Bear Market

Do you remember when The Sopranos dropped? I mean, I don’t really, I was pretty freakin’ young, and I’m not even sure if my family had HBO at that point. But the general consensus at the time was that American television would never be the same. Liberated from the strictures of FCC content rules – can’t have the smol beans seeing the dangly bits, now can we? – Matthew Weiner’s often wickedly funny Greek tragedy set in hideous and tasteless Jersey suburbia reset what television was. There was Before Tony Soprano and After Tony Soprano.

This was what was called “prestige” television, i.e. something theoretically better than laugh-tracked man-children whom we the audience are supposed to both identify with and pity, the machinations of cruel heiresses dripping in Swarovski, or the avatars of a masculine ideal we failed to meet, whether embodied as cowboys back then or cops now. This was something that was supposed to use its lengthened timeline to reach the novelistic depth that movies couldn’t, that eschewed the clean Aristotelian endings of procedural TV in favor of uncertainty, complexity, and depth. And I was all in, at least for a time.

A few weeks ago, The Bear launched the long-form episode “Gary,” as an interim between its seasons. And it was godawful.

I’m not the first to comment on the decline of The Bear, and a lot of ink has been spilled over the past couple of years on the show’s wasted potential. “Aimless” seems to be a term that gets thrown around a lot, but I’m OK with aimless, at least certain kinds of aimless. “Self-indulgent” is another, but I think good art is almost definitionally self-indulgent to a certain degree, because it takes itself and its vision seriously, rather than trying to pander to a preexisting set of sensibilities. However, my qualms with the more recent seasons of the show are really just reflections of my qualms with the overall decline of prestige TV in general.

When The Bear dropped in 2022, it was a breath of fresh air in a prestige landscape that had gone stale. The shows that had defined it – The Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Six Feet Under, Deadwood – were all distant memories, and most of the shows that had emerged in the interim had nowhere near the kind of cultural impact. There were a few, sure (Succession, The White Lotus, and The Boys stood out in terms of their contribution to the discourse), but on the whole, each new show seemed to have less and less staying power.

To a certain degree this was inevitable. The idea of high-quality television was no longer a peculiarity, and as glossier, more highbrow programming proved itself to be a bankable asset, more and more media outlets were willing to put forth the effort. Furthermore, audiovisual content was quickly moving online, and countless streaming services and platforms emerged, each with their own suite of shows. Apple, Amazon, Hulu, Netflix, Disney, HBO, and Paramount all attempted to woo their subscribers with flagship series featuring A-list actors. However, this necessarily curtailed the potential viewership, and if a show was on a platform you didn’t subscribe to, you probably didn’t watch it. Game of Thrones, it seems, was the last series that you could reasonably assume the guy at the water cooler to have at least a passing familiarity with.

Furthermore, as part of this boom, many of these shows seemed to carry the form of prestige TV – the production values, the top-tier talent, the sense of profundity – but ultimately rang hollow. A show like Westworld, for instance, was basically mediocre pulp sci-fi. But it had Anthony Hopkins and Ed Harris and beautiful art direction, so it was deemed prestigious. And so for every groundbreaking Breaking Bad, there were 10 woodenheaded Ozarks.

So when The Bear dropped in 2022, it felt like a breath of fresh air. Like so many of the best shows about working life, it balanced humor and pathos in a way that really, really worked. OK, not early-seasons Simpsons level, little reaches those heights, but pretty damn good! The setting was pleasantly intimate and small-scale, Carmy had demons to slay, and had to get his ragtag band of outsiders on his side and lead them to success, with the daily dramas of kitchen life – health inspections, rush orders, emergency repairs, and the like – providing the drama and tension and challenge. And, in the post-Bourdain world in which the kitchen is deemed a “cool” setting, audiences were hooked along with the critics.

And yet, as so often happens in serial media, Flanderization was inevitable. And when a media landscape is utterly ruled by metrics and engagement, this becomes a feature rather than a bug. You like the family dramas and inability to process trauma? Yeah, have some more of that. You need those heartwarming moments in which said trauma is finally resolved through the power of listening? Sure, have some more of that, you fuckers. We’ve focus-grouped the shit out of this show, so have some of that slop you like, you fucking piggies.

 

The real turning point, the shark-fin soup jump, is at the end of season 2, with Carmy having finally opened his dream restaurant to suitable fanfare, and then loudly declaring his uncertainties and inability to have a relationship to no one in particular while locked in the walk-in. It’s not only an utterly lame and pointless monologue about how sad and insecure he feels that no one would actually say out loud when locked in a room by themselves, so even that premise is ridiculous… but of course his new gf is on the other side of the walk-in door, and she hears everything, and decides to just leave the fucker. If this was on a 1980s midday soap, you’d call it camp, but here it is on the prestige teevee.

