Females Rule the Night: VMAs Wrap-Up

I didn't watch the entire show, because I wanted to catch Mad Men, and it turned out to be a good episode. Don sorta got hit on again, by his daughter's teacher, but we were treated to plot and character advancement, plus plenty of 60s life.

But the VMAs:

Preshow: WHY ARE YOU HERE??

Fefe Dobson…you had a minor “hit” in 2002, a song that I don't remember at all. You were wearing black, red, maybe a checkered shirt? White background? Rant/sing? Giant question mark.

Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony. Seriously, you passed your sell-by date in 2001. Go away.

TOO MUCH TWILIGHT OMG.

Twitter new VJs blondness teenagers and technology whoa.

Opening: Probably the first time that there wasn't a performance. Madonna gave a tribute to Michael Jackson, just as I was writing about her in my last post. I watched it, cause it was Madonna, though I had planned to skip any MJ moments.

Katy Perry: With Joe Perry. Meh. White pants, sparkles.

Russell Brand: Useless.

Taylor Swift: The subway gig was cute, and impressive in that as far as I know has never been done before. I enjoyed her freewheelin' yet professional performance.

The Kanye Showdown: Low. Beyoncé was nominated for "Video of the Year", a much bigger and enduring award than "Best Female Video", and his "excuse me" to Taylor was rude. Beyoncé and Taylor were both very embarrassed.

Lady Gaga: Anyone who doubted Lady Gaga’s talent was proved wrong when she performed a deranged version of "Paparazzi", which ended with her hanging in the air, eyes dead, blood splattered over her funky white outfit, reminiscent of Madonna’s "Like a Virgin" wedding dress, without the dress. Her voice was strong, theatrical in its wobblyness, and her typical piano playing mesmerized the audience; they were all wondering where this would lead. Gaga brought out the other things she is known for (going pantless, crazy hair), even the wheelchair and the crutches. She’s the only artist that makes that work, along with showing the lines of her stockings below her underwear.

Pink: Very fitting (you need to listen to Sober). She knows how to do it.

Beyoncé: Classy, gracious, "Single Ladies" still kicks ass. Fantastic choreography, deserves to win all-around.

Green Day: They feel too old for this crowd.

Winners: The category that stands out the most is “Video That Should Have Won a Moonman”, all videos around 20 years old, most that the average high schooler doesn’t know. Nice concept, but the nominees are retarded.

Winners should go to videos that have had an impact. Eminem did not with "We Made You", though most of the others went to the big hits--"Womanizer" (I knew Britney wouldn't show, she's done with this crowd), "Live Your Life", and of course, "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)".

Not surprising to see Gaga win "Best New Artist". She clearly had the most influence in 2009, and she usually does give you a reason to watch (though "Poker Face" is not her best video). Not sure what she's doing by covering up her neck and face, besides her glamour pop thing, making a statement, the whole "Paparrazi" shtick. Whatever. Gaga is gaga. Females rule the night.

Love Stories

A couple weeks ago, I wanted to write about how the success of House gives me faith in America. House is a complex show that deals with philosophical issues, about medical ethics, of right and wrong, connecting with people, of how to live. The fact that it is one of America’s top-rated shows—and one that is well-acted, generally well-written, and both a critical and fan favorite—makes me very happy. But I also realized that House does something that is very rare on television shows: two of the main characters, Gregory House and Lisa Cuddy, are both single for a long time.

As most people know, these are two characters who flirt and argue with each other, and often their scenes are fun to watch. They are the standard couple that fans are suppose to root for, and of course they’ll get together at the end of the series, as is television convention. What is notable is that their relationship obstacles are themselves—their own stubbornness, expectations, beliefs, habits, and personality quirks—and not other people. House does not date. Cuddy does not date. This is pretty big for television; most shows have boyfriends and girlfriends and affairs and would-be suitors that rotate out of the main characters’ lives, with various missed chances and misunderstandings. But as House has continued the past few weeks, with Cuddy and House kissing and acknowledging their attraction to each other, there have been those classic television misunderstandings, most notably in last week’s episode, “Let them Eat Cake”, where House is off flirting with a woman he hired to play a prank on Kutner and Taub. Cuddy sees this just as she’s about to forgive him for an earlier incident, since House had done something special for her.

Last weekend, I saw three movies that revolve around “grand” love affairs: Twilight, Australia, and a Bollywood hit titled Fanaa, which means “Destroyed in Love” in English. While it’s true that love stories follow similar arcs—there’s a meet cute, often involving a misunderstanding or a dislike, a gradual time of becoming friends, then really good friends, periods of crisis that draw the two together, the requisite confusing/scared emotions, the obstacles that keep the two apart (whether external or internal, or a combination)—it doesn’t mean that they are particularly interesting, victorious, or that they work at all. A formula does not mean success.

