Notes & Queeries is a monthly column that focuses on the personal side of pop culture for lesbians and bisexual women.
Over the course of six seasons, the women of The L Word have certainly gone through their share of drama: baby kidnapping, mushroom tripping, salon burning, bride-at-the-altar leaving, nefarious-sex-video blackmailing.
I could go on.
But while I was watching the first half of this final season of Showtime’s lesbian drama, I kept returning to the fact that despite all these crises, the main characters are remarkably unchanged.
Bette, ever the alpha dyke, still struggles to stay faithful to Tina. Tina still battles to have her voice heard, whether it be by Bette or her boss.
Shane still entangles herself with women who become obsessed with her, and she still fears commitment.
Kit still can’t find her true love.
Alice is still quirky.
And Jenny is still crazy.
That’s not to say that they are exactly the same as they were in Season 1. When we first met them, they were only skeletons. Now, their neuroses have been fully fleshed out. Their personalities have solidified.
Take Bette, for instance. In Season 1, she had an affair with Candace, a sexy carpenter, while her seven-year relationship with Tina was on the rocks. When this story line first aired, it was the first time we saw Bette in this kind of situation, but as the seasons progressed, it became clear that Bette has always found it difficult to stay faithful to her partners.
In the first season, she cheated on Tina with Candace. In Season 5, when Bette was with Jodi, she cheated on Jodi with Tina. When Bette’s previous relationships are mentioned by other characters, it is Bette’s wandering eye that gets remembered – she even cheated on Alice, apparently, during their short-lived relationship.
During the first half of this sixth season, Bette’s flirtation temptation has been front-and-center as she reconnects with a beautiful former roommate; nearly every episode so far has involved Bette and Tina rehashing Bette’s tendency to stray.
Bette has almost become an archetype: She is the magnetic, powerful woman who struggles with temptation, her signature weakness.
A critical viewer of The L Word might well question whether Bette’s repeated trips down the same path constitute quality writing, but Jennifer Beals, as an actor, manages to bring newness to these similar experiences.
She somehow makes each iteration feel like yet another layer being added to the character of Bette.
I think that Bette’s cyclical story lines are partly a reflection of the genre that The L Word fits into: soap opera. You may have noticed that even if you haven’t watched Days of Our Lives for years, you can turn it on and almost instantly know what’s going on. The soap serial relies on lengthy continuing story arcs focused on character development, often over the course of years. Any given character might make the same mistake multiple times before she learns from it – if she learns from it.
I also believe that Bette’s repeated struggles are perfectly understandable. We’ve all heard that doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is the definition of insanity, but it’s also very human.
Even if you are aware of the error of your ways – and Bette is clearly aware – change is hard. It’s hard enough when it happens to you. Forcing yourself to change a behavior that has become a habit can feel like attempting to move a mountain with only the power of your own small shoulder.
Usually, it’s just easier to take a path you’ve been down before.
Tina, in Season 6, seems to know this. “I don’t want to deprive you of something that’s so fundamental to who you are,” she tells Bette in Episode 6.02.
She believes that Bette is defined by certain unmutable characteristics, just as most of us believe that our personalities are defined by traits that have solidified by the time we reach adulthood.
That’s why we tell each other, “People don’t change,” or “Don’t try to change her – she won’t change.”
But as much as we might want to believe it’s true, we don’t remain solid and unchanging all our lives. We’ve known this since we were children, but as adults, many of us try to forget it.
Because if you can’t depend on yourself to act in certain ways, who can you depend on?
It’s only years later, when you’re getting ready for bed at 9 p.m. because you have to go to work at 6 a.m., that you realize you’re no longer that overeager teenager sneaking out at midnight. You’ve changed, and it’s crept up on you, unnoticed.
Do you remember your senior year in high school? At the end of the year, when the yearbooks were distributed, we passed them around in a ritual of remembrance; they would anchor us back in those locker-lined hallways every time we opened them. In my yearbook, several people wrote “Don’t change!” or “Stay the same!”
Those words were defensive barriers against all the change that was about to come flooding through our lives.
I think we all knew somewhere inside ourselves that we could not help but be changed by what was to come. But those words allowed us to cling to the idea that we could weather the storm intact, that we would remain the same people we always were.
It’s a romantic idea: the solid, unchanging rock in the storm, secure and stable. But wind and water will still wear away that stone grain by grain, and a new landscape will eventually emerge.
When I graduated from high school, I could hardly wait for the change to come. I hated high school and thought that anything would be better – especially college in far-off Massachusetts, where nobody would have any preconceptions about me.
But when I first arrived, alone with my two suitcases, the change was so extreme that I found myself longing unexpectedly for the sameness of high school. It didn’t help that my two suitcases got lost on the way from the airport to the college, and for the first two weeks, I had none of my clothes with me. By the time my suitcases turned up (misdelivered to the dorm next door), I had spent two weeks fumbling my way into a new life with only what I’d brought in my carry-on.
For someone who was already insecure about who she was, having so few physical reminders of home was very hard.
I remember calling my parents while sitting in my dorm’s living room, looking out the long, tall windows at the rainy night – yes, it was actually raining – and crying. I had never been away from home for so long, and because I had wanted so desperately to leave, I had a hard time recognizing what I was feeling as ordinary homesickness.
But college was expensive, and of course I stayed, and of course things got better – and my life kept changing. I came out, for one thing, and though that experience was not exactly fun, ultimately it made all the difference.
The truth is, so much good can come of change. In reality, the exhortation to “stay the same” is a ridiculous one.
Why would we wish for someone to never develop, never move on from a time in their life that was meant to launch them into something new?
I’ve been thinking, too, that the end of this season of The L Word – its last – marks quite a big change. However you feel about the show, it will always have its place in the lesbian community, and this change on its own might seem daunting to many fans of the show.
I’m sure I’m not the only one to feel that it’s a little bit comforting to see Bette and Tina and Shane and Alice doing the same things they’ve always done. Whatever has happened in our lives over the past six years, these characters are still there. They have become, for many, a constant to rely on.
The good thing is, even after The L Word ends, it will still be there for us. It’s like that yearbook.
Every time you watch an episode, it brings you back to where you were the first time you saw it – in your living room, maybe, or surrounded by friends.
Simultaneously, The L Word has created a major change for us.
We’ll never be able to go back to a time when lesbian characters have never been the leads on a prime-time show. Even though it is still a struggle to get lesbian characters and story lines on TV, I can only see The L Word as positive progress for our visibility.
And when there are no more new L Word episodes, there will be even more room for other visions of who we are and what we look like.
It is a wide-open landscape out there, full of possibility.
As we watch Bette continue her struggle over the last few episodes, I am hoping that she pulls through this time. I hope that, like many humans who have fought for years against their own bad habits, she finally turns down the path less taken and embraces the change in herself.
For more on Malinda Lo, visit her website.