“She loves him and he loves her, but to quote RuPaul, ‘If you can’t love yourself, how the hell are you gonna love somebody else?’ Let’s please get Carmy a therapist for season three because he very much needs one.” – Marah Eakin, Vulture, who managed to close a review in a manner almost tailor-made to piss me off

And the rest of the show has seemed an extension of that moment. By season 4, it was bordering on parody. Nonstop maudlin emotion punctuated by quietly simmering resentment, all revolving around their shitty narcissistic mom (Jamie Lee Curtis, who really does play her part awfully well), and the lingering effects of the suicide of Carmy’s substance-abusing brother Mikey, as played by Jon Bernthal in flashback after flashback. And yet despite the high-pitched melodrama, no difficulty was insurmountable. Bros came in from around the world to pitch in, and the former janitor can become a wine expert in a matter of a few weeks with just a lil’ heart! Maybe this is what some viewers were looking for from the beginning. But what I was looking for was honesty, and there is nothing more dishonest than this level of sentimental pap.

And “Gary” continued in this vein. What we see is a flashback of an assignment to pick up unknown product in Gary, Indiana, by Jon Bernthal’s Mikey and Ebon Moss-Bachrach’s Richie. And eventually they get bored and sidetracked by the allure of substances and loose women (at a working-class bar in 80 percent black Gary that is somehow 100 percent white). Over the course of the hour of David Mamet-aping dialogue and phony confessionalism, the contempt for the audience is palpable, especially as the snarling dialogue paves the way for the required emotional breakdown monologue. Oh, and there’s a twist ending where they get in a car crash or some shit. I stopped caring.

But what sucks is that this didn’t need to be the case. There are echoes of things better. The Mametian Chicago tough guy talk could have actually been captivating, as anyone who has seen Glengarry Glen Ross or American Buffalo can testify. The liberal use of “Heart of the Sunrise” by Yes seems a direct reference to Vincent Gallo’s nightmarish journey in the famed Buffalo 66 trailer. And the cinematography is, as is the case in even many shitty prestige shows, truly beautiful. And for this prodigal Midwesterner, the strip mall lights and the flash of hopper cars through the naked winter trees are transcendence itself.

And we can extrapolate that deficiency to the series itself. It could have been the next great show. It wasn’t.

Twilight of the Public Access Idols

It’s a long-time cliché of art history that kitsch eventually turns into a high art. It wasn’t that long ago, for example, that Victorian gingerbread was seen as the disgusting affectation of a less enlightened time, and it was only in the past 10 years that Anglo-American brutalist architecture has been reappropriated as the signifier of a more optimistic era rather than just some gray concrete shit. If we’re going to extrapolate further, it’s so easy to mistake age for wisdom, and stupidity for prelapsarian virtue, that I always have to caution myself against it, to put certain automatic skepticism triggers in place, lest I be deceived.

But if you have that crate-digger mentality, a desire to go through the archives and find past ideas and expressions, you’ll always be tempted to find enlightenment therein. It’s something I used to do a lot, in the hope that I could somehow recontextualize and redo what I saw, to make my mind palace into a Joseph Cornell box. Like most people, as I have aged, immediate and quotidian requirements have taken precedence, and yet there will always be an allure in the grainy filmstrip, the library book last checked out in 2003, the potshard. 

And in that context I recently watched 2004’s Public Access Hollywood (available in its entirety here), and it was an opportunity to revisit one such strange world, the legendary LA public access channels, widely regarded as the best in the country, and the strange personalities who inhabit it.

I’m not sure how many people under the age of 30 have even watched public access, but I’m sure many of them know the aesthetic of it – grainy video stock, ill-fitting polyester, primitive digital effects, and general amateurism and incoherence. Famously crappy, famously occasionally very weird programming produced on non-budgets in local cable markets across America, a frequently parodied (see any number of classic SNL sketches from Wayne’s World to Goth Talk) format from a pre-Youtube era where the idea of any audiovisual media beyond the family vacation video being homemade was novel. A clear lineage to the two ferns that Zach Galifianakis sits between (by god, is even that reference long-outdated?). Even by my day, public access was viewed as a strange and quaint thing, something we found through early Youtube clips. The last memory I have of even watching it on an actual tee vee was in my early 20s, in the margarita-and-marijuana haze between viewings of Project Runway with my gay housemates. 

The first viral public access clip I remember was The Spirit of Truth, in which a borderline street preacher randomly cites Bible passages without quoting them from what looks like a telephone book while insulting callers, against a backdrop of Yosemite while Funkadelic’s “One Nation Under a Groove” plays. Across America, his quotes were dropped in the same way Antwone Dodson’s would be a decade later. He’s not in Public Access Hollywood – a little too ephemeral.

