The Mailbox

I've been talking about what 30 Rock has to say about political and social issues, so it seems appropriate to ask about the role of the media in society. Does what 30 Rock have to say matter? Is anyone listening? The episode "Rosemary's Baby" has a few answers, or at least a few questions.

Liz's comic idol, Rosemary Howard, the first female writer for Laugh In, a sketch comedy show hosted by Dan Rowan and Dick Martin from 1968 to 1973. Liz says she wrote all the "political stuff" for Donny and Marie, and the show includes two clips written by Rosemary. A guy playing Nixon says "pardon me" as he bumps into someone and a woman says "pardon you? You're already pardoned!", and a young Liz says "it's funny, because it's true!". The other is a "mailbox sketch that shocked America" where a mailbox says "Nothing's wrong here!" and then falls over. Rosemary explains that it's a reference to H.R. Haldeman, Nixon's chief of staff. Later, when Liz calls Jack a mailbox, he knows exactly what she means.

The episode presents a few different opinions on what TV can do:

Liz: "We should be pushing the envelope, making people think." She thinks suits like Jack feed of the creativity of others, and that she isn't like that. 

Jack: "Pushing the envelope is for people without the guts or the brains to work within the system. Letter writers, radicals, Howard Dean." He tells Liz that she's in TV because she's "funny, weird, and socially retarded,"and also because it pays well, making Liz like Jack, not like Rosemary. He also tells Liz that TGS is, at the end of the day, his show.

Rosemary: Rosemary thinks TV should be "very subversive." She suggests that TGS write a sketch that "opens at a New Orleans abortion clinic, with a beautiful mulatto" (to which Liz responds, "I don't think we can use any of those words"). She thinks profanity is okay for TV, and that "live TV is like sex. It's better when everything goes horribly wrong." She also calls race "the last taboo."

So what can TV do? With big corporate interests in play and a need to be politically correct, what can the show say? I honestly don't have an answer to that, but I think 30 Rock does a pretty awesome job of asking the questions. It's like the mailbox: 100% TV-appropriate, funny, and you know what it means.

P.S.: ARHU, did you catch the Howard Dean reference?

The Natural Order

"The Natural Order," the title of the episode, refers to what Tracy and Liz eventually agree is "a world in which [they] both get preferrencial treatment" because Tracy is black and Liz is a woman. I'm not sure what I think about this episode. Don't get me wrong-- it was hilarious. I love Jack's sarcastic and high-maintanance mother, who says of her married boyfriend Paul, "it's Florida. It's like it's still the 70s down there. When you find a guy like Paul, who can drive at night, you don't pass that up." Gotta love that. Anyway, back to my point. Here's the backstory: Tracy gets frustrated that Liz and the producers of the show are treating him like a child, so demands that he be treated like everyone else. Liz accepts the challenge, and Tracy accuses Liz of being treated specially because she's a woman. Liz has a series of shenanigans ["don't patronize me with your Celtic slang!"] about ways in which she is treated differently,  like usually having a man help her change the water cooler, holding back farts, being excused from Lutz' fake bachelor party, Jack "needing to have a conversation with [her]. With a man, [he] can be more direct." Tracy gets bored with actually working rather than doing the fun things he used to do, and then they have this exchange: [only the first half is relevent]

Tracy sent the monkey in his place earlier in the episode with this message: 

Dear Racist Liz Lemon,

I've sent this monkey because this is how you treat me. 

Like a  white whiskered gibbon put on this earth to do nothing but dance around your amusement and reduce the insect population of Malasia.

The gibbon was pretty effective in making Tracy's point, but Jenna's adopting it later had implications I can't decide were intentional or not. Some things are meant to be symbolic and others just to be funny, and I'm not sure about this one. We read Tony Morrison's "Playing in the Dark" in my English class, in which she talks about the use of blackness and what she calls the Africanist presence in American literature as a foil or easy, go-to metaphor. She highlights four ways in which Africanist characters function in American literature.

1. As surrogates and enablers for plot and character development. (It convinces Liz and Tracy to reconsider their feud about equality)

2. As a contrast to modernity. (Tracy uses it to make his point about how he's treated. Remember the outrage when the NY Post used this racist/ stereotypical metaphor in an editorial cartoon?)

3. To reinforce the implications of whiteness. (Jenna adopts the gibbon to have someone to love her: "Now somebody loves me!" and uses it for media attention and to further her career. One of her media ploys is to give Little Jenna (that's the gibbon) a human-baby doll to care for... possibly an allusion to slave wet-nurses raising the mistress' children?)

4. A narrative that can be manipulated as a means of meditation on one's own humanity. (Anyone meditating? If so, I guess the episode did it's job!)

Bipartisanship, Cajun Style

This post most likely will not conclude anything about bipartisanship that you don't already know, but I thought the episode about it, "Secrets and Lies," was hilarious. The premise: hardcore Republican, pro-big business Jack has been secretly dating Democratic Congresswoman from Vermont C.C., and they consider taking their relationship public. 

