Last week, someone put one of those challenges up on Twitter where you're supposed to name four books that "changed" you. I wasn't sure if I could really measure which books had a real change on me and which I merely admired, but I did the best I could with the list. One book I included was Kiss of the Spider Woman by Manuel Puig. It's about two political prisoners who are cell mates in a Latin American underground jail. They are occasionally tortured for information. Completely powerless while in prison and totally at the mercy of their captors, they cast about for ways to regain some kind of tiny agency over their lives. One of the prisoners, Molina, who is jailed for being gay, finds one small thing he can do: he tells stories to his hard-core communist cell mate Valentin, who was jailed for openly fighting the government.
Molina likes to re-tell the stories of movies he has seen, providing a kind of screen-to-audiobook adaptation for Valentin's amusement. One of the movies he re-tells is a Nazi propaganda film, the kind Leni Riefenstahl might have made. Molina seems to have genuinely liked the movie, which Valentin finds impossible to believe, given that it was propaganda meant to serve the worst purposes. Molina believes, though, that the film makers, constrained in their ability to make a different movie, chose to make the most beautiful movie they could make within the constraints given. Molina finds the romance in the movie beautiful, and doesn't feel the beauty in it is less because it is there to serve an evil purpose.
That has stuck with me. None of us has any real power to affect the world the way we'd like to. This fact might not be as dramatically shoved in our faces as it is for political prisoners in a hellhole of a torture chamber, but our power over our circumstances is usually incredibly circumscribed. Society is what it is. I wanted to be a poet. Instead, I'm doing the job that society made available for me to do. Within those constraints, I'm doing the best I can to live with some kind of free will, to bring something beautiful into being.
The tragedy of North and South
North and South Korea are both full of people who share a common history, a common language, and a common culture. Every Korean person sees their separation since the end of World War II as a tragedy, but nobody seems to think it will be resolved in my lifetime. There was some hope once. After the Soviet Union fell apart, North Korea's original ruler, Kim Il Sung, died, and some thought that North Korea would fall like many former Soviet satellite states did. It didn't, but South Korea later implemented the Sunshine Policy, leading to unprecedented breakthroughs. Families from North and South met for reunions. South Korean companies opened an industrial park in the North that employed North Korean workers. There were cultural exchanges. People thought there might be a real shot for something--if not total reunion, at least an openness between them that might be nearly as good.
But that all disappeared in the late 00s and early 10s. The Cheonan sank in early 2010, which South Korea blamed on North Korea. The industrial park all but disappeared, lines of communication and travel were closed, and the two countries went back to cold war.
In the last few years, there have been a few glimmers of hope: Trump's meeting with Kim Jong Un, South Korean President Moon's historic step into North Korea, a slight thawing in North-South relations, the 2018 Winter Olympics. But hopes never quite rose quite as high for quite as long as they had before. Right now, we don't seem any closer to a meaningful reunion than we've ever been.
Proof of the low hopes: Crash Landing on You
The best evidence of the humbler hopes of Korean people for an eventual reunion I can think of is in the wonderful 16-part drama Crash Landing on You (사랑의 불시착). Like Molina from Puig's novel, the writers of Crash Landing have looked to romance as a socially acceptable way to find power in a powerless situation. In this case, the writers wanted to tell a story about North-South relations at a time when any such story was likely to be fraught with tension on both sides of the border.
The drama succeeds by focusing not on politics, but on love. When Yun Se-ri crash lands in North Korea after a sudden tornado pushes her hang glider there, she is found by Ri Jong Hyok, the hyper-masculine son of the chief of the General Political Bureau, a man who might be considered as the second most powerful man in North Korea.
Ri Jong Hyok (Hyon Bin) beats up so many people in this series, you can forget it's a romantic comedy
Ri doesn't turn Yun into the authorities. He quickly falls in love. Because he's in love, the audience can sidestep the issue of whether this is a betrayal of his country. There's a subtext to this. There are a lot of reports out of North Korea that the citizens up north watch a lot of South Korean dramas, at great risk to their own lives. Early in the series, we find a lovably naive North Korean watching the now 16-year-old drama Stairway to Heaven, one of the first big hits of the Korean Wave of the 2000s. The writers of Crash Landing were clearly hoping that at least some North Koreans might somehow get their hands on their drama, and they wrote the content about North Korea with that audience in mind.
That left them a dilemma. They wanted to write respectfully of North Korea, but they couldn't praise North Korea too much, both because it might run afoul of South Korea's National Security Act, and also because it's a little too much to praise the North in the name of cultural diplomacy.
The writers found their way out of this dilemma in two ways. First, they focused on basic human relationships that are more fundamental than national citizenship. There is, of course, the romantic relationship between Ri and Yun. But there is also friendship, mainly the friendships between Yun and the North Koreans she gets to know. There are also family bonds, the bonds which allow the director of the General Political Bureau to stand by his son in spite of terrible risk.
Secondly, when they needed to make North Korea look bad, they found a scapegoat in the Ministry of State Security, North Korea's feared secret police. They essentially made it possible for a North Korean watching the show to feel that neither the people nor the state--including the Dear Leader--were being attacked. Instead, it was those vexatious Gestapos in the MSS. It was a brilliant move on the part of the writers, because honestly, who ANYWHERE likes the secret police? Even Kim Jong Un probably hates them, as much as he needs them.
There is a lot of humor and optimism in the show, but I wasn't sure we were going to get a happy ending. When the show kept referring to the earlier drama Stairway to Heaven, I took that in two ways. On the one hand, the writers made frequent references to Stairway's most famous line: Love always comes back. I thought the writers were linking the fate of Jong Hyok and Se-ri to the fates of the two countries. There are all kinds of hokey contrivances in the series to keep putting the two together, but this use of the cliches of the Korean drama are totally justified if we are thinking of Se-ri and Jong Hyok as microcosms of their two countries. North and South Korea SHOULD come back together, however long it takes.
But then again, Stairway ended with the death of the female lead, so....I wasn't sure where Crash Landing was going.
It concluded with maybe a perfect ending, but also one that reveals the fading hopes of the present generation for reunification on any kind of grand scale. (SPOILERS COMING!!) The two are separated at the end, but they manage to meet once a year every year in, of all places, Switzerland, that country famous for its neutrality. The lovers can't hope for ultimate union. They can't get married and have children. They can only meet once in a fleeting while in a dream-like neutral state.
I thought often while watching this drama of the 2003 Korean movie 남남북여, translated into English as Love Impossible. The title of that movie in the original is a reference to an old Korean saying, one stressing that the best looking women are in the north and the best looking men in the south. (I always assume a South Korean man made that one up, although it's a pun in Korean, so maybe lots of people thought of it.) In Love Impossible, the love really doesn't end up being impossible. The South Korean man finds a way to be with his North Korean love--by directly convincing Kim Jong Il of the power of love, no less!
Clearly, switching from a southern man and northern woman to the reverse wasn't the only thing that's changed in the 17 years since the movie was made. The hopes for what's possible have dimmed considerably as well, if we judge from Love Impossible and Crash Landing.
This was one of the most enjoyable K-dramas I've watched in a long time. It also had more to say than most do, although it mostly managed to hide its message in a compelling romance. It used love to tell a story that was hard to find space to tell. And while the humble happiness the lovers find doesn't fully satisfy, maybe that half-fulfilled happiness will keep alive some hope in whatever people on both sides of the border happen to watch the series by making them also yearn for greater satisfaction.
Tomorrow morning will be January 31st, the day Netflix releases the last eight episodes of Bojack Horseman. I'll probably leave work early to come home and drink it all in, possibly while actually drinking. Whatever those eight episodes contain, it's already likely the best comedy I've ever seen.
Bojack Horseman is a show about sadness. More specifically, about sadness with an ill-defined cause. It's about sadness making you hurt the people around you, making you even sadder.
If Bojack Horseman, about to finish its run on Netflix tomorrow after six too-short seasons, is a great show, it's because it spoke to the age it was made in as few stories have. The animated show about a half-man, half-horse, has-been TV star who suddenly becomes a star again but cannot get out of his own way and stop "fetishizing his own sadness" resonated because the culture viewing it is full of an alarming number of people who also can't stop feeling sad. In the midst of plenty, we're full of misery.
What I've loved about this show is what it isn't. It isn't anything you can easily condense into a simple message. It's not about Bojack having some lovable core deep down inside.
It's not about Bojack being flawed but relatable, someone who can make us feel less bad about ourselves. Season Five pretty much destroyed that as a viable reading of the show.
Bojack is not really admirable. He's barely redeemable. But I don't think it's true, either, as one writer put it, that the point of the show is simply to "not be like Bojack." He's not just a cautionary tale. We like Bojack. We forgive Bojack. Eventually. Even when he nearly has sex with a near-minor, or when he contributes to the death of a woman who looks up to him like a father, or when he is drugged out and attacks his co-star/lover. The reason he's able to get away with things is because people naturally like him. Which Bojack knows, feels he doesn't deserve, and feels terrible about when he doesn't really face the comeuppance he knows he deserves.
