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So I was watching Lost last night and something struck me about the show’s female characters (Kate, Shannon, Sun and Claire).
One of the things that's so fun to watch on this show for me is the way that once set into this primitive environment all the men (er...except maybe one) feel the need to prove themselves a necessary contributor to the community. It's not just that every guy has a talent, it's that every guy needs to prove to himself that he's a man by finding his strength: Hurley makes the golf course, Michael knows about engineering, Charlie gets Jack out of the cave and kicks his heroin habit (I wonder if he'll become a sort of bard, being a musician), Jin catches fish, Sayid is a communications expert, Locke catches boar, tracks and hands out Vision Quests and Jack does everything else. Of the last two men, Boone desperately TRIES to find ways to prove himself and Sawyer makes a big deal of refusing to do that just because he's supposed to.
But what of the women? They feel no such need, but busy themselves with domestic tasks that often no one asked them to do. Look at Sun, for example. She's been invaluable finding herbs for medicine and even started a garden and a grove, but there's no hint that she felt she had to do this to prove to herself and the community that she's useful. She just does it because she can and it seems helpful. It needs to be done.
I have a hard time breaking the men on the Island down into really clear groups. Some are more the main characters, some are involved in different stories, some get along with others, but they don't sort themselves out to be the way the women did last night into two easy groups. All the four main female characters are characterized through their relationships to men. (As opposed to the number of male characters defined by their relationships to women which as of now seems to be a whopping ONE character: Boone, and he's attached himself to Locke the first chance he got). Two are passive and two are active.
Sun and Claire—The Passive.
Sun and Claire's stories are remarkably similar when you think about it. Both are upfront with men, trust in men's promises, and wind up trapped. In Sun's case, she chose a man for a partner who was not part of her father's world. He promised to remain that way and take her away from that world, too. Then he changed his mind. He wanted to buy her things; he became her father's creature. Once this happened Sun was pretty much trapped. She loved her husband, she was married; she had no power over her own. She just didn't have that much control in her world. Sun asks Kate, "haven't you ever lied to the man you love?" as if this is a universal bonding experience for all women, but Sun's lie was very different from any of Kate's so far. "Sun only lied when it was clear her husband now belonged to her father and "I'm not going to tell him I learned English because I was planning to leave him once. It would hurt his feelings," is a different sort of lie than, "I lied to him so he wouldn't find out I'm a criminal and because he might not do what I wanted if I told him the truth." They're both lies, but that's not the whole story.
Claire also relies on a man's word. Her boyfriend tempts her with a similar illusion of a family by telling her they will raise their child together. Then he changes his mind and leaves her. Like Sun, Claire has little control over her situation: she's going to have a baby. Like Sun, Claire must start taking action for her own survival. On the island, Sun and Claire are both good providers in the very traditional female sense, imo, since they're both fertile. Sun brings forth food and medicine from the soil, Claire is having a baby—a very special baby, it seems. They're even both associated with sort of non-scientific stuff. Sun provides alternative medicine, as opposed to Jack's prescription bottles, the kind that might be considered flaky off the island. Claire goes to psychics and does astrological charts, which are considered flaky everywhere, even when they're accurate, as Claire's seem to be.
Shannon and Kate—The Active
Kate and Shannon are also remarkably similar. Both compulsively manipulate and trick men into doing what they want. Shannon's manipulation is laid out for us the day her stepbrother challenges her to catch a fish and Shannon flirts with Charlie to get him to do it. Boone is disgusted (and we can especially see why now!). To Shannon getting something done literally means finding a man and, through deceit and false promises of sex, getting him to do it for you. (In the end Shannon gets her fish, but it's Charlie who's learned to fish.) When we learn Shannon's back story we see she does this on a far grander scale than we ever might have imagined, manipulating men through their desire for sex and their heroic impulses. Such a vampire is Shannon that the idea of her dead leaves her stepbrother feeling relieved. (The show seems to already have realized that the way to challenge Shannon's character is to force her to do things for others —who knows what effect Sayid will have on her.;-) )
Kate's really not all that different. On the island she shuttles between Jack and Sawyer, turning to one when whatever she needs done won't be done by the other. When she spots the suitcase holding something she wants under the water she doesn't draw Sawyer's attention from it and come back by herself, she says, "Help me get that." (He gets it for her.) When she's unable to get the suitcase back from Sawyer she starts lying to Jack about why she wants it. Both men offer to give her the suitcase if they can see what's inside it, but she continues to lie, even though whatever it is she likes about that plane isn't visible to the naked eye.
