tv – Page 5 – Letters from Titan

Glee: When want is wrong

Perhaps the most amazing thing about the reference to lesbian bed death in Glee’s Whitney episode last night was that it didn’t fill me with rage. In fact, it was actually pretty funny, served an interesting function regarding gender in the narrative, hinted at a number of off-screen details, and was something of another shout-out to fan concerns about how much time Kurt and Blaine don’t spend sucking face on our screens compared to the ongoing car crash of PDA in Finn and Rachel’s relationship.

In case anyone reading this first heard of lesbian bed death from Kurt Hummel (an idea so hilarious to me, that I beg you to confess in comments if this is the case), let’s talk about that dreaded phrase, which does get used both within and outside of the lesbian community, even though Kurt does get the definition more or less right.

The idea is that sex leaves relationships between women and that the blame there sits with presence only of women in those relationships. More specifically, lesbian bed death as a phrase is a symptom of people not necessarily believing that what women do in bed with each other is sex. How, many people wonder, can desire be maintained with out male sexual assertiveness, or, to be really direct, the presence of a penis?

This is absurd, mostly (and we’ll get to that mostly in a minute — it’s important regarding Kurt and Blaine). For one thing, the presence of sex ebbs and flows in all relationships for all sorts of reasons; anyone who’s been in a long term relationship knows this.

And it’s hardly surprising that Kurt and Blaine haven’t had a lot of time for making out or anything else when Blaine’s been injured; the situation with Dave Karofsky happened; Kurt’s preoccupied with NYADA; the Finchel marriage drama has exhausted everyone; Quinn was seriously injured; and Blaine’s been super emo about a ton of things, including the stress of having his brother around. So really, Kurt and Blaine are experiencing a normal adult couple thing like the teenagers they still are.

That Kurt is worried enough about the situation to apparently Google around to find the phrase lesbian bed death is hilarious though, and really shows one of the ways he’s been growing up about sex and relationships. And yes, I firmly believe Kurt found this one on the Internet.

Because Kurt explaining it to Rachel means she wasn’t the source; and if Santana were the source (the only other source that makes sense), that would have been all over the school long before Kurt and Rachel have their little chat. Who else at WMHS would have likely shared that phrase with Kurt?

But as absurd and offensive as the lesbian bed death idea is, one thing that can actually be hard about relationships between women, at least in my own experience, is that a lot of us receive significant training to never, ever be sexually assertive. Certainly many of my female friends who are attracted to women lament situations in which no one is willing to make the first move before the relationship starts, and no one feels fully confident initiating sexuality once it does. Obviously, this isn’t just a lesbian problem, but it is a real thing we do talk about.

Which brings us to Kurt and Blaine, gender, and that fandom favorite of “who’s the top?” While that who’s the top conversation has always been a mess — confusing terminology about sexual positions and terminology about BDSM activities with ideas about sexual assertiveness (the whole thing is just a morass) — that conversation happens for a reason: among other things, people want to know who takes the sexual lead between these two boys who are both private and shy about their sex life, even, it seems, with each other.

Because Kurt is associated by others with the feminine so often, people have generally, stereotypically, expected him to want his partner to take the lead. When Blaine showed up in season 2, that suspicion seemed confirmed, until Blaine started talking about never being anyone’s boyfriend and Sadie Hawkins and then demonstrated his desire not just for approval, but to be courted. And once that happened, things got murky.

The murkiness, frankly, has been good, because relationships are complex and as a random Tumblr meme says, asking who’s the boy (or girl) in a gay relationship is like asking which chopstick is the fork. It’s not really a question that makes sense, unless a particular couple wants it to because of dynamics they enjoy.

But the murkiness has also suggested the possibility that neither Kurt and Blaine seem to feel particularly comfortable initiating sexuality between them. Other than the first time Kurt and Blaine kiss, most of Blaine’s attempts at being sexually assertive end in disaster (Jeremiah) or involve alcohol (Rachel, Kurt at Scandals). When Kurt tries to discuss whether Blaine wants him in “The First Time,” he’s utterly uncomfortable once that hilarious discussion of masturbation begins.

But none of this is really surprising.

Just as women are often trained not to express their sexual desires or make the first move, gay teens (and especially gay boys who don’t have the advantages of the level of platonic touch that is socially acceptable between women) are also trained not to show desire. It’s not safe, polite, or well-received. It is an insult to want.

How many times has Kurt been scolded for having a crush or pursuing so much as a conversation with another boy because of how it will reflect on that boy? And Blaine arguably had the actual desire to make the first move beaten out of him with what happened at the Sadie Hawkins dance.

That Kurt and Blaine are experiencing anxieties around sexual activity as generally discussed in the context of women makes perfect sense, and shouldn’t actually be feminizing at all. Yet, because of the way gender comes into play around both characters so often (especially considering the evolution in Blaine’s choices regarding female empowerment songs — first he’s having kept woman fantasies (“Bills, Bills, Bills”) and now he’s telling Kurt he can pay his own way (“It’s Not Right, but It’s Okay”)) a perfectly reasonable problem they’re encountering for a number of not unexpected reasons becomes once again about Glee‘s ongoing examination of how queer men are, and sometimes are not, perceived as men by both themselves and the world around them.

Ultimately, what’s hard about this for me as a queer viewer with a female body and a female partner, isn’t actually that dread reference to lesbian bed death. What’s hard is that lesbian sexuality is used so often not as a subject unto itself, but a side note to explicate the sexualities of others.

I joke a lot about how I connect so much with the Kurt and Blaine storyline in part because Patty is so the Kurt to my Blaine (go on, ask me about the time she went to eight stores looking for a limited edition McQueen-inspired nail polish that was sold out everywhere). But I also connect to their storyline because of their chemistry (which I’m only really starting to see between Brittany and Santana) and because their anxieties are often mine.

The lesbian bed death comment underscored that, because it underscored the doubts Kurt and Blaine have both been trained to have on how acceptable their desire is. Those doubts are what made Sebastian interesting to Blaine earlier in the season, and Chandler interesting to Kurt now. Open expression of want is hard to look away from when you’ve been told you’ll never hear it and that you shouldn’t engage in it yourself.

