Knees Up

Caprica Six & The Rainmaker of Kiau Tchou

2012-01-11T16:58:00.000-06:00

Mailbag time.

...Your comment, both here and on Facebook, that it's all about Caprica Six. I'm intrigued, and interested in hearing more, if you have time. I'm finding that my mental hierarchy of all of the characters' arcs and their significance has been shifting as I re-watch, but I still haven't quite decided where to place Caprica Six. It's amazing to rewatch an entire series after seeing its conclusion, even if it was an imperfect conclusion. Many things take on new and different meanings, viewed through that lens. you find out that maybe you weren't watching exactly the story the writers were telling all along. My sympathy for Baltar, for example, has grown immeasurably. Also my disgust for him, oddly. But Caprica is fascinating and elusive, and as I'm at about mid-fourth season now, I'll be keeping an eye on her based on your statement.

Well, it's kind of a long one, but since you asked, I think a lot of my personal emphasis on Caprica Six is really just overidentification with the character. She doesn't show up, in any real way, until halfway through the series, but it's pretty telling that, before she comes back, Boomer was my favorite. And then the things that I loved about Boomer became things to love about Athena. They both cross the salt.

But in the final analysis, Caprica does it best because Sixes don't love the way Eights do: Not through Boomer's interpersonal, relationship, boy-girl Love, but through a kind of love that we don't really talk about in our culture much because it's fundamentally "religious." And not through Athena's sense of loyalty and honor, which are beautiful, and certainly helped shore up her version of love against some odds.

It's a Jungian truism that the one place that Christianity, or the Western Judeo-Christian viewpoint, is often weakened in its denial of balance: That absolute good is possible and that peace is possible, and therefore anything that doesn't fit the program should be repressed, ignored, or destroyed. That means untold damage you're doing to your own soul, when you hate so much of yourself instead of looking into it and exploring, to my mind.

I was thinking today about Star Wars, and how the Jedi should have been my favorite thing -- "soldier" plus "priest" -- but I was immensely distrustful of the whole idea even as a child, because when they talk about bringing "balance to the Force" they're using "balance" in a really weird way that means ignoring and attempting to destroy all darkness everywhere, including people they think are tainted by it. It's very thin Eastern lipgloss on a fairly old Western idea: We admit dichotomy and opposition, but are content to wish things were otherwise.

Contrast then with Buffy the Vampire Slayer (which I would say is the Gen Y equivalent of modern myth to Gen X's Star Wars "fighting Daddy" obsessions) which is centrally and continually a story of recognizing and negotiating darkness within the self. No Big Bads, in the way of the Emperor: Even the vampires are complex people, with all manner of capabilities and qualities inside themselves: The complete opposite of the faceless Stormtroopers (who are eventually revealed as literal clones).

Anyway. The reason I love Caprica Six is that from the first moment we see her, she is demonstrating both opposites at once: The heartlessness of war, and the seed of what will become the greatest compassion on the entire show. Her model's dedication isn't corrupt or compromised by anything: It's a Six that runs the Farm, blows the Armistice Station, and starts the Cylon Civil War, because she believes that children will lead us closer to God. If Caprica/BSG is about moving through sentience and into soulhood, my money is on Caprica Six because she's the only one who is realistic about anything.

When she explains to Tigh about the clarity of pain -- while her angel counterpart is inspiring Gaius to his litany of heresies -- it's because she's been there. She holds her values higher than anything, including her own safety, which is another step beyond Athena's evolution, which is group-centered. Gaius is made a scapegoat, but Caprica offers herself willingly.

She is intellectually nimble enough to murder her spiritual leader and take over the government when Three makes a wrong ethical call, because her ideals are higher than anything the other models can even conceive. And I think she got there through hard spiritual work that transcended any of the intellectual gifts she was programmed with, which is something to which I aspire -- but also is the final nail in the conflict.

Past mid-S3, everything bad that happens comes out of personal vendettas and weaknesses and horrors and revenge motives, but Caprica is the only person who ever manages to put things back together, and it's because she's not afraid of opposites and dichotomies, which is -- again, in Jungian terms, and before him, the alchemists' -- the highest spiritual state we can aspire to, because it means you can finally stop fighting yourself and start the work.

Personally, it's because I am unbelievably morally rigid and judgmental, and fairly certain I'm smarter than everybody else, and I love the idea of God and I love kids, and that's all she's really got going on. But in terms of the story, I really do think the evolution of Caprica Six -- by the end, or rather the almost-end -- tells the story in a way that could never be done upfront, through actual narrative, because it's too internal and too magical. But I think she saves the world.

There's a story in the Jung community that everybody likes to invoke, before certain discussions, about this Chinese village the Sinologist Richard Wilhelm was observing, Kiau Tchou. They couldn't get any rain, so finally they called in a rainmaker, this old dude, who came into the village and wrinkled his nose and demanded that they sequester him in a cottage and bring him food and leave him alone, and on the third day it not only rained, it snowed, and the ethnographer was like, How did you do that? "I didn't do anything." You made it rain. "Oh right. No, I just come from a place where the people are in order, they're in Tao. And when I got here, you guys weren't, and it infected me. So I went inside until I was back in order, and then the weather got right again."

Bitchy, but still TCB. Sounds like my girl to me.

Top 11 Songs of 2011

2011-11-29T08:26:00.000-06:00

11. "House Of Balloons," The Weeknd - This was my first favorite song of this whole year. It is so good. I don't know what else to say about it except that I am glad I don't take pills or do hard drugs very often, because sometimes I imagine that a person's whole life could sound like this song. Unlovely. 10. "Lofticries," Purity Ring - Sometimes it's possible to be creepy and not feel weird about it. It's hard for me, but I know that it's possible, and at best it would sound like this song. I always thought it would be so hard to live with the Munsters because you would just want to get rid of the cobwebs and that would make them sad. You know? How stressful for everybody. Sometimes I have this dream where I look over and something that I thought was me is dreaming. Very big, very hairy, very scary to look at. And I just know that I have to take the best care of it. 9. "Aroused," Tom Vek - Good song, perfect voice, amazing video. This is how I feel on the fashion days. Or those days when you have to deal with people and you aren't in charge of them already and you can't work them immediately. Sometimes if they're scary I think about the beginning of "Peter & The Wolf" because that song gave me strength when I was little, but when I feel energized, it's this or "Destroy Everything You Touch" by Ladytron. One or the other. 8. "Who Are You Really?", Mikky Ekko - Absolute awesomest song of the fall -- and of use to so many TV shows!

Also: "SEE ME BARE MY TEETH FOR YOU" is used so often and so well that it should be closer to the Dan Smith Listener song, in terms of saying what I feel or think better than I can do those things I can't do. If I were a tattoo-getting person, that would probably be the thing I would have on my body first.

7. "Somebody That I Used To Know," Gotye ft. Kimbra - This song helped me make sense of a thing I did to a person I loved very much. 6. "Video Games," (Lana Del Rey) Bombay Bicycle Club - The very best cover of the very most important song of the year. Yeah, I love Adele too and LDR hasn't got one-tenth of the whatever-she-is, but this song is a very big deal. And I love this band anyway, so it's awesome they did the best version of it. 5. "Settle Down," Kimbra - I described this one as "True Grit meets Douglas Sirk," which is true, but also a humble-brag because when my childhood best friend Will took me to West Side Story (tour with the original choreography!) before the house lights went down he said, "Have you seen True Grit yet," and I said "Heck yeah because that little girl..." and he goes, "I told my husband about twenty minutes in that it was like watching you when we were kids. If you want to know what Jacob was like, you're looking at it." Which made me so happy, because it is true. Sad and also good because it is true. 4. "Sail," AWOLNation - Hey, it's that guy from UTIOG doing his usual ragtime/soul bullshit but it doesn't annoy me! And the video is awesome! And he is mesmerizing! I will tell you one thing: I am not going out like this. Also: Good for yelling. 3. "212," Azealia Banks - you already know about it, we don't have to talk about it.

2. "Wooden Heart," Listener. The official video -- which is not this -- was released this year, so technically it can be the second-best song of the year. This song is partially about my second-favorite part in the whole of Michael Ende's Neverending Story.

"...my hopes are weapons / that I’m still learning how to use right / but they’re heavy / and I'm awkward..."

He mailed me this CD months ago and I still haven't opened it because it lived in his house and he sealed it with his hands and probably he breathed at some point. The plan is, I marry this man forever and ever. I mean, unless something shows up that makes more sense than him. So far, not much does. No homo. 1. Hyuna, "Bubble Pop." Probably the best song and video in all creation. The way girls -- not boys -- feel, or once felt, about Britney Spears is the way I feel about this video. I get soooo crunk and I watch it over and over sooo many times. My friend Jonny was like, "I've never bought anything off the internet" and I said, "Not even to charities? What do you do when you're drunk?" and then I started thinking about ways to be drunk and not spend money. I asked the internet for my new favorite song, aloud, and said I would be checking for confirmation bias. And since then I don't need much more than this video. BONUS: Not yet actually available as far as I can tell; album coming out Jan 24 2012. Chairlift, "Guilty As Charged." Only people who are awesome enough to watch The Secret Circle got to know about this one and then we all spent weeks trying to find a decent copy of the song. See you in 2012, amazing song!

WHAT IF? Marvel On Rowling

2011-11-28T17:38:00.001-06:00

Claremont: Everybody mind-controls everybody else and they all wear black leather straps instead of clothing and fight in underground fight clubs. Ron gets really fat and mind-controls everybody into wearing black leather straps instead of clothing and fighting in underground fight clubs. Lucius Malfoy is obsessed with Harry's DNA and keeps trying to steal his wizard semen using fake Ginny Weasleys. Hermione is blind but has computerized eyeballs that make her invisible somehow, and she is mind-controlled into wearing black leather straps instead of clothing, and also she fights in underground arena fight clubs. Everything is also Kaballah.

Len Wein: Minorities! Rita Skeeter is black and from Egypt and also a goddess of weather and also she is kind of a lesbian. One of the Weasley twins is Russian and the other one is from West Germany. Cedric is now a proud Apache warrior who sadly is eaten by a sentient island. Tonks smokes cigars and -- just like in the original books -- becomes everybody's favorite character for no reason whatsoever. Now she is Canadian and has adamantium claws and a refrigerator stuffed with Japanese women.

Austen: Snape kills Dumbledore, but it wasn't really Snape, he just thought he was Snape, and there is another Snape who is Chinese and might be Snape or his twin brother or something. Hagrid's father is actually the Devil, even though that makes no sense, and Hagrid dies or something. Dumbledore gets Wizard AIDS very immediately. Everything is very serious, so please don't laugh.

Nicieza: Hermione is not blind anymore! Now she is a Japanese ho. A butterfly comes out of her face sometimes, and she has a psionic knife that is the focused totality of her psionic knife powers. She dies of wizard AIDS. Everybody gets wizard AIDS and dies, but then comes back. Crossovers with Twilight, Vampire Diaries, and most other things that exist result in a paramilitary atmosphere and lots of hip pockets and giant guns.

Claremont: A future daughter of Ginny and Harry returns from the future, where she has been mind-controlled to hunt wizards whilst wearing bondage gear. Lesbian Parvati makes contact with Future Lesbian Lavender in order to stop this future from taking place, or maybe this is what makes it happen. The Ministry of Magic is mind-controlled into wearing bondage gear and dressing up their house elves in absurdly offensive mammy outfits. Everybody is put into concentration camps, wearing leather bondage gear instead of clothing.

Simonson: Slytherin is still more interesting than Gryffindor, but we barely ever see them. Neville dies pointlessly to save a supremely annoying, half-bird house elf mutant creature. A Veela shows up and everybody goes to space for a million stupid years. Ginny dies, so Harry marries a lookalike who is also a member of Steely Dan. Gryffindor start a "wizard-finding" service that appears to be bad but is actually good, which doesn't keep lots of wizards from committing suicide in a thinly veiled metaphor for internalized homophobia. Somebody in Ravenclaw is in a wheelchair and has magic pet lobsters.

Claremont: Albus Severus Weasley Potter is magically abducted to hell and then comes back a few seconds later full-grown, wearing bondage gear and growing devil horns whenever he practices magic. He enters a gay relationship with Cedric, who has a pet dragon now. He accidentally brings hell to earth, covering himself in eldritch armor with an eldritch sword that is the concentration of all his eldritch power. Inside the armor is Albus Severus as a baby, who immediately dies of wizard AIDS.

DeFilippis & Weir: One book to meet all of the young children, six books to murder them one-by-one in more and more horrible ways, while the original students -- all grown up now, all with mental disorders -- are forced to watch.

Whedon: Lavender and Parvati sleep together one night and then are brutally murdered. Ginny Weasley becomes a half-elf computer expert for no reason, and then is brutally murdered. Hermione gets addicted to time-turners and must defeat her future self like six times, including several brutal murders. You start to feel sorry for Dolores Umbridge, and then she is brutally murdered. Everybody sings a bunch of annoying songs and then are brutally murdered. Turns out they are sex workers this whole time.

Ellis: Hermione joins MI-5 and teams up with basically John Constantine to solve political British in-jokes. He's pretty cynical and smokes a lot, but underneath it all he just really believes in people. It is not really about the kids or about Hogwarts or wizardry or magic or anything you might have thought it would be about. Harry is actually Houdini's grandson and Hermione is descended from Tarzan and the whole Weasley family is actually from the Little Nemo universe and they just forgot. They get all the most awesome students together, and become sexy fascists. Also the media is aliens putting lizard babies in your abdomen, most likely.

Liefeld: Everyone's spines are bent into horrible contortions, they all get giant breast implants and weird crosshatches over parts of their bodies, the hip-pockets double in number and size, and the new Defense Against The Dark Arts teacher is Snape from the future and he has a twin brother who is also Snape but from the different future and from different parents who wears a toaster over his face. It is mostly nonsensical and has itself a latent homosexuality. All the spells do the same thing, which is go KRANGGG and SPOOSH and BLONK.

Morrison: Everything is perfect and way better, except the last book is still an unholy mess. Wizards are now a wonderful, vibrant and visible, culture-setting minority the rest of the world adores, almost like in real life. Dolores Umbridge turns out to be totally awesome and just says she was drunk the whole time she was with the Ministry; instantly forgiven. Snape is actually a future version of Harry Potter but doesn't remember everything in time to save everybody, but that's okay because everybody is everybody else and there's no such thing as Voldemort because he is all of us but inside-out and backwards, so deal with it. PS, Ginny Weasley is God.

Bendis: Stupid fuckin' Mrs. Weasley -- a person who dresses like an ugly stripper and is married to a robot and her only personality trait is to go insane periodically -- goes insane for the millionth time and wishes there were no wizards, so then everybody goes back to being some kind of ridiculous 1960's version of minorities that doesn't even exist, because Marvel is an idiot.

David: The gang goes to therapy! Which is lucky, because they all have serious mental problems. Hermione becomes an alcoholic, then gets pregnant. Harry has sex with alternate versions of himself in secret, then marries a little girl in a future concentration camp. Ron and Cedric also are gay on occasion. Please do not tell Rob Liefeld.

Liefeld: Ron and Cedric are not gay.

David: Ron and Cedric are totally gay.

Liefeld: Ron and Cedric are not gay or else.

I DON'T KNOW WHY SHE DOES IT

2011-09-20T23:39:00.002-05:00

I'm in a small, gluten-free café in the hills of Los Angeles, waiting for my lunch dates to appear. Ever since the Weinsteins' record-setting deal on Jacob Clifton and Gwyneth Paltrow's co-production, I DON'T KNOW WHY SHE DOES IT, they've been impossible to track down.

Variety: "Jacob, you said you've been working on this script for a while?"

Clifton: "For a little while, yes. Of course, without Gwyneth onboard it never could have happened, so things actually ended up moving very quickly..."

Paltrow: "It's been a breeze, really. Jacob is a dream to work with."

Clifton: "Oh, Gwyneth. It is you who are the dream."

Paltrow: "You just 'get' me. Do you know what I mean?"

Clifton: "I 'get' what you mean..."

I have no idea what either of them means.

At this last, said with an arched eyebrow, they laugh -- desperately, honkingly -- clutching at one another like Dakota and Elle Fanning might, if they were children.

Variety: "Gwyneth, how would you describe your character?"

Paltrow: "Well, we said from the beginning that we wanted our characters to reflect us, and our process..."

Clifton: "But I mean, we're not playing ourselves. Any more than usual, that is!"

Again with the laughing. It's disconcerting. I wonder if either of them has ever had a friend before. I wonder if Claire Danes has any friends.

Paltrow: "I play an aspiring country musician who pays the bills by acting in blockbuster hits."

Clifton: "Same, but I pay the bills with intellectual fraud."

Paltrow: "Basically, the movie follows us through our lives as we make irritating choices."

Clifton: "I wanted to show what it's like for regular people, you know, succeeding in several different industries simultaneously. That power of delusion. Cookbooks. Lifestyle branding."

Paltrow: "I just wanted to take my top off. It's been a while since I did that in a movie."

Clifton: "A lot of it is just bare-assed excuses to have a lot of witty, self-aware dialogue. We're big fans of wit."

Paltrow: "And awareness."

One critic called the film "a more insecure version of Baumbach or Anderson, you know, taken to the next, even wankier level." I ask about the critical response so far, and am met with a wall of intense enthusiasm.

Clifton: "Am I a genius? I doubt it. Am I a saint? I try. Is this the best movie of all time? Who knows. Certainly the Cannes board doesn't get it. Could it herald a new genre in film? Probably."

Paltrow: "I call it Bumble & bumblecore."

They are forthright and forthcoming with all details: About the film, their eating habits, their families... I find it's hard to get a word in edgewise, to ask about the film, with the two of them up each other's sweaters the whole time. There is a discussion of kale that goes on longer than most features. It's worth noting that the two seem to have become inseparable.

Clifton: "We don't really like to have 'fun,' per se."

Paltrow: "Sometimes we prank-call Anne Hathaway."

Clifton: "True. True that."

Paltrow: "She's just asking for it, you know?"

When I ask Gwyneth and Jacob about their husbands -- mainstream rocker Chris Martin and CIA Director David Petraeus, respectively -- they just roll their eyes and laugh, once again.

Clifton: "It's kind of like being married to that computer that almost won Jeopardy!, but more intense."

Paltrow: "I don't understand a single word my husband says. I think that's what makes it work."

Clifton: "Really, we're married to the work. And each other. And Walter Van Beirendonck menswear."

Paltrow: "GET."

Clifton: "I'm paleo right now. You can almost see an ab."

Paltrow: "I subsist entirely on pages torn out of W magazine at the moment."

Clifton: "We talk about food a lot. That's one thing we do that is fun. And has no calories."

What follows is a dizzying ten-minute ramble in which labels and brands go whizzing by my head almost audibly:

Paltrow: "When it comes to organic herbals, I try to grow my own at home. But sometimes that's just not convenient, so I turn to the cold-packed, hand-picked herb mixes from my friend Elsie's line, Easy Being Green. Sometimes Chris makes me wear a mask of Thom Yorke."

Clifton: "The new Thom Browne is almost too much. I'm into trad right now. I want one of those leather helmets they used to play football in."

Paltrow: "I once made dinner for the Cleveland Browns. I told them I was using my grandmother's skillet, but the reality was vastly different. The skillet was from Lodge's Logic line -- I bought it at the Burkina Faso Williams-Sonoma. The truth is that I have no grandparents. I was made in a lab."

Clifton: "David and I are naming our next child Bristol-Myers Squibb. If it's a girl."

Paltrow: "If it's a girl we'll have to get her some Tom's shoes and an Apple iPad. Oh, and my friend makes the most wonderful artisanal bath salts for children. All-natural ingredients. You can only get the range at her small brick and mortar on Carnaby in London, but I'll have them mail over some for little Bristol-Myers Squibb. The line's called Precious/Precocious."

Clifton: "That's ironic."

I'm never sure if they're looking to use me for product placement or if they just talk in these terms all of the time, but just to be sure I am redacting that part of the interview. I ask them what their plans are, after the movie gets its wide release in a month. By the time you'll be reading this, of course, its success or failure will be a thing of the past, but in the meantime they seem somehow both jaded and hopeful.

Clifton: "Hitting the slopes. Wait, what? I don't ski. I guess that's just the person I was trying to be just now. How odd."
Paltrow: "How Drew Barrymore."
Clifton: "Ugh, right? No, for me it's more like, I want to meet Ryan Seacrest. Go to the Poconos, maybe. I want Andy Cohen and Brian Wilson to fight over me."

Paltrow: "I've already been to every country, with Anthony Bourdain."
Clifton: "Like, to the death."
Paltrow: "But travel's always been very important to me. Especially now that I keep having children and naming them things."

Clifton: "Travel. This junket is really taking it out of me, honestly. Do you know that we've had this exact same conversation we're having with you, literally forty... What is it, forty-two times?"

Paltrow: "Thirteen of those times were en français."

I try to imagine them having this conversation in French, thirteen times, and it so disturbs my equanimity that I squeeze my crystal water tumbler until it cracks with a high, near-imperceptible ting. Paltrow reaches out and takes my hand, while Clifton looks intently at my face, as if searching for something.

Clifton: "I mean, you seem like a nice man..."

Variety: "-- Thank you."

Clifton: "...But not so nice that it offsets the boredom. Here, have a hazelnut."

Later, when I ask what he means, exactly, he goes into detail. I have never met two people more comfortable with being patronizing in my life. It's like being slowly smothered to death by a well-meaning gift basket full of organic beauty products.

Clifton: "It's not that you're boring, of course. It's that... Well, don't you get tired of asking movie stars such as ourselves the same questions over and over? Wouldn't you like to..."

Paltrow: "Something about authenticity. Say something with 'authenticity' in it."

Clifton: "Wouldn't it be more authentic to, I don't know, talk about anything other than the work?"

The entitlement of these two, for a moment, is nearly breathtaking. Of course, why should they earn anything?

Paltrow: "They're going to come see my movies no matter what, homeslice. Why overdo the whole publicity thing?"

Clifton: "See, that's authentic."

Paltrow: "My mother, Blythe Danner, beat Jacob in an arm-wrestling match."

Clifton: "Too authentic."

Paltrow: "I am new to this, sorry. To authenticity."

Clifton: "It's okay."

A fan approaches Clifton with a bouquet of hydrangeas. Paltrow sits back, deep into her chair, flashing a toothy grin of satisfaction, anticipating what will happen next.

Updates

2011-09-02T11:55:00.001-05:00

Our block's water main was shut off for like an hour yesterday. Even today I feel profound gratitude when I turn on the faucet and water comes out of it. I am going to take so many showers now and they are going to mean something.
Billie Joe tweeted that he got thrown off a Southwest flight for having too-saggy of pants. Why not just pull up your pants and stop fighting the power for like one second? You're a dad now.
There's something stubbornly Gen X about complaining about celebrity tweets, like, you're staring into the glory of celebrities actively engaging in their own demythologizing and you can't think of anything but the generic superiority of rejecting entertainment figures. "I prefer to stay in this cult of personality and complain about it rather than acknowledge that they are people, and generally most people are pretty boring sometimes."
When You Reach Me is such a great book I lost the desire to finish Mondegreen as I was reading it. It's the kind of non-genre SF I like best, but with some hefty wisdom, like, on the level of Harriet The Spy wisdom. Enjoy it for your own self.
I'm recapping The Good Wife for TWoP this season, which reminds me of how I forgot to write about hybristophilia in vampire fiction.
I had a zombie dream; you know how much I hate zombies but I need to disclose this: It was in a Home Depot. Somebody wrote a play about surviving the zombies and we performed it for each other to stave off the grim certainty of our coming demise. In the end, I led Yaya DaCosta out through the warehouse and over to my cottage behind the Home Depot, locking the door behind us; there was a full garden there and a bunny named Miles in the cabbages again. She asked why we even stayed in the Home Depot with the zombies to begin with, and I woke up.
Did I ever tell you about my friends Emily & Jodi? They make me incredibly nervous, but I love them.
Please resist the desire to ask other people whether Hunger Games is just Battle Royale again. It's not clever, and you might never date again. You'll certainly receive tude from anybody who's been getting that goddamn question since goddamn 2008.
Also, on the subject of conversations/horses that die minutes after their birth, George Lucas is the new The Help.

