Hey, y’all. M.I.A.’s Madonna’s half-time show took some unpacking, didn’t it? You can read my take over at Antenna.
Archive for the 'Feminist Music Geeks Turn on Their TVs' Category
08
Jan
12
Shit Celebrity
During my brief trip to Texas, I went to the video premiere for Christeene’s ”African Mayonnaise” at Cheer Up Charlie’s. I was pretty excited to see the final product, as I knew it was a tense shoot. I also heard it was Christeene’s best video to date. I can vouch for it. Given Christeene’s impressive videography, that’s saying something. It is an exhilarating video. It has dense, beautiful imagery that requires multiple viewings to unpack all the stuff that’s going on. It demands you watch it more than once. It’s a statement video, one that I might place alongside Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”. But it’s a lot more fun to watch than most statement videos, particularly since they tend to be overlong yet short on ideas, Artistically Significant yet ultimately shallow, and include dialogue. Get to the hook already!
Still from "African Mayonnaise" video; image courtesy of tumblr.com
The song is about celebrity–the mutual dependence between star and fan, the malleability of image, the tricky business of turning a person into a constellation of symbols, the star’s contentious relationship with the camera, the acrid deliciousness of scandal. The video mirrors that concept in its attempts to create iconographic imagery and reveal that those images are made possible through surveillance. In addition to what PJ Raval and his crew shot and edited, the video also includes footage–mostly taken from smart phones–from fans and onlookers.
One of the major themes of the video–perhaps Christeene’s entire M.O.–is invasion. The video shows Christeene and her back-up dancers shimmying in front of the Austin Motel and sashaying through a food court, a supermarket, a barber shop, a hair salon, a gym, a patio bar, the UT South Mall, Starbucks, a Scientology center. Christeene also poses in front of the Eiffel Tower and Arc de Triomphe and is displayed on a television monitor placed in a chicken coop apparently belonging to the artist. I don’t see malevolence behind these moments of invasion, though some of the men do look uncomfortable about receiving dances from Christeene and her minions. I even think there’s potential moments for community formation. Certainly the dance party at the end of the video celebrates Austin’s queer scene. But I see such gestures of good will and inclusion in Christeene high-fiving a woman at the gym and waving to a young girl at the grocery store. I think the collaborative nature of the video’s shoot reflects this spirit as well. In taking a piece of Christeene, many people are part of the process of constructing her.
But the charged moments–what made the film infamous in friend circles before its premiere–were the scuffles with authority. Police officers escorted Christeene and the crew off the premises during the shoot at various locations. In particular, staff members at the Church of Scientology of Texas locked their doors and confiscated equipment. Folks also harassed the star and crew with hate speech. At least one person cried godless and I like that this moment is reframed as a joke about the stupidity and destructiveness of queerphobia. I think such moments of brutality and intolerance, and the willingness to share them and package them as part of a music video, are what’s so powerful about this clip. Celebrity may have power over us, but it’s useless without people using that platform to challenge larger social and institutional problems. It’s thrilling to watch a queer artist, dressed in unconvincing drag, confront such phobia in public. Christeene does it through humor and an invitation of inclusion, but the stakes are fucking high in the war against individual freedom. Cops might rough you up. People might yell at you because you tucked in your dick and flaunted your ass in public. Cult practitioners may take your stuff and make threats. It happens off-camera.
Christeene also reclaims space as a star. Stars often accommodate the context they’re in, particularly at red carpet events and photo shoots. Teams of people make them into whatever they need to be for a film premiere, magazine interview, or concert. Even stars photographed without makeup is a construction no different from a band breaking out an acoustic guitar to do an “unplugged” performance. Stripping down is as much an act as wearing a safe Armani gown. I don’t know if many would label Christeene a star. She’s not starring in an action movie based on a board game, though I’d love her to play Queen Frosteene in Candyland: The Reckoning. She’s not performing for a televised award show, though she’d show up in an outfit at least as eye-catching as Björk’s swan dress. She doesn’t have a hit album, though I think that might come. Have you heard her music? The production’s really good and the singles are ready for the clubs.