 

So who is in the documentary? The focus is on the mainstays, who, while perhaps, less intense in their insanity, are their own variety of eccentric. There’s David Liebe Hart’s Junior Christian Science Bible Lesson Program, starring his puppet Chip the Black Boy, with crack-is-wack messaging and songs about helpful aliens. More intentionally weird, there’s Dan Kapelovitz and the team behind Three Geniuses, slashing the media form of television to bits, and commenting on the rebirth and “re-death” of psychedelia, a stage of weirdo anti-humor somewhere in its evolution between Andy Kaufman and Devo on one end and Gen Z Dada on the other. Or the bro version, Zuma Dogg shouting shit on Sunset in his Oakleys and ‘90s condom beanie, a kind of demonic Ashton Kutcher. For more informative content, there’s Dr. Susan Block’s sexual education program, a cavalcade of bizarre proto-sex-positive theater, dressed in vinyl and spanking her guests. Mediating it all, the sort of cultural arbiter was Michael Devine of Hollywood and Devine, whose variety show featuring the lovely freaks and weirdos of Los Angeles feels like a chopped and screwed version of Letterman. And the one who garners the most screen time and most pathos, there is Francine Dancer, chubby and dancing in her lingerie while maintaining that she would never do something so classless as to dance nude, confined to a wheelchair when she’s not dancing. No fixed address, much beloved within her niche community but at best an absurdist artifact outside it.

I think you get the idea. Cranks who interrupt municipal council meetings worldwide, desperate souls, who, above all else, want other people to listen and understand, pranksters and ironists in it for the lulz who could probably cite Baudrillard and Debord off-camera, or at the very least Tony Wilson and Malcolm McLaren, and the dreamers in rattrap apartments who still believe they can make it in real Hollywood, despite their often-dire circumstances. This studio was their home, and you kind of love it for them. 

But what the makers of Public Access Hollywood didn’t know was that in 2004, they were already at the end of an era.

One thing they acknowledge is that by that point, reality TV had already become an institution. From its inception point in the late ‘90s, it had spread to become the standard for the cable networks, deliciously cheap to produce and packed with mass appeal. Like the public access stars, it provided an ostensibly (adverb doing some heavy lifting there) authentic appeal, and a lurid opportunity to see one’s fellow man at his ugliest and most depraved.

And what they further probably couldn’t have anticipated was that the ecosystem of public access television, one which claimed to bypass the gatekeepers of audiovisual entertainment, was about to expand to the whole damn world with the rise of Youtube (the irony being that that is the very platform where I watched the documentary). 

It logically follows that this is something that the drive towards algorithmic correctness inevitably destroys, not only preventing us the audience from seeing the wilder and weirder side of things and trying to get us to watch preapproved slop, but also incentivizing creators into producing things more algo-friendly (with the occasional oddities like Elsagate videos representing a genuine flaw in the system, fucked up as they are). Sure, previous forms of media were beholden to a hooting and hollering public, but the algorithm seems even worse.

Which might be why, despite the similar hypothetical freedom, few of the public access stars would find a home on this new platform. And beyond that more coldly rational lack of economic incentive, there’s also a deluge of competing content, rather than a particular zone of permitted bizarre. In a world where everyone is a weirdo, and you can turn on or shut off their weird at will, it’s irrelevant. But when you turn on the television and randomly flip to public access, it’s something different entirely. 

“I miss TV… Some of this may sound stupid. I miss commercials that were louder than the programs. I miss the phrases ‘Order before midnight tonight’ and ‘Save up to fifty percent and more.’ I miss being told things were filmed before a live studio audience. I miss late-night anthems and shots of flags and fighter jets and leathery-faced Indian chiefs crying at litter. I miss ‘Sermonette’ and ‘Evensong’ and test patterns and being told how many megahertz something’s transmitter was broadcasting at.’ He felt his face. ‘I miss sneering at something I love. How we used to love to gather in the checker-tiled kitchen in front of the old boxy cathode-ray Sony whose reception was sensitive to airplanes and sneer at the commercial vapidity of broadcast stuff.’…

The man tended to look up at him like people with legs look up at buildings and planes. ‘You can of course view entertainments again and again without surcease on TelEntertainment disks of storage and retrieval.’ 

Orin’s way of looking up as he remembered was nothing like the seated guy’s way of looking up. ‘But not the same. The choice, see. It ruins it somehow. With television you were subjected to repetition. The familiarity was inflicted.”