Homophobia has a lot of costs — many of them big, public, frightening and violent. But “Whitney” also shows us one of the small costs of bullying, violence, homophobia, and misogyny in its treatment of Kurt and Blaine by showing us just how hard it is to carry on a relationship when you’re still learning that it’s okay to love and it’s okay to want and it’s okay to have.

It’s remarkably deft. Now if Glee would just acknowledge that lots of girls of every stripe — cis, trans, and metaphorical — like and have sex too, we’d be golden. But that can probably really only happen once characters graduate and start escaping Lima; at WMHS femininity (which is generally defined as performativity) is always punished, early and often.

Just ask Quinn Fabray who has to put her gender on every day. Or Rachel “man hands” Berry who is punished for not being enough of a girl precisely because she is a girl. And how about Mercedes Jones who gets called lazy for being the size and shape typical of far more American women than not? Or Blaine who so often seems almost guilty over how he constructs and is rewarded for a masculinity he doesn’t seem to feel? And what about Kurt Hummel, who never asked for grace and sorrow and a kingdom of dead things he didn’t choose to pull him from the world of men.

Looking at it that way, lesbian bed death, even as it sort of explains it all, is really the least of the reasons no one at WMHS really enjoys being a girl.

Glee: Kurt Hummel has this death, mourning and magic thing down

You know I try very hard not to write about Glee episodes before they air, but a clip has just been released of the performance of “How Will I Know” that features some really key stuff around Kurt as WMHS’s mediator for death, yet again. It’s also a great and surprising arrangement of a song I never would have thought of in this context.

The clip opens, you’ll notice, with Mercedes, Santana, Kurt and Rachel gathering around a shrine to Whitney Houston at a locker (as Will Schuester looks creepily on).

While Mercedes begins the song, singing to a photograph of Whitney for advice and everyone is mourning it’s ultimately Kurt who is doing the actual work of it for his community by handling the artifacts of the deceased, enforcing the boundaries of grief (closing the locker), cementing the reality of death (blowing out the flames — gee, I think I remember Kurt and his boyfriend singing a breakup song about that) and presiding over the aftermath (the way he closes off the shot after he sits at the foot of the table following the three girls).

Don’t Turn It Off also rightly noted on Tumblr that Kurt is the only one snapping — he is the time keeper both of loss already transpired and the limits of what is now but not forever.

There’s lots of other interesting symbolism here — we’ve got a four horsemen thing going on; we’ve also got a three muses thing going on. At Delphi they were Nētē, Mesē, and Hypatē — the chords of a lyre, necessary fort he production of music. But the muses, when also assigned as three (instead of the common four or nine), can also be Aoidē, Meletē, Mnēmē — song, practice and memory.

Who can Kurt be here but an oracle telling us all things end, because all things already have? After all, he knows, because he’s seen it. He opens the drawers of his mother’s dresser to breathe her scent, to know the fumes, to see the future.

This number is likely the opener to the episode, and it seems clear that the four characters singing here are in pain personal, beyond Houston, as well. Rachel and Finn have ongoing problems; Mercedes is still in pain over what to do about Sam; we’ve been spoiled for some angst between Kurt and Blaine regarding the impending reality of New York; and Santana’s fear of losing love (And here’s another past song shout-out — remember the Adele mash up?) remains deeply prominent within both her history with Brittany and her unresolved drama with her family.

Connecting these personal pains with mourning for Houston is amazing. It draws a clear line under the idea that the social act of grieving for a public figure is actually an act of grieving for ourselves through the part of the sorrow that is about narrative and celebrity persona as opposed to the life behind that construction that the general public is not granted access to, even when they think they have been. That Kurt hangs Whitney’s picture in the spot all WMHS lockers seem to reserve for photos of boyfriends and girlfriends makes this idea of grieving for the self both particularly clear and poignant.

I’d ready the tissues and expect some magic.

Glee: Authenticity, Play and Adulthood

No matter how low the expectations or interest level many of us had for the promise of Glee doing disco, the fact is what seem like the biggest throwaways on Glee are often the episodes that matter the most. Some of this is because these episode are often the knitting — closing up plots and setting others in motion — but a lot of it is actually because Glee is a better show when it’s sneaky, and this ridiculous episode is mostly very, very sneaky.

Because at its heart, “Saturday Night Gleever” is about authenticity and arguing about authenticity. It has to be, because it’s about disco, and that’s what disco makes us do. Because while Will Schuester can talk, relatively correctly, about Saturday Night Fever being the story of a working class guy finding himself, that argument ignores the degree to which disco was, and continues to be, criticized for being more contrived and less inherently meaningful and authentic than the musical and social periods its sandwiched between.

By encouraging the kids to explore disco, Schuester is providing another not-getting-it teaching moment even if the kids don’t really have the conscious reference points to even know why they’re saying, “disco sucks.”

But no one on Glee has ever had to actually know what’s going on for the show to tell its story (remember, Blaine has no idea what he’s doing… and neither does anyone else), and so it’s absolutely a story about authenticity we get. Most obviously, that shows up in the Wade/Unique plotline which gives America some vague introduction to trans or genderqueer issues without actually using those words and just hinting, somehow, that this is something other than drag. (I am, as an aside, desperately curious as to how that read to an America that knows about drag but otherwise hasn’t gone beyond binary at all. Can anyone help me? because I have no idea).

Kurt’s mystified and uncomfortable, but that’s honest too — he didn’t handle bisexuality well either and queer identities outside of his own have always been difficult for him, which makes all the lovely, playful cuts to him and Blaine dancing together during key lines of “More than a Woman” immediately following the discussion about Wade’s/Unique’s identification particularly interesting.

In fact, Kurt’s reaction to Wade and Unique’s performance is also fantastic in how it recalls us to Kurt’s initial reaction to Rory’s falsetto (he was annoyed, because Rory was playing at what Kurt can’t avoid). It also helps explicate some of Kurt’s probably likely feelings behind his own part in the “disco sucks” moment. After all, it’s a genre which Unique finds a way to own without it being play but something more fundamental, while Kurt is probably stuck feeling irritated, at least if New Directions is as clueless on the difference between falsetto and a countertenor as much of fandom seems to be.

