An open letter to Joss Whedon

Dear Mr. Whedon,

I'm not refraining from calling you "Joss" because I'm angry, I just think it's tacky that all your fans refer to you as if you were friends in real life.

But I am a little angry, I won't lie. I watched Friday's Dollhouse, and I have a few questions for you.
1. What kinds of promises did you have to make to Fox in order to get signed for another season? After renting the show on DVD and watching the unaired pilot and mythic "thirteenth episode," it became clear to me that the show had the potential to be something much more interesting than it had been up to that point. You obviously had a clear sense of the overall story arc, and some really exciting ideas not just about where the show might go, but how a more long-term story arc might pay off more than an episodic "Who's Echo This Week?" structure. However, once the season started off again, all that movement toward big-picture questions and serial structure seemed for nothing. Echo's an undercover FBI agent! Echo's a mother! Who Will She Be Next? I know that major networks are more and more skittish by the day, afraid of getting even more handily outpaced by cable, and that those shows which fall on the "episodic" side of the divide tend to get better ratings week-to-week, but all your other shows (and your history in comics) make it clear that your heart's in the serial format. So why is Dollhouse on Fox and not FX? Or the odiously renamed SyFy? I'd bet that even though you didn't get many viewers by network standards, you could be a BSG or Damages-style tentpole for a good cable station.

But, okay, maybe you don't have much control over where this show airs. Judging by Eliza Dushku's Executive Producer credit, she was key to making the show happen at all, and she was in all likelihood locked in with Fox proper. Fair enough. And Buffy worked the balance between episodic and serial fairly well, so I know it can be done.

2. This brings me to my second point--because, know what Buffy did really, really well? Girl-power-style liberal feminism. It was sometimes incredibly stupid about race, but at least its heart was in the right place, and you did make up for at least some of those issues in Firefly, with all its anti-imperialism and the mind-blowing beauty of Gina Torres. And you know what neither Buffy nor Firefly had? Ridiculous Hand-That-Rocks-The-Cradle storylines that make mothers out to be somehow better and worse than all other women, but definitely some kind of crazy lactating love mutant. In case you forgot, here's what happened on Friday: Echo gets put on an assignment where she's a mother to an infant, and Topher has changed her "on a glandular level" so she'll be up for the job. Apparently, what this means is that she turns into a shrill, demanding wife who doesn't think twice about breaking into her husband's office as soon as he leaves for work. As always, something goes Terribly Wrong (this is also no longer working for me as a plot device--the Dollhouse is supposed to be a functioning business, after all!), and Echo first escapes her handlers and then the wipe she's given is insufficient so she goes back to steal the baby she knows is hers. For you see, "the mothering instinct is the strongest instinct of all."

Is it? Tell that to the post-partum mom who struggles with breastfeeding, or the one who has to be hospitalized for depression. I mean--I'm all on board for celebrating the unique power that comes with motherhood, but by making it into this binary thing (once you have a baby, you morph into super-mom--and that change can even happen just from the Baby Hormones!), it keeps up the idea that women are just hormone-driven machines, and makes the transformation into SuperMom an expectation for all women (it is, after all, "instinct").

I can still see how there are possibilities here--maybe you're also commenting on the constructed nature of the Ideal Mother, and showing how the myth of SuperMom blocks the possibility for men to fully explore emotional bonds with their kids (once Echo leaves the scene, Daddy is suddenly able to canoodle with his baby without his previously immobilizing grief), but I'm not buying it this time. The force of this "instinctual" argument is too strong, and the show's not strong enough to bear the flaw.

So we're not breaking up, exactly, but I need some space. Don't get me wrong, I'm still writing that chapter of my dissertation on Buffy, and I still want to be friends, but the new episode of the Buffy comic is going to linger a while longer on the shelf of my local comics store. I'm not removing Dollhouse from my TiVo, but I'm not going out of my way to watch it any more, until you show me that you're really trying to get this relationship back on track.

Take care,
Anne

Sherlock Holmes as Iron Man?

I'll admit it--my Special Lady and I walked out of Iron Man. I love superhero movies, and I have a special place in my heart for Robert Downey, Jr., as I do for pretty much all celebrities who struggle with addiction (even Lindsay and Britney get a level of immunity), but I just couldn't take Iron Man. We went to see it at a big theater, and the crowd was so jingoistic and creepy, I had this moment when I found myself suddenly unable to approach the film as a Big Dumb Action Movie--and if I had to sit there while people cheered as another Afghan village exploded, I would start to cry. And don't even get me started on Gwyneth frakkin' Paltrow.

So I met this news that Guy Ritchie is making an "updated" Sherlock Holmes movie with trepadation, to say the least. Like Iron Man, most Guy Ritchie movies seem to try for irony around their masculine posturing, but ultimately find themselves way too invested in that posture for the irony to really take. The fast editing and ass-kicking are over the top, but the characters never reach the self-aware (or even accidental) self-parody of a Nathan Fillion or Shatner or Mark Wahlberg.

The figure of Sherlock Holmes offers a chance to present a different vision of masculinity--he's always struck me as sad and vulnerable, with his obsessions (the OCD stuff, obviously, but also his obsession with Watson) blocking him from the world of male privilege where he would otherwise be able to succeed. This strikes me as a particularly feminine conundrum--where your skills prevent you from getting what you want, rather than bringing you toward it. I think of it as the Lisa Simpson Syndrome: intelligence and skills mark you as weirdo instead of a Success.

And part of this feeling must come with the historic physical characterization of Holmes, which it's impossible not to think of (the coat, the hat, the big pipe, etc). He just doesn't look like an action hero, which is why I think he works as a hero for braniacs, misfits, and nebbishes. Guy Ritchie just seems like another guy who'd beat you up for your lunch money--or at least idolize the guy who could.

So here's hoping this turns into gay camp, à la my favorite gay male love story ever. I doubt it, but anything's possible.

Feminists, Musicals, Sex-Crazed Vampires: Performance among/and Art Fans

1) The Guerilla Girls

“Are the Guerilla Girls really necessary? Take a little test. On one side of a piece of paper, list all of the female artists you've heard of. On the other side of the paper, list the male artists.”
-essortment guide to the Guerilla Girls

It might be easy to forget how few women artists are represented in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York--after all, so many of the paintings (especially the naked ones) are of women. The Guerilla Girls are out to change that, one piece of guerilla art at a time.

The Guerilla Girls formed in 1985 as a reaction to an exhibition at MoMA called “An International Survey of Painting and Sculpture.” Out of 169 featured artists, only three were women. Adding insult to injury, the curator publicly stated that any artist whose work was missing from the show should “seriously rethink his [sic] career.” A group of local artists protested the opening, but only managed to piss off patrons and industry bigwigs alike. (Darn those shrill, shrill feminists!) So, in a decision that ultimately matched form to function, they decided to stage their protest as a piece of performance art, hiding their identities and letting the information speak for itself. The Guerrilla Girls make public appearances and conduct interviews, but only while wearing gorilla masks, and only using names of dead female artists. In this way, they can advocate for the value of these sometimes forgotten artists, protect their own careers, and keep the focus on the depressing statistics that form the core of their message (for example, only 3% of the artists in the modern section of the Met are women).

Although they began by focusing their energy on the New York art world, emphasizing inequity in museums and the art world as a whole, they've since shifted their energy to Hollywood, where the situation for female directors and producers is even worse. They posted billboard in LA advertising the gender inequity of Oscars and the absence of any feminist historical perspective in Hollywood films. Their most engaging work, however (if you ask me), is their political posters. Check out this amazing sendup of the “Terror Alert System,” and this shield against the groping paw of the Governator.

I realize this is a departure from my usual focus on fans in this blog, but I think the Guerrilla Girls show the most awesome end point of the resistant power of fan art--using the form of something you love (postmodern art, in this case) as a framework for pointing out the things in it that make you crazy.

2) Andrew Lloyd Webber

Secret love/ secret shame of theater geeks everywhere, Webber is simultaneously an example of what's wrong with theater and what's right. His work brought musicals into the modern era, incorporating lots of different styles, garnering a huge following, and even getting knighted (!)--but his shows are for the most part grindingly repetitive and, well, bad (and this from the girl who can recite the entire libretto of Evita from memory). So the question is, what desire does Webber tap into? What's at the source of his appeal?

I don't have a simple answer to that question, but I do think part of the reason for Webber's popularity has to do with spectacle and seriousness. The musical that really changed things for him was Jesus Christ Superstar (1972), where he moved from the campy pastiche of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (1970) to the overblown soaring solos that became his signature (I'm thinking specifically of “I Don't Know How to Love Him”). Ultimately, then, I think Webber's popularity is about his ability to do camp (or something that should be camp) seriously--he gets at the seriousness of opera (particularly in Phantom of the Opera (1986), his most famous show) but also the accessibility of big-budget megamusicals like My Fair Lady (1956) or Oklahoma! (1943). This makes him ideal fodder for ten-year-old girls who want to be the next American Idol or at least wear a cat suit on stage (I don't blame you, for the record, if you can't bear clicking on all of these links).

Although Webber was not directly involved with Les Miserables (1985) or Miss Saigon (1989), the success of Evita (1978) and Phantom of the Opera laid the groundwork for those, and these later musicals bear much of the same appeal--big budgets, elaborate sets, insistent refrains, soaringly Serious Solos. The influence of these shows on pop culture can be seen in the way musical parodies get structured, and in how we understand the iconic nature of women in power.

3) The Rocky Horror Picture Show

A rite of passage for freaks and theater geeks everywhere, The Rocky Horror Picture Show is a 1970s B-movie transformed into a piece of participatory theater. Midnight movies always have cult value--who but a fanatic will leave their house for a movie in the middle of the night? Over time, though, Rocky Horror has become the Midnight Movie that defines Midnight Movies, with showings in West Des Moines, IA and Hobart, IN. In this way, it serves as a kind of entré into freak culture for people in areas that might not have the most thriving cultural scene. This was certainly the case for me, heading into the Twin Cities from my sleepy suburb of Minnetonka, MN. My parents were out of town and I had a fever of 102, so I don't remember much beyond a heady combination of rebellion and flu medicine, but afterward, I felt like a Real Freak (which was exciting).

The basic formula for Rocky Horror is like Mystery Science Theatre 3000--people yell back at the screen in response to stupid character decisions or bad acting, or as a way of participating in the action of the film. The content of the film itself might be part of what marks Rocky Horror as particularly freak-friendly. Tim Curry (whom you might remember as Wadsworth from Clue or the super-scary clown from It) plays Dr. Frank-n-Furter, a “Sweet Transvestite from Transsexual Transyvania”--the owner of the Gothic mansion where middle-American bourgies Brad and Janet find themselves after getting lost in the woods. Like horror protagonists everywhere, Brad and Janet get more than they bargained for with their stop, and they both get tricked into sleeping with Frank-n-Furter (and into eating Meat Loaf--the actor, not the dinner!).

Fans understandably see Frank-n-Furter's castle as a kind of anything-goes playground, and the atmosphere at a midnight show feels a lot like the party Brad and Janet first walk in on. People bring props to throw at the screen at the appropriate time, and virgins (first-time viewers) have to undergo initiation while hard-core fans act out the show on a stage in front of the screen. It's similar to a Star Trek convention in that there's a funny balance at a Rocky Horror show between a pressure to be the most hard-core in your knowledge/fandom and a profound sense of inclusion for all fringey types. It's strange, now, how the show has become such an institution. There's a weirdly official “preservation society” for maintaining shows in These Modern Times. And it's hard to take something's fringe appeal seriously when it's praised on The Drew Carey Show.

On another note, this is the last post that I'm doing for the class I've been teaching. From here on out, things will be a little less structured and listy, but also hopefully a little more frequent, and more focused on serials and all things dissertatey. Any ideas? Requests?

Music Makes the People Come Together: Three Larger-Than-Life Artists or Groups

1. Elvis Aaron Presley

Velvet paintings. Buck knives with his picture emblazoned on the handle. Competing stamps with his “fat” and “thin” portraits. A ridiculous movie released eleven years after his death (and twenty years after his fame had peaked) about how he inspires suburban hippies toward patriotism. Clambake. Who could inspire all this fanmania but the King?

The question that always gets me about Elvis is why he inspired the level of fan attention that he did--why Elvis and not Buddy Holly or Jerry Lee Lewis? (Especially Jerry Lee Lewis, who was making music at the same time and had the same crossover appeal of taking black music into suburban white living rooms.) Obviously, capturing the cultural imagination is like catching lightning in a bottle, and there's never a simple answer as to why one star makes it over another, but I think Elvis's appeal is all about his ability to transgress boundaries of identity, particularly racial and sexual identity. He was dangerously masculine--courting 14-year-old Priscilla Presley and (according to urban legend) packing his jeans with the cardboard tube from inside a roll of paper towels to emphasize his...appeal. At the same time, however, he showed an effeminate vulnerability--his signature leg movements are rumored to have stemmed from uncontrollable nervous shaking, and he was an infamous "mama's boy."

This sexual ambiguity was only reinforced by his racial ambiguity. I'm not sure Steve Allen would have made him sing "Hound Dog" to an actual dog or Ed Sullivan would have refused to film Elvis below the waist if he didn't present the threat of miscegenation by being a white guy performing music that was so unmistakably "black." Of course, Elvis never would have been famous like he was if he'd actually been black--part of the controversy around him as a singer, then and now, is that he's among the first in a long line of singers from Elvis to Pat Boone to Vanilla Ice to Eminem to the Beastie Boys who've been accused of co-opting African-American music for a while middle-class audience. Elvis and Pat Boone deserve this accusation more than Eminem, The Beastie Boys, or even (shudder) Vanilla Ice, since Elvis and Pat Boone re-recorded songs written and already released by black artists like Big Mama Thornton and Fats Domino.

Once Elvis died, however, the nature of his popularity changed dramatically. Instead of race and sex, Elvis fans were obsessed with sex and death and thwarted potential. Elvis's famously excessive personal life captures fans' imagination these days. He's become a much more classically "cult" figure in death, with people positing connections between Elvis and aliens and claiming that he faked his death. The greatest cultural riff on Elvis's lasting cultural appeal (besides Colonel Homer, of course) would have to be the film Bubba Ho-Tep, starring Bruce Campbell and Ozzie Williams as Elvis and JFK, both of whom (the film argues) faked their own deaths. Don't question the logic--just watch the movie--it's awesome.

2. Madonna
If Elvis caught the cultural imagination around the relationship between race and sexuality, then Madonna has exploited our obsession with the relationship between gender and sexuality. As her name suggests, she's always interested in breaking down the virgin/whore dichotomy that structures so much of how people think about gender in our culture.

A confession: the first course I ever took in college was about Madonna, and although I didn't realize it at the time, I think it was there that my obsession with cultural studies started. Madonna garnered a ton of critical attention in the 1980s, and I've heard that it was impossible to go to an academic conference without seeing at least one Madonna paper, if not a whole panel. I remember watching the video for “Material Girl” in class, and then my teacher asking us why we thought feminists were mad about it. More than my answer, I remember being blown away that there was an academic conversation about Madonna at all. I imagine this is how my students feel about Buffy now.

How to characterize Madonna's different stages? There's Underwear Madonna of the early 80s, when she performed at the MTV video music awards and launched a thousand “wannabes.”; scary dominartix Madonna; Evita Madonna, the Serious Actress; Spiritual Madonna, coming back after 40 with Ray of Light, kaballah, and a brand-new British accent; Britney Spears makeout partner and adoption-loophole US Weekly fodder Madonna (her current incarnation). So many different social anxieties seem to coalesce around her: fear of aging, partly, but mostly she seems to address the problem of how American culture can handle an economically and sexually powerful woman. She's interesting to critics because she's infuriating--playing off the cultural stereotypes that have kept her down, but incorporating them into her own image.

Her relationship to the aging process has unsurprisingly taken center stage of late--she turns fifty on August 16 (of course she's a Leo), and so much of the fan art she's inspired revolves around her ability to constantly reinvent herself--and by being constantly new, she never has to worry about getting old.

3. The Grateful Dead
Although you can buy Grateful Dead albums at a store or online (American Beauty is their best, I think), the real deal with this band is live shows. They've been touring nonstop since 1965--have continued touring even after Jerry Garcia's death in 1995 under the new monikers "RatDog" and “The Other Ones.” As this second name suggests, Jerry Garcia was the heart of the band.

The mythology of the Grateful Dead is deeply hooked into that of free love and huge festival shows like Woodstock. As such, the music is only part of the appeal of a Dead show. People follow the band around for years, trading bootleg tapes and selling clothes and bags and jewelry at the shows as ways to make money. Fans love their music, of course, but the real deal is the show itself, and the opportunity it offers to form an alternative community based in free love and free drugs. The connection among freaks and hippies (and the way this connection is always measured against "straight" culture") is awesomely characterized (again), by the greatest television show ever, Freaks and Geeks. This blog entry, too, shows how fans narrate their love for the band like a religious conversion: I was trapped by bourgeois mainstream culture, but then the Doors of Perception opened in my mind and I saw the Beauty of Music. I was Lost, but now I'm Found.

This ethic of the always-touring, drug-addled band has been reproduced in bands like Ween and Phish over the years. Even festivals like Lollapalooza and Bonnaroo, while they feature bands thoroughly disconnected from the free love vibe of the Dead, still build on that pattern of sprawling days-long shows and alternative fan-based communities.