The HBO biopic on Temple Grandin is far, far better than I expected it to be. I found it absolutely riveting.
2/6/2010
5/8/2009
Seriously
What the fuck is wrong with these people? NBC canceled Life.
3/13/2009
Oof
Cramer on Jon Stewart last night. Reminds me of when he took down Crossfire.
Edit: Atrios has the unedited interview.
3/8/2009
Good
From the Guardian a few days ago:
It explains the intense interest in Jade Goody, one of television’s “colourful, attractive, animated, alive” personalities referred to by David Foster Wallace, faded to a wintering, chemotherapy version of her former supercharged self. “By transforming death into a product which is eagerly consumed, the media enormously reinforce and heighten the illusion that death happens only to others.” According to the American cultural critic Michael Valdez Moses, this is what Don DeLillo’s darkest and funniest novel, White Noise, is largely about. For DeLillo’s characters, contemporary American “reality” has become completely mediated and artificial; theirs is a culture of comprehensive and seemingly total representation.
Go read the whole thing, and then follow the related links in DFW-land.
2/22/2009
On Pushing Daisies
I want to begin with this.
This is an image from season two of Pushing Daisies. It shows the two principal characters—love-interests Chuck and Ned—in a moment of honest expression of their feelings about one another. Chuck has appeared in Ned’s apartment wearing only a comforter, and when she drops the comforter to reveal her naked body, it is an articulation of her sexual desire for Ned.
It is a funny image–if only for Ned’s expression–but it is also a disturbing one.
There is little dispute over the novelty of Pushing Daisies, Bryan Fuller’s latest (and recently-canceled) series. Indeed, Fuller seems to be challenging Joss Whedon for his ability to write critically acclaimed shows that are canceled. Fuller’s two other series were Dead Like Me (a show about Reapers who usher the newly-dead into the afterlife) and Wonderfalls (a show about an over-educated girl working in a gift shop at Niagara Falls who finds one day that inanimate objects tell her to do things). Pushing Daisies operates in a similar vein, fusing magical realism with noir with pure camp–it has been described as a “forensic fairy tale,” and it blends hyper-saturated colors and a sappy sweetness with a stunning verbal dexterity that both articulates and tempers the sweetness (“It’s like an emotional Heimlich. Someone puts their arms around you and they give you a squeezed and all of your fear and anxiety come shooting out of your mouth in a big wet wad and you can breath again” or, alternately, “It’s nerves. Aggravated by a stomach thing. It’s like acid reflux, but in my eye.” ["Pie-Lette"]).
The show is also about zombies. Or, at least, some kind of undead. Or some kind of formerly-dead and now no longer dead. And in the universe of Pushing Daisies, however, even the zombies—or whatever they are—are sweet.
This sweetness masks a crucial issue at the heart of the show, which is that the heroine is someone who was, at one point, dead, and is not so anymore.
This is difficult to explain.
The premise of the show is simple. Sort of. Ned, the pie-maker, learns that he has the ability to raise the dead simply by touching them. We do not know why Ned has this ability, and all we are told is that “this touch was a gift given to him, but not by anyone in particular. There was no box, no instructions, no manufacturer’s warranty. It just was. If Ned does not touch them within a minute, something else has to die to balance out the life returned. The terms of use weren’t immediately clear, nor were they of immediate concern” (“Pie-Lette”). If Ned touches them again, they go back to being dead. Ned opens a pie-shop, restores rotten fruit for his pies (to save money), and solves crimes with private detective Emerson Cod (“murders are much easier to solve when you can ask the victim who killed them” ["Pie-Lette"]): Ned touches murder victims, asks them how they died, Emerson solves the crime, and they collect the reward.
Ned’s life is further complicated by Charlotte Charles, his childhood love, who is murdered on a cruise. Ned raises her from the dead and cannot bring himself to re-dead her (note, please, the difficulty of terminology here), and so Pushing Daisies has at its center a pair of lovers who can never touch. They kiss through cling wrap.
They hold hands either through gloves.
Ned has a divider in his car with a glove attached, sort of like an incubator.
They hold hands through proxies.
They hug through proxies.
They kiss through proxies.
Or by using a prophylactic of some sort.
Or sometimes a bodybag.
This is perhaps an example of what Christine Seifert, in describing the Twilight series, calls “abstinence porn.” But it is more than abstinence, for it is not merely the sex act that threatens the two lovers; physical contact will result in death. Again.