But as Kurt grapples with authenticity around identity and voice (which is a bit shocking since he’s always been our beacon of authenticity), let’s remember that authenticity is also on display for Santana, who wants what she wants at any price; Finn, who wants to stop being told what he wants because he doesn’t want to pay the price of adulthood; Brittany, who isn’t actually playing a game at all (she’s really the way she is, and she can show us the MRI if we don’t believe her); Rachel, who really only wants Finn to find his dream so it can confirm hers; Mercedes, who just wants to be done with WMHS; Schue who who really is a bit like a grown up Jesse St. James because he can’t hear anyone talking over the sound of his own issues (as he demonstrates himself to be an authentically bad ally to Santana and all the WMHS queer kids); and, of course, Blaine who just really, really wants to be liked as much as he likes everything around him.

But while the glee club is on a quest to find itself, most of what we’re witnessing is play, with numbers segueing in and out of heightened realities, dream sequences, and random fantasy moments. Very little of it is real, but that’s hardly surprising, because the kids are mostly still kids, and aren’t out in the wider world yet.

But the things the kids are playing at with all sincerity — Santana’s devotion to Brittany; Blaine’s ridiculous heart-eyed trust for Kurt in particular — are there not just to make us coo with delight (it was an often adorable episode), but to set us up for all the grown-up stuff that’s about to come crashing in on them in a way that shares at least some similarities with the Finchel storyline.

Grownup relationships in the grownup world are hard. And while the Finchel problem comes from wanting to be too grownup too soon without doing the grownup work of communication and knowing the self (which is to say the Finchel relationship may be showing us a real thing that happens but remains internally inauthentic), the Klaine and Brittania problems are going to come from that “no one can touch us” thing both couples think they’ve got going on.

Freedom, distance from Ohio, and other people like them — pretty much everything that the gay kids pin their It Gets Better dreams on — are all also about come with their own headaches, betrayals and questions about the self. I suspect those issues, which will also help set up some of the season four themes, will be on full display in the next two episodes.

From here on out, odds are nothing is funny, and the characters who know themselves will continue to school those who don’t, much as Wade/Unique does to Kurt. Authenticity will win the day (we’re looking at you, NYADA auditions), but some people will graduate still not realizing just how much they’re lying to themselves (hey there, Finn) while others will increasingly be shown to have it even less figured out than already revealed (oh Blaine, if only Cooper was your biggest demon).

Mostly though, for an episode with lots of delicious detail and micro-continuity glory that will probably matter more to the arc in retrospect once the season ends than we realize now, this episode was just painfully, painfully fun and has fandom asking all the best questions — like just what (or who) was Kurt thinking of when he eyed those sparkly platforms Sue wanted sent to Wade/Unique?

But all long-legged fantasies aside, fandom’s right, of course, that those platforms matter. Look at the composition of the shot, with the cheerleading trophy showing a female figure with wings (evoking faerie, again) in front of the glittery shoes.

Because let’s remember, the ruby slippers only became such for the film, and that Kurt’s always enraptured with his possible idendities in Oz. If home isn’t a place (and there’s no place like it), as Rachel tells Finn, but a person, isn’t the most fundamental home oneself? There’s that authenticity question again, this time sparked by Kurt’s sense of play even about serious things, that reminds the audience in a small, graceful and almost kind way that the people we pretend to be matter too.

(p.s., I use Wade/Unique throughout this piece because the character presents us with two identities and is dealt with throughout the script as such. It may be that we should be using Unique and female pronouns at all times; it may be that Wade/Unique is bi- or other gendered in a way where that might not be the best answer either, and I don’t feel comfortable making that decision when it’s intentionally unclear in the script, and I suspect the character and the related identity questions will be back soon, possibly with more clarification. And yes, as usual, I have a theory).

Glee: Someone wants your thinky thoughts

Since this has been showing up in my mailbox and comments for the last 24 hours, I thought I’d spread the word for the interested on this call for submissions for a scholarly anthology related to Glee.

The Fox television series Glee is nothing short of a phenomenon—hit show, sell-out concerts, extensive merchandising, chart-topping hits (eighth in digital sales), and a very passionate fandom. Glee is also simultaneously celebrated and disparaged for its tackling of timely cultural topics, such as bullying, coming out as gay or lesbian, and teen pregnancy. Much of this blurring of praise and derision centers on the program’s representations of gender and sexuality issues, like those previously mentioned.

This collection aims to illustrate how multiple fields of study inform, shape, challenge, and/or complicate gender and sexuality representations on Glee.

The varying types of diversity represented by the characters featured on Glee, as well as the ensemble cast portraying them, provides the opportunity to examine representations of gender and sexuality from multiple perspectives.

Deadline for abstracts is May 15, and the full call can be found at the Lambda Literary site.

Glee: Micro-continuity and you

One of the most common complaints I hear about Glee from people who watch it is about its supposed lack of continuity. And, while I’ll certainly grant that there are some major issues in that regard — characters’ ages and grades in school; the physical distance between Westerville and Lima; the mid-season plan changes around Sam and Blaine; and the show’s overwhelmingly inconsistent tone (comedy, drama, or satire? heightened reality or dream sequence? 90210 or DeGrassi?) — I think Glee also has some of the most remarkable continuity I’ve seen on television.

That continuity, however, is largely in details that only arguably contribute to the overall plot. When Santana insults Blaine’s bow ties in “I Kissed a Girl,” said bow ties then disappear from the scene for a bit. It’s trivial, but it’s also clever if you’re on board with Blaine’s desperate need for approval as a plot item that’s being set up but hasn’t been executed on yet.

Other moments of micro-continuity include Will saying that Terri “used to be filled with so much joy in high school,” which is innocuous enough, until you remember the show also tells us that Terri spent most of high school high on pseudoephedrine. (Thanks to mzminola on Tumblr for that find).

