What was I doing in either 2003 or 2004 you wonder? Watching TV apparently:
On Sunday night on PBS there was a documentary on the Miss America pageant that was surprisingly interesting considering it was mostly in black and white. It was chock full of feminist historians with glasses, untamed hair, and little-known facts, popping in at intervals to provide commentary on the unholy tale of the little Southern Baptist lady who made the whole event real high-toned by adding the talent component. That was the point at which the girls began to represent scholarship, as they do today.
About an hour into the thing, right as they were getting to the dirt on the swimsuit competition, they cut from Gloria Steinem’s sage mien to Isaac Mizrahi. He’s burbling cheerfully on about how this is by far the most degrading part of the process. How his heart bleeds for those poor young girls teetering along nearly naked in those ridiculous heels…. Long pause… “Although if they have to walk around in bathing suits, it’s for the best that they have to wear heels. Heels make anyone’s legs look so much better.”
Next, the first night and the hind end of Steven King’s Rose Red, a miniseries about a flesh-eating house. “Sixteen bathrooms– and growing!” the commercials intone ominously. There are hours of dialogue in which the protagonist, a sexy young tenured professor of paranormal psychology also with unruly locks (so much frizzy hair on TV!) and her bumbling nemesis, the British head of the psychology department who wants to get her fired and occasionally slips into a Mid-western twang whilst bringing out nuggets like “old boy” or “I say there,” sneer at each other for twenty-minute stretches. Just when you think it’s over, you get some more close-ups of acting. The scene in front of the house where they say “God help us, it knows we’re here” lasts for like twelve minutes. They show each person close-up, then far away, then everyone from the front, then everyone from the back, then they sort of spin around everybody and do a few more close-ups and a flash-back. You should watch it. It’s amazing. But if you didn’t, you can still bid on the props and set on Ebay.
Rose Red herself appears to be constructed completely from Home Depot parts. Not only do the hollow core aluminum doors bang open with suspiciously empty thwumps, but the 200 year old fake-trad “wrought-iron” ivy-covered front gate is operated by a remote control that the beautiful young professor has stuck over the front visor of her SUV. Then I fell asleep. So much for Sunday.
But I tuned in again for the final episode on Thursday. To the untrained eye it appears that nothing much happened in the intervening three days. Actually some stuff happened. We’ve become aware of a flinty streak of academic avarice in the character of the BYP. She cares more about validating her own theories than she does for the unfortunate souls around her. Eventually she gets it in the neck, but not before telling us in a lugubrious voiceover, “We say haunted, but we mean the house has gone insane.” Meanwhile the other characters get killed off, play pool, lose their fingers in supernaturally slamming doors, and drink iced tea from a cobweb-festooned Maytag refrigerator (circa 2001). A pasty-faced young girl with psychic powers is holding the doors closed. She is wrestling with inner demons and stuff as evidenced by her etiolated features and rolled back eyes. Eventually the alive characters go home and come back Six Months Later and it’s pretty much over.
The same Thursday night, sex sold: chicken, Rogaine (Will she feel the same if I’m bald?), Vaseline, and a cruise, but not Polygrip. At intervals the local news previews enticed us to tune in later to find out: what airline may be grounding flights, what the weather will do to your morning commute, and who is returning to pro wresting. I recognized the photo of Hulk Hogan they dug out of the morgue.
The moral of this story is that TV is more interesting than you think it is. Don’t be a snob. Also, don’t try to understand it. With the sound off American TV is a lot like those cryptic Japanese game shows with a lot of inexplicable laughter, pointing, and people falling in holes.
