Frequently Asked

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.

Read On

Stanley & Myra Say Fuck It

I.

All of the wedding presents were in what the kids used to call the "very back," the fifth-door back-facing child seats that Stanley and Myra forgot to fold down when Tommy was old enough to sit in the back seat without pulling hair or throwing food, and Stanley and Myra were alone in the car for a moment of blessed silence between the hall and the reception, and Myra was eating the nuggets out of a Happy Meal they'd bought and as she ate them they tasted like a quiet guilt in the back of her mind because when the girl at the window handed Stanley his change back in the drive-through her eyes had flicked back through the car, to the back and the very-back, and noticed that there were no kids there:

And Myra had the strangest desire to call out to the girl at the window that there was a child waiting for the Happy Meal, it wasn't for the grown woman next to Stanley in what the kids used to the call the "jump seat," it wasn't because they were strapped for cash but just because her girdle was feeling tight as it was and she didn't want a whole meal, an adult-sized meal, didn't even want to eat what they were calling a Big Kids Meal, just a regular tiny Happy Meal like the kids used to get when they were kids, before high school and before the wedding, when everyone was bite-sized and the children lived on ketchup and were too young for rock and roll television or sex or programming the TiVo and looking down at her like that little slow girl in Tommy's class that hugged her once outside the school because she thought Myra was her mommy, because all mommies look alike, less so to the children than to strangers but more so than to the mommies themselves, but also to the mommies themselves:


In the very-back were all the wedding presents, between the hall and the reception, in blessed silence as Stanley drove, taking the long way without saying any more than a subtle little smirk as he missed the exit, and Myra knew he wanted to keep in the still and the quiet again, because everybody goes crazy and everybody deserves to go crazy and everybody secretly looks forward to going crazy on the day of a wedding so they can tell their friends if they cried or not, if they wept and why, if it was Gloria all grown up so lovely in her dress or just the power of love and romance as those two youngsters those two children finally clasped their hands and put on their rings and stood together in front of everybody and smiled and wept and grew up right before your eyes and went off on their honeymoon and they maybe you'd never see them again, but for now there was still the reception, and all the presents, and this what they were:

There were two blenders probably, and a couple of games of Parcheesi or so it sounded; there were mixing bowls in glass and in ceramic with that characteristic corrugation down the side, what did they call that, and what too did they call the glassware, you used to see it all the time; there were books both funny and sincere and sometimes both; there were dirty gifts and clean gifts and gifts for cleaning; there were gift certificates and cards and overnight stays and spa weekends and beauty products and grills for Gloria's boyfriend, now her husband, all the home products and beauty products and jewelry that a man could ever need, a watch and a good pair of cufflinks or two and a joke garter from his brother the best man; there were larger packages too that sounded that clanking metal like a microwave with the glass plate inside gone off its rockers and rotators; there was a car safety kit with red and black cables and a tire pump and a jack, she knew because the paper ripped in her hands as she was carrying it in her hands with their veins and wrinkled paper skin, feeling like she was helping, feeling strong for a moment as she carried it, before she dropped it; there were hopeful but no-pressure hints at babies, grandchildren, nieces and nephews; there was house paint for a new tradition:

And over in the driver's seat there was Stanley with his smell like old tobacco and his kindly wrinkled face like oak and his hand first on her knee and then upon her thigh like a secret joke between the two of them and no sign but the smirk on his face and the sparkle in his eyes, and past him there was a car of teenagers driving too fast, somewhere else, looking like strange and beautiful alien creatures from Stanley's old magazines, or out of a forest, going who knew where to do God knows what, and all the secrets and the things we don't want to know about our children, so we don't:

And before them on the road there was the next exit, and the next, and past them there was the reception and standing in line on heels for the first time in gosh years because when you're a librarian nobody expects you to wear heels, ever, and though she'd gotten pregnant with the oldest, Gary, too young for nursing school, she thought that nurses too could get away with wearing flats or soft old lady shoes every day of their lives, but probably had less time to be thankful for it than did librarians, who spend all day telling the world to whoever will listen, and shelving books that nobody will read, and sneezing in the dust and the silence and grinning in humiliation whenever the electronics got messed up by accident or by divine design, and a million things to do, and Gloria being downright nasty with Tommy about the CD player, and Myra trying to help him figure out the correct buttons on the awful thing at the rehearsal dinner and Gloria acting like he was slow, when all we are is not as fast as our eldest sons and daughters;

And out the window on her right there was the exit passing by again, and the next, and down there Stanley's hand upon her thigh, and past the exit sign there was the damned reception and Stanley's awful sister that was still alive and her husband that always looked at Myra and made her wish she had hair growing out of her moles and wasn't wearing a girdle at all, so he would look somewhere else; and Gloria's boyfriend now husband whose name, Myra told herself again and again, was Ted and not Todd, Ted and not Todd, although who could blame her with Gloria only coming home now every couple of years, you could confused Ted Not Todd with a boy on the television for all the exposure Myra and Stanley had to him, and even when they did visit it was nothing more than recitation and his resume telling us where he came from and what college, where he was going and where the best city was for his practice, as though by accident and not design as far away from Stanley and Myra and Ted Not Todd's awful parents and the whole kit and caboodle, and Myra recognized something fundamental, something true, just as she looked out and saw a long straight cemetery, as she saw the lines of white stones and crosses and carvings curving out orthogonal and then wrenching straight as they came parallel on the highway, and the thing, the fundamental thing that Myra recognized was this:

Gloria and Ted Not Todd were practically strangers and they could go wherever they wanted and do whatever they wanted, because something about marriage meant that they were the new center of their family, that they'd cut the threads that bound them to their mothers and their fathers and that their house was now the center of the universe, the firstborn, with all their ducks in a row, eldest son and eldest daughter, moving away across the universe in a blind red stretch as far as the wind could take them, but perhaps Myra thought perhaps it worked the other way too, and she could take flight just as they had done, perhaps Myra and Stanley with the clothes on their back and the money in their wallets could just keep driving forever into the sun, just say have done with the whole mess now that Tommy was out of the house they could:

Fold the very-back seat down in the station wagon and put their stuff in it, or a more limber woman could climb back there and hurl all the wedding presents out the windows one by one and Stanley would never have to stop again, never stop that station wagon again until they were safe and sound with nobody there to bother them, and the blessed silence could stay still forever and there would be no noisy reception music and no awful relatives and no Gloria with a stranger's face, and would they care, and did she care if they did, and Stanley's hand upon her thigh, and when she looked at him with that smirk on her face too now it erupted into a grin, the real truth of smiling like the sun with no thought of dentures or laugh lines or the wrinkles in her neck, just a smile that said:

Stanley, we are here and they are there, where they belong, and we belong nowhere anymore, and that means we belong everywhere, and as long as we're together we can just keep driving with your hand on my knee or on my thigh, and I'll throw all the wedding presents out of the windows one by one, because they are slowing us down, Stanley, can you hear me in the blessed silence saying, Stanley, we are here and they are there where we belong, and even though she didn't say a word he heard her nonetheless, always a firm marriage, always a strong connection the two of them had, only stronger with age and the hard times and the softer times too, and his hand tightened around her thigh and he squeezed her like a young strong man, like she saw in her mind's eye when she pictured him, and they smiled at each other and said:

"Fuck it."



II.

They distributed the wedding gifts to the immigrants and homeless citizens of in a pawn shop neighborhood in Pensacola, and headed north. Stanley suggested turning off their cell phones they never really knew how to use and chucking them out on the side of the highway. Myra was happy to see him so excited about the process. They went back ten minutes later to collect them because of Rosie, the middle one, who at the age of fourteen went green and never went back, and was now a lesbian on top of it. Rosie wouldn't approve, and Myra felt bad about the environment. Once back in the car, they lost ten years each.

