Shelly Johnson is the unsung heroine of Twin Peaks

Trigger warning: this entry contains discussions of sexual abuse, spousal abuse, and child abuse.

When I talk about Twin Peaks, I always feel it necessary to mention that my fascination and obsession with the show lies much deeper than a regard for its moody aesthetics or an appreciation for  David Lynch as a director (although I very much appreciate David Lynch). For me, it is more than just a TV show and cultural icon, it is something very spiritual to me, something that speaks to the dark places of my soul that I thought nothing could ever penetrate.

Twin Peaks is often name-dropped by mainstream media and bloggers as a quirky supernatural detective show, an interesting piece of '90s ephemera, while its more significant themes of abuse and incest are largely ignored in favour of references to cherry pie and saddle shoes. It's not that I mean to be pretentious, as if I'm the only one who loves the show for its dark themes and connects with it emotionally, because many women in the fandom do, but I do feel that certain aspects of the show are overrepresented while other elements of the show (as well as important and meaningful characters) are largely ignored.

With that in mind, I'd like to devote some time to arguably my favourite character in the series, waitress Shelly Johnson.

Unlike the other ladies of Twin Peaks, not much of Shelly's backstory is explicitly stated, other than that she dropped out of high school to marry truck-driver Leo. However, there is much we can infer about her life based on context and clues given by the show and tie-in materials. 

At the time we are introduced to Shelly, she is 19 years old, and she states that she dropped out of eleventh grade to marry Leo, which means that she has been married to him for at least two years. She works at the Double R Diner as a waitress and seems to be friends with the proprietor Norma (who, at 35 or so, plays somewhat of a maternal role towards Shelly).

The biggest question about Shelly seems to be "why is she so alone?". Her parents or any sort of family are never mentioned and she doesn't seem to have anywhere to go to get away from Leo's abuse. She also seems to lack any of the resources that she would need to escape from him: she doesn't have any money of her own (likely because Leo takes all her earnings from the diner) and she also seems to lack a lot of adult life skills, like driving.

None of this seems coincidental to me. I think it is indicative of a history of parental abuse for Shelly. It's important to think about the context here: what would be going on in Shelly's everyday life that would lead to her dropping out of school and moving out to marry a truck driver? Why else would anyone be so desperate to get out of their parents' house? Of course, the sad irony is that because Shelly probably grew up in an abusive household, she would be unlikely to recognize the red flags and warning signs of abusive behaviour in Leo, as she would have become so accustomed to abuse at home that she wouldn't be able to recognize what wasn't normal.

It seems to me that Shelly has known abuse all her life, and that she is not so dissimilar from her deceased peer, Laura Palmer. Shelly is 19, Laura was 17- they would have passed each other in the halls at school before Shelly dropped out, and they knew each other from volunteering from Meals on Wheels. They were both abuse victims and were both involved with Leo Johnson. 

It's clear that Leo intended to murder Shelly when when he tied her up and set the mill on fire, and I have to wonder- would Shelly's death elicit as much mourning and sympathy as Laura's? I doubt it. Everyone in town knew Laura, and everyone knew Shelly too, but in a different context. And that context is what makes the difference. Shelly is "white trash"- a girl from the Wrong Side Of Town who dropped out of high school to marry a truck driver and work as a waitress. It's clear from contextual evidence that the townspeople, even Sheriff Truman, knew that Leo was beating Shelly (and probably raping her too) but no one did anything about it, not even Bobby, who is supposed to care about her. Nobody even offered her a place to stay.

I guess it makes sense for the sake of the narrative, but my heart goes out to Shelly. She's a sweet, adorable girl with a loving heart who makes great pies. She deserves just as much concern and sympathy as any other abuse victim, but she will never get it, because of her class status. I think that's often the way of life though.

I don't mean to lessen Laura's suffering or say that Shelly deserves more sympathy than her, because Twin Peaks is largely a series about the different forms abuse may take and the way it affects all kinds of women (Laura, Shelly, Audrey, Josie, and even Norma to an extent). It's about how nobody deserves abuse no matter if they're a "Bad Girl" or a "Good Girl". I just wish that people paid more attention to this aspect of the show and Shelly's storyline when discussing the themes present in Twin Peaks. 

10 Things Only North American Kids of British Parents Understand

1. The confusion you felt when your friends' parents' record collections didn't have any Cilla Black, Simply Red, or James Last.
2. At school when said your favourite food was mince and tatties, cheese toasties, or bacon butties, and nobody understood.
3. How aghast you felt about the Scholastic versions of the Harry Potter books.
4. Arguing with your teacher about the proper spelling of "omelette".
5. Nobody wanted to share your Enid Blyton books.
6. When people tried to imitate your parents' accents and sounded nothing like what they actually spoke.
7. When your relatives overseas sent you videotapes and they wouldn't play.
8. Watching The Snowman instead of The Grinch every Christmas.
9. Lying to your playmates that you knew the Spice Girls personally due to your British Connections. 
10. When your parents would scold you for using the North American term for something rather than the British term.