Brittany tells us in “The First Time” that her first time was in a tent. “Alien invasion,” she says, raising questions of consent. This type of vulnerability is underscored in a later episode when she tells Santana “I don’t know how,” in response to an instruction to lock a door.

Sam, despite the fact that he was originally brought on the show to be Kurt’s boyfriend (something that changed when the whole “Teenage Dream” thing rewrote season 2), also hasn’t been immune from the micro-continuity. He auditions for the glee club with “Billionaire” and, when he returns to it after having moved away because his dad got a job after they lost their house in Lima, sings “Red Solo Cup,” which includes a line about foreclosures by Freddie Mac. (Thanks to rena-librarian on Tumblr for that find).

Micro-continuity appears in the form of costume items, especially for Kurt. Watch for the moments that he wears brooches of things that fly — a pair of ducks or a single airplane — in seasons 2 and 3. They match to school transfers and other major events between him and Blaine. If he’s wearing the antique scissor brooch, expect him to cry and negotiate for his rightful place. And always, always track the hankies.

Sure, we all talked the red hanky, left side issue into the ground. But it was made far funnier by the appearance of the white hanky, right side after Blaine’s injury at the hands of Sebastian. Good to know Kurt was being gentle with him in his time of need (the info around that is in the comments of the linked post around the middle; outside of that discussion be forewarned that, that thread is intense and centers around Karofsky and consent issues).

Anyway.

Other bits of micro-continuity are less explicable, but as deeply rich. There is, for example, Kurt’s fear of vampires (thanks to actingjunkie on Tumblr for helping me find that).

Is this a reference to his allegiance to Team Jacob? Does it somehow hark back to Figgins’s issue with Tina? What is going on in that Regionals competition moment other than a particularly surreal way of underscoring Lima’s in ability to be fully sensitive to the matter of Dave’s suicide attempt?

I don’t know, but I’m enjoying Tumblr trying to figure it out (there’s been lots of hilarious threads about Kurt accidentally walking on his dad and Carole role-playing Bella and Edward during sex).

In light of these instances and many others like them, the idea that Glee lacks continuity seems more than somewhat absurd to me. It may lack useful continuity or the continuity you want, and its mid-course adjustments have certainly been clunky at best more than once, but it’s still definitely there.

Because Glee is also the product of a team that is obsessive about certain types of details and views writing and continuity as something done not just by the word people, but also by the costume people, the set people (Blaine’s bookshelves feature vintage cameras and a book about J. Edgar Hoover — coincidence that the episode featuring a previously unmentioned older brother is going to be called “Big Brother?” Probably not. Expect a surveillance theme or plot.), and, of course the actors.
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Micro-continuity has been used to foreshadow things like Dave’s suicide attempt, and is, I suspect, currently directing us to Kurt getting himself into some form of trouble in the very near future. After all, we had the episode in which Kurt mentions when he and the girls’ periods are due; followed by the episode in which he declares himself “tin roof rusted” by way of the “Love Shack” performance. Since Kurt’s not actually pregnant, what type of trouble is he in?

What are your favorite moments of Glee‘s micro-continuity? And do you think it’s this love of detail that keeps even people frustrated by the show invested? There’s something to be said for a program broad enough that we can project ourselves onto its characters easily even as it sometimes paints its world with a brush made from a single mouse hair.

(P.S., sorry about the title, but if I were at all a visual artist, I would have done this entire entry as an Emma Pillsbury pamphlet.

ETA: And she-named-nik has designed a pamphlet cover! I’m super tickled. Thanks!)

Glee: Being a girl is something that happens to you

If you follow me on Tumblr, you know I’ve had a not so secret desire to write a post here entitled “Kurt Hummel is Totally Having a Baby” ever since we were treated first to his crack about he and the girls not getting their periods until the end of the month. It was something which was only moderately funny until it was followed up in the Valentine’s Day episode with his shout of “tin roof rusted” during “Love Shack.” If you don’t hang out on Urban Dictionary, or aren’t of a certain age, I am here to inform you that, that particular non-sequitor has come to mean unexpectedly pregnant.

But what in the world could this particular bit of hilarity (which arguably started with Sue’s rejection of Kurt’s sperm during the opening salvos of her baby quest) possibly mean other than another excuse for me to argue that Glee, which is often criticized for continuity problems, has some of the best, if most peculiarly detail-oriented, continuity on television?

Odds are, probably nothing, but it did get me thinking about the ways in which ideas of obstruction and control are structured around gender on the show. Because in the world of William McKinley High School and Lima, Ohio, women — or more accurately, femininity — is punished early and often, usually by events that, rightly or wrongly, come as abrupt surprises to the affected parties. For the women, and the femininely associated of Glee, it’s tin roof rusted time all the time.

Quinn is probably the woman on the show most severely and obviously punished this way. While the possibility of pregnancy and the risks of texting while driving are arguably obvious to those of us sitting at home watching TV, they’re not necessarily obvious to a 17-year-old girl living in an environment where she’s sure the greatest thing she will ever accomplish is captaining the Cheerios while she dates, among others, a guy who thinks he got her pregnant via a hot tub.

Quinn’s pain may not really have external sources, but it seems so to her, and it certainly takes her by surprise over and over again.

Santana is another woman who gets hit hard by surprise. In her case, it’s in the form of outing, not just because Finn fights back when she starts in on him, but because what Finn says gets overheard and amplified in a way no one could predict. It’s not that it’s all over school, or all over town; it’s that it’s all over the congressional district.

Kurt, too, who is identified with and identifies with (but not, seemingly, as) the girls he socializes with, also experiences misery from unexpected sources: even when he seems used to the dumpster-related bullying of the pilot, he’s still startled when Dave slams him into lockers, knocks that cake topper from his hand, and, of course, kisses him. There’s little there, in his father’s heart attack (which positions him as an even more obvious care-taker), or in his election to the post of Junior Prom Queen, Kurt could possibly see coming (unless Kurt’s an Ugly Betty fan, in which case he should have totally had a clue).

