Ellynne wrote:
<The thing about B7 is that there are so many things that I'm sure no one consciously put in (and, some would argue, that aren't present outside of the minds of some of the viewers), yet they're _there_. Maybe it's because some things feel right to writers, actors, whoever, even when they aren't _consciously_ created.>
Well, literary criticism tends to be rather heedless of the author's conscious intentions. The usual procedure is to apply one or more of the existing critical approaches and see how much meaning a text yields when examined from that aspect. A good work of art should be able to snap the umbilical cord binding it to its author and exist in its own right. There is an adage that we would be quite dissappointed if Shakespeare could now explain to us what Hamlet was all about. I'm not sure one can analyse a TV show the same way, although I usually do.
Some time ago I saw the 13th Warrior and thought it was offensively patriarchal in its subtext. At the end of the film, the hero played by Banderas says that he is grateful to Norsemen because they have taught him how to sevre properly his God the Father. In the course of the film it is revealed that the best way to serve the Father is to sneak into the Earth's womb and kill the Mother. Mother-worship, which is essentialy Nature-worship, is presented in the film as something totally unnatural: the devotees eat human flesh and live by night. At the beginning, Banderas is exiled from one patriarchal community because he is also, in a way, a worshipper of the Goddess, a poet and a lover. But then the Norsemen come to sort him out and make a 'man' out of him. I'm quite certain the authors never had any conscious intention to convey these ideas - they just set out to make a good action movie - but the cultural archetypes spoke for themselves. The film duly represents the cultural attitude towards the feminine.
N.