- David Foster Wallace, The Book You Should Read Even Though People Will Call You a Lit Bro 

But concomitant with the rise of Youtube was the rise of another media machine – Adult Swim. Here, the aesthetics of public access, along with industrial video, low-end public broadcasting, and every other ephemeral form of media from the cable-and-VHS era would be recycled into the lysergic mandalas of Tim and Eric et al. We could view the original vomit of the era on Youtube, and we could view the avant-garde pisstakes on Adult Swim. Indeed, Heidecker, Wareheim, and Co. had the wisdom and foresight to bring some of the LA public access idols to the national stage. I’m guessing a lot of the readership will be more likely to know David Liebe Hart in this capacity. All the food is poison. Keep your meat ice-cold.

But his story seems to be one of the few successes here, and even that success is pretty circumscribed. 

Maybe they would have always been fated to obscurity, but maybe they could have been fortunate enough to breach containment and find their improbable sliver of success. I’m reminded of another LA icon, Angelyne, the bleach-blonde daughter of Polish Holocaust survivors known more for her billboard poses – an early stab at guerrilla marketing – than any of her purported entertainment talent. It would be hard to imagine her transposed to today without a couple seasons on Bravo, or at least a horny Twitch following.

Part of the reason the documentary works in 2025 is that it plays at this historical disconnect, and part of the reason it would have worked upon release 20 years ago is that it plays on the very fundamental feels of the desperate attempts to keep a dream alive. One of the oldest of LA cliches is that of a graveyard of aspirations, a place where the ideology of individual merit runs headlong into bitter reality. And every year, we hear new stories that reinforce the trope, whether lasciviously documented for TMZ, or as the backstories for stalkers and mass shooters. 

I put in some hours, but the fate of most of the performers in Public Access Hollywood is difficult to suss out in casual searches. David Liebe Hart’s latest credit involves Lloyd Kaufman of Troma / Toxic Avenger fame, so he’s continuing to participate in weird media. Dan Kapelovitz still seems to be invested in making fucked up shit, and for that he is to be saluted. The latest project in his IMDB profile is 120 Days of Sodom… Literally, a cut-up of Pasolini’s Salo with a 120 day runtime (feel free to watch it streaming, it’s ongoing), and he seems to be pursuing a side passion for left-wing electoral candidacy (seeing someone else tragically ahead of his time?). Zuma Dogg still seems to be doing pranks in his sunglasses, to a tiny audience. Susan Block simultaneously had a career as a sex therapist and regular on Real Sex on HBO – raise your hand if you remember furtively watching that in the basement, only to be deeply deeply disappointed – and still has the Susan Block Institute, but the website looks like something from 1998, which seems awfully appropriate for a woman seemingly designed for that very 1990s precise balance of lewd, subversive sociosexual commentary. Michael Devine seems to have died from cancer in 2006. And Francine Dancer is still out and about in Hollywood, occasionally popping up on someone’s Instagram, still smiling.

But all of that being said, I ran into quite a few dead ends. Whole swaths seem to be likely dead media, and I doubt I could find much more than the minima I’ve already found, unless I were to chase down moldering basement VHS collections and chase the performers for follow-ups (something I’d totally do if I wasn’t doing this whole thing on top of a full-time job plus freelance writing for actual cash money). Honestly, more than anything else, I just wanted to find signs of life, and maybe it was parasocial, maybe it was morbidly curious, but I wanted confirmation that they were OK. 

Maybe I held hope because in their own way, these were truly the last bohemians, scraping by on the fringes of Hollywood. They said fuck it, did their own thing, on the public commons, with minimal regard as to market incentive. The things that followed inevitably come off as moneymakers, aping authenticity as part of their branding. Reality television, of course, or the monstrous sponsored-content machine that Youtube has become. Even those weirdo Adult Swim shows, as much as I love them, are shaped by the requirements of the advertisers, and Tim and Eric’s legendary, absurdist late ‘00s Absolut ad series were at the end of the day still Absolut ads.

So what we get is real folk art from a lost world. And the documentary, 20 years on, its cri de coeur.

Goodbye, Nona Mecklenberg

Michelle Trachtenberg died last week – something that might not mean a lot to most people, but one of the first celebrities of my age cohort to die other than the obvious set of young overdoses and suicides. Her death was different – the death of someone, like myself, approaching middle age. Not that I was any particular fan, but I remembered her fondly as someone from my youth.

 The plaudits for her work were to be expected. She was much-remembered for her roles in Gossip Girl and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, neither of which were particularly on my radar, and also for her child-star performance in Harriet the Spy, which I mostly remember for being a story about the world’s most endearingly awful and judgmental tween who goes on a rampage of emotional revenge seemingly designed to give the girls in her class a lifetime’s worth of eating disorders.

But I would always know her as Nona Mecklenberg.

