just jen: essays and guest posts

glee

Glee is one of those things that makes you understand how an overused word became an overused word in the first place. The word in this case is delightful. The show is funny, quick, and the singing and dancing is simply that--a delight. It is also a fascinating phenomenon to me for two reasons: the form and the first season story arc. 

I'm not sure exactly when, but at some point the American musical began to indulge in a certain self-reflexive irony. Which is to say somewhere between South Pacific and Urinetown the form began to become highly aware of itself and it's own absurdity, and actually began to mock itself within it's own context. Whether the American Musical is laughing with itself or at itself is a whole other post, but along with this self-reflexive irony, came homage to the form in multiple formats. Television shows seemed to have a semi-obligatory musical episode (see: The Drew Carey Show, Scrubs, The Simpsons, Ally McBeal) the most outstanding of which, in my opinion, was the infamous musical episode in season six of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I say it is outstanding not because I like it--which I do, I love it, like I love a nice bordeaux served at 55 degrees--but because it has actually inspired Rocky Horror Style sing-a-long late night showings and festivals all over the world.

In any case, Glee is a whole series based on the stand-out musical episode--though to be formally correct, here, Glee is not musical theater but ballad opera. Ballad opera was a popular theatrical form that used the popular music of the time to tell stories and that is exactly what Glee is--like the ballad opera format of Baz Lehrman's opulent Moulin Rouge, minus the periodicity and the, um, opulence. 

The device of the show actually justifies the most absurd aspect of musical theater, which is the random nature in which the characters burst into song. You aren't sure if everyone realizes they are singing and dancing or not. I'm not sure why this works, exactly, but it does, for some. Though some people will always find musical theater ridiculous or embarrassing, there are always those people who really get the way some emotions are so strong that words fail and only music and dance will do to get the meaning across. Glee has the perfect device for dealing with this--which is the preparation for the glee club performances which coincidentally seem to comment on the story arcs and character development (how perfect, right?) 

Which brings me to the second fascinating part of Glee--the story arcs themselves. At the heart of the story is the appealing glee club teacher Will Schuster and the budding romance between he and the guidance counselor, Emma Pillsbury. The thing is Will is married. I'm watching with fascination because I'm really wondering if a prime time television show will be able to successfully break up a marriage (if that's where they intend to go with this love triangle) and remain sympathetic. They are working hard--the wife is very unlikeable and to say that Emma Pillsbury (who is often compared to Bambi in the dialogue because of her cartoon-y doe eyes) is sympathetic is to really understate the case. She's a cross between Ann Margaret and Cindy-Lou Who. At this point, it doesn't seem that the story can resolve without Emma and Will getting together, but the problem of his marriage just seems to stick out like a sore thumb. 

So, I'm curious about how they are going to deal with this. Are Americans ready for a story that kills a marriage in order to reach a happy ending, no matter how vicious and unlikeable the wife is, and how wide-eyed and dewey her nemesis is? I'm really curious. It's a fascinating bit of meta-theatricality. Other reasons to see the show include a guest appearance by Kristen Chenoweth and um, okay--the TOP reason to see the show--Jane Lynch and Stephen Tobolowsky. The lip-synching is kind of sucky but that only seems to add to the kitch factor and there is, as I led in with, that ever-pervasive self-reflexive irony. In fact, one of the best lines of the season so far is Will Schuster's: "There is nothing ironic about show choir!"

  Ironic, yeah? My golly, it's just an ironic hall of mirrors, that, isn't it?  :)

gregory house

Building from Nurse Jackie and Don Draper, I thought that I'd continue on this anti-hero vein and talk a little bit about my current tv series crush, House, MD.  I'm always behind on television because, you know, I'm way too cool to watch anything as it airs on prime time, so we've been watching on DVD. Fortunately for me, my brother left Season 5 at our house and---hey Bro, if you're reading this, it's a great season SUCKAH! wait until Turkey weekend to get it back!!!-- we've become immersed in Season 5, which is the best so far. But House is like that--whatever season you are watching seems like the best season.  Despite considerable emotional difficulties brought on by immediate, unexpected fame and success, Hugh Laurie never loses a creative edge, and makes the devices of the show--like the predictable third act AHA! that both ties a and b story lines together and solves the diagnostic puzzle of the week--seem authentically fresh, no matter how many times he has to do it. 

