One of the strengths of this episode is the way it deals with perspective. Bomb Girls is a show about the home front; Victory Munitions builds bombs, the workers perceive the war through newspapers, the radio and the news reels in the cinema, and their own victories and losses are meeting quotas, witnessing or becoming victims of horrifying accidents and being the shift that builds the millionth bomb (which is what blue shift accomplishes at the beginning of the episode, after Lorna steps in to help them). They are physically as far from the front as the other citizens who don’t fight, and yet, they are an essential part of the war effort: without them, the soldiers have nothing to fight with. They are vital enough to necessitate a publicity drive, in order to get more women into moving to the cities and working in factories, and potentially radical enough in how they change gender roles by subverting the established division of labour to provoke the very same advertisement to contain a soothing note that all of this grand change is merely temporary. The workers perceive the war through news media and are, at the same time, also perceived and considered necessary and vital, but also potentially dangerous to the established regime.
A news reel director watches blue shift assemble the millionth bomb and decides to make them the focus of his film; he specifically zooms in on Gladys, hoping to make her the star – but this is where all the different storylines and interests collide. Gladys can’t be part of the film because her parents might see it, and the fact that she works the floor, not in the office, is still a secret. Lorna is convinced that for the purpose of bringing in new workers, Betty would be a better match, since she is “the best worker we have”, even though Betty thinks that she’s “hardly the type of girl they want in those type of things. Which is fine by me.”
The process by which Betty really does become the poster girl is brilliant, and fits in with how Gladys’ mother described the subtle influence she has in decisions. Akins and the director discuss the casting in front of Lorna and Carol, Gladys’ friend, and while Lorna argues with them about it and doesn’t get anywhere because they are convinced that Gladys is the right choice, Carol uses all the things that her upbringing have taught her about how to utilize the power she has. She tells them that Gladys is a perfect choice, soothing their ego, then blames the potential audience for not being able to recognize their brilliance (the women will not see her appeal!).
Carol: Of course I practically have to say that because she is my best friend. Gladys is terrifically sincere; it’s just that she might putt off a working girl. And besides, her family wouldn’t like it.
Akins: She is a little on her high horse.
Russell Joseph: I found her approachable.
Lorna: Just because you’d like to get her out of that uniform and into… your little movie, doesn’t mean the average girl will see her and think ‘that’s me’.
Russell Joseph: Madam, I’ve been making news reels since Hitler strolled through the Sudetenland, I know how to sell this war.
Lorna: To men, maybe.
Akins: She’s right. As much as it pains me, I gotta stop you here, Russell. They’re our target audience. This time we listen to the ladies.
Russell Joseph: I expect you have a suggestion, Matron.
There is this little moment in the middle of the conversation where Lorna realizes exactly what Carol is doing and that it is working and plays right into it, so they both get what they want: Gladys’ secret remains safe; Betty becomes the star of the movie.
It’s not like Betty is enthusiastic about it, but there is this part of her that enjoys being recognized – not as the star, not as whatever Russell saw through the lens of his camera when he framed Gladys, but as VicMu’s best worker, as someone who could in fact inspire other girls (maybe trapped with limited opportunities far, far away) to do what she has done. And then there’s Kate’s “You wait Betty. They’re all gonna see what I see: a hero”, which is so significant because of course again it is pulling on her heartstrings but it is also an awesome choice to have Kate use the word “hero”. Male soldiers in battles are heroes. At least during WW2, the word was still reserved for men, and yet, Kate uses it to describe Betty.
Marco: Amazing how it takes something fake to make it look like something real.
Of course, inevitably, this has to go wrong. Russell Joseph is the one with the power: he creates the shots, he tells her what to wear, how to move, and then, afterwards, in the editing room, he assembles it into whatever he wants it to be.
Russell also incidentally captures the reality of things in-between the scenes. Betty runs out of the fake house with open arms, a scene that will later be assembled to have her greet her two children – and after the shot, she strolls towards the house holding hands with Kate, telling her that this is exactly what she wants – a house of her own – and working at Victory Munitions is maybe giving her exactly that opportunity.
Kate: Isn’t it beautiful? Imagine living here.
Betty: Yeah. I do, actually. I’ve been saving for a place like this since I started working.