But Christeene is a star to me, perhaps in the way that Courtney Love and Sinéad O’Connor insisted upon their own fame and found an audience with their outsize talent and personality. Christeene wasn’t groomed for celebrity. Quite frankly, I don’t think she has interest in grooming of any kind. Yet she has become a star for some on the basis of her formidable imagination and her total ownership of this invented persona. It continues to blow my mind that Christeene and Rebecca Havemeyer share Paul Soileau’s body. Frankly, I’m intimidated by the kind of creative person who can breathe these beings into existence even if I’m thrilled that such a person can take pop iconography and make something truly punk out of it. That’s probably why I write about it instead.
But actually, the challenge to write about Christeene is also exciting for me. Lokeilani Kaimana might attest that it’s hard to do. A friend of mine at school recently did a job talk about sketch comedy and used Funny or Die as a case study. I wondered how a figure like Christeene, who used the site as a distribution platform, might disrupt how we conceptualize FoD’s viewership and comedy more broadly. I attempted to explain Christeene to the speaker and the audience, grasping at words like “bad drag,” “gold tooth,” and “rectum.”
She’s especially difficult to talk about in terms of race. I believe this is deliberate on the part of the artist, but no less dicey in execution. “African Mayonnaise” refers to the mixture of cum and fecal matter on a spent penis after anal sex. The use of the term “African” to connote darkness and shit is … yikes. Many might say it’s outright racist, and I’m not sure I have an argument against such an appraisal. In a lot of ways, Christeene’s dangerous play with race as a white drag performer reminds me of Nitsuh Abebe’s excellent piece on CocoRosie and artistic risk. There are certainly perils and limits to playing with race, not the least of which is alienating an audience.
I don’t want to applaud these artists and call them brave or misunderstood simply for making people angry or uncomfortable. I know their work might play into rather than challenge other people’s racist assumptions. But I think there’s something valuable to not only acknowledging that such assumptions exist in the culture, but that they must be confronted, mutated, and roughed up in the process (working with a gay filmmaker of color who was a cinematographer on Trouble the Water doesn’t hurt either). Anyone can make millions from an anthem about individuality and perseverance that makes vague claims toward and cynically leaches off of a queer audience. But it takes something more to position yourself as a star and base such fame on the abjection of stardom.
Some may make comparisons between Lady Gaga’s crutches and Christeene becoming someone else’s (or her own) santorum. For one, what an uninspired comparison. For another, celebrating one’s own abjection, framing it as explicitly queer, and making angry, giddy, political, participatory art out it feels a lot more transgressive to me than some of the music passing as such these days. She may never win a Grammy, but I’m no less challenged, outraged, and awestruck. Sounds like pop to me.
Happy new year, y’all! I trust you all have woken up by now and had pancakes to soak up the hangover. Or maybe you just quietly sipped some tea, played with a noisemaker, and went to bed at 12:01. Either way, let’s make 2012 our year. And since a number of us found out that we lost a good friend today and are reeling from the horror and tragedy of such a deep loss, let’s make this Esme’s year too.
Earlier this fall, I expressed interest in contributing a piece on America’s Next Top Model for In Media Res. The forum is running a series on the show later this month that will be worth checking out when it goes live. But as sometimes happens, I bit off more than I could chew. Long story short, I missed the deadline by about a month due to end-of-the-semester scrambling. So I thought I’d offer up what I planned to pitch to IMR in order to circulate my ideas and help publicize the site. Also, next time I’ll write the deadline into my calendar.
I stopped appointment viewing ANTM about a year (roughly two cycles) after I earned my master’s degree. But the show was very much a part of my schedule during graduate school, particularly my second year when I was working on my thesis. My deadlines always seemed to fall on Thursdays, so an episode of ANTM, cycle 8 and Chinese takeout helped prepare me for a long Wednesday night. And I will drop everything if a cable network is airing a marathon. I’ve lost weekends over reruns of the show on VH1 and Lifetime.