Take Your Daughters to See Maleficent

With the release and resounding success of Maleficent, Disney has proved two things: one, that there is a market for big-budget fantasy films with overwhelmingly female casts; and two, that a film can be progressive and feminist without losing its glitz, excitement, and appeal to little girls.

I went to see Maleficent last night expecting to watch a well-meaning but ham-fisted take on a familiar story, and instead, I saw a powerful film about female strength, platonic love, and moral ambiguity. I won't bother to rehash the plot of the film- rather, I'd like to talk about the way women are represented in it and how it surpassed so many of my expectations and made me cry, like, five times.

Maleficent is a truly unique film in the sense that it is a by-the-numbers fantasy blockbuster and yet it also breaks every unspoken rule Hollywood has about the way women, particularly women protagonists, are represented in mainstream film. Undoubtedly this has much to do with the fact that the screenwriter is a woman and that Angelina Jolie herself served as an executive producer. Jolie's role as producer as well as her considerable star power (she is one of the most, if not the most, bankable actresses in Hollywood today) ensured that she had full control over the way her character was represented onscreen.

And that's what I found so very interesting about this film: Maleficent, as you know, was a straight-up villain in the original Disney film, perhaps their best-known villain ever. Although she was given an incredible backstory in Jolie's Maleficent, she wasn't turned into a pure-hearted, misunderstood, sweet character. She remained morally ambiguous, both good and evil, altruistic but selfish, caring and yet still terrifying. She is allowed the complexity and intensity that is normally only given to male superhero characters like Batman or the Transformers protagonists.

Maleficent experiences duplicity and betrayal (in the form of an extremely powerful rape allegory) as well as persecution and pariahdom, yet the film does not make her into a one-dimensional victim. She is powerful, vengeful, and angry, rightfully so, and carries out her revenge in a theatrical, fantastical, and selfish manner: cursing the daughter of the man who mutilated her (the mutilation, in this case, is quite clearly a metaphor for sexual assault.) Like many revenge flicks starring male protagonists, the film does not exonerate or vilify Maleficent, instead, it simply tells us her story fairly and even-handedly.

Maleficent avoids falling into many of the classic Disney cliches: noticeably absent from the film are a male hero-figure, a wedding as a happy ending, or a scary, evil female villain acting as a foil for a sweet and beautiful pure-hearted heroine. Instead, it is a film about women finding strength from themselves and from each other, about fighting one's own battles, and standing up for oneself despite the threat of persecution and hatred.

How great would it be, if, this Halloween, we saw little girls dressed not as Barbies or brides but as a powerful figure like Maleficent? Little girls (and big girls, and women) should see this movie just as their brothers saw Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy. They need a protagonist they can identify with, one who is not a tired, reheated cliche but an exciting, captivating, and relatable heroine.

Mental Illness Narratives in Media

As someone who is both mentally ill and a vociferous consumer of popular media, it's rare for me to see a movie or TV show that accurately reflects the struggles an individual deals with when dealing with mental illness. There have been some novels written by authors who also suffer from mental illness, but by and large I have found that most media representation of the mentally ill is inaccurate, unsympathetic, and sometimes downright harmful.

Classic literature has a long history of authors writing frankly about their mental illness, even if it was in antiquated terms: Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath. But since film and television are far less personal mediums than literature, they tend to use mental illness as a plot device or an interesting character trait rather than offering a first-person account of mental illness. This is dangerous for several reasons. The first being that film and television are two of the most accessible forms of popular media, and are available to people who may not be blessed with the education level or resources needed to access classic literature and/or academic writing. This means that for many people, their entire understanding of mental illness is based on what they've seen in films and on television. Those who suffer from mental illness but haven't been diagnosed may know that there is something wrong with them, but struggle to identify with the often outrageous and outlandish depictions of mentally ill people that they've seen, and so remain undiagnosed and unable to seek help. Those who do not suffer from mental illness may have seen Jeremy Sisto as Billy Chenowith on Six Feet Under or Glenn Close as Alex Forrest in Fatal Attraction and assume that these are accurate depictions of bipolar disorder, and become fearful of schizophrenic or borderline people. Or it may not be as bad as that: maybe they've seen Silver Linings Playbook and think they understand bipolar disorder, think that their bipolar friend's problems can be solved if they just set them up with some young hottie who likes to dance. Oh, if only it were that easy! The entire psychiatric community would be out of work.

