Brief Thoughts After Binge-Watching Girls

1) If nothing else, the show is kind of genius at creating buzz. The SATC nod in the first episode, the parody of He's Just Not that Into You in the second, to the Reality Bites-ish, "well, a voice of a generation. . . " the show practically wrote half the blog posts that would be written about it in its first few episodes. I just feel sorry for all the straight girls internet dating now who will probably be reading ads saying "don't even think of messaging me if you identify with any of those stupid girls" five years after it goes off air. Not that I'm speaking from experience or anything.

2) Adam is kind of a legitimately great character: unlike any of the girls, he's sort of like someone you know but have never seen on TV. (On the other hand, I spent the first few episodes trying to remember who he reminded me of, and it was Jeremy Sisto's Billy on Six Feet Under. But still).

3) However. Hannah and Adam's relationship strikes me less as the dark, fucked-up thing the show seems to think it is and more of an unrealized S&M thing. I mean, they kind of both realize that they get off on treating each other badly, on power games, but I'm not sure if they don't know enough to be conscious of it. Yes, the awkward sex on Girls can be as good as the awkward sex on Louie, but there also seems to be this shorthand that kinky sex=bad/awkward/fucked up sex, like with Booth Jonathan in the last episode, whereas nice guy Charlie just wanted to look Marnie in the eye.  But chicks secretly like the jerks, am-I-right? In network land, the "jerk" was someone who "just wants sex." (At least that's how it was back when I watched network sitcoms. Even Six Feet Under kind of fell into that with Brenda and David.) Girls is too sophisticated for that, but is kinky=fucked up just the more sophisticated version?

4)  Speaking of which, sorry, that Booth Jonathan "I'm a man" line just made me laugh, and I didn't buy it working on Marnie. That whole storyline feels really forced and fake-daring.

5) Speaking of artists, to the extent that you I did have a pretty negative reaction to these characters, it comes from how fake their passion/interest in the "arts" they're supposedly pursuing seem to be. Yes, they're exaggerations, and ok, there are lots of superficial narcissistic types who think you don't have to be a reader to be a writer (and always have been), but Hannah does have a certain smarts and originality to her and you think she'd be reading something and talking about it.

6) I think the nepotism/spoiled/class charge is basically crap (when directed against Dunham rather than against the characters, who are indeed pretty oblivious). Her mom's an artist! Yeah, that and 2.50  . . . .The race thing is more complicated. I do think it gets more crap for it than more deserving sources (Looking at you, Breaking Bad). The response with the Donald Glover story line was clever in that it showed Hannah's incompetence in dealing with these issues (the deft portrayal of this incompetence being evidence that the show itself is less incompetent.) On the other hand, as with Hannah's narcissism, the whole "look, other characters are accusing her of what the critics do" has a bit of the "I know this is a cliche, but cliches are true" thing to it.

7) On the other hand, if the show was giving its critics the finger,  it was a much more playful, less capital F fuck you than when Woody Allen finally wrote a black character and made her a prostitute. Speaking of which, the father doing the Dead Shark speech at his anniversary dinner seems like a just as explicit and way more ball-sy of a call out about her ambitions than the SATC thing in the first episode.

8) Speaking of narcissism, I just reviewed a book about Philip Roth that spent a bunch of time playing around with character names. Stuff like that always seems a bit silly to me. But: Hannah H, Marnie M, Jessa J, Shoshanna S. What's up with that?

9) Speaking of class, the other Sunday night show I watch is Shameless, which is brilliant and fascinating, has even more of a mix of tones than Girls, and almost as many as Louie, and its class stuff could be a whole other post. I don't watch Dowton Abbey. But you do have to wonder: why do people hate on the Girls for being rich and spoiled but nobody looks askance at identifying with the Dowager?

The Secret Lives of Wives and Widows

So T.S. Eliot's wife has died.  Wait, what? How is that possible?

Of course you can probably guess: "Mrs. Eliot, who was almost 38 years younger than her husband, had been his secretary for several years at the publishing house Faber & Faber when they married in 1957." 

