The Good Wife 2-22: Getting Off

So here's a question: why does American TV only feel comfortable addressing unconventional sex on procedural crime shows?  On most shows, no matter how sexed up, it's unlikely for the protagonists to do it in anything but missionary position, but it's such a frequent plot element on your CSIs and Law and Orders that they spawned a spinoff entirely dedicated to it (Law and Order SVU, which is actually still on, although everyone seems to have forgotten about it.)  Maybe it's just that such elements are introduced only by lowest-common-denominator shows looking for more ways to be lurid, having already exploited the element of violence as best as they can.  Maybe it's that in our cultural mind sex and violence are two sides of the same coin, or that we can only deal with sexual deviancy [1] when it's coupled with criminal deviancy.

The Good Wife doesn't entirely fit into the profile established above -- its lead characters have moments of sexual misbehaviour, and are at one point glimpsed engaged in cunnilingus [2].  And because it's a legal drama its protagonists are just as often engaged in defending sexual deviants than trying to put them away.  But for all its prestige-drama leanings, it still employs sensationalism frequently to add gravitas to its plotlines, and sensationalized sexual strangeness is among its arsenal.  The Good Wife at least makes an effort towards allowing its deviant characters self-explanation, but it still nonetheless associates this deviancy with unsavoriness if not outright evil.  Look at how Peter's nadir was not just sleeping with a prostitute but asking to suck her toes.  Or the entire Colin Sweeney character.  Or this episode, "Getting Off".

This episode does boast one of the better integrations between the episodic "case of the week" storyline and the ongoing serialized plot, although it's not exactly a subtle parallel.  Lockhart/Gardner is tasked with defending Stephanie Engler. a woman who runs a thinly veiled Ashley Madison and has an open marriage, while Alicia and her family deal with the fallout from her learning of Peter's earlier affair with Kalinda.  A prep session between Alicia and Stephanie quickly becomes obviously Alicia taking out her frustrations about her adulterous husband.

There's a big gap between having an open relationship and adultery in secret, and I don't think "Getting Off" entirely conflates them, but it does view them as associated phenomena.  What lurks like a spectre here is the idea, articulated by Laura Kipnis among others, that adultery and its ubiquity are a sign not of the weaknesses within individual relationships but in the mainstream relationship model itself.  Stephanie mostly gets to best Alicia in logical argument, her theories being undone by emotional response later, but even she can't quite muster up this kind of societal critique.  Still, she does raise the question of whether the sin -- Peter's adultery -- that lies at the centre of The Good Wife's ongoing storyline should really have been that big a deal.

The contrast between logic and emotion is a key structuring mechanism in the episodic plot.  This is most obvious in the cold open: Will has a cool demeanor, refers to the dispute as a matter of contract law, and generally adopts a hyper-logical libertarian dispute.  His opposition, recurring antagonist Nancy Kroeser, adopts her usual scandalized act and puts focus on the sexual component of the case, obviously appealing to the prurient emotions of the jury.  She's made out to be a villain for doing so, but it's more or less the strategy The Good Wife is using in this very episode.

As a matter of contract law -- whether or not Stephanie should be held responsible for the murder of a man at a date arranged via her website -- The Good Wife has little interest in the story, and the ethical ambiguity remains unresolved.  Instead the story transforms into a more black-and-white murder case, with Lockhart/Gardner having to defend Stephanie from charge of doing the killing herself[3].  This would seem to lend a lot of credence to my earlier musings about television needing its sex and violence to be intimately intertwined.

But even when Stephanie's business becomes well and truly irrelevant to the proceedings, it's still a central element of the episode, with it being the one central idea "Getting Off" wants to mull over.  Its continual presence is justified by the fact that Kroeser will use it to inflame the jury, but once again the jury and the audience of the show are both being served by the same device.  Visually, the scandalous images of the murder victim engaging in kinky sex are constantly framed and partially-blocked by the audience, calling attention to their spectatorship.  The trial is revealed as a spectacle by the frame of the larger episode, but even with that frame the audience can enjoy the spectacle nonetheless -- perhaps enjoy it more because it is no longer a guilty pleasure.