Blaine, despite the passing narrative that surrounded him early in the season, and which I suspect we’re not done with yet, also has this femininely associated experience. Not only is there the Sadie Hawkins backstory, but the turn Sebastian’s predatory actions take is one he literally doesn’t see coming, and both sets of events clearly position Blaine as someone terrible things no one can prepare for happen to. That’s what it means on Glee to be a girl.

These sorts of events, and others (Brittany experiences “alien invasion;” Sunshine gets sent to a crack house; Beiste has her boyfriend stolen by Sue; and Rachel, even when nothing is wrong, is often convinced she is being actively obstructed by external forces she cannot effectively respond to) along with the agency feminine and femininely-associated characters are often denied on the show through circumstance, tells us something incredibly grim. But it is something that, I think, is in keeping with the idea of despair that the show has painted around the concept of Lima as a place to escape from, even as it claws at your ankles in every moment you’re busy trying to get out: to be a woman is to have things done to you and the only choices you have aren’t about changing those things, but merely about how you respond to the consequences.

And so we see Quinn beg, borrow, and engage criminally around access to her daughter. We watch Santana blackmail Dave into creating a quasi-safe closeted space for them both. And we watch Kurt bend not bow to circumstance, over and over again; often by keeping secrets and accepting, no matter how angrily, that pain is something he’s going to have to necessarily live with.

Really, it’s one more way in which Glee talks about consent issues without really talking about them, and it contrasts pretty markedly with how the pain the men on Glee experience is shown.

Because, while it certainly doesn’t make the pain less, the level of surprise when it comes to masculine pain on Glee, tends to be low (although this is not nearly as constant as the degree to which the female characters get hit with surprise!).

Puck gets sent to juvie because of his own choices; Will Schuester faces career dilemmas; Finn Hudson is in agony about a football scholarship he had to know he was never a shoo-in to get; Mike is in pain about parental disapproval that is anything but news to him.

But pain, and a lack of hope, for the guys of Lima is expected, and things only ever go really pear-shaped and get really scary when the unexpected befalls them, because its horror compounded: pain plus the suspicion and taint of stereotypical femininity — helplessness — implied by the mode of its arrival.

Certainly, we can look at what happens with Dave in “On My Way” and his response to it as particularly emblematic, not only of this dichotomy, but of the transitional and liminal spaces the show’s gay male characters often occupy in regard to these gendered modes of punishment, while the queer female characters remain firmly placed amongst the feminine, which is both an interesting comment on where women are in the privilege hierarchy and also frustrating for me as a gay woman who is not consistently femininely-identified.

As a guy who is both closeted and could pass as straight even if he weren’t, when Dave gets hit with the public, wide-spectrum discovery of his homosexuality, he loses the privileges not just of heterosexuality in the world, but masculinity in the structure of Glee. Things happen which he does not anticipate, he is beset by external forces, and his situation goes explicitly from that of someone who formerly executed his pain upon others, to someone things happen to.

The scenario is arguably as feminizing to him as the word scrawled on his locker in pink spray paint. After all, the public response to his homosexuality arguably convinces him of the thing his internalized homophobia and closely linked misogyny had probably been suggesting to him for a long time — that to be a gay man, isn’t to be a man at all (something not true, but seemingly true even to some of the most enlightened in Lima).

Dave responds to this by attempting to reclaim masculinity and control in the only way he can imagine at that moment — he dresses in a suit (reversing the change from monster to individual complex human in his revelation to Kurt, by explicitly recostuming himself, this time with masculinity) and trying to kill himself.

It’s a grim narrative, not just for Dave, but for everyone trapped in the stories Glee is telling. Those with feminine associations have come to expect that terrible things will happen to them to the point that they almost shrug many of these occurrences off; while those with masculine associations have become convinced that the worst thing in the world is to be a girl. And it’s a belief which isn’t just about misogyny in the world of Glee‘s Lima, OH, but also, seemingly, about common sense, which is what makes the cycle of belief illustrated so insidiously difficult to break.

As the senior class of 2012 at WMHS gets ready to graduate, I feel like I need a score card for who says in despair, “I knew this would happen” and who says in shock, “I don’t understand how this could have happened.”

In the second column? I’m expecting a check mark for Rachel Berry when she doesn’t get into NYADA.

Glee: Sex, death, the Anubis archetype, and Kurt Hummel

I’ve written before about the ways in which Kurt Hummel from Glee and Severus Snape from the Harry Potter books may be similar, with the critical difference being age and circumstance. We hope that Snape is the guy Kurt won’t have to turn into, because Kurt has, unlike the professor, family support and requited love.

But after an episode in which Kurt has once again has served as William McKinley High School’s chief functionary around death, I can’t help but want to bring up one of my favorite pieces of pop-culture analysis ever, Clunycat’s “Severus Snape and the Anubis Archetype: Smoke and Mirrors.”

It essentially offers us a checklist of items that allow us to see that Kurt also largely fits this Anubis archetype, although he is not so much yet a master of the underworld as Snape is, but a magician with the power (and need) to visit that underworld, and, eventually, leave it not entirely behind.

Traits that Clunycat points out as part of the Anubis archetype that would also apply to Kurt in her well-sourced piece include: intense introversion, being clearly marked out as other, a significant childhood incident, crying easily, and a collection of other traits that the paper notes could be viewed as commonly present amongst those on the autism spectrum.

This last detail I note specifically because there is a significant degree of speculation in Glee fandom that Kurt may be non-neurotypical in this or some other way because of his avoidance of touch, obsession around texture, tendency to fake eye-contact, use of finger spelling, habit of rocking, and several background interactions with Brittany that indicate they may each have a particularly clear sense of how the other processes the world.

Other traits that Kurt possesses that serve the Anubis archetype include his specific functions around death. Kurt, marked by his mother’s death, plans funerals from that of a pet bird (whose death leads to his own relationship blossoming) to that of Sue’s sister Jean. Both situations are striking because of how they hark back to the living. There is the visceral awakening sexuality of the kiss Kurt and Blaine share over Pavarotti’s casket; and there is also that chocolate fountain as a centerpiece at Jean’s funeral.

It’s food for the living that Kurt seems to bring in times of death, and that too is of the Anubis archetype, who serves as a messenger between worlds and a healer; in fact, Clunycat notes that the Anubis archetype heals by “charms and songs,” although that is a particular reference to Odin, another god of death referenced in the piece.

