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spenglernot · 6 months

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STORIES TELLING: NED LOWE AND THE DEATH OF POOR REPRESENTATION IN OUR FLAG MEANS DEATH

In history, Ned Lowe was one of the most sadistic and violent pirates in the early 18th century, so he’s an obvious choice for a villain for season 2, episode 6 – Calypso’s Birthday. What is interesting is what the OFMD writers chose to do with him.

Lowe announces himself to the crew of the Revenge with great fanfare (cannon ball attack) and gets right to the point.

Ed is thoroughly unimpressed.

Cut to Ed and Stede tied up while Ned attempts to set the mood so he can monologue about why he wants to kill Ed.

Ed knows what’s coming. He is going to suffer but he still can’t be arsed to meet Ned with anything but vaguely bored dismissiveness (and Stede is happy to play along).

Up on the deck, Ned prepares the crew for his big, dramatic moment of symphonic torture.

Note that the Revenge crew is tied down, braced by vices and generally unable to protect themselves from imminent torture and possible death, but their spirits are up. They don’t seem terribly fussed.

Then Stede uses his people positive management style to happily orchestrate a worker uprising in Ned’s crew.

Ned’s crew responds instantly; severing their allegiance to Lowe and telling him off.

The crew sails away and talks profit sharing while Ned dully threatens to hunt them down.

Ned is now a prisoner of the Revenge crew and seems entirely disinterested in his own survival.

And Ned sinks to the depths, without struggling at all.

There is a lot going on in this episode: pay and labor equity direct action, gay love engagement bliss, kink humor, Stede being a hero and saving his crew by playing to his strengths, then having to decide whether to kill in cold blood and feel the consequences of that choice. Ed having one more reason to be done with piracy (while being so impressed with and fond of Stede), and then watching his man make a fraught choice and having to deal with the fallout from that. (And, damn, I haven’t even mentioned the passionate sex bit.) Anyway, back to the point.

Now for the the meta part

The Ned Lowe sequences are perfectly in keeping with OFMD’s signature blend of madcap violence, humor, and big emotional gut punches. But something about Ned Lowe just strikes me as off for this show.

Ned is seriously threatening the crews’ lives, so why don’t they take him seriously?

Why does Ned have such a boring, throwaway backstory?

Why is Ned so nonchalant about his own death; like it’s a foregone conclusion?

Why does Ned have a silver violin and silver spurs on his slip-on dress shoes?

Why is Ned sartorially monochromatic?

And then I realized who Ned reminds me of.

This guy,

Earnst Stavro Blofeld in the James Bond film Diamonds are Forever (1971)

And this guy,

Scar in Disney's The Lion King (1994).

And this guy,

Xerxes, 300 (2006).

And it sure seems like Ned Lowe isn’t just an episodic villain. He is an archetype of the one-dimensional, stereotypical queer-coded villain that has been endemic in film and television throughout history. The OFMD writers have a lot to say about what to do with this kind of character:

Don’t respect him.

Feel free to openly mock him.

Don’t let him take your joy, even though he will hurt you.

He won’t disappear on his own. You have to throw something at him (take action) to make him go away.

Once he’s in the water, he’s content to drown. He’s not into what he’s doing any more than you are.

Oh and, just to be clear,

The LGBTQIA+ community has a very long history of turning shit media into better stories. So, hey, big media, prepare to have your crap characters wrecked (improved).

Now, back to our transformative pirate show with rich, complex queer characters and a multi-layered plot that surprises me every week and makes me feel big feelings - most of all, joy.

Final thought: I do wonder if Ned Lowe is monochromatically silver as a tribute to/poke at, Hollywood and the silver screen.

This meta was written before OFMD season 2 has fully aired. No idea what’s going to happen in the finale (and I’ve generally fled social media to avoid spoilers). I’ll be back, looking at everyone’s fascinating posts after episode 8 airs.

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howtofightwrite · 6 years

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Just read your post on Heat and watched the clip, and while the whole clip was pretty horrific, the part that hit me the hardest was...... how in the nine hells did he justify taking that final shot? If the guy so much as twitched- not even deliberately using the girl as a shield, but maybe something happened off to the side- the cop would have wound up shooting a little girl in the head! Is he a sociopath or something?

A little bit. Vincent (Al Pachino) is not entirely stable, and Pachino has since gone on record saying his character was coked up throughout the events of the film, though we see almost no examples of that in this sequence.

So, a couple things worth noting. I didn’t cover the characters’ backstory at all, because it’s mostly irrelevant to an overall critique, however, Vincent is a marine. He mustered out and joined the LAPD, which is used as a point of comparison, because Neil McCauley (De Niro) is also a marine who ended up in prison after mustering out.

It’s very difficult to judge distance in Heat, because the film is shot, almost exclusively using 75-100m telephoto lenses which does very strange things to perspective, but Vincent and Michael (Tom Sizemore) appear to be within 30-50m of one another. At those ranges, someone with marine marksman training, using a reasonably accurate rifle on semi-auto, should be able to hollow out a dime.

You can see Vincent do two things before firing. He adjusts his shooting position, moving the sights into line for a precise shot, and he then holds the shot as Michael turns, to give him the cleanest possible shot. Note that the girl (Yvonne Zima)’s head is the furthest from Michael’s when Vincent fires. (Had Michael continued to turn, their heads would have been closer.) He is firing on someone using a human shield, but he’s doing his best to mitigate the danger to her.

If you really want a full, “use of force,” breakdown on the situation, then @skypig357 would be the person to ask, though, the short answer is that Michael was using the girl as a human shield while firing indiscriminately at civilians and police. He needed to be stopped. Unfortunately, given these specific circumstances, killing the perpetrator is the safest way to do that, for everyone else involved.

-Starke

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#heat #followup #reasonable force

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