 

Not necessarily the best-known reference – but Nickelodeon’s The Adventures of Pete and Pete ran from 1993 to 1996. And few pieces of media have had as strong an effect on my outlook of the world.

What was it that made this show special among what I only later learned was a cult audience of bespectacled library girls and future wiseasses and class clowns? What did we all see in an otherwise little-known children’s show from the mid-‘90s? Why did it never get the branding push that accomplished other shows of the time on the same channel?

The premise is absurd from the beginning – two brothers, both named Pete – but this fact seems perfectly in tune with the setting, both pathologically normal (what name could be more normal than Pete?) and deeply surreal. The setting is Wellsville, State Unknown (the “Sideburn State,” per the license plates), but it’s strongly implied to be New Jersey, and the look and feel of the show is very much the look and feel of what journalist David Roth called the “old-growth suburbs” of North Jersey, hissing summer lawns and all.

 

 

But as David Lynch knew, that always hides deep weirdness. An episode of Pete and Pete feels like that childhood bike ride down an alley you’d never gone down, wondering what lurked inside, wondering if what your friend’s older brother told you was true.

What make the world of the show different from reality is that all of that playground lore is brought to the surface, front and center. Little Pete has naval tattoos. Their mom has a plate in her head that gets a frame in the intro credits. The mysterious, bizarre townsfolk are played by Michael Stipe, Iggy Pop, Kate Pierson, Debbie Harry, LL Cool J, with dulcet Magnetic Fields instrumentals humming in the background during the tender scenes. This might seem all too familiar in a world full of obnoxiously self-aware ostensible children’s cartoons that seem to be designed just as much for adults – and which I would say radically fail as grownup entertainment, and are perhaps a bit too on-the-nose to function well as children’s entertainment as well – but in the ‘90s, this was revolutionary.

Which meant that unlike most children’s media of the time period, it actually struck me as honest. There were no moralistic fairytales here, no condescension. There was only the understanding that the world is a strange, magical, baffling, fascinating place, ruled by the cruel dictates of adults who seem to operate on their own twisted logic (q.v. Little Pete’s war against adult swim at the local pool, or his attempt to tunnel to freedom to escape being grounded all summer, or the International Adult Conspiracy’s attempt to banish local superhero Artie, the Strongest Man in the World, from Wellsville). But through the spirit of discovery, exploration, and embrace of the weird, these dictates could and should be subverted, even if there’s a recognition that the magic is fleeting. Mr. Tastee, the mysterious ice cream vendor, has a whole other life to live. Summer will always end, and it will be back to the drudgery of school life. Artie will eventually leave Wellsville. You can’t live in a dream-world forever, no matter how hard you try.

“It was the story of a superhero and a kid, who ruled at dodgeball, waltzed the lunar landscape, and beat up the Atlantic Ocean. Until one day, the kid finally learned all there was to learn from this friend, and it was time for the superhero to move on.”

 And as magical as the world of Pete and Pete is, there’s a darkness that lurks in the corners. That pay phone that rings for years straight is as feared by the adults as by the kids. The bullies and creeps weren’t just funny, they were often actually frightening, with the grin of James Rebhorn’s evil vinyl siding salesman character Mr. McFlemp being just as sinister as that of Bobby Peru or Leland Palmer.

 

It’s a darkness that extends to love and sex too. It wasn’t something that I registered as a small child, but there’s a whole episode in which Big Pete borrows petty thug Endless Mike Hellstrom’s vintage Ford Mustang to take his best friend Ellen to the drive-in, fogs the windows, throws the seats back and tries to make a move… because he feels that’s what he’s supposed to do. And of course he fucks up and he winds up hurting the person he cares the most about. It might be the most honest treatment of teenage romantic confusion I know of.

All of this is why it never became part of the ‘90s marketing machine, vicious teenagers with pit stains described as “glandular freaks” are less likely to sell sugary snacks than the Rugrats were able to.

Likewise, few of the show’s stars went on to do much afterwards. Both Petes had acting credits for years afterwards, but I doubt I’ve seen them in anything else. Michelle Trachtenberg was the only one who became anything resembling a household name, and how she, too, is gone.  

And so, Nona, I hope you’re frantically dancing to Luscious Jackson in a better place.

 

A Subject/Object/Charlie Brown Christmas

 There’s nothing original or interesting about being a Christmas hater. Indeed, it’s just a seasonal riff on “that thing everyone likes, lemme tell you what, I think it BLOWS!” (OK, I kind of do that a lot).

 But I can’t say I’ve been much of a fan of Christmas ever since it stopped meaning Matchbox cars and Encyclopedia Brown books. It’s not too hard to figure out why – the crass commercialism, the religious simpering, counterpointed with Sunday-suit Southerners bemoaning the secular war on Christmas (in which I proudly believed myself to be at least a corporal), and of course the awful music. So I hid my head under the rocks, and around holiday time, if I was lucky, in response to Bob Geldof’s question, the answer was “no.”

