Thinking About The Golden Girls
Mar. 24th, 2012 01:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
babydracoI've been watching the late night reruns of this show. I've always loved it but now I'm realizing why. It's not just that it was often genuinely hilarious and well written. It's kind of an example of a type of show that doesn't get made anymore.
I love the way the characters are named.
Dorothy: I think of Dorothy Parker and Dorothy L Sayers, in other words, sharp witted, opinionated female intellectuals.
Blanche: Obviously a shoutout to Blanche Dubois, the ill fated, quintessentially southern heroine of A Streetcar Named Desire.
Sophia: It means “wisdom”, and she frequently dispensed advice based on the experiences she'd had in her 80+ years (in between the nonsensical stories and snark).
Rose: Well, it speaks of someone who is traditional and romantic and sweet, but it’s also a little generic, the sort of name someone would pick for a baby found on the doorstep of an orphanage.
Additionally, the names “Blanche” and “Rose” mean “White” and “Red/pink” and seem to be found together a lot. My mother has two aunts named “Blanche” and “Rose”, and there’s also the tale of Snow White and Rose Red. A woman named Rose is an obvious counterpoint to a woman named Blanche. And it’s fridge brilliance that the one named Blanche is promiscuous and the one named Rose though she has a healthy sex life, is more monogamous and traditional, but it’s more important to note that she’s pure of heart and mind.
One thing I loved about the show is that it regularly passes the Bechdel Test. Not just in the way most shows do, either. See, it’s becoming clear that a lot of film school graduates have heard of this concept now, and you can see their clumsy efforts to acknowledge it. They write women talking to each other about something other than a man. Women get to talk about their jobs (especially if the show is set in the workplace, like Grey’s Anatomy or Law and Order) and they get to talk about clothes, and housekeeping, and their families and food and their health. These are all great topics, really, they are, and women do talk about them. But you know what other things women in real life talk about that they never discuss in movies or on tv? That would be art, books, music, comics, computer games, politics, religion, what they’re studying in school or what they’re watching on tv. They offer each other financial or technical advice, but they also get bogged down in ridiculous minutia that devolves into rambling nonsensical weirdness.
Most tv shows fail to acknowledge that. Because most writers are still male, and men have such trouble figuring out what women talk about, or when women write the scripts, the men who run the shows don’t care so much about scenes where the female characters discuss anything other than the plot. Men have this idea that women never allow themselves to get silly… mostly because adult women don’t allow themselves to be seen getting silly when men are around. Because men spend that time demanding in subtle and unsubtle ways that women pay attention only to them. So I think that a lot of women feel that allowing themselves to be silly in front of men causes them to lose dignity, and dignity is the only power they have in these situations? I don't know. But what I do know is that women talk about different things when men are around, which is why so many men don’t know how to write women talking about anything men don’t need to hear. It’s like they think women don’t discuss anything they read or watch or believe, aside from a few shallow comments.
Even on shows where the adult women participate in silliness or discussions of music and pop culture and stupid bar bets, like Seinfeld, Cheers, and How I Met Your Mother, it’s always, always, only in mixed company and initiated by the men. The bare minimum of two female characters, if they ever actually get scenes alone, will only discuss the actual plot. I realize that I spend most of time amongst very intelligent, highly intellectual, educated women interested in the world around them, but that’s just not my experience of how women talk.
The point of feminism is that women are people too, and that means that not every conversation we have needs to remain strictly on topic about practical matters when we're not gossiping about people behind their backs. We read books and watch movies and listen to music and have opinions on politics and theology, and we share those thoughts with other women. Even women who don't seem like they have opinions on those topics, do and talk about them with other women.
And my Holy Grail for tv or movie dialogue is women who not only talk to each other, about something other than a man, but have conversations about the books they’ve read or the movies they’ve seen or the music they like, just like they’re real people.
Joss Whedon is one writer who has done that. Especially in later seasons of "Buffy". I remember scenes where Tara, Buffy and Willow walked across their college campus having indepth discussions about their course material. Another time, Tara and Anya have a random discussion about playing the stock market.
