Note: I wanted to write and send this newsletter much earlier in the year, when Season 8 of this show was airing and when it might have been somewhat relevant. But things just move slowly around here these days (with the exception of the baby, who is now crawling quite fast) so you’re getting it now.

Outlander is one of those shows I finished more out of a sense of duty than a real desire to know what would befall the characters. Every time I paid for a month of Starz to binge the latest season before canceling my subscription again, I’d spend the episodes thinking, “You know what I’d rather watch right now? Season 1.”

This is mostly because Season 1 was incredibly sexy in a way that the following seven seasons just didn’t match. (When I say “sexy,” here and throughout the newsletter, note that I’m using it interchangeably with “romantic”—that I am referring to steamy scenes and to long looks of yearning and scenery porn under the same umbrella.)

Setting aside the obvious, intentional reasons why this might have been the case (the sexual tension between the main characters ceased to be the focal point of the show; relentless sexual violence against multiple characters probably made the showrunners want to handle future love scenes with more care), I’ve been wanting to explore why I think the show lost its spark. With Season 8 still fairly fresh in my memory, I’ve narrowed down to four key points:

1. the wigs

Lately, the unfortunate fashion in film and TV is that characters in period pieces—particularly women—be made to look like they have never seen so much as a faint breeze in their whole lives. The wigs are glossy, pristine, kempt to the point of unreality. They do not look (if I may be a little crude) like they would survive a good roll in the hay.

Sex is about touching, not just looking. If a show wants to be sexy, it needs to convey embodiment—to evoke the sense of touch—through visual means. This is a doable challenge, especially when you allow for a little frizz. We all know what it feels like for the wind to brush a wisp of hair against our face; letting hair move and be imperfect on screen is a pretty simple way to connect us to a character’s sensory experience.

2. the cameras

A while ago, I watched a great video essay about how movies and shows all look like they were shot in iPhone portrait mode these days, and why that’s bad. Similar to the wig problem, visually separating characters from their surroundings by blurring and flattening the background is a great way to limit our connection to those characters. Again, sex is sensory. If you want to suggest that a roll in the hay is imminent, we really ought to be able to see the hay.

3. the ensemble cast

Every season of Outlander after Season 1 was at a serious disadvantage because Claire and Jamie were already together; obstacles to their union were fewer and farther between; desire was no longer sustained—and eroticism in a story isn’t really about sex, it’s about desire. With the story no longer centered around their romantic tension (and with Caitriona Balfe and Sam Heughan likely getting more leverage to say “no I don’t want to be naked all the time anymore, thanks”), the show had to throw its thirsty audience a few bones in the forms of other couplings. But these were relationships in which viewers were less invested, and, frankly, none of them ever matched Balfe and Heughan’s chemistry. Long-time fans of the show didn’t want to watch just anyone smooshing; we wanted the tension, hunger, and intensity that we got from Claire and Jamie in Season 1.

I’m trying to move quickly through these points because I want to get to #4, which is the main point.

4. the setting

Outlander airs on Starz, an American media company, to a majority-American audience. Because of this, I feel confident that most of its viewers will agree with the following statement: The Scottish Highlands are sexy; colonial America is not. This isn’t just because it’s Somewhere Else and therefore easy to romanticize (though that’s certainly part of it), but for a few more defensible reasons:

• In the English literary canon (English as in the nationality, not as in the language, though England’s hegemony means this Venn diagram has a well-fed center), Scotland is often portrayed as a place of wildness, where characters can escape the strictures of society and do things like elope (as in Pride & Prejudice and also real life). If the story already starts in Scotland, then the Highlands are where the characters go to be even more wild and free.

• I’d argue Scotland looms so large in the romantic imagination in part due to Romantic-era Scottish writers like Robert Burns and Walter Scott, who helped to construct a cultural identity absolutely dripping with romantic ideals (folklore, nature, The Sublime, yadda yadda) and to popularize that identity across Europe. The Romantic era was also a time when painters went feral for a good rugged landscape, of which Scotland has many.

• The specific historical moment in which Season 1 takes place, the Jacobite rising of 1745, is especially burnished with romance and nostalgia. Popular depictions of the Jacobites cast them as noble Highland warriors fighting for an ancient way of life as much as for specific monarchic loyalties, one cause as doomed as the other. Tragedy is romantic, too.

The colonial U.S., on the other hand, has none of this going for it. For one thing, the American colonies were largely founded by puritanical religious weirdos who would rather sail across the ocean than be a little less uptight, a tradition that haunts us to this day. For another, we associate the pre–Revolutionary War period with the Enlightenment, a bloodless and sexless artistic era compared to Romanticism.