This is why most love stories aren’t good. They just aren’t. They’re everywhere, and that’s one of the problems—love stories are supposed to be special, exciting, meaningful, infused with pain, yet there’s an unbreakable sense of connection, friendship and yes, love, that underscores it all. That’s what the good ones do. You can follow all the rules, and still not have the story matter. Twilight, Australia and Fanaa had many of the standard elements, but none of them were particularly good. What struck me and my compatriots in watching the movies, though, was that there were thematic and tonal similarities: while all of them were over-the-top, the drama was ridiculous in Twilight and Fanaa. There was too much back-and-forth, too much “I can’t live without you!” hysterics. There was too much talk of dying for each other, of “You can’t be with me, because I will get you killed! I will ruin your life! And therefore we must STAY AWAY from each other!” In both Twilight and Australia, there was a scene where one of the leads doesn’t know how to dance and is shy. The genders were reversed, but the dialogue was practically the same in both movies, despite that one dealt with cowboys and the other vampires.

Love stories are overhyped, fit into any story because it’s considered a necessary element of success. Upping the ante by introducing politics, death, illness and other catastrophes is often considered another requirement of epic romances, but it’s not necessary and often takes away from the central story. That’s what happened in Twilight and Australia (although Australia's story wasn’t really about the romance, but was a substantial part of it). These elements are usually so over-the-top that they obscure the real romance and move it into parody, drawing out the movie so we just don’t care any more. That occurred in all three movies.

What’s missing in the movies, and in most love stories, is the friendship behind the leads. In Roger Ebert’s review of Twilight, he says, “They’re in love with being in love.” Bella and Edward spend the movie giving each other smoking, lustful looks and discussing why they can’t be together (he wants her blood too much), but there’s nothing else besides attraction that hold them together.

The central question of any love story should be: why do these two love each other? Why them? The audience needs to see why each cares for the other, why each genuinely likes the other. Most treat this question superficially, glossing over it for the more exciting romantic tension that awaits. But tension is meaningless and not as much fun if the fundamentals aren’t there, if the reason for the tension is perfunctory and silly.

I’m convinced that Michael Patrick King wanted to create a great love story in Big and Carrie in Sex and the City, and that’s the overwhelming feeling I’m left with whenever I see the finale. (I’m excusing the movie here because I feel it retreads a lot of the same ground, but it could work within this framework, since their love ends happily after a massive screw-up.) Here we see why Carrie and Big just have this overwhelming affection for each other—that they can laugh and flirt and just be fun with each other, and each likes the other’s playful attitude, that person’s love of New York City. Despite all their problems, they go back to each other—a controversial point in most romantic relationships, because this tendency can be destructive, hampering the necessity of moving on. Carrie and Big’s epic love story is one thing I take away from the show, and I think he succeeds in creating a lasting, captivating story, one with many believable, heart-wrenching turns.

One of the reasons The Office is such on shaky ground this season is that it doesn’t know what to do with its central couple, Jim and Pam. The show was phenomenal in its second and third seasons partly because it was powered by the unrequited love between those two, and the second season finale “Casino Night”, where Jim confesses his love to Pam and then kisses her, is considered by many to be the best episode of the series. Watching the friendship between the two, Jim’s longing and confusion followed by Pam’s longing and confusion, was at times exhilarating, heartbreaking, and frustrating, and garnered lots of fans of both the show and the characters. By coupling the characters early enough in the series, considered a radical move by many, the show set us up to watch their relationship grow. But the lack of romantic tension, sad to say, was not replaced by genuinely interesting and compelling storylines, but ones that had the potential to be so and then written off. Romantic intrigue was passed onto other characters, poorly, as if one great love story can be substituted for another.

While The Office can and hopefully will bounce back from the stupidity this lackluster season has brought, it could show what many want to see: a full-fledged, real relationship, without the excessive drama that plagues most television and movie romance. It can be done, and it can be done well—it just takes imagination and a real commitment to write a story based around interesting and compelling characters. But too often it just doesn’t seem palatable. After all, it’s very hard to write about a relationship in television or in the movies that’s about the after part of “happily ever after.” The joke is that it doesn’t exist.

As Emily Gould put it recently, when discussing Gossip Girl:

It’s rare to watch a tv show’s writers basically confess that they’ve hit a wall. Imagine if, somewhere around the third season of Friends, Ross had sat Rachel down and said, “You know, we’ll never stay together, because there would really be nothing to hang the misunderstanding-based hijinx of this show on.” When Chuck told Blair that “the game” is “what we like,” he might as well have been staring into the camera and addressing the audience directly. ‘When we finally get together,’ he’s saying, ‘you’ll know that Gossip Girl’s writers have finally gotten that memo from CW headquarters that they’ve got another episode or two to wrap things up.’

