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Close Up: Suit-burning
by E. Kline
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Sean's suit-burning gesture in Series 1, episode 10 of Bad Girls
is a powerful image with rich and widely varying possible meanings.
The scene is largely played without dialogue between Sean and
Helen—in fact, Sean doesn't speak at all after he's reentered the
grounds of Larkhall. He slips in silently: Helen is informed by a
prison officer that he's in the garden, and runs out to find him.
She asks what he's doing, and Sean doesn't answer (or need to). He's
burning his wedding suit, complete with boutonnière. The marriage is
off. The psychological meaning of the gesture itself is clear: Helen has
just told him she can't marry him because she doesn't love him; Sean
is angry and hurt—and his response is to humiliate Helen in public,
at her job. Some viewers see this as a revelation or exposure of
Sean's weakness of character, something that's been in him all
along. It's also possible to view such an act as something that's
potentially in all of us: relationships end; in our rage and sadness
we behave badly (and usually regret it for a long time afterwards).
Whatever other emotions make up Sean's reaction, he clearly feels
humiliated—and he's going to humiliate Helen right back. He finishes
buying the suit even after Helen has left the shop and declared the
marriage off: Sean uses the suit as a prop to express his feelings
to Helen, in technicolor. The gesture is effective dramatically
because it requires no further translation—as a gesture.
While Sean is probably not thinking he'd like to make a grand
symbolic gesture, the strength of the burning suit purely as an
image (and a spectacle) is impossible to ignore. It's the biggest
and most obvious symbolic image the show has offered to this point.
Its positioning at the end of the first season further emphasizes
the import of this moment.
As an image, it's also a bit odd, or at least unusual, and this
oddness—combined with the image's impact as the culmination of ten
hours of storytelling—invites exploration. The image is both
'unspoken' and visually quite striking: these two elements
contribute to its somewhat indeterminate status. No single
conclusion can (or need) be drawn: part of the power of the image of
the burning suit is that it gathers its strength from a number of
possible cultural or visual 'echoes'.
One interpretation of the suit-burning is that it represents an
act of self-immolation. Self-immolation is usually performed for
reasons of "political protest, devotion, renouncement etc."
In a way, all three of those apply here, to Sean's
faux-immolation. He's showing both his devotion to Helen (the
wedding suit) and his denouncement of her (the fact that he's
burning the suit, throwing the house keys)—and he's protesting her
over-involvement with Larkhall by staging this whole scene in the
yard for the entire wing to see.
The suit-burning also evokes a historic echo: that of the straw
man. A straw man is a fallacy, a false argument where an opponent is
set up with an untrue claim or argument, in order to knock them
down. Historically, different cultures do literally burn men of
straw in association with various rituals; Guy Fawkes night
might be the association nearest home for UK
viewers. (Druids set up wicker men and lit them up for sacrifices;
also, Guy Fawkes night is close on the calendar to Samhain.) One
step further down the rung of associations would be to female straw
figures at country fairs: people threw things at them and set them
ablaze.
A straw man is without substance, all façade. Sean is making what
is ultimately an empty gesture about an empty gesture: he is burning
his unused wedding suit (which he no longer has need of), over his
anger at the loss of a wedding (a formal gesture) which was never
going to happen, to cement a relationship that was going nowhere.
What we're looking at on the screen isn't literally a straw man,
of course, but a suit of clothes: an empty suit, which stands in on
many levels for Sean himself. However, the idea and imagery of the
'suit' provides a visual and thematic link to Helen as well. She
wears suits throughout the first series of Bad Girls; Sean never
does, to the point that he jokes about this fact with Helen when
making plans to shop for the suit. Helen is the professional here,
the one with the 'real' job, the serious job (Sean's landscaping
work holds no potentially life-affecting responsibilities for
himself or his clients), and in this scene Helen is wearing a suit
remarkably like the one Sean is burning.
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Visually, there's another parallel beyond that of the burning
suit and the suit Helen has on: Sean's suit has a boutonnière (a
'buttonhole' in the UK), marking it as a wedding suit; Helen is
wearing a white I.D. tag in the same position on her jacket.
