Season 31 - The Cazalets (2001-2002)
This family saga taking place during the first few years of World War II is ostensibly about "the ways in which English life changed during the war years, particularly for women" but is really about how awful men are to women. I can't actually believe at one time I viewed this nostalgically as a comfort watch when women are being date raped, having a rape-related pregnancy, having said rape-related baby die, having crucial medical information withheld, and just suffering all the microaggressions women have come to expect on a daily basis. I don't know if I just had my head in the sand the last time I watched this or it was sadly what I, as a woman, just expected. I hadn't been educated enough to see the world around me for what it should be not what it was. Even Hugh Bonneville as the least offensive male Cazalet isn't without sin. Though nothing compares to Stephen Dillane's Edward Cazalet. To put in mildly, his behavior as Stannis Baratheon on Game of Thrones, where he literally takes his daughter Shireen and, you know, burns her alive as a sacrifice for the Lord of Light, is more humane and understandable than his detestable actions as Edward Cazalet. Let me enumerate. Where shall I start? I think I'll start with the least offensive and work my way to the ones that made me so uncomfortable I could barely stand to watch the show. So that means we start with his wife, Villy. Villy, at the age of forty-two has found herself pregnant again. She goes to her doctor and honestly tells him she doesn't think she can handle having another child, to which the doctor says, too bad, Edward will want this child and if you try to do anything stupid I'm coming after you and when is your husband free to play golf? Yes, married women had to normally defer to their husbands in regard to their sexual health, but the fact that the doctor thought he and her husband understood her body more than her just enraged be, especially given the double standard that is about to come up. Because obviously a letch like Edward isn't keeping it in his pants when he's out in the world. First there's a quickly discarded mistress that goes off from whence she came once Anna Chancellor's Diana arrives on the scene. Her and Edward have a yearslong relationship, in fact she has just given birth to Edward's bastard when Villy finds out she's pregnant. But the cherry on the top of the cake, AND the double standard, is when Diana gets pregnant a second time and because of how things stand with her husband she asks Edward to help her get an abortion. Which he is willing to do! Mainly because he's moved on from her with a young girl at the air force base he's stationed at. Though being a controlling and philadering husband isn't the worst of his sins. That would be his feelings towards his daughter, Louise. She's a happy, carefree girl who becomes withdrawn when, after her father takes her out to celebrate her birthday with dinner and a show he sexually assaults her. This won't be the only time. Every time the two of them are in the same scene you feel like he's hunting her. I felt physically ill watching this. It's no wonder the show ends with her marrying an older man, she had to escape. She had to get away from a man whom, as she bluntly said, treats her as his daughter or as his whore as it suits him. I'm queasy just thinking about this. Can we, I don't know, tie Edward up on a nice pyre and light it? We can say it's for the Lord of Light even though it's just for all the women, mothers, wives, daughters, who have been wronged. Who have not been able to do something about it. Let's do it for them.
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