the talking cure

And I wake up and I ask myself what state I'm in
And I say well I'm lucky, cause I am like East Berlin
I had this wall and what I knew of the free world
Was that I could see their fireworks
And I could hear their radio
And I thought that if we met, I would only start confessing
And they'd know that I was scared
They'd would know that I was guessing
But the wall came down and there they stood before me
With their stumbling and their mumbling
And their calling out just like me…

~Dar Williams, “What Do You Hear in These Sounds?” from the album End of the Summer (1997)

I was watching TLC’s What Not To Wear (2003-present) the other day and marveling at how its two hosts, Stacey and Clinton, fancy themselves both fashion experts (which they are) and amateur therapists (which they aspire to—curing people’s neuroses and poor self-image through the healing power of fashion). In this particular case, they were making over a woman in her early twenties from Austin, Texas who insisted on wearing extremely short skirts and provocative clothing that was exceedingly unflattering, though she didn’t realize it. She also often accessorized with a fake raccoon’s tail pinned to the back of her jeans or skirt, in order to “stand out” and “make a statement” about “who she is.” Basically, she was using her clothing to get (the “wrong” kind of) attention from men and Stacey and Clinton told her as much, eventually coaxing out of the girl a genuinely sad tale of a past relationship with a very controlling man who all but forbade her from leaving the house. And, hence, she surmised, this was why she felt the need to flaunt herself in public, using her over-the-top outward appearance to mask her very deep-seated insecurities. In the first half of the episode, she continually fretted over Stacey and Clinton not only taking away her clothes, but thereby also taking away her sense of self and self-worth. Talk about pulling at our heartstrings. But by the time the episode was over, Stacey and Clinton (along with hairdresser, Nick, and make-up artist, Carmindy) had transformed this walking ball of contradictions—a woman whose friends claimed regularly “dressed like a hooker,” but who was simultaneously kind of mousy, immature and insecure—into an adorable, self-confident Cinderella-at-the-ball (without the midnight bell toll). While Stacey and Clinton often caution that fashion can’t cure deeper emotional issues, the show promises that it can prove a tantalizing stop-gap salve to ease away perceived flaws.

This is all well and good, and although I’m not sure I entirely buy the fashion-positive moral of the What Not To Wear storyline, I’m content to leave it be for now. I’m more interested in the trend to want to help people on television and through television, a discussion I started in my post on Oprah’s The Big Give and which I’ll continue here on a broader scale. I think we’re all agreed that television usually entertains, that it often serves as an escape from the humdrum blahs of everyday life, and that it perhaps even educates at times. But can television help us become better people? Can it provide a place for us to process our traumas and recover from the woes of the daily grind?

When I asked, perhaps a bit coyly, in last week’s preview, whether television is therapy, I wasn’t talking about the obvious attempts to make television shows somehow therapeutic or curative—shows like What Not To Wear or The Biggest Loser (NBC, 2004-present) or TLC’s new frighteningly televangelist-like self-help show that I can’t bring myself to watch, I Can Make You Thin—although the growing number of makeover shows is certainly part of the television-as-therapy trend. Nor was I referring to the few narrative shows that feature psychologists/psychiatrists, like Showtime’s Huff (2004-2006) or the brilliant new HBO show In Treatment, which I adore in an obsessive way that probably isn’t healthy.

No, when I talk about television as therapy, I mean television as a whole—a landscape of pixels and sound waves, narratives and advertising, hypnotic glow, endless flow and ubiquitous cultural resonance. For better or for worse, television is a mirror of our society, or parts of our society. And while this reflection may be always distorted, I believe it proves crucial in our formation of cultural and social identity. In his essay on the mirror stage, French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan posits that infants first learn to recognize themselves as separate from their mothers by looking in the mirror and seeing a perfect, complete, discrete child-being (the child herself) with whom they identify (later he argues that this isn’t necessarily a childhood identification, but more of an on-going internalized split in every individual’s subjectivity--but that’s really beside the point). Essentially, there is always a disconnect between who we feel we are (incomplete, confused, ungainly) and who we see ourselves to be (complete, composed, balanced).

