Filed under: feminism, TV, writing | Tags: feminism, lessons, Naomi Alderman, television, The Power, TV, writing, writing advice
This Part Two of a Two Part Series on my viewing of The Power. You can read Part One here. Here’s Part Two:
Since I started writing this, I’ve watched more episodes – which hasn’t really improved my opinion of the show, though I am grateful that it has shifted out of exposition and into stuff happening. But as stuff happens, characters keep saying, “This is going to change the world.” And while I understand that people really do say that in the midst of crisis, as I’m sure we all heard a lot of it in 2020 – it is actually really irritating to hear in a show. Don’t tell me this thing is going to change the world; Just show me the world changing or changed, as the book did. Maybe it’s having lived through these last years but hearing that the world is going to be changed by a thing that some writers made up just rings sort of hollow somehow. “Hey everyone – in this universe we just made up, everyone is growing a tentacle out of their chest! It’s going to change the world!” I hope so! That’s why I’m watching this show, to see what a world where people grow tentacles would look like. I don’t need to know why they grew them. I don’t need to watch them figure out how it happened. Just show me tentacle world, okay? That is the joy of speculative fiction.
The book does explain the science and mechanics of the Power in such a way that it all feels very plausible but it is also very gradual. There are just glimmers of it for a while. It’s not a global event right away. It’s a secret for many of the girls, where they think they are the only ones who possess it and they’re not talking. One of the characters has had the Power for six months when we meet her and it’s a secret that she’s been keeping from her family. There is a single day in the book where it becomes clear this is a global event and it’s not the first day of the book.
The TV show by contrast, starts with a global crisis. And it somehow feels excruciating to watch the early stages of a rapid mass global event in the TV show. I can see why they wanted to add this to the story. (Though I’m not sure why they needed to add a catastrophic plane crash that seemed to recall the beginning of Station Eleven.) I guess it feels like there’s something we know now that we didn’t before the pandemic began. Maybe they feel this will help us process our recent experience – but it turns out I’m not so keen on watching a global catastrophe unfurl.
The early stages of the book were exhilarating. The Power seemed to be a liberating force, offering young women defense and equality and the downsides were not so bad.
In the TV show, the downsides are clear, right away, and the response is instantly fascistic and totalitarian. Liberate me before you cuff me, please!
Lesson for Me: If you ever use the sentence, “This is going to change everything” – cut it immediately and then show the world changed.
Since putting out Part One of this look at The Power, I have learned many things. (Thank you for the link and your comments, Markko!) One of those things is that this show has had multiple show runners, has had a change of casting after a full shoot and has had a re-write and a re-ordering. Part of that was due to COVID, apparently. So, you know, forgiven on that count. But I was never less surprised to learn that too many people were steering a ship. It feels like a story being pulled in 7 directions and it seems that was, in fact, the case.
Another thing I learned was that Naomi Alderman (the writer of the book and a producer on this show) got stuck while she was writing the book and explained that she got herself out of it by writing the book like it was scenes from a TV show. Maybe that’s why the actual show is so frustrating. The book was a better TV show than the TV show! Why why why did they have to mess with it?!
An answer seems to be that each new person leading this ship felt she needed to put her own personal stamp on this. Apparently the retrograde “panties in a bunch” line came from the life of the last showrunner. And of course sexist TV writers still say dumb retro sexist stuff, color me unsurprised. It sounds like a lot of the mayor’s narratives are the personal stories of the writer. But the writer is also someone who spent quite a few lines of her interview declaiming how much she loves men, which just reeks of someone who only worked out recently she might need a feminist movement. We have talked about this sort of thing before and it explains a lot about why the tone is so off in this show. The book is just unadulterated “burn it all down” radical feminist rage for a while. It’s just…what if vengeance rolled across the world? There are no Serena Joy type characters, yearning to support the patriarchy like they do in Handmaid’s Tale. The world tilts very quickly in the book and there’s no stopping the rage. It takes a turn into misandry and that journey of going too far is one of the things that is interesting about it. I’m not sure I like where it ends up but I appreciate the questions it’s asking. The TV show isn’t asking; it’s trying to play both sides and it just makes it dumb.
Lesson for Me: Ask questions with your story instead of giving answers.
I feel like the over-riding flow of the show is its need to explain things – either the Power itself or why all these girls and women might be angry enough to need it. And sometimes the desire to teach Feminism 101 shines through in the stupidest ways. In a later episode, the other Nice Guy™️ character (Tunde, the journalist) gives the clumsiest (and wrongest) explanation of intersectional feminism I have ever heard. He says something like, “Yeah, I never realized how my identities intersected before.” Uhhhhh. First of all, this character has all the privileges but one – so it would be hard to call this an intersectional character – and second of all, this is not how people talk, especially not about intersectionality. It’s dumb to try and teach something in a single line from a character. It’s even dumber when you clearly you don’t know anything about the thing you’re trying to reference.
I feel like the show has been made for people who “just don’t get it” – to teach them or show them the reason the rest of us read this book and thought “I’d be interested in having this power, actually, even with all the downsides.” And so in the end, in trying to serve everyone, it serves nobody.
And you could reasonably say to me – “hey, you know, TV is a medium for the masses. A certain level of appealing to more than the twenty people who already get you might be in order.” But the problem with that is that if that process kills the spirit of the work, it runs the risk of appealing to no one and wins you no new converts. I have probably bought ten copies of The Power over the years. I was a one woman promotion machine for it in its novel form. If the TV show had managed to meet it in any way, I’d be doing the same for the TV show. I’d be evangelizing it instead of breaking down all the ways it has failed so far. I would have helped promote it if I felt it was even CLOSE to the spirit of the book. But it isn’t. So. Just read the book.
Lesson for Me: Write for the 20 people who really get it. The others will have to catch up on their own. If you write for those others, you may imperil the essential nugget of your work. Maybe this show will get better as it goes along. I doubt it. But. It’s possible. There are excellent actors in it, the source material is good, the international storylines are refreshing to see on American TV. I keep watching it, even though it’s driving me crazy. I don’t think the show is a lost cause. I just want it to be better. It could have been amazing. It should have been amazing. It should have been electrifying. ⚡️
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