Monday, March 2, 2009

go yea into the streets of Jerusalem and see if yea can find a man

It is no secret to those who know me that I am a big Battlestar Galactia watcher. I watched it the first time round with my mother. It was our only real time together during my teenaged years and remains one of my favourite memories. Every Sunday night without fail we would gather together to watch Battlestar Galactia at 8pm and I, Claudius at 9pm on TVO until both shows had run their course.

So having grown up with the old Starbuck it took a while for me to accept the new Starbuck as a woman. I wasn’t particularly fond of the transition and it wasn’t really until the second season got underway that I warmed up to the new Starbuck persona.

Dirk Benedict, who played the original male Starbuck character, is interviewed in National Review and has this to say about his cinematic remake of Starbuck.
“They castrated the character from that show who is the most male,” he says, referring to how Starbuck was reborn female, the most telling detail in the new show’s surrender to Hollywood’s regnant sexual politics. “They came up with the idea to remove his balls, his humor, his gallantry, and make him an angry, pissed-off woman with a cigar. That is a reflection of our society. What Hollywood couldn’t do to me in 25 years, the producers of this show did to me with a delete button.”

One real source of dissatisfaction I have had for the new series is just how unappealing most of the young male characters are. They run the gauntlet of whiny, petulant and overtly emotionally needy. I cannot help feeling none of these ‘new men’ of Caprica hold any real appear to me as men. I still cannot understand Hollywood’s love-in with the ‘metrosexual’ persona of male characters – far too tiresome in real life and even more tiresome to watch on the big screen. I admit I cheered watching Gaeta be executed and thank the writers for finally killing off the whiny little worm of a man. There is a kind of ugly ring of truth to what Benedict says, but the thing which really hit home for me as a mother of teenage sons, was this:
“Even up in Montana I’ve spent the last 20 years defending the right of my boys to throw a frickin’ snowball, to climb a tree, to jump off a little cliff, to go out in the canoe off my dock without a life jacket,” he says. “All the little boys that refused to give into that were put on Ritalin. The future warriors of America are all on Ritalin in the second grade.”

Can I get an Amen? About fracking time someone finally said it. Here I was thinking it was just me.

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