Let’s put aside for a moment that this is a grossly oversimplified version of Lacan’s mirror stage (for the real deal, check out the first two volumes of The Seminar of Jacques Lacan (Book I and Book II), and his collection of essays, Ecrits), and introduce yet another exceedingly abridged psychoanalytic construct to the mix, that of the Freudian “talking cure.” While the phrase “talking cure” was not coined by Sigmund Freud, but rather by a patient of his lesser-known colleague, Dr. Josef Breuer, this phrase has come to epitomize psychiatric techniques, Freudian and beyond. Loosely: by allowing the patient to talk through her problems, perhaps circuitously or by continually revisiting the same ideas from different angles or by letting the patient dictate the path of the conversation, the psychoanalyst can help the patient overcome neuroses/traumas/etc. While talking, the patient is not only able to process what she is going through, but she also unknowingly reveals certain symptoms, connections and patterns that frame her mental state, allowing the therapist to glean the oft-hidden root of her problem(s) even when she cannot.

Thus, the concept of television-as-therapy can be approached in two, not necessarily mutually exclusive ways—television as mirror stage (making apparent how we reflect on our own identities) and television as talking cure (in which we converse, figuratively, with our favorite shows and unintentionally reveal our own neuroses in how we respond to them). In the case of the former, I’d like to refer back to my epigraph by singer-songwriter Dar Williams, which might actually make sense now in context. Television has the potential to reveal to us (especially, it pains me to say, reality TV) that everyone else is at least as befuddled by life as we are. But what about television as a talking cure—not in the framework of the individual show but in regards to the medium as a whole?

Actually, I’m asking the question backwards or, perhaps, the wrong question entirely, because it’s not a matter of whether or not television affords us the opportunity to watch ourselves watching, to reveal to us the inner workings of our mental lives—our wants, desires, needs. Of course, television has the potential to do this (just as the books we read, music we listen to, and art we like probably speak volumes about who we are). The questions isn’t whether or not television can serve as a technological manifestation of the talking cure, but rather…who’s listening even if it does?

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(NEXT WEEK: “It’s Not TV.” This may be HBO’s slogan, but the initiative to make television that isn’t quite television has taken on a life of its own.)

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we'll be right back

Just a brief hiatus while I refuel with back-to-back episodes of CSI and Scrubs. You won't have to wait long for the return of my regularly-scheduled blogging...with all new episodes and a shocking twist you have to see to believe!

Er...or not.

Next week: “The Talking Cure.” Television as escape. Television as entertainment. Television as therapy?

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this american life

Forgive me for stealing the title of this post from my favorite NPR radio program, but the analogy seemed too apt (check out their site if you have no idea what I’m talking about). For a while now, I’ve been fascinated by how the American family is portrayed on contemporary television, from the tendency of coupling overweight husbands with skinny wives in sitcoms to the favored trope of the families we choose trumping those we’re born into in many dramas (particularly those of the adventure, action and sci-fi genres). Surely, a comprehensive study of American families on television warrants a book: starting with something like I Love Lucy (1951-1957) and moving through other landmark shows featuring families--both nuclear and alternative--like (get ready for a pretty random selection) Bewitched (1964-1972), The Odd Couple (1970-1975), All in the Family (1971-1979), Kate & Allie (1984-1989), The Cosby Show (1984-1992), and Boy Meets World (1993-2000). Not to mention more recent offerings like Gilmore Girls (2000-2007), Arrested Development (2003-2006), and Family Guy (1999-present) and a few wildcard shows like Gilligan’s Island (1964-1967), Star Trek: Voyager (1995-2001), and Lost (2004-present), in which wildly incompatible people (sometimes actual enemies) are thrown together and forced to rely on each other to survive.

Naturally, there’s a lot I could say about television families and, chances are, I’ll revisit this topic with a gentler example as my subject matter in the near future, but, for now, I want to think about the American family as dystopia. Last week I closed with a question—“What if motherhood is no longer a choice but an inevitability, and your facility as a mother is the only thing that stands between humanity and an apocalypse?”—asked in regard to Fox’s Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (2008-present). As an action-adventure drama, this show may not be the cream of the crop, but there’s something compelling about the characters and their interactions that keeps drawing me back into the story. And I think I’ve figured out why. (I should also say, by way of a disclaimer, that despite the following analysis I actually really enjoy the show. In spite of myself, perhaps, but I do.)

Taking up where James Cameron’s 1991 film Terminator 2 left off, The Chronicles follows Sarah and her teenaged son John (ostensibly the eventual savior of mankind) as they fight for their lives against cybernetic assassins from the future (the eponymous terminators) while trying to stave off a technological apocalypse. Actually, Sarah does most of the fighting, along with Cameron, a cybernetic terminator-girl sent to help them, while John gets into trouble and has to be rescued over and over again. John’s relative weakness compared to Sarah’s strength provides an interesting reversal of the lady-in-distress trope, but this apparent subversion loses some of its feminist clout if you consider that John is just filling the role of the child in need of protection and guidance and that Sarah is his Mother, “naturally” inclined to protect him at all costs.