What do I find compelling about the show? Tyra’s certainly a fascinating character, but it’s not just her. Some time ago, a BUST contributor argued that the show had radical potential by depicting the modeling industry as a strange, discursive sites for experimentation and play with feminine beauty. This may be an overly generous interpretation, but it’s part of my interest. But to borrow an observation made by a colleague at a conference a few years back, I’m troubled by how Tyra and the ANTM staff enforce their supremacy over black contestants by messing with their hair, a major and highly contested site of identity for many black women.
Yet I do think the show offers a number of teaching moments regarding the intersections between race and gender throughout the show’s run. In cycle 8, Jaslene and the crew did a photo shoot in male drag. The results, particularly Natasha Galinka’s hip-hop-inspired shoot, reaffirmed many of Judith Halberstam’s assertions about the ambiguous nature of play and racial performance in drag king shows. Thea Lim called out the show’s use of colorface in a controversial cycle 14 episode that featured a photo shoot where the models had to pass as women of mixed ethnic heritage. I imagine there’s some kind of postracial rhetoric operating here–if models are supposed to transcend any identity in order to be commodifiable in an international industry fixated on edge and nowness, why not have them transcend racial difference?
Natasha Galkina used a gum wrapper to make her grill; image courtesy of examiner.com
Erin Wagner is neither Egyptian nor Tibetan; image courtesy of wiznation.com
Yet as any casual ANTM viewer knows, the show often has trouble transcending race (fact: it’s something none of can do). One common trope in the show’s 17-season run (one swiped from The Real World, masterfully satirized on Chappelle’s Show, and recirculated in basically any show where people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds share a house) is the simmering feud between white contestants and black contestants. Often, the white contestants with beef on ANTM come with a coalition of passive-aggressive housemates from the ‘burbs in desperate need of enrollment in a critical race theory course. They tend to target, or be targeted by, one to at most three contestants of color. The feud is usually shaped by regional difference between suburban white girls uncomfortable sharing space with ’round-the-way black girls.
But I think the show also reinforces racial difference in a variety of ways. As mentioned earlier, the makeover episode is a site of articulating difference in a way that asserts cultural supremacy against black women. But sometimes a shoot’s creative direction affirms such difference. Witness cycle 10′s music photo shoot. Many of the models who excel at this shoot are white girls working within rock and pop contexts. The contestants who do poorly or cause concern at panel are those whose assignments worked against the raced implications of musical genres–an African model posing as heavy metal, two women from multicultural backgrounds representing white-dominated genres like country and folk, and a lily-white contestant whose “tone-deaf” interpretation of R&B costs her the competition.
What I find especially interesting here is how race informs generic affiliation. Notice Paulina Porizkova having to explain “emo” to Miss Jay, which she dismisses as white people music. Note too that Tyra admonishes Aimee for failing to embody a genre as popular as R&B. The subtext here is that R&B is Tyra’s music but not Aimee’s, and thus racial difference is once again reinforced. Granted, Stacy-Ann and Anya are called out for playing it safe or relying on costuming and lighting for shoots that respectively represented house and punk. But Whitney is given disproportionate praise for representing a musical genre that fetishized white-trash and thrift-store aesthetics, which no doubt made the contestant–who was repeatedly compared to Anna-Nicole Smith–bristle. Finally, Fatima’s repeated use of the term “metal rock” seems to demonstrate that the model has literally no connection to the genre beyond sticking her tongue out.
Interestingly, hip-hop is not represented in this shoot. That’s a missed opportunity, as the genre simultaneously reifies stereotypical notions of black American masculinity and is global in scope both in terms of production and reception. While hip-hop seems to have a racial affiliation, it doesn’t always have the same affiliation depending on what national borders are crossed. While racial and class privilege bolster eclecticism, this shoot confirms the still widely-held belief that when you announce your affinity for a particular musical genre, you reaffirm cultural assumptions of racial categories in need of troubling.
