Favorite Characters: Helena (Orphan Black)

The first of what’s likely to be numerous character posts for Orphan Black.  Helena is made up of elements from various types and clichés, but all of these facets piece together to create a really striking character who feels incredibly novel.  Spoilers, both for the character herself and major plot points of season 1, are unavoidable.

We actually start getting to know Helena long before we see her onscreen.  By the end of the pilot, it’s clear that someone is out to get the assorted members of Clone Club, and the mystery of who’s trying to kill them (and why) is a big question in the early episodes.  We meet Helena through some tried and true psycho-killer hallmarks:  creepy calling-cards in the form of Barbie heads made to look like the clone she’s killing, jumbled religious references, bizarre clues facilitating a cat-and-mouse game, and so on.  And once we clap eyes on Helena, more tropes follow.  She’s a bad-ass eastern European.  She doesn’t have screws loose so much as missing altogether.  She has frakked-up religious ideas and practices self-mutilation.  Despite her clear mental health issues, she’s an expert killer who’s as quiet as a ninja.  Plenty of these traits fit her type.

And yet, I’ve never seen a psycho-killer archetype quite like Helena.  At times, she’s almost animal-like, scrounging to get by in the wild and using every possible recourse to survive – watching her determined, untiring efforts to escape when she’s captured is fascinating.  Even when she finds more permanent associations, she still eats like she hasn’t seen food for days and won’t again for weeks.  Her life experiences are tremendously lacking, and in some ways, she’s as childlike as she is dangerous.  Her emotions scatter through her; she’s by turns woeful, raging, icily calm, desperate, bemused, and entirely numb, and there’s really no telling how she’s going to react in any given situation. 

As the show goes on and we get to know Helena, she emerges as something fairly unique – a truly sympathetic psycho killer.  Other shows and stories go down this road from time to time, but I don’t think any of them are written as effectively as Orphan Black writes Helena.  She and Sarah are the two “lost” clones, the ones that slipped through the grasp of their creators, but while Sarah was fostered by a fierce woman who would do anything to keep her safe, Helena first languished in a Ukrainian orphanage and was later discovered by a militant anti-clone cult.  They train her to be their weapon against her own sisters, feeding her their lies and filling her fractured mind with the idea that clones are abominations that mock God and nature.  Her emotional and psychological development is horribly stunted, and within her, there’s such an urgent tug – a longing for something she can call family and such a strong desire not to be an “abomination” that she kills her own and scars her back – that she’s easy prey for the cult.

This also means that Helena is a good candidate for being flipped.  She’s so alone, unloved, and deceived – when Sarah takes her on, Helena responds brutally, lethally, but when Sarah plays up their connection and shows Helena how she’s been used, Helena steps haltingly toward the fold.  She’s still wildly unpredictable and prone to acts of staggering violence, but despite her guarded wariness, she badly wants someone in whom she can put her trust, and inch by inch, she edges toward her “sestras.”

Top Five Songs: Pacific Overtures

I think, for me, Pacific Overtures might be Sondheim’s all-killer-no-filler score.  It has fewer songs than most of his shows, and musicals like Sunday in the Park with George or A Little Night Music might have some of the all-around best numbers, but every song in this show really makes it count.  Even though the score only features eleven songs, narrowing it down to five was no easy task.

(Pictures are from various productions - it's incredibly hard to find a good assortment of Pacific Overtures photos.)

“Chrysanthemum Tea” – A hugely sprawling patter-and-plot number.  In it, the dilemma of western ships approaching Japan’s isolationist shores is expressed by the Shogun’s mother.  She offers her son her warnings, advice, and tea through lyrics that simply outdo themselves in rhyme.

Best line:  “Have some tea, my Lord, / Some chrysanthemum tea. / It’s a tangled situation, / As your father would agree. / And it mightn’t be so tangled / If you hadn’t had him strangled? / But I fear that I stray, my Lord.”

“Poems” – As Kayama and Manjiro journey, they play a game of almost “dueling” poems, inventing compositions based on one another’s opening lines.  Some of the imagery is just terrific, and I like the way they both write for their respective “ladies”:  for Kayama, his wife, and for Manjiro, America.

Best line:  “Moon, / I love her like the moon, / Making jewels of the grass / Where my lady walks, / My lady wife.”

“Someone in a Tree” – This is such an intriguing number; I adore it.  Here, an old man reminisces about the day he saw the westerners come, aided by the memory of himself as a boy and a soldier listening to the proceedings.  It’s a gorgeous contemplation on the nature of observation and history, the idea that nothing quite matters unless it’s been witnessed.

Best line:  “I am hiding in a tree. / I’m a fragment of the day. / If I weren’t, who’s to say / Things would happen here the way / That they happened here?”

 “A Bowler Hat” – A great passage-of-time song about gradual assimilation.  Through Kayama, we see how the influences of the west bleed into Japan.  The way each stanza builds upon the previous one by echoes and slight changes is excellent, and it’s a great showcase for the actor.

Best line:  “No eagle flies against the sky / As eagerly as I / Have flown against my life.”

“Pretty Lady” – This song is creepy-beautiful Sondheim at its best.  In the number, a trio of British sailors come upon a young woman they mistakenly believe to be a geisha.  While the melody and overlapping harmonies are absolutely rapturous, the lyrics – in which their desire for her becomes increasingly insistent – make it hair-standing-on-end foreboding.  Truly amazing.

Best line:  “Pretty lady, you’re the cleanest thing I seen all year. / I sailed the world for you…”

Crimes against Emma Swan (Once Upon a Time)

Here’s a new periodic feature on the blog.  “Crimes Against…” looks at a story or a particular aspect of it, specifically examining how the writing has let it down.  Now, I’m not sure the second half of Once Upon a Time’s fourth season is definitely its weakest so far, or if it just feels that way because I watches seasons 1-3 on Netflix and clipped along at a good pace with them.  However, I have a few major gripes with season 4B, the first of which is the focus of today’s post (Emma-related spoilers for season 4B.)

Quick background:  in this half-season arc, we learn that, prior to Emma’s birth, Snow and Charming discovered there would be a chance their child would be born with “great darkness” inside her.  Desperate to keep their unborn child from coming in the world a villain, they strike an extremely sketchy deal with a shadowy figure and essentially transfer Emma’s “darkness” into another unborn child – a girl/dragon baby, care of Maleficent.  In general, this thread is part of the convoluted “write me a happy ending” plot, and it also serves the show’s larger tendency to woobify their villains and tells us how much the heroes suck.  (Sigh… remember when the heroes were flawed but admirable people struggling to do the right thing in an uncertain world?)

I have dubious enough feelings about the above aims, but I’m entirely against the implications this plot has for Emma.  Under this retcon, Emma was basically reprogrammed to be a hero, to be a noble person who leans into the wind and maintains an inner lightness no matter how difficult things gets.  In a way, it means that Emma’s heroic qualities aren’t really hers, weren’t forged within her, but bestowed upon her.  In a show that places a premium on the discussion of good and evil, Emma was born with a winning ticket in the lottery of souls.

And I hate that, because it takes so much of what’s so awesome about Emma and puts it in the hands of some sorcerer’s apprentice.  This is a series that enjoys explaining villainy with sob stories, showing us how the baddies’ parents didn’t care about them, their chance for love was torn from them, and, of course, the heroes were super mean to them.  To me, Emma is the answer to all of that.  She came into our world virtually alone.  She was bounced from foster home to foster home.  Any time she thought she might have found somewhere that could become home, everything fell apart.  There wasn’t a single trace that her parents ever existed, her friends lied to her, and those she loved betrayed her.  She was a runaway, a convict, and a pregnant teenager, and she’s wonderful.

Emma doesn’t take all those terrible things that happened to her and become scornful or destructive.  She’s damaged by her experiences, certainly – she’s incredibly slow to trust, and it takes her a long time to even consider the idea that someone could love her – but she doesn’t let them poison her, doesn’t vent her frustrations outward.  The young woman who did jail time becomes an instrument of justice, tracking down bail-jumpers with investigative skills honed by a lifelong search for absent parents.  She protects the downtrodden and encourages the weak to find strength inside themselves.  In season 1, she stays in Storybrooke despite not believing Henry’s story about fairytale characters come to life; she realizes that he needs her, and she carries out the mission in small, unconscious ways, bettering the circumstances of those around her.  All that bleakness and misery is turned into something good, and I can’t stand the idea of anyone taking that away from her through some prenatal cosmic interference, not my Emma.

That Old-Time Racial Insensitivity…

*Disclaimer: I get that my opinion on the level of racism in Buster Keaton’s films isn’t really helpful or welcome. While I do still think that the racism in Buster’s movies, for the most part, isn’t as egregious as some of the material I’ve seen in other films from that era, that doesn’t particularly matter. “Not as racist as it could have been,” as a designation, serves no point beyond me wanting to feel better about liking Buster’s work in spite of its occasional racist content. This was an unnecessary post, and it’s clear I went easy on Buster because I’m such a fan of his work.*

Today’s Buster Monday post isn’t a subject I’m crazy about, but I’d like to address it.  The golden age of Buster Keaton was the 1920s; admittedly not the worst era of American race relations, but not a good one, either.  A number of Buster’s independent films, both shorts and features, include people of color.  And just how does race figure into his movies?

As with most media of the past, the films are products of their time.  Looking at them from a modern perspective, the most uncomfortable parts are definitely those involving blackface.  At the worst, there’s the servant in Seven Chances, who adds to the film’s central misunderstanding by repeatedly failing to deliver an important message.  I wouldn’t quite call it minstrelsy, but it’s a poor characterization that plays on “lazy Black servant” stereotypes.  There’s also a lot of redface in The Paleface, since many (all?) of its Native American characters are played by white people.  This scenario isn’t as egregious to me; the short’s portrayal of Native Americans is certainly ignorant, and it hinges on a White Savior trope, but the clear antagonists are the unscrupulous white folks trying to steal Native land.  Here, my biggest gripe is the mere fact that white people were cast in the Native American parts, much as I resent whitewashing, colorism, and racial corner-cutting in Hollywood today.

Unfortunately, Buster himself wears blackface a few times.  I think it’s interesting that it’s never actually Buster doing it but his characters.  By that, I mean he doesn’t play characters who aren’t white.  Instead, his white characters, on rare occasions, adopt blackface.  There’s the dream sequence in The Playhouse, in which some of Buster’s many characters are minstrel performers (the most unsavory bit here is the poster advertising the minstrels with a drawing of a monkey playing a banjo – it might have been typical for the time, but it’s gross.)  In College, Ronald poses as a Black man to get a job as a waiter.  Though it’s obviously very sketchy, I’m grateful that Buster’s performance here isn’t mocking.  Including Neighbors is a bit of toss-up, since Buster’s character isn’t technically in blackface.  Instead, he just gets so grimy that the policeman he angers thinks he’s Black, meaning Buster can escape simply by scrubbing his face.  Much like the chief villains in The Paleface are the white businessmen, the chief fool in this bit is the policeman who can’t tell the difference between a Black man and a muddy white man.

As far as actors of color go, there’s not much to impress.  The tired “Black folk are scared of ghosts!” cliché is trotted out a few times.  Also, Black extras are sometimes used as a visual punchline, where they’re first seen from behind and only later found to be Black:  one of the women Jimmie tries to propose to in Seven Chances, or one of the men Bill thinks might be his son in Steamboat Bill, Jr.  In contrast, the best example of Black people in one of Buster’s movies comes in The Navigator, when Rollo sees a pair of newlyweds and decides he’d like to get married, too.  From what I can tell, there’s no added comedy to making the newlyweds Black – they simply are, and it’s a nice moment (too bad Rollo and Betsy are attacked by “cannibal” islanders later in the film.)  Overall, when I look at race in Buster’s films, the impression I get is that his portrayals are uninformed and overly simplistic but not malicious.  The jokes feel more lightly-intentioned than a lot of contemporary entertainment might have and don’t seem to come from a place of perceived superiority or spite.  Though they’re obviously still insensitive and I completely understand that others may very rightly take offense, this lighter tone makes it easier for me to take them as what I think they are – unpleasant products of their time.