Originally conceived of as another procedural show like CSI, the creators  quickly realized that the damaged-genius protagonist was their creative vein of gold, and season 1 evolved from the individual puzzles he solves to relationships and character development.  House is a maverick, an unparalleled diagnostic genius, a musician of substantial ability, and a practical joker--he is also mean spirited, lacking in empathy, self-absorbed, and a pill-popping drug addict, as gifted in inflicting pain on those he purportedly cares about as he is in manipulating a differential.  

At first the supporting characters are wooden devices, there to prop up House--but by Season 2, they've each become their own enigma, and the writers undress them slowly, confidently.  One character in particular had the potential to be cloyingly inauthentic, the necessary sidekick Dr. James Wilson. House, a narcissist who doesn't feel that communication is particularly essential, and asks no permission before acting makes Wilson a necessary device (see Don Draper and The Nick Caraway Effect) as he probes in order that we may find out what  the impenetrable doctor might be thinking or feeling.  Gregory House is modeled on Sherlock Holmes, of course--the name is a play on Holmes, and Robert Sean Leonard's endearing Dr. Wilson is Laurie's Watson.  Wilson is the key to knowing House, and finding him sympathetic in anyway. It would be easy to forget the difficultly in believing that a man like Wilson would be such a loyal and dutiful friend to someone as frustrating and pain inflicting as House--but even that is a secret eventually laid bare and the answer is satisfyingly believable, and extends Wilson from  two dimensions to three and possible four.  

There is a lot of careful planting and sowing in Seasons 1-3,  and seasons 4 and 5 are harvest time; I give the writers the Joss Whedon Award for unanticipated and gut wrenching character story twists--the kind that almost leave you angry that the creators manipulated you into something akin to authentic grief. 

Expert storytelling aside, what is so fascinating about House is not only why the characters in the series put up with him but why we do.  Shore, the creator of the character who he claims was inspired by Holmes and Dr. Perry Cox from Scrubs, was really concerned that, in the wrong hands, House would be just hateful.  And Laurie succeeded in creating a character that is horrid, reprehensible and self-indulgent.  The question is, why do we care about Laurie's House?  Why do we put up with a character who is a selfish, manipulative, sabotaging, misanthropic, atheist, who not only refuses to have faith in humanity, love, and God but goes to great length to destroy such belief in others?  

The writers give us the means through the characters who love him--the more sympathetic the characters around him become, the more we love the great big boil of a foil in their midst, and the writing provides conflict in their desire to work with House and to understand the man behind the virtuosic abilities.  And Hugh Laurie's authentic talent for music is also a glimpse into the man behind the Vicodin--his love of music in listening and performance, makes you believe that he does in fact have a soul, and one worth saving, too.  There is one episode in particular where this is crystal clear--House fails to attend an event in support of a close friend, and stays, hermetically sealed, in his man-pad. Inter-cutting scenes of the event with his impassioned improvisation on the gorgeous, jet black baby grand Yamaha that sits at the center of his cave, it is not only the feeling in the performance but the choices in his improvisation that read.  His improvisation evolves from something typically House-y-blues-y, to something atypically traditional, foreign, and, indeed, something religious.  Even before it morphs back into a funky mixolydian mode, it is undeniable what we have just heard: House is playing for his friend, sending a spirit that desires to be there and participate in the joy of loving another, even as his deeply flawed personality and scarred, crippled body refuse to attend in a deliberate and despicable adhedonia (a pathological inability to experience pleasure--a diagnosis, that actually emerges in two patients in Season 5).  

