The Surge

Remember "The Crucible"? ...Written by Arthur Miller? ...About the Salem witch trials? ...Anything? If not, here's the cliffs notes version: the play is an allegory for the McCarthy era, framed through the Salem witch trials. The 30 Rock episode "Cougars" from season two is also an allegory, though not for the hysteria of the Red Scare but for the war in Iraq.

The basic premise of the episode is that Tracy is coaching an inner-city baseball team, and that Jack intervenes with his "superior resources" to make the team winners. Jack responds to Tracy's concern that he doesn't understand the entire situation, saying "You don't have to understand their world in order to help. It's like this great country of ours: we go into a nation, impose our values, and make things better. Bush is doing it all over the world." Okay, so maybe it doesn't count as an allegory if the show comes right out and says it. But wait, it gets better!

1. Jack plans to fix a player's bunting with a biography of Winston Churchill. Clearly, we can use values and figureheads to solve pragmatic, daily problems.

2. After Jack builds a new field for the team, the team celebrates by tearing down the statue of Confederate leader Jefferson Davis. This exactly mirrors the destruction of a statue of Saddam Hussein in Iraq after he was deposed in 2003:

3. "Conditions deteriorate" with the team when Jack fires Tracy as coach and appoints Kenneth. Jack justifies the downturn by saying that the team is "testing our resolve" and that they should "stay the course." Bush has used "stay the course" as his general plan on multiple occasions, and the phrase "testing our resolve" appears five times in this Congressional Record on the War on Terror.

4. When forced to admit that he has made an error, Jack says that because it's hard for him to admit he's made a mistake, he'll have Kenneth do it. So Kenneth explains to Tracy that they "didn't know what they were getting into," that they "just wanted to help, but things got out of control." He says they have two options to make the team into winners: 

1. Cut and run, but that would mean betraying the commitment they made to the people.

2. Form a coalition, combing Tracy's know-how with Jack's superior resources.

5. The result of the coalition of Tracy and Jack is what they call "the Surge." Not exactly subtle, but pretty funny all the same. Tracy's two friends/bodyguards/entourage, Griz and DotCom (these huge African American men), are brought in with fake Dominican birth certificates to play on the team of 14 year-olds and make them win.

6. Another great reference and important concept: "Just because I don't support Jack Donaghey does not mean I don't support the kids." I hope I don't have to explain the connection in that one. 

Truth Bombs or Stink Bombs?: The Ethics of Representation

"The ethics of representation" is definitely one of those phrases found only in academia. Seriously, it sounds like the subheading of a dissertation. But as ridiculous as the phrase sounds, it's actually a really interesting idea. The concept is rooted in the assumption that art is not bounded by the artist's intent. We talked about this in my English class the other day because we're reading The Colonial Harem, by Malek Alloula. In the early 20th century, when the Algeria was under French control, there were millions of postcards produced and circulated in an attempt to satisfy the European fascination with the exoticism and "barbarism" of the Arab world. The postcards are borderline-pornographic portrayals of Algerian women, and Alloula, an Algerian, explains that he is writing to try to "exorcise the photographer's intruding gaze" from his country and to "send the postcard back to its sender."

Alloula's book has been criticized, though, for doing exactly the opposite. Critics argue that the fact that his book is full of images of these postcards serves, regardless of the text Alloula adds and his unambivalent stance regarding them, to perpetuate their influence and existence. As much as I'd love to say that this is ridiculous, it might not be. Here are some other examples of how art can get away from the artist:

1. Colbert mocks an anti-gay marriage commercial, and the group sends him a letter thanking him for circulating their ideas and their ad. The National Organization for Marriage has a point: their small-scale internet ad got national television coverage and thousands of YouTube hits. You can watch Colbert's version here, and, honestly, you might not need to bother with the real thing because it's almost as ridiculous.

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
The Colbert Coalition's Anti-Gay Marriage Ad
colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Gay Marriage

2.A student group tries to show a pornographic film at Maryland. Although the group's intentions were to connect the showing with a safe-sex message, many people were outraged that a public university would sponsor (or at least agree to) the screening of a film that objectifies women, etc. My friend and fellow HoHum-er Chiara wrote a great explanation of the issue on her blog a few weeks ago. She pointed out that whatever the group's intentions were in showing the film, many students' reasons were going did not stem from intellectual curiosity. 

