The chains that bind
A common cliché in television shows and popular literature is that, in the pursuit of self-actualization, one should break free from the dictates of society and others, and seek out one’s own way in the wilderness that is the world. In the show ‘Power Rangers Time Force’ (2001), the character Wesley Collins is portrayed as escaping the oppressive grip of his domineering and dour father, Mr Collins, and finding true freedom by joining 4 officers in the Time Police – Jen, Katie, Lucas and Trip - from the year 3000 to form the Power Rangers Time Force. This sounds idealistic, and indeed it is, for the truth is that as long as we engage in social interactions with other people, we will always have to conform to social expectations in one way or another, even if we think that we are escaping from them.
This concept of “accountability” is expounded on in John Heritage’s Garfinkel and Ethnomethodogy; in undertaking “social action” (p. 179), people must adhere to “morally appropriate (i.e. accountable) courses of action” (p. 193), for otherwise they will be chided by others (p. 193). With this understanding of “accountability”, we can see that although Wes (as he is known in the show) is portrayed as freeing himself from having to fulfil his father’s expectations, he really exchanges those chains for another, albeit less onerous, set.
We first witness how Wes is to be accountable to his father when we see him in his father’s mansion, rebuffing his butler Phillips when he is asked to choose a suit for an impending board meeting (Episode 2, 11:18), complaining that “these meetings are so boring” (11:20). Wes complains about having to attend meetings that he has no interest in attending, and which he goes to solely at the behest of his father. When Wes’s father then walks in and reminds him about punctuality (11:39), Wes pretends that he has a date with Jen, the Pink Ranger and leader of the group, and evades the impending meeting (12:10). We can see that Wes seethes against the expectations that Mr Collins has for him: he has no interest in attending the board meetings of his father’s company and being accountable to him by living up to the expectations he has of Wes’s behaviour.
Later, Wes struggles to put on a tie, the quintessential element of fashion for accountable males in the corporate world, and remarks to Phillips that “I hate these things” (Episode 3, 3:43), only to be told that “You can’t attend an executive meeting without a necktie” (3:48). He then wonders if he would rather not suffer the pressures of accountability to his father anymore, musing “maybe I shouldn’t even” (3:50). Wes is portrayed as chafing under his father’s expectations to follow in his footsteps and “[take] my place at Bio Synth some day” (7:52); to be a dutiful son is the morally appropriate action which Wes has to be accountable for, at least as Mr Collins is concerned.
When someone feels that his accountabilities are too much for him to handle, or the others are not in their turn accountable to him, he can choose to jettison said accountabilities. When a group of children is kidnapped by one of Ransik’s mutants (Episode 6, 8:30), they demand a $10 million ransom. Wes asks his father for the ransom money, but is turned down. Mr Collins then, with the stroke of a pen, signs a cheque for $10 million and gives it to his business partners (10:14). Distressed by his father’s failure to be accountable to him, Wes appears listless, and is advised by his butler Phillips that “maybe you want to make your own footsteps” (10:50). At the end of the episode, disenchanted with his father’s behaviour, he donates the $10 million (recovered form the mutant) to a children’s charity without his consent (19:17), leaves home and moves in with the other Power Rangers in a dilapidated clock tower (19:55). However, by abandoning his father for the Power Rangers, Wes has not escaped accountability, but merely abandoned one type of accountability for another, albeit less pressing type.
We have seen how Wes is clearly accountable to his father. However, even from the first time he joins with the other Rangers to defeat their mutant enemies, he is not free from the chains of accountability. When the main villain Ransik taunts the Rangers about his having taken down one of their former team mates Alex - Jen's fiancé - and Wes asks “what is he talking about?” (Episode 2, 15:40), he receives from Jen the curt reply, “doesn’t concern you” (15:41). Besides it not being an appropriate course of action for Wes to ask trivial questions just before a battle, he is also touching on a sensitive topic that Jen does not wish to discuss. Not long after that, when exulting in his new powers and how they defeated the mutants – “I love this, yeah!” (19:20), Wes is met with stony, implacable silence on the part of Lucas (19:34), and is told angrily by Jen that “this isn’t a game” (19:38). Mutant fighting is obviously an activity that must be engaged in seriously, and to treat it flippantly is not a morally appropriate action, at least not to both Lucas and Jen.
