UPDATE: A Lipstick-Stained Farewell

For anyone interested in the feminist content of The L Word, one of the neatest tricks about Season 6—at least until its yet-unseen ultimate episode—has been how efficiently the writers have managed to contain most of it in just one early-season episode. In that brief hour, the character of Bette (Jennifer Beals) was “invited to leave” her academic job after an accusation of sexual harassment, and Alice (Leisha Hailey) raised the specter of homophobia on her TV show by reading a letter from a woman whose gay brother was shot by the man to whom he professed his attraction. Finding other feminist angles in this season has been a bit like looking for feminism in Playboy—not that it can’t be done, but there’s a lot of lipstick, heels and black lace to wade through to get to it.

Take the notion of fidelity, which has been the season’s obsession. The writers might have explored something vaguely political, such as the challenges  non-normative (lesbian) relationships face, but instead they focused mainly on a series of fidelity tests. Will Bette or Shane stray? Will Tasha (Rose Rollins) or Alice? Each is simply presented a tempting alternative, as in any cliché soap opera, and fidelity tests are played out even if they make no sense in terms of back story. For example, the character of filmmaker Dylan (Alexandra Hedison) returns after a couple of seasons away to declare her undying love for Helena (Rachelle Shelley), and so the crew of lesbian friends puts her sincerity on the line by having a seductive actress pretend to hit on her and simultaneously pitch a film project. Yet Dylan’s initial crime against Helena was extortion not infidelity. It’s hard to see what might be lesbian in all this, let alone the queer, and once again I find myself wondering about the representation of difference on this show.

The signature “difference” couple for the last few seasons has been Tasha and Alice, yet the differences that the show stages through them rarely touch on the most obvious thing: Tasha is black and Alice white. Instead, there is a perpetual emphasis on their individual and personal incompatibilities in terms of temperament, life experience and values, as if these things remain untouched by the political context of racial differences in America. This is the dynamic which has defined the show: rendering the political personal, rather than the other way around. It is played out again this season when Tasha and Alice get their fidelity test in the form of a new “friend” to whom both are attracted, Jamie (Mei Melançon), who, perhaps not incidentally happens to be biracial Asian American. What initially looked to be moving toward a threesome looks now like it will resolve into a new option for only one of them, Tasha. But this left the writers with some explaining to do. So, in order to account for the growing attraction which simultaneously distances Tasha from Alice, Jamie and Tasha are given something in common—which turns out to be a shared childhood experience of growing up in families dominated by a patriarchal father figure. Despite the fact that this scene is played in a way that stages race visually, inviting the audience to see it as something significant, it’s not part of the dialogue. It seems that whenever difference threatens to be political, which it does simply in visual terms in these scenes, it slides off like Teflon.

As I wrote in the previous piece, if politics is your passion then dramatic television might not be the best place to look for it, unless you’re willing to read between the lines. What I hadn’t banked on in this last season of “The L Word” was that there might be fewer lines to read between.

 —Sal Renshaw