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Being Human - Episode #1, Season 3.
After a somewhat busy weekend, am hanging back today, watching the snow fall - although I think it has stopped. We didn't get that much - maybe two inches if that. It's pretty though and with any luck will melt fast.
Watched the premier of S3 - Being Human this morning - which actually addressed the whole vampire blood-lust = alcohol/heroine/crack addiction head on and in a far better manner than Angel did in some respects. I still think the season finale of The Closer may have handled this the best, because the problem with vampirism being a metaphor for drug addiction is that well, the drug addict isn't taking the drugs to stay alive. Granted vamps could choose another way of getting their blood. But it still doesn't quite work, I don't think you can call a drug addict a vampire. And drug addict's addiction is something they can avoid completely, while a vampire can't avoid needing blood. Nor for that matter should the vampire be alive. The only connection between the two - is the desire to be free, to lose oneself completely in the substance, and do whatever one wants without inhibition. Which is somewhat different than a compulsion to drink blood because you are a "vampire". That's not to say the two things aren't related on some level - I just think the metaphor has some serious flaws.
That said, I found how Being Human addresses the topic more interesting than far more romantic gothic dramas have to date. The difficult with Angel and Buffy - is to a degree the vampire is romanticized. Albeit not to the degree he or she is in say - Vamp Diaries or Twilight, but we are still presented with a "redeemable" character who could potentially win the heroine's heart and "Shanshu". My difficulty with the character of Angel is he is allowed to hide and never forced to address the fact that he is not the victim here of either fate or the PTB, that he has outlived his due date and the mere fact that he continues to live often at the expense of others lives, is why he can't be redeemed. He never willingly faces what he is, instead much like Mitchell, he hides. It's not my fault. It wasn't me. It's the blood-lust. It was Daisy or Darla or so and so's fault. And it is the weakness in Never Leave Me and Amends - where in both cases Buffy gives Spike and Angel an excuse, much the same excuse Mitchell attempts to give himself in this episode - it wasn't you - it's the blood-lust, it's what possessed you - ie. The First Evil (but isn't that part of them? They both gave into it for the same reasons Mitchell does - to not feel pain, or guilt, or suffering, to lose themselves in the wild rush.) The only redeemption for a vampire is to die in a way so that others may live or to complete another's story- ie. Spike standing there and allowing his soul to burn all the vampires in the room including himself.
"How arrogant to call yourself the victim, here. How insulting to your actual victims." Lila tells Mitchell, and she is right.
It's an echo of what Fritz tells Brenda Lee about Trey in The Closer - the crack addict who leaves rehab, because it's too cruel for him to handle and they are abusing him there - so he gets so doped up that he kills one girl, tortures and cages the other - just so they can deplete their bank accounts in order for him to get more drugs, to stay high, to keep the fix. Fritz confesses to his wife that he knows what addiction is. That addicts lie. To themselves and everyone else. They see themselves as the victim. It's never their fault. Anyone would have done what they did in their place.
(The truth is we don't know that.) They justify their actions - blaming it on their addiction. I had no choice. God made me this way. It's not my fault that I'm addicted to drugs, crave drugs. It's the drugs. This wasn't me. It was the blood-lust. Yet as, Fritz states - it is me. "When I was drinking" he tells Brenda Lee - "I had a gun, one day I looked in my car and I shot it up. No one was hurt, thank God, but I didn't know that - I could have killed any number of people. I was driving drunk - I got a DUI. And even though I knew, KNEW that I could have, possibly did kill several people - I kept drinking. I did not stop. I am a monster. I became a monster. I had a choice not to drink."
This speech is almost the opposite of Mitchell's to Lila, the 22 year old student who he meets in purgatory - one of the twenty people he killed on the train with Daisy. Because he wanted vengeance for another vampire's death. He was filled with rage and grief and wanted to go on a killing spree, to lose himself in the blood. I was compelled, he tells her, it's not my fault. It was the blood lust.
