Blakes7

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5511 discussions

Re: ideology vs individuality
by Helen Krummenacker 09 Feb '01

09 Feb '01

> Have you ever tried looking at people as *animals*? I don't mean to > dehumanise them in any way, just to stop seeing the person for a moment, and > see instead an individual of one particular offshoot of the evolutionary > tree. People can look startlingly different if you get the right mind > adjustment Constantly. I frequently think about what evolutionary advantages their might be to some human traits, and what ones may just be there because they don't get in the way of survival. At the same time, I have never felt this impeded my ability to respect how individuals think and express themselves. Loaded with the burdens of language, culture, and genetic predispositions, people still attempt to form beliefs and explain why they believe them. > If we all hear pretty much the same tune, then we're all going to > dance in pretty much the same way. Individuality diminishes. It can even > disappear altogether. And yet... in a society where men are expected to take an active role and women to be more passive, David Jackson did not (or did not successfully) lobby for better lines and scripts for Gan. Meanwhile, Jacqueline Pierce expanded her part from the 4 episodes they were planning to have Servalan in, to the ongoing baddie. Plus, she talked them into giving her glamour costumes instead of military uniforms, and got lots of fabulous scenes. If J.P. had had different tastes, Servalan might have worn business atttire rather than evening gowns. Of course, the variations happen within a social framework, but a slow accumulation of individual choices can change social expectations. Even on a large scale, to look at what a *society* accepts, believes, etc, is to ignore the fact that societies change with time. You must use statistics and generalizations to say what a society is-- and there may be counterexamples within the group. In fact, a single person can have conflicting views on matters. And one of the most important differences between individuals is how they interpret and define words. I'm rapidly getting the feeling that Neil and I mean completely different things when we say someone 'represents' something. If I understand him, he is saying an outsider's interpretation of whaat I represent is part of who I am, whereas I define myself by what *I* believe I am and represent, and if someone else interprets me as something else, they are misunderstanding me and that is part of who they are, not who I am. I am a peaceloving cowboy-- it's not my fault if the Indian reaches for his rifle, and hopefully I can get him to understand this before he does something irreversable. It matters that the Liberator crew came to try to help Ensor Jr, not to try to harm the planet's occupants. It does matter that Avon took the time to figure out how to work the rocket controls-- whether he was doing it out of gratitude, kindness, or for his ego, it had more to do with him being a *person* than being a man.

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Re: [B7L] Re: Subtext vs Character
by Sally Manton 09 Feb '01

09 Feb '01

Neil wrote: <Takee very careful note, everyone, you might never see this again. I agree with Sally.> That's all right, everyone's allowed to once or twice a decade :-) Now if I can just convert the Tarrant Nostra ... <But some of us are thinking about the parameters, and stay out of threads where we feel we have no meaningful contribution to make. <snip> <Actually 'the post that started it all' accused the episode, not Avon, of misogyny. A classic case of imposing a CJ framework on a non-CJ thread, methinks.> Now this could illustrate the viewpoint problem here. The post that actually drew *me* into the thread wasn't Wendy's short opening one, but (and Wendy, I'm truly not trying to criticise you, I'm quoting this to try and make things clearer for non-CJs) went as follows : "After a bit of Freudian imagery of Avon firing off a big rocket and fertalising her race, he then leaves her to die of radiation poisoning on Cephlon, having taken away her reason for living! A case if wham, bang, thank you man. What a sexist pig!" To me, that *did* refer to Avon, I didn't mentally add the words "Terry Nation is!" to the end of the sentence. I did take it as character discussion, since it appeared to be a comment not on the episodic inferences, but on one character's own actions. So of course I treated it as as much a character thread as a subtext one, since the point I entered, and most of the posts I answered appeared - and still appears to me - to have derived at least partly *from* this comment which I saw as a judgment of the character, not the episode, and as based on a statement about his actions (that he left her to die) which I didn't agree was *fact* but rather supposition. Now of course, my reading could be because I am more interested in the characters than the writers, and therefore it's more in the way I read the post. I accept that. But it wasn't a *totally* unreasonable assumption, *me* thinks ... This business of staying out of threads is a bit of a hairy business therefore. It's easy for me to say "this thread's on the chemical properties of Aquitar, I'll just sit back and try and learn or even understand something". It's easy for you to say "Red leather trousers and Avon's state of mind at Terminal ... oh bloody hell, not again!" But when it's a thread combining [a] interpretation of a perceived subtext by one of the writers involved on the episode *and* [b] interpretation of what one or more of the characters *actually did or did not do* (remember, part of this discussion was a disagreement on the validity of individual interpretations of the part of the action not shown) it gets more complicated. Besides which, do admit, had all of us CJs not become involved over that little point, the thread wouldn't have been nearly as long or convoluted, and probably died a quiet death. As it is, my inbox is chockers every morning. *How* many posts has it spawned now? <And why are you telling your rats?> They listen so politely and never disagree ... _________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.