Kate: Why? That’s what husbands are for?
Betty: Did you never want something of your own?
“That’s what husbands are for”. I love that the scene is shot on the threshold, because this is all Betty can imagine – probably, even if she wanted that normality Russell is currently working eagerly to fit her into, she couldn’t betray herself enough to get it – but Kate is right there in-between two things, the extremely limited world her father forced her to live in and the radical notion that she should be able to choose her own life for herself and not have to depend on others to provide it for her. Then, Betty asks Kate to become her “housemate”, and Kate says “you’re on”, except she doesn’t fully realize what this means to Betty.
The finished news reel is horrible. It’s like a mirror for Betty, showing her all the ways in which she is “wrong” and all the ways in which society wants her to be different – she doesn’t have children (“They gave me kids?!”), and worse, she doesn’t have a husband returning from the war so she can go back to pruning roses (“It’s not just love of country, that keeps Betty going, it’s her love of a very special man. Once her husband comes home from fighting Jerry, she’ll be happy to return to her wifely duties.”). What could be more terrible, more insulting than to be told that the way she has imagined her own personal happiness is wrong, that all her secret hopes and feelings and desires and that love she isn’t even allowed to openly acknowledge are flawed because they don’t fit into what Russell Joseph created?
Lorna: I never imagined they would do this.
Betty: Shows you what a freak I am. They had to make up a whole set of lies about me.
Lorna: You listen to me, Betty. You are a skilled, hard-working, decent girl. And that’s what women who watch this will see, that’s what they’ll wanna be.
Betty: Nobody would wanna be me, Mrs Corbett. Nobody.
She takes it as a personal insult, but there is the additional layer of grievance because he is using her to tell a lie to other girls, to coax them into working in the factory for all the wrong reasons.
Betty: You’re asking women to trust a lie.
Russell Joseph: What we want is the lie. Love, war, the whole damn thing, it’s the lies that stitch it all together. And I can tell from here, you do your share every day.
This goes to the core of her being, because he is insulting everything that is important to her. The war provided her with this opportunity to escape and to maybe buy that house and exist on her own terms. And love isn’t a lie – how can it be when it has this transformative power (and how Betty changes whenever Kate is near is truly a magical thing). If all of this is a lie, then her entire existence is in question, and then there’s the final sentence, this threat, almost, this “I see right through you”. And all she can do is hit him.
She later tries to explain to Kate how it made her feel, and again (they are having this conversation in bed, but Betty’s sitting on the covers and makes herself leave), Kate says exactly that one vital thing that Betty needs to hear.
Kate: I don’t care what other people say, I thought you were great.
Betty: Except it wasn’t me up there and everybody knew it.
Kate: So the director made a few things up, people just thought it was fun.
Betty: I looked like an idiot, Kate. Did you see them laughing? They know I’d never be that girl on screen.
Kate: You wouldn’t want to.
Betty: The thing is, sometimes I would. It would make so many things easier.
Kate: Betty.
Betty: I mean, look at you. You’re here a month and already you fit right in. Stupid to ever think that I could do this.
Kate: You don’t need everybody liking you. Just the ones that matter.
Gladys
Hazel: You swarm around here like you’re the poster girl for a happy engagement, but ask yourself: if your fiancé loves you so much, why did he come wandering my way?
Awesomely, in an episode that is all about using film for propaganda, creating lies for a specific purpose, soothing an audience that fears social change, Gladys interprets her own conflict – James’ affair – through the lens that Hitchcock provides in Suspicion. She watches the movie in which Cary Grant plays a “complete charmer who turns out a callous rake”, and articulates her own fear – that she is about to marry someone she does not truly know, who might turn out to be an awful person – by identifying with the female protagonist of the film. The experience of watching the film makes her go to James’ apartment and reveal that she knows about Hazel.
James: It was want of an education that led me here. This was all an idiotic attempt to prepare myself for my wedding night.
Doctor: You feel the man should be more experienced?
James: I expect my fiancé will appreciate it when the time comes.
Doctor: Young women these days can be more sophisticated than you think.
James: Not Gladys. She’s an innocent.