03
Nov
11
Kelsi Nielsen, composer
I recently watched the first installment of High School Musical for my media franchising class. I was somewhat familiar with the series. I evaluated a colleague’s term paper on it for a class I took on dance and film. I figured South Park nailed their musical parody, which I now believe they did. I also watched two supremely awesome little girls grow up next door to me for three years. A friend once used Ashley Tisdale’s name as her blogger handle. And I have some chores for a shirtless Zac “Lt. Dangle” Efron to do around my house.
Despite compelling arguments in favor of HSM‘s merits as a franchise or media text, as well as a firm belief that Daft Punk could do a sweet remix of “Bet On It“, I wouldn’t consider myself a fan. Overall, the cloying wholesomeness gets on my nerves. For me, the stakes are so low. Will Gabriella (Vanessa Hudgens, who I recently saw in the so-problematic-it-must-be-blogged-about Sucker Punch) end up with Troy (Efron)? Of course they will–at least on screen. I think I would be a fan of a variety show hosted by Evans and his sister Sharpay (Tisdale). Glee very much tries to provide the archetypes it mines from High School Musical with depth and grit (Kurt Hummel is basically an out Ryan Evans).
I also don’t know what to do with colorblindness, conflict-free inclusivity, and the politics of positive representation, particularly with the girls of color on the show. On the one hand, I think it’s cool that Gabriella is a smart girl who excels in math and science and attends Stanford after graduation. On the other hand, I’m very troubled by how little the series seems invested in her academic pursuits or her ethnic identity. She and her friend Taylor (Monique Coleman) are both beautiful, brainy girls of color, but their presence often veers toward tokenism to me. I don’t want them to be defined by their racial or ethnic identity any more than they’d want to be thought of as nerds. But such attention toward respectability doesn’t give their characters much conflict. However, the white characters are also less-than-compelling for these reasons as well. Although I wish Glee wouldn’t relegate Mercedes to the role of the sassy black girl, at least there are instances within the show where she resists or defies such categorization.
Kelsi Nielsen (Oleysa Rulin)
Taylor is joined by another female character I wish was better incorporated into HSM‘s story world. Kelsi Nielsen (Olesya Rulin) is the shy, nerdy white girl at East High who provides piano accompaniment for the school’s musical productions. She also serves as the productions’ chief composer. Something tells me that if Nielsen wrote a musical that centralized Gabriella and Sharpay and brought in Taylor, it would be far more compelling. Maybe she could get all Max Fischer with it and cast them in a musical remake of Robert Altman’s 3 Women. She could follow it up with Věra Chytilová’s Daisies starring Demi Lovato and Selena Gomez. Or she could come up with something original. I’m sure if she were really given the spotlight, she could share it with the other girls and create something better than a rehash of Romeo and Juliet without any actual romantic conflict.
22
Sep
11
Check out my two Antenna posts
This week, I have two posts up on Antenna, a media and cultural studies blog run through my graduate program. One is on hipster celebrity drag and the other is a review of Zooey Deschanel’s sitcom The New Girl. Check it out.
CSC's Sports Night team (Natalie Hurley in back row on the left, Dana Whitaker third from the left on the second row); image courtesy of nytimes.com
I’ve been thinking about Dana Whitaker and Natalie Hurley for a while now. Since high school really, because I shared my love for Sports Night with high school bestie Jamie. But especially since I watched the show again this summer. It didn’t exactly fit this blog’s content (I deleted the graf where I talked about Snuffy Walden’s bar band score), and I’ve been a Persephone Magazine fan since a couple of girlfriends forwarded Filmschooled‘s post on the Bridesmaids trailer, so I was really stoked that they agreed to publish it. Check it out. Then follow Ailanthus-Altissima’s “Women in Academia” series. After that point, you probably already added Persephone to your Twitter feed, Reader, or wherever you aggregate good Web writing.
As summer winds down, I thought I’d throw up a few videos by artists I can always rely on. Two of them–Björk and St. Vincent–have albums coming out next month. Jill Scott is the third artist featured here, and The Light of the Sun has been in personal rotation this summer. I’d include Rihanna’s Avril-sampling “Cheers (Drink to That),” but Rihanna slants her eyes at the 3:11 mark, bringing to mind Miley’s racial insensitivity incident, so I can’t endorse it without a lot more context.