What had begun as a quiet, slow, subtle process was speeding up, the faster they drove, and the more things they dumped the faster went the ride. Myra found that she could slip off her shoes and stick her feet out the window, like Gloria used to do on family trips, and once she attempted that, she realized it would be nothing at all to slip her girdle off, under her dress. That one she threw out the window and didn't even feel bad about. Even though elastic plastic doesn't biodegrade, it made the car go five miles faster per hour, which took a good seven years off.

Stanley at forty-three years of age still had a strong thickness to his back, like a slumbering bear. Myra remembered lying in bed with him, when Tommy was still little, and marveling at the size of Stanley. Just the sheer size of him, like a wall in the bed with his back to her, so high she felt she could almost climb it. This was decades before the advent of the Sleep Number bed, which equalized them in more ways than one. She liked her mattress firm and he liked it soft, which meant at night his back was of a more manageable size.

Myra softly raked her fingernails down his arm, watching the hairs rise, and he looked at her coyly, but they were both wary of stopping the car. She wanted to go faster and she wanted to tease him as he drove. She could see his breathing under that grey suit, and the way that it was speeding up. She thought just with that tiny, subtle touch she'd probably given them another six years, but it was an invitation to a party they didn't yet want to reach. Go faster, faster. She thought that it was said in silence, but his laughter made a mockery of quiet. She turned up the air conditioning and it smelled like Stanley used to, that old tobacco smell, and she rolled down the windows.

Myra realized she was hot. She was perspiring after twenty years of cold, always too cold, rheumatoid arthritis and hemochromatosis and all the words you're supposed to remember just because they apply to your body. A thing you hardly know on a first name basis anymore, unless that name is Pain or disappointment. But her body was waking up as they drove, and Stanley's too, and it was a celebration and a reunion she'd somehow expected but wasn't quite sure of until it was happening. Hello, it said. And hello, said she, and smiled. And then she said hello to his.


III.

They were forty when they reached the state line. They stopped the car and stared at each other for awhile to make sure they wouldn't age, and then opened their doors carefully, and finally he turned off the engine and they stepped out of the car. They bought peaches and drove down the road a while, turned off into a grove. The juice of the peaches and the soft firm flesh of them were delicious in a way nothing had been delicious since Stanley's first stroke, when the world tasted like peanuts and then whiteness to them both. They made love; strong love, like beasts, hungry and laughing and wet in the moss. They dozed there and when they woke they were nearly thirty-five.

Back in the car they headed to the coast and took a dip in the ocean. It was salty and warm and sweet, as though the summer had arrived their first. She'd never seen the beaches of Georgia, how they bend and recede and curve around the land in a gentle hello. The old people on their porches waved at the young people in love, laughing and splashing in the surf, and when she came back to the car she realized she had nothing clean to wear, so they bought clothes at a store, dripping and giggling in the air conditioning, and changed outside, by the car. A little boy pulling a wagon saw them, and laughed, and for a while they were embarrassed until they remembered they were just kids, in the summer in Georgia, with peach stains on their clothes and the salt of the ocean in their hair, and they laughed back and waved.

Stanley decided on boxer briefs, and Myra decided on a thong. She didn't like it, exactly, but the feeling every now and then reminded her of her decision, and she would look down at her flat, taut muscles and the tennis legs she'd had so long ago, and laugh, and run her fingers through her hair. Stanley fidgeted in his boxer briefs but allowed as how they were comforting, in a way. "Like a tiny man holding your balls for you," he said, and they laughed out loud.

She reached out and turned on the satellite radio thing Gloria bought them for the rehearsal dinner, and wondered briefly how the reception was going. At least they'd attended the wedding, all hours and hours of it. Gloria would be older than her, now. The thought excited her. All the music on the radio was pretty and insistent, but too glossy for her tastes. She remembered the radio when the kids were younger, the country before it went western and the rock before it got hard. She'd loved the Beatles once, dancing around the kitchen with a baby on her neck, almost entirely unashamed. She wondered if the satellite radio thing could find the Beatles for her. And it could.

South Carolina, North Carolina, all of the Carolinas. Stanley kept asking if they could pull over, but she just wanted to keep going, faster and faster. Light speed, she told him. Nothing less than light speed. At the north border they did it against the car, Myra bent over the hood, and she watched the sunlight on a field of sunflowers instead of his face. Before they got back in the car, they did it again, this time in the gravel. She loved the pebbles pressing against her back as much as she loved Stanley's mouth at her neck, nipping and kissing, and the funny sounds he made. They'd learned a thing or two, back before they said fuck it, but they'd never had a chance to use that knowledge like this. She almost thought she'd lose consciousness at one point, staring past his beautiful, searching face at a crow wheeling in the sky.


IV.

They bought acid from a goofy white kid in Severna Park, Washington. He talked like a little black boy but was as white as the albino man back home, with red hair like Gloria's and covered in freckles. His hat was backwards. He looked stupid, mentally ill. But he sold them the acid, and some ecstasy for later. She asked him where they could go dancing, but didn't want to be rude by specifying what kind of club.

She didn't want to say "not a black club," because she could hear Rosie in the back of her mind screeching, even though it was really just because the music seemed so demanding. And more importantly, she didn't want to bring up the little boy's confusion about his race. So she said she would take his suggestion under advisement, and smirked again at Stanley, who shook his head. Equal parts wonderment at her, and complete exasperation with the child.

They "dropped" the acid at the door of the club he'd suggested, and were greeting with metal detectors. She was afraid she'd set them off, because of her hip, but as they walked closer she realized she couldn't feel the steel there anymore. It just felt like a hip. She walked through with a bounce and realized that her breasts were drawing stares.

Stanley put his hands on her body in the middle of the dance floor, and they moved together, sinuous and striking. All the people, young people, as young as Stanley and Myra, stared: they'd never seen two people so very much in love. When she went into the bathroom to reapply her lipstick, she realized two things: they were probably in their late twenties now, and you should never look into a mirror when the acid's coming on. She'd remind Stanley about that later, but not soon enough. He said he saw the ghost of his father with the ghost of his grandfather inside, and that he briefly became a horse. She said that was sexy, and took him back to the dance floor, and she rode him until they both came right there. Nobody seemed to notice. Then the song got soft and quiet, and they shook their heads at each other, laughing. They needed something more. Something faster.


V.

These people took them to a house show that a couple of cool bands were playing at and they said they could just leave the car at the club because the cops were so heavy down there in that part of town so it was actually safer, and neither Myra nor Stanley wanted to admit that they were worried about being too far away from the car for too long because what if they started getting older again, but really they were both realizing that it didn't come from the car or from the miles per gallon, it came from saying Fuck it, so they said Fuck it a few more times and that cleared their minds, plus, their friends suggested, maybe they were feeling so paranoid in part because they were tripping balls, which caused Myra and Stanley to look at each other bemusedly and ask, "Are we tripping balls?" but the lights of the police cars going faster, faster all around them were sending up the whole park in sparks and flames of blue and red and the cars seemed to multiply like giant friendly black and white killer whales, into a vast herd of them with their plaintive undersea song, and once they agreed that this was the effect happening around them they had to admit that they were, for good or ill, tripping balls, so they said Fuck it a couple more times to be safe and then they were at the party:

You couldn't tell if they were good or bad, or boys or girls, but they were gorgeous and you could just tell that inside themselves they all carried a secret and special light with amazing consequence, to which their new buddies replied, "That'll be the E," and of course it was, and then Stanley's hand accidentally touched her hair by accident, and it sent shockwaves of awesome through her whole body past the thong to her high-heeled shoes and right back up again, and she pushed him over sideways like a lady wrestler into a soft couch and they made out, and everybody laughed but they quickly got bored, and Stanley and Myra devoured each other, and sooner or later somebody else got involved, somebody with a secret and special light of amazing consequence, and then two or three more, and then the whole party was saying, Fuck it, and getting younger, and the lights of their consequence began to grow brighter, and there was a heat building in Stanley's body and a hunger, and the reason that Myra knew this was that she felt it too, and it was beginning to frighten her, except probably, he said, between bouts of kissing and the silence as the crashing waves of their bodies licked up into the sky and back down again into their ocean, he said, and he was probably right, that it was more than likely just the massive amount of drugs they'd done, and them never having done this before, and all around them the beautiful young people nodded and bent themselves back down to the task at hand:

And somewhere in the ocean and the lights Myra realized that they needed to get the hell out of there, because between the heat and the skin everywhere she felt like she was in an ocean that had nothing to do with Stanley and very little really to do with her, and that was not what she was going for, and she tightened her hand around his shoulder and he pulled back just a bit, his face red where he was kissing her, and he looked into her eyes and nodded, and they pulled themselves from the lovely human wreckage, and walked right out through the door and into the yard and the sunlight, and under that brittle sun they realized a thing they had forgotten in their jealousy, which is that even a very young body has limits, and they had somewhat surpassed theirs. They slept in the car for a few hours and then headed west, into the frontier, and I will tell you this:

By the time they reached California they were twenty and holding, and set the car on fire, in the desert and started to run, and the looks of the old men and women, the fifty and forty and thirty-year-old men and women, the disapproving stares and the hushed whispers and the well-meaning advice to slow down, take it easy, be quiet, stop shouting, stop laughing, stop asking questions, stop doing everything that is good:

Well, maybe I'll tell you the story another time, about when Stanley and Myra said Fuck it for real.

Read On

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

- 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.

Read On

HOW I THINK IT HAPPENS MAYBE

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.

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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.

Read On

WHAT TO EXPECT WHEN YOU'RE EXPECTING TV

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.

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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.

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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.

Read On

ONCE IT SHAKES MY BONES

What frightens me about the monster isn't so much his dead flesh, or his silvered eyes, or how behind them you see only sky, how the muscles around them -- the keys to thought, to feeling, to love, to hunger -- lie slack, holding the eyes, their piscean flatness, in simple abeyance, like a child with a wasp or moth caught in the loose embrace of his hands.

I saw my son snatch a bee, large and fuzzy, between his two cupped hands once, right out of the air; he said that they never sting, caught in that strange cave, because their lives have gone from day to night: it's not the danger of a giant human's flesh, but the sudden eclipse of day by night. When I see the monster's lack of feeling or response it is encoded in the bones and muscles of his face, his eyes; his teeth rattle in a mouth like a child's hand, cupped lightly around disaster.

They call him a zombie and Frankenstein's monster, but I see neither. Our daughter gave me a hit from her marijuana cigarette, the day he appeared; she pulled out a joint and rolled her eyes at my Chardonnay surprise and simply lit it and passed it to me, and I inhaled deeply, and she nodded without even a smile. And my hands soon stopped shaking.

And we discussed zombies and Frankenstein's monster: what drives the zombie is hunger, for flesh or brains we supposed; what drives Frankenstein's monster was hunger, too, for simple understanding. To break out of the cage of ignorance and fear and to understand what could possibly have happened, what went wrong enough in enough ways to have led him down the road to where he found himself. To take apart the science of bodies and to understand his place in that world. My monster, he must hunger, but I don't know for what.

I assumed he wanted things the way they had been: that we were to be remarried somehow, under a full moon and no stars, that I would once again be his wife. That he hungered for the commonplace, that she would be our daughter, that he would drive her to school in our minivan with his fingers stiff and decrepit and smelling of garbage day; that he would stand with the crowd at a volleyball game clapping for her until his hands dropped to the floor, crawling with insects. That I would take him once again into my bed, and each morning wash the smell of the grave and dust from our sheets. The sheets were given to me by my mother on the night of our wedding; when he was gone I slept on them every night, and gloried in the fresh and empty scent of them.

But he doesn't seem to want those things. He wants to sit in front of the television on his old nasty chair, which I tried for years to throw away, until he was gone and I couldn't bear to see it gone. He wants to sit in this chair, neither moving nor speaking, insensate to us as we change the channels, mute the sound or turn it up, make dinner and sit down to dinner and cast our lives around him. This is what he seems to want to do. And perhaps that is his version of the commonplace, after all. I can see that.

I don't know what he went through, in the time before he appeared again at our door, opened it with the secret key under the flowerpot, dropping dust and vegetation as he went, in the middle of the night. I don't know if it was years, or months, or days, or mere minutes from his new origin to his reappearance in our lives. If some wild-haired scientist dug him up in a rainstorm and spent weeks electrocuting his dead flesh, or if he spent months digging in the earth until his rotted flesh gave way, and then pushed and dug and punched upward toward the sun with only bones. When confronted with madness one has few opportunities to consider, reflect, hypothesize: this is real, the mind says, this is happening.

Mad scientist or voodoo priest, these things are imaginary: what is real and what is happening is the scent of fresh and rotting earth, the stumping sliding sound of his feet upon the floor as he makes his way from window to door to chair to stairs, to stare unmoving up at the second level of our home for hours before resuming his strange and slow circuit around the house. What was real was that I said goodbye, and now must say hello again.

My dearest friend in the world, after my husband died, said in her cups that I was better off, and I couldn't disagree. Three months precisely after he was dead, and everything was so much easier: nothing to fight about, nothing to disagree on, no questions or doubts or fears about what he'd think about, or rage about, or the circumlocution I would have to undergo, to justify my thoughts and choices and opinions. He was not an easy man. He wasn't a bad man, but he wasn't easy. I am not a pushover but I do prefer and try to preserve a certain efficiency: while the easiest and best thing is usually clear upon reflection, it was sometimes easier and best and more efficient to factor him in, for the disturbances he'd cause. My grief was a translucent, bright white thing: every decision would take half the steps, half the compromise, half the trouble and worry. And that was what I missed most, and what I didn't miss at all, and I didn't speak to my dearest friend again, even though she was right.

Take shopping. In the days before my husband died, I would pull down the nearly empty pad from the refrigerator and look at the grocery list: all the things I'd added to it, and the rest of the house's complete disinterest in the process making blank space all around my own entries. I would visualize my son, his days and nights, the dinner he preferred and the shoes, nearly worn out, and write down his imaginary additions; my daughter's newly discovered vegetarianism, her graph paper and her magazines. And then my husband: a blot upon the page, a thousand quibbles about brand names and whether Product A were really healthier or more cost-efficient than Product B, and his absolute disbelief that I could honestly lack a serious opinion about any of it. That when I said, "Just tell me what you want," that this was all there was to the story. His relentless pounding at me, demanding to know the process by which I came to the opinions he was sure I secretly had. He called himself a feminist but I think he was talking mostly about this kind of thing.

Now I make the list, I go to the store, I bring back the things on the list. I time myself, from locking the front door to putting the last item away, in pantry or vegetable drawer, and congratulate myself on my efficiency. And perhaps I do have opinions after all, on the benefits of Product A over Product B, and perhaps those opinions are only stirred-together mixtures of precedent and dim memories, of brand recognition and warm feelings toward the brand mascot, or fuzzy recollection of long-ago slogans and mottos and word-of-mouth recommendations, or that the meat I prefer fits more easily into my baking dishes by virtue of its packaging. Or perhaps it is my taste, and I am slowly determining what that is, in the silence left by his shaggy, wandering form. It is a burden.

