As Indiana Jones, Harrison Ford’s wry, sardonic, vaguely reluctant action-energized masculinity always seems to hold the seed of its own critique. Even in the current flick, he comments wearily on the necessity that he extract himself from touchy situations, assessing his ability to contain threats with quick insight and clear confidence but none of the arrogance or stupid invulnerability that seems de rigueur for so many action heroes.

Indy’s escapades always have an ulterior motive; ultimately, it’s all about the research. The representation of professors on film speaks volumes about cultural stereotypes—see, for only several, recent instances, Smart People, in which Dennis Quaid plays a disheveled, impervious literature prof, and The Visitor, in which Richard Jenkins offers a much more nuanced portrait of a sad, lonely, professionally stalled economics professor. In the Crystal Skull, we first see Indy captivating his class of young acolytes, wearing the requisite suit and bow tie of the 1950s egghead. Donning his battered brown fedora signals his transition to action hero. Gone is the effeminizing suit and tie, replaced with his sweat-stained safari shirt, brown pants, and scuffed boots, his worn but ubiquitous bull-whip by his able side.

When his younger boy-partner admires Indy’s strength, our hero wise-cracks that he’s only a teacher part-time. During the rest, adventure is his playground and he’s proud of his ability to execute his moves. Under every ivory-towered absent mind, it seems, is a superman waiting to loosen his tie and leap tall buildings. But for Indy, the requisite one-against-many fist fights, car chases, and narrow escapes seem subsidiary to the character’s main goal, which is to secure knowledge, as well as the containers in which it’s supposedly borne. In the Indiana Jones series, the quest to know justifies the pursuit of things.

The Crystal Skull, in fact, makes the pursuit of knowledge its overt and primary motive, as the totemic object over which its heroes and villains struggle represents an ancient Mayan ritual symbol that honored the gods and dispensed wisdom. The errant skull must be returned to its rightful resting place, so Indy and his team face a perilous journey down a series of increasingly long, fast, and furious waterfalls, and into and out of various caves and tombs, shoving aside cobwebs and fighting off the creatures of the dark that imperil their way.

(In one of the film’s most unfortunate missteps, these creatures, who stream from the central tomb much as the horrible, giant red ants copiously bled from their mound earlier in the film, are costumed as caricatures of Native American Indians, with feathers, war-paint, and loin-cloths. The extras’ over-the-top make-up screams Disney World ride more than it serves as a scary narrative detail, a gratuitous bit of racism that could have easily been cut.)

The characters line up good and bad pretty much along the knowledge v. things axis—Max, the turncoat double-agent who pretends to be “Jonesy’s” friend, inevitably becomes consumed in the great final conflagration since he refuses to leave the cave of treasures, greedily stuffing his pockets with jewels and gold. The good folks, who survive, are those who “know,” and know enough to constrain their desire by respecting the origins and proper ownership of things. “Oxy,” for example, Indy’s anthropologist colleague, somehow lost his mind in his effort to return the skull to its rightful homestead, but proceeds to regain his coherence over the course of their journey. His appreciation for “the natives” is rewarded quid pro quo: the return of the skull buys him the return of his mind. As they travel, Oxy’s cryptic remarks, which only Indy can decipher, lead them to the skull’s originary cave and allow them to set the world aright.

The film’s villain, on the other hand, can’t keep her obsession with knowledge separate from an imperialist desire to acquire things and cultures. In the final confrontation, when the skull is returned to sit among the twelve others that make up their own tribal council, the Russian villain is incinerated by her own hubris. Played with gleam by Cate Blanchett (even if, as A.O. Scott reported in the Times, her accent slips all over the globe), the icy evil-doer peers too deeply and looks too hard into the skull’s empty eye sockets, chanting, “I want to know” (or rather, “I vant to know”) over and over until the skull’s extraterrestrial powers turn her into smoke, her greed punished with death.

Most notable in this fourth installment of the Indy chronicles is his reunion with Marion Ravenwood, his hard-drinking buddy from the first film, and her newly introduced son, who (spoiler alert, although it’s not much of a secret anymore) turns out to be Indy’s. “Mutt,” played by Shia LeBeouf as a rather vain greaser, has quit school to pursue motorcycle maintenance (a perhaps an oblique reference to a more Zen way of life than the kind Indy pursues, however reluctantly). When he realizes the boy is his, Indy insists he should go back to finish school, again trying to honor knowledge over adventure. Given old Dad’s activities, book-learning is a hard sell.

