Brody proves to be a persistent, smart, witty newshound who relentlessly pursues Joanna in hopes of an inside story on her kidnapping. Joanna is further distracted by the discovery that she’s been replaced on the newspaper, by engaging journalist Max Brody (Jason George, Jigsaw). Joanna tries several times to demonstrate this, but fails completely. At the same time she is dismissing Joanna’s claim to have telekinesis. Kat heals a child with a touch, then deliberately rejects this evidence of her own powers. Kat and Joanna, however, are a complete mess. She eventually comes to the point where she can pack away the clothing and other keepsakes she’s been obsessively hanging onto, and can now get on with her life. For the rest of the hour, she deals with her grief, comes to terms with her losses (and her growing reputation as a black widow), and starts to track down the mysterious clues Chad mentioned. And while at first she acts as if she is in denial, very shortly she is breaking down into grief-stricken sobs. At any rate, when Kat and Joanna come to tell her he’s dead, she already knows it on some level. What is it with dead people, that they have to always speak in riddles? What I wouldn’t give for a dead person who spoke sense once in a while. In the classic manner, her dead lover appears to her in a dream and gives her cryptic clues. We start out immediately following last week’s fatal accident, while Roxie still does not know her lover is dead. And after watching Eastwick, I wonder if there are any voters left who are willing to try. Twenty-five years after its first publication, we still don’t know if women in power would be gentler and kinder, because we haven’t tried it. What we get, here in 2009, is an interpretation of women as weaker and stupider. He’s even stated that he meant the book as a warning against female power: “That was my warning to the feminists, since the peaceniks in the Sixties claimed that women in power would behave better than men, be gentler and kinder,” (see this 2008 interview with Updike). In any event, the show continues to annoy and mystify with its treatment of its lead characters, as if the writers themselves hold their creations in contempt.Ĭould this all be a lingering echo of John Updike’s own ambiguous treatment of women in his original novel, The Witches of Eastwick? That novel was set in the late 1960s, in a time of feminist turmoil and the maturing of the women’s movement. Or maybe it was the presence of veteran actresses Veronica Cartwright and Cybill Shepherd, actresses who remember a Hollywood that was friendlier to smart female characters. This episode of Eastwick was better than many, perhaps because the writer and director represent new blood. There should be a fun romp here, and from time to time it can be entertaining. Which is why, ultimately, I find Eastwick so annoying. Women have once again been relegated to their classic sideline roles. The divide is so stark that even shows in which men are portrayed as having “psychic” gifts ( The Mentalist, Psych), it turns out that they are merely clever con men-again, succeeding with brains, not spells. Neither of those is a position of power or respect. Women, rather than taking their place as the equals of men, are now relegated by writers and producers to the role of sidekick or witch. The top shows on TV today in which women play the lead are shows like Medium, Ghost Whisperer, and True Blood, shows where women succeed only through the use of non-intellectual gifts. Where did all those women go? What we have today is a TV landscape full of women who are either the butt of their own jokes, or whose “powers” derive from the mystical, the mysterious, the supernatural-anything but the intellect. What power they had came from their brains they consistently outwitted male criminals and earned the respect of their male cohorts. There was a time when smart women could be found at the head of popular TV series: Murder She Wrote, Maude, Cagney & Lacey.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |