The Super Bowl, Glee, And Pop-Culture Obligations

Few things on this earth interest me less than watching sports. It just does not engage me in the slightest. On the one hand, you have a bunch of (often overpaid) (almost invariably dude-type) humans chasing after a ball for 90 minutes or so; on the other hand, you have LITERALLY EVERYTHING ELSE IN EXISTENCE, and the former cannot possibly compete for my attention.

American football perhaps tops the list of Sports I Do Not Care About. Friends have gamely attempted to explain the rules to me, but such endeavors always put my brain in a jellified stupor quicker than Of Grammatology and a letter from the bank combined. Sports terminology is my personal soporific.

So you can understand why I anticipated my first Super Bowl with some trepidation. In fact, I looked on wistfully as a friend of mine offered a marvelous piece of counter-programming in the form of “Buffy Bowl”; but I just couldn't not participate in arguably the biggest cultural event in the US calendar.

As it turned out, I had a pretty excellent time. Beer, food, beer, friends, beer, yelling at commercials for being offensive kyriarchal clusterfucks, and beer are some of my favorite things, so I barely even noticed that there was a sport going on. It turns out there's enough of a surrounding circus that you can be reasonably entertained without paying the slightest attention to the game. (Also, it's apparently socially acceptable to be mortal as a newt by like 4pm on Super Bowl Sunday.)

I doubt I could summarize the goings-on better than Liss (except to reiterate: OMG NICKI MINAJ, be still my beating heart), nor get my feminist outrage on better than Fannie, so I won't try. What's interesting to me is my own feeling that, as a pop-culture connoisseur, I absolutely had to experience this event.

You see, this same weekend, I made official my breakup with Glee. I unliked it on Facebook and deleted the unwatched episodes that have been accumulating since October. For a couple of years, much as I would criticize it, Glee was essential viewing for me. The pop-culture buzz, the detailed analysis, the sense of witnessing a significant event in early-twenty-first-century television – it was irresistible. And yet, by the time season three started, the feeling of icy dread that accompanied each episode far outweighed the anticipation of conversation around it. The sheer awfulness of the show had, in my judgment, at last surpassed its cultural relevance.

The criteria we use for judging which pop-culture phenomena are worthy of our time and attention are subtle and strange. I absolutely believe that popular culture is worthy of close study and analysis: that this study can reveal all manner of truths about a given society – how it functions, what it values, what narratives it tells about itself and how these narratives perpetuate or challenge existing systems of domination and oppression. However, no one has the time or energy to be a consumer of all the popular culture from which we can learn these things. I know that everyone makes choices and compromises, but I still find myself second-guessing my own judgments about pop culture. Since I jumped ship on Glee, I understand that it's aired an episode dealing with gay teen sex, and has another forthcoming in which Brittana will actually, you know, do something. These are arguably watershed moments in pop-culture representations of homosexuality in the US, and maybe by bailing when I did I am missing out on something culturally important. I guess my question is:

To what extent are you obligated to engage with something you hate in order to study its sociocultural impact?

A Very Glee Blog Post

Regular readers and personal friends will know that I like watching Glee almost as much as I like complaining about Glee. There's just so much to complain about! Lately all my thoughts on Glee have been channeled to my best gals Emily and Erica at the awesome GleeKast, thus depriving my lovely readers of many wise insights and/or fangirly squees (unless you listen to GleeKast, which you should, because it is, as I said, awesome).

My love for Glee is like the Grateful Dead's back catalog: vast, inexplicable, and deeply confusing. Each episode entertains and delights me; each episode offends and annoys me – and my feelings about the show in any given week tilt with the balance of these two axes. Even the better episodes always have a number of elements that need fixing, and the worst ones are downright unpleasant to watch. Nevertheless, Glee has a genuine wildness at its heart, a disconnect from reality and a compelling originality that maintains its status as appointment viewing.

Last time I blogged about the most annoying show on TV was in November. At that time, Glee was really getting on my tits. The ten episodes of Glee's second season that aired before Christmas included the delights of “Duets” and the uneven pleasures of “Grilled Cheesus”, “The Substitute”, and “Furt”, but there was also a slew of truly awful episodes: “Britney/Brittany”, “The Rocky Horror Glee Show”, and “A Very Glee Christmas”. In 2011, the good/bad balance has been more to the positive side, with lots to enjoy about “Silly Love Songs” and “Blame It on the Alcohol”, while “Sexy” and “Original Song” featured enough fanservice to counteract their problematic parts.