3. 30 Rock. See? This wasn't a complete tangent. So, in my very first blog entry, I looked at the presence and prevalence of stereotypes in the pilot of the series. My first instinct was to try to justify these stereotypes as a way of establishing the show's characters while mocking and acknowledging their absurdity. I still think that this was the show's intent, and I'm saying that this was not the result, but I'm willing to add the "ethics of representation" angle. Does 30 Rock, in fact, perpetuate stereotypes by so bluntly acknowledging them? Take, for example, the episode Blind Date. When I looked at it in one of my other entries, I felt like the show did a good job of exposing the stereotypes it embodied and, in a sense, debunking them. But because they were so obvious, was there some part of my brain that was storing these new lesbian-stereotypes? Before watching the episode, I didn't "know" that lesbian couples liked to make planters out of rail-road ties, and now I do. While I know that this is a generalization and a stereotype, I somehow still remember that association. My brain knows it's false, but it's still stuck in there.  Is there a way to destabilize and debunk stereotypes without perpetuating them?

Conscious Socialness

I apologize for the text-overload in the last few posts. This time, I'm going to try a more condensed format, and we'll see how that goes. I'm going to skip "Jack the Writer" and "Jack-Tor," but I just can't overlook my two favorite moments in those two episodes: 

1) Tracy's advice to Kenneth: "LIVE EVERY WEEK LIKE IT'S SHARK WEEK. 

2) Jenna's song "Muffin Top" [everyone knows the best part of the muffin... is the top]. It's been stuck in my head for days! 

Moving on, this episode is "Jack Meets Dennis." Best line: Jack buys a beeper from Liz's obnoxious Beeper-King boyfriend Dennis. When she tells him to take it off, he refuses, saying "I can't. I'm expecting a call from 1983." This episode is interesting, too, in the way that many of the characters acknowledge the constructs of the social groups they belong to and the conscious decisions they are making to remain there. Here's a few examples:

Jenna: Jack asks Jenna her age and she lies and tells him she's 29. Though she passes Jack's series of test questions about her supposed age (teen celebrity crush? Kirk Cameron. movie she lost her virginity to? Arachnaphobia. drive-in or theater? "... what's a drive-in?"), she panics about her stability as a non-character actress. She tells Liz, "when someone asks an actress her age, it's more of an answer than a question." She then gets ridiculous Botox.

Tracy: Tracy is horrified when he sees a photo of himself in a tabloid with the caption "NORMAL." He rants that "If I'm normal I'll be boring, and if I'm boring I won't be a movie star, and if I'm not a movie star I'll be poor, and poor people can't pay back the $75,000 cash they owe Quincy Jones." He shows up to work the next day with a huge facial tattoo of a "Biblical dragon from outer space," which turns out to be fake. He explains to Liz that he needs to maintain his image to keep his "street cred." 

Jack's friend Howard/ Jack Welch: Jack is trying to convince Liz to let him mentor her to becoming more cultured and successful. He brings his old "student," Howard in to meet Liz, and together the two men list Howard's accolades: he's married, has two beautiful kids, and a pool; he makes a seven figure income; he's married to a "swell Filipino gal." Jack also explains to Liz that GE CEO Jack Welch is "the best leader since the Pharoahs" because he integrates himself into both the working and personal lives of his employees. He "introduces us to the finest booze and the most exclusive country clubs, recommends the best private investigators to spy on our ex-wives, and holds our hands during our triumphs and our Senate hearings." By the end of the episode, Liz decides that she's willing to let Jack mentor her rather than ignore what Jack calls her "lack of foresight and addiction to dysfunctional relationships."

Blind Date (video clip)

Video Recaps | Full Episodes | Webisodes

Blind Date

One way to debunk a myth or stereotype is to make it look absolutely ridiculous. The third episode of 30 Rock, "Blind Date," is built on gender stereotypes that, through the course of the episode, reveal an interesting way to look at same-sex relationships.

The basic premise of the episode is that Jack sets Liz up on a blind date with his friend Thomas. At first, Liz refuses, but after Jack's question, "don't you live in constant terror of choking to death alone in your apartment?", hits a little too close to home, she concedes. When Liz gets to the restaurant, she discovers that "Thomas" is in fact Gretchen Thomas, a female, lesbian ex-coworker of Jack's.  Although the two women get along well, Gretchen tells Liz that "she's not interested in chasing a straight girl." The next day, though, as Liz cuts her food into almost-miniscule pieces for fear of choking alone in her apartment, Liz decides to start a friendship with Gretchen. Like Oprah and Gayle, right?