In the days that he was gone, I began to fantasize about college. Not going back, since I've already gotten one Master's degree more than I was interested in having; and not in reminiscing about college, which was simply another chore to be done and have finished with; I began to fantasize about the children leaving. They're in high school now, and so busy that we're halfway there. But when it's time to go to bed and to prepare for Monday morning's mad movement and rush, when their music is blaring at me from opposite ends of the house, I often wonder what it will be like, when that midnight music is my own. Once it shakes my bones and I can wander the house, with all the lights on, or all the lights off, and learn to be at home by myself. When it will be my home, and I won't have to impose rules on myself just because it's best for the children. Whether I would grow so lonely that I would seek out new and better friends, or travel endlessly, or do whatever it is when you get to be alone. I still think about these things but now there's a monster in the middle of it. Sitting.

When the children are gone, I wonder now, if we'll settle into a life, one monster to another, and we can pass each other in the hall without a look, and simply occupy the same space; if that's what I wanted. If perhaps that is what marriage always was, to me: the opportunity to be alone and simultaneously not alone. I wonder if maybe I'm not a terrible person for finding this concept tremendously appealing.

So when they ask, I say, for good or not he is back, and for good or not I am here still, and we don't fight, and we don't argue, and I am allowed not to care. That in time, perhaps, I will accustom myself to his strange presence and lack of presence, and in that circumstance create a new sort of life. I can still travel: he won't notice. It will not interrupt his navigation of the house, three turns in the night and twelve in a day, from the door to the window to the stair to the chair. I will become accustomed to the smell of vegetation, the rough edge of garbage day, and I will glory in my newfound independence.

I will dress him up for holidays and hang lights and ornaments on my monster, for Christmas; I will make of him a moving tree and he will shed Yuletide glee from the door to the window to the stair to his chair. I will strap a mask to the front of his head when Halloween comes, or simply let it ride, or push him out the door to frighten children, and watch his slow circles in the garden; and the last thing I'll do every Halloween is let him in for the night, and fall asleep comforted by his heavy sliding footfall.

Or one day his steps will cease at the foot of the stairs, and the customary five minutes will drag out into six, seven, ten, and I'll hear his shuffling grunt upon the bottom step, and he'll come up, slowly and with much working. At the eighth step there is a vent for the central air, which pushes cooler air up into the bedrooms, and it will waft a fresh scent of death and rot up into my room, and I'll awake and listen as he plods slowly up, and down the hall, and the door will swing open, and I will compose myself silently upon the bed, like a fresh young thing to her groom, and when he enters, I will smile.

Or perhaps years from now I too will die, and rise again, and we will meet at the door, and I will be his undead bride. And all the questions and the doubts and the fighting will fade, and we will be happy, and move together from door to window to chair to stair, and when the children come home they'll be the ones -- with their families, wives and husbands and children -- coursing the rivers of their chatter around us, changing the channel, adjusting the volume, sitting down to dinner, working around us as they always have. Perhaps I'll be happy; perhaps behind my fishy silver eyes and slack and ugly skin I'll somehow know that I am loved and in the bosom of my family. Perhaps one day we'll both fall to dust, parts scattered around the house, moving or unmoving, and we will know peace together.

"She wasn't an easy woman," a well-meaning neighbor will say, and behind my eyes I'll say, "Look how easy now."

Read On

What To Watch. Besides Yourself.

- 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Read On

No Futures: Before & After

- 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.

Read On

Or, To Put It More Bluntly

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."

Read On

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

- 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.

Read On

Come With Me If You're Bored With TV

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Originally uploaded by Paul Kelley

When Battlestar Galactica made its US series premiere on the Sci-Fi network in 2005, it didn't take much time for entertainment critics and media to notice they had a gem on their hands. The quality of the writing, acting and production were so much higher than the usual Sci-Fi original fare, the story had a clearly expressed mission and endpoint, and the focus was, for once, off the science fiction tropes, whistles and bells. Three years later, it was one of the most highly regarded series on television, for its compelling story and the clarity and open-handedness of its political pursuits and developments.

We can be forgiven, then, for assuming that Bionic Woman would be a similar success. The shows share not only a creator-producer (David Eick), but their pedigree: a warmly regarded but ultimately campy show from childhood, poured into shiny new bottles and aiming for cultural relevance. The show's basic premise -- woman with superpowers is forced to comply with the government spooks that created her -- managed to translate well to a post-feminist mindset, providing an easy pretext to ask questions about women's rights, our rights to privacy and control of our own bodies, and government control.

To look at it with the new, serious eyes that brought Battlestar into the cultural limelight should have been an easy trick, and resulted in something combining the sly social commentary of Buffy, The Vampire Slayer with the high-velocity technology and accessible, fantasy violence of 24. Instead, what we got was a mushy-mouthed retread of one-size-fits-all spy tropes that would have seemed limp five years ago on Alias, an anti-heroine/antagonist more vital and intriguing than the show's lead, and leaden, emotionally tone-deaf dialogue.

And now, thanks to the WGA strike, we've been confronted with Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, a new take on a beloved franchise that debuted in 1984 -- a bit later than those others, but still well within that warm nostalgic glow that old sci-fi tends to cast.

While the Terminator movies are more highly regarded, in general, than the television series mentioned above, that actually makes the show harder to swallow. The time-traveling premiere and subsequent episodes feature long, foreboding speeches from the main character -- a paranoid single mother predicting doom and apocalypse at every turn -- played by Lena Headey, best known for being an intense but replaceable beauty in genre flick 300. The young man at the center of the story is played by Thomas Dekker, straight from Heroes where his intriguing storyline switched horses midstream before ditching him altogether. His John Connor spends most of the premiere declining to do anything interesting, flirting with decade-old "hacker rehab" behavioral problems, and mostly shivering in fear. The third lead, played by the strange, robotically beautiful Summer Glau (Firefly), isn't even human: she's a new Terminator model who spends every moment straddling the roles of father, big sister and love interest with a barely concealed, subversive glee.

An entire show about a time-displaced family of three which spends most of its time freaking out and hiding in seemingly abandoned houses? An whole show about a single mother's constant acts of terrorism and sabotage against a conspiracy that may not even exist? Given the demographic makeup of the leads, one might imagine a mutant cross between Gilmore Girls and the Ashley Judd vehicle Bug -- and one wouldn't be too far off with that diagnosis.

So why on earth should this show succeed where Bionic so spectacularly failed? And how on earth can America be expected to swallow a bizarre, complex story so far off from the niche division between mainstream women's comedies and dramas, and men's adventure stories? By following the Battlestar model more closely than Bionic Woman ever imagined possible, Terminator succeeds, full throttle. Not a scene of this story goes by without an emotional high point, a truly funny line of dialogue, a believable and heartbreaking interaction between family members, or a suddenly brutal surprise -- and this last, usually performed shockingly by one of the leads, without warning. All of these are Battlestar hallmarks, and of the desires of the sophisticated TV audience of 2008. Where "family," "honor," "identity" and "respect" are gestures for Bionic, invoked with all the subtlety of an American Idol hopeful's sadsack sob story, Terminator keeps them center stage, upending whole scenes and stories around them to explore their darker crannies and corners.

The characters are real, inhabited completely, in a way that could take most shows an entire half-season to coalesce. The pacing is dramatic, moving and often terrifying. Most of all, the show treats its female leads as real women, never forgetting that they are more than simple incubating grounds for violence. By turning these expectations on their heads -- and by making the end of the world as we know it a metaphor for the terrors and vulnerability of pregnancy and parenthood -- Terminator even proves itself a viable critique of television stereotype. By subjecting characters and audience alike to an almost unbearably fierce pace and pressure, and bringing that into balance with its quiet, emotional portraiture of a family in crisis, Terminator proves to be as unique and powerful an experience as we've had in a few seasons.

We can hope that Bionic Woman takes a few pointers from this scruffy upstart; TV is finally big enough to carry multiple sci-fi tales about women driven to super-powered violence. We can hope that the writer's strike ends soon, and safely enough for everybody involved, and for our favorite shows. But it's possible that, in the end, it's the shows that were given a chance by the strike and knocked it clean out of the park, like Terminator, that we'll remember about the fucked-up winter season of 2008.