In the end, the vaunted open marriage is revealed as a lie, as it turns out that Stephanie's husband murdered the victim out of jealousy.  When she hears this, Stephanie embraces him -- turns out that deep down she wanted homicidal devotion after all.  I suspect the idea was to make her appear normal underneath the deviant facade, but it turns out that normalcy involves an equation of violence with love and a myopic if not sociopathic focus on personal relationship issues over another human life.  Stephanie's claims to an alternate and positive sexuality are rebutted and made the focus for her own humiliation.

Most episodes of The Good Wife end with a pyrhhic victory, and this applies doubly so here.  On the strictly literal level, the firm defends their client but only by implicating her husband.  On the more thematic level, the principle of monogamy is restored and the dangerous deviant sexuality is revealed as a form of denial -- but a new deviancy based on violence is created.  Stephanie's ideas would also seem to have some kind of traction despite the episode's conclusion, as they foreshadow the affair between Alicia and Will which begins in the next episode.

I don't really have the time this week to get into the more serialized bits of storytelling, but it's worth considering Kalinda's own recently-revealed deviancy, both in terms of her one-night stand with Peter and her bisexuality.  (The Good Wife makes a show of LGBT-tolerance, fitting with its generally moderate liberal ideology, but I think it's telling that Kalinda's cheating came out around the same time as her sexuality.)  In this episode the drama with Alicia is almost enough to send her to a new job with her occasional lesbian lover, a FBI agent investigating white-collar crimes, before she learns it would involve working with Peter.  In the end, this is a choice between two deviancies, and she chooses the workplace where she's known as an adulterer over the one where she's known as a lesbian.  It's a bit more complicated than that, but sometimes the broad strokes of a story are more telling than the disclamatory details.

But that choice can also be read as Kalinda choosing the female Florrick over the male.  The friendship between Alicia and Kalinda has been much more developed and more believable than whatever is between Kalinda and Peter.  I don't really read anything sexual in there (although if you want to, slash away) but as Eve Sedgewick has argued, homosociality can be every bit as subversive as homosexuality.  In the end, the more you fight it, the more deviance creeps in.

Next week: "We're unable to tell if it's a machine or a life form."

[1]"Deviancy" is an extremely loaded term, but I need a shorthand here for the constellation of kinks, fetishes, lifestyles and subcultures that makes up everything outside the narrowly proscribed horizons of "vanilla" sexuality.

[2] This isn't deviant sexuality in any way, shape or form, but I can still count on one hand the number of times I've seen it even suggested in television.

[3]I'm reminded of the story in one of the Phoenix Wright games where the titular character has to defend his client against a burglary charge and remarks on how weird it is that it's not a murder trial like every other case he's done.  Sure enough, the client is promptly charged with murder, which turns out to be the "real" trial.

The Good Wife 1-13: Bad

In retrospect, it's really no wonder that rich people love The Good Wife so much.  It situates itself very clearly in the realm of celebrity and of scandal, presenting that slim realm as uncertain and dangerous.  In echoes of her own background, Alicia constantly comes up against people who use the tools of sensational media to slander and destroy the lives of the famous and usually rich.  It's not as upfront about its celebrity pity as something like H8R, but by its nature it invests our sympathy in media subjects, subjects who have a considerable amount of power but suffer the indignities of public opinion.

The legal system, then, appears as a redress to the court of public opinion.  By defending the falsely-accused, Alicia acts as a restorer of truth.  "Bad", at least, goes further than most Good Wife episodes in complicating this dynamic.  It begins with a situation where the legal system has already in some degree failed in its role as truth-establisher.  Colin Sweeney, a wealthy socialite, was acquitted of killing his wife but is still generally believed to be guilty.  (The show explicitly draws the comparison to OJ Simpson on multiple occasions, although this case doesn't have the racial dynamics that made that one such an obsession.)

