A Blog of My Own

People used to say Ringo Starr was a bad drummer. I could never see this. Technically, maybe he didn’t have all the refinement of Buddy Rich, but that simple, foursquare yet swinging beat of his made The Beatles sound the way they did. With any other drummer, they wouldn’t have been The Beatles. And, since the Beatles’ sound was perfect, it follows that Ringo was perfect.

When Mad Men first began, January Jones struck me as an actress of limited technique. I always liked her, but she seemed stiff in a way that I equated with a lack of range or dynamics. But as the show progressed, I began to see that since the show was perfect, January Jones must be playing Betty Draper exactly right. Mad Men would never have been Mad Men with anyone else.

This especially hit home during the big confrontation scene in Sunday night’s episode, in which Betty forces Don to talk to her about his secret past. While watching this, I had the thought, “If January Jones has limited technique, how come this scene is so incredibly powerful?!? What the hell is she doing that is making me buy this scene so completely?” I still don’t know.

My provisional conclusion is that January Jones is a fantastic actress. Just one whose fantasticness doesn’t resemble anything we’ve seen before, so we’re not accustomed to it, and can’t fit it into a mold of what we think “good acting” is supposed to look and sound like.

Have you noticed how, in shows that are about characters who are writers (as, for instance, 30 Rock is a show about a writer, Liz Lemon, who creates a weekly SNL-type show called TGS), the creative product of the character in the show, if we get to see that creative product at all, is never as good as we’re told it is? We’re asked to accept that Liz Lemon (Tina Fey) is a talented comedy writer, yet the sketch-comedy show she puts on every week starring Tracey Jordan (Tracy Morgan) and Jenna Maroney (Jane Krakowski) looks pretty lame.

From this, one has to conclude that even though Tina Fey writes a hell of a sitcom, it’s harder to write the sketch-comedy show that the sitcom is supposed to be about.

TV shows and movies almost always fail at this “thing within a thing” thing. That’s no doubt because writing the overall show or movie at a high level of excellence requires such expenditure of creative energy, little energy is left to make sure the glimpses of the characters’ work live up to their billing. One exception was the movie this summer called Funny People, a comedy/drama about standup comedians. When it came time for the characters in the film to deliver some standup, they were funny.

Another exception is Mad Men. Judging from other shows about creative types, the hardest thing for the show to get right is the advertising that the characters in it create. But Mad Men succeeds. When the point is that Don Draper and his creative team are coming up short, the ads which we see them present actually are lame; and when we’re asked to believe that they have solved a problem with some ingenuity, the ads we see them present actually are good, and sometimes excellent. We’re not just asked to “take the show’s word for it” that these characters can create good advertising. Hats off to the show’s writers.

Here’s an interview from GQ with one of Mad Men’s stars, January Jones.

After last night’s horrid premiere of the primetime Jay Leno Show, I can see two eventualities happening:

1) The show will die a merciful death. (And I really mean merciful. It’s no skin off my back if the show continues for decades, because I’ve got plenty of other things to watch, or not watch. But I feel for Leno and the behind-the-scenes folks if they get caught in the soul-destroying rut of having to put this shite on night after night.)

2) The show will be a success, because vast portions of the American public actually enjoy seeing this particular president treated with shameful disrespect (satire works when it’s smart, pointed and funny; when it’s not, it’s just ugly), and think the idea of a white guy singing hip-hop in a car wash is a real hoot. (See Blackface, below.) The right-wing, borderline neo-Nazi demonstrations in Washington this week serve to show, sadly, that an audience like that is just waiting to have its comedy needs catered to.

Some media attention is being focused this week on a scene in the most recent episode of the early-sixties advertising drama Mad Men, in which Sterling Cooper partner Roger Sterling, at a country club function he’s hosting, performs a song in blackface. (The still above is from that scene.) The moment shocked audiences as a reminder of our unenlightened past, as if it were from a past we have left behind.

But if you look around and listen, you’ll discover we haven’t left it behind, and are not any more evolved than people were in 1963. Slate today has a feature on “urbanized” cartoon-character t-shirts, including one depicting a black Bart Simpson; and anyone listening to the radio will hear white singer after white singer attempting to “sound black.” Indeed, the phenomenon of white suburban teenagers dressing and talking “black” is so well-known now as to have become a cliché. The only difference is that (actual, non-cartoon) people don’t put black makeup on their faces anymore — but I would argue that’s a minor difference. We may have changed the form blackface takes from the one Roger Sterling employed, but we have not changed the substance.

White people have been appropriating black styles of performance and presentation since Reconstruction (sometimes in admiration, sometimes in parody, and sometimes in an ambiguous blend of the two), and it shows no sign of stopping. To find yet more examples, one has only to look at all the scenes in movies of the last twenty years in which some white middle-class guy or grandma gets up at a wedding reception and does hip-hop, an idea clearly intended to be received as hilarious in itself. Blackface the way Roger Sterling did it is no longer approved, but our society has its own ways of doing it now, which are so much a part of our fabric that we don’t even think about it. Any more than Roger did.