In flashbacks we see Jack and Sawyer are just two more in a line of men Kate has enlisted to get at the toy plane inside the suitcase. She lies to and sleeps with a punk to get him to plan the bank robbery with her, then lies to a bank manager to place herself in the building when he arrives. Once a holdup's in progress she plays up to the bank manager's sense of heroism by having her "boyfriend" slap her around—this after covering up her failure to help the same bank manager by playing the damsel in distress who "doesn't know how to shoot a gun." When her "boyfriend" crosses her personal lines (by threatening to murder someone) she suddenly turns heroic and shoots him and his friends. "I told you you shouldn't trust her," one of the bank robbers growls, and clearly he's right. The other man Kate heroically saved, an Australian farmer with whom she lived, was also put into danger by Kate herself when she drove his car off the road to escape the police. Back on the island, the only explanation she'll give for why she wants the little toy plane once Jack sees it is that it belonged to the man she loved/killed, suggesting another man who wound up dead because he got involved with her.
Interestingly, so far Kate is obviously the Alpha Girl on the show, which suggests this kind of behavior makes her cool. She's active in ways Sun and Claire or not; she manipulates men into doing things for her instead of just relying on men to do things for her like they've promised. Yet look at the one man who follows the same kind of code: Sawyer. Sawyer, too, gets money by tricking others out of it, often through sex. Only with Sawyer it's part of his generally being a slimeball. Sex appeal aside, the show always suggests Sawyer is ''less of a man'' than Jack, or most of the other men on the show. He seems to fill a sort of Omega Wolf position on the Island (I think that's what it's called—the Omega) and he knows it. When Boone is in disgrace Sawyer points out that for the first time he knows what it's like to be Sawyer—and Boone immediately begins trying to make up for his mistake.
The other thing about Sawyer is that he knows his own behavior is disgusting. He revels in it. He even carries out a letter he wrote to remind him that he's become the thing he hated, in case he forgets that he hasn't taken on the name of the thing he hates as well. When Sawyer can't go through with a con, it's because he sees a little boy in the same position as he was and refuses to do to that boy what was done to him. He leaves the money he was about to steal and just walks out. This act, imo, seems nobler than Kate's own moments of remorse. Sawyer makes a decision to walk out of the house with nothing. Kate just sort of gets cold feet so she's not going farther than she wants to go. Sawyer ultimately does protect the boy he wants to protect. Kate tends to leave everybody wounded somehow. Wounded, but not dead if she can help it.
I'm not sure what this says in any grand way yet. I mean, it seems natural to me that in this kind of environment people would revert to more old-fashioned gender roles to an extent, and I enjoy watching the men trying to be men. I think the women could be just as interesting. Maybe it's just that since the show is so male centered, with more male characters, it just relates more to women-as-male-appendages more than women at this point. Even Wise Old Woman Margaret (Martha? ETA: Rose??) is defined through the husband she doesn't think is dead, before she's a mother figure for LostBoy!Charlie. I seem to remember a conversation between Kate and Claire where Kate seemed almost uncomfortable conversing with this other female. Kate and Shannon don't get along. Until recently Sun couldn't speak to any other female anyway. She and Kate now work on the garden together, but it seems like Kate's there just to give her another place for Jack to come looking for her. If the two of them wind up bonding the way the male pairs do I'll be surprised. I think I'd prefer a friendship between Sun and Claire, actually.
Maybe it just seems one has a better chance of not being maimed being friends with Claire—okay, I guess Charlie was. But Claire didn't do anything to cause that to happen. As usual, she was passive.
One of the things that's so fun to watch on this show for me is the way that once set into this primitive environment all the men (er...except maybe one) feel the need to prove themselves a necessary contributor to the community. It's not just that every guy has a talent, it's that every guy needs to prove to himself that he's a man by finding his strength: Hurley makes the golf course, Michael knows about engineering, Charlie gets Jack out of the cave and kicks his heroin habit (I wonder if he'll become a sort of bard, being a musician), Jin catches fish, Sayid is a communications expert, Locke catches boar, tracks and hands out Vision Quests and Jack does everything else. Of the last two men, Boone desperately TRIES to find ways to prove himself and Sawyer makes a big deal of refusing to do that just because he's supposed to.