Bullying Followup #1

2011-08-31T19:37:00.003-05:00

The trouble with writing constantly about teenagers as though they are people is that they inevitably talk back, also as if they are people, and then you have to have yourself a think. I got an amazing letter from a kid this week about the bullying stuff, heavily excerpted below, and apparently my response to her response went over well, which is good. Mostly, I was just amazed at my own blind spots, which is always gratifying.

...I don't really know if this is something even appropriate to even do, but they don't have a comments section for the recaps and there's something on my mind regarding your recap that's been bugging me a lot. As a disclaimer, I'm really sorry if this is something that's not acceptable to do or anything, but then again... you wouldn't put your email for the public to see online if you didn't want people to email you. Before you freak out, I'm not creepy or anything I promise... I'm just a fan of your recaps on televisionwithoutpity.com and I read something tonight and I don't know what to make of it.

"If you're going to be the kind of person who gets bullied, and you can't handle it, you need to stop being that person."

I don't buy [this] at all ... I really want to understand what you're saying here because I think it could really mean something to me if I understood it.
For the past three years of high school I've been bullied. It's not obvious bullying though, which is why my case, I think, is kind of an exception to some of your argument. I am a genuinely nice person and I get bullied for it. I get harassed because I'm too nice of a person to defend myself when others make fun of me. When there's a disagreement I find it easier to just go along with whatever the other person wants because they should get what they want rather than causing a huge scene. When people make fun of me, I don't defend myself because I don't want to make the other person feel unhappy... I just take it because I'm a good person and I don't want to create a big deal out of it. That's just the person that I am.

...You say that whatever I'm being bullied for I should change. How can I change my disposition to be nice? Maybe I'm interpreting your argument wrong. I just feel really unclear and I hope that maybe you could do me the favor of clarifying that.

Once again, I'm sorry if I seem really stupid or if this is inappropriate... I don't mean to be annoying. I just really want to know what you meant because it's bugging me.

I mean, what do you say? Obviously a sweet kid, a smart kid. A girl who deserves applause for not just plugging her ears when she got to a part that sounded like bullshit, which is more than 99% of us are willing to do. I just kind of stared at the screen for awhile and wondered how much and what kind of danger this neat girl's fire was really in. Trying not to count the apologies, qualifiers, passive-voice and the rest of it like I was going to serve her an itemized list at the end of our conversation.

Because the kind of person who takes that statement apart -- and I'll grant, the original ranterview was a little on the unstructured side, because I was trying to leapfrog questions and draw an emotional through-line -- and honestly asks, "Are you being a dick or what am I missing," well, that's the kind of person I want reading my writing. You know? Almost entirely 100% of the time, an email asking for "clarification" is really just being passive-aggressive and calling you out without actually doing it. But not this lady, no. So I was cowed, and maybe that's why the reply was blunt, but I thought either way it was worth preserving here, since the bullying thing seemed like such a valid conversation the first time around, last week:

I think that where the problem comes in is that we have different definitions of being "nice." I'm not saying this applies to you, necessarily, but I will tell you about my friend [J]. He is smart, and strong, and I admire him in a lot of ways, but he has a lot of problems about being "nice."

Everybody wants people to like them, of course. (I do too, probably more than most people.) But what I see J doing is thinking that by not having an opinion of his own, or by being quiet when he shouldn't be quiet, or agreeing with things that he doesn't agree with, it short-circuits in the end. He is resentful, because he gave away his own power -- and it didn't even work! People don't like him more because he is quiet, they don't like him any more because he agreed with them, and they certainly don't like it when he comes out resenting things after the fact.

He's very interested in being The Good Guy. The guy that doesn't make waves, the guy that doesn't make people angry or disagree with them, even when they're wrong. The guy who knows the right answer, but doesn't always say it because it would make other people feel stupid. I know he feels bullied. I know he feels bullied personally by me, because I don't know if you know this but I can be kind of intense, and that's a bad mix. I am not a very good friend to J, at all, which is especially gross considering how much I love him. But also, it wouldn't matter, because he's already gotten himself into that position most of the day. Sometimes just asking him to form an opinion makes him feel bullied -- because he doesn't want to be the Bad Guy who said No.

That's not being nice, in my opinion. That's being weak. That's holding your own image of yourself as the Good Guy, or the Nice Girl, above relating honestly with other people. I think that a lot of our society, and the ways we are raised, give us the idea that not having opinions, or never saying no, is the way to make people like you.

But you know that this isn't true. You wrote to me that it isn't true. It isn't working.

What I see is a situation where you get to be the Good Guy, because you're "always nice," and if it doesn't work out -- that's everybody else's problem. You don't ever have to risk disappointing anybody, or getting anybody mad, or starting any confrontations, because you're always being "nice." There's nothing for them to get mad at!

Our culture raises us, especially young women, to think they're doing the right thing when we do this. That Nice Girls are good, and Not-Nice Girls are bad. But the definition of "Nice" that is used for that idea is really gross, and wrong, and old-fashioned, and nasty. It's designed to make you hate yourself, and to keep you small, and to keep you quiet.

And then you get the reward, for following along: You get to be the victim, because you didn't offer your opinion and they didn't ask. You get to feel like you have the moral upper hand, because you're "nice" and everybody else is not-nice. You're the winner. You're the victim.

And what I was writing about in the recap is the idea that any time you see yourself as the Victim, you need to stop what you're doing and look at your own ability to change the situation. Because nobody ever makes us crawl, and nobody makes us feel bad without our consent. And I will tell you another thing, [Lady], and I hope that you don't think I'm being a jerk or that I don't understand:

Nobody was ever too kind. Nobody ever got bullied because they were too kind, nobody was ever victimized for their compassion. Ever.

And what that means to me, is that you need to think about the difference between "nice" and "kind." "Nice" is passive and lazy and cowardly, and thinks only about itself. "Kind" is active and strong and thinks aboutother people. I think you should remove the word "nice" from your vocabulary for a little while, because my reply would be that -- whether or not you want to hear it -- you're not a special case: You're just like everybody else.

We all were brainwashed to be "nice." We all were taught that we need other people to feel okay about ourselves. We all were taught that popularity is the most important thing, and that being "nice" is a good way to get there. But it's not true. None of it is true. You have to find a place of your own, to stand on. Even if it's just the ground underneath your feet, you have to know that you own it, and you don't owe anybody else for it.

So yes, that is the thing you have to change about yourself, but it's just a dictionary definition in your head that needs to change: That "nice" is the opposite of "strong," and you're not any more "kind" than you would be otherwise. Nobody can be expected to respect you if you don't show respect for yourself, and that starts with having convictions and standing by them, showing character and strength, and remembering to be kind. You can do those things and still be true to yourself.

You are a smart person, and you have good intentions. It's nice to see you thinking, and curious, about this kind of stuff, and I hope you read these words in the spirit that they were written, because I'm not trying to be rude, or condescending or bossy or whatever. I am impressed that you wanted to get more into that sentence, it means a lot to me -- I hope this helped, whether or not you think I'm right about the rest of it. Good luck!

Jacob

Moral of the story? Don't write me fanmail or you might get some words back, I suppose. Certainly her response was intensely gratifying on a whole other level. Either way, a helpful reminder that the shorthand you use throughout your mental day doesn't always come across -- and that's not really because people are lazy, or at least, not as often as you're/ I am apt to assume. It only makes you smarter when you get to go back and look at what you said and why, and fill in the gaps, but you often have no reason to do that. Unless, apparently, you're in the habit of corresponding with precocious young girls.

How It Gets Better

2011-08-25T13:05:00.000-05:00

I've gotten a lot of heat over the years for the things I say about bullying, because there's not really an open entree to say everything I think at once, and it's kind of a large subject. So when I was writing about this week's episode of Pretty Little Liars, which is a pretty amazing show, I kind of let myself get pulled into a full-on discussion of the subject.

Which is dumb, in some ways, because A) Writing one-third of an entire recap about an unrelated subject is not interesting to people who want to know what happened in the show, and B) Plenty of people who might want to think about that subject are not necessarily going to watch a show about Pretty Little Anything. So maybe I should have just put it here to begin with. Although from what I can tell, it's doing okay in the middle of that recap. Maybe polarizing a little, but that's to be expected. Anyway, they had a therapist lady in to talk to their high school about bullying, which struck me as funny because the whole show is a better conversation about bullying and cyberbullying than any grownup presentation could be, and this is what I wrote:

I think cyberbullying was invented mostly by moms. I mean, it's obviously a thing, but it's not a thing in a vacuum. A kid whose life is hell would be going through hell regardless of the Internet. So you take the victim mentality of a bullied kid's mother, and you add the Internet superstition of everybody over thirty, and yes, it can seem like this huge monster that Boomers never had to deal with.

But to me, cyberbullying is a great model for all bullying, in that your response is completely your choice: It's as real as the boogeyman, which can be pretty fucking real. But asking people gently to stop bullying is like asking them to recycle, or asking them to find obesity attractive suddenly, or asking teenagers to stop having sex so they don't embarrass Jesus: Not only are you asking for something that's never going to happen, but you're putting the responsibility on the most unlikely possible people. Have the conversation and start your own army, instead of looking for validation from the shitty people who don't want you anyway.

Anne: "So what, all this outreach and advocacy is for suckers?"
Jacob: "No. But the It Gets Better campaign is the closest possible answer. Not addressing the bullies who aren't listening, but the kids who are so tied up in their own powerlessness and need that they don't understand how much power they actually have. Explaining to them what options they have, in an untenable environment. Tools and strategies to beat the game."

Anne: "It seems like you're blaming the victim."
Jacob: "Understand things as they are, operate within that framework, and there won't be a victim to blame. The only worthwhile education you can give a kid at this point in life is how to deal with ugly realities, the way things actually work. Not whine at shitty kids with shitty parents who aren't listening anyway. Stop outsourcing accountability for your own strength, or your kid's, to gross people who don't care anyway."

Anne: "Okay, fine. What would you say to a person who was getting cyberbullied?"
Jacob: "Block the person. The Internet is not real, it's a giant bathroom wall. Learn it early, live it forever."

Anne: "What would you say to a person who was getting regular bullied?"

Jacob: "Beat the shit out of the person."

Anne: "Really?"

Jacob: "No, not really. Maybe sometimes. I would say that everything is a transaction, and we've all forgotten that somewhere along the way. That if you're going to be the kind of person who gets bullied, and you can't handle it, you need to stop being that person."

Anne: "Just completely give in to peer pressure."
Jacob: "No. Understand that peer pressure doesn't exist. Everybody has the right to feel less alone. Those people are out there and you have to find them. What works for therapy also works for real life, meaning that you have to tell the secrets before they can stop hurting you, or paralyzing you, and the biggest secret of all is your loneliness."

Anne: "Sounds like selling out, possibly."
Jacob: "Absolutely it is selling out. But you're making deals every day of your life. If you don't like the terms, change them. If that's selling out, you have to ask yourself who you're trying to impress."

Anne: "But kids should be allowed to be themselves."
Jacob: "Heck yeah they should. But they're not. And they won't ever be. And that won't change, no matter how old you get, and at some point you'll understand that 'yourself' doesn't change, regardless of the deals you make. The stuff you're getting harassed about is not essential to who you are. Bullies are educating you about the parts of yourself that don't fit into the herd, they're like the immune system for normality. But a virus doesn't roll over and die, it mutates. It evolves."

Anne: "Sounds like you had it pretty easy."
Jacob: "Yeah, being the fat gay kid at a small-town Southern high school that was literally named for a Confederate General, that was a real fucking blast."

Anne: "So you had it hard?"
Jacob: "Not really. I realized that high school is a fucking joke, that It Gets Better pretty quickly after that, and that my best defense was not asking for it. Not cosigning their bad trip. I think in some ways being gay made it easier to cut through the bullshit, because I'd found one true thing about myself that I could stand on, get my head above water, finally look around and see how silly and stupid everything else was."
Anne: "You opted out."
Jacob: "No, I made a deal. It cost me a lot. In other, better ways, I got a lot more in return. But yeah, once you're on the outside of a game, the rules of the game make a whole lot more sense. It doesn't get better. You get better. It was never in charge, and sitting back waiting for It to get better means It's going to suck as long as it possibly can, because It has no reason to change. It is doing fine no matter how miserable it's making you."

Anne: "So, what. The old Nobody Can Make You Feel Lousy Without Your Consent chestnut. You realize that when you say that, it just makes people feel worse, right?"
Jacob: "If you're already buying in, sure. It's not just a Roosevelt quote, although you could live your life by her wisdom and you'd turn out okay. But it's true. The world is much, much bigger than high school. High school is the very last time in your entire life that you honestly cannot choose the people or the situations around you. I had pretentiousness on my side. Still do."

Anne: "So what would you say to Emily, or Lucas, or Mikey?"

Jacob: "Lucas and Mikey are figuring it out. Actively working on this, which is why it looks so scary. They're burning calories to get there, and don't necessarily have all the tools or support to know that there's even an endpoint. Emily, I would say that it sucks to have a ghost ninja after you [long story], but that caged-up awful feeling would probably be something you would feel anyway. Just like absolutely everybody else does."

Anne: "Even bullies?"

Jacob: "Especially bullies. It's amazing what you can learn once you stop looking at people as the enemy and start looking at them as people. These pressures are atmospheric, they are part of the basic gameboard, they are the burden of everybody. Bullies deal with the pressure by turning it on the weak; they're quislings. Cyberbullies do it in the most pathetic possible way. Alison [the dead frenemy on the show] did it like a knife."

Anne: "It's sort of sacred ground to talk about this stuff, you know, when kids are actually dying."
Jacob: "I get that, and yeah, that's horrific. But it doesn't change the facts, which is that puberty makes everybody crazy, and high school means putting all those crazy people in a room and making them fight. Why do you think The Hunger Games is so amazing?"
Anne: "That was political."
Jacob: "It's all political. It's inherently political. If our culture didn't have teenage girls and gay boys to carry all of our shit, we'd have to fight it out ourselves. It's all the same story. Contending with social pressure while under the attack of insanity hormones is a crucible for the real world."

Anne: "What about compassion?"
Jacob: "Compassion is all I'm talking about. Compassion for everybody. But it's something you give, not something you can take. Certainly not something you beg for. Meanwhile you gotta go hardcore on the shit that you can personally fix."

Anne: "So you're saying the parents of bullied kids are doing it wrong?"
Jacob: "God no. I'm saying that everybody is doing the best they can already. The only thing we can do as parents -- or as kids, as people -- is get the tools to be less crazy, and stop trying to get everybody else to parent better. Because that's never going to happen. Stop remembering your childhood as this golden age, like it wasn't as fucking tawdry and scary as teenage life is now, and get in there with both hands. Have the conversation. Your responsibility is your own kid -- your own life -- and making sure they -- or you -- feel safe enough to go outside, or on the Internet, with the armor and weapons to stay alive."

Anne: "You're talking like it's war."
Jacob: "It is a fucking war. That's what this entire show's about."

It's also generally what I'm writing about, but there it is.

Goodbye Housewives

2011-08-16T02:54:00.002-05:00

Surprisingly, a Tea Party stealth show that regularly shows up on the Top Three shows watched by Republicans eventually stopped being covered by TWoP. Any recapper that has covered it will tell you that nobody can actually recap the show that long, because its two settings are idiotic and bigoted. I had fun. The recaps were more fun to write than the show was to watch, which is usually a recipe for success. Any case, I'm glad my last words were these, from there to the end.

Having said that, I'm really proud of the writing I did for this hateful, bigoted, racist, homophobic retrograde piece of shit show, and you should read them.

The 5 TV Characters You Are Way Too Close To

2011-08-12T08:00:00.036-05:00

I was going to do another pretentious religious post today but I had a great conversation with a friend tonight about the move from identifying with characters to identifying with story, which is a major topic that you can't attack all at once.

So I will ask you, to start with: What or who are the TV characters that you take on, or have taken on, so personally that it changed your life?

I will tell you some bad ones in this blog right now, because there are roadblocks and bumps, but it's implied that they're only problems because of my job, not objectively. (Well, actually if you get to this level with any fictional character, that is a problem and you need to get a life, but I'm trying out this idea of not being super judgmental and it's lasted almost four days so I think it's a success. Plus, I'm disclosing my own personal shit on that level so "get a life" has a specific meaningless meaning here.)

1. Is obviously going to be Buffy Anne Summers. Our moms died the same week, we turned our sex lives into nightmares the same week (multiple times), we labored under the super-special unique snowflake drama of the gifted child all the time together, we made self-hating sexual decisions together... I was raised, by a witch, to believe that I was going to do something amazing to save the world. That is a lot of pressure (and explains a fuckload if you know me at all). It doesn't mean I don't still believe that is true, lol, but Buffy really did help me deal.

It wasn't that I looked up to her or even liked her that much: We were just in the same shitty situation, and she always did the thing I would do, so it didn't occur to me to like or dislike her. We were brothers. She was Artemis, I was Apollo: Who discusses that? Perfect sync, perfectly crafted mistakes. I think this made Riley a lot easier to take for me than most viewers, because you take one look at that dude and you're like, "This is going to suck when I break you." Which is what he was for: Teaching Buffy that she walked through this world, like all of us do, warping everything and everyone around us, with power we didn't even know we had.

I still love Riley. (And while I'm grossing you out? I fucking hate Willow Rosenberg. She is the worst. She writes herself passes on the reg that make me sick. I cannot handle self-dealing, because I am naturally a manipulative person and I believe you have to fight your skills to grow because everybody lives best in the house of their best accomplishment. I only liked her from mid-season six on, and by season seven she'd become my favorite character.)

2. Eva Longoria's character Gabriela Solis on Desperate Housewives. Not only is she the most talented and (sorry to say it but it's an Olympic race not a Special Olympic one?) beautiful actor in the cast, but I have always identified with the traits she represented: The girl who is judged entirely by her outsides to the point that she forgets she has insides. Again, it was less a matter of liking her and more a matter of watching her make the same decisions I would make, in every situation, over and over.

Basically the only non-depressing thing about the very sad situation of that show -- which has become, I know you don't watch it so I'll tell you, a fucking racist Teabagger jubilee in which all women are idiots, all fags are 80s faggy, and women with opinions are worse bitches than women without, it is so gross, you guys; I love writing about it! -- is Gabby, because (when she's not embodying some horrific gay stereotype or playing one up) she still speaks for my major part, which is: You make a deal to be an object, a sexual object, and you take the power that gives you. You know you're negotiating with a smart clear head, but the object of the game is never letting on that you're smart or know what you're doing.

On my actual favorite show Grey's Anatomy (why I love it goes in a forthcoming conversation, because that is a fucking doozy) my identification character was Izzy, basically for the same reason. "Oh, you think I'm a whore? Well, that's not going to change. But I'm happy to act like an idiot for a second to calm you down." My relationship with Izzy was more powerful and influential than anybody on TV, besides #1 and #5 on this list. I fucking am still insane for that girl. (It's also funny that Blogger thinks I should link to the Stardust post, because I don't even know who I identify with, but I think it's a combination of the two leads because they're two halves both necessary, viz the Stardust post. Still the coolest thing I ever wrote, for me to reread, besides that one Starbuck one.)

As a feminist, as a queer man, images like this helped me make so much more sense of my life than trying to fit other people's random boring 1969 white male narratives into what I was and still am being subjected to. Not the diva, just every girl that ever said "You know what? Fuck it, yes. Fine. Treat me like I'm an idiot and in five years when I have your job we'll see what happens." They're already playing this game, and we've been playing it since we were born, so it only makes sense that you fake it and keep playing -- with an eye to win.

3. Mrs. Zoe Washburn. To a casual viewer -- to Joss himself, to Himself himself -- it's River that plays the Buffy role. Mal is to Giles as Buffy is to River: The butterfly psyche that must be protected and loved and never restricted, the anima that fights our fights. But to me watching Firefly, it was Zoe that carried me because the fact is, I belong personally in the Loyal Bodyguard role. Not sidekick, not wingman, but a more vital and passionate figuration of both. I am the Riker, the Chakotay, the Nerys. Zoe is Neo's Trinity, and to me it's not a contradiction because in this formualation Buffy represents the Loyal Bodyguard ... of Everybody. (Class Protector. Obviously, I know, but I'm trying to equate Zoe and Buffy here, when any sane person would tell you it's Mal or River who is the Buffy.)

Saving the world is for figureheads and activists and special snowflakes. (Saving the world is what misers do: I want to see how you change it.) Just give me somebody amazing to love, and I'll do the rest. That is how I do my part, in the story about me. (PS: Do not ever tell a guy you feel like/want to be his bodyguard, you lose, the end.)

You should always be the star of your drama, but it's possible to be amazing while also preserving somebody else's untenable idealism. You heal each other, doing this: Your dream lives on in them, and you remind them to eat and you fight their fights when they're busy. Mary Magdalene and Molly Millions/Sally Shears/Stepping Razor are all the same thing: Deadly beauty that preserves the dreamer's fragile intuitive beauty. There is nothing more wonderful than that, to me.

4. If you haven't seen Jennifer's Body, or if you didn't like Jennifer's Body, you should go back and watch it again. Because the two leads in that movie describe the loveliest tango around those two ideas that it's breathtaking. You know how Dark Knight keeps playing with this idea of the multiple Batmen and multiple Jokers and then it's about order/chaos and the ridiculousness of having to force yourself into these untenable philosophical shapes and what it does to you, and then even Commissioner G and Two-Face get sucked into the multiplicity? That's Jennifer's Body, telling that story like it's everyday life.

The best line of that movie is left out of the final product ("I'm not killing people, I'm killing guys!") which is a shame, because it tells such amazing truths about what it's like to be an object and to negotiate actual deals with actual people with your sexuality on the table. Truest movie. In the last decade I would say Jennifer's Body and The Nines (which is not on this list because there are no people in that movie, besides you) are the only ones that come close to explaining what it's actually like to be a human person. (Which explains why every privileged straight male hated one or both: They literally don't speak the language, they hold no currency, they are surrounded by the sound of angels in the architecture etc.)

Jennifer (Megan Fox) a little bit moreso than the other one, but not by a whole lot: If you honestly want to know how fucking rank it is to be a girl or how many decisions girls and gay dudes have to make every second of ever day, first thing is you listen to "What It Feels Like For A Girl" which is the most brilliant song of all time, and then you watch this movie. My God, it's verite.

5. Brenda Chenowith. Without her I doubt we'd be having this conversation at all, because I never would have gotten interested to this degree in writing about culture, TWoP, the whole thing. I never stepped back from my TV until Brenda. The internet was fairly new, even, back then. I didn't know that spoilers were cancer, I didn't know that shipping was cancer, I didn't know that any of the things I was doing were fucking up my own game. All I knew was, Brenda Chenowith was literally watching myself brought to life on TV. She had my biography, she had my neuroses, she had my strengths and my weaknesses, the same books/dissertations were written about her that had been written about me, she had the same parents, all of it, and of course I was convinced nothing bad would ever happen to her.

And then she started doing the most awful shit! Suddenly all my sexual mores and priorities were being called into question, on a regular basis, weekly even, and did I rise to the occasion? No I did not. What I did -- and that's why I'm blogging about this entire idea -- is decide the Six Feet Under had lost the magic. (And decided to blame Australians, which is a random racism that still haunts me but I'm convinced started here.)

The show had become stupid, too high on its own success, too up its own fundament, nothing mattered and everything hurt. And realizing, which I didn't do for years, that this very hardcore critical viewpoint was predicated on a single simple thing -- I didn't like it when Brenda did the shit I was doing in real life, because she was being gross -- getting too real. I watched myself cross the streams between "good" and "I like this," which is the root of all fucking internet discussions that are useless. And even worse, I was liking or not liking it based entirely on whether my fictional puppet-self was being perfect or not.

I watched this happen and I was powerless to stop it, because I loved her too much. Four seasons of that show I watched, angry, because Brenda would never be me again. Even when she was, in all her complex ugly glory, still playing out my dramas and my weakness and my perversity: I rejected it so hard that I was rejecting the show.

And I'll never get those years back. I recently started watching random episodes of the show just to test it, to push on the bruise knowing that I wasn't that boy anymore -- and I noticed that Claire Fisher is fucking amazing. Never noticed her the first time around. And the coolest thing about that is, I said something to that effect on Facebook -- "I was so obsessed with Brenda that I completely missed out on the fact that Claire Fisher is an amazing young woman" -- and the thought seemed so specific and self-obsessed and Facebooky that nobody would remark on it, much less like or dislike or quibble. Frankly, those pronouncements I always make on FB without expecting a response... But you know, in this case a couple people that I simply love came back to say, "I feel the same exact way."

