An hour-long special created to air with the series finale of The L Word on Showtime pays tribute to the program's heritage and legacy. Here, producers and writers, cast members, minor celebrities, and an omniscient female narrator reflect on The L Word -- purportedly the culmination of years of media history, beginning with TV's first lesbian kiss on L.A. Law in 1991 -- as a force for social change. Although interviewees always return to this refrain about the program's positive influence on gay equality at the level of the personal (by speaking to isolated or underprivileged youth) and the political (by portraying national issues like the military's "don't ask don't tell" policy and the lack of rights for same-sex parents), the special also reviews some of The L Word's more controversial and problematic choices. Mixing contradictory narratives of inclusivity ("it's not about being gay, it's about being human," opines classical guitarist Sharon Isbin) and exclusivity (it's "a place of collective belonging" characterized by weekly viewing parties at lesbian homes and bars), it captures the dilemma of a niche show that must simultaneously appeal to a mainstream audience. Before The L Word, the fact that "lesbians on TV served more to titillate than to illustrate" was a common complaint; nonetheless we should respect The L Word because it "unapologetically went 'all the way'" in its sex scenes to ensure that "straight people watched." By staking its very premise on the commercial viability of this overlap between the interests of gay and straight viewers, The L Word's 2004 premiere heralded a moment when "lesbianism seemed poised for popularity." But according to the narrator, this alchemy did not come easily in the program's early seasons, as "its assumed audience felt most left behind. Many lesbians felt the show had failed to deliver on its central promise: to represent the community in an accurate way." The L Word's producers thus found themselves trapped between irreconcilable imperatives to be realistic and to be aspirational, to reflect lesbians authentically and to "break out of stereotypes" (with the latter leanings preferred due to the wider allure of glossy fantasy). One solution was to intervene in our cultural understanding of what constitutes "real" lesbianism. Amidst criticism that the program portrayed only rich, beautiful, feminine women with no "Birkenstocks and flannel" in sight, for example, costume designer Cynthia Summers took it upon herself to "challenge the way lesbians think they should be looking or need to be looking to be able to be identified as 'a lesbian.'" We must then concede that The L Word is "definitely representative of some lesbians" (Kate Clinton), facilitating Hilary Rosen's claim that critiques of the program's inauthenticity are inauthentic themselves, since they evidently come from "people who don't know that many lesbians." These tensions -- between normativity and sexuality, between lesbian and mainstream audiences, between realistic and positive representations, and between portraying and fabricating a community -- structured The L Word's achievements and limitations throughout its six-season run.
The farewell special -- with its melange of talking heads, staged interviews, behind-the-scenes footage, public appearances, news headlines, flashbacks, snapshots, and clips from the show -- also encapsulates The L Word's multiplying and intersecting layers of reality and fiction. It could neither execute nor escape the mandate to translate lesbian culture faithfully onto the small screen, but the program deployed its alternating declarations of either transparency or escapism strategically. This prevarication over The L Word's relationship to real life settled into a reliable circular logic: obviously the more deeply it penetrated into society the more representative it was, and obviously the more it represented current events the more deeply it had penetrated into society. Thus the creators' response to criticisms of its bland homogeneity (which was, in the words of writer/director Angela Robinson, "trying to represent an array of different types of lesbian representations") was rendered as a multicultural menu of bite-sized political references. The examples given in the special, which dedicates four minutes to celebrating butch characters Max, who is working class, and Tasha, who is black, typify The L Word's tendency to bundle minority identities while preserving the white femme consumer as the lesbian norm. Max, initially a woman named Moira who chooses to undergo a medical gender transition, starts out as a recognizable point of contact with the queer communities that exist in parallel to The L Word's West Hollywood fantasia. He is quickly assimilated into stable masculinity, however, and devolves into a caricature of testosterone-induced abusiveness and topical male pregnancy. Tasha, whose relationship with Alice triumphs over personal differences and professional conflicts with her military career, exhibits the program's signature approach to incorporating racial difference. As in the case of other black characters, including straight lead Kit and her bi-racial half-sister Bette, "a figure of racial authenticity" is periodically invoked "to ventriloquize racial transcendence" in order to "depoliticize[ an issue], stressing individualizing, privatized aspects" to support "the elision of 'community' by consumerism" (Osucha). The L Word's open acknowledgement of its commercial dictates, however, effectively inoculates it against such critiques: as entertainment (or so its alibi goes), the program's only option is to portray political realities by packaging identities as commodities.
