Filed under: feminism, movies, TV, writing | Tags: Do you?, movies, Perry Mason, screenwriting, supercut, The Power, TV, You Just Don't Get It
While watching the new Perry Mason show, I heard one character say to another, “You just don’t get it, do you?” and I wanted to ring a bell. Ding, ding, ding! Every screenwriter’s favorite line!
There was a bit of a stir around a movie clip video supercut a while back which featured one character after another saying, “You just don’t get it, do you?” As you watch, you can start to feel crazy as one person after another says, in almost exactly the same tone (because there’s really only one line reading for this text), “You just don’t get it, do you?” with occasional text variations.
The video went viral and I would have thought eight minutes of a single line repeated would have alerted every screenwriter to flash a red light whenever this phrase slid out of their pen or keyboard. I certainly put a mental pin in it. But apparently folks are still saying, “You just don’t get it, do you?” onscreen.
I feel like I read a breakdown of why this phrase was both so ubiquitous and so lame but I cannot find it now, twelve years later apparently. Maybe the folks at Perry Mason thought no one would notice their cliché because twelve years have passed since this trope got called out. I don’t remember what folks were saying about this in 2011, when this video went around, but now, it’s clear to me that it is a way for a character to explain something going on in the story, a way to squeeze in some exposition or context. It’s a funnily stylized way to include information.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say this phrase in real life – but it is relentlessly common on screen. It sounds natural because we hear it so often but it is just an exposition delivering mechanism, disguised as a tiny conflict between two characters. I was thinking about this phrase while watching The Power (I know, I know, I thought I was done but apparently not). I don’t think they actually used this line but the whole show feels like a fleshed out, “You just don’t get it, do you?” story. This is partly because of the enormous amount of exposition that the show indulges in but mostly because of the attitude. The show feels like someone is playing that line under everything, whispering it, declaiming it, shouting it – over and over again it, the series feels like one big, “You just don’t get it, do you?”
And the problem is, I DO get it. I DO understand why the women in this show are angry and why there is enormous appeal in the evolution of a power that shifts the angle of the playing field. It feels somehow condescending to have these things explicitly stated or illustrated or demonstrated. And I imagine that that patronizing feeling is much worse for men watching the show and very possibly more alienating in the ways it tries to include them and “educate” them. A show that keeps reiterating that you, the audience, just don’t get it, do you, is a show that is fairly likely to push away its viewers. We all like to think we get it. Even men without a stitch of exposure to the feminist movement don’t like to be told they don’t get it, even if they don’t.
We all have things we don’t get. I’m sure there are a lot of things about being a man that I don’t get and it’s clear that there are a lot of things that many men don’t get about being a woman. And, of course, there are tons of things cis people don’t get about being trans and so on.
Part of the reason we’ve had movements like #MeToo and #YesAllWomen is that it became very clear how much was not understood. It can feel like we live in different worlds sometimes. Here’s a conversation I had with a man recently: He said “I like to keep the shades open so I can look out and remember I live in a city.” And I said, “And I like to keep them closed so I don’t get stalked and raped and murdered.” And then there was silence. I could have said, “You just don’t get it, do you?” But there’s no need when we put beauty and fear of violence on the scale. I think he got it.
I guess I feel like, if someone doesn’t get it, finding a way to demonstrate it or feel it or even just explain it, is a more useful way forward than leaning into cliches would be. I mean, you get it, right?
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Filed under: feminism, TV, writing | Tags: adaptation, back story, John Leguizamo, Naomi Alderman, Nice guys on TV, The Power, TV
For years now, I have been hotly anticipating the TV version of the novel, The Power. I would occasionally search for it on IMDB or Google, just to see when we might get a televised version of this book that kept me going in some difficult years. I was advised to read The Power by a friend around about the time dragons came into my life and I feel a kinship with Naomi Alderman and the world she created in her book. In case you haven’t read it, it’s the story of a power that teen girls develop which allows them to generate electricity from their hands. It changes the world and how it changes the world is illuminating. ⚡️ I bought a lot of copies of this book for many of the women in my life. It’s been an important book in recent years and I hoped the TV series would only further electrify me. ⚡️
I’ve only seen two episodes so far and so far it has not electrified me 🚫⚡️ and I’m writing this now to try and understand why and also give myself some notes, in case I ever get the chance to write a TV series.
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The first episode was written by the author of the book so I’m baffled by how it could be so disappointing. She wrote such a great book! How could she write such a bad TV episode? It was pretty much ALL exposition. Almost everything that happened pre dates the events of the book. It was just one back story after another, with no real sense of what was to come. It was set up, set up, set up, no pay off. Not much happened. A character, who isn’t that important in the book, accidentally set a couple of things on fire but those events were equally weighted with the posting of some Instagram comments. Another character (Roxy) gets dressed to go to a wedding, then she goes to the wedding, gets in some arguments, goes home and then her mom is murdered there. (This is pretty much the only thing that happens in this episode.)
And by contrast this murder scene is the moment that the novel really begins. There are a few preliminary literary prologues but then the novel opens with Roxy locked in the closet as the home invaders are killing her mo m. It is an inherently dramatic way to start a story. When it begins, we don’t know why this person is in a closet but we learn pretty quickly that she will get out and even more dramatic things will happen. It’s funny to me that a novel would be more dramatic than a TV show but it is, in fact the case. The author has undercut her own drama with “dramatic writing.”
Lesson for Me: Start in the middle of the action. The audience will catch up and it is much more exciting for them to not know things.
The first episode, aside from the murder, was pretty much all backstory. Maybe Alderman got excited to write it because it was the new stuff for her or maybe TV execs gave her “we need backstory” notes or maybe, given that there are quite a few playwrights in that writer’s room, they all got a little high on backstory. I don’t know what happened in this writer’s room but backstory is absolutely a trend in TV writing in these last several years. I haven’t read The Foundation books but I have it on reliable authority that the TV show is mostly invented backstory for the first twenty pages of the first book. That show, too, is stacked with playwrights. I don’t know why playwrights are so enamored of backstory these days. Maybe it’s something they get drilled into them MFA programs? But I am not a fan of the back story. Aside from slowing down the dramatic action, it kills a lot of mystery and intrigue. I don’t need to know why someone does something. I don’t need to understand why their childhood trauma made them stab someone or whatever. Just have them stab and let me wonder why they did it. If Othello were a contemporary American TV series, it would open with Iago as a child stumbling upon his mother’s affair with a “moor” or some shit. Can we not just let Iago be a villain who hates Othello for no good reason and goes too far?
Can we not have everything explained? If you absolutely have to put backstory in, please wait until we’re much further along in the series when I might at least find it an interesting explanatory flashback. But, truly, I’d be happy to have it disappear altogether.
Lesson for Me: If you feel tempted to explain why someone is the way they are – with backstory or a speech – don’t.
On a related theme, the TV series has already failed to do something that the novel did beautifully and that is, create mystery. The first thing in the novel (after an epigraph) is a letter from its “author” – a man whose name is not the name on the front cover of the book. That’s Mystery #1.
Mystery # 2 is the letter in response to that letter from someone with the first name of the author on the front cover (Naomi) and a reference to “this world run by men you’ve been talking about.” This Naomi is titillated by “male soldiers” and “boy crime gangs” and we have to wonder, “what is this backwards world?” Then when the narrative begins – its title page says “Ten years to go” and as the novel goes on that number counts down. We don’t know what happens in ten years but we have the whole novel to wonder about it.