My job has given me hella distance from the shows I write about, at this point. I get letters you wouldn't believe, imploring me with EVERY other WORD in all-caps, about the importance of Dan Humphrey marrying Blair Waldorf and how other configurations and characters are TACIT CORROBORATIONS of some nefarious sexist plot or another. And god knows I will wade into that fight without a second thought, because it's my duty as the Zoe, as the Buffy, to explain certain things in a patronizing tone that won't ever make a difference.

But what they don't see -- and you don't see, because I don't talk about this part of my job very often, the hatemail and the meantweets (!) and the professional scars -- is that every time they strike out against an unfair and ugly narrative world, I am right there with them. As dumb as I find it, fighting for the personhood of Amy Pond who is barely a person and thus not subject to the rights of even a fictional person, I get it. We're not talking about Amy Pond, we're talking about you. We're not talking about Joey Potter, we're talking about you. Beautiful, wonderful, intelligent, complicated, angry you. You are Brenda.

And I am Brenda, I am Faith, I am every West Wing character that ever existed, especially the men, but most of all I'm Zoe and Buffy and I'm Brenda. I get it. I am on your side. But I can't fight for it anymore, because that's not what stories are about. I broke Six Feet Under for myself in a way I will never get back, and I'm still angry at myself for that. I needed a better bodyguard. A less invested one, at least.

Edit: Good question. No dudes. I don't feel represented on television very often. Jason Street was probably the last time I felt that way about a male character. Plus, Alexander the Great works for most any purpose so I guess I don't really go looking... The older brother on that show Jack & Bobby, Peter Pevensie, Peeta Mellark, Gaius Baltar, Riley Finn. Most of the men on your modern sitcoms like Happy Endings and Cougar Town. (I was going to say the ginger from Modern Family, but that would be cheating because I'm really just responding to the traits he shares with his sister.) Jason Stackhouse, quite often. St. John Rivers, from Jane Eyre. Most priests, actually, from Father Mulcahy to Qui-Gon Jinn. The entire cast of Full Metal Jacket. Billy Bibbitt, Fiver the Rabbit. Charles Wallace Murry.

Stopping At The Revelation

2011-08-11T08:00:00.002-05:00

I think it says something that most of these posts have begun with some variation on, "Here's where I fucked up" or "What people don't seem to get is..." What I think it says is that I am still learning how to have an opinion without being convinced that the world would work a lot better if everybody did exactly what I say at all times. On the other hand, I firmly believe that if everybody operated that way -- acting in accordance with their own values, making sure those values work for everybody -- things actually would be better. Not exactly a new concept.

Having said that, What people don't seem to get is that noticing the Matrix does not equal evil intent on the part of the Matrix. Whether it's understanding how manipulative advertising can be -- or understanding that God is irrelevant/doesn't exist, or that men have an unfair advantage in a lot of ways and that's been true for the entire existence of people -- there's a fairly heroic shout in uncovering that truth for yourself. A feeling of having broken through: What was hidden is revealed!

Now, my own religious stuff is complicated and boring and personal, but I wouldn't go so far as to disavow atheism. For the purposes of this context, I am confident that the theist concept of God is ridiculous and nonexistent: I am an atheist. (The very loud existentialist asterisk here, where I am also not one at all, is something I'd have to be drunk to bore you with.)

But the revelation of God's absence feels, like in the examples to follow, like a pressure has been lifted. That's because a very real pressure has very really been lifted. A spark from the heavens has come to illuminate the world, the shadows are just bedroom furniture, nobody is watching you, and those niggling feelings of trying to go along with the herd simply vanish. A tremendous feeling.

And the revelation of institutionalized misogyny and patriarchal control -- you are not crazy, they just want you to think you're crazy -- has a personal meaning for all of us, because all of us are trapped in that system. Queers and women live inside a system that's working against them, and has been, for eternity. And honestly, that's a pressure lifted.

The revelation of one's own queer sexuality, my God, it cured my GERD within a week and I can only barely remember how bad my ongoing digestive distress had been in those pre-teen years. The exuberance of the newborn queer, the newborn atheist are lovely; the exuberance of a newborn feminist is loveliest of all.

And then we stop.

THE END

Having discovered The Answer, we retreat to our corners and our online collectives and our like-minded compatriots, and we start making lists. Stupid Christian Conservatives being led around by corporations. Stupid anorexic supermodels being led around by the Male Gaze. Stupid heterosexuals getting up in our business.

Lists and examples and horror stories and monster actions and monster reactions, and the whole time your audience is getting smaller and smaller and angrier and angrier and you're preaching to a rapidly vanishing choir, to the point where we can agree that our little kaffeeklatch of Fellow Geniuses is, simply by yelling at each other -- or worse, playing Mean Girl games about who gets to be more outraged, outraged first, outraged with the most novelty -- somehow making a difference to a culture that doesn't even know we're having this conversation.

We go looking, like junkies, for the diminishing returns of that first feeling of revelation. Every mutilated photoshoot, every pronouncement by Rick Santorum, every exciting protest march or speech, becomes another chance, another hit of that beautiful feeling of freedom: Another attempt to level up toward transcendence. This looks to me like a lot like complacency.

Revelation isn't a state, it's a moment. Revolution isn't a particle, it's a wave. They are tools in your toolbox, not laurels or garlands. One does not become a feminist, one begins the project of feminism. One doesn't simply join the cargo cult of modern homosexuality, or kink, or childfree-dom, or whatever the thing is: One steps outside conventional ideas of gender and relationships, and then finds out what's next.

OR WHATEVER AMAZING THING YOU DID

I'm finding it hard to get to the end without relying on spiritually tainted language, because it's my belief that -- though the human mind wasn't "designed" -- we were designed to keep moving. And I believe that God -- even though there isn't one, and I always get yelled at for substituting "grace" so I can't say that either -- is a wave that never breaks. What I really want to do is quote Hegel (and some very basic Jung) but that would just piss you off, so I'll leave their names out of it.

The way of all thought is thus: Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis. You think of a thing, you think of the opposite thing, you take the best stuff from both, you keep going. Every Synthesis is a new Thesis. It doesn't stop. It just gets bigger. You just get bigger. You go higher. you get better.

For the rest of your life, The Answer will continue to stop being the Answer the second you find it. It goes into your utility belt to make locating the next Answer easier and your journey less terrifying, but it doesn't ever describe you completely. The second you rest on the thought you've just thought is the very second it dies all around you: You got lost in the loop of trying for the same revelation over and over again.

Breaking Good: The Season Arc

2011-08-10T08:38:00.000-05:00

Because of my work with Television Without Pity over the last decade, I've obviously seen a lot of the same recurring questions and complaints having to do with the viewing of television. If you have any interest in TV writing at all, probably the following will seem really basic to you, but that's by design.

My interest isn't in explaining the jobs of a screenwriter or showrunner: My interest, as always, is in doing what I can to make sure that you're getting as much as you can out of the activity of watching itself. And -- at least for me -- having internalized some of these basics actually contributes a lot to my understanding and enjoyment of a particular episode of television. It's the kind of thing that's so written into my DNA (and anybody with even a tangential connection to the business) that nobody really seems to explain it, you have to go looking for it. Which I guess you did, if you're reading this, but still.

So: A simple, consumer-oriented primer on how a season of drama and comedy gets written. (With the caveat that this is Platonic and no show actually works like this 100% of the time, of course.)

Before anything else, understand that television shows are broken out -- outlined -- a full season at a time, and that even if the actual episodes aren't all written (and often subject to rewrites after the show begins airing), the overall arc (what happens in each episode) has been decided long before filming even starts.

"So-and-so has been going on too long," "Character X can leave my screen any time," "Why does this character even exist" are questions and complaints that become a lot less meaningful in this context. Obviously, having opinions like these are one thing -- do whatever you want -- but in terms of the mechanics of television, it's not like you could create a petition to suddenly change the direction of the season at whatever point you're watching it. And once you are looking at the season as a whole, it can ease the pain of complaints like this to know that there's a place and a plan for whatever storyline whether or not you personally enjoy it.

So all the writers and the producers get together in a room and break the season. We'll use True Blood as an example, because A) That show rules and B) The numbers are easy to work with, as you'll see.

Three-act structure defines every story, so it makes sense that it would be the first step here. A given season of True Blood has a structure that falls into three acts: Episodes 1-4, 5-8, 9-12. Generally you'll find a lot more cliffhangers, fun plot, and oftentimes emotional strength and quality focused around those breaking points. (Go look up your favorite episodes, they're probably there.) You also get a major turning point around the halfway point (6/7 for this show, 11/12 for a longer-season network drama), where the season's whole arc flips over.

I don't want to spoil any TB fans with examples here, so I'll point you to Buffy, which took a brilliant approach to this structure with the Little Bad and the Big Bad. In every season, Act II introduced or brought to the fore a villain who created the conflict for Act II, and then was vanquished or absorbed in time for the Big Bad in Act III.

Within these acts, alongside the main themes, every character needs to be accounted for. Act I, Character X is doing A, then moves into B, and ends the season with four episodes of C. Shippers especially have trouble with this one, because different character arcs get highlighted in each Act: For example, with Gossip Girl each lead character (Serena, Blair, and somebody else almost every season) takes an Act. It can be hard to perceive, much less enjoy, these kind of patterns on a week-to-week basis, but I do find that knowing the basic structure and keeping an eye on where we are in the season can take a lot of the pressure off.

On this level, then, you see a lot of complaints along the lines of, "Why has the show forgotten about X?" or "I'm so bored with this storyline taking up time!" Which again: Valid, for you, but easier to take if you think about it in terms of structure. Quality becomes less a matter of catering to your personal likes and dislikes, in this way, than is making sure that back-burner storylines remain compelling.

Season Two of True Blood, for example, meant something very different to a fan of the show than a fan of a given character, but even diehards often found the Maryann/Tara storyline to be inert and repetitive. You have an Act about Tara's seduction and re-parenting, an Act about orgies, and an Act about religious belief. But the four episodes with the orgies seemed to stretch out into infinity, for lots of reasons that don't really concern us right now.

(Similarly, in terms of subjective time, an arc on Buffy that drew comparisons between two lead characters' self-destruction had the misfortune of falling on opposite sides of a painfully long winter break, creating in viewer's minds the illusion that two or three episodes which saw Buffy actively destroying herself, Dawn whining and screeching endlessly, and Willow becoming a crackhead stretched out into forty unending episodes -- because for the viewer of the day, that's how long it took to resolve -- that persists to this day. Ask anybody how long Willow was a crackhead and they will tell you that it was no less than forty-six thousand years, and they won't even really be exaggerating.)

If you're getting bored by -- or turning nasty about -- a given character's storyline, look at the numbers. Chances are you're getting bored right on schedule, and something big is about to happen. Even if the character doesn't take the Act, their back-burner story is going to flip into something else. Nobody will ever leave Bon Temps for more than four episodes, nobody will ever stay in a relationship longer than four episodes, and nobody will end the season in the same place they started. (Of course, the debates about that last one will rage, but at least it means people are thinking in structural terms.)

If you're bored of everybody talking about Serena, a simple check of the episode number will reveal where in the seven-episode (-ish) Act you are: That's precisely how long people are going to be talking about Serena, until they start talking about Blair. And so on.

I know it may seem basic, and even obvious, but that doesn't mean the next time you sit down to watch your show you won't get frustrated and impatient about whatever's going on. I do it too. And when I do, I check the numbers and I chill out, and then I let them go on telling me the story they want to tell.

If you're not happy doing it, why do it at all?

What Is & What Should Be

2011-08-09T15:04:00.001-05:00

The hardest-won and most important lessons you learn tend to be the ones that become part of your firmware: You can come to posit or impute them so easily that you forget to show your work. I'm not talking about the things that ossify to the point that you should be examining them here -- constant improvement means constant inventory -- but the actual good things you've discovered and put to use.

When something becomes such a natural part of your toolkit that you forget not everybody is operating on the same page as you are, or worse, the arrogant shrug when people get offended about dumb stuff because they aren't operating from the same conclusions you are, which invalidates their opinion anyway.

For me, I think my major stumbling block -- with a lot of readers, fellow fans, fellow feminists or religious thinkers, all of whom I've offended the shit out of on a regular basis -- is the division between What Is, and What Should Be. Namely, the instructive idea -- which hit me like a brick at 16 after a lifetime of burdensome victimhood -- that you can't change What Is until you accept What Is.

And already the language betrays us: Not "accept" as in knuckle under to the status quo, but in terms of propositional logic: You accept that gravity works in a given way and accept that air resistance works in a certain way, and then you defy those things.

AND THEN YOU FLY

Where it gets me into trouble when I write about exciting or sensational issues, then, isn't an assumption about a political or philosophical stance, but something tremendously more immediate and intimate. If we're not on the same shared page about personal accountability -- if we're not working from the same definition for gravity's existence -- then no amount of discussion about, around, or directly bearing upon the context of flight is going to make sense.

At best, it becomes an attack on your worldview, which you can ignore or impugn because I don't have personal experience of the issue, as you define it; at worst, I become the aggressor. It's not gravity pulling you down, it's me -- and everybody else who's telling you that you'll fall.

IT'S NOT REALLY ABOUT GRAVITY

And the worst part is that I can't think my way out of it! I cannot envision a way to play into a gravity-related discussion which doesn't first accept gravity as a fact. I can't keep from going nuts when I see complaints about "Everybody keeps telling me not to fall, but nobody's telling gravity to keep from pulling on me." I can't handle a philosophy that says, "Proceed as if gravity does not exist, until such time you get hurt, and then we'll all be outraged together." I cannot depersonalize or intellectualize my thoughts into a collective conceit that simply acknowledging the existence of gravity is blaming its victims.

And so, for me, it's a peculiar relief to finally get that we're not diverging over basic tenets of feminism or queer identity: We diverged a long, long time ago, way back on the ideological timeline of our developments, to the degree where even having the conversation is doomed to failure, because you're talking about What Should Be, and I'm talking about What Is. You're saying we can fly, it's just the Man that's keeping us down, and I'm saying we can't fly yet.

And -- inescapably, and it breaks my heart to think it just as loudly as it must suck to hear a person say it, regardless of how qualified he is to have an opinion -- I believe that we can't fly until we accept that fact.

So then it becomes a game of examining where -- in the sheltered echo chamber of the internet -- it's possible to change the tenor of the conversation to where I need it to be, in order to create the world where I want to live, and right in the middle of that sentence is where it loses all credibility, obviously.

It has to be about locating a higher, transcending context where both forms of reality can be addressed at once, and I'm afraid I'm not there yet. I can't see past my very Muggle sense of optimism in the concrete world to even imagine what it would be like to live as though the wonders have already arrived. Your help would be appreciated.

APPENDIX: SOME ALREADY DOOMED EXAMPLES

What Should Be: "I should be able to go anywhere or do anything without getting sexually or physically assaulted."
What Is: "Yes, you should. Until you can, enjoy this pepper spray and a designated driver. It's not blaming the victim when there isn't one yet."

What Should Be: "Children should be able to grow without being subject to sexual and gender norms."
What Is: "Yes, they should. Until then, do your job as a parent and teach them how the world actually works while empowering them to understand the deals we make with any revolutionary behavior. Every child is a steamrolling dynamo with the power to remake the world, and the only marching orders they get are from you, so they'd better understand the terrain."

What Should Be: "I should be able to have any kind of sex I want without judgment or reprisal."
What Is: "Yes, you should. But until you can, understand that you can't be both a Sexual Revolutionary and a society-approved Good Girl yet."

What Should Be: "Kurt Hummell should be allowed to wear a dress to Prom."
What Is: "Yes, he should. But until teenagers aren't consumed by issues of identity and socialization, and the million other sexual and social burdens placed on them by screwed-up adults, he might want to consider that you can't have it all yet."

What Should Be: "My persecution is everybody else's problem, and they should stop."
What Is: "No doubt! But until they do, maybe you should operate on the assumption that people are dumb and mean sometimes, and trust yourself enough to conform without dying inside."

BONUS ROUND

Liberal: "Please stop hurting the Earth, as a favor to me. CFCs and recycling are great ways to limit your destruction, and they take zero time at all to accomplish. Oh, you don't give a shit? Nuts!"

Conservative: "Please stop having sex of any kind, educating yourself about sex, or arming yourself with safety measures, as a favor to me. Oh, you're going to keep doing it? Nuts!"

Platinum Hit: The Song Of Your Life

2011-08-08T14:17:00.000-05:00

Songwriting is more honest and more difficult than memoir, because you're dealing in at least two languages -- the one with words and the one without -- while also making a place for yourself, and for everybody else. You have to be completely true to your vision and your truth, while also constantly making allowances for your collaborator.

You have to remember that it takes an ass to fill every seat, but never rely on the cheap or played-out to achieve those ends. You have to remember that a calling is not a job and that no amount of money is worth letting go, but that too much effort on the back end means you'll have no creativity to spare your calling.

You have to know when to check in and make sure you're not going on some life-wrecking tangent, but you also have to know when you're making the right move regardless of what people are telling you. You have to know that there's a beginning, a middle and an end, and you have to have the grace and patience to get there without losing your dignity.

You have to remember that drinking and drugs, though they open the door, are not the only keys to the door, and that selling yourself as a neurotic artist or a drunk genius is a great way to close yourself off altogether; that everybody loves a rebel but nobody loves a revolutionary and everybody gets a hangover from an asshole. That any pass you write yourself today is going to charge you double one day very soon, so you need to operate as close to your higher self as you possibly can if you don't want a bunch of hassles and bullshit later.

That losing control is the key to creativity but staying in control is the key to everything else.

UNICORN SAUSAGE

2011-08-07T18:32:00.002-05:00

It is getting pretty hairy thinking about what it actually takes to be a musician or a songwriter in terms of this show Platinum Hit which I'm writing about for TWoP, which aired its finale on Friday, which makes me incredibly nervous because watching the sausage get made always makes me nervous when the sausage tends to look so much the same at the end. You watch these beautiful, smart individuals make their songs and you see the baby unicorn standing up, knees shaking, and you're like, One day you will be sausage.

One day everything will sound like a Beyonce song or a Taylor Swift song, and we'll love it but we'll feel like we're missing something, and that day was a few days ago. And since nobody is watching that show and thus nobody is reading the recaps, I thought I would bring a little bit of that over here, because the interesting part is what comes next: That there is a longer con at play, having to do with the fact that the term "Information Economy" is a contradiction in terms anyway.

Music, TV, movies and print are all dying because we're in the middle of a movement away from physical objects, the scarcity and rarity of objects that you buy to own, and into the infinite abundance of information, because information wants to be free. If I give you a loaf of bread, I don't have one now and you do. But if I tell you a story, then we both have the story and nobody's lost anything. And once we went digital, that applies to all information.

So now you've got a temporary three-way split in the economy: The people who buy the object, the people who download the idea, and the people who steal it. (TV is a little different because that was always ad-supported, movies are a little different because we've fetishized them as physical objects, and books even moreso, but it's all the same thing, content, in this model.) And just like CBS kills in the ratings despite having no internet presence, just like country and R&B are the bestselling genres, you have a situation where the only things that matter are the things people are willing to pay for, and at this point that's only a scarcity of access. You're only measuring the people who can't figure out how to steal. (And of course the people who choose not to, because they appreciate art.)

But that's fine, if you're one of these industries, because these are the only people who are paying your rent. So the end result is that the industry itself gets smaller and smaller, funneling resources at every level toward the only things that will sell. Comic book movies, reboots of comic book movies, reboots of nostalgia-boner kid things are the only things that sell, so they become the only things that are offered for sale, so they continue to be the only things that sell.

But information is only getting slippier and more free, and our ways of getting them proliferate at an exponential rate, meaning that any information industry is at or past the point of peak oil: At some point, there has to be a replacement for DRM or bringing billion-dollar lawsuits against children who use Napster. When you're only operating your dying industry in terms of the highest-selling units, you're driving even more traffic off the grid entirely, because if you don't particularly like songs that sound like Bruno Mars or Ryan Tedder wrote them, you're going to turn off the radio because that's all there is. In the short view, that's the definition of success.

And it's not a matter of cyclical, ups-and-downs, "recession economies create grunge revolutions" or any of those cultural lenses we're used to using: This is an evolution of the entire concept of information delivery, of what art and commodification even mean, and dancing on the edge of that shit is scary as hell. Entertainment and information are the quintessential American exports, and it's all predicated on a concept of scarcity that is already dead. There is no resurgence, there is no reconditioning, there is no way of coming back from that, because ones and zeroes have replaced physical objects.

In the short term, you've got to gather those rosebuds, which is what this show is about. It's a historical record of the last days of disco. But in the long term, it's next to useless to even look at it in terms of the industries themselves, because they are not the point. After this part of the process, the next stage is micropayments -- which we're already there, studying the top iTunes downloads, which is the middle tier of people still willing to pay at all -- and social networking to build artists' brands. But those are stopgap measures too, because after peak oil nobody knows what the hell you're going to do.

In order to keep from being the next Flint Michigan, LA needs to talk to the boys up north about how to monetize ones and zeroes in a way that doesn't feel like an Orwell novel, but that won't happen because they're still making the money. There's no reason for them to be scared about any of this, as long as there's a Scotty or a Sonyae willing to sell their unicorn to squeeze out another year in the black.

Because that's not the only kind of scarcity that's dying. On the artist side, you're also talking about scarcity of access to production equipment, access to broadcast, access to marketing, access to eyeballs and earholes. And now that writing a song or performing a song or making a beautiful video and then getting it talked about is as simple as uploading it to YouTube, it's all just noise. The business model that pays off other industry people to get access to those eyeballs is dying just as fast, because there is no way to apply normal business models to the abundance of attention that is possible for a talented artist with a computer.

Our conversation is so lost in this idea of loops and trends -- linking the sale of iTunes singles back to the 78s of yore, linking singer-songwriters of today back to the Brill Building -- that it's hard, maybe impossible, to see an off-ramp. You assume that because everything looks the same that it is the same, and you look to history to explain it and lead the way into the future. But this isn't a cyclical development, it's a radical departure -- not to say "singularity" -- that challenges every single one of those assumptions, because you're still putting a price on something that is already free.

The arrow is pointing toward a meritocracy, in which rising above the noise is as simple as making a quality product and working for the traffic and interest that validate it. Monetize that -- witness YouTube partnerships, Kickstarter projects, etc. -- and you'll beat the monster and get paid for your art. And right now that looks incredibly depressing, like a farmer's market or barter system, like Etsy for musicians, like weird self-published romance novels, like sad low-budge derivative web sitcoms.

That's how every art starts, because more people want to say something than really have something to say, but at this moment it can look like the apocalypse happened and we didn't even notice.

Which is precisely what happened. But you can't expect the dinosaur to rebuild itself or reconfigure or fall apart into a brand new beautiful day: You build your new machine in the cage of its bones.

Part Of The Noise II: A Short Interview With Generation X, Continued

2011-02-11T14:07:00.001-06:00

(More answers in a conversation. See Part One.)

Q:

A: Right, the acquisitive thing. I think this is in some ways the key paradigm shift of what we're talking about. At the risk of overextending the analogy let's talk about Mac and PC.

A PC person wants the guts, wants to customize. The PC person wants control over the environment. A Mac person wants a turnkey solution: Intuitive, understanding and anticipating my needs. I don't need to get in the guts, because the guts already know what I want.

And so if you compare this dichotomy to the shift in the way our media reaches us, you have on the one hand people like you, people who stored up on tapes and LPs these rare recordings and bootleg versions, traded them wildly, cared about preservation and cared about obscurity.

But what's going on now is, everything is available. Name a bootleg, the location and date of a particular musical performance, and the internet will provide it. If not immediately and digitally on a video upload site, or via gray-market pirate sites, than by the action of microbusinesses providing analogue recordings through Amazon or auctions.

And while this doesn't appeal to the collector brain, it appeals very much to us, because the vast capability of our entertainment world means it's really just one collection, which belongs to everybody. The ocean in which we go diving.