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Re: Deliverance
by Helen Krummenacker 09 Feb '01

09 Feb '01

> THINK.... WHICH ARE YOU-- WOLF OR SHEEP? > > > Wendy > Now you're just insulting people. I doubt many of us have our whole lives wrapped up in waiting for a Messiah to save our people. Therefore, no Lord Avon could take away our reason for living. Besides, Blake's entire life is devoted to defeating the Federation. If Avon had won the fight while he was disappeared, would Avon have taken away his reason for living. You seem to think anyone who disagrees with you is blinded by Avon's appearence. That is really, truely insulting. You are being sexist in assuming that hormones are overpowering people's ability to reason. Okay, aside from Neil, we haven't heard too much from the men on the Lyst. This also seems to assume that Meeghat quietly curled up to die post-Deliverance. I don't assume she has been transported to another planet, but I do think, now that she doesn't have to tend the rocket-bunker, she has been able to move on to a *more* varied and interesting life among her people, where, as I have said before, she would be greatly respected for her part in fulfilling the prophecy. Once again, I see Wendy's assumption as being sexist, assuming Meeghat has no ability to adapt to change, and that her inability to launch a rocket and her belief in prophecy make her incompetent in all areas of life. Many modern people believe there will be a Messiah. Few of them are rocket scientists. Does this mean that they are stupid? No. Calle, Iain, anyone who known to be not Avon-biased? Please answer the following: Did Meeghat, in her circumstances, do the right thing by her standards by letting Avon in and persuading him to launch the rocket? Did Avon 'take everything away from her', or did they form a mutually beneficial arrangement, in which he took care of a task for her and she offered shelter to him and his companions?

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Deliverance Is Not Sexist
by Penberriss Wendy S. 09 Feb '01

09 Feb '01

KNOCK KNOCK There's a handsome wolf at the door. Let him in and he will take away everything, including your reason for living, and then leave you to die. Deliverance is not sexist-- it is not imperialist-- it is not misogynistic-- it's a test. Only the victim will find excuses and fight to open the door and let the wolf in. Even when the truth is spelt out to them. THINK.... WHICH ARE YOU-- WOLF OR SHEEP? Wendy __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get personalized email addresses from Yahoo! Mail - only $35 a year! http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/

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Re: [B7L] Re: Subtext vs Character
by J MacQueen 09 Feb '01

09 Feb '01

>From: Mistral <mistral(a)centurytel.net> >Um, I think I've posted about that repeatedly (to Joanne's occasional >dismay). <raises eyebrow> Indeed. I'd stick to discussing red leather trousers if I were you. It amuses Julia, and keeps me sane. Well, relatively... Regards Joanne _________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.

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Re:Deliverance
by Helen Krummenacker 09 Feb '01

09 Feb '01

> But then, I'm strongly against casual abortion. Ellynne, I have never met anyone who was in favor of it. However, this is the one area in which I can really see some grounds to complain about Deliverance. The writer seems to prioritize the gene banks of potential lives ahead of Meeghat who is alive right now. If you think the reason Meeghat's fate is not dealt with is because she is safe on her planet (as I always had before this thread began), then this is a non-issue. She's happy and safe. But if you assume, as some of the debaters have, that the dwindling numbers of her group indicate that they are not ina good environment for them, then the safety of Meeghat has been trivialized for the sake of a generation that not only has not yet been born, but is not even in the process of gestation. This is the point at which a pro-life stance become an anti-woman stance. Her life is unimportant except as a womb for the future. I seriously doubt that this is what the writer intended, but as I've said, the discussion thread has made me look at Deliverance from an ideological standpoint and I can see this as a problem, whereas I do not for a moment see the rocket as a phallic symbol. Having arguing against Wnedy's view that the episode was misogynistic, I thought it was only fair to bring up the new interpretation that occured to me that made me less inclined to defend it.

