Top of the Lake
Sep. 23rd, 2017 04:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
untonugganSo if you read Captain Awkward there's this semi-meme in the comments where people are like "omg if I/we had a TARDIS we could travel through time and save people from terrible relationships."
And I have been watching Top of the Lake (literally all the trigger warnings you can think of related to sexual assault ever), but for me that is basically what that show is except there is no TARDIS.
The first season is set in New Zealand, the second in Australia. The MC is a cop who was sexually assaulted as a teenager, and each season is a case. The cases are hard, and the kind of thing where if you want to just let rape culture keep doing its thing you can pretend that nothing is necessarily wrong.
But MC does not leave things the fuck alone, because she knows what that's like, so on top of her own trauma and trying to stop more from happening, she's basically dealing with various hostile work environments etc.
I find it kind of viscerally satisfying, despite the violence and being triggery as fuck. Like there's a scene in the second season where a coworker invites her to join him on an elevator. And she pauses, and in that pause there's that moment of "I am judging whether or not it's safe for me to join you, where all the escapes are, how I can punch you if necessary, etc" that femmes/women do all the time. And I think what I find reassuring in this show is that it *shows those moments*. It doesn't gloss over them like they don't happen. It shows the judgements and the "oh fucks" and the gaslighting of whether people believe you.
Anyway, like I said, it's triggery as fuck. But I think it's kind of nice to have that...oh, this really was written by people who *get* sexual assault etc, because it's less interested in showing piles of dead sex workers (cough literally every police procedural ever) and more interested in showing you the discomfort of deciding whether or not it's safe to get in an elevator with a coworker. to accept a ride home. to drink something that someone else has handed you.
I can't speak necessarily to how well the show handles race. There's a risk of it being a little white savior-y because the MC is super white and so far her cases tend to be related to WOC. Also, the second season is literally called "China Doll". That's the case name that the other cops give for an unidentified body. Arguably showing that dehumanization is a positive, and MC does point it out...and yet, I don't know if the show pokes at racism with the same compassion as it does sexual assault. I also don't know enough about race relations in AU/NZ (particularly wrt indigenous peoples and immigrants) to speak to that bit. Nothing was obviously The Worst, everyone had backstories, but the white cop lady definitely has more agency soooo...
I do like the general idea of "using history of trauma to help fight rape culture" though, and I think it arguably does a better job than Jessica Jones. (At least there's no random anti-fat jokes in the first ten minutes or so.)
And I have been watching Top of the Lake (literally all the trigger warnings you can think of related to sexual assault ever), but for me that is basically what that show is except there is no TARDIS.
The first season is set in New Zealand, the second in Australia. The MC is a cop who was sexually assaulted as a teenager, and each season is a case. The cases are hard, and the kind of thing where if you want to just let rape culture keep doing its thing you can pretend that nothing is necessarily wrong.
But MC does not leave things the fuck alone, because she knows what that's like, so on top of her own trauma and trying to stop more from happening, she's basically dealing with various hostile work environments etc.
I find it kind of viscerally satisfying, despite the violence and being triggery as fuck. Like there's a scene in the second season where a coworker invites her to join him on an elevator. And she pauses, and in that pause there's that moment of "I am judging whether or not it's safe for me to join you, where all the escapes are, how I can punch you if necessary, etc" that femmes/women do all the time. And I think what I find reassuring in this show is that it *shows those moments*. It doesn't gloss over them like they don't happen. It shows the judgements and the "oh fucks" and the gaslighting of whether people believe you.
Anyway, like I said, it's triggery as fuck. But I think it's kind of nice to have that...oh, this really was written by people who *get* sexual assault etc, because it's less interested in showing piles of dead sex workers (cough literally every police procedural ever) and more interested in showing you the discomfort of deciding whether or not it's safe to get in an elevator with a coworker. to accept a ride home. to drink something that someone else has handed you.
I can't speak necessarily to how well the show handles race. There's a risk of it being a little white savior-y because the MC is super white and so far her cases tend to be related to WOC. Also, the second season is literally called "China Doll". That's the case name that the other cops give for an unidentified body. Arguably showing that dehumanization is a positive, and MC does point it out...and yet, I don't know if the show pokes at racism with the same compassion as it does sexual assault. I also don't know enough about race relations in AU/NZ (particularly wrt indigenous peoples and immigrants) to speak to that bit. Nothing was obviously The Worst, everyone had backstories, but the white cop lady definitely has more agency soooo...
I do like the general idea of "using history of trauma to help fight rape culture" though, and I think it arguably does a better job than Jessica Jones. (At least there's no random anti-fat jokes in the first ten minutes or so.)
no subject
Date: 2017-09-26 04:29 pm (UTC)Like, I really enjoyed a lot of this Danish show, Dicte, which is about an investigative journalist who won't reveal her sources and like as someone from the US I'm like "I'm sorry, you actually rehabilitate people into society after they've been to prison? Sorry, I need to pause while I process this." But also, like every single Black person on that show is a sex worker or someone who was a sex worker or a sex worker who also smuggles diamonds. And most of them have zero characterization or backstory and liiiiike...ugh.
ETA: And I just really appreciate that Top of the Lake really does not do that with crime victims. Like they're real people (what a concept) and even in the cinematography of how it shows peoples' bodies, it doesn't revel in the violence it kind of...shows you how horrible it is that this happened to an actual human person?