Singing the Body Electric

This is just me poking at my own (negative) reaction to something that was shared about a joke in the Our Flag Means Death finale that didn't fully make it onscreen. I know it goes without saying around here, but this isn't a slam on the person who shared it—I just have continuing thoughts I keep chewing on about the show and about some of the production details that I think speak to larger trends.


Our Flag Means Death creator David Jenkins has talked about how the show was never originally intended to be a romance, or at least not a requited one. His decision to make Ed/Stede more than one-sided was an extremely late-stage pivot. They had already started filming, and one of the first scenes they shot was the one in s01e06 where Ed has just had a PTSD flashback and is curled up in a bathtub confessing to Stede through tears that he doesn't think he's a good person. Jenkins was struck by the way Rhys Darby and Taika Waititi played one of the exchanges with honest emotion instead of throwing it away into a joke, and the rest was history.

(Note: I take everything David Jenkins says with a grain of salt. Good faith, he's been accidentally contradictory in his statements about the show. Bad faith, he's been outright dishonest. But I'm inclined to believe this one because it pre-dates the era of more defensive comments and was backed up by implication by the cast.)

This revelation stuck with me for two reasons. The first is admiration. The sunk cost fallacy is real, and I can only imagine how much more tempting it is when you're creating something that directly involves dozens of people and a large budget. It takes real courage and creative commitment to scrap a previous plan and take the leap to something new when a potentially stronger, more interesting story presents itself.

The second is that it supported my feeling that what many writers had turned into a setup had originally been a punchline. The idea of 18th century men in a violent profession having feelings, experiencing trauma, and being queer is taken as a given in the show's better moments, but periodically there's a sense that these things were meant to be incongruous enough that taking them seriously was the beginning and end of the joke, with not everyone having the comfort or confidence to then handle them in a serious narrative. Because what else was that bathtub scene intended to do if the presence of some honest emotion was unexpected enough to prompt a complete re-envisioning?

Not that I would put money on the distinction breaking down neatly between writers. People contain multitudes, television is a collaborative medium, etc. But this is one of those series that varied so much that I started looking up who wrote and edited each episode fairly early on, and there are definitely trends.

Anyway, I ended up thinking about all this again recently, after seeing a clip in which someone from the production team laughingly described an element that was filmed but didn't end up in-shot in the final cut of the finale. She was talking about how, in the scene where there are a bunch of dead English naval officers who are being stripped of their uniforms, we were supposed to be able to see that some of them were wearing women's lingerie underneath.

Under other circumstances, my reaction would probably have just been, 'Enh, I'm glad they didn't do that.' But what took me further aback was that she described this costuming decision as being "to push the queerness of the show."

And it's like...no. That's not what that was. That's a tired gag we've seen a million times for at least half a century, in which queerness is the punchline. The joke there is that someone in a traditionally masculine role of authority is revealed against their will to be queer and/or kinky in a moment of defeat. The laugh comes from absurdity and surprise because that's not something that someone like them "should" be wearing, and it positions both the secret and its forced reveal as humiliating and proof of deviancy or weakness.

These are villains whose deaths we were supposed to cheer. Showing them in lingerie under their uniforms isn't a coherent act of queering given the positions of piracy and the navy in the narrative, and neither is it delivering humour by happenstance through queer characters. It's just a joke about crossdressing that relies on the understanding that it's not normal and that it's embarrassing. At a stretch, in terms of trying to see it through a lens of subversion instead of just a regressive trope, it still plays into the equally tired idea that those in the establishment who are most responsible for hurting queer people are secretly queer themselves. Either way, the vibe with which the anecdote was shared didn't go beyond "it's funny and naughty."

It's not the worst possible joke with roots in homophobia by a long shot. (I mean, it would have played additionally poorly in conjunction with what happens to Izzy—a man who was recently willing to put his own toxic performance of masculinity aside to try drag, and whose glad adoption of a femme/fanciful accessory is what gets him clocked as Other and killed—but given the last-minute change from ten episodes to eight, there's maybe a chance the lingerie scene was conceived of and filmed before they decided to kill off Izzy in the same episode.) It's just an interesting example of a potential pitfall when queer comedy, or even just queer representation in comedy, is approached as simplistically as "showing a queer thing or person in a way that makes you laugh."

For the record, I have no idea of the orientation of the person who told this story. Even though I do think the showrunner's limitations as a straight cis man who by his own admission had to get a 101-level intro to queer tropes while making the show are relevant to a lot of my issues with s2, at the end of the day, we all grew up soaking in heteronormative media and all have our blind spots.

But I find myself going back to when David Jenkins was out there telling people that Our Flag Means Death was not a "queer show for queer people," but rather a four-quadrant show for everyone. I know I've talked before about how making something "for everyone" inevitably results in making things for the majority, and I feel like that also goes a long way toward lowering the bar and removing space for people to take a more thoughtful approach to "pushing the queerness" of a show beyond what percentage of words or visuals superficially diverge from heteronormativity.

Mileage varies, obviously. The fact that this anecdote seems to have been happily received when it was first shared and is recirculating with the framing that it would have been a fun/hot detail means I could be the outlier on this one. But it was still food for thought for me with regards to mainstream shows (selectively/inconsistently) marketed as queer, and to what we can all conceivably have slip into our writing and design when we don't take care.