I’ve watched SVU on and off since it premiered. While I generally find it interesting, it’s never been on my must-watch-every-week list (which currently has no members anyway) because it’s so dark. So maybe I’m out of the loop on the way the show has evolved. Or maybe last night represented a nadir:
Benson goes undercover in a women’s prison to find a prison guard who raped a girl in Manhattan. While she being processed, there is a long sequence–maybe two minuets long–showing her being stripped for a shower and otherwise dehumanized; a guard gropes her after she has on her prisoner uniform, prompting her to reflexively fight back, and only the intervention of Finn (also working undercover, as a guard) saves her from beating. While the prison is in lockdown because of a TB outbreak, her prime suspect, not knowing she is a cop, accosts, beats, and tries to rape her; she fights him off and runs, only to be stalked through the bowels of the prison and ultimately caught. He forced her to her knees, handcuffs her to a door, and begins to force her to fellate him while she begs him to stop. Finn arrives literally seconds before she’d have been forced to blow the villain. Incredibly, Olivia and Finn’s statements are not enough to get the guard held, and to arrest him, Olivia must go to the original rape victim and prompt her to identify the guard by a mole on his penis.
The reason I went into so much detail in that spoiler because I wanted to emphasize just how much detail the producers showed. While the events didn’t exactly shock me–hell, a character on The Shield had something similar happen–it did vex me. Not only was the whole thing sleazy, it seemed
to either carelessly or deliberately undermine the strength of Olivia’s character. Not only was she cringing and helpless–she, and the rest of the squad, were stupid. The attempted rape was as predictable as a air duct infiltration in a Flash Gordon serial. For the squad not to have said, “You know, this isn’t worth it–find another way to find this creep” was unbelievable, even by television standards.
I found it very creepy and exploitative too. Keeping Finn held up so that the rest of it could take place? It built tension like a horror movie and that’s not what that show’s about. It reminded me of how they had Vincent D’Onofrio get himself committed on Criminal Intent–way too personal and creepy.
I guess the only redeeming thing is it gets her even more sensitized to what the victims go through.
On a lighter note, I loved the promo for next week–“the biggest stars appear on SVU” and it’s Bill Pullman. I love him, but a huge star??
There are some episodes of SVU that get really purple.
SVU usually keeps a semi-realistic tone to their stories. But occasionally they get so caught up in a completely ridiculous situation, it seems like they throw in every National Enquirer headline they can get their hands on.
One ep that left me tasting my own bile was about a tweener set of teens, a boy and a girl. They obviously used the same actor kid in both roles. He dressed in drag for the girl part and wore makeup and a wig. They used greenscreen tricks to make it look like both were in the same scene.
Later in the story, it’s revealed that the girl was actually a boy whose penis got whacked off by accident shortly after birth, so the doctor gave him hormones and estrogen to turn him into a girl. When the kids find out about it, they kill the doctor, but nobody can prove which of them did it. The girl quits taking the drugs to turn back into a boy, and the two are kept locked in separate rooms to keep them from committing homosexual incest with each other. The last scene is the two of them trying to embrace each other with a wall between them. The former girl now has a butch haircut and looks like a meth addict.
Just wait til the week after. 200th episode and they get…
Robin Williams!?
Anyway, I loved last night’s SVU. At times, it gave me chills. I wouldn’t call it expoitative so much as I think they were trying to have the viewer sympathize with the plight of how those in the prison system are treated. I didn’t find the Finn’s test/Olivia’s beatdown scene to be horror-movie-like; I thought it was quite suspenseful, as the show was in its earlier days.
After Stabler and Olivia had their little scene towards the end, I half expected the guard to turn up dead.
Favorite line of the night: “Who’s the bitch now?”
I remember thinking that the luckiest day of the guard’s life had happened some time before–when Stabler was the one sent to pretend to be a lawyer, and thus was disqualified from playing the guard. If Eliot had come onto the scene of someone trying to mouth-rape Olivia, he’d have killed the guy three times.
I recall when Henry Winkler appeared in an ep of, I think, L&O:CI. As the bad guy, of course. Nothing like L&O for giving nice-image celebs a chance to play a villain’s part; I’ve seen it more times than I can count. In fact, if you see a big name guest-starring on an L&O show, you can almost be sure he/she will turn out to be the perp.
That’s more true of CI & SVU than of the original show, and it’s a major flaw. The two spin-offs tend to do actual mysteries much more than their parent, but the way they use big-name stars gives away the mystery far too often.
Hmm, Law and Order has been responsible for an exploitive first in an area of interest to me, but I can’t tell you about it because of a special Board Rule applying only to me. What a shame, because it’s REALLY unusual, the first and only in television.
I didn’t see this episode, but I gave up on SVU a couple years ago for similar reasons. At first, I was vaguely impressed that they always seemed to show the “proper respect” (whatever that means) to the rape victims in their storylines. After a while, though, it gradually dawned on me that, though they seemed to get most of the details right, they were still, on the whole, exploiting rape and other horrible crimes simply for entertainment’s sake, and to sell shampoo. So yeah, without having seen this particular episode, I still have to agree with you in principal.
Pretty much ditto on all counts. With the original L&O, they’re murder mysteries that may touch on the emotions of the grieving, but usually concentrate on the motives and methods of the killers.
But the SVU eps seemed to excessively wallow in the pain and traumatic aftermath of the assaults (not always for dramatic effect, but simply to push emotional responses in the audience) and the fact that you knew every ep was going to be some kind of sexual crime made the prospect of seeing how raw and untethered they were going to approach the subject each week made it too much for me.
Olivia went through so much pain, fear and humiliation that when she was asked if she’d been raped, I expected her to say something like “not technically”.
Og, I hope so! Never rest on your laurels, dudes! There’s always a higher peak to scale!