This means that in some way the court has failed -- either in convicting a guilty man, or in failing to settle the matter in the public eye.  Furthermore, the actual case this episode deals with concerns his guilt, but is not going to put him on Death Row or even in jail.  The legal battle is over Sweeney's inheritance from his wife.  Although the question of his guilt is in the balance, the only consequences of the chase is whether a rich man will have to become less rich.  The Good Wife may never be able to fully deal with the fundamental amorality of the legal profession, but it is at least edging towards it with this episode.

The problem is, in essence, that Sweeney doesn't perform grief well.  Instead of being distraught at his wife's death, he makes pithy quips about it.  This instantly makes him suspicious, even aberrant, as much to us as to the in-text fictional public.  There's been a lot of ink spilled in academic writing recently about affect, and while this is in many ways an academic fad, you only have to look at an example like this (or the real-life Casey Anthony media craze) to see how significant affect can be.

Whether or not Sweeney is innocent (and the episode leaves at least a little doubt as to this) he carries himself like a villain -- mincing and quipping and going on about his sexual fetishes, all played to the nines in an awesome performance by Dylan Baker.  He has the affect of the murderer from the movie, and this makes people view him as the murderer in real life.  On the other hand, the lawyer on the opposing side plays like an innocent who doesn't really know what she's doing but is still likable -- a movie hero.  This is heavily suggested to also be a facade.  There's a distinct and unusual disconnect between affect and emotion here.

To get metatextual for a moment, the very idea behind acting is that people experiencing a certain emotion will display these emotions through a specific affect (e.g. facial expressions, tone of voice, body language).  To suggest that one can be grieving and still acting like Sade is to call into question our tools for understanding what we see before us.  When Sweeney's daughter, who performed grief properly, is revealed to be the real killer, this is a potentially revolutionary moment.

But The Good Wife is never really comfortable with this statement, and at the end of "Bad" Julia accuses Sweeney of being the murderer because of his creepy gift of a wall-sized snuff manga poster.  Throughout the episode Sweeney's fetishes and deviances, sexual and otherwise, are sensationalized and made into part and parcel of his evil appearance.

His ultimate exoneration would seem to reveal this prejudice -- I'm not fond of the word "kinkphobia" but it seems most applicable here -- as false, but the end of the episode brings it back into play.  Regardless of his innocence, it's pretty clear that Sweeney being into "breathplay" is supposed to make him creepy, which makes the episode partly hinge on something I'm not comfortable with.  This is the thing I find so interesting and yet frustrating about The Good Wife -- it so frequently seems to go halfway towards a really interesting idea and then retreats back into the fortress of convention.

The Sweeney storyline does provide an interesting contrast for this episode's chapter in the ongoing storyline about Alicia's scandal-plagued husband.  His appeal hearing begins, and Peter seems the polar opposite of Sweeney: soft-spoken, contrite, and looking overall like a good guy -- a movie hero, even.  But this is, of course, all affect.  His lawyer is stern and dispassionately rational, affecting authority.  But the juxtaposition with the Sweeney case, intentional or not, suggests that this is all unreliable -- that we can't learn anything about Peter's actual guilt from his sympathetic face.  The only people in any episode of The Good Wife who aren't playing a part seem to be the judges, whose removal from the ongoing power struggle between plaintiff and defendant seems to allow them room to be their (usually very quirky) selves.

There's another way in which these two stories inform each other, which relates to the above-mentioned sexual sensationalism of these two cases.  "Bad" begins with Peter's attorney repeating "This is not about sex" in the courtroom, trying to divorce Peter's corruption charges from his publicized infidelity.  This would again seem to suggest that we divorce both characters' sexual peccadilloes from the more serious crimes they're accused of.  (Let's just leave the equation of infidelity with kinkiness to the side.)  With its cool rational gaze, The Good Wife tries to divorce the sensational from the important and condemn both those that publicize sensationalism (e.g. the talk show host from a few episodes back) and the public that laps it up.  At the same time, however, it uses that prurient interest -- in strange sex and ripped-from-the-headlines stories -- to draw us in as viewers.  It's a curious tension that I'm not sure the show has quite figured out, but which is still in some ways productive.