This is the core of all of James’ and Gladys’ issues. These destructive ideas they have about each other because of the roles assigned by society and by their social class. He assumes she will expect him to perform when all she wants is to be loved. He thinks she is this innocent virgin who has never thought of sex and in fact she has desires just like all the other women surrounding her. He is unable to perceive her as a human being with ideas and pleasures and a sex drive because society tells him she isn’t, and the whole season is about him learning that she isn’t that: she is the woman who decided to work the floor and he admires it, she is the woman who has ideas about how the business should be run and he admires it, and finally, she becomes the woman he can share his intimate thoughts and desires with when they finally manage to overcome the fictional restrictions on how close they are allowed to be, both mentally and physically.
For now, they are still struggling. Gladys is painfully aware of the double standard that allows him to “bring home the bride to dear old mom and then run away back with a factory girl”, and the repercussions of her doing the same thing remain unnamed. “I ran before the walls caved in”, she says.
Gladys struggles with this for several reasons: there’s the very personal fear of not truly knowing the man she is going to marry, but also the frustration with the double-standard, the fear of repeating the mistakes her parents made and the hypocrisy of it all, especially when they are later in the parlour of a reverend they want for their wedding to receive “lessons”.
Gladys: I know you must have felt something for Hazel, otherwise why would you have been with her?
James: For the experience. Gladys I can’t show up on our wedding night with hardly a clue.
Gladys: And what, she was your education?
James: In a manner of speaking!
Gladys: Why not come to me?
James: Gladys…
Gladys: Cause I’m not that kind of girl?
James: That kind of girl gets around, and a girl that gets around leaves her fellows… unfortunate souvenirs.
Gladys: HAZEL MCDOUGALL GAVE YOU THE CLAP?!
James: I’ve taken a cure. Gladys, you’ve never made a mistake?
Gladys: I’m still a virgin if that’s what you’re asking?
James: I was still a virgin. Now, I’ve supported you working in the factory, making new friends, and you think I like that? No, but I love you. You can’t cherry-pick what suits you, Gladys.
[…]
James: You ready to talk to me now?
Gladys: We’ve done that. All those nights at the lake, railing against our parents, vowing we’d never be like them.
James: We’re not like them.
Gladys: No. And yet you’re having affairs just like my father. Am I supposed to play my mother’s role now, flawlessly hostessing with a bottle for company?
James: Unless you’re in a uniform, nobody sees you as a man. People can’t see that I’m an American, that this is not my country’s war. They think I’m a coward.
Gladys: And an affair with Hazel somehow proves that you’re not?
James: No. But it did make me feel like a man.
Gladys: What If I were the one that strayed?
James: That’s different.
Gladys: Why should it be? What would you do?
James: Don’t make me answer that.
Russell Joseph later asks Gladys if James is aware that she isn’t perfect, and this is really the entire problem they are facing; that he reduces her to someone she is not (“You put me up on a pedestal, James, and when I fall, I’m gonna hurt something.”), and they can’t be together if they can’t be honest about who they are (“I’m no saint. And if you can’t stop seeing me like that, this will never work. I want you to see me across the room and waltz me into bed. And when you get me there, stop me talking.”). It’s the theme that runs through the entire episode: characters struggling to be perceived as the complex, contradictory and flawed individuals they are rather than being fit into some kind of constructed cliché about what a woman or a man or a soldier should be.
Lorna
Lorna: there’s Marco, who gives her a strange new sense of confidence, who fits into that empty space in her marriage, and this would all be easy if Bob were a terrible person, but he is not. He came home from his war with all the things he could not share with her and now they both fail to overcome this silence between them. Lorna is confronted with that specific lack in her marriage when Bob seems to find the words to talk about war in his letters to Edith’s children (“The letters he writes my kids are so real it’s like he’s over there.”) and yet fails to do the same for his own two sons, maybe fearing the memories that writing about his own experiences in his war instead of imagining someone else’s would bring up, and secretly resenting them for volunteering.
Lorna finds something she needs in Marco; at the same time, Bob is also replacing an emptiness by taking care of Edith’s children. Her son understands his pain in a way that Lorna can’t - “They hurt you back”, he says about the Germans.
