December 21, 2012 On Television Keep Me in the Loop, You Dead Mechanism By Dave Tompkins What’s Christmas without some ancient demons embedded in the chimney? On the evening of December 25, 1972, BBC viewers celebrated the birth of Christ by being scared to death. They learned that their homes could be resonating with discarnate traumas absorbed over centuries, that the limestone walls have been listening, recording, and screaming—and that the ghost of Christmas past had been using their minds as its personal VCR. Scripted by Nigel Kneale, The Stone Tape is about a British electronics company who’s in a race to beat Japan to a super washing machine and a groundbreaking recording medium based on the “magnetic susceptibility” of certain minerals and their capacity to retain terrible memories. Holed up in a Victorian mansion, the team of bickering scientists working for Ryan Electronics would discover that haunting was a new form of playback. Merry Christmas. Kneale had grown up on the Isle of Man, home to a mongoose named Gef who could prove his own existence in six different languages, including Russian and Arabic. Kneale’s imagination flourished in television, a medium with a reputation for killing souls. His teleplays seemed intent on trying to out-weird each other: a taxidermist gets stuffed by a pond of vengeful toads; a man is choked to death by his own bike wreckage; a porn cinema is haunted by dolphins. He also gave us titles like “Vegetable Village,” “Clog-Dance for a Dead Farce,” and “The Big Big Giggle.” One of my favorite Kneale shows involves a frumpy supermarket cashier who enlists the store mascot—a woodchuck called Briteway Billy—to wage telekinetic war against her tyrant boss, pummeling him to death with nonperishable canned goods. How many soup cans can a supermarket woodchuck ghost hurl? Read More
July 16, 2012 On Television Desert Moon: Breaking Bad in the American Southwest By Andi Teran There’s a moment when thunderclouds smother the sunset and the chile ristras begin to sway, when bits of smoldering earth intertwine with invisible rain, and you’re tangled in tumbleweed magic. Everything is burnt orange and cactus green, clay-tinged and warm. There’s mystery disguised as menace, comfort in spite of storm, and the sky gives off a phantom light that makes the concrete seem cinematic. This is the desert Southwest, my homeland, also known as Breaking Bad country. If you’ve made the television journey with Walter White—from tightey-whitey chemistry teacher to hairless drug kingpin—you’re already familiar with the show’s desert setting of Albuquerque, New Mexico. It acts as a silent character that, to me, is also its most important. Read More
June 22, 2012 On Television Coitus More Ferarum [NSFW] By Carmen Maria Machado Warning: explicit images after the jump. Now that Game of Thrones has aired its second season, there has been no shortage of commentary about the amount of skin and sex on the Emmy-winning HBO drama. Viewers have taken notice of the gratuitous nudity and graphic fucking, which are sometimes necessary, and sometimes incidental, to the plot. I’ve noticed something else, something more specific: from rape within an arranged marriage to sibling fucking, it seems like the sexual beings of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros speak two primary languages, fellatio and doggy style. Why do I care? Besides being an obsequious and social consumer of television (I host Game of Thrones night weekly at my house), I’m a writer of short fiction who has also published erotica under the pseudonym Olivia Glass. My story “Drought” was published in the (sadly now defunct) women’s sex magazine Filament and was selected by Violet Blue to appear in Best Women’s Erotica 2012, from Cleis Press. I’m always interested in sex as it is presented to us—in literature, film, and art—in that it is both a reflection of what we think, and a reflection of what we think those consuming the art want to see. So what’s happening in Game of Thrones? What does it mean that the primary sexual positions in a highly sexualized show are those of domination? And, more specifically, what’s up with doggy style? Read More
June 20, 2012 On Television Dear Don Draper By Adam Wilson Sunday. Father’s Day. It was a lovely day, high sixties and sunshine, the last spring wind before summer stills the air and AC units plug windows, dripping dirty water on my sunburnt, hairless head. I was at the King Suite at the hotel 6 Columbus on Fifty-eighth street, a comfortable and accommodating establishment decorated in a 1960s mod style. Zebra-patterned throw pillows and four-hundred-thread-count sheets. A Guy Bourdin print was hanging over my bed. The bathroom mirror was circular, haloed by a curved fluorescent bulb that adds a golden aura to my cheeks and shiny head. The bathroom walls were blue tile. The curtains looked like textile cutouts from old issues of Vogue. The bed was large and soft and sexy. The ceiling high and airy. I was here to channel you, Don, to gauge the world through your big brown eyes. I wanted to feel the tidal pull of a room without a past, a bed whose every morning comes complete with clean, new sheets. That day, through my window, I could see the Columbus Circle fountain, and Central Park beyond it: fathers and sons, fathers and daughters, fathers and dogs and wives and husbands, all out for postbrunch strolls. Families skipped light-footed in the sunlight, smiling and carrying shopping bags. The fathers had received gifts that morning: new ties, new socks, new oversized grill spatulas. Their bellies were swollen with bacon and Bloody Marys. Their faces flushed rosy. They wore sunglasses and stupid shorts; their shirts were thickly pinstriped, overly pocketed, Hawaiian even; all varieties of dad-dork style. These are the new American men: nonsmokers, light drinkers, carb cutters. Boy did they look happy. It was their day. And where were you that morning, Don? Last we saw, you’d dressed your wife as a Disney princess, and then abandoned her on set so you could drink up at the bar. Megan was lovely, G-ratedly grinning for the cameras. It made you sick to your stomach, didn’t it, the way she gave up her ideals for a little taste of fame? There was something unabashedly babyish in her joy, like a little girl playing dress up. And you were her jaded daddy. You’re the blunt realist who’s seen the gears that turn the wheels of capitalism. You work those gears, pull the levers, propagate the charade. But to buy into it like Megan did? To hang her star on an ad for Butler shoes? Read More
June 6, 2012 On Television Dear Lane Pryce, Some Retroactive Advice By Adam Wilson Dear Lane Pryce, I feel like Eminem when he wrote to that dude Stan, recommending psychiatric treatment before realizing that Stan had already driven his car off a bridge, pregnant girlfriend tied up in the trunk. Or like the guy in that Phil Collins song “In the Air Tonight” who could have saved that other guy from drowning, but didn’t. Or like Count Vronsky in Anna Karenina, who was so busy partying with socialites, he didn’t realize his girlfriend was depressed and fucked up on morphine until it was too late. [Spoiler alert! -Ed.] Read More
May 31, 2012 On Television Dear Joan Holloway, Was It Something I Said? By Adam Wilson Dear Joan, Just wanted to check in, as I can’t help but feel slightly responsible for your actions in this week’s episode. I thought these letters from the future would do you all some good, providing twenty/twenty hindsight into your blindingly Day-Glo historical moment. But Doc Brown was right: messing with the past can alter the future in unexpected ways. Matthew Weiner and company thrive on this very notion; they’ve remodeled the mid-sixties into an era in which cigarettes don’t cause cancer, and the advertising industry is the pinnacle of glamour, filled with beautiful people in beautiful clothes making eyes at each other across rooms then retreating into bedrooms with beautiful bed frames for bouts of steamy congress in which panties always match the bra, and a woman can achieve orgasm just by inhaling Don’s smoky musk. No surprise, then, that here in 2012 we’ve gone gaga over sixties style, sporting skinny ties and summer plaids, puffing cigs like we’re unaware of science, and ruining perfectly healthy marriages because, according to Pete Campbell’s friend from the commuter train, variety is the spice of life. We should probably all reread Richard Yates. Maybe it was wrong to tease you with a glimpse into third-wave feminism when the second wave is only now breaking against your shoreline. But don’t think I’m judging you. Read More