Note: This post contains spoilers for Seasons 4 and 5. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
If TV is fantasy, what if the vision offered weren’t one of escape, but self-destruction?
I love Weeds. A while back, I wrote on how I felt it was part of a trend on modern TV that has seen shows trade stock narratives and characters for much more ambiguous, unsettling ones (Sopranos, The Wire, Lost etc.) . I used my standard argument – that in the face of the postmodern collapse of fixed values, the only option left was to wallow in the non-judgemental ambiguity of it all and let the viewers pick their poison – an argument I’m now sick of, largely because I think it’s a simplistic cop-out response to, well, anything.
But having watched the first couple of shows from this season, I’ve been thinking about the Botwins again, specifically in how unlikeable Nancy has become (hello smoking, drinking, sushi-eating pregnant woman!) and also how she so soundly unsettles the relationship between the viewer and the subject on TV. To wit, how do you get behind someone who’s such an asshole and is so seemingly bent on self-destruction?
One might say that Nancy is an anti-hero/ine – but I think that misses what makes her so intriguing. A more interesting take is the idea that, after a spate of mainstream critiques of normalcy and suburbia, sympathising with the anti-hero/heroine doesn’t simply offer a fantasy of escape from the mundane and homogeneous maze we live in now. Instead, we get a fantasy of self-destruction and self-negation – the catharsis here is not temporarily letting your hair down; rather, it’s jumping off a cliff and throwing the whole pointless mess away.
Regular, flawed people (like Nancy) are just like us and lead boring unfulfilling lives until they/you shake them up, and when they/you do, they/you’ll be in drug deals (and get hurt), be in car chases and drive-bys (and get hurt), have romances (and get hurt) and, just before you die, you get to have sex with Mary-Louise Parker (and then get hurt). Woah. I have no idea how that last one got in there.
But my point is that instead of just focusing on a hero (whom we empathise with) or an anti-hero (through whom we live out the fantasies of things we can’t actually do), Weeds makes it impossible to separate the two sides, forcing us as viewers to empathise with someone we ultimately don’t like. And what’s more ‘postmodern’ or whatever than hating the things inside yourself that you have no control over? What could be more emblematic of contemporary North America than doing things you know are wrong (smoking, drinking heavily, buying sweathshop goods, driving ’cause it’s easier) but then doing them anyway because they’re easier and feel better? What does Zizek always say about late capitalism? It beckons us to enjoy, enjoy, enjoy.
Which is why, despite the cries of of “Weeds sucks now”, I still love the show.
I think the other fascinating thing about Weeds is what it does with American narratives of race. But I’m trying to keep the blog tight and easier to read, so I’ll put that in a separate post later.
#1 by Tim on June 17, 2009 - 11:08 pm
I think you circle around to a better (b/c more nuanced, more accurate, more interesting) claim at the end then the one you begin with. It’s not that we don’t judge. It’s that we judge constantly, but our judgments are conflicted. And those conflicts themselves act as a kind of indictment against the status quo, even if it’s an impossible indictment.
The key moment for this is probably the “Employee of the Month” episode of The Sopranos, where Dr Melfi is raped. Melfi’s always been a kind of voyeur touchstone for the Sopranos audience, awed and charmed by Tony but also deeply afraid of or even repulsed by him. She’s only able to feel safe after the rape (and subsequent release of the rapist on procedural grounds) because of her knowledge that if she wished to, she could have Tony wipe him off the face of the earth. When she’s faced with the prospect of losing Tony, she panics, but then composes herself, reasserts her professional mask, holds back.
There’s a fantasy of violence in The Sopranos, a compensatory violence that can mete out justice against injustice. I think the same principle guides a good chunk of The Wire, and (less artfully, more problematically) 24 and most of the police procedural shows. We recognize that the system is a failure, but we want to believe that someone (a strong man, outside the law – Tony, Omar, etc) can mete out paternal justice on our behalf.
The difference in the good shows is that they actually resist that easy satisfaction. There’s an episode in the first season of The Sopranos where Tony refuses to kill or hurt Meadow’s soccer coach, who’s molested one of her classmates. That what was the first time David Chase set out to screw the audience, by denying them narrative satisfaction. This is an old routine – Chase learned it from the master, Buñuel – but it works well in serial drama, where the routines and the morality always threaten to get easy.
It’s actually even older than surrealist cinema, of course — this is also the motif of a whole passel of Greek tragedy, especially conflicts between different modes of violence/justice, fantasies of ad hoc justification, and ultimately a kind of collapse into nihilism. the “gods’ indifference to heroism” that David Simon spends so much time talking about. (The Eumenides and Oedipus at Colonus offer a different, almost Shakespearean model of reconciliation, but so far, that’s not the route most dramatic series have taken. Maybe Rome. Maybe.)
My frame doesn’t work as well for shows like Mad Men or Weeds or In Treatment that don’t deal as readily in violence as Sopranos, Deadwood, The Wire, Rome, etc. Maybe there’s something less overtly tragic, more precisely surreal, about the conflicting judgments, the aversion to easy narrative satisfaction, and the ultimately reflexive move that forces us to turn the analytic back on ourselves. But there’s also something mannered and bourgeois about these series, too. Like yourself, I still haven’t figured it out.
#2 by Nav on June 18, 2009 - 12:30 am
Thanks Tim – that’s great. And I think that’s exactly part of the cathartic pleasure of the anti-hero – that when the system fails, the values that underpin it will still be maintained by the individual willing to ‘go that extra mile’. When The Sopranos or a show like it frustrate that easy narrative resolution, that lack of satisfaction certainly feels more interesting, particularly when one looks to art not as mimetic mirror but, as I so often say, a kind of ‘flight and return’ that refigures our relationship to the texts of our reality.
What also interests me is that the status quo in Weeds now seems to be something other than ‘suburban homogeneity’, but the entire discourse of health and self-preservation: what is happening when the protagonist of a show (who is also white, middle-class, traditionally attractive) discards all the markers of good suburban existence but then also exists in some liminal state where she has no corrective epiphany nor ultimate destruction (death is usually the narrative punishment for transgressing the rules, right?).
So it’s the specific relationship between viewer and object that I find weird and cool. It’s almost akin to Jameson’s reading of Hamlet – it couldn’t ‘finish right’ because it expressed a moment of historical transition during a moment when the thing over the horizon remained mysterious. I wonder if Weeds is oddly analogous, in that most critiques of suburbia express rebellion as the trope of individualist triumph. Weeds just slowly chips away at the main character until, at least in this last episode, is literally bent over a table and raped. It’s disturbing and hard to watch for more than just the violence and misogyny – it’s that ‘our protagonist’ is being destroyed.
Anyway, I’m rambling, but thanks for the engagement. I appreciate it.