FOOB: A Study in Passive Aggression.
I’m simply confounded by the conversations and situations depicted in today’s episode of FBFW. This may be the only time you see these words at this blog, but thank heaven for LJ’s obsessive, if inconsistent, attention to her characters’ background (ironically, that attention to detail is what made the strip so good in the past, and so infuriatingly awful today).
It’s because of this attention to detail that I know that Lizzie is 25 years old. Now, I realize that Lizzie’s leaving back home with her parents, and I realize that kind of a situation can play into obsolete patterns of behavior: when my sister moved back in with our folks for a few months in the 1990s, it didn’t take long for the same old parent-child bickering to rear its head. Same thing happened with my brother before he moved to Philly. If I remember correctly, he moved here after I pointed out to him that he was playing right into old behaviors (and that I’d found him a super cheap 1 bedroom apartment).
However, at no time did my parents tuck us in at night after the age of say 10, as John is depicted here. We didn’t have bedside chats just before sleep. TLC was also surprised, so I guess her dad doesn’t make himself comfortable in her bed either.
As Cookie77 asks at the FOOBIVERSE, “John calls his daughter “MY sweetheart”? I can understand “sweetheart,” but “MY sweetheart” sounds either very creepy or very sarcastic. And I vote for creepy, since she’s all tucked in in her bed.” I’ll add that not only does it sound creepy, it sounds stilted. But maybe it’s a just native to the dialect they speak in Ontario: Canadians have different expressions and speech patterns than Americans. For example, my son’s mom says that in Montreal if the person speaking to you mumbles, you say “Pardon”: “What” or “What did you say” indicates a grievance. So if someone called your mother a whore, and you didn’t hear them you’d say “Pardon”, but if you heard the statement and were taken aback, you’d say “what?” And then there’s the whole “eh” thing, eh?
Whatever the reason for John’s creepy language, what’s more creepy are the next two panels, where John equates “moving forward” with “getting another man ASAP.” Why he doesn’t use this moment to suggest his 25-year old daughter find herself an apartment of her own, I don’t know. In fact, John seems to be kind of obsessed with the men in Lizzie’s life, and has apparently been keeping track of their various qualities. I’ll have to ask my dad if he did that with my sister’s various suitors, but I doubt he really thought about it much after she hit a certain age. Like 18.
What’s also interesting is the way the text indicates John’s tone of voice. It seems as if he’s not just teasing his daughter, which is kind of inappropriate considering her sexual assault case finally wrapped up with a two year sentence for her would-be attacker, but outright mocking her romantic past, which is just cruel coming from a parent who actually pushed for Lizzie to dump one of those suitors to begin with! In sentence one, the ellipses after “Or” clearly indicate some kind of dramatic build-up, and the exclamations points after the question mark make me think of the voiceover during a soap opera commercials. In the next sentence, notice the word “Warren” is physically larger than the rest of the words. He’s literally shoving these false starts in her face, leading up (of course) to the Anthony plug in panel three. And she’s right to look shocked: if either of my parents went sarcastically down a list of my failed romantic entanglements, right on the heels of another failed relationship, I’d be pissed off too!
Of course what’s really going on in this panel is that John isn’t functioning so much as a character as a plot device, one that seems to have been lifted from one of those “Choose Your Own Adventure” books. “Do you step into the old professor’s time machine? Turn to page 18. Or do you just stay home and bake a nice pie? Turn to page 22.”
John’s delight in all things Granthony isn’t just a quirk of today’s strip or the linked text. Again, a visit to FBFW-HQ, where LJ (or her employees) write monthly letters from each character including the pets. unfortunately the individual letters have the same url, so I can’t link directly.
Here’s December 2006:
I would have thought Paul, Liz’s boyfriend, would have come down to be with her, but he seems to be staying away. I suppose he spends lots of time in court, so knows what a waste of time it is. Anthony has certainly come through, though. He always was incredibly reliable. Maybe that’s why Liz never appreciated him. He was too reliable, and treated her too well. I am always amazed how girls seem to prefer guys who mistreat them. I suppose it is more exciting! There’s always lots of drama! It makes me glad that Elly fell for a dull, reliable (but incredibly good looking) guy like me!
Here’s another reference from the October letter, 2006:
Hmmm, I’ll have to discuss the details with Anthony. He is a pretty sharp fellah when it comes to investments. Gordon has done a lot of expansion, each time a very good financial move. I used to give Gordon all the credit, but lately have learned that a lot of the ideas have actually come from Anthony, and Gordon just executes them. Amazing how teams evolve and each part of the team has different skills that complement those of others in the team.
[This language in interesting also because it expresses one of Lizzie's aspirations: Aspirations:To someday become as great a teacher and inspiration as Ms. Edwards. To keep singing and be better at it. To marry a guy like Dad! This also calls into question Lizzie's psyche, considering her father seems to like beating her down verbally. Also, John's letter indicate some serious repressed feelings: in the strip he is nearly always presented as a benevolent character, but his letters have a number of harsh criticisms of his youngest daughter and snarky remarks about his son's wife. But I digress.]
With all this in way of background, I have to ask myself if John is more interested in Anthony than Lizzie is! Poor Granthony marries Lizzie and then finds John naked an masturbating in the closet at the honeymoon suite. Lizzie looks like she’s pretty fucking sick of hearing about Granthony too: for once, I feel her pain.
The underlying assumption of all this, that “moving forward” necessarily involves choosing a new mate, is utterly flawed. As anyone recovering from a broken relationship knows, you get back into mating and dating when you feel comfortable doing so. I was single for about 5 years before I met Sam’s mom. One of the reasons TLC and I hooked up so soon thereafter was that by the time Sam’s mom and I split up, I’d been de-facto single for two years, but for the formality that I wasn’t sleeping with other women.
I’m not going to deal with the last two panels other than to point out not only that the “not trying to be irritating” line shows that like most of the characters in FBFW, John is passive aggressive, but to point out that the entire strip is a study in passive aggression. That includes Anthony’s pursuit of Lizzie and Lizzie’s relationship with her mother, Lizzie’s seeming innocence of Anthony’s intentions, Lizzie’s refusal to level with Paul about her reasons for returning to Millborough, the Lizzie Paul break up, including the failure of mutual friends to alert her before hand, the 4EVA versus Rebeccah story, and a whole host I haven’t blogged about, like the relationship between Michael Patterson’s household and the unpleasant couple downstairs, Michael’s alienation from his family, his wife’s barely expressed fury at his neglect (see January Letter, “Once I was done shouting at him (I actually don’t shout so much as hiss), I was able to express how happy I was to still have him alive, so that took some of the sting out), April’s multiple displacements in the wake of Lizzie’s unnecessary return, followed by Michael’s family’s necessary return, to the parental nest. No one communicates, and no one is accountable for their actions. The entire strip is a study in passive aggression.
From the well-documented holes in the plot and the inconsistency of the characters, I cannot argue that Lynn Johnston is deliberately offering an untrustworthy narrator:that is to say, I do not believe the passive aggression implicit in For Better or For Worse is deliberate. Where does it come from? If Johnson does not deliberately mean to portray a passive aggressive family, yet each and every character is passive aggressive, often cruelly and selfishly so, what does that say about the writer herself?
God, I can’t believe I just spent the last three hours writing this. Never mind Johnson, what does this say about me?
February 24th, 2007 at 10:18 pm
I’m surprised the obvious is eluding you – it’s a VERY sad state of affairs when LIZZIE is the voice of sanity for the strip.
February 26th, 2007 at 9:56 pm
Gee, Brendan, what do YOU think it says about you?