A: You could take it to the postmodern place if you want, sure. Lady Gaga coexists with Louis Armstrong and everything's a mixtape. You're not wrong.

But even that doesn't describe it fully, because you're still thinking in Generation X terms where you're collecting, not curating. When all of you is available for exposure, and pleasure, even bookmarks are passé.

So when you want to hear a song, you go to your record albums and you pull it out and you lay down the needle and you have yourself an experience. But when we want to hear a song, we listen to it.

And then the internet says, through our social connections or just through a fairly simple algorithm, "If you like this, maybe you will like this other thing," and we find ourselves in the net of association, weighing out our likes and dislikes. Swimming through things and discerning among them based purely on pleasure rather than self-identification.

Now, I can see this threatening you, because you think you are what you buy a lot of the time. You don't think of it that way, but that's what's going on: You are presenting yourself as the sort of person who. Which sometimes means forcing yourself sternly to listen to things you don't even particularly, in your heart of hearts, love, because it fits with the image you have of yourself.

Books, too. Some of the people who love books the most, in Generation X, have the least to say about them and take the least pleasure in reading them, because you treat them like accessories instead of parts of yourself.

But if you can imagine the entire internet, this sum total of human knowledge and interaction, as a suit you put on and take off, then none of that means anything anymore. Everything is available, all of the time, for any mood. You don't have to be just one person, you don't have to fit yourself into just one shape. And once you understand that, the whole question reveals itself to be pretty meaningless.

A: No, there's a place for the archivist. Film and books are their own thing and we've mostly been talking about music. But I think Generation X gets a fairly large amount of identity from the idea that everybody is an archivist, and I don't know that that's necessary any more than the idea that everybody must be a foodie. It's a special interest that's become a generational marker.

Although it's interesting to look at it that way, because nothing is more transient than the art of cooking and eating. It's the opposite of this storing-up of information and experience and documentation that we've been talking about. And it's completely sensual so you get a lot more out of the food photography and styling on blogs than the actual content itself, because that can't be represented in words.

I think food is one of the few places where our two philosophies actually meet. Although it's funny, because of this food-truck thing and the way that stylistics and trendiness have such an impact on the desire to consume this ephemeral pleasure. Restauranteurs are the architects and designers of the modern experience, just incredibly adept at making food mean more than it does. And you guys still find a way to make it about status.

A: The whole thing about conspicuous consumption is that it's done for other people, just like conspicuous thrift: Placing yourself in a vector triangulated by you, the imaginary observer, and the thing itself.

But I would say that if you take that observer out -- because it's a useless concept and nobody is looking and nobody is judging you -- then you've got a map completely focused on yourself, with everything else in the observable media universe coming off like spokes on a wheel.

Which is why the collector/curator thing is so important, because if you're stuck in this idea that your likes and dislikes represent you as a person, you're sharing but not completely. When boys give you a mixtape it's invariably about them, with you sometimes guest-starring as a subject of desire: These songs represent the narratives in which I feel you and I -- but mostly you -- are represented. But my grandmother always said that the perfect gift is about you, and about me, and most of all about us.

A: Yeah. That's a big one. You guys spend a lot of time complaining about sequels and remakes and rehashes and reboots and covers and George Lucas. Firstly I think this comes from a place of nostalgia, which I reject out of hand because now is always better than then. And it's this impossibly glamorized and sensationalized then, which has no bearing on reality. You remember the feelings you felt, not the actual quality of the thing, which makes no sense to us.

While we may all meet for a kickball game over the weekend, you're doing it as a conscious act, a return to a golden time -- we're in a place we never left. Nothing gets broken and nothing gets replaced. We don't really have a yearning for childhood because it's always there, accessible.

Which I think is really the deal with the George Lucas thing: You're so used to dividing things up between then and now, good and bad, childhood freedom and workaday slavery, that you think things can be lost. Or taken away, or misplaced. And to me this is just a part of the collector brain working, this privilege of the physical and analogue over the available and digital.

A: Sure. You go see the Transformers movie, expressly ironically, and in order to bitch about it. That seems nuts to me. And what seems even more nuts is this continual arched-brow discovery of the cynicism of the culture, "who are they selling this to," because you're calling everybody else out for what you, yourself, are doing.

It shows a real susceptibility to marketing. The reason they keep making comic book movies and remakes is because that's all you people will show up for. That includes your slumming, that's part of the business plan: Nostalgia, with a touch of nastiness.

And of course, anybody younger than you who might enjoy it unironically is committing at least three offenses: First by doing anything unironically, second by enjoying something you're too good for, and third because they missed out on the good old days.

And then you complain about it, because it doesn't measure up to the memories you have of the original thing, which bear usually very little resemblance to the original thing. That's a lot of work for something that you know, going in, is going to suck. That's going a lot way for this ephemeral joy of being the one person ahead of the pack, the one sheep that figured it out.

A: Sure, Daria. As a community-building exercise, hatred has always been the quickest way to get things done. But to us, the whole joke is really inauthentic.

Because as it turns out there was a movie playing next door that was awesome. But you bought into the shitty lowest-common-denominator advertisements and decided that this movie was for people who weren't as smart as you are -- instead of doing the work yourself of finding out for sure, against all evidence and word-of-mouth -- and so instead you did something you hate, for no good reason, and then went home to talk about how this is everybody else's problem.

Instead of, say, looking up old episodes of Transformers on YouTube and reflecting on how you're an adult now, and it was never actually as awesome as you believed -- and continue to believe -- it was.

Part Of The Noise: A Short Interview With Generation X

2011-02-04T03:45:00.003-06:00

(Answers to a conversation.)

Q:

A:I just feel like in popular culture we don't discuss him. Maybe it's me thinking he's more important than he was, or the magazines I read... Vanity Fair talks a lot more about Kennedy than Cobain.

Possibly this is because of the differences between Courtney and Jackie O.

Possibly though, it's because you still can't talk about it, and you managed to grab hold of print right before it died, so you only talk about what you can talk about.

Q:

A: Characterizing it as my "Problem With Generation X" is sort of rash. I'm DOB 1978, HS class of 1995, so I spent most of high school trying to figure out where I fit into that idea. I liked the eponymous book, took part in all the usual shit; music, pop culture, whatever. But it's a philosophical ideal, not a timeline, and once I got that, a lot of shit clicked into place. I don't think it's a matter of birth so much as a way of viewing the world.

And as far as complaining about it, there's a certain claustrophobic era that starts right around Reality Bites and ends with, I don't know, Lady Gaga, that has to do with:

Email spam (don't care), privacy concerns (don't care), physical collector objects like vinyl and comics (don't care).

Your defining shit, based on what you complain about.

Q:

A: No, we care. But we care about each other. And you, we do love you. But never ideas, because you've turned that into a pissing contest.

Look, the metaphor is like this: One of the first film events was the Lumière Bros, doing the demo for a crowd where the train pulls into a station. And it was so real that the people were like, leaping out of the way. And Generation X treats the internet, advertising, media, that way a lot of the time: Like something real, that's there for YOUR entertainment, or there to fuck YOU, like it's this movie going past. Coming for your face, and yours alone.

And us -- whatever you call us next -- we know it's all actually more like an undersea world made up of all human knowledge, that we're just going out swimming. The internet, media, entertainment, are just a suit you put on.

You already know you're constantly going to be being sold something. It's not offensive, because that is always true and has been true forever. Drive down the street, turn on the TV: Selling. It's like being hit on by old dudes: That's always going to happen, why let it crimp your shit.

It's still your choice to buy, which I don't think most Gen X people really believe, because you're super worried about whether I'm smart enough to resist. This Generation X obsession with how everybody else is doing. Is everybody else smart enough to withstand the social pressure I have discovered, do they need saving.

Just like your grandparents were worried whether their kids were smart enough to not get pregnant, or our parents were worried about whether or not we were smart enough to not die.

Patronizing is powerful. A powerful feeling. A way of making sense of the world, whether it's high-fashion photos where the models' heads are cut off (horrors!) or Facebook's latest world-ending policy.

And again: You've earned it. You've earned your immunity to the Matrix.

It just would never occur to you we were born with it.

Q:

A: No! We love you!

Because it makes total sense: The person who designed the spacesuit can never fully trust the spacesuit. They know where the cracks are, and where the vacuum can get in, and how cold space gets. You're allowed to be paranoid.

But if you look over there, there's a whole generation of kids, girls and boys, who toss that helmet on without a second thought. And you need to express power over them, because they don't know what the fuck they're doing.

Which means a lot of stuff gets slowed down, redundantly processed. And a lot of stuff doesn't matter as much or as fast as it should, because you guys are over there complaining this Klosterman bullshit about how entertainment and media and technology are "taking over our brains," or commodifying our souls, or whatever paranoid lazy shit that assumes people have suddenly gone stupid. How nobody will ever truly understand life the way you do.

The scorn for anything new, anything popular, this mulish curmudgeon thing you've got going on. And when you do win your way through the tangle of irony and what it "says" about you to a place where you're having an authentic reaction to something, you guard it jealously.

You're offended by sequels and remakes and covers and remixes and mashups because you still believe things can be broken, or replaced.

The High Fidelity of it all, rather than the Infinite Playlist.

Which honestly we've come to expect, given your solipsistic fixation on your own moral superiority. Your having gotten it.

But it gets exhausting, because the ideals are so different -- and to us, so obsolete -- that the conversation is completely derailed. It's irrelevant.

If you're calling me soulless, what's the point of talking at all?

Fuck me for knowing exactly what I'm buying, and then buying it. You're setting up the field of play in such a way that we can't win. Just like your parents. And theirs. Etc.

Q:

A: No, quite the opposite. It's not an obsession with self-documenting, it's an acknowledgment that documentation doesn't matter. That's such a Generation X way to go with it.

We don't tweet about what we had for lunch because we assume that everybody cares what we had for lunch. We tweet what we had for lunch because we know for a fact that nobody cares what we had for lunch.

Your dad bought a video camera to document things in 1982, right? And maybe you started a blog to document yourself in 2002. But for us, the first thing that ever happened to us was The Real World. That fishbowl. For you, I guess it was a turning point. For us, it's what we were handed. It isn't a problem.

For you, it's more personal and essential than that, because you are more personal and essential than that, in terms of relative importance to the noise.

Either way it's about the differing relationship with technology, and available information, more than anything.

You can't see the system from anywhere other than your particular position, because it all comes to you through a screen that you think is your eyes, looking at reality. You think it wants something from you; we know it doesn't.

We know we are just part of the noise. I can't see that sitting well with you.

Q:

A: No. It's all consumption. It's all just a costume you put on. When you say it, you're just talking about a label you selectively use, to describe others, and make exceptions for your own consumerist obsessions. Because you know better. Because you are a generation of not-sheep, who know exactly who the sheep are.

And if you're not sure, you've got Jon Stewart and Glenn Beck and Rachel Maddow and Rush Limbaugh to tell you exactly who the sheep are.

Q:

A: Alphabetically, "About A Girl," "Been A Son," "Clean Up Before She Comes," "Drain You," "Heart-Shaped Box," "In Bloom," "In His Hands," "Paper Cuts," "Scentless Apprentice," "Serve The Servants," "Teen Spirit," and "Something In The Way."

Particularly "Drain You."

Q:

A: No, we'll still sleep with you. It's not that bleak yet.

Part Two, not quite as good.

...I Don't Even OWN a TV

2010-05-14T15:57:00.016-05:00

When I say, "I don't really watch that much TV," it never fails to get a laugh, because I can answer any TV question -- things that happened 24 hours ago -- with pinpoint accuracy, so clearly I watch a lot of TV.

And while the amount of TV hours going into my brain is probably higher than most, I still don't feel like I watch that much. One reason is that I can't stand to just watch TV, I've got to be doing something else: One of my other five jobs, or cleaning the house.

Drinking gallons of wine counts as a task -- just now it's this hot little number, of which I can drink just heroic amounts -- but only as long as I am also writing ranty, ill-advised emails to my professional contacts, or apologizing for same.

Working out is not on that list, but it could be -- at least then I'd feel like I was accomplishing something while straining to understand simple plotpoints on Stargate: Universe.

That show seems really basic? But there is so much I don't understand on it.

But the other reason I don't really feel like I deserve the Couch Potato ribbon at the fair is because I don't particularly enjoy watching television: You say Pop Culture, I say Muggle Studies.

Like today, for instance: I'm watching MTV, I've trained my DVR to go straight to MTV when it wakes up because I'm trying to crack the mystery of MTV.

After several weeks of this, I still don't get it. Who is the MTV viewer? What age and socioec are they? What gender? When I have a baby will he or she understand this instinctively? Is it okay to think of your baby as a test-market? Can I borrow your baby to explain this to me?

For instance, there is no Chris Pontius to look at anymore and think about how neat he is, because the channel seems exclusively to show two programs:

The first is the STOP BEING MEAN TO WHITNEY PORT show, in which a beautiful girl like a stick insect -- named I believe Olivia -- attempts to make it in the fashion biz despite the unprofessional antics of everyone around her, including the titular villain, who fights daily against the ravages of what seems to be a permanent concussion.

The second is called HOT TEEN DADS WHO NEED SOME RESPONSIBILITY, which is like the first ninety seconds of every pornographic cinema film I've ever seen, plus there's some girl with an awful haircut talking about a baby. She's bitchy, or maybe just tired. Maybe she's tired from having to spend so much time on her orange tan and multicolored Gosselin hairdo.

The program is scheduled in blocks of no less than four hours, and from I can gather, Teen Moms mostly need to tan themselves orange and complain to everybody about what they caused to happen to themselves, while doing nothing to improve their lots, which is after all what Teens do. And the Teen Dads, they need to get drunk and do Whip-Its and pretend that none of this is happening. Also what Teens do.

The tragedy is that parenthood involves so much more.

Does anyone watch both of these shows? I have a sort of Palin/Biden feeling about MTV that half of the entire country watches the Olivia program, and the other watches the documentary about teen fathers. But what happens when they run into each other? What do they talk about? Do you have a preference for either of these programs over the other? Does fashion even have a place in our world anymore? What about those Real Housewives, might they have an opinion?

Is it about schadenfreude of seeing the heterosexual girls who didn't manage to not get pregnant, being punished for their sexuality? Is it for you, as it is for me, a chance to engage in the dual fantasy of 1) Having a baby and 2) Smooching the rambunctious teen fathers?

The hottest thing about teen fathers is that they're on TV, so you can't smell their disgusting teenage smells. You don't have to clean up their barfy teenage father messes, or listen to their teenage father thoughts. And when you turn off the TV, there they go!

Perhaps it is a PSA saying, "This is what people will see when they think of you, so use your options!" But if it were, I don't think everybody would be nearly so supportive of the trashy teen parents.

I think if MTV really wanted you to be scared of pregnancy, they would line the pregnant girls up and throw rocks at them. Or at the babies.

What I would like to see is a combination of the two programs, in which a thin blonde girl from Duchess County battles both her GPA and her eating disorder, discovers she's pregnant, and then gets that shit dealt with before you can even spell all the letters of WASP: Once and for all, exactly how much money it takes to create a semester-long French internship out of literally nothing. Sort of like Survivor, but with the added tick-tock of never knowing when your grandmother is going to call somebody a Jew.

Alternatively, I would really like to see a program where I debate Gwyneth Paltrow on the issues of the day.

Frequently Asked

2008-04-14T06:15:00.007-05:00

I recently gave an interview with an up-and-coming genius journalist at Northwestern, the beautiful and talented Jessica Torres-Riley, having to do with my job as a recapper and moderator at Television Without Pity. I loved her questions and -- yeah, you know me -- loved even more the opportunity to talk about myself. Here are some of the questions, some of the answers, and some bonus questions asked by a friend which I've also answered.

Q: How did you get involved with Television Without Pity?

A: I became involved with TWoP (Mighty Big TV in those days) in the summer of 2001. I came across the site on a Google search for something random, and I loved it, just the quality and the spark of the writing. I had no idea that it was a phenomenon or anything -- even in those days it was a pretty big deal, but I'm not a person that spends a lot of time on the internet.

So I just thought, you know, these are funny people, they watch TV like I do. They think hard while it's happening. TV goes through their blood.

I think one of the major attractions of the site all along has been this kind of conspiratorial or personal effect it has on people. It's very one-on-one, I think, for most people.

(The recaps, anyway. The forums are a separate issue. I didn't even know those existed until I came on as a staff writer a couple years later. That minority of people who are primarily posters on the forums has created a separately beautiful community which -- at the time -- had little to do with me. I think they are awesome, but at the time I wasn't even aware. They were very nice about my early attempts at recapping, though, I found out later. Mists of Avalon represent!)

So I wrote to the editors/founders of the site, offering to recap a TV movie that was coming on like that week, and got two polite refusals back, and that was it. Only my concession letter -- an ambitious, unprofessional, mortifying move -- was funny enough that they ended up giving me the TV movie, and that was my first recap (The Mists of Avalon). I pitched a few more Extras, different things that caught my eye, for a couple of years. Probably half of those, I got to do. And then I did two or three in the same week, including one suggested by my editor.

That moment, as a freelancer, when they actually assign you something, that's huge. That's validation, like something out of a television show, and I will never forget it. And then I was hired-hired, and it changed my life in every way. It was a long time ago, and I was just peeking out writerly pride, so it was a big deal. Now, we've got more staff than we can assign, but back in the day, I was all about the brute force.

Tara (Wing Chun) and Sarah (Sars) and Dave (Glark) are and always will be gods and goddesses to me. They gave me the opportunity to grow and twist and change -- and whine like a motherfucker every step of the way -- throughout the life of my career working with them. I have been a kid with my first job, this total artistic cliche nightmare bullshitter, the kid that makes friends with the school nurse. I demanded fifty times what any sane boss or editor would give. But they nurtured my voice, and that makes them heroes for me.

Now that the site's grown I don't suggest this as a way of getting "in," as I say, but they gave me that opportunity and watched me stretch those muscles, and complain and moan, and were loving and corrective every step of the way. And I'm sure a lot of the time they wondered if I was just malformed or born wrong, and corrected me as well as they could. But they believed in my voice, and my take, and worked with me to get there.

(Now that I'm working with other venues, like MSNBC or whatever, I've gotten a few letters about how "a stronger editorial voice" is what turned me from the fevered madman to a regular journalist or whatever. And I get it, because it's a different voice, but that seems like a particularly ignorant backhand slam to them -- they nurtured my voice in the same way that my lovely editors in other markets do.

And don't get me twisted: TWoP is a market that accepts what I do, and that's amazing. Another market or site demands a different voice, and I'm willing to go there, but in terms of creating Jacob as a writer, TWoP is crazy elastic, which is a gift from above.

I write in a particular style for every show, every episode, and the editors have always worked around that, and sharpened it into the best it could be. When I am assigned a new show, or a show starts a new season, part of my thrill is just finding out who's going to be writing the recaps. Every new show is a new Jacob, and i'm often surprised at the voice that comes out.

Like Gossip Girl: that's a very unique blend of my own innate emotional and sexual obsessions, my reflections on the class differences and meaningless evaporative stuff that seemed to matter so much at the time, and the "TWoP snark" voice I thought I'd abandoned. I love it. But I love just as much the brass-balls seminarian bootcamper quiz-guy from The Apprentice, or the surprisingly religious and oracular Jacob that wrote about Doctor Who, or the fever-dream hypnotist of Farscape, or the ecstatically civics- and spirituality-minded Jacob that tells us about Battlestar.

Which, if you like that specific voice or not, has never been down to the editors. They are kind, good and brilliant people, and believed in me. Don't blame them if you don't like the recaps, because it's all me, with them desperately reining me in. Yes, the stories are all true. But more importantly: how lonely would my life be, without all those Jacobs enriching it? I don't expect anybody to jump from Idol to Battlestar just because of my writing. But occasionally they do, and the thing I thank just after those people is my opportunity to develop so many of those voices at once, for cash money. You couldn't ask for a Clarion or graduate program so intensive and so immediately responsive. Because when you're a recapper, everytime is NOW, and every up you fuck, you're going to be informed in ten minutes. It's magic.)

So anyway, sorry, then after those came through and I did them, I was offered American Idol. It was the summer of 2004, so even though I got the assignment in like July, I wasn't going to be writing until January, when Idol comes on. So I moderated unpaid for a few months, to ramp up. Now, of course, the moderators are paid, but back then it was the price of admission, and nobody minded.

Q: What do you enjoy about recapping?

A: I think the recapper is called upon, as a consequence of the form, to fulfill three basic roles: humorist/critic, storyteller, and couch buddy. You're there as a critic and joke-teller, but you also have to tell the story of the episode in a way that makes sense (and hopefully is artful as a separate piece, or at least well-crafted), but you are also there -- in somebody's living room -- each week, talking to the reader about an experience the two of you are sharing.

It takes longer to read a recap (God knows especially one of mine) than it does to watch the show, which means that your presence in a reader's life, a diligent reader anyway, is a pretty powerful thing. I think the job of a recapper is to balance those three roles. I love all three of them, and in hindsight it's pretty obvious that balancing them is not only difficult, but very subjective. Any given reader is going to say, "More funny, less criticism! Less funny, more personal stuff," and that's just the appeal of having lots of very attentive readers.

(Similarly, if you hate it -- and sometimes they really have -- you hate it more than you've ever hated anything in your entire life or previous lives or however much hate your stuffed animals can hate. And I trust those haters more than I do the fans of the writing, because you are being given a chick in the armor to write past. And depending on how intense they are, or how community-building that devotion to dislike is, maybe they don't see an effect. But every word, positive or negative, really does make an aggregate difference. We're all just doing the best we can.)

Then, too, it's a serious writing lab with a vicious turnaround cycle. Depending on the show and format of the coverage, you've got either 12 hours or five days to put something together, and once it's up, it's up. And the feedback -- I think in part because of the personal response of the reader, because of how it gets read -- is instantaneous, and very visceral. So just about the time you've decided for yourself whether a given piece or paragraph or concept or writing trick worked, which feedback is worthwhile and which is subjective to the reader, which things to incorporate moving forward and which things to drop, while remaining true to your voice ... there's another episode on, and you have to start the process over. Any skill I have at writing, it's because of the TWoP bootcamp. It was my first writing job -- in some ways my first job period -- and that has been, and continues to be, an exhilarating learning curve.

Look, firstly I am a novelist. Any reader can tell you I think easier in longer forms, unending blah-blah gigantic forms of arc and story and character, than I in the short term. That's not bragging, I wish I could tone it down. But the fact is, I can't just think about what's happening, I have to deal with why it is happening and what will happen because of it. It's a recapper failing, I think, but it's my brain. I have to live here.So I've written three novels, meaning that I've put to paper three complete stories that are even longer than usual. I don't know if they'll ever see the light of day, and frankly I don't care. I would love to shape them into something salable. But that's primarily about me, and it's between me and my beloved agent.

Available for human consumption, we're talking about TWoP. You can love the recaps or hate them, you can take in the detail and literary quality that's hopefully brought to them, you can appreciate or not the extra layers of interpretation and story that cone in, you can enjoy the humor if that's what you're there for. But ultimately, you're coming to TWoP to see somebody's response to an episode. I don't think anybody's under any illusions about the "recaps" actually filling in the blanks.

I mean, I do try to do that, I hope it's comprehensible, even with all the extracurricular references and poems and religious texts and whatever, but we also have a responsibility to bring an art to it, in its own right. Firstly, I'm not adding anything: it really is first response. I really am, quietly and secretly, just that pretentious when I'm watching the episode. In my head, watching an episode of the show really is that overblown and emo and detailed and hypertexted. I don't go back later and talk about Persephone or Pi or whatever: that's what's happening when I'm watching, so that's what I bring to the recap.

And more than that, I'm really, really tired of "snark." I don't think there are many of us that are capable, or interested, in turning out boilerplate "snark." If you want to hear the same jokes you've been hearing for ten years, you're going to need to look to someone less original or interesting than the current staff. We've done snark. We've done "guilty pleasure." We can do that shit in our sleep. But I think the spirit of TWoP is a bit more searching and powerful and intellectual than that.