The TV show opens with Toni Collette at a press conference and then flashes back with a title card that reads “Six months earlier” – which is not a particularly curiosity-inspiring title card.
Lesson for Me: A little thing like a title can create a whole lot of mystery and continue to drive curiosity through a whole experience.
Sometimes I feel like I can see the TV executives’ notes as I watch a show. In the case of The Power, when John Leguizamo showed up as the Mayor’s husband, I saw the TV execs’ note that said, “We need at least one more good man in this. We need a man who’s doing the right thing. We just need a little balance. We’ve got a lot of bad guys. We need a good guy we can root for.” So we get this nice guy dad and we like him because he’s played by John Leguizamo, and he’s a doctor who cares about teenage girls, like his daughter – and he’s a good husband who wants to help his wife express her rage. Where would this mayor be without her nice husband? (Well, in the book she’s already divorced when the story starts, so we can see where she’d be. In a much more powerful position, truthfully.)
But because this Nice Guy character is not at all necessary to the story, they have to come up with nice guy stuff for him to do. They get the mayor mad by having the governor tell her to not get her panties in a bunch – something no one has actually said directly to women since the 80s, I think, and then they have Nice Guy™️John Leguizamo encourage her, a forty something year old politician, to express her rage.
First, you’re asking me to believe that Toni Collette (age 50) doesn’t know how to express her rage?! Sorry, no. And then you’re asking me to believe that it takes an especially enlightened nice guy doctor to teach her how to break a plate? That she’s never been mad before in all her 50 years? Did this character miss the entire Trump administration? Believe me, she’s broken plates before – and she did not need her nice guy husband to release her somehow. But they surely added this scene so Nice Guy™️ had something to do that shows he’s not like the other guys.
It feels like this whole character arc is remedial feminism – like, “Hey fellas, did you know women could get angry too? Sometimes it takes a little while or some help from a friendly man to express it but those ladies have a lot of anger stored up if you know how to see it!”
Lesson for Me: If anyone ever insists you put a Nice Guy™️ in your work to balance it out, please break a plate and tell them to go fuck themselves. ⚡️
The other note I can practically hear from the execs is to appeal to the young people more. They beefed up the part of the Mayor’s teen daughter and created some of the dumbest conflict between mother and daughter because somehow they thought it would be interesting to have the teen express her anger on an Instagram-like platform. (Don’t they know kids don’t use Instagram? That’s a Millennial platform! Kids are maybe still on TikTok. Even I know that and I don’t even have kids.) So – they’re, like, trying to appeal to teens – because I guess the two working class teen girls weren’t enough? They needed a weird argument where the privileged teen is mad her mom doesn’t spend enough time with her? What sort of teens are those? I know kids these days are closer to their parents than my generation was – but still? Do these writers not know any teens? They are not generally wishing their parents were MORE on top of them.
Also, they’ve weirdly added a teen boy to this family, seemingly so they can explore the ripped from the headlines’ madness of Andrew Tate and have some conflict between these kids! Cause kids like conflict? And they like to see stuff they saw on TikTok on TV shows? I don’t know. Seems dumb.
Lesson for Me: Has someone asked you to appeal more to teens? Don’t just write your idea of a teen, go talk to some teens, see what actually appeals to them (it’s not necessarily characters their own age) – and if you’re going to include social media, please use what they actually use.
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Believe it or not, I’ve got another thousand words to say about what I’m learning from this TV show so I’m going to do this in two parts. Meanwhile, I’m in the process re-reading the book, just so I can be accurate about the differences.
Short version of my re-reading experience so far: The book is still good. The TV show is still not. More to follow.
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Filed under: American, TV | Tags: Brazil, bus, Cable Girls, Crash Landing on You, friendship, Germany, International TV, Italy, kindness, Norway, South Korea, Spain, travel, Turkey, TV, Velvet
For a while, I thought my interest in International Television was coming from a desire to escape, to be so far from my own world that I couldn’t even understand the language or the norms. That may still be a factor, but lately I’ve found that watching these things has revealed things about my own culture, the patterns that were underneath that were previously invisible to me because they were just the air I breathe.
Of course a TV program is not the culture itself. A TV show tends to reveal things about a culture that it wants to be seen doing that aligns with its values or pushes them in illuminating ways. American TV is not American culture but it is how we like to imagine ourselves – and there a lot of things we DON’T do in our TV that reveal as much as we do.
I’ve talked about Men Crying before. Men don’t cry much in American media and I thought it was just Spain where men cried beautifully on TV. Since I wrote the piece, I have also enjoyed men crying in Korea, Turkey, Poland, Norway and more. Some of the countries have a reputation for machismo – and yet seeing so many men crying for a wide range of reasons, I gotta say, we may have some of the most screwy tropes of masculinity going here in these United States. Given our recent (and current) political situation, this is probably not a surprise.
We also don’t do a lot of kindness and consideration in American media, I’ve realized. I’ve been watching the Korean mega-hit Crash Landing on You and the thing that moves me over and over about the main characters’ relationship is how considerate they are of one another. Sure, they save one another’s lives by shielding each other from gun shots, that’s pretty usual in American movies, but the stuff that touches me is, like, thinking about what their partner would like or what would make them more comfortable. The male lead, who is very tall, bought some groceries for his beloved and he put them on an empty shelf – but then squatted down to his partner’s height to place them where she could reach them. The grand gestures are very American but the small ones are things I can’t think of ever having seen in an American show or film.
There was a whole sequence of this character making coffee for her before they get together and it was almost erotic, the way the camera lingered on the process. First there was a scene of him searching for beans in the market, then boiling the water in a cauldron, grinding up the beans by hand, pouring it into the cone. It is not a short moment.We know he loves her by the way he makes that coffee. Which just points out for me the way American romantic leads will take a bullet for you, but make you a cup of coffee? Only if you’re both cops at the station’s machine and it happens to be convenient. American media loves a big gesture and cares very little for small acts of devotion. Because of my exposure to American media, I feel like it took me way longer than it should have for me to work out how important kindness might be in a partner. The most kindness an American partner might demonstrate is pulling a blanket over a sleeping person, which, you know, is nice – but not, like….exceptional.
Another thing I find myself moved by in a lot of International TV is friendship. It’s not true of every country’s TV I’ve seen (I’m looking at you, Norway and Germany) but a lot of countries have incredibly powerful groups of friends who are as devoted to one another as romantic partners. I first noticed it in Cable Girls but I’ve seen it in many Spanish programs since (Morocco: Love in the Time of War, Valeria, The Time Between, Velvet) as well as Brazilian shows (The Girls from Impanema, Maldivas) and of course Italy (My Brilliant Friend). You don’t see this kind of camaraderie in American Media – unless it’s a war film or a heist. Pretty much you can’t enjoy one another’s company unless you’re killing people or working together to steal things. American media has a lot going for it but there are a lot of gaps in how we represent relationships and given the influence of the American media on our culture (and other people’s culture). I wonder if the gaps are reflective of gaps in our actual relationships
I have a lot of great friends but they are scattered across the globe so I haven’t enjoyed the joy and power of a strong friend group in ages. I find myself very jealous of these groups on TV when I see them and wonder if our media had shown us more of them in your youth, if we might have held together more. Prioritizing one’s friends is a little unusual in these United States. That’s probably clear in the way we present to the world.