However, no matter how bitter my experience with the holidays, I still always loved A Charlie Brown Christmas, if for no other reason than that Charlie Brown seemed to get it, and when he moped around Charles Schulz’s magical-realist version of snowbound Minnesota to Vince Guaraldi’s piano lines, it seemed deeply and truly real. Yes, Christmas is a pay grab, and his holiday blues are a frankly reasonable response.  His teacher wants him to read Dostoyevsky over Christmas break. Lucy offers him therapy for 5 cents, and of course she’s also the one who pulls away the football.

It’s now behind a paywall on Apple TV+. Fuck you.

Furthermore, even if I couldn’t stand Christmas music, even if I still feel a frisson of horror with the first department store carol of the season I hear, there were two songs that I could always rely on.

“I wish I had a river I could skate away on.” – Joni Mitchell, “River,” 1971

“Charlie, if you wanna know the truth of it I don’t have a husband, he don’t play the trombone, I need to borrow money to pay this lawyer, Charlie, hey, I’ll be eligible for parole come Valentine’s Day” – Tom Waits, “Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis,” 1978

 Because for most of my adult life that was my Christmas – in milder climates, away from the meter-high snowbanks and goose down coats and hot spiced beverages on abandoned train bridges and candlelit fairytale evenings of my youth. Trying to figure out what it was to live on my own terms, to the extent I could.

And every Christmas, I had to determine whether or not I’d be bowling alone.

But sometimes the stars align.

Two old friends – Jordan and Amanda, if you’re reading, I love both of you dearly – needed someone to housesit and dogsit on Christmas Eve, and they were kind enough to leave me a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon, a joint, 30 bucks for delivery Chinese, Almost Famous on VHS, and the company of their lovely if overactive husky in their house in North Seattle. Which would itself have been a lovely if anesthetized evening. Hold me closer Tiny Dancer.

But what made it truly special was the following night, when homeboy had to pick up a shift at a frankly sinister dive bar-slash-pizza place on Pike Street (any Seattleite should be able to figure out where I’m talking about). Black glass tables left over from the ‘70s, boxes of Franzia, burnt-out fairy lights, and a decidedly marginal customer base. It was the sort of place where I could and did take Jager bombs with the crust punk on one side of me and the philosophy professor reading Derrida in the original in the other, none of the three of us particularly liking either Jager or Red Bull, but all three of us enjoying the goofy ritual of it. And on that December 25th, it was full of the people I needed to be around.

It became obvious, as the Rainiers and the Seven-and-Sevens flowed. I met another guy with a passion for writing, who’d just gotten out of Snohomish County Jail for beating some dude into the hospital. A middle-aged woman in a white fur coat and a few solicitation charges kept buying me shots of Rumpleminze. It’s a story I tell to anyone in earshot around this time of year, the story of our one-night-only little Island of Misfit Toys, the Jews and the Indians and the disowned gays and, as it happened, a skinny and lost Midwesterner with literary pretensions, scarves, and a bad attitude, who felt, for the first time, like he’d finally found that milieu he’d come looking for.

Charlie Brown never got to grow up, or maybe he never had to He began life in the Truman administration and departed this planet along with Schulz himself, the man having left a missive typed out by Snoopy on top of the doghouse, in February of 2000, in the last few months of the end of history.

Maybe they would have all made it. Maybe Linus would have become a meek and mild liberal Lutheran pastor in the kindly and deeply vanilla Upper Midwest tradition. Maybe Lucy would have realized that she didn’t need to be a shit and gracefully aged into a delightfully cynical old bat who still leaves her husband on read just to fuck with him, but loves him to death all the same. Maybe Schroeder would have gotten into Juilliard and written an opera in between visits to Greenwich Village backrooms. Maybe Peppermint Patty would likewise have made it onto the women’s basketball team at the U of M, with Marcie pining for her down the hall. Maybe Pigpen would get the right meds. Maybe Charlie Brown would be sitting there across the bar, a little too serious, having finally gotten around to that copy of Crime and Punishment he’d had to read, which he was the only one in class to actually read, cigarette burns on his matching scarf, and maybe we’d talk for a bit about some random shit, and he’d be a little too serious and a little too intense and we’d go out to smoke a spliff in the sleet and he’d mention all the dumb crap he’d done as a kid just to get the attention of a little red-haired girl.

Or maybe not.

But there’s always hope.

Merry Christmas you fuckers.