The absence of physical contact between the lovers is a constant concern for Olive Snook (played by Kristen Chenoweth), whose unrequited love for Ned leads her to obsess over why Ned and Chuck never touch. Nevertheless, the touching by proxy of Ned and Chuck certainly adds to the sweetness of the series–their love for one another transcends sexual desire.
Ned enjoys a similar relationship with his dog, Digby, whom he raised from the dead as a young boy. Like Chuck, Ned can only touch Digby via a proxy:
This is, again, all very, very sweet. But it is also deeply problematic, for in the second season, the show began to push the boundaries of their contact prohibition. This image of Chuck, standing naked before Ned, brings the issue to the fore:
While this scene is most certainly endearing insofar as it is as close as Chuck and Ned will ever get to a sex act (without them both being completely covered in a prophylactic—such as the full body condom from Naked Gun [youtube]), how we respond to it—perhaps on our second thought—is important, for it raises a series of problems at the heart of the show.
The primary problem with this scene is fairly obvious. Chuck is dead. She is no longer alive. She is an ex-Chuck. But what, precisely, is she?
The first bit of dialogue in the first episode deals with this problem of terminology directly:
Ned: “I asked you not to use the word zombie. It’s disrespectful. Stumbling around, squawking for brains. It’s not how they do. And un-dead? Who wants to be un-anything? Why do you got to stick with the negative? It’s like saying ‘I don’t disagree.’ Just say you agree.”
Emerson: “Are you comfortable with ‘living dead’?”
Ned: “You’re either living or you’re dead. When you’re living you’re alive. When you’re dead, that’s what you are. But when you’re dead and then you’re not, you’re alive again. Can’t we say ‘alive again’? Doesn’t that sound nice?”
Emerson: Sounds like you’re a narcoleptic.
Ned: I suffer from sudden, uncontrollable attacks of deep sleep?
Emerson: What’s the other one?
Ned: Necrophiliac.
Emerson: Words that sound alike get mixed up in my head.
Olive: Me, too! I used to think that masturbation meant chewing your food! (“Pie-Lette”)
The question of what, precisely, these people are once they are raised/un-deaded/alive again is left undetermined. And furthermore, the implications of Ned’s attraction to Chuck prove initially problematic for him. When Emerson asks whether Ned is in love with the alive-again Chuck, Ned responds
Ned: I’ll admit to being confused. It’s a very confusing time. Childhood issues. Digging in the dirt. It’s all coming up.
Again, while the confusion is ambiguous—it is, in the end, unclear whether Ned’s confusion results from his inability to touch Chuck or from his awareness that whatever his relationship is with Chuck, she is still formerly dead and now alive again. Digging in the dirt, indeed.
Even Chuck has difficulty describing what has happened to her. She tells Ned that “This whole thing is like reincarnation, but more immediate” (“Pie-Lette”). While Emerson’s response to the question of whether he believes in reincarnation is typical—“No.”—the problem is that what Ned is capable of is not reincarnation so much as it is reanimation: “alive again,” as Ned says. But even this is not without its problems, for if Ned makes them alive again, then when he touches them the second time, he therefore kills them:
Ned: And can we not say kill? I touch them again is all and they snap right back to the way they’re supposed to be.
Chuck: Am I the rubber band that broke?
Ned: Chuck, you are the only human being I’ve ever made alive again to stay. (“Dummy”)
Leaving aside the fact that Ned is lying here (he had also made his own mother alive again, and Chuck’s father died in the balance)
Chuck: I can’t be alive again for no reason. I mean I suppose I could be, but where’s the fun in that? (“Dummy”)
Ned’s remark that the dead “snap right back to the way they’re supposed to be” is important, because when he reanimates the dead, the maintain their injuries even in their (cheerful) reanimated state.
Some have been mauled by dogs.
Some have been run over.
Some have been trampled by horses.
Some have been stabbed.
Some have been burned.
Some have been murdered by someone using the hands of a sex doll to strangle them.
Some have drowned in taffy.
Some have been frozen.
These are, clearly, dead who have been reanimated. It is notable, therefore, that Chuck was asphyxiated and then dumped in the ocean—a murder leaving no physical changes to her corpse.
Despite her lack of disfigurement, Chuck is no different from any of the other reanimated corpses Ned encounters. She is, in other words, just as much a zombie as anyone else in the show.