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Re: [B7L] Subtext vs Character, or would Mr Humphries have pushed the right buttons?
by Natasa Tucev 09 Feb '01

09 Feb '01

I read Fiona's last post from the archive, because for some mysterios reason the server I'm using has erased all my mail from 2/7/01. If by any chance someone else made a comment on this thread and used some other title, and if you'd want me to respond, please send again. Thanks. Fiona wrote: >IIRC, what the Federation wanted in reconditioning him was somebody who was rational and reasonable, but who had apparently changed his mind-- they had to make it look natural, rather than like he was coerced. Consequently they could not have turned him into a zombie, but left him with his reason and critical faculties intact-- which evidently provided a basis from which to start questioning the state again.< So how did the rebels contact him again? By involving him in a discussion about the Federation colonial policy, for instance? Or by telling him the brief history of the resistance? No, they talked about his family. They knew he was thoroughly indoctrinated, but hoped that he was essentially still a good man. Which was something the Federation couldn't profit from - it simply remained there, intact, in spite of their efforts to change him. I believe that one of the ideas implanted in Blake's mind was total obedience to the system. Therefore his decision to make even a minor transgression - leave the dome - was actually very difficult to make. E.M.Forster wrote (more or less, I don't know the exact words), 'If I ever get in a position to choose whether to betray my state or my friend, I hope I'll have the guts to betray my state.' Blake had the guts to disobey the system, because love for his family was more important. He didn't know anything about the Federation's evil nature at that moment, nor about his own past, but he still made the right decision. It wasn't intellectual, it was emotional. Of course, I'm not saying that it's impossible to resist an ideology by means of logic, reason or information - I'm just saying that even in drastic cases, such as Blake's, it is still possible to find a portion of the self the system hasn't affected. >Anyway, the family which he loved was a bogus one--they were killed, Excuse me? People that you love become bogus when they die? Presumably your love for them also becomes bogus? >and the letters were faked, and his feelings for them formed part of his conditioning-- the point of the letters was to maintain for him the fiction that he had never been a rebel.< What does this imply? That he had different feelings for his family before the conditioning, and that the Feds conditioned him to love them? It doesn't make much sense to me. >Your statement, BTW, suggests that people who have been socially or mentally conditioned by the Federation are not human-- which seems an odd thing to say about Travis, Par, Maryatt, Bellfriar, Kasabi et al.< My statement doesn't suggest this at all. I am talking about the possibilities to remain human in spite of social conditioning, which some of the characters you've mentioned have managed to do. >You seem to be making a very hard-and-fast point here. I would once again restate that the theory of the person as I understand it is that persons are a combination of influences from their culture and upbringing, biological matter and individual psychology-- what you seem to be arguing is that to be influenced by a culture is to be "completely blinded by [its] ideology." Even in a totalitarian society there is a middle ground.< This theory seems OK to me. I don't think I'm contradicting it. I was just talking about some drastic examples. I'm trying to say that we are not completely trapped by our culture's system of thought - if, for instance, you live in an anti-semitist society, you as an individual needn't necessarily hate Jews; if you are a man and live in a chauvinist culture, you needn't share your culture's opinion that women are inferior; in my case, if I live in Serbia, I needn't be a nationalist. An individual can resist these wrong commandments imposed by his or her culture, because of this 'residue of personality' which I'm talking about. >To return to Winston's mother: she appears, as I recall, in a brief flashback scene, in which Winston steals food from his sister, runs away and returns a few hours later to find the house empty except for rats (establishing his phobia of the creatures). I don't see her particularly resisting anything in that scene.< You've forgotten that she also appears in Winston's dream, where Julia and Shakespeare also appear. Dreams, to quote Jung (him again!) can be compensatory to our conscious attitude, they can bring a one-sided state of consciousness into equilibrium. So I'll quote from Winston's dream, and let this be the conclusion to this post. I have to go, before my kids start eating marbles in the other room. 'The thing that now suddenly struck Winston was that his mother's death... had been tragic and sorrowful in a way that was no longer possible. Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there was still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason. His mother's death tore at his heart becuase she had died loving him... and because somehow, he did not remember how, she had sacrificed herself to a conception of loyalty that was private and unalterable.' N.