All of which is to say, thank Tinkerbell Jesus I'm not recapping it.

Read On

The Only Story We Ever Really Tell

Wind in the Willows
Originally uploaded by R E D H E A D

In January, I think about this story constantly. It's always seemed like the most complete, brief, wise thing I've ever read, since before I could even read it to myself. When I was a kid I was really into fantasy and magic stuff, talking animals, and now I'm obsessed with religion. I don't think that's unrelated. I think we come with the hardware necessary to create or find spiritual meaning, and it's not impossible to imagine that the same thing that puts gas in that engine at 30 or 40 is going to work just as well when you're little.

Kids are used to considering the infinite, and things larger than themselves, because that's all they see around them. I think that's why the best and most basic writing is invariably for children, or by children's authors; I think that's why comic books are in the domain of children no matter how much the nerds complain when you say that. I don't think it's a bad thing, I just think the big stories, the ones that tell it plainly like this, or like Buffy, or Harriet the Spy, or Stardust, or The Sandman, solve the problem -- of putting the ocean into a teacup -- by cutting out what's least essential, by restricting the infinity to a place as small as a child's life. Makes sense, and I think people like us don't mind stepping back across that line, but it's impossible to explain to anybody else. I think that it's possible to tell stories this true outside the children's domain: most of the highest-regarded movies, the Oscar winners, The Nines, are able to tell these truths in a way that doesn't take part in the children's ghetto.

My birth mother was a witch, sometimes, and even when she goes back over to more orthodox stuff, she still looks for the Goddess in everything. This is kind of like the opposite of that. When I was a kid, the whole book was just a waiting game, waiting for this chapter, to relive it again and again.

In January, I think about this story constantly. I go back to it when I'm sad, when I'm lonely, when somebody dies, when somebody leaves, when I leave somebody. When it's cold or dark or everything is stupid, I go to this the way people on TV go to scripture, or the way I go to Cruel Intentions or Bring It On, to make things bearable again.

My friend Rachel Pollack once said something that stuck with me, to the effect that it's all well and good to have guided meditations and vision quests in somebody's backyard sweat lodge, meet your spirit animal, mine some gold -- but it's a whole other thing when you're just tending the fire in your yurt and three animal-headed shepherds come in without asking, and take your body apart piece by piece, and put you back together with wonderful magic. That shamanic ecstasy is terrible, and frightening, and awful -- but worth it, of course.

I talk about it a lot in my writing -- this idea that change feels like dying because it is; that if it doesn't hurt, you're not doing it right -- but the references I make to this particular example of spiritual ecstasy are always very, very obscure, because of the way we as a culture devalue children's experiences and children's literature: if I described the Final Five Cylons on Battlestar Galactica as Ratty and Mole at the Gates of Dawn, well, I'd lose more than I gained. But I think about it a lot, and I was thinking about it all that time: the music, coming across the water, like a wave.

Or the moment when I realized two things: I was very, very bad at writing about the show Doctor Who, and eventually they were going to take it away from me, but simultaneously, that I loved writing about the show Doctor Who, because the writer feels the same way about this stuff that I do, and let me know it, which in turn gave me the wherewithal to write probably the most blatant thing I've ever written about religion in any context, about the Bad Wolf, which of course happened to be half-true as usual:

Imagine that much love. If the loud, crashing, bright scary thing that was coming to get you was God all along. And He was only coming to take you home.

---

The old-school prose here is a bit purple for my tastes, and there's a subplot about a runaway otter child that I never cared about, but the feeling is something I could spend my whole life as a writer trying to approximately reach.

This is the kind of moment that would justify a life of crap writing -- thank goodness it doesn't have to, he's a good storyteller -- and could justify a whole winter full of worry and fear and shame. When you feel displaced and afloat, you have to find a place to anchor, and the strangest things can provide it, sometimes. I've probably written about this passage before, and it was probably a year ago, when January was coming like that, like it does every year. You can learn a lot from the Rat.

Read this with the weight it deserves; sing it out, sing it aloud. I miss the sun; this makes it better.

Fastening their boat to a willow, the friends landed in this silent, silver kingdom, and patiently explored the hedges, the hollow trees, the runnels and their little culverts, the ditches and dry water-ways. Embarking again and crossing over, they worked their way up the stream in this manner, while the moon, serene and detached in a cloudless sky, did what she could, though so far off, to help them in their quest; till her hour came and she sank earthwards reluctantly, and left them, and mystery once more held field and river.

Then a change began slowly to declare itself. The horizon became clearer, field and tree came more into sight, and somehow with a different look; the mystery began to drop away from them. A bird piped suddenly, and was still; and a light breeze sprang up and set the reeds and bulrushes rustling. Rat, who was in the stern of the boat, while Mole sculled, sat up suddenly and listened with a passionate intentness. Mole, who with gentle strokes was just keeping the boat moving while he scanned the banks with care, looked at him with curiosity.

`It's gone!' sighed the Rat, sinking back in his seat again. `So beautiful and strange and new. Since it was to end so soon, I almost wish I had never heard it. For it has roused a longing in me that is pain, and nothing seems worth while but just to hear that sound once more and go on listening to it for ever. No! There it is again!' he cried, alert once more. Entranced, he was silent for a long space, spellbound.

`Now it passes on and I begin to lose it,' he said presently. `O Mole! the beauty of it! The merry bubble and joy, the thin, clear, happy call of the distant piping! Such music I never dreamed of, and the call in it is stronger even than the music is sweet! Row on, Mole, row! For the music and the call must be for us.'

The Mole, greatly wondering, obeyed. `I hear nothing myself,' he said, `but the wind playing in the reeds and rushes and osiers.'

The Rat never answered, if indeed he heard. Rapt, transported, trembling, he was possessed in all his senses by this new divine thing that caught up his helpless soul and swung and dandled it, a powerless but happy infant in a strong sustaining grasp.

In silence Mole rowed steadily, and soon they came to a point where the river divided, a long backwater branching off to one side. With a slight movement of his head Rat, who had long dropped the rudder-lines, directed the rower to take the backwater. The creeping tide of light gained and gained, and now they could see the colour of the flowers that gemmed the water's edge.

`Clearer and nearer still,' cried the Rat joyously. `Now you must surely hear it! Ah--at last--I see you do!'

Breathless and transfixed the Mole stopped rowing as the liquid run of that glad piping broke on him like a wave, caught him up, and possessed him utterly. He saw the tears on his comrade's cheeks, and bowed his head and understood. For a space they hung there, brushed by the purple loose-strife that fringed the bank; then the clear imperious summons that marched hand-in-hand with the intoxicating melody imposed its will on Mole, and mechanically he bent to his oars again. And the light grew steadily stronger, but no birds sang as they were wont to do at the approach of dawn; and but for the heavenly music all was marvellously still.

On either side of them, as they glided onwards, the rich meadow-grass seemed that morning of a freshness and a greenness unsurpassable. Never had they noticed the roses so vivid, the willow-herb so riotous, the meadow-sweet so odorous and pervading. Then the murmur of the approaching weir began to hold the air, and they felt a consciousness that they were nearing the end, whatever it might be, that surely awaited their expedition.

A wide half-circle of foam and glinting lights and shining shoulders of green water, the great weir closed the backwater from bank to bank, troubled all the quiet surface with twirling eddies and floating foam-streaks, and deadened all other sounds with its solemn and soothing rumble. In midmost of the stream, embraced in the weir's shimmering arm-spread, a small island lay anchored, fringed close with willow and silver birch and alder. Reserved, shy, but full of significance, it hid whatever it might hold behind a veil, keeping it till the hour should come, and, with the hour, those who were called and chosen.