Sars always said (usually defending my psychotic ass) that "recaps don't mean one specific thing." Heaven help us if they did. I'm more interested in really testing those limits, that snarky definition, than I am in recapitulating a house style that's ten years old. We set the standard before I was around, and the rest of the internet took up that standard before I was around, and that's what "recap" means. But I'm not satisfied, and I don't think any writer could be for very long, with recapitulating the classic recap. I want to bring the information to the reader in a newer way. The challenge -- to me especially, obviously -- is in drawing the balance. And god knows I'm not the champ at that. Luckily, I have readers who are generous enough to follow along, and wonder if "recap" means what we all thought it did.

Q: What appeals to you about TWOP?

A: It is a community of people engaged in their entertainment. It is of prime importance to me, as an idealistic person, that people engage with their entertainment, and deliberate about what they are putting in their bodies. Not avoid any particular thing, or gorge on some other thing because it's intellectually trendy, but just to taste whatever it is with their whole tongue. I think the quality of any given piece of television whatsoever is completely contingent on the viewer.

A canny person can get as much out of so-called "guilty pleasure" TV -- either a clue to the bigger societal picture, or a little self-examination -- as somebody else gets out of watching "Hardball." The mere act of watching a high profile show, either current events programs or that HBO "it's not TV" thing, is not enough to make you smart, or well-read, or eloquent, or thoughtful, or anything. That's borrowed ego, it's a reflected halo.

And on one level, the community at TWoP is good about puncturing that. But by the same token, there are groups on TWoP that are willing to engage with and give weight to stuff that I think the average viewer would either ignore altogether, or watch with some kind of hang-dog "guilt" about how they're engaging with something they can't apparently justify. Two lazy approaches that have nothing to do with fulfilling your own desires in a present and dedicated way.

Q: I see that one of the shows you recap is American Idol, which is consistently one of the most popular shows on TV today. How do you think the online communities and commenting enhance viewers interaction with the show?

A: Online discussion of this show, in particular, fascinates me. Firstly because Idol is such a case study of where our country is at, at any given time. Because it's the biggest show in history, the stories that it tells and the personae that it brings to us are immediately illuminating. The archetypes that the show produces for our consumption, and the order in which America votes them off, are so key to understanding where we are as a nation. I truly believe that. The word "zeitgeist" gets thrown around a lot, but I mean: that's American Idol. Your week-by-week Tarot reading for America.

But the internet is NOT America. Online communities like TWoP are a self-selected fraction of a fraction of a fraction that leaves out some pretty major groups of Americans, for the most part. So there's an interesting skew between the TWoP consensus and the overall American consensus. And in some ways I think that promotes the superiority complex of any online discussion or group, so it's to be expected, but the really fun thing about TWoP in particular is the rational minority among the fans who actually try to follow the show as fans of the phenomenon, rather than falling into the trap of obsessing over a particular persona from the show. That's something that I really think is specific to TWoP: not "how has this perceived conspiracy hurt my favorite's chances," but, "let's talk about whether or not it's possible that there's a conspiracy at all." And that intellectual approach to the show as a whole, as a packaged entertainment product that is doing a GREAT job of being successful, that's something I've only ever seen on TWoP.

So to expand that, the genre shows I've written about like Doctor Who and Battlestar Galactica involve different fans and different concerns. At some points I've been mystified, by the obsessive attention paid to a given detail that I, from a story point of view, overlook. I treasure those other viewpoints, and wish always to incorporate them into my own. My only wish, as a passive waiter or as a moderator, is that everybody watching the show taste it with their whole tongue. You must conquer your entertainment, own it utterly, if it's going to take you anywhere.

Recaps, moderation, off-site comment, blogging here, whatever, my number one priority is to say, "Mickey Mouse is a four-fingered rat, his friend Donald wears no pants, and there's a social inequity between Pluto and Goofy, because they're both dogs but one of them is a pet and the other one can vote, or legally marry, or whatever." Get on the internet, get the information, make up your mind. Don't come to me or anybody else and ask for the answers, because that makes you sad and lazy.

And I think even the house style, the snark, is basically asking the same thing: think about what you're putting in your body before you put it in your body, ask what it means and what it says, about America and about you, before you sign on.

Q: Have you found that participating in the online community has changed the way you watch television?

A: Not really. Possibly, after writing recaps for years, I have changed. I tend to approach any show or movie from the producer's or writer's point of view, thinking about what works and what doesn't, or what should happen next, or how this act should be structured, and I know that's a recapper thing. Because I do not EVER want to write for television, it sounds horrible. But I do tend to figure things out a lot faster than I used to, or maybe am supposed to, that kind of thing -- because the recapping is a training job for noticing things and making patterns. It's an introduction to storytelling like no other, which I really appreciate.

Although I guess there are a lot of things that really seem to vex the posters in the forums that don't bother me anymore, although they used to. So I guess just seeing the same complaints over and over, or learning to anticipate the reactions of other viewers, has made me more dedicated to seeing what's on the other side of that. The N+1 response. Which has, in my actual life, helped me to look completely insane on more than one occasion, even if generally that N+1 turns out right in the end.

To be honest, I've always been weirded out by the fandom situation. It's like, the readers and posters are the people eating the meal, and the showrunners and writers and actors are cooking the meal. And then there's me, kind of awkwardly serving the meal. As a creative person, as a novelist with my own stories to tell, it's a weird place to be. I think a lot of recappers just enjoy talking about TV, and I do too.

But there's something about being involved with fandom, and being involved (and privileged to be involved) with the creation of fandom factions, like the TWoP Battlestar fans or the TWoP Farscape fans, or the Who fans, this LINDA we created out of sixty years of history or whatever, is of immense pride for me. I love those people and I'm proud to be part of them, but that's all them. I don't get to play in that sandbox. I love them from the outside, by writing about those shows and telling them how brilliant they are.

So I'm the waiter, not the cook or the diner. That's weird. I would much rather play with my own toys, in my own sandbox. And one day, I will. But meanwhile, I am having so much fun playing critic and doll-player on those terms. And the benefits as a fan and writer of doing this job! The writerly part, analysis and character and all that, obviously. But as a fan! I can tell you every episode title of every episode of BSG, why it matters, who was in it, who guest-starred, who this and who that... There are readers who still hate me because in my transition from viewer to writer I made some wild -- I mean really disgustingly dumb -- mistakes, like what planet is which and what kind of spaceship different from some other spaceship.

I realized eventually that it mattered -- and I'll frak you up if you say it doesn't -- but also have made it a point to apologize in the next recap for mistaking things, or hearing a wrong line of dialogue. Some readers hold onto that stuff for years, you know. I think it's great. I love that, because it's a constant reminder that firstly, I owe these people my rent, and secondly, these people are teaching me new ways to love the show. I always want new ways to love the show. This year, I loved Idol more than I ever have -- and got BURNED! I hated a couple weeks more than anything I've ever hated, because I finally after like twenty years let myself get involved. And of course, here come the emails: "Are you clinically depressed? You hated Idol two weeks in a row, much more poisonously than when you just didn't care..." And I'm like, "Trust me, I actually love it now, I just randomly got two shit weeks in a row."

Nobody who reads your recaps hates the show. Even 7th Heaven. Even that show, we loved most what we hated most, and out of that comes great comedy. Even "snark." But I feel bad when I honestly fucking HATE an episode of a show, because that's an automatic diss on people that liked it. People, in a lot of cases, who generally agree with you. So of course, the first thing they think is that you've gone mentally unstable. And anybody else, I mean, that would be farfetched. Me, they know how delicate that tightrope walk can be, so they give me a little leverage. Do not print that part.

Q: Would you say you watch more television to be involved with conversations online?

A: Not me. I watch everything I moderate, but I would do that anyway. And I try not to get too involved in the conversations online, A) because it's not something I would do anyway, and B) I feel like there's an authority issue where some posters have trouble drawing the line about the weight of my opinion. Which is, you know, zero.

But I think because lots of posters come to the site as a bulletin board, they can't be expected to understand that it's primarily a content-driven site with forums attached. So the recaps, for example, end up seeming to them like super-posts with ten times the power of a normal post. Which is silly, so I try to keep those lines from getting blurred by staying out of conversations, or making clear that I'm taking off my moderator hat and recapper hat and putting on the fan hat. I do it seldom, though, because it's just not my thing.

I love it, I love the communities that it's created, and I'm proud of them, especially things like Doctor Who and Battlestar where I feel like I was privileged to even be a part of creating this giant, living, vibrant and wild group of fans, but I don't really take part.

Q: Do you have a "day job" or are you able to support yourself primarily working for TWoP? Do you read or contribute to any other sites that talk about television and pop culture?

A: I've done both. Right this second I'm writing for MSNBC and Radar magazine, doing other freelance things, so I'm pretty busy. With freelancing as my day job, TWoP fits in well with that. But in the past it's been harder to balance with a regular office job. Like this month, I have three shows going, so I'm working like every night, and dealing with the forums... it's close to six hours a day, three or four days a week, between writing and modding.

I've worked myself to death with that schedule, basically, in the past. So supplementing just TWoP with freelancing is a mental health move, some months out of the year. I mean, I try to live by the whole "adapt & overcome" mantra, so I am always looking for ways to work more efficiently, but if I had an office job in April or May, I'd end up homicidal.

q: What is the best and the worst thing about writing and modding for the site?

A: That's actually four questions, but I am going to answer the shit out of them. You know how I roll, right?

The best thing about moderating for the site is getting to read everybody's thoughts about the show in question. I find the Hills boards as fascinating as the Battlestar ones, and I do try to tell all my assigned forums how much I love them regularly. Because I do. The most cantankerous is the BSG set, the most adorable is The Hills, the most paranoid si Big Brother, and the most anarchic is Doctor Who. There's a well-known moderator maxim, just discovered by the newer recruits, that the flavor of crazy of your particular show equals the particular crazy that your posters will be. It's true like mothereffing astrology.

(One thing casual readers might not know is that we have super crazy forums discussing every single show or moment ever aired on TV. And even if you know that, you might not know that last year we took on paid moderator staff to cover them. The only recappers who transitioned were me (Bayliss) and Kim (Pembletom, totally not planned!) and Susan (Strega, moderator name still Strega). So that was a huge shift right there.)

The worst thing about moderating is trying to explain basic things and not making headway. Like, we have really strict rules on the boards. Really harsh, perfect, wonderful rules. I looooove them. They're easy to follow, if you get it. They solve problems ten posts down the line by nipping in the bud in the first place. "Don't do this thing. Not because it's bad, but because if you X, I know from pattern recognition and thousands of posts a day that somebody is going to do A, B and C, and that's a mess the moderator cleans up, so don't do X, please."

And it's like if you say, "Don't do X," if you say it in the site rules,and in the Show-specific rules, and in the MOD Q&A thread, and at the top of every page ... how many personal gold-embossed invitations to decency do people need? Those are all requests to follow the rules, and clarifications if for whatever reason, so when people act like they never knew it, that bums me out. And when they persist, you have to cut them off. That hurts me, but it's worth doing. Because hopefully and eventually, you have a conversation about the show whose quality still rivals that of anything on the internet. Considering how crazy important TV is to our country and our world, that's saying something. I'm proud to be involved with that, no matter what cosmetic stuff happens from time to time.

Three: The thing I hate about recapping is the thing I was talking about before. The fact that, because I'm an employee and moreso because I'm recapping, my opinion matters. DUDE, my opinion doesn't matter. It's an opinion, that's how it works. So you get a lot of mommy-defiance and "well you said this, but I thought that" and it's like, "I'm not telling you what to think, I'm telling you what I think." Which is really the opposite of telling people what to think. I just feel like -- and this applies to the mod thing too -- people assign way to much power to you, because they are desperate to do so.

People are used to authority figures, either to agree with them or to fight them. The hardest part of my job is convincing them that I'm not one. I'm a guy, who loves a thing. I'm not your mommy. If I tell you to knock something off, knock it off. That's not a judgment on you, that doesn't mean you're a bad person -- it's a reminder of the rules. Fucking knock if off, and we'll go back to talking about the show. The end. There's nothing more important or epic or victimizing to it. And the hardest thing about it is, you cannot convince people of their own agency. You cannot tell people to take control of their opinions, to express them, to say it without recourse to "I may be in the minority, but..." None of that. You cannot tell people to have the strength and beauty and courage of their convictions, because that defeats the purpose. Which I am willing to ignore unless it contrasts the rules of the site, which it ... does, so cut it out. Knock it off.

And the best thing, question number last, the very best thing about writing for the site is this: I get to swim every week in something very important. I get to touch the great big brain of writer, actor, viewer, commentator, and what it becomes. I get to swim alongside that monster like a killer whale, and report back. What's better than that?

If you're not buying, in the particular shape I'm selling this week: no skin off your back. Complaining about the form the recaps take is like busting into a party you weren't invited to, and then complaining about the food. If you don't like it, well, it wasn't written for you. We're sure that you're very nice, and clever, but it's not meant for you. Go crash another party. We love you nonetheless, and hope to see you next week.

The bottom line is that story is all we have. The oldest societies on Earth, the writers and editors of today's reality TV segments: they all know it. They told our stories back and forth, into myth, and so on. Story is what we are. I get to tell those stories in a way that nobody else does. I get to play storyteller AND story-explainer AND court jester. The best things you can be. I get to midwife story, the heart's blood of our humanity. To both tell us what is happening, and why the story is happening the way it is happening. The how and what, but also the why. There's not a fuckload of jobs that give you that many opportunities to touch God, or magic, and pass it along. And that's how seriously I take it.

And trust me, I'm throwing in as many jokes as I can along the way.

If you have any questions, I'm here to answer them. Be classy, be smart, and be cool, obviously, but I'm serious: On my approval, this post could keep getting longer forever and ever, and I'll credit whoever asks the question as I add it to this post. My dream is to make this "Frequently Asked" post an ongoing, wonderfully transparent thing.

Just be nice. You can ask the most frakked-up question in history, but if you ask it in an awesome way, or at least politely, I will answer the fuck out of it. I am well aware of my weaknesses, and I can share info on that as easily as everything else. Even something like "Why is the recap for X episode of Y show so fucking pretentious?" Or, for example, "What's with the obsessive hatred of X writer of Y show?"

I'll answer it, and thank you for giving me the opportunity. I really do find myself just that fascinating. And if your question is dickish, give me an email and I'll answer it in private, because I care and I want you as a reader. But it would be nicer if you made the question blog-ready to start with. My grandma always told me, "Breeding tells," and as sick as it is, that's how I live. Show your breeding, and we'll have a talk. Either way.

And here they are: Question One, from Kelly H.

Interesting insight into your side of the TWoP recapping world. I'm sort of curious how your few weeks of bad mood affected your moderating on the forums, if at all? It seems like that - especially when combined with how emotional/involved fans can get - might have been a bad combination.

Good question with a stupid answer. The answer is No. It's my job. Whether or not ten teenagers sing shitty songs for forty-five minutes has nothing to do with whether or not people stay on topic, remember where their shift key is, or allow their fellow posters to question David Cook's perfection.

My "bad mood" lasts precisely the forty-five it takes to watch/write/think about the episode. It has no bearing on the entirely separate proposition of the fans themselves. This isn't my first barbecue. But even if it were, the entire point of the job is keeping that stuff separate.

Who do you cast as the Scorpio of the Cylons? I would love it to be Tory.

Only Scorpios ever ask this question. I've always put the Eights as Scorpio, not just because of the Six/Virgo Eight/Scorpio thing, but because of all the secrets. I'm thinking primarily of S1 Boomer: she's very sexual, she has secrets she's not even interested in dealing with, but she's very emotionally responsive at the same time. She's very smart, and very adaptable. Although, as you say, all that fits Tory now too.

Given the quote above, what's the flavour of the BSG board?

There's a hard-science fascination with the mechanics and fake science of the show that seems very life-or-death. I don't know if other sci-fi show fans are like that, I'm guessing that they are. So what's most specific to BSG is the political stuff. There's a lot of parliamentary procedure and worrying over the details of governance, that kind of thing. The Farscape people are also like this, but more emotional about it. BSG fans are like, "But how can we make this discussion more equitable without denying the central truth of our differing opinions?" And then there's the whole lifeboat thing, because the show is so perilous and the ratings and attention paid the show are so up and down, that translates too.

MAMAN FATALE: Is Every Noir Woman Some Gay Dude's Mother?

2008-02-26T19:33:00.001-06:00

- Suddenly, Last Summer by Tennessee Williams
- Romeo Is Bleeding, screenplay by Hilary Henkin
- Running With Scissors, directed by Ryan Murphy
- The Devil Wears Prada, directed by David Frankel
- Misery, directed by Rob Reiner
- Macbeth, by William Shakespeare
- Cerebus, written & drawn by Dave Sim

Last night, a friend and I watched a double feature: Romeo Is Bleeding and Suddenly, Last Summer. Not wanted to give away the total nutsack craziness of the latter film, I couldn't explain to him why it was not only the perfect but the necessary complement to the film he'd chosen -- but watching the scope of Suddenly's total fucking weirdness dawn on him was more than fulfilling enough. It is a deeply strange, nearly perfect, viscerally upsetting film with a denouement as unbelievable and inevitable as that found in Bug, or Ellen Burstyn's Switch. I wish movies were being written that so closely approximated the raw, ugly, weird, personal creepshows we all carry around -- hell, I wish plays were still being written that were half so brave.

Romeo Is Bleeding, of course, follows Jack (Gary Oldman)'s adventures with the ladies: from his wife (Annabella Sciorra, doing her usual sexy-wounded emotional flipbook) to his mistress (Juliette Lewis, knocking yet another brain-damaged sex doll out of the park) to the cunning and magical hitwoman Mona Demarkov, played by the possessed and terrifying Lena Olin. While Roy Scheider's Don Falcone is nominally the source, or one half of the source, of Jack's misery, we are never privy to the whole story of Mona and Falcone's association. The story follows a repeating, telescoped sequential narrative: Jack (1) tests the waters of ethical relativism, (2) is rewarded in a small way by Falcone, (3) has sex with Lena Olin, (4) is offered a bigger reward to betray Falcone, visits his (5) wife and (6) mistress, and then (7) is punished mightily for his crimes.

The whole movie simply plays this sequence of events out several times, each time cranking up the pain and stakes of the iteration, until we end up at a brilliantly funny, ridiculously over the top version of the story in which Olin -- hands cuffed behind her back -- nearly murders Jack from the back seat of a Cadillac using only her dainty ankles, survives the resulting car accident, kicks through the windshield, grabs a suitcase full of money with her bound hands and an envelope of false ID in her mouth, and takes off down the street to construct an elaborate ruse in which she somehow procures Juliette Lewis, dresses Lewis up like herself, gets Oldman to shoot her, and then produces her own arm -- which she thoughtfully removed herself at some point while all of the other shit was going down -- and still manages to escape the legal system scot-free.

She is magic.

She's also a femme fatale, clearly, but one whose person and persona are so bound up with the universe of the narrative itself that we are never surprised to see her popping up out of nowhere, coming back from the dead, visiting Jack in dreams, straddling him in a variety of rooms and amputations, and haunting him long after her death. She's the Joker to his Dark Knight, the Tyler Durden to his Jack's Sense Of Oedipal Guilt. Romeo is a deeply personal, an almost Impressionist, film, which twists and manipulates the rules of noir and action so perversely around itself that in the end we feel like we're reading the diary of a deeply lonely man.

What's interesting, and subversive, is that the story is written by a woman, Hilary Henkin. Born in 1962, she's part of the Shane Black generation of smarty-pants action writers, but with a subtle and emotionally savvy touch that few reviewers seem to really grasp. I've just been through a thousand inches of Romeo criticism, and they all -- men and women alike -- seem to say the same thing: "derivative," "sluttish," "appallingly violent"; most of all, there seems to be agreement that Henkin, in telling her story, is trying to do the Boys' Club one better: to "out-Hammett Hammett." Or, even more insultingly, one female critic claims that "[Olin's] lingerie flaunting appears to be one of the film's main raisons d'etre."

1994 was not so benightedly long ago that this crap should be unexpected. It's not a perfect movie -- the voiceover and absurdly drawn-out end sequence are both laughably heavy-handed -- but it's an original film, and like anything else it deserves to be critiqued on its own merits.

I'm reminded firstly of Geek Fallacy #235, "This Unfamiliar Thing Is A Rip-Off Of Something With Which I Am Familiar." 235er involves constricting the entire universe and all creative artifacts in it to a private gallery, owned and curated by the loser who's talking. Your favorite band? I heard about five seconds of it, and I have to say that the A-G-E chord progression reminded me of a Rolling Stones song I saw in a commercial last week; therefore I am fairly certain that your favorite band is a ripoff of the Rolling Stones. The herky-jerky camera work of your favorite television show reminds me of the gritty autofocus tricks on my favorite television show, which was cancelled: therefore your favorite show is obviously a ripoff of my favorite television show.

Combine GF#235 with the mid-'90s "glass ceiling" obsession and you can see how they got there: hardboiled, ridiculous dialogue is a staple of the genre, but can you really picture it coming out of a woman's mouth? Or, by extension, her pen? Of course not: obviously she's trying to join the Boys' Club. Obviously, by using and exploiting the tropes of the noir style -- which by 1994 had disappeared up its own asshole anyway -- she's just trying on the slumpy suits and rumpled fedoras of her betters. What can a woman know about violence, or about the terrifying and numinous power of a sexy, squatting (Always with the squatting! In basques and garters, squatting all over the place!) Circe like Mona Demarko? Obviously, she's just aping the work of the stronger, smarter men -- the Dashiells and the Jakes and the Bogeys -- that came before. No way is she trying anything new. Right? It sounds like something I've heard before, so obviously there's nothing new here.

Except, of course, this is the same woman who has written, produced, co-written, ghost-written or polished some of the most loudly lauded and goofily beloved tongue-in-cheek action (Fatal Beauty, Road House), genre-establishing claustrophobic gothic incest remix satires (Flowers In The Attic) and straight-up genius political calls-to-arms (Wag The Dog, V For Vendetta).

Once you've watched Olin cackle her way through the fourth or fifth deadly iteration of the above sequence -- at one point asking, in all seriousness, if the shackled and toeless Oldman would prefer she fuck him with her prosthetic arm (the busy leather straps of which seem organically developed from her earlier complicated belts and garters, and which serve her breasts up like St. Agatha's, on a plate) attached or unattached -- it becomes clear that we're operating in a heightened reality. This is not, after all, an expose about the corruption to which policemen are sometimes, or FBI witness protection protocol, or a amputee's story of determination: it's literally being told by the narrator, to the narrator, as part of a semiannual self-flogging ceremony of guilt and flagellation.

Romeo gives us a world of all-consuming femininity, in which whatever the plan is, Mona's already thought five steps ahead. She infiltrates the personae of both Jack's lovers, replacing his wife Sciorra through gesture and in dreams and his mistress Lewis through actual costumery. In the final sequences, we learn that her ties to Falcone, Jack's other torturer and puppetmaster, are as mysterious and intimate as everything else about her. The bitch chainsaws her own arm off and then sets an entire building on fire with herself inside, but still makes her day in court. Jack finally kills her -- the movie's second act is built around the premise that he cannot bring himself to kill her until she has literally leveled his life around him -- but only on the way to killing himself. She fences him in with sex, with money, with temptation, with legal and criminal double-crosses, and even forces him to dig a grave for her archenemy (in a sequence that makes it clear she's only suffering him to live because she's down an arm): without Mona, the story falls apart.

Meaning that the story is fundamentally about Mona, or rather, about the relationship between Jack -- the Ego of the story -- and Mona, whose seeming demonic possession echoes the archetypal possession that fuels Jack throughout most of the story. She represents not only his shadow, the id temptation that puts his wife and lover and self into jeopardy, but also the dark aspect of his anima: she is his female Other, on whom he projects all of his own darkness, giving her mythical powers far beyond those of mortals.

Compare to director Peter Medak's other projects, which include an adaptation of Lawrence's The Rocking-Horse Winner and Species II -- both of which echo Romeo's devouring and dominating feminine stories, in their own way. (Species II in particular is interesting: the sequel doubles the original's Venus Flytrap sex/death naïve/horny heroine with her male counterpart, and then watches them fall into a mutually destructive dance of exploitation, death and sex, but expands the universe with a surprising amount of latitude given the male's viewpoint as the chase comes to a close.)