Ford’s advanced age is addressed head on, providing some of the film’s best jokes. Always the hesitant hero, Indy is now also a profoundly tired one. Mutt calls him “gramps” and “pops” not because of their new familial tie but because Indy seems ancient to him: “What are you, 80?” Mutt asks guilelessly. That Indy doesn’t try to overcompensate for his old bones is one of the film’s sweetest conceits.

Given Ford’s limited ability to perform his own stunts (although he clearly accomplishes enough of them to make his performance impressive for a 65-year-old), this film focuses on his relationships much more than the earlier ones, creating for him a nuclear family that’s solidified in the end by a marriage, of all things. How ironic to see Indiana Jones domesticated, although since more sequels are never out of the question, whether he can settle into the conventional, complacent couple-dom that action heroes always, if sadly and nobly, resist remains an open question.

Until film’s rather ludicrous, conservative conclusion in marriage, Karen Allen, returning as Marion, has fun representing a middle-aged woman who’s more than a domestic help-mate for Indy. She drives their get-away cars over cliffs, confident that they’ll all survive; she delights in fighting off evil physically and intellectually; and she never cowers in the face of the fearsome or revolting challenges that confront Indy’s party on their way to the story’s happy finale. Watching her take such energetic good fun in being part of the crew brings a welcome point of female identification to the typically masculine (and male) action story.

Likewise, Blanchett’s villain, with her silly black helmet-hair and her icy blue eyes—however ridiculous the character or her recycled Cold War conflict—provides a fun display of female power and ingenuity. With two women in central roles—one good, one bad—the Crystal Skull offers more gender balance to the action-adventure plot. Of course, were Indy as young as he used to be, the women might remain constrained in subsidiary, sex-object-to-be-protected roles. Now that he’s older and more conscious than ever of his mortal limitations, Indy’s women can assume a more central role in his escapades—his masculinity has less to lose or to prove.

But that’s part of the fun of it.

Humming to John Williams’ familiar score,
The Feminist Spectator

Deb Margolin takes her title and her impulse for this set of four brief plays from a poem by William Blake. I saw the production May 9th, at the West End Theatre in New York, a third floor walk-up space perfectly intimate and appropriate to the sentiments of the evening. The four pieces read like short stories interconnected by themes of loss, grief, violence, and death. Margolin’s language, always so rewarding and exciting to experience at the theatre, is typically rich, allusive, and elliptical here. Her narratives drop the audience into the middle of stories that don’t necessarily need a beginning, middle, or end, because what we experience in their telling is the vitality of a moment in which something is observed, the clarity of a slice of time that captures something keen and unforgettable, something that might otherwise be forever lost.

Margolin’s sense of time works like that—she demonstrates, through her writing, that life is really an accumulation of moments that we can never retrieve, that we can only try to remember through association, through language, through feelings that are always undependable but necessary, nonetheless, to fleshing out our memories.

Margolin calls this evening “a quartet of pieces for a quartet of actors” who are multiply cast across each playlet. “The multiple casting,” she says in the published script, “is designed as a kind of human poetry, casting light on the imbricated conceits and thematic unity of the multiple pieces.”

The first piece, When They Quiet Down I Start, is masterfully performed by Curzon Dobell. He presents the intense monologue directly to the spectators, who serve as witnesses to the posthumous confessions of a man who was a suicide bomber in some unnamed location (leaving us free to imagine him anywhere in the Middle East, from Israel to Iraq). He’s now the bus driver, he tells us, the ferryman crossing the River Styx to carry the souls of the newly dead into heaven/eternity.

Dobell’s performance is precise and compelling, his wiry body tense with focus yet conversational, almost colloquial in his delivery if not in his language. He pulls us into his disquisition about the ridiculousness of suicide bombers’ actions and desires, scoffing at the notion that 72 virgins constitute adequate motivation for mass murder.

Instead, the bus driver says he was convinced to join the self-destructive ranks of suicide terrorists not for the rewards his initiators tell him will be his in the next life, but for how pulling the string on his jerry rigged device of self-immolation will make everything stop, will arrest a life that’s become too chaotic and emotionally over-stimulated.

Margolin writes chilling images that in Dobell’s delivery capture their macabre appropriateness. He describes bodies that look wrong, because they’re new to being dead and don’t quite know how to do it yet. He describes faces frozen in death masks, covering bereft souls weeping with loss as he ferries them to his world.