The Times obituary itself is a kind of accidental masterpiece, a perfectly calibrated mini-biography, evoking the strangeness of the lost worlds that passed away with her:

Esmé Valerie Fletcher was born in Leeds, England, on Aug. 17, 1926. Her father, who was in the insurance business, was a bookish sort who passed on to his daughter his love of poetry. She said she fell in love with Eliot — or at least his work — when, at 14, she heard John Gielgud’s recording of “Journey of the Magi.”

After her schooling, she worked at a library at the University of Leeds and then as a secretary to the novelist Charles Morgan. When a family friend who knew Eliot mentioned that he was looking for a secretary, she applied.

I love those dashes. Because how is a 14 year old to know the difference between a man and a voice on a phonograph, one that doesn't even belong to that same man? 

 In my benevolent literary dictatorship when novels about professors who sleep with their students have been banned, I may make an exception for stories about those students, or other younger women who  marry much older men years down the road: what happens later when the men are not older but old or sick or dying? I know this sounds nasty or vengeful like, ha, they still grew old and died but I don't mean it like that. A while back I read the excerpt from Francisco Goldman's memoir/novel Say Her Name in the New Yorker. He says that when they got together, they would joke about how the future would play out, and he'd promise that if he was still alive at a certain point he would go off and leave her while she was still young enough to meet someone else, but as it turned out he was the one who lost her.

But of course more often the odds are not defied.  Valerie was 86 when she died. The marriage that put her obituary in the papers  lasted seven years. Her widowhood lasted forty-seven. 

My own grandmother was a widow for twenty-seven years, despite having married a man one year her junior. Only shortly before her death did I come to understand that so much of her personality and interests, so much of her way of being in the world - or what I had understood it to be - had been forged out of this widowhood, and that my mother and aunt and her husband and four sisters and known and loved a very different woman.  

For Valerie, of course, the widowhood that lasted more than half of her life was also her career. She managed his estate,  edited an edition of The Waste Land, edited his letters, got rich by authorizing Cats, started a foundation with that money, and defended his reputation. 

There are a lot of very obvious feminist points about this, about the trajectories of bookish girls born in 1926.  For a while I got kind of obsessed with the throw away descriptions of wives in profiles of artists and such and started collecting them. Things like this: 

During their thiry-five years of marriage, Natalia Dmitriyevna served as her husband’s first reader, editor, assistant, cook, driver, researcher, and (because Solzhenitsyn was a kind of literary monk) conduit to the earthly realm of agent, publishers, journalists, lawyers, and politicians. She also raised three sons because, she said jokingly, “the way Alekasandr Isayevich saw it, they would just grow up on their own.”

“The Widow’s Peak,” David Remnick, The New Yorker June 18 2012

 Or this: 

“It’s curious, and perhaps no more than curious, that the two most productive periods of Bowie’s career coincide with his two marriages.”

Thomas Jones, “So Ordinary, So Glamorous,” Thomas Jones, LRB, 5 April 2012 

"Perhaps no more than curious." Because of course one mustn't make too much of such things.
I always thought "And they were mostly, men" could be the great title for something: how that phrase, nine times out of ten consigned to a parenthesis, is called on to do so much by way of explanation and apology.

And yet. Were one to make the obvious feminist points, to reach for our Virginia Woolf and go to that passage I just taught my students, the one about how we're on "the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet," when we read of "a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother" - we might be led off the track.

For one thing, there is this: apparently Valerie hated talking to the press but made an exception when the movie Tom and Viv came out, defending her husband against the charge, among others, that Eliot's first wife, Vivienne, had written parts of The Waste Land and been denied credit. "The exemplary literary widow" delicately describes her understanding of Vivienne's illness, expresses sympathy for Ted Hughes, and asserts that the first Mrs. Eliot's role in creating The Waste Land was the traditional one: causing the misery that helped to inspire it.  Valerie comes across in The Independent as the reluctant truth-teller, making a more modest but more accurate claim for her role in the great man's work.

