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katallisonSo, some people expressed an interest in my thoughts on RayV and RayK as shame-based and guilt-based characters, respectively, so I typed out some rambling comments, which are cut away because they got incredibly long-winded.
First, a disclaimer: there's a body of literature in cultural anthropology and social psych about shame-based vs. guilt-based cultures. Because I am a crappy scholar, I did not consult that literature, of which I have only the dimmest memory, and my formulations of the shame/guilt concepts may be totally out of line with the received wisdom. So I'm just rollin' my own here, folks, and you're free to tell me how wrong I am. *g*
Having said which, I posit that shame and guilt, though similar in many ways, have a crucial difference. Shame I see as being externally focused; it grows out of the sense that one has screwed up or fallen short in the eyes of others. One has visibly failed to live up to some group norm, whether of honor or coolness or correctness or whatever. Guilt, on the other hand, is internally derived; one has failed to live up to one's own personal standards. One can feel guilty about actions, or thoughts, which no one else will ever know about (except perhaps one's God).
So, let's look at the two Rays.
Ray Vecchio as shame-based: Vecchio is a guy who cares deeply about how he's perceived by others; he's all about la bella figura. This goes beyond the obvious (his clothes, his car, his style) and shapes his behavior with others. When he gets his raise, in Juliet is Bleeding, he takes his pals out for dinner to a fancy place, because that's what a guy does, even though the tab is going to eat up most of his raise. And when the dinner is wrecked by Zuko's party, you get the sense that a large part of his anger is about losing face, not being able to show his buddies a good time, being humiliated. (RayK might just say, "Screw it, let's go down to the diner.") The pool game on his birthday, in Victoria's Secret, is farcicallly impractical, but it's the gesture that matters, the image, the amplitude and gentleman's-club luxury implied by that grossly-oversized pool table, and the graciousness of having his colleagues over for a game (never mind that none of them are really enjoying it).
When he's made to look foolish in others' eyes, he suffers. His interactions with Fraser are constantly punctuated by his mortification about Fraser's freakish behavior, and the fact that he's looking like a freak by association. When he comes back in CotW, the jabs he chooses to take at RayK are all about how his image has been damaged.
Vecchio is, as I mentioned in an earlier entry, a guy who is enmeshed in a rich, complex network of culture and tradition. A lot of his pride, self-esteem, and sense of self grow out of acting and presenting himself in ways that are seen by others in that network as being appropriate and estimable. He wants respect, and to be respected, a guy needs to be well-dressed, drive a sharp car, be suave with women, exhibit largesse, have a snappy comeback, take care of his family. There are moments throughout the Vecchio episodes that show us the private times when he actually falls short of "honorable" behavior (e.g., the deal with Frannie and the lottery tickets). As long as these things remains private (or known only by Fraser, whom Vecchio realizes operates by an entirely different code), they don't bother him. He sure doesn't lie awake at night guilting about them.
Ray Kowalski as guilt-based: Unlike Vecchio, RayK is something of an atomized individual; estranged from his family for many years, divorced from his wife, separated from his home-base precinct, with few visible old buddies or connections to the past, living alone. He comes across as someone who's largely set the terms for his own life, chooses his own conduct and appearance, and if other people don't like it, fuck 'em.
He is also, clearly, someone who feels a lot of pain about his failures to live up to standards; but to a large extent those standards are internal. The best example of this, perhaps, is Ladies' Man. All his associates are clearly pleased with how he did on the case--it was a clean arrest, he did the right thing, stop worrying about it, etc. etc. But he's in agony, because he knows something's wrong, he screwed up, and he goes against all the conventional cop code and endures the contempt of his colleagues to try to set it right. Even when he's saved Beth Botrelle from execution, he's still riddled with guilt for his failings; others might congratulate him, but he's suffering his own judgment. He still broods about the fact that he wasn't able to do the right thing, by his own standards, when his dog was hit by a car. And during his recounting in Eclipse of that formative encounter with Marcus Ellery in the bank, what's continued to eat at him over the years isn't the shame of having wet his pants in public--he seems almost shame-free about describing that to a group of strangers--but the guilt that he didn't do the right thing, didn't somehow take the guy down. (Of course, he would also have liked to look like a hero to Stella. None of this is 100%. *g*) [ETA:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
shayheyred makes an excellent point in her comment below--that what's really eating him is that Stella bought his false hero facade, that their relationship was founded on that lie. Long-term guilt over being able to pull off a short-term shame-avoiding front--that's an extra-special full-gainer-with-half-twist turn on the situation. Thanks so much for pointing this out, Shay!]
It would make sense that a guy who works undercover would have to be someone who doesn't internalize whatever particular set of group norms he might be acting-as-if within at the moment. And it's noteworthy, I think, that the internal changes we see in him through the series, the way he finds a new sense of purpose and mission in his work as a cop, isn't really so much a matter of his trying to live up to Fraser's standards; rather, Fraser seems to inspire Ray to live up to his own standards, to take himself and his ideals seriously again.
