I believe that, sometimes, in order to understand and appreciate something, you need to see its opposite.
I live in a city in Massachusetts called Worcester. It is the second largest city in New England, eclipsed by it's much more successful older sister, Boston. It is generally not known to people outside of the Commonwealth. In Massachusetts, it is not well regarded. It is seen by most as a stink infested pit, choked with drug addiction and economic depression and best to be avoided.
Worcester is one of the things in this world I love more than anything else.
For a very long time, it was difficult for me to articulate why. True, some of the common criticisms about Worcester are inaccurate (people often think of Worcester as having little to no activity, when it in fact has a thriving nightlife and arts scene), but many more of them are completely on point (there really is quite a lot of black tar heroin). Still, when friends or colleagues would insult my hometown, I would get defensive. I simply knew that there was something about Worcester that was special, and which was important to me, and anyone who thought otherwise simply didn't get it, man, even though I could barely wrap my head around what exactly "it" was.
And then, a year or three ago, I started spending a not small amount of time in a town 50-odd miles to the west of Worcester called Northampton.
Northampton is a small town, tucked away in the woods of Western Massachusetts. It has a low crime rate, a high standard of living, and it is famous for its many charming storefronts and lively music venues.
I hate Northampton. I hate it so much.
I hate Northampton because it is fundamentally insincere. The majority of people you see walking along Main Street are not Northampton residents, but people from other towns or students from the local colleges who've come to take in some shopping. The "charming" (and grossly overpriced) shops are a calculated venture to further the economic goals of their cold and distant capitalist masters. Northampton center is designed to appeal to out-of-towners and college kids with more money than sense, not to provide a place of coming together and community for its permanent residents, most of whom are wealthy and overwhelmingly white. Northampton is a ringing endorsement of gentrification. Northampton is not a town, but a strip mall designed by Marie Antoinette that is merely posing as a town. Northampton is a falsehood, and it makes my skin crawl.
And it was in experiencing the New England cultural Mordor that is Northampton that, after so many years, the reason for my unending love for Worcester became clear to me.
I love Worcester because it is real.
The people you see on the streets of Worcester live in Worcester. They work here, and they struggle to build lives for themselves here. They're diverse, having come here from a hundred different cultures and countries and speaking several dozen different languages. We have a living local culture, full of its own quirks, traditions, famous faces, and municipal folklore. For a city of its size, it's surprisingly small, with hundreds of noteworthy figures weaving their way in and out of our various communities, binding the city together. Our artistic and cultural scene comes from the city itself, from a community of artists who've made Worcester their home and who work their craft in the face of hardship. We have more than our share of troubles, but we also have community organizers, labor organizers, co-ops, and activist groups that dedicate their time to solving those troubles without simply expelling those people who are most vulnerable to them.
By looking at a town that was in every way the photo-negative of the city I love so dearly, all of the beautiful details that I took for granted suddenly became obvious to me. Through this experience, I have come to see enormous value in attempting to learn more about something by observing its opposite.
And so, I seek to observe the 1998-2006 television series "Charmed," for it is in every way the opposite of what it is to be a human being who lives in this world.
Charmed was created by Constance M. Burge, from what I can tell an at the time relatively inexperienced writer, who seemed to have a genuine interest in telling a story about the strained relationship between three sisters who were navigating the struggles of urban living and genre show magical adventures.
The show's executive producer was Aaron Spelling, an unrepentant studio hack who elevated the act of gutting an art form in order to maximize profits into its own kind of art form, and who's primary goal for the series was to ride the coat tails of the very popular "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" and to make dubiously ethical amounts of money.
It was a show created by a woman, about women, and ostensibly for women, but shepherded under the watchful eye of obscenely powerful, morally bankrupt, and artistically tone deaf men, resulting in what can only be described in the words of Richard Ayoade and Matthew Holness as "a sick, twisted parody of womanhood," more in line with a very male (and very Hollywood) perception of the life and mind of a modern woman than any meaningful reality.
Generated by the slick and finely tuned industrial apparatus of Spelling Television, the scripts for Charmed were expertly calibrated to capitalize on viewing trends and data mined from focus groups, propped up by a framework of perfectly timed and emotionally hollow dramatic beats and resulting in an internal emotional reality that resembles the truth of the human experience in much the same way that Azathoth resembles the Christian notion of a loving and personal deity.
It started off as a bad show, made with bad intentions, and possessing a bad understanding of what it is to be a person, and through some profane miracle it actually got worse and further distant from any identifiable human feeling with each passing season.
I believe it has a lot to teach us.
If you will, join me as I satisfy my obsession with this nearly forgotten late-nineties-to-mid-aughties genre show and work my way through it, episode by episode. In exploring this series, I hope to gain a deeper understanding of and appreciation for those things which are its opposites. Not only other television shows (there's plenty to say about Charmed in comparison to its peers in the genre, including and especially the works of Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy Productions), but also the daily experience of being people, alive in this world. This journey will be long, painful, and absurd, but I have faith that we will come out the other side, wiser for our efforts.
Blessed Be
- Rev. H.B. Snood
No comments:
Post a Comment