One of the most interesting things about traveling, like, real-in-person get on a bus in a foreign country type traveling, is how much it can reveal about one’s own culture. I have never felt so American as when I am far away from home. I have come to appreciate aspects of my culture that I might have previously never considered. It is fascinating to be identified as American, not because of my accent or appearance but because of some aspect of my behavior. The smiling will often give me away. Or some effusive expression of enthusiasm.
Watching a lot of international TV seems to have a similar effect as real life traveling can but on a broader cultural scale. I feel and understand my culture’s Americanness in a new way. I can see some things we’re missing and the impact that might be having on us, as a nation. Like, maybe if we weren’t such rugged individualists, we might value our friends more, we might cry more freely, we might show love, not just to our romantic partners but to the world at large in acts of service or devotion. I feel like it would be good for us as a nation – which might be good for the world, too. Like, if we stopped romanticizing men who shoot bullets (or take them for us) and leaned into men who make coffee and kindness, well, maybe we’d stop sending bullies to govern us. Or something like that. I know other cultures have their troubles and issues, too, and sometimes I can see those peeking out beyond their engaging works of television – but it’s the things that showcase our differences, our cultural contrasts that really teach me something. And maybe, someday, if I get to travel for real, someone can show me how to ride a bus in those places.
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Filed under: art, feminism, TV, writing | Tags: Dahlia Lithwick, feminism, Fleishman Is In Trouble, Lady Justice, Lizzy Caplan, people, The Patriarchy, Trojan Horse, women, women's stories
Probably because I have now written TWO pieces about Fleishman Is in Trouble, my friend sent me Lizzy Caplan’s interview where she talks about the show, and her role as Libby. My friend figured I’d be interested and he figured right! Lizzy Caplan explains that the writer (Taffy Brodesser – Akner) created the novel as a kind of Trojan horse, a way to trick people into reading/watching a story about a woman. (Tricksy! Didn’t I tell you?) Caplan says, “Libby discovers in our story – that people don’t seem to care about her stories if they’re written about a woman. They care about them if they’re written about a man. And so Taffy manages to kind of Trojan-horse the real story into this – you know, you think that you’re watching this story about a man getting divorced, figuring it out, dating apps, and you’re really not watching that story at all. “
And I am sympathetic to this problem. I write women’s stories and I can confirm, a lot of people aren’t interested. “People” may, in fact, need to be tricked into caring about women’s stories.
It’s these “people” that I am suddenly curious about. Who are these people who only read stories or novels if they are about men? Who are these people who will only watch shows if they are a man’s story? I doubt anyone would cop to being one of those people. Most people don’t like to think of themselves as being so biased. But I also can’t argue with the assertion that men’s stories are the preference of most people. Both men and women. It’s not shocking, given the media diet most people grew up on. For a very long time, the prevailing idea has been that girls will read stories about boys but boys won’t read stories about girls, so most stories had boy protagonists to have the widest appeal. (Thank you, The Patriarchy!) I’d hoped that might be changing but this sense of the “people” makes me fear that we’re no better than before.
The thing is, while I can’t argue that the majority of “people” seem to prefer stories about men, there are a lot of us who are very keen on women’s stories and always have been. Are we not people, too? If you went and hung out at, say, the Feminist Press – you’d find that pretty much all the people there would prefer a woman’s story. If you sat in the editorial office of Bust or Bitch or Ms magazine, I think you would choose a woman’s story first.
But some people still need to be tricked into reading or watching a woman’s story, I suppose. I was reading the first chapter of Dahlia Lithwick’s Lady Justice, which is full of stories about women in the law, and she talks about how a law professor wondered why she’d “waste time and credibility writing a ‘pink book about the law.’” That guy would clearly need to be tricked. But the people who made Lady Justice an instant bestseller didn’t require any tricking.
This is the part that feels key to me. Who are you trying to talk to? If it’s the guy who feels you’ll lose credibility by talking about women, yeah, you’re going to need to trick him into paying attention to women’s stories. I have nothing to say to that guy – and yes, maybe that DOES mean that “people” don’t want to listen to me – but also, that guy sounds like a dick. I don’t like to think of people as irredeemable but I can’t imagine what I could say to reach such a person. Nor do I want to.
I guess “people” are usually the population of the Patriarchy and of course the Patriarchy prefers stories about men and if you are trying to please the Patriarchy, you will have to resort to some trickery to be heard on the subject of women. I’d just as soon the Patriarchy went and fucked itself so I’m not so keen on the trick. I mean, if I were going to Trojan Horse the Patriarchy, I’d go all the way and hide our best feminist warriors in a wooden horse’s belly and bust out in the middle of the night to create havoc and burn the Patriarchy down. (Then dance in the moonlight over the dying embers with my sisters.) But “people” don’t like that.
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Filed under: age, art, feminism, Gen X, music, TV, writing | Tags: feminism, Fleishman Is In Trouble, Free Bird, Generation X, Millennial, Once in a Lifetime, Same as it ever was
This is going to be a regular thing now, isn’t it? This thing where Millennials play Gen X-ers now? This is going to happen a lot from here on out, I’m starting to realize.
I’d already watched seven episodes of Fleishman Is in Trouble but it hadn’t been bothering me much. I was too pre-occupied with how it compared to the book and what had changed and wondering if I felt differently about it as a TV show. But then, Lizzy Caplan’s character went to a barbeque in New Jersey and the scene was just chock full of model gorgeous young Millennials and then she walked past four Millennials (or maybe Gen Z?) men, playing “Free Bird” in the backyard and suddenly the generational stuff was all I could think about.
You all are familiar with the song “Free Bird,” right? It’s a Leonard Skynyrd song from 1973. For Gen X, “Free Bird” was a joke. A literal joke. You probably could not have gone to a concert in the 80s without some joker yelling, “Free Bird” to the band in any moment of silence. And it was very clear that no one actually WANTED to hear “Free Bird.” When a band got tired of this joke and learned “Free Bird” so they could play it when someone shouted it, people laughed after the first few chords but only a sadistic band would play the whole thing. And I will confess something to you. I understood this as a joke long before I ever actually heard the song “Free Bird.” I was really surprised when I finally listened to it, honestly. “That’s Free Bird?!?” It was not at all what I expected. I was imagining an epic like “Stairway to Heaven” and it was this thin, maudlin thing instead.
Anyway, to see a bunch of young people singing “Free Bird” at a backyard barbeque in a completely unironic and earnest manner really confused me. People like this song now? This character is supposed to be 41 in the show, so she is technically an elder Millennial as the eldest Millennials are turning 42 this year but the show is set in 2016, so she’s actually Gen X, just like in the book. This Gen X character is having a fully earnest moment with the joke song of the 80s? What the hell is going on?!
So I looked up Taffy Brodesser-Akner, the writer of this book, as well as the showrunner of the show and yes, she’s Gen X. She’s 47. But – and this will be significant for cultural signifiers – she spent a lot of her youth in an Hasidic community. My girl probably had very little exposure to Gen X youth culture in the moment – which may be how this “Free Bird” situation occurred. And it may be why there’s a lot of confusing cultural and generational issues in this show. I suspect the delay in entering the pop cultural landscape might mean that she may be more Millennial than Gen X in her cultural influences.