Which makes Suddenly, Last Summer the perfect follow-up. In this one, based on Tennessee Williams's 1958 one-act, two women catch Monty Clift's hapless doctor between them as they war over the rights to memory regarding the dead man they both still love. While the play was originally presented off-Broadway as a double-bill with Something Unspoken under the joint title of Garden District, the latter play's emphasis on the lesbian undercurrent (the eponymous unspoken "something") turns up the volume on the gay content in Suddenly, which is basically unnecessary and unbalances its noir effects and devilish religion.

Suddenly takes Olin's Mona Demarkov and makes her a god. Literal. Half the story takes place in an explicitly primal jungle of a New Orleans garden, while the rest of the scenes are set in a mental hospital. Katherine Hepburn's Violet Venable aims to get Elizabeth Taylor's character, Catherine Holly, lobotomized for reasons having to do with her faceless, voiceless son's sexual secrets, and pulls every string -- like a grande dame, Katherine Hepburn version of Mona Demarkov -- in order to make it happen, catching Clift and Taylor both in a web of deceit and Razor Magnolia denial. A Venus Flytrap -- "named for the goddess of love" -- originally seems to represent the devouring mother/aunt at the heart of the tragedy, but in the end it's revolved itself around to represent the willing sacrifice of St. Sebastian Venable himself.

The God stuff is weird, but follows. Violet remembers Sebastian's preoccupation with the destruction of a litter of sea turtles by carnivorous birds overhead through her own filter, that of a bereaved mother sea turtle, but the truth is that the give-and-take of Sebastian's mutually destructive and devouring relationships with everyone around him make him both a God of turtles and a sexual victim of ancient seagull sex rites. He is the recipient of fervent worship, by both his female relations and the young men of Cabeza de Lobo, but knows that ultimately he will be destroyed by their rapacious appetites. He is, offstage, a magical character in his own right, imbued even in death with so much power and secret knowledge that he almost seems more present than Clift himself. And again, we see identity slippage at the hand of the death mother figure: Clift, the protagonist, is eventually rewritten as a new Sebastian.

So why have Clift's character, Doctor "Sugar," in the story at all? Because there must always be a man who resists. Williams is good at writing the devouring female madness, because Williams has a shrieking madwoman in his head making him a good playwright and a very commonplace homosexual, but knows enough to know that without a male character standing apart, denying, or directly contradicting the emotional, neurotic, unconscious mass of crazy that comes with mommies and madwomen in his stories, he's just telling static stories about nothing at all.

Stories resolve conflicts. In the undifferentiated unconscious content that gives birth to dreams, stories and our every shadowed movement, there is no conflict, just as there is no time or distance or spatial relationships. Everything is now, everything is present. It's a big old mess. So to simply tell us a story of how crazy and scary women can be, without including a male or denying ingredient, means looking at an undifferentiated mixture of crazy. Which is not story, but in fact the first step of art therapy, which is by definition not art. What makes Sebastian Venable so interesting and significant is that, as Sugar's double, he is the man in the story who gave in to the susurrus of unconscious significance that threatens to devour men, in Williams's stories. He is fully invested, like Dionysus in the Bacchae: neither classically male nor physically female, but above and combining both; like the flower of the Venus Flytrap, which gobbles like a predator while resting gently in the garden, Sebastian is a female and male symbol of passion and androgyny.

The story takes place several months after Sebastian's death, as the title suggests, and the main action of the plot follows Dr. Sugar as he tries to bait first Violet and then her niece Catherine into giving up the truth about the murder -- a truth which is so bizarre and unbelievable that one can forgive both women for being driven mad by it, and by falling for the numinous trap of thinking that it represents the true and awful face of God. Sebastian is a sacrifice and apotheosis for them as well, God incarnate and sacrificed on an altar of hot, grimy, luxuriating decadence and sensuality. While Dr. Sugar, like Tom or Stanley in Williams's bigger plays, can stand apart and watch this happen and shake his head bemusedly, it's Sebastian who is forced -- by Violet's narrative, which she dominates just as she dominates the plot of the film -- to reenact his namesake's martyrdom.

For a historical example of the noir flytrap narrative, look at Macbeth. From the beginning to his sad end, he is hounded by magical, strange, witchy women. His fortune is told by actual witches from outer space, his entire path is written out by the original Mona Demarkov of course, and in the end he's defeated by whom? The only man on earth not "born of woman" -- not touched, that is, by the sick energy and magic of the whole world that encroaches slowly in on him from all sides, like happens when you end up in Silent Hill. Or think about Rob Reiner's Misery, in which a writer is caught between two crazy women -- one who sprung from his head like Athena, and the other who leapfrogs up the chain of command and becomes the boss of him in every way, literally creating the narrative of his life, his eating and shitting and ability to move, as he's doing the same for the fictional object of her obsession.

When I say post-Oedipal, I'm talking about two things which specifically inform the fictions of the last sixty or seventy years: non-normative sexuality and gender-imbalanced sexual development.

Firstly, the purely sexual connotations of the Oedipal conflict, as classically understood and referenced, are unavoidably inscribed with the heterosexual male viewpoint. This is fallacious in several ways, not least because -- if things were really that simple -- gay men and all women would get off scot free. That's not the case, however: in fact, all people, men and women alike, are born of women to this day. It's limiting and sophomoric to an insulting degree to ascribe the consequences of birth in these childish, giggling terms. (One might say, however, that while the Oedipal conflict directly relates to the Hero's Journey itself -- as a retreat from, descent into, and return from the oblivion of undifferentiated psychic content, or ecstasy, in all its forms -- it's the Nuclear Age, with its creepy focus on artificial family units and rigidly enforced gender rules, its top-down regulation of female and child sexuality that suborns all desire to the rules of the Father, that has really given Electra her strength, and her wounds.)

Or to put it another way: the opposite of the Oedipus Complex is not the Electra Complex, it's the Oedipus Complex. Our connection of the Mother archetype with both wish-fulfillment Eden and devouring, negative critic (from kritikos, "judge" or "discerner"), carries the danger of infecting our actual view of the world. By letting the former shade our worldview, we run the risk of staying infantilized -- as in the once-popular "Peter Pan" diagnosis -- or by engaging in subtle or overt warfare with the outside world. A disappointed Peter Pan sees the failure of Mommy to provide in every unfair detail of his life: the car he can't afford, the clothes she can't fit into, the job for which he is unqualified, the uselessness of her graduate degree. All cause and effect goes out the window when Mother archetype takes control of the spoiled adult child: if the world won't comply with Peter's wishes the way Mommy used to, then he'll just hold his breath until his face turns blue ... or become a serial monogamist, or regress to childhood and become an otaku, become bulimic, or otherwise demonstrate her dissatisfaction with the status quo by refusing to grow up at all.

Similarly, possession by a negative anima or Mother archetype takes advantage of and fulfills all fears and nightmares of powerlessness. By relieving the subject of his ability to make informed decisions -- or by making them futile, by overwhelming them with critique or bitterness -- these types of ego possession actually absolve the subject of any responsibility to himself at all. How much of the voice of depression is an inverted, bloated Mother archetype taking on the guise of self-hatred? What these stories warn against -- by describing its possibilities and procedures -- is the abandonment of personal power in favor of the controlling, poisoned anima.

The Devil Wears Prada and Running With Scissors are both fundamentally stories of children who, through trial and error, manage to make it out of their childhood alive, even as the worst and most hellish Mother possessions swoop at them again and again, like Williams's God-infused seagulls. Burroughs's memoir-filtered mother is expertly played by director Ryan Murphy and Annette Benning as a charismatic, secretive figure who controls and destroys the lives of others without a second thought; back to whom every strange desire and ugly event can be traced. While Hathaway's beleaguered assistant is a grown woman with common sense, and not a innocent young man, the narrative itself follows the same basic skeleton as any other devouring-feminine story: the hero resists a set number of slings and arrows, is tested and discovers love and a personal ethical standard, and -- this is key -- eventually repudiates and leaves the mother-dominated world.

Where things get dangerous is when we are unable to separate the unconscious and archetypal content of these stories from our own personal narratives: ask a straight male acquaintance of average intelligence about his views on women at the right time of night, and you'll get a psychiatrists-level survey of his mother's faults and virtues, universalized across the spectrum. This is so laughably common -- and so prevailing among the rules-setting, normative, male heterosexual definers of culture -- that we've forgotten to be grossed out by it.

Only when the details become too terribly personal -- as in Dave Sim's memorably loopy ass-hatted digression into the "gaping void" of femininity in the pages of his once-feminist comics -- or when something else ties the storytellers together do we realize anything is off. While Hilary Henkin is subversive and wonderful for telling her story in such big, crazy, 1994 terms, I'm seeing a certain commonality among the creators of these others stories.

Let's see: Suddenly was scripted by Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal, and apparently the confusing, overly symbolic mess of an ending can be blamed on the Catholic Legion of Decency's interference with the script, and the homophobic compromises made and stances taken by producer Sam Spiegel and director Joseph Mankiewicz -- the former of whose mistreatment of Clift was so overt that Hepburn, once she was sure her filming was complete, spat in his face.

Prada is, while based on a female novelist's sub-par novel and taking place in a female-dominated and -coded environment, is commonly accepted as somehow related to the gay men's experience, a gay male fantasy played out entirely in female and gay male characters, aggressively feminized -- a modern-day Wizard Of Oz, in which the accepted cliché of gay men's lives are (like Sex & The City, we're constantly being told) played out by cardboard cutouts and surreal personae. Contrast, please, this film -- or the other big, execrable Rudnick-esque hits like Birdcage or In & Out -- with something like Brokeback Mountain or the more gritty gay men's narratives like Prick Up Your Ears, in which neither couture nor the devouring feminine have anything more than a vague symbolic presence -- and ask which one made more money, by virtue of its accessibility, its accordance with our accepted perception of the gay male as feminized, fussy, flighty eunuch. The more masculine the gay man in question is, whether on the screen or in real life, the more likely we are to judge him with the harshest terms imaginable: as a waste. "What a waste!" we say: and why? Because he's not playing the game, and without the game, what are we? We want our own stories told back to us, and that's true for everybody. But 90% of the world is straight, and needs the radicalizing spectre of gay sexuality -- which calls into question not only sexual identity, but also gender and, most importantly, the static roles of male/active and female/passive -- pushed into its little box. It's not evil, it's just the accumulation of desire; it's supply and demand.

Running With Scissors was adapted and directed by one gay genius of our time, Ryan Murphy, from a book by another gay genius of our time, Augusten Burroughs -- who was of course writing from his own experience. The Devil Wears Prada, directed by David Frankel, a Hollywood scion whose credits include Sex & The City and the shelved gay romance The Dreyfuss Affair, who had this to say about the continued Disney stalling of the project, back in the summer of '96: "Birdcage is the most conventional story about stereotypical, flamboyant gays who are hardly shaking up the system. What did Birdcage make possible? More Birdcages.''

I couldn't agree more, and God knows big-budget loads like Birdcage and In & Out are almost more embarrassing than the lion's share of the awful independent gay movies that followed, mired in their '70s self-obsession and self-pity, but it doesn't really answer the question at hand, which is: why do gay men tell these stories, over and over and over? Cause and effect rear their ugly heads again.

Picture this: Absent father, overbearing mother. Heard it before? Me too. It's a pretty common narrative.

What's interesting, and telling, is that the narrative is written by straight men, who have no experience of organic homosexuality. I've just been through a thousand inches of attempts to circumnavigate the essentially and implicitly Othered experience of homosexuality, and they all -- men and women alike -- seem to say the same thing: "derivative," "sluttish," "immature," "neurotic," "appalling"; most of all, there seems to be agreement that gay men, in telling their stories, are joining the Boys' Club by describing their relationship to femininity and masculinity in weirdly heteronormative terms. Not the gay men's experience of femininity or masculinity, then, but what the heterosexual definition of culture would prescribe as everybody's experience of gender.

I'm reminded of Geek Fallacy #235, "This Unfamiliar Thing Is A Rip-Off Of Something With Which I Am Familiar." 235er involves constricting the entire universe and all creative artifacts in it to a private gallery, owned and curated by the loser who's talking. Your favorite band? I heard about five seconds of it, and I have to say that the A-G-E chord progression reminded me of a Rolling Stones song I saw in a commercial last week; therefore I am fairly certain that your favorite band is a ripoff of the Rolling Stones. The herky-jerky camera work of your favorite television show reminds me of the gritty autofocus tricks on my favorite television show, which was cancelled: therefore your favorite show is obviously a ripoff of my favorite television show.

Combine GF#235 with the mid-'00s backlash against the '80s-'90s entitled white bitching of ACT UP and other radical groups who alienated the definers of culture while disappearing up their own boring, self-destructive, lazy, mindless assholes -- and then screamed like toddlers when their Peter Pan dreams weren't fulfilled. By letting the dominant culture infantilize them, and rebelling against those self-defined cage walls, all they did was reinforce the "real" cultural perception that homosexuality was simply a deferment of sexual maturity: to reinforce the ugliest stereotypes by letting their poisoned animas and abused Peter Pan egos take the stage. Way to go, girls.

That's one narrative: that without a normalizing, heterosexual masculine influence, or with a powerfully -- magically? -- feminine force of great enough magnitude, the normal course of nature is somehow subverted. As a person who believes that every human being deserves -- and is required -- to know and love themselves intimately, all the way to the bottom, this is a contradiction I could never reconcile, even as a youngster. Somehow an a priori condition of my identity -- the gender and sexual lines against which we define ourselves, in terms of the twinned forces of life, sex/attraction and death -- was, thanks to the environment in which I had grown up, traveled back in time like some kind of submicroscopic quantum phenomenon?

Of course, to screech -- like Catherine in Suddenly, asserting her sanity from inside the insane asylum, unable to gain leverage against the culture-defining powers so threatened by her personal truth -- that these memories are mine, subjectively verifiable and real, is to get into an impossible argument. The one response you can't have, to the accusation that you are crazy, is that you are not crazy. It's like telling the witch hunter that you're not a witch. "I just happen to be a woman of intelligence who resists the dominant, masculine heteronormative paradigm," you could be screaming while they set you on fire.

I've written before about the inscription of patriarchal values, the logos, on our viewpoint, both in the abstract and in unending anecdotal exegeses. I've also performed deconstructive analyses of classic homosexual tropes in the same vein. I've discussed the experience of gay teens in this context, and what it feels like to except yourself from the entire mess, whether you're a real-life business executive or fictional celebutante.

What I've never really done is offer a real alternative to these narratives. Try this on for size: Perhaps the absent father contributes to an a priori sexuality by virtue of his absence, in the case that his assertion and enforcement of heterosexual behaviors would twist what's naturally there into a behavioral approximation of heterosexuality. Perhaps in his absence, the father avoids wrecking what was there in the first place, and establishes a negative space in which his child's desire and identity arise from actual experience rather than tradition. Likewise, the overbearing mother is expressed -- by straight and gay writers alike -- in the particular Peter Pan narratives of her son: the only people who tell stories are those people who have stories to tell. Which is to say, the only people that tell stories are those with conflicts that need to be resolved. It comes down to a self-selected population telling their stories, which align along both lines in a false positive that becomes universalized, and the myth of constructed homosexuality is born.

The radical element in this narrative, as in the lineage of classic noir, is represented by Romeo Is Bleeding, in the works of Kathy Acker and Karen Novak; in short, by the female writers whose need to tell the story of the devouring mother take their form in parallel to the more usual -- which is to say, canonical, which is to say male -- gay men's narratives. Every gay man whose healthy, nuclear upbringing still "resulted" in unaltered homosexuality speaks against this prevailing narrative, and every woman whose experience, as told, recapitulates the false ontogeny of the mythical gay persona, radicalizes the enforced gender and sexual roles that have come down through the accumulated power and narrative of our culture.

And if those voices are ignored and liminalized by the defined culture of their fathers, for whom Geek Fallacy #235 is a simple fact of life, in which we all take part -- even threatening and attacking when they're sufficiently well-stated, or too derangedly different from the accepted paradigm -- I don't know that we have many alternatives than to attack that paradigm head on, and speak our stories for ourselves, even as they light the coals beneath our feet.

You're not crazy, and you're not alone, but if both of those things are true, then the most hideous responsibility has just landed itself firmly on your shoulders, because there's nobody left to blame. If you're not crazy, and you're not alone, then why aren't you happy? That's the path you have to walk, alone. And it'll take you the rest of your life.

HOW I THINK IT HAPPENS MAYBE

2008-02-15T01:36:00.004-06:00

My question was, what if DH Laurence decided to write a chapter of Dubliners but it was all about Britney Spears's vagina? Nobody could answer it, so I did it myself. Eliot on beats.

O and don't they have their hair just right like werewolves in a song and don't they just look perfectly put together like pieces in a puzzle book with every hair just right and every hair plucked out of place and every hair arranged in a cartoon mystify guaranteed to put you in a Tokyo frame of mind, and didn't they surprise you when with hair like gilded silk they glided all in a row like maidens and true gentlemen down the lane, across the red carpet, into a thousand flashes bound like stars, and didn't it surprise you when you became like one of them, first a little bit famous and then a lot, and the flashes came for you? Didn't it sound just like a fanfare like a Phil Collins symphony of soft money and hard good times at three o'clock into somebody's car some strange limousine waiting at the curb for you and your soft time to continue, to drive on and ever on into the next place and the place after that until you didn't know and didn't care and then deposited like a baby like an orphan like baby Moses at the door at the stair at the back of the place where you laid your sweet head all alone upon silk and satin and five thousand threads, count them all, where you could lay it down and rouge and gloss the pillow up and louche and toss the fellow up and turn it all over, waking at noon and start the thing again, and on that twelfth day when it was time to repair and to rejuvenate, when there was someone on Rodeo that could do your makeup up and wipe away those days and nights, when it was time to go to work again and fill up and fall again and be somebody else again, o did you ever wonder who that was that they were making up? Did you ever think again of days spent living on the drag with not a shoe nor a fabulous gown nor anything but your name to your name and waiting for someone to see the talent, raise the talent, polish and love and praise the talent, to see the talent and pass the talent upstairs now to the next level and the flourish of the talent, to raise and praise and cage the talent, and didn't you know even then that somebody somewhere was hating you then even as they raised you up, and did you think on it after like a girl at the end of a Sunday sundae thinking, what is it that brought me here and do I have enough to last a lifetime? O and don't you feel the eyes upon your tender flesh bruising like a fruit as they turn you this way and that and press upon your navel and smell the rich and young fragrance of love arising like a bruise out of your tender flesh, and passing you on down from hand to hand to hand until one claw one painted lovely perfect hand reached out and caught you in its palm and curled its painted claw around your heart, not touching and not bruising and not caging but just holding and said this is it my kingdom for this year, I will hold and bear and love this fruit until we all can share? And do you remember what happened then, my girl upon the stair? My fairy, story, my fairytale, sorry, my darling dear my sweet thing that must meet this man and then the next, photographed in this position and moved again into that position and always with the good of your career and with only the strength and power of conviction and the future of your life on the line your career like a shining star in the distance toward which a claw and then your tender unbruised hand reached out reached for reached out towards and then the voice saying almost there, not close enough, almost there not close enough, just one more thing just one thing you mustn't do if you're not up to it but this could be the bigtime and this could be the one that separates you from the pack of up and coming young and blooming girls with pinking cheeks shall I tell you what it is and have you yet been waxed and where are you going tonight and what are you wearing tonight and have you thought about a thong or your big-girl panties have you thought about a thong or a brief or a bikini or what about this have you thought about this have you given any thought to please don't freak out but what about this idea and all the girls are doing it, those girls with cheeks who want to rise above the pack have you thought about just maybe possibly probably this: wearing nothing at all.

WHAT TO EXPECT WHEN YOU'RE EXPECTING TV

2008-02-14T18:05:00.002-06:00

SO. The strike is over, and everybody's throwing these numbers around: episodes in the can, shortened season orders, lengthened season orders, production start dates, air dates, lots of blank spaces where the answers will one day appear. But what does it actually mean? Here are a few tips on what to expect between now and June.

The Best News

Gossip Girl, the best show on television of all time, will be finishing out their original 22-episode order -- which you may remember was the very first full-season order of the season -- airing through June. Now, the quasi-finale was a great possible ending to the season, so really this is just good news on top of a stellar year, but it will be nice to see Queen B get her revenge on the UES sometime before we've all graduated high school.

I'm reminded of The OC's first year, when the baseball break was figured into the storylines, with a similarly powerful cliffhanger/break-point (Marissa's OD in the TJ). Obviously this break wasn't planned in the same way -- it's the usual 13-ep order that dramas get before they know whether they're cleared for the "back nine," or a full season -- but it worked out brilliantly here, within the strike's curtailment of the 07-08 season.

What To Expect: All of Manhattan crushed by a towering wrath so powerful and destructive that Cloverfield starts looking like a puppet show, from late spring to early summer; even more aggressive reruns until then.

Less Awe-Inspiring, But Still Very Exciting News

Ugly Betty, Brothers & Sisters, Grey's Anatomy and House are all shooting 4-6 new episodes to finish out the season.

While the reaction to Grey's has been a little bit more so-so every year -- regardless of my continuing awe and love for the show's writerly (almost literary) ambition and skill, and inability to shut up about how much of a Writing 101 inspiration it is and should be for every writer, even/especially if some fans are vocally unhappy -- and House's overarching narratives are mostly not the point (although Olivia Wilde's 13 and the return of wonderful Anne Dudek's Amber are vitally exciting), it's a little sadder to see uber-serials Betty and Brothers possibly forced to crimp their own style to accommodate the strike-shaped hole in their season orders.

Betty's creator has said he's basically going to have to cram a planned 20+ episode arc into 17 episodes; this show is just hitting its stride, and while there's a certain candy-sweet anticipation to seeing the narrative explode even more quickly than we've come to expect this season, think of all the nutty Amanda and Mark situations that will probably get squished down to deal with Betty's incredibly boring love life, plus complications with the truly horrible sandwich man! (On the other hand, the second Betty's romantic bullshit gets ironed out, maybe she can go back to being likeable, plucky, smart, morally directed, and confident again -- you know, the reasons you loved the show to start with.)

Brothers & Sisters is such a sweeping multi-generational tale that its stories might not even be noticeably affected: the current Nora/Isaac storyline is pretty compelling, we already know where the Kitty/Robert stuff is heading, and I can't keep all the blonde homewreckers apart anyway. I mean -- though I am in love with the show -- there are parts I tune out: I can barely pay enough attention to understand all the stuff with Tommy's dead baby, for example. I literally could not tell you how that went down, even now. Maybe it's personal, but I think the show does such a good job of combining and recombining all of its hard-hitting players, and resolving most character arcs in three or four episodes before moving them around into new dramatic landscapes, that almost any episode could serve amicably as a finale or premiere. (Meanwhile Eli Stone's well-hammered pilot -- along with its heartfelt spirituality and post-Gore high-concept twist on legal drama -- can only mean safety and good things for the sibling series from the B&S creator.)

The Upside: All four of the shows left some pretty crazy things on the table, including a couple of huge cliffhangers, that I'd really like to see resolved; even at the expense of drawing things out even longer and more awesomely.

What To Expect: A hurried but hopefully not rushed end to all four show's overarching plotlines, perhaps a little-less-glossy dialogue than we're used to, and perhaps a tighter, more satisfying finish for the more digressive shows out of the bunch.

The Post-Comedy Comedies

30 Rock, How I Met Your Mother, My Name Is Earl and The Office all have lots of episodes coming. Earl and Office especially, because they got major orders at the beginning of the season, so it's in their best interest to bring in as much content as quickly as they can before the season restarts.

If you asked me right now what's going on with The Office, I wouldn't be able to tell you, which is mostly down to the fact that something like half of the total season order was funneled into those grossly bloated and uninteresting double-episode nightmares. Angela's cat died, and Jan continues to suck. I'm sure there's more -- Ryan's a dick? Kelly's on Darryl now? -- but mostly, I don't see any truly dangling storylines in this unfocused season that needed clearing up. On the other hand, it really still is a great show, so it'll be fun to watch. Then, Earl ended right around the right time for a strike- or hiatus-break, coming to a seeming natural close (or reshuffle) of the quickly tiring jailhouse storyline, so we'll enter the remainder with open hearts and hopefully back out in the fresh air.

30 Rock and Mother share the distinction of being at the very top of their very cult-inspiringly games, and the benefit of being a tad less serial-minded than the other two. The 30 Rock storylines, such as they are, deserve a wrap-up -- too many loose ends for a Fall premiere -- but the show's crazy, wheeling momentum has always put in-jokey continuity over anything resembling drama or emotion. Which is, of course, a major reason 30 Rock is one of the best shows on TV, and we deserve the reward of new episodes, if nothing else.

