We Need to Give Women Narrative Control
The Control Group is a well-produced podcast that unfortunately continues the tradition in fiction to use violence against women as a narrative prop.
Warning: The following article contains spoilers and discussions of violence against women.
The big podcast network names are ramping up their audio fiction production — Maximum Fun’s Bubble, Gimlet’s Sandra, Stitcher’s Gossip — and on June 17th, HowStuffWorks joined this list of big networks with the historical fiction podcast, The Control Group. At the time of writing this article, the first five episodes were available for download. While this podcast’s technique in audio and acting is of a professional quality, I spent most of my listening time being made uncomfortable with the portrayal of violence against women and the receding amount of time I got to hear the voice of the central woman in question. It’s one thing to be made uncomfortable by sensitive and traumatic material that needs to be discussed, and it’s another to be uncomfortable due to how it was deployed.
As a rough plot outline, a young woman named Karen Myers — though she never states this name herself — is forcibly trapped in an asylum by the mysterious figure of the government in 1960s Connecticut after being accused of a murder, one which we witness the aftermath of in the first scene. She becomes the object of the lead doctor’s obsession into psychiatric experimentation, alongside a nebulous quantity of the other women patients trapped there with her. According to writer and director Bret Wood, it’s inspired by the historical incidents of the CIA funding experimentation into mind-control and covert drug operations, though you wouldn’t have really figured this out from the first half of the podcast.
Technically speaking, this is a well-produced podcast with an extraordinarily talented cast. It does not suffer from the narrator problem we saw in Bubble, nor does it suffer from a wandering, flimsy script like we saw in Sandra. The sound design is the kind of audio I expect from a professional company like HowStuffWorks — clean, crisp, quality changes depending on what we’re hearing, and a deft hand at creating a sense of background. If someone is speaking from the radio, there is a certain sense of crackling static, and someone speaking over the phone sounds distant and slightly muffled. The acting is exactly on par with the quality of the sound design, especially in actress Hannah Fierman, who plays Karen incredibly throughout her mood swings, uncertainty, and desperation. She has believably made me doubt whether Karen is still playing along in order to find an escape, or entrap her doctor, or if she has fully been broken. Lisa Paulsen, the voice of the morally conflicted head nurse, is similarly astounding in her role as caregiver whose belief in authority has been shaken at its foundation.
Even so, I was deeply unnerved by this story, by its very conceptualization. We’re witnessing the utter and complete psychological breakdown of Karen by a man — by a madman, certainly, but by the kind of man in power who has become the bogeyman of women going to the medical profession for help. And when I say witness, I do mean witness — the first episode ends with a fully detailed scene of electroconvulsive therapy, with no fade to black, right down to the sound of putting the mouth guard in and the grunts of a woman undergoing convulsions. We are treated to audibly graphic scenes of attacks against Karen, ones that end in a hollow victory as she finds a weapon and then has it stripped from her. We are forced to listen, over and over, to Karen’s gaslighting and reprogramming, to her desperate bid for freedom ending in desolation and to the machinations of men — men she doesn’t even know exist — using her for science and glory.
Even the casual slap across her face is used as an effect to illustrate a man’s breaking point, not Karen’s. Karen barely reacts at all.
This is not to say that we shouldn’t be telling these stories — on the contrary, we must be telling these stories so that we can illustrate the past and bring to light these ignored and silenced voices and histories. And that would be happening here, but for two salient points in conceptualization: 1) while it is an obvious insinuation that Karen is part of a bigger picture, it is not clear why, if for any real reason, Karen is suffering, and 2) so far, it is more a story about a man’s descent into moral corruption, and not a story about a woman who was abused and her reactions. The man makes a mannequin out of Karen, something for him to audibly batter when he needs to further his downward spiral of a storyline.
In episode two, Karen states in dialogue to a fellow patient that you must never allow yourself to be changed by a man or owned by one. She drops hints that she’s involved in something bigger than herself; I hope she’s some kind of deep cover agent. But in five episodes released so far, all I can determine about Karen is that she’s been used by men who have abandoned her, and that she is an object of medical obsession. We see Karen through the eyes of her captors — one of whom will not even use her name and calls her “the forensic” and “the prostitute” — and, only very occasionally, her fellow victims in the form of Charlotte, who serves as the foil to Karen’s initial spirit. Even in the descriptions of the podcast, the focus is placed on the male doctor and his descent into ethical and moral horror, not on the women suffering under his abuse. I have not witnessed anything that truly tells me Karen’s side of the story, that shows me continuously what Karen thinks and feels as we go deeper into the darkness. Her attempts to gain narrative control are just steamrolled over: she begs the doctor to ask her questions about her and not about the one night of the murder, and he turns off the tape; she tries to escape and is foiled violently and cruelly. The further into the storyline we go, the more we lose Karen and her voice — literally, since she spends the majority of one later episode in a forced medical coma and speaks for less than two minutes. As we go deeper into Karen’s abuse, we should be hearing more from her, not less.
Additionally, I should note that examining both the broad and narrow scope of damage this man has done to many women is necessary, but is completely undermined by any lack of accountability. The doctor says things like “the female mind is more supple, more malleable, than the male, which has developed a stronger resistance” and the agent replies with comparing women to lab mice, and they are never contradicted. If you are going to present a historically accurate framework in this fashion, you are shouldering the responsibility of then presenting why it is sexist and wrong, and declaring it so explicitly in the course of the work. The head nurse tries to reign him in when she perceives what’s happening to Karen as “going too far”, but it doesn’t last long, and she still believes in the value of his work and her own and says so.
This is not a story about women liberating themselves from the constraints that medical science long slapped onto them, from terms like “hysteria” to “mother’s little helpers”. This is a story about government conspiracy and ethically corrupt scientific practice where, once again, women are only the tools to bring this story home. Karen can’t be removed and replaced by a sexy lamp without damaging parts of the storyline, but her narrative arc so far is about supporting a man’s story, a man’s goals, giving him an object to be obsessed with.
Looking around at our political and social climate, is another fiction about the subjugation and dehumanization of women, one that does not give the women in question agency or focus, one that is not a story from a woman to express her experiences and history, really what we need?
I cling to the frail hope that in the last five episodes, we will see Karen triumph over both man and government because I, and women around the world, have suffered enough at the hands of both without it being the only plot point an author can come up with for women in fiction. The problem isn’t the presence of these stories — after all, these are realities we must contend with, woven into the fabric of our social consciousness — but the continued lack of accountability and lack of focus on the victims within them.
Even if she does triumph, it will feel hollow to me. I will have had to be broken alongside Karen in order to get there.
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