American Horror Story Sucks: Horror in American Cinema, Part 1

I have a bit of a habit of getting into big-name TV shows later than everyone else -- I'm recalling a girlfriend who more or less forcibly sat me down in front of Game of Thrones. There are a few reasons for this, the big one being that unlike most of us, I am more or less incapable of binge-watching.

But I eventually come around, and years after I should have, I finally watched season 1 of American Horror Story. And it shouldn't surprise me that I couldn't stand it.

I hated the way that every character was completely unlikable -- not in and of itself, a sin, but an unlikable character has to at least be interesting enough that the viewer cares about their fates, and the Harmon family at the center of the story (the smarmy shrink husband, the self-righteous wife who can't stop calling the cops) was so insufferable that I just wanted the ghosts of the house to off them as soon as possible. I hated the way that high production values were used to gloss over the limp plot and complete lack of emotional involvement. I hated the off-kilter psychological-thriller camera angles that have been tired ever since David Fincher deployed them back in the '90s (and, hot take, Se7en kinda sucked), and which were used to create a false and adolescent sense of the "disturbing" in lieu of actually building an environment of dread.

 

 

But most of all, I hated the writing. Because horror, moreso than any other genre, is dependent on good writing. And this flabby mess of a script completely failed to horrify.

To provide true horror, something has to get under the skin. And when everything seems recycled from other media -- the mysterious and sinister wealthy next-door neighbor, the brooding teen heartthrob with a dark past, the kid-ghosts pretty much copied whole cloth from The Shining -- all you get is pastiche. Sure, there's plenty of gore to go around, but there's nothing visceral about it, and it would be more at home in a second-year theater student's Halloween costume than in the grisly body horror of The Thing or Videodrome.

One could argue that this was not the goal of showrunner Ryan Murphy and his cohorts, and that he self-consciously wanted to allude to the whole history of horror cinema (after all, the show is called American Horror Story). But there are any number of films that both knowingly incorporate these sort of midnight-movie tropes, and, if they don't just turn them into comedy (Cabin in the Woods-style), manage to find ways to celebrate and elevate them. House of the Devil comes to mind as one recent example, which very deliberately apes the style of '80s teen horror, but at the same time manages to be genuinely creepy through slow development of atmospherics. And similarly, in Crimson Peak, Guillermo del Toro managed to transcend the cliches of Gothic horror and English country-house fiction through his signature visual style and elements of the truly weird.

But when season 1 of American Horror Story just throws these tropes at the audience, subplot upon subplot, ragged end after ragged end, with the hope that a few would stick, with no regard to world-building, none of them made an impact. And because this was television and not independent cinema, the showrunners couldn't just throw world-building out the window and do a full-on freakout, like was masterfully done in Midsommar.

Here's the rub, though. Even if Ryan Murphy and his attendant media machine have completely failed to establish any kind of investment in the characters, the writing, or the imagined world, he has still managed to create a product that received both a large viewership and a relatively positive critical response. How is this?

The answer lies in this very maximalism.

A TV show is not supposed to have a drum-tight and coherent storyline in the same way a classically narrative film should. It is supposed to keep viewers on the hook. Therefore, each episode had to be reduced to a series of easily digestible themes, with enough memorable moments that could generate buzz from episode to episode, that could keep the Netflix viewers in a state of televisual bulimia.

And American Horror Story did just that. It didn't matter that the plot was a mess, that the characters were unlikable. The images were sharp and memorable, the scenery was beautifully composed, pointlessly jarring events occurred to fulfill the requirement of novelty "unpredictability," the actors themselves were photogenic and their emotional touchstones were easily relatable, if skewed enough to be deemed "artistic" (Murphy can't resist dropping in an emotionally volatile twink...). That's enough to both ensure that enough prestige tropes are hit to ensure both critical plaudits and ROI for the show's financiers.

Now would be a good time to give credit to Ryan Murphy where credit is due -- he also played a major role in the development of the sister series, American Crime Story, where his over-the-top impulses served him well. The two seasons cover sensational tabloid cases -- those of O.J. Simpson and Andrew Cunanan -- where the reality was, if anything, more maximalist and absurd and hyperreal than the shows themselves. If you're writing about O.J. threatening to off himself in Kim Kardashian's bedroom, you really are better served by going big.

But it just doesn't work for horror.

So what is good horror? That, I fear, would merit another essay. And for that, part 2 will be coming soon.

On Rewatching Mad Men

And you thought you were binge-watching before.

I've been, too, but I've been focused on re-watching Mad Men, a show I've held pretty close to my heart since I was introduced to it by a remarkably shitty ex-roommate. I watched it, episode-by-episode, week-by-week, as we always used to, and finally got around to watching the whole thing again, the first time I've re-watched a drama in full (which like binging in general, is something the general populace as a whole does that I've never been very good at).