Jeff Goldblum has made a career of being the most interesting thing in the room. Sure, you never quite get past the fact that he’s Jeff Goldblum, nor does he want you to (he’s never been an actor who “disappears into his roles”), but heck, the same could have been said of James Stewart. Goldblum’s quirky, unignorable “always thinking, always probing” shtick brings dimension to his characters even when everything around him is 2-D. This is paradoxical, because you’d think an actor who brought all kinds of attention to himself would destroy the integrity of a piece, but in Goldblum’s case, the showiness is hypnotic — it draws you in and allows you to sail past substandard elements in a piece that would otherwise hang you up. He doesn’t allow you to suspend your disbelief so much as he allows you to enjoy your disbelief. And soon enough, you’re actually caring about the ridiculous things he’s asked to say and do.

He’s now bringing the Goldblum Touch® to alternating episodes of Law & Order: Criminal Intent. (New eps air on Sundays at 8 Central on USA Network.) LOCI is in some ways the perfect Jeff Goldblum vehicle. At times the plot holes are gaping. At times the dialogue is unbelievably dumb, jammed with clunky expository lines real people would never say, engineered (more like jerry-built) to squeeze ten pounds of information in a five pound bag. So, it is a show (if it is to have any redeeming value at all) desperately in need of rescue.

When I watch the Goldblum episodes of LOCI, I see an actor who’s stoked by the realization of how badly he’s needed. (Yes, he even makes his own evident ego-gratification part of the performance.) He’s actually goofing on the show, sharing with the audience that he knows that it knows just how awful it is, even as all the other actors around him struggle hard to maintain their commitment to the show’s “reality.” I wonder if they hate him. I can hear Eric Bogosian saying, “Hey man, I know how sad this shit is — I’m a respected playwright and performance artist, for God’s sake — but at least I’m trying to make it work!” Meanwhile, Goldblum is using every tool at his command to signal the audience, “Get a load of the next clunker they’re making me say. Sorry, folks. I’ll do what I can to make things interesting while you have to watch me say this.” It’s a tour de force that makes the show worth watching.

Two years ago I raved about a psychic-detective show called Raines, with Goldblum in the title role. That was a much better show than LOCI, written with some subtlety and directed with intelligence, so it died after seven episodes. You could tell Goldblum believed in it, and that made it great. Goldblum doesn’t believe in LOCI at all, not the plotlines, not the dialogue, not his own character — and that’s how he’s making LOCI great.

Thanks to patients like Hope Davis and John Mahoney, In Treatment on HBO may be even better in season two than it was in season one. Some of the half-hour episodes are models of suspense — and models of what you can do to create suspense when you have nothing to work with but two people talking in a room.

The show this year is particularly good on the details. In one of the installments, a happy couple exits through the shrink’s waiting room while one of the show’s main characters is waiting to go in. The couple’s happiness seems a bit over the top, and that’s exactly the point. People often leave therapists’ offices with a false sense of security, like “everything’s going to be all right now.” (I found myself thinking, “Hmm, let’s give it a couple of days, and see how things are going for you then, shall we?“) And this short scene touched on another key therapeutic issue: the meaning a waiting patient can attach to the apparent happiness of an exiting one. We idealize the happiness of others, and think we are the only ones who suffer. So when we see someone leaving a therapist’s office apparently “cured,” we feel jealousy and deprivation; we ask, “If that’s happening for her, why isn’t it happening for me?” (And then we reassure ourselves by snarking, “If she’s so damned happy, why is she seeing a shrink?”) This particular form of psychic pain is one I haven’t seen dramatized before, which is just one of the breakthroughs In Treatment has to offer.

Here’s the latest from my friend, artist James Kuhn, in his face-painting-o’-the-day series. (You can see the whole collection at his flickr page.) I wrote about him before, and before that, but this painting of TV’s Golden Girls Dorothy, Rose and Blanche is just too good not to pass along. Can you tell James’ real eyes from the painted eyes? Can you find James’ real nose?

I give Kings three weeks before NBC pours a vial of poison in the show’s ear and puts on reruns of The Biggest Loser.

The only thing worse than sub-literate television is semi-literate television with pretensions to literacy. Give me a show that knows exactly how bad it is, over a show that thinks it’s miles better than it is. That this overstuffed turkey clearly gobbled up a fortune (the production values and digital scenery are awesome) only compounds the folly.

The actors arch their eyebrows archly and ring wry changes on the words as if to convince us (or themselves) that the dialogue is worthy of Shakespeare, but the gestures of wit seem there mainly to cover up the absence of wit; the words are wan, limp, flaccid, signifying next to nothing. You can feel the writer, Michael Green, spraining his own eyebrow. In comparison, the vigorous, punchy writing on the Aaron Spelling shows of the eighties puts the conversation on Kings to shame. Richard and Esther Shapiro, where art thou?

And yeah, I get the biblical David and Goliath references. I got them well before seeing that the enemy tanks which the young soldier named David went up against were named, er, Goliath. I liked the allegory a little better before I had it buried in my head like an ax. Green wants credit for cleverness, but he’s hedging his bets for the slow-on-the-uptake crowd.

Poor Ian McShane. You deserve better, Al.