On the other hand -- and not that there's anything bad about new episodes of TV's best comedy property -- but doesn't it seem like this show always gets sandwiched between the Superbowl and this week's American Idol Event? For a criminally underwatched show, it's kind of a sucky-yet-believable circumstance that the single trumpet of "New 30 Rock!" should be outmatched by the full brass shouts of "New TV! The strike is over!"

Weeds is a Lionsgate property, so it would have been fine from a month ago, and it's not scheduled to air its fourth season until this summer anyway. I'm dying to find out what happens next! I would love it if each season, Nancy climbed another rung: from street dealer to merchandiser to grower to -- now, I think -- trafficker... what will S5 bring, a run-in with Jack Bauer? A promotion to US Drug Czar?

Meanwhile, The New Adventures of Old Christine and Samantha Who? have a few episodes in the can -- seven and three respectively -- but only Samantha is even maybe expected to resume shooting for this season. Christine is better every season, and something I've only lately really fallen in love with, but a good seven-week run, especially right now while everybody else is gearing up, should give it momentum. (Does anybody else miss Jake In Progress as much as I do? No? How about Wendie Malick and John Stamos, we all love them, right? Man, I liked that show.)

Along with the totally awesome Notes From The Underbelly, which seems perfectly composed as an old-school "season replacement" type -- and carries the off-hand edgy torch for beloved failures like Sons & Daughters and Significant Others more than any other show on the slate -- to weather the storm, these are two of my favorite shows currently on air.

I'm happy to see them around at all, although I worry about Samantha after those last three episodes air -- the strike could be a boon or could be a death knell, depending on how the show's scheduled. It's the difference between limbo and a plumy spot after Dancing With The Stars, which is such a weird concept I can't even really deal with it. It's great to see such a perfect mix of subtlety, hilariously nasty/simultaneously compassionate writing, acting talent and humor in one place. Arrested Development may have resurrected the half-hour comedy, but the true heirs of that renaissance have only become clear in the last year, and I hate to lose even one of these gorgeous kids.

What To Expect: Are you familiar with the metanarrative concept? Expect every single comedy to hit fast and hard with strike-related humor, labor-relations etiquette and explanations, and general exuberant relief. God, 30 Rock could get a whole season out of the strike... Actually, that's exactly what's going to happen: Liz and Jack will be going head-to-head over the writing staff's demands. I feel it in my bones. I just hope it lasts more than an episode! I just excited myself!

Don't Care A Bit

Smallville has four Supergirleriffic episodes in the can, and expects to shoot 3-5 more for the spring. I'm guessing that's it for our favorite dewy-eyed young heterosexual. Bones has four episodes ready to go, and may or may not be producing more for the season. I know it's a fan favorite, but I also know that the reasons have very little to do with writing quality, believable characterization, understandable comedic logic, or even human-like human beings. I also know that I watch it every week for the spastic woman who always offers everybody tea and whose inflections are guaranteed to be excrutiatingly bizarre every single time, and to see if any of the nerds are hot yet. It's coming, I can feel it -- my money's on the little gay one. We'll be tuning in, but I can't help thinking that somehow having episodes airing throughout the strike would have really put the show's weaknesses on shout, which would have been nice. TV being a craft, and the room for improvement being the biggest room of all, it would be nice to see Bones step up its game a little bit, going into 09.

We Care A Lot

Battlestar Galactica's on track for the first of the two last demiseasons in April, and will blast into production on the last seven episodes of the last-last of the season next year. Of several nightmarish rumor scenarios that have been offered over the last few months -- from withholding the entire final season for 2009 to airing the thirteenth episode as a random "I guess this could work" finale, to chopping the season in even weirder places for the 2008 and 2009 airings, it looks like we're finally in the clear to see the two halves of the season they were designed to be seen. As a huge fan and a pretty critical viewer, I couldn't be more thrilled, but I'm guessing you knew that.

Lost, which I maintain gets better every season, has their whole thing mapped out, and the strike really messed with it: four seasons of sixteen perfectly mapped-out episodes. Which has already been broken down this year, when five episodes remain after tonight and six more may be shot -- which is a total of fourteen, not sixteen, and implies more of that narrative squishing on the way.

Terminator has just a few episodes in the can, with the future of the show TBD. You know how much I believe in and love the show, so I'm honestly hoping they burn through the rest while the industry brings itself upright. This is the show that the strike gave birth to, and I sincerely hope it sticks around; if any show deserved to be awarded the title of Post-9/11 Buffy, it's this show, and I think with time it'll generate the madness that characterized and still characterizes the incredibly still-voracious Buffy area of fan worship.

Bionic Woman: No new episodes expected. Ever. But don't cry! Even if that horrible news has shaken your faith in humanity, there's still Chuck, Pushing Daisies, and my secret favorite Life, all of which will be back in the fall, and all of which couldn't have broken at a better or more emotionally satisfying place.

What To Expect: Business as usual. Genre shows, no matter how great they are, all pull from the same pool: genre and action fans, two groups who are so used to being undernourished it sometimes takes an act of Congress to even get them to differentiate between good TV and bad TV. (Or at least this was true before Star Trek: Enterprise, Bionic, and the rise of Harry Knowles and his overcritical nerd-speak ilk... So now at least we have something to thank both of those entities for. If we have the internet to thank for anything, it's the growing sophistication of genre fare.)

Other Dramas: Dirty Sexy Money, another quiet favorite with a lot of heart and some pretty stellar performances, will have its last three produced episodes "tweaked" into a season finale. Seems pretty likely that it'll be back next fall, but a bummer, since the show has only been increasing its momentum with every episode. You can trust the staff to do the right thing, so I'm not as worried about how the narrative will suffer on this one.

What To Expect: D$M to turn up next fall in a field with a lot less of this pseudo-louche proto-S&TC crap we've been deluged with in the past few months. Once the Lipstick Mafia Big Shot bolus gets swallowed, and the movie finally reminds us that -- although we all watched it -- nobody really liked S&TC that much, D$M will be able to stand on its own, as a wonderful and witty story about the actualities of money and class.

...Um, storywise I have no idea, it's been too long. Nate Fisher and his wife will switch roles as he becomes more and more grossed out by the Darlings, while she falls more and more in love with their human vulnerabilities. A détente between various wives and trannies will fall apart into even more violence. Karen will continue to rock your ass off.

And then there's Friday Night Lights, which may or may not even exist as of today. I don't know what to say about this show that I haven't already said, but there aren't any episodes in the can and there doesn't seem to be a sustainable audience on NBC, no matter where they schedule it. The move to Friday night was a strong thought -- the competition is low, the family quotient of the show is unstoppably high -- but I don't know that it matters, at this point. I'm not turning the lights out yet, but I am worried. As is usual. To love FNL is to preemptively mourn it, no matter how much better it gets every single week.

What To Expect: Responding to an email offering a free place at a cast and crew luncheon, all five remaining fans of this show will be taken to a remote location and savagely beaten, then possibly murdered. That's literally all they can do to us at this point.

What To Watch. Besides Yourself.

2008-02-07T15:06:00.000-06:00

- Friday Night Lights, NBC
- Big Brother 9, CBS
- Paradise Hotel 2, Fox Reality
- Moment Of Truth, FOX
- jPod, CBC

So it only took the networks this long to get enough television shows on the air worth talking about, which really has less to do with the strike and more that the slow-moving dinosaur of network TV always tries to suck around this time of year.

Friday Night Lights is interesting, because there are two maxims here: number one, that the Tyra/Landry murder thing is universally hated, and number two, that the season has lacked a unifying moment like Street's injury. Both are wrong. The first maxim is wrong because I love the Tyra/Landry thing, as writer, for reasons which I'm happy to explain. The second one is wrong because I made it up, and because it only became clear last week what season two's 9/11 moment actually was, if you're dumb like me.

To address the first thing: hot bad girl does not go for sweet ugly nerd. It doesn't happen. Not in real life and not in stories. If you want to make that story work, you have to earn it: you have to drive them together in the grossest, most downward-spiralling way possible, so that the thing that brings them together is also the thing that splits them up. It's really the only way to accomplish the storyline -- and the "after-school drama" nature of the story, as much as it was ballyhooed, was a very savvy bit of flash: distracting us with something shiny in the left hand ("Sexual assault! Manslaughter! Guilt sex!") while the right hand was rearranging all the pieces to make Tyra's bizarre relationship with Landry fit. Of all the other hideous possibilities I can think of, the murder plot is also the only one that doesn't follow through on Tyra's sexual peril, which would have been a disaster in terms of the show's feminism: you don't take the one unrepentantly sexual teenage female creature on the show and rape her, or give her a baby in high school ... Both of which are ways television has accomplished this shell game before.

The second thing is basically me being crazy again. I always loved the way Jason's injury in the first episode basically inspired the whole season, in a very organic way. Think about it: Lyla and Tim wouldn't have a story in season one without Jason. Matt would basically be worthless, because it's only his assumption of the role that gets him into Eric and Julie's radar, which is where the rest of his storyline comes from. Without Street as a stabilizing influence, Smash and Tim are bound to go off the rails. And without Street as a living testament to his failure, I sincerely doubt that Eric would have left Dillon at all.

Which is the 9/11 for season two, and I can't believe it took me this long to realize it. Every single story arises from this (basically total) betrayal, and Eric's spent the season atoning for it. Julie has lost her entire damn mind; Tami and her sister -- and coworkers --have had to dismantle piece by piece the support systems that grew up around his absence. Obviously, Smash and Riggins are destroyed by his departure; Jason actually begins to grow and change in exciting new directions without the comfort of having Eric around, which in turn has helped with Lyla's wonderful about-face. Although we didn't see the months they lived through without Eric, with Dillon's royal family scattered across Texas, we can feel the effects, because they're still all around us.

And of course this obvious stuff only became clear to me once Saracen finally freaked out, in the most heartbreaking scene of the season (and a mirror to my favorite scene in season one, when Eric teaches him to scream): underwater, abandoned by his father and his love interest and his slowly departing grandmother, screaming at Eric: "You left me! For a better job!" Well, I just about died. Figures Saracen would do it.

Big Brother 9, Winter Edition, starts up on the twelfth. Big Brother is a funny thing for people to talk about, because it's simultaneously two things: brainless Orwellian obsession with watching boring people do things you're doing as you're watching them, such as drink heavily and eat on the couch, while also providing a serious magnifying glass for human interaction. If the show aired on PBS -- and it has, with the added benefit of time travel, in the Manor House series -- it would be the brightest spot in the sky.

I watch it because I am obsessed with interpersonal and group dynamics, because it is my goal to be the best Julie this cruise ship of life ever saw, and because I'm sneaky and manipulative. It's a training guide about people in distress and isolation, binge drinking, which is to say that it's more real than real. I realize that a lot of it is faked, and a lot of it is producer-created, but the fact is you can't fake body language or personal, of-the-moment honesty, which is what the show captures.

As you may know, it is a strong -- central, maybe -- belief of mine that the quality of any entertainment lies entirely on the viewer. You can get something out of it, or not, as you choose. But to me, a couple of hours of Big Brother is equal to a day watching The History Channel is equal to four episodes of Laguna Beach (seasons one and two). It's what we were promised, and what we were given, in the early days of The Real World, when my obsession and yours with watching normal people do normal things first gained its glamour. Now, my friend Karen rightly points out that the damage done to our generation's psyche by this concept is huge, but I also think it provides a certain insight, or objectivity, in regarding human character in the individual. By watching a person live their life, no matter who they are, you've learned a little something about how other people live their lives. And other people are always more interesting than ourselves, even as they're illuminating ourselves -- which is where the benefit comes in.

I saw several, possibly all, of the houseguests for this season on The Early Show this week. And I am not sure that I want or care to know how it is that they live their lives, because they seem to be completely vacuous and brain-dead to a level at which the show's previous editions have only hinted. But I think that I have thought this every single year, and yet every year I keep watching until the end, so maybe this feeling will go away. Even if it doesn't, though, the sheer science of watching them degrade will still dazzle me, if nothing else. There's a point in every Manor House season where the people just stop worrying about the flies walking around on their faces, you know? That's what I wait for. Not out of prurient interest, but because that's when you know they've gone so far past being aware of the cameras that they have retreated into a world of their very own, and this is edifying.

Paradise Hotel 2 is less so, unfortunately. I almost wept actual wet tears of joy when I heard that this show was coming back. The original's power over me was something akin to mystical -- although the short-lived and idiotically boring sequel Forever Eden made it clear that this was due more to the personalities involved than anything else. Because those bitches were crazy, and did crazy things, and that was more of a draw on PH than it would ever be on BB. Really, the show was just the Extreme Dating version of Big Brother, as far as I'm concerned -- and if you're interested in altered and weird human behavior, dating should always be your first stop.

This is one of the reasons I'm so excited about BB9, even after it disappointed me so badly last summer: the twist involves eHarmony-style matchups among the 16 singles, the details of which they may or may not understand yet, but which we've learned will have strategic import. If you take my two favorite reality shows, Big Brother 2-4 and Paradise Hotel 1, you've got the perfect show, no matter how dumb the people are. Hopefully.

I've only watched the first episode of this season of PH -- I've got the second one on DVR as we speak -- and as yet it seems to be falling into the MTV category (Next, Date My Mom, Home Invasion, whatever their titles are or were), which I only watch or can stomach in marathons, for some reason. If you're feeling it or not makes a huge point of difference, but it's one that can consume a whole day. (I've also lost all interest in America's Next Top Model, a former long-term favorite, but am open to future marathons for this reason.)

I'll keep an eye on it and let you know, but for now it's on the bubble. I find myself wondering why I'm watching it when I could be watching the latest Terminator for the eighty-fifth time, which is always a bad sign.

Moment Of Truth is another bubble show for me, right now. The concept is just about the most exciting thing I've ever heard of, right up with Kid Nation's inspiringly American high concept, or Nip/Tuck's mantra, "Tell me what you don't like about yourself." I can't imagine anything more wonderful than watching a person spontaneously admit their shit, in front of people, for cash. It's like watching somebody go through six months of deep therapy over the course of an evening. If you can do Moment Of Truth, you can do anything -- it's like climbing Kilimanjaro, only instead of going outside, where nature is located, you just go further in.

I've seen a lot of guilty and grossed-out faces when this show comes up, and I get it: are we dicks for watching this take place? I think maybe we are, but I don't care: I'm in it for the victims, not the finger-pointing hilarity. I want to see people climb those walls in themselves, because it's inspiring and beautiful to watch anybody weigh the consequences of admission, knowing that they've already been laid bare. The focus is shifted to the act itself: not "are these things true" but "can you say out loud that these things are true" -- and as we all now, saying it out loud is the most powerful magic there is. Raise the stakes however you want: cash, loved ones standing by, a shark tank -- I won't complain. You can't buy that much psychological value.

I think having the questions take a sliding scale of difficulty -- contestants are asked to assent to various statements, which have already been verified with a pre-show lie detector, with a rising embarrassment (or horror) quotient as they go, tied to a dollar amount. Answer this many questions without lying or sicking out, and you rise to the next dollar amount -- but answer untruthfully, and you lose it all. I have lived my entire life waiting for someone to do this to me, for the absolute comfort in admitting the worst that there is to admit. I wouldn't even need cash for it -- think about it. Knowing that you have no more secrets left, and that the whole world knows them; you would enter, I think, a new covenant with the world at large. It would feel like being born.

Except for how the questions are pretty defanged, for the most part. I haven't seen anybody really come clean about anything truly fucked up yet. But we live in hope, for them and for us.

jPod is the last show I'm loving right now. It's a Canadian show, out of the CBC, starring the young guy's mom from Queer As Folk US and Alan Thicke as the main character's parents. It follows a group of young game designers navigating the 3.0 world, with style and humor and more than a little madcap mayhem.

I have a longstanding agreement with Douglas Coupland, the novelist who wrote the book on which the show is based, and who had an obvious hand in its development. Every year, he writes a novel. And every year I read it, when it comes out. This is because his book Generation X changed ... if not my life, at least my aspirations. If not my aspirations, then my furniture. It also made me obsessed with Canadians. Every year, I read the book, nod my head noncommitally, and toss it on the shelf.

I think to myself, "What a charming man is Douglas Coupland. He has still managed to write about young things in young ways, despite being a hottie of a certain age. In the north, things keep longer, but in any case, I think it's pretty amazing. He's like the well-mannered, large-hearted child of Anne Tyler and William Gibson. Bret Ellis on a potent Lithium-Thorazine-Paxil cocktail. That Douglas Coupland has once again managed to portray my life to its thinnest and stupidest detail, in a loving way that helps me comprehend my world." In every way. I just love the man.

I don't always love his books, though. Often they've been little more than erudite and hilarious conversations with an old friend that you don't really remember very well a month later. I always, always like them, but I haven't loved very many of them. Microserfs I kind of loved. All Families Are Psychotic I loved, although -- as Ali says -- it shares the distinction with jPod and Girlfriend In A Coma of seeming to have been written on a dare. In the case of Girlfriend, that was a no-go for me, but the other two are good.

Shampoo Planet is probably my second favorite, if only because I've been compared to the main character, positively and negatively, more than once; and because he represents a move of past supporting characters (often with the same name, Tyler, and usually the lead's brother) to center stage. The satire, and the emotion of the story itself, were much improved by this shift, I think, and it's much beloved in my home.

jPod is awesome. He could turn out potboilers like this every year -- like he's going to do anyway -- and I would be satisfied. But what if you made a TV show of the awesome book, with lots of awesome Canadian actors?

Here's a little taste: Alan Thicke plays a recovering ballroom dancer who falls in mutual bromance with a Korean mob boss who is storing his human cargo in the main character's house. Nobody can understand why Main Guy has a problem with Kam Fong, because they all think he's great: Not only does he give everybody furniture all the time, but he truly does love to dance with Alan Thicke. Mom sells pot and keeps killing Canadian drug thugs by accident. Big brother holds weekly "MILF Nights" because he can only get into women over the age of fifty. Dad (again: Alan Thicke) is a professional film extra trying to make it in the biz, which leads to truly horrifying dorky antics in a variety of locations with film production types.

Main Guy works at a game design company as the gore expert; they're having to tailor their extreme skating game to include a fun cartoon turtle character because their new boss who is a divorcee who becomes obsessed with married pot-growing mom, to the point of trying to parent Main Guy in the office thinks turtles are fun. One coworker is the female Subway Jared of Canada, the catchphrase of which campaign is: "You made me an Underground Loser!" People constantly shout this phrase, in weird contexts. Second coworker is a totally hot internet-hookup sex addict who's constantly getting roofied and found in strange situations. Possibly gay.

Coworker three was raised in a nondenominational lesbian commune and was so traumatized by all the parliamentary procedure and unconditional encouragement that he has changed his legal name to John Doe and obsessively monitors his hair color, height, weight, eating choices, apparel, entertainment choices, and word choices in order to approximate the national mean. (Keep in mind that this is Canada, so the average there is -- mathematically possible or no -- even more average than American average.) He also is maybe the darkest character in the whole story. Except for the last coworker, the single daughter of a large family, who gets bouquets from her parents that say things like "THANK YOU FOR NOT DISAPPOINTING US" and "YOU'RE OUR FAVORITE DAUGHTER!"

And finally: you get to see a cute turtle cartoon game character fuck up an Ollie and roll around in a pile of his own viscera, while everyone on the entire show floats around in a complete fog of amorality and total disinterested carelessness. It's like The Great Gatsby in hyperultimatecrazyvision. It's like your brain exploded, and all the fun awesome parts got picked out and baked into a funny cake. As described by a reviewer of the novel (or possibly Coupland himself), "These people do not watch the news."

Beg or borrow the show, and stand amazed.

No Futures: Before & After

2008-02-06T16:03:00.001-06:00

- Charlie Wilson's War, written by Aaron Sorkin and directed by Mike Nichols
- The Golden Compass, written by a committee of idiots, director: Chris Weitz
- Southland Tales, written and directed by Richard Kelly

I think about the French Revolution constantly. There's something I can't resist about any situation that can't be easily pinned down, that turned into its opposite, that made bad eggs of good ones and scary stories out of bright hope, the same way I adore very awful things that result in brave new worlds. Maybe it's just my obsession with war, or our ongoing American obsession with The War, but I think it's probably more to do with philosophy, or spirituality.

The Enlightenment is good. The Reconstruction is good. Chemotherapy is good. Biofuel is good. But for every social and cultural good, there's a corresponding nightmare, depending on who's talking. Without Chris Columbus, we wouldn't have America, and the people who lived here before us would be alive and well; we also wouldn't have the quintessentially American Gossip Girl. That would be sad, but probably not so sad if you spent any time on the Trail of Tears. I realize I don't have much new to say about it; Dickens said it was the best and the worst of times, and he died a really long time ago, and he was even more unendingly graphomanic than yours truly, so I can't really add to it. But it preoccupies me.

Because you can't say that we, globally, are now worse off for it: as an atheist and a person pretty much religiously obsessed with democracy and the duty of the individual to the state, there's a lot to be said for the Terror. I guess you could say it about any revolution, which of course leads us back to war, but for some reason it's Robespierre that gets to me the most, I guess because the aims of the French Revolution are still as relevant and necessary now as they were hundreds of years ago: liberty, equality, the brotherhood of man, the demystification of religion and dethroning of schizophrenic superstition as a valid method of rule. They were intellectuals and poets who sought to overthrow everything that was holding them back. And then, like Napoleon the Pig, they turned on their creation.

Chemotherapy is a big one, right now: it's pretty much exactly the Terror, played out in toxins and poisons, pain and nausea. I think about the French Revolution a lot these days. And I think about Afghanistan, about the brilliant intellectualism and obstructed religious fervor and valid economic dissatisfaction that made Communism such a powerful idea, that made it so scary, that led to the Cold War -- which made nobody look good -- which led to the US using Afghanistan as our own personal hound dogs of death, which led to the Taliban, which led to 9/11, which led to a hideous American hegemony and bloodbath that's still going on. Which led to the Presidency accumulating power with the implacable hunger of a science fiction creature that somehow combined free-market nepotism with the scariest corruption of the fourth estate since broadsheets were invented. Which led to the alienation of rights nobody even knew we had.

Which led to dissatisfaction with the administration, which -- with the spontaneous regeneration of the fourth estate through nonstandard media like the internet and a basic cable comedy show -- led to my generation's sudden interest in politics. We watched our hearts broken by disappointment, and watched ourselves fall in love with America again, once we had something to fight for. Once we were fighting for ourselves. Which, of course, led to a stolen election, which led to an award-winning documentary that finally convinced even the highest tax-bracketeers that the sky was broken. And which led to more dissent, and more communication, and which is now leading to an America led by either a white woman or a black man. Something that even four years ago seemed so impossibly far off and outlandish that it brought a tear to my eye; something of such enormity that you still feel it, physically, in your body: we get to be America again.

But Hillary or Obama, either way it leads to our generation's next Rush Limbaugh, to whole new categories of racism and bigotry. The next gay marriage won't just be a political football: in eight or twelve years, we'll have ourselves another Reagan, and a million new ways to hate. Just because we're tired of hearing about gay rights, or a woman's right to control her body, just because even the evangelicals are bored of talking about these things, even though the rhetoric of 2008 is so relentlessly sunny that no negative-spin group can find a thing to point their hate effectively at, they won't be down for long. They never are. Neither are we. The Republicans in the wake of Bush's downfall are identical to the Democrats in the age of Kerry and Dean: running around mindlessly like elephants, with their heads cut off. But it won't last. Thank God.

A friend saw Charlie Wilson's War before I had a chance to do so, a fellow Sorkin fan and Mike Nichols devotee. His description of the film was intriguing, the talent was a huge draw (I'm an unabashed fan of Julia Roberts, her every word and movement; I'm slowly making peace with the cruel intensity of Tom Hanks's blandness), but what I wanted to know was: did they complete the cycle? Did they let on to the 9/11 punchline? The first time he saw it, he said it was there, but subtle. Quiet.