Motivated specifically by the fact that Marco has a tendency to bring girls into the storeroom, she sets out to have Mr Akins establish rules of conduct for the workers. She tries to introduce a moral code that would serve several purposes at once – it would ensure that the factory can avoid at least some of the pregnancy and not lose that many qualified workers, it would perhaps stop Marco from being with other women who aren’t her, and it would be a moral code that she herself would have to stick to, since the rules she sets for herself aren’t very effective in actually keeping her away from Marco.
Lorna: Without rules, that’s a recipe for disaster.
Akins: We can’t fight human nature, Lorna.
Lorna: We can certainly try.
Akins is doubtful of her proposal at first, offering to put rubbers in the men’s locker room instead and basically insisting that this is unavoidable – until he sees Kate and Leon, ironically engaged in an entirely innocent activity (Leon is showing Kate how to sing), and in the end, it’s Akins’ racism that makes him greenlight the code of conduct (“It’s awful, things get folks up to down here.”)
In the end, all her rules don’t help. Lorna ends up sleeping with Marco. The next morning, she finds a letter that Bob wrote their children – finally sharing his feelings with them – and she resents him for it because it’s too late and she resents herself because she cheated, because she would have needed that intimacy and truth before. They have both found something outside their marriage to make up for an emptiness but now that they have, it serves to somehow bring them closer together. Bob builds a kite and convinces her to go outside on a beautiful day and let it fly – and she just runs and runs until it takes off, and it’s rather beautiful symbol for their respective lives (including the failed attempts to get the kite to fly…), hoping to restore their connection because it’s still beautiful and they care enough to work on it.
Random notes:
The whole idea of the soldiers returning from the war and everything, but especially the women, going back to how they were before is really interesting in terms of Betty and Kate, but it only occurred to me recently that Lorna is actually the character who has been subverting that concept since the last war: Bob returned disabled and she is the breadwinner of the family.
Kate asks Leon to teach her to sing like Billie Holiday:
Leon: Until you’ve been loved and left like Billie, I doubt I could teach you a thing. I’m gonna get some corn.
Kate: Are we listening to the same record, because I hear a lady singing ‘don’t judge me’. We all have our secrets.
Which is such an interesting thing for her to say a couple of scenes before the director tells Betty that he can see right through hers.
Betty would be an amazing movie critic. On Hitchcock’s Suspicion – I WENT OUT TO SMOKE. OFTEN.
Also, Betty’s reaction when Gladys reveals her “dalliance” is like my favourite thing ever (“Aren’t you the dark horse.”). She is so endlessly delighted (that sparkle in her eye when she teases her about it) to find out that Gladys isn’t all proper – and I think this actually starts their friendship, the fact that Gladys too has secrets and a side she doesn’t show openly. This is the first time she sees more in her that just the privileged, rich girl. Also, Betty, Gladys and Kate are my ultimate OT3.
Gladys: He was an airman. I wanted to be kind to him and get some experience under my belt.
Betty: And a few other things, by the sound of it.
Gladys: Betts! We didn’t go all the way, what kind of girl do you think I am?
Betty: Trying to figure that out. It’s time to pay your fiancé a visit.
I really like the scene between Leon and Kate in the storeroom – he touches her, and she seems to have this initial instinct of flinching but doesn’t, because it’s explicitly non-threatening and non-sexual, so it’s okay. He seems to have this instinctual understanding of her boundaries and respects them.
Kate: So I’m not the best singer in the world, but hey that’s no reason to throw me the cold shoulder.
Leon: You think your singing’s why I won’t talk to you.
Kate: No, I think it’s because I’m not…. Like you. And I’m just telling you, I don’t give a hoot.
Leon: Truth is, I can’t be seen with someone who sings from her neck.
Kate: That is where my throat is.
Leon: But that ain’t where the song is. You’re keeping it trapped up in that little box up there, when the feeling comes from here, and the power, from here.
"This policy reads like the best bits of Lady Chatterley’s Lovers."
"Stuff that bomb like you're slapping Hitler's face!"
Betty: If it takes too long it’s not news, right? It’s history.
I don't know why but Marco seriously always gets the most ridiculous lines. "Girls these days. Just too eager. They haven’t figured the beauty’s in what a woman hides."
Gladys didn’t get “sold into white slavery”, but she DID meet BOHEMIANS and lost at strip poker!
Russell Joseph: That’s a real modern marriage seminar!
Gladys decides that James also has to get Hazel some penicillin.
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