Hugh Laurie is an unknown to most Americans, though to those who are fans of Rowan Atkinson's outrageously funny British comedy series Blackadder, he is a lovable and familiar face.  But even those of us who know his considerable comedic gifts, experienced something of a revelation in his creation of Gregory House.  He is uncanny; he portrays the inner contradiction of a character who spews a hateful and scientific materialist view on the world, yet somewhere, unspoken, and perhaps even sub-cognitive--we believe that the force with which he launches that black-pit world view emanates from a dark and desperate desire for it to be proven false.  

There is an over-riding arc in his character--House is a man who solves riddles in a search for a God he can't bring himself to believe exists.  He continually performs metaphysical experiments using patients to prove to the world and himself that things like love, God, and belief, are nothing more than irrational aberrations, biochemically produced, and that the afterlife is a fairy tale we tell ourselves when we are afraid of the sleep-dark of death.  Laurie makes us believe that his determination in proving these things is not that he doesn't believe that they are true.  Rationally, he is convinced.  But there is an emotion in House, a sort of auto-erotic sadomasochism, where he continually needs to prove it to himself, in order to feel the pain of realizing it isn't true.  He is a spiritual self-mutilator.  

Here is where contemporary television writers have found a mode in which to keep a pluralistic American audience composed of various layers of belief and non-belief, atheism, and theism, hooked in. They create a God through the desire for Him--sometimes, that manifests as a painful and ardent desire for a God who doesn't exist.  Even the most ardent atheist, must admit that they have at least, once, perhaps when they were children even, wished there was a God, even if they can't quite believe there is one.  Who can deny the desire for immortality?  For eternal happiness? 

Laurie's words and performed attitudes would satisfy the most militant scientific atheist audience member.  But his eyes, his pain,--and his music--leave a yawning question that would satisfy the most convicted mystic.  

Either way, the space for God and Love, with a capital L, is there, either in Faith or in the presence of His keenly felt absence.  The shows has it's skeptical atheist cake--and the spiritual romantic can eat it, too.  

don draper

I'm going to go pretty far afield here at moments, because, hey this is my blog and I write here for FREE so you know, I can do what I want. But I think you should know that this is all about Don Draper---what's that?  Did you hear that Gentle Blog Readers?  it's the collective clunk of my female readers (and a few of my male ones, perhaps) hitting the floor in dead swoon.  Now.  To head into wandering territory again.  

This article here cites Flannery O'Connor as I have before in relation to anti-heroes in literature, film, and television.  As a kind of semi-adventitious aside--can we come up with a term that includes film television and literature in one?  (And how do you like that word: adventitious.) I know book snobs persist and far be it from me to stop a division that encourages people to read more, BUT we forget that all television and film is written first (except in the case of loons like Mike Leigh who make passable films on improvisation alone--though even those have a pre-written structure to them).  To me literature, film, and television--like the Bard told us of the lover, the lunatic, and the poet--are of imagination all compact.  So what would that word be?  Cinetelelit?  How about this:  stories?  Because even something as annoyingly dense and literary as Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (which--I'll pass my Twitter whisper on GR here: psst!  the Emperor has nothing on!) all comes from the same historic root which was an oral tradition and therefore a performance tradition:  telling stories.  

And please note: just because performance PRECEDED literature as a vehicle for telling stories and preserving history does not necessarily mean it is in inferior to the literary tradition.  It is not an earlier stage of development--rather, it's like the village elder of story telling, it's literature's grandfather. Therefore it is a progenitor not a snotty-nosed, unsophisticated kid sibling--ancient, wise, and full of information, some of which it's uppity and less mature forms (like, um, literature as in what PBS and A&E watchers like) miss in it's leap toward bettering itself from the small town of Oral Traditionville from which it broke free, like Irene Cara in Fame (the original I hear the new one stinks, anyone see it yet?). . 