The last episode in October left us wondering if that comeuppance is about to finally come. When it does, how Bojack reacts will give us all the final word on what this series was aiming at. But I think it's already been written into the show. There's not going to be a single, epiphanic moment when Bojack figures it out. He's had many small epiphanies, and he's maybe improved a bit with some of them. During the rehab arc, he really seemed to be on a good path. Will the revelation of secrets derail him?
I think it might, but the point of the series seems to be that there's no real secret to anything. You have to do the work and keep doing it.
The last eight episodes will reveal whether Bojack, having suffered a setback, will be able to commit to continuing to do the work.
The show doesn't discount modern psychiatric remedies for sadness. Diane's decision to take anti-depressants seems to be the right one, in spite of her weight gain. But it also reminds us that anti-depressants alone won't do it.
It's easy to say that we're all unhappy because of something unprecedented in our society today. There is plenty of that, to be sure. Our constant connectivity, lack of mental down time, and social media constantly ratcheting up our over-reactions all hurt our mental health. But there's another unprecedented factor in our society, which is our unprecedented lack of a sense of responsibility. It's easy for us to complain about the political system not caring about people, but it's harder to ask ourselves if we do. It's easy to blame distractions in society for our sense of malaise, but it's harder to look at our own decisions and how they affect our well-being.
The show is hyper-modern, but also quite old-fashioned. It's full of irony, but its irony is never cynical. It's almost preachy, in a charming, funny, nihilistic way. I've never seen anything like it, and even though I resisted watching it until three seasons had passed, now that I've watched it, I don't know what I'll do without it.
Netflix released a comedy special by Aziz Ansari recently. I was interested to see what Ansari had to say after the controversy he was involved in last year where a woman he took back to his apartment accused him of being way too aggressive. Unlike most stories of celebrity misconduct, I took an interest in that one, because I really liked Ansari's show Master of None and I liked the person Ansari seemed to come across as while playing someone fairly similar to himself.
Ansari's recent comedy special was...okay. He started off by addressing the story from last year. Without going into too much detail, he essentially said that he's felt bad and embarrassed about it, and that he's used it as a moment to rethink how he acts and to try to change. He said he has friends who have drawn the same conclusions, and that if that's been the main result of the incident, then maybe it wasn't such a bad thing. Since his actions probably weren't illegal, only really, really shitty, maybe that's all he needed to say.
But perhaps because he was forced to start off from a position of admitting his own failures, he then stayed in comfortable territory for the rest of the show. He gave a lot of time to the subject of racism and how he thinks it's funny to see white people suddenly aware of the racism in the world becoming overly zealous about wanting to change it all at once. He wasn't mean about it; he said, in all sincerity, that this generation of white people was trying harder than any other. The punchline to that set-up was that "I just don't think we're going to solve these issues during this brunch."
Fine. Ansari needed a win after a tough year, and he went with his bread-and-butter. But along the way, he brought up the controversy concerning Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, the long-time Simpsons character. Ansari's line was something like, "Of course it's racist, but just because white people just realized that doesn't mean we all have to be upset."
I'd heard of the controversy, but since I haven't watched the Simpsons in about 20 years, I'd never really looked into it that much. After a little research, it seems like the present push to brand Apu as a racist character started with a 2017 documentary called "The Problem with Apu."
It so happens that my viewing of Ansari's documentary was a break for me in watching a show about some other Asian convenience store owners. Kim's Convenience is about a Korean-Canadian family running--very much according to stereotype--a convenience store in Toronto. It's a not-great-but-solid show, which I enjoy largely because I like seeing what the show's Korean-Canadian writer Ins Choi finds funny about his own community. The show doesn't have a whole lot of real highs, but it's consistently good, and it's rounded out by some funny reoccurring side characters, so I keep watching it.
This show is only about a 7/10, but it's a 7 every episode, so it's worth a watch.
Maybe most viewers don't notice that Jung, the family's estranged older son, is played by a Chinese actor (Simu Liu). His pronunciation of Korean is egregiously awful. Jung's friend, "Kimchi," is played by an actor of mixed Vietnamese-Chinese origins, and his Korean is probably worse. That's not necessarily a problem, because an important part of the show is that the kids can't speak Korean and the parents can. There is an episode where Janet, the Kims' other child, is frustrated at a Korean restaurant that she can't speak Korean to the waiter. Janet, played by Korean actress Andrea Bang, pronounces words badly, too. It's a real thing from real life in Korean diaspora communities, and so it's fine that Jung can't speak well. The show needed a character who would look Korean but also have a really fit physique (because it's a reoccurring source of humor), and maybe they needed to go with Liu out of what was available. But it does mean some of the key roles in a comedy about Korean people are played by people who aren't Korean.
Three possible critiques of Apu and what the Kims have to say about it
I have to admit that when I first heard that there was an objection to Apu, I thought it was a myopic critique. Apu is obviously a satire of how Americans often view Southeast Asians. There is an episode where there is a bowling team called "The Stereotypes," made up a sea captain who talks like a pirate, an Italian chef, a Scottish janitor, and a redneck. Apu looks at the team as they are winning and laments, "Oh, they begged me to be on their team, begged me!" The show has never hidden the fact that Springfield is full of stereotypes. The show began as a running gag about American stereotypes, including the eponymous family of five. It seemed to me that as long as the audience was in on the joke, and it was clear that the writers of the show understood that there was more to Indian-Americans than convenience store owners with funny voices, then Apu was in-bounds. So when Hari Kondabolu, the film maker who created The Problem with Apu, stated that the main issue was that "it's a white person's perception of an Indian immigrant," I think, well, yeah, that's the whole point, isn't it? Isn't the show about how simplistic American perceptions of complicated things tend to be?
But I'd like to consider the arguments that Apu is, if not outright racist, at least problematic. The problem with Apu might be that it's racist, but it might also be that it's offensive or hurtful, which are related but different in key ways. I'm taking these objections largely from Jeet Heer's piece in The New Republic, which I thought was balanced and took seriously the counter-arguments. There are three main objections to Apu I can see:
1. Although the show is full of stereotypes, Apu was unique in that his was the only depiction of Southeast Asians and not corrected somewhere else in culture.
This is a claim that requires a little bit of cultural archaeology to confirm, but it's probably true. In 1990, there were no other depictions of the Desi diaspora on TV. It was okay to make fun of Scotsmen or Italian mafia-types or slack-jawed yokels, because there were other depictions of them to balance those out and make it clear, on the whole, that what viewers were seeing was an over-simplified stereotype. But there was no such balance to Apu.
I wonder if this is as true now, when there have been a number of excellent shows about Southeast Asians. Literature from the region has been influential in the West for decades. If a show appeared now with a character like Apu, I wonder how it would be perceived, especially if that character were just one character on a show with others from the Desi diaspora to balance him out.
For the Kims, they are appearing at a time when Korea is possibly less understood in the West than India and Pakistan, largely because so many people in India and Pakistan speak English. Western notions of Korea center around North Korea and missiles and Kim Jong Un's ridiculous hair and Gangnam Style. The Kims are similar to Apu in that they run a convenience store--a stereotypical profession for their demographic--and have accents, but they are an improvement in that one sees behind the curtain of a whole world of Korean disaporic life. There's the centrality of church and the cut-throat politics that go on in church. There's the slow move away from some long-held Korean beliefs, like that the Japanese are evil and signing your name in a red pen might kill you. There's the generation gap and the things that bind generations together.
In other words, the show is about the Kims, and this gives the Kims agency. The Simpsons did try to do this, to their credit. Apu got married and had kids, which was a big deal in a show where almost nothing ever changes in a way that would upset the basic formula. He got more shows that were about him than almost any other stereotyped character in the show. But it's not the same as having the show be about him. Because Kim's Convenience is entirely about the family, they are able to have characters both act in ways that make them part of a larger group (Korean-Canadian immigrant) and also be themselves in ways that set them apart as individuals within a larger group. The Simpsons didn't really accomplish this with Apu.
It might be unfair to lay all of this at the feet of the Simpsons. They weren't responsible for there being no other depictions of an Indian-American in the 90s or well into the 00s. And whatever Apu was in 1990, he was an improvement over I.Y. Yunioshi from 1961's Breakfast at Tiffany's. With Yunioshi, the joke was on him. He was a warmed-over version of World War II propaganda making the Japanese stupid and buck-toothed. With Apu, the joke was at least partly at the audience, if the audience was smart enough to get it.
Of course, the audience wasn't always smart enough to get it, and that's the point of critique #2.
