Money Men
Today, I want to talk about the convergence of three discrete phenomena. I want to talk about television, money, and women. These are three things I'd quite like to be able to indulge in on a regular basis, but all three of them end up making me feel guilty, duplicitous and unworthy. Plus, one of them seems to find me emetically repellent.
Occasionally, a rash of articles will appear in the Guardian about how there aren't enough women working at the highest level of film / television / drama / insert demographically-perfect left-of-centre field here. It's true, of course, although it's a highly blinkered thing to complain about - there aren't that many women at the highest level of anything much, and the reasons are usually the same*. Most institutions or professions have been dominated by a dull, stinking masculinity for decades, like a passing spirit that burps, farts, pisses in the corner when too drunk to find the toilet, and scratches its bollocks while watching reruns of The Sweeney. Maleness is the world's most banal poltergeist.
Usually, this is called institutionalised sexism, although the term has never been properly explored. It isn't - for the most part - due to any prejudice on the part of the actual people involved, and nor does it mean an overt bias in the systems themselves. It's simply a boring question of evolution; these institutions formed around men and male behaviour, and so their conventions are linked to a particular type of male mentality. Television fetishises traits like boorishness, loudness, opinionated braying and a semi-OCD disposition - how else do you explain the existence of Jeremy Clarkson? - and while it's obviously a bit simplistic to classify these as exclusively male traits, I'm going to do it anyway**. Most of the obnoxious, reactionary, oafish fucktards I meet tend to be men, and that's as scientific as I want to get. Plus I just hate men in general.
The result is that getting more women involved will not, in itself, solve any sort of problem. These women will be as forced to conform with the conventions of the institution as much as everyone else - indeed, most of them are already attuned to the male mentality. Sex and the City was made for women (and by women, if you count Sarah Jessica Parker being an executive producer***), but it still managed to be a thumpingly misogynistic tract that implied that all girls desire men and handbags; Samantha Who is written by Cecilia Ahern, who's technically a woman, and it implies that turning Christina Applegate into a submissive, sentimental dullard is a good thing; and Katherine fucking Flett has tried to claim that Mad Men is about women, even though all the female characters are so resoundingly one-note that only a man could have written them****.
So; television (say) is irredeemably, moronically male; the stench is so strong that it transmogrifies any woman, like those yokes that turned people into gas-mask zombies in Doctor Who; our only remaining hope, gay men, have all been tarnished and discredited by the existence of Alan Carr. This has all been true for over fifty years. And yet, so much television is so much worse than it used to be*****. Why?
Well, television has money now. This is one of the biggest disasters ever to befall TV. Men should never, ever be given lots of money to spend, because they'll only go and find any excuse to spend it. There's no point in pretending that I can talk about telly without mentioning Doctor Who, so here goes - Doctor Who old-stylee used to be made for fivepence, and this was one of its greatest assets. It could never afford to rely on visuals, because the visuals would never be good; it had to be creative and quirky and inventive, because the option of Loud And Boring simply wasn't there. Doctor Who when it came back kept this up, at first, because it was written by fans who remembered how the old-school stories worked. Slowly, inevitably, this has been bled from the programme. Stories like The Lazarus Experiment or The Unicorn and the Wasp would never have been made in 1978, and before you ask, that was a fucking good thing.
Nowadays, television can be made better than we could ever have dreamed of. Programmes look impossibly, wonderfully seductive. Brothers and Sisters is lit so well that every scene looks like a Renaissance painting. Mad Men is so artfully shot, and the period glamour so well-realised, that hardly anyone notices that fuck-all ever happens in it. CSI gets a following just by showing lots of things in carefully-tracked slow-motion, in spite of it being obvious cack. With some honourable exceptions (I will not talk about The Wire I will not talk about The Wire I will not talk about The Wire) television has never been so slick, so perfect, and so completely empty. Television has reached a point where it has to look cool, so much so that the title sequence of Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle can seen bizarrely shocking, just because it looks unapologetically silly.
I have, somehow, managed to get through ten episodes of Mad Men. It's seductive because it's beautifully shot. You'll get gorgeously-composed shots, perfect blocking, wonderfully perfect cast, and art direction to beat the band. What you won't get is any insight, or wit, or drama of any description. And when they try to go all writer-y and artsy on us, they produce utter crap like this:-
I mean, seriously. Are you fucking kidding me?
This Sunday in The Observer, Katherine Flett rhapsodised about Mad Men (yes, again), and referred to the three main women suffering their own form of pre-feminist breakdown. This was smack-bang next to a piece on Michelle Obama, musing on how she's replaced Carla Bruni as the new political doyenne of choice. The fact that both these women are treated as glorified clothes-horses, while Flett looks upon a sexist environment as a quaintly historic curiosity, would be clinically depressing if not for the irony value.
