John Waters' Hairspray

Noel Murray of The Dissolve reviews John Waters' Hairspray via its new home video release:

While it’s corny by design, Hairspray also aims to get at something truthful, about the various kinds of prejudice weighing down the city circa 1963, and how youthful optimism and music made a difference, if only in the lives of those kids craving some kind of diverse, progressive community.

If I'm not mistaken, Murray is close to my age (near 40), so I expect the normal Gen-X level of irony, all the more so when discussing Waters.

This interpretation is colored with the Millennial think-happy-thoughts vision that made the recent musical reboot far removed from the original.

Waters shares with Morrissey a perspective of being empathetic without being sympathetic. They understand their characters' desires and actions but don't necessarily agree with them, all the while generally liking them. I'm having a hard time thinking of straight artists that did the same but the point-of-view doesn't seem inherently gay, even though it's a major element of camp.

It seems to me that Hairspray is a continuation of this attitude. Pink Flamingos was about the triumphs of an insane-but-principled woman aspiring to be the Filthiest Person Alive; Hairspray is about the triumphs of a silly little fat girl in the mid-60s.

In the film, Tracy usurps the snobby rival who is the most popular girl in Baltimore. She snags the city's most eligible young bachelor. She earns the respect of her parents. She becomes a style-setter and she changes the world for the better. And she does it by dancing and being her wonderful self.

Waters likes Tracy and, like a fairy godmother, waves a wand to make all her dreams come true. But he hints at his feelings for how valuable her goals are. Tracy's rise as Baltimore's princess for the masses is shown by making her the spokesmodel for a ladies big-and-fat store. When she introduces Baltimore to her new dance, she's wearing a dress patterned with cockroaches. When she visits the record store where black teens dance, everyone is grinding against one another in an overtly sexual manner. What Tracy thinks are the greatest things in the world are at best pointless and usually grubby.

That's what makes Waters' work so much fun to watch. He's saying, "Isn't this girl cute? She's so sweet and doesn't even care that she's fat. Oh, look, she's got a boyfriend now--he's gorgeous! Look how happy she is!"

Contrast Waters' attitude with that of Todd Solondz. In Welcome to the Dollhouse, he focuses on a girl only a bit younger than Tracy. Maybe Solondz doesn't actively dislike Dawn but he definitely has no illusions as to who she is. His story shows bluntly what happens to girls like that. He doesn't make her dreams come true--in fact, he dashes them, as when her hated sister was kidnapped, only to be treated like a princess during and after the abduction. Solondz takes a loser and shows just how badly she loses. Waters takes a loser and makes her queen for a day.

Law & Order: SVU in Resurgence?

The AV Club announces that L&O: SVU is TV's most improved crime drama:

But more often than not, the SVU of today is a markedly different show than it once was, which would be a given for most scripted dramas to produce over 300 hours of television, but is a profound compliment for a spin-off of a show that prided itself on its slavish devotion to a meticulous formula. SVU’s willingness to evolve is what left it standing among the rubble of the once-impregnable L&O franchise.

Or maybe the longevity is because SVU has always been the most prurient of the L&O franchises.

The original L&O was a long-time TV staple for me and, for a time, I was a devotee of all the spin-offs. Criminal Intent's first few seasons were the best of the franchise. SVU was the show that I got into last and got tired of first.

As usual, I was in the minority and probably for the very reasons that writer Joshua Alston finds exciting in the new era of SVU. He enjoys the serialization of the stories and the increased attention to the lives of its characters.

My slowness in appreciating SVU and the subsequent loss of that appreciation came from the show's insistence that every case had to be someone's Worst Case Ever. I didn't like having to watch the actors grimace and ask each other, "What's going on with you?"-- I wanted to see the case play out.

That was the original's strength. Thankfully, every story wasn't jerry-rigged with a "shocking twist," but you knew that the case would take at least a couple of turns before the verdict came in. By splitting the focus between investigation and prosecution, the writers had more moving parts to play with, which I think was the secret to its extended freshness.

Certainly something had to change in the SVU formula. I've been catching up with the series thanks to constant marathons on USA and the most recent seasons have been just terrible. I like to think that I can see disgust on Christopher Meloni's face in his last seasons; procedural dramas are notoriously boring for actors and Meloni has enough respect in the industry to do a lot more interesting work. When the work went from dull to dull and stupid, it's time to renegotiate one's salary.

But I'm curious about Alston's automatic assumption that "serialization=better." I suppose I can chalk it up to The AV Club's new, young staff--they simply believe that each season of a show should be a an extended film.

