Buffie the Bionic Bartending Brunette

Okay, my title is clearly unfair, implying as it does the new “Bionic Woman” is tapping into the creativity of Joss Wheedon in a slightly dishonorable fashion. After all, Buffy is a blonde, superpowered young woman with a bratty teenage sister and an evil brunette counterpart [Faith, who of course was merely misunderstood]. The "Bionic Woman" is a brunette superpowered young young woman with a bratty teenage sister and blonde evil counterpart. How could anyone mistake the two?

And when the hell is Spike going to show up and and eat that annoying sister?

I originally titled this simply "Buffie the Bionic Bartender," but anyone can see at a glance that the Jaime Sommers who walks through the first episode of the reimagined "Bionic Woman" is no bartender. No, she's a substitute teacher who is also a subsitute bartender. It's been years since I spent much time in a bar, so maybe things have changed, but I can't ever remember a bartender who didn't affect a certain detached breeziness or coziness or, at least, personality. None of that is evident in this Jamie Sommers. She tends bar with all the realism a substitute host on Saturday Night Live-- trying to sell a skit she didn't "get" to begin with.

I was looking forward to this series. I still am.







Visually, it's gorgeous. The dark sets are well designed and well lit. The production crew must have watched “Blade Runner” like a zillion times, and they paid attention. That's something.



Against all odds, the shadowy military organization that has rebuilt Jamie Sommers is played with respect. These producers have obviously learned the lessons of "Stargate" and "Battlestar: Galactica," that most military folks who have not sold their souls to a guy named "Bush" are intelligent and capable, and to portray them as unintuituive, two dimensional cartoonish buffoons is an insult to buffoons everywhere--not to mention to the viewers.








And then there's that evil blonde who stole the show. I knew Katie Sackhoff could act--her version of "Starbuck" is clearly one of the five or six best characters on Battlestar: Galactica--but damn, girl, where did you get them chops? And why you been hiding them?

It's very clear that Sackhoff knows what she's about. She's the original Bionic Woman, i.e., she's Lindsay Wagner, the REAL Jaime Sommers, and she's PISSED to find that she's the victim of bionic identity theft. Happily, the title of the series, "Bionic Woman," is ambiguous enough that sometime in Februay '08, the producers can kill off the putative lead played by Michelle Ryan [I already have a name for that episode: "Intel Inside"].
After that, the series can become the story of a bionic lesbian who cruises karaoke clubs and sings the HELL out of Melissa Etheridge songs. Damn, there's a show I'd like to see!



SPEAKING OF RIPPING OFF JOSS WHEEDON: I also watched the program called something like "Angel sans Humor" (aka "Moonlight"). Gee, where did they get the idea of using an interview with a vampire as a framing device? And that sleep inducing voice over--how'd they come up with that? The ingenuity of these hollywood types never ceases to amaze me.

I would like this show to succeed. I don't see why it should. There's a fundamental lack of commitment where it's soul ought to be.

What the Joss Wheedon understands, and the producers of Battlestar Galactica, and the Bionic Woman understand is that shows like this have to make a commitment to their viewers. Not to ratings at all cost (which they are not going to get) but to fans. The show has to practically scream, We'll be for you if you'll be for us, regardless of who else watches. Angel, Buffy, Battlestar, and even this first episode of Bionic Woman seem to have that kind of commitment to the ideal of commitment. I don't see any hint of that in acting, the writing, or the standard tv action flick direction on Moonlight.

There is one nice twist. Sophia Myles, who apparently I should recognize but don't from Underworld, plays a reporter who our vampire hero saved as a young child and has been looking after since. I like where this could go. The conflicts that someone he sees as a daughter is going to be looking at him as (presumably) an attractive man. If they don't shrink from this or sensationalize it, they have opened a possibility of real thought. Would an immortal feel feel it was wrong to have sex with a woman he has mentored since she was a child? Why or why not?

Let's see.

Is the “Post” in “Posthuman” the Same “Post” as the “Post” in “Postmodern,” “Post-colonial,” “Post-feminist,” or even “Post-gender”?

Yes, yes, yes, and I don’t know, but probably.

My title is a take on an Anthony Appiah essay which asks, "Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial” (Critical Inquiry Winter 1991). His answer is, in a word, no. “Postmodernism” assumes modernity with all its problems (i.e., the belief in the uniqueness of the present day, not to mention rampant commodification of every damn thing), and wants to get over it, or at least get over worrying about it. The “Post-colonial” condition is one of trying to catch up to the modern. The post-colonial world can’t really afford the luxury of simply dumping every thing that colonialization brought (western languages, western parliaments, western hospitals, western schools) and starting over. On the other hand, it can’t simply accept it all.

The photo of a statue, above, right of a "Man on a Bicycle" is one Appiah cites, because it was chosen by James Baldwin for an exhibition, as embodying the disparate genealogoy of the post-colonial world.

Think of Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain,” which was a urinal entered into an exhibit (under the pseudonym “R. Mutt”; photo above, left). The timing is not quite right (1917), but the spirit is: this is the type of gesture that would become common among the post-moderns. Contrast that with the need for potable water and sanitary discharge throughout much of the “post colonial” world, and you get a sense of the gulf which separates these movements.

But the “post-“ is becoming increasingly more similar.