The dull grind of look-at-the-size-of-my-cock is too well-established for womankind to stop it. Our only hope lies in recession. Because, with a few budget cuts, television might actually start looking like this again.
...c'mon, you know you love it.
The 1980s; when old blokes could like children, and not be paedos.
And I don't give a fuck what anyone says, he's a monkey.
* I'd like to be commended formally for my refusal to say "Because women are shit at everything", which was enormously tempting, but I felt might alienate some readers early on.
** I want to keep this piece at least moderately short, and anyway, 24 has just come on the telly. 5 minutes of 24 more than proves my point.
*** Except that Sarah Jessica Parker isn't a woman. She's a semi-sentient hatstand, with a shaven horse's head stuck on top.
**** Written by a man who actually think he's a proper writer, too. At least if a teenage boy had written it, someone would flop 'em out at some point. What's the point of watching something inherently sexist if it's not even going to have the good grace to be pornographic?
***** Sometimes, these judgements can be written off as nostalgia. At other times, it's just observation. Make your own mind up. But watch an episode of Brothers and Sisters first.
Occasionally, a rash of articles will appear in the Guardian about how there aren't enough women working at the highest level of film / television / drama / insert demographically-perfect left-of-centre field here. It's true, of course, although it's a highly blinkered thing to complain about - there aren't that many women at the highest level of anything much, and the reasons are usually the same*. Most institutions or professions have been dominated by a dull, stinking masculinity for decades, like a passing spirit that burps, farts, pisses in the corner when too drunk to find the toilet, and scratches its bollocks while watching reruns of The Sweeney. Maleness is the world's most banal poltergeist.
Usually, this is called institutionalised sexism, although the term has never been properly explored. It isn't - for the most part - due to any prejudice on the part of the actual people involved, and nor does it mean an overt bias in the systems themselves. It's simply a boring question of evolution; these institutions formed around men and male behaviour, and so their conventions are linked to a particular type of male mentality. Television fetishises traits like boorishness, loudness, opinionated braying and a semi-OCD disposition - how else do you explain the existence of Jeremy Clarkson? - and while it's obviously a bit simplistic to classify these as exclusively male traits, I'm going to do it anyway**. Most of the obnoxious, reactionary, oafish fucktards I meet tend to be men, and that's as scientific as I want to get. Plus I just hate men in general.
The result is that getting more women involved will not, in itself, solve any sort of problem. These women will be as forced to conform with the conventions of the institution as much as everyone else - indeed, most of them are already attuned to the male mentality. Sex and the City was made for women (and by women, if you count Sarah Jessica Parker being an executive producer***), but it still managed to be a thumpingly misogynistic tract that implied that all girls desire men and handbags; Samantha Who is written by Cecilia Ahern, who's technically a woman, and it implies that turning Christina Applegate into a submissive, sentimental dullard is a good thing; and Katherine fucking Flett has tried to claim that Mad Men is about women, even though all the female characters are so resoundingly one-note that only a man could have written them****.
So; television (say) is irredeemably, moronically male; the stench is so strong that it transmogrifies any woman, like those yokes that turned people into gas-mask zombies in Doctor Who; our only remaining hope, gay men, have all been tarnished and discredited by the existence of Alan Carr. This has all been true for over fifty years. And yet, so much television is so much worse than it used to be*****. Why?
Well, television has money now. This is one of the biggest disasters ever to befall TV. Men should never, ever be given lots of money to spend, because they'll only go and find any excuse to spend it. There's no point in pretending that I can talk about telly without mentioning Doctor Who, so here goes - Doctor Who old-stylee used to be made for fivepence, and this was one of its greatest assets. It could never afford to rely on visuals, because the visuals would never be good; it had to be creative and quirky and inventive, because the option of Loud And Boring simply wasn't there. Doctor Who when it came back kept this up, at first, because it was written by fans who remembered how the old-school stories worked. Slowly, inevitably, this has been bled from the programme. Stories like The Lazarus Experiment or The Unicorn and the Wasp would never have been made in 1978, and before you ask, that was a fucking good thing.
Nowadays, television can be made better than we could ever have dreamed of. Programmes look impossibly, wonderfully seductive. Brothers and Sisters is lit so well that every scene looks like a Renaissance painting. Mad Men is so artfully shot, and the period glamour so well-realised, that hardly anyone notices that fuck-all ever happens in it. CSI gets a following just by showing lots of things in carefully-tracked slow-motion, in spite of it being obvious cack. With some honourable exceptions (I will not talk about The Wire I will not talk about The Wire I will not talk about The Wire) television has never been so slick, so perfect, and so completely empty. Television has reached a point where it has to look cool, so much so that the title sequence of Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle can seen bizarrely shocking, just because it looks unapologetically silly.
