I am too old for the Disney Channel. The bright candy colors, the
rapid-fire pacing, the saccharine music and headache-y flash-cuts and
forced zaniness – it all adds up to one massively hyperstimulating,
sugar-coated migraine. Half an hour of all that on a Saturday morning
and I am ready to bounce off the ceiling before crashing to earth
semi-comatose for the rest of the day.
If you can overcome (or, better, avoid entirely) the excruciating
commercials and the overstimulation of the Disney Channel milieu,
however, you can experience maybe the most exciting television debut
of 2012. (Not, I'll admit, that the upcoming fall season looks to
offer stiff competition.)
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| Welcome to Gravity Falls. |
In
the nine episodes aired so far, Gravity Falls has
already established a pretty dense mythology for itself, jam-packed
with occult imagery, cryptograms, conspiracies, clever callbacks, and
hidden Easter eggs (and there are already plenty
of websites
devoted to deciphering this stuff). It's an enormously fun show,
chronicling the supernatural adventures of twelve-year-old twins
Dipper and Mabel in the creepy, not-quite-right town of Gravity
Falls, Oregon. The level of care and detail lavished on the
world-building is matched by the depth and – if I can say this of
an animated Disney Channel show – realism of the characters.
Dipper
and Mabel, voice by Jason Ritter and Kristen Schaal, are wonderfully
characterized as not just siblings but true friends: despite their
personality differences, they enjoy spending time together, and
although they needle and mock each other they always have each
other's back. As somebody whose siblings are my best friends, I find
it rings very true to life, and the only other show I can think of
with a comparably close sibling dynamic is Bob's Burgers –
where, coincidentally, one of the siblings is also voiced by Schaal.
The
twins' age is a savvy writing choice that allows for some spot-on
exploration of themes of growing up, pitching the show niftily at the
crossover-hit sweet spot for both younger and older viewers. A
grown-up trying to convince other grown-ups to watch a Disney Channel
animated show can certainly relate to the twins' swithering between
the childish excitement of their supernatural adventures and their
desire to prove themselves cool enough for the local teenagers
(including Dipper's hopeless and completely understandable crush,
Linda Cardellini-voiced Wendy). Two specific episodes of Gravity
Falls work well as companion
pieces exploring Dipper and Mabel's respective struggles to establish
their identities.
Episode
6, “Dipper Vs. Manliness”
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| A cutie patootie. |
Dipper is the more introspective, bookish twin – as Mabel puts it,
he's “not exactly Manly Mannington.” When an old “manliness
tester” machine at the local diner declares him “a cutie
patootie,” Dipper's insecurity about being a man goes into
overdrive, and he seeks training in the ways of manliness from a
group of Manotaurs (“half man, half... taur!” “I have 3
Y-chromosomes, 6 Adam's apples, pecs on my abs, and fists for
nipples!”).
Anyone who's been a feminist longer than five minutes knows that the
enforcement of gender roles harms men as well as women, and this
episode features a lot of great jokes lampooning the sheer absurdity
of what's considered manly in our society: the pack of REAL MAN JERKY
emblazoned with the slogan YOU'RE INADEQUATE!, the Manotaur council
that involves beating the crap out of each other, Dipper convincing
the reluctant Manotaurs to help him (“using some sort of brain
magic!”) by suggesting they're not manly enough to do it.
In the end, it's Dipper's love for a thinly-veiled “Dancing Queen”
pastiche that causes him to defy the Manotaurs' stereotypical
definition of manliness. His enjoyment of something considered
“girly” opens his eyes to the nonsensical restrictiveness of
traditional gender roles. As he says in his climactic speech to the
Manotaurs: “You keep telling me that being a man means doing all
these tasks and being aggro all the time, but I'm starting to think
that stuff's malarkey. You heard me: malarkey!”
Rejecting the Manotaur's version of manliness does not, however,
answer Dipper's agonized question about the nature of masculinity:
“Is it mental? Is it physical? What's the secret?” (And how many
times have I myself asked that question?) Although the episode puts a
neat bow on Dipper's arc by offering a pat moral – “You did what
was right even though no one agreed with you. Sounds pretty manly to
me” – it's made fairly clear that masculinity and femininity do
not have to be discrete, oppositional spheres rooted in stereotypes,
and the question of what makes a man is left open – as, perhaps, it
should be.
Episode
8, “Irrational Treasure”
Mabel is the best. She's my favorite character, and with every
episode I love her even more. Her quest for self in “Irrational
Treasure” is not a direct counterpart to Dipper's search for
manliness – Mabel is pretty comfortable with both the ways in which
she is conventionally feminine and the ways in which she is not
(reflecting the sad reality that girls' freedom to express masculinity
is not mirrored by an equivalent freedom for boys to express
femininity). In the show's fourth episode, “The Hand That Rocks
the Mabel,” she confronts the societal pressures around dating
while female, as she struggles with how to extricate herself from a
coercive romantic relationship with the creepy Lil Gideon – an
object lesson in how messed up are our society's ideas of the
romantic pursuit of uninterested women by persistent men – but in
this episode she faces a less explicitly gendered problem: how to
convince everyone that she's not silly.
The delightfully goofy hijinks of this episode – involving a
conspiracy to cover up the existence of Quentin Trembley, the
peanut-brittle-preserved eighth-and-a-half president of the United
States – are propelled by Mabel's quest to prove her seriousness to
rival Pacifica Northwest. Pacifica is a pretty stereotypical
stuck-up-rich-mean-girl archetype thus far, but it seems distinctly
possible that an interesting character arc could await her in future.
“You look and act ridiculous,” she tells Mabel with scorn, and
Mabel takes her peer's cruelty to heart the way only a pre-teen can.
“I thought I was being charming,” she says dejectedly, “but I
guess people see me as a big joke.”
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| Don't worry Mabel, you really are so so charming. |
As it was Dipper's non-manliness that ultimately proved him a real man, so it's
Mabel's silliness that saves the day here, allowing her to crack all
the clues for the conspiracy and help President Trembley escape the
local police (who, despite being called serious by Mabel, are in fact
extremely silly). By the episode's end, Mabel is impervious to
Pacifica's jibes: “I've got
nothing to prove. I've learned that being silly is awesome.”
Figuring out who you are in the face of societal pressures that
buffet you every which way is the trial of growing up, and helping
people to do that is one of feminism's goals. It's also at the heart
of Gravity Falls, which helps cement this for me as the most
exciting new show of 2012. (Plus, it's apparently indoctrinating
kids into occult symbolism. Cool.)
This sounds like a great show - thanks for the report!
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