And Daisy's response is pitch perfect: "You are lying to yourself. Every word out of your mouth is a misdirection. An excuse. How dare you. The arrogance to call yourself the victim. How insulting to your actual victims. You want forgiveness every day. You see me smile at you and it makes you feel better - because that means you are what? Forgiven? You do a thousand small little things thinking they will make up for all the big things you've done - you actually do the sums in your head, don't you? I was a 22 years old, studying to become a vet, with a little brother I loved more than anything else in the world. That's what made me human! Did you taste any of that in our blood?"
And here is Mitchell's response which echoes Fritz's, as Lila's to a degree echoes Brenda Lee's silent look of horror at Trey, seeing the monster unmasked before her eyes.
"I hacked my way through the world, left a trail of blood a thousand miles long. I loved it, the sensation, the power, I was dead, I lost my conscience, I was free and that was what I was addicted to - that freedom." There it is - the metaphor. The addiction is not to the blood - it is to losing oneself, feeling no pain, just the rush. Being able to do anything without the pressure or anxiety of conscience getting in the way. The childish glee of Alex in Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange - when he rapes and beats to death a family all the while singing the hit "Singing in the Rain."
Mitchell sees himself as the lead player. The hero. But he's not - Lila states. You will get Annie back, but you have to go back as well - we aren't keeping you here to suffer, no, you have to play an important role in someone else's story - you are part of their journey.
In short, George is the lead player here not Mitchell. George whose parallel tale with Nina is about living. Of the three roommates - George is the only one who is alive. He fights the monster inside himself. In the prison cell - he begs the man in there with him - to kill him. When Nina rescues him, he worries about changing with her in the same area, because maybe they'll kill each other. They don't (actually they have sex or so it is strongly implied). And we see a vampire kidnap a werewolf and force him fight a human victim who just has a knife to defend himself.
Unlike Vampire Diaries - the difference between the werewolf - who is alive and cursed and only comes out once in a full moon and the vampire who is dead and cursed to feed on the living to remain undead, is one enjoys his power, gets off on it, is addicted to it, and the other...fights against it and despises it, even if giving in may well be less painful.
Experience may cloud my own judgment here - as is often the case in most things. For I actually have met people who gave in to their addiction and destroyed others lives including their own as a direct result of it. I sat across from a man who was the realistic equivalent of a Mitchell and/or a Trey. Who made the same excuses and justifications. His eyes were yellow. His arms had track lines up them.
He'd clearly been a crack head and a heroine addict. And he killed a lot of people to maintain that habit - which was why he was serving life in prison. He was human. Not a monster. I could smell his breath and sweat, and we were sitting knee to knee with a small table separating us at the visiting room in the Penitentiary. When you see it face to face, when you realize the choices and situations that lead people there...and how silly and small they seem at first..it can blow your mind. The problem with comparing drug use to vampirism is well the human addicted to drugs - may have lost himself to the drugs, but unlike the vampire - he chose to take the drugs. But he most likely did not know what the drugs would do to him - when he took them, anymore than I'm guessing Mitchell knew what becoming a vampire would do to him, even if the evidence of it was starring him in the face. As he tells Lila - I thought I could go back to my old regiment, it did not occur to me that the blood lust would take over. He thought he could control it. You see this still happening with Mitchell - I can control it. But can he? Is he too far gone?
The reason redemption stories are such a major part of our culture - is the desire to know if we can be forgiven for our actions. They can't be undone, but we can learn from them. We can become better.
The drug user can go to detox, make it through rehab, and be a better person. And hopefully make amends for what they did.
Mitchell aches to be forgiven, but as Lila states - how repeatedly? He keeps falling off the wagon.
It's of course not that simple. And I think Being Human demonstrates the complexity far better than the more romantic depictions of the same theme - in Buffy, Angel, True Blood, and Vamp Diaries. Mitchell's crime in Being Human is in some respects far worse than what we see them do in the other drama's, and in part because it is clearly Mitchell who did it - not a possessed Mitchell, not
flashback to another time when he was under Henrick's control, but Mitchell - himself. As Mitchell finally says to Lila - it was me. I'm not addicted to the blood, I enjoy the taking of life - I got off on that. Just as Spike and Angel got off on the taking of life, the violence, the torture, not just the blood. The bloodlust is the excuse they use, the justification - for being monsters.