St. Vincent
“Cruel”
Mercy Me
Directed by Terri Timely
Jill Scott
“Hear My Call”
The Light of the Sun
Co-directed by Jill Scott
Björk
“Crystalline”
Biophilia
Directed by Michel Gondry
19
Jul
11
Julee Cruise, Miss Twin Peaks
Last night, I finished Twin Peaks, a show that is the textbook definition of a cult classic. The Sopranos shouldn’t get sole credit for its challenge toward TV audience expectations and use of talismans as a storytelling device or shorthand for character development, nor should Lost get singled out for its complex narratives, limitless paratexts (open Laura Palmer’s diary to page 3), spirited online discourse, and fervent aca-fandom. It’s clear that televisual generic experimentation the and conceptualization of creator/showrunner as auteur gained ground with this show. Twin Peaks sharply divided audiences while also providing intrigue for late adopters–something I’ll keep in mind when I get around to watching The Killing (I’ll also reread Kristen Warner and Lisa Schmidt’s great rebuttal toward the backlash against the season finale and Veena Sud). I’m not a TV historian, so I hope I’m not overlooking other shows that accomplished what Twin Peaks did. But it seems obvious that Twin Peaks changed what could air on American television and how audiences related to it.
Julee Cruise, conjuring
But how do I feel about Twin Peaks as two seasons of television? To borrow from the schlemiels on Stella, Twin Peaks ”is, like, whatever dude.” There are indelible moments that I can’t and wouldn’t want to unsee–a surprising amount of them from the lesser-regarded second season, even if James Hurley is given entirely too much screen time. I certainly understand why it’s become such a cultural touchstone. Yet I was often bored and unmoved, though never when Frank Silva was on screen. YIKES.
I should admit that I’m not a big David Lynch fan. Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, and Mulholland Drive all have great, unsettling moments. I may take for granted the sociohistorical context in which his best-regarded work was originally received, but Lynch’s curdled nostalgia and deliberate weirdness seem too obvious to me. Lynch is a deft surrealist. He certainly can set and shoot a scene, and is smart enough to get Angelo Badalamenti to score it. But his gender politics undercut his work’s transgressive potential. I don’t want to dismiss the predominantly white women of Twin Peaks as sweetie pie damsels and she-devils. Actually, my favorite characters on the show are women: Audrey Horne, the Log Lady, Super-Nadine, Donna Hayward when she isn’t written and played as a sultry bad girl.
I might include Lucy Moran, if only because I’m surprised that future Fox News enthusiast Victoria Jackson didn’t play her in an inevitable SNL parody because Kimmy Robertson could be her sister. I’d include Catherine Martell because who doesn’t love Piper Laurie, but any business with the mill bored me. Also she hoodwinks Ben Horne by posing as a Japanese businessman, so ugh. I can’t include Shelly Johnson because, while at first her abusive marriage to Leo elicits terror and sympathy, she and her lover Bobby Briggs made so many stupid decisions that I stopped caring about their arc. Then there are plenty of women I don’t have a read on–Josie Packard, Norma Jennings, Annie Blackburn, sudden junkie Blackie O’Reilly . . . Laura Palmer isn’t Twin Peaks‘ only mirror onto which men reflect themselves.
But there’s one lady I wish I saw and heard more: Julee Cruise. I wish the theme song wasn’t the instrumental version of “Falling” because I treasure what Cruise brings to it. Actually, I pretend all of the show’s musical flourishes include Cruise breathily cooing about love’s rainbow or something. All of the opaque, murky, strange humanity I’m supposed to get from the show I hear in Cruise’s voice. I’m sure plenty of people want to cast Cruise as Lynch and Badalamenti’s ingenue, the M.I.A. to their Tarantino. They’d probably point to their songwriter and producer credits as evidence. They might also dismiss Cruise as a cheaper substitute for Elizabeth Fraser, since they worked with Cruise on Blue Velvet after they couldn’t get This Mortal Coil’s cover of “Song to the Siren.”