Like, she’s telling a Gen X story about aging using iconic Millennial actors. Jesse Eisenberg is the epitome of a Millennial leading man. I’m not sure you could get a more representative actor for his generation. Maybe Daniel Radcliffe? But for American Millennial angst? Top of the list. I saw a Tweet about this show suggesting that Jesse Eisenberg grappling with middle age meant that the Tweeter, too, was facing down middle age. It becomes a Millennial middle age story in a Gen X outfit. I found the whole experience disorienting.
I wasn’t crazy about the book, as you may recall. But I hated the TV show. I’m not sure why I felt compelled to watch it. Maybe because a lot of the reviews I read suggested the TV show was better than the book? Regardless, I stuck with it, maybe just out of morbid curiosity. I suppose the curiosity was largely about my own response to it. Why do I hate it so much? And so much more than the book, too? Why am I so alienated by a show by someone, who is more or less my age, taking place in the city I live in? Shouldn’t I relate to this somehow? Is it just the bizarre intermeshing of Millennial actors and styles with Gen X dialogue and t-shirts? I don’t think so.
One of the major differences between the book and the show is that we see a lot more of the narrator in the show. We get her story. We understand that the divorce she’s telling us about is just a way for her to understand her own dissatisfaction with her own life. And the thing of it is, she’s roiling with dissatisfaction. Like a lot of recent Gen X mother narratives, she’s trying out abandoning her family and fascinated with another woman who has abandoned hers. But, like, of course she’s dissatisfied. She gave up her writing career to become a stay at home mom. And when people say to her, “Maybe you should go back to work?” She somehow doesn’t think that’s the answer. It’s a whole crisis about how she doesn’t know who she is anymore but like – she’s changed her name, given up her career and moved to the suburbs. It’s not rocket science.
And weirdly, the TV show is even further removed from the feminist movement than the book was. There’s a reference to “the Future is Female” t-shirts but no one wants to talk about it. The narrator not only works at a men’s magazine (as she did in the book) but also idealizes a super sexist male writer and often re-reads his super sexist books for fun. In the journey from the book to the screen, she’s become one of those women who only like and hang out with men. (More about this later.) There is no sisterhood, only shared trauma. (If this was true for the character in the book, it wasn’t obvious.)
And everyone is just so shockingly unaware of their privilege. But also, they’re aching for meaning and searching for it desperately. The show seems to be trying to say something about “middle age” and “getting older” for our generation and yet I can relate to none of it. The narrator doesn’t recognize herself, doesn’t know who she is anymore and instead of doing stuff to help her find herself, she just shrugs and says, “I guess that’s what getting old means!”
No. Sorry. No. It’s the choices you made, you silly rabbit. You gave up your last name (as does every married woman in this show, another generational disconnect – Millennial women are statistically much more likely to do that. Such a weird backslide. And also weird coming from a writer with a hyphenated name.) You gave up your career. Like – what is this? 1955? Are you struggling with the “problem that has no name”? Read some feminist theory, goddamnit!
I guess that’s the issue. Like, it’s 2022. It should not be a mystery why a woman who has surrendered every aspect of herself (her name, her city, her work, her identity) might not be happy living with shallow people in the suburbs. It’s not some existential conundrum. Like, of course. Of fucking course. Put down the Philip Roth novels and go get yourself some Betty Friedan or Simone de Beauvoir or, like, Liz Plank? Maybe some Virginia Woolf if you’re stuck on literary fiction.
It reminds me of this woman I knew in my touring days who confessed to us (the other women on the tour) that she’d never really liked other women. She’d always hung out exclusively with men and allied herself with only men. Eight months into the tour, she got pretty sick of the men’s shit and realized we, the other women on the tour, might be some support, hence the confession. It is a strategic choice to ally with men and not a crazy one in any business run by men (which is most of them). But sooner or later you’re going to run into some sexism that those men will either be unwilling to look at or deal with and you’re going to need some women to help you. This TV show and book seem like a dramatization of that moment and but with no awareness that that is what’s happening. If any of the women in this show had had just one good woman friend, it would have made a world of difference.
This show is hard for me to sympathize with because I have many women friends I can turn to and have turned to all these years. I have been in the feminist movement this whole time. I don’t need to try and figure out who I am now because I haven’t made any choices outside of my own integrity and intention. I haven’t surrendered any of myself and I have trouble relating to these characters who just pushed themselves aside and called it a day. But I guess this is true for a lot of people who follow more conventional paths. Maybe you do find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife and you may ask yourself, “How did I get here?” In the case of the people in this book, I can guess how you got there.
But then, this reference to Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime” might just go right over the head of the writer of this book/show because it was a hit in 1980 and a Gen X cultural touchstone. Come to think of it, it’s probably the song the band at that barbeque ought to have been playing instead of “Free Bird.” “Free Bird”?! Did they really use “Free Bird”? Was “Once in a Lifetime” too on the nose? I mean, we’ve known since we were kids that adults might be struggling with their beautiful houses and beautiful wives and the large automobiles or even the shotgun shacks. We’ve heard that it was the “same as it ever was” since 1980. We can even do the dance that goes along with it. “Once in a Lifetime” does a better job of summing up this show than the show does. Maybe that’s why they didn’t use it. Or the rights were just too expensive and so they just went with “Free Bird,” joke or no joke. In this case, it wasn’t funny.
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Filed under: art, class, TV, writing | Tags: Elisabeth of Austria, Hamilton, International TV, mythologization, Royals, shoes, The Poor, TV
It was the shoes that made me suspicious. It was either the kind of story that was true and became the central story of this woman’s history OR it was entirely invented. So I went looking for some historical context for The Empress, a German TV show about Elisabeth of Austria. I learned a lot, though found nothing about the shoes. I’ll come back to them later.
The show is delightful; I’m not going to lie. It is a fun romantic period drama full of court intrigue and historical detail. I am enjoying it very much. But I have learned that it has very little to do with this woman’s actual life and I’m curious about the motivation for the differences. In essence, the writers have made a beautiful historical fantasy. What if Old Time Europeans were like we WANT to be, but in prettier costumes? It’s an intriguing mythologization, really.
What if The Empress were a headstrong iconoclast way ahead of her time who speaks her mind and shoots guns and doesn’t do what she’s told? What if she’s a poet and doesn’t care about her appearance like everyone expects her to? What if she’s loads of fun and really nice and her only flaw is that she doesn’t know how to suppress her true self? What if she marries the emperor out of love not because she wants to marry up? Of course we love her! These are our values!
But – it turns out – while she was really smart and did read a lot of books and she did write poems, she was VERY much concerned with her appearance. She spent two hours having her hair brushed every day. To wash it (every 3 weeks) took the entire day. She was obsessed with “tight-lacing” her corset, such that many people were worried about what she was doing to herself. (Unlike the show, where she is apparently shocked to be laced into a corset and would prefer to go without.) All historical accounts suggest that she was unusually concerned about her appearance – even for an empress. She was apparently so fat-phobic that she made her daughter afraid of Queen Victoria when she met her.