I've seen the film five times since that conversation. It's heartbreaking, and lovely, and densely funny. It's so strange to see Sorkin dialogue coming out of non-Sorkinesque, inner-directed actors; it's like watching A Few Good Men, or watching actors try to shove themselves into the neurotic poke-poke-poke rhythms of Woody Allen's unending series of nebbishes and shiksa goddesses. But the thread of pain, of foreboding, of sadness; the ephemerality of glory, that turns even in the moment of triumph to taint it with foreknowledge of the horrors yet to come ... It's all there. From the Culture Wars of Phillip Seymour Hoffman's pragmatic CIA agent and Julia Roberts's bloody-minded Christianity, over Wilson's soul itself, it's there. When even an American politician, whose planks are his compassionate conservatism and Christianity, finds himself caught up in the unending chant, "Allah Akbar! Allah Akbar!", scaring the shit out of everybody else, it's there. As first Hoffman's Gust and then Wilson himself takes up the rallying cry, after the war is over, for the reconstruction of the battered and decentralized Afghans, it reaches its peak. And what happens after, well, the real Charlie says it best:

"These things happened. They were glorious and they changed the world. And then we fucked up the endgame."

It's more than Shakespearian: it's history, biting us eternally in the ass. And of course, the events in the movie happened, and they were glorious. And they changed the world, for the better. The world is a better place because of them. That's the really awful part.

I've read a lot of comment and criticism of the movie focusing on its glorification of war: see how the one Russian we ever see face-to-face, is blown apart while discussing his latest infidelity. I don't know how that makes it a pro-war movie, because war is a thing that exists in both states at once: it's both a wave and a particle, both horrible and wonderful. It's easy to make an anti-war movie, and to do it well, but I don't know that I've ever, in my life, seen a pro-war movie. And if I had, it wouldn't be this one.

Is portraying this Russian as a pig a move of dehumanization? Are Sorkin and Nichols suggesting that he, and by extension, all occupying Russians, deserves to die? You'd have to be pretty ignorant on the subjects of Sorkin, Nichols, and humanity itself to think so. He's a man with a wife, and a mistress: do you honestly think that this means his life is worth less than the little Baby Talibans on the ground who blow him up? He is both a particle and a wave, and they are too. And this is the truth about war: we're all just shooting past each other, into the darkness, with tears streaming down our cheeks. And we all seem to have the most unfortunate habit of getting in the way of those bullets.

By contrast, I saw The Golden Compass once. No, sorry, I saw it twice. The first time was with my best friend, who is very against war or violence of any kind. He's upset by harsh words and bad driving etiquette to the point of weeping. This wasn't the movie for him, and I thought at the time that it was for the opposite reason that it is the perfect movie for me: the movie preserved all of the harshness, the single-minded determination, the antagonistic attitude, the bravery and the strength of the books' characters, whom I love so much. Of course, they chopped it all to hell: the hour that feels like it's missing also, apparently, included any and all moments of emotional truth, connection between the characters, or basic rational movement of the plot. Maybe there will be an extended cut, because I don't think a director (especially a likeable one like Chris Weitz) could possibly have done such a crapulent job on his own: it had the fingerprints of fingerprints all over it. But I got my Iorek Byrnison, one of my five favorite characters in all of fiction, and I got my headstrong, wonderful Lyra, and I got Serafina Pekkala, so I was happy.

Not happy: BFF, who took away from it a very strange idea having to do with entertainment and culture. He saw it as glorifying war. Now, I won't bore you with my speech about how all entertainment is 80% descriptive and only 20% prescriptive at any time, because that would involve letting you in on the secret that writers only barely know what the hell they're doing at any given time. Like artists, or directors, or people. The idea that a book written twelve years ago by a British atheist about the false signifiers of spirituality could somehow twist itself into Iraq propaganda was, to me, farfetched. I suppose it's a valid viewpoint, since it did take twelve years to get made, and was filmed by an American entirely during the war, but the fact that the entire thrust of the movie, incomprehensible as it was, presented in the most basic terms its subject as the question of free will and state control... He would have none of it. It got pretty bloody, to be honest, and I felt bad about it later. It's hard to explain how comparing His Dark Materials -- a cherished and amazingly compassionate modern work, with all the timelessness of classic children's literature, which will be beloved for generations -- to Rambo or Black Hawk Down is a bit like calling a movie where people eat hamburgers virulently anti-vegetarian, without seeming condescending.

But if you're not cool with war, then war is what you get. Nevermind that the three battles in the film take place in an area the size of one's living room, or that in all three cases it's about five kids who are being saved. The problem was, I think, the many mentions of "the upcoming war." That word, that was all it took. Now, the "war" in question is not even nearly fought in The Golden Compass, and when and if it is fought, it won't be fought with swords or guns, or even on Earth. Any of them. All of which the movie was pretty blatant about explaining: the "war" is against all forces that seek to shackle our minds, whether they be religious, conservative, or ... so slavishly and unthinkingly liberal that merely the word war sets off our red flags and turns off our faculties, that turns a beautiful and dark children's story into a bright American tale of conquest.

I'm still bewildered, but I doubt he's the only one; he's one of the smartest people I know, and we all have our little buttons that get pushed. Still, it took away from the experience of seeing the movie, which is already a compromised experience, due to the shittiness of the movie, so I wasn't having it.

Because what that looks like to me is a lot of the same thing, no matter if the word is "war" or "gay" or "abortion": the second you let those words take over your brain, you're letting them win. And if you read this blog at all, you know "they" are nobody you want to mess with, because they don't really exist, because they're just us, from the other side. Which is why I'm looking forward to the rise of the next Rush Limbaugh. Which is why, dear reader, forgive me -- I voted for Bush.

Twice.

Why? To make it worse. To get us to the point that our 2008 president will be Hillary or Obama. To help wake us up. To bring on the jackboots and the black masks and the closed-circuit televisions; so that FOX News's particular brand of IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH would spread to every station. To get V For Vendetta made. To scare everybody under the age of thirty.

If I could go back, I wouldn't do it. Understand that I was voting in Houston, TX -- no matter who it was I voted for, I was voting for Nader -- so there wasn't a measurable civic result. And my aims were accomplished. But if I could go back, I wouldn't do it, and the reason for that is that there are enough bad guys in the world already, put there by cruel circumstance and scarred history and greed, and posing as one of them, just to get the best out of everybody else, isn't worth the cost. I would tell myself to shout, and beat against the wall, and scream in the face of anything bigger than myself. I would explain over and over again to myself that people don't need your intentions or your love, they need your strength, and your bravery, and that no matter how little difference it made, the price you pay for giving in takes more of a toll on you than anybody will ever see.

Which is why I loved Southland Tales so much that I saw it twice, on consecutive nights. I strongly suggest that you find a way to see it; I'm sure it'll be out on DVD soon. While it's a messy narrative -- let's be Frank: Donnie Darko was a very bad, very wonderful movie; bad for the reasons that people make movies and good for the reasons that people make art -- with a lot of unnecessary touches and stoner coolnesses, it's also poetically beautiful, and stakes out its philosophical territory with a much grander, steadier hand than did Darko, which was ... about not very much, turned out.

Not so Southland. I've seen every possible reviewer throw up his or her hands when it comes to actually discussing the film, beyond a sort of impressionist, vague "response." I'm not about to do that, because it's impossible for me to "respond" to art; I overthink things and it's chronic and it's not going away, but it does mean that while my companion might be contemplating the framing and composition of individual shots, I'm holding every moment onscreen like a ball, and juggling as many of them as possible, drawing connections and inferences between them, and to other works of literature. Which is, of course, a crapshoot -- you're never going to get every intention or every reference, Pound's ideal reader doesn't exist -- but it makes my batting average pretty good.

I think as a writer of fiction I -- where each word builds on the last, and the connections between them, and then the next and the corresponding pyramid of meanings, and so on down the fractal pathways of all the words as they accrete -- am so used to keeping those balls in the air so nobody will notice what I'm really doing, that I tend to read fiction and television and movies the same way. Which makes sense to me: reading and writing, transmitting and receiving, should work the same way, in both directions. I don't think any of us really believes that there's a moment onscreen, or a word on the page, that got there by its own accord. I think we owe it to the artist to at least try and follow along. As angry as some readers have gotten at me, for getting too hardcore or overthinking some "guilty pleasure," that's nothing compared to the rage I feel when I see somebody willingly put their minds to sleep, and accept their entertainment as a consumer product, and swallow it willingly and stupidly, without thinking at all.

So: Jacob's version of Southland Tales. A scientist (Wallace Shawn) creates a mysterious liquid, Fluid Karma, which is at once an alternative fuel source, a world-changing terraforming technique, and most importantly: a drug. Not just any drug, but one that sends its users into a land of pure imaginative joy; it's not a far jump -- especially for me, of course -- to assume that this, like the Abyss finger of fate in Donnie Darko, we're looking at infinity, somehow penetrating into our reality. Which is to say: God, in injectible form. And what happens when it's used? Whatever you want. Heaven for everybody. We bring back our boys from Iraq scarred and traumatized, emptied out, and give them God, under the table, in dark alleys. And what do they do with it? What does your Heaven look like?

The film's most remarkable and remarked-upon set piece is of course Justin Timberlake's whirling lipsync to the Killers' "All These Things That I Have Done." Now, the Killers are my favorite band of all time, and I like the song just fine, but unpack it:

These changes ain't changing me
The cold-hearted boy I used to be

I got soul, but I'm not a soldier

Don't you put me on the back burner
You know you've gotta help me out

While everyone's lost, the battle is won
With all these things that I've done

What is the usual Brandon Flowers admixture of bravado and broken-hearted begging, Kelly makes a plea from the war's forgotten: Timberlake's beautiful, marred face, surrounded by Playboy-issue chicks in nurses' costumes, kicking Rockettes style as he downs beers and wanders aimlessly through a pleasure casino. This is his Heaven. This is the Heaven that we've left him alone to find, and even inside its Technicolor surreal musical theater, he can't stop begging: for help, and for forgiveness.

The film's ending, in which twin brothers (Seann William Scott) are revealed to be the same man from two different time periods, whose meeting ends the world, is almost a given once you've digested the Killers moment: one "brother" was sent here before the war, before his friends died, and spends the movie as a beautiful, strong, happy-go-lucky pawn of the other interests in the story. The other, his face horribly disfigured, comes to us from after. How, Kelly asks, can these two people, these two Americas, these two states of mind, possibly reconcile? How can our belief and our fear coexist? In the film, of course, they can't: the matter/antimatter intimacy of the two selves combusts in the Rapture.

Or is it perhaps that only in reconciling these two sides of ourselves, and of our fractured memory as a nation, can we ever hope to rise to the next level of the game? Isn't the Rapture just another singularity, beyond which lies a realm of such difference and specificity that we couldn't comprehend it in its entirety?

If I went back to my first presidential election, in 2000, at twenty-two, I'd tell him I was right: Bush would make things worse. So much worse than that little guy could ever imagine. And 9/11, and the war, would change us all so much, and change the shape and character of our country so much, that it would appear as a singularity. That after the war, in this new time, when all the words we speak are words of hope, that I would be unrecognizable to him, that the world, that the country he loved, would be entirely different places, tired, wiped out and scarred by fear and violence and anger. And I would tell him to be brave, and to be bold. I would tell him about the French Revolution, and Charlie Wilson, and all the angry, beautiful art and men and women that the war and this darkness would make, of all of us.

And then I would hold him as fiercely as I could, and tell him it always, inevitably swings back the other way: that it's always already changing. That the best we can hope for is to be strong, and to be present and aware, and keep the balls going in the air as long as it takes, to learn what we can from the downtimes and remember them for the uptimes, or risk destruction on either side. I'd tell him about war: how it's always awful, but like most awful things, you're better off adjusting to it than denying that it exists, or that it will always exist.

"It takes an ass to fill every seat," I'd say, because that's what I always say: "Just make sure what side of the aisle you want to be photographed on." I would tell him that we are all on the anvil, and that every second that passes marks us, and that -- Hillary and Obama and Gore willing, the electoral college willing -- eventually we'd find our way back to peace, and find ourselves in an America where the only word we can agree on right now, is change.

Or, To Put It More Bluntly

2008-01-24T21:28:00.000-06:00

Per a friend: "Only you, Jacob, could bring yourself to tears about the religious significance of two fucking nutcases setting themselves on fire."

To paraphrase Hothead Paisan: "Either I'm crazy, or the world is."

When Sex Is Not Sex: Bug, Lars, and Comics

2008-01-24T10:34:00.000-06:00

- Bug, starring Ashley Judd
- Lars & The Real Girl, starring Ryan Gosling and Emily Mortimer
- "Three Septembers & A January," by Neil Gaiman

I saw Lars a while back and I was really touched by it. That was surprising, because normally I hate stories where a French Lady/Magic Retard/Reincarnated Loved One In The Form Of A Dog/Otherwise Strangely Disposed Individual arrives on the scene, and teaches a whole town full of poor people to love and reclaim the joy in their own lives, through the power of Magical Chocolate/Forbidden Concupiscent Dancing/Skill With A Kazoo. Maybe that's why I liked it: I went into things knowing that the whole town was going to inevitably realize the value of love and community, so I was free to ignore the movie's message -- which was not in the least facile, to my mind; just uninteresting to me personally -- and enjoy the individual reactions and interactions that got the town to that place. However, that's not what I'm interested in talking about.

I saw Bug two days ago, after waiting more than a year for my ship to come in, or the stars to align in order to get me into a Bug-watching situation. I'm kind of notorious for never getting around to seeing the movies about which I'm most excited, and then whining about it, but this one I kept quiet about. It's a weird, deeply weird movie; weird in the way that only a screenplay faithful to its theatrical roots (The House Of Yes, Agnes Of God, Angels In America, The Children's Hour; the obvious Virginia Woolf, the execrable Proof) can be weird.

Play language is not human language -- that's part of the point of plays, and playwriting. Of course, the linguistic tics are not the main issue with Bug -- a movie I loved, don't get me wrong -- but they definitely put one into the familiarly queasy linguistic space between poetry and vérité that so often distracts from our suspension of disbelief. And really, that's sort of the point: not only is the language of modern theatre self-conscious and literary (one could almost substitute the more apt "painterly" there), but these are, one and all, fundamentally stories about madness.

Contrasting the two films seemed at first quixotic: the stories begin on different ideological continents and spend their lives fleeing in opposite directions. But in delusion, and in loneliness, and in the stark existential terror of connection, I think they meet, on the other side of that globe.

In Lars, a young man with a clear disorder that may or may not be undiagnosed high-functioning autism uses an imaginary proxy as first a defense against the aggressive care of his family and small town, and eventually as a passive tool for storytelling: he brings these invaders (which amount to the entire world) into his story through the backdoor and getting everybody on his emotional page, in order to level the playing field. There's almost an audible pop in one's ears, when the township finally comes to accept Lars's "girlfriend" as a separate individual; the feeling is of an ocean's pressure suddenly equalizing.

Of course, there's a very personal, highly emotional story being told here, but it pales in interest (to me) when set against this story: like Ennis Del Mar or Humbert Humbert and Dolores, Lars uses every manipulative tool at his disposal in order to arrange the world around himself in exactly the way he wants it. Unlike those past worthies, of course, there's a happy ending. Embarrassing degree: in the film's hurried third act, the young man spontaneously overcomes his myriad fractures in a series of out-of-the-blue catharses ranging from survivor guilt (mom died in childbirth), Oedipal/sibling-incestuous feelings (toward his brother's wife), altered sexuality (gets a girlfriend!), and -- most intriguingly -- his terror and horror of the human body (cannot bear to be touched; assumes prenominate sister-in-law will die in childbirth).

A few crumbs are dropped, including a dissonant encounter with the boys' more conventionally messed-up father, but on the while, it's a fairy tale and a parable of the best kind: if you're prone to crying in movies, you won't be surprised to learn that it's a tearjerker. If you're prone to crying in movies for reasons you don't understand, in moments of enormity or transcendence or grace, I daresay you'll enjoy it just a bit more.

And then there's Bug. Which is neither a fairytale nor a parable, exactly, and which contains moments of enormity and intensity, but will not, perhaps, inspire many tears of sadness, or joy. In brief, Bug is the story of an incredibly lonely woman whose cooperation with (and eventual co-option of) a stranger's schizophrenia ends in a literal conflagration. It is, also, awesome, but cerebral. Where Lars is all heart, to an irritating degree, Bug is almost all brain. And maybe a little stomach.

While the grimy desperation of the film's first half is effectively desolate, and the third act is an unrelenting descent that often feels like it's dragging you down with it, one's ultimate response by the end of things is more likely one of narrative and literary satisfaction: the story points out its road map to you at every point, subtly, and then teases just a little bit before giving you the next "reveal." The entire point of the story, of course, is that there's not a single "reveal" in the unfolding sequence of "discoveries" suffered by the two intrepid adventurers: they are astronauts in the stratosphere of their own madnesses, shared and separate, locating and excavating new twists and turns of fate while locked in a room together, watching the story they're creating twist and turn around itself, coming to a -- horrifically, understandable -- Byzantine and brutal conclusion. The subjective reality of the film's early, grotesque portrait of loneliness similarly builds itself directly into later scenes contrasting the claustrophobic and frighteningly deranged interior with the calm, realistic world outside: the eventually tinfoil-covered room shakes, imaginary black helicopters thunder, lights flash and dim crazily. I'm not a "horror-porn" hater, but the Roths and Saws of the world could learn a thing or two from Bug's balls-out impressionist evocation of internal mayhem: this really is the way the world ends.

No more "I love you's," goes the song: "The language is leaving me ... Changes are shifting outside the word." I've always found the lyrics of the song (originally by The Lover Speaks, covered memorably by Annie Lennox) mysterious and almost obnoxiously evocative -- certainly a little precious -- but I've been thinking about it a lot, both versions, while putting together this little essay:

In an absence, or rather a reversion, of quantifiable fact, language becomes a spiritual source of communication: the lovers speak, they use the language of entomology and Area 41 conspiracy to reify their delusions and desperation, lending support to their madnesses, twining them together into a long and bristled thread. Outside that room is a world that has proven, again and again, to be a brutal and incomprehensible place: outside that room is a world that steals children and will jail and torture you for no reason at all. Outside, things shift without meaning or fairness, but inside, in their tinfoil Eden, all that exists is the story they create; their love takes place in their collaboration, creating meaning from all the ingredients they have. Those ingredients are sad, and scary, and ugly, but it's a heaven nonetheless, because at least within the insect garden, they have control of the narrative. The fact that the story, like the floor itself, bucks beneath their feet is of no consequence: they are literally creating a world of the only pieces and facts the cruel world has shown them. ("And you know what, Mommy? Everybody was being really crazy! The monsters are crazy. There are monsters outside.") No matter how hideous and painful that created world might be, they declare again and again against their imaginary oppressors, at least they have their humanity, and their own self-determination.

The tasks of the writer, director and actors are, in a recursive-iteration story like this, very specific and unusually similar. In order to believably sell the story's endpoint, all three must work together at creating a linear development from A to Z, without ever letting go of the primal naïveté of each passing moment. We have to believe that a reasonably functional -- if desperately walking-wounded -- woman could move through that alphabet with such speed and intensity, and all three sides of the team have to do this work in tandem. And while it's not a failure on this level -- which is pretty much the entire raison for the piece, this development -- I will say that Judd's performance (and her co-star, the taut and fascinating Michael Shannon; perhaps also the play itself) has something of the workshop about it.

It's understandable. The pair create world upon self-devouring world, never ceasing to raise the ante or deepen the conspiracy they're imagining, sometimes moving too fast for us, or their various foes and would-be rescuers, to even stay aboard. Flipped sideways, that's your basic summer camp improve class: actors one-upping the emotional stakes while rewriting history around themselves, working themselves into a fantastical and delusional furor. If you've ever seen it, or taken part in it, you know the kind of Pentacostal power the act can carry -- the possession that overtakes actors in the heat of that moment is both particular and universal to the religion of possession, whether it's vodoun or snake-handling backwoods Baptists. But if you've ever seen it, or taken part in it, you'll recognize it here. It's almost a strength, and certainly speaks highly of Judd and Shannon's talent: they seem to be improvising the entire time, which is the mandate here. However, one wonders if the particular rhythms and cadences of the film's final torrential descent don't take some of their flavors from the training of actors itself.

Which is a technical distraction: there's nobody to blame, because there's no blame to place. It's impossible to look away from, and so carefully delineated and built that you wouldn't be faulted for calling it a technical masterpiece, on that primally creative level. As the disparate tragedies and terrors and deep sadness of the two leads begin to weave themselves more and more nakedly into the madness of their shared narrative, one feels almost a sense of relief: it's a lot easier to believe a nearly nude woman, especially one as beautiful as Ashley Judd, screaming "I AM THE SUPER BUG MOTHER!" when you realize she's been pacing the conspiracy all through its development, waiting to add her two cents of bereaved motherhood. In fact, it's the terrifying and heartbreaking moment that Judd's Agnes takes the controls that you know there's no turning back, for either of them. She steers their shared delusion to its apocalyptic crisis with a firm, strong and terrifying hand; with a will that could move mountains.

Just like Lars.

In Gaiman's story "Three Septembers & A January," collected in the Sandman volume Fables & Reflections, concerns itself with the effects of a family of demigods on a historical figure, in this case Emperor Norton of San Francisco. (The rest of the Distant Mirrors cycle, collected alongside it in the same volume, places the story's themes during the French Revolution and the reigns of Augustus Caesar and Haroun al-Raschid.) Joshua Norton is a fairly well-known historical case, but one thrust of the story here is the statement that he is a rare case in which, quote, "his madness keeps him sane." By devoting himself wholeheartedly to his delusion of empire, Joshua keeps himself from succumbing to the despair of his poverty, the distraction of desire, and the oblivion of delirium itself. ("I used to have demons in my room at night," goes the song: "Desire, despair, desire: so many monsters...")

Like Lars, Joshua defends himself from the terror of physicality by putting a proxy -- his imperial duties -- above the temptations of the flesh. Like Agnes and Peter in their hotel room Heaven, Joshua sidesteps both despair and delirium by devoting himself wholeheartedly to his delusion: creating truth and more importantly purpose within the world as he defines it. And like Lars, he manages to con a whole city into going along with it.

There's a well-known Freudian axiom to the effect that "love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness." Solely, he's saying, those are the two factors that keep us from killing ourselves: the twin madnesses of love, or connection, and work, or meaningful purpose, are the highest and most basic of our mental needs. For Lars, it takes the form of using his devotion to the imaginary girlfriend as a way of reestablishing communion with the people around him; Lars creates meaning by telling a story, and shares that meaning by convincing everyone around him to help create it. To collaborate. Agnes and Peter find love in a platonic mutual obsession (they have sex once, at the end of the first act, and that's a gun that goes off, in the end, with quite a bang); they find purpose in a world that has treated them both with a singular cruelty through collaboration on their shared mythology, and through the meaningful work of fighting off the ever-shifting conspiracy that hounds them.

Love, and work: combined, that's collaboration. I've always maintained, in line with Kierkegaard, that religion is ultimately personal -- on the level of privacy reserved for things like sexuality, in fact -- but that the collaborative effort of political movements, churches, revolutions -- even those against our insect invaders -- fulfill a need just as basic as the need for solely spiritual meaning. The solidarity and community found in self-selected social groups (online television viewers, for one example; sports mania for another) provides a sense of collaboration, work -- love -- that could go head-to-head with church any day of the week, in terms of the human need for connection. (Absent the question of personal spiritual development, of course, which is another need entirely.) Collaboration, then.

It takes a lot of forms, and Lars is the only truly happy ending here, normatively speaking, but there's something almost hopeful in the deluded empires built by Joshua, and by Agnes and Peter: even given no positive raw materials at all, no grace or faith or hope or charity, humans will always find a way to sketch out a structure for meaning. We're lucky to be only minorly neurotic, for the most part, I think, and the castles we build in our particular skies are gigantically preferable, given the fact that we have worthwhile building materials. But in the same way that everyone deserves to experience love, or meaning, or work, or collaboration, I can't see my way to discounting what Peter and Lars and Agnes and Joshua worked so hard to build. Might be destructive, might be filthy and horrible to look at, but if the only alternative is madness, if you don't have any other choices, you could do a lot worse than constructing a narrative in which you are the Emperor, or a devoted husband to a woman of rubber and plastic, or even the Super Bug Mother herself.