As someone who suffers from depression and is a recovering bulimic, I find it difficult to relate with the characters in film and television who are explicitly stated to be mentally ill and are supposed to represent people like me. To begin with, protagonists who are canonically defined as "depressed" are almost always white men, and usually white straight men. I think that's probably because a mentally ill character is already an "other", so the writer may try to make them as "normal" as possible in every other aspect of their characterization. Unless, of course, they're a villain, in which case they're also often coded as queer, because dangerous craziness and queerness are so often intertwined in popular media! Never mind that queer people are more likely to be depressed due to the oppression and discrimination they face every day- most Crazy Queer Villains are depicted as madmen and madwomen, driven to homicidal insanity by their sexual perversions. This is a trope that was once extremely prevalent and seen everywhere from psychodramas and thrillers to animated children's movies (think: Professor Ratigan from The Great Mouse Detective, coded "sissy" and violently insane). It is slowly falling out of favour, but it can still be found in popular procedural crime shows like CSI and Criminal Minds.

Even when characters aren't portrayed as villains, they are often written and acted very stereotypically and one-dimensionally, as both the writers and the actors choose to base their interpretation of a mentally ill character on a set of symptoms, rather than portraying their character as a fully-realized person with interests and quirks that exist outside of and irrelative of their mental illness. Personally, I've done a lot of research into the way eating disorders are portrayed in media aimed at teenagers, and I've found that the characters are almost always stereotypical Type-A "Best Little Girl In the World" overachievers. I'm thinking here of endless Young Adult novels, a recent storyline on Glee, and that time on Lizzie McGuire that Miranda stopped eating for one episode but was cured after a pep-talk with her friends. In most teen media in fact, eating disorders are portrayed as a confidence issue that can be cured easily (I could wrte another entire post on how this erases the very real struggles of eating disordered people, who are overwhelmingly girls and women). To my mind, the most well-rounded and developed character with an eating disorder storyline to date has been Cassie Ainsworth from the British teen drama Skins. She has anorexia, and it is a continual struggle for her, but she has character traits that are not related to or attributed to anorexia, a love interest, and is generally quite sympathetic and likeable. When I was at my worst suffering from my own eating disorder, my best friend watched Cassie's episode of Skins and said it helped her to understand me better.

And that's the thing about proper representation: it doesn't have to get in the way of a good story. Cassie's storyline is engaging and interesting even to people who don't have anorexia or bulimia. It's entertaining, but not damaging. The same can be said for the many mentally ill characters on Mad Men (though I'm still waiting to see how Ginsberg's schizophrenia storyline plays out).

All I want is to see people like me onscreen. People who aren't dangerous, or hopeless, or inhuman... just... whole. Because mentally ill people like me aren't broken or incomplete or irreparable, we just want to be understood.

"Young Americans" is the most cynical song of the '70s

David Bowie has long been described by the media as a chameleon of sorts, someone who picks up on social and cultural trends, takes them to their logical extreme, and casts them aside soon after, on to the next thing. While I agree that Bowie is certainly always in tune with  the cultural zeitgeist, I disagree with the idea that his many personas represent a wish to emulate the zeitgeist- rather, I'd argue, his many different public identities come from an intent to parody and comment on whatever trend du jour he happened to find worthy of discussion.

Now Bowie is well known for his gender bending which was obviously intended as  his commentary on the constructed social structures placed around male and female identities. But what I think is rarely discussed is his brilliant commentary on race, colonialism and cultural theft.  this was something explored throughout the "plastic soul" era of his career and most explicitly on Young Americans, both the song and album.

As a Brit who was heavily influenced by American culture, Bowie wrote "Young Americans" as an expression of his distaste with the racial climate in the USA at the time. Stylistically, the song is an up-tempo number in black American soul/R&B style but unlike his contemporaries, Bowie didn't just borrow the musical style for aesthetic purposes. It's intended as a reflection on the cultural theft that he talks about in the song. Quite clever really as at first listen it sounds like another blue-eyed soul number, but the lyrics belie a criticism of "blue-eyed soul" and the willingness of white people to steal from and exploit black culture while still harbouring racist attitudes.

Have you been the un-American?

Just you and your idol sing falsetto

'bout Leather, leather everywhere, and

Not a myth left from the ghetto

Well, well, well, would you carry a razor

In case, just in case of depression?

Sit on your hands on a bus of survivors

Blushing at all the afro-Sheeners

These lyrics express Bowie's feelings about the cultural climate of the 1970s in regards to race relations, and basically what he's saying here is that white (especially male) Americans consider themselves the "default" American, and, as it has been said before "everyone else gets a hypen". Now Bowie is a white male and I am a white female so I don't want to imply that either he or I are the foremost experts on race relations. What I mean to say is that the song is intended as a message to Bowie's white contemporaries. Black music was (and still is!) being imitated by white singers and white bands who were happy to take the fun parts of black culture but refused to engage in any political discourse about race relations or acknowledge the disparity between the recognition they got and the recognition black artists got. "Not a myth left from the ghetto" may be referencing the fact that black culture and black stories were mined by white people for artistic inspiration until we (white people) saw the well as being run dry. Not a myth left because we stole everything.