Trust Me (TNT Tuesday nights, repeated through the week) is my favorite show, but that’s not surprising, since it’s about me.

Written by two ex-Leo Burnett advertising agency creatives, the show, which is about two Leo Burnetty creatives, gives me (an ex-Leo Burnett creative) a chance to relive my life there, and to spend time again through the show’s characters with many of the real-life characters I knew. I feel safe in saying the show will have a devoted following among about five thousand people. Will anyone who is not an advertising creative find the show equally compelling? I have no idea, but if you don’t happen to be an ex-Leo Burnett creative, but are looking for a show that pretty well captures what it’s like to work at a modern big-time ad agency, trust me, Trust Me is it.

I have a friend (also an ex-Leo Burnett creative) who can’t watch the show because it gives him bad dreams. I understand this. Advertising (if you do it right) is a business of manic highs and crushing, murderous lows. Stress is what both moodstates have in common. So reliving one’s good old days in advertising is a little like reliving one’s good old days in Vietnam. Oh please, I hear you saying, advertising isn’t brain surgery. You’re right. It’s harder. Brain surgeons, to relax before an operation, tell themselves, “Hey, it’s not advertising.”

In advertising, you are never as good as the thing you did just before the thing you did last — only as good as the thing you did last, and then only for five minutes. Psychological platitudes like “they’re not rejecting you, they’re rejecting the work” are meaningless, because the work is you — brought up from your innards in an attempt to break through to people as they’ve never been broken through to before. Emotional trauma, all-consuming jealousies, fear of death are all in a day’s work. The thick-skinned would survive it well, but the thick-skinned tend not be the sort who make ads so brilliant they’re unlike any the world has ever seen. Now as in any profession, it’s possible to do respectable, journeyman work and go home at the end of the day with not a thought in your pretty little head, but that’s not the work a Leo Burnett is asking you to do. So, you dig. But you mine your soul for emotional truths inside a corporate structure with conflicting demands. Are you working for yourself, are you working for your client, or are you working for your boss? Yes.

Doctors and lawyers must also be brilliant, and clearly (unlike ad people) hold people’s lives in their hands — okay, let’s give them that — but are they asked to reinvent the wheel every time, as advertising creatives must do? Firemen have to storm into burning buildings (which, all right, I’ll grudgingly admit, is harder than advertising), but do they have to storm into a burning building a whole new way for no reason other than that the other way has “been done”? Most professions have precedent and a canon of best-practices to rely on. Ad folks go it alone every time. By definition, if they rely on precedent, they are creating a product that is not fresh enough to set the world on its ear.

If there’s something missing from the show so far, it’s that it hasn’t portrayed the manically exhilarating upside of a life in advertising as much — the orgasmic pleasure of a music session that goes great, or a multimillion dollar film shot that captures everything you dreamed of, or what a blessing it is to go to work with smart, funny people every day. But these, I guess, are not the stuff of drama, and would just make the audience jealous. The show’s writer/creators, Hunt Baldwin and John Coveny, are doing a bangup job of capturing the downside. After watching the first true-as-far-as-they-go episodes, I’m convinced they are using the show to work through their own personal recovery from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Cleverly, Baldwin and Coveny have found a way to recover from Advertising PTSD so as to amuse and entertain, and in the process have conquered a whole new, and equally challenging, art form. I hate them. Hats off.

The United States of Tara proves that writer Diablo Cody is not a one-hit wonder or a one-trick pony. Her ear for fresh dialogue, so evident in the movie Juno, is once again the salient element. In this Showtime comedy series about a suburban mom (Toni Collette) with multiple personality disorder, people talk with a sound at once real and stylized, heightened — you listen for the next turn of phrase that sounds unlike anything you’ve quite heard before, and when it comes, it brings pleasure. Though you’d think such pointed stylization might make the dialogue sound contrived, it doesn’t; instead, it makes the characters seem more alive, I suppose because people in life do have their own, unique sonic and syntactical fingerprints. Or, contrarily (but leading to the same result), we desperately want to believe they do, that somewhere there are families who really do use language in so fresh a way, even if we haven’t run into them.

Beyond the pleasure of hearing bright people talk in surprising ways, there is an idea in The United States of Tara, one that goes deeper than the high concept of the show. On the surface, Tara is about a wife and mom who may at any point shift into the persona of one or another of a whole repertory company of characters due to her psychological condition. The more one wades into the two episodes that have aired so far, however, the more one notices that all the characters in the show, the central and more peripheral ones — Tara’s husband and kids, their coworkers and friends, etc. — have adopted personas that may or may not be who they “really” are. The only difference is that everyone but Tara picks one and sticks with it, while Tara gets to choose between several. But that, the show seems to say, is a trivial difference. The selection of a pair of funky eyeglasses, a punk-Samurai hairstyle, an attitude — these are the ways each of us controls the characterization we consciously or unconsciously choose to present to the world. Tara’s “dissociative identity disorder,” her abnormality, is a lens the show’s creators use to focus us on the artifice of the thing we call the social order, the alienation behind the thing we call normality. The show has a lot on its minds.