The conversations between Liz and Gretchen are riddled with awkward moments that stem from Liz's stereotypes about lesbian relationships. Liz wants to take cooking classes, buy furniture at IKEA, sign up as a team for the Amazing Race, and "make flower beds out of old rail road ties." The reaction from Gretchen is certainly effient in exposing how ridiculous some of these impressions are. 

There's also a running theme of men's stereotypes throughout the episode. When Liz asks writer Frank "what [men] like," his response is "porn." Then how should a woman act on a date? "Like she was in a porn." Later, Jack tells the writers as he ups the ante in their weekly poker game from quarters to $20s that "[they'd] better put on your daddy's shoes, because this s a man's game." Subsequently, producer Pete bets and loses his wedding ring. At the end of the episode, Gretchen tells Liz that they need to stop spending so much time together because their relationship is turning into her "chasing a straight girl." The two part ways on decent terms, even after a very awkward comment from Liz. This mature good-bye is directly followed by the middle-aged guy next to Liz responding to her "but who'll go with me to cooking class next week?" question with "if by next week you mean tonight and by cooking class you mean..." Liz cuts him off, but you can imagine where he was going with that. 

Liz's friend Pete asks her at one point if she's sure she's not gay, because Gretchen is much nicer and Liz is "more comfortable around Gretchen than she was around any of the men [she's] dated" since he'd known her. Liz assures him that she's "100% straight," but the question is still a good one. If men and women are so drastically different, why is it so shocking that two people of the same gender could be attracted to each other? The episode shows so many stereotypes-- of men, of women, of lesbian couples-- to be ridiculous, but actually addresses the idea that a homosexual relationship could be relatively natural.

The Girlie Show

Alright! I found a way to embed video clips from nbc.com! Unfortunately I posted the clip before the blog about it, so take a minute to scroll down and watch the clip I'll be referring to...

So this clip is from the second episode of the series, "The Aftermath." Tracy Jordan has officially joined the cast of The Girlie Show, and Jack has renamed the show "TGS With Tracy Jordan." Even before the name is changed, Jenna (Liz's friend and the star of the show) is in a panic about what her role in the show will be now that Tracy is hired. Liz consoles Jenna, telling her that she is looking out for Jenna's interests and reminds her that "This is 'The Girlie Show,' and [she is] the girl." Then they walk into the hallway where the show's signs are being replaced with new "TGS" ones featuring Tracy, and Jenna resumes her panic and Liz makes one of her characteristic "really?!" faces. 

The first few episodes of the series are, on a simplistic level, about the transition from "The Girlie Show," headed by Liz and starring Jenna, to "TGS," which is ultimately run by Jack and stars Tracy. This shift of power from women to men and the conflicts that arise from it expose a lot of the stereotypes about women in business.

When Jack explains to Liz that the cast and writers on the show "are not your friends, they're your employees," he adds that "oh, sure! then we can sit around braiding each other's hair until we get our periods at the same time." Ah, so THAT is how women exist in the workplace. The ways in which concepts are represented tell us a lot about our stereotypes. Toni Morrison argues in "Playing in the Dark" that blackness is used as an easy, go-to metaphor for darkness or otherness in literature. Naomi Seidman takes offense in "Burning the Book of Lamentations" at the Biblical book's use of the extended metaphor of a woman's body and its grotesqueness/ violation because it represents for her the objectification and marginalization of women in traditional Jewish culture. Jack's reference plays on the idea that women are incapable of managing in business because they want to "be friends" or have everyone like them.

In one episode of Bones, for example, a woman named Cam takes over the supervisor's position at the Jeffersonian, and is very hard for the team to get along with. She insists on being in charge (which, in fact, she is), and demands respect and cooperation from the team. If she were a man-- like, say, the previous supervisor-- she would have been considered tough, intimidating, and strong. Instead, she is considered a bitch. But don't worry-- she loosens up gets accepted in the end. The male FBI agent/ protagonist, Booth, even tells her not to "stop doing the intimidation thing," because "it's cute." Great. What was threatening and intimidating is only seen as cute and girly.

I'd just like to close with some insight from Tina Fey herself on Weekend Update: "I think what bothers me the most is that people say that Hillary [Clinton] is a bitch. Let me say something about that. Yah, she is. And so am I. And so is [Amy Poehler]. You know what? Bitches get stuff done. That's why Catholic schools use nuns as teachers instead of priests. Those nuns are mean old clams and they sleep on cots and they're allowed to hit you. And at the end of the school year you hated those bitches, but you knew the capitol of Vermont! So I'm saying it's not too late, Texas and Ohio. Get on board, because bitch is the new black!" 

The Aftermath

Video Recaps | Full Episodes | Webisodes