I Like to Watch

by Emily Nussbaum

  TRAUMA QUEEN

  Law & Order: Special Victims Unit

  The New Yorker, June 10 & 17, 2013

  This show is also women’s culture, whether we like it or not.

  Fifteen years ago, the rules changed when it came to sexual violence on cable television. With Oz and The Sopranos, television creators began to include rape, child molestation, and even torture as story elements. Dr. Melfi was raped by a stranger on The Sopranos; Gemma was gang-raped on Sons of Anarchy; Joan was raped by her fiancé on Mad Men. These shows weren’t averse to using graphic imagery for a queasy jolt, as on Game of Thrones, but they were also aiming for something deeper, a confrontation with real-life pain, done with adult directness.

  But all the while, on network television, another show was addressing sexual violence through a very different lens—the episodic crime procedural. Like The Sopranos, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit launched in 1999. It was a spin-off of Dick Wolf’s popular NBC crime series, with the familiar cha-chung sound and torn-from-the-headlines plots. But this iteration was pure red meat, dedicated to an NYPD unit investigating sexual crimes. (The original title was the blunt Sex Crimes.) It starred a powerhouse pair of actors: the tough, warm-eyed Mariska Hargitay as Olivia Benson, a detective who was conceived in a rape, and Christopher Meloni, who was best known as a sexually predatory sociopath on Oz, as her partner, Elliot Stabler. Together, they became a team as potent as Scully and Mulder, with a prickly chemistry that reflected shifting, unspoken notions of them as victim and predator, protector and protected.

  When the original Law & Order debuted in 1990, it starred no women; only under pressure from NBC did Wolf cast actresses (mostly stunning assistant district attorneys). In contrast, Law & Order: SVU felt like a woman’s show, at once prurient and cathartic, exploitative and liberating—with an appeal much like that of the old Lifetime channel, that pastel-tinted chamber of horrors. The audience was two-thirds female, young women for the most part—the same demographic that drives fan fiction, romance novels, and vampire stories. “Oh, you enjoy this, do you?” an angry john says in the SVU pilot. “Is this how you get your rocks off?” He’s talking to some detectives, but he might as well have been addressing viewers, for whom the show’s pulp appeal was addictive and shameful.

  But why am I using the third person? I’ve done my share of marathon-watching, soaking in the show’s titillating misery and puzzle-solving shortcuts. (If you recognize an actor, you can bet he’ll be the culprit.) Even bad episodes—and there are plenty—hold my interest. It’s fun to check off the clichés: the rotten rich kids, the weaselly husbands, the witnesses who won’t stop planting shrubbery while the cops question them. When I was pregnant, my unsavory addiction felt something like pica, the disorder that causes people to eat dirt and fingernails.

  SVU shares a certain amount of methodology with Nancy Grace, another television figure who feeds off tabloid scraps. This season included a script that was a pastiche of recent campus rape stories, opening with a hot drunk girl being assaulted by frat-boy predators. Although the episode ended on a stirring note, with silent protesters holding the school’s administration accountable for a cover-up, along the way it wavered uneasily, as SVU often does, between PSA and pornography. Cinematic sex has always worked that way: When you record something, you create a fantasy. At its greasiest, SVU becomes a string of rape fantasies, justified by healing truisms.

  On the other hand, a fantasy is a place in which the world is controllable. That’s the appeal of all fiction, but it’s even more strongly the allure of pulp. As in a dream, SVU takes the grisly stories that dominate the news—Steubenville, Delhi, the U.S. military, the torture house in Cleveland—and it reorganizes them, reducing the raw data to a format that viewers can handle. You can pause an episode, you can laugh at a bad guy. The cheesiness (cha-chung!) is itself a reassurance. For young women, who are endlessly bombarded with warnings of how to avoid assault, watching can feel like a perverse training manual. What is it like to be cross-examined about your sex life? Is there any way to foil a home invasion?

  For survivors, there may be something validating about seeing one’s worst experiences taken seriously, treated not as the B story but as the main event. But the show also has a strange therapeutic quality for any woman, a ritualistic confrontation with fear: It might upset you to watch one rape story, but it thickens your skin to watch a million. (As Bart Simpson once put it, “If you don’t watch the violence, you’ll never get desensitized to it.”) And, of course, the show is also a fantasy about something else, something largely out of reach: an incorruptible legal system, in which the police are eternally in the rape victim’s corner.