C.C. is trying to get the US government to sue NBC's parent company GE (specifically, its subsidiary the Sheinhart Wig Company) for "allegedly turning a bunch of schoolchildren orange." Liz somehow/ accidentally convinces C.C. to compromise for Jack, and she convinces the Sheinhart Wig plaintiffs to settle for $5 million each (Jack: that's NBC sexual assault money!), thinking that now that the controversial case was over they could stop sneaking around. Jack is still hesitant, though, because he's up for a big promotion at NBC/GE.

Jack complains to Liz that he doesn't know what to do, and that "nobody understands what I'm going through!" by dating across party lines when James Carville steps out of the elevator. [James Carville is a Democratic campaign manager, strategist, and TV pundit who is married to Republican political consultant Mary Matalin.] Carville advises Jack, as well as a few other characters, in what to do with their problems with clever references to Carville's political career. [e.g.: "True love weathers any storm. Even desert storm," and many, many references to doing things "Cajun style"] 

I think what this episode does best is take shots at both parties. Jack calls C.C. out as helping the orange kids not only for humanitarian reasons but also for a leg-up politically. He refers to Carville (to his face) as a "pinko nutjob," and C.C. as his "liberal, hippy-dippy mama," his "groovy chick," who wants to "tax us all to death and make it legal for a man to marry his own dog" [seriously, that's a thing!]. The Republicans go through the episode relatively unscathed, besides a reference to Karl Rove's alleged professional ties to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth organization that made TV commercials questioning John Kerry's war record during the 2004 elections, until Jack announces his relationship to C.C. in his executive dining room. It's hilarious. Jack begins, "Gentlemen, token ladies... I have an important announcement," and then proceeds to reveal his relationship. Other Republicans in the room stand up to confess their own transgressions against the party: "I gave to NPR last year," "My children go to public school," "I'm gay," and my personal favorite "I'm black." Finally, in an gesture of bipartisanship, C.C. reveals that "In 1984, I voted for Ronald Reagan."

I Don't Believe in One-Way Streets: a.k.a. Why I Didn't Hate the Movie The Soloist

Tracy Jordan once said, "I don't believe in one-way streets. Not between people, and not when I'm driving." Like many other instances in 30 Rock, I noted that this was a pretty clever line and moved on, only to have one of those "OH! That's like this one time on 30 Rock!" moments that drive my friends who've never seen the show up the wall. 

That particular line came back a few weeks ago when I went to see "The Soloist" in theaters. I was really hesitant to see it, because it looked like the usual formulaic, self-righteous story of magnanimous [white] man swoops in to save less-capable and underprivileged [black] man. The story is everywhere- in film, books, and, possibly most irritatingly, in real life.  The era of colonization has ended, but celebrities, entrepreneurs, and governments sail in to "save" African and Asian countries [see my last post on the spread of democracy and the Iraq war]. The movie started out exactly like I feared. LA journalist Steve Lopez (Robert Downey Jr.) sees Julliard-trained cellist Nathaniel Ayers (Jamie Foxx) homeless but playing his two-stringed violin beautifully. He writes a few columns about him, gets a new cello and some cello lessons donated, and is lauded as a hero. Lopez desperately tries to "fix" Nathaniel, and the only ways that he knows to measure his success are by helping/forcing Nathaniel to meet societal benchmarks like keeping his cello in a homeless shelter or living inside an apartment. These changes don't make Nathaniel any happier, and actually further aggravate his schizophrenia. Robbie Oibst on her blog "Joy Dance," puts it nicely: 

In order to help this homeless musical genius, the journalist naturally decides to give him shelter and a way out of his illness through drugs and therapy. But the celloist wants no part.

How many times do each of us seek to "help" someone else by making them into versions of ourselves? Shouldn't everyone want what I have? 

On top of that, due to some kind of combination of Nathaniel's schizophrenia and Lopez's arrogance and holier-than-though attitude, Nathaniel begins to conflate Lopez with God. This extreme situation, thankfully, forced the movie turns around. Nathaniel articulates my concern, though unfortuantely I can't remember the line or find it on the internet. (And I thought you could find anything on the internet!). The gist of it was that although Lopez calls Nathaniel by his first name, Nathaniel calls Lopez "Mr. Lopez," and that that discrepancy shows the inequality in the relationship. The Kansas City Star's review of the film observes that "This Steve Lopez connects with his fellow man at only the superficial level; his friendship with Ayers forces him to depths of concern and commitment with which he is profoundly uncomfortable." 

The film's conclusion is that the best thing Lopez can do for Nathaniel is to be his friend. Not his benefactor or his god, but his friend. Lopez needs someone to listen to him, not someone to "fix him" to conform to a societal expectation. So next time you try to help, stop. The goal is not to help the other person to be more like you, but to be a friend. Come down off your pedestal, shut up, and listen. If you're on a one-way street, make a turn and try to go in a different direction.