2. Apu put a gun in the hands of bigots to shoot at Southeast Asian people
I'm going to quote Heer at length:
"Older desi, not just me and Shanker but Kondabolu’s own parents (who joke about his “Apu hair”) see Apu as a minor inconvenience. But younger desi, including many comedians and actors that Kondabolu spoke to for his film, have experienced a very different reality. They grew up in a world where The Simpsonswas a pervasive part of popular culture and Apu the only Indian-American character everyone knew. They were taunted and bullied in school, with Apu’s name and catch-phrase (“Thank you, come again.”) used as an insult. It’s their lived experience of growing up with Apu that shows why this minor character is so pernicious.
Apu is now a slur more than he is a character. It’s true, as Shanker argues, that other slurs existed before Apu. But those slurs didn’t carry the cultural authority of The Simpsons. When a bully calls an Indian American “Apu” or says to them, “Thank you, come again,” he isn’t just demeaning the person by himself (though that is wrong enough); he’s using The Simpsons to justify his contempt. As The Problem With Apu showed, Apu makes desi kids feel insulted not just by individuals, but by American culture at large. That’s why the film changed my mind. It featured testimony about Indian-American experiences I wasn’t aware of. I was bullied for being Indian American, as Kondabolu’s subjects were, but I wasn’t bullied with language from one of the most famous shows on TV."
It's very hard to contest an argument that's not about the abstract logic of whether something is racist or offensive, but about how it has practically affected a generation of young people. Yes, if the Simpsons would never have existed, bigots would have figured out something to throw at Indian-Americans, but the Simpsons--whatever the show's intent--gave them that something, and because it was the most popular show on TV for a while, it gave them a feeling that their insults had authority behind them.
Here, I'd like to coin a term. I'm calling this the "good fences make good neighbors fallacy." In Robert Frost's poem "Something There is that Doesn't Love a Wall," a provincial neighbor twice repeats this phrase. It has since occasionally been cited as a solid maxim, citing Frost as the origin of the thought and using his respected place in American letters to give it weight. But in the poem, of course, the quote about fences is something that's being undermined. Fences seem to fall down on their own, because keeping people apart is artificial and unnatural. But in popular memory, the phrase is often remembered on its own as a maxim to be respected.
That's what happened with Apu. Americans were supposed to see Apu as a representation of what our own poor understanding projected about a group of people. Instead, a lot of Americans saw it as a real representation of what that group was really like, and used it to justify their own ugly behavior.
You can argue that the Simpsons aren't responsible for the audience not paying attention enough to get what the real joke was, but at some point, maybe the Simpsons should have taken responsibility for how their creation was being used. A gun manufacturer has some responsibility for how the guns it makes are being used, and the Simpsons should have taken the same responsibility.
I don't disagree with this premise at all. And maybe the Simpsons' creatives agree, too, and have altered Apu over the years. Since I haven't watched the show in so long, although I think it's possible that the show actually has changed how it's depicted Apu, I can't really confirm that. But Apu has gotten at least some agency in a few episodes.
I can only report that when I was still watching the show, I liked Apu. When there was a script that focused on him beyond just being the funny man at the convenience store, I thought he was a hard worker, smart, thoughtful, and with a lot to offer the community of Springfield. But as long as a generation of kids grew up hearing "Thank you, come again" as an insult, I don't know how much my view of Apu matters.
What would a Korean-American or Korean-Canadian's experience of Kim's Convenience be? It's a little hard to compare between the two shows here, because when the Simpsons came out, it was the biggest thing on TV. Everyone knew about it, even people who didn't watch it. It was on a network that had just begun, and its creation increased the number of TV options by 33%. Kim's, meanwhile, is a moderately successful show at a time when there are more streaming services than there used to be TV networks. There are thousands of shows running right now. So the cultural weight of the two is not even in the same stratosphere.
But if we try to imagine Kim's as a juggernaut and imagine what its impact might have been on Korean diaspora living in North America, I think it's at least possible the show might give similar ammunition to bigots. Bigots might mimic the accent of the two elder Kims, or ask a Korean student in their class if she has to get to her job at the store afterwards.
To summarize, The Simpsons probably should have taken more responsibility for the impact it had back in the heyday of its run, but it did, I think, make some effort to do this, and whatever it did, it likely would have been used by some people for evil purposes. I am very sympathetic to the stories of young people who were bullied based on Apu's depiction, but in some ways, this is a critique of all of us and our culture rather than a critique of the show.
3. Brownface
This is the real heart of the matter, I think. It was possible to overlook for so long because we only hear Azaria, rather than seeing him. If he'd had to pull an actual brownface like Ben Kingsley in Ghandi, I don't think the character would have survived so long. But it is, in fact, a white person doing a voice that's a stereotypical Indian character. He's not the only white actor of his time to have done so. Robin Williams used a similar voice as a bit from time to time.
How angry do we get about this? I have to admit, I'm never sure. I've written before about how even though I accept that white actors shouldn't put on makeup to play other races, I don't feel the same way about putting on makeup to play an old character, even though old actors are available. This makes it hard for me to figure out WHY I feel this way about blackface/brownface/yellowface.
One reason is just economics. The Problem with Apu isn't just the story of Desi kids getting picked on. It's also the story of Indian-American actors having a hard time finding roles. It would have been nice to give an actual Indian actor the chance to play Apu. Even if the role still called for a stereotypical voice, an Indian actor might have done it with more authenticity and nuance. And it would have meant a steady paycheck for an underrepresented group.
Apu's existence also meant that as these Indian-American actors were trying to break in, they were often asked to play a role like Apu. The roles called for goofy, over-the-top accents and clownish behavior. Apu, by being such a perennial favorite, prevented the existence of better roles.
These are strong, practical reasons why brownface is at least hurtful, but I think most critics feel it's more than that. They think it's offensive, racist and immoral. They think it's a remnant of colonialism.
I think they have a point, but only if categories like racism aren't viewed with an either/or switch. Things can be relatively more or less problematic from a racism perspective. Attending a Black History Month seminar is a zero out of a hundred on the racially problematic scale. Asking to touch your black friend's hair is a 37. Touching it without asking is a 51. Tweeting that members of Congress who were mostly born in the U.S. should go back where they came from is a 73.
Where is Hank Azaria aurally buy not visually portraying an Indian-American character, in which the portrayal is understood by discerning viewers of the show to not be accurate?
Before you answer, consider Kim's Convenience again. There is an actor on it playing a Korean who is Chinese. This is just one of thousands of examples of movies and shows using East Asians interchangeably when it comes to nationality. And if you answer "close enough," you're essentially just pointing out how stupid the whole modern notion of race is. It's nothing more than "a group of people who look similar enough that most white people can't tell the difference." Moreover, Paul Sun-Hyung Lee doesn't really talk like his character "Appa" (dad). He does a really good impression of a Korean immigrant who speaks English as a second language, but that's not how he talks. As the show points out, older Koreans get upset when their kids talk like them. So why is it okay for Lee to do it when Azaria can't? Is it okay to learn an accent and play it, but only within your race? So a British actor can do an American accent, but not an Indian one? Even if he grew up in an Indian quarter of London, and he can really nail it?
But why does this matter if the actor does not appear on screen? All the show really needs is a voice that will sound like what it's supposed to sound like. If a computer could do it, the show could use a computer. But we're not there yet, so shows have to keep using humans. But what is inherently racist about a voice that belongs to a man of one race sounding like an intentionally stereotypical version of another race? In fact, wouldn't it be easier for the white man to do this than the Indian actor, who might be, ironically, too authentic? If the bit calls for a white guy sounding like what ignorant white people think Indians sound like, then a white guy might do it best. Especially if that white guy is a really talented voice actor like Azaria.
It's important that "Appa" and "Omma" have accents on the show. It's an integral part of how the world views them, and it's also an important part of who they are. They are people forced to carry on their lives in a language that will always remain difficult for them. That gives them a sense of vulnerability and bewilderment, but it also gives them a sense of nobility for their bravery in facing such an alien and disorienting life.
Apu hasn't been a fully sympathetic portrayal like Appa and Omma, but it's also not a mocking portrayal like Mr. Yunioshi. It's a satirical character that somehow became more popular than anyone imagined and then stuck around for three decades. Along the way, it caused collateral issues for groups of people that are unfortunate and sometimes heartbreaking.
So what do we do?
Ansari wasn't zealous about Apu. He pointed out that even his own show, Parks and Rec, probably did some things a decade ago that shouldn't be included now. Much like his "upward and onward" take on his own failings with a date he went on 18 months ago, he felt like the important thing to do is not to re-litigate the past, but to improve.
The Simpsons have, I think, tried to change their portrayals of some characters over the years. But they probably missed a chance to do better after the documentary on Apu came out. They could have worked with some of the best Indian actors to come up with a new trajectory for Apu. Instead, the show wrote a sort of anemic response into an episode, "No Good Read Goes Unpunished," shrugging their shoulders at how social norms of what is "politically correct" change. It's the very kind of view the Simpsons would have skewered 20 years ago.