This is not someone who might suggest rolling around in a muddy stream with her beloved. I mean, it’s an enjoyable scene in the TV show – but wildly improbable. And the central premise of Emperor Franz Josepf and Princess Elisabeth just falling in love with each other because of their personalities is very fun in the show but not at all what happened. Yes, her older sister was supposed to be the one to marry him (like in the show) but he spotted the fifteen year old Elisabeth and insisted on her instead. So he looked at the 18 year old sister and went….”Ah, no. I’ll have the child, please!”
I can see why all these choices were made. We want a love story, not a problematic age gap! We want a ballsy heroine not a vain clotheshorse! We want a woman ahead of her time not one who embodied many of the complications of her own moment. These choices are made for the TV show to please us, to give us a heroine we’ll really root for.
Which brings me to the shoes.
In the fifth episode, they take the Empress out to see the people and she breaks protocol and goes into the foundry to see a little urchin she saw disappear there. The Empress sees the state of the child’s feet and gives the child her own shoes.
What a saint! This rich lady really cares about the poor! If only anyone would listen to her instead of just admiring her beauty! It’s just what we want in a leader! Someone who’d give away the very shoes upon her feet! Wow!
But I cannot find even the barest mention of Elisabeth giving even the smallest shit about the poor. This is not to say it wasn’t so. I haven’t read any of the books about her and I have seen no primary resources – so maybe in those, she cares nothing for her possessions and really sees poor people. There ARE stories about her caring for veterans and people with mental illness later in her life, and there’s one kind of performative Christmas ritual for poor children. But that’s all I could find. I think this collection of extra-historical things in the show are best read as a contemporary fantasy – one in which a wealthy princess is really a compassionate hero of the people, one who really gets it and would forsake her own comfort for the needs of the poor. She’s an Austrian Princess Diana but even more generous!
She’s so ahead of her times she’s even ahead of ours in her treatment of the poor! She’s a hella compassionate royal!
But of course – the actual Elisabeth was raised as royalty. She was a princess. She would have been fed on the same view of the poor as everyone else in her class. She wouldn’t necessarily have had an especially common touch. If she did, nothing I read about her suggested it.
I think this is a contemporary fantasy as well – that all it takes to change things is one nice rich lady who sees that the poor are people too. And I’m not saying there aren’t nice rich ladies like this – I know some personally, in fact. But they rarely manage to move the needle in the way that shows like this imagine they would. In the end, this show would seem to have very little in common with the actual lives of these people. Instead, they are transformed into a comforting myth, a revised history where someone somewhere once had an enlightened leader, sort of, or would have, if they’d let a woman lead.
We do this all the time. Shakespeare did it in the history plays, turning actual historical figures into heroes and villains – with hints of truth. Hamilton is the myth created by a musical theatre nerd based on a financial writer fan boy’s mythologization of an American founder. It is normal to do this, for our entertainment. I’ve done it myself in writing about Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for president. I mythologized her so hard, I gave her an apotheosis.
But I just feel like I’m ready for a much more complicated relationship with historical figures. The way Elisabeth actually was probably isn’t like-able – but it is interesting! It is complex and weird. (While she had her hair combed for two hours a day, she learned to speak Greek! That is some multi-tasking!) I also feel like it’s important to track what story a work is trying to tell through their mythologization of an historical person. I think, perhaps, creating a fantasy of a compassionate, forthright, rebellious, adventurous Empress gives us hope for a world where such women could find leadership now. It is serving a purpose. It’s why the whole enterprise is enjoyable even if it’s hilariously inaccurate. Maybe we’re all just longing to watch our leaders give away their shoes.
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Filed under: pandemic, TV | Tags: A Very Secret Service, Always a Witch, Babylon Berlin, Brazilian TV, Call My Agent, Charité, Colombian TV, France, French TV, German TV, House of Flowers, international, Mexican TV, No One's Looking, pandemic, Tamponné, The Bonfire of Destiny, The Five Juanas, The Girls from Impanema, TV
Last week, I took us (mostly) to Spain, Italy and Turkey.
And now it’s on to France, Germany, Mexico, Colombia, Brazil and beyond.
France gave me some quality TV and Netflix gave them all silly titles in English. (I get the sense that the folks at Netflix thinks Americans are dumb and need dumb titles.) One of the few shows set in contemporary times that compelled me was Call My Agent which I really wish they’d called its French title, Ten Percent (Dix Pour Cent). But no one asked me. So. One of the benefits of watching this show full of French stars was that when one of them appeared in the next French show I watched, I was very excited.
That show was The Bonfire of Destiny (French title: Le Bazar de la Charité – The Charity Bazaar – which is much more descriptive as this is an important setting/event of the show). It was harrowing at first, since it begins with a lot of people dying in a really terrible fire (at a Charity Bazaar!) but then becomes a really intriguing look at class and gender and culture in 1897. It felt like an adaptation of a classic novel from the old days that never actually existed, with some really complicated romances. There is, I have discovered a Turkish version of this show and now I’d very much like to see that, too.
Then, there was the cold war era comedy delight called A Very Secret Service (in French: Au Service de la France – In Service of France, once again, a much better title!) It’s got fewer women in it than I prefer but its bureaucratic idiocy made me laugh a lot. I sing to myself a line from it occasionally for no good reason except that I enjoyed it so thoroughly – “Tamponné. Double Tamponné.” (Stamped. Double Stamped.) In a giant global crisis, they are most flummoxed by which stamp to use for a form. It was a delight. A sexist delight but I didn’t care. And you know when I don’t care it must have been worth it.
On to Germany!
I started with Babylon Berlin last year. I’d avoided it for a while because I was afraid it was going to be too violent for me and it was too violent for me but my brother was living in Berlin at the time and he liked it so I watched it anyway and I wasn’t sorry, even if I did have to cover my eyes and ears more often than I’d like. I’d been curious about the Weimar era in Germany pretty much ever since Trump got elected so this show successfully brought me into those pre-Nazi times and helped me understand a few things. Also – a lot happens! Stylishly!
I also got hooked into Charité which is a series about a hospital in Berlin, based on historical people and events. The first season takes place in 1887 and deals with doctors’ attempts to cure and/or vaccinate against tuberculosis and diphtheria. It is a very interesting moment in time where some doctors are pushing for cleaning and sterilizing the hospital and the nurses and other doctors are skeptical. It is a fight that has a clear winner but in these times, is interesting to watch play out. Their second season takes place during World War Two and I have to say, watching a World War II show from a German hospital staff’s perspectives was hard but illuminating. Watching well meaning doctors look away from eugenics happening right in front of them or claiming that the harrowing tales of their government that made it to their ears was all propaganda. I guess I understand now how folks like that fooled themselves. I’m seeing people do that now.
But I haven’t just watched shows from Europe.
I’ve told you about Mexico’s House of Flowers already and I’m in the middle of The Five Juanas, which is very silly, soapy and kind of trashy. It’s about five women (named Juana! Surprise!) who discover they all have the same birthmark and therefore the same father. Ridiculous though it may be, it is super interesting to realize that I can sometimes distinguish between accents in Spanish now, after having watched so much TV from several places. I can hear that the Juana from Colombia sounds very different than the one who grew up in Spain, who sounds different from the three from Mexico.