But less cynically, or maybe more cynically: the audience basically never gets to watch the ever-after part of romances – it’s boring, we’re given to understand, all that moviegoing and hand-holding. Love affairs have three acts, we know from tv, and even, a little, from our own experience. There’s the thrilling beginning, fraught with obstacles and delicious suffering. And then there’s the middle, the happy normalcy phase that actually maybe doesn’t even exist and is just a slow slide into the mediocrity and boredom that signals the end. Maybe there are just two acts, then.

And when act two is running its course, it’s back to the drawing board again.

Be Sexy. Just Don't Have Sex. But Don't Wait Too Long, Or Then You're Weird.

“You can see how what they want the most is beauty. Not in a chauvinistic way, not even as something they can act on. Just instinctively, to look at and enjoy. It’s what they expect, and who they expect it from most of all is teenage girls. When you’re older, it’s all right to get heavy, but when you’re a teenager, being beautiful or at least cute is your responsibility. Say the words sixteen-year-old girl to any group of males, eleven-year-olds, fifty-year-olds, and they will leer, maybe a lot or maybe a little or maybe they’ll try not to leer. But they will be envisioning the sixteen-year-old’s smooth tan legs, her high breasts and long hair. Is expecting her beauty even their fault?”

--The Man of My Dreams

How has it that teenage pregnancy has become this big thing? Yes, teenage pregnancy was always around, and for most people it always loomed as a danger to avoid (at least in modern life). But in the past year it’s just exploded, with the idea of teen girls having sex a linchpin of the culture wars.

There has been a lot written, particularly aimed at Juno, about how “normalized” teen pregnancy is becoming, and it must be that newfound attitude that the Republicans and the media adopted when the news that Bristol Palin was pregnant hit. She and her mom were lionized for keeping the baby, and unbelievably, this story is spun as a positive thing.

I do not want to suggest that Bristol should be shamed by her pregnancy, but the hypocritical attitude towards girls and sex boggles my mind. On one hand, you have conservatives—including her mother—who want to avoid teaching teenagers anything about sex and preferring to stress waiting until marriage to do so, and on the other hand, the encouragement to think about sex constantly; it’s the national pastime.

Sex is this great chasm. Angela Chase put it best in an episode of My So-Called Life (7:30): “There's this dividing line between girls who have had sex, and girls who haven't. And all of a sudden you realize you're looking at each other across it.” She’s talking about an old friend here, one who’s suddenly grown up, on the other side of that line. Sex is adulthood, and you haven’t reached it until you cross that threshold.

Sex is the bane of young adults. Watching the VMAs brought this home: Many of the stars were under 20, and their stances on sex were Not Until Marriage. The fact that they were so public about it—and that Jordin Sparks felt compelled to defend her choice so ardently in front of millions of people when attacked by an aggressively heterosexual 35-year-old male—just made that culture line so much sharper.

Jordin Sparks’ sex life is only her business. Making a joke about how the kids are wasting their youth by choosing to not get any by any of their ardent fans might elicit a chuckle and some boos, but it’s tacky, and makes it seem like they are only in it for the booty, not because, y’know, they actually like music. Nor is Sparks’ comment that sex = slutty fair. It’s just promulgating a standard and a detrimental label, one that’s increasingly used as a general all-purpose slur.

One of Britney Spears’ biggest mistakes was to announce that she was waiting until marriage to have sex, because that vow was constantly hanging over her head. It subconsciously colored her image, and made her appeal vastly more interesting. But when she couldn’t hew to that misguided standard she set for herself, her image fell apart. She shouldn’t be judged for doing something millions of other teen girls do, and she shouldn’t be punished because she said something really stupid when she was young. But it also shouldn’t be the standard that is espoused to the youth of America. Since her downward spiral, she’s become a laughingstock of the public, eliciting pity and scorn. Her sister’s own pregnancy was just another nail in the coffin of the Spears saga. Someone somewhere must have made the case that because she had sex outside of marriage, breaking her vow to wait, her punishment is to become insane. After all, in pop culture, teen sex is bad! We see that time and again on TV, now it’s proven in real life!

It’s not fair that these starlets are forced to say these things. Miley Cyrus may really and truly want to wait until she is married…but she’s 15, and she will probably reevaluate many of her statements for the next few years. After all (and you can take this with a grain of salt, since it is a post-scandal apology), she said she didn’t realize the pictures in Vanity Fair were sexual, and is deeply embarrassed by the outcry. A teenager, especially one in the public eye, should not have to discuss her opinions on sex when most of us know—even if she doesn’t—that they will probably change, and if our immediate reaction to the comments is smirking that they are lying.