But Lynch and Badalamenti clearly needed Cruise’s voice to guarantee the emotional responses they sought to engender in their audience, and they weave magic together. We never actually meet Laura Palmer, the show’s dead catalyst. She’s intercepted and interpreted by friends, townsfolk, law enforcement, and her damaged parents. Thus I think Cruise comes the closest to embodying Palmer as a fragile dreamer wrecked by evil circumstances who willed herself to survive for as long as she could.
Cruise performs in my favorite episode, the Lynch-directed “Lonely Souls.” She demonstrates Palmer’s charm in “Rocking Back Inside My Heart” and stops time with “The World Spins.” Paired with the horrifying scene that reveals Palmer’s murderer, Cruise’s performance of “The World Spins” is part of the best sequence in the series’ run. I cry right along with Donna, both for who was lost and what could have been.
Let her have the damn chair; image courtesy of hitfix.com
I’ll always feel for Britney Spears. I am thrilled that Beyoncé raced past the quartet of blonde girls to be the enduring pop star of her generation–outsinging Christina Aguilera even at triple pianissimo, channelling Tina Turner’s stage presence, putting forth something of a (racially problematic, materialistic) feminist rhetoric, and, taking a cue from Janet Jackson, insisting on having a personal life. Beyoncé clearly has a support system who quake when a shy Houston girl transforms into a diva while rehearsing backstage. Does Britney? At least she had her assistant Felicia.
Remember 2007, aka Britneywatch, no doubt the worst year of her life? She was soon to turn 27. I’m not a superstitious person, but I knew many past pop icons bit the big one at that age. I worried we’d lose her, either to an overdose or a car accident or by her own hand. I was hardly alone. South Park 86ed the laffs in “Britney’s New Look” to comment on the horror show her life had become and our collective involvement in its creation (one of my contributions: I felt really good about myself when she admitted to not ”getting” Sundance selections because, you see, I watched Spirited Away). David Samuels wrote on Spears and tabloid journalism for The Atlantic. Tom Ewing compared her to Laura Palmer. Tobi Vail wanted to send her some Bikini Kill records after she shaved her head, a moment Beth Ditto noted as a potentially radical stance against a public she didn’t want touching her anymore.
I don’t know the exact nature of her mental anguish. Maybe it was being raised to be a pop star and treated like a commodity for so long without developing a better sense of self. Diet pills and an intense gym regimen certainly didn’t help. I don’t believe Courtney Love’s accusation that Spears was sexually abused by her father, but I would believe Spears if she made that charge, for the same reason I’d believe you or Mackenzie Phillips. But I’m glad she’s still with us. Like Jody Rosen, I enjoyed Femme Fatale. And I hope Britney is happy and has people looking out for her. I don’t know what Britney Spears did to “get better.” Frankly, I’m not convinced she did. Her comeback registered as hasty defense to me, but I’m willing to assume the best. So it makes me sad when I see comparisons between her early and current concert performances. A friend directed me to a clip and noted that the light from her eyes was gone. My concern is the restricted movement. One thing that gets overlooked in the outlining of Britney’s downward spiral is the knee injury she sustained from the video shoot to “Outrageous.” As a dancer and maybe as a person, she never recovered.
Blowing out her knee may have been even more depressing than the swarms of paparazzi she fought off or her marriage to Kevin Federline. Like Jackson, people dismissed Spears as “just” a dancer. These folks tend to overlook that while both artists have limited vocal ranges, they brought personality to their voices (see also: Rihanna, Madonna, Diana Ross). Jackson beguiled audiences as much with her whispered soprano as with her authority over any complicated dance routine. Likewise, Spears “sang” like a southern robot working through a head cold. It worked with her frayed-wire cyborg stage persona and anticipated that she’d be cast as a femmebot. Also, have you tried to do either of these women’s dance routines? One of my favorite high school moments was watching two cheerleaders in the middle of a Britney-off at a Sadie Hawkins dance. For one, it was hilarious because those girls were so serious about it. For another, it was impressive. High kicks, shimmies, lunges, punches, intricate foot work. Doing the routine to “Oops! . . . I Did It Again” is work. I don’t remember which girl won the battle, but both were probably sore in the morning.
