a due south thought to develop: today while despairing of my attempts to rhyme (my current paid work involves rhyming and i am bad at it) i was watching some old due south interviews/documentaries on youtube, and… paul gross talks a lot about the show as a modern fable, and he stresses that it’s obviously not realist, or meant to be taken literally as something that could happen. which is fine; i think realism is an overrated mode anyway.
it does make me think a bit of they eat horses, don’t they? – and this bit of dialogue:
RAY: You know what really annoys me? Why am I covered in crud and you look like you just got back from a hand laundry? FRASER: I don’t know. I’ve always been this way.
and the way that fraser is this total nexus of weirdness. he’s a reality-warper; he’s a supernatural being dropped into a world that operates on a different level of reality. sarah monette talks about pararealism vs contrarealism and i don’t really understand the terminology, which is a shame – i think the levels of reality at which characters operate is a key thing at play here, and throughout the show.
and also, if it’s a fable – the show has lots of morals that it’s illustrating, and sometimes they’re tough and sometimes they contradict each other, which is in part why i think it endures. but why else? well, i think the strange ending – the strange varieties of ending. the show neither ends at a point where we can imagine all of the characters happily continuing their lives in the same manner, nor in such a way where we understand easily what the ultimate “moral” or message is. it’s a kind of mystical, mysterious thing – except that i guess we know it’s about change, and love, and accepting that things always change and end.
there’s also something about fraser as this archetypal stranger-comes-to-town figure, a magical kind of fish out of water… who changes everyone he comes into contact with. this is both a key part of how fraser operates – he makes everybody better – but it’s also true about how the show ends. we see all these characters who gain something that they originally lacked (except, i guess, harding welsh, who was pretty satisfied at the start)… and you don’t have to like where the characters end up to see the weird epilogue as a kind of odd series of wish fulfillments or characters that have somehow been mystically changed, that have been through trials and come out – with some kind of reward. whether or not you think they work particularly well as rewards, i think that’s how they’re supposed to function. they’re silly because they’re magical. if they were less silly, it would be less clear.
and then, because this is me, we get to the ending for fraser himself. fraser starts the show as a lone stranger in a strange place – and he ends it as a partner, acting as a guide to his partner, in a familiar place which is made strange through another’s eyes. the roles are reversed. and while fraser started out alone, he was never unsure of the place around him, the place he wanted to be. in a way his story is about personal growth/learning from other people in order that he can go back. and he learns and changes in different ways throughout the show – he learns how to be a friend, how to work with other people… and in the arc with ray kowalski, he learns about partnership and trust. so fraser, who starts out alone, ends with a partner. he’s back where he started physically, geographically, but everything has changed personally.
whereas ray kowalski’s story is about being unsure of himself and everything around him, the stuff that makes up his life. he’s a loner, his identity has been pinned to a lot of signifiers that have changed, that have been pulled out from under him. when we meet him, he’s lost. and in only the second episode he’s in, he has the big… symbolic rebirth moment. but he also can’t help going back; there are multiple episodes where he fixes mistakes he made in the past or has to confront what he can’t fix and has to move on from. chicago is a place full of baggage for ray; in orde to move forward, we get the sense that he might have to go away, or everything will keep getting dredged back up.
so what does he gain from his trial by fire, from working with fraser, the reality-warper? he gains a partner, and a place with him – a place in his life, but also a diferent place, a different journey – physically, and geographically, as well as emotionally. this is part of what i think the metaphor of their search for the hand is about; it’s about purpose and rebirth as well as adventure.
I’d be curious to know what you thought of the originally scripted ending in which Fraser returns alone to the north? (http://lipstickcat.livejournal.com/446602.html, though the pics have died, damn. I have ‘em somewhere)
omg so i have seen mention of a different scripted ending existing before, but i didn’t realise that fraser went BACK HOME ALONE. ok so the ending with fraser & ray kowalski going off together is very important to me, granted, and the images aren’t there so i haven’t read how it plays out, but just the idea of it severely hurts my feelings.
i guess to me the idea of having it end with fraser and other characters almost back where they started totally changes the nature of the show – which to me is about a kind of mystical transformation through closeness with others. through love and trust, i guess.
. and also i like thinking about the show through this angle so i find it interesting that this ending was written but then changed… that they thought of leaving fraser relatively untouched by his adventures in chicago, but decided against that.
anyway this is just based on your comment above & the discussion at the lj post – not the script. if you do find the images, please send them my way! i would love to have my feelings further hurt by this.
(Pics from lipstickcat’s LJ, borrowed only to save them from oblivion)
So these took some finding – and I don’t want to re-read them because it makes me sad to think of Fraser having learned nothing/thrown away whatever he *has* learned about partnership and the value of cooperation and the inherent problems of isolationism. (And treating RayK and RayV equally badly isn’t a plus point, imo). I’d love to know at what point the ending was changed and by whom.
missionlameturtle 