Of course, Sarah is also a working mother, in two senses of the word: first, she has to maintain a waitressing job to keep up appearances while providing for the household in superficially nurturing ways (having breakfast ready in the morning, cooking dinner, doing laundry, not allowing John to skip school, and hiding 9mm guns and semi-automatic rifles behind toasters and under drywall). Secondly, being a mother is her raison-d’etre—the only reason she keeps fighting is her need to keep John alive and safe so he can, in turn, deliver humankind from the destruction of an imminent machine uprising (an obvious Mary and Christ re-visioning if I’ve ever seen one). While the narrative of The Chronicles changes the stakes of the game a bit when John insists that he’s not capable of becoming a resistance fighter and pleads with his mother to avert the apocalypse before it happens instead, this doesn’t really change Sarah’s character or her place in this dystopic rendering of the American family. While it’s made quite clear that Sarah loves John deeply, the premise of the show (and the films before it) dictates that she didn’t want him, that she didn’t chose him or their life together. Rather, in the age-old tradition of the long-suffering, accidental hero, this life was thrust upon her and she’s just risen to the occasion. Motherhood, for Sarah, was not a choice, but is more of a burden—whether she openly says as much or not.

And let’s not beat around the bush: Sarah is kind of a bitch, which is not to say that her determination isn’t impressive or her heroism admirable. She does what she has to do in order to get things done. Once Sarah has hardened herself into this role of reluctant, but quite capable, mother-savior-warrior-martyr (a personality that is fully formed by the time of The Chronicles’ pilot episode), she bristles at any possible intrusion into her compact family unit of two. She bolts from a man who loves her when he asks her to marry him, and she generally eschews outright affection in favor of abject concern, tough love and anger with the world. When Cameron, a reprogrammed terminator sent from the future, ruffles Sarah’s Weltanschauung by coming to their rescue, Sarah accepts her—and allows her to become part of the family with an air of deep mistrust (Cameron masquerades as John’s sister)—only because Cameron is a useful tool in the fight against Skynet and the terminators. And you’ll remember that in the first Terminator movie, Sarah slept with Kyle Reese (John’s father, sent back to the past by future-John himself to protect his mother) out of the kind of desperate affection that comes with life-threatening, imminent-apocalypse types of situations (in film, at least). Sarah’s is a family built, from son to “daughter” to mother to the absent (dead) soldier/hero father, out of necessity—a family born of fear, not love.

It is clear at every turn that Sarah’s family is only a fragile metaphor for life never being what we expect of it, that extraordinary circumstances call for extraordinary measures and a certain degree of sacrifice. Instead of the utopian idea that differences can be overcome through love and trust, The Chronicles confronts difference with distrust and violence. This is not dissimilar from another American dystopian vision of the future, but one we’ve been facing now for years in the real world. The morals espoused implicitly by The Sarah Connor Chronicles are as follows: protect your children at all costs, openly distrust outsiders because they may be the enemy, allow help from your allies only on your own terms (and distrust them, too, only keep it to yourself), prophecies of future devastation sanction preemptive violence, and all is fair in war.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but does this rhetoric sound familiar to anyone else? And who better than someone masquerading in the utopian, wholesome guise of an American Mother to carry this message to us viewers, innocently seeking entertainment in a world of turmoil. But sometimes a mother is just a mother. And sometimes she’s not.

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(IN TWO WEEKS: “The Talking Cure.” Television as escape. Television as entertainment. Television as therapy?)

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playing the mom card

Postfeminist wisdom would have us believe that the feminist movement is a thing of the past. Women fought for their rights and they won and now women can do anything they want to do, from being a homemaker with three children to running for the Presidency. Not only that, but we’re told that any struggles contemporary women may face on account of their sex/gender—harassment, discrimination, domestic violence, body dysphoria, etc.—are individual issues, not due to endemic socio-cultural conventions. Putting aside for a moment that these above statements are rather ludicrous (American women by-and-large may have more choices these days about the paths their lives will take, but they’re still hemmed in by gendered cultural norms and expectations), I want to spend some time today thinking about the postfeminist (tele)visual heroines of the late 1990s and 2000s.