You can't write a good story until you've written a hundred shitty ones. Society can't get it right before it's gotten it wrong. We need to keep working to get better, but it's better to work to find ways to improve rather than people to blame. I think the Indian-American actors who have criticized Apu deserve credit for not being particularly acrimonious. They've told their story, expressing admiration for the Simpsons along the way. Every one of the actors criticizing Apu is aware of all the counter-arguments I've made here, and so is reasonably circumspect about how forcefully they criticize the show. Their reasonableness should be met by The Simpsons with the same.
It's not too late. Despite rumors Apu would quietly leave the show, he was still in a few episodes in Season 30, which just finished two months ago. The show can't have too many legs left. A really successful episode get two million viewers these days. Azaria has expressed a desire to have more Southeast Asian writers in the in process. If Apu could somehow be rehabilitated before the show ends, it would not only make a nice coda to a show whose importance in American culture can hardly be overstated, but it would even make all those old episodes more watchable, because they'd be part of a continuum that ended in a better place.
Vanity Fair ran a piece last week wondering whether Jon Snow would, like Frodo in Lord of the Rings, end the series not as a king, but by leaving for the Gray Havens--the closest thing to that in the violent world of Game of Thrones being the North. Last night's episode where Daenerys goes full dragon-PMS blew that theory up--it's hard to imagine Jon going off to live a life of luxury knowing his family would be subject to a ruler who is now revealed to be a tyrant. But last night does revive the possibility that Jon may end up as king.
That same Vanity Fair article touched upon an idea that's been popular in America since George Washington: the best rulers are the ones who don't want to rule. For many, this brings to mind Aragorn from Tolkien's legendarium, a legendarium Game of Thrones creator George R. R. Martin has admitted his series is in dialogue with.
Aragorn didn't want to be king, so he was the perfect king, the thinking goes, and now that Daenerys is definitely not the right person for the job, reluctant ruler Jon Snow will be the man for the job.
But is this really a good criterion for a ruler? Doesn't being a ruler require someone who has prepared an entire life specifically for that role?
The idea that Aragorn didn't want to be king is entirely from the movies. Tolkien's Aragorn very much wanted to be king. Elrond, the father of his true love Arwen, would only give his daughter to Aragorn if he first became the king of a united Gondor and Arnor. Aragorn actually spent decades preparing for the test. (True, he trained to win the throne by wandering and being a badass, not to be a good ruler by reading a lot, but it still shows he wanted to be king.)
If there is anything the show has taught us, it's that ruling is always a terribly deft art of threading an impossibly thin needle. There are dangers of being too soft and being too hard. There is danger in too much ambition and too little. You can show too much strength or too little. Someone like Daeneryswho has been taught to believe in her destiny to rule might end up going too far in one direction, but a Stark who is always naively good might just as well go too far in the other. The only person right now on Game of Thrones who might be fit to rule is Sansa. Or Tyrion, if he could stop making one wrong decision after another.
A lot of people don't have the ambition to rule. That doesn't mean they should rule.
I see three possibilities for the last episode next week:
-Daenerys is evil, and she is killed/ousted in favor of someone else, like Jon, Sansa, Tyrion, etc. (A cool scene could take place in which she tries to dragon blast Jon for not bending the knee to her after her nuking the city, and the dragon either won't do it or it doesn't hurt him because he's a Targaryen.)
-Daenerys is evil, but the show ends without a coup being fully carried out. Instead, we're right back where we started with a mad Targaryen and the need to find a king slayer. You can't break the wheel, because in trying to break it, you only make it go round. The entire show was about the futility of trying to escape the game. The game is inevitable.
-Daenerys is, against all reason, right. She had to do what she did. After listening to her advisers tell her over and over to go lightly, she finally had to get raw with her enemies. It's a dark and Machiavellian ending, one in which the worst thing power can do is to be half-hearted. She gets to work and does a good job ruling, after first overpowering everyone who opposes her. (Personally, I don't see this as possible. I think the graphic images of innocent people dying are clear indication she's gone too far to save. But it wouldn't be totally out of line for a show that's been pretty close to an endorsement of realpolitik throughout.)
Whatever happens, I hope we don't think that Jon can save us because of his pure heart that doesn't really want to rule unless we all ask him really nice so he just has to.
In my last post, I argued that racism as a character defect does not, by itself, preclude someone from being a good person. I used Michael Scott, the insufferable boss from The Office, as an illustration to make my point. Here today to offer a counter-point is...me. Let's all welcome me here.
Guest Post
Art is not life
In Jake Weber's June 24th post, "Is Michael Scott both a racist and a good person," we get a good glimpse into how addled a brain can become after a lifetime of interpreting the world through fiction, rather than reality. Weber tries to debunk the notion that racism alone is enough to make someone a bad person. He derides the idea that racism is somehow a more elevated form of evil, worse than greed or parsimony or concupiscence.
It might be a convincing argument, if there were any examples in the real world of people with enough racism to be plainly evident but enough other charms to balance it out. But there are no such people, unless you find Paula Deen charming.
This is what comes of using fiction to draw ideas about real life. Fiction isn't real life. It follows a specific path meant to bring about a satisfying response in the reader or viewer by the end, leaving the consumer of the story to feel that all of what happened along the way was there for a reason. The real world isn't like that, and people in the real world tend to be quite different from people in art. In art, we need to show people as balanced, and give them some redeeming trait so they don't seem too simple. But the real world is full of people with no redeeming qualities at all, and racists are often at the top of that list. People who say the kinds of things Michael says don't usually also have hidden hearts of gold. They just don't. It's nice to think that people have some kindness just beneath the surface waiting to come out, but usually, when people seem like assholes, it's because they're assholes.
The Office is fantasy
The Office is escapist fantasy pretending to be a realistic comedy about working class people in middle America. When Michael says things no longer tolerated in any office in America, the audience cringes, but it also feels a slight tinge of vicarious thrill: someone is getting to say something that none of us is allowed to say anymore, and because it's presented as bad, we can enjoy it without feeling guilty about enjoying it. In this manner, the show gets to have it both ways: it can give us a stock heel character, but it also gets to show that same character humanized enough that we feel warm and fuzzy when he once in a while gets something right. Because Michael so frequently offends, the emotional payoff is that much higher when he acts appropriately.
Can't you tell when you're being played, Jake?
There is no greater example of this than the very scene Weber cites: the one in which his employees sing a tribute to him before he leaves. The writers need the audience to have warm feelings for sweeps week, so everyone remembers the Michael of the previous three episodes instead of the one who picked Stanley for his basketball team because he was black.
Some flaws really are more important than others
Racism might not be a greater sin than avarice in a personal or spiritual sense, but that's between you and your confessor, if you're into that kind of thing. Because in its effect on society, racism is far more dangerous, as the entirety of human history teaches us. Society's judgment lies on the behaviors that most threaten its harmony. So yes, it is appropriate to hold the racist's racism against him more than than egoist's egotism.
Michael may grow throughout the series, but we don't see him ever explicitly repent of any of the terrible things he said or did over the years. By the end of the show, we did, it's true, witness fewer lines like "Mo' money, mo' problems, Stanley; you of all people should know that." But it seems more likely (other than the business reasons that the show couldn't keep going to this well) this was because Michael learned from his many scoldings from corporate, not because he had a change of heart. In other words, the punishment worked. Society is right today to treat racism as a special brand of evil, because treating it like this works.
While suffering through a lecture on gender roles in Renaissance literature--the most painful class I took in graduate school--my professor made an off-handed remark that has always stuck with me. She said the writer we were studying--I forget who it was now--exhibited such ingrained prejudices surrounding class in her writing that she suspected that we, in reading her, would find her to be "a classist, much like we would now think of someone as a racist."
What she meant was not just that we would find her assumptions about class to be anachronistic; we would actually find them evil, the way we find racism to be evil. We would find her prejudices to be inexcusable. She feared that we might be so put off by how ugly her thoughts on lower class people were, we'd be unable to see value in anything else the writer had to say.
I don't recall what I thought of the writer. I hated both class and professor, so I assume I hated the assignment, too. But what stuck with me about that comment was how easily I knew what she was saying. Our age finds racism to be so heinous a crime that anyone guilty of it is written off as altogether unredeemable. It's what makes trying to label a politician a racist such a powerful and divisive claim. Who would vote for a racist, even one who had a plan to fix schools and the economy? Being a racist in 2018 (or 2002, when I was in that class) is a tenuous step above being a pedophile in the hierarchy of public enemies.
Can a racist be in any way redeemable? You'd probably get a mixed answer to that question, depending on whether the person answering has had enough personal experience with a variety of racists to be able to distinguish between them. You'd get a much clearer majority, though, on this question: Can a racist be a good person? I'd wager the overwhelming majority would say no.
Michael Scott of the 1970s
This was a question pop culture made people ask when I was very young. The show All in the Family featured Archie Bunker, who was clearly a bigot, but also could show flashes of a rascally charm from time to time. The New Yorker ran an interesting article a few years ago about how All in the Family did not accomplish its goal of getting viewers to examine their own prejudices through humor. The article quotes Saul Austerlitz: “A funny thing happened on the way to TV immortality: audiences liked Archie. Not in an ironic way, not in a so-racist-he’s-funny way; Archie was TV royalty because fans saw him as one of their own."
