Comparing “The Ladies’ Man” to “A Likely Story”: some collaborative due South meta

[hexenmeister]

Here’s what happens when two friends separated by lots of geography watch due South together over Skype, read ALL of truepenny’s meta, and then start jamming in a google doc about two episodes-- which differ drastically in tone but share a bunch of themes!

H is me and T is the inimitable touchmycoat. (Crossposted here on tumblr.)

ETA: I can't believe I forgot to mention alwaysalreadyangry's Ladies' Man meta! It's an amazing reading of that episode and it was heavily on our minds as we wrote this.

H: In “A Likely Story,” Ray is trapped in his ideas about his love interest (what’s her name again?). He cannot for the life of him tell when she’s lying, he can’t see her true motivations, he can’t know her. He’s just using her as a blank screen to project his internal conflicts onto. This is, as truepenny points out, a theme that due South returns to almost every single time it explores romance. How many episodes philosophize on the possibility of “love at first sight?” Off the top of my head, I’ve got “You Must Remember This,” “Victoria’s Secret,” “An Invitation To Romance,” and “Say Amen”…

 

As Huey and Dewey say in “Say Amen,”

“Well, you know the thing is, you can't really love someone until you know them.” “Sure you can. The hard thing is to love them after you know them.”

T: The love interest’s name is Luann— Frannie’s actually the first person to name her, well into the episode. Luann’s not introduced to us, to Ray, to Fraser by name, relation, or even profession. We’re just left to assume she has a caretaking role for Mrs. Tucci based on her age and actions. The dialogue even (intentionally?) suffers from this unknowing; Ray says, “Look Fraser, I am very sorry for Mrs. Tucci’s loss, and I will make every effort to find the killer of her husband, but the fact remains she is a very beautiful woman.” The pronoun confusion just further highlights how much it doesn’t matter who Luann is, just that she is “a beautiful woman.” This issue goes from highlight to glaring headlights when the cut from EXT. CAR, EVENING to IN. STATION, DAY is done by their conversation just rolling over, and guess what they’re talking about? Well, Ray’s talking about sex, and how little of it they’re both getting.

H: The Lou Skagnetti story and Sword of Desire, which both show up multiple times throughout the episode, explore the (gendered) stories people build around romance. The ending scene specifically juxtaposes these two stories about love by putting their endings right next to each other. Ray and Luann have retreated from each other after a failed attempt at connection, and they both soothe their disappointment by turning to fantastical love stories.

This one, told between two men, out in the “wilderness” by a campfire:

“Lou Skagnetti looked at the princess who sat across the stone table in the stone cabin high atop Sulfur Mountain, and the princess smiled at him. And for a brief second, Lou Skagnetti could hear his own inner bell ring as though it were rung by a thousand angels. And he took his hand and he placed it over his heart, and Lou Skagnetti vowed that never again would he kill and eat another princess as long as he lived. . . unless, of course, she were covered in choke cherries and brown lichen and a sprinkling of dust -”

vs. this one, read in a comfortable bedroom (with the most floral bedspread ever invented), a story that one woman read aloud to another to help her sleep:

“Gabriella's chest heaved at the sight of him. His boldness made her feel like a true princess. As he came near her, she could feel the trembling of the deep inside her most secret place…”

Notice how they could almost be the same story told from different perspectives.

Fraser’s story, though, does not offer the same easy comfort Luann’s does. His story is a funny distraction, but it's also a dark mirror held up to romance. Fraser's status as an outsider means he knows different stories than Ray and Luann. This story shows the blood and guts of love. In the context of the episode, it gestures at how the theater of "love" often leads people to act in deeply un-loving ways towards each other; how it can get in the way of people even knowing each other. (“That's one dark story.” “Yes. It is.”)

Fraser has seen Ray use his position as a police officer to stalk his ex and now he’s seen him try to date a suspect. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that he’s telling Ray a story where the protagonist has been “eating princesses.” The story’s not just an accusation, though; it’s a hopeful story, a humorous story; it’s told playfully and as an act of care, and it points to the possibility of true love in the future that is not based on violence.

T: I almost wish the show had the continuity to also let this moment comment explicitly on what Fraser couldn't get from Victoria. His love for her is so mired in guilt that he thinks himself deserving of all the violences she visits on his person. It's like, Ray is pre-Lou Skagnetti and Fraser is post-Lou Skagnetti; Ray needs to stop his violence and Fraser needs to pay for his violence. The same problem of failed recognition occurs on both sides of the story.