He describes his own moment of destruction, when he approached a crowded train station and watched as people moved down the tracks toward a train that stopped farther away from him than he expected. Only after they’ve cleared his portion of the platform does he pull the string that sets off his bomb, killing himself but not, he implies, many others.

Throughout When They Quiet Down I Start, a second actor wearing the white cassock of a priest stands with his back turned to the audience, appearing to pray. The bus driver refers to him occasionally, glancing at his glowering back for a response, somehow wordlessly rejecting the solace of his presumed prayer.

The small stage is decorated by an overturned table, its legs extended into the air, with two upended chairs resting on its underside, and a large steamer trunk set vertically, against which the bus driver leans and on which he places his blue-and-white paper coffee cup.

A video plays overhead, projected against a set of very large steel doors. Images of train tracks and women splatter and fragment across the screen, illustrating the chaos and inchoate sensations of a man walking knowingly toward his own death. The design’s cumulative effect creates the aura of noisy quietude, the force of its contradictions compelling us to witness the stories that unfold within.

The monologue imagines the emotional interior of a man who’s by no means a martyr, but someone unhappy for other reasons, who sees his carefully choreographed murderous act as a way to address his own psychosis and despair. By making it personal instead of political, Margolin’s writing somehow humanizes these terrorist acts. She puts a specific face on the action and lets us imagine that these destructive choices are made by particular people with real histories, whose brief lives brought them to this moment for individual, more than political, reasons. Margolin and Dobell deftly remind us that human actions exceed ideology.

In Clarrise and Larmon, the second piece, Lisa Kron plays the mother of a boy who’s been killed, senselessly, in war. In the play’s opening moment, a soldier gives her and her husband a photograph of their son’s remains: his knee, calf, ankle, and foot. Clarisse questions the reporting soldier’s language of fear. In answer to her questions, he says, “I’m afraid so,” or “I’m afraid not,” or “I’m afraid it would have been . . .” and other declarations of timid hesitation. “Why are you so afraid of everything?” she asks impertinently and honestly. He can’t understand her challenge to the banal language we use to inform people of the most awful truths.

Kron and Dobell—making a quick emotional transition into the husband’s role from the terrorist he plays in the first piece—play wife/husband mother/father in the intimate yet formal way that typifies Margolin’s work. Their language is too perfect, too writerly to be real, but at the same time, that bit of artifice helps heighten our understanding of the emotional magnitude of their feelings.

The play’s most wrenching image is the last, when Clarisse rips the photograph of her son’s leg into bits, crying that the boy needs to go back where he came from, and tries to shove his image back into her womb. The pain of loss and the impossibility of retrieval become achingly clear.

The third play, The Rich Silk of It, is dedicated to the memory of Lyric Benson, a Yale acting student who was murdered by her ex-boyfriend/fiancé. Her death devastated the Yale community of which Deb, who teaches playwrighting and acting and other courses at the university, was a part. The piece imagines the final three seconds of Lyric’s life, as she stands on the stoop of her apartment building, trying to persuade her psychotic ex not to kill her.

She recalls happier moments from their shared past; she tells him he wouldn’t want her mother to find her body on the stoop, as what mother should be forced to discover the body of her child? She talks non-stop to him and to us, as the light focuses our attention on her face and her assassin’s inscrutable back.

The piece is perhaps the evening’s most ambitious, partly because Margolin attempts to tell so much of the back-story of this last tragic moment. In the other three pieces, she spins out a rich web of allusions and connections that comprise one particular moment of eternity. But in Rich Silk, she looks for answers in a larger network of time, in a series of moments that culminate in Benson’s murder.

The piece dislodges chronological time, flashing forward and back across the moments that brought the young woman and the deranged man to the moment of her death. Yet where the evening’s three other plays are tinged with irony and absurdism, The Rich Silk of It plays earnestly and realistically, generating the expectation that the story will provide motivations and reveal the secrets that realism leads us to anticipate. Instead of the swift slice of intersectional, slightly skewed reality that the other pieces provide, this one is more teleological, looking for answers that really can’t be found.

While the slain student (played by Claire Siebers) is a unified, clearly delineated character, her murderer—played by Khris Lewin, a visually arresting, muscular, small, bald, white man—changes personae frequently. Lewin portrays the very troubled boyfriend in one moment, a dubious gay bartender the next, and an anonymous man whom the boyfriend also accosts the next.