As noted above, none of this is 100%. Vecchio clearly has his inner areas of guilt; it's pretty clear that a big part of what drives him to face down Zuko in the gym, in The Deal, is his guilt over not having tried to protect his schoolmate all those years ago. And Kowalski's relationship with his father clearly has a big element of shame in it; he doesn't feel guilty about having chosen to leave college and be a cop, but he's shamed for having let his dad down, not met his dad's standards.
But at heart, the two are operating from fundamentally different stances, and I think it to some extent shapes their relationships with Fraser. Fraser, of course, is himself almost wholly without shame--he really doesn't care what people think about him--but he is deeply and intimately familiar with guilt. That's one reason why it's much easier for me to see F/K than F/V; Fraser and RayK have the guilt-base in common, they're familiar with the same demons.
As a side note: Fandom supplies us with another nicely-drawn contrast of shame- and guilt-based characters, and that's Mulder and Scully. The specimen scene for me is in the episode where Max Fenig is wafted off the airplane, which then crashes, and we go to the hanger where the rubble is being laid out, and the investigating team are assembled, all bleak and hard-faced and just-the-facts. And Mulder comes sashaying in and proceeds to unleash one of his classic cockamamie the-aliens-did-it rambles, and the lead FAA guy is glaring at him contemptuously, despising him, and you can see Scully standing at his shoulder, just curdled with shame, but Mulder is utterly shameless, he's very calm, utterly willing to look the fool if it'll get him a step closer to the truth. [ETA: Just like Fraser, askormantic points out in her comment.] (Thanks to eliade, btw, for a long-ago comment that made me go back and look at this scene again.)
If Mulder is without shame what he does have in spades is guilt, of course. For not saving his sister, for not getting the evidence, not cracking the conspiracy. Which--it's not like any sane person would expect him to, but he's not sane in this regard, he expects it of himself, and he punishes himself relentlessly for falling short.
And Scully ... one continuing story thread in X-Files is Scully learning to get past her shame; her FBI-agent shame about always having to come back with shoddy or nonexistent evidence, her scientist shame about believing disreputable and unprovable kookiness, her personal shame about choosing a path that no one else except Mulder approves of for her. It's a hero's journey of a sort, just as Vecchio gains a kind of heroism in being willing to live through his own shame at the embarrassments Fraser regularly gets him into, and to stick with the guy despite it all.
First, a disclaimer: there's a body of literature in cultural anthropology and social psych about shame-based vs. guilt-based cultures. Because I am a crappy scholar, I did not consult that literature, of which I have only the dimmest memory, and my formulations of the shame/guilt concepts may be totally out of line with the received wisdom. So I'm just rollin' my own here, folks, and you're free to tell me how wrong I am. *g*
Having said which, I posit that shame and guilt, though similar in many ways, have a crucial difference. Shame I see as being externally focused; it grows out of the sense that one has screwed up or fallen short in the eyes of others. One has visibly failed to live up to some group norm, whether of honor or coolness or correctness or whatever. Guilt, on the other hand, is internally derived; one has failed to live up to one's own personal standards. One can feel guilty about actions, or thoughts, which no one else will ever know about (except perhaps one's God).
So, let's look at the two Rays.
Ray Vecchio as shame-based: Vecchio is a guy who cares deeply about how he's perceived by others; he's all about la bella figura. This goes beyond the obvious (his clothes, his car, his style) and shapes his behavior with others. When he gets his raise, in Juliet is Bleeding, he takes his pals out for dinner to a fancy place, because that's what a guy does, even though the tab is going to eat up most of his raise. And when the dinner is wrecked by Zuko's party, you get the sense that a large part of his anger is about losing face, not being able to show his buddies a good time, being humiliated. (RayK might just say, "Screw it, let's go down to the diner.") The pool game on his birthday, in Victoria's Secret, is farcicallly impractical, but it's the gesture that matters, the image, the amplitude and gentleman's-club luxury implied by that grossly-oversized pool table, and the graciousness of having his colleagues over for a game (never mind that none of them are really enjoying it).
When he's made to look foolish in others' eyes, he suffers. His interactions with Fraser are constantly punctuated by his mortification about Fraser's freakish behavior, and the fact that he's looking like a freak by association. When he comes back in CotW, the jabs he chooses to take at RayK are all about how his image has been damaged.
Vecchio is, as I mentioned in an earlier entry, a guy who is enmeshed in a rich, complex network of culture and tradition. A lot of his pride, self-esteem, and sense of self grow out of acting and presenting himself in ways that are seen by others in that network as being appropriate and estimable. He wants respect, and to be respected, a guy needs to be well-dressed, drive a sharp car, be suave with women, exhibit largesse, have a snappy comeback, take care of his family. There are moments throughout the Vecchio episodes that show us the private times when he actually falls short of "honorable" behavior (e.g., the deal with Frannie and the lottery tickets). As long as these things remains private (or known only by Fraser, whom Vecchio realizes operates by an entirely different code), they don't bother him. He sure doesn't lie awake at night guilting about them.
