Community: A Return to Normalcy

“Custody Law and Eastern European Diplomacy,” last Thursday’s episode of Community, is an ostensibly normal episode for the series. There are very few pop culture references, no clear aesthetic parodies or gimmicks, and clearly delineated plots with little overlap. While the episode moves faster than a classic sitcom and still features the series’s typical look, it by no means shows Community performing with its signature high-concept sense of daring. In fact, the episode could easily have been shot with a standard four-camera setup and not deviated terribly from an episode of Friends. The plot is the stuff of standard sitcom conflict: Britta likes handsome new Balkan Luka until she finds out he carried out ethnic cleansings in his homeland, but doesn’t want to tell Abed and Troy about his genocidal past for fear of being called out yet again for ruining their friendships. (Incidentally, Abed and Troy’s attachment to various forms of male friendship has reached a point where it probably qualifies as a legitimate dissertation topic.) She spends most of the episode gesturing towards these facts in increasingly bizarre and indirect ways, until Troy and Abed find out about Luka’s past on their own and tell Britta that a genocidal past is a necessary bit of information in a way that Jeff’s fondness for nipple play is not. In the episode’s other primary story, Chang tries to finagle his way into becoming a legitimate parent for Shirley’s new baby even though he has proven himself to be insane. He does so in weird ways, as ever, but the plot is essentially a case of an outcast working his way into a parental role with funny antics.. On Friends, this episode would have most likely involved Monica canoodling with a new friend of Chandler and Joey, only for her to find out that he was the executive attempting to buy out Chandler’s company and fire all the employees, or something else dumb, but not tell America’s favorite zany roommates about it for fear of being called a party pooper. The other story wouldn’t have to change much, honestly: by my count, Ross fathered roughly 72 children out of wedlock on the series, and he was borderline-moronic in a manner not especially different from that of Chang. The differences between how Friends would have handled this material and how Community did so are in the specifics. The show's writers never would have allowed Chandler and Joey to make a friend who had been involved in genocide and Ross probably wouldn’t have kidnapped a random person’s children, although I think the latter point is up for debate. So, yes, this was about as normal as Community gets, as long as you define “normal” as “hewing to conventional sitcom structure.” But, at this point, an episode such as “Custody Law and Eastern European Diplomacy” is almost a more surprising turn for the series than a gimmick episode like “Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.” If forced to describe the series to a neophyte, I’d call it an attempt to make a traditional community sitcom (e.g. Cheers) as filtered through the lens of pop culture fanaticism, which is its own kind of community. “Custody Law and Eastern European Diplomacy” only accomplished that goal if we choose to view it as a parody of classic sitcom misunderstandings, except, again, it doesn’t exactly ask the audience to seriously interrogate the assumptions and structures of those kinds of shows. This expectation of parody means that Community has reached a point where it can only really meet the heights expected from its core audience by parodying a genre or format it hasn’t used before. Fans want to hear that creator Dan Harmon and Co. are prepping