The show has some fun with this joke.
In the episode “Girth,” Olive, believing that Chuck has merely faked her death, claims that after Halloween Chuck will be “One sorry little zombie. Seriously, you’re going to be dead.” Chuck’s response to this, later, is to note that “Olive thinks I faked my death with is completely different to knowing that I’m dead.” Later in that episode, Chuck explains to Ned’s dog, Digby,
“You know, if you think about it, we’ve already been murdered once. How many dogs or people can say that, huh? You know what we are? We’re the walking dead on Halloween.”
“Bitches” begins with a dream sequence in which Chuck trips getting out of bed, falls onto Ned, and they realize that they can touch. After they strip off their clothes, Chuck strips off her skin to reveal that she is Olive, underneath, wearing a “Chuck suit.” When Ned reveals this dream to Emerson, the response is “you feel guilty about kidding Olive when you want to be kissing some dead girl.”
At the heart of Pushing Daisies, I want to suggest, is a fundamental tension. Here we have, as I have shown, a series that has, at its core, a strong attraction between the living and the dead which must, therefore, mount a serious prohibition against the sexual relationship of its lead couple. But the prohibition is dual. Yes, the show’s overt message is that any contact with Ned (and not just sexual) carries with it the punishment of death. But the show’s other condition is that physical contact (and especially the sexual) between Ned and Chuck would, in fact, be a kind of necrophilia. And so the sexual tension—the show’s Ross and Rachel pining—places the viewer in the uncomfortable position of rooting for necrophilia.
There are other, more practical, concerns in the show, for Ned is able to reanimate anything that is dead.
He can reanimate leaves:
His pies are made with zombie fruit:
He makes zombie pies that he cannot eat:
In addition to the need for Ned to abstain from his creations, he apparently has abstained from sex for some time. In the episode “Smell of Success,” Ned explains to Chuck and Emerson why he has been silent about his former girlfriends before, as Emerson puts it, “Dead girl came long.” Ned explains that he’s had girlfriends, but that “there were always extraneous factors. . . . You know. We grew apart. Lost interest. Had intimate relations on a bear-skin rug.” When Chuck asks whether the rug re-animated, Ned simply replies that “it did enough to be upsetting.”
There are other issues. Chuck asks, at one point, “Which birthday do I celebrate? I’ve got two of them now: first day I was alive; first day I was alive again.” Ned responds by saying that she should celebrate “The one that requires less explanation.” There is more to this exchange than Ned’s cautiousness. Pushing Daisies always chooses the path of less explanation.
We do not know why Ned has this gift. We do not know why it works the way it works. The specifics of the balance between what has been raised and what must die to replace it are unclear. Indeed, the mystery of the balance remains an open question throughout the series. In “Pigeon,” when Ned accidentally raises a pigeon from the dead, Emerson asks “What is the rate of exchange on the life of a bird? Because if it’s equal to or greater than mine, I need to get back to my car” (“Pigeon”). Ned assures him that it will likely be a squirrel near them that will die. And what, precisely, is Ned responsible for when he does not re-dead his reanimations? Even this proves impossible for the characters to sort out. For example, Emerson, attempting to explain the difference between murder and the effects of Ned’s refusal to re-dead Chuck, says “Lawrence Schatz wasn’t murdered. He was accidentally, involuntarily manslaughtered” (“The Fun in Funeral”).
This is the face he makes when he ends this sentence—
—as he becomes aware of the absurdity of trying to categorize these incidents.
Certainly, this is simply a component of the magical realism that animated the series (and which will no doubt re-animate it in DVD and syndication). Magical realism is hardly magical if it has to be—or can be—explained. And so Pushing Daisies asks us to accept the sweetness of Ned and Chuck’s chastity, it does so by deliberately avoiding discussions of what, precisely Chuck is, and by necessarily forcing their abstinence, staves off the possibility that Ned’s attraction to Chuck is essentially necrophiliac in nature—regardless of its sweetness.
The removal of the traditional political commentary associated with zombies forces the show’s central plot device to defy categorization. What are these people after Ned touches them? What is Chuck, in the end? Re-animated? Undead? Zombie? In a show preoccupied with balance, such epistemological problems render the core of the show unknowable, and without attachment to the traditional commentary associated with such devices, we are left with a (forensic) fairy tale whose moral center is unclear—if it is there at all.