Oblivious to these obvious signs of disapproval, he asks the two of them to “lighten up” (19:44), and remarks that he “can’t wait to do it [fighting mutants] again” (19:46). Having crossed the line of tolerance, he is told by Jen that he “won’t get the chance to” (19:47), and has his morpher (the piece of equipment that lets him transform into a spandex-wearing superhero) taken from him (19:51). Having behaved in a morally unaccountable way, he is subject to Jen’s accusation that “You’re not fighting at all, you’re playing” (Episode 3, 6:11) and chided because “You’ve never had to fight for anything in your life” (6:18). Chillingly brought back to reality, Wes realises that with his flippant manner, he has failed to be morally accountable to them. Although the show idealises Wes’s association with the Power Rangers as freeing him from being accountable to paternal expectations, as a Ranger he too has to be accountable – to his fellow Rangers – and not treat fighting mutants as a game.
Accountable to the Rangers though Wes is expected to be, the expected degree of accountability is still not as great as it is with his father. To be accountable to his father Wes has to dress right, be punctual and meet clients, and is continually nagged and hurried by him (Episode 3, 9:50), yet with his fellow Rangers, when they are not fighting mutants, he leads a free, relaxed and unhurried life (Episode 6, 2:45). One reason for this is that, as Lucas points out, Wes “is a good fighter” (Episode 3, 20:16), and that to catch Ransik, “We’re gonna need help” (1:50). Indeed, since the 4 Rangers are stranded in the past with no allies, hope of reinforcements from the future (2:20), no money or food (Episode 4, 0:18), nor even a base of operations, they cannot afford to expect the same degree of accountability of Wes as they would under less pressing circumstances or, for that matter, that Mr Collins expects of him.
Furthermore, later on Wes finds for the other Rangers a dilapidated clock tower for a base of operations (Episode 4, 1:16), and from then on they are noticeably more tolerant of him. Wes is at that point in time the Power Rangers’ only potential ally in the year 2001, so these extenuating circumstances make the Rangers less demanding of Wes’s accountability than they would otherwise be. On the other hand, although Wes is being groomed as his father’s heir, he is not otherwise of active use to him in his business dealings, being a very disinterested hanger-on. We can see, then, that degree of accountability expected of individuals depends on those individuals’ usefulness to the people expecting the accountability, as well as how secure the latter are.
Different people also expect different degrees of accountability. While Wes is in his father’s household, he receives a sympathetic ear from Phillips the butler, who also advises him to follow his heart (Episode 6, 10:50). After the Rangers’ first battle, Wes celebrates with Katie and Trip – the two less uptight of the Rangers, who also do not upbraid him (Episode 2, 19:20). Later, when Jen is chiding Wes for his treating of fighting mutants as a game, Trip tries to intervene (Episode 3, 6:43), but is restrained by Jen, although he flashes her a pleading look on Wes’s behalf.
Lucas, Jen and Mr Collins are all more serious people than Phillips, Katie and Trip, and the former have higher standards of accountability than the latter. If Jen and Lucas were as easy-going as Katie and Trip, the degree of accountability expected of Wes would have been a great deal less. Nonetheless, he still would have been accountable to some degree, for Katie and Trip are still members of the Time Police, with an attendant code of conduct and expectations of their team mates. Different people may expect different degrees of accountability from others, yet accountability itself they expect still.
We have examined the accountabilities demanded of Wes by both the Rangers and his father, and the factors accounting for them. Yet accountability is not a one way street: just as it takes two hands to clap, it takes at least two parties for accountability to be practised – besides those who demand accountability there are those who provide the accountability. Let us now examine how Wes responds to the accountabilities demanded of him.
As Wes interacts more with the other Rangers, he begins to be more accountable to them. After finding them a dilapidated clock tower in which to live, he helps them clean it up (Episode 4, 4:03, 4:12), and even gets his hands dirty painting walls (8:45) – things which, in his previous spoilt rich boy incarnation, he would never have done; as he observes, “I guess I’m not used to manual labour” (9:00). Furthermore, we can see from his manner and expression, and from the cheerful music being played in the background (4:00), that he is undertaking all these tasks willingly, even happily, as opposed to the stiff, stilted manner in which he interacts with some of his father’s clients (Episode 3, 7:55), or the sullen manner with which he faces his father (Episode 6, 18:30). Despite his erstwhile resistance to becoming accountable to his father, he has now become accountable – wants to be accountable - to the other Power Rangers, helping them with their chores and doing his part in fighting mutants as part of the team. In escaping from one form of accountability, he has thrown himself headlong into another form of it.