  * * *

  —

  After fourteen seasons, SVU is in crisis. The sole survivor of the Law & Order line, it’s got competition not only from cable but also from network shows like The Following and Hannibal. In 2011, the playwright Warren Leight became the showrunner, and, after contract negotiations failed, Meloni left the series. None of the new cast members has quite his magnetism, although the Broadway star Raúl Esparza is a major asset as the dandyish ADA Rafael Barba. “Objection!” Barba announces, when someone accuses Benson of being a man-hater. “Argumentative. And ridiculous.”

  As with any network procedural, the quality varies. A story based on Rihanna devolved into a bilious, puritanical fantasy of a pop star getting murdered. A few backstory episodes fell flat. Despite the show’s feminist bona fides, it’s striking how many stories have retrograde themes. In one, a classic “bad rape victim”—she lies, she cheats, she dresses trashily—is redeemed because she’s a good mom. In another, a workaholic detective murders a kindergarten teacher because she got what the cop couldn’t: a proposal and a baby. The dialogue can lean hard on stereotypes. “Detective Rollins, I’m Hashi Horowitz,” a lawyer who might as well be named Jewy Jewowitz announces. “The guy who’s going to get you out of this mishegoss.”

  Yet even flawed stories can be saved by great guest performances, including the one by Patricia Arquette as an aging hooker, Denis O’Hare as a tormented priest, and, in one of the season’s standout chillers, Hope Davis as a worried mother and the great child actor Ethan Cutkosky as her sociopathic son. The show has long made use of red herrings, hooking its audience with a “splashy” plot in order to make a political point, as in an episode that starred the real-life rapist Mike Tyson as a death-row prisoner and an icily good Ed Asner as a pedophilic summer-camp director. In the first act, the plot played off the Jerry Sandusky scandal, but it became, by the final scene, a story about poor black prisoners deprived of decent legal representation. Other episodes have used the same type of bait-and-switch to raise awareness about rape in the Congo and the backlog of unexamined rape kits.

  Still, none of this would work if it weren’t for Hargitay’s Benson, a Xena with empathy, the woman created from—but not destroyed by—rape. The worse the stories get, the stronger she becomes; it’s the show’s unspoken dialectic. Which made it all the more alarming when, in this year’s finale, the series broke its own rules, not by putting Benson in danger but by leaving her there. When I saw the opening shot—of Judith Ivey, pointing a camera in Central Park—my heart sank. Sure enough, the plot was drawn from the horrific recent rape of an elderly bird-watcher, but, even for SVU, the dialogue was gruesome overkill. Then it ended with a cliff-hanger: Olivia being held at gunpoint by a sadist, which left us to imagine her being brutalized until the next season begins. It felt like an imitation of another kind of television—Scandal or Homeland—and, instead of a meaningful risk, a betrayal. For all SVU’s excesses, we expect it to keep one promise: No matter how bad things get, the story will end.

  GRAPHIC, NOVEL

  Marvel’s Jessica Jones

  The New Yorker, December 21 & 28, 2015

  Any excuse to write about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 6.

  “I promise that I won’t t
ouch you until I get your genuine consent,” the sinister Kilgrave (David Tennant) announces on Marvel’s Jessica Jones, the latest tentacle to emerge from the Marvel universe. It’s a villain’s line, but it’s also one that carries a throb of multiple meanings. It’s Kilgrave’s vow not to hurt a woman whom he’s already brutalized. It’s delivered as if it were a romantic seduction. And it seethes with modern ironies, as if culled from a freshman handbook aimed at preventing sexual assault.

  Jessica Jones (played with a traumatized glare by Krysten Ritter) has, like her peers, supernatural gifts, among them extreme strength and the ability to jump enormous heights. (Her flying abilities aren’t quite there yet.) But she’s damaged goods, as the jerks might put it, having been scarred by her time in the good-guy business, when she was coerced into becoming Kilgrave’s girlfriend. Using mind control, Kilgrave kept Jessica in a state of total submission—dressed up like a pretty trophy, exploited as a sex toy, continually smiling at his command. In the aftermath of this nightmare, she’s found a gig more suited to her jaundiced mind-set: noir private eye. Holed up in her apartment, binge drinking, Jessica is a hostile basket case, barely keeping her PTSD in check, while she spends her nights tracking the ugly adulteries of strangers, confirming her dark view of the world.

