Rewatching LOST: Season 1

Hello! if you originally subscribed to my blog because you heard about my book, Never Saw Me Coming a brief update: publication date is 9/7/21 in the US, 9/2/21 in the UK. We are currently in the process of cover design, but are not quite yet in the advanced readers copy game. I will be honest and say it’s hard to start seeing “Most Anticipated Books of 2021” lists coming out and you’re not on them, but those tend to be front loaded, and they do them seasonally.

In the meantime, when I’m not attempting to do home workouts, tending to my Literary Assistant (dog), or worrying about the next attempted coup, I’ve been somewhat feverishly been rewatching Lost.

I told a friend I started rewatching Lost and she said WHY in that exact tone of voice of people who are still angry at the ending of the show and how it increasingly unraveled as the seasons wore on. But really.. what else is there to do? I was in the mood for something that had a lot of lore behind it and let’s face it Lost’s ending was better than Game of Thrones’ was. But more important than my existential-level boredom crisis while the world is ending, is the fact that my current work in progress is a large book with an ensemble cast and multiple timelines. I was a HUGE fan of Lost when it came out—an early adopter from the time I started to see the mysterious billboards in LA when I lived there. Love or hate the show, I don’t think you can argue against the first season being really solid for a lot of reasons. Part of the reason the show turned out be a disappointment is just that—it started out so strong that people’s expectations became so high. As much as some writers like to talk down about TV, I think TV teaches us really critical lessons about storytelling, about characters, tropes, and what fans respond to. Clearly this show did some things really really right.. and also some other things really really wrong.

via GIPHY

The Good..

Atmosphere/ Setting: Who can complain about a gorgeous island in Hawaii, with beaches, jungle, and plenty of exotic locations to explore. There are a lot of books/films/shows where the setting has as much importance as a “character” as humans do, and this is more true for Lost than anyone. For one, you love to look at the island—whether it’s a beautiful shot of the mountains, the lush-looking jungle, the beach, or some of the more creepy locales, it’s just easy on the eyes, and the show’s creators did a great job of using location to their advantage. You got the sense that they were on an isolated island, but that the island was big enough to hide various mysteries. (To throw in a neg, one of my peeves about the first season is that they never do a thorough survey to explore the entire island. For all they knew, they were actually on peninsula attached to a wholeass country, or there was a resort somewhere on the island [this happened on the The Golden Girls once], or, I don’t know, a whole self-sustained weirdo commune of semi-bad people..?) The setting had so many nooks and crannies that it was perfect for a series of mysteries, but the setting itself was also a mystery that spread out over the course of the entire series—what does “the island” want? What is it exactly? Where even is it?

Ensemble Cast: My recollection, at least, was that at the time it started airing (2004), there just weren’t any shows like it on air—not just that it had huge production costs, and was a weird combination of mystery/scifi/fantasy, but that it had a huge ensemble cast. The cast is at its pinnacle in the first season: almost everyone who’s a major character is explored and is also interesting.

Also consider, Lost was wildly diverse in 2004. Six out of the 20 main characters (ones important enough to get flashbacks and major plot lines) were minorities—that just wasn’t happening back then. Two of those characters, Jin and Sun, are still main characters despite not speaking English at all (Jin) or most of the time (Sun). With the exception of Michael and Walt, they all make if through all six seasons of the show (and TBH, I didn’t need more Michael, although I thought they could have answered more questions about Walt—I never knew if that was just bad writing, a lack of time, or the fact that Malcolm David Kelley had hit puberty at a rate too rapid to make sense for the show’s timeline). It also had a significantly overweight character, Hugo, who is not just a sidekick or there to be someone’s best friend. They lean hard on him for comic relief (the main sphere of influence for any overweight character) but to be fair Jorge Garcia is a funny actor, and often times he’s the stand-in for the viewer, expressing how crazy something that just happened was. (Rewatching this show reminded me of the now-forgotten trend of saying Dude when something objectionable happened). But on to address a diversity elephant in the room: Naveen Andrews. I like Naveen Andrews. He’s a good actor and a handsome fellow (and shout out for promoting my exact brand of curly hair). But it’s super cringeworthy that they cast an Indian to play an Arab. It falls under the “any brown guy will do” line of casting, ala “Jimmy Smitts can play this guy, right?” type of thinking. It’s not like there weren’t Arab actors back then—plenty of them got cast to play minor roles in Sayid’s flashbacks. Did viwers look at Naveen Andrews and think that he passed as Arab? (He 100% didn’t for me, but perhaps I’m saying that as an Indian and as a somewhat Arabic speaker.)

Two things that were really impressive about this first reason with respect to cast. One is that in any series, you have an arc for that season and an arc for the overall entire series. Putting aside the latter for now, within that first season-wide arc, there’s also an arc per character. It’s some pretty impressive planning to consider that just about all the main characters got major arcs in Season 1 and that these were intertwined with the overall mystery of Season 1. Another thing that was really satisfying (and continued to be, even when the show got worse) was seeing new character interactions over time because they had such a large cast of characters to work with. You have standard dyads (Jack vs Lock) or triads (Jack vs Kate vs Sawyer) but then you’d have occasional moments of people who hadn’t spent much time together suddenly forming a group (Lock + Boone on hatch duty, Sawyer + Micheal + Jin on the raft.)

Clue drops as cliffhangers: If I can take you back to 2004.. there was no Netflix. Well, there was, but it was a service that sent you DVDs in the mail in these envelopes and somehow the DVDs never broke. (I remember a friend of mine worked on the streaming side of Netflix and I thought it was weird and not sustainable lol.) Lost was a show that you watched, glued to your TV, and then had to literally wait a week for the next installment. It caused a frenzy of people discussing what various clues meant—I remember getting into heated arguments.

As the author of a thriller (ahem!), one thing I’ve paid sharp attention to is what keeps people turning pages. It’s cheap but it works: drop a “what the fuck” clue and end a chapter/episode—works every time. The first season had the luxury of walking into an entirely blank slate—anything could be on the island.. and they really gave us a smattering of everything. But the first time you heard the smoke monster?? (many thought it was a dinosaur). When Sawyer shoots and kills a polar bear? When we discover that all-around Island Man John Lock was actually in a wheelchair before the plane crash? When the light turns on in the hatch? All moments when viewers yelled WHAT—and there is nothing you want more than that as a mystery writer.

Some really stunning moments:

Plane crash: as someone who is scared of flying, the plane crash (shown over and over across the entire show…) is probably in my top three terrifying fictional plane crashes (along with Flight—a not very good movie with a very good plane crash scene—and Castaway).

Jack telling Shannon that Boone is dead: More on this later, but I hated Shannon as a character and was sort of benignly indifferent about Boone. (It’s shocking how flushed Ian Somerhalder is in Lost vs how pale he is in Vampire Diaries. And the wigs they gave him for later guest appearances on Lost are a TRAVESTY!!) Maybe it’s the COVID-isolation-for-almost-a-year, but this made me cry (along with the below two scenes) even though I knew it was coming. It was just filmed so well—no talking, a great musical score, most of the group celebrating the birth of Claire’s baby, Shannon and Sayid coming back from their date, having absolutely no idea what’s been going on until Jack walks out to tell them. Or maybe it’s because I’ve been in that awful position of catching happy, unexpecting people off guard and having to tell them that someone they loved has died, but it was such a good, good scene.

Sawyer telling Jack about his father: I’m a hardcore sucker for enemies-to-friends stories and also curmudgeons and well, Sawyer in general. But here are two people who didn’t like each other coming to a sort of “we’ve been through enough to respect each other” understanding, Sawyer is going to leave, possibly forever (possibly because he might die), and he finally decides to tell Jack that he’s figured out that the man he talked to in a bar in Australia was actually Jack’s father, and that he (Christian) was sorry but didn’t know how to say it, and was proud of him. Matthew Fox (Jack) is a champion crier. I don’t know of another male actor who does it better while still looking attractive. Here is a just a selection of good cries:

(I’m not 100% sure but I think the last one is a clip from the actual scene I’m talking about.) But the first thing he does when he realizes what Sawyer’s saying is turn away as he starts to cry, which felt extremely real because that is exactly what I do when I cry (I can relate to the whole “trying to pretend I don’t have residual psychological traumas that maybe aren’t entirely dealt with because busy dealing with whole world is on fire stuff” haha 2020 thing).

Season finale: I thought it was masterful, one of the best season finales I’ve ever seen on TV, and some of the very last scenes were ones I thought about long after the show had ended. Think about the fact that they wrangled 20-something characters into three different important threads that all converge within the finale: Rousseau doing the fake-out to take Claire’s baby, the mission to blow the hatch up with dynamite, and the raft crew taking off. You had no idea how the raft crew would do, but between the music and acting, felt elated when they took off with everyone’s help—and then (tears!) Vincent tries to swim out to the raft. For all its faults, I don’t know if a show ever had a better season finale than the quick switch from the raft crew being “rescued” only to have a weird scraggly Gordon’s Fisherman dude say “thing is… we’re going to have to take your boy” right over to the hatch being blown and seeing the long tunnel down and having no idea what was down there. I remember not being able to sleep the night of that finale because I kept thinking about the WTF moment of “we’re going to have to take your boy” and what on earth was in that hatch.

My favorite characters:

via GIPHY

Lock: You can dislike him for sort of being a zealot, or someone who makes decisions without discussing it with others, but the thing I consistently liked about Lock is that he was unpredictable but for real reasons. In badly written fiction, people do shocking things for no purpose other than throwing a twist into the plot. But Lock always did weird things because he had his own agenda and it made sense with his internal logic: the island healed him of his paralysis so he thinks that various things are “supposed” to happen. It was also pretty pleasing to see the contrast between his pre-crash life, where he’s a pathetic loser, to how strong and agentic he is on the island. It’s like he’s written his own fan-fic.. so of course he doesn’t want to leave, and doesn’t want anyone to figure out who he is. I’ve also loved Terry O’Quinn back from when he was on an obscure show called Millennium, a Chris Carter/ X-files-like show which now that I think about it, had some similarities to Lost. I think he’s a great actor who can go from outright creepy, to strong, to vulnerable, and at some really great moments, funny.

Sawyer: Ignore the fact that Josh Holloway is just really hot with killer dimples and just consider how interesting Sawyer’s character is. He’s a person who profoundly hates himself, and wants others to hate him, who has annoying nicknames for everyone, and probably would have voted for Trump (if he wasn’t a felon, which he might be?), but I can’t help but like the guy. Sure, the show is rife with people with daddy issues, but he has these contradictions I find emotionally interesting. If given time to prepare, he will act obnoxious or even cunningly in a self-interested way that makes people dislike him—but when there’s an emergency (a fire at the campsite, when the Others try to take Walt off the raft) he unthinkingly responds by doing the “right” thing. This is far more palatable than what they do with Jack (see below). It also creates lots of fun situations where as a curmudgeon he warms up to others despite his desire to keep himself hated. (One of my favorite music-overplaying-montages from the first season is everyone on the beach, and Sayid throwing him a piece of fruit even though they’ve already fought). Sawyer isn’t trying very hard to be a hero (see: Jack) but sometimes he is one which gives him more complexity.



The Bad..

Jack: The show’s unrelenting focus on Jack (both in the first reason and in general) is a significant problem. I read that the creators/writers originally intended to kill him in the pilot but “You can’t kill the white guy.” Not that I’m complaining that he stays alive, but that the show is so overwhelmingly focused on him that I felt like he was being shoved down our throats. Having a doctor on the island does create a lot of good moments. And in the first season, I was fine with his flashback storylines: his messed up relationship with his dad, his marriage, and how he has trouble with his savior complex. But the show went overboard in its focus on him such that it didn’t make sense in some instances, or took away from other characters. He becomes the de-facto leader of the survivors—but why? Because he’s a doctor? (or the white guy..?) It absolutely would have made sense for him to be one of several main decision makers on the island, but not The Guy. Why was Jack calling the shots so often when Sayid had military experience and Lock is like a literal mountain man? Time and time again there is some dangerous situation where Jack has to go somewhere—and on top of this, typically insisting that someone like Kate doesn’t go—when this doesn’t make sense at all because he’s the only doctor amongst the survivors. Kate’s actually right in every single one of these arguments (which keep happening!!): Jack is too valuable to be carrying around dynamite and to be traipsing through the woods in search of Bad Guys. What he should have been doing is training an army of assistants in his field. (Much like Lock and Sayid should have been as well.) Not only this, every time anything remotely interesting happens, any other cast member has to say, “We have to tell Jack!” “or get Jack!” or “we need Jack!” (when these are not medical emergencies). In fact, the show suffers from people constantly saying Jack’s name. (people on this show in general say people’s names too often, but it’s the worst for Jack.) The cost of this is that a lot of that leadership stuff could have been spread out to other characters and given them more to do plotwise. (see Sayid below). In particular, Kate’s character gets weaker after the first season—as someone who’s really resourceful and scrappy, it would have been interesting to see her as more of a decisionmaker and less of a “No I’m going you can’t stop me”/ love triangle attendee.

Shannon: Shannon is the worst of the survivors. Don’t get me wrong: I liked her weirdass near-incest plotline with Boone. And introducing a character who is so obnoxious and self-centered creates a lot of natural tension for a situation where everyone has to help each other out. But she doesn’t really have an arc, when an obvious, great arc would have been that she grows the fuck up. Her relationship with Sayid is not growing the fuck up; Boone even says to Sayid that she would inevitably find an older guy amongst the survivors to take care of her and do stuff for her, which is exactly what she does. Translating the French maps (as obnoxiously as possible) and being a love object doesn’t redeem her. And later in Season 2, having an episode where we see that her stepmother was mean to her after her father died and cut her off financially doesn’t really make my sympathize with her (compare that to Kate’s childhood, Sawyer’s, or even Hurley’s—or Sun’s terrifying figure of a dad!) The worst part of this is that in no way shape or form did I believe that Sayid would fall in love with Shannon. There’s more substance to him, and he’s still hung up on Nadia. I think the writers knew they were going to kill Shannon off early in Season 2 by one of the tailees accidentally killing her, and they knew that fridging her could make Sayid go into some interesting places emotionally. But this was… not good.

The Ugly…

What do you make of a thing when you have all the right ingredients for a cake—fresh eggs, Guittard chocolate, King Arthur flour—but then the thing you end up with is all kinds of wrong? In the long run, can we still say Season 1 of Lost is good if it eventually declines to a pretty bad place?

Tune in (at some point) for an entry about Season 2, which contains my favorite Lock moment of all time.

Recap of Poldark, Season 5 Episode 1

Season Five opens up right in the midst of a game-changing event: Elizabeth's death. The main question is how will this change Ross and George's relationship? I hope for the better, but we’ll see. The show gets right down to business and I'm not sure why I'm surprised at the emerging plotline: how can we possibly make Ross Poldark, the character who is ALWAYS on the right side of a political issue, even more right? Have him join the abolitionist movement. Initially I was concerned when the show introduced its first black character, Kitty Despard, the wife of one of Ross's good old friends from the war against those pesky Americans (who of course Ross actually supported, even though he fought against them). I've never read/ watched Outlander for reasons, but heard that the show jumped shark once they went to the new world and the writers cringingly handled the topic of race. Here we see Demelza and Kitty bonding over the fact that they were each originally their husband's kitchen maid--but was Kitty his kitchen maid or his slave who worked in the kitchen? It's related later that he purchased her to set her free, but anyhow, it's a little awkward--not the worst, but awkward. So I was set up for what I thought would be a predictable abolitionist storyline for this season and wasn't exactly excited because I can see Ross getting into trouble, but not necessarily getting wrapped into ethically interesting situations. His political problems are always obvious: poor people should have a working wage--somehow he'll end up on the gallows and he'll give a speech so rousing they set him free. But more on that later.

Humming in the background are some C plots. Drake and Morwena are married, and I was "glad" to see that the show didn't gloss over her trauma. Morwena's been through a lot, too much actually, but I fully expect that she'll get a happy ending somewhere down the line. There's some not particularly interesting rabble-rousing in the countryside, with the townsfolk being upset that there isn't work for them. Demelza solves the problem by hiring one of the female rabblerousers, whose main purpose, I anticipate, is to provide a feisty love interest for Demelza's brother, Pious McEyebrows.

Let us turn to George. Oh George. One of the saddest scenes from last season is right after Elizabeth's death with him holding the baby, and tentatively holding Valentine's hand. We open this season with his unsurprisingly cruelty to Valentine--which is just tragic. A new "businessman" arrives in town, Ralph Hanson, with a sassy daughter who I like but who looks too much like Caroline Enys (how many Aryan youngish blonde women with weirdly ethereal skin can you possibly cast?) I started to cringe as soon as Ralph, who bears a weird resemblance to Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh--began to pitch George about his lucrative business in MAHOGANY. So much was said about MAHOGANY.. how good the money is . . how great the trade. So... slavery. George wasn't necessarily taking the bait--either the business relationship or the potential match to the sassy daughter--but I prayed he would not go down this road. As I've written elsewhere, George is dastardly AF, but not necessarily in a way that's clever. I'd love to see a more complex storyline for him--maybe a redemption arc, or maybe a more morally ambiguous argument behind his dastardlyness. Right now he just does bad stuff because he's bad, or because it annoys Ross, and this lacks any sort of nuance. I wish he had more of a Thanos bent--more like the thing he's fighting for almost kind of makes sense, but the way he's going about it is why you have to fight against him. (Ever heard of birth control Thanos? Or environmentalism? Oh well.) If George goes the way of slavery, there's no redeeming him. I can forgive him being really angry about Drake assaulting him with frogs, but not for participating in the Transatlantic slave trade. Of course that would put him in direct opposition to Ross, so maybe that’s where we’re headed ..?

Or maybe not? I expected to see serious psychological effects from Elizabeth's death--mainly in the form of rage, and mainly directed at Ross-- I honestly wasn't expecting him to start calling his maid Bessie “Elizabeth.” The look on her face the second time she does this is priceless. As is the Houston We've Got A Problem look from his uncle. This culminates in a weird scene where Drake and Morwenna discovering George having some sort of weird and very Poe-esque dinner with Elizabeth's portrait. To be fair, Elizabeth's portrait had about as much agency as Elizabeth. George, you definitely need a tincture of some sort, but I would not go to the same doctor as your wife did.

There are some political shenanigans --it's not even a major plotline for Ross to spoil an attempted assassination of the king himself--all of this is really just to put Ross into contact with a shadowy and apparently powerful political figure, essentially an 18th century Smoking Man in leggings. He offers to free Ross's friend in exchange for Ross's . . . services to the crown . . services of a secret nature! Didn't see that coming, but I found it more interesting than a straight "bad guys are bad and good guys are good" abolitionist plotline. In particular, Ross fought in whatever the British call the American war for independence--he fought for the crown, but agreed politically with the Americans. This is more morally complex than everything else he does (I'm not sure how interested the show is in interrogating what he did to Elizabeth as a moral transgression--it was explored with respect to its impact on his relationship with Demelza, but I don't think it was considered independent of that).

Top remaining questions: Is Ross a Mulder or a Scully? Most importantly, where is Horace??

Poldark Season Four: In Which Some Things Come To A Head

I finally got to finish Season 4 of Poldark—I got distracted with writing a book, rewriting it, and then this thing. Season 4 felt short—some things were very satisfying while others didn’t quite work for me.

Let’s start with the weirdest and most moderately-warm-dishrag: Justice for Morwenna. 98% of Morwenna’s scenes have involved her suffering horrifyingly—if not by Ossie assaulting her then by him or his mother threatening to take away the one thing that seems to bring her any joy in life, her son.

Happy to see Ossie finally bite the dust, but his manner of death was pretty unsatisfying. I was hoping it would involve Morwenna breaking a wine bottle and going wild on him, or even just some good of fashioned poison; it’s been difficult to just sit back and watch Morwenna get shit on over and over. So ultimately Ossie’s undoing is self-made—the creepy affair he has with Morwenna’s sister results in the sister’s husband going Clue on his ass with a candlestick. A very nice candlestick. The fact that Morwenna doesn’t have a lot of agency in her situation felt reasonably fair at first— lots of girls were forced to marry whoever and were then unhappy—but the fact that she never ends up having agency is ultimately frightening. It just felt like her situation kept going from bad to worse with no end in sight. We do get a more-or-less happy ending with her tentative marriage to Drake—the one drop of sugar in a season finale filled with intense negative emotions.

The politics in the show aren’t really nuanced to be intriguing in and of themselves. Ross is always heroically arguing for something obviously right, like the idea that poor people who make terrible wages shouldn’t starve to death in abject poverty while rich dudes with monocles laugh heartily over bowls of caviar. The show always wants to give Ross the moral high ground on everything but Elizabeth. Wealth disparity, in this world, is due to men’s insatiable greed, but it doesn’t really get into, say, what was going on with colonialism at the time, and about where a lot of those men in London probably got their wealth. Oh well.

London also plays host to a wife swap: Ross heads off to the big city without Demelza and ends up spending a lot of time with Caroline, who has fled there in the wake of her losing her baby. Meanwhile Demelza and and Dwight do the same back home. Happily this didn’t devolve into another infidelity plot. I’ve always found Caroline and Dwight’s relationship to be cute but reasonably complicated enough to be interesting. They’re clearly different people from different walks of life, but I like how they make it work. In a red-herring subplot, Demelza accompanies Ross back to London, where she attracts the attention of high-“class” Monk Adderly aka #metoo in a tricorner hat. This plotline wasn’t particularly shocking (of course Ross responds withe righteous anger tinged with dudely violence), but the fish-out-of-water elements of London for Demelza were interesting. We’re used to seeing Demelza be fiercely competent and independent—she manages the land back at Cornwall entirely by herself in her husband’s absence, and this burden only gets bigger once Ross gets elected into office. But in the eyes of the London elite, she will always be the scullery maid Ross married. Some of this is legitimately how people look at her, but some of it is the differences in class between her and Ross that she doesn’t have to feel in Cornwall, or at least not that often. Back home, she’s afforded a lot more freedom as someone from the lower classes she’s able to do more and say whatever she wants.

But the main course of this season is really various explosions happening within the main conflict triangle of Ross, Elizabeth, and George Warleggan. Finally we get some really satisfying fireworks: mainly Ross explicitly saying what we’ve all been wondering—he confronts Warleggan directly (with Elizabeth in the room, no less) and says WHAT do you WANT exactly? You have wealth, you have Elizabeth, you have everything (including an impending knighthood). George doesn’t have a good answer to that question. He is weirdly obsessed with Ross, and it’s too easy to assume that assumption is based entirely on Elizabeth. (Or at least, the above statement has to be true if the show is to survive without Elizabeth.)

Oh Elizabeth. I was literally shocked when she died. When Ross stress-horsebackrides to the Warleggan home when he hears Elizabeth is ill, and walks into that room and George says, “Oh Elizabeth, she’s dead” I actually thought he was playing a terribly cruel trick on Ross. Because her character arc didn’t feel finished to me. There could have been another entire season or more of her moving toward something, or doing something. There was some satisfying confrontation between Elizabeth and her husband- when Geoffrey Charles points out that Valentine is “the spitting image of Uncle Ross” George flies off the deep end. He stone cold turns on Elizabeth (fair) and Valentine (not fair—and really heartbreaking to see). Particularly seeing how overjoyed he had been when he found out that Elizabeth was pregnant once again (and I thought it was nice that he specifically wanted a girl). Ah, what a way to manipulate us with that turn.

But ultimately, Elizabeth’s death doesn’t make sense to me. The show weirdly has a flashback (which I don’t think it has done before?) to show her getting a tincture that will cause early labor back before she had Valentine. So when George finally comes to once again question Valentine’s paternity, Elizabeth’s solution is to convince him by having another “premature” baby. . . ? So he’d think that she just has a tendency to have premature babies? I know she dies in childbirth in the books, but I always had the thought that Elizabeth could be more fleshed out. Now that this is her final demise, it just feels like her entire story is about her being the bone that two dogs are fighting over. I don’t know if she ever grows as a person—her plotline for several seasons revolved around her hiding Valentine’s paternity. All of the other major and minor characters in the show are capable of plotlines independent of Ross except for her. When I said I wanted her to more actively do things, I didn’t mean take a tincture and die (the plot equivalent of “go jump in a lake.”) She gets the short end of the stick—to be a plot device for Ross and George. Although it does provide the opportunity for Ross to point out that they (he and George) are the ones who have done this to her.

With the somewhat tiresome love triangle disposed of, maybe there is somewhere more interesting for the conflict between George and Ross to go. It’s a fair guess that George will go off the deep end, even though Elizabeth wasn’t exactly holding him back from being evil. The last shot of him this season is of him with his children, newly widowed, holding the newborn baby—I couldn’t help but feel for him, despite him being an awful person. Elizabeth was the only thing in his life that seemed to bring him any joy—will it now be nothing, or maybe will the focus move to the baby? Is poor Valentine about to be shipped off to boarding school? (On second thought, given the duels and fires and Dwight’s incapability to keep anyone alive, maybe Valentine would be better off . . . ?)

See you next season.

Here’s another Poldark post about the first half of Season 4.

Review of HBO's Euphoria, episodes 1 -3

File this under “mildly chagrined, but would still watch.” Euphoria is not a high-brow drama about teens. It’s a well-filmed horror show for parents where you’re supposed to eat popcorn and think about the good ol’ days. Hear me out:

Rue (Zendaya, 23) is back from rehab with no intent on getting better. Parents in this show are easily fooled, absent, or are predators hunting teens. She forms a friendship with the new girl in town, Jules (Hunter Schafer, 20). I guess Rue is tapped in enough with the cool kids to get invited to the parties, but not enough to have any actual friends other than Jules. In this sense, she’s floating in the middle of no where without anyone sensible to ground her, and has no interests other than drugs. We get the sense that this is tied to her father’s slow death from something probably like cancer.

Everything about this show is mega-angsty with no levity whatsoever—that doesn’t make it unwatchable, but it creates this very specific category of watchable that I find compelling while at the same time significantly depressing. I felt the same way about Skins and 13 Reasons Why. It’s independent of whether or not these shows are actually well written, but for me it does throw a glare of nonreality to them. There is tons of angst in being a teenager, but these shows tend to show the most extreme version of this—I don’t think this is because it’s supposed to echo reality, but because older people—particularly people with kids—are drawn to it the way we slow down on the highway when we see an accident. If you were to make a list of things that make parents clutch at their pearls, this show is a grab bag of them.

THE INTERNETS! Kids use it to share sex tapes of other students as a form of shaming or humiliation. To use anonymous sex apps to meet up with strange S&M dudes in hotels. To buy fake urine to pass drug tests that oblivious moms force you to take. They definitely don’t use it to watch people play games on Twitch, to make funny videos on TikTok, or to do anything of substance related to an interest or hobby.

THE DRUGS! Peak pearl-clutching: your daughter may be in a drug-dealers house and somehow be forced into a situation where she will literally have to lick fentanyl off the knife of a brown drug dealer with facial tattoos. Rue is apparently isolated enough that none of her friends are willing or able to say, so . . . maybe this is self-destructive? (Edit, I wrote the above after episodes 1 and 2— episode 3 is a little bit better at indicating that Rue is friends with Jules and Kat, although on the whole, I don’t think these friendships are three dimensional, which kind of makes the first person narration from Rue telling her friends’ stories not quite work for me. We’re supposed to see Rue-Jules as one of these hyperintimate female friendships you have when you’re young—episode three has a drop of this— Jules saying, “I can’t watch you kill yourself” and some of Rue being jealous, but not too much of their actual bond, which is mostly shown by them riding bikes).

BOYS AND SEX! Pretty much every male on this show is a horrorshow nightmare dumpsterfire. The only halfway decent one is the drug dealer (not the fentanyl one—the white one that Rue is friends with). There’s the one who sort of shames/ manipulates Kat (Barbie Ferreira, 22) into having sex with him in a roomful of other boys, only to post a video of it online. When she discovers this no one (even other girls) seems to have any empathy for her, even though one must imagine these other girls are dealing with the same horrorshow nightmare dumpsterfire boys. There’s Nate (Jacob Elordi, 22) whose sociopathic tendencies are starting to evolve into controlling behavior centered around his girlfriend (who in an act of revenge, has sex with an older boy [played by a 24 year old] in a pool in front of him, then lies about it later saying she blacked out.) Girls are either hypersexualized or being raped—nowhere in between. Jules has been talking to someone online and meets up with him at a hotel for a disturbing sexual encounter she does not seem to enjoy—the man involved turns out to be Nate’s father.

This show feels like a dark fantasy—I can’t use the word idealized because that has a positive connotation, but in this world, everyone is beautiful and makes terrible mistakes. There’s no compassion, no friendship, no awkwardly fumbling toward sexuality with a boyfriend who actually has a soul. No one’s laughing at anything except ironically. Recently I talked to one of my friends who’s a child therapist and she said high school has radically different tracks— if you were on the nerdy honor roll track, the notion of a party where someone might legitimately die of anything other than a peanut allergy seems outlandish. So maybe my own high school experience was just vastly different than licking fentanyl off a knife. It was closer to Freaks and Geeks except I really didn’t have friends to play D&D with.

It made me think about why we like these hyperdramatic shows about teens that take themselves super seriously in their negativity. Consider Skins where there is, I swear to god, a situation where Tony (high school student) is in some sort of dangerous situation in a warehouse where a scary dangerous guy demands that he (Tony) have sex with his (Tony’s) own sister (Effy) in order to placate the scary guy. Compare to Friday Night Lights where Julie feels pressured to just get sex “over with,” arranges alonetime with her boyfriend Matt (insert heart emoji), only to have him discover that she isn’t really ready and to suggest that they could just, like, hang out, which they do, making fun of each other’s feet and goofing around.

Think about how these shows mix sex and lurid things in a bid to be “real” or at least this is what they say they’re doing. But notice how they tend to cast actors that are a lot older; they want to show good looking people having sexy times, or maybe even really being in peril, but then there’s the conundrum about feeling weird about casting people ages 14 to 18, the actual age of most high school students. If they were actually working with actors that young, there’s a variety of things they’d have to more seriously consider, and we as viewers would have to ask ourselves some difficult questions. This isn’t a “real” show any more than Skins was. There’s actually a scene where Nate buys his girlfriend lingerie. I’m sorry, but when in the history of the world has a high school boy 1) bought his girlfriend lingerie and 2) it fit perfectly even though men who have been married for 10 years are still mystified by the whole bra/band/cupsize thing and also even if you know the size that doesn’t mean that any particular thing will fit you?

TLDR: Euphoria= listening to a superhip soundtrack while being stuck in the passenger seat of a car driving very quickly towards a brick wall with stylized graffiti on it.

Review of HBO's Sharp Objects (has spoilers)

I'll lead with the positive: the main reason to watch this show is not the murder mystery, but for the execution of how the story is told. (In a weird, obverse opinion of my last review of The Blackkklansman). 

Positives: the performances were incredibly strong all around, but in particular Amy Adams (Camille), Patricia Clarkson (Adora, her soft-spoken but histrionic southern belle of a mother), and Eliza Scanlen (Amma, her not-quite-right wild-child half-sister). I loved the Southern Gothic feel when Camille returns to her hometown, complete with a lovely-but-creepy house with a wraparound porch. 

The thing that kept me intrigued, and the thing I admired about it the most, is the way it was filmed to resemble human memory, as opposed to linear storytelling with breaks to make it easier for the viewer: ie, Camille sees the hingey-thing on the back of the toilet, then we stop the story for a liner flashback of that entire memory so that it's easy to digest. Even though I think they didn't do this because Camille is a damaged, fractured person, I think stylistically how they actually did it is closer to how people experience memory. A scene is interspersed with brief flashes with no explanation, sometimes so momentary we can tell that she's thinking of two things at once. Or even more than two. This felt literary to me, which is why I didn't need tons of intrigue to the storytelling aspect. I'm rewatching the first episode right now and they just showed a brief cut of Camille looking at the hingey part of the toilet--a full 6 hours before we actually see the story of why that matters. I hadn't even noticed it the first time around. 

Negatives: I never thought the show was boring like other viewers apparently did (I didn't mind the somewhat unnecessary Calhoun Day diversion), if you put the entirety of the show together, there's about 20 minutes of Camille driving, listening to music, or drinking vodka out of a water bottle. We get it--she's an alcoholic. I don't think people need to be shown more than two or three times. 

I was a wee bit frustrated with the (first) climax which occurs in the house. Ultimately, Camille is incapacitated with whatever poison her mother has given her, and is feebly trying to cry out to once-lover/cop Richard while she is prostrate on the bathroom tile. Ultimately it is Richard & co who rush in to save the day, arrest Adora, and spirit the sisters away for medical treatment. Was this not agentic enough? Just before this, Camille had made the discovery (..or rather, was given the information by Richard) that Adora had probably been poisoning Marian, Camille's younger sister who had died of a mysterious illness when she was younger. Death by munchausen by proxy so Camille rushes to the house, realizing that Amma--currently "ill" in the care of their mother--is in danger. She encounters a bizarre dinner tableau: a sickly Amma dressed in a white nightgown and a crown of flowers, her mother setting up a massive feast to her and her creepily silent husband. In an interview, Gillian Flynn mentions that she wasn't bothered by the show's decision to have Richard rescue Camille, more or less, because Camille did do something agentic: she takes her sister out of the line of fire by pretending to be sick and taking on her mother's "care" (ie, poison) herself. The action has the duel duty of both proving her suspicion, and giving Amma some time to recover. So she did do something agentic, but I realized this morning what really bothered me:

She runs into the house, thinking that her mother killed her little sister, and is possibly in the process of killing her other little sister... but she enters the house and silently sits down at the table? How about forming some distraction, grabbing your sister by the arm, and running off? What's to stop her? Her mother's in her 60s, and Camille is young. How hard would it have been to overpower her? How hard would it have been to grab that blue bottle of whatever noxious "medicine" and throw it across the room? Flush all the pills down the toilet?

Two practical things: can we please please please retire the female reporter who sleeps with people involved with her investigation thing? And did Camille really have no where where she could stay except for with Adora? No per diem from the paper? How much is a hotel in that small town? Given the high psychological price of staying in a home filled with trauma... why stay there rather than the Motel 6?

My only other problem was with the ending. It bothered some people, but I liked it. I was definitely not expecting an ending that abrupt, but stylistically it made sense to me. And I had already taken my eyes off the screen when the cut-scene appeared during the credits. If the entire story is through Camille's perspective, it wouldn't make sense for the cut scene of the murders to appear in the normal timeline of the show. My problem was that the scene itself was so fast it was sort of incomprehensible. I rewound and watched it 2 more times. While I think the images were great (particularly that really disturbing ending one of Amma) I actually misinterpreted what I had seen. The girl getting killed by the river I got, but I definitely didn't think that the image of Mae, Amma's new friend, gripping the fence was supposed to be her getting killed. I got that something violent was happening, but didn't necessarily think it was murder until I read recaps this morning. 

On the topic of Amma being the murderer (which I suspected the entire time), one plot-holey thing. They find the bloody pliers in Adora's house and it's assumed she was involved in the murders. Yeah, but fingerprints--whose fingerprints would be on those pliers? Amma's, not Adora's. (I doubt she wiped prints off if she didn't bother cleaning the blood off.) This made it a bit unrealistic to me that Camille would be the one to discover Amma, rather than physical evidence catching up with Amma. (who is arrested in the book, and her friend Mae's death is more in view.) 

And really smart to put the trailer for True Detective with Mahershala Ali right after.. It looked so good that I was sold before they even said the words "True Detective" (good advertising, considering I didn't like the first season, and skipped the second.) 

This Stupid Reality TV Show Is The Perfect Demonstration of What Is Wrong with Non-Minority "Progressives."

Sorry to write a serious blog post about a stupid TV show. But in case you missed it, a white woman who identifies as a progressive and part of "the resistance," this season's Bachelorette, picked one man over another and got engaged on last night's episode. The controversy was that after the season premiere episode aired weeks ago (so after she got engaged) it emerged that he had liked alt-right "humor" posts on instagram that implied that feminists are ugly and anti-feminists are beautiful and patriotic; made a joke about throwing migrant children back over "the wall;" made fun of trans people (children, specifically); and accused Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg of being a "crisis actor" (a view promoted by extremist and all around idiot Alex Jones, who promotes conspiracies to sell protein powder and just got kicked off the internet).  

Garrett, the guy who did this, apologized a couple times for doing this, and made it seem like liking something on Instagram is just something that happens by accident. [It's not, incidentally, that I don't think his apology was good enough; it's that I think his apology is irrelevant. Apologies are often what you do when someone catches you doing what you normally do.] He said he didn't mean it, and that anyone who knows him can attest that he's a great guy. And yes, people have insisted that he's a great guy-- previous suitors who have been kicked off the show already, Becca (the bachelorette), Garrett's family, and Becca's family. Becca says, on the last episode, that the two men she has fallen in love with are "the best guys on earth." Notice that all the people involved making this assessment seem to not be noticing that this is fundamentally an issue of values--specifically values that aren't really about them. 

All of these people insisting that Garrett is a great person are white, and as far as I can tell, have none of these other minority identities- LGBT, migrant, PARKLAND SHOOTING SURVIVOR. Embarrassingly enough, I consume a lot of pop-commentary about the Bachelor, and on a lot of this media, white non-minority hosts dismiss the Instagram scandal as "stupid but not necessarily reflective of him as an individual." 

What is reflective of you as an individual but your actions? Doesn't the fact that you find punching down say a lot about who you are as an individual, morally? (let alone in terms of emotional maturity..) 

If you're progressive and part of the majority--straight, white, not an immigrant, able-bodied-whatever-- the true test of your progressiveness is not at the ballot box. It isn't the bumper sticker you put on your car or what candidates you donate to. Because there are far too many "progressives" who are all about all these things until it comes to anything involving them. [Or on the obverse, they don't care about anything until it involves them--which is behind the hard-to-explain annoyance that some minorities had about the Women's March). If you're white and your boyfriend is racist against blacks, it might not come to a conflict because his racism isn't directed at you--it's just an inconvenience that you'd wish would magically go away. You could confront it, but wouldn't it be easier not to? I think what some people forget is that racist people aren't necessarily all-around assholes who walk around with devil horns spouting sulphur from their mouths. They can be incredibly kind and sweet and caring to you, and to their families, and to their friends. But just because they're nice to you doesn't mean they're nice, or good people at all. You can't call yourself a progressive if you're okay with your significant other having attitudes that while not harmful to you, are harmful in general to minority groups. If you're not bothered by this, you really need to ask yourself what your values are. If you think someone who punches down would be a good father, have fun raising some really wonderful children.. 

Maybe this bothers me in particular right now because I'm not mad at people who make fun of migrants, (because I think they're a lost cause) I'm mad at their ostensibly "progressive" family members. These are the same family members that year after year complain about their "crazy" uncle, of "frustrating" parents-- you push some turkey around your plate, and then go back to their regular lives sharing shit on Facebook to make yourself seem woke. You are the problem. The gay 13 year old in rural America is forced to directly confront his family over and over because he has no choice. This is what has moved the needle in terms of America's acceptance of gays in the past few decades. They weren't doing a public service--they were forced to because their lives and wellbeing depended on it. One version of this 13 year old will somehow manage to convert his family to PFLAG waving allies. Another version will face the trauma of realizing that this family is no family of his, and that he will be forced to find his own non-biological family. Another will move his family some, but not all the way, and will continue to have to battle for years. Another might find it overwhelming--which is perfectly reasonable for a young person with no support in the one place where he needs it the most--and turn self-destructive or even suicidal. People with minority identities were forced to fight this fight with enormously high stakes, and yet some of the people who call themselves our allies are unwilling to even lift a finger in their own houses. 

Rant over. I leave you with an actual image of the couple from the show last night. (And yes, that is him pulling her deeper underwater by the foot, which I guess is supposed to be funny). 

Give Poldark's George Warleggan the plot he deserves

A couple of weeks ago, I blew through all three seasons of Poldark in one weekend, or maybe close to it. I had it on in the background as "period piece background noise I didn't expect to really capture my attention," but it totally did. (Apparently I also weirdly forgot my fetish for 18th century men's fashion.)

Not only is the show filled with lush scenery (waves crashing on rocks beneath dramatic cliffs, people riding horses in haste, etc.), but the writing is really, really good. Particularly in Season Two, with the infidelity plotline, every single character involved responds in a way consistent with their character, and in ways that highlight both their positive and negative traits.) (Well, I'm not sure Elizabeth has any positive traits, but whatever). 

Season 3 had me pondering the fact that the writer's haven't entirely taken advantage of villain George Warleggan. The WETA blog says he is a flatly evil character, one step away from twirling a mustache; I don't entirely agree, but they do have something of a point.  Over the course of the series, George shown himself to be cold and conniving when it comes to both business and life--sometimes playing unfairly. He is weirdly obsessed with taking Ross Poldark down--and what is this based on other than the fact that he basically hates Ross for having what he doesn't: the support of the townspeople, actual love from his wife Elizabeth, a sense of honor. Ostensibly, he has beef with Ross because Ross is "responsible" for inciting the riot that led to the shipwreck being looted (the shipwreck containing some of George's property). But we all know that he 2% cared about the property and 98% just wanted Ross to be tried and hanged--which seems a bit extreme. 

But I just rewatched Seasons 1 and 2 and took a closer look at him. The development of his relationship with Elizabeth is a weird mixture of creepy and pitiable. It's clear he likes her when she's married to Francis Poldark and is already attempting to put the moves on her. When he first propositions Elizabeth, more or less, unless I'm wrong, she didn't seem repulsed but genuinely caught off guard. Surprised, but not "oh God how do I get out of this." I think for her it came out of left field. I do believe, in his own strange way, George loves Elizabeth. (I'm not sure why, because everyone seems to fall in love with her based purely on looks...?) 

Maybe there was a world where Elizabeth and George could have been happy--this makes me sad. Her decision to marry him was both practical and eyeroll worthy. She's a widow and her mom has just had a stroke. Standing beside the drooling mother's bed she asks the doctor, "But who will take care of her--?" then a look of distain comes over her face when she realizes that the caregiver could be her. God forbid we don't have servants to do something, or have to get a job, or figure shit out for a while before she might actually fall in love with a man who wants to marry her. Okay, I realize that's unfair--the aristocracy didn't work back then. Although I did wonder how hard it would have been to scrimp and pinch for a while--sell off some of her crap and let some servants go. Instead, she spots George through the window getting rid of some pesky serfs who want to work her land, which apparently by law is their right. He could take care of her, and she wants to be taken care of. And I never go the sense that he was disingenuous in his offer to take care of her; someone purely evil wouldn't do that. 

She marries him, quickly, and for his money basically, but I got the sense that she had some hope that maybe it would work out. George quickly ruins any chance of this, mainly through his desire to get rid of his Poldark stepchild. Really much of her hatred of him stems from actions he does solely out of his obsession with Ross. (It's more like he himself is a worser enemy than Ross is.) It didn't have to be this way, but he does several things that destroy any hope between them: getting the governess and wanting to send the stepson away, and the trial against Ross which was overkill. A really unexpected turn for me at least was that Elizabeth and George start to become an evil couple together--which was relieving because many many many shows/books/movies fall into the trap of "the first love is the only-est, best-est love." Her turn toward the evil was somewhat satisfying because her unhappiness brought out the nastier parts of her personality and I didn't find much about her redeeming anyhow. 

But George is more interesting to me. Sometimes there's this one grain of humanity in him that makes me feel sympathy or want him to have a turn of character. He suspects that "his" baby with Elizabeth--Valentine--is actually Ross Poldark's but you get the sense that he's almost tricked himself into thinking the baby is his. At least until stonecold Agatha tells him the truth. He seems really broken by this, and I don't think it's just because of Poldark. No matter how despicable George is, Elizabeth wronged him and continuously lied to him. Sure, there were various strictures on women that made life hard for them, but I can't see Demelza making that series of decisions. Sure-- George is pathetic--he gets all sniveling when Elizabeth (lying about the paternity issue) threatens to leave their home, and let's be clear George is dishonorable and nasty and single minded. I don't know why he seems to love Elizabeth, but he does. I truly wondered if he actually loves Valentine and this was a serious blow to him (he doesn't have an heir after all). I love the moment that followed: Ross going out to look for Demelza in the dunes--of course we think he's about to catch her in the act of cheating--but instead he comes upon George, who is dazed with the realization about Valentine. For a split second George is a human, but then he goes back to being George. This moment echoed back to the moment when George found out that Ross's baby had died and for a split second was at a loss. 

Don't blame George for the infamous toad incident in season 3. Oh damn, this show got dark. What started as a funny prank against George--Demelza's brother Drake putting toads in George's ponds--gets hella dark when Morwenna has to marry the gag-reflex-inducing Reverend Osborne Whitworth. At first the Reverend just seemed like a pervier version of Mr. Collins from Pride and Prejudice--funny, foppish, and gross. But then it gets much darker than the tone of Poldark generally with him being physically abusive and a rapist--I kept waiting for Morwenna to be rescued at the last minute. And it's George and Elizabeth--who has now drunk the evil George Kool-aid--who have pushed this marriage into existence. Because it's a "good match." (There's one weird misstep in the plotting here: when Morwenna's weird sister showed up, I thought for sure she would pretend to try to seduce the Reverend and then murder him . . . but instead seemed to like boffing him??) [Another tangent, how on earth is the guy on the left played by the guy on the right??] 

Here's the thing: George has no idea how bad the Reverend is. He knows Morwenna isn't crazy about him, but how many women got to marry someone they were crazy about? You know who does know just how bad the Reverend is? The good doctor Dwight. And while he does try to press the pause on the Reverend's appetites for Morwenna after giving birth--that's all he does-- presses the pause button. George's sin, really, was that he wanted to control Morwenna and family wealth by marrying her off--Dwight's sin strikes me as worse (albeit not outside of what would have been typical male behavior back then.) 

It's clear that Poldark is headed towards more political storylines, and that both Ross and George will be players. The only two things George cares about are himself and Elizabeth and I'm not even sure about the second part. His political identity could easily get tied into his sense of honor; if Poldark wants to keep treading the same waters, we could have Ross and George square off again and again. Or . . .

Make George the villain he deserves to be. George should be smarter than he is on the show. He's made his wealth rather than inherited it, so it's a little unrealistic that his deviousness is pretty consistently ham-handed. I wish they would let him be as full blown smart as maybe a man who's made his own wealth might be. And while Ross clearly has flaws, sometimes he falls too hard on the "good guy who's always right" side (at least when it comes to the shows political plotlines.) Moving the show towards increasingly political plotlines leaves a lot of room for complex machinations--I would love to see George pull off some Cersei-level political maneuvering rather than say, printing slanderous pamphlets. I would love there to be something Ross and George could agree on--a common foe where they would have to work together despite despising each other! Someone who offends George's honor and Ross' political sensibilities-- but I'm not sure the show has that sort of sensibility, particularly after what happened with Morwenna. If Morwenna isn't going to save herself, it would be nice if we just didn't default to Ross saving the day. Too often shows default to "good guys save people, bad guys hurt people, and if bad guys save people they are redeemed." There's a few other options-- like bad guys doing the "right" thing for an entirely different reason. Bad guys responding with a level of retaliation that the good guys wouldn't "stoop" to in a way that is more satisfying to viewers. Bad guys outmaneuvering other bad guys because they are more clever.

Update 6/10/2019: a surprising number of people have read this article. Life has occupied me; I will return with another longform article about Poldark in June after I’ve had a chance to watch the most recent season. I’m hoping it will be me coming back after seeing some interesting developments in this villain.

8/13/19: and here’s that other post as promised, about the rest of Season 4

via GIPHY

Trust me, the morally reprehensible things I say and do aren't reflective of me as a person.

In the past two weeks, what looks like what is going to become an increasingly common “scandal” occurred surrounding the show The Bachelor. (Or The Bachelorette, to be more specific). During the season premiere a guy named Garret clearly became one of the frontrunners for Becca, this season’s Bachelorette. While the show skirts as far away from politics as possible, it’s known from her social media that Becca considers herself as part of “the resistance” and voted Democratic in the 2016 election. In this article by two women who also host a podcast about the show, one of the contestants, Garrett, was outed as having liked a bunch of morally reprehensible posts on Instagram including ones that made fun of: the Parkland kids who survived the school shooting (calling them crisis actors), undocumented immigrants, feminists, and trans children. (He immediately deleted the account once this was exposed.) 

There's a chance that the producers of the show did this on purpose--knowing that Becca is at least a somewhere left of center, and that this would lead to conflict and therefore good TV. I imagine this is what happened when they had their first black Bachelorette and included a contestant who compared the NAACP to the KKK on not-too-hard-to-find social media posts. We could work under that assumption of wanting drama, or assume their background checkers are just lazy. 

But would this even lead to conflict? Becca publicly responded, in as much as she can, (because I'm guessing he was one of her final few..) in an interview by saying she would address issues as they come up, but that "I can't fault anyone for what they believe, and who's to say that anyone is truly what they believe in if they just double tap . . . I am a strong woman and I do believe in certain things, but again, that's what's so great about our country — everyone is entitled to their own opinions." This is a really, really different response than the reaction of the black Bachelorette--Rachel--had when confronting the contestant who said racist stuff. Her response wasn't, "Oh, he's  a good person who just kept accidentally saying terrible things--lay off him would you!" Garrett responded with the typical "I didn't realize the things I did were hurtful / I need to learn/ this isn't reflective of who I am as a person" apology. ("I need to learn/ go to rehab" is definitely a great all purpose excuse for just about anything, isn't it?) But we're not here to talk about him. 

We're here to talk about the Beccas. The straight guy who cringes when his father says something anti-gay at the dinner table, but doesn't say anything. I want to talk about the white girl with the white boyfriend who grits her teeth when he says something racist against blacks. It doesn't really affect the straight person at the dinner table because he isn't gay, or the white girl because neither she nor her boyfriend are black. The ignorant views of their loved ones don't directly negatively affect them, but are seen as more embarrassing than fundamental conflicts because I guess, to them, their values don't constitute a dog in the fight. 

Why can't you fault someone for what they believe? We make decisions about who we want to surround ourselves with, and sometimes people come into conflict with those values. On the one hand you want a partner you have chemistry with who also wants the same things (a house, a picket fence, a family), but then there's this pesky thing where he says something profoundly ignorant about another group--but don't worry--you're not part of that group. You can just sweep it under the rug. 

You can just say, "Well you don't know him." You don't know him like I do! Indeed, I will never know your racist boyfriend the same way that you do if the two of you are white and I am brown. Your boyfriend can be caring and kind and considerate to you, while at the same time thinking that gays are disgusting or that migrants aren't human beings with inherent dignity. You just don't know him like I do! Indeed, I don't. 

Like many people caught in the apology chamber, Garrett responded in an Instagram post "I am a sincere, genuine, loving, light-hearted, open minded and non-judgmental individual." I'm willing to bet that Garrett has never met one of the Parkland kids, who not only survived the mass murder of their friends and classmates, but are pushing through with activism despite grown adults feeling the need to attack and threaten them despite their being children who were almost just murdered. I'm willing to bet that if quizzed on the situations in El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras and other countries that led to migration, he would not be able to tell you much and in all likelihood couldn't find most of these countries on an unmarked map. You've never met these people, but have hateful things to say about them (at worst), or at best, you don't really hate them but think their situations are funny and should be made fun of on social media. Call me a square but I don't find devastating earthquakes or drug cartels funny. 

Is it really fair to judge people by their social media accounts? It's true, your finger can slip and you can accidentally like a post promoting a conspiracy that the victims of a mass shooting are in fact actors rallied by a vast left wing conspiracy to seize the guns you use for mass shootings. To be fair, I do think there are instances where people take things out of context, like the movie that puts on its poster that a reviewer said "This movie is fantastic!" when they actually said "This movie is fantastically stupid!" And I do think its unfair to dredge up Livejournal posts from decades ago and point out how un-woke someone was, when in reality only some of us have documentation of how un-woke we are, and, let's face it, collecting points for pointing out unwokeness is sort of tiresome. 

Here is an exhaustive list of the past handful of things I did on Facebook and Twitter: a request that they make a movie out of cockygate; an interest in attending a poetry performance; 3 likes to UPS Dogs, a Facebook group where UPS drivers post pictures of their favorite dogs on their routes; a comment that news media "controversial comments" instead of "racist comments" suggests that there is a legitimate debate underlying the idea that racism is bad; 3 comments about whether or not the robot from Netflix's Lost In Space is sexy or not (it isn't); a Twitter moment about peacocks stopping traffic on a highway wherein I commented "cockblocking;" and this, which can only be described by looking at its awesomeness. This is actually a pretty accurate representation of who I am. Not a complete representation. But no one who knows me would be shocked that I liked/said/tweeted any of these things--they are all pretty run-of-the-mill for me. So if you were known to be an open-minded, kind, considerate person who's on social media, likely connected with friends, wouldn't your friends be shocked if you posted something morally reprehensible? Does the fact that they're not shocked say something about you, and something about them?

Whenever this cycle happens--an insulter says something insulting, there's negative publicity, then an apology--we are told, "Wait, get to know the real person, you don't know them like I do." We are asked, again and again and again, to get to know this person, to give them the benefit of the doubt, to assume good intentions despite the data before us. And yet those who insult are never giving the benefit of the doubt to the Parkland kids, or getting to know the migrants or their situation, or assuming that the person they are deriding is an actual human who might be as sincere and open-minded and loving as the insulters claim to be but aren't. In other words, "Treat me fairer than I treat you, otherwise you're being unfair." Sadly, an argument that keeps being made over and over. 

What Bubbles Under the Surface of MTV's Catfish

Why do I continue to love this show? Despite the fact that it's formulaic--and continues to be after years of being on the air. Despite the fact that it's fake. Despite the forced moralizing that occurs at the end of each episode, wherein the catfish is supposed to feel bad for catfishing but often doesn't. Despite the hokey "hosts being adorkable" thing (I like Max, but not a fan of Nev). 

It's the same story over and over. A youngish person ostensibly contacts the show with a story about how they have been in love with someone for several years that they met online, but they have never met in person. The other person--the catfish--refuses to videochat/ has a broken phone/ lost their truck and therefore can't meet the catfishee. Nev and Max arrive with their high tech investigative skills (ie, they look on Facebook and Instagram and do Google image searches, which apparently no one else has figured out). They contact the catfish when they've collected enough "evidence," and the catfish always miraculously agrees to not only meet up and be filmed (show spoiler: typically the catfish actually contacts the show, which is why they never run into a catfish who refuses to meet). Despite the fact that it's the same thing over and over, I find myself completely riveted during act three, the moment when they're knocking on the catfish's door and you have no idea of who is going to come out. I will run out of the kitchen in order to not miss the reveal. (NB: I am never sitting in front of a TV and just watching it, so when I actually have my eyes on the TV for more than 3 seconds, someone has done something right.) 

Forty percent of the time, the catfish is someone who is LGBT but closeted, often in a small town where no one ever says, "Wait, which gay bar with the roofdeck and the bartender with the arms?" (#DCLife). Forty percent of the time it's just someone who used the pictures of a (culturally-dictated) more attractive person because they're insecure. The remaining 20 percent is a grab bag of more interesting cases: pure sociopaths, best friends who were secretly in love with the victim for years, and one recent rarity: and old gross dude trolling for young women. (sidebar, why doesn't that happen more often? And I can't even think of an instance of the catfish turning out to be married.) 

The show often sends the hosts to meet victims in places where reality TV typically doesn't go: Oklahoma, small towns where one can apparently be the only LGBT person in their entire class. You see small houses and trailers, and tons of people of adulting age that live with their parents and yappy dogs and work regular jobs. It seems a stark contrast from the constant parade of TV/movies/books that focus on New York City, LA, London, places where people who would be poor in real life live unrealistically opulent lives (not to use a dated reference, but it's beyond laughable that we're supposed to believe that Carrie Bradshaw can afford all those designer shoes when she's a freelance writer). Every so often on the show when the host takes the victim to meet the catfish, they find out that the victim has never actually been on a plane before. In some cases, they've never even left their hometown. The hosts often respond with a chipper, "You've never been on a plane before?" How quaint! Median income in Oklahoma is (let's ballpark it based on this dated website) is $45,000; in my hometown of DC its $93,000 (to be fair DC has one of the highest median incomes in the US, and using the median rather than the mean glosses over the income disparity the city has but whatever). There's even been cases where it clearly seems that both the catfish and the catfishee were faking just so they could meet each other (maybe just to get on TV, or maybe so someone else can pay their airfare.) 

I wish the show would get more in depth about the psychology behind this incredibly weird phenomenon. In between the movie and the TV show, the concept of catfishing is so well known that they added the new meaning of the word to the dictionary over at Merriam Webster. People on the show know what this is, but still fall for it. Or maybe they don't fall for it at all-- maybe they know the whole time that these relationships aren't real. Sometimes the people involved are somewhat isolated--just in general, not just in terms of not being willing to pursue other romantic relationships because they are spoken for. Sometimes they are approached by other would-be mates, but turn them down in favor of a relationship that is purely electronic. In either case, they've settled for an electronic facsimile of a relationship: no physical presence, not even videochatting, just a stream of texts, phone calls, emojis, and maybe an occasional picture stolen off Instagram. 

We don't really talk about loneliness in this country. Usually we're kidding when we are: making fun of cat ladies and "Oh no I'm going to die alone LOL." Even for introverts, the desire for companionship is so fundamental to what it is to be human that being denied companionship can often be lethal. Suicide is the tenth largest cause of death in America--it's right up there with cancer and heart disease. Even amongst people who can both articulate their feelings and are willing to do so, they're far more likely to say they are "sad," "bored," or "depressed" than to say that they are lonely, or lacking in human companionship. Some turn inwards toward depression (self-directed hate), some turn outwards. We always talk about lone wolf mass shooters. They're "lone." I don't feel bad for them, but I wonder about the power of the sickness that is loneliness, not feeling part of a community, or not feeling validated. 

Last week I was at a speakeasy (#DCLife again) with some friends and one lamented that he wanted to move into a commune in the woods and just not deal with anything. Easy to feel that way when the news is pretty stressful, but we were also talking about how the very structure of life--at least here and now in America--is isolating, overly focused on work, overly focused on nuclear families. In this scifi thing I'm writing, there's this character from a planet that has been destroyed that is often described as a utopia. People sitting on porches calling out to each other, a town where everyone knows your name. One thing I based it off of (here's a knife in your heart) was something one of my Arabic teachers told me about her childhood growing up in Damascus: a large house that is more like a compound, shaped like a square with a courtyard in the center, the whole extended family living in the same house so closely that the cousins are like brothers. So . . . not sure what it says about me that I had this planet destroyed.