Yet another cop drama with non-monogamous people involved in a murder? Can Hollywood actually show ethical non-monogamy or is it just another excuse to punish "deviants"? Joreth reviews the Netflix show, iZombie, to find out.
That was a surprisingly hopeful episode. Well, I mean, the whole series has a hopeful tone, given the subject matter and the impossible situations it spirals into. But I was still surprised by this one.
iZombie is a quirky little show. The premise is that a young, over-achieving doctor gets invited to a trendy boat party by a rival who is impressed with her doctoring skills. At the party, a new designer drug is introduced, everyone but the doctor gets high, and then, inexplicably, a zombie outbreak happens. The doctor, whose name is Liv, gets scratched as she runs to jump off the boat and wakes up in a body bag on the beach with all the other victims of the party.
This is just the opening credits. Now the walking dead, Liv goes into a major depression (I mean, who wouldn't?) upon learning that she's dead and craving brains. She breaks up with her fiance, quits her promising career as a heart surgeon, and goes to work in the cororner's office, where she can steal the brains from the dead patients when she closes them back up after their autopsies, before sending the bodies out to their final arrangements.
Now, here's the kicker ... after she eats someone's brain, she gets flashes of memories from that person's life and starts to take on some of their personality characteristics. She accidentally has a flash of a murder victim's life while the investigating officer just happens to be in the morgue inquiring about the body. Her boss (who has figured it all out within 10 minutes of the first episode) covers for her blurting out this data that she couldn't possibly know by claiming that Liv is a pyschic. Because that's easier to swallow.
So now Liv eats the brains of murder victims that her boss looks the other way for, in exchange for studying her condition and trying to find a cure, and she runs around solving crimes as a psychic cororner sidekick to the rookie cop who believes her "visions".
I really like this show, but then I really like police procedural shows. I always have, and I continue to love them even now with all the shit going on about real cops. But that's not the point of this review. In this second episode, we meet a couple in an open marriage.
Javier is a brilliant young artist married to Lola, who appears to adore him. Javier is a stereotypical "male artist", meaning that he is all about passion - passion in his work, passion in life, and passion in bed. When Liv gets a flash of Javier having sex with someone who is not Lola, the crime fighting duo think they have a break in the case with his affair. As the cop says, "it's always the spouse". But when they go to Javier's loft to speak with his wife, they find the mistress with her arms around Lola, comforting her.
Lola introduces her as "my favorite of Javier's lovers". This is where we learn that they have an open marriage. I like this scene because Lola defends her relationship with Javier without sounding defensive, as in "methinks she doth protest too much".
[insert audio clip of Lola introducing Tasha as "my favorite of my husband's lovers"]
Now, here is where I would normally get really irritated at how non-monogamy is portrayed in pop media. In The Mentalist, the open marriage was a red herring, and I loved that about the episode. The cops spend time and resources chasing down dead end leads because sex is so often a motive for murder, but their particular open marriage had nothing at all to do with the murder. That's very rare, in my experience. Usually these shows indicate who is the "bad guy" by making them kinky or non-monogamous or a casual drug user, because only deviants do those sorts of things, and deviants must also be criminals, obvs.
So usually I get pissed off about that. But I didn't see the anger in this one, because I see the motive all the time in the poly community, so it's clearly a common experience. The anger at being replaced, not murder, of course. That's a very common fear, whether it's from couples who create a bunch of rules to protect their marriage or it's monogamous people who tell us without a shred of shame that they could "never do that" because "what if your partner finds someone they like better than you?" As usual, in order to discuss the parts that are relevant to polyamory, I have to spoil the big reveal.
SPOILERS:
We eventually find out that Javier knocked up his manager's teenage daughter. Which could have led to the manager being the murderer as either pissed off at Javier for "cheating" on Lola, whom the manager secretly loved and not-so-secretly thought Javier was a poor husband for, or the manager could have been pissed off at this older man getting his daughter pregnant.
But, as was dropped in the clip I just played for you, Javier and Lola never had children because Javier never wanted children. The detective neglected to ask Lola if *she* ever wanted kids. [insert clip of Lola saying that Javier was leaving her to start a family that he never had with her with an 18 year old girl].
I see this play out in a lot of ways in the poly community. The fear of being replaced is a very common fear. And, unfortunately, a fear that is realized all too often. Part of the point of being polyamorous is that we don't *have* to end otherwise working relationships in order to get into other relationships. That's a monogamous problem. But this couple in this show was not polyamorous, they were hierarchically non-monogamous. And, so it seems, are many other people who dip their toes in the poly world.