Although this instantaneous multiple casting underlines the boyfriend’s chaotic subjectivity, it also lessens the frightening effect of his insanity. The play intercuts his moments of pure psychosis with more sober reflections by the other characters Lewin plays, breaking the terrible momentum of his drive to murder the woman.

We observe the boyfriend’s possessive rages, his expressed desire to cut the woman into little pieces the better to devour her. We hear the bartender’s cautions, his sense that something’s not right with the man the young woman intends to marry. We see her visit a priest, concerned that she can’t seem to bring her fiancé to god. And we watch uncomfortably as he performs his desire to possess her emotionally, physically, and sexually.

Because the piece is more realistic, we expect explanations. Our desires, though, are finally foiled; what answers can be found in the act of a madman? The image of a woman talking against the silhouette of a man holding a gun on her is compelling, but clouded by the back and forth of time. Leaving her suspended in that one awful moment, those three seconds before she’s hurried to eternity before her time, might have been a powerful enough choice.

In the eponymous last piece, Kron returns to play “Woman in Bed,” who’s revealed as stage-hands open those large steel doors and push a full, tastefully decorated bed out onto the stage. It turns out she’s lolling, fully dressed, on a store display, calling for the attention of “Woman in Blazer,” an officious saleswoman who tries to cajole her out of her bedding back into the proper reality of the department store.

Although her motivations are never quite clear, the Woman in Bed feverishly describes her desire to talk to the Woman in Blazer, finally seducing her into the bed to frolic among the sheets and covers. The brief scene ends in a passionate, unexpected kiss, providing a moment of humor and happiness, however inexplicable, that ends the evening.

Margolin’s writing and the actors’ embodiments provide the evening’s rich satisfactions. The direction, however, is a bit too ham-fisted for such delicate, intricate writing and ideas. Although in his program note, director Marc Stuart Weitz seems to understand Margolin’s intent, he freights the four pieces with cumbersome weight.

Weitz envisions these scenes with too much stuff and too many extraneous people come on between the plays to move décor on and off. These intersessions let us detach and rest, when we should be moved inexorably through each of these short pieces to feel their cumulative effect.

Ultimately, they all tell one story of loss, death, yearning, and finally, hope. Their collective impact might be better served by a directorial hand able to highlight the writing through simple, crystalline images, instead of filling the stage with actions and things that distract from the pure impact of Margolin’s words and the actors who say them and feel them so well.

The Feminist Spectator

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When I first ordered this film from NetFlix, I got the beginning French article wrong and received instead Ma Vie En Rose, the coming-of-age story about a young boy who desperately wants to dress as a girl. I was disappointed that I hadn’t received the biopic about Edith Piaf I’d expected, but I’d wanted to see the other film and watched it anyway. Although I thought it beautiful and moving, I’m still not sure whether it’s trans- and homophobic, or if it’s a sensitive discussion of a boy’s gender ambivalence/ambiguity.

La Vie En Rose, on the other hand, I found unambiguously wonderful. Writer-director Olivier Dahan’s film eschews chronology, cutting backwards and forwards in Piaf’s tragic life, from her collapse onstage at one of her final performances and onward to her death, back to her childhood as the abandoned daughter of an alcoholic street singer and a circus contortionist. She’s taken in early on by a warm-hearted prostitute named Tatine who works under the stern hand of her madam, who happens to be Piaf’s paternal grandmother. Scenes of the sickly young Edith navigating the purgatory of a 1930s Paris bordello capture the inchoate confusion of the perversions and lusts that course through the house’s warren-like rooms and winding hallways.

Here and throughout the film, Dahan shoots from Piaf’s perspective. These early brothel scenes deliver incoherent images of men and women in various states of undress and unusual sexual postures that are difficult to piece together, as they would be for an eight-year-old child who knows not what she sees. Seen through Edith’s eyes, the brothel seems a happy place; Tatine and another prostitute clearly love and care for the girl in ways her parents could never manage. They entertain her during her bath, and take her for walks, swinging her by the arms between them.

Poor health consigns young Edith to months in bed; at one point, she’s temporarily blinded by an eye inflammation. Her dependency on caretakers and medications begins early and haunts her life, eventually contributing to her premature death in her mid-40s. Her physical needs infect her emotional constitution, turning her quickly from a strong, devil-may-care young woman with a flippant attitude to her own poverty, to the cantankerous, querulous diva who adores and despises those who eventually control her career.