Slowly, but with no doubt or hesitation whatever, and in something of a solemn expectancy, the two animals passed through the broken tumultuous water and moored their boat at the flowery margin of the island. In silence they landed, and pushed through the blossom and scented herbage and undergrowth that led up to the level ground, till they stood on a little lawn of a marvellous green, set round with Nature's own orchard-trees-- crab-apple, wild cherry, and sloe.

`This is the place of my song-dream, the place the music played to me,' whispered the Rat, as if in a trance. `Here, in this holy place, here if anywhere, surely we shall find Him!'

Then suddenly the Mole felt a great Awe fall upon him, an awe that turned his muscles to water, bowed his head, and rooted his feet to the ground. It was no panic terror--indeed he felt wonderfully at peace and happy--but it was an awe that smote and held him and, without seeing, he knew it could only mean that some august Presence was very, very near. With difficulty he turned to look for his friend. and saw him at his side cowed, stricken, and trembling violently. And still there was utter silence in the populous bird-haunted branches around them; and still the light grew and grew.

Perhaps he would never have dared to raise his eyes, but that, though the piping was now hushed, the call and the summons seemed still dominant and imperious. He might not refuse, were Death himself waiting to strike him instantly, once he had looked with mortal eye on things rightly kept hidden. Trembling he obeyed, and raised his humble head; and then, in that utter clearness of the imminent dawn, while Nature, flushed with fulness of incredible colour, seemed to hold her breath for the event, he looked in the very eyes of the Friend and Helper; saw the backward sweep of the curved horns, gleaming in the growing daylight; saw the stern, hooked nose between the kindly eyes that were looking down on them humourously, while the bearded mouth broke into a half-smile at the corners; saw the rippling muscles on the arm that lay across the broad chest, the long supple hand still holding the pan-pipes only just fallen away from the parted lips; saw the splendid curves of the shaggy limbs disposed in majestic ease on the sward; saw, last of all, nestling between his very hooves, sleeping soundly in entire peace and contentment, the little, round, podgy, childish form of the baby otter. All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered.

`Rat!' he found breath to whisper, shaking. `Are you afraid?'

`Afraid?' murmured the Rat, his eyes shining with unutterable love. `Afraid! Of him? O, never, never! And yet--and yet-- O, Mole, I am afraid!'

Then the two animals, crouching to the earth, bowed their heads and did worship.

Sudden and magnificent, the sun's broad golden disc showed itself over the horizon facing them; and the first rays, shooting across the level water-meadows, took the animals full in the eyes and dazzled them. When they were able to look once more, the Vision had vanished, and the air was full of the carol of birds that hailed the dawn.

As they stared blankly. in dumb misery deepening as they slowly realised all they had seen and all they had lost, a capricious little breeze, dancing up from the surface of the water, tossed the aspens, shook the dewy roses and blew lightly and caressingly in their faces; and with its soft touch came instant oblivion. For this is the last best gift that the kindly demi- god is careful to bestow on those to whom he has revealed himself in their helping: the gift of forgetfulness. Lest the awful remembrance should remain and grow, and overshadow mirth and pleasure, and the great haunting memory should spoil all the after-lives of little animals helped out of difficulties, in order that they should be happy and lighthearted as before.

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Dealing with Celebrity Death Is Really Confusing

Brokeback Mountain
Originally uploaded by Dreamer7112

Dude I watched Brokeback Mountain yesterday. I hate it when celebrities die, because you kind of know them, at several hundred layers away. But then on the other hand, that's how well you know most people.

When anybody dies, the people that have an opinion about it tend to make it all about them. That makes sense: your feelings only flow in one direction, always. If it's your wife or some stupid druggie celebrity, your feelings only ever flow in one direction. So it makes sense to talk about yourself, when somebody else dies: they're not there to talk about themselves, but it still needs to be talked about, so you talk about your feelings. That's all that's left, because it's all that was there in the first place.

I think the reason nobody knows how to react when celebrities die is because of the opposite direction: they didn't know you. So they wouldn't care if you cared if they died. Except ... that's still all about you, and they're still dead. It's still fucked up, and you still have feelings going in the direction of the event.

I think I'm done feeling guilty for feeling bad when celebrities die, even when it's celebrities I don't really care about one way or the other. He was talented, super young, he was the Joker; he was Australian, he was fucked up and now he's dead. And those four little words I hate so much, in this type of situation: "Found in the nude." Never appreciated, never necessary. And that actually is sad, regardless of whether or not he knew who you were in return.

---

If you know me very well at all, you probably know that I was pretty much overjoyed when my mom died. But that didn't make it any easier to watch my brothers, who actually loved her, or my dad, who desperately needs to be taken care of.

Why do we feel so guilty even thinking about dead people? To me, the number one feeling surrounding death is that: just shame, and guilt. Preemptive guilt, for thinking you matter in the vastness of somebody else's world ending; for some future moment when you'll use that moment to talk about yourself. For the moment coming when you try to talk about what that person meant to you, and you imagine somebody hearing you and saying, quietly or silently even, that you didn't even know them.

---

And then the celebrity thing. Ellen said once about how whenever people meet her, they want a hug, and that makes sense, because she's in their living room for an hour every day, and they think of her as a friend.

I know that because of my job, and the balls-out raw and drunken way I tend to do my job, I often come across to strangers as somebody very vulnerable, and caring, and compassionate, and rigid, and pious, and generous. And that is actually how I try to be, for the most part, but the unfiltered reality is a lot less comforting, and a lot more selfish. So at the times where I meet readers, I try to compose my behavior to be that version of myself, because it is WAY better than I actually am. I am a much better person on the screen, in this person's living room, than I am in real life.

But the fact remains that I spend a lot of time in these persons' living rooms, telling them stories and secrets about myself that I don't really share with people in general life. These strangers know more about me -- my passions, and my secrets, and my loves and hates, and my hopes and dreams -- than my actual friends probably do, because it's rare that you talk about that stuff, if you live in mortal fear of Things Getting Weird.

---

My birth mother locked herself in a room for three days when River Phoenix died. Her second or third husband Mike did the same thing when Selena died. Neither of them could explain it. I can't explain it now. Any attempt at explanation just keeps you from being present, I guess.

---

I am not a professional actor, but I don't think it's a far stretch to say that there are probably parts of actors that we, out here in the living room, are more prepared or qualified to see, and to love, than the actor's real-life friends and lovers: they are composing their behavior to create a specific kind of person. They are creating the image of a reality, with feelings and hopes and fears and dreams, and all those things come from somewhere inside them, in an organic or believable way, or else they would not have been given the role, if the director is good. So you're seeing certain filtered truths about a person, through the screen, just like when you read somebody's words. Storytellers, whether they're writers or actors or artists or directors, make a habit of showing us their secrets precisely because they don't know us, and don't have to care about the judgments that we'll make.

So when a celebrity dies, I think it's okay to be sad. I think it's good to mourn: it's not just the person that you helped them create, in your living room, but it's also all the people they were going to help you create, in the future. When writers die, worlds collapse. But when actors die, it's genocide: an entire nation of secrets and hopes and fears and dreams, an infinity of men that he could have spent his life showing us, in little glimpses and moments. And that actually does suck, no matter how insecure and selfish it makes you feel to admit it.

Read On

Gossip Girl

Gossip Girl Poster
Originally uploaded by 被遺忘的貓

This links to the last recap for this season's Gossip Girl run, but doesn't really appear in the recap itself: this was a very long tangent, and my editor dealt really well with it. More importantly, it's even more about me and the way that I live my life than usual. However, what with being back on the Wind in the Willows obsession, I wanted to share it with you as a separate document. Most conversations I have about GG come down to this:

Dude: "Okay, genius TV guy. Explain the strike in simple words. But first, what are, in your opinion, the good shows on TV right now?"
Me: "Battlestar, Terminator, and Gossip Girl."
Dude: "Okay, I said I would watch Terminator already, but ... really?"
Me: "Fucking yes, really."

