Instead of being negative about the choices The Big C‘s lead character has made to go it alone and not tell her family about her cancer diagnosis, this week I decided to go into the episode by focusing on the positive, and by zeroing in on the excellent acting chops of Laura Linney as she brings to life Cathy Jamison, the formerly repressed, khakis-wearing cancer patient.
And when I did, this episode wound up surprising me by the ways in which it revealed layers about its characters.
Nearly every story line in this episode revolved around sex and attention in one form or another, from Cathy accidentally walking in on her son Adam as he was masturbating to porn and Andrea asking (nearly commanding) Adam to touch her breast, to Cathy getting waxed “down there,” which led to her having sex on her desk with the painter/muralist in her school who’d flirted with her.
It’s not in your nature to be at the center of anything. You’re more of a nurturing, behind-the-scenes kind of person.
That’s what Cathy’s estranged husband Paul observed after she told him that she caught their son self-pleasuring and decided to sit down and watch the porn with him in an attempt to deconstruct it and tell him what wasn’t real and what women really want, much to Adam’s abject horror. Saying she likely scarred Adam’s psyche permanently, Paul proceeded to paint a picture of Cathy as someone who not only refuses to look at porn, but someone who’s so fearful of being the focus of anyone’s attention that she doesn’t wear skirts because she doesn’t want people looking at her legs.
The opening scene of the episode confirmed Paul’s assessment that for too long, Cathy allowed herself to be invisible; the woman at the nursery pretended she didn’t see Cathy waiting for her turn to pay for her flowers and fertilizer, and arrogantly breezed past Cathy, expecting that because she was “pressed for time,” she could simply go ahead of the wallflower standing mutely to the side. This was Cathy’s opportunity. She loudly told the woman that SHE was pressed for time, given that she had cancer and all, and ordered the woman to remove her items from the counter. ‘Top that one world,’ Cathy seemed to be saying. ‘Get out of my way.’
It was Paul’s statement, however, coupled with getting aroused by the muralist who complimented her and treated her nicely, that seemed to radicalize her. Cathy decided she wasn’t going to be ignored. In the middle of the workday, she went for a wax and, though she’d always decried the practice as something done by self-hating anti-feminists, it ignited something within her. “It makes me feel powerful,” she told her brother. “I kinda wanna show it off.”
And show it off she did, to the painter who repaired the peeling corner of her classroom while she was out. By the end of the episode, Cathy was having sex with him in her classroom as the camera panned to the potted iris in the window. Cathy in full bloom.
The theme of the episode could also be found in the advice Cathy gave during the sweetly awkward discussion she had with her son about women and sex: “Women like attention, even if they act like they don’t.” They want someone to notice them, she said.
And, in this episode at least, Cathy got the attention she desired.
Clacked by Meredith O'Brien 
on Sep 21, 2010 @ 14:00 EST5EDT
