“The Gang Gets Satirized and Doesn’t Like It” is S04E04 of the legal comedy-drama TV series The Good Fight, aired May 7, 2020.
One of the law firm’s clients is upset because he believes he is being caricatured in a popular play, C*cksucker in Chains. He says he wants them to “gawker” it, which basically means “Somebody’s talking about me in a way I don’t like, and I’m rich enough to shut them up.”
The play was written by a former employee of the law firm, and the characters and relationships do bear a carnivalesque likeness. Diane Lockhart (Christine Baranski), the series’ lead, is caricatured as a lawyer who rips off her business suit to reveal a dominatrix outfit beneath. The caricature of Diane’s boss, a black man, rips off his business suit to reveal an antebellum slave costume, and is rapturously dominated by the lawyer-dominatrix, including bullwhipping and anal penetration with a dildo (off camera).
The play within the TV show is a rather unsubtle take on gender and race politics in the workplace. It’s the way Jeremy O. Harris’ Slave Play would be viewed by someone with the values of an upper-class law firm. The idea of “overly powerful woman as dominatrix” also calls back to the infamous SPY magazine cover with Hilary Clinton’s face superimposed onto a woman in a dominatrix outfit. It’s also a funhouse-mirror reflection of the racial dynamics of The Good Fight, about a historically black legal firm that recently began hiring white people, and is now owned by another, all-white-run legal firm.
The characters who see their on-stage parodies are affected, as much as they are loathe to admit it, and question themselves with imaginary dialogues with their doppelgangers. (Not the show’s first use of fantasy, I understand.) Even art considered crude or exploitative can provoke consideration.
Diane and her husband Kurt (Gary Cole) watch the play, and are powerfully aroused afterwards. “We probably don’t want to examine that, do we?” Diane asks Kurt in bed with him. “I don’t,” he says, and rolls over.
The next night, Diane dolls herself up in a dominatrix outfit and riding crop (and hurts herself by whacking her thigh with it), and poses in front of a mirror. The riding crop is apparently the accessory for the dominant woman, her almost universally recognized metonymy.
However, when Kurt sees her in this outfit in their bed, he shuts down, even though she tries to pass it off as a joke. Diane has an imaginary conversation with her caricature/actress, trying to figure out why she and Kurt had such a strong reaction after the play, but he was so cold to her in the dominatrix outfit. The phantasm tells Diane that Kurt was turned on by the image, but he doesn’t want Diane to be the caricature. “People can be turned on by things and not be that all the time.”
On another night, Diane comes out in a different dominatrix outfit, but with the addition of a black cowboy hat and toy gun. This apparently meshes with Kurt’s rustic style and he approves. She mounts him cowgirl style.
Merely mentioning the idea that older people, especially older women, have sexual lives, and even non-vanilla sexual lives, should be commended.