I remember reading a Reader's Digest--that paragon of conservative mores--that was strategically placed by the toilet in my home when I was a teenager. An opinion piece within it noted that even though Archie was a bigot, you couldn't deny that Meathead and Gloria were living in his house and mooching off him.
Nussbaum saw All in the Family as the show that launched the "bad fan," the person who unambiguously likes the character meant to be ambiguous and partly hateful.
Michael Scott of Dunder Mifflin
Watching the entire nine seasons of The Office forces the viewer to consider it as one large work of art, with the entirety of the series operating as one extended narrative cycle. (Okay, I see it as seven seasons with a two-season spin-off by the same name once Steve Carell leaves.) While individual episodes and seasons certainly have a self-contained meaning to them, the series continues narrative threads from one to the next, and so it asks us to consider it as a unitary whole.
A quick non-sequitur
The first thing that struck me watching the series in 2018 was something I'm sure others have noted, but I'm not even going to bother to Google. Michael Scott is a white man who has succeeded in business in spite of having almost no sense, no intelligence, little education, and being a generally irritating person. He is racist. He is sometimes a terrible friend. He ogles the secretary and makes comments on how attractive women in the office are. Yet, he is somehow a gifted salesman with the common touch who can make people like him if he shuts up long enough to let them. I will just say that in 2018 that...reminds me of someone.
The narrative arc of Michael Scott
Michael grows as the seasons go by, influenced by the people around him. But at the beginning of the show, Michael is pretty clearly a racist. Season one is the status quo for Michael as the curtain rises, letting us see what he is like before the events of the show begin to change him. He is clueless, stupid, racist, and sexist. We laugh at him because he is what is wrong with the American workplace. He is not a good person with flaws so much as an incarnation of all that is bad. This montage captures most of him at his worst:
After the short season one, the creators realized that unlike the British version of the show, this one was going to try to stick around for the long haul. That meant they couldn't leave Michael relentlessly awful. So Season Two starts to give us a more complex view of him. We see that he is a good salesman who was pushed into a position that isn't right for him. This alternating Michael--the terrible, tone-deaf racist and the sympathetic, goofy guy who just needs to be surrounded by better people--is carried into season three.
Season four is where the real change in Michael's character takes place. Is it possible that his relationship with overbearing Jan is the impetus? That her terrible treatment spurs a change in him? Michael's fundamental weakness is his need to be liked. But in Season Four, Michael, possibly learning from his mistakes in failing to stand up to Jan, manages to stand up to Stanley even though he risks not being liked because of it. If all of the first seven seasons are one narrative arc for Michael, then Season Four is something of a crisis point. Having gone through the climax of learning from Jan makes him ready when Holly comes along.
The show then goes on a three-season-long denouement, in which we wait for Michael and Holly to get together. Michael backslides for our amusement often, which makes it difficult, sometimes, to follow his narrative path. For example, Michael is sometimes extremely loyal, insisting on sticking with Ryan in spite of Ryan's obvious character flaws, or refusing to say his employer is a bad place to work even when it costs him millions of dollars. But he will also be suddenly and disturbingly disloyal to his faithful henchman Dwight when the writers need a joke. There is then a second climax of development for Michael when he goes off with Holly. Right before he goes, he manages to get rid of Packer, a far viler man than Michael ever was who has had a terrible influence on Michael. It shows that Michael's judgment has improved at least a tiny bit.
So how do we answer the questions?
Is Michael a racist? At least as we define these things in 2018, I think he's absolutely a racist. Although he's not, by the end of the show, what he was in Season One, he still shows some signs of racism. He is still afraid on occasion that Darryl will physically assault him based partly on Darryl being a large black man, even though Darryl has shown his good sense and trustworthiness over and over.
One might claim that Michael isn't racist, he's just ignorant. It's okay to laugh at his racism, because it's based on him being a rube. We can forgive him, for he knows not what he does. He actually believes that he is enlightened, as a matter of fact.
There is a difference between Michael assuming things based on assumptions he isn't bright enough to question and a KKK Grand Wizard who quotes from dozens of books of racist theory he's consumed. One has been educated into hating others, while the other inadvertently hurts others through a lack of education. But we tend, in 2018, not to forgive this kind of racism via ignorance. Archie Bunker's racism was also ignorance-fueled, but we are less likely to overlook it now. Furthermore, Michael's racism through ignorance is, at times, pretty profound, and he never seems to learn from it or apologize for it. When confronted with the fact that his actions are racist, he stubbornly refuses to change his mind: "When Chris Rock does a routine, people call it edgy and groundbreaking, but when I do the same routine, I get called racist?" he says, speaking of a bit Rock did criticizing black people and using the N word liberally. So I think you have to say Michael is a racist.
Is Michael a good person? Well, it certainly seems that viewers like him. (The surest sign that fans have taken to him is the number of people I know who still do the "That's what she said" bit at every opportunity. I'm one of them.) Does this mean we're being bad fans? I don't think so, as long as we "like" him in the ambiguous way the show presents him to us. I definitely found myself cringing and
even shouting at Michael during some scenes I'd forgotten about. But when I'm shouting at him, it's because I've seen enough to know he can do better, and I'm disappointed when he doesn't. I can still laugh at his failures through the disappointment.
I don't think I'm a bad fan for liking him, unless all of Michael's subordinates on the show are bad people for liking him, too. They've certainly been given more reason than anyone to dislike him. But they send him off with a loving Broadway-style tribute song they wrote for him, Why? Well, at the end of the day, most of us don't get to pick our co-workers anymore than we get to pick our family. You can end up with anyone. The employees of Dunder Mifflin/Sabre are wise enough to know that given all of the people out there you could end up with, Michael Scott, weighed in the balance, isn't the worst you can do.
Racism isn't a special genus of defect that should be privileged above avarice, hubris, sloth, indifference, ignorance, fastidiousness, or any of the other flaws we ridiculous humans show. While it can be especially insidious when it manifests itself at a macroscopic social level, in individual humans, it shouldn't be a hammer to smash the scales of character pluses and minuses we would otherwise weigh character with. Racism is not a unique class of human wickedness. It is not different from the other vices. It is at times shocking and terrifying and at other times so absurd one can only laugh at it. In that, it is like humanity itself.
It's important for me to make it clear, before I say ought else, that I really love my wife. I'm happy with our marriage most of the time, which is, I believe, a lot more than most people can say. If you were to pick 100 women at random throughout the world and sample them for how well-suited to me they would be, Mrs. Heretic would be in the top three of group after group of those women time after time. Some dreamers think marriage is a bust unless you get the one perfect match out of all the billions of possibilities. That's stupid dreaming. In the real world, getting anyone in the 95th percentile is really good fortune in a wife.
But the assholes who bring you Valentine's Day every year will never let you just enjoy how much you've beaten the odds. They will not let you be content being content. It isn't enough you got a spouse well-suited to you at a statistically serendipitous rate. She must be THE PERFECT wife. She must be your other half, split from you before time and then surgically re-attached to you by God, Cupid, and Nicholas Sparks.
Valentines, Inc. doesn't want you to just be happy. You've got to be perpetually ecstatic, and you've got to prove how excrementally ecstatic you are each and every day. Moreover, you've got to leave tangible proof of your ecstasy in a form that can be shared on social media.
The Single's Lament
Every year around this time, I see posts from my single friends about what the impending Dia del Amor means to them. Some take it as a joke, posting about how they're going to be drunk alone or masturbating or pondering suicide. Others post earnest or passive aggressive things about how couples should be considerate of those not fortunate enough to have someone special to love.
For the record, I'd file this one under passive-aggressive.
As a person in my mid-forties who has not achieved many of the things on my to-do list in life, I'm certainly not going to be dismissive of your feelings of being let-down if you're single and hating it. And I realize that settling down and having a family isn't like my dream of publishing a successful novel. There's a clock on the family dream. If you're my age and a woman, then the window of opportunity is closing fast or has closed on having kids the old-fashioned way. I don't blame you for your sadness.
But you mustn't think that Valentine's Day is a day out to get you. It's out to get me. You aren't playing the game, and so you don't get judged on whether you're the perfect plus one to your mate.
My Valentine's Day this year
I hate crowds and traffic, and so I generally hate to go out on Valentine's Day. But I've been feeling pretty good about my marriage lately, and I wanted to go out and celebrate with Mrs. Heretic. Let me say that part again--I wanted to go out and celebrate with her. Nobody was forcing me. There was no perfunctory feeling to it. It was a genuine feeling on my part. I came up with my own idea because I wanted to.
I asked her if she wanted to go out the Friday before the holiday to avoid the crowds. We'd get a nice dinner, then go to the mall--the good one--and use some of our tax refund to buy the clothes we'd be needing to get for a while. She likes to shop, and I thought if I went with her in a good mood, that'd be a nice night for her. I offered to throw in a trip to pick up a charm for her Pandora's bracelet.