H: I love your point about Fraser being like Ray but somewhere further along in the accountability process.

In the "love-at-first-sight vs. true knowledge of a person" saga that is this show, there is one unexpected pair of people who know and love each other deeply after very little time spent together: Beth Botrelle and Ray Kowalski. They can see right through each other. They understand each other’s motivations— so not only can they tell when the other’s lying, but they can tell you exactly why. They are bound together through shared experience. And while their story is obviously not romantic, it is shockingly loving. Beth is willing to falsely confess to a murder she is unjustly accused of just to make Ray feel better, just to give him a real shot at moving on with his life after she dies. Ray is obviously willing to risk his job and his life to exonerate her, but he is also uniquely willing to admit his mistakes to her; he tells the truth exactly as it happened, and therefore sacrifices the easy self-justifications that have kept him functioning as a cop and as a person all these years.

(and, side note— how interesting is it that Beth of all people calls Ray “queer,” and his response is to laugh and nod?)

Beth does need to be saved from a death sentence, but she is emphatically not a damsel in distress (or a "princess"). She needs to save Ray as much as he needs to save her. Both of them know that their freedom is bound up in the other's.

T: So maybe in some ways this is Ray's post-Lou Skagnetti (I'm laughing as I write these words but bear with me). This is his Victoria, but antithetically; this is where he pays for the violence. Victoria was guilty and Fraser arrested her, Beth was innocent and Ray arrested her—but they both know, to some extent, that the arrests seemed immoral (Fraser in particular, where if they did actually sleep together, he’s fully abused his power as an officer of the law). Where Victoria wanted to destroy Fraser for it, Beth wanted to save Ray from it (she sought to alleviate his conscience by telling him she was guilty). But both Fraser and Ray had to be willing to destroy themselves and the roles they occupied for Victoria and Beth. The Fraser who is whole and the Victoria who seeks his destruction cannot coexist. And, to continue your reading of "Ladies' Man" as the keystone episode where Ray just really should not be a cop anymore, the Ray who is a cop and the Beth who is innocent/alive cannot coexist. There's something very interesting about these relationships between men and women that fail due to one or both of their placement in some kind of institution, because of one or both of their duties/supposed loyalties. Fraser's commitment to duty catalyzes the break between him and Victoria. Ray's abuse of his authority is no fucking good for Stella or Luann, and even when he succumbs to the ease of police authority he fucks over Beth.

Tying Ray and Fraser and Victoria back to “A Likely Story,” everybody, particularly Ray, speaks in projections; throughout the episode, Fraser is the mirror while Ray is the puppy, as in Ray doesn’t know the other puppy isn’t real, so he’s snarling and barking at the mirror, who is merely the medium through which the reflection is transposed.

H: “FRASER IS THE MIRROR AND RAY IS THE PUPPY” WHAT THE FUCK I LOVE THIS IMAGE. IT IS ABSURD AND TRUE. YOU ARE BRILLIANT. Please, expand upon this point.

T: This one particular projection:

Ray: “Let me see if I got this right, Fraser. Luann is a beautiful woman, therefore she must be bad. And since she's a really beautiful woman, that means she's got to be really bad. Is that how it goes inside your brain?”

Of all the projections, Fraser most clearly calls this one out for what it is: “Are you sure it is my brain we are talking about?” Funny, since this is the one projection that fully echoes Fraser’s hangups about Victoria. Vecchio’s line from “Letting Go” seems resonant: “Not every woman with long dark hair tries to kill their lover.” But this is clearly about Ray: his low sense of self-worth makes him look for flaws in women he believes are “beautiful” and out of his league.

H: Yes!! They're both backed into these low-self-esteem corners with regards to romantic relationships: they’re both thinking, "there's something wrong with me." Ray projects that outwards (“what’s wrong with this woman?”), but Fraser does a slightly different thing with it: “if she's into me, she must be operating on an incomplete set of data.” Fraser knows that people think he's attractive, but also thinks that they can't see/know him enough to love him in a real way. I think that's why he was so INTO Victoria-- she knew he did bad things and wanted him anyways! And she, to his mind at the time, was clear-headed about what kind of punishment he deserved for his wrongdoing. There's something more comforting about that than waiting for the other shoe to drop.

T: Both “A Likely Story” and “Ladies’ Man” are about women that Ray Kowalski has wronged, and both end with Ray apologizing—very sincerely—to the women. Fundamentally, I love that as a narrative choice.