These statements are a way to protect the stars, a way of saying it’s ok to look up at them, an excuse to offer them as role models. It’s ok to emulate them, even though they put up provocative pics on the internet, because they aren’t going to have sex until they’re much older and have a wedding ring to prove their commitment. It’s not just dishonest, it’s a terrible message to send. We can sexualize ourselves all we want, make ourselves sexual commodities for other people’s fantasies, but we hold off until it really matters. The song and dance is old hat; it’s called being a tease. And yes, being a tease can be fun. That’s also called flirting. But in a public space, it’s also ripe for judgment, because it’s a way of subverting the system, of having the cake and eating it too, with no caloric payback.

The stars also become oddly sexualized by just making these statements. I know very little about the Jonas Brothers, but hearing that they all wear promise rings—and having that become a defining fact, instead of their music—immediately makes one think of them as sexual beings, because they are announcing their (lack of) intentions to the youth of America. They shouldn’t be mocked for that decision, but rather we should be questioning ourselves to why it’s necessary in the first place.

Our culture is also conditioned to accept teenage girls as sexual beings, and increasingly, they are marketed that way. Victoria’s Secret has its own line of teenage lingerie (shouldn’t that be an oxymoron?), Pink. It’s as if they’re not ready for red. Red = blood, lust, lipstick, fiery passion, adult. Pink is gentle, mild, lipgloss, sweet, girl.

Other clothing retailers, like teenage mainstay Abercrombie & Fitch, have similar lines. And they are hardly the only ones marketing sexualized material to a young audience. Music, movies and especially television always revolve around sex as the be all and end all, with looking good as the way to get sex, and often some of the most memorable episodes of a teen drama revolve around When They Finally Have Sex (see Everwood, Gilmore Girls, Dawson’s Creek, 90210…). This attitude has not only grown, it’s been enhanced. Teen stars are no good girls; they have to flirt with sexuality. It’s mandated by the rules governing pop culture. Other than Daria, can one think of a teenage character that resists the lure? She was constantly trying to prove that she shouldn’t have to tart herself up to be accepted, that she was just fine in her black skirt and green jacket. She didn’t need to conform to the ridiculous standards of beauty that a girl in her demographic was expected to don. But Daria is a glaring exception, and that’s a reference a half-generation removed. She, incidentally, decided to wait in her sex episode.

Sex and its consequences are also the backbone of the popular Twilight series; the first book will be released as a movie in a few weeks. Popular with teenage girls, Twilight features a traditional female lead, complete with a waiting-for-marriage-to-have-sex philosophy.

This ideology is hailed as being a positive role model for the target demographic, despite the fact that Bella, the protagonist, is largely a cipher. The sexual content of the novels is one of the draws; there’s no sex 'til the fourth novel, Breaking Dawn, but it’s all heart-throbbing lust until then. Edward, her eventual husband, is marketed as the perfect man (except in vampire form), patient, understanding, responsible: a real caretaker. Yet she gives up everything for him, and when she does, both she and the story lose a lot of their appeal. Reviews of Breaking Dawn all harp on this point; the story dissolves into a very traditional happy homemaker life, one that author Stephenie Meyer apparently has. In addition, her views of love and what makes a happy couple are very alarming: most, including the main one, seem to fall somewhere on the “abusive” scale. She also does not believe in the word “choice”, for in her world, everything is preordained, and nothing goes against destiny; it’s just a matter of waiting.

Twilight might be telling girls to wait—but sex here is also viewed as an act that has violent and horrifying consequences: she is badly beaten up during it, and becomes pregnant with a child whose sole existence is seemingly designed to torment her physically, psychologically, and mentally. The passion and her new life are supposed to be worth the expense of physical torture, but it’s a trade-off that doesn’t sit well with many readers. The message to wait is lost—thirteen-year-olds (not to mention twenty-five-year-olds) may be scarred by the idea of sex equaling broken bones and demon spawn.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with waiting to have sex, though in this culture, it’s often scorned at. At a certain age, the choice to wait is regarded as a curiosity. How can you not have sex? It’s a biological imperative. The 40 Year-Old Virgin exemplified this. Despite its “old-fashioned” values, the movie still managed to condemn the lead character, and by doing so, scared some people into having sex because they didn’t want to end up in his position.

Teenagers shouldn’t be forced to hold to a societal standard of sex, whether or not that is the rampant hookup or sanctioned chastity, and they shouldn’t have to defend their choices on a public scale. It robs them of the complexity of sex, boiling it down to an either/or, a narrow line of wrong or right, depending upon who’s doing the judging.