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Day Five: Favorite female character on a male-driven show
Polly Shelby in Peaky Blinders
Peaky Blinders, is, at its heart, a show about male violence. It's about violent men, traumatised by the violence of the Western Front in World War I, returning home and unable to deal with their PTSD. It's about a world that has never offerred these men any option but to be violent, and the uses to which they put that violence. It's about clever, violent men harnessing the violence of others to their own ends. It's about a community accepting a level of male violence as the price it pays in protection from other violent men, men outside the community.
It's also a show about how the women around these violent men manage their violence.
Polly Shelby is the ageing matriarch of the Shelby clan, a multigenerational family of racetrack gangsters who have occupied the role of de facto rulers of the 1920s Birmingham slums for decades. They lead a gang known as the Peaky Blinders. As in other occupations, when the young men went off to war, Polly stepped up to run their operations. She and the other Shelby women actually ran things perfectly well on their own, and one of the minor subthreads of the first season dealt with how Polly and her nephew Tommy renegotiated their respective roles within the Shelby leadership after his return to Birmingham. Since Tommy's return she has alternated between an admiring enforcer of his plans within the family and the Peaky Blinders as a whole, a sounding board for Tommy to speak to behind closed doors, and a restraining voice of caution whose keen sense of self-preservation sometimes wars with Tommy's grand vision. In spite of these various conflicts, Polly remains talented at manipulating and directing the various nephews, cousins and friends within the Peaky Blinders, and it's in her story that we see most clearly the other side of the show's thematic coin: Peaky Blinders is about male violence, but it's also about women's responses to that violence. Polly's preference is to turn that violence outward, using it as a weapon to protect her position in the community and keep that community reasonably harmonious.
In the first season, Polly frequently acted behind the scenes to get things done, either because she saw things Tommy didn't notice, and dealt with them before they became a problem, or because she was trying to spare him from having to make personally difficult choices. This desire to act alone frequently put Polly in conflict with Tommy, even though this was a trait he shared. Polly is blessed with a razor-sharp ability to read people and come to the correct conclusions regarding their actions, choices and the consequences thereof. However, the second season is showing that she has some significant blind spots, and, most importantly, that the only person she can't read is herself. I'll be very interested to see where her story ends up.
( The other days )
Polly Shelby in Peaky Blinders
Peaky Blinders, is, at its heart, a show about male violence. It's about violent men, traumatised by the violence of the Western Front in World War I, returning home and unable to deal with their PTSD. It's about a world that has never offerred these men any option but to be violent, and the uses to which they put that violence. It's about clever, violent men harnessing the violence of others to their own ends. It's about a community accepting a level of male violence as the price it pays in protection from other violent men, men outside the community.
It's also a show about how the women around these violent men manage their violence.
Polly Shelby is the ageing matriarch of the Shelby clan, a multigenerational family of racetrack gangsters who have occupied the role of de facto rulers of the 1920s Birmingham slums for decades. They lead a gang known as the Peaky Blinders. As in other occupations, when the young men went off to war, Polly stepped up to run their operations. She and the other Shelby women actually ran things perfectly well on their own, and one of the minor subthreads of the first season dealt with how Polly and her nephew Tommy renegotiated their respective roles within the Shelby leadership after his return to Birmingham. Since Tommy's return she has alternated between an admiring enforcer of his plans within the family and the Peaky Blinders as a whole, a sounding board for Tommy to speak to behind closed doors, and a restraining voice of caution whose keen sense of self-preservation sometimes wars with Tommy's grand vision. In spite of these various conflicts, Polly remains talented at manipulating and directing the various nephews, cousins and friends within the Peaky Blinders, and it's in her story that we see most clearly the other side of the show's thematic coin: Peaky Blinders is about male violence, but it's also about women's responses to that violence. Polly's preference is to turn that violence outward, using it as a weapon to protect her position in the community and keep that community reasonably harmonious.
In the first season, Polly frequently acted behind the scenes to get things done, either because she saw things Tommy didn't notice, and dealt with them before they became a problem, or because she was trying to spare him from having to make personally difficult choices. This desire to act alone frequently put Polly in conflict with Tommy, even though this was a trait he shared. Polly is blessed with a razor-sharp ability to read people and come to the correct conclusions regarding their actions, choices and the consequences thereof. However, the second season is showing that she has some significant blind spots, and, most importantly, that the only person she can't read is herself. I'll be very interested to see where her story ends up.
( The other days )
