Maybe this time...
May. 7th, 2014 02:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakState of the ficathons: having participated in both the Remix and the Rarewomen ficathons which had their posting limit last weekend and will go live next weekend, I am of course impatiently waiting for the later. And eyeing the "gifts" list at the AO3, trying to guess. Also, Remix Madness is open for business, as is the custom in the week between the posting limit and the reveal, and I couldn't resist and joined.
Meanwhile, I watched the Inside the writers' room video at the Bates Motel series website, and it hit me a second before it was mentioned that with the exception of Carlton Cuse, all the producers and writers seen there who were making the decisions about the show, mapping out the characters and their development, were women. This btw does not mean the show is a wonder of social justice putting no foot wrong with its female characters - there's at least one female character this season whose main point of existence seems to have been so that the most popular male character can have a sex scene - , but it still strikes me as worth mentioning. And related to, the above mentioned criticism not withstanding, the show's qualities: it makes you care about the majority of their cast, root for them without trivializing the enormity of their psychological damage (let alone see it as "cool"). And it's about a mother and her sons. In a tv world and pop culture world where 90% of the characters seem to have daddy issues and "dead parents" usually means "dead father who is important and dead mother who doesn't even get to speak", this is a show who picked one of the few famous mothers in pop culture who in her original incarnation only was a corpse and a (horrible) persona inside the head of her son, and made her three dimensional, human, alive and the center of the tale. Both Cuse and co-producer Kerry Ehrin gave post season 2 finale interviews (hers is here and his is here), and Cuse, asked why, given that Bates Motel put the story in the present, he connected it with Psycho at all instead of making the characters originals, he said:
The idea was to tell a tragedy. But it’s super hard to go out and pitch that as an original concept to a network and say, “Hey, I have a great mother-son tragedy for you,” but if you put it in the framework of the Psycho franchise it becomes something that’s marketable. When you watch Bates Motel you kind of know that, well, Norma Bates ends up sort of stuffed in the fruit cellar and Norman becomes this crazed serial killer, but in our version, you kind of love these characters. If you watched the movie you’d think, Okay, Norman Bates became Norman Bates because he was berated by [his] mother and she drove him into insanity — but what if, in fact, she just loved him? What if she was this wonderful, smothering, slightly crazy, over-the-top mother who just had the misfortune of having a son who had a flawed piece of DNA? And what if somehow because of her behavior she sort of catalyzes something that is inevitably going to happen, and because she loves him so much she kind of enables him to become the character he becomes? So we subvert all those expectations you’d have walking in. (....) Norma Bates is one of the great characters of cinema and yet ultimately we know nothing about her, so to be able to sort of create and invent a character for her was something that was super appealing.
I'll end with two great Norma scenes from this second season which aren't really spoilery. The first is Norma talking to the city council, trying to prevent that bypass which, as Psycho watchers know, will end up isolating the Bates Motel, taking nearly all the customers:
And the other is Norma auditioning for the local community theatre (yes, Bates Motel used that idea before Orphan Black did) with the most appropiate song I can imagine for her:
Meanwhile, I watched the Inside the writers' room video at the Bates Motel series website, and it hit me a second before it was mentioned that with the exception of Carlton Cuse, all the producers and writers seen there who were making the decisions about the show, mapping out the characters and their development, were women. This btw does not mean the show is a wonder of social justice putting no foot wrong with its female characters - there's at least one female character this season whose main point of existence seems to have been so that the most popular male character can have a sex scene - , but it still strikes me as worth mentioning. And related to, the above mentioned criticism not withstanding, the show's qualities: it makes you care about the majority of their cast, root for them without trivializing the enormity of their psychological damage (let alone see it as "cool"). And it's about a mother and her sons. In a tv world and pop culture world where 90% of the characters seem to have daddy issues and "dead parents" usually means "dead father who is important and dead mother who doesn't even get to speak", this is a show who picked one of the few famous mothers in pop culture who in her original incarnation only was a corpse and a (horrible) persona inside the head of her son, and made her three dimensional, human, alive and the center of the tale. Both Cuse and co-producer Kerry Ehrin gave post season 2 finale interviews (hers is here and his is here), and Cuse, asked why, given that Bates Motel put the story in the present, he connected it with Psycho at all instead of making the characters originals, he said:
The idea was to tell a tragedy. But it’s super hard to go out and pitch that as an original concept to a network and say, “Hey, I have a great mother-son tragedy for you,” but if you put it in the framework of the Psycho franchise it becomes something that’s marketable. When you watch Bates Motel you kind of know that, well, Norma Bates ends up sort of stuffed in the fruit cellar and Norman becomes this crazed serial killer, but in our version, you kind of love these characters. If you watched the movie you’d think, Okay, Norman Bates became Norman Bates because he was berated by [his] mother and she drove him into insanity — but what if, in fact, she just loved him? What if she was this wonderful, smothering, slightly crazy, over-the-top mother who just had the misfortune of having a son who had a flawed piece of DNA? And what if somehow because of her behavior she sort of catalyzes something that is inevitably going to happen, and because she loves him so much she kind of enables him to become the character he becomes? So we subvert all those expectations you’d have walking in. (....) Norma Bates is one of the great characters of cinema and yet ultimately we know nothing about her, so to be able to sort of create and invent a character for her was something that was super appealing.
I'll end with two great Norma scenes from this second season which aren't really spoilery. The first is Norma talking to the city council, trying to prevent that bypass which, as Psycho watchers know, will end up isolating the Bates Motel, taking nearly all the customers:
And the other is Norma auditioning for the local community theatre (yes, Bates Motel used that idea before Orphan Black did) with the most appropiate song I can imagine for her:
