How did you feel about Season 9?

[binkie]

(15-11-2010 05:50 PM)femaleBertieWooster Wrote:  Looking forward to Binkie's dissertation in the Lucas thread. (Are you an English teacher a philosopher or psychology prof Binkie?)

None of the above. History, I’m afraid. Even worse ... History of Ideas. Any questions about the manifestation of evolutionary theory in 19th-century visual culture, I’m the woman of the moment!!

(16-11-2010 11:59 PM)Byatil Wrote:  I have noticed that throughout the 3 series, Lucas' flats had less and less personal possessions in them... his first flat was covered in books and paintings, whilst his most recent only had one book according to the team. Could that be a hint at him attempting to escape himself?

I'm really glad you've raised the question of Lucas' possessions, Byatil. This is yet another area where, it seems to me, the writing/production team behind seasons 7 and 8 had some kind of coherent plan for the realisation of this theme and what it meant for the character, and which season 9 simply up-ended in service of an unsustainable plot direction.

In 7.2, we see Lucas physically in the middle of the life, formerly his, that is being unpacked from the boxes in which they have been stored for the last eight years. He agrees with the lady who brings him macaroons (we will assume he has his suspicions about her, as he must do about more or less everything at this stage) that it is odd “seeing your life in boxes.” There is a horribly bleak edge to this line, both in the writing and in the utterance. Lucas is trying so hard to engage in small talk, but the skill is rusty after eight years of minimal use. He has to drag the very idea of offering a cup of tea from some neglected compartment of his social awareness. It is evident in the way he looks back into the room and closes his eyes before reassuring himself, and his prospective guest, that he probably “has a kettle here somewhere.” The mundane quality of this exchange serves to highlight the very real distance between Lucas and the world at this point, even though the world is really just a series of rooms filled with what anyone else would describe as possessions.

The only time we see him responding to the contents of the boxes is when he hangs, and straightens, the Blake prints over the mantelpiece. Everything else either stays in its box or is extracted and discarded. No attempt is made to re-engage with these other objects. They belong to someone who no longer exists, and has no need of them. The use he finds for his pre-prison life is tragic and telling: he uses it to expose the insecurity of his post-release reality. He strews the books and photographs and CDs (music he no longer hears?) in a calculatedly haphazard way around the flat in order to trap whoever tries to come near him. Ros is clever enough to recognise the trap. Somebody else might not have been.

When next we see Lucas at home, for a short scene in 7.5, and then again - for slightly longer - in 7.7, all the objects from the boxes are gone. What remains is purely functional.

We don’t see Lucas at home again until 8.4, by which point he appears to have moved house. The decor and the layout of this new flat are starkly institutional. Everything is at right angles. Everything has a purpose. Even the plant looks like the kind of greenery you see in banks and offices, installed so as to make the place look more welcoming and less blatantly corporate. It seems to me that the clear intention of the production at this point, in showing the diminishing progression in Lucas’ domestic arrangements, is not that Lucas is trying consciously to rid himself of any indicators of a personality. Rather, that he is separated not only from the person he was before prison, but from the person he is trying so hard to be: the person who has left prison, and the experience of prison, in the past. There is, I think, an important conclusion being drawn here on the part of the production. Lucas is not trying to forget who he was, neither is he having trouble remembering who he was. He is, rather more desperately, horribly aware that the person he was no longer exists, and cannot be called back into existence by the contents of some plastic storage boxes. There is a huge, and vital, difference between this line of interest and the somewhat clumsy logic used in season 9 to explain the absence of personal clutter.

You're not the only person here releasing their inner essay monster