What I haven't been able to do is correctly explain why. It seems like every analysis I do here comes down to defending the things I love in a way that doesn't seem defensive, or like an attack. But I've been thinking a lot about children's lit, and teen shows, and the purpose of drama in the context of the strike: why we're willing to put California's entire economy at risk in order to keep these stories rolling as well as possible.

I'm still not really prepared to talk about the strike more than I already have, but I at least have come up with a feeling for how to explain why Gossip Girl rocks so bad, without being a dick about it.

---

B wanders the city at random, looking like a million very screwed-over dollars, and it's totally hurtful to watch. She flashes back to cuddling with Nate after she found out about Serena, and fucking Chuck in the limo, and feels horrible some more. The funny thing about balloon popping is that they're going to do it anyway, but that doesn't stop us from ignoring it as long as possible. This was always going to happen, it was just the timeframe and the circumstances that changed every week.

And I know you'd make fun of me for bringing up Joseph Campbell right now, but this has always been a classic story, with the classic symmetries, and I think we devalue, as a culture, those artifacts which are gendered specifically feminine. I mean, I hate that phrase "guilty pleasure" more than anything, because it's a contradiction in terms and seems really self-hating and self-defeating to me, but more than that, I think the one thing you will always get crapped on for is honestly loving -- much less rigorously reading -- something that's so heavily feminized, because to be blunt, we devalue women's experience.

Add to that the fact that this is a "teen" show, whatever that means, and you've got the two groups of people in our country whose opinions literally could not matter less: women, and children. Let's talk about the scorn you get for seriously applying yourself to the reading of children's texts, because hoo boy have I gotten an earful about that. And plus, they're moneyed, and God knows nobody with money or privilege has feelings that amount to anything, and I'll freely admit that the books they're based on are trash, but we're talking about this show. This show where even the boys are girls, and where the girls are turning into boys.

This show is a repository for things that don't matter and never will, no matter how true, or how current, or how real, or how powerfully or well they are told. Before the internet this show wouldn't have lasted six episodes, but we watch it outside the box for reasons also outside the box. The flipside is, we get to enjoy something outside the rules of that game, too. Frivolous, feminized, fluffy or not, this show is at the very top of its game, and technically speaking, it outperforms most other dramas regularly, even outside its genre. I do honestly believe that, as a writer and as a fan, and I count us lucky to be playing outside the game by watching it.

I don't think there's ever been a story told that you can't apply to yourself, and universally, because that's how stories work and it's why they exist: to tell us our lives back to ourselves. Sometimes you have to work a little bit, or bend yourself a little bit, in order to see yourself looking back from the story -- pretend you're a robot, or a rich girl, or riding on the back of a time-traveling angel -- but the benefits of stepping outside your system and free-falling in somebody else's, in growing to accommodate the rules of a strange world that doesn't look like yours, are absolutely without comparison.

Our lives are spent growing in just this way: taking on other perspectives and understanding them, trying on moccasins. You cross the distance from here to there, from where you're standing to where the story takes place, or to where the whores are dancing, for example, and you end up owning both, and understanding both, and owning all the distance in between. You've increased your ability to love, to understand, and you've dug down deeper into your own story, and provided yourself with that much more stability and flexibility for yourself. It's not asking a whole lot, this story. It's nothing less than what Blair's being asked to do.

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Gossip Girl

GOSSIP GIRL
Originally uploaded by ☆.♣.♪-H@rry-♪♣.☆

I realize this show plays ever so fast and loose with the time/space continuum, but it's like Vanessa is the embodiment of that. Like she could also be in another scene at this exact same time, in DUMBO, taping Dan at home and being greasy with him like always, and then the screen would split and the two Vanessas would wave at each other and then turn to the screen and wink at us through the fourth wall like some kind of Patty Duke nightmare scenario and then all the clocks would start turning backwards and water would flow uphill and she'd just be there, grinning with her crazy-lady eyes, and the last thing you would see is a kaleidoscope of infinite Vanessas like at the end of The Manchurian Candidate and then they put you in the Ostroff Center and it's all Vanessa, all the time.

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Gossip Girl

GOSSIP GIRL
Originally uploaded by ☆.♣.♪-H@rry-♪♣.☆

Rufus enters a publick house, as mentioned in the troublesome correspondence of A.B., and sees a very cute Ralph Fiennes-type sitting at the bar with his garters crossed as in the fashions of the day. "Sir, might you be 'Alex'?" he asks this worthy gentleman, and with a flourish the gentleman gives assent. Yes, he is the selfsame Alexander Bancroft of the letter. "And prithee," asks this worthy fellow, "Who might you be?" Forsooth, he is Rufus Humphrey. "Zounds!" exclaims the fellow. "Unless your wish is to be carried out of here like a blackguard, I surmise the best course of action might be to absent yourself from my wife, and leave off your attentions." Alexander Bancroft, heretofore known as A.B. in these proceedings, begs the angry artist and merchant to settle himself. "Sent you a letter unto my home? To my wife, at the DUMBO loft where we make our primary residence? Where my children do even now bend and tremble with the extent of their mother's whoredom? Whatever it is that you two have shared and tendered, it has now ended. Acquaint yourself with the facts!" Alexander Bancroft begs, worriedly, for the intemperate Rufus to sit himself down and share a cup of ale, but the Humphrey Man will not be assuaged! "She asked of you to let her alone, and to take your leave!" With compassion, the altogether appealing and seemingly blameless Bancroft shakes his head and considers the Humphrey Man kindly. "I do beg your pardon and clemency, good sir, but that is not what your good wife said when last we spoke." Rufus begins to shake like the very timbers under a gale: "Excuse me. You spoke to her?" They gaze, each upon the other, and realize Alison's whoredom has outplayed them both, in capacity for endurance and in base mendacity. Methinks Rufus will be swiftly forgiving, for, what has Alexander Bancroft vouchsafed him but the answer to a prayer, on the wings of a dove as white as the Lily?

Read On

Gossip Girl

GOSSIP GIRL
Originally uploaded by ☆.♣.♪-H@rry-♪♣.☆

You know, Kati and Iz, everybody feels so bad for them being the Minoriteens and wearing their little outfits, but on the other hand, how great to date twins and whatever. It's like the thing that keeps Blair and Serena from being Kati and Iz is the same stuff that keeps them from being happy. So Kati and Iz, on this level, are actually better at life than either B or S, because you know they'll do exactly what it says on their presentation statements, whereas B and S couldn't have normal lives if they tried. There's a benefit to being vague and passive, is all I'm saying. Just remember what deals you're prepared to make.

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Gossip Girl

GOSSIP GIRL

Surprisingly, Blair is technically now the product of the healthiest family in attendance, or on this show; Serena and Dan shepherd the group out through the fire escape to go get some food untainted by incest.

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The One

I always said that if there was the One -- and it wasn't a forest creature or sea pirate -- it would be the guy with the other half of the golden amulet they found me wearing when I was first discovered on the steps of Cape Canaveral. I'm changing that now. Now it's the guy who will one day say, "I want to hold your hand and run across non-Newtonian Fluid with you."

---

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Battlestar Galactica: Razor

Originally uploaded by the gaylords of kobol

If anything, I'd say this story's faults lie in complete opposition to those present in "Crossroads," where there was plot and more plot, explanation of what was happening, soliloquy about internal states. Nothing left for the actors to do but read their lines, nothing left for the viewer to do but sit at home, infantilized by the same emotional simplicity and Cliff's-Notes lack of variation or subtlety that has characterized science fiction television and film since the genre began.

If "Crossroads" was like having your steak cut up for you into tiny pieces, like a good little boy or girl, or chewed and regurgitated onto your plate, Razor is more like being handed an entire live chicken.