  In this state of nihilistic freefall, she gets involved with a beautiful fellow superhero, Luke Cage (played by Mike Colter, best known as Lemond Bishop from The Good Wife—an actor with so much sexual gravity he could be his own planet). She tests the loyalties of her oldest friend, Trish (Rachael Taylor), who is a talk-show host and a former child star; Jessica also does investigatory gigs for a corporate attorney (a nicely metallic Carrie-Anne Moss), who is going through a bitter divorce from her wife. But Kilgrave still lingers on the fringes of Jessica’s life, wreaking havoc. His crimes are chilling: No matter what he says, his words get taken literally, as commands, compelling innocent people to stab themselves or to abandon their children, shove their arms into whirring blenders or never, ever blink. But it is always Jessica who is his real target, and his crimes are intended to send messages to her—a courtship, in his eyes.

  In early episodes, Jessica is a bit of a drag: She’s like the self-image of every brooding brunette, a hot punk Daria in shredded Citizens of Humanity jeans and red lipstick. But whenever the plot snaps her together with her horrifying ex, it springs to life, suggesting disturbing ambiguities about the hangover of abuse. Kilgrave raped Jessica, but since he did so using mind control, rather than physical force, the scenario emerges as a plastic, unsettling metaphor, a violation that produces a sense of collusion. Mind control is a roofie, but it’s also an addiction. It’s mental illness; it’s domestic violence. At times, the psychological scars that Kilgrave leaves on his victims, who gather in a support group, suggest the result of an extreme political ideology, the sort that might cause a soldier to commit atrocities that would never have occurred in isolation. It’s any mind-set that causes you to do something against your nature—a guilty burden but, also, for some, an eerie escape from responsibility. Jessica hates Kilgrave, so why, when he requests a selfie of her smiling, does she send him one? She has strategic reasons. But to the world it looks as if she were flirting—and that’s what he keeps telling her, too.

  It’s a particularly effective form of gaslighting, since he has cast her in a popular narrative, one that shows up in many forms these days, in books and movies, and particularly in stories aimed at and embraced by female audiences. Is it really such a reach for Kilgrave to insist that Jessica will succumb to him in the end? Tweak Kilgrave’s banter, and he’d be a wealthy vampire who desires Jessica above any other woman, a man who is literally irresistible, as in Twilight. Wrench it again, and they’d be role-playing Fifty Shades of Grey.

  “I am new to love,” Kilgrave tells Jessica. “But I know what it looks like. I do watch television.” Much of the reason their dynamic works is because of Tennant’s layered performance, which suggests a grotesque innocence beneath Kilgrave’s sadism, a distorted belief that this is true romance. It’s the ultimate in entitlement: He deserves Jessica because he desires her, which means that her own desires are just obstacles. (He won’t even take responsibility for the brainwashing, arguing that his supernatural powers are actually a burden: “I have to painstakingly choose every word I say. I once told a man to go screw himself. Can you even imagine?”) At times, their relationship reminded me of the Jonathan Coulton song “Skullcrusher Mountain,” in which a supervillain regards his hostage as a mysteriously recalcitrant date. “I made this half-pony, half-monkey monster to please you,” he croons. “But I get the feeling you don’t like it. What’s with all the screaming?…Isn’t it enough to know that I ruined a pony making a gift for you?”

  Of course, a modern TV show needs to be more than go-girl feminist to be any good. (If you doubt that, check out the disaster that is the pilot for Amazon’s Good Girls Revolt.) And, truth be told, Jessica Jones wasn’t entirely my jam. It took five episodes for me to get interested—three too many, in these days of television glut. Only after the seventh and eighth did the cruel and clever plot twists (which include graphic torture) become truly gripping. In the early episodes, the pacing was logy and the action muddy, with several subplots that itched to be trimmed or recast.

  Still, right away I could tell what was firing up so many viewers, particularly online: In the world of Marvel Comics, a female antihero—a female anything—is a step forward. But a rape survivor, struggling with PTSD, is a genuine leap. The fact that Jessica Jones is Marvel’s first TV franchise starring a superpowered woman—and that it was created by a female showrunner, Melissa Rosenberg—amounts to a pretty limited sort of artistic progress. But the show doesn’t need to be perfect in order to deepen the debate. In a genre format that is often reflexively juvenile about sexuality, Jessica Jones is distinctly adult, an allegory that is unafraid of ugliness.

