Good morning!
Welcome to Issue 47.1 of Digestable, your thrice-weekly mouthful of real things happening in the world, minus alarmist pandemic news.
Today’s news, fermented:
I was going to look for a nice tidbit to share, but instead fell into a hole of how broadly and deeply I hate Bill Gates and all billionaires.
While we’re on exceptionalism, here’s a special American whale.
(via)
The Second Look
Half-baked cultural criticism from Gabriel Coleman.
So the disgraced and disgraceful 45th POTUS was impeached and subsequently acquitted a second time, something that everyone expected but still feels like a little bit of a disappointment. Whenever something like this happens I secretly hope that one of these Republican characters has a change of heart - and I always end up disappointed. I think this optimistic impulse partially comes from fictional narratives: a story isn’t interesting unless the main character has some kind of internal crisis and a change of heart - and it’s even more interesting if the villain does the same.
The sitcom Arrested Development doesn’t do this. The show has had issues over its 5 seasons. Lots of the jokes in seasons are cringeworthy edgy white guy humor, though I do appreciate how later seasons rehabilitated some of the most ill advised gags, like MRF, as better more ridiculous jokes (Mexican Romney Family). Honestly I wish they would just recut the show without Jeffrey Tambor (accused of sexual assault on the set of his other show, Transparent) as he’s easily the weakest part of the cast. All this in mind, I appreciate how Arrested Development is able to churn an endless stream of gut busting laughs while uncannily reflecting the disappointing monotonous evil of America’s pseudo-wealthy.
The Bluth family, the show’s focus, has always reflected, and even at times preempted, the lives of the Trump family. Patriarch George Sr. (Tambor), a real estate mogul whose conviction in embezzlement, money laundering, and “light treason” sets the show’s plot into motion, mirrors the will he won't he [go to jail] Donald. Lindsay (Portia DiRossi) is a shoe-in for Ivanka, Gob (Will Arnett) and Buster (Tony Hale) reflect Don Jr.’s stupid scheming and Eric’s helplessness. Though Lucille (Jessica Walter) is more conniving than I imagine Ivanka or Melania to be, and Tobias (David Cross) is just slightly gayer than Jared Kushner, the family’s pedophilic lawyer Barry Zuckerkorn (Henry Winkler) is more Giuliani than Giuliani himself.
Arrested Development focused on real estate scams four years before the 2008 crash and even preempted Trump’s biggest 2016 campaign promise, the wall between the U.S. and Mexico. The running gag of Lucille quipping “that was my idea” when someone mentions the wall came full circle when the show included a clip of Trump’s stump speech in the 5th season.
The way the show most accurately represents reality is that the evil rich selfish characters don’t change - they stay unsympathetic and terrible. The show plays with this idea in the episode S.O.B.s where audience avatar Michael asks whether the family is becoming sympathetic and relatable, saying that “that’s what people want to see…” It’s a poignant jab - the episode aired after Fox announced it would be cutting the season in half and cancel the show due to declining audience numbers; evidently terrible rich people being consistently terrible was not what people wanted to see.
Schitt’s Creek is a foil to this unsympathetic strategy. The CBC show follows a similar plot of a wealthy family’s fall from grace, though in this instance they were defrauded, it’s through no fault of their own. Over the seasons Catherine O’Hara, Dan Levy, and Annie Murphy’s whacky antisocial veneers chip away and we’re meant to fall in love with their characters as they fall in love with the tiny town where they landed (and which they still happen to own). The actors are funny and amazing of course, Digestable devotee Travis Amiel has discussed how Dan Levy’s performance as David Rose opened up new frontiers in the lexicon of queer gesture, but once these vapid wealthy characters lose their shiny unrelatable patina, I lose interest.
Schitt’s Creek’s Rose family attempts to overcome their fall by investing in small businesses and falling in love with the locals. The Rockefeller kids, in their generational removal from the extraction and exploitation of their fortune have done similar things, but it doesn’t seem like a believable plotline for the upper crust. The Bluths however, don’t try to build back better, they continue to lie, steal, and get tied with autocrats. It doesn’t make the characters likeable or relatable, but who wants to identify with a rich person?
*Hot Goss*
Back on Wednesday from the superb Latifah Azlan.