Kurt is also our public gateway between genders, sexualities and physical locations in the world of Glee. He is many types of messenger and he understands chaos, patterns, and intuition. Really, I can’t urge you to read Clunycat’s piece enough, because I’m leaving out literally dozens of connections I can draw between Kurt’s role and nature in the Glee narrative and the themes of this Snape-related article.

But, of course, to talk about Kurt’s role regarding death, we must talk about Kurt in relation to Dave Karofsky in episode 3.14. It’s a difficult episode, and I know there is a great deal of discussion around many aspects of it, including the idea of victim-blaming and whether it was appropriate or not to show Kurt having guilt regarding Dave’s actions and his own non-responsiveness to Dave’s calls, because Dave is not now, nor has he ever been, Kurt’s responsibility.

Without addressing at too much length what I think was a realistic response on Kurt’s part, even if understandably painful, triggering and murky for some viewers, I do want to talk about how this related to Kurt’s role in Glee as magician, as messenger, and as the boy who secretly rules a kingdom in hell and yet will also ultimately escape that place.

Kurt been kind and generous and sort of unable to let go of the Dave situation as he’s tried to make it into a pattern of events that makes sense and isn’t about his own personal worth, and so it makes sense that when Dave tries to kill himself, Kurt will be present for him, not only out of kindness, but also out of a desire to understand.

Kurt is also consistently drawn to death-related situations in Glee and volunteers his way into them when he doesn’t have to: Pavarotti didn’t need a bedazzled casket or funeral, and Jean was someone he essentially didn’t know, but when death shows up, so does Kurt. Sometimes he’s the person who helps us relate to the death that has transpired, and sometimes he’s the person who holds the door as Death exits the room having taken less than he came for (see: Burt’s heart attack; Dave’s survival; even arguably Blaine’s eye).

That Kurt doesn’t visit Dave until 72 hours have passed should be because of the psychiatric hold, but it’s Glee and we do know Dave has had earlier, prior visitors, at least based on what the God Squad tells us it plans to do and all the flowers in the room. So Kurt shows up appropriately late, after a symbolic three-day interval, to usher Dave back into the world of the living through a guided vision of the future. In the presence of death, Kurt once again provides sustenance to the living.

Kurt holds the door between life and death often in Glee, and it’s a door that swings both ways. At least it is for this boy who likes to open the drawers of his dead mother’s dresser to remember her perfume and who covers himself in oils and unguents as if they are the embalming fluids of Anubis’s trade to stave off age when he is still seemingly a child himself.

As Kurt continues to be a master around Death (because he is not a master of death; death can have no master and Kurt is still learning his powers besides), I think he gets an increasingly clear sense of control over Hell (life at William McKinley High School and in Lima). Look at how Kurt and Blaine sometimes express affection in public now; look at how his outfits have begun to reveal flesh; look at how much less rigid physically he is — this is a boy who is coming to life through the act of mediating around death. And with that control over his hell comes a knowledge for Kurt that he does have power in him, that he can get out, and abandon these realms that will also, always, be his home.

The real question for me is the one that Glee will probably never answer, unless its final episode of its final season is drawn like that of Six Feet Under: Who does Kurt grow up to be?

And I don’t mean to ask whether he becomes a fashion designer or a performer (both are roles that emphasize a chameleon-like nature, another essential part of the Anubis archetype) or whether he and Blaine stay together (I believe they do for narrative structure reasons as much as anything else, but that’s another post for another day).

What I mean to ask is this: How does a boy whose childhood has been defined by matters of sex(uality) and death, who has been a guardian of some terribly feared gates, learn to live in the world? And I think part of the beautiful answer, and part of why many of us love Kurt, is that he doesn’t, but that he’ll do it anyway.

Glee: A pause and a brief note about warning cards

One of the things I try not to do here is write too many posts about what I’m going to write about, as opposed to just writing the posts. And wow, what a terrible sentence that is to untangle.

But so much of what I want to write about regarding tonight’s episode of Glee is material that was in the smallest of details.

I want to talk about how the broadness of the show’s borrowed musical form means that much of the writing is done not by the writers but by the costumers and set dressers.

I want to talk about Blaine’s gender identity, again.

And I want to talk about, as I suspected I would have the opportunity to a few weeks ago when tonight’s narrative seemed to be coming down the pike, Kurt’s relationship with Death.

But it’s really hard to do any of those things without first acknowledging that tonight’s episode contained some very powerful and surprisingly visceral content regarding teen suicide. If you haven’t watched it yet, be aware that what is shown is more intense, and arguably graphic, than what I think we’re generally inclined to expect out of Glee.

I’m glad the show made the choices it made around the topic, even when the results of those choices sent messages (if stories send messages at all) that can be considered murky. I happen to like murky stories and while this was what we call “A Very Special Episode,” it still wasn’t an after-school special, so it worked for me. But quite understandably, everyone’s mileage may vary extremely widely on this one.

Because I want this to be a conversation somewhere other than Tumblr, it’s worth noting that the episode in which the show’s two main couples — Rachel and Finn, and Kurt and Blaine — lose their virginities received a warning card about its content that was displayed before the episode began.

The losing of said virginities in that episode, for the record, included a few conversations about the obvious topic, one instance of the word masturbation, some fully-clothed reclining on a bed, a bit of hand-holding, and Darren Criss’s eyelashes.

It was the least graphic thing I’ve ever seen in my life. It was barely a metaphor for sex, no matter how well executed; and it certainly didn’t portray sex, even soft-focus TV-style fake sex.

But tonight’s episode, which contained one of the most shocking representations of suicide I’ve ever seen on screen? No warning card for strong content or suggestion that this might be an episode that parents want to watch with their kids.

I don’t love a lot of the restrictions that exist around television content. I also don’t love a lot of the discussions around the topic, although they are necessary ones; they’re just ones that I find hard to do while also trying to deal with stories largely from their internals, and this is a moment to admit that weakness.

