Desperate Housewives!

I love Desperate Housewives (DH), all I did over winter break was binge watch it. In fact, I almost did DH for my heroic narrative personal reflection. So I wanted to talk about it here.

When you only get 45 minutes of the story on Sunday night, you have an entire week to mull the story over, think about the plot, etc. When you watch over 9 hours a day, your focus shifts to the more concrete and easier to think about plot. Resultantly, I didn't even think about heroism in DH until the essay was assigned. Before I settled on my final topic, I thought about writing my paper on the character of Bree Van de Kamp.

One challenge of analyzing the heroism in DH is that there at 8 seasons, which follow the characters lives rather than a story arc. So it's a bit harder to track a character's heroic arc. 

Some background (spoiler alert, but since they TOOK IT OFF OF NETFLIX, it doesn't really matter). I'm going to throw a bunch of names at you, only really have to pay attention to Bree and Carlos.

 At the end of season 7, a main character named Gabrielle's sexually abusive stepfather, Alejandro, found her after 20 years and began harassing her again. When he broke into her house - presumably with the intent to rape and/or kill her - her husband, Carlos, killed him. Then, Gabrielle, Carlos, Bree, Susan, and Lynette buried his body in the woods. Over the course of season, we see the coverup deteriorate to the point of Bree going to trial for a murder which she did not commit.

However, Bree decides that she is willing to take the fall for Carlos so that his family isn't torn apart. While all the women behaved heroically throughout the series, their sacrifices were mostly for their immediate family. Which I will come back to. But Bree's actions were to benefit her friends, and it stuck out to me as the most prominent heroism in the show.

Another thing DH does is highlight the inherent heroism in motherhood. By definition, mothers put their children before themselves, and time and time again, the women do just that. Interestingly, watching Desperate Housewives made me appreciate my own mother more, which isn't something you would expect from a show titled Desperate Housewives. 

Thoughts on Victory Lap

I wasn't present during the period where Victory Lap was discussed, so I thought I would lay out some of my reactions to it. Please tell me if it lines up with what was talked about in class, etc.

It took me a little while before I recognized the hero narrative, but once I saw it, it became very conspicuous. Kyle breaks the rules of his weird, obsessive, slightly abusive sounding parents, whose wrath he is terrified of, to save Alison. In this act, he discovers a powerful, independent part of himself, and then controls it.

One of my questions from class concerns motives. If an act has positive results, can the perpetrator be hailed as a hero, no matter how selfish the motive? We never explicitly understand why Kyle decides to take action -- I don't think Kyle consciously does, either, because he's thinking of all the reasons he shouldn't save Alison then and there when he starts running -- but it's implied. He could never live with himself. It also might have been because he liked Alison (they were childhood playmates), but this reason is less prevalent.

Is the cleanliness of your own conscious a heroic motive? I tend to think not. It's pretty self-centered, actually. Yet, Kyle still strikes me as heroic, so perhaps considering motives are too hard and calculating a thing to do when evaluating seemingly heroic actions, since these evaluations tend to have heavy emotional weight. But I still want motives to be part of the equation! It seems too simplistic to ignore them.

Finally, a couple of things I have to get off my chest: Of course Kyle Boot runs cross country, he fits the xc boy stereotype way too well for him not to. (Think of Paulie Bleeker from Juno.) Popular stories have you believe that cross country boys are nerd incarnate. Also, nobody runs that much in practice.