No doubt for some people this is a cautionary tale about the perils of looking too hard for the evidence of lost female genius. I remember one time in graduate school a certain professor saying that for the material we were looking at, 19th century French poetry, there were no women. "And not because they've been suppressed," he said with something like a sneer. But Woolf's point was not just about the things that don't get read, or the things that were written as "anon", or the ways women's intellectual capacities were channelled into work produced by men, but the things that never get written at all.

But in a way this all misses the point. In some ways,  literary history remains a stubbornly conservative field no matter how many of us pinkos teach it. The whole mythology of genius teaches us to spend our time thinking about creation as a process that is ultimately distant from the rest of human experience, done by a select few. We can expand the pantheon, and we can talk about "context," we can look at literary movements that tried to be collective, we can study popular culture, but it's very hard to ever have the cultural equivalent of social history or history from below, or to really study anything but a few works at a time, be they representative or exemplary, no matter what the "digital humanities" people say.

Looking again at the lives of those who live in proximity to the big names can of course be a part of this in the worst way, like those awful panels run by author societies where everyone talks about what so and so wrote to so and so and talks like they knew them, like when the nice Jewish lawyer in Quiz Show comes back from hanging out with Van Dorens talking about Bunny Wilson. That's what they call him, he tells his wife. Well, you don't have to, she says.

But when you look at these in another way, they can be something else entirely. My favorite part of the obituary is this:

He was made for marriage, he was a natural for it, a loving creature, and great fun, too,” Mrs. Eliot said in a 1994 interview. “We used to stay at home and drink Drambuie and eat cheese and play Scrabble. He loved to win at cards, and I always made a point of losing by the time we went to bed.”

If they'd made Tom and Valerie, no one would fall in love with Bertrand Russell and no one would go to the looney bin and I don't know how you dramatize thirty years spend editing his letters, but I would watch any movie that showed a moment like this. Genius is all well and good (actually it's not but that's another story), but she also serves who knows when to lose at cards.

From the Inside Out

Imagine this scene: a woman in her thirties is standing in her apartment with her boyfriend of four years. She's leaning against the wall and turns toward the mirror and says, apropos of nothing, "I wish I could just be just one notch more beautiful."

Here are some things this scene is not. It is not the start of an argument between this woman and her boyfriend.  It is not a calculated moment of self-deprecation designed to make a flawless heroine more "relatable." It is not a part of a film "about" body image. It is not part of a film that will impart any lessons about lovable imperfections or self-acceptence.

Here is one thing the scene is: it is a moment in a film that creates and explores one woman's subjectivity. After she expresses this wish, she thinks aloud about something no character from a "body image" movie ever thinks or talks about: the actual experience of living in the in-between space where most women live, of feeling attractive some of the time, and thinking about it sometimes, in the course of a day when you're also trying to think about other things. . It's like I'm always on the border, she says. Like I have to make my case to every new person.

The scene is from Miranda July's second movie, The Future, which came out last year. And despite everything you might think about July, here are some things the film is not: it is not quirky, twee, ironic, or whatever they're calling it.  July's dancer character Sophie is no one's manic pixie and she's no one's dream girl.  But neither is the film a "response to" or "deconstruction" of manic pixies.  (Although this also a very worthy project!) Nor it is a "response" to irony or an embrace of neo-sincerity or what have you. As Andrew O'Hehir points out in an interview with her,  she's the rare indie auteur who doesn't seem to be responding to other films or to some theme or some aesthetic.  She's not "responding" to anything except the experience of being alive.

July wrote what is possibly my favorite short story, "Roy Spivey." The narrator of that story has an encounter with a famous person on a plane.  They build a connection but he explains that they won't be able to talk when they get off.  They come up with a code: he will say "Do you work here" and she will say, "no." But when the time comes a flight attendant interrupts. I work here, she says. I will help you. Then she rolls her eyes at the famous man, as if she was commiserating with him about people like her.  This is the kind of imperceptible but all-important shift short story writers often try and fail to describe: the little shifts in our alliances, the circles we draw of who is inside and who is outside.