Performing on the Dick Cavett Show, December 1974

Black music and black fashion are things that we white people are happy to steal but still see as threatening in their original form, so they have to be watered down. Bowie is asking his audience why they are happy to take from black culture without ever really knowing the black experience.  He asks his audience, "You may enjoy the music, but do you understand where it comes from culturally and emotionally?"  At this point I have to state: no. I do not understand the experience because I have never lived it. I'm just a white lady from rural Canada and I'm in no way attempting to speak for black people with my commentary on this song. I think it's telling though that most of the musicians featured on this song are black, including of course Luther Vandross, who played a big part in arranging the song. Bowie, a white man, is singing it, and I think it's very sneaky how he gets his message across, because he knows that many of his listeners will only listen to funk/soul/R&B music if it's played by a white man like him, so he emulates the style perfectly but makes his lyrics very cynical and accusatory, so that  the listeners are initially hooked by the melody and style, get into the song, and then somewhere around the middle, realize that the very song they are in enjoying is decrying people like them (people like us, rather).

I think there's also some interesting commentary here on gender, too: the lyric "ain't there a woman I can sock on the jaw" references domestic violence obviously, but it's not an autobiographical lyric, it's a narrative "voice" Bowie uses to illustrate the hypocrisy of the ~enlightened~ '70s man. He loves the fact that the sexual revolution has freed women to engage in no-strings-attached sex, but he is angry at the fact that the women's lib movement has offered them other sorts of autonomy. He longs for an old-fashioned woman he could own and abuse rather than the Modern Woman who asks that a man be accountable for his actions.  

Basically, this song is about the hypocrisy of the 1970s youth: pretending to be so much more open-minded than their predecessors, but still harbouring racist and sexist ideals, just expressing them in a different way, perhaps a more insidious way.

That being said, although Bowie's a brilliant songwriter, the song shouldn't be taken as the last word on race relations: he is after all, still a white man from Britain. I do think though that we white people can learn something from it since we still persist in copying and stealing from black culture. The fact that this song is performed in a funk/soul style is the cleverest thing about it as it allows the narrator (Bowie) to address the issue from within the cultural arena in which it exists. Bowie's always played with personas, image and identity, and although I think he feels free to adopt personas that are based on some aspect of his personality, "Young Americans" is his protest against those who base their image or identity or sound or look on something that is not a part of their life and never will be, something that they will never know or understand. 

Mad Men, or, "Daddy Issues: The TV Show"

So the theme of paternal abandonment continues, both in my life and on Sunday's episode of Mad Men! But, as per the theme of this blog, I'm going to stick to covering Mad Men, with this entry paying particular focus on the interaction between Roger Sterling and his daughter Margaret.

Margaret is an interesting character in that the events of her life are rarely shown through her perspective on the show. Instead they are mostly relayed to us by Roger through conversations he has with other characters. In an early episode, Roger bitches to Joan about the fact that Margaret seems to have no motivations in life, only having dated two boys (one who committed suicide). You'd think that even someone like Roger would be able to extend sympathy to Margaret for dealing with a tragedy like that, but the event is reduced to pillow talk between him and Joan (Joan, lovely Joan, defends Margaret, saying that Roger is too hard on him). In another episode, Margaret's possible eating disorder is hinted at as Roger jokes that Mona stopped cooking after Margaret stopped eating.

And of course, there is Margaret's wedding, the events of which are particularly contentious for father and daughter as Roger is hell-bent on taking his new, much younger wife Jane to the wedding, while Margaret is against this. It's not a huge leap to assume that Margaret is viciously (and rightfully) jealous of Jane for her relationship with Roger. After all, Jane is not much older than Margaret herself.

So as we can see Roger and Margaret have quite the strained relationship, largely due to Roger's failure to provide for Margaret emotionally and to acknowledge her humanity as a daughter. I think this has much to do with Roger's issues with women: he tends to categorize his relationships with women as either sexual and passionate or cordial and distant. For instance, he doesn't appear to have much regard for Peggy as a friend or colleague despite seemingly respecting her work.

Roger doesn't know quite what do do with Margaret, a daughter, because he never wanted a daughter. A son, he could commiserate with and raise in his own image, but with Margaret he's faced with a dilemma: does raise her to be used by men the way he uses women, or does he warn her against such men, which would require some reflection on his part and admittance to misdeeds? The answer that he comes to, of course, is neither. He chooses to give up on parenting Margaret entirely.

Which brings us then to the events of The Monolith, where we learn that Margaret has engaged in her own form of parental abandonment: leaving her toddler behind as she chooses to follow a group of hippies to live on a commune. Both Roger and Mona are shocked and make it their mission to set Margaret straight, travelling to the commune to shake some sense into her, as it were. It doesn't work, obviously, because who would want to leave a life of free love and drugs to go back to New York City with their parents, to raise a child just the same way as their parents did (and have the child grow up to be as miserable and dissatisfied as them?).

