Danger Will Robinson!

My friend Simmi told me about an incident yesterday where mouth had connected directly to reflex reaction, short circuiting brain and she had found herself exclaiming 'Danger Will Robinson, danger, danger!' I could visualise clearly the scenario and it tickled me, I did actually laugh out loud. I was also able to empathise with those moments where brain gets left out of the equation, often leading to fear of retribution.

I used to love the programme 'Lost in Space'. It was cleverly done. The robot didn't burst out with its warnings at panto moments, the 'look behind you!' ones, nor was it a question of 'oh pleeeease don't go down into the dark cellar where the light doesn't work,' but rather when no-one was yet aware of the danger, viewer or character, so it gave a genuinely eerie quality. The warnings were real warnings.

When I was at the airport on Monday, a woman approached me with a clipboard, wanting to ask me questions. She was a nice lady, wearing a maple leaf brooch, when I said I was travelling to Canada she expressed the envy that I remember experiencing myself. The Robinson family's robot should have been there waving its little corrugated tubing arms around, saying 'Danger! Danger!'.
'What is the occupation of the main earner in your household?'
'Electrical engineer.'
'What is the highest level of education in your household?
'MA.'
'So...the person who is the electrical engineer has the MA?'
'Um...no, um....'
Moment, nothing said, we both just stared at the page, things unspoken hanging in the air.
But a tiny grain of irritation can turn into a pearl given the right circumstances, and I will do my best to make that happen. I have noticed that the writers on one of my favourite shows, the L Word, do exactly that. They purposely put in a little irritating grain of sand and allow us the viewer to construct the pearl.

When I started watching the first series, the one character I didn't like was Jenny Schaechter. She seemed different, like a little girl, annoying, the storyline where she is seduced by Marina seemed unbelievable. Jenny seemed too passive and she was haunted by something not very interesting, she was an irritant.
But then in the second series, there is a change, and the change is marked by her getting a haircut. She wonders whether she has to have short hair to be a lesbian, but the truth is, the haircut is about growing up and with growing up comes the acceptance, acknowledgement, recognition of her sexuality. But in accepting her adulthood, she also has to now deal with the demons of her childhood. Again, the writers present us with an annoyance that will lead to something. As she opens up to her demons and struggles to confront them, she plunges deeper into depression and breakdown. Towards the end of the process and that series, she is in a situation of self-abasement. She is stripping in front of very low men.
The French philosopher and writer Barthes presented us with the idea that as a woman takes off her clothes in public, so she puts up a barrier. A clothed woman is aproachable, a naked one who is in control of her nudity is not. Every decoding is another encoding.
So it is with Jenny, she is not on stage as a seductress, she is declaring 'I am not available to you, I am in control of this, but look what you have become, blind slaves to your own lust and look what I have become, see how I have debased myself, laid myself bare.'

And then they do it again. At the beginning of the third series, Jenny is away from LA and she has found a new partner whom she brings back with her. The new girlfriend seems an anomaly, she doesn't fit. But then the writers use this character they have created to make us think. We can feel Moira's discomfort as she meets Jenny's friends, our friends, for the first time. Jenny is pleased to be back, in more than one sense, but she makes no effort to ease Moira's discomfort. We see Moira isolated at the end of the table, having to ask the price of the dish she wants to order and when it comes, it is not food so much as art. Someone offers her some of her lobster and she turns it down, subtly reminding them how lobsters are sometimes cooked alive, and making a low-key comment about the behaviour of the lobsters as they boil to death. The writers are reminding us that maybe we have become too complacent, too accepting of this group of well-off women. They all have loudly proclaimed left-wing views but they are affluent and have not thought about the point that Moira has made to them.
Although Moira seems to drive an unnecessarily large vehicle for someone who is keeping us grounded, she finally shows back up just as Jenny is letting the pages of her manuscript fall into a fire because she has not been contacted by her publisher.
'You don't have to be published to be a great writer,' says Moira, pulling Jenny back from that edge.
She doesn't fit, but she is an interesting character brought in to challenge us. I hope this turns into another pearl.

Somehow the Robinson famiy always survived the vicissitudes of life in outer space, possibly because they had a danger spotting robot and good writers. The rest of us have to spot our own dangers and write our own scripts, but I'm hopeful that I can turn my irritant grains of sand into pearls and that's at least a good place to start.