ANYWAY.  

Flannery O'Connor comes up time and time again when talking about the low culture of anti-heroes, because she provides the perfect example of the via negativa in literature--a pet subject of mine in that I think we have a fundamental crisis in mainstream criticism: we can't get our head around the difference between representation and advocacy. Mad Men has come under scrutiny by moralist critics for representing the morally degenerate world of advertising in all it's glory--and again the word, "glamorize" comes up or "glorify"--these are words that popped up all the time around The Sopranos and more recently, my new pet series, Nurse Jackie.  

The thing about Don Draper is not that he is as my friend has said, a "tool" (yet an undeniably, hot tool at that, and boy do we hate to admit that his bad behavior does nothing to reduce our desire for him!) but that you believe there is something about him worth saving, (beyond his hotness) though his behaviors suggest that he is beyond the edge.  They use a device in this show exceedingly well, one that enhances this deep mystery of nobility about a man who goes through women like some men go through Altoids, and lies 13 times before he's had his morning coffee and at least 26 times before his afternoon tipple. I call it the Nick Carraway Effect--in that every character, guest star or otherwise, becomes a Nick Carraway to Don Draper's Gatsby.  We explore him through others perception of him and his reaction to other people.  

I believe that the writers have been reading some of the academic literature that came out around the turn of the century (and by that I mean 21st century--itsn't it fun to realize we live at the turn of the century?) about the post-World War II period and gender identity.  I did quite a bit of reading on gender roles during the Cold War as a grad student and among the ideas that I recognize in Mad Men is Susan Faludi's Stiffed, and David Savrans Cowboys, Communists, and Queers.  But as academics are wont to do I may be putting the theoretical cart before the practical horse--these theories of masculinity were all deeply influenced by The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, a story that showed what happened to the American male as he re-entered culture after having endured the horrors of war.  So it is possible that the cinema and literature of the time period has allowed these deft writers to come up with a character who symbolizes all these two academics (to name but two who write on the subject) theorize on.  No matter.  It all comes together in something vaguely truthful and at least interesting.  

This American Man is one who is neither militarized nor de-militarized, because he is still armed to enter the height of American Capitalism as a warrior and still on alert against the foe through the Cold War.  And one of his most dominating features is his silence.  He is silent for many, many reasons.  He is silent because he has secrets, because his identity is built on lies.  He is silent because he can't reveal the parts of himself that don't match the American ideal of the uber-male.  He is silent because if he speaks he reveals himself a hypocrite.  But most of all he is silent because he cannot speak the unspeakable things he has seen as a man of war.  You get the sense if he speaks them that he will come apart at the seams and all that will remain is a lunacy that lies seething behind the after-shaved, gimlet scented facade.   

What is so completely riveting about John Hamm's Don Draper is his silence--and they continually use his reactions to other character's as the index of what lies beneath. His reactions to other's pain is what defines the possibility of his own emotions--even the birth of one of his children, he remains opaque, except for the way in which he listens to another young father-to-be who is a foil to Don's stoicism, wearing every emotion and every fear out on his sleeve.  

And, again, our eye is drawn to all that is worth saving in Don Draper.  While I suppose that there are many who might watch Don Draper and think he is a hero worth emulating--just as there are those who would ignorantly model themselves on Tony Soprano, Nurse Jackie, or House, MD--you can't really make art for those who will always willingly or ignorantly miss the point.  The idea about Don Draper that keeps most hooked in (aside from his obvious sexual appeal) is that he may in fact find redemption---from the horrors and secrets of his past, as well as the path he is on toward his own assured self-destruction.  

