Jamie (Sam Heughan) and Claire (Caitrionia Balfe) drinking, eating, confiding on their wedding night (Outlander 7)
Friends and readers,
I carry on my comparison of Outlander with Poldark (see Outlander as a descendant of Waverley): as film art, as mini-series, made using the same kinds of cinematography (rich, mesmerizing, computer enhancement continual), dramaturgy (figures in a landscape not on a stage, montage, juxaposition), briefer dialogue, both seen as “women’s material,” albeit with plenty of male heroes and villains about, this dyptych again shows where the new Poldark is lacking (see scripts): the pair are symmetrically structured with the underlying paradigm for both a repetition of the same alluring exploration. As Emily Nussbaum puts it,
Outlander is, finally, as thoughtful about male vulnerability as it is about female desire, a rarity for television. It’s a quality that makes the show appealingly romantic in multiple senses (Emily Nussbaum, “Out of Time,” New Yorker, April 8, 2016)
When Dougal proposes that Claire marry Jamie, he says to Jamie and Claire separately that his purpose is both to secure Claire from the depredations of Black Jack Randall (yes played with fierce intensity by Tobias Menzies), and (as Murtargh [Duncan Lacroix] also suggested was needed, wanted) and to secure for Jamie an older mature woman.
It might startle some viewer that Jamie responds to Claire asking him if he will mind that she is not a virgin, no, as long as she doesn’t mind that he is (not that he’s never kissed a woman, “I said I was a virgin, not a monk”). But it fits the frequent reversals of roles in this series.
Garrison Commander when viewed as a whole is the second of two linked phases: in the first (from Jane’s memories in Rent or Outlander 5) we see Tobias capture, at first seem to negotiate with but then longingly flay Jamie, flog him until his back is permanently seared, scarred, somehow made shameful (like a slave’s); in the second, Garrison Commander, Claire lands in his hands for a few hours, and just as she thinks she has succeeded in winning him over to take her into an English situation where she can make her way back to Craig Na Dunn or where she wants to go, he kicks her hard in the stomach, threatens her humiliatingly and seems about to knife her mortally (as it is mortally dangerous for Jamie to come into the English lair).
The Wedding has three phases of love-making: the first just after the episode begins and the two, just married, come into their apartment together, almost as a duty:
the second after a long period of conversation about themselves, only Jamie tells far more of his family, background, memories than Claire, this a deep coming together lovingly, tenderly:
and then the third after Jamie tells her of his preparations for the wedding, where he takes over the woman’s role it seems — securing the priest and ring, getting the proper beautiful clothes which will endow them with great dignity, and finally the ceremony itself; and then third, hungrily, far more aggressively, letting go,
after which they are hungry and morning has come. We are allowed to dwell on each phase feeling it with no interference as it were.
It is framed by another wedding: as the episode opens we see Claire walking a city, perhaps London streets, in modern outfit with Robin Hood hat, and Frank suddenly eagerly begging her to marry him now, at city hall, with no preparations. She protests she has not yet met his parents, to which he responds, well now you’ll meet them as Mrs Frank Randall.
He is (like Jamie) while in the male position, yet abject and in need of her permission. This scene makes a striking contrast to the elaborate decorative ritual Jamie and Claire go through,
and lest we forget this, at end when morning comes and Jamie has left the room, Claire picks up the wedding dress, and out tumbles her wedding ring from Frank. In order to marry Jamie she had taken the ring off, and put it down the front of her corset, and now it falls to the floor almost going down a crack. But not quite. She kneels and picks it up and puts it on the ring finger of her right hand. This knits The Wedding back to the Garrison Commander for of course we know the same actor plays Black Jack as plays Frank.
There is nothing like this kind of consistent loving development in Horsfield’s Poldark. it’s partly the result again of taking a small and self-enclosed portion of a single novel (Chapters 12-15, “The Garrison Commander,” “A Marriage is Announced,” “A Marriage Takes Place,” “Revelations of the Bridal Chamber”); but it’s also this trusting to the material, not feeling that you have to supply something else, or qualify it.
Nussbaum suggests that what we watch in the first season is a “continual crumbling” of a bridge they build between them. I think that’s so, from when she “disobeys” him and he beats her, to when after the witch trial, she at long last tells him of who and what she is, where she comes from (the future), her other husband, and he generously takes her to the stone and leaves her to make up her mind. She does — for him, and again it’s his vulnerability risked, and her desire knitting them as one, her strength too as she says to him, “Get up, soldier” (making us recall her as as a battlefield nurse).