The night pretty much went as planned. We had a nice dinner, in which I gave up my share of the bottle of wine so she could be happy-drunk and I could drive home without worry. We got clothes in a stress-free mostly empty mall. The emptiness of the mall meant we were free to make out here and there. I suggested she get an impromptu ten-minute massage. I thought it was a fun night together.
Right at the beginning, though, as we were on our way to dinner, she said something about settling for an off-night instead of the actual night. She made it sound like she was sacrificing to make me happy, because I didn't want to go out on the actual February 14th. She suggested it would have been more romantic to make a reservation for the night itself instead of working around it. It wasn't a long or a constant harangue. It didn't ruin the evening. It hurt my feelings just the littlest bit. It was just a tiny blip in any otherwise fun night that made it not quite perfect. And not perfect on Valentine's Day is, of course, the worst fucking thing that could happen ever and you might as well call the divorce attorney right now.
I blame Jack Pearson
Why was our mostly-good-but-not-quite-perfect evening not enough? I blame a string of characters we've been made to compare ourselves to. This year, it's Jack Pearson.
This man is pretty much the worst person ever. I fucking hate this guy.
On the show This is Us, Jack is a child of an abusive, alcoholic father and a depressed mother. His brother, who helped him survive his childhood, dies in Vietnam, where Jack also served. Jack nearly fell into a life of crime, but then he met Rebecca, and everything changed for him. He is romantic, given to grand gestures. He has just the teensiest bit of an alcohol problem, but not in a way that makes him mean to his wife or kids ever. His addiction mostly happens off-camera, and it's only there so the show doesn't get accused of making Jack too perfect. But he is too perfect. He's perfect in his adoration for Rebecca. Every mistake he makes is just a way for him to be more grandly romantic. Every man in 2018 will get graded on the Jack Pearson scale of sweetness and devotion, and we will all fall short.
I could be more like Jack. I could plan picnics and surprise getaways. I could insist that Valentine's Day was meant to be overdone or not done at all. But that's a trap you can never get out of. Once you do one grand romantic gesture, it demands another, grander one, or else you're left feeling you've lost something. Something done once in a genuine fashion quickly becomes something you're a slave to. Moreover, the whole thing smells of artifice. It's as fake as the holiday itself.
I never wanted to be a breadwinner. I feared that kind of responsibility, because I didn't think I was cut out for it. I've done it for fourteen years, though, because it kind of just happened that way. This is how I show how much I love the woman I'm with. I keep it together. I don't even complain that much about it most days. I do what I have to do so we can do what we want to do. I don't expect much more from Mrs. Heretic than that she try to keep it together, too. And most days of the year, we're very happy with one another keeping it together.
Then this particular fucking holiday rolls around to make you feel that good enough is not good enough, although I've been around long enough to know that good enough is actually great. My day-to-day better than average is awesome. It's worth celebrating. Except Valentine's Day tells me that I need to be Jack Pearson when I really just want to go on being Jake Weber.
Not comparing who has it harder day-to-day, but I am claiming February 14th
I don't want to get into some kind of who-has-it-worse competition with single folks. Loneliness can actually kill you. Some people love their single lives, others are bitter about it. You're welcome to either reaction, or anything in between. If you claim you've got it better than me, then you probably do. If you claim you've got it worse, then you probably do, too.
But the fourteenth of February is tougher on me than it is on you, single folks. (I mean, unless, like, your husband died on Valentine's Day or some shit like that.) Let's leave aside the financial debacle of the thing, coming right after I've just had to pay the credit card bill from Christmas. Every year starts off with me feeling like I'm supposed to be hopeful for a better year, even though with each year that goes by, I give up a little more on certain key hopes I had for my life. But I adjust, and trudge through the cold and the sludge and try to focus on what is still within my reach. At the very top of the list of blessings I count is how much I enjoy my family. And the best part of my family is Mrs. Heretic, the one I started it with. My life is not what I hoped it would be, but on most days, I think about my wife and my family, and it seems like it is enough.
Then this stupid holiday comes along and makes me feel like neither my life, my marriage, nor I personally am nearly enough. It's a hurdle to get through that I dread. And I can't even rise above it just by knowing I'm being manipulated by a culture with asinine assumptions about love. I grew up with enough romantic comedies that I can never de-internalize some of those idiotic concepts. Part of me will always think of love in Lloyd Dobler terms, or some other sap. (I wonder if Lloyd Dobler ever figured out what to do for a job? When he did, did he become less sweet?) There will be a voice in my head that feels if I'm not literally melting Mrs. Heretic's face off with romance, then the end is nigh (or might as well be).
The worst part about this is that it obscures the very good thing I do have. Valentine's Day makes it hard for me to see what I appreciate most other days of the year: that graded on terms of how love actually (another terrible movie) works in the real world, ours is pretty great, and I'm lucky to have what I have. Valentine's Day is my Tantalus punishment--where I am within arm's reach of the thing I want, and still unable to enjoy it.
But feel free to start up the "being single sucks" memes again on February 15th. I'll give them a thumbs-up.
I resisted watching A Handmaid's Tale for a long time, even though everyone was talking about it and it seemed to be the darling show of the moment. Much like "Cat Person" was the right short story at the right time politically and culturally, Hulu's remake of Margaret Atwood's novel has benefited from coming to be at a time when significant segments of America feel the gains of women of the last two generations are under a counter-revolutionary attack from a conservative right. Donald Trump is seen as a marker of this counter-revolution. Handmaid has become a focal point, an easy-to-identify signifier in a cultural war. Women are dressing up in Handsmaid's garb to make a point about the lack of female voice in a misogynistic culture.
My resistance to watching it, in spite of how much everyone was talking about it, was similar to why I waited so long to watch the Christmas comedy Elf. It seemed like a story that kind of wrote itself, and I found it hard to believe it could hold enough surprises to be interesting for long. I knew the basic idea of the book: the American government is replaced by a radical theocracy. A core concept of that theocracy is the total disenfranchisement of women. The increasingly shrinking number of fertile women are used as breeding stock by the ruling class. I didn't see how there would be much I wouldn't expect.
But much like Will Ferrell can make me laugh at a joke even when I know it's coming by being utterly committed to the character, Handmaid drew me into a story I mostly knew was coming through its wonderful attention to detail and the ability of the actors to painfully incarnate the emotions of people in hopeless situations. For the women of Gilead, the Puritanical government that has replaced the United States, the time to fight back openly has passed. The women must live with the bitter knowledge that they have missed their chance to either fight or run away to Canada. (Side note: Did the Canadian government sponsor this series? Because they come off looking REALLY good in it.) Scene after scene delivers believable emotional pay-off. "The ceremony" is truly creepy time after time. It's rape, but done slowly and with community approval.
You can know it's coming and still be haunted by it
What makes the show compelling is watching how women who have been stripped of all rights and all agency struggle to find ways to fight back, to form meaningful emotional bonds, and to keep hope. I couldn't help but be reminded of the novel The Underground Railroad, which I've alluded to a few times on this blog. Both Cora the runaway slave and Offred the human baby incubator are in a political environment with so little room to maneuver, the best choice by far is to attempt to run north.
Offred has, perhaps, a little more leverage than Cora. Modern day "slavery wasn't that bad" advocates like to contend that slave owners were motivated by profit not to harm their property too severely. But white slave owning fear of rebellion was often a stronger impulse than fear of lost capital. A slave owner would sacrifice a few slaves to prevent the lot from turning. In Handmaid, no amount of rebellion seems to be enough to condemn a handmaid to death, at least not while she is still fertile. The need for babies is too strong to waste one of the few working uteri still in existence. When Ofglen is discovered to have committed "gender treason" (being gay), her partner is summarily executed, but Ofglen is sent back (after having her clitoris removed to prevent temptation) to breed more children. Offred continually finds ways to obtain leverage, whether it's playing on Serena Joy's desperate hope for a baby or Commander Waterford's need for companionship and sexual titillation. There are limits to what leverage can get her, and the season ends with us about to find out what those limits are. But she's got something to work with.
Missed opportunities
Still, the show so far leaves me wanting. We know that the environment is under duress from pollution. This is what has caused infertility among most women, and it has also apparently had an impact on the food supply. In an early episode, Offred is warned about getting certain kinds of fish that might be high in toxins. When visiting foreign dignitaries inquire about Gilead, it is a point of pride that Gilead has made strides growing oranges.
We aren't actually told this in so many words, but it's a good bet the the stress on the environment and resources had a lot to do with Gilead getting a chance to come to power in the first place. How could any militia group overthrow the world's most powerful military? Not without a lot of concern from the people that the way things are going isn't getting it done.