So I was treated to a dual experience, both the standard experience of revisiting a work from a previous stage of one's life, as well as the experience of viewing something in a completely new way, in this case in a condensed version, where the themes that Matthew Weiner and Co. chose to underline were starker, more obvious.

Spoiler alert, and all that.

Some things, of course, remained wonderful – the richness and depth of the characters and the very specific ways in which they change and evolve, the gorgeous cinematography informed by 1950s and 1960s American cinema, the dreamy montages presenting the characters' mundane lives in counterpoint, the occasional streaks of dark humor, and perhaps best of all, the slips into the surreal – dead characters reappearing, a suddenly empty elevator shaft.

(That's right, I used a gif from a popular TV show in its own right instead of using it as a pointless throwaway gag)

And simultaneously, I cringe even more at the glibly self-congratulatory moments were we the audience are reminded how much better the present day is than the past – the arrogant tobacco execs, the scene where a young Sally Draper wears a plastic dry-cleaning bag to play astronauts, and her mother stops her, only to tell her the laundry better not be on the floor, the way the camera lingers over trash left behind by the Draper Family after a picnic.

I can't speak to the historical accuracy of the show. I obviously wasn't in a New York office space between 1959 and 1970, and increasingly few people were. And since art trades in vibes more than facts, I hesitate to apply any kind of data-based analysis to what the show is or isn't, what it does or doesn't portray. What interests me is not the era itself, but the lens the showrunners chose to examine that era through.

One can be forgiven for thinking of the show as possessing a fundamentally progressive worldview. The script champions women taking a more assertive role within the office, and all of the major characters seem to be more or less on board with the Civil Rights Movement. By the end, they've all become sickened by the Vietnam War, and the struggles of the show's few gay characters are treated with real empathy.

But yet upon second watching, it all seemed like window-dressing.

The version of feminism that is proffered is the Lean In variety, one in which, being a girl-boss is seen as the transcendental goal, and the status quo is in no way meaningfully questioned. The characters often find themselves shattered by the contradictions in their own life, but those are problems resulting not from any kind of structural failings in the society in which they live, but by their interior psychodramas. And when each major character resolves those contradictions in the end – Peggy Olson finally opening her heart up to love with the dopey artist down the hall, Joan Harris starting her own company, Roger Sterling finally settling down with a woman his own age instead of chasing 20 year-old secretaries, Pete Campbell accepting a gilded corporate gig and returning to his family – they do so with a full commitment to the machine.

In probably the most noxious version of all, our hero, Don Draper, a man whose entire life is built on lies, finds salvation at a commune presumably modeled on the Esalen Institute (look it up, it was a major force for the boomer generation but has largely been forgotten), it is by saluting the sun on a cliff over the Pacific. The final scene closes. He smiles as he chants an Om, and the scene cuts to the famous 1971 Coke ad with the teenagers singing on the hilltop in Italy, the presumed message being that he returned to work at McCann-Erickson and thought it up.

“I did hear rumblings of people talking about the ad being corny. It's a little bit disturbing to me, that cynicism. I'm not saying advertising's not corny, but I'm saying that the people who find that ad corny, they're probably experiencing a lot of life that way, and they're missing out on something.” – Matthew Weiner, in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter

Nah, fuck that.

The end message is further evidence that only the worst parts of the '60s survived – the half-baked spirituality and Westernized version of Eastern religion, the mask of inclusivity covering up rapacious capitalism, a Whiggish faith in the inevitability of human progress, and the reduction of all human endeavor to individual choice and self-expression.

A sort of mediocre liberal centrism, the kind long since de rigueur in Oscar-noms, has become the standard perspective of American scripted television, at least in its “prestige” sector (reactionary programming now being confined to reality television and the sorts of fucking dumb “SALUTES TO OUR ARMED FORCES” that I skip over whenever I torrent an NFL game). Few are the shows – The Wire and Deadwood being two magnificent examples – that take an honest look behind the curtain.

With the first episode, featuring lots of idiotic old boys' club joking designed for the audience to be horrified by, I was afraid that Mad Men would become another thing, like so many others, that was ruined for me. I may have liked The Breakfast Club when I was 16, but it's fucking unwatchable now. I've been told not to re-watch Dead Poets' Society, and I have no intention of doing so.

But here's the thing – regardless of the many eye rolls, Mad Men is still a joy to watch. Each character is treated with real empathy, even at their worst, and I'm rooting for them, dammit! Certain sequences still took my breath away as much as they did when I first watch them. I take far more umbrage at the notion that art must contain a correct perspective (I'm listening to Wagner right now, for the-Christ-I-don't-believe-in's sake), than the various sins of the showrunners