There was a lot of pleasure in Colombia’s Always a Witch, even though its premise was off the charts problematic. (A slave woman in love with the master’s son is set to be burned at the stake for witchcraft but is saved by going to the future where she spends all her time trying to get back to her boyfriend. {Yes, the boyfriend whose family owned her.} Oh, Honey, no.) But the music was great and the witchery was fun and they realized their mistake by the second season but it may have been too late. I’m pretty sure it’s been cancelled. It is fascinating to watch a show screw itself up so badly.
On to Brazil!
One of the most unique shows I’ve seen on this kick I’ve been on was No One’s Looking which is about these bureaucratic angels who start to break the rules. It is an odd odd world and I admired the quirky design a lot. My favorite part may have been when the angel middle manager takes his team to go see some “stand up comedy” and it turns out to be a very sincere motivational speaker talking about angels. The angels watch from the balcony laughing their wings off. If you’ve ever wanted to watch office worker angels dance, take drugs and generally explore being human, this show is for you.
The other Brazilian show was called The Girls from Impanema (in English – in Portuguese it’s Coisa Mas Linda, which is a line from the song “Girl from Impanema”). This show falls in line with my usual interests by being the story of women at work, trying to make things work. The story is of a woman whose husband leaves her and so she starts a club and becomes the center of the Bossa Nova scene in Rio. I almost quit watching the show at the top of season two when they brought back her husband and he took over her club. And I guess this is a spoiler but I know I would have appreciated knowing that she and her girls would turn it around and send him packing again within a couple of episodes. The women in the show are all pretty amazing and do remarkable things. The biggest flaw is that the writers seem to subscribe to the “All Men Are Trash” school where even the good ones do some very bad things. I found all that pretty tiresome but the music and the cool dames kept me going. You’ll want to get out your bossa nova albums after this show.
Other shows I tried:
The Egyptian version of Gran Hotel (Hmmm. Nope. Didn’t do it for me.)
I tried to watch Cathedral by the Sea (Spanish) but if you start your show with repeated sexual assaults, I’m out.
I didn’t get more than 15 minutes into Bolivar (Colombian) or The Last Bastion (Peruvian).
The first episode of Paquita Salas (Spanish) had a quality. But I feel like I’ve seen that quality elsewhere and better in other shows.
There are a lot of cultural holes in my watching that I would like to fill in. I feel like I’m really missing a lot of good things from Asia and Africa. I tried Giri/Haji – which was just too macho for me and I’m interested in Kingdom but just can’t ever seem to face it. Anyone who can point me toward the Korean feminist period drama section of the video store will get a big thank you.
I realize, too, that I am constrained by the limitations of the streaming services. They only show me what THEY want to show me. I’m subject to Netflix’s tastes as much as my own. I may have to investigate alternative international streaming services. After all, Netflix has cancelled a lot of my favorite shows – and removed some great ones from the platform. (Gran Hotel, The Time in Between and I never got to see it but I heard The Ministry of Time was amazing.) I did just read that Netflix has started to open up to the African film and TV world so I’m looking forward to seeing what emerges there.
If you have international favs, please tell me about them, especially if they’re period dramas about women working. I may have exhausted Netflix’s Spanish TV resources and Amazon’s Pantaya service tends to not have English subtitles so I gotta branch out! Or get better at Spanish! At some point, I suppose I’ll want to watch more than a couple of shows in English again but for the moment, I’m just much more interested in the worlds far away from here.
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Filed under: American, pandemic, TV | Tags: 45 rpm, An Astrological Guide to Broken Hearts, Cable Girls, Daniel Lundh, Generazione 56k, Gran Hotel, Italian TV, Italy, Jaguar, Larbi, Luna Park, Money Heist, Morocco: Love in the Time of War, Spain, Spanish TV, The Club, The Cook of Castamar, The Neighbor, The Time Between, Turkey, Turkish TV, TV, Valeria, Velvet, Zero
My guess is that international TV got its hooks into me these last two years because there’s something about getting so far away from the world I live in, they don’t even speak my language. Or maybe the extra “labor” of reading subtitles kept my attention when it was inclined to wander? Or maybe it’s like traveling in a period where I mostly just saw the kitchen table? Whatever the reason, the various streaming platforms have afforded me the opportunity of diving into international TV shows galore. Just in case you’ve been wanting to branch out, I thought I should write up some of my favorites and bring you into my international orbit.
I’m going to do this in a Two Part series as there’s, um, a lot here and I think it might be too much to sort through in one sitting. This first part features: Spain, Italy and Turkey
As you may know if you’re a regular reader of the blog, this journey began with Spanish TV shows. I’ve talked already about Cable Girls, The Time Between, Gran Hotel, 45 rpm and Velvet. I believe I’ve also made mention of High Seas (a show on which there is the world’s fastest vaccine development). Missing from this list are:
The Cook of Castamar – which was an absolutely lush period drama set in an estate in the 18th Century. It features an upstairs/downstairs love story, a few Dangerous Liason-y sort of love affairs and some royal batshittery. The ending is really abrupt, like they ran out of film and just had to hurry up and wrap it up. But other than that, this was one of my favorite shows of the year. The cinematography was like a Vermeer painting sometimes and the performances were extraordinary.
Morroco: Love in the Time of War which takes place at a military hospital in Morocco in the 1920s. It is full of strong lady nurses in crisp white uniforms having complicated affairs with handsome doctors. It also features some really impressive racism – and I don’t mean it’s good, of course, just kind of fascinating in its awfulness. I get the sense that Spain hasn’t quite grappled with these things yet. My favorite part of this show is something I’ve nearly written about multiple times but just never found the way. It’s this love affair one of the Spanish nurses has with the Moroccan handy man. Everyone on the show is baffled by it. They just cannot understand what she’s doing with the uneducated Moroccan guy! And they never mention the fact that he’s just preternaturally handsome. Like, the man is an Adonis and not one single character is like: “Listen, I get it. He’s nice to look at. But – you should keep in mind he can’t read your letters.” The whole scenario made me laugh a lot. I mean – look at this guy:
Oh, and Jaguar – a period drama about a ring of spies who are trying to bring down Nazis who are harboring each other and helping one another escape in Franco’s Spain. It features the stars from Cable Girls, Velvet and 45 rpm so of course I had to watch it, even though there aren’t enough women in it. It’s a rough ride. But spies! Fighting Nazis! In the middle of a fascist regime!
One of the few shows I’ve watched that ISN’T a period drama is The Neighbor, which is a very boring title for a very eccentric and fun show. It’s a superhero story – but the man given the superpowers is kind of a shithead and he cannot figure out how to use his powers appropriately. The show goes to some extremely unexpected places. Never once have I been able to predict where it was going. It’s also very funny in a delightfully wacky way. I can’t figure out how to tell you the best parts of it without spoiling it, so, you know, watch a trailer.
Other contemporary Spanish shows I’ve watched:
Valeria which is a sort of contemporary Spanish Sex and the City. Watch it if you want to watch Spanish millennials pretend to have sex with each other in colorful apartments and to get a glimpse of some good looking Spanish Tortillas.
Money Heist which features actors from many other shows I’ve watched so though I tried to resist it (as it seemed like it was going to have too many guns and explosions for me) ultimately I succumbed and joined the rest of the world in being mildly obsessed with this show for a while. If there’s a Spanish show you’ve heard of, it’s probably this one. It has a dumb name in English, but its Spanish title translates to The House of Paper, which is much better. I only just finished watching it so I’m still digesting. I may have more to say about it later.