But, and this is emphasized, they always have a choice. As Lila states - if you knew that the bloodlust would always overtake you, that you were already dead - why not just kill yourself? Early on? Why did you feel the need to continue? Why choose to stay the addict, someone who lives off others lives?
Quite impressive episode. Much better than last year.
I'm not watching the US version - find it difficult to watch after seeing the far superior UK brand.
[Please no spoilers for any episodes after S3, episode 1.)
Watched the premier of S3 - Being Human this morning - which actually addressed the whole vampire blood-lust = alcohol/heroine/crack addiction head on and in a far better manner than Angel did in some respects. I still think the season finale of The Closer may have handled this the best, because the problem with vampirism being a metaphor for drug addiction is that well, the drug addict isn't taking the drugs to stay alive. Granted vamps could choose another way of getting their blood. But it still doesn't quite work, I don't think you can call a drug addict a vampire. And drug addict's addiction is something they can avoid completely, while a vampire can't avoid needing blood. Nor for that matter should the vampire be alive. The only connection between the two - is the desire to be free, to lose oneself completely in the substance, and do whatever one wants without inhibition. Which is somewhat different than a compulsion to drink blood because you are a "vampire". That's not to say the two things aren't related on some level - I just think the metaphor has some serious flaws.
That said, I found how Being Human addresses the topic more interesting than far more romantic gothic dramas have to date. The difficult with Angel and Buffy - is to a degree the vampire is romanticized. Albeit not to the degree he or she is in say - Vamp Diaries or Twilight, but we are still presented with a "redeemable" character who could potentially win the heroine's heart and "Shanshu". My difficulty with the character of Angel is he is allowed to hide and never forced to address the fact that he is not the victim here of either fate or the PTB, that he has outlived his due date and the mere fact that he continues to live often at the expense of others lives, is why he can't be redeemed. He never willingly faces what he is, instead much like Mitchell, he hides. It's not my fault. It wasn't me. It's the blood-lust. It was Daisy or Darla or so and so's fault. And it is the weakness in Never Leave Me and Amends - where in both cases Buffy gives Spike and Angel an excuse, much the same excuse Mitchell attempts to give himself in this episode - it wasn't you - it's the blood-lust, it's what possessed you - ie. The First Evil (but isn't that part of them? They both gave into it for the same reasons Mitchell does - to not feel pain, or guilt, or suffering, to lose themselves in the wild rush.) The only redeemption for a vampire is to die in a way so that others may live or to complete another's story- ie. Spike standing there and allowing his soul to burn all the vampires in the room including himself.
"How arrogant to call yourself the victim, here. How insulting to your actual victims." Lila tells Mitchell, and she is right.
It's an echo of what Fritz tells Brenda Lee about Trey in The Closer - the crack addict who leaves rehab, because it's too cruel for him to handle and they are abusing him there - so he gets so doped up that he kills one girl, tortures and cages the other - just so they can deplete their bank accounts in order for him to get more drugs, to stay high, to keep the fix. Fritz confesses to his wife that he knows what addiction is. That addicts lie. To themselves and everyone else. They see themselves as the victim. It's never their fault. Anyone would have done what they did in their place.
(The truth is we don't know that.) They justify their actions - blaming it on their addiction. I had no choice. God made me this way. It's not my fault that I'm addicted to drugs, crave drugs. It's the drugs. This wasn't me. It was the blood-lust. Yet as, Fritz states - it is me. "When I was drinking" he tells Brenda Lee - "I had a gun, one day I looked in my car and I shot it up. No one was hurt, thank God, but I didn't know that - I could have killed any number of people. I was driving drunk - I got a DUI. And even though I knew, KNEW that I could have, possibly did kill several people - I kept drinking. I did not stop. I am a monster. I became a monster. I had a choice not to drink."
