And they all play on the golf-course
Having yesterday quoted Panu's appeal:
I would like to see movies and other works of art that depict the middle-class lifestyle in a way that values its good and positive aspects. That accept that the desire to have a steady life and healthy family relationships is a deeply human desire. And that understand that the tragedy of the underclass is precisely in the fact that the underclass has no way to rise to the middle class, to live even the middle class life --- and that the underclass would want to rise to the middle class, but cannot get there, and doesn't know or understand why.
I then remembered the series "Weeds".
For those who haven't seen it, the premise of this show is that a
recently widowed suburban mom starts dealing pot for a clientele of
various wacky suburban characters to finance her suburban lifestyle.
As is quickly apparent in the show's theme song "Little boxes"
(as I side note, until hearing this song I didn't know that also
American singers could sing with such a Stalinist voice) and the title
sequence of horrible forced uniformity that it accompanies, the writers
of this show had just decided to lazily copy "American Beauty".
The show's general theme is that people who live in suburbs and gated
communities are all either evil, stupid or whacked, no matter how hard
they try to maintain a public facade of happy life to disguise this.
This point is driven across so often and in so many ways that not even
the dullest viewer could possibly miss it. Fortunately love, human
warmth and genuine friendship still exist and can be found among the
poor but real people from
whom our heroine buys her product wholesale. (The obvious question why
the main character insists on living in an expensive suburb if it's
really so bad is never actually addressed, of course.)
I
remember wondering, while watching the pilot episode, how the producers
and writers of this show had totally missed the opportunity of their
lifetimes to make a show that was actually meaningful. The show could
have been about how the main character chooses to sell drugs to
maintain her middle class lifestyle that she and her kids have grown
accustomed to simply because middle class lifestyle is good,
and how she wants to keep the good life that her neighbours have and
millions of others can only dream that they could have. The main
character would understand in a quiet desperation that her life is
steadily slipping away from her and she is well on her way to becoming
a character of some Barbara Ehrenreich book, no matter how she tries to
keep up the facade and keep up with the Joneses. The possibilities of
this setup would have been truly endless and would have made a show
that would have really been
meaningful and different for viewers throughout the ideological
spectrum. But apparently it was just so much easier to make cheap shots
to "prove" that nothing is really better than anything else.
But
hey, perhaps in Season Two a proper and decent middle class gay couple
will move in the neighbourhood to further highlight what a bigoted
human failure everybody else is. Perhaps only our heroine would ever
say a friendly word to them and sympathize with them. But then they
could have a hearty laugh together in the end after they had humiliated
the biggest bigots in some funny way! Perhaps the biggest bigot guy
would secretly himself be gay. That sure would be edgy and different!
Is that perhaps an Emmy that I'm smelling in the air?
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