I believe I’ve already told you everything about the Italian shows I’ve watched: Zero, Luna Park, Luna Nera and Generazione 56k. I also watched An Astrological Guide to Broken Hearts which was a charming contemporary love/work story.
One of my favorite shows of anywhere has been The Club, a show from Turkey that Netflix sold me on almost as soon as it came out. Sometimes they really nail it. (Most times they don’t. I find it hilarious how often they suggest shows I have already watched. Like, you know I watched that already. I watched it HERE!) Anyway – The Club mostly takes place in and around a nightclub in Istanbul, so it’s a show biz show and you know I’m a sucker for a show biz show. But it’s also about this period in the 50s where Nationalism and racism were on the rise. The Turkish Business Council seems to be gaining in power and targeting anyone who isn’t Muslim. Living in a country where Muslims are often the targets as I do, I found it very interesting to see these power dynamics reversed. One thing I learned from reading about it that wasn’t obvious in watching it, is that there are several languages spoken in the series. To my ear, it all just blended together, so I had no ideas folks were identifying themselves by their language sometimes. There’s one moment where a character speaks Greek to another who isn’t actually Greek and it condemns him. I’d love to be able to understand at least one of the languages spoken to catch some of these distinctions (or to have it noted in the titles which language was being spoken) but it’s just as thrilling with the subtitles as they were. And the musical numbers are both good theatre and good music. The story is complicated and I didn’t always trust where they were going but it made for some really interesting questions about redemption and loss.
The Club was so good, I instantly searched for other Turkish shows or movies but failed to find anything yet.
We’ll leave it here with my new taste for Turkish TV simmering.
Part Two will feature shows from France, Germany, Mexico, Colombia, Brazil and beyond.
This post was brought to you by my patrons on Patreon.
They also bring you the podcast version of the blog.
It’s also called Songs for the Struggling Artist
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Every podcast features a song at the end. Some of those songs are on Spotify, my website, ReverbNation, Deezer and iTunes
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Filed under: age, Gen X, technology, TV, writing | Tags: Acting, actor, ageism, Generation X, Logo, mermaid, PDF, Sutton Foster, TV, wood nymph
Because I’d read some interesting criticism/praise of the TV show, Younger, I decided to check it out, despite it NOT being a Spanish TV show. (Truthfully, I have expanded into TV from France, Colombia, Italy, Germany, Brazil and Turkey at this point, so it’s more like: despite it not being an international period drama.) The premise is that a 40-ish year old woman pretends to be 26 so she can get a job in publishing. She’s played by Sutton Foster who is, according to Wikipedia, currently 46 and was not quite 40 when the show started. In other words, Sutton Foster and her character are definitely Gen X.
The show’s premise is basically one big set up for “She’s so old and doesn’t get it!” jokes – with the occasional “These crazy kids today do WHAT crazy stuff?” I know for sure that this show was not made for me. Or any Gen X women, really. It’s a show called Younger for younger people and that’s probably why I didn’t have much interest in it when it came out. But the stuff I read said that it had an interesting take on ageism and feminism so I thought, sure! Somehow I managed to get through a few episodes – weathering the jokes about this character (her name is Liza) not knowing anything about hashtags or how to Tweet. (Twitter, founded by a Gen X man, btw.) But then I watched an episode that made me exclaim, “Get the hell out of here.” While my mouth hung open in astonishment for a while.
Liza (the forty year old pretending to be twenty six) calls up one of her friends from her book club in her previous 40 year old life and Liza tells her she’s going to send her a PDF. And this 40 year old woman from the suburbs in New Jersey (which is not an island with no access to civilization, btw) says “What’s a PDF?” Get the fuck out of here. Actually, I watched this scene again to pull an image for this piece and it turns out she doesn’t actually say “What’s a PDF?” she says, “A what?” So I remembered the subtext, rather than the actual line. But still – it is heavily implied that she does not know what Liza is talking about.
Find me a forty year old woman who has lived in a privileged place in America who does not know what a PDF is. I’ll wait.
It’s going to take you a while.
Good luck.
Like – PDFs have been around for as long as the younger Millennials have been alive. It made me think of this Old 97s song “Longer than You’ve Been Alive.” Come on. “What’s a PDF?””A what?”
It is just such a stupid joke and I can’t understand why the Gen X-ers on the show didn’t speak up about it. It’s like someone asking “What’s an email?”
Like, sure, there are people who don’t know but you’d be hard pressed to find one in our society. It’s just part of the fabric of ANYONE’s life here. Even the folks who don’t have access to a computer or the internet.
“A what?” I do not know how that actor said that line with a straight face! Acting! Obviously. I applaud her, really, because you wanna guess how that actor probably got the text for her audition for that part from her agent? Yes, my friends, she surely got those lines on a PDF. She went in and auditioned for a part where she had to say “A what?” about a PDF, with the assistance of a PDF. Her contract was probably a PDF. Her first copy of the script for the episode once she got the job was probably a PDF. I’m saying this woman did an amazing job pretending she didn’t know what something she uses on a daily basis is. It’s like someone saying “What’s a fork?” It makes sense if it’s coming from a mermaid or an alien from space but for the most part everyone knows what a fork is. So my hat is off to the actor. And honestly, in watching it again, I can see how she’s playing it a little ambiguously, as if she just didn’t hear it, or got distracted. It’s subtle but I bet that’s how she got through it. So kudos to her. But the writers of this show…come on, people. Come on. Were there no Gen X-ers among you? Must be no.
Now – is this important? Not really no. It’s just a dumb ageist joke. But something about it really gets under my skin and I don’t think it’s just how lazy it is – (that good old “old people just don’t understand computers” trope). It might, in part, be the lack of specificity that gets me mad – that 40s means old and old means dumb about tech. But so much of this way of thinking is garbage. The head of the team that invented the PDF is 81 years old. I heard a podcast, recorded via Zoom, in which a 90- something actor talked about looking up his fellow actors on IMDB. I bet he gets his sides on PDFs, too. The old people and computers trope is dumb for everyone but especially for Gen X. Gen X grew up with computers. And not these user-friendly point and click computers either. I learned Logo in school. I spent hours trying to tell a little triangle, called a turtle, where to go. The notion that someone in my generation would be flummoxed by a PDF is just ridiculous. But even if it wasn’t a Gen X suburban mom, if it were a Baby Boomer suburban mom, it would be just as ridiculous. Our world runs on PDFs now. Anyone with access to the internet deals with PDFs on a daily basis – for birth certificates, for medical records, for taxes, for literally every thing you need a document for. It’s a stupid joke – but also an absurd one.
Was there a time in my life that I didn’t know about PDFs? Yes. Before they existed. There was a world where none of us knew what a PDF was because they were not invented. But this show is not a time travel show and does not take place in 1990. And while we’re at it, who are those Gen X suburban moms on TV? Like, I’ve never seen anyone my age like the suburban moms of TV. It’s like a type that only exists in film and TV and somehow remains the same regardless of the people in the roles. Have these women ever existed? Are they just figments of the TV imagination? Like maybe since they’re not really real real people, they live in a world that has no PDFs – so this mythical suburban mom is not so weird. It’s like if a wood nymph asked what a PDF was. We’d have a lot to explain to her. Because she’s from another (fictional) world.