Increasingly, what we mean when we use this prefix is that we’re going to take what we want from the term we are prefixing, and leave the rest. Cultural context be damned. The post-feminist (supposedly) is tired of fighting for women’s rights, and wants to assume them, and then do whatever the hell he or she wants. Think of Terry MacMillan’s characters. They are not necessarily happy with their lot in life, but they are more interested in playing the deck of cards dealt them than in changing the world (note: many of her characters have a meaningful social engagement, but it is usually first and foremost another social outlet for them).

Think of Maureen Dowd salivating over George W. Bush. If you have the stomach…

I’ve never figured out what post-gender means. I think it refers to the idea that gender still defines us, we still think in terms of gender, even though we know that humans can’t really be defined that way.

The post humanist isn’t free to denounce all of the values of humanism (education, self-care, etc.) but must try to extricate these things from the racist, classist, sexist ideologies that underpinned them. We understand that because the genetics which gave life to an idea are imperfect, yet the idea (education, etc.) can take on a life of its own, independent of its parentage.

Reading Patricia J. Williams while Listening to Rabkin on Wells

Every now and then, the habit I have of engaging two or more books at once pays off. For the last few weeks, I've been reading Open House by Patricia J. Williams, and listening to a series of lectures on science fiction from the Teaching Company. I know Patricia Williams mainly through her articles in The Nation which, frankly, have not really said anything new to me in over a year. It is not even that I disagree with her, though of course sometimes I do; it is that her columns don't surprise me. Happily, this book, which is sort of a miscellany of family, personal, African American, and political history is full of surprises.

The best surprise is that Williams has not lost the ability to write strikingly good prose. Reading it, one gets the sense of that all of the startling metaphors and juxtapositions which the constraints of a bi weekly column squeeze out of her newsprint fair have found rich soil and taken root; at one point she even critiques one of her colleague’s reversion to a rationalistic legalese in a broad discussion of, among other things, extinction. Her descriptions of the food, night skies, cement stoops, mudpies, and fireflies of her Boston childhood enrich the writing, not by weaving a flannel shawl of nostalgia over the past, but by forcing the counterpoints to emerge between the past and the Manhattan concrete life she and her son inhabit.

She has a lot to say about the prospects for improving the human species. Towards the end, she declares that she doesn’t want to be sound like a luddite, but the history of biological “progress” –eugenics, Tuskegee experiments, etc.--has not been terribly good for black folks over the years. But that’s not what I particularly want to reference here.

One of her essays deal with the malleability of racial definition. Let me quote from a version of it she has posted on the web (http://ichrp.org/paper_files/112_w_06.pdf.)

In courts throughout the South, the borderline statuses of the “enslaved white” and the “passing black” were methodically examined, defined and reduced to stereotypes that endure to this day. Putatively enslaved whites came mostly from the ranks of “poor whites,”whom the common law generally disparaged as those with coarse features and bad manners; in contrast, “passing” blacks were those with “fine” features and deceptively good manners.



In the 1835 South Carolina case of State v. Cantey, the judge observed that, despite an ambiguous appearance, “it may be well and proper, that a man of worth, honesty, industry and respectability, should have the rank of a white man, while a vagabond of the same degree of blood should be confined to the inferior caste.” And in an 1845 trial litigating the whiteness of one Sally Miller, a Louisiana judge cited Miller’s “moral power and weight, and influence. An influence, which I contend no one but a white woman could possibly raise up and control — an influence as inconsistent with the nature of an African, as it would be with the nature of a Yahoo.”

I encountered these remarkable legal opinions equating whiteness with manners and moral rectitude a day after hearing a speaker talking about the crisis in black, male education. Young black men have no role models. They think being a man is defined by how many women they’ve been with, that being a father means inseminating a woman, not raising a child. We need to teach them to hitch their pants up and take their hats off.

Of course I am summarizing, somewhat unfairly, a speaker who had more to say, and has an impressive record of accomplishment, but what I am NOT being unfair about is his linking of middle class manners (pants, hat) with morality. Young people and the very privileged (think Jenna and George W.) are often shielded from the fact that their actions have moral consequences for which they are responsible, and be painfully slow to learn that lesson. But taking your hat off in class is not even the first step in learning that process.

A day or two later, I listened to a lecture on H.G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau, from “Masterpieces of the Imaginative Mind” by Eric Rabkin. The novel, you will recall, is about animals Dr. Moreau has changed into something like humans through his own biotechnology. Rabkin finds in the “Sayers of the Law” chapter, in which the transformed animals learn to act like men, an analogue for British colonial brainwashing of colonial subjects.

Not to go on all-fours; that is the Law. Are we not Men?
Not to suck up Drink; that is the Law. Are we not Men?
Not to eat Fish or Flesh; that is The Law. Are we not Men?
Not to claw the Bark of Trees; that is the Law. Are we not Men?
Not to chase other Men; that is the Law. Are we not Men?

My point is that “manhood” – as in the case of the speaker I referred to earlier – is being defined by adherence to an arbitrary code of conduct, just as “whiteness” was in the cases Williams referred to.

I am not going to deny that there is economic value in learning and conforming to prevailing social mores just because they happen to be the prevailing and social mores. But I am going to deny that any substantial change for the better will ever come of that.