I heard "Roy Spivey" read at a benefit for 826. I was there with someone I was interested in, and it wasn't really going anywhere, and I'd done the lame "I have two tickets" thing.  Before it started I went on about how it was my favorite story, and how it perfectly described the experience I'd recently had during a brief encounter with a famous person. Maggie Gyllenhaal introduced the story and said it was something we didn't hear enough of, that it was about a woman's body from the inside out, not about how it looked but how it felt to be in it. That was the first time I realized exactly what July was doing in her stories and in her movies, and why the twee thing she gets tagged with is so wrong.  Like Mary Gaitskill, July is the opposite of an ironist. She's making a movie about artistic types in their thirties and the apartment looks like something out of Portlandia but she never makes fun of them for being what they are. If you think about it, that satirical impulse - making fun of hipsters, academics, what have you - is just another way of asserting, despite all evidence to the contrary, that their (ok, our) lives and fears are fundamentally different from anyone else's.

As in Gaitskill, there's some very interesting, very un-twee sex in "The Future." I imagine that a lot of people probably looked at it and said, that came from nowhere or, why would she do that.  You can look at it and say, she's anxious in her relationship, or afraid of commitment, or afraid of growing older, or you can look and say she's narcissistic or masochistic or what have you. All of these things make sense, or none of them do. In a commentary to Three Women, Robert Altman talks about how strange it is when actors say, oh, my character does this because so and so. But people, unlike scripted characters, don't know why we do what we do. We don't act, he said, we behave. To the extent that July's character has a "motivation," it's a kind of poetic one. She and her boyfriend make the decision to "open themselves up" to new experiences and for Sophie that means that the boundaries between inside and outside start to dissolve. Women who "act out" sexually in movies or television are usually shown as lightweight and stupid or as vicious man-eaters or beautiful fuckups. With Sophie it's any or all of the reasons anyone might, or at least have the impulse to - and that's a different kind of psychological motivation to explore, that what ifs - restlessness, curiosity, transgression for the sake of transgression, not in the sense of shocking anyone but in the way that Brenda explained it on Six Feet Under: that your cross a line, and then you realize the lines are all in your head. (Brenda was one of the best-written female characters on TV, although they sadly pushed her a little too much towards the fuckup category and saddled her with shade-by-numbers Freudian motivations. Her parents were shrinks! And swingers!)

After we heard that story at that benefit, the guy I was with said, "yeah, it was ok, not really my thing." I remember feeling that thing I identify with being a kid, when you're all enthusiastic about something and try to explain it someone and they try to humor you but you can tell what they mean is, yeah, whatever, kid. It's why it's sometimes better to go on a date to a movie you only like so much, or not to try to teach your favorite texts. It was why I was glad to watch The Future at home with my baby sleeping on my lap. He slept through the whole thing, and so I had the rare treat of watching the whole thing without interruptions. At certain points I found myself thinking that that guy from the benefit or this person or that would hate it, and all their reasons, and just where it would lose them. But the film is all about indeterminacy and perspective. Unlike the ironists, July never distances herself from what she's doing. She risks being seen as pretentious. And you can choose to see it that way. Or you can let the boundaries dissolve, and think, maybe this has something to do with me, just a little bit.

