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Spoilers for Friday's Battlestar Galactica coming up after the jump:
"I just hope, I hope that people realize eventually who I am."
I direct you, as usual, to Maureen Ryan and Alan Sepinwall's already posted breakdowns of this episode for more point by point discussion, but let's just answer that question for a second. Who Felix Gaeta is, and what this two-part story showed him to be, speaks to some of the things that make BSG so great. The show could have made him Zarek's craven toady or a slimy power-grabber, but we see—even while sharing Adama's revulsion for him—that he's finally a principled man too.
He may be morally weak (as we saw on New Caprica as well), he may be misguided, and he may be out of hiss depth, but he carries out his coup out of a genuine feeling that the fleet has gone wrong. And unlike his co-conspirator, it's important to him to do it in (as he sees it) the right way, getting justice rather than just grabbing power. Thus he insists on a trial, and thus he recoils when he realizes what Zarek has done to the Quorum.
And yet, rather than take the expected easy way out—having Gaeta see the error of his ways and turn on Zarek, redeeming himself at last—he sticks to his guns. He would rather fail than do things Zarek's way (he would probably have succeeded if he had done things Zarek's way), but that doesn't mean he stops believing in his original goal. Instead, he goes down, faces the firing squad and—in a final moment worthy of Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities—looks down at his leg and experiences one last second feeling whole and painless before he dies.
A great end to this story arc and a good sign that BSG will pull no punches in its final episodes. A few miscellaneous thoughts:
* How many times by now has someone said a reckoning is coming? Do you suppose a reckoning is coming?
* "I am coming back for all of you!" That's my new answering machine message! Seriously, great work by Mary McDonnell in that scene. One of the first things I ever learned about acting is that anger is one of the easiest emotions to play, and that may be generally true, but she's doing so much more in this raging moment: underneath the fury is her grief—subordinated for the moment— at the false news that Adama is dead, as well as the effort that it takes for her, after having given up on life, to rouse herself to the task of fighting back, or of vengeance.
* One quibble: Baltar's dreaming Adama's execution was a cheap shock, like most such switcheroo dream sequences are. (The one weakness of the last few episodes, I feel, is that BSG seems like it has forgotten what to do with Baltar.) Baltar's recognition of how he ran from his flock on Galactica was a good moment, though, as was his final scene with Gaeta—in some ways his soulmate—and another switcheroo: the cut from Gaeta's execution order to Tigh holding the gun on his executioner.
* It's amazing how much contempt Adama was able to convey for Gaeta after the coup failed, without so much as uttering a word—just motioning with the barest nod for him to be taken away.
* So there's a rip in the hull. Those are not good, right?Let’s continue that conversation with the British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare, whose retrospective just opened at the Brooklyn Museum.
LACAYO: When did you first decide to take a mannequin and decapitate it and dress it in those “authentic” African fabrics?
SHONIBARE: In 1995, something like that. It was a festival in London called Africa ’95 and I was commissioned by the Vatican. I made this piece that now belongs to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It’s called How Does a Girl Like You Get to Be a Girl Like You? That line is from Hitchcock, in North by Northwest.
LACAYO: What made you want to put the cloth on a figure and not just hang it on a wall? Or do it as a painting?
SHONIBARE: I was thinking about colonialism. What am I doing in the U.K., why am I speaking English? And I was thinking about the aristocracy of that time. The idea was to make effigies of the aristocracy and then cut their heads off. And then dress them in these fabrics as a metaphor for things now.
LACAYO: When I first saw one of your pieces, I didn’t know that what we always think of as authentic African fabric is actually Indonesian fabric brought to Africa by the Dutch who colonized Indonesia. There’s nothing African about it except the fact that Africans adopted it, but because they did, it became a global symbol of African-ness. What it demonstrated to me, in a tongue in cheek way, was that identities are constructed out of whatever are the materials at hand. That they’re inventions.
SHONIBARE: For me it’s more about parody and masquerade. In the Caribbean, even at the time of slavery, they would have carnival days. If you were a slave or a poor person, you could dress up as an aristocrat. Carnival day was the one day that the aristocrats were the working class. It was the one day you could be whatever you wanted to be.
LACAYO:There’s a well known book by a Russian theorist named Mikhail Bakhtin that presents a theory about medieval carnivals and the way they subverted social hierarchies and satirized sacred ceremonies, if only for a few days. The low were raised high, they could masquerade as their “superiors”. It’s a spirit that survives a bit in Mardi Gras.
SHONIBARE: Yes, and when you see African textiles in the media, it’s usually in a report about poor Africans. So when I switched those fabrics to become aristocratic clothing, there’s a sense of playing with this colonial relationship.
LACAYO: You also have some mannequins dressed in African cloth to parody specific figures of the 18th-century Enlightenment like Adam Smith, the first theorist of capitalism, and d’Alembert, the French physicist and mathematician. When I see them dressed in those outfits it says to me that reason, which was the faith those men lived by, wasn’t enough by itself to understand the complexities of the world that Western civilization, which liked to think of reason as its foundation, was creating. It had a dark side that reason didn’t want to know about. The French called their own colonialism the “mission civilatrice”, but it was usually accomplished at gunpoint.
SHONIBARE: And now we use reason and democracy to justify invading Iraq. We used that kind of civilizing zeal and mission that was used in the 19th century to invade Iraq.
LACAYO: Let’s talk about the staged photo pieces you started making in the 1990s. In Diary of a Victorian Dandy you made four elaborate photos of a day in the life of a 19th century man-about-town with yourself playing the man. You also did a series of pictures illustrating scenes from Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, with yourself in the role of Dorian. Were you looking at photographers like Jeff Wall and Cindy Sherman who set up their own scenes?
SHONIBARE: I’m interested in Jeff Wall and those artists but I was looking more at traditional narratives like Hogarth’s. I was thinking about how Hogarth’s narratives like the The Rake’s Progress are more like film stills. The photographs also opened up a whole new set of issues. They were like film stills so it was a like a logical next step to doing film. The problem of course is that doing film projects can be quite costly. I’m still in the process of trying to explore more. But not as much as I’d like to, because of the financial constraints. Those projects are not cheap to make. I use HD cameras, they’re elaborate productions.
LACAYO: You have two video pieces in the Brooklyn Museum show, Un Ballo in Maschera, an ensemble work about the assassination of the King of Sweden in 1792, and Odile and Odette, which uses just two dancers, one white and one black, to play with themes from Swan Lake. Both of them are effectively dance videos. Who does the choreography?
SHONIBARE: I tend to work with collaborators. For Odile and Odette it was a contact from the Royal Opera House. For Un Ballo in Maschera it was a contact through a friend of mine who is a dancer.
LACAYO: Un Ballo in Maschera is based on the true story of the assassination of King Gustav III of Sweden, who was shot at a masked ball at court. It’s the story that Verdi used as the basis for his opera of the same name. What drew you to that story?
SHONIBARE: When the invasion of Iraq was first announced, I was in Sweden in a residency. Gustav III was fighting wars with Denmark and Russia. Things were not great at home, but he had these expansionist ambitions. So I was thinking about America and expansionist ideas and the cost. Gustav spent a lot of public money on this useless project, his wars, ambitions that weren’t going anywhere. Most people have no idea that video is about Iraq.