But this lack of a warning card tonight, especially when compared with “The First Time”? Is jarring. What happens in the first ten minutes of the episode is the type of material I am used to seeing warning cards for before episodes of other programs. So why wasn’t it there? And why was it there in the least sexy episode faintly about sex ever? Because I’m used to sex-related warning cards too, but not for content like that presented in “The First Time.”

Obviously, those questions are rhetorical, and we can all guess the answers (or discuss them in comments). But for now, I wanted to acknowledge this before taking some time to sit with the episode, because it brought home the thing that haunts me the most about the struggle for any sort of equality — not everyone gets to see the battle won, and that’s so agonizingly unfair.

In the next couple of days, I’ll write a few posts about some of the gorgeous detail work in “On My Way” that speaks to the themes I’ve been writing about here all season. But tonight, I need to pause, and I kind of need to say that I’m doing so aloud.

Glee: We’re all monsters here

Like most everyone else watching Glee, for me the big discussion topic in the aftermath of this week’s episode is Dave Karofsky, not that I was particularly surprised by his appearance. I called him as the secret admirer a while ago but wasn’t sure if he would actually be the guy in the gorilla suit. Since he was, this is a great time to talk about how Glee uses costume to define the monstrous.

In regard to Dave’s appearance in 3.13, it’s obvious; I mean, come on, he was dressed like a gorilla. But it’s also notable that we see the moment he takes the mask off. Partly, this is to shock us with the reveal (although from the first scene where Kurt cooed about Blaine being the secret admirer, we all should have seen this coming), but partly this is to show us that Dave is not what he once was. After all, he sheds the monster costume right in front of us, and Kurt, to declare his love.

There’s just one problem. It’s that Kurt’s right; Dave Karofsky is not in love with him. He’s merely transmuted Kurt from the symbol of all his problems to the theoretical solution to them. And so, while Dave is relatively non-threatening at this point (Kurt’s appalled, incredulous, and also saddened on Dave’s behalf, but what he’s not is afraid), the monster isn’t entirely gone. After all, we only see Dave remove the mask, not the rest of the suit, and Dave’s still bogged down in his self-hatred and fear, the resolution of which we’ll be seeing in next week’s episode.

But Dave and his gorilla costume (and seriously, how did he hatch that idea? Kurt likes grand gestures and theatricality, yes, but was this the best Dave could do? Or was it a knowing moment of self-deprecating humor meant as a nod to their history?), are hardly the only monsters in the world of Glee. Because on Glee, nearly everyone wears a costume, and nearly everyone is a monster.

The cheerleaders are monsters. So are the boys in their lettermen jackets. Sue and her track suits are another incidence of costumes as a sign of monstrosity. So are Will and his sweater vests. Tina and her days of terrorizing the rich fantasy life of Figgins with her faintly goth look is yet another fine, and hilarious, example.

And let’s not forget about the Warblers. Lots of people thought they were creepy when they were first introduced; I didn’t get it at the time, but I see it now. Uniforms and costumes worn off-stage are a bad sign on this show, and while I’ve speculated that Dalton has been corrupted from its role as refuge and faerieland since Blaine and Kurt’s departure, perhaps really their brief tenure there was the actual aberration.

Because Blaine’s no less monstrous now that he’s out of Dalton. Look at those ridiculous bow ties — he’s still wearing costumes and performing an identity that is viewed, rightly or wrongly, as threatening by others. He’s just a different type of monster now, and busy finding out what tools come with that role.

But, of course, it’s Kurt who wears some of the most costume-y attire off-stage, and he certainly has been framed as a monster at various times — for being gay, for expressing desire, for wanting friends. And in case you’re worried, this isn’t where I’m going to argue that Kurt is different, that he somehow isn’t a monster, because he totally is.

Because the issue on Glee is rarely whether someone is a monster, but what type. There are greater and lesser demons not only in Hell, but in William McKinley High School and in Lima, OH. Some monsters have great tasks and strange powers; some monsters are cruel, some chaotic, and some necessary; some are just negligible.

Monstrosity in the world of Glee is, essentially, about power. While the show’s overt message is that the kids who are branded losers are actually awesome, the covert message isn’t just that being Other is good, it’s that what scares other people about us is what gives us power, even if we don’t necessarily know how to recognize or harness that power.

It’s there in Figgins’s reaction to Tina; it’s there in the very scary play and threat between Santana and Sebastian; and it’s there particularly in Kurt’s interactions with Dave, because they are both boys who, at various points, have attempted to shed their monstrousness and in doing so, have ceded their power on at least temporary bases.

Kurt attempts to leave his monstrousness behind in “Laryngitis” when he drops the pitch of his voice, wears flannel, sings Mellencamp. But the song is terrible, and only when Kurt reclaims the voice, appearance, and interests that make him so conspicuously Other, so conspicuously monstrous, at WMHS, does he regain his power. While it’s not power he knows how to use, nor power that keeps him safe at that juncture, his ferocity is undeniable when he reclaims it.

Which is why I just can’t get worked about Dave showing up to declare his love for Kurt in 3.13. Yes, it’s inappropriate, and not just because of the past history between Dave and Kurt. The current actions are creepy in and of themselves; Dave’s gestures here are deeply unsettling when you remember that Kurt is being so trusting regarding the secret admirer only because he assumes the messages and gifts are from Blaine. I mean, does Kurt go to sleep with that little plush monkey (an avatar of Dave, we later realize) in his bed because he thinks it’s from Blaine? I’ve got a lot of sympathy for Dave Karofsky, but if I were in Kurt’s shoes, I’d freak out massively when that penny dropped for me.

But even so, in taking off the gorilla mask, Dave cedes his power to Kurt. He is no longer monstrous, and Kurt can hurt him far more than Dave can ever hurt him now. Love makes you vulnerable; in a place like Lima, OH, so does being anything but a monster; Glee draws a sharp line under this when Dave and Kurt’s conversation is overheard by Nick, a bully at Dave’s new school, and Dave runs out of Breadstix.

