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selenakAmong of its many virtues, Manhattan has this: enough female characters so that none of them has to bear the burden of being The Girl, i.e. the sole presentative of women in the narrative, whose actions and story are therefore read as somehow standing for the writers' opinions about all women, instead of simply the story of one particular woman. Liza Winters and Abby Isaacs are two of several, and thus each of their stories can be taken on its own value.
Their stories intersect only rarely, and their personal interactions take place solely at the beginning of the season, when Liza makes an effort to be welcoming to the new couple, only for the shared dinner to end in a social disaster due to their husbands' mutual antipathy. It's perhaps telling that neither of them makes an effort to develop a relationship of their own after this; not because they can't think for themselves or have relationships their husbands disapprove of, or aren't interested in other people. The very next thing Abby does is to befriend another woman and develop an intense relationship with her. But I find it worth noting that Liza, who suffers under the reduction of her existence from acclaimed scientist in her own right to "the wife" of one, has her confidential, soul baring conversations with other (male) scientists (Glen Babbitt and Nils Bohr). I don't think Liza has a single scene with the other prominent female scientist in the narrative, Helen, which can't be because Helen works for her husband; so does Glen Babbitt. It's not until the very end of the season, when Liza tries to convince the civilian council that it should not just rubberstamp the military's way of ruling the camp, and pays her condolences to the just widowed Rose Akley, that we see her interact with other women in a significant way again. By which I don't mean that Liza has internalized misogyny, but that her sense of self is very much tied to being a scientist, this is constantly frustrated due to her current situation, and I wouldn't be surprised if she didn't subconsciously or consciously asociate interaction with the other women in Los Alamos with giving in and conceding. And of course there's the painful secret of her having been institutionalized in the past, which won't lose its power until she outs it to the world at the end of the season.
(Liza does interact with her female Navajo housekeeper, Paloma, and attempts to learn Spanish in order to communicate better, in marked contrast of both female and male people at Los Alamos. But the problem there is not only that this relationship, too, is burdened with secrets - since Paloma has an affair with Liza's husband -, but also that Liza, the one time she visits Paloma's house, acts so well-intentionally entitled that it has lady-of-the-manor written all over it. Paloma quits shortly after.)
Through the season, Liza is presented as a seeker of truths, using her scientific background to figure out what exactly is going on in Los Alamos, and as an implicit, then explicit rebuttal of her husband's "the end justifies the means" belief. In a searing narrative irony, she's also standing on an ever shifting ground of uncertainties and deceptions - both the Colonel and her husband gaslight her at one point, then her mental illness makes a comback and she can't really trust her own perceptions, and even the climactic moment of (re)connection, when Frank finally starts to tell her the truth, is also wrapped in a lie, which he tells as soon as Liza leaves, plus the very act of his telling is both truth - he does want to tell her - and deception - he's aware already of them being listened to. Not to mention that the very act of learning the truth will make Liza tied even more to deception, since there's no way the military can let her be free outside Los Alamos now, whatever becomes of Frank. And yet her seasonal story does end in an unambiguously positive moment of truth revelation, too: just not about Los Alamos, but about herself. Liza telling everyone the truth about her mental history and being voted for as a voice for the civilians not regardless but because of this courage may be the most blatantly retroutopian moment of the show, and yet it feels also earned and direly necessary.
If Liza through the season is seeking for hidden truths, Abby does the opposite but finds them nonetheless. Come to think of it, Abby is in many ways constructed as Liza's opposite: young and newly married to Liza's middle age and long term marriage, never having had a job pre Los Alamos to Liza's ambitious scientist whom her husband and Bohr see as destined for the Nobel Prize one day, the spoiled daughter of indulgent parents who never seems to have had a care in the world before to Liza's history of having been in an institution, something which her family had to have allowed (and since it predates Frank, it had to be her parents). Liza maybe lied to by her husband for professional reasons for most of the show, but she knows Frank inside out. Abby gets far fewer lies (though she gets some) from Charlie, but for all their newly married giddiness at the start, you don't have the impression they know each other very well, and will so less and less as the season proceeds. Abby certainly isn't into self knowledge, either; she starts the season as a conformist who would be perfectly happy being the decorative wife of a successful scientist.