But what of the women? They feel no such need, but busy themselves with domestic tasks that often no one asked them to do. Look at Sun, for example. She's been invaluable finding herbs for medicine and even started a garden and a grove, but there's no hint that she felt she had to do this to prove to herself and the community that she's useful. She just does it because she can and it seems helpful. It needs to be done.
I have a hard time breaking the men on the Island down into really clear groups. Some are more the main characters, some are involved in different stories, some get along with others, but they don't sort themselves out to be the way the women did last night into two easy groups. All the four main female characters are characterized through their relationships to men. (As opposed to the number of male characters defined by their relationships to women which as of now seems to be a whopping ONE character: Boone, and he's attached himself to Locke the first chance he got). Two are passive and two are active.
Sun and Claire—The Passive.
Sun and Claire's stories are remarkably similar when you think about it. Both are upfront with men, trust in men's promises, and wind up trapped. In Sun's case, she chose a man for a partner who was not part of her father's world. He promised to remain that way and take her away from that world, too. Then he changed his mind. He wanted to buy her things; he became her father's creature. Once this happened Sun was pretty much trapped. She loved her husband, she was married; she had no power over her own. She just didn't have that much control in her world. Sun asks Kate, "haven't you ever lied to the man you love?" as if this is a universal bonding experience for all women, but Sun's lie was very different from any of Kate's so far. "Sun only lied when it was clear her husband now belonged to her father and "I'm not going to tell him I learned English because I was planning to leave him once. It would hurt his feelings," is a different sort of lie than, "I lied to him so he wouldn't find out I'm a criminal and because he might not do what I wanted if I told him the truth." They're both lies, but that's not the whole story.
Claire also relies on a man's word. Her boyfriend tempts her with a similar illusion of a family by telling her they will raise their child together. Then he changes his mind and leaves her. Like Sun, Claire has little control over her situation: she's going to have a baby. Like Sun, Claire must start taking action for her own survival. On the island, Sun and Claire are both good providers in the very traditional female sense, imo, since they're both fertile. Sun brings forth food and medicine from the soil, Claire is having a baby—a very special baby, it seems. They're even both associated with sort of non-scientific stuff. Sun provides alternative medicine, as opposed to Jack's prescription bottles, the kind that might be considered flaky off the island. Claire goes to psychics and does astrological charts, which are considered flaky everywhere, even when they're accurate, as Claire's seem to be.
Shannon and Kate—The Active
Kate and Shannon are also remarkably similar. Both compulsively manipulate and trick men into doing what they want. Shannon's manipulation is laid out for us the day her stepbrother challenges her to catch a fish and Shannon flirts with Charlie to get him to do it. Boone is disgusted (and we can especially see why now!). To Shannon getting something done literally means finding a man and, through deceit and false promises of sex, getting him to do it for you. (In the end Shannon gets her fish, but it's Charlie who's learned to fish.) When we learn Shannon's back story we see she does this on a far grander scale than we ever might have imagined, manipulating men through their desire for sex and their heroic impulses. Such a vampire is Shannon that the idea of her dead leaves her stepbrother feeling relieved. (The show seems to already have realized that the way to challenge Shannon's character is to force her to do things for others —who knows what effect Sayid will have on her.;-) )
Kate's really not all that different. On the island she shuttles between Jack and Sawyer, turning to one when whatever she needs done won't be done by the other. When she spots the suitcase holding something she wants under the water she doesn't draw Sawyer's attention from it and come back by herself, she says, "Help me get that." (He gets it for her.) When she's unable to get the suitcase back from Sawyer she starts lying to Jack about why she wants it. Both men offer to give her the suitcase if they can see what's inside it, but she continues to lie, even though whatever it is she likes about that plane isn't visible to the naked eye.
In flashbacks we see Jack and Sawyer are just two more in a line of men Kate has enlisted to get at the toy plane inside the suitcase. She lies to and sleeps with a punk to get him to plan the bank robbery with her, then lies to a bank manager to place herself in the building when he arrives. Once a holdup's in progress she plays up to the bank manager's sense of heroism by having her "boyfriend" slap her around—this after covering up her failure to help the same bank manager by playing the damsel in distress who "doesn't know how to shoot a gun." When her "boyfriend" crosses her personal lines (by threatening to murder someone) she suddenly turns heroic and shoots him and his friends. "I told you you shouldn't trust her," one of the bank robbers growls, and clearly he's right. The other man Kate heroically saved, an Australian farmer with whom she lived, was also put into danger by Kate herself when she drove his car off the road to escape the police. Back on the island, the only explanation she'll give for why she wants the little toy plane once Jack sees it is that it belonged to the man she loved/killed, suggesting another man who wound up dead because he got involved with her.
