general had suddenly begun prioritizing marriage and motherhood over their careers (ibid., pp. 116–145). Faludi’s explanation for this phenomenon is that at times of crisis, nations tend to ‘recapitulate in quick time the centuries-long evolution of [their] character as a society and of the mythologies [they] live by’ (2008, p. 13). Hence, she reads the regressive gender representations spread by the American media in the wake of 9/11 as the ‘involuntar[y] revisiting’ (ibid.) of a set of myths created to Introduction 3 quell a much earlier American cultural trauma: the capture of hundreds of New England settlers by Native American tribes during the late seventeenth and most of the eighteenth centuries. This resulted in a pervasive sense of shame that ‘was largely a male burden … in which the captivity of women and children served to spotlight male protective failures’ (ibid., p. 211). The ultimate consequence of this trauma, Faludi argues, was that ‘[t]he specter of the white maiden taken against her will by dark “savages” became [the nation’s] recurring trope … That maiden’s rescue, fantasized or real, became [the] reigning redemption tale’ (ibid., p. 212), reappearing throughout history every time social or political events created feelings of shame or insufficiency on the part of American men. The 9/11 attacks, Faludi contends, were just such events, disconcertingly similar on a basic level to the ‘foundational drama’ of the Indian wars (‘murderous homeland incursions by dark-skinned, non-Christians’) (2008, p. 208) and raising similar ‘apprehensions that America was lacking in masculine fortitude’ (ibid., p.