It is then we see Roger trying to take on the Cool Dad role: Oh sure I'll have a look around! Yeah, I wanna here all about your cool new life! Far too late to make a difference, of course. And as the day wears on, the similarities between Margaret and the hippie girl that Roger has been sleeping with over the course of the season become too apparent for Roger, and he's faced with the harsh reality of what he's done to the women in his relationships (the "she's somebody's daughter!" dilemma) and what a shitty human being he is towards women. His breaking point comes when Margaret sneaks off from the barn where she is supposed to be sharing a tender moment with her father, to have sex with another one of the hippies, which hits way too close to home for serial womanizer Roger.

Roger doesn't want Margaret to continue the cycle of parental abandonment that he has been perpetuating, and so he flips his shit, attempts to drag her out of there, and lays a guilt trip on her about her responsibilities as a mother. Then, Margaret, in what I can only say is one of the best fictional daughter-to-father fights I've ever heard, truly rips into Roger, handing his ass to him about his own parental abandonment and all-around shitty behaviour as a father.

Roger mocks Margaret (Marigold) about her life in the commune, telling her she's got to step up and face reality, be a mother and stop living for a life of hedonistic pleasure.... but isn't that exactly what Roger did for Margaret's entire childhood? Boozing it up, banging secretaries, spending loads of money and basically doing whatever he wanted? Margaret is clearly still extremely bitter over what she feels was a shitty childhood and she unloads it all on her father, so viciously and so painfully: "How did you feel when you went away to work, Daddy? Your conscience must have been eating you alive. Calling your secretary from a hotel at lunch to pick out a birthday present for me.... it's not that hard, Daddy, I'll be fine."

Roger walks away in his muddied suit, defeated.

The events of Roger's trip to the commune echo Don's own relationship with Sally and perhaps serve as a warning of sorts as to what will happen if Don doesn't get his shit together and be a proper parent. What pains me so much though is that this episode is set in 1969 and there are still girls and women out there with the same complaints about their fathers: they never cared, they were never there, they never had any emotional connection. People like to say that about Mad Men: "oh, weren't things terrible back then?",  they say, but things are still pretty terrible, just not as explicitly. When will they get better? When men like Roger and Don everywhere start getting their damn shit together.

On "Frasier", Accents, and Class Distinctions

In a discussion about class, regional accents, and the way they are presented on television (especially American television)  the most pertinent example, for me anyway, would be Frasier Crane of Cheers and later his eponymous sitcom Frasier.

Frasier Crane is initially introduced in Cheers as a love interest to Diane. He is a haughty, uptight, somewhat pretentious psychiatrist intended as a foil to Sam's 'jus-plain-folks' working-class persona. He was pompous, overbearing, and full of himself, and was not the most popular character on Cheers. As Kelsey Grammar has frequently mentioned, he was often approached during his run on Cheers by fans of the show who would ask "are you that pin dick that plays Frasier on Cheers"? Frasier's Mid-Atlantic accent is supposed to indicate that he is a man of 'good breeding', so to speak, making him removed from his friends at the bar, who are all regular working stiffs from families of working stiffs.

While the Frasier character began life as a typical unflattering upper-middle class stereotype (over-educated, boring, coded feminine, and a distinct clipped and affected upper-middle class neutral American accent) the transition from Cheers to Frasier allowed the audience to see a different side to Frasier following his divorce from his equally chilly and uptight wife Lilith. Namely, the introduction of Frasier's father Martin, a retired cop. While Frasier claimed to be the orphan son of a scientist father in Cheers, it is revealed that he in fact has distinctly working-class origins, as Martin has nothing of Frasier's mannerisms, nor anything close to his accent. (As an interesting note, John Mahoney, who plays Martin Crane, is a British expat who was raised in Blackpool by a family of Mancunians.).

As an audience, we come to learn that Frasier has adopted his upper-middle class persona and his pompous attitude as a defense mechanism against the bullying he endured as a child and as a sort of rebellion against his cop father. He chose to remove himself from his father as much as possible, in order to escape his roots and be better accepted in the world of academia and psychiatry. However,  the living situation that is thrust upon him (taking his father in after an injury reduces Martin's mobility) forces him to accept the reality of his origins. The humour of the show often derives from the conflict that arises between Frasier and Niles and their attempts to be taken more seriously in their fields, alongside their father's lack of pretension and his propensity to foil their social-climbing schemes.

Then we throw Daphne Moon in the mix, who is identifiably working-class as she has a thick pseudo- Manchester accent and often speaks of her formative years in England in a less-than-pretentious way. Daphne and Martin bond over their working-class backgrounds, while Frasier often scoffs at Daphne's tales of childhood or claims of psychic abilities. Niles' infatuation and eventual relationship with Daphne could perhaps be attributed to a desire to re-claim his working-class identity or a way of reconciling what he may view as abandonment of his father and his father's way of life.