We can see, then, that it is not accountability per se that Wes resents, but the type of accountability his father demands, and the ends this is directed to: saving the world as a Power Ranger is a much more noble task than succeeding his father at the helm of a company, merely for the sake of the agglomeration of wealth. The moral value Wes assigns to saving the world is higher than that he gives to fulfilling his father’s expectations. We can see, then, that although individuals may be unwilling to be accountable to certain people under certain scenarios to certain ends, in others they willingly – even cheerfully – accept and even welcome the accountability expected of them; it is not accountability in and of itself that they resent, but accountability which they are not prepared to show, whether because they dislike the person to whom they have to be accountable, or the ends for which this accountability is for.
It might be argued that Wes really has no choice about where to go; after giving away $10 million of his father’s money he has no choice but to move in with the Rangers. If he doesn’t move in with them in the dilapidated clock tower, he will not have to be accountable to them. However, the fact is that even if does seek refuge elsewhere, he will have to be accountable to the people he interacts with then; the Rangers being close friends who hardly interact outside their circle, as well as needing his help in fighting mutants, they are probably one of the groups of people who will expect the least amount of accountability from Wes. And, needless to say, if he continues staying with his father he will have to be accountable to him. As it is with Wes, so it is with us: as long as we interact with people, we will have to be accountable to them.
We can also see that accountability is not a unidirectional expectation. In Wes’s interactions with his father, the bulk of the time Wes is being pressured by his father to be accountable to him. Yet there is a scene where Wes expects his father to be accountable to him: when Wes asks his father to fork out the $10 million ransom (Episode 6, 9:45) to save the kidnapped children. In this scene, instead of rejecting Wes outright, Mr Collins first demurs (9:35), and asks of his son: “Y… You don’t expect me to have it all, do ya?” (9:39). When Wes pleads with him: “Dad, you’re their only hope, please!” (9:45), he hesitates for a brief moment, and even half-apologises to Wes – “the police, not me” (9:49) - before turning down the request. Wes’s pleading and subsequent disappointment with his father shows that he expects his father to be morally accountable to him: to provide ransom money to save the kidnapped children.
On Mr Collins’s part, although he eventually turns down Wes’s request, he clearly feels that he is accountable to his son in some way, since he is at least semi-apologetic. Similarly, when Wes is with the other Rangers, where at first he was the one constantly chided for not being accountable to them, the others begin to become more accountable to him. For example, when Trip uses his powers of mind-reading to spoil a game for Lucas and Wes, Wes shows clear signs of frustration with Trip (Episode 7, 4:28) since reading other people’s minds is not a morally appropriate course of action. Although the onus for accountability may be primarily on one person, this does not mean that other people are not themselves accountable to him.
Some might ask how accurately a TV show, and a children’s TV show at that, can reflect on reality and inform us about accountability. Yet, it is precisely because Power Rangers Time Force is a children’s TV show that its depiction of accountability shows us how pervasive this concept is in reality. Power Rangers might exist outside normal society, a reality best illustrated when they ‘morph’, gaining superhuman powers and spandex suits which clearly distinguish them both from normal people and their own civilian forms, yet they are still expected to be accountable to each other. If, even in a show about spandex-clad superheroes and aimed at children – and thus, inevitably simplified somewhat - the characters can be seen to show accountability towards and demand accountability from each other and adhere to what are considered to be appropriate courses of action, how can accountability fail to pervade all of our social interactions?
Accountability is indeed an invisible chain that binds us in our social interactions. When we are agreeable to the ends for which the accountability is directed, as with Wes and the Power Rangers, the chains of accountability become inconspicuous, and indeed welcomed, since through binding they help us in bonding with others. Yet, whether or not we are bothered by them, the chains of accountability are the chains that bind.
Discarded:
We first witness how Wes is to be accountable to his father when we see him in the kitchen of his father's mansion (Episode 2, 11:00). Stealing some cream from the top of a cake, Wes is scolded by a chef (11:07): “You cannot have that”
I'm quite sure he'll kill me if I write this...