The considerable amount of technological intervention that goes into pop vocals may isolate the star from the voice and the voice from the listener, which may explain why many producers seem to be channeling video game music these days. The chorus to the Dr. Luke/Max Martin/Billboard-produced ”Till the World Ends” charges like DDR set on expert. This is no doubt why producers Stargate and Sandy Vee made the verses to “Only Girl (In the World)” sound like the music to Mortal Combat. Instant embodiment. Power up!
But to understand Spears is to engage with her changing body and how it can and cannot execute certain activities anymore. Thus it’s weird that there’s relatively little discussion about athleticism and issues around ability when talking about Spears, as these are essential components to understanding her as a performer. Then again, female dancers’ athleticism is often minimized, if not outright ignored, especially when they’re playing hurt or risking a sustained injury. Spears always lip synced, so her understanding of a song may have resided in using her body to act out its emotional register. I hope she’s not just going through the motions now. She’s not just an avatar. She’s Britney.
I fell in love with a girl for the first time in the sixth grade. I didn’t conceptualize it as a crush at the time, because I was supposed to be having those on some white boy in Tiger Beat. My taste in men was influenced by Spin and Rolling Stone—Dave Gahan, Jeff Buckley, Damon Albarn, Beck. I got it up for Christian Slater and an androgynous Leonardo DiCaprio, couldn’t get it up for Tom Cruise, and had an alarming (and mercifully brief) infatuation with Robin Williams.
The feminine masquerade that comes naturally to Becky confuses and annoys Darlene; image courtesy of taylorcolemiller.com (click on image to read Miller's piece on reading Darlene as a rebuttal to postfeminism)
My affections turned toward Darlene Conner, Roseanne‘s jaded middle child. In high school, I would more likely have palled around with her honor student older sister Becky (or at least until she started dating Mark, because Becky’s totally the kind of girl who has girlfriends when she’s single and his friends when she’s in a relationship). But through junior high, I was enamored. She was unimpressed and angry and also had a mischievous smile and killer delivery. I didn’t know Bikini Kill existed until Roseanne and Jackie picked up Jenna Elfman’s riot grrrl hitch-hiker in season seven. But I wanted to take Darlene home, try on her clothes, dye her hair black, and play her Daisy Chainsaw tapes. Ughn!
Darlene and I met some time in Roseanne‘s second season when my parents started watching it. No doubt the Conners’ doomed entrepreneurial spirit spoke to my parents, who ran a fledgling print shop. Roseanne became a site of multi-generational female bonding, as did many feminists and like-minded women on prime-time network television at the time, including Dorothy Zbornak, Khadijah James, Murphy Brown, Clair Huxtable, and life partners Mary Jo Shively and Julia Sugarbaker. All these women, including my mother, contributed to my insistence that I bellow the 19th Amendment at my fifth grade open house. But Darlene was the first girl character on television who really resonated with me. I had intermittent cable access, so Clarissa Darling and Alex Mac weren’t always around. Plus they were plucky and blonde. I was not, and neither was Darlene.
Apparently a friend of a friend wrote "Sara Gilbert forever" in her copy of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse--I concur; image courtesy of tumblr.com
I began to relate to Darlene when I caught season two’s “Brain-Dead Poet’s Society” in syndication. This is the episode where she begrudgingly read “To Whom It May Concern” at her school’s culture night. It’s a major turning point. Prior to that, Darlene was a gifted athlete who was quick to defend herself against the world with a joke, usually at Becky’s expense. Season one hints at Darlene’s interiority when she gets her period and has her appendix removed. It was clear that Darlene was far brighter than her below-average grades indicated, much to the bemusement of her parents and sister. I was famously useless in athletics, so we couldn’t play horse together. Instead, I was my room drawing or writing something for myself. So I felt this moment in my bones. I wanted to give her a hug and my diary.
