Grey's Anatomy, Cristina, and Owen
Apr. 19th, 2012 06:33 am![[personal profile]](http://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
giandujakissI have so many thoughts about this storyline. They are long. They are really tl;dr.
For anyone who's bothering to read this and isn't familiar with the show, the basic premise is - Cristina and Owen are both surgeons, and at first, their romance was amazing and I loved it. They married. Cristina got pregnant and wanted an abortion, because she doesn't want/never wanted children. Owen did want kids and they had tearing arguments about it that I suspect - with no personal experience of this situation myself - were probably very realistic. I.e., Owen kept saying things like can't we compromise, and you're not making me a part of this decision, and Cristina's response was, you can't have half a baby, there's no compromise, it's going to be one way or the other and I don't want to be a mother.
So Cristina schedules the abortion, and at the last minute her best friend, Meredith, talks to Owen, and based on her own experiences as the daughter of a mother-surgeon who did not want children, explains why having a baby would tear Cristina apart.
Owen calms down, joins Cristina, and holds her hand through the procedure.
But their marriage deteriorates after that, he blows up at her about the abortion during a party with all their friends several months later, they try counseling, he has a one night stand with another woman, Cristina finds out, and in the latest episode, Cristina asks him to leave and basically makes it clear she's ending the marriage.
Politically, I'm very torn about the storyline. We never get to see "good" women, sympathetic women, have abortions on TV. So, yay! Groundbreaking. But I also want to see women have abortions and it not ruin everything, and here, obviously, the abortion killed the marriage. So, boo. But on the third hand, once again, with no personal experience, the entire storyline - which was emotionally brutal - struck me as very realistic.
The reason it struck me as realistic was because of a particular sort of chauvinism that threaded through Owen's characterization, and came out even in other, entirely unrelated storylines. Specifically, his willingness to substitute his emotional judgment for the emotions of the women around him, and his unwillingness to trust them to gauge their own feelings.
So, with respect to Cristina, when they were having their couples therapy, he had some of the most telling dialogue in the entire arc - namely, he kept saying things like "People want babies" and doubting/questioning/probing whether Cristina really didn't want a child. Now, what one can't help but suspect he meant, on some level, is that women want babies. And he simply could not wrap his mind around the truth that Cristina did not want a child. For him, if he scratched deep enough, he was sure he'd find she really did want a child but was somehow denying that fact, either because she was ignorant of how she'd really feel once the baby was born, or because she had some sort of undisclosed trauma that needed to be fixed, etc.
And once this idea was in his head - that Cristina really did want a child - then all this anger came out. Because that meant this wasn't a case of irreconcilably different desires - this was a case of Cristina lying to him in some way, or deliberately denying him something that he wanted. So he couldn't view this as a situation where neither party was at fault, they just wanted different things - the only thing he could see was that Cristina had wronged him, and he had a right to be resentful.
That is, I think, the subtext that was being telegraphed. And that was born out in the text. He went out and slept with another woman - and after he confessed to Cristina, after they'd talked about it, she eventually realized what to me was obvious from the start - he hadn't done it because he was lonely or horny or drunk, he'd done it because he wanted to hurt her. He was trying to get back at Cristina, because in his mind, she'd done him wrong, first.
And when Cristina realized this, that's when she kicked him out.
We saw this aspect of Owen's character in his storyline with Teddy, in two ways. Owen is the chief of surgery, so he makes the final decisions about how surgeries are handled.
Teddy's husband was very sick, and needed surgery. Teddy wanted Cristina to perform the surgery, because Cristina was the best. But everyone was concerned that Cristina would get psyched out by the idea of performing a critical surgery on Teddy's husband. So they agreed - and I forget whose idea it was at first, it may even have been Teddy's, but Owen was the one who carried it out - not to tell Cristina who the patient was. She'd go in to the operating room, see the patient ready for surgery, not see the face, and have no idea she was operating on Teddy's husband. That's basically a fundamental lack of willingness to trust Cristina to manage her own emotional reactions.
Continuing on with that storyline, the husband died - Cristina couldn't save him. But when that happened, Teddy was conducting a critical surgery. So Owen made a decision that no one would tell Teddy that her husband had died until her own surgery was complete. So there were a brutal few hours where people were wandering in and out of Teddy's surgery, and pretending that her husband was okay - I think Cristina actually joined her in the operating room for a while - and Teddy was happy and relieved, until she concluded her own surgery and found out that her husband had died hours earlier. And that was Owen's call, it was his decision, and it was his instruction to Cristina not to tell Teddy anything.
Once again, then, we saw Owen basically refuse to trust a woman with her own emotions, and decide that his judgment about what she can/should feel at any given moment should override her rights to basic information and her right to make her own judgments.
Anyway, I was very glad that Cristina ended the marriage, in the end, because I thought this tendency of Owen's was intolerable. But I just really hope someone articulates it at some point, particularly in the abortion storyline - that the marriage broke down, essentially, when Owen fundamentally refused to believe Cristina was telling him the truth that she did not want children.
For anyone who's bothering to read this and isn't familiar with the show, the basic premise is - Cristina and Owen are both surgeons, and at first, their romance was amazing and I loved it. They married. Cristina got pregnant and wanted an abortion, because she doesn't want/never wanted children. Owen did want kids and they had tearing arguments about it that I suspect - with no personal experience of this situation myself - were probably very realistic. I.e., Owen kept saying things like can't we compromise, and you're not making me a part of this decision, and Cristina's response was, you can't have half a baby, there's no compromise, it's going to be one way or the other and I don't want to be a mother.