My assessment of TV's finest musical dramedy depends not only on my aesthetic response to each episode, though, but also on how much it offends me politically. From the outset, Glee declared its political intent: it was to be an all-inclusive rainbow story of diversity, embracing the bullied, the outcast, and the marginalized kids – per its tagline, it's “for the underdog in all of us”. How it's actually handled diversity, however, has varied wildly.

First, the evidence for the prosecution:

Example 1 – Blaine thinks he might be bisexual. I think there is a chance for the show to offer a thoughtful, nuanced story about adolescent insecurity regarding sex and sexual identity. We actually get a flip resolution and an apparent reinforcement of Kurt's biphobia (“Bisexual is a term that gay guys in high school use when they wanna hold hands with girls and feel like a normal person for a change”). N.B. I still hold out hope for a slightly different exploration of adolescent sexual insecurity now that Blurt is a real, honest-to-God thing.

Example 2 – Mercedes. Mercedes, Mercedes, Mercedes. For God's sake, Glee writers, can't you give poor Amber Riley something to do? If you need some lessons in writing for a woman of color, I'm sure the writers of Community would be able to school you; perhaps in exchange for a nice ratings-boosting in-show plug. When Mercedes told Mr. Schue, in “Original Song”, that her song was good, and he said it wasn't regionals material, I felt that his comment bore the unspoken subtext “because it doesn't foreground the white kids”. Note also the near-total silence of Tina and Mike Chang this season. For a show that started out trading on its Benetton-ad diversity, Glee is really quite amazingly racist.

Example 3 – Quinn gets a personality transplant every five minutes. One day she's the closest thing New Directions has to a feminist; the next all she wants is to be prom queen. And there's the whole virgin-whore thing, where every female character is one or the other; the way a male character can lose his virginity (and even regret it, as Finn and Artie both do) without suffering in any discernible way, but when Quinn loses it she has to go through the oldest punishment in the book to earn her way back to (pseudo-)virgin status; the way, as The Funny Feminist points out, the hetero relationships are focalized through the male party. Sometimes I think that Glee just hates women.

Example 4 – the kicker; in my opinion, the absolute worst thing that has ever happened on Glee. I speak, of course, of Cyborg Artie in “A Very Glee Christmas”. A lot of PWD (that's people with disabilities to you non-PC brigade) find the casting of able-bodied Kevin McHale to play wheelchair-using Artie deeply problematic, because so few parts are available to actors with disabilities (google “crip drag”, y'all). The storyline with Artie's robot legs was the nadir of this show's neverending parade of offensiveness: “Hey, kids using wheelchairs, if your gym teacher is a gazillionaire, then maybe one day you too can walk again like a REAL BOY! It’s a ~*~Christmas miracle~*~”... I hope I don't have to explain why this is so very, very offensive. (If I do, then seriously, google “crip drag” and get self-educating.) The prosecution rests.

None of these things are defensible, of course, so the defense counsel can only hope to outweigh them with counterexamples. Step up:

Counterexample 1 – Coach Bieste becomes a BAMF. As you know, her treatment in “Never Been Kissed” turned my stomach, and since then the writers have wisely stepped back from the 40-year-old virgin territory. For a moment in “Blame It on the Alcohol”, I was terrified that they were going to go there, which would have undermined a truly awesome sequence of her and Will having a buds' night out at the roadhouse (Patrick Swayze sadly too deceased to cameo). At this point, their friendship is almost the only thing I like about Will. Long may it continue.

Counterexample 2 – Lauren Zizes. Oh, she is wonderful. A character who was initially nothing more than a delivery service for mean-spirited and offensive jokes (the AV nerd is fat! The fat girl is always eating! Ha ha!) has transcended this role to become one of my favorite characters in the whole ensemble. Lauren doesn't buy into society's prescriptions for women's body-image; she knows she's beautiful; she doesn't truck with standard Glee self-congratulatory footling around minority characters, telling Puck to cram it when he's being offensive; and, hell, I know a woman doesn't need a hot guy to validate her, but I really do love the Zizes/Puckerman pairing. They're just such a fun couple.

Counterexample 3 – Burt and Kurt's father-son relationship goes from strength to strength. Their every interaction nails it so hard that it's almost as if they've been airlifted in from a different show, one that values things like consistency and believability. The After-School-Special aspect of Glee has been handled really quite well lately, from the Kurt/Karofsky business to a teen-drinking episode that was reasonably realistic and not too preachy. Despite its frequently cartoonish nature, Glee has an ability to totally commit to its PSA-like aspects, with an endearing, My So-Called Life-ish earnestness.

