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‘PERSON OF INTEREST’ AND FEMALE MORAL AGENCY

9/23/14

Jonathan Nolan’s “Person of Interest” returns to CBS tonight for its fourth season, and with it comes one of its biggest unresolved problems from season three. It’s still got its fascinating and highly relevant premise: A small group of vigilantes try to use an all-seeing surveillance machine to save lives. It’s still got all the dilemmas that result from that premise, and it’s still got the ethics and subtle sense of hope that point to the possibility of finding a way through those dilemmas. It’s still got most of its excellent core cast—Michael Emerson, Jim Caviezel, Kevin Chapman, and Sarah Shahi—though Taraji P. Henson’s conflicted police detective was regrettably killed off. In short, it’s still got a lot of what has made it one of the best (and most underrated) series on network TV.

But it’s also got Root.

Root, played by Amy Acker, is a deeply unstable hacker, who chose her name based on her obsessive interest in computers—“Root” signifying “root path.” But lately, she reminds me more of the botanical meaning of the word: “Root” as in “root that digs in and spreads kudzu-like growth all over the place, choking the life out of everything in its way.”

In other words, we’ve got way too much Root, and it’s throwing the show off balance.

It didn’t have to be this way. Acker (as I’ve had occasion to observe before) is a talented actress, and the character had a lot of potential. She was introduced in season 1 as a force of chaos, reminiscent of Heath Ledger’s deranged Joker from another Nolan family project. She was clever, devious, and utterly ruthless. With her brilliance, she was set up to work as an effective foil to Emerson’s Harold Finch, who is also brilliant but has the kindness and selflessness that she lacks. And as a lover of machines and a hater of humanity, Root’s presence had very interesting implications for a show about a team dedicated to using machines to serve humanity.

But somehow, the writers who are so good at complexity in other areas of the show have allowed this character, potentially the most complex of all, to succumb to that all-too-common malady: Hot Chicks with Guns syndrome.

For the title of this disease, I’m indebted to one of the show’s own promos. (Maybe it’s unfair to put so much weight on a clearly tongue-in-cheek promo—but it’s hard not to when it unwittingly nails the problem that’s been bothering me.) But of course the disease itself has been around a lot longer. Sophia McDougall successfully diagnosed it last year in an article about why she had grown to hate the “Strong Female Character.” Writing about how “strong” in this context is now shorthand for “physically strong,” McDougall recalls:

I remember watching Shrek with my mother.
“The Princess knew kung-fu! That was nice,” I said. And yet I had a vague sense of unease, a sense that I was saying it because it was what I was supposed to say.
She rolled her eyes. “All the princesses know kung-fu now.”

There’s nothing wrong with physical strength and competence—except when it’s the only kind of strength allowed.

In the case of “Person of Interest,” it’s telling that Root has shifted from a largely intellectual character who sometimes resorted to physical violence, to a physically violent character who sometimes resorts to intellect. An actress who could have handled pretty much anything thrown at her is now playing a character whose chief traits are a permanent smirk, a steady stream of cheap jabs and suggestive one-liners, and—obviously—the ability to look hot while holding a gun.

Even worse, this supposedly strong female character has literally given up control over her own mind and her own purposes. In season 3, Root’s great admiration for the Machine at the center of the show, created by Finch, led her to obey its every command, and eventually to have a device implanted in her ear that made her its mouthpiece. Because Finch had created the Machine as a benevolent entity, this put Root in an odd situation: a villain under the command of a force for good. By the season finale, Root was lamenting the fact that she and the Machine had been unable to save the world from a sinister government conspiracy.

But here’s the problem: We never saw her actually take on that mission as her own. With the exception of one perfunctory episode where she felt a few twinges of remorse over a past killing, Root has never truly shown a change of heart about her fellow human beings. Obviously, saving the world is a good thing, and if we had seen Finch’s benevolence, working through his Machine, influencing Root to start becoming a better person, then her actions would make sense and be genuinely praiseworthy. But as it is, she’s simply slavishly obeying a Machine that she literally sees as a deity (“You invented God,” she tells Finch) just because it’s a superhuman, almost AI-level piece of technology.

This is not the stuff of which either great villains or great heroes are made, or even great anti-heroes. This is just an ill-defined character stuck in an unconvincing gray area.

So we have one female character whose will is entirely subordinate to an outside force at odds with her own previously expressed purposes. And we have another one—Sarah Shahi’s Shaw, a former CIA operative—who conveniently has that other common TV disease, Emotional Constipation. (See also Dr. House, “Bones” Brennan, et al.) In other words, we have two Hot Chicks with Guns who currently show few signs of an inner life.

This is a huge step backward from how the show used to portray women. It was made pretty clear that Henson’s character, Detective Carter, had to go because the show was transitioning from a police-procedural-style show into something more sci-fi-oriented, leaving most of her storyline behind. Fair enough. But with her we lost the only well-rounded regular female character on the show, and that loss has left a gaping hole. Two Hot Chicks with Guns cannot substitute for one fleshed-out woman with a sharp mind, a warm heart, often-clashing obligations, and a strong sense of duty and loyalty. That math just doesn’t work.

“Person of Interest” is, I think, genuinely trying to make a case for the sanctity, dignity, and moral accountability of all human beings in a world full of technology and the ethical dilemmas that come with it. That’s a laudable and very important mission. But until it drops the Hot Chicks with Guns trope and starts giving us real, complex, morally accountable female characters again, I fear it’s a mission that can’t fully succeed.

Image copyright CBS.

Gina Dalfonzo is editor of BreakPoint.org and Dickensblog.