The disposal of TV wives for TV men.
Throughout human history, media has always been a reflection of the current times. The values and (something) society upholds are the ones reflected back to us through our music, tv, and movies. In the 1940s, propaganda films produced by the Nazi party helped train the German populace to view themselves as superior to their own Jewish neighbors. To the contrary, Charlie Chaplin produced multiple anti-nazi films that rallied American audiences against the growing regime across the ocean.
No matter the times, patterns emerge. For as long as I can remember, “executive producer Dick Wolf '' has been seared into my brain. My mom LOVES cop shows. (Before this gets turned into something it doesn’t need to be, she is absolutely aware and supportive of the copganda allegations. They make great tv all the same.) Catching my dad locked into the tail end of a riveting SVU episode was the funniest thing in the world to me.
The more of one niche you consume, the more instinctual and critical your thinking of said niche you will become. (AKA, the more you ride different bikes down the same street, the more intimately familiar you will become with the grooves in the road. My best friend's road is video games. My moms’ is knowing the right time to say the right thing to me.) Mine is watching cop shows. I don’t watch a lot of new tv and I gave up on Grey's anatomy four years ago. Any show I HAVE finished, I’ve memorized. I'd love to rewatch my favorite shows, but whenever I start, my brain retells the entire episode line by line before the opening scene is finished. This weirdo trait of mine is heightened when watching (god i want to abbreviate this to “CP” so badly but unfortunately I think that’s in bad taste considering the show i’m about to talk about. sry stabler. I’m gonna make it into an acronym. Law TV….LTVs.) LTVs. I can’t watch new episodes of the shows I like because I begin to predict the twists.
About 6 years ago, I began to notice something weird. It took a bit to have the vocabulary to articulate my hunch, so I threw my head back on my grandpa’s chair and decided to say it the most immature way I could think of. “All the wives died!” is what I came up with. (hello?)
In every single show I could think of, there were examples of male characters whose tragic backstories included the death of a wife. The more badass a man, the deader his wife.
Rationally, shows with dark, tragic characters have to give the person something to mope about. The handsome and brooding man becomes dramatic and mopey if we never learn why he acts that way. The death of a child is too taboo, too tragic even. A dead wife provokes the necessary sympathy, without having to create a fleshed out female character. She can be perfect and beautiful. The wind can blow in her hair during flashbacks, and the montage of her dying will be tear-jerking.
But I want more. In Law & Order SVU, (spoiler alert!!!) the return of Stabler means the death of his wife, Kathy. In Criminal Minds, we watch Haley Hotchener get shot dead in her home. There are so many examples of this, but I wanted to focus on these two in particular.
Kathy and Haley were both “bad wives”. Women who stood in the way of their husbands ambitions. Kathy wanted Stabler to help raise their four kids. She was blown to pieces in a car bomb. Haley asked Hotch to not dedicate his entire life to work. She was shot in the stomach by an unsub. Good wives die, bad wives are killed. Complex, unlikeable, wives are not allowed the dignity of being side characters or the autonomy to separate themselves from their husbands.
In an era where diversity is celebrated even at its bare minimum, I think it is important to remember that generalized archetypes cannot be allowed to persist. Studios will not push for anything that doesn’t affect profit. We must not allow them to become complacent. That is how we go backwards.
Comments