I just reveled in these two episodes. Yes because I loved the love-making (the first time watching I was embarrassed by the candour and directness of the scenes), but also because the way the development was placed against a background of serious disruption of any morality among the English and hedonistic vicarious joy among the Scots (though sometimes the episode again made me feel Claire had landed among a group of disciplined frat boys). In Garrison Commander there is an earnest British soldier who first sees Claire while she is with the Scotsman seeking rent, and thinks she may be their prisoner; he takes her for safety to the English fort, only to find she is now open prey and he can do nothing about it because of his lower rank. This holdover of emotion of a subaltern is matched by Dougal (Graham McTavish) in The Wedding, who clearly would cuckold Jamie, were Claire to be open to this; Jamie’s is as subject to Dougal and Colum as other of the British officers who would try to stop Randall, protect Claire but they can’t. Dougal is the linchpin of both episodes: following Claire into the English stronghold, pulling her out, engineering this wedding, to hold onto her. He has decided she is not a spy and wants her identity as useful to him and has a fierce authority over Jamie, his nephew it seems.
These patterns are not found in the chapters, rather they are filled with nuanced dialogue and thought between Claire and Jamie. In the novel for these chapters there are no memories of Frank. There is loss here: effective as the outward dialogue in the scenes of clash in Garrison, of argument at table, and of gentle and raucous comedy (the priest who must be dragged out of bed and then bribed to perform the ceremony, the trading of Biblical passages, Ned Gowan (Bill Patterson) among teasing prostitutes who are presences out of The Beggar’s Opera), I found the long give-and-take conversations in Gabaldon’s novel much more moving. The movie can risk only suggestive fragments of Jamie’s childhood, boyhood, who was this relative and who that. This is a building up of a picture of him as having pride as Laird.
The next episode, Both Sides Now (Outlander 8) will be a continual movement back and forth from 1943 and the desperate Frank at the police office, with the Reverend Wakefield, told by Mrs Graham that some supernatural neolithic charm has taken Claire off to another time, with Claire and Jamie traveling or wandering themselves as semi-outcasts through the highland’s landscape. They encounter a beggar, Hugh Munro in the novel, now called Willie (Finn Den Hertog) whom Jamie welcomes warmly, and has himself been made permanently mute (his tongue cut out), his feet ruined, during a captivity among the Turks, in Algiers, as a galley slave. Now he wanders through the world.
He is a parallel to Frank.
And this new trio comes near danger.
Again this is a lingering juxtaposition not in the book. But this is for another blog.
Ellen
Ellen And Jim Have A Blog, Two 
[…] 6 and 7: Garrison commander; Wedding Nights (2): […]
What I realised only yesterday while re-watching those two episodes is how much “The Garrison Commander” is really a story about Claire and Frank. At this point, as seen in the previous two or so episodes, she is missing her husband very much, and so she is willing or at least hoping to see some part of Frank in Jack. Her two lives, so to speak, intertwine in this episode. There is this lovely detail in the title card (or whatever the correct name is) after the opening credits where the camera shows us the room with Jack’s coat in it, his shaving kit – and Frank’s watch. A symbol of the connection between the two men in Claire’s mind and time that both connects and separates them?
Later, we find the parallel in the shaving scene with Claire’s flashback. Of course, the episode also introduces us to Jack’s obsession with Jamie, and it is without doubt a powerful scene, but I found myself mesmerised by the long conversation between Claire and Jack. The back and forth, his disclosure of the darkness inside him, Claire crying, not so much about Jamie here, I think, or about the horrible events at Fort William, but about the loss of all the good she imagines in Jack via his (perceived) connection to Frank. That’s why she tells him she is happier than he knows when she believes she has succeeded in redeeming him. And when Jack effectively kills that belief, it also in a way marks the beginning of the end of Claire’s love for Frank. It’s somewhat telling that what follows is her marriage to another man. We still have that very sweet detail of Frank’s theme playing during the end credits of “The Wedding”, after Claire has retrieved his ring, and there is her attempted return to her own time in “Both Sides Now”, but I think that scene really marks a turning point.
(We find, of course, a parallel and opposite scene in the first episode of Season 2 where Claire subconsciously expects to see Jack in Frank.)
It’s all those parallels and interconnections throughout the series or the way that things are conveyed simply by looks and gestures that really fascinate me! I could linger over some scenes for hours. 🙂 Terrific storytelling and acting, which I definitely wasn’t expecting at first.
Thank you. That’s very astute: deep Jungian psychology about doubles — doppelganger is the german word. There is so much cross-reference, contrast and parallel. The way the book and film adaptation are talked about centers on Claire and Jamie, but as important, indeed central to the triangle is Frank/Black Jack. The evil Black Jack goes after Jamie sexually; torture is done not to extract information (no one who understands what is done and how seriously believes that) but to torture, to destroy a personality and terrorize a people. The good Frank wants his wife and their loving life together back. I had not noticed the music. I encourage you to respond more. I hope to go on to the second season soon. I have to read the book as well as watch the films in order to appreciate both more.