General speculation is that we’ll see Dave be the victim of anti-gay violence in the next episode. My own feeling is that that violence will be internal (self-harm) and not external (gay bashing committed by Nick) in nature, because of the stories Glee has already told, or at least mentioned, and because there’s been a lot of foreshadowing about gay teen-suicide particularly around queer characters that have committed acts of bullying themselves (Santana and Dave) in previous episodes.

But while I keep trying to figure out what happens next, I also keep coming back to this idea of monstrousness. As hard as the narratives that tell this story are, it’s an idea makes me smile. It says a lot about Ryan Murphy’s body of work (I have got to get back to American Horror Story), and it also says a lot to me about the stories I love; I once remarked, only half-jokingly, that in Harry Potter fandom, Severus Snape taught me everything I thought was horrible and unlovable about myself actually made me hot.

Not all monsters are evil. It’s an important message buried under a tangle of other stuff (there goes Glee and its consent-related narratives, again). Sometimes we’re all monsters, and, yes, that may not be good. But it can be okay, and knowing ourselves is, apparently, always the first step in that journey to own the power of monstrosity and to use it, if not for good, then not for evil either.

For some people and characters, it’s harder than for others; and Dave Karofsky is still at sea.

Glee: Power, union, and alchemy

To be really honest, I was dreading last night’s episode of Glee, not just because it looked terrible, but because I thought there wouldn’t be much in it that I felt qualified to talk about. But, instead of getting an episode that I anticipated would be both poorly structured and really offensive, we got some fairly high-quality knitting.

The knitting is all that stuff that happens that isn’t an event (prom, someone coming out, a proposal, a fight), that makes sure we get from point A in the past to point Z in the future without being totally confused. Yup, it’s that magic stuff called continuity that so many people argue Glee doesn’t have. Me? I think Glee has tons of continuity, but plays such a long-game that it doesn’t always execute on that continuity or prioritize the right bits of that aforementioned knitting.

But in the case of “The Spanish Teacher” I’m almost sure that even if we don’t have a lot to say about this episode now, it will be the episode we go back and revisit both at the end of 3.14 and at the end of the season, when we try to figure out just what it is that Glee‘s been trying to tell us. And what Glee is trying to tell us is a whole lot of stuff about life, death, growing up, and what you can and can’t leave behind.

In “The Spanish Teacher,” the key moments on this theme came from Emma, Sue, and Kurt, all three of whom have consistently been the only people able to act as guides in the underworld that is both WMHS and Lima, Ohio. But in this episode they also each point, not just to the now well-known to us signposts of this hell, but to the paths, long obscured, out. In each case those paths are explicitly about alchemy and about union with the self. This isn’t a new theme for any of the trio, but it’s the first time it’s been highlighted for each of them in the same episode during which they function, oddly, as Maiden, Mother, and Crone.

Let’s start with the Maiden. That’s Emma. She’s a virgin, and no one takes her seriously. The kids are generally boggled by her pamphlets (Mercedes is not a two-timing ho), and Will consistently condescends to her. Yet, not only is she the teacher to receive tenure at the end of the episode (and whose teaching is shown to be effective thanks to that hilariously uncomfortable scene in the locker room), she makes a critical pronouncement to Will mid-episode: “I don’t need you to take care of me.”

The things that make Emma arguably different — her OCD and its connection to her virginity — do not make her a child, and, in fact, give her power. There is power in what she says to Will, not just in the force of her voice, but in the transformative decision (Will’s surrendering of the Spanish teacher position) it sets into motion.

Emma, as Maiden, also has a critical talk with Sue, as would-be Mother. Motherhood and Sue aren’t new topics — she’s often talked about how she is like a mother to her Cheerios and her somewhat maternal interactions with Becky, Jean, Santana have been on display before. But after several scenes of comedy in which Sue ferociously goes after people she feels are putting her not-yet-existent family at risk, Emma confronts her about her desire to use Will as a sperm donor.

This leads us to perhaps one of the most affecting speeches ever performed on Glee, and one I am still unsettled by — Sue Sylvester is not someone I ever want to have cause to identify with. But when she talks, seemingly with enthusiasm at first, about how she walks around day-in and day-out, every hour of every day vibrating with rage, and then explains she never wants her child to experience that feeling, I shattered.

Sue knows exactly who she is, and what of her nature she cannot leave behind; she can, it seems, only seek to contain it, by moving into a new future, in which, as mother, she must protect the imagined child from the truth of herself.

All of which brings us to Kurt, that boy without a mother, who Sue calls out early in the episode when she doesn’t want his sperm saying, “Let the weird end with you.” It’s hardly a reference to Kurt’s homosexuality.

Rather it’s a reference to Kurt’s voice, face, clothes and affect. He is a witch, one of the three weird sisters — not just in the triumverate formed with Emma and Sue, but in his later interaction with Rachel and Mercedes, wherein the three of them pass bowls (cauldrons) back and forth. Kurt mentions that their behavior is “weird” (witchy) before deadpanning about all three of their periods not being due until the end of the month.

Sue, for all her cruelty, has always identified Kurt for exactly what he is. And, like Emma’s awkward but real connection to Sue, Sue has an awkward but real connection to Kurt.

Declared a witch early on, it is Kurt who goes to Finn in the wake of finding out about the engagement to Rachel and says at the end of a long speech, “Your time isn’t up, Finn. It’s just beginning.” Only Kurt, who has always been a master of death, as Crone, could make this declaration to Finn about the nature and duration of his life, at least conceptually. Although, if I’m right, Kurt is far from done mediating others’ relationship with death this season; keep an eye on 3.14.

Ultimately, “The Spanish Teacher” is an episode that tells us Emma is not too innocent to take care of herself; that Sue is not to cruel to mother; and that Kurt is not too removed from the world to fight the passing of things out of it. Each character displays self-knowledge, duality and personal acceptance, while many of those they interact with have not yet made that journey into the magic of union.

The real power of this episode, and these characters, won’t, I think, be clear until we’ve reached the end of both this block (through 3.14) and of this season. However, when we look back to define the themes of this year and the arcs of these characters, “The Spanish Teacher” will be the pivot point from which we should have guessed everything Glee‘s trying to say about power, surrender and the way forward.