This speech is almost the opposite of Mitchell's to Lila, the 22 year old student who he meets in purgatory - one of the twenty people he killed on the train with Daisy. Because he wanted vengeance for another vampire's death. He was filled with rage and grief and wanted to go on a killing spree, to lose himself in the blood. I was compelled, he tells her, it's not my fault. It was the blood lust.
And Daisy's response is pitch perfect: "You are lying to yourself. Every word out of your mouth is a misdirection. An excuse. How dare you. The arrogance to call yourself the victim. How insulting to your actual victims. You want forgiveness every day. You see me smile at you and it makes you feel better - because that means you are what? Forgiven? You do a thousand small little things thinking they will make up for all the big things you've done - you actually do the sums in your head, don't you? I was a 22 years old, studying to become a vet, with a little brother I loved more than anything else in the world. That's what made me human! Did you taste any of that in our blood?"
And here is Mitchell's response which echoes Fritz's, as Lila's to a degree echoes Brenda Lee's silent look of horror at Trey, seeing the monster unmasked before her eyes.
"I hacked my way through the world, left a trail of blood a thousand miles long. I loved it, the sensation, the power, I was dead, I lost my conscience, I was free and that was what I was addicted to - that freedom." There it is - the metaphor. The addiction is not to the blood - it is to losing oneself, feeling no pain, just the rush. Being able to do anything without the pressure or anxiety of conscience getting in the way. The childish glee of Alex in Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange - when he rapes and beats to death a family all the while singing the hit "Singing in the Rain."
Mitchell sees himself as the lead player. The hero. But he's not - Lila states. You will get Annie back, but you have to go back as well - we aren't keeping you here to suffer, no, you have to play an important role in someone else's story - you are part of their journey.
In short, George is the lead player here not Mitchell. George whose parallel tale with Nina is about living. Of the three roommates - George is the only one who is alive. He fights the monster inside himself. In the prison cell - he begs the man in there with him - to kill him. When Nina rescues him, he worries about changing with her in the same area, because maybe they'll kill each other. They don't (actually they have sex or so it is strongly implied). And we see a vampire kidnap a werewolf and force him fight a human victim who just has a knife to defend himself.
Unlike Vampire Diaries - the difference between the werewolf - who is alive and cursed and only comes out once in a full moon and the vampire who is dead and cursed to feed on the living to remain undead, is one enjoys his power, gets off on it, is addicted to it, and the other...fights against it and despises it, even if giving in may well be less painful.
Experience may cloud my own judgment here - as is often the case in most things. For I actually have met people who gave in to their addiction and destroyed others lives including their own as a direct result of it. I sat across from a man who was the realistic equivalent of a Mitchell and/or a Trey. Who made the same excuses and justifications. His eyes were yellow. His arms had track lines up them.
He'd clearly been a crack head and a heroine addict. And he killed a lot of people to maintain that habit - which was why he was serving life in prison. He was human. Not a monster. I could smell his breath and sweat, and we were sitting knee to knee with a small table separating us at the visiting room in the Penitentiary. When you see it face to face, when you realize the choices and situations that lead people there...and how silly and small they seem at first..it can blow your mind. The problem with comparing drug use to vampirism is well the human addicted to drugs - may have lost himself to the drugs, but unlike the vampire - he chose to take the drugs. But he most likely did not know what the drugs would do to him - when he took them, anymore than I'm guessing Mitchell knew what becoming a vampire would do to him, even if the evidence of it was starring him in the face. As he tells Lila - I thought I could go back to my old regiment, it did not occur to me that the blood lust would take over. He thought he could control it. You see this still happening with Mitchell - I can control it. But can he? Is he too far gone?
The reason redemption stories are such a major part of our culture - is the desire to know if we can be forgiven for our actions. They can't be undone, but we can learn from them. We can become better.