I haven’t read the books; not sure I ever will, because I love the TV series so much. 🙂 Comparison always take something of that away, I find. I’m nearing the end of Season 2 on basically my second watching now (I had re-watched some scenes before, but not the whole series).
Yes, Claire and Jamie get a lot of fan attention, but I agree, the story actually has four central characters. What struck me a while ago – especially with the role “Time” as such plays in the story – is how all four of them at some point in their lives get stuck in time. A part of them is caught at some moment in time while life goes on for the people around them. And them being out of sync, they react in a way that hurts people, whether they want to or not.
Frank naturally can’t move on from losing his wife without knowing what happened to her. So when she returns more than two years later, his idea of their relationship is very different from hers, because for her so much has changed in the meantime, not the least her feelings for Frank.
Basically the same happens with Claire who can’t get over the loss of Jamie, even twenty years later.
Jack is fixed in the moment of Jamie’s second flogging. He has to learn that this experience which has been so important to him doesn’t mean nearly the same for Jamie like he has assumed all this time. Jack is only able to move on by reliving that moment, by acting out his fantasy of breaking and possessing Jamie. (We find his demeanour very changed, very relaxed, when he meets Claire and Jamie in France.)
Jamie’s case is interesting because I actually find two instances of him being “stuck”. The obvious one is his PTSD after Wentworth. Then there is his capture at Lallybroch. He is tortured by his recollection of Jack going after Jenny, even believes Dougal’s story of Jenny giving birth to Jack’s child. I really like this example, as horrible as it comes across, because there is a great deal of humour in it, too. Jamie beats himself up, imagining some high drama; and Jenny, wonderful character that she is, just goes: “Oh, you mean that guy all those years ago?”
And yes, I agree, Jack’s molestation and torture of, well, quite a lot of characters in the story is never mainly about sex. When one looks at all the scenes, it is always about submission, as corny as it sounds. There is a certain nasty, sick rationale about it that reminds me of characters from de Sade novels who also rationalise their abuse of others. (“Is there ever a good reason for rape?”, as Claire asks Colum.) If Claire had thrown herself upon Jack’s mercy during their first encounter, he might even have acted the gentleman. Instead she runs, insults him, spits at him. Jamie at Fort William is first given the chance of escaping his second flogging altogether by having sex with Jack, and later on, during the flogging, by being asked repeatedly if he is ready to give in, to beg for mercy. (Jack’s obsession with Jamie really starts with Jamie’s repeated refusal to submit to him.) Jenny is offered the choice between watching her brother die and submitting to Jack sexually. The list goes on and on. It is about exerting his will and his power over others, by all means he perceives as necessary.
There is also a bit of iconography going on. Not sure if I had caught it this time around (I missed it the first time) if I hadn’t read it in the Making of book, with Jamie and Jack in Wentworth Prison representing a pieta, just before Jack mocks Jamie’s “Christ-like” passivity in suffering, which in turn connects to Jamie remarking to Jenny there was a devil in Jack Randall and also to Murtagh in Season 2 concluding Jack really had to be the devil’s spawn.
On a more positive note! (I just paused to have a discussion with a colleague about the villain in “Jessica Jones” who is far too close to real life for me, despite superpowers; archetypical stalker/rapist/control freak. Brought back memories. I don’t Black Jack on top of that as well.) For a series that focuses mainly on the female side of things, I was surprised to see that fatherhood plays such an important role in Outlander. Especially the high number of men who take on the role (or at least name) of father for children not their own: Frank, Jack, Reverend Wakefield, Colum, Louise’s husband, even Jamie to an extent when he adopts Fergus.
Clarissa
By the way, I really like your assessment of Outlander as a triangle. It is, isn’t it? Whichever way and timeline one looks at it.
One last note on the topic, and then I’ll shut up. (It’s always dangerous to encourage me!)
Yesterday, while finishing the second watching of Season 2, I noticed that “The Hail Mary” actually contains a mirror scene to “The Garrison Commander”. I had watched that particular scene twice before, but only now that I am more familiar with Season 1 did I see the connection. It’s of course the pub scene where Claire tries to convince Jack to go along with his brother’s wishes while he tries to enlist her help in convincing Alex otherwise. Again, we have a heart-to-heart, he reflecting, baring his soul, she trying to get him to do the right thing. In a twist, this time around Claire doesn’t try to save his soul while we get the feeling that’s more or less the very thing Jack asks of her. (I like the prolonged pause after his anguished “Help me…” before he continues with the sentence. It’s the same in the earlier scene in Alex’s room.)