I have, somehow, managed to get through ten episodes of Mad Men. It's seductive because it's beautifully shot. You'll get gorgeously-composed shots, perfect blocking, wonderfully perfect cast, and art direction to beat the band. What you won't get is any insight, or wit, or drama of any description. And when they try to go all writer-y and artsy on us, they produce utter crap like this:-
I mean, seriously. Are you fucking kidding me?
This Sunday in The Observer, Katherine Flett rhapsodised about Mad Men (yes, again), and referred to the three main women suffering their own form of pre-feminist breakdown. This was smack-bang next to a piece on Michelle Obama, musing on how she's replaced Carla Bruni as the new political doyenne of choice. The fact that both these women are treated as glorified clothes-horses, while Flett looks upon a sexist environment as a quaintly historic curiosity, would be clinically depressing if not for the irony value.
The dull grind of look-at-the-size-of-my-cock is too well-established for womankind to stop it. Our only hope lies in recession. Because, with a few budget cuts, television might actually start looking like this again.
...c'mon, you know you love it.
The 1980s; when old blokes could like children, and not be paedos.
And I don't give a fuck what anyone says, he's a monkey.
* I'd like to be commended formally for my refusal to say "Because women are shit at everything", which was enormously tempting, but I felt might alienate some readers early on.
** I want to keep this piece at least moderately short, and anyway, 24 has just come on the telly. 5 minutes of 24 more than proves my point.
*** Except that Sarah Jessica Parker isn't a woman. She's a semi-sentient hatstand, with a shaven horse's head stuck on top.
**** Written by a man who actually think he's a proper writer, too. At least if a teenage boy had written it, someone would flop 'em out at some point. What's the point of watching something inherently sexist if it's not even going to have the good grace to be pornographic?
***** Sometimes, these judgements can be written off as nostalgia. At other times, it's just observation. Make your own mind up. But watch an episode of Brothers and Sisters first.
Labels: Females, Mad Men, Males, The Slowly Rotting Corpse Of Our Culture
posted by Nyder O'Leary at
22:39
7 Comments:
Yay! Good this week.
When the phone goes in the background in the Madmen clip I thought 'Ooh, I wonder who that can be...c'mon camera, let's go!...get me out of here!'
And let me formally commend you on your elegant restraint, cos I dont think anyone else reads this...
Yeah, good except now I can't shake a mental image of shaving a horse's face - eek - no thanks for that....
I really enjoyed this piece, and agreed with much of it. But I do think that Mad Men has some considerable virtues; the lack of "anything happening", for instance, is arguably an unusual refusal to have obvious (cliched) dramatic scenarios; the real drama occurs entirely in the way characters relate, or fail to relate, to each other, the power-plays and negotiations of everything, at every level: and the tensions and embarrassments of this thrill through otherwise ordinary lines. That is, there's a great deal of emotional and psychological subtext beneath the dialogue, sometimes in a sustained and remarkable fashion: and I rather like that subtlety, given that most TV whacks me on the head, violently forces open my mouth, and shits in it.
I like your argument Robert, but I don't think it describes the clip (which is all I've seen of the show). I thought it was vapid, pretentious and full of visual and dramatic cliches - like the firearm introduced in act I that has to be fired by Act III - and the way the camera lands like a fly on the plate of danishes just as our character gets peckish.
Don't get me wrong, I love slow telly - just not this!
Is the rest of the show as theatrical as this? I mean, is it telly as hyper-theatre with the dialog and the minimal sets and so on?
To be fair, Robert, Mad Men isn't entirely without merit. The fact that it's unapologetically slow is a good thing, for example; telly always thinks it has to be quick-quick-quick, but this gets an audience BECAUSE of its slow pace. Thing is, although an awful lot of it screams "look at the subtext!", I actually don't find the subtext particularly insightful or interesting - a lot of it is using the office as a metaphor for power-plays in a wider society, but I'm not sure that office politics tell you much beyond the obvious.
Yer man Pete is a good character, unevenly played; Don Draper well-acted, but actually kind of dull; and the women are caricatures who happen to speak quietly. If you look at it as a soap opera with good production values it's oddly diverting, but speaking of it as The Best Thing on Television... I don't think it's in that league.
"Is the rest of the show as theatrical as this? I mean, is it telly as hyper-theatre with the dialog and the minimal sets and so on?" - Hyper-theatre - ooh I like that.
To be fair, the clip I picked is a very extreme example of how it can look, but yes - it's extremely stagey. I think it sees itself, actually, of following in the tradition of 60s U.S. melodrama (Peyton Place and what have you), which was rather stagey anyway (as indeed was most telly back then). As styles go it's oddly compelling - there just isn't much substance to back it up.
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