Perhaps nothing can illustrate these differences better than two Mel Gibson movies made within five years of each other that have the same plot: Mel Gibson fights the British to avenge a loved one and secure freedom for his community. The one set in Scotland (Braveheart) is, despite Mel Gibson’s presence, often very sexy. William Wallace and his doomed lady love elope in the woods and consummate their union by a lake! Under the moonlight! The one set in the colonial U.S. (The Patriot) is aggressively un-sexy, despite having Heath Ledger in it. This is because people in the colonial U.S. do not smoosh on moonlit lakesides but instead get sewn into sheets during sanctioned premarital sleepovers.¹

American viewers of Outlander also have the disadvantage of knowing too much about the American Revolutionary War: Where the Scottish Highlands get to remain shrouded in mystery and intrigue, their picturesque castles and ruins evoking untold histories into which we can project our romantic fantasies, the American colonies are mundane, shrunk in our imagination by familiarity and made ugly by slavery and genocide. (Jamie and Claire’s brief pit stop on a plantation was deeply uncomfortable and never resolved; Young Ian’s persistent cosplay as a Mohawk warrior gave me spasms of secondhand embarrassment every time he came on screen.)

For all these reasons, the Scottish Highlands are a great place to set a spicy show, while the colonial U.S. is one of the worst options I can think of. Jamie Fraser’s Scotland is the land of castles, dramatic glens, beautiful folk music, and kilts. (Hot.) The colonial U.S. is the province of log cabins, muskets, guys in tights, and Johnny Tremain. (Not.)

Of course Outlander was about more than the physical relationship of two beautiful people, but it was clear that the show had found a winning formula in the first season (romance plus adventure plus a bit of magic) and wanted to maintain as many elements of that formula as possible to keep viewers hooked. In my view, the romance part of this formula got lost somewhere on Claire and Jamie’s sea voyage to the New World in Season 3, and never really found its way ashore.

good links

I can tell I’m making progress at clawing more of my life back from new parenthood because I was able to watch two long-form video essays in the last fortnight:

• This feature-length video about bisexuals was excellent, and its emotional closing argument took me by surprise. Come for the media criticism, stay for the class war rallying cry!

• I also liked this deep dive on the million tiny compromises we make as consumers that normalize dystopia. I particularly appreciated its focus on the end of ownership because a recent Last Week Tonight episode talked about shady practices in subscription services but (in my opinion) missed an opportunity to discuss why it’s bad that everything is a subscription in the first place.

This account of increasingly egregious land theft and violence against Palestinians by Israeli settlers is sobering and urgent, but (sorry) it is also a reminder of what I don’t like about The New Yorker’s style guide. The story relies heavily on numbers, which are harder to digest and compare when they’re all spelled out as words (and don’t get me started on “per cent”).

Here’s an excerpt from the final paragraph in New Yorker style:

The 1947 U.N. resolution proposing a partition of the territory left the Palestinians about forty-three per cent of the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. In the wars that immediately followed, Israel expanded its share to seventy-eight per cent of the land, leaving just twenty-two per cent for the Palestinian half of the population. The Oslo Accords, signed over thirty years ago, gave Palestinians at least administrative control of limited areas as a first step toward eventual control of the West Bank and Gaza—almost all of that twenty-two per cent of the land. But on the most recent map … the settlements and outposts, and the military operations in Gaza, appear to permanently confine the Palestinians to control of even less than those limited areas, amounting to just eight per cent of the total land. Israel fully controls about ninety-two per cent.

And here’s how most other publications would have done it:

The 1947 U.N. resolution proposing a partition of the territory left the Palestinians about 43% of the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. In the wars that immediately followed, Israel expanded its share to 78% of the land, leaving just 22% for the Palestinian half of the population. The Oslo Accords, signed over 30 years ago, gave Palestinians at least administrative control of limited areas as a first step toward eventual control of the West Bank and Gaza—almost all of that 22% of the land. But on the most recent map … the settlements and outposts, and the military operations in Gaza, appear to permanently confine the Palestinians to control of even less than those limited areas, amounting to just 8% of the total land. Israel fully controls about 92%.

I would argue that not only is the second version easier to read, but it also makes a stronger impression. When we think in numbers, we tend to think in numerical figures, not words or sounds. The difference between 43% and 8% is more tangible, and tells a more coherent story, than the difference between forty-three per cent and eight per cent.

~

OK that’s all!