We're gonna have a tv party tonight: Part 1
To date I have dropped out of preschool, high school, college, and grad school. I used to have more of a chip on my shoulder about this. When I was around the traditional college age and still living in Austin (I’m a little embarrassed to admit this), I would go to parties with my ex and find myself making up stories about attending UT—not because I truly wanted to deceive anyone, but because I didn’t want people to reject me out of hand for being untutored or an outsider.
This has had various consequences for my writing, but one of them is that I can’t remember writing much about TV, although, like most USians of my generation, I have watched (and continue to watch) an awful lot of it! In a way, I feel like I am on the other side of someone like Jack Halberstam, who can go on about Chicken Run without any danger to their academic authority. I’m not an academic, so I must out-serious the academics is how my thinking has often gone, albeit never on a fully conscious level. There’s a trans aspect to this gravity, too: Cameron Awkward-Rich, in a forthcoming monograph whose premises have gotten stuck in my head like a song, critiques the repudiation of mental illness in the founding documents of Trans Studies, which are also a part of my intellectual inheritance.
The result of this has been the construction of a persona: the purely literary self, neither trivial nor mad (though I am absolutely both). Although it has been curtailed by the pandemic, this has been a part of myself as a performer, too. I have availed myself of the ephemerality of performance to insert humor into the interstitial spaces between (serious) poems. This sounds too deliberate: rather, banter is a surplus, a remainder, a pleasurably improvisatory excess that spills out of me. It’s also a source of regret: I’ve never managed to translate this humor onto the page.
Despite this inner resistance, to do something frequently, habitually, is to become at least an armchair theorist of it (doubly an armchair theorist, since the absorptive quality of TV is predicated on comfortable detachment from the body). And at certain moments, I have reached for TV in order to understand or articulate something, like this piece built around Buffy, published last year but written very early in my transition (sorry mama, we’re cool now!).
Clearly, I’m compelled to reach for TV right now. My friend Paula turned me onto the show Legends of Tomorrow, a show in the DC universe, about a group of people with a timeship—fighting villains and fixing the timeline (or trying not to screw it up themselves). The first season is dreadful and the whole thing is a little silly, but it has a lot of heart.
And thinking about Legends of Tomorrow prompts me to ponder what I like in a show. One value is memory: I think a lot about the past, both my own and the historical (and mythological) past, so time travel appeals. Another, and I do feel a little ashamed writing it, is melodrama. Formulaic stories about the loves and losses of characters that generally speaking fit into established archetypes do something for me. Magic and the occult are also an important part of my personal and poetic practice. Writing is lovely, but I actually feel best suited for a career as a custodian of magical artefacts, and stories seem like the best outlet for this. I’m attracted, as I think many people are, by a romanticized resistance of underdogs, outsiders, revolutionaries. I like a show with a ragtag band of misfits; the small group of friends as the matrix for both individual growth and the resolution of collective issues (or the accomplishment of collective projects).
As I assign myself the task of writing about TV, I think first about how TV deeply satisfies my desire for the conventions of narrative. As I watch certain narrative conventions being met (or subverted in fulfillment of still other conventions), I experience a kind of catharsis. Which makes sense, because one of the most popular texts for aspiring screenwriters has been Aristotle’s Poetics.
Still, I wonder how different things would be if Hollywood in general became adherents of Bertolt Brecht’s idea of non-Aristotelian dramaturgy—an epic theatre whose goal is incitement to action rather than the psychological release of catharsis (which Brecht thought of as pabulum). Or even—and this is my own modification—what if TV offered an incitement to true dreaming: open-ended and unabashedly surreal, which I think of as entangled with our capacity to act (if you’ve been following my deal for a while, you’ll notice that this is a recurring theme!).
This is all a preamble to a series of posts about TV, spurred by my friend Paula’s invitation to write about Legends of Tomorrow, which will be about that show, but will also touch on humor, so-called high and low culture, friendship, queerness, and ongoing conversations about the relationship of aesthetics and politics. I will probably also bring in other shows like Buffy, Lost Girl, Community, The Librarians, Warehouse 13, and Firefly.
PS Some of the linked books go to my Bookshop.org storefront, and I get a percentage if you buy from there, but don’t forget about the library! I anticipate meeting you in the future where we don’t have to monetize everything to keep body and soul together!