There’s just something about Outlander. When the Starz original show based on the popular series by Diana Gabaldon premiered last August, it became the most popular series opener the channel had ever had. It was such a big debut, Starz immediately ordered a second season.
Perhaps you sense a theme on the show: the prevalence of sexual violence. It is an undeniable part of the narrative in the way that the violence of war is in real life. As Emily Nussbaum recently argued in a great piece on the new Netflix show The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, when you center women in stories and when their “lives are taken seriously, sexual violence is going to be part of the drama.” Sexual violence is always present in times of war but is often absent in depictions of war on screen. Not so with Outlander.Julianne Ross at Mic named a scene from the show as “the most feminist moment on television” last year because when the laird of a Scottish clan asks Claire about that first encounter with Randall where he tries to rape her. The man can’t believe it, saying to her, "You're saying that a man bearing the King's Commission decided to rape a stray lady traveler he came upon in the woods, for no good reason?" Claire responds, "Is there ever a good reason for rape, Master MacKenzie?" Unlike Game of Thrones (to which Outlander is often compared), the show uses sexual violence as part of its story, without just throwing it in for shock value.
At the same time, and importantly so, the show is sexy and shows scenes of hot, consensual sex. The very first episode includes a sexy scene of Claire and Frank exploring an old Scottish castle. With Claire sitting on top of a table, Frank goes down on her and we watch her get off on the pleasure. Frank is barely visible in the shot. Executive producer Ron Moore says the scene was included “to show Claire as empowered sexually as a person and having her own appetites and desires.”
“Fans were treated to an entire episode devoted solely to watching the new couple enthusiastically consummate their marriage. Mixed in with the candles and teasing glimpses of naked flesh, there was genuine caring on the part of the groom, who had no desire to take his reluctant bride by force.”
It is Claire who is not the virgin in this pairing and who becomes the instructor after Jamie fumbles through sex the first time. Maureen Ryan captures it: “People, especially women, felt seen and recognized by this hour of television.”
So much of the show rides on the character of Claire. That’s good. Despite finding herself in moments of peril repeatedly, Claire is a gutsy and capable person who refuses to let the patriarchy of 1743 boss her around. As Rebecca Jane Stokes described the character from the book series (in a post looking forward to the show), Claire “has no time for fools or misogyny. Granted, this occasionally means people try to kill her and maybe some folks think she’s a witch, but that comes with the territory.”
No comments:
Post a Comment