Today was the first really hot weather run of the season. I went out at 6:30pm for a very easy nine, and it was still around 88 degrees. I wore a bunch of sunblock and didn't push it. Here's a plug for spray sunblock. It's extremely important to protect your skin. Don't forget your legs and face, too.
Tammi and I spent the weekend in New England where I delivered a conference paper - the paper was well received, and the session productive; we were able to go for some fun runs along a really nice river, as well as spend some quality time watching TV from a cushy hotel bed. Nervous about the paper, I had a hard time sleeping the night before and woke up wide-eyed an hour before my 6am wakeup time, when I planned to go for a run. On a little less than 5hrs sleep, after some of the in-house coffee maker's weak filter-packet coffee, I left the room at 5:20 for a solid 80 minutes, during which I saw more people than I would've expected out for early weekend morning runs.
The reason I ran late in the day today is because I stayed up til 1:30 last night watching Desperate Housewives, a surprisingly funny, fast-moving show that's part murder mystery, part comedy, part domestic drama, part suburban gothic. It puts into delightful comic soap-operatic form the four-character Sex and the City formula: neurotic redhead, do-gooder burnette, horsey blond with problems relating to men; Samantha's comic promiscuity is replaced by Eva Longoria's devil-may-care attitude toward mothering. (DH corrects SATC's all-white-girl racial obliviousness to reflect contemporary American demographic realities, it nevertheless replaces Samantha's stock lusty-dame character with hoary stereotypes of Hispanic families: a domineering patriarch, a lax mother who lets her fat prepubescent daughters mess up the house, eat whatever they want, and watch whatever trash TV they want.) Each episode moves quickly in and out of separate plots lines centering on each character.
Like its sister comedy Weeds, DH updates the durable American genre of the suburban gothic. The gothic has always, after all, been about houses, ever since the first gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto; it's based around the idea that enclosed spaces enclose secrets, that appearances don't match reality. In the twentieth-century U.S. this genre takes off in the 40s and 50s with The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, but also, more familiarly perhaps, Updike's Rabbit trilogy. Rabbit, Run mixes in a lot of 50s-existential angst (Rabbit's last name is Angstrom), but you have to remember that despite Updike's well-wrought prose and sophistication and overwritten sex scenes, it's a novel that begins with the main character running through a graveyard and ends with his drunk wife, an example of the desperate housewife who in her physical confinement and mental isolation is a staple protagonist of the suburban gothic, drowning her baby. In novels, houses always function as shiny symbols of the status quo that conceal turmoil within, but in TV shows from the 50s-90s, the inside of the house sets the stage for sitcom comic resolution, and serves as a repository of family values. The placid outside is matched by a placid inside. (Perhaps an exception to this division is the daytime soap--but the soap, of course, is a key genre ingredient of DH.) The genius of DH is to take the novel's gothic approach to the interior of the house and put it in what's really soap-opera sitcom form.
DH takes the gothic very seriously. In another nod to SATC, it begins and ends with pat voiceovers. But instead of the voiceovers being the embarassingly bland musings of ambivalent exorbitantly dressed wanna-be writer Carrie Bradshaw, we have the ghostly voice of a Wisteria Lane suicide, a housewife whose despair took the extremest form. By playing with the various forms despair can take on the spectrum between lethality and comic triviality, the show achives an engaging balance of melodrama, comedy, and utter weirdness.
Last thing: I think of the show and its companion show Weeds as a response to the housing mania of the mid-00s. Everyone's obsessed with real estate, there's a renewed interest in the exurbs and the suburbs--the suburban genre again has its moment. But what DH captures perfectly is the extreme weirdness of the magical thinking characteristic of the moment, the idea that anything and everything can and will happen in the suburbs, the instead of being a place of placidity and stability the suburbs are turbulent, dynamic, dangerous. Despair went both ways in the housing boom as first it was desire that was desperate, a yearning to have a bigger house with all the psychological and (so people thought) financial benefits it would entail. Suburban houses truly were investment vehicles--places on which to wager the future of your money and your future hopes for achieving the suburban norm; when things turned, the despair took a far darker turn.
No comments:
Post a Comment