And herein is the first thing I haven't quite found satisfying in Handmaid. There are some really intriguing flashback moments of how it all went down, none more satisfying than the realization that Mrs. Waterford herself, although a highly intelligent and successful writer, was actually an architect of the rules meant to subjugate women and make it illegal for them to read. She was never able to publish a book on the subject, but she was the one who conceived of treating fertility as a national resource. But so far, I haven't yet found the explanation of how the revolution put Gilead in place to be understandable. I feel like the show sort of yadda-yadda-yaddas its way through parts of it by having Offred trot out the old saw about being in a bath where the water gets turned up bit by bit until you're boiled alive.
That's unsatisfying, because it's an argument used by those who fear progress as much as those who fear backsliding. What about this particular crisis made it possible for people to accept this grim society? What made it possible to erase respect for human rights to the point the handmaids lost their right to choose sexual partners?
I don't feel like the writers quite have a handle yet on their own cosmos. In adapting the book to the screen, a certain looseness has crept in. If this were a movie, and the writers made the choice to focus on the lives of the handmaids and leave the nature of the origins of calamity something of a black box, that would be fine, but in a series that aims to go on and on, the audience is going to need to feel that this world is realer. Why has this society failed to find technological solutions to its problems? Why does there seem to be no fertility treatment? Why, if it has the discipline to treat female fertility as a national resource in order to save itself, is it so carefree about male fertility? (We learn that many midwives are assigned to infertile male commanders, meaning they go through month after month of wasted ceremonies. Does nobody check the men?)
Moral certainty is a little too certain
When Offred manages to tell the visiting Mexican ambassador the truth about the lives of midwives, that they are beaten and raped and monitored, the ambassador says she's sorry. "Don't be sorry. Do something," Offred says. The ambassador responds that she can't do anything, because her country is dying. In her large hometown, a live human hasn't been born in six years. Mexico needs to trade with Gilead to obtain handmaids of its own or it will die. Offred replies, "My country is already dead." We, the audience, are meant to side with her moral indignation and believe that Offred's view is the right one. What good is it to save humanity if, in the process, we lose what makes us human?
Contrast this with the moral upside-downness of possibly my favorite dystopian story, the musical Urinetown. In the world of the musical, years of drought have made water extremely scarce. It is illegal to urinate anywhere but in a public restroom, and there is a charge to go there. Anyone who is caught going outside the public facility is sent to Urinetown, which, in the interests of not ruining the musical if you haven't seen it, let's just say is sort of like jail.
There is a revolution against this system. Heroes rise up in the cliched way that heroes do, and the people replace the heavy-handed government with a leader who promises to share the water with the people.
The audience is meant to side with this peasant's revolt, but we're being played. The peasants' motto, "Don't give us tomorrow, just give us today" should have tipped us off. The leader who takes over after the revolt is too kind-hearted. She gives the limited water away too freely, and within a short period of time, society is on the brink of collapse because its water reserves are gone. The leader who toppled the government is now killed and replaced herself.
Is Urinetown defending dictators? I don't think so. But it is questioning the unproblematic easiness of the story where right topples might. There is a cost to an easy morality. If you apply absolutely a moral principle, even a seemingly obvious one like "people should be able to pee freely," there are costs to your absoluteness. Offred might be correct to say that her country is dead if it has lost its sense of human rights, but if the shadow group Mayday leads a revolt to topple Gilead, how will it prevent the literal death of humanity that is under duress?
This is an uncomfortable line of questioning. I'm uncomfortable writing it. Of course Gilead is wrong. That's the success of the show's close rendering of the lives of the midwives. Our empathy is activated, rightly, to feel that no matter what issues society is facing, this can't be the answer. But the show is also cheating a bit by not really putting us face to face with the issues society is facing. We only see the privileged world of the well-to-do, those who are given a handmaid. What's life like for the rest of the world? If you saw the blight there, would you feel more of a sense of understanding for how Gilead made the choices it did?
I wish people who wrote about Christians knew a few
As a side note, I was disappointed in the realization that there is a secret hotel used by the politically powerful where all of the sins of the flesh Gilead keeps under wraps are permitted. There is booze, music and dancing, and sex slaves. By making such a world, the show is demonstrating an essential contempt for the villains. This contempt doesn't make the villain more odious, it makes the villain pathetic and less frightening. Gilead would be a more formidable--and interesting-- foe if moral hypocrisy wasn't so predictably rampant. The presence of this hotel is a sign of the prejudice of the liberal mindset against religion and people who take their religion seriously. Of course there are hypocrites, but there are also Christians in America jumping in right now to fill the breach by fostering the children of families torn apart by the heroin epidemic. There are Christians who feed the poor and take medical care to other countries. The same Christians we revile for voting for Trump may have also brought medical care to Haiti, the place Trump called a "shithole." I'm not saying religion is the answer. I am no longer a Christian myself. I'm saying that it's less clearly the problem than some liberals like to pretend it is.
The intellectual argument...
I can construct an argument about why it is wrong, even if the human race depends upon it, to force the handmaids into childbearing against their will. One way to make the case is through the trolley problem, a thought experiment in ethics. In one scenario, there is a trolley car coming down the track, and there are five people on the track tied up who will be killed by the trolley. You are standing by a switch that can change the trolley to another track. But there is one person on that track tied up who will be killed. Do you pull the switch?
Almost everyone agrees the answer is yes, but critics of pure utilitarianism will add that the reason isn't simply because it's a question of saving five people versus saving one. You cannot treat people as tools, even if they are tools to accomplish something good. People are ends, not means. Flipping the switch to save five people was morally sound, and you cannot be held responsible for the unintended consequence of it killing someone else.
A variation of the scenario makes the concept of humans as ends not means clearer. A trolley is headed toward five people tied up on the track. You are standing next to a fat man on the platform. If you shove him onto the track, you are certain (I guess you're an engineer of trolleys or something) that the fat man's weight will slow down the trolley enough to stop it from killing the other five. Do you throw the fat man onto the track?
The answer is no. It's one thing for Spock, in Star Trek II, to decide that "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one" and sacrifice himself. It's entirely different to sacrifice someone else without consent based on that philosophy.
You might argue, based on a purely utilitarian position, that my refusal to throw the fat man on the track amounts to superstition. Sacrificing one to save five is just good math. I should do it and not hesitate. But think of what that leads you to. Do you take a healthy man and harvest his organs to save five others?
The extreme example of the problems with strict utilitarian thinking is in the story "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas." In Ursula K. Leguin's imagining, an entire society lives in paradise, but their paradise is all predicated on one condition: the never-ending torture of a child.
...and the argument of the belly
I can make these arguments and we can see the strength of them in a society where we are all generally well-fed. Offred can make her appeal to empathy, and it will resonate with an audience in which perhaps more people are dying of diseases caused by over-eating than they are dying of being malnourished. But do these arguments ring hollow to people who are dying? If you were hungry, and the world looked like it was dying, would Gilead make more sense to you?
I hope the answer is no. I hope society would not try to build the paradise of the many on the suffering of the few. But it's foolish to try to pretend the rationale to do so isn't strong. There are five people on the track screaming, and you can save them if you just ignore that one person.
Great ethical leadership
The other day, I was discussing these very ideas with a friend of mine who is an officer in the Marine Corps. He is also a Harvard graduate, a voracious reader, and a Christian. I was keenly interested in what the Marine Corps had taught him and what he thought about making decisions in a combat scenario. If his platoon was outnumbered, and he couldn't extract them without leaving some Marines, should he sacrifice some to save most of the platoon? Given that the military believes in not leaving anyone behind, to what extent do you follow that commitment? What if you are being pursued, and there is one slow guy who, if you wait for him, will get you all killed?
He gave great answers, and he admitted that sometimes, you might be essentially throwing the fat guy off the platform, and your justification will come down to semantics. You might have to ask one group to sacrifice itself in a delaying action to save the rest of the unit. The important point to him, though, was that you don't call it a suicide mission. You call it a delaying action. You tell them to fight to the last man, to try to come out of it alive. Importantly, he felt that everyone, by signing onto the Marine Corps, had essentially given consent to be sacrificed, so it was different to him than throwing a fat man off a platform without him knowing.
On the other hand, he realized that war itself is sort of like throwing a fat man off a platform: we are killing some people against their will in the hope that it will make the world better for everyone else. In the end, he recognized that making decisions is context-dependent. There is a principle that "we leave no Marine behind." Without it, the entire band-of-brothers bond that the Corps depends on would be broken. But this is not an absolute principle. You don't kill unlimited numbers of Marines in a hopeless effort to save one person.
Preserving human rights in an resource-constrained environment requires a great ethical leader. You cannot have the pure utilitarian who cynically shakes down the poor, like in Urinetown. But that cynical utilitarian cannot be replaced with a doe-eyed idealist, either.
The best leader, in the fat man scenario, will convince the fat man to jump in front of the trolley to save others. The best leader will build a monument to the fat man and get people to call him Steve instead of just "the fat man," because damnit, the man had a name. The best leader will also fix the trolley so it doesn't run over people tied up on the tracks, so nobody else ever has to jump in front of it to stop it. That's a lot of ask of a leader, but that's the only way to avoid the extremes of a prosperous Gilead or an impoverished Mexico.
We have precious little of that kind of leadership in the real world. I'd like to see it emerge in Handsmaid's Tale, rather than a simple tale of good triumphing over evil.
With it being as cold here as it is everywhere right now, and since I am too weakly constituted to deal with the cold, we've been doing a lot of what everyone else is doing: streaming shows all day long. Mrs. Heretic and I are currently watching the entirety of The Mindy Project, which neither of us is crazy about, but since we're too lazy to figure out an alternative, we'll probably watch to the end.
In the mornings, I write short stories where I try to bring about a convincing and satisfying resolution in five thousand words or less. In the evenings, I watch shows where the goal is to keep the story going for as long as it is profitable to keep it going. There are, of course, little climaxes and little denouements within the episodes and seasons of a TV series, but the big resolution is withheld indefinitely, until the stars want to do something else or the sponsor decides to cut bait.
Interrupting ancient tradition
The basic plot structure of exposition, rising action, climax, falling action and resolution or denouement has been more or less the cultural expectation in the West for over 2,000 years. Aristotle described plot in a way that people growing up in my era could find very easy to recognize. It can be a little difficult to find the structure in some ancient stories, partly because we have only fragments of some of them, but it's there. All the literature we read in school follows this outline, whether it's Shakespeare's plays, Homer's epics, 19th-century Romanticism or 20th-century realism. The only exceptions are stories that are intentionally trying, through some avant garde sensibility, to subvert classical plot structure. For the most part, though, it's been something that's been constant whether we're watching Star Wars or reading Faulkner.
When television became ubiquitous, plot structure changed only slightly. Instead of being treated to a story where a character faced challenges, adapted, and either overcame or was overcome followed by a hard ending where we were forced to imagine what would happen afterwards, viewers got miniature versions of the plot cycle repeated over and over. Every week, the stage was re-set and the play took place again, with variations from the last episode, but still very similar. Beaver Cleaver learned life lessons, then would forget them the next week and have to learn all over again.
This wasn't totally without precedent in Western culture. There had been serial narrative. Dickens, of course, is the first example that comes to mind. But a Dickens story, even broken up into dozens of magazine installments, still is headed towards an end the whole time. It's a traditional plot structure that just takes a while. A better early analogue for 20th-Century TV would be Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, with narratives progressing toward an ending, but then re-set to do something similar again. The earliest analogue in American literature would be James Fennimore Cooper's Natty Bumppo stories.
In talking about 20th-century television, I'm talking mainly about the sit-com, or dramas like The Fugitive or Kung Fu, where the overall meta-plot of the story didn't really advance much from episode to episode. This was the dominant model, but there were others. The daytime drama or soap opera had plot cycles or "story lines" within a larger story that, if the network executives were lucky, would never end. The daytime soap was held in low esteem, thought to be trash for shallow housewives, but there were night-time versions with a slightly better reputation.
Around the turn of the century, shows like Ally McBeal started to give audiences something different. This was a comedy where things that happened in one episode carried over into the next one, allowing writers to do things they hadn't been able to do before. As the Internet and fan forums started to exert influence in how people watched TV, fans loved being able to speculate on what would happen with a story from season to season.
As a result, plot cycles started to operate on many levels. There was still the plot cycle of each individual episode, but there was also an emerging plot cycle of a season. As CD sets got sold by season, we started to think of the season as the fundamental unit of a TV show, not the episode. This has accelerated with shows that are now made for streaming services that get released as an entire season and watched, often, in one binge session.
Like having sex for five years
In general, opening up TV narrative past the episode and into the seasonal aspect has made it better. In the old days, shows required us to forget what we'd seen in past episodes, a characteristic The Simpsons has had endless fun making mocking. The application of consequences to TV shows has made it easier for audiences to suspend disbelief and get into the shows.
However, there is a built-in problem with TV's season-by-season approach to building narrative. The climax in plot has the same name as the high point of sex for a reason. Plot is supposed to delight, to build expectation, and then eventually to deliver on that expectation and resolve the tension. Odysseus is supposed to eventually make it home. With a TV show, however, as long as there is a promise of one more season, then we cannot ever really get to the big orgasm. It might sound great to have sex forever, but at some point, delayed gratification starts to pass a point of diminishing returns. (Mrs. Heretic might opine at this point that this would explain why I'm fond of short stories. At least I don't write a lot of micro-fiction.)
There are three plot cycles in a TV series: the episodic, the seasonal, and the overall series cycle. As long as the series cycle is not resolved, Odysseus will never get home again. The audience never gets its big orgasm. In a great series, you can have moments that certainly feel orgasmic, like when Sansa Stark releases the hounds on Ramsey Bolton's ass. But for most shows, we just get points in the narrative that feel better than others--like season openers or finales. (One strength of Game of Thrones is that the series always had an end point in mind. It is just a very long plot instead of an indefinite one.)
Finally, at some point, the audience gets rubbed raw by all this foreplay. The show starts to jump the shark, and the executives, if they're smart, plan for a final season that finally resolves the show's big narrative issues. So we do finally get resolution. But there is a strange effect on the evolution of a show.
House, Nurse Jackie, and essential character armor
We all know about plot armor: the certainty an audience has that the show's main character cannot die until the end. The modern TV series introduces another kind of armor, one that makes the main character invulnerable from fully maturing past his or her shortcomings until the end.
I commented before about the movie Train Wreck, how it's satisfying once Amy Schumer's character finally overcomes her self-destructiveness. But it's also clearly the end, because now we, the audience, have nothing left to laugh at. With shows like House or Nurse Jackie, the main character is not going to fully overcome (or be overcome by) their shortcomings until the end, and the end is not now until we have the announcement that we are in the show's last year. Until then, we can have false climaxes--both House andNurse Jackie had a season where the main character kicked their addictions and tried to live right. But that made it hard to keep the momentum of the show going. For viewers, it was an interesting contrast from seasons past, but we all knew that the writers would pull the plug out of the tub of that transitional season.
In a movie like Train Wreck, the main character's personal development is linear. Events change her little by little until she makes a big change. In a TV show, the character is resistant to hundreds of events before it starts to change the character. The development isn't linear; it's a circular holding pattern. The character gets close to getting it right over and over, but always falls away until the show finally gets clearance to land.
The TV series does not have to answer one of the big questions in traditional narrative--Why now? Why are we being allowed into this person's life at this point in it? Usually, it's because that's the point we need to start at in order to witness the change. In TV, though, we come in at the point where the change is furthest away.
The result on modern viewers
It's hard to say what the actual psychological effect of stories are on readers and viewers. Hopefully, they help to produce empathy. But does reading about or watching a character overcome personal flaws (or fall to them) help the reader to do (or avoid) the same? I'm not sure, although I operate on faith that it does. I feel like it has in my own life, so I write in the belief it might do the same for others.
But I feel like there is an entirely different psychological effect of a television show that goes on indefinitely and only decides to end when external factors make it end versus a story that ends organically on its own terms. Not to sound like one of those annoying people who make a big show of how international and cosmopolite they are, but I prefer watching a Korean drama, where there is an end built-in from the beginning, and we are working toward it through all 20 episodes. The season is also the series. It has an entirely different narrative impulse.
I suppose a show where the main character limps on for seven years with the same basic issues is more like real life than a show where the main character overcomes a flaw within the space (to the audience) of a few hours. We do tend to face the same life issues year after year and decade after decade. So maybe the modern, streaming show is a truer model of how to deal with our weaknesses. Maybe Bojack Horseman can't stop doing drugs and drinking and wallowing in self-pity, but he can try to find ways to deal with his horrible flaws so he can face his day-to-day issues. He wins some, even if he usually loses, and the losses have much direr consequences. But maybe that's really all most of us can really do--try to minimize the downside of ourselves rather than overcome it and conquer mightily.
But this feels like a loss, somehow. The greatest fiction in fiction might be the illusion that we have control over our lives, but as Lander said in Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad, "Sometimes a useful delusion is better than a useless truth." I think readers and viewers lose some sense of agency when they follow narrative arcs that last from the time our kids start kindergarten to the time they're asking out prom dates, especially if we all know the show only ended because two of the characters left to go be on a different show.
Speaking of The Underground Railroad, I hear it's going to become a series on Amazon Prime. I look forward to watching it. It will deal with a question the writers of Handsmaid's Tale are dealing with now: how do you take a single novel and turn it into several seasons of stories? If there is a novel that's not itself a series but that might work for a TV show, it's this one. Like the underground railroad in the story, the narrative of the book has a lot of hidden passages that might lead to places nobody even knows about. Since the book is as much about the journey of African Americans as it is about the main character, it ends with more questions than answers.
The age of streaming video, which most are viewing as a golden age of television, has given us some brilliant moments and some stuff that's just better than being outside when it's freezing. I hope The Underground Railroad will become some of the best we've yet seen.