Actually there are at least two types: first, the career-oriented, hyper-femme thirty-something who has spent her life playing the field and/or working her way up and suddenly finds herself at a loss when she realizes she wants a husband and a family (think HBO’s astoundingly popular Sex and the City (1998-2004), with a film coming out this May marking its continued appeal). Even shows that don’t explicitly have that Sex and the City feel (i.e. the never-ending romantic comedy approach) often employ this character-trope. For example, 30 Rock’s Liz Lemon (NBC, 2006-present) spends as much of her time stumbling over her mess of a love life as she does dealing with the shenanigans of her boss (Alec Baldwin) and a hilarious ensemble cast. In one particularly telling episode, Liz (played by the brilliant Tina Fey) unintentionally steals a baby from a coworker when her biological clock begins to tick too loudly (again, this baby-envy theme has a filmic version, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler’s comedy Baby Mama, coming out in April).

This obsession with family, husband and/or babies leads me to the second type, my actual focus today: Moms. Shows like Desperate Housewives (ABC, 2004-present) showcase the current televisual mother-fetish, and more recent incarnations such as Cashmere Mafia (ABC>, 2008) and Lipstick Jungle (NBC, 2008-present) try to combine the career-oriented, swinging single girl type with the mom/wife character with mixed results. NBC’s Medium (2005-present), a crime show with more serious subject matter than the above lifestyle shows, considers how Allison Dubois, a psychic mother-of-three, balances her paranormal career with her family. Even reality shows are weighing in, with offerings like Your Momma Don’t Dance (Lifetime, 2008-present)—not to be confused with its unofficial companion-show My Dad Is Better Than Your Dad (NBC, 2008-present)—and The Secret Life of a Soccer Mom (TLC, 2008-present).

Compellingly, The Secret Life takes the career-first-than-scrambling- to-find-love theme of Sex and the City and turns it on its head. Only two episodes have aired so far, but the central premise promises to stay the same if we believe TLC’s promotional materials and the show’s website: each week, a woman who has found a wonderful husband and had several beautiful children is given the chance to go back to the career she chose to leave behind when she had kids. It’s important to note that these women aren’t/weren’t necessarily homemakers by profession—meaning that they (or at least the first two women, a former fashion design and a former chef) had successful careers before they became wives and/or mothers. The Secret Life allows them to take a break from their full-time jobs as moms and go back out into the working world for a week while their husband takes care of the kids and manages the house, all the while believing his wife is at a spa as part of a nonexistent reality show that rewards stay-at-home mothers.

The tagline for The Secret Life, which shimmers on the screen at the start of each episode, reads, “For anyone who has put their dreams on hold…your time has come,” and the show seems intent on showing mothers what they’re missing in their long-abandoned careers. It’s a curious premise. Ostensibly, it gives women a chance to see what they left behind—the path not taken—but the two women so far have been offered jobs after their week-long, secretive trial run and have had to make tearful decisions about whether to go back to work or stay home with their kids. This once in a lifetime opportunity to reclaim the past is fraught with problems—sometimes it’s just not that simple to reinvent yourself and your family. For example, tonight’s mother, Katie, would have loved to go back to work as a chef in one of LA’s top restaurants; however, even though her husband and toddlers encouraged her to go for it, she ultimately decided to stay home because she didn’t feel the family could bear the financial burden of putting two boys in daycare full-time. Tearfully, Katie lamented that if the timing had been better…things might have been different.

This “choice” is a very sharp double-edged sword, and television developers seem to find more and more inventive ways of manipulating the dichotomy already faced by women between what they want and what’s expected of them in and by society. I wanted to conclude this post with a discussion of Fox’s new show—still on the fence, I think, concerning its renewal for next season—Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (2008-present). However, I think the title character’s dystopic rendering of the American mother as a violent, stoic, gun-totting protectress will have to wait until next week. This show begs the questions: What if motherhood is no longer a choice but an inevitability, and your facility as a mother is the only thing that stands between humanity and an apocalypse? Where do we stand on the career versus family debate then?

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(NEXT WEEK: “This American Life.” A meditation on television families—those we choose and those we are born into.)

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a helping hand

Watching The Ellen DeGeneres Show (2003-present) last week forced me to consider the degree to which philanthropy, the receipt of free stuff, and talent contests have become part of the fabric of the American Dream as presented by television. From the now almost eighty-year-old Miss America Pageant (remember, it’s a scholarship fund not a beauty pageant) to The Apprentice (2004-present), proving we are better than someone else and then being rewarded for our competitive spirit and superiority—with money, cars, celebrity, careers, and maybe even a chance to make a difference in the world (feature optional)—is an American tradition.