RIP Patrick Swayze

I almost didn't write this post because, though I loved Patrick Swayze, I couldn't, at first, define exactly what was loveable about him, aside from his impossible and drool-worthy shoulder to hip ratio.  But in thinking about it, I came to a slightly more nuanced understanding that makes me dare to define something I once thought was undefinable.  What was completely and utterly attractive about Patrick Swayze was the contrast between his look and his essence.  Though he played many roles, the ones he will be most remembered for were Johnny Castle in Dirty Dancing and Sam Wheat in Ghost.  In both of these, he was a romantic hero who, though he has plenty of opportunity to do otherwise, takes a higher path and is victorious in doing so.  He had a certain masculine bravado and a bad boy look to him.  His perfectly chiseled male physique, the downward slant of the outer corners of his eyes, his strong chin, and his roughly hewn nose all gave the impression of a contained masculine strength that he used when appropriate but belied the purity and essence of his flaming--and surprisingly gentle--heart.  

His sensitivity of spirit was portrayed through performance in his dance ability which, while not as virtuostic as an Astaire or as otherworldy as a Michael Jackson, was exquisite in its own way, expressive but still masculine, tender but still strong.  And it was portrayed in Patrick Swayze himself in various virtually unmarked ways from his longtime devotion and dedication to his wife to his simple and innocent defense of his friend Mel Gibson during Gibson's seemingly indefensible, anti-semtic, manic breakdown a few years back.  This was the defining characteristic of his Johnny Castle, who was a raw male sexual energy lured into the most base uses of that life-force.  But it ultimately revealed its nature in its desire to be loyal to and hooked to the higher virtue of an innocent idealist like Baby.  In Sam Wheat, the famous "ditto" in place of "I love you" was the pentultimate male stoicism, but it is revealed to be full of passion and virtue in his disembodied state.  Any illusion that "ditto" was a cop-out was fully destroyed by the end of his journey. 

In Johnny Castle, you see the pent up rage against injustice and prejudice, yet he contains it (barely) and is eventually vindicated in peforming his final dance and winning the love of Baby and the respect of her father.  In Ghost, Sam Wheat takes that masculine stoicism and pent up anger (toward Carl the predatory theif who betrayed his friendship) and, unable to realize it through violence against him because he is disembodied, turns that dammed up energy into a flaming heat that manifests in loving Molly, and, in so doing, brings justice far more satisfactorily than if he's been allowed to thrash Carl limb from limb in the first place.  Certainly, these are themes developed first by writers, but it was Swayze whose masculine energy mixed paradoxically with a pure and innocent lover's heart, that made these characters so memorable.  That vulnerability contained within such a sharply male and impentrable physique is portrayed poignantly in his exit line in Ghost:

It's amazing Molly, the love inside, you take it with you. See ya."  

He seems about five years old when he says that line.  And I mean that in the best possible way.  

This paradox in Swayze can be seen in earlier incarnation--in The Outsiders his Darrel Curtis is an older sibling burdened with the care of his younger ones.  Though you can see the pent up energy that makes him desire to live a more carefree and reckless, young, male lifestyle, he forcibly rechannels that energy toward those he loves, selflessly and for their benefit.  He does not assume that role because it is the only choice he has; he assumes that role because he actively chooses to "do the right thing" despite his very real and experienced masculine desires.  

And there is one other poorly remembered role, nestled unobtrusively between Skatetown USA and The Outsiders, in which you see this quality nascent and first emerging as that undefinable something that would later lead to blockbuster roles--in M*A*S*H he had a small role as a young soldier who comes in wounded and discovers that he has a likely terminal case of leukemia. The young soldier bravado melts away and you see the vulnerablity of one facing his own mortality; and his selfless reaction to it is profound.  The contrast between what he projects and what lies at his heart is achingly and almost unbearably moving.  The episode is called "Blood Brothers"  and I'm telling you. Watch it.  And see if you can't identify the quality I try to describe here. 

That quality, I think, is a man who has every thing at his disposal to make the world his own--and instead gives it back.  And not without a struggle that allows us to identify and believe we, too, though we often desire the opposite for our own reasons, could win the battle and give our baser desires up for something more satisfactory and, well, good.