Although the special was created to commemorate The L Word's finale, it conspicuously foregoes any discussion of the final season, an incoherent fiasco that was reviled by fans and critics. Apparently conceived more as an extended promo for Chaiken's unsuccessful spin-off series (a prison drama called The Farm) than as a consistent conclusion to the characters' narratives, season 6 partially diverges from the program's soap operatic format to become a murder mystery. In the opening of the premiere, one character drowns under suspicious circumstances; after immediately flashing back several months, the remainder of the season consists of a string of storytelling contortions that provide everyone else with a motive for killing her. The final episode withholds the promised resolution to this whodunit, however, retreating instead into maudlin reminiscences, complete with a diegetic tribute video that mirrors the extra-diegetic tribute special. As the characters film, edit, and finally watch their teary farewells to lead couple Bette and Tina, The L Word waxes nostalgic about its own history, evoking in particular its history of self-reflexive gestures. These include Jenny's autobiographical memoir retelling the events of the program's early seasons, later adapted into a film production that furnished the primary motif for season 5, and season 2's subplot about a male roommate who was videotaping the women using hidden cameras, as if to comment on the line The L Word walks between documentary and soft porn. Such elements foreground the interdependence of media form and the program's claims to authenticity -- none more so than a series of webisodes, The Interrogation Tapes, that continued after the television finale. These online bonus features enticed once again with the answers that the episodes deferred, a tease involving even the contradictory codes that characterized the "tape" of each character's questioning by police: video noise that referenced gritty realism but appeared highly stylized, an evidentiary time counter that continued across cuts between multiple cameras and takes. And in place of criminal revelations, the extreme close-ups draw out histrionic confessions about past trauma and emotional relationships, making the characters under "interrogation" seem more akin to the special's interview subjects than to murder suspects. This jarring lurch between genres offers one last rendition of The L Word's structuring paradox: charged with representing both reality and melodrama, both truth and spectacle, what the program does best is leverage one to sell the other. In this section, I propose a Marxist theoretical framework for understanding how The L Word negotiates this terrain by putting authentic identities to work.
The farewell special -- with its melange of talking heads, staged interviews, behind-the-scenes footage, public appearances, news headlines, flashbacks, snapshots, and clips from the show -- also encapsulates The L Word's multiplying and intersecting layers of reality and fiction. It could neither execute nor escape the mandate to translate lesbian culture faithfully onto the small screen, but the program deployed its alternating declarations of either transparency or escapism strategically. This prevarication over The L Word's relationship to real life settled into a reliable circular logic: obviously the more deeply it penetrated into society the more representative it was, and obviously the more it represented current events the more deeply it had penetrated into society. Thus the creators' response to criticisms of its bland homogeneity (which was, in the words of writer/director Angela Robinson, "trying to represent an array of different types of lesbian representations") was rendered as a multicultural menu of bite-sized political references. The examples given in the special, which dedicates four minutes to celebrating butch characters Max, who is working class, and Tasha, who is black, typify The L Word's tendency to bundle minority identities while preserving the white femme consumer as the lesbian norm. Max, initially a woman named Moira who chooses to undergo a medical gender transition, starts out as a recognizable point of contact with the queer communities that exist in parallel to The L Word's West Hollywood fantasia. He is quickly assimilated into stable masculinity, however, and devolves into a caricature of testosterone-induced abusiveness and topical male pregnancy. Tasha, whose relationship with Alice triumphs over personal differences and professional conflicts with her military career, exhibits the program's signature approach to incorporating racial difference. As in the case of other black characters, including straight lead Kit and her bi-racial half-sister Bette, "a figure of racial authenticity" is periodically invoked "to ventriloquize racial transcendence" in order to "depoliticize[ an issue], stressing individualizing, privatized aspects" to support "the elision of 'community' by consumerism" (Osucha). The L Word's open acknowledgement of its commercial dictates, however, effectively inoculates it against such critiques: as entertainment (or so its alibi goes), the program's only option is to portray political realities by packaging identities as commodities.
Although the special was created to commemorate The L Word's finale, it conspicuously foregoes any discussion of the final season, an incoherent fiasco that was reviled by fans and critics. Apparently conceived more as an extended promo for Chaiken's unsuccessful spin-off series (a prison drama called The Farm) than as a consistent conclusion to the characters' narratives, season 6 partially diverges from the program's soap operatic format to become a murder mystery. In the opening of the premiere, one character drowns under suspicious circumstances; after immediately flashing back several months, the remainder of the season consists of a string of storytelling contortions that provide everyone else with a motive for killing her. The final episode withholds the promised resolution to this whodunit, however, retreating instead into maudlin reminiscences, complete with a diegetic tribute video that mirrors the extra-diegetic tribute special. As the characters film, edit, and finally watch their teary farewells to lead couple Bette and Tina, The L Word waxes nostalgic about its own history, evoking in particular its history of self-reflexive gestures. These include Jenny's autobiographical memoir retelling the events of the program's early seasons, later adapted into a film production that furnished the primary motif for season 5, and season 2's subplot about a male roommate who was videotaping the women using hidden cameras, as if to comment on the line The L Word walks between documentary and soft porn. Such elements foreground the interdependence of media form and the program's claims to authenticity -- none more so than a series of webisodes, The Interrogation Tapes, that continued after the television finale. These online bonus features enticed once again with the answers that the episodes deferred, a tease involving even the contradictory codes that characterized the "tape" of each character's questioning by police: video noise that referenced gritty realism but appeared highly stylized, an evidentiary time counter that continued across cuts between multiple cameras and takes. And in place of criminal revelations, the extreme close-ups draw out histrionic confessions about past trauma and emotional relationships, making the characters under "interrogation" seem more akin to the special's interview subjects than to murder suspects. This jarring lurch between genres offers one last rendition of The L Word's structuring paradox: charged with representing both reality and melodrama, both truth and spectacle, what the program does best is leverage one to sell the other. In this section, I propose a Marxist theoretical framework for understanding how The L Word negotiates this terrain by putting authentic identities to work.