The drug user can go to detox, make it through rehab, and be a better person. And hopefully make amends for what they did.
Mitchell aches to be forgiven, but as Lila states - how repeatedly? He keeps falling off the wagon.
It's of course not that simple. And I think Being Human demonstrates the complexity far better than the more romantic depictions of the same theme - in Buffy, Angel, True Blood, and Vamp Diaries. Mitchell's crime in Being Human is in some respects far worse than what we see them do in the other drama's, and in part because it is clearly Mitchell who did it - not a possessed Mitchell, not
flashback to another time when he was under Henrick's control, but Mitchell - himself. As Mitchell finally says to Lila - it was me. I'm not addicted to the blood, I enjoy the taking of life - I got off on that. Just as Spike and Angel got off on the taking of life, the violence, the torture, not just the blood. The bloodlust is the excuse they use, the justification - for being monsters.
But, and this is emphasized, they always have a choice. As Lila states - if you knew that the bloodlust would always overtake you, that you were already dead - why not just kill yourself? Early on? Why did you feel the need to continue? Why choose to stay the addict, someone who lives off others lives?
Quite impressive episode. Much better than last year.
I'm not watching the US version - find it difficult to watch after seeing the far superior UK brand.
[Please no spoilers for any episodes after S3, episode 1.)
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Lack of new ideas?
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Being Human is more or less a straight drama with comedic elements - but came out of the writer's interest in struggling with addiction, OCD/Attention Deficit and agrophobia - which he found supernatural metaphors for. While Buffy came out of the writer/creator's desire to critique the teen gothic and slasher horror trope - where the blond girl gets either butchered or attacked by the vampire/slasher and or seduced and taken over by him - a la Dracula straight through the Lost Boys, Halloween, and I Am Legend. As Buffy evolved, the metaphors evolved beyond that of course, but you can't quite get past that basic orgin. Where the vampire is basically not much more than walking death. So I think he does find them interesting - it's just in a vastly different way.
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The final sequence of the first episode is ironically written, Annie in a voice over is talking about her great friends, that they are just different species but still innately human. While on the tv screen for a brief flashing moment Mitchell sees Lia's photo and the words In Memorium pop up on the screen. He shuts it off before they notice it. But it hangs in the background mocking Annie's words.
Prior to that, before Annie's leaves Purgatory, she asks Lia - what happened to her, if she's okay. Lia doesn't tell her. But it is made clear that Annie doesn't know. If Annie did know, would she be able to look at Mitchell? Would George? Particularly George who spends so much time doing everything in his power not to hurt anyone?
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Anyway, was nodding along to all this. Very much agreed on Mitchell. *points to icon* I had
(Oh and it's Lia, not Lila btw.)
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Thanks, I could not tell when I was watching it. Even though I rewound it four or five times to get the dialogue.
I remember reading an interview with Toby Whithouse, where he explained that his original idea had been to have an addict, an agoraphobic and someone suffering from ADHD living together. And then - the way these things go - he suddenly thought to make them a vampire, a ghost and a werewolf. I think this goes a long way to explain why the metaphors are so clear and work so well.
Which explains why they aren't as muddied as they are in other gothic shows. Angel, Forever Knight, Moonlight, True Blood, and Vamp Diaries - all treat the vampirism in somewhat the same manner - to the point in which it is almost trite. While Being Human seems to take it a step beyond that.
when he was about to drown himself in guilt - told him that actually he was important for someone else's story, so he should just shut up and go
This is what I loved most about that scene. I wish they'd had the foresight to do that with Angel - to show him that you know, you aren't back for what you might do, but because you are an important part of someone else's story. (ie. Buffy finally staking and killing you. Or someone else.)
Here - the writers have the guts to go there. And in doing so, comment on the protagonist privilege in a way that is actually sort of interesting. Challenging the protagonist's view that it is all about him, that is his journey, when in reality he may just be a supporting player in someone else's. That duality - that while we are the lead player in our own, we simulataneously play supporting roles in each others journeys and often one's we may not like.