H: Yes. Apologize, man. (Apologize and quit your job. I think these two episodes lay out a really compelling case for exactly why Ray does not go back to being a cop post-COTW.)

to summarize:

1. Ray is a human-shaped projector. He can’t readily name his feelings, but they do warp his perceptions of reality and he does act them out. "I don't know what I want till I see what I do." -Ray Kowalski in The Teeth of the Hydra by Resonant.

2. This is terrible news for everyone involved when you're a cop!

3. These episodes both deal with the nature of love-- its relationship to truth and to police work. “A Likely Story” shows the burdensome trappings of heterosexual, romantic love, which in this case serve to obfuscate the truth; “The Ladies’ Man” shows an intense kind of "true love" between a man and a woman that has nothing to do with romance or sex and everything to do with solidarity and truth-telling.

T: And 4, we can absolutely implicate Fraser, at least thematically, in something every step of the way, el oh el.

Comments

[thisaintbc]

Honestly, I feel like these aren't narratively incompatible viewpoints, because to me it seems like it's exactly this tension the show runs on (at least in part, at its most serious). Obviously different people have different beliefs and Ray and Fraser are VERY different people, but part of Fraser's superhero-ness is that he in a way *imposes* his beliefs on the world around him--this comes through very clearly in episodes like One Good Man, and we even see how much it can potentially cost him in Good For The Soul. And honestly I feel like this is a lot of what RayV's arc is about--the stereotypical burned out American tv drama detective who no longer believes in anything, much less the system, confronted with someone whose response to a broken system is to dig in harder to their idealism and somehow wields it as an effective tool. (Admittedly, in Fraser's case it's often more of a battering ram, but still.)

[desireearmfeldt]

Not narratively incompatible, no. Just, if one is imagining a narrative arc in which Ray ends up leaving policework for the reason that 1) he's unsuited and 2) You Can't Change The System Even If You Try... then presumably Fraser either also leaves, or he remains. It feels to me hard for Ray and Fraser to remain close if Ray leaves policework and Fraser remains; and it also feels not right under most circumstances for Fraser to leave ("not right" in the sense of either "out of character" or "not actually a happy ending for the character").

I feel like most fics I've read in which Ray leaves policework and Fraser remains are cabin-fic: they move to Canada, Fraser goes back to the wilderness version of superhero-Mountie, which is much less about encountering the corruption in the system, and that skirts the dissonance. Fics in which they both leave policework...I must have read some, but examples are not leaping to mind.

(Not counting AUs in which one or both has left or never become police, before the story starts. I have read AUs in which Fraser leaves the RCMP out of disillusionment with the system and/or himself. And there are sure plenty where Fraser leaves *Chicago* out of disillusionment with the system *there*. )

Maybe what I mean is: if Ray actually has to explicitly acknowledge that the system is broken and he can't fix it and being an individual good cop is not enough...and Fraser is still a person who will fight the damn system *even though* he can't fix it...what does Fraser do with Ray's acknowledgement? And what does Ray do with a Fraser who can't or won't acknowledge the futility if Ray has himself acknowledged it?

[thisaintbc]

Hmm, I guess I think it would depend on how it was written? I think you've got a point about cabin fic--fic which prominently features Ray and Fraser in a romantic relationship gives us a context for them to still see each other outside of work, and moreover in cabin fic Ray is explicitly prioritizing that relationship over his career (which is hardly out of character for him, also, which I think is part of why it's so easily believable). But I think I could see this working for gen fic, too, if the author took the time to establish them hanging out outside of work--or, this might be cheating a bit, but you could also take the PI route and have them still interact at work even after Ray'd given up being a cop. Because I really do think that Ray and Fraser can have endless, unresolved and unresolvable conversations about the system being broken without it destroying their relationship, provided that doesn't become the entire basis of their relationship.

[desireearmfeldt]

Yes... I think what I'm finding hard to reconcile is that being cop-vigilante-superheroes together *is* so central to the canonical relationship -- and I think (in-world) that's not just because that's how they are thrown together, it's also because it's so central to Fraser's identity that it might actually be hard for anyone who couldn't share that with him to have a really close/intimate relationship with him. Harder still for someone who couldn't be swept along into sharing his idealism, at least in the moment where push comes to shove.

But then, quitting because he can't beat the system might not make the latter harder for Ray -- might, indeed, make it easier.