Couples try to "open up" their existing relationships without actually changing their existing relationships. They make all these rules designed to keep "the couple", not just intact, but at the top of the priority chain. No matter what, "the couple" always comes first, as if "the couple" is a person in its own right. You can have other lovers, but you can't *love* anyone as much or more than you love me. You can have sex, but you can't have babies with anyone else but me, even though babies are a risk of sex. You can care for other people, but your home and your family are me.
In this sort of arrangement, you simply cannot have a situation that Lola and Javier found themselves in. You can't have your side chick get pregnant. Nevermind that pregnancy is a possibility in hetero PIV sex, we won't make any contingency plans for it because we have decided that it just won't happen. So you can't get your side chick pregnant. Especially if you didn't want to get your main chick pregnant. Lola can't have another woman bear Javier's babies or have a marriage-like relationship with him, and Javier, apparently (since he wasn't around to actually say so), can only have one primary lover at a time.
I've seen lots and lots and lots of people out there hurt and angry that their spouse or primary partner wanted to elevate one of their secondary partners to something resembling the primary relationship, and lots of people surprised to find that they can really only feel what they interpret as "love" for one person at a time and so leave one partner for another even after years of non-monogamy.
So, while I really don't like the representation that non-monogamous relationships get from pop media as that of selfish, lust-driven narcissists out to bang everyone with a pulse, seducing questionably aged people, leaving a trail of wreckage behind them, or justifying murderous rage (because I guarantee most of the target audience of this show is probably singing the Cell Block Tango right now [he had it coming!]) ... while I hate that this is the picture frequently painted of us, it's also not entirely inaccurate, although hyperbolic.
So I'm feeling ... not quite charitable, because this sort of possessive, limiting, restrictive version of non-monogamy currently flooding and tainting my communities really irritates me ... but I'm feeling like this might have some teachable moments in it for the community. First, with the candid admission of non-monogamy in the beginning, and later with the horribly absurd yet inevitable conclusion of what trying to do non-monogamy with these sorts of premises leads to. Not the murder, but the feelings that these people had.
This episode is technically poly-ish because there is definitely consensual non-monogamy happening here, and while the conflict might have been about the non-monogamy and not some outside pressure, it was a conflict that I see actually happen in the poly community - that of couple privilege and trying to prioritize one relationship at everyone else's expense (which is, also technically, "pressure from outside" since it's what I call the Monogamous Mindset leaking into non-monogamy). Maybe (hopefully) it doesn't result in murder all that often in real life, but certainly a lot of people feel an awful lot of strong emotions when their primary relationships are not flexible enough to change with changing circumstances or evolving feelings. These are the kinds of emotions to expect when we legislate our relationships to prevent addressing our insecurities and fears rather than build dynamic, resilient relationships that can accommodate inevitable change and the processing of challenging emotions that come with change. The only constant in life is change, after all.
It could possibly also be the final thoughts of the episode that make me not hate it. Most cop dramas do not have final thoughts voice-overs with some sort of moral lesson at the end of the episode. A lot of them can leave an audience with a sense of hopelessness or despair at the depravity of humanity on screen. But not this one, with the unusual premise of this show.
Liv is undead. Can you imagine waking up one day to realize that you are dead? That you need to eat brains? That you are in danger of infecting those you love if you get too close to them - accidentally scratch them, make love to them? That you are alone in the world? That your life is literally over, yet you still have to keep going? I bet some older members of the queer community know exactly what that feels like. Or, maybe, those who know that feeling didn't make it to old age, but back in the '80s and '90s, a lot of them knew this feeling. Minus the brains-eating part.
Liv is going through an existential crisis as this show dawns. She withdraws further and further into herself, to protect those she loves and also because she is struggling with who she is and what her purpose in life is. But, as we have established even this early in the show, she takes on some of the personality of the person whose brain she has consumed. And this person LIVED. Javier was passion personified. He exuded life. He felt every moment. When he entered a room, he saw *everything*. And, for a short while, now so does Liv.
I've been suffering with depression for the last decade or so now. It wasn't a part of my brain chemistry until I experienced a series of major losses, one on top of the other, and I have been unable to fully claw my way out ever since. Some days, my depression is bearable. I can fool most people into believing that I'm normal. And every so often, enough little things go my way that the fog lifts for a while and I am my old self again, without any depression. And then I have one minor setback and suddenly everything is insurmountable again.
Liv on artist-brain is like me on one of my sunny days, or me before I ever knew depression. [insert clip of Liv grasping for the light]
I'm a little bit like Liv at the end here. I am not currently on "artist-brain", but today I remember that I used to be. Some days I can't remember that, but today, while I don't feel it, I remember that I once felt like that. So I need to remember that there might be a life waiting for me, even though I'm dead.
Which sounds awfully morbid, and has nothing to do with polyamory. But it felt hopeful to me. Maybe it'll feel hopeful to others.