Okay, before I tell you how Desperate Housewives re-runs saved a mother and daughter let's trot out and then dispense with the usual canards and clichés about popular culture:
Popular culture is insidious and vile. It is fast-food for the soul, the Taco Bell of the psyche. Hollywood and television have figured out how to stimulate and feed without nourishment. - just the right amount of salt and soy sauce in the chicken, just the right high and low notes of taste and before we know it, we have consumed two buckets' worth and it is rotting our stomachs.
Of course, the reality is that popular culture, movies, films are mass-produced, but our computer terminals and television sets are not just passive outlets for junk food media. They are a nexus of negotiation. We are the ones who use these devices to select, pick and choose what to watch.
The following is a story of how popular, crass and vulgar media saved a mother and her daughter. This mother and daughter duo: Linda and Cheryl have been at loggerheads since the beginning of time. They bicker and quibble as many mother-daughters do, but there is almost a titanic quality to their fights. Each is the spiritual if not mortal enemy of the other.
The mother, Linda, is a woman best described as a secular ascetic. She is a devout worshiper at the altar of NPR. They have never had a television in their house. She listens to the radio (Morning Edition) and reads the New York Review of Books every night with a fervor that would make a priest proud. She eats only "healthy" food and reads books suitable for the high church of New York moral intellegentsia. Though intellectually liberal (in favor of gay rights, pro-choice, anti-war) Linda, divorced more than 10 years, is cut off from her id and all desires unspeakable.
Her daughter Cheryl on the other hand, is a hothouse of desire. A modern day Jodie Foster if not Amy Fisher, the Lolita of the Upper West Side - you can imagine, the short skirts, the leggings, the makeup laid on thick on her tender young lips.
If it weren't so painfully obvious, you would rush to say that Cheryl is a reflection of her own darker self - the hungry self that knows no bounds: hungry for food, for sex, for attention - those horrible things that the mother finds unacceptable in herself and others.
From earliest times, the daughter's simple life drive for sugary food was thwarted ruthlessly by her mother under the banner of "good health" As she got older, she wanted to wear "hot clothes" and her mother forbade her. "These clothes are not proper," mother would say. Her taste in makeup, clothes, men all "disgusted" her mother. She saw Cheryl's desires as something that needs to be "corrected." By the time the daughter was 14, she was failing in school and pretty much on strike. There was barely a civil word and certainly no chores or any kind of cooperation.
That was until the father came along and suggested that the two of them watch Desperate Housewives. Every night for 4 months mother and daughter watched this vile show which should be awarded the national prize for narcissism. What's best is that in the show there really are no men except as props and prizes for women desperate to establish some kind of dominance over each other.
Mother and daughter settle in each night, cozying up in bed around the laptop and watch this miserable show. Eva Longoria, so laughably manipulative and the clueless Terri Hatcher (with a sweet teenage daughter many years older than her mother) give them a lot to talk about. Gabrielle has aged, since season 2 she changed her color and looks so ugly. Or in the insight category mother says Bree is me! If that isn't enough there's a macguffin-like murder churning the waters every season and an orgasm-less, sexually controlling, Bree makes for the perfect straw, straight man to talk about the fine points of sex.
For the first time mother and daughter are not at each other's throats. How come watching this show has brought peace? Mother says that despite all of her of intellectual accomplishments (she's a professor of history) she feels desperate and is drawn to the characters. Cheryl, on the other hand, draws gleeful satisfaction in seeing full-fledged adults and mothers fail so thoroughly. The show, like life, despite its high gloss is saturated with spectacular failure. Teenagers love to see adults fail. There are probably more reasons, but somehow, the cartoonish yet artful quality of Desperate Housewives seems to bring out the best in both of them.
Maybe father really does know best.
