Sunday, August 2, 2015

Fridging Ms. Shayla (a Mr. Robot story)



          
"The intertitle of the TV show." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 5 Jun. 2015.
           At the end of this past week’s Mr. Robot, hacker extraordinaire Elliot opens the trunk of a car and discovers the dead body of his girlfriend and former morphine hookup Shayla. This is supposed to be a devastating moment for Elliot and for the audience—Shayla has been in the series since the premiere and she and Elliot only just recently made their relationship official. We barely knew her, but, perhaps more importantly still as far as this particular episode is concerned, Elliot endangered himself, Darlene, and countless others to release Shayla’s violent supplier (who Elliot put away for drugging and raping Shayla) from prison. He was promised Shayla’s safe return in exchange for his assistance, and, of course, anyone who has ever watched a movie or TV series in the thriller genre knew from the get-go that the effort was doomed. Situations like these never turn out well, especially for the women.

            Elliot finds Shayla’s corpse in a car, but she might as well have been in a refrigerator. If that statement sounds nonsensical, then this post is for you. The “women in refrigerators” trope (verb—“fridging” a female character) was given its name by comics writer Gail Simone in “honor” of a story from DC’s Green Lantern series in which the hero returns home to find his girlfriend murdered and literally stuffed into a refrigerator to cause him as much harm as possible. TV Tropes summarizes the specific story briefly and offers the following description of the trope: “[A]ny [usually female] character who is targeted by an antagonist who has them killed off, abused, raped, incapacitated, de-powered, or brainwashed for the sole purpose of affecting another character, motivating them to take action.”[1] This is essentially a cheap tactic designed to elicit an emotional response from readers. It often represents lazy writing and also devalues the life of the character killed, reducing them to little more than a motivating factor for someone else’s story.[2] Does that mean that every female character death is an example of fridging? No. Is it always easy to distinguish a cheap fridging from a meaningful death? Definitely not—though Simone offers some thoughts on the difference on the blog where she documents fridged characters in comics.

            Simone notes the obvious counter-argument to the problem of “women in refrigerators”—that “male superheroes ALSO get beat up, cut up, and killed up”—however, she goes on to say that the percentages are off (fewer major female characters of note means that each death essentially “counts” for more), but also that “male characters tend to die differently than female ones.”[3] While the men tend to die heroically and nobly on their own terms, the women are often first abducted, tortured, or violated as “shock value seems to be a major motivator in the [female] deaths more often than not.”[4] Because these women were already often fixtures in the lives of male characters (the girlfriend, the wife, the sister, the mother, etc.), their deaths often do less to characterize them or serve as a dramatic ending to their own lives and instead serve to motivate or characterize the men around them in the story. From an audience perspective, there’s just something especially horrid about the deaths of women and children, and I suspect that it’s primarily a result of gendered expectations and a thoroughly masculinist society. “Women and children first,” after all. They’re the weak ones, and when we see them butchered or even just endangered, we instantly get upset. Men are often the action heroes and the ones who instigate and fight back; therefore, we have less of an instinctual desire to see them protected or unharmed.

            As far as I know, there is no codified method for figuring out what constitutes a fridging. In terms of Mr. Robot, specifically, I offer the following evidence that suggests Shayla’s death was an example of the “women in refrigerators” trope. First and foremost, as a character, Shayla has only ever been understood as a part of Elliot’s life. Her own interiority is a complete mystery, and we’ve only ever encountered her by way of Elliot, whereas characters like Darlene and especially Angela have segments apart from Elliot where we see them do their own thing without having the experience colored by Elliot’s presence, his narration, or his subjective point of view. We know very little about Shayla as a person, and what we do know comes about because Elliot specifically asks her to tell him about herself when he asks her out. Although we’re over halfway through the first season, Shayla remains a non-entity. Admittedly, there are other characters we know very little about as well, but when we’re talking about Shayla and her involvement in the story, which has presumably ended, the possibility of further development down the road is no longer an excuse of sorts. Granted, we could see her developed further through flashbacks (a la Abigail Hobbs on NBC’s Hannibal), but as of right now her development is finished. She died the way she lived—a supporting character in another person’s story. 

            At this point, it’s hard not to see Shayla’s death as the pay-off from the time and effort the writers put into developing a relationship between Elliot and Shayla and Elliot, Shayla, and the audience. We got to know her just well enough to care about her so that her death would matter. Not to mention the fact that she’s already been victimized once already (drugged and raped) to drive Elliot to give up his morphine hookup and put the vile Vera away. Shayla was only ever adjacent to the main plot action of the series (taking care of Elliot’s dog at times, serving as an impromptu date to Elliot’s boss’s party). I have admittedly been bothered by how Elliot has varying degrees of romantic tension/possibility with so many members of the female cast. He’s been attached to Shayla, but it’s been suggested that he wants to be with Angela. Darlene is still a bit of a wildcard; however, the way that she’s been treated as something like a grungier version of a “manic pixie dream girl” makes her seem like a male fantasy and potential partner also.[5] Like I said before, though, Angela definitely seems to be striking out on her own and acquiring more agency apart from Elliot and her ex-boyfriend. Conversely, Shayla’s role on the show has only ever been defined by her position next to Elliot, and we never really saw her in her own element, though her night on the town with Angela hinted at possibilities we’ll never see bear any fruit (and I’m not just talking about the kiss the two shared in a bathroom). What I’m saying is, “Rest in peace, Shayla. We hardly knew ye.”

            I initially wrote a largely ambivalent post about Mr. Robot. It’s since grown on me somewhat by striking a balance between visual artistry and good old fashioned thrilling that has been skewed significantly toward the former over the latter on Hannibal this year. It’s also a show with an interest in detail and being as accurate as possible with its depictions of hacking and technology. This past week’s episode of Mr. Robot has left a bad taste in my mouth, though. The fact that the show held the moment between Elliot’s opening the trunk and the ultimate reveal of Shayla’s body as long as possible despite the fact that the audience would immediately know what he found based on Rami Malek’s response feels exploitative at worst. At best, it serves to characterize Malek’s character, but we’ve already talked about what it means when a woman dies just to motivate a man. If Mr. Robot really wanted to break out into new territory, it should have exploited the audience’s expectation of what was in the trunk and then had Shayla live. Instead, it’s gone down a familiar road so well-trod, so hackneyed, and so offensively lazy that the show is going to have a hard time earning back my respect. One could argue that I shouldn’t be as pissed off about this as I am. It’s nothing new or shocking, after all, but that’s precisely why I’m sick of it. It’s not just disgusting, it’s boring.

Notes:

[1] “Stuffed into the Fridge.” TV Tropes. TV Tropes, 30 Jul. 2015. Web. Accessed 2 Aug. 2015. <http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StuffedIntoTheFridge>   

[2] Ibid.

[3] “Fan Gail Simone Responds.” Women in Refrigerators. N.p., n.d. Web. Accessed 2 Aug. , 2015. <http://lby3.com/wir/r-gsimone.html

[4] Ibid.

[5] The “manic pixie dream girl” is another trope that reduces a woman to little more than a fixture in a male character’s life. The “manic pixie dream girl” is a male fantasy. Often an outspoken guy’s girl, she enlivens the life of a male character through her quirky or eccentric behavior that helps him come out of his shell or break out of his funk. Again, this character exists solely for the benefit of her male counterpart. Darlene’s vulgarity (her casual remark about cum stains on her clothes, for example), her masculine assertiveness, and her penchant for just appearing in Elliot’s apartment marks her as a “manic pixie dream girl.” For more on the trope see: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ManicPixieDreamGirl

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