This was all brought to mind for me because of two things. The first was the “Highway to Ellen Road Trip,” a prize awarded to four women from Nevada who received a “brand new GMC Acadia” in which they traveled across the country from Ellen’s hometown of New Orleans to The Ellen DeGeneres Show set in Los Angeles, stopping over at various national landmarks along the way. There was much screaming and eye-popping excitement from the bevy of friends when Ellen called to congratulate them in mid-February and, a mere week later, there was equally much screaming and bouncing and happy flailing when they finally arrived weary and not-so-bushy-tailed (but definitely excited, exceedingly excited) on Ellen’s set. Their response reminded me of the “Favorite Things” episodes of Oprah (1986-present), a pre-Christmas show in which every audience member receives hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars worth of merchandise—items that Oprah considers her favorite things of the season and wants to share with her fans. The “Favorite Things” episodes are always a surprise—not scheduled as such—so many audience members who find themselves unexpectedly involved in one of these amazing giveaways burst into tears or leap around in gleeful hysterics when Oprah announces the news at the beginning of the fateful show.

And, yes, it would be very exciting to unwittingly stumble into a situation wherein you receive an incredible quantity of top-of-the-line, sponsor-donated goods—from Ralph Lauren polo shirts to dishwashers. Who doesn’t like free stuff? What strikes me as curious is the hysteria revolving around such events and the popularity these days of evoking that hysteria and/or emotionality over and over again in every possible reality show context. There’s also the obvious appeal of celebrity—Rachael Ray sells knives because she has fans who worship her technique, gumption and extraordinary perkiness; Oprah has so much clout that her endorsement for Democratic presidential candidate carries serious weight; and the “Highway to Ellen Road Trip” ladies were probably just as thrilled about getting to meet Ellen DeGeneres and be on the show as they were about the free spa treatments, other fancy prizes, and all-expenses paid vacation weekend they spent in LA afterwards. A more in-depth consideration on the cult of celebrity may have to appear in another entry, since there’s something specific lurking in the talk show genre that bears further examination. Is it like therapy for the masses—the talking cure for the televisual nation?

But, for now, onwards. Because what I really want to talk about is Oprah’s The Big Give, the series premiere of which just aired on ABC yesterday and which is sure to spark a new genre of reality television (there are probably executives and producers mulling this over as I write, wondering which celebrities they could woo to host and how they would alter the formula just enough to get away with it). The Big Give is predicated on a philanthropic model of competition rather than the usual cutthroat, I-deserve-this-more-than-you-do model. Each week, contestants are challenged with new ways to “give big”—finding unique and exceptional ways to change the lives of individuals and communities with the resources allotted to them. Then the givers are judged on their creativity, their passion and their actual gifts (be they monetary, personal, spiritual or material) and the least-giviest competitor is sent home. The clincher? The contestants think that they’re just competing for the sake of competing—to show the world “how one person can make a difference” (as Oprah put it) and to have the opportunity to feel good about themselves as magnanimous philanthropists. But, of course, there’s prize money at the end of the tunnel; however, in true Oprah form, the contestants don’t know about the one million dollars they could win if they succeed in becoming the biggest giver (though, really, they must suspect it, given that every reality show worth its snuff has some sort of prize money, “secret” or not).

The contestants include people from all walks of life—from a former army captain and, indeed, a Miss America pageant winner, to a relief worker and a singer who considers herself a “survivor.” Dedicated to “changing the lives of complete strangers in the most dramatic ways,” the big givers and The Big Give itself sure pull at the heartstrings, with most of the givees in the first episode—among them a homeless woman with two teenaged kids and a young mother who’d recently lost her husband in a random shooting—bursting into uncontrollable sobs when their gifts were revealed. The best gifts were about presentation rather than just monetary value. Two givers (the singer and the army captain) managed to raise $40,000 in a mere 15 minutes at a local church for the homeless woman and her family and were able to present her not only with the money, but also a new home and a car and job training. Another team (the relief worker and the contractor/dedicated family man) set up an amazing block party to celebrate the memory of the young widow’s husband, an event which was so heartfelt that it all but trumped the $50,000 they raised for her to help cover her mortgage and the eight years of educational scholarships they secured for her two young girls.

So, there’s something to be said for presentation in philanthropic gestures—which is why the “Highway to Ellen” crew probably wouldn’t have enjoyed their prizes as much if they hadn’t been sandwiched with a visit with Ellen herself. But is philanthropy the new entertainment (and is it even entertaining in the long run)? Where does it fit in with the old version of the American Dream (that’s the land of opportunity, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps version)? Is philanthropy (or, at least, the dispersal of free stuff and money) the inevitable outcome of the talk show genre? Money and prizes instead of mass therapy? And, as a nation, which do we need more?

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(NEXT WEEK: “Playing the Mom Card.” Motherhood and television: protective mothers, restless homemakers, and career/Armageddon versus family.)

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