Drowning Nor Waving

I found Due South on Youtube. All of it. Mostly having gone looking because of truepenny's ongoing writeups, which have been teasing my backbrain for months with half-remembered bits of TV watched on the floor of my parents' living room.

It is so different to watch this as an adult than as a twelve-year-old.

And as an adult with training in close reading, an actual sociopolitical context to put it in, and a knowledge of where in my city every shot was filmed.

(I take a bizarre joy in location-spotting. Evil Chicago gang bar? The El Mocambo on Spadina. Chinatown? Well, Chinatown; you can see the streetcar stop as the car pulls up to the curb. But the best one?

(The Canadian Consulate? Well. The US Consulate. On University Avenue. Bwahahaha, meta, I love you so.)

And the soundtrack has all the music I listened to in 1994.

Thing is, maybe I'm able to read the text this way because I know how the theme is sustained and developed, but it does what all good fiction does: gives you the thematic statement, or question, inside five minutes:

Even then the name Bob Fraser was spoken with awe among the ranks of the new recruits. It was said he could track a ghost across sheer ice and that a young officer would have to move fast and drive hard just to catch his shadow. Many have followed the spirit and traditions of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police but few have embodied it. The name of Sergeant Robert Fraser will always be among them.

Bob Fraser was a myth. A superhero. He's an embodiment: he is THE Mountie.

Benton will spend his life and his heart trying to catch up. His haunting is literalized because it's literal; what truepenny calls The Mountie, his expressionless, idealized facade, is...Bob Fraser. And the narrative tells us that right off the bat.

Benton Fraser will break himself on the wheel of trying to be his father.

Until he doesn't.

(I am so glad I am a grownup now. Who can read the text, and the text between text, in its fullness.)