I’m beginning to think that I might be the only person dreading the return of one of this season’s most talked about and critically well-received television shows, and it’s beginning to make me feel like an angry, self-loathing troll. Fox’s Glee has garnered mostly rave reviews from the press, of whom most would agree with Troy Patterson of Slate, who writes that “(a)t its best, Glee is not just entertaining but elating, dramatizing Breakfast Club-quality teen angst with the aid of tight production numbers covering new and classic popular songs.” While this may be true, it misses what I consider to be a much larger and more culturally salient point, which is that the show is a mess of misogyny and concealed homophobia that makes use of cheap racial and ethnic stereotypes for laughs. It’s an exemplar of the bait-and-switch nature of commercial television programming: the premise that makes news is that show tracks the trials and triumphs of a large multi-culti, multi-sexual orientation-y parade of misfits merrily navigating the rough waters of a small-town Ohio high school who, comprising as they do the school’s glee club, regularly break into song and dance. After watching the show for most of last season however, it has become painfully clear that the surface layer of the show provides the viewer with a weekly meet-cute experience that masks a much seamier side. Specifically, the women of the show, to a person, are shrewish, mean, unintelligent and/or needlessly cruel, and the other characters who lend the show its supposedly “liberal” street cred are boxed into tiny, safe zones of influence where they can do no harm to the overarching white, male power players who move the show along and are the protagonists. Allow me to walk through some of the plotlines to illustrate what, exactly, it is that everyone is so excited about every week at my workplace water cooler.
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All posts tagged criticism
The Deceptive Inclusivity of Glee
Luna Remembers by Paul Chaat Smith
Luna in the San Diego Museum of Man, circa late 80s
James Luna is a visionary, a truth teller, a romantic, and a hanging judge. For these reasons, I wish he lived someplace other than up in the clouds on a mountain located on the extreme western edge of North America. Or at least that his mountain looked over a nondescript valley of crows and cows instead of the Pacific Ocean. And I really wish his mountain wasn’t next to the one named Palomar, in the state called California.
The truth is he does live up there in the clouds, on Indian land, sharing the sky with the Palomar Observatory, for much of the last century home to the most powerful telescope in the world. He lives in the richest state in the richest country in the history of the world, ten miles from the horizon where the continent meets the sea, where destiny became manifest. California: the end of the line, the final stop on the trail. It is the last destination and therefore the newest place, where everything could be remade and forgotten. Media critic John Leonard must have been in Los Angeles when he spoke about “the unbearable lightness of being American.”
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