high art

I watch too much TV. This is a given. Up until recently there wasn't much else to do shy of prolonged communion with nature or making myself sick through overenthusiastic consumption of my own cooking. But now it's made its final transformation from tool-for-winding-down to daily distraction to guilty pleasure to disturbing addiction. I offer as proof of this that I have seen the pilots of BOTH Pan Am and The Playboy Club. I'd love to say that this is because I'm indulging Steve's penchant for boobs, but deep down, we all know it's because reruns of The Office on the CW and hilariously neutered versions of movies like Sideways on the local classic movie channel will only get a girl so far towards that digitally induced high. (I mention Sideways because it is in almost no way a movie that instinctively lends itself to prime time television: by the time they've muted all of the sex, gloss over the alcoholism, cut the male frontal nudity and changed all the creative cussing to less offensive terms that make absolutely no sense--my favorite was the substitution "ashcroft" for "asshole"--the movie's four minutes long and sounds more or less like a long string of gibberish.) So we've been partaking of this year's crop of new well-endowed if largely ill-conceived dramas.

However, having seen Pan Am and Playboy Club, (and perhaps in a desperate attempts to intellectualize a particularly low point in my cerebral trajectory) I'd like to offer my thoughts. At first glance, one might assume that these two shows were more or less the same--and they are! Both are set in the late 50s/early 60s, so both are fairly unabashed Mad Men knock offs. Both feature rebelliously independent fun and flirty women who are on their own and loving it, (with well chiseled, muscle-bound co-stars) and both glamorize occupations that most normal people would find at very best completely exhausting. In terms of acting, photography and narrative structure, Playboy Club is far superior--and indeed Pan Am will be very lucky to get a second viewing. But what I find fascinating, if also completely horrifying, is that both have decided to depict the latter part of the women's movement as coming not from any grassroots feminism but from highly sexualized corporate structures that "allowed" women to break free from previous constraints of hearth and home and see the world, have their own careers and (if you believe Playboy Club) single-handedly triumph over discrimination. All a girl needs to be (indeed best!) Betty Friedan is a 20 inch waist, a corset and a generous C cup. And my question is, why? Why is this how we've chosen to remember this particular past? Sure, NBC could really use a gyno-triumphalist narrative to justify those crazy bunny suits, but why need we suggest that the key to opening up opportunities and remedying inequality is abject objectification? Why not just call a spade a spade and say this is the closest thing to soft-core porn the FCC will let us air on network television and cut out the shots of the cute little girls looking up in rapturous awe to our high heeled heroines? (People would still watch it--and I for one would feel much less guilty about doing so!) And (I think this is the real question), why do I let these shows and their inherent flaws to occupy so much of my attention, when, as previously mentioned, it's quite intentionally a very fine veneer of historical fiction that's hiding a story with all the sophistication of an unpeeled potato?