La Vie en Rose is an often moving biopic whose form and content meld to create its portrait of the tragic artist. The camera dedicates itself to Piaf’s perspective; as it moves through her life, hand-held shots with very few edits move with her from room to room, seeing through her eyes the walls literally closing in around her, feeling along with her confusion, determination, and despair. The camera captures physically, as well as metaphorically, how time and space collapse around Piaf.

Toward the end, the film detours into unnecessary melodrama, given Piaf’s already heightened life story. The story reveals that she had a child, a daughter who died young from meningitis. It’s not entirely clear why Dahan’s script withholds this information until the finale, which overburdens the secret with importance it doesn’t really earn. Are we supposed to think that Edith’s often cruel emotional connections to people resulted from the loss of her only child? Does the writer-director presume this explains more of her complicated personality than scenes of her own degrading childhood?

In fact, the film does its best work illuminating the formative impact of poverty on Piaf’s life. When her stardom brings her wealth, she believes in it no more than she did her own mother’s fealty. The diva’s bitterness is so thoroughly internalized, no fortune could compensate for those early deprivations. She remains, throughout her life, the street singer, hat in hand, reaching out to audiences who marveled at her voice to feed her emotionally and physically.

Marion Cotillard’s performance as Piaf richly deserved the Oscar she received for Best Actress this year. Her performance of the doomed diva is intensely physical; it seems to emanate from her round, kohl-drawn eyes as well as her pleading, sweeping hands. Cotillard lip-synced Piaf’s singing, but her physical mannerisms and her impersonation of Piaf’s vocal virtuosity is so persuasive it’s difficult to tell that the voice emanating from those perfectly rounded, quivering lips isn’t hers.

Cotillard embodies Piaf’s songs completely, reveling in the chanteuse’s vocal idiosyncrasies and her signature gestures, using her elegant, bird-like hands to enhance her music’s emotional appeal. The film underlines that “piaf” means “little sparrow” in French, a name bestowed on Edith by her first benefactor (played benevolently by Gerard Depardieu).

Despite her precarious health, Piaf commands a stage. The contrast the film captures between her increasingly vulnerable, frail body and her powerful, charismatic stage presence is utterly compelling, even frightening. Later scenes, in which her talent overwhelms the capacities of her small, brittle frame, are terrifying, brutal in how they depict Piaf’s will to sing and the way in which her talent ultimately seems to kill her from within. Her body, it seems, couldn’t withstand the power of her voice.

Cotillard never loses sight of Piaf’s intense vulnerability and her contradictory strength (opposing characteristics that Joe Roach, in his wonderful book, It, says are what mark people who have “it,” that most elusive, difficult-to-describe star quality). She persuasively ages, playing Piaf from her teen-aged years to the end of her life with nuanced, convincing changes of tone, character, and emotional quality. The sole DVD extra demonstrates the make-up artist’s achievement with the film, as the meticulously constructed age effects and wigs allowed Dahan to film Cotillard in extreme close-up without losing believability.

The crippling arthritis that contributed to Piaf’s early death made the singer look twice her age. Convalescent scenes after her breakdown toward the end of her career show her bent as if with osteoporosis. In her illness, she wears her once-dark, lush hair in a badly dyed haze of carrot-colored fuzz around her head, and her face is lined and crumpled. Yet despite her body’s deterioration, Piaf continues to command her spirit, her voice, and her companions. Only when she realizes that she’ll never sing again does Piaf acquiesce to death.

Piaf’s original talent was raw and rather glib, as she stood on street corners nearly daring people to stop to listen and appreciate her voice. As various male coaches help her construct the more calculating emotive image for which she became known, the performativity laced through her performances becomes stunningly clear. Piaf performed herself, even while she truly seemed to love and feed off of her fan’s adoration for the image she created and held at such a short distance from herself. She found kinship in performance, connecting to audiences who were always anonymous and fleeting, but huge sustaining presences in her life.

The Feminist Spectator

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A friend wrote to remind me that I hadn’t addressed the Jodi debacle of the last episode(s), which does seem worth at least a few words. Jodi’s character shifted in unpredictable and rather unbelievable ways through the course of her run on the series. She started as a sex radical of sorts who didn’t want to commit to a monogamous relationship with Bette, and ended as a betrayed girlfriend infuriated by Bette’s affair with Tina. Too bad the show’s writers couldn’t maintain their hold on a character who could practice non-monogamy with magnanimity, but had to reduce her to a conventionally jealous, spurned lover.