Maybe Middle Aged “Suburban Moms” are like that. When they show up on TV or in news stories, we can just think, “Oh those fictional characters again! Like a mermaid! You never know what they’re going to say!”
Do I know people who live in the suburbs? Sure. Are some of them moms? Yep. But no one is like this weird beige archetype. The Gen X moms I know are more like Pamela Aldon’s character in Better Things. Complicated. Cool. And they sure as hell know what a PDF is.
I’ve been thinking and talking about PDFs for days since I saw this episode of Younger. I know more about PDFs than I ever did before. I got nostalgic about the days when you had to update Adobe Reader seemingly every time you opened a PDF. I watched a very compelling story about the early days of PDFs. I learned some of the history. If someone asks me, “What’s a PDF?” They will not only get an incredulous face but also an earful. But then again, anyone who doesn’t know is probably something like a mermaid and it’s going to take a lot of explaining to get them up to speed. There’s this thing called a computer…
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Filed under: art, music, TV, Witchery | Tags: Italian, Italy, Jovanotti, Luna Nera, Luna Park, music, Netflix, Penso Positivo, radio, RAI, resources, Silvio Berlusconi, TV
Back in 1993, I got my first passport and moved to Italy for my junior year abroad. One of the things I was most excited about was getting to see the culture and art of an entirely different country. The internet was in its infancy then, so going places was really the only way to see what other nations were making. I was hungry for Italian pop, Italian TV, Italian cinema, Italian theatre, whatever I could get my eyes and ears on. I understood, too, that watching and listening to these things would help me improve my language skills. I listened to the radio but the pop music was pretty lousy. I watched TV and the shows all seemed to be tacky variety shows full of show girls. I went to Italian theatre and mostly found translations of works in English. Only the cinema managed to deliver high quality contemporary art.
Meanwhile, I was studying the old stuff, too. I learned incisione (metal engraving), solfeggio and read incredible works from Italy’s past. In 1993, the great works were the old works, the Renaissance works, the great art of the past. I don’t regret a moment of it. I’m built for the classics.
However, I was baffled by how a people who were raised at the feet of such classical greatness could be inclined to make such trashy art. I found it very confusing.
Recently, I learned a lot more about Berlusconi, who was not yet in charge of the country when I moved there, but who WAS in charge of the media. I suspect there were a lot of tits on TV because Berlusconi was a fan of tits on TV. There was a lot of trashy pop on the radio because Berlusconi was pretty trashy and he had tremendous broadcast power. I mean, imagine if Trump were in charge of every single TV station and most of the radio. Now imagine what he’d put on those stations. That’s what Italian media was like in 1993 – 1994.
I’ve been thinking about this because I’ve been watching Italian TV shows lately and they are a world away from what I saw while I was there. They are artful. They are thoughtful and some of them feature really good Italian pop, which I’m delighted to discover has also radically improved in the last few decades.
I watched my first current Italian show by accident. Honestly, if I’d known it was Italian at the start, I’d have been a little wary. However, Netflix has worked out that I love a show about witches so it was selling me pretty hard on Luna Nera, which featured gorgeous production design in the trailer and was very thoroughly witchy. As I watched the opening scene, I realized that the sound was not matching their mouths and so I clicked around to see about turning off dubbing and – ecco – non ci credo – it’s in Italian. And it was great. It’s like a medieval Charmed with a power-hungry, witch-hunting bishop and a witch-hunting club. The design was glorious. The performances were excellent. The premise and the writing were very engaging. They left us on a cliffhanger and there is still no word on a Season 2. It may be cancelled? Or not? Anyway, I would like to see more Italian witches.
And then my friend wrote an article about another Italian show – one I’d put on my list and forgotten about – called Zero. You should, for sure, read her piece about it. It places the show in context and lays out why it’s so innovative. I’m generally a sucker for a show where someone has powers of some kind but the fact that this one is also about the real estate take-over of a poor immigrant community makes it all the more powerful. There were immigrants from Senegal living in Florence when I was there but most Italians and tourists behaved as though they weren’t there, as if they were invisible – except when it rained and you needed an umbrella, as they were often on the street selling them then. It’s telling that this show is about a young Senegalese immigrant who can turn invisible.
I feel like this show makes the best argument for why diversity in the arts matters. It’s not just that we get to see a story about a community we rarely get to hear stories about – but the immigrant influence feeds all strands of the artistic experience. The Italian music in the show seems to have an African influence and it makes for the best Italian pop I’ve ever heard. Also, it’s just really well done. Beautifully shot, engagingly written, surprising and exciting. This show, by the way, also ended in a cliffhanger and is also, as yet, not renewed.
And now that Netflix has my Italian TV number, they sold me immediately on Luna Park, which just came out. It’s a fun period drama that owes a lot to Italy’s Fellini past. I mean, you can’t watch a show about a carnival in Italy and not think of La Strada or even I Clown. I enjoyed so much of this show (aside from the contemporary music moments. Whyyyyyyyyy?!?!) and could feel my language skills seeping back into my brain as I watched my third Italian drama. And then, for the third time, the show ended on a cliffhanger, almost literally. The show only just came out, so it has not been renewed. But it’s good, you know? All three of these shows that Netflix has made happen, are good. They’re not in the least bit trashy. There were some boobs but they were in good taste, in that they weren’t on showgirls and they made sense in context.
So why am I telling you about all this Italian media? Do I just want you to watch these shows so Netflix will make more? Sure. Maybe. But really, I am not here to pat Netflix on the back. (This is definitely not the moment for that.) The cultural skill was clearly already there in the people who made these shows. Italian cinema is evidence of that. Italian artists know how to tell a story – it’s just that the media landscape was controlled by a buffoon and so they got buffoon art, for years. They needed the resources to make better art. Diversity matters, not just in the stories we tell but in the places we get to tell them. When you only have RAI 1, 2, 3 and so on and they’re all the same network, run by the same guy, it is very hard to get any interesting variety going.
I’m thrilled by the way Netflix is opening storytelling doors for Italian TV but I also worry, that as time goes by and Netflix begins to dominate the world’s watching experience, will it also lose the incredible global diversity that it’s currently tapping into? Will it become one of only a handful of places we can watch something? Will they control the narrative? Will they cancel all these shows that they left on a cliffhanger? And will they make any more or is it just these three and then they’re done investing in Italy?
Italian pop was terrible in the 90s in part because it was controlled by the same powers that controlled TV. It created a same-i-ness of sound and quality. Italians in the 90s mostly listened to pop in English. My Italian friends found my affection for Italian rapper, Jovanotti, kind of hilarious. I can still sing/rap along to large swaths of “Penso, Positivo” and “Serenata Rap.” So you know, I enjoyed some Italian pop but we couldn’t call it good, really. Now, here in the US, we have just three record companies and so much of American pop sounds the same. I fear we are headed toward an Italy in the 90s kind of world and I’m here to tell you that was not a good time for music or TV there.
But it is an exciting time for Italian TV and music now – diversity is coming in and making things cool and interesting. Though, there are way too many cliffhangers.
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Songs for the Struggling Artist 