Regardless of motivations, the Niles/Daphne relationship represents a destruction of class boundaries, as Daphne is not only identifiably working-class in her accents and mannerisms, but also her profession, because as Martin's physical therapist she could generally be regarded as "the help". For Niles to fall in love with a woman like Daphne requires an acknowledgement of these class boundaries and also an outright rejection of the class distinctions that he has spent his adult life mimicking and affecting. The same can be said for Daphne, as her "Manchester" accent is slightly mangled and Jane Leeves has said that this was intentional on her part to indicate that Daphne has spent quite some time in the States and has probably intentionally taken on a bit of an American twang in order to fit in with her peers in the USA.

It's not to say that Frasier is a perfect representation of class distinctions or that it breaks down any boundaries, as a 30-minute American sitcom. Certainly, any Brit or anyone with British ties couldn't help but laugh at the fact all of Daphne's brothers have wildly differing regional accents. All in all though, I think anyone from a working-class background who has ever struggled with their working-class identity and being accepted in a field that is not friendly to working-class people can relate.

"Hi, I'm Daria. Go to Hell."

Oh, Daria. There's so much to be said about this show that has, inevitably, already been discussed by legions of nerds and/or hipster ladies before me. In accordance with that fact, I hope that my thoughts on the series will offer a fresher perspective than what has already been said.

First of all, a little background, because I know you're just dying to hear the details of my childhood media consuming habits: Daria premiered in 1996, when I was six years old, ostensibly too young for the series. I don't remember exactly when I started watching the show, but it was sometime after the first few seasons had already aired, but not before the series had ended, so sometime in the late nineties. My parents were extremely strict about the television that my sister and I were allowed to watch, and we were banned from watching most mainstream cartoons. The two exceptions were The Simpsons (because it was "intellectual and satirical") and Daria, because it featured a female lead who was intelligent, interesting, and who refused to buy into shallow ideals of beauty and relationships. What can I say, my parents were feminists, and I'm lucky that they were.

As a nerdy brunette with glasses, a dysfunctional family, and a pretty, popular sister, I heavily identified with Daria at the time. I felt I was surrounded by idiots and used my wit and intelligence as a defense mechanism against my peers' attacks on what I was supposedly lacking (beauty and popularity, naturally). To have someone like her to look up to was comforting at the time, but as an adult re-watching the series, I have to question whether Daria is an intentionally flawed heroine or simply a "nerdy" version of the mean bitchy cheerleader trope.

Something that distinguishes Daria from most other teen series with an "outcast"-type protagonist is the fact that the head cheerleader and football captain are not antagonists in the least.

Brittany and Kevin (truly prophetic name choices there, I might add) may be utter dunces, but they're not mean or unpleasant. They are always friendly to Daria and Jane, and Brittany even does her best to do poor unpopular Daria a favour by inviting her to a house party in one of the series' first episodes. Daria and Jane, by contrast, kind of look like total assholes, as they mock Brittany and Kevin constantly, sometimes to their faces, when all the couple try to do is be friendly and sweet.

It's easy to understand why Daria and Jane behave this way, of course, because they're teenagers who have not developed fully evolved critical thinking skills, and as intelligent as they may be, they don't have the maturity to see that they would get along in high school much easier if they just accepted the friendship of the "popular kids", since it is genuinely offered without expectations.

If the pair have any true antagonists at school, it's probably Sandi and the other members of the Fashion Club.

Quinn and Stacy are less antagonistic than Sandi and Tiffani, but since they encourage the other girls' behaviour and enable their bullying, I'm going to say they come close. What's ironic about the Fashion Club though is that they are just as rude and snobby as Daria and Jane, albiet in a very different way. Daria and Jane are unpleasant because they feel disenfranchised and unnoticed in the "girl culture" of the '90s, and the fashion club are unpleasant because they feel intimidated by their more intelligent peers with the looming threat of college on the horizon.

Both groups of kids have their own issues to deal with, and I think the series explores this idea as Quinn grows emotionally throughout the run of the series, choosing to expand her horizons beyond sartorial choices, while Daria eventually gains some confidence and manages to develop enough self-actualization to participate in a real relationship with a human male.

In that sense, I think Daria is like The Breakfast Club in that it explores the hidden depths of every high school stereotype, from Brittany the Bimbo to Daria the Brain, to Sandi the Bitch and Jodie the Token Minority (there's been great stuff written about her, which as a white woman I don't feel qualified to regurgitate). 

