It's unstable, it's corrupt, and the people there eat a lot of terrible-smelling preserved fish.") But if you missed the pilot and have not spent much time in the western part of that continent then it's just kind of "Africa." (Another Westen voiceover: "Southern Nigeria isn't my favorite place in the world. If you happen to have seen the pilot episode, then you know the African city Michael Westen is waiting in is Warri, Nigeria, which is not coincidentally one of that country's oil production centers. #MICHAEL WESTERN BURN NOTICE TV#Even without the voiceover, all the considerable visual information of just this one frame of the opening montage of a 42-minute long TV show asks us to focus on the white dental patient in his exotic waiting room, and wonder what kind of dental work he's waiting for. Whose day are we interested in here? Whose waiting, whose thoughts, desires, aspirations - to pick up a thread from yesterday's remarks, whose subjectivity does the costuming, art direction, and cinematography of this shot encourage us to pay attention to and be curious about? Those of the person driving the blue car on the lower left? Those of the woman in the yellow dress and red headscarf on the upper left? I think not. So we are looking at a lone white man in a sea of Africans in what we might infer is Africa. You read magazines, you sip coffee, and every so often someone tries to kill you.") The white man is surrounded by black people, Africans by the look of the bright, printed garments and head coverings that nearly every one of them is wearing. "Like sitting in your dentist's reception area 24 hours a day. ("Want to know what it's like to be a spy?" Westen asks in a voiceover in the pilot episode, from which this image is drawn. He's looking at his watch, which means, in the language of bodily gestures, that he's waiting for somebody. We see, in the center of the frame, a white man wearing dark sunglasses and a sleek gray suit of probably American or European origin. In keeping with this week's informal theme of looking and reading, let's scrutinize the screen grab above. The long arc of each season of Burn Notice consists of Westen's efforts to get himself back in the CIA's good graces. To do this he draws upon his prodigious spy skills and inexhaustible resourcefulness. The short arc of each episode of Burn Notice consists of him helping some innocent who's being threatened by a gang or has been bilked by a con man or whose child has been kidnapped by a bad guy (the terms good guy and bad guy come up a lot in the Manichean world of this show). They have frozen Westen's accounts, revoked his passport, and banished him to Miami. The deciders at the CIA have ousted Donovan's character, Michael Westen, who worked freelance for them, because they've been led to believe he has done something bad, not regular spy bad but, presumably, against-America's-national-interests bad. Burn Notice was created by Matt Nix and stars Jeffrey Donovan as a spy who has been excommunicated - "burned" - from the CIA and is trying to get back in.
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