Ray Kowalski as guilt-based: Unlike Vecchio, RayK is something of an atomized individual; estranged from his family for many years, divorced from his wife, separated from his home-base precinct, with few visible old buddies or connections to the past, living alone. He comes across as someone who's largely set the terms for his own life, chooses his own conduct and appearance, and if other people don't like it, fuck 'em.
He is also, clearly, someone who feels a lot of pain about his failures to live up to standards; but to a large extent those standards are internal. The best example of this, perhaps, is Ladies' Man. All his associates are clearly pleased with how he did on the case--it was a clean arrest, he did the right thing, stop worrying about it, etc. etc. But he's in agony, because he knows something's wrong, he screwed up, and he goes against all the conventional cop code and endures the contempt of his colleagues to try to set it right. Even when he's saved Beth Botrelle from execution, he's still riddled with guilt for his failings; others might congratulate him, but he's suffering his own judgment. He still broods about the fact that he wasn't able to do the right thing, by his own standards, when his dog was hit by a car. And during his recounting in Eclipse of that formative encounter with Marcus Ellery in the bank, what's continued to eat at him over the years isn't the shame of having wet his pants in public--he seems almost shame-free about describing that to a group of strangers--but the guilt that he didn't do the right thing, didn't somehow take the guy down. (Of course, he would also have liked to look like a hero to Stella. None of this is 100%. *g*) [ETA:
shayheyred makes an excellent point in her comment below--that what's really eating him is that Stella bought his false hero facade, that their relationship was founded on that lie. Long-term guilt over being able to pull off a short-term shame-avoiding front--that's an extra-special full-gainer-with-half-twist turn on the situation. Thanks so much for pointing this out, Shay!]It would make sense that a guy who works undercover would have to be someone who doesn't internalize whatever particular set of group norms he might be acting-as-if within at the moment. And it's noteworthy, I think, that the internal changes we see in him through the series, the way he finds a new sense of purpose and mission in his work as a cop, isn't really so much a matter of his trying to live up to Fraser's standards; rather, Fraser seems to inspire Ray to live up to his own standards, to take himself and his ideals seriously again.
As noted above, none of this is 100%. Vecchio clearly has his inner areas of guilt; it's pretty clear that a big part of what drives him to face down Zuko in the gym, in The Deal, is his guilt over not having tried to protect his schoolmate all those years ago. And Kowalski's relationship with his father clearly has a big element of shame in it; he doesn't feel guilty about having chosen to leave college and be a cop, but he's shamed for having let his dad down, not met his dad's standards.
But at heart, the two are operating from fundamentally different stances, and I think it to some extent shapes their relationships with Fraser. Fraser, of course, is himself almost wholly without shame--he really doesn't care what people think about him--but he is deeply and intimately familiar with guilt. That's one reason why it's much easier for me to see F/K than F/V; Fraser and RayK have the guilt-base in common, they're familiar with the same demons.
As a side note: Fandom supplies us with another nicely-drawn contrast of shame- and guilt-based characters, and that's Mulder and Scully. The specimen scene for me is in the episode where Max Fenig is wafted off the airplane, which then crashes, and we go to the hanger where the rubble is being laid out, and the investigating team are assembled, all bleak and hard-faced and just-the-facts. And Mulder comes sashaying in and proceeds to unleash one of his classic cockamamie the-aliens-did-it rambles, and the lead FAA guy is glaring at him contemptuously, despising him, and you can see Scully standing at his shoulder, just curdled with shame, but Mulder is utterly shameless, he's very calm, utterly willing to look the fool if it'll get him a step closer to the truth. [ETA: Just like Fraser, as
kormantic points out in her comment.] (Thanks to eliade, btw, for a long-ago comment that made me go back and look at this scene again.)If Mulder is without shame what he does have in spades is guilt, of course. For not saving his sister, for not getting the evidence, not cracking the conspiracy. Which--it's not like any sane person would expect him to, but he's not sane in this regard, he expects it of himself, and he punishes himself relentlessly for falling short.
And Scully ... one continuing story thread in X-Files is Scully learning to get past her shame; her FBI-agent shame about always having to come back with shoddy or nonexistent evidence, her scientist shame about believing disreputable and unprovable kookiness, her personal shame about choosing a path that no one else except Mulder approves of for her. It's a hero's journey of a sort, just as Vecchio gains a kind of heroism in being willing to live through his own shame at the embarrassments Fraser regularly gets him into, and to stick with the guy despite it all.
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Re: So. Friggin'. Brilliant.
Date: 2003-10-26 07:54 am (UTC)Oh, okay. We can *both* be Kat's minions. We are Katty Minionites.
Amen.
And yeah, much agreement on the brilliance.
Re: So. Friggin'. Brilliant.
Date: 2003-10-26 08:03 am (UTC)Kat, you are such a brain on legs. And it's such a suave brain, too.
Re: So. Friggin'. Brilliant.
Date: 2003-10-26 11:12 am (UTC)Re: So. Friggin'. Brilliant.
Date: 2003-10-26 11:24 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2003-10-26 02:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2003-10-26 04:18 pm (UTC)I think I'm in the wrong thread, but here's a RayV thing--his smile. The slow easy delighted one that breaks across his face when something utterly cool befalls him.