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Culture
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by Anne Moore
"Why is it that everyone who
rents Alias is gay?" my friend Dave asked me the other day
as yet another queer couple left the video store where I work holding
their next fix of the addictive show.
I'd been watching Alias for
a while, and had turned my roommates and friends on to it as well, but
hadn't considered the possibility of any queer following, only thinking
that most of my friends loved it – not because they were queer,
but because of the intensity of its cliffhanger structure and the undeniable
beauty of its heroine, Sydney Bristow (Jennifer Garner). But Dave was
right; at least among the clientele of (the now "Off the") Waterfront
Video, the Alias devotees were a decidedly queer bunch. Even
if I take into consideration my decided tendency to turn a sample of three
people I know into a "trend," a brief Internet search confirmed
my suspicion – there was a brief article on the queer following
of Alias in gay.com
as early as the first season.
Perhaps part of the reason for my delay
in noticing this pattern is that there's surprisingly little overt queer
content in Alias. Unlike other perennial queer favorites like
Buffy, The L Word or Queer as Folk, there are
no explicitly queer characters on Alias, or even overtly queer
themes. Why, then, does the show resonate so deeply with queer viewers?
I think this is for a series of reasons,
not the least of which is the way the show foregrounds identity as performance,
combined with its focus on familial trauma and the tension between the
heroine's connections to her family of origin and her family of choice.
I think it's safe to say that the fear (or reality) of familial rejection
is a source of the central trauma of many queer people's lives. As a result,
queer people often build up a family of choice, made up of people with
whom it's easier to envision an alternate value system. The appeal of
Alias lies in the combination of this familial instability with
an acknowledgement of the constructed nature of identity, experienced
by queer viewers not only in the experience of drag, but in the act of
closeting oneself, undergone by almost all queer people at some point.
Okay but before I even start with
any of that, here's a brief synopsis of the convoluted plot. Sorry if
it sounds over-the-top, but that's part of the show's appeal. Sydney begins
the show working for SD-6, which she thinks is a black-ops branch of the
CIA. After her fiancé is murdered by SD-6, she discovers that they
are in fact a terrorist organization and begins working as a double agent
for the real CIA. She finds out that her father, from whom she has been
estranged for most of her life, is a double agent as well. Then (still
with me?) she discovers that her mother, whom she long believed was dead,
is in fact alive and working with a rival terrorist faction. It goes on
and on like this – every twist is more extreme than the last.
As part of this convolution, few of
the relationships in the series remain steady, especially those between
Sydney and her family. In the first two seasons, Sydney's family of origin
is represented by SD-6: her father works there, her boss, Arvin Sloane,
is clearly the patriarch of that space, and there's even some confusion
about whether or not he might in fact be her biological father. Sydney
discovers halfway through the first season that she was part of a CIA
operation that trained children to be agents from childhood. Without her
knowledge or consent, Sydney was trained from childhood toward a specific
way of being in the world – to participate in a specific system.
When we consider this in comparison to the way kids are trained from childhood,
without their knowledge or consent, to participate in heterosexuality,
the parallels between Sydney's relationship with SD-6 and that of a queer
kid with her family of origin become striking.
Perhaps because of this instability
in her family of origin, and her inability to rely on her parents for
unconditional support, Sydney's family of choice is clearly the source
of her emotional sustenance. This is why it’s so heartbreaking when
her connections with her family of choice are constantly jeopardized by
the machinations of her family of origin. Her fiancé is murdered
under Sloane's direction, with the approval of her father, after she tells
him she's a spy, and her best friend is murdered by an agent from a rival
faction (possibly connected with her mother) and replaced by a double.
Not to say that I think that the straight
families of queer kids are necessarily destructive forces – but
I think the power of Alias lies in the way it shows the connection
between the family of origin and the destructive system of heterosexuality.
Sydney's connection with her parents is deep and lends the show much of
its emotional power, and I don't think that connection is wholly negative.
The problem – and thus the thematic connection to the problem of
so many queer people – lies in the way that this family compels
Sydney to participate in a system that is ultimately destructive to her.
It wouldn't seem explicitly queer in that – after all, unwanted
parental pressure is the subject of loads of literature that doesn't have
a queer subtext. It's Sydney's weekly drag act as she negotiates the minefield
of familial relationships that resonates most deeply with this queer viewer,
at least. Hopefully that's indicative of some kind of trend.
Anne Moore lives in Winooski and her favorite secret identity is a
New York stockbroker named Mike.