When at the end Bette protests that their relationship never really worked, spectators can only agree. As I’ve noted before, Jennifer Beals and Marlee Matlin (who apparently have long been close friends in “real life”) never sparked much, physically or emotionally. Their sex scenes seemed forced and perfunctory; toward the end, when Jodi so frequently tried to force herself on Bette, their scenes were nearly distasteful.

Bette’s rekindled desire for Tina inspired all sorts of new moralizing from her friends (I still can’t fathom why Bette’s choices are always judged so harshly), with everyone protesting that they didn’t want to see Jodi hurt. Although the character was drawn as everyone’s best friend this season, the inner circle’s reactions tread close to pity for the disabled deaf girl who was about to be dumped.

Granted, Jodi’s affection for the L girls made her into a good buddy, but I couldn’t help feeling suspicious and uneasy that their protectiveness toward her came at least partly from her deafness. While writing a deaf character into a series like The L Word is a progressive choice, implicitly pitying her, under cover of emotional support, seems cheap.

Jodi’s “explosive” unveiling of her new “sculpture” in the last episode was a gratuitous attack, a gleefully performed humiliation of the woman The L Word loves to bash. Why does Bette have to take another one right between the eyes? Because she’s so smart? Her speech at Jodi’s premiere was elegant and eloquent, her intellect and her (fabricated, of course) insights into art-making keen and original. The show inevitably undercuts these admirable public performances by so openly dragging her through the mud of her private life.

And since when does a sculptor use two-dimensional multi-media to make her art? The scene at the gallery felt unnecessary, a public shaming of Bette that didn’t further the plot any more than letting Jodi exit with uncharacteristically vindictive self-righteousness.

I’m left wondering what will become of Max’s affair with Jodi’s interpreter, and who will be the next temporary standard-bearer for the show’s more radical (although in the context of The L Word, “radical” is relative) artistic and sexual practices. Tune in next February.

The Feminist Spectator

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Perhaps I’m anticipating the show ending its run next season, with eight short episodes in which to wrap up the sprawling melodramatic plot. But my sadness at the end of this season’s The L Word felt much more like the grief I experienced at the end of the first season, knowing I’d have to wait months to watch, rapt, until this lesbian soap opera started up again.

Maybe it’s because the resolutions this season were more satisfying than usual. Maybe it’s because the typically ham-fisted cliff-hanger ending seemed so over-the-top . Maybe it’s because the narrative captured the spirit of an ending more than any of the other seasons. Whatever the reason, I feel this year the same sort of separation anxiety and sadness that plagued me for weeks after the first season ended.

I’ve saved the season finale on my DVR, and watch it (well, parts of it) regularly, not because the writing is particularly good, but because I feel moved by certain threads in the story, and because certain images and scenes strike a chord in me that makes them both familiar and keenly nostalgic.

For instance, I’m embarrassed by how delighted I am that Bette and Tina have rekindled not just their relationship but their romance. The scene I’d wear out if I were re-watching it on tape happens toward the end of the final episode, at the wrap party for Les Girls, when Tina and Bette join the party’s dancing women. The camera tracks Tina leading Bette by the hand toward the dance floor. It’s not particularly artful camera work; in fact, the lighting is dark, the subjects far from the lens. But you can see Tina in control, with Bette following almost shyly, as they wind their way through the crowd toward the floor.

Laurel Holloman, especially, got this moment right. She performed that nuanced pride that a woman in the lead radiates as she parades her partner into a public party space. In some ways, she demonstrated that deeply queer sense of what Joan Nestle called “erotic responsibility” (although Nestle was talking about butch lesbians in the 1950s, which hardly describes Tina). Something in her manner, in the proprietary way she lead Bette to the floor, showed off her newly found sense of agency and social and sexual power. I’ve found it inexplicably satisfying to watch Tina come into her own in this way, and to see her role in her relationship with Bette strengthened and broadened. I also find it rather sexy to see Bette “topped” in this subtle way, to see the erotic power between her and Tina grow and shift.

When they reach the floor—as a lovely cover of “Walk on By” plays on the soundtrack—they perform a dance of mutual seduction that’s both breathtakingly intimate and boldly public, caressing each other’s hips and arms, shoulders and backs, moving in for kisses that look almost artful in how well they meld together physically and emotionally.

