One of the particulars of the series is the absence of substantive females. Although Suzanne, the (maybe) villain of the piece, is certainly strong, she is more a fantasy than anything else. We never learn where she comes from, how she ends up with Bodine, where she goes from here. Having said that, she certainly cuts a different figure than most fantasy babes. She shoots Ray, hits him with her car, punches him out, and yet he is entranced. Nothing wrong with that. The role is acted with verve and much more than meets the script.
The male bonding scene during the stakeout is terrific. Do the guys want to play poker or figure out women? Fraser's hesitant, awkward silences contrast against Louis's bravado and Ray's insistence on "signs."
Of course, the highlight is Fraser's description of his time with "a woman, once." We watch his back as he tells Ray the tale about being with this woman "the world was white", all the while gazing out the window. (We know, don't we, that men can't share intimacies face to face, so this is a great choice.) The camera slowly pulls in and changes focus from his back to his face reflected in the glass. Watching, but not watching, Fraser's face fill with pain is heartbreaking. That Ray is asleep during the monologue only heightens the sense of Fraser's loneliness.
Ray's encounter with Suzanne at the cabin is great -- the soundtrack makes the moment sexy and tense. The kiss is passionate, and then violent. Cool. Fraser's response to Ray's "She kissed me" --"*After* she hit you?"-- is priceless.
The voiceover wrap-up of Suzanne's departure is I think, hasty and not all that well constructed, although the shot of Ray strolling down the avenue among the streetlights is really rather pretty. All in all, we learn something new about all of our boys. And a Kiss is NOT just a kiss.
This episode really stands apart from the rest of the series, and not just because it is the only 'comic' episode to centre on Ray. I think it stands apart because it is the most purely comic episode produced by DS: it uses the material traditionally associated with comedy, the obstacles in the path of true love. Its central conceit - love is a hit-and-run accident - is convincing, funny, and gives it great dramatic unity. This metaphor governs the entire structure of the episode. It provides the means by which Ray and Suzanne first meet, both physically and metaphorically: she runs him over; she hits on him (gives him the kiss of life)and runs away. Each subsequent encounter follows the same pattern: first she shoots at Ray and drives off, then she kisses him and hits him on the head - and runs off again. The idea comes right out in the dialogue here: Ray: She kissed me. Fraser: Before or after she hit you? Finally, as they are both threatening to hit each other which, given the situation(Suzanne in the army truck hurtling towards Ray who is behind the Riv with a gun)looks likely to be the last time, disaster is averted and Ray's fantasy Suzanne is destroyed in another road accident. The episode pefectly balances the tragic and comic potential of the situation together with the romance and realism of its presentation. And what is most remarkable perhaps is that the ending preserves that balance, although with the final accident the dynamics have had to change. The idea that the delicate illusions of romance must end when lovers come together and discover who each other really is, is presented as another version of the hit-and-run theme in the final scene: Ray kisses Suzanne who then drives off. In this way, the tragic romance and the comic reality of the situation are perfectly preserved in the paradox stated by Ray in the voice-over: she loves him and that's why she left him. Just as in love, apparent nonsense makes complete sense.
The scene which I think most captures that delicate balance is the one in which Fraser and Ray investigate the appartment used by Suzanne. The whole "floral" sheets thing is a delightful bit of scripting and playing; the heavy emphasis given to the adjective in Marciano's New Jersey accent gives added comic effect. Both of them are conducting an investigation in the manner of the cop show, but whereas Fraser is attempting to ascertain the nature of the situation in the crime plot, the 'real' situation, Ray is trying to work out Suzanne's relationship to the bloke he's seen her with - he's investigating the situation in the romance plot. Whereas Fraser can read virtually nothing in everthing he finds in the appartment which is very bare and doesn't furnish much for his mind to work on, Ray reads everthing into nothing - the bare appartment leaves everything to his imagination. The contrast between Ray and Fraser's attitudes to exactly the same thing produces subtle comedy: what produces in Fraser calm and logic, produces in Ray jealousy and torture. The climax of the sequence - "there she goes, Fraser! The woman of my dreams." - is a neat moment of bathos, produced by the contrast between what Ray feels and the knowledge of the audience and of Fraser that he knows absolutely nothing about the woman.