As compared to the sped-up episodic plotlines, the Florrick trial moves as slow as a real court date does, taking up weeks and months, always looming painfully ahead.  This creates a bit of pacing whiplash, but it works very well as a season-long arc.  What's most interesting about this is how little of the battle over Peter's appeal takes place in the courtroom.  There's a lot of subterfuge, possible deals, and underhanded stunts between Peter and his nemesis Glen Childs, with neither side emerging with clean hands.  In the end, the facts are almost irrelevant to this battle, despite Golden's opening-arguments pitch.  This is a battle for power.

The importance of power is revealed through a deal Childs offers Peter early in the episode.  He offers release, meaning that Peter can get all the things he's been claiming to fight for -- his family and a normal life.  But it would mean giving up any chance of running for political office again, as well as a chance at clearing his name.  Peter rejects it more or less out of hand.  While he explains that the offer shows that Childs is afraid of losing the battle, it also shows a less flattering side of Peter.  As much as he tries to portray himself as (and may even want to be) a family man, he refuses to give up his grasp on power.

And if we're talking about productive tensions at the heart of The Good Wife, that's another one that both Peter and Alicia have to face -- power against family.  By conventional morality family would be the obvious choice, but what if you're giving up power to someone who will do evil with it?  There's a parallel here as well with Alicia's return to the workplace, which gives her more power in the external world (the public sphere) while estranging her from her family (the domestic sphere).  Whether or not this trade-off is worth it is yet to be seen.

Next Week: "Shut Up! Why don't you just enjoy it for what it is?"

The Good Wife 1-06: Conjugal

We open on a scene that is blatantly not a scene.  A big, burly black man straight out of central casting robs a convenience store, all of which plays out in action-movie fashion, including shakycam taken to an almost parodic extent.  This is a show -- specifically a low-budget, ripped-from-the-headlines TV movie, but not the show we're watching, and everything from its stylistic choices to its colour palette inform us of this.  When we pan back from the TV into the law office we're used to, it's the comparison of sensationalized television to a more complex and less convenient reality.

Of course, The Good Wife is in itself a strange version of reality, no matter what it chooses to compare itself to.  It's a glossy primetime legal drama, about good-looking lawyers with perfect hair who always end up defending the right side of a case, and its central characters -- despite their personal problems and downfalls -- exist in the rarefied air of the 1%.  The visual style is an elegant, comfortable mixture of golds and browns, which is definitely different from the action movie faux-realism of the film within the show, but not really any more or less truthful.

Compare and contrast:

These are the ideas that The Good Wife continually toys with: truth and deception, reality and fantasy.  Throughout "Conjugal", and the series at large (at least judging from the episodes I've seen so far), we're offered a variety of fakes and simulacra, with the heroes creating these deceptions as often as not.  The episodic plot here is a fairly straightforward treatment of this: Alicia and Carrie are charged with defending a death-row inmate, who they discover has been falsely convicted.  The false narrative is replaced with a true one, resulting in a triumph for justice.  Elsewhere in the episode, things are not so simple.

Take the titular conjugal visit, which is staged so that Alicia can get information from her husband without them being monitored.  The express purpose for the visit is fake -- they don't even share a bed, with Peter sleeping on the floor.  The simulacrum bedroom that the prison provides is a transparent example of falseness.  But it is a legitimate reconnecting experience for them, and in the end the lie becomes a form of truth -- the two being around each other clearly begins to heal their marriage and Peter's mental state, even if they don't physically do the deed.

I have to give a lot of credit to Josh Charles' performance here.  Peter is theoretically a repulsive character, but Charles invests him with a charm and at least an appearance of decency that makes it obvious why Alicia would try to save their marriage.  It's also suggested repeatedly that Peter was more effective and scrupulous in his professional life than most of his colleagues, drawing parallels with Elliot Spitzer, who just happened to have his personal dirt dug up just as he was moving against the banks.