Uber-producer Ilene Chaiken, who wrote and directed the episode, also does a good job using the “audience” for their dance floor performance, letting the Greek chorus of Bette and Tina’s friends note their reunion and agree with Kit when she remarks that “they belong to together and always will.” Chaiken also cuts into the scene several reaction shots of women on the floor who note Bette and Tina’s seduction dance with a kind of proud envy. These moments of public feeling, if you will, are crucial in lesbian communities—or at least in my own historical experience of them. Before lesbian weddings or commitment ceremonies were options for public display, these moments on the dance floor were when we acknowledged relationships, approved of partnerings, and shared a kind of community pride in how we were learning to love each other.

I remember those moments in smoky dyke bars, leading a lover to the floor to visibly declare our existence as a couple. I recall almost viscerally how necessary the affirmation of our community was to believing we could continue to love each other, to figure out how to be together, to make our way in a world in which we were never as visible or as supported as we were in those moments on those dark, loud dance floors, twirling together under disco balls. Fortified by those moments, we made our way out into a much less compassionate world.

While party scene reminded me of my bar dyke days, Bette and Tina’s conversation beside their luxurious pool reminded me that lesbian relationships are now solidified and acknowledged in more domestic ways. As they reminisce about their history, Bette protests that she never really left Tina, and Tina corrects her, saying, “Yes, you did. But you came back.” I was moved by their renewed commitment and enjoyed watching the staged intimacy of their conversation at home But then Chaiken had to go and ruin it all by having Bette whisper into Tina’s hair as they embraced, “Should Angie have a baby brother or baby sister?”

I regret that this representation of what finally seems like a good lesbian relationship has to be marked as reproductive and conventionally kinship-based. Angelika is a cute little kid (and a sweet little actor, giving her one-word lines the appropriate inflection: “Jodie!” “Honk horn?”). I like seeing Bette and Tina raise a bi-racial child. But do they really need another baby? Do they have to underline the newly found, hard-won health of their relationship by reproducing again?

And why can’t Chaiken and company cut poor Shane a break? Why does her inability to commit have to provide the overly melodramatic cliff-hanger for every season? This year, it seemed the show’s resident Don Juan (or Don Juanita, as Lily Tomlin would call her) had finally found her match in the reluctant lesbian turned Sapphic enthusiast Molly (Clementine Ford). Although Molly was just coming out, her initial refusal to fall for Shane’s charms made her a worthier conquest for Shane, who had to modulate her expectations and her seduction strategies to Molly’s slower pace.

When they finally had sex, their emotional connection was already established, their affectionate give and take already grounding their physical connection. Their sex scenes seemed to work better than any others Kate Moenig has played over the years—Clementine Ford actually seemed to be fond of her, and they seemed to meld physically in more fluid, persuasive ways than Moenig’s other on-screen sex partners.

How disappointing, then, to have the writers contrive this too-predictable, abrupt and self-abnegating break-up. When does Shane get to show some strength and self-respect, instead of acquiescing to queer shame and abjection at the end of every season? She actually seems to love Molly, and only leaves her because Phyllis, with her arrogant class snobbery, can’t bear the thought of her precious daughter’s life sullied by a street kid like Shane (who, let’s face it, as a hairdresser on a Hollywood movie, is hardly slumming anymore). Shane caves too easily; casting off Molly at Phyllis’s behest doesn’t make sense. When will Shane get to fight for herself?

And what’s with this casual sex with Nikki at the episode’s end? Granted, the sex is nicely explicit, happily public, and pretty hot (I’ve enjoyed, all season, the actor playing Nikki. Her bedroom scenes with Jenny seemed sincere, and their attraction more authentic than other sexual liaisons performed on the show across the seasons). I can be persuaded that Shane and Nikki’s mutual loneliness would throw them together. But honestly, who cares anyway? Why does sexual fidelity always arbitrate who stays together and who breaks up? In this sense, the show wears its conservativism on its sleeve, even though the fact that it exists at all continues to be something of a political and cultural miracle to me.

Jenny and Nikki have been a compelling couple this season, appreciating and honoring each other’s vulnerability, ambitious in their sexuality, yet caught in the strictures of a Hollywood system that requires its stars to stay closeted. Jenny’s diva-dom falls apart when the viper Adele replaces her as the director of Les Girls, and she and Shane have a sweetly intimate but Platonic moment together at home on their couch, getting high and cuddling to take Jenny’s mind off her fall from grace.

