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. 

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."