10 Plus Great, Interesting, or Favorite Movies Directed by Women

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Inspired by this amazingly comprehensive website and this interesting thread at Shakesville, I've been mulling over some of my favorite movies directed by women. After Nora Ephron's death, a lot of people were quoting her list of things she wouldn't miss which included "panels on women in film," and it's easy to see how such discussions (and perhaps lists like this one) can be wearying. But it is interesting to think about the way that, despite all the auteur theory and fan-crushing on the next hot indie whatever, most people don't really internalize the sense of a film as having a voice or something that could be filtered through gender along with so many other factors. So we don't really think of the missing stories that an overwhelmingly male-dominated industry gives us they way we would if 90% of novels and memoirs were by men. And we don't really think of movies directed by women as a "canon" the way people think about classics of women's literature. This may well be for the best, given how the canon construction, even in its alternative modes, tends towards a reification that prevents people from forming their own individualized, subjective, complex relationships to texts. And god knows The Hurt Locker is like the Maggie Thatcher of films, existing to keep feminists honest. No, women don't have to make films about women, but they should probably come close to passing the Bechtel test. Yes, it was well done. But Thatcher was also a good politician. And the fact that it wasn't some kind of fire-breathing wignuttery made it all the more insidious as pro-war propaganda. Oh, and she's got one coming out this year about killing Bin Laden. So yeah.

But still, it's good to know that despite all the obstacles this stuff is out there. So in that spirit, this is in no ways definitive, and there are tons of candidates I want and need to see, especially non-American stuff, and it's not necessarily "the best," just great, interesting or important to me for different reasons.   Also in no particular order: 

- Winter's Bone, Debra Granik

Best movie I saw the year I saw it. Tight, perfectly shot and paced, with a great and classic story. It does a wonderful job depicting a young woman being tough and courageous and not in some ridiculous "kick ass" cartoonish way.

- Boys Don't Cry, Kimberly Pierce

Like Brokeback Mountain, it works because it's a classic tragic love story, told in a classic and straightforward way. I didn't want to see it for a long time because I'd heard the rape scene was hard to watch. It was, but here's the thing: a "hard to watch" rape scene is ultimately less upsetting to me than one that's actually tittilating, which is to say, most of them. Of course, it was threatened with an X rating not because of that but because of the great love scenes between Hilary Swank's Brandon and Chloe Sevigny's Lana. Fun fact: in This Film is Not Yet Rated, Pierce recalls that the complaint from the ratings board was that Brandon goes down on Lana for too long. Ladies, isn't it that just the worst?

- Julie and Julia, Nora Ephron

My grandmother, an undying optimist, who kept asking me why so many "great" books were so depressing, called this the best thing she'd seen since Singing in the Rain. She had a point: it's really hard to show someone finding the thing they love and just doing it, and to make this dramatic. Yes, the Julie side is kind of hum, but Meryl and Stanley and Paris and the food more than make up for it. As Sady Doyle pointed out, Nora Ephron was underestimated by a lot of sophisticated types for a lot of reasons, but at least in part because people really, really underestimate how hard it is to make funny, strong, popular entertainment. It kind of should be obvious, given how few people do it. As Sady said, we should have listened to Mom, or to Baubie. 

- Sans Toit ni Loi (Vagabond), Agnes Varda

In the spirit of a lot of French New Wave with its young outcast heroine, but with a tight formal twist that resists psychological probing of its heroine. She's not letting us in anymore than anyone else. Tight, haunting, all that jazz.

- Laurel Canyon, Lisa Cholodenko

Not as well know as The Kids are All Right, but more interesting to me in its fluid approach to family, sex and creativity, with less contrived conflict as well as the sublime Frances McDormand getting a too-rare opportunity to cut loose. And not to get all essentialist but the wonderful sex scenes definitely feel like they're directed by a woman, or "queer" even the straight ones, which is probably not really an essentialist claim so much as a commentary on the sad predictability of sex scenes in most movies, at least in the U.S., which seems to have another ratings board rule that sex must be super super romantic or super super violent and that humor is in no cases allowed.

Friends with Money, Nicole Holofcener

Not to be confused with those friends who have kids or benefits. Holofcener seems to be pretty polarizing, and this film especially, mostly for her willingness to show her characters' self-pity. Viewers are funny people. We'll accept murderers and sociopaths as quirky and compelling looks at the human condition and congratulate ourselves for the ruthless self-examination we're putting ourselves through. Then, the minute a character gets in a funk about a gray hair we're all, BEGONE! Your humanity has not to do with mine!! When people say, it makes you uncomfortable, but in a good way, I usually run, but here it's really true. Plus, more Frances McDormand.