Counterexample 4 – you knew this was coming! Brittana. Santittany. Whatever you choose to call them, they are another terrific instance of Glee's capacity to flesh out one-joke stereotypes far beyond what anyone could have predicted, into one of the best things about the show. Objectivity will never be a part of this for me, because I've been shipping this portmanteau with every atom of my being ever since that first fateful one-liner back in December '09, but I am super-chuffed with how this storyline is unfolding so far. We're not getting straightforward fanservice (well, except where body-shots are concerned); we are getting a long-term story arc, deep emotional truth, and one heck of a lot of processing. Could it get any more lesbian than that? The defense rests.

Noble internauts, fellow Gleeks, you are the jury. What is your verdict?

Glee: Infuriating Fans Since 2009

Overthinking It has been making ripples across the Interwebz of late with a series of articles on one-, two-, and three-dimensional characters, most notably the Female Character Flowchart (which has its own issues, chiefly that its gigantitude arguably negates its point, but that’s not what I want to critique today). Plenty could be said about all these articles, but the point I want to pick up on is Fenzel’s remark that

If a character lacks depth and believability on the page, the actor can provide it.

Chris Colfer understands this. At this point, Kurt Hummel is by far the best thing about Glee, and it’s not because he’s written more consistently and given more interesting things to do than the other characters (although arguably he is; that creator Ryan Murphy is rewriting the gay teen experience from a perspective of both wish-fulfilment and Aesoptinum gets more evident with every episode). No, it’s because, week in, week out, Chris Colfer delivers a performance of such depth and nuance that he elevates even the weakest material. I will admit to taking a fangirl’s delight in the appearance of Harry Potter and his puppet pals in Tolerance Narnia; as ridiculous as the whole thing was, it was the least cringe-worthy aspect of last week’s episode.

That song really sucks, though. I live in a little bubble of indie, prog, and Kelly Clarkson (WHO IS THE GREATEST POP STAR OF HER GENERATION AND AS SOON AS I HAVE ANY EVIDENCE TO SUPPORT THIS ASSERTION I WILL PRESENT IT TO YOU), so my familiarity with the songs featured on the show is variable, but I like it best when they do great show tunes or interesting reinterpretations of classic pop songs. From my point of view, a lot of the music this season has been kind of terrible. It’s the missed opportunities that sting the most, though: imagine if ‘Grilled Cheesus’ had featured, instead of the not-really-relevant ‘Losing My Religion’ sung insipidly by the insipid Finn, Kurt singing XTC’s ‘Dear God’. Or Sue singing it. Or both of them singing it, as one of those neat cross-cut duets the show used to do? *dies from the thought of what might have been*

The most recent episode featured a couple of fun mash-ups, so I guess it wasn’t all bad. What was all bad was the treatment of Coach Beiste, which was a veritable shag-pile of WTF. I watched in horror as the show drained away everything I love about the walking factory of awesome that was pre-‘Never Been Kissed’ Coach Beiste. First we were invited to laugh at her in an unbelievably mean-spirited way, and then we were fed the vomitous rom-com line that every woman, whoever she is and whatever she’s accomplished, wants nothing more in life than for a boy to tell her she’s pretty – preferably in the form of a hideously patronizing pep-talk and pity-smooch from Will Douchester, who is fast becoming the show’s least likable character.

Also, she’s not gay, you know. Well, why the heck not? Kurt Hummel began life as the most flamboyant acculturation of gay male clichés in TV history, and through a combination of increased airtime and brilliant acting has transformed before our eyes into the most well-rounded member of the ensemble. Why not do something similar for the gay ladies?

While I’m at it, what is this show’s problem with women, anyway? No other show literalizes the virgin/whore dichotomy so thoroughly. On the one hand, Santana and Brittany are the school bicycles, maliciously stealing the virginities of male characters Finn and Artie in between screwing every other guy in school and fooling around with each other (which is both a telling comment on the show’s portrayal of bisexuality, and the only bone thrown to the gay ladies).

However, while both Finn and Artie regret losing their virginity, they quickly get over it and certainly do not suffer in any discernible way. Contrast this with the one female character we have seen lose her virginity (since Rachel and Emma choose to stay chaste and wholesome, while Coach Beiste is actually a 40-year-old virgin – I hope she has a large and well-loved collection of vibrators). Quinn submits to pressure from Puck, who is of course promiscuous without being judged, and is punished with pregnancy, loss of her social status, and getting kicked out of her parents’ home. After spending a season paying the price for her one foray into whoredom, she has earned back her place on the virgin side of the tracks, and she’s staying there now that she’s learned her lesson. Hmmm...

That’s probably enough TV Tropes links for one blog post. (Sorry about those hours of your life you’ll never get back.) To put it succinctly:

Glee, please try harder.