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Friday Night Lights

35798
Originally uploaded by sideburnslady

Pantherama!

"Street's like the 9/11 of everybody on this show, still."

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Gossip Girl

GOSSIP GIRL
Originally uploaded by ☆.♣.♪-H@rry-♪♣.☆

"Teenage girls have, since the early '80s, been carrying on a very secret, very weird relationship with Japan right under everybody else's noses. Cutesy cartoon shit aside, there's also a secret room inside the brain of every girl where Jensen Ackles is giving Gabriel Sylar a Rusty Trombone, and this secret room was discovered by the intrepid weirdness explorers of Tokyo. Madison Avenue, are you listening? All you have to do to sell a Wii to a teenage girl is to have those two guys from the commercials make out. Mark my words."

Read On

Gossip Girl

GOSSIP GIRL
Originally uploaded by ☆.♣.♪-H@rry-♪♣.☆

It's like the first boy and the first girl of all time. Dan's propaganda is that he has no propaganda, and Serena's is that she used to have propaganda and now she dresses like a cowboy and has no propaganda. Nate literally has no propaganda, but nobody will believe him about that. But Blair and Chuck, now: you could watch them dance burlesque for two hours and they still wouldn't be done shedding all those clothes. More lies and veils and schemes all the time, so they can stay alive. And tomorrow is going to be hell, because nobody wants the shame of being seen, least of all these two. But that's tomorrow: tonight, it only makes sense that they could do this so easily, and so carefully, so slowly and quickly, and so sweetly. See them holding hands? See him asking, "Are you sure?" See the screen go grainy again while that pop-punk keeps playing, and she climbs onto him in her little nightgown, and they make love, and the film falls off the projector altogether and burns itself white.

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Halloween Is For Lovers

buzzer

You know how much I love slutty Halloween costumes.

"I'm a naughty nurse!" Sure you are.

"I'm a sexy cat!" Bless your heart.

It's a truth universally acknowledged that slutty Halloween costumes are the best kind of costumes, and the trick is to combine three things...

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1) Sluttiness, first and foremost.

2) What you're actually working with, Color Me Beautiful-style: are you a "pear"? An "apple"?

3) Some kind of twist that makes you interesting and special.

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If slutty Halloween costumes are the best kind, then the worst kind are conceptual. If I have to ask what you're dressed as, you'd better have a snappy answer. I don't, personally, want to have to explain my costume, or do a little show or shtick to help you figure it out.

Similarly, Halloween is about two things: hooking up and getting drunk. You don't want your costume to inhibit either of these activities, either by being cumbersome or by being needlessly grostesque. The best slutty costumes combine ease of movement with total sluttiness, allowing both. That's generally why I stick to bunny ears.

However, this year I tried -- with varying levels of success, although I guess we'll see for sure tonight -- to get the boyz on board. I want to start a movement for men of all shapes and sizes to get slutty on Halloween.

The upside is that I think I convinced JBS to go as Dingle, the short-shorts cop. It wouldn't be the first time I started a movement to get my own unhealthy kicks.

Downside: I can't let the movement down by avoiding my responsibilities as its demagogue, but I show a distinct lack of creativity when it comes to stuff like this. Here's what I've got at presstime.

1) Slutty Dora The Explorer: orange short-shorts, tiny backpack, and some kind of wig. "Como se dice threesome?" You won't need a compass or a map to track this hot bitch.

2) Slutty Pirate. 'Nuff said.

3) Slutty Priest/Nun. Too on the nose/Castro. Not the kind of gay we like.

4) Slutty Serviceman. Only if it's the Navy, and we're working with a budget.

5) Slutty Santa.

I think we have a winner.

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Gossip Girl

Blake Lively as Serena in GOSSIP GIRL
Originally uploaded by GMMR

After a babbling dry run at explanation, Dan explains: "...What was I going to say? That I was renting a tuxedo to attend a masked ball without a mask, or an invitation, to go get a girl who not only has a mask and an invitation, but another date?" Actually, that's exactly what you should have said. Vanessa would understand that. Vanessa would be like, "Why didn't you just break into her house?"

Vanessa says that at least the truth would be honest, but then S watches as Dan admits that Vanessa's too-cool-for-school propaganda still carries some weight with his stupid ass, because he was embarrassed to tell Vanessa all of that because she disapproves of...masked balls. Proving that Vanessa is a halfwit, but also: Do not apologize for your life! They never listen! (They are in the TV!)

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NOW WE FLY AND THE CARS STAND STILL BY ALEXANDER THE GREAT BY JACOB

Woman with a Parasol - Madame Monet and her son, 1875
Originally uploaded by TRI - Tag Research Institute

This is a story that happened to my body, and if I tell it I must tell her body and if her body cannot hear it than I cannot tell the story. If I told the story from my body to her body it would look a lot like hitting, punching, cutting, stabbing. That's the way she would understand it, if understanding were what she wanted. I could do her this favor, and it would bring me relief, but no pleasure: it was like this, it felt like this, I died. My breath tears in half like a painting of a woman.

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I WAIT FOR THE CUT BUT THE CUT NEVER COMES BY ALEXANDER THE GREAT BY

50s Kiss
Originally uploaded by life by pixels

My daughter asks my wife about boys. Why don't they understand that girls are just like boys, smart and fun and wise? Why don't they know that boys and girls are the same? My wife says this isn't true, that one day she'll know. That her body will change, and the boys will change, inside, and everything will be different. My wife says, where she thinks I cannot hear her, that it will become war.

My fists go hard and I want to throw myself down before them both and say it's all a lie, Mommy tells lies, boys and girls are just the same. Same dreams, same fears, same weak and strong places. Mommy tells lies. Daddy says nothing. The boys look up at me every now and then, behind my shaking newspaper, and go on shining their shoes. They're listening too.

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Doctor Who

Original L.C.
Originally uploaded by Jacob Clifton

...If you ask me why, as an atheist, I'm so obsessed with writing and reading about religion, that's the pat answer that I won't give you, because it's too small.

But I think in human development there's something that leads us on, some gift of the world, that gives us guidance toward becoming whole. I think there's something, a Doctor, that wants us to look in those dark corners and tease the mysteries out and become strong enough to see things the way they are, without all the magic and hope and fear and ugliness that we project on them, because when we do that, we're abusing ourselves, because the world inside our head is where we actually live, and the best we can hope for is to work until it matches the world outside our heads as closely as possible.

So I've never found it weird or particularly interesting to cast Doctor Who as either a meditative experience of the divine or as a description of individuation, the process of growing up. Those are all just a bunch of words for fairy tales, which are all just versions of the Quest, and the Quest never ends.

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Mad Men

Living in the 50s
Originally uploaded by un4gtableann

When I said I wanted an episode all about Roger and Joan, it was because they're my favorite characters. I should have been more specific. I didn't think about how you never know if this show's going to be nice, or cruel.

I love Roger because he desperately needs it.

I love Joan because she's a pioneer, an astronaut, born at the wrong time. Too strong and too smart and too beautiful to be valuable, to be anything but dangerous. A little sex bomb, tossed over the transom. And as the doors close on her beautiful face, as she gets caged in by yet another secret, by another demand, as she realizes that as much as she hates it, it's within her to fear for this man, and maybe she loves Roger after all, you might wonder: Laika was an astronaut too.

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Gossip Girl

Gossip Girl cast picture
Originally uploaded by jcshie

First Gossip Girl recap

Blair Waldorf and Nate Archibald, who stare at each other over the lunch she's not eating for a while before agreeing that they have zero problems as long as they never mention his admission last night, pretend that Serena doesn't exist, ignore all truth and live grasping at lies, and repress all their feelings by sublimating with drugs and alcohol. Thus becoming their parents! The very outcome Nate was worried about! They have ten thousand spoons, yet all Nate actually needs is a knife!

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