Harlan County, Barbara Kopple

A classic for a reason. Straightforward great documentary storytelling, without grandstanding but without pseudo-objectivity.

Orlando, Sally Potter

A suitably weird take on Woolf's weirdest book (ok, except maybe Flush). The weirdness of being born one thing at one time wrapped up in Woolf's ultimate topic, the weirdness of being alive.

Clueless, Amy Heckerling

Really. So much closer to the subversive spirit of Jane Austen than a dozen bloodless period pieces put together. "You're a virgin who can't drive." RIP, Tai.

I Shot Andy Warhol, Mary Harron 

What happens if you're a misfit and you run away to be with the other misfits, but they're the new cool kids and you're still a misfit and just as much of an outsider as ever? Lily Taylor's Valerie Solanas is a rare complex but legitimately totally fucked up female anti-hero. Also, "Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex" is a totally awesome first sentence. Especially the "at best." (As a piece of writing!)  

Some honorable mentions: Persepolis (Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud), Wild Man Blues (Kopple again), Meek's Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt), Humpday (Lynn Shelton), 2 Days in Paris (Julie Delpy), Mississippi Masala (Mira Nair), The Piano (Jane Campion)  

A list of all the episodes of current TV shows directed by women on this list would also be fascinating. 

Breaking Bad Season 5 Countdown

A while back Emily Nussbaum had a nice piece in the New Yorker on Game of Thrones that kind of summed up why I don't think I'll be watching it anytime soon. (Aside from the fact that, despite the best efforts of just about everyone I've ever dated and a bunch of other friends too, I just don't seem to have the fantasy gene.) She says that the show "is the latest entry in television’s most esteemed category: the sophisticated cable drama about a patriarchal subculture. This phenomenon launched with “The Sopranos,” but it now includes shows such as “Deadwood,” “Mad Men,” “Downton Abbey,” and “Big Love.”"  (Big Love turned from something very promising to a creepy defense of said patriarchal subculture, but that's another story). But she also talks about what the sexysexy cable sex looks like in this particular patriarchy: it looks a lot like something designed to prove Andrea Dworkin right.  When you make a point like this, a million blog comments start to auto-compose: it's a critique! It's showing what that world is like, not endorsing it, you stupid puritanical philistine! Since I don't plan to see the show, I don't really know or care, but what I do find interesting is that Nussbaum makes a point that if I recall my women's college days of yore, somewhere late in the last millenium, Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon used to make. It's kind of an obvious point but rarely made: pornography is not pure representation, constructed in the mind and enacted by robots. It (in the live action non-anime version), is actual people having sex.  Which of course is not an argument against it, if you support legal safe sex work, which I do, but it does mean that talking about it as just in terms of representation and "free speech" is a way of erasing that work. As Nussbaum reports:

It’s unsettling to recall that these are not merely pretty women; they are unknown actresses who must strip, front and back, then mimic graphic sex and sexual torture, a skill increasingly key to attaining employment on cable dramas. During the filming of the second season, an Irish actress walked off the set when her scene shifted to what she termed “soft porn.” Of course, not everyone strips: there are no truly explicit scenes of gay male sex, fewer lingering shots of male bodies, and the leading actresses stay mostly buttoned up. Artistically, “Game of Thrones” is in a different class from “House of Lies,” “Californication,” and “Entourage.” But it’s still part of another colorful patriarchal subculture, the one called Los Angeles.