The sense of the ridiculous which pervades this episode is perhaps the key to its success. Instead of just balancing a knife edge between romance and realism, it plays both off against the ridiculous, and think Marciano's performance is largely responsable for this. He has always played Ray as a three-dimensional character, despite the often two-dimensional nature of the scripting he is given - the earliest episodes, especcially the ones written by Haggis, are particular offenders. This ability, or perhaps conscious decision, to play the character bigger than the script serves Marciano well as the series progresses. He is, in fact, recorded as saying that he was irritated by the presentation of his character as a stereotypical Italian-american, and took steps for "the betterment of Ray" (see DS: the Official Companion). What really allows all the elements in this episode to balance so well is Marciano's portrayal of a man whose reason tells him how ridiculous the whole situation is; who is stuck between Fraser's calm reason which is too detatched for him to believe in, and his own irrationality (the "shortie pyjamas" bit springs to mind).
What has always puzzled me about this episode is the way in which Fraser's famous monologue does not appear to fit in dramatically, apart from the irony it generates in the final voice-over. I'm not saying that everything must have its place, but that it would be unlike DS to produce so unified an episode and miss something like that. One explanation could be that Haggis did not think Fraser got enough attention in this episode. However, I think the monolgue and the subsequent irony add an extra dimension. It undercuts the dominant presention of Fraser in this episode as the embodiment of detatched reason, which is really Fraser as seen through Ray's eyes. Fraser appears on the surface as one who might say "I am armed against love with the breastplate of reason" [I wish I could remember who said that]. Out of the two of them, Fraser and Ray, for the one most likely to find themselves in the situation around which the episode revolves, you'd pick Ray every time because you just don't expect that sort of behaviour from OFM, and neither does Ray ("...but you wouldn't know anything about that, would you, Fraser?"). The irony is that even Fraser, of all people the one you'd least expect, has known the craziness of love: AMOR VINCIT OMNIA.
In 'The Short Story: a critical introduction', Valerie Shaw says that "it has become virtually a commonplace to point out that photography in the form of cinema is closely allied to the short story" (p.14). It doesn't seem too far fetched to grant a television series the ability to fulfill the same function as a collection of short stories. Shaw says: "even though each single story could cover only a limited field of experience, a collection of stories could be made to reflect life's diversity" (Shaw p.12), which seems an accurate description of what DS does, focussing in particular on life in the city. I think, however, that YMRT gets closer to reproducing the short story form on the screen than perhaps any other episode. It aims at "not a transcription of actuality, but at a patterned dramatisation of life" (Gorham Munson on Edgar Allen Poe as a short story writer, quoted in 'The Short Story: the Reality of Artifice' by Charles May, p.120). The American critic Mark Schorer suggests that the short story is an art of "moral revelation", and Walter Sullivan asserts that the fundamental methodological purpose of the short story is a change from innocence to knowledge in character(s) and reader/viewer (May p.121). In YMRT, the change is not so much from innocence to knowledge, as from apparant innocence to remembered knowledge. Just as Ray's experience reawakens Fraser's memory of Victoria, it also reawakens our own memories of the times we have experienced the craziness of love. The audience goes from an objective viewer of Ray's situation, seeing him as a comic character and having a laugh at his expense, to recognising their own weaknesses in him and identifying with this apparently loopy series of events. It's kind of a case of "oh, I'd never get mixed up in anything like that.....uh, wasn't there that time when I...". As time goes by, the fundamental things apply and love is one of those fundamental things. However much we think we're immune, however much we've forgotten what it can do to us, however insane we think it is, it will sooner or later, if it hasn't already, turn us into complete idiots: you must remember this.