Interestingly, so far Kate is obviously the Alpha Girl on the show, which suggests this kind of behavior makes her cool. She's active in ways Sun and Claire or not; she manipulates men into doing things for her instead of just relying on men to do things for her like they've promised. Yet look at the one man who follows the same kind of code: Sawyer. Sawyer, too, gets money by tricking others out of it, often through sex. Only with Sawyer it's part of his generally being a slimeball. Sex appeal aside, the show always suggests Sawyer is ''less of a man'' than Jack, or most of the other men on the show. He seems to fill a sort of Omega Wolf position on the Island (I think that's what it's called—the Omega) and he knows it. When Boone is in disgrace Sawyer points out that for the first time he knows what it's like to be Sawyer—and Boone immediately begins trying to make up for his mistake.
The other thing about Sawyer is that he knows his own behavior is disgusting. He revels in it. He even carries out a letter he wrote to remind him that he's become the thing he hated, in case he forgets that he hasn't taken on the name of the thing he hates as well. When Sawyer can't go through with a con, it's because he sees a little boy in the same position as he was and refuses to do to that boy what was done to him. He leaves the money he was about to steal and just walks out. This act, imo, seems nobler than Kate's own moments of remorse. Sawyer makes a decision to walk out of the house with nothing. Kate just sort of gets cold feet so she's not going farther than she wants to go. Sawyer ultimately does protect the boy he wants to protect. Kate tends to leave everybody wounded somehow. Wounded, but not dead if she can help it.
I'm not sure what this says in any grand way yet. I mean, it seems natural to me that in this kind of environment people would revert to more old-fashioned gender roles to an extent, and I enjoy watching the men trying to be men. I think the women could be just as interesting. Maybe it's just that since the show is so male centered, with more male characters, it just relates more to women-as-male-appendages more than women at this point. Even Wise Old Woman Margaret (Martha? ETA: Rose??) is defined through the husband she doesn't think is dead, before she's a mother figure for LostBoy!Charlie. I seem to remember a conversation between Kate and Claire where Kate seemed almost uncomfortable conversing with this other female. Kate and Shannon don't get along. Until recently Sun couldn't speak to any other female anyway. She and Kate now work on the garden together, but it seems like Kate's there just to give her another place for Jack to come looking for her. If the two of them wind up bonding the way the male pairs do I'll be surprised. I think I'd prefer a friendship between Sun and Claire, actually.
Maybe it just seems one has a better chance of not being maimed being friends with Claire—okay, I guess Charlie was. But Claire didn't do anything to cause that to happen. As usual, she was passive.
From:
no subject
Shannon is like fingernails on the chalkboard for me. Call it unresolved childhood issues, but egad she reminds me of all the girls who made elementary school and jr high so unbearable for me. I'm intrigued by your explanation of why you like her tho - I'll have to see if this improves my experience of her. I did find her interaction with Sayid interesting in last week's ep.
Rose is in fact a Machiavellian Evil Supervillain, and the rest of the season could be about her eternal battle with Locke to rule the island's super sekrit power.
Wow, I want you to write for the show. :) JJ does like bizarre twists, so Machiavellian!Rose is probably more possible on his show that in the hands of any other writer. I really like her as she is, but making her a supervillain would make me so happy.
From:
no subject
Heh, its gets a lot of comments.
And don't get me wrong, it's not that I like Shannon. I knew quite a few girls like her at school to (seems that type is universal for all countries), and she's not someone I could see myself getting on with. But when I contrast the way she's written and presented with Kate, she comes off infinetely better, since the writers seem actually aware of her flaws.
Also, I think she has some potential for character growth in the island, and I am a sucker for 'shallow characters acquiring layers' type stories.
From:
no subject
Shannon is just such an obvious leech that might take away some of the power she would have in real life. I mean, even here they made sure to give her one truly useful thing and that is what's driven all her real stories--her ability to speak French. Her tan, her pedicure, her cuteness...that stuff really doesn't do much for her.
Clearly the show knows what poison she is, given her own brother realizes he'd kind of prefer her dead.