Once Darlene started high school, she stopped playing sports and returning her friends’ calls. She started wearing black, writing comics, and refusing meat. Luckily she found someone who pulls her out of her existential crisis. No, it wasn’t David Healy. It was Karen, a local bookstore owner, with whom the Conners have misgivings.
I forgot that Karen isn’t a lesbian. I sublimated that Darlene’s parents don’t like their daughter hanging out with her because of what it might suggest about their daughter’s sexuality. They just think it’s weird that their daughter would spend so much time with an adult. Still, I think there’s queer anxiety embedded into Roseanne and Karen’s meeting in season four’s “Santa Claus.” Roseanne is hurt that Darlene found another mother figure in whom to confide. But she’s also uncertain about who her daughter is. So Karen and Darlene could still scan as mentor and baby dyke to me.
I might be assuming network imperative here. It’s been reported that actress Sara Gilbert, who came out privately during the show’s run, wanted Darlene to be a lesbian. ABC was reticent. To Roseanne‘s credit, alongside its consideration of working-class angst, the show forged a space for queer visibility before Ellen DeGeneres came out on the network and Will and Grace skyrocketed on NBC. It could have done a lot more for people of color, though I’d attribute the success of Friends and Seinfeld on NBC’s Must See Thursday line-up, a marketing construct that rose to popularity with The Cosby Show, to the whitewashing of the sitcom in the second half of the 90s rather than blame Roseanne exclusively. But for a show that featured a bisexual female character, a lesbian character, and a gay male character in the supporting cast (along with the reveal of a gay principal character in the series’ finale), it’s vexing that the one queer person in the main cast played straight. At least we had Sandra Bernhard.
Nancy (Sandra Bernhard), with Anne-Marie (Adilah Barnes); image courtesy of ilovecatparty.com
A friend made a convincing argument for why it’s okay that Darlene was straight. She pointed out that there aren’t many heterosexual masculine women on television. Fair point. She may have pointed out that queer actors shouldn’t be relegated to playing queer characters, which is also true. But if Darlene had to be straight, couldn’t she have had some female bonding? Her mom and aunt were tight and had several lady friends. They started a restaurant with Nancy. They hung out with childhood pal Crystal. They reconnected with high school friend Anne-Marie (one of the few women of color on the show). When Roseanne waited tables at a diner, she brought coworker Bonnie over for girls’ nights. And in a regrettably truncated season two narrative arc, Roseanne befriended young newlywed Debbie, refugee Iris, and haunted widow Marsha when she briefly works at a hair salon. Seriously, Pedro Almodóvar could have turned those few episodes into a feature.
I knew I loved Darlene when she started dating David in season four. Yes, I was jealous. No, this isn’t why I haven’t watched Gilbert reunite with Johnny Galecki on The Big Bang Theory (credit creator Chuck Lorre, who was on Roseanne’s writing staff for a few seasons). At first, I thought it was cool that they made comics. But as their relationship developed, it was apparent that he was manipulative and insecure over Darlene’s talent. David was a textbook emosogynist. As the series focused on Darlene and Becky’s relationships and growing resentment, it never recovered.
Season five is when the show falters. After Becky elopes with Mark (an Amy Sherman-Palladino masterstroke that so totally informs Rory’s romantic trajectory on Gilmore Girls that it’s pretty surprising Roseanne didn’t hail her in her New York Magazine essay), sexpot neighbor Molly Tilden (Danielle Harris) is the token good girl gone bad. Darlene is threatened by her boyfriend’s attraction to her. When Molly strands her at the Daisy Chainsaw concert, any possible good will between the two is gone. Then Darlene goes to art school in Chicago. We hear some talk of friends, but never see them. Ultimately, she marries David and has a daughter. I watched all of this, and rooted for Darlene to complete school and help her mother live through her dad’s heart attack. It’s revealed in the finale that Darlene paired up with Mark, but this seemed incongruous with Roseanne’s vision for her daughter, so she fictionalized a romance between her and David. Sadly, this felt disingenuous to me too. I hoped she kept in touch with Karen.