But it's Abby who keeps being confronted with the secrets she's not looking for. First by the very nature of the job she takes (out of boredom), being a telephonist and thus prone to both the intimate and professional chatter of the camp, and part of a spy system since she's told (like all the telephonists) to be alert and report the use of certain terms and phrases. Then through her friendship-turning-into-love-affair with another woman, Elodie, which has her discovering not only part of her sexuality she hadn't been aware of but also a world of the imagination she hadn't accessed before. (It's telling about their relationship that when Charlie finds her reading Beaudelaire, he just makes a joke about how she reads the fashion magazines for the photos, but doesn't wonder where this new interest into French poetry comes from.) And just after an expressed refusal of seeing herself as part of a Jewish community, of insisting on being a Jew in name only, she's presented with the most ghastly "secret" of all, a file on the extermination of Jews in the ongoing Holocaust. The self knowledge and self examination she hadn't looked for keeps coming at her from all directions, and it still hasn't finished. Something all the charaters of the show discover is that they themselves are capable of, and by far not solely in the positive sense. When Charlie asks/tells Abby to frame her friend Elodie's husband in order to get rid of a threat at work, she's shocked and refuses. But then she ends up doing it, not for Charlie but because she's coming so close to running away with Elodie that the two of them are already making plans as to possible destinations. Framing Elodie's husband removes not just him but Elodie from Los Alamos, and thus the temptation to break entirely with everything Abby ever thought she wanted and risk all for an utterly uncertain future. The last image of Abby in the season we have is of her wandering through Elodie's deserted house, where she had placed the false evidence, and being confronted by another woman who is basically Abby herself only a few months ago: a cheerful new arrival, trivially chattering away, ready to move in. Abby hits her.
Simultanously, Charlie - who by then has his own affair - has finally found out about Abby and Elodie and is promoted to project leader. Which means Abby ends up in the position she once wanted - wife of a succesful man - under the worst circumstances imaginable: her marriage has become a sham, neither she nor Charlie were the people they thought they were, and the knowledge she didn't seek has altered her irrevocably. Where she will go from there, I have no idea. But I'm looking forward to finding out.
December Talking Meme: The Other Days
Their stories intersect only rarely, and their personal interactions take place solely at the beginning of the season, when Liza makes an effort to be welcoming to the new couple, only for the shared dinner to end in a social disaster due to their husbands' mutual antipathy. It's perhaps telling that neither of them makes an effort to develop a relationship of their own after this; not because they can't think for themselves or have relationships their husbands disapprove of, or aren't interested in other people. The very next thing Abby does is to befriend another woman and develop an intense relationship with her. But I find it worth noting that Liza, who suffers under the reduction of her existence from acclaimed scientist in her own right to "the wife" of one, has her confidential, soul baring conversations with other (male) scientists (Glen Babbitt and Nils Bohr). I don't think Liza has a single scene with the other prominent female scientist in the narrative, Helen, which can't be because Helen works for her husband; so does Glen Babbitt. It's not until the very end of the season, when Liza tries to convince the civilian council that it should not just rubberstamp the military's way of ruling the camp, and pays her condolences to the just widowed Rose Akley, that we see her interact with other women in a significant way again. By which I don't mean that Liza has internalized misogyny, but that her sense of self is very much tied to being a scientist, this is constantly frustrated due to her current situation, and I wouldn't be surprised if she didn't subconsciously or consciously asociate interaction with the other women in Los Alamos with giving in and conceding. And of course there's the painful secret of her having been institutionalized in the past, which won't lose its power until she outs it to the world at the end of the season.
(Liza does interact with her female Navajo housekeeper, Paloma, and attempts to learn Spanish in order to communicate better, in marked contrast of both female and male people at Los Alamos. But the problem there is not only that this relationship, too, is burdened with secrets - since Paloma has an affair with Liza's husband -, but also that Liza, the one time she visits Paloma's house, acts so well-intentionally entitled that it has lady-of-the-manor written all over it. Paloma quits shortly after.)