So Cristina schedules the abortion, and at the last minute her best friend, Meredith, talks to Owen, and based on her own experiences as the daughter of a mother-surgeon who did not want children, explains why having a baby would tear Cristina apart.
Owen calms down, joins Cristina, and holds her hand through the procedure.
But their marriage deteriorates after that, he blows up at her about the abortion during a party with all their friends several months later, they try counseling, he has a one night stand with another woman, Cristina finds out, and in the latest episode, Cristina asks him to leave and basically makes it clear she's ending the marriage.
Politically, I'm very torn about the storyline. We never get to see "good" women, sympathetic women, have abortions on TV. So, yay! Groundbreaking. But I also want to see women have abortions and it not ruin everything, and here, obviously, the abortion killed the marriage. So, boo. But on the third hand, once again, with no personal experience, the entire storyline - which was emotionally brutal - struck me as very realistic.
The reason it struck me as realistic was because of a particular sort of chauvinism that threaded through Owen's characterization, and came out even in other, entirely unrelated storylines. Specifically, his willingness to substitute his emotional judgment for the emotions of the women around him, and his unwillingness to trust them to gauge their own feelings.
So, with respect to Cristina, when they were having their couples therapy, he had some of the most telling dialogue in the entire arc - namely, he kept saying things like "People want babies" and doubting/questioning/probing whether Cristina really didn't want a child. Now, what one can't help but suspect he meant, on some level, is that women want babies. And he simply could not wrap his mind around the truth that Cristina did not want a child. For him, if he scratched deep enough, he was sure he'd find she really did want a child but was somehow denying that fact, either because she was ignorant of how she'd really feel once the baby was born, or because she had some sort of undisclosed trauma that needed to be fixed, etc.
And once this idea was in his head - that Cristina really did want a child - then all this anger came out. Because that meant this wasn't a case of irreconcilably different desires - this was a case of Cristina lying to him in some way, or deliberately denying him something that he wanted. So he couldn't view this as a situation where neither party was at fault, they just wanted different things - the only thing he could see was that Cristina had wronged him, and he had a right to be resentful.
That is, I think, the subtext that was being telegraphed. And that was born out in the text. He went out and slept with another woman - and after he confessed to Cristina, after they'd talked about it, she eventually realized what to me was obvious from the start - he hadn't done it because he was lonely or horny or drunk, he'd done it because he wanted to hurt her. He was trying to get back at Cristina, because in his mind, she'd done him wrong, first.
And when Cristina realized this, that's when she kicked him out.
We saw this aspect of Owen's character in his storyline with Teddy, in two ways. Owen is the chief of surgery, so he makes the final decisions about how surgeries are handled.
Teddy's husband was very sick, and needed surgery. Teddy wanted Cristina to perform the surgery, because Cristina was the best. But everyone was concerned that Cristina would get psyched out by the idea of performing a critical surgery on Teddy's husband. So they agreed - and I forget whose idea it was at first, it may even have been Teddy's, but Owen was the one who carried it out - not to tell Cristina who the patient was. She'd go in to the operating room, see the patient ready for surgery, not see the face, and have no idea she was operating on Teddy's husband. That's basically a fundamental lack of willingness to trust Cristina to manage her own emotional reactions.
Continuing on with that storyline, the husband died - Cristina couldn't save him. But when that happened, Teddy was conducting a critical surgery. So Owen made a decision that no one would tell Teddy that her husband had died until her own surgery was complete. So there were a brutal few hours where people were wandering in and out of Teddy's surgery, and pretending that her husband was okay - I think Cristina actually joined her in the operating room for a while - and Teddy was happy and relieved, until she concluded her own surgery and found out that her husband had died hours earlier. And that was Owen's call, it was his decision, and it was his instruction to Cristina not to tell Teddy anything.
Once again, then, we saw Owen basically refuse to trust a woman with her own emotions, and decide that his judgment about what she can/should feel at any given moment should override her rights to basic information and her right to make her own judgments.
Anyway, I was very glad that Cristina ended the marriage, in the end, because I thought this tendency of Owen's was intolerable. But I just really hope someone articulates it at some point, particularly in the abortion storyline - that the marriage broke down, essentially, when Owen fundamentally refused to believe Cristina was telling him the truth that she did not want children.
no subject
Date: 2012-04-19 01:33 pm (UTC)As an aside, one of my favourite things about White Collar when I was watching it was that Elizabeth and Peter were shown as mature adults who had a been happily married for a long time and who didn't have children, and the show felt no need to explain why they didn't - no underlying pathologies or failures, no horrible arguments festering beneath the surface - they just didn't have children and it wasn't treated as noteworthy. I'm very far behind on the show now, and I don't know if this is still true, but in s1, it made me very happy.
no subject
Date: 2012-04-19 04:15 pm (UTC)And yes, that's why I've been of two minds about Grey's - it's really pretty groundbreaking that they were willing to tell the story at all, even if I'm upset that it destroyed their marriage. And that's why I really want Owen's fundamental problem here to be articulated - because, obviously, in a patriarchy, it needs to be - that this wasn't just about irreconcilable differences between two people and their different desires as far as procreation. The real problem was that Owen just didn't believe her when she said she didn't want a child. If he had believed her - if he'd truly believed she didn't want a child - I think his demands would have been very different. Because it's very hard to say to a woman "I acknowledge you don't want children. Have them anyway." It's much easier to say that - and get angry about it - if you characterize it, as Owen did, as getting the woman to admit that secretly, she does want kids.
no subject
Date: 2012-04-19 09:46 pm (UTC)