So: is Daria an appropriate heroine for nerdy teenage girls? Someone they should emulate? It's hard to say. On the one hand I would answer no because she's deeply insecure and takes that out on other people. On the other hand, I think she experiences significant growth throughout the length of the series, and perhaps she could serve as an example of moving on from one's bitterness and self-hatred. In any case, I think the series itself is something that disenfranchised teenagers will always take comfort in, because it reassures them that there are other kids out there like them, and perhaps it will give them hope that they too can move on from a stifling environment to become fulfilled and feel appreciated, like Daria seemed to be in her last appearance, the TV movie Is It College Yet?. 

On Rita Leeds and Arrested Development

Something that has always been a source of debate among Arrested Development fans is the Rita storyline and the question of whether it not it is disrespectful to mentally disabled people. Speaking strictly as someone who loves the show and has only dabbled in the fandom, I cannot say whether or not anyone from the disabled community has spoken on the storyline and whether or not is offensive. Based only on my observations as a viewer, though, I have always felt that the way the story was written was respectful to Rita specifically as a character. The true humour of the arc came not from mocking Rita's disability, but rather from highlighting what awful people the Bluths are in regards to their treatment of her.

Michael, of course, is horribly selfish from the beginning in his relationship with Rita, as he initially only approaches her in order to get her assistance in helping him view some classified documents. He becomes enchanted with Rita, but only because of her beauty, whimsical nature, and willingness to listen to him pratter on about his ridiculous problems. He knows almost nothing about Rita aside from the fact that she's British and lives with her uncle. If he had even bothered in the slightest to ask her about her life, he would have learned (as she would have offered the information gladly) that she is mega rich and mentally disabled. 

Secondly, the storyline also serves to highlight how truly awful the other Bluths are as well, as they see nothing wrong with marrying Michael off to a woman he knows absolutely nothing about (and who is terribly unsuited to him, his lifestyle, and family) because they want her family money.

I'd say that particular storyline is in a sense, part of the essence of Arrested Development, as it asks us to follow the lives of an extremely unlikeable family,  and tricks us into sympathizing with them until they do something so reprehensible that we are startled out of our comfort zone and forced to acknowledge the reality of the Bluths, and to recognize that they are people who, if we were watching their storyline unfold in real-life on the news, we would be cheering for their destruction and dissolution.

"My Father Has Never Given Me Anything..."

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Something I think about a lot as I re-watch the last season of Mad Men is Sally Draper's relationship with her parents. Up until she caught her father fucking Lindsey Weir in Elizabeth Taylor drag, she idolized him and saw him as the the Good Parent to Betty's Bad Parent. That's not to say that Betty isn't a Bad Parent, but isn't Don pretty terrible as a father too? Ditching his kids so he could move in with his new wife to a chic Manhattan apartment? Leaving them alone for the night without any supervision whatsoever? Sally doesn't see that, though, because she isn't around Don enough to realize what an asshole he truly is. She is around enough to bear the full brunt of Betty's anger and frustrations, though, and to take her abuse head-on. That's the thing, really. They're both horribly abusive parents, but Betty's abuse is just more obvious, especially to a child who grew up in a time when all TV moms were nurturing and kind and happy. It's easier to put Don's abandonment out of her mind, but Sally has to live with Betty's abuse every damn say.

It makes me wonder if children, and society in general, think of abusive mothers as much worse than absentee or neglectful fathers simply because mothers are not 'supposed' to have character flaws like the coldness, anger, and resentment that Betty has.

It's particularly sad, though, when a mother is abusive towards a daughter, because we think that as a woman, she should know how hard it is to constantly feel as if you are not good enough, and that she would not be so heartless to inflict that on a child. We expect heartlessness from men, so when a father abandons his children, it's obviously shitty but not at all surprising because men are generally pretty scummy or can turn scummy at a moment's notice.

My parents share some similarities to the Drapers, and it's difficult for me to reconcile my sympathy for Betty with my deep and abiding empathy for Sally. It's maybe more difficult to have a mother like Betty than it is to have a father like Don, because as a young woman growing up you have no understanding of what a healthy female friendship or companionship dynamic should feel like. We all joke about the 'daddy issues' that arise from paternal abandonment; but if a young woman doesn't know how to make friends that will set her straight and give her guidance in her relationships with men, what does she have?

It's also easier for people to understand or believe paternal abandonment from an outside perspective if they haven't experienced it. Based on personal experience, I have found that my friends and acquaintances don't know how to respond to and often don't even believe admissions of maternal abuse, be it emotional or physical.

Victims of abandonment or abuse should perhaps stop asking ourselves "who fucked me up the most, mom or dad", and rather ask ourselves "how fucked up am I, exactly, and how can I avoid fucking up my kids in the same way?". Easier said than done, of course, especially when paternal abandonment can have consequences that are not as obvious as abuse.

I wish there was an easier answer for all of this, but there isn't. I guess this is why therapists will always be able to find work.