They're not in the minority, at least among the chattering classes. I think, like everything else in America, there's a polarization within the mass audience that wasn't nearly so pronounced as it is now. The youngsters writing online these days think that entertainment is life, that the advances to the televisual arts supplied by Mad Men and Breaking Bad are monumental.

Well, I'm a grown man with a job and a family and a million interests. When the television is on, I'm not interested in dropping everything else in my life and sitting with rapt attention, lest I miss a knowing look or a subtle clue. The cult of serialization is not for me.

It's not for the general public, either:  take a look at the top shows of the 2012-2013 season. Of those, I only recognize two, The Walking Dead and The Following, as serialized dramas. The rest non-reality shows are episodic.

I think we'll see a return to episodic television among the chatterers eventually. That's where the money is and money draws talent.

Television has the ability to tell long, multi-hour stories but that's not its strength. The television, in case you haven't noticed, is a piece of furniture, even with a Chromecast attached.

The Music Documentary Returns to the Mean

Jason Heller at The AV Club examines the music documentary through the lens of Searching for Sugarman:

[T]he documentary’s subject: Detroit native Sixto Rodriguez, better known as simply Rodriguez, a singer-songwriter who recorded two obscure albums in the early ’70s before effectively disappearing from the music scene.
---
[T]he gist of Searching For Sugar Man is how the forgotten Rodriguez experienced a huge revival—unbeknown to Rodriguez himself—in, of all places, South Africa.

Heller's argument is against the trend of music documentaries over-lionizing their subjects. In this case, the talking heads describe Rodriguez as being on par with Dylan.

The next Dylan: It’s a whopping claim that’s been made so many times about so many singer-songwriters, it’s become a cliché.

One would hope that by we as a culture would be tired of searching for a novelty that changes everything. For one, it's not realistic. For another, it causes a lot of ballyhoo that inevitably disappoints.

Take this year's most-hyped rediscovery, featured in A Band Called Death:

But the narrative that resulted from the film was that Death invented punk, which is as overreaching a claim as saying Rodriguez was second only to Dylan. Proto-punk, as it became retroactively known, was embodied by many bands that formed slightly before, or at roughly the same time, as The Ramones in the early ’70s. That fact doesn’t make Death less interesting—it makes the band more so, part of a proto-punk continuum rather than lone outliers. 

I got wind of the band a couple of years ago. I now assume that this was a bit of underground advance publicity, leaking a digital copy of their album to the grey-market mp3 blogs. I wasn't especially impressed. Heller sums it up nicely; if you like that sort of thing, Death is the sort of thing you'd like.

The larger issue is that the media documentary in general is in decline after a great run. It's mainly because of this tendency to present their subjects as the greatest whatever you've never heard of. The reason these subjects are obscure is because--can you figure it out?--they deserve to be obscure.

That's not to say that they're bad but that they don't fit into mainstream tastes. The greats of music are fascinating because their progressions could be said to dictate changes in the mainstream. Dylan going electric or The Beatles becoming a studio band, for example. But this kind of narrative isn't appropriate for an also-ran whose work wasn't appreciated when it came out.

Heller highlights an older documentary that got it right, the Klaus Nomi doc The Nomi Song. I found it enjoyable because it places Nomi in his context as a part of the New York New Wave scene that broke out, however briefly.

New Wave was driven less by philosophy, like hippie or punk culture, and more by the thought, "Hey, we're a new generation. We should be doing something different!" Nomi was a male soprano and had a fey and alien look and presence that was heightened by his foreignness. He was presented in manner that emphasized his strangeness and had some success on the pop charts.

The Nomi Song does it right. There's no reason to pretend that Nomi changed music forever or that he's a neglected genius. He had unique body of work and sprung from a unique movement. The best music documentaries give us an understanding of the artist, his goals, influences and life. This lifts them out of footnote status and gives potential new fans a way to think about them.

One of my favorite artists is Scott Walker but I wouldn't have pursued his work if I hadn't seen Scott Walker: 30 Century Man. He's the perfect subject for a rediscovery-style music documentary because his work and career went through so many changes that it's difficult to find an entry point for newcomers. In the same respect, Who Is Harry Nilsson (And Why Is Everybody Talkin' About Him?) is good as well.

The problem with this kind of hyperbolic filmmaking, ironically, is that it overshadows the best qualities that obscure artists truly possess. While these artists sometimes live tragic lives, their obscurity isn’t a tragedy in and of itself. They’re usually obscure for a reason: They didn’t make music that was palatable to people at the time, or they weren’t able to devote the relentless energy it takes to become famous, or they simply did what millions of musicians do every day: create music for the love of it. By elevating them to the dubious status of noble losers, this new wave of documentaries perpetuates an empty myth that doesn’t do them justice.