Libba Bray is pretty good at it. And “The Golden Girls” did it constantly. They’d try to start out with dialogue about the plot, but then Rose or Sophia would derail it completely and it’d just be…a bunch of women talking about stuff they’re thinking about.
I love the way the characters are named.
Dorothy: I think of Dorothy Parker and Dorothy L Sayers, in other words, sharp witted, opinionated female intellectuals.
Blanche: Obviously a shoutout to Blanche Dubois, the ill fated, quintessentially southern heroine of A Streetcar Named Desire.
Sophia: It means “wisdom”, and she frequently dispensed advice based on the experiences she'd had in her 80+ years (in between the nonsensical stories and snark).
Rose: Well, it speaks of someone who is traditional and romantic and sweet, but it’s also a little generic, the sort of name someone would pick for a baby found on the doorstep of an orphanage.
Additionally, the names “Blanche” and “Rose” mean “White” and “Red/pink” and seem to be found together a lot. My mother has two aunts named “Blanche” and “Rose”, and there’s also the tale of Snow White and Rose Red. A woman named Rose is an obvious counterpoint to a woman named Blanche. And it’s fridge brilliance that the one named Blanche is promiscuous and the one named Rose though she has a healthy sex life, is more monogamous and traditional, but it’s more important to note that she’s pure of heart and mind.
One thing I loved about the show is that it regularly passes the Bechdel Test. Not just in the way most shows do, either. See, it’s becoming clear that a lot of film school graduates have heard of this concept now, and you can see their clumsy efforts to acknowledge it. They write women talking to each other about something other than a man. Women get to talk about their jobs (especially if the show is set in the workplace, like Grey’s Anatomy or Law and Order) and they get to talk about clothes, and housekeeping, and their families and food and their health. These are all great topics, really, they are, and women do talk about them. But you know what other things women in real life talk about that they never discuss in movies or on tv? That would be art, books, music, comics, computer games, politics, religion, what they’re studying in school or what they’re watching on tv. They offer each other financial or technical advice, but they also get bogged down in ridiculous minutia that devolves into rambling nonsensical weirdness.
Most tv shows fail to acknowledge that. Because most writers are still male, and men have such trouble figuring out what women talk about, or when women write the scripts, the men who run the shows don’t care so much about scenes where the female characters discuss anything other than the plot. Men have this idea that women never allow themselves to get silly… mostly because adult women don’t allow themselves to be seen getting silly when men are around. Because men spend that time demanding in subtle and unsubtle ways that women pay attention only to them. So I think that a lot of women feel that allowing themselves to be silly in front of men causes them to lose dignity, and dignity is the only power they have in these situations? I don't know. But what I do know is that women talk about different things when men are around, which is why so many men don’t know how to write women talking about anything men don’t need to hear. It’s like they think women don’t discuss anything they read or watch or believe, aside from a few shallow comments.
Even on shows where the adult women participate in silliness or discussions of music and pop culture and stupid bar bets, like Seinfeld, Cheers, and How I Met Your Mother, it’s always, always, only in mixed company and initiated by the men. The bare minimum of two female characters, if they ever actually get scenes alone, will only discuss the actual plot. I realize that I spend most of time amongst very intelligent, highly intellectual, educated women interested in the world around them, but that’s just not my experience of how women talk.
The point of feminism is that women are people too, and that means that not every conversation we have needs to remain strictly on topic about practical matters when we're not gossiping about people behind their backs. We read books and watch movies and listen to music and have opinions on politics and theology, and we share those thoughts with other women. Even women who don't seem like they have opinions on those topics, do and talk about them with other women.
And my Holy Grail for tv or movie dialogue is women who not only talk to each other, about something other than a man, but have conversations about the books they’ve read or the movies they’ve seen or the music they like, just like they’re real people.
Joss Whedon is one writer who has done that. Especially in later seasons of "Buffy". I remember scenes where Tara, Buffy and Willow walked across their college campus having indepth discussions about their course material. Another time, Tara and Anya have a random discussion about playing the stock market.
Libba Bray is pretty good at it. And “The Golden Girls” did it constantly. They’d try to start out with dialogue about the plot, but then Rose or Sophia would derail it completely and it’d just be…a bunch of women talking about stuff they’re thinking about.