Through the season, Liza is presented as a seeker of truths, using her scientific background to figure out what exactly is going on in Los Alamos, and as an implicit, then explicit rebuttal of her husband's "the end justifies the means" belief. In a searing narrative irony, she's also standing on an ever shifting ground of uncertainties and deceptions - both the Colonel and her husband gaslight her at one point, then her mental illness makes a comback and she can't really trust her own perceptions, and even the climactic moment of (re)connection, when Frank finally starts to tell her the truth, is also wrapped in a lie, which he tells as soon as Liza leaves, plus the very act of his telling is both truth - he does want to tell her - and deception - he's aware already of them being listened to. Not to mention that the very act of learning the truth will make Liza tied even more to deception, since there's no way the military can let her be free outside Los Alamos now, whatever becomes of Frank. And yet her seasonal story does end in an unambiguously positive moment of truth revelation, too: just not about Los Alamos, but about herself. Liza telling everyone the truth about her mental history and being voted for as a voice for the civilians not regardless but because of this courage may be the most blatantly retroutopian moment of the show, and yet it feels also earned and direly necessary.
If Liza through the season is seeking for hidden truths, Abby does the opposite but finds them nonetheless. Come to think of it, Abby is in many ways constructed as Liza's opposite: young and newly married to Liza's middle age and long term marriage, never having had a job pre Los Alamos to Liza's ambitious scientist whom her husband and Bohr see as destined for the Nobel Prize one day, the spoiled daughter of indulgent parents who never seems to have had a care in the world before to Liza's history of having been in an institution, something which her family had to have allowed (and since it predates Frank, it had to be her parents). Liza maybe lied to by her husband for professional reasons for most of the show, but she knows Frank inside out. Abby gets far fewer lies (though she gets some) from Charlie, but for all their newly married giddiness at the start, you don't have the impression they know each other very well, and will so less and less as the season proceeds. Abby certainly isn't into self knowledge, either; she starts the season as a conformist who would be perfectly happy being the decorative wife of a successful scientist.
But it's Abby who keeps being confronted with the secrets she's not looking for. First by the very nature of the job she takes (out of boredom), being a telephonist and thus prone to both the intimate and professional chatter of the camp, and part of a spy system since she's told (like all the telephonists) to be alert and report the use of certain terms and phrases. Then through her friendship-turning-into-love-affair with another woman, Elodie, which has her discovering not only part of her sexuality she hadn't been aware of but also a world of the imagination she hadn't accessed before. (It's telling about their relationship that when Charlie finds her reading Beaudelaire, he just makes a joke about how she reads the fashion magazines for the photos, but doesn't wonder where this new interest into French poetry comes from.) And just after an expressed refusal of seeing herself as part of a Jewish community, of insisting on being a Jew in name only, she's presented with the most ghastly "secret" of all, a file on the extermination of Jews in the ongoing Holocaust. The self knowledge and self examination she hadn't looked for keeps coming at her from all directions, and it still hasn't finished. Something all the charaters of the show discover is that they themselves are capable of, and by far not solely in the positive sense. When Charlie asks/tells Abby to frame her friend Elodie's husband in order to get rid of a threat at work, she's shocked and refuses. But then she ends up doing it, not for Charlie but because she's coming so close to running away with Elodie that the two of them are already making plans as to possible destinations. Framing Elodie's husband removes not just him but Elodie from Los Alamos, and thus the temptation to break entirely with everything Abby ever thought she wanted and risk all for an utterly uncertain future. The last image of Abby in the season we have is of her wandering through Elodie's deserted house, where she had placed the false evidence, and being confronted by another woman who is basically Abby herself only a few months ago: a cheerful new arrival, trivially chattering away, ready to move in. Abby hits her.
Simultanously, Charlie - who by then has his own affair - has finally found out about Abby and Elodie and is promoted to project leader. Which means Abby ends up in the position she once wanted - wife of a succesful man - under the worst circumstances imaginable: her marriage has become a sham, neither she nor Charlie were the people they thought they were, and the knowledge she didn't seek has altered her irrevocably. Where she will go from there, I have no idea. But I'm looking forward to finding out.
December Talking Meme: The Other Days
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Date: 2014-12-07 07:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-12-08 07:35 am (UTC)