  * * *

  —

  As I watched Jessica and Kilgrave spar, another show kept coming to mind: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the comic-book-inflected series that made me into a television critic and was airing around the same time that the original Jessica Jones comic-book series, Alias, came out. Buffy’s most divisive season was its sixth, when the villains weren’t the show’s traditional “big bads” but extremely little ones: three comic-book-loving nerds, Warren, Jonathan, and Andrew, who began as minor characters, precisely the type of geeky guys who bicker over the merits of TV adaptations of Marvel comics. Their gang, the Trio, was a goofy lark, designed as much to catch the attention of the superpowered Buffy as it was to defeat her. Only over time did they slide, in increments, into real crimes, attempted rape and murder. And, like Jessica Jones, the show was less obsessed with pure-cut violent misogyny than with the queasy intersection of seduction and mind control, with fantasies about overriding consent and the excuses that abusers make for their worst acts.

  On Buffy, this coercion took many forms, using overlapping occult metaphors: There was a Buffybot sex doll, a memory-wipe magic spell, and a supernatural roofie that Warren designed to turn his ex into his sex slave. The kinky, and also mutually abusive, relationship between Buffy and her bad-boy vampire boyfriend, Spike, kept shifting back and forth in meaning, with coercion and violence, exploitation and role play, combining into a toxic mess. Many viewers resisted these plots, finding them off-putting or, as Tumblr might have phrased it had it existed in 2001, problematic. But, in retrospect, that Buffy season, in all its gaudy perversity, its willingness to shock, feels underestimated. On Buffy, the truly dangerous people were the weak and resentful: That was the kind of person (often but not always a man) so ravenous for control that he’d embrace evil rather than risk rejection.

  Since Buffy aired more than a decade ago, that season has struck me as remarkably prescient, a rare confrontation with intractable questions of sex and power. Gamergate—the corrosive online cultural movement—might as well have bee
n founded by the Trio. Bill Cosby is nothing if not a vampire. The on-campus movement against sexual assault lives on the fault line of these stories, with the grayer area of blackout drinking at the center of a national debate. Even the recent revelations about the “boy-next-door” porn star James Deen feel related. He has been accused both of raping his girlfriend and of manipulating the rules of consent on porn sets, enabling him to abuse women in front of an audience. It all seems like a replay of the same nightmare scenario: Say yes to anything and you’ve signed away your right to ever say no. “I want everything to be my fault,” one female character says on Jessica Jones. “Means I have some control.” When the alternative is radical vulnerability, who can blame her?

  L.A. CONFIDENTIAL

  Behind the Candelabra

  The New Yorker, June 3, 2013

  A celebration of the depths beneath the surfaces.

  In Dave Hickey’s 1992 essay “A Rhinestone as Big as the Ritz,” the critic made a case for the neglected legacy of Wladziu “Lee” Liberace, superstar pianist and sometime cultural punching bag. Liberace’s joyful opulence, his disciplined showmanship, made him “a genuine rhinestone, a heart without malice,” Hickey argued. By spinning his flamboyant personality into fame, he managed to “Americanize the closet, democratize it, fit it out with transparent walls, take it up on stage and demand our complicity in his ‘open secret.’ ”

  Steven Soderbergh’s fabulous biopic Behind the Candelabra, on HBO, is a standing ovation for that argument, painting a nervy, empathetic portrait of a lifestyle (a word that actually fits the bill here) that might easily be seen as macabre. Candelabra hardly skimps on the grotesqueries—there’s a scene in which a plastic surgeon rotates Liberace’s ear to a soundtrack of the pianist’s own ragtime music—but it’s rooted in a love story, not only between Liberace and his young partner, Scott Thorson (on whose memoir the film is based), but between the creators and the period they portray: Hollywood, post-Stonewall, pre-AIDS, a few years before any major star was “out.” It’s a culture teetering on extinction, first because the “gay plague” soon eroded the ability of figures like Rock Hudson to keep their sexuality private, and then because of what followed: the triumph of a social movement predicated on proud visibility. Yet there’s no room here for Boys-in-the-Band self-loathing: As the man who invented the convention of winking into the camera, Soderbergh’s Liberace is confident that, in some more significant sense, he’s got nothing to hide. His was a closet that had its own pleasures, particularly since he had the resources to decorate it to his specifications.