Sean wanted to
be married to Helen, but the echoing of these two images underlines
the idea that Helen is married to her job—which has been a point of
contention between Helen and Sean since the start. Sean never seems
to grasp the importance of Helen's work to her, and though he makes
supportive noises often enough, they're more placatory than helpful.
In this last scene between them, Sean's actions suggest he might
well believe Helen has sacrificed their relationship, their
marriage, a future, happy home life with children and so forth, in
favor of her job.
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This is reinforced by the fact that Sean is not communicating
directly and personally with Helen, but instead has literally staged
this scene almost as if it were a play, one intended for a very
specific audience: Larkhall and the women of G-wing. The
suit-burning is set up in the garden facing the Wing where the
maximum number of prisoners (and screws) are likely to see it: it's
meant to be very public. In addition to humiliating Helen, it outs
her private life and makes it fodder for the prison rumor-mill. Some
viewers have suggested Sean has Nikki in mind as potential viewer
for this scene, but there's no clear indication of this. The shots
featuring Sean looking up at the Wing suggest he's hoping/making
sure he has his audience; the reaction shots from various characters
are about their characters and how each responds to this drama: thus
Fenner's reaction is about Helen, and typically malicious ("Oh dear,
oh dear"); Julie Johnston is angered by Sean's action and indignant
on Helen's behalf ("Oh, very classy!"); and Nikki is simply
worried/concerned for Helen's welfare. (Nikki then runs to another
portion of the Wing to call out to Helen, perhaps to offer some sort
of wordless support, but there's little else she can do at the
moment.)
The repercussions of the suit-burning further demonstrate how
Sean is burning Helen, not himself. Just as Sean's job keeps him
insulated from certain responsibilities, his staging of this act
keeps him from its long-term consequences: he sets the suit alight
and walks away. It is Helen who will be most adversely affected both
emotionally and professionally by Sean's retribution. Through this
gesture, Helen's personal life has been fully
exposed— overexposed—and is no longer her own: it becomes everyone's
business. Cons and screws alike watch the scene play out with a full
range of responses—some of which extend into the next season. When Helen
returns after a leave of absence, she receives an official caution
from Stubberfield for no very good reason other than his
bureaucratic small-mindedness—but clearly this incident, which Helen
brings up during their conversation in order to put it to rest, is
still in play. (As it is for Nikki as well, who raises the subject
during her first chance for a private talk with Helen.)
Sean's other gesture—throwing the house keys at Helen—is more
personal (and far more contemptuous) than the suit-burning. He
doesn't throw them to her, to catch—he throws them at her (they land
at her feet). The gesture tells us he knows there's no coming back
from this, and he doesn't care. They're the keys Helen probably
duplicated for him when he moved in with her, so this part of Sean's
actions speaks more to what ails them personally: they are a symbol
of what's gone wrong with the couple on the domestic front. Helen
has allowed him into her life and her home, but only so far, only on
the surface. Emotionally, Sean's been locked out, and his angry
return of the keys to Helen is thus bitterly appropriate. They never
worked in the first place; they're worthless to him.
In contrast to the informality and intimacy of the key-throwing,
the burning of the suit (instead of its 'proper' use in a wedding)
is still a formal, dramatic gesture—but it's final, the last gesture
Sean can make. Ironically, by staging this little drama within the
larger drama of the show, Sean has taken himself off the stage
permanently: he's the director, and only secondarily, a bit-player
who's been made redundant, both by Helen's refusal of him and the
pettiness of his own retaliation.
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Sean’s lack of involvement in his own actions and their aftermath
is also emphasized by the camera. The camera doesn't catch Sean in
the flames: he takes a wide angle off to the right to pick up his
jacket, and walks around and past them on his way out of the garden
and off the screen of Bad Girls forever. It is Helen we see framed
through the flames, caught in them as we look past the suit towards
her as she gazes back at the Wing: Helen burning. |
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This essay arose from an online discussion on the
Nikki and Helen board. Thanks to the following people who
participated: abuzg, invisicoll, Lisa289, microsofty, richard.
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