So I was thinking about this and about whether there's anything behind this "patriarchal subcultures" thing, any reason why it would be the setting for so many of these shows. Long form cable using its form to maximum achievement is all about the construction of worlds, layered worlds and worlds within worlds. In all these cases you're constructing a world in order to show how its rules, power structures and hierarchies, work, in ways that resonate for our own world where these things may be harder to see. It can be a fantasy past, like Game of Thrones, the recent past, like Mad Men, or subcultures like The Sopranos.  Now The Wire took this further by starting with subcultures and then layering them on until you had a whole culture,  defamiliarized and then refamiliarized. (Or perhaps the dystopia of the near future, in the neoliberal world where we are all Baltimore, or at least 99% of us.)  There have been some interesting exceptions - Six Feet Under, who's characters live in that atomized L.A. L.A. writers seem to love to write about - beyond the family, they don't have much social context at all. And In Treatment, which I've just about given up trying to get people to watch, because no one has, but which I just found out was created and written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez's son, which is kind cool.

Anyways, it's six days until the start of the new season of Breaking Bad, and I'm wondering whether or not it fits into Nussbaum's category. It has a lot in common with The Sopranos, working the Dostoevsky thing about what is permitted for those not constrained by normal rules. With Tony S., he starts fallen and the whole show teases the possibility of redemption even though in retrospect it's clear there was never really that possibility. Breaking Bad seems to be about a decline, except that the decline is pretty much accomplished right away - as soon as that basement scene plays out, there's no going back. We realize right away that Walter is not so much a man fallen as a man freed to more completely be the asshole he always was.  Certainly this helps us see why there's never a real question of him stopping once he has enough money. It's all about ego, proving he's the smartest guy in the room, making sure he's daughter knows that he provided for her. We're firmly in The Sopranos/Mad Men world of status and hierarchy. But we're not in patriarchy, per say, except in the sense that all of contemporary culture still fits that mode. Which of course it does in certain ways. But we meet Walter in a world where status-seeking has been dissipated or sublimated beneath the haze of southwest sprawl. His old friend has achieved some post-alpha alpha success with his biomed company, and Walter is stuck as a teacher in a world where people are polite but quietly judge him as a failure - only the teenagers themselves are upfront about mocking him. While his alpha-crime career is beneath the surface, he's stuck in pissing contests of card games and drinking in front of the kids with his sort-of alpha brother-in-law, who in this mostly not-alpha world is mostly a comic figure. From the start, Walter was a wolf in sheep's clothing, and once the costume is off, he's pretty much a straight-up psychopath. Jesse, on the other hand, shows himself to be more and more sheep, which makes him the tragic one and quite possibly the show's real hero.

In short, Breaking Bad may not be a show about patriarchy, but it's definitely a show about masculinity. (Mad Men is both, of course, as well as being a much rarely thing - a show about femininity, in which femininity is interrogated as well as embodied.) There's a certain conservative streak, in that Walter is not trying to live up to some concept of manhood, like fellow asshole Pete Campbell. He just wants to dominate, and there's a certain "this is the true self every man would have if faced with dying" thing -  except that Jesse, in his oversized gangster clothes is there as a counterpoint. And, potentially much more radically, there is Walter Jr., who will never chase down drug dealers but admires some of his father's ruthlessness. I'm still figuring out predictions, but as for wishes: I want more Walter Jr. almost as much as I wanted more Carla.

What He Said, or, No Need to Write Another Hipster-Bashing Post, like, Ever

“This little band of bohemians, as grimly single-minded as any evangelical sect, illustrate, by the very ferocity with which they disavow American attitudes, one of the most American of attributes, the inability to believe that time is real. . . Society, it would seem, is a flimsy structure, beneath contempt, designed by and for all the other people, and experience is nothing more than sensation – so many sensations, added up like arithmetic, give one the rich, full life.”  James Baldwin, "A Question of Identity," from Notes of a Native Son, 1955 

Dance, Little Monkey

So, there was a little kerfuffle recently about David Simon saying that it's silly that people spend so much time and effort doing episode-by-episode analyses of shows that are meant to have long arcs. Actually and not surprisingly, he was saying something much more important and interesting, about what happens when you actually try to say something through a cultural medium. Anytime someone talks about political art, there's lots of hand-wringing about how it can't be "preachy" or "simplistic" or a "pamphlet" and it has to do more than "preach to the choir." Well, here's someone who made a brilliant and genuinely radical piece of art that, even if it got less viewers than Jersey Shore or what have you, became a force in at least a segment of mainstream culture, and among a lot of media/cultural type people who we might think have some sway over how we talk about things. But as Simon notes, what becomes of that? You get a sports reporter asking a fanboy question of a certain fan who happens to be the most powerful person on the planet:

And yes, I understand that the reason for that interview – the precondition under which Obama participated, no doubt – was that it was a discussion of sports.  So, okay, no one needs to bring up a TV drama with the President of the United States for any sensible reason.  And yet at the end, Simmons chose to invoke The Wire.

If he were a hectoring asshole, an argumentative scold, a fucking killjoy, he might realize that he has The Man right there, and that he is at the end of the day acting as, well, a journalist.  So if anything is to be said about that show, well, here is a rare chance to break some ground.  He might swallow hard, seize the moment and say something along the lines of, “Mr. President.  I know you’ve said you’re a fan of The Wire.  Well, one of that show’s basic critiques is that the drug war is amoral.   More Americans are now in prison than ever before, and the percentage of violent offenders in prison is lower than ever.  We are now the jailingest society in the world, incarcerating more of each other than even totalitarian states.  How can we go on supporting this?”

Balls out like that.  Truth to power,  brah.  Get some.

Instead, to use a sportswriting cliché, Simmons choked, throwing up an ugly brick at the buzzer: “Who’s the best character in The Wire?”

So, yeah, the depressing news is that you can make a radical and brilliant work of art that gets some play, and make it entertaining  enough that it's not dismissed as yet another dreary liberal preachy thing, and people get so entertained they say, hey, chill out, it's just entertainment. Yeah, you were a reporter, but that just makes your entertainment nice and real. Neat little trick, that:  

Arguments about the taste of the bread or the look of the circuses go on forever, because, hey, Omar is cool and Bunk is funny as hell and isn’t it great when Clay Davis says the word shit.   Yes, it is nice to know that people were entertained.  It’s not that anyone begrudges an audience its pleasure; we wrote the cool stuff and the funny stuff and we enjoyed it, too.   But four years after The Wire is off the air, are we wrong for admitting aloud to other hopes and purposes for the finished work?

Probably some of my non-English major friends would say, well, yeah, that's the way things go, and that's why serious people should stick to serious straightforward journalism and activism. But it's not like earnest journalism doesn't just as often cause people to say, oh yes, and turn the page - they may not be entertained the way they were with The Wire, but it is similarly pleasure and not a spur to action that motivates them. Right now I'm sitting here typing this with my gorgeous almost-three month old on my lap, and listing to NPR, to reviews of books I won't have time to read and outrages I won't effectively combat (though I might toss off a rant about how NPR gets them wrong.)  And there is a reason "art" - however you look at it - creates the sense it might "break through" where the earnest and straightforward fails. Mike Daisey may have given creative non-fiction a bad name, but there's a reason so many people were drawn to his piece. And obviously there's lots of reasons why David Simon started writing books and making TV instead of being a full-time daily reporter.

I'd be curious how many cops or politicians watched The Wire, and whether it impacted their thinking. Closer to home, it made me think about my own profession, teaching somewhat differently. I'd like to think that if nothing else, it's some kind of counter-programming to the relentlessly pro-lock 'em up drumbeat of just about every other cop or lawyer show on TV. It's not impossible to imagine it spurring some people into action, and having a kind of cumulative effect with other forces pushing towards a more open debate and change. 

On the other hand, I read somewhere recently that The Good Wife had been called "the new Wire." Here's a show basically about a bunch of rich lawyers and their rich lawyer problems of every once in a while having guilt about letting people off, because on lawyer shows it's defense attorneys who are supposed to feel bad about themselves, never the prosecutors. It's enough to make one imagine Simon pulling a full-on McLuhan. In any case, the man knows a thing or two about pushing a form, and it's a treat to see blog writing that pushes outside the normal point and click.