On being a member of the "Video Generation"

I was born in 1990,  which means that I grew up in a time when videotapes were the norm when it came to distributing movies, TV shows or cartoons. My family had a VCR, a stack of Disney tapes,  and because we didn't have cable and my mother didn't like for us to watch the violent cartoons of the day, my sister and I took to watching the same movies (The Little Mermaid, The Great Mouse Detective, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, etc) over and over and over again.

Recently it struck me that Millenials were really the first generation to be able to do that (watch movies over and over and over at home). Before the advent of commercial distribution of videocassettes, a child would get to watch a movie in theatres upon its original release (several times if they were lucky) and wouldn't get to see it again until it was revived in theatres of broadcast on television. But my generation, we had our favourite movies at our fingertips, and we could watch them every day, maybe even twice a day, from the comfort of our own homes. We didn't get the "first movie experience" that the kids who came before us did.

It makes me wonder if this has had any bearing on the way we consume our media, art, and entertainment. I don't mean to say that watching movies from home (and watching them repeatedly) is any better or worse than seeing them in theatres, but I do think that repeated viewings of a particular movie during a child's formative years can have an impressive impact. If nothing else, it becomes a deeply personal memory to the child, because they've experienced the movie in their own home, in a familiar surrounding with the freedom to get up and sing along or act out the movie as they're watching it. A child who has the opportunity to watch The Little Mermaid every day (like I did as a little girl) is likely to develop a very strong attachment to the film. The "message" of the film will be ingrained in her mind just as firmly as the lyrics of "Under the Sea."

Certainly there are varying degrees of interest and attachment for each child, but I have definitely noticed that people my age and around it are all incredibly nostalgic for their favourite childhood movies in a way people of my mother's generation (and even the generation before her) are not. I think that affects the way we consume media today: vociferously consuming media, keeping meticulously up-to-date on our favourite TV shows, and engaging in what I like to call "Submersive Media Therapy" (a fancy term for holing oneself up binge-watching movies and TV via DVDs, Netflix or internet streaming sites).

It's funny that we're so often derided for consuming media in this way when our parents the Boomers (who were the first generation to grow up with television as an ever-present force in their everyday home lives) saw no problem in plunking us down with a copy of our favourite movie and allowing us to press rewind and play it yet another time.

Past, Present, and Future

I feel like there's this need people have, sometimes, to compare their favourite to something classic and great that came before it in order to give it credibility. For instance, I've gotten into this argument on Tumblr: people love to compare their favourite boy-band of the day to the Beatles. I see a lot of people doing this with One Direction recently, and no shade intended towards One Direction fans, but people did that with the Bay City Rollers and the Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC and the Jonas Brothers. None of those bands have gotten a Grammy tribute recently, as far as I am aware. 

That's not to say that I think some comparisons aren't worth making. Personally, I think One Direction is easily comparable to The Monkees, in the sense that they are a genuinely talented group of young men who were created to be famous and achieved initial success through the medium of television. Much like the Monkees they're prefabricated and were intended to elicit screams and adoration from young female fans; whereas with the Beatles it just kind of happened and they went with it. 

Anyway, that's not really the point. I guess what I'm trying to say here is that if you really love something- be it a band, TV show, movie or actor- you should talk about its good points and what makes it special on its own and not compare it to something that came before it because they share some small similarities. 

Plus, I just think it's silly to expect bands and singers and actors of today to have career trajectories anywhere near the way acts of the twentieth century experienced. How can any band follow the Beatles' success and become as big as them if they are constantly looking towards them as the pinnacle of rock 'n' roll? When the Beatles started out, rock was a relatively new genre of music there were no big groups that they had to live up to. There was Elvis, of course, but he was American, a solo act, and his career and image had changed significantly by the time they became famous anyway.

To diverge from the Beatles/One Direction example for a moment, let's talk about Beyonce. I remember when she first left Destiny's Child and started off on her own solo act. She was frequently compared to Diana Ross, because her career path at that point superficially resembled Ross' own. She had just left a very famous R&B/pop trio to embark on a solo career, with a significantly sexed-up image and a dancier sound that what she had previously recorded.

Superficially yes, that's similar to what Diana Ross did, but unlike Diana Ross Beyonce has proven herself to be not only a singer, but a songwriter, producer, and entrepreneur, and I would argue that her music holds more significance to her respective generation than Ross' solo output ever did. To compare Beyonce to Diana Ross does her a disservice because it assumes that all the great pop music success stories have already been written, and that modern acts are simply reprising them for another generation.

Anyway, where was I going with this? I guess I just think it's pointless to try and compare young upstart talents with "legendary" acts. Why compare Amy Winehouse with any other members of the "27 Club"? Why compare Britney to Madonna? (I have always found the Britney/Madonna comparison particularly egregious- though Madonna's obviously an influence on Britney, Britney's identity and image has nuance and vulnerability that Madonna never did). 

All these modern acts may be influenced by the people that came before them, but they will never truly recreate their predecessors, nor should they be expected to: they have their own paths to follow.