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Re: [B7L] Re: Subtext vs Character
by Sally Manton 09 Feb '01

09 Feb '01

I'm late for work, but who cares? (The boss cares, but she ain't as poisonours as My Darling ...) Fiona wrote: <If Chris Boucher always saw Travis as someone who had worked his way up fromhe ranks, then Stephen Greif may have been playing him as a man who had disguised his origins and changed his accent, while Brian Croucher was playing him as someone who had stayed true to his origins and taken stick for it.> A couple of points from this that I find interesting ... 1. To be honest, that *is* a big "if". Yes, he said it and no, I'm not saying he isn't truthful, but it was twenty years ago remember, and quite a few of the people involved have gone through some rich and strange sea-changes of memory since then. (E g Jacqueline Pearce stating that Servie went into black as 'mourning' for the death of her clones, when in fact she was in it for the whole episode in question, before they died). After all this time, I really prefer to see some evidence on-screen for what they tell me (e g again, PD's view of Avon *is* evident in the 4th season when he had more power over the way the character was portrayed, so yes, I believe that he did see it that way in 1980). 2. Chris was the script editor, but Terry Nation (remeber him? the guy who's copping all the 'Deliverance' flak) wrote all of Greif's scripts, someone else directed him to play it the way he did and Greif ... errr ... played it. So Chris's view isn't the be-all of the matter. And from his appearance on the 'Blake's Back' tapes, it's no use asking the actor, 'cause his memory of the whole thing is distinctly fuzzy (not surprising, really. It was what, six episodes filmed twenty *years* ago). So again, we really don't know what the original intentions were, we have to primarily go by what we each see on film (which means - as with deliverance - we all see what we want to, then shoehorn the facts to fit ...) JMHO. _________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.

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Re: Deliverance = Lady of Shallott
by Helen Krummenacker 09 Feb '01

09 Feb '01

> FWIW, I hated Lancelot's insouciance in LoS long before this thread cropped > up. Anyway, what he says doesn't sound that heartfelt to me: translated, all > he says is "She's pretty, hope she goes to heaven." > > Fiona Okay, that's also a valid interpretation. Mine was based on the knowlege, as a poet, that it can be very difficult to convey everything intended with the brevity required in the form. In this case "God in his mercy lend her grace" is indeed a hope she goes to heaven-- and given that Lancelot is usually considered quite devout, is meaningful. He would not take the name of God in vain, therefore it is a form of prayer. As for being a Lancelot apologist-- in everything but this poem, I detest the character. He's full of himself and ruined several women's lives, not just Gweneviere's, because he had a marriage that he abandoned when the amnesia that made him forget Gwenwviere wore off. I believe he ran off from an engagement as well. However, in this context he was no more responisble for the Ladu of Shallott's death than I would be responsible for a man spotting me from across a street, who wanted to come over and hit on me and stepped out in front of a truck while my back was turned. I'd never seen the man before in my life, I didn't know he was going toward me and I didn't know he was in danger. I *do* have the responsibility of calling 911 and administering first aid, as I would for anyone nearby who was hurt. But I am not to blame for his death and if he dies before I can help him, I will never know there was a connection between my being where I was and him getting killed. Even if he were to live long enough to say he wanted to meet me, I should hope you wouldn't want me to feel guilty for unknowingly inspiring him to do something foolish. So what do you want Lancelot to do? Haul her ashore and give her a proper funeral? I assumed the boat indicated she was deliberately sending her body out to sea, after the fashion of ancient kings set down the river on boat aflame. Therefore, if you pulled the boat ashore, you'd be violating her own choice of death ceremony.

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Re: [B7L] Re: Deliverance
by Harriet Monkhouse 09 Feb '01

09 Feb '01

Fiona wrote: >And once again, he doesn't seem too embarrassed > by the attention. Go watch the episode, I'm telling you, > it's just not there. You mean you don't see it there. To others among us, it leaps off the screen. There is no way of settling who is right, as even Paul Darrow is an unreliable witness. Harriet

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