Jenny and Shane, in fact, provide one of the more interesting relationships on the show—the friends who’ve never been lovers, but whose love for each other is foundational, necessary, motivating. Yes, Shane seduces Nikki (who could resist Shane hanging over your table making eyes at you as she did to Nikki?). But why does it have to break Jenny’s heart? Why does sexual betrayal have to be the period put on the end of the season?

Likewise, Alice’s relationship with Tasha needed the addition of a new love interest for Alice to help it dissolve, instead of more frankly addressing the couple’s incompatibility. Rose Rollins as Tasha has been an elegant presence on the show; her throaty, sometimes nervous laugh always added a level of sincerity to the proceedings, while at the same time, seemed to underline the show’s essential falseness. But Tasha and Alice were never a good match.

Chaiken and company, however, write their pending break-up as a clash of class values and politics instead of addressing straight on their racial differences. Alice can’t understand why Tasha would join the police academy, a choice that fundamentally contradicts Alice’s liberal politics and also disappoints her class aspirations. Alice’s attraction for a white woman (another actress with a British accent of unknown origin) and Rose’s isolation from any vestige of a lesbian community of color isn’t interrogated or even explored, leaving the show’s racial implications strangely unexplored in the narrative.

The parodic Sopranos-esque subplot about Kit losing The Planet to Dawn Denbo-and-her-lover-Cindy ended in grand style. Deus ex Helena came to the rescue with her newly re-released trust fund, encouraged by her possibly-dying mother (played by the divine Holland Taylor) to solve the situation by simply buying Denbo out. With The Plant secured and Cindy freed (whether into Helena’s arms or not), we can rest assured that our heroines will have somewhere to get their lattes on their way to work in the morning, and can return there in the evenings to listen to women musicians, fall into each other’s arms on the dance floor, and otherwise not engage in Turkish oil wrestling, the show’s ridiculous wet t-shirt contest moment of the season.

Perhaps next season, Kit will get her life back. Without a paramour, she’s left without a plot-line, except as little Angie’s babysitter and Bette’s disapproving older sister. She also carries the show’s “color,” performing race with the colloquial greetings she tosses out regularly, but never written to have a life in which her race is truly explored as a factor.

It’ll be interesting to see if Rachel Shelley returns fulltime from her sojourn with the tax-dodging prison-escapee in South America to bring some allure and levity to the L-girls’ machinations. And hopefully, Bette and Tina will continue to grow their relationship without necessarily growing their brood.

Eight episodes next year should be enough to wrap things up. But anticipating the series ending, I already regret not having The L Word‘s Sunday night escapades as a touchstone in my life. Over these last five years, loving and hating the show has been not only a pleasant pastime, but a meaningful, moving incursion into pop culture territory for an old-time lesbian feminist like me. I’ve enjoyed watching Chaiken (who’s chronologically my contemporary) mature as a writer/director—with lots of help from her co-producers, especially Angela Robinson, whose own directing and writing always bumps the series up a notch. Chaiken’s willingness to parody herself with the Les Girls subplot, using it to mirror and acknowledge the excesses of The L Word itself, proved a generous gesture to fans.

The season’s treasure trove of in-jokes, too, seemed shout-outs to lesbian and queer culture that made me feel part of a community, not just of the show’s viewers, but of a certain strata of lesbians who’ve traded in open secrets about closeted lesbians and other subcultural knowledge for many years, without a cable tv show to affirm us. This season’s casting of Kelly McGillis as the closeted army sergeant prosecuting Tasha under “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was particularly fun, especially in the same year when Jodie Foster finally acknowledged that she’s a lesbian, given rumors of her affair with McGillis on the set of The Accused. This kind of reference added to the show’s fun.

I’ve also enjoyed watching the actors grow with their characters, especially this season, as some of that growth was portrayed with more nuance and sophistication, and seemed more complicated, hard-won, and heart-felt. Jennifer Beals, Laurel Holloman, Leisha Hailey, and even the boyish Kate Moenig all look older than they did five years ago, when The L Word began. Looking at the new lines on their faces, and the way even their lithe, toned bodies are starting to soften, I’m moved by the time I’ve spent with them as actors in this lesbian comedy-melodrama. Their familiarity with and affection for each other as people seems reflected in the ease of their characters’ interactions and commitments. Their growth over time is evident in the comfort of their physical relationships with one another, regardless of their dialogue. In their screen presences, and in their acting, I sense how they’ve matured and aged, and I’m reminded that I’m older, too. I already feel nostalgic, watching the last episode of the season; I’m already starting to miss them.

The Feminist Spectator

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