Red State Melodrama

The Melodramatic Paradigm

The other day I mentioned the Melodramatic Paradigm, the idea that there are good guys and bad guys and the lines are clear cut. This is how most people view the world since the age of enlightenment. Up until the nineteenth century the Comedy/Tragedy paradigm dominated philosophy and literature. The universe was rigidly well ordered. Only great people could be the subject of serious ideas, of serious drama. Fate determined action. In tragedy a good people fall from great heights due to some flaw in their characters, usually pride, but the common people are only the subject of comedy. They are to be made fun of, their warts exposed and their foibles laughed at. They are incapable of being serious. The most noble thing they were capable of was young love which, in the comic paradigm, is tied to sex and will dissolve eventually into bitterness in the form of philandering husbands and shrewish wives. Only the nobility are capable of noble actions, and only their falls—their tragedies—matter. Eventually Arthur Miller showed us that the common man can indeed be the subject of tragedy, but long before that the common man had his own type of drama—the Melodrama, the drama of the French Revolution, where bad guys, often the aristocrats themselves, persecuted the virtuous, and only a strong hero could save them. Psychologists point out that this dramatic idea has become an important part of interpersonal communications: most people view conflict in terms of the “drama triangle,” the idea that all conflicts involve a persecutor, a victim and a rescuer. Melodrama became the dominate form of drama in the nineteenth century, and in the twentieth it became the basis for nearly all dramatic film and television. Every cop show, lawyer show, western, mystery, hospital drama and soap opera is, at its core, a melodrama. There are other genres too: farce, satire, tragicomedy, true comedy, even now and then a real tragedy, but those are the subjects of later posts.

Right now I’m dealing with melodrama and with one in particular. Recently I wrote that, like a lot of depressed liberals these days, my favorite show is “The West Wing.” It really is a self masturbatory exercise watching “The West Wing.” We hold it up as some ideal vision the way a fourteen year old holds up a copy of playboy, and loose ourselves in a fantasy of its perfection.

Don’t we?

But I want to talk about a Red State melodrama. Not JAG, which is a conservative wet dream to be sure, but I want to talk about a show much closer to home. In my house there are two must see pieces of television (both NBC, of course): “West Wing” and every possible permutation of “Law and Order.”

My girlfriend is a fiend for “Law and Order.” She likes old “Law and Order” and new “Law and Order.” She likes Chris Noth, Benjamin Bratt, and Jesse L. Martin. She is still sad over Jerry Orbach’s death last month (so am I, to be honest). She watches SVU and CI as well. I think her favorite “Law and Order” actor is Vincent D’onofrio (and why not? She was a fan of Full Metal Jacket too). And, since “Law and Order” is on, seemingly, 24 hours a day, and since like all girlfriends she has a good pout, I can’t get away from it.

And I hate it. I love it, but I hate it.

I love “Law and Order” because it so beautifully written, so beautifully acted, and so righteous in its outlook (although the writing has been slipping the last two years).

I hate it because I hate Dick Wolf.

“Law and Order” is how the Red States view New York City. Forget the fact that crime has been falling steadily in New York for the past decade (due in large part, I’ll admit, to a Mayor whom I did not and will never vote for). Forget the fact that New York was just named one of the safest cities in America. You wouldn’t know any of this by watching “Law and Order.” Law and Order is New York City for Midwesterners—a city of evil, a strange and dangerous place with murder around every corner. It is certainly not Kansas (any more—never was, really).

Ok, that’s not a big deal. You can’t just stop making cop shows because crime is down. I mean, it’s not like crime has gone away, and after all: drama is all about conflict. Shows about nice families living together in peace haven’t done well since the Waltons (did *anybody* watch “7th Heaven?”)

No, the issue is that Dick Wolf plays to the ignorance, fear, and bigotry of a certain swath of America—the xenophobic, homophobic and (worst of all) the prurient puritans. On “Law and Order” if you practice any type of alternative lifestyle at all—if you are gay, if you are at all kinky, if you are a witch or a pagan or practice Santeria, or an academic, if you are or were a hippie, if you are into S&M, if you are into drugs, if you are in an open marriage or a pluralistic marriage or are a single parent or anything other then white-bread American you are guaranteed to be either a murder victim, a murderer, or both. It promotes a view of life where anybody who doesn’t practice straight, man on top married monogamous sex is a doomed sinner. “Law and Order” is comforting to those Ohioans who voted for George Bush because Queers shouldn’t get married, those same people who think New York is the devil’s playground (well, all of it except the New Amsterdam Theatre), because somewhere, deep inside, “Law and Order” represents a real Old Testament view of the world. It’s as if God is wrecking his retribution on those sinners in New York one victim/murderer at a time. It is melodrama colored by Red State glasses, as ridiculous as “West Wing” and twice as insulting because it’s insulting to me.


Later: UNFAIR TO ACCADEMICS!!!

Tonight’s episode of SVU (which my girlfriend loved) was the worst! It was a good episode: WAY over the top, funny in the right places and certainly entertaining. It also subscribed to the conservative theory that academics are Frankensteins: arrogant, elitist and amoral, more interested in performing God-like experiments on your children then actually helping them. In tonight’s episode, which was kind of a riff on *Hedwig and the Angry Inch* one of a set of identical twins had been given a sex change operation because his penis had been accidentally cut off during a botched circumcision, making his gender indeterminate (by the way, Hedwig dealt with these issues in a much better way). The anti-intellectual part comes in the demonizing of the twins’ therapist, who is presented as using them as guinea pigs in his effort to prove the (to Dick Wolf) ridiculous theory that gender is learned not inherent, that it is a product of nurture not nature. This is a serious theory among some psychologists. SVU didn’t just make it up. I’ve got no idea if it is true or not, but SVU treats it as though it can only be the product of a diseased mind, and that anybody that subscribes to this theory (presumably including the thousands of real psychologists who actually do) are misguided and evil. In this episode, this therapy included having the twins simulate sex with one another so the girl could be “programmed.” Ok, that is both sick and criminal. However, it was handled like it was the natural product of any accademic inquiry. The psychologist is presented as being so arrogant that he doesn’t know his actions are illegal: he is even writing a book about it. My favorite part is when he told Detective Stabler that he couldn’t understand his theories because “you’re a bourgeois American who’s uptight about sex: that’s why your children all grow up to be sex maniacs.” I loved it, because it confirmed everything I had written an hour before (see above): liberal sex bad, conservative American sex good (it even gets in an implied dig at all those Godless Europeans as well). Talk about a conservative’s wet dream! THIS is how the people who voted for George W. Bush see us academics. If Wolf had done a piece suggesting that someone’s ethnicity had led them to these ideas of sex he would have been excoriated in the press, but academics are fair game (he did go after religion once, in an episode about female circumcision in Muslim families, but it’s ok to be prejudiced against Muslims and, to be sure, even *I* can’t find anything defensible in female circumcision). As you can imagine, I’m pissed.

This is a fiction that could have been written by the New York Post. It demonizes academics while having a salacious scandal, incest, murder, and a sex change operation all in one episode! This type of anti-intellectual propaganda is a cornerstone of the right wing culture war. This comes from the same impulse that led a US congressman to denounce Edward Said on the house floor, to press attacks against Noam Chomsky, and to Bill O’Reily saying that professors “are all a bunch of liberal pin-heads anyway” during an interview with President Bush. I’ve said it before: it amazes me how the “education president” can be so anti-education. And Dick Wolf is their mouthpiece. And it really sells the soap. Hell, even I watch it. :)