EPISODE 438: SHOW ME WONDERS
POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
British writer Kieron Gillen, in his newsletter on writing, Britpop, RPGs and reality, writes this week:
I’ve thought the last few years have increasingly felt like walking into a boardgame six hours in, and players have been reduced to trying increasingly baroque edge-case interpretations of the rules, and we’re just standing, watching, confused, and hoping the rules lawyers in the room can work out who’s actually cheating.
I very much resonate with the idea that reality of late has been like walking into the middle of something. Like maybe a buzzsaw, for instance, or a shouting match amidst a classroom of grade schoolers which turns out to be about which one of their classmates to hurl rocks at. And the teachers are like, “I mean, we don’t agree with this, but this is an institution of learning, so I guess let’s hear them all out *shrug*?”
Between the Supreme Court decision in the U.K. – I still don’t fully understand what prorogation is, but I think it has something to do with Boris Johnson’s hair? — and our own Impeachment Cell Block Tango (*putin Ukraine squish ugh ugh*) last week did seem like a moment in which Stuff Happened.
Also a week in which Succession suddenly went from guilty pleasure to weirdly relevant.
It does pretty much seem like Tom and Cousin Greg are running the country, not that that’s really news, I guess? But still.
A tweet I’m embarrassed to be so proud of that I needed to post it here:
THE POP CULTURE THING I WANT FOR YOU THIS WEEK: ER TV NURSES
ER debuted 25 years ago last week, if you can believe that. (Suffice to say I’m furious to realize I was already a Jesuit when the show began.)
In honor of the anniversary, Vulture’s Always Worth Reading Kathryn VanArendonk wrote about one of the show’s greatest attributes: the fact it was not just about the doctors but the nurses.
ER always treated its nurses as people, with desires and tragedies totally separate from whatever was happening in the lives of the supposedly godlike residents. It was not just good storytelling. It was a radical way of rethinking who matters most in a hospital, and what stories are worth telling.
ER is not the only show to have had looked beyond the doctors for stories; in fact more than ten years before ER began St. Elsewhere was already featuring stories of nurses and orderlies, thank you very much. (VanArendonk gives St. Elsewhere just a nod, which is too bad. So much of what made ER and also Grey’s Anatomy great – large ensembles, multiple ongoing storylines, a mixture of drama and comedy, and an eye toward examining and challenging society’s standards – began in a poor Boston hospital that ended up being just the highly detailed snow globe fantasy of an autistic child.)
(I also give all the love to the NBC hospital-comedy Scrubs, which had in its main cast nurses Gloria and Laverne, a singing lawyer and J.D.’s nemesis The Janitor. And it was just a fantastic show.)
But ER did it best. It had a lot of nurses, and also desk clerks, with distinct personalities and storylines of their own. Any one of them could suddenly be the character that saved a moment, dropped some truth or took the spotlight. Desk clerk Jerry gets shot saving a kid and later becomes a Universal Life Church minister. Chuny and Mark Greene have a relationship. (And they were great together.) Lydia gets married.
As much as I loved the main cast of ER, I think part of what kept me coming back over the long term was that constant possibility of getting a greater glimpse into the lives of a Haleh, Conni or Yoshi.
So many doctor shows have background characters that you wonder about. (See: Bokhee on Grey’s Anatomy.) ER took that curiosity and ran with it. Everyone you saw on camera had a life with just as much color and drama. Everybody was somebody. And on some level isn’t that what we all look to television wanting to hear?
Crazy but True: In real life Grey’s Nurse Bokhee is an open heart surgery scrub nurse. SOMEONE LET ME WRITE AN EPISODE ABOUT HER PLEASE.
Somehow last week was a combination of both JESUS GOD THESE DAYS ARE BUSY and Oh Look, I had this whole day to myself. Some of it was a matter of me chasing interviews with Important People who were not getting back to me or who decided sure, let’s interview, but at no specific time. “Call me Whenever” is usually just another way of saying, Hey, how about I call you while you’re eating dinner for once with your community. It is not the droids that I am looking for.
I did end up getting a mind blowing interview with an exorcist – his takeaway on exorcism films was that THEY ARE NOT SCARY ENOUGH (as soon as the interview was over I literally turned on all my lights, crawled into bed and hid under the blankets), and another with my mother about the time when she saw The Exorcist and then forbade my brother and I to ever make scary voices with such conviction that I recently realized even now just the idea of doing that voice actually frightens me.
(Did I mention I’m writing a piece about the making of The Exorcist? Yeah, it’s been fun and not at all kept me from sleeping through the night.)
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
People read fantasy to see the colours again. We live our lives and I think there’s something in us that yearns for something more, more intense experiences. There are men and women out there who live their lives seeking those intense experiences, who go to the bottom of the sea and climb the highest mountains or get shot into space. Only a few people are privileged to live those experiences but I think all of us want to, somewhere in our heart of hearts we don’t want to live the lives of quiet desperation Thoreau spoke about, and fantasy allows us to do those things. Fantasy takes us to amazing places and shows us wonders, and that fulfils a need in the human heart.
— George R. R. Martin
LOOK
The opening of Succession that we need:
This x1000:
CLICK
The Navy admits UFOs are real and it’s all because of Blink-182.
Frozen flowers like gossamer webbed memories of your grandparents’ wedding.
On kissing as a (really messed up) form of greeting in the workplace aka NO:
LISTEN
Say what you will about the Beach Boys, for me there’s no song that better captures the feeling of driving through Southern California than the chorus of Ventura Highway.
Little Bits of Me Elsewhere:
Today I saw a young father sitting on the beach with his son in his lap. He held a string attached to a rainbow colored kite with a long tail. It hovered just in front of the two of them, almost alive with curiosity.
It was like the father was giving his son his first lesson in the magic that lies hidden just under the surface of things. I walked away suddenly aware of the eddies of wind all around us.
Life is crazy, but walks and sunshine and leaves and a good book and sometimes even just a couple slow deep breaths are all still pretty wonderful and really who’s not to say kites are not actually magical creatures?
Take time to savor. See you next week.