An Unambitious Feminist Watching of Peep Show
Posted by Charlotte R at 12:35 pm Labels: feminism, TV
Ben Marshall wrote a piece about Peep Show in the Guardian Guide on April 26th, 2008, and I thought it was kind of interesting. In the article, which you can read here, he talks about the conservatism of the show and its morality, but he also discusses reactions to it and how men identify with the male characters. In particular, he says this:
"People in general think men are Jez, Peep Show's shallow self-styled libertine; men themselves wish they were Super Hans - tall, confident, elegantly wasted, utterly amoral; but men are really Mark, a highly moral, but sexually repressed conservative whose idea of a good date movie is the four-hour German submarine epic, Das Boot."
I love Peep Show. It's one of my favourite TV programmes of all time and, frankly, makes it worth staying in on a Friday night. So I've watched every episode, most of them two or three times over, and I think I'm as qualified as the next person to comment. But really, people think all men are like Jez? Seriously? To me, the whole point of the show is that it's a bunch of awful, awkward, misguided and inept humans who just haven't figured out how the world works. The joy of watching it is that halfway through, you realise that they're all flawed in almost exactly the same way. And so are we. None of us humans, wandering around living our lives, have really worked out the codes that everyone else is supposedly living by. There's a great line said by Mark in the last episode, referring to Jez, and it's something like, "What is he doing? He's just saying words with his mouth!" The one message the show gives us is that everyone is just saying words with their mouth, all the time. Nobody ever really knows what the hell they're doing.
So my interpretation of the show has always been that it's showing us just how clueless we all are, and that, really, everyone in the world is just blagging until they get caught out. In Peep Show, Mark and Jez get caught out all the time. But I don't think that's just because they're men. Which is why I was a bit annoyed at this comment in the Guardian article:
Surely everyone's like that, not just men? Let's not get into the use of the word "girls" vs "men", which always pisses me off, but women don't watch the show to find out what men are "really like". They watch it because it's funny, and very human. Nobody is like the characters in the show to the letter, but equally, everyone is a bit too like them for comfort. I can't work out whether the writers and directors are trying to say that women are much better and cleverer and socially inept than men are, or whether they're saying that stupid shallow women have been duped by men pretending to be sensitive, when really they're all self-obsessed, sex-obsessed bastards.
Personally, I'm of the opinion that everyone in the world is secretly a self-obsessed, sex-obsessed bastard, to some extent. The joy of Peep Show is that you get to watch people struggling to reconcile their horrible mean emotions with a calm and kind exterior. And they fail every five minutes. It's funny because, oh my god, I think awful things like that sometimes, but thank god I don't do what they do! Thank Christ I can shut myself up and behave like a normal person! Wouldn't it be terrible if we all had Mark's emotional diarrhea and Jez's painful inability to be self-aware?
The women in the show are not nearly as well fleshed-out than Mark and Jez; they are mostly only there to provide opportunities for Mark and Jez to embarrass themselves. Particularly Nancy and Big Sooz. But Sophie is an interesting one - Mark's sort-of wife ("It was never, you know... consummated", he says to a potential date) - and a women who really has been treated appallingly by Mark. He jilted her at the altar, insulted her family, and only proposed to her by accident in the first place. She accepted because she was desperate for children, and while she is, essentially, a victim, she's also been a total bitch. She cheated on Mark with the beefy, laddish Jeff, takes drugs and seems to go from man to man as quickly and thoughtlessly as Olive Oyl, of Popeye fame.
So as Ben Marshall's summed up men's reactions to the main characters as all thinking they're Jez, wanting to be Super Hans and really being Mark, I suppose you could do a similarly depressing thing with the women. Women viewers think we're Big Sooz - the lovely, posh, kind, reasonable ex-girlfriend of Jez; we want to be Nancy, the beautiful, exotic, sexually depraved maneater, but we're really Sophie - insecure, desperate for affection and terrified of not being married before society's norms dictate we must be.
But I think the show is far more concerned with the male characters to intend us to interpret anything like this from it. And I'd guess that the overall intentions of the writers is to suggest that most women really are like Big Sooz, and it's men who screw everything up. Maybe if women had more of a role in the show then we'd get a more cohesive picture of how the Peep Show creators view the world - I want to see more of the 'reactionary conservatism' that characterises Mark, but I want to see it in the women. We can be funny too, I promise.
In the meantime, I'll be watching avidly tonight on Channel 4 - I hear they're going to a Christian rock festival soon. It'll be awkward, awful, and hilarious. Forget Doctor Who, this is the show you have to watch from behind the sofa.
3 comments:
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I've missed your blog :)
And good point. I actually hate all the women in Peep Show, Sophie included. And maybe that is cos they're not fleshed out enough.
What do you think of Dobby though?
Annie said...
Saturday, 17 May 2008 at 21:02:00 BST
Good point, she is an interesting addition. I don't know - I think it's sad that Mark seems to sort of hate her, but I guess - once again - that plot development is all about him.
Apart from being a slut in the stationery cupboard she hasn't done much yet, so I'm looking forward to seeing more of her. I'd like it if she became a proper character :)
What do you think?
Charlotte R said...
Saturday, 17 May 2008 at 21:04:00 BST
This is an interesting viewpoint in response to the guardian article. I realise that it has been a while since this has been published, but I want to ask if you purchased the series 5 dvd and whether you watched "Sophie's Peep Show"?
I thought that they developed her in an interesting way in comparison to the male characters. But she's representing a very stereotypical view of women.
But I don't agree with Ben Marshall's article either.
Anonymous said...
Friday, 7 November 2008 at 19:45:00 GMT