The idea of falsity also comes up at the beginning of the episode, with the inmate's widow.  We first see her making what appears to be a personal, emotional plea to Alicia, begging her to recognize the humanity of the man she's defending and offering her a picture of their family.  Later on we learn that she went through the exact seem routine for Carrie, producing an identical photograph.  Both lawyers are amused at the woman's duplicity, but don't fully condemn her -- "Hey, it worked, didn't it?"  There are types of falseness that "Conjugal" resolutely condemns, such as the police officer's negligence and deceit, but it also recognizes that deceit can be employed to good ends -- and that it can also contain elements of the truth, as the wife's story certainly does.

The standard episode of The Good Wife features a case-of-the-week plotline as well as an ongoing narrative involving Alicia's background as the wife of a disgraced politician.  "Conjugal" is more episodic than most, with the above-mentioned conjugal visit being the only real part that touches on Alicia's past, and that advances character more than the plot.  It's a bit of an odd choice, as what we have here is a stock legal drama plot that is well-executed but not exactly reinvented.

Lawyers may be the third point in the holy trinity of TV professions, but unlike the other two -- cops and doctors -- TV has to go a lot farther to establish attorneys as a force for good.  (I would probably disagree with the idea of police as being automatically heroic, but most people wouldn't).  In reality Alicia would spend a lot of time defending guilty men, which is a necessary aspect of the criminal justice system, and it may be possible that these cases happen in the margins between episodes.  But, at least in the episodes I've seen thus far, Alicia falls on the side of justice, and cleanly[1].

This isn't to say that the episodic plotlines aren't enjoyable in the same way that a lot of genre entertainment is -- even if we know the end result, there's a lot of pleasure in seeing how we get there.  But there are also problematic aspects in this structure that it's hard to ignore. The tone of this episode, in which the courageous white lawyers save the life of a burly black guy, has undeniable Blind Side-ish overtones.  The accused's wife asks the lawyers to consider the man as a human being, but the show never really does -- he's a cause, and little more.  (Hell, I can't even remember his name).  In a series that spends a lot of time complicating conventional narratives, it's disconcerting to see the savior narrative presented so straightforwardly.

So we have an unjustly sentenced black inmate, but "Conjugal" seems to go out of its way to disclaim the racial outrage that usually comes with such cases.  There's some suggestion of racism in his conviction, but this is all pinned on an individual, the corrupt police officer who rigged the line-up.  Worse, there's a scene where the lawyers discuss the inaccuracy of cross-race identification, and their brought-in expert describes it as a reciprocal and universal phenomenon.  She demonstrates this by showing how Kalinda (the only non-white cast member) can't correctly identify a white man.  This turns an issue that's often attributed to personal racism into something that's scientifically natural and not specific to any one race.  In other words: Hello rich white audience.  You know, it's totally not your fault that you can't tell all those black guys on The Wire apart.

We end up discovering that it was simply another black criminal who did the crime, although this is assumed on fairly shaky ground.  A situation that has potential for institutional criticism becomes a story about one lazy cop who got the wrong perp.  All so that we can get the money shot of our cuddly inmate tearfully forgiving the white woman who misidentified him.


And so I end up once again frustrated with the two disparate parts of The Good Wife: the interesting and nuance ongoing storyline and the fairly standard episodic storylines.  It's a good idea for a format, one that preserves the episode as a significant narrative unit while still being able to tell a longer-form story, but one side of the equation undoubtedly feels fresher than the other.  Perhaps it's just that the case-of-the-week narrative are obviously structured around a familiar format, and have to hit the same beats like clockwork, but they just feel too pat and morally simple compared to the more complex world of politics the show is enmeshed in.

Of course, if The Good Wife was just about Alicia's relationship with her husband, it would probably be a movie and not a TV show.  And its impetus for episodic plots seems a lot more natural than, for example, the one in Pushing Daisies.  With a little more elbow grease and nuance, the cases of the week could become as interesting as the long-term political dealings... and judging from the increasing praise the series has gotten for parts I haven't watched, I don't think that's an unreasonable hope.

Next week: "Would you say we'd be venturing into a zone of danger?"

[1] To its credit, The Good Wife is willing to devote episodes to a lot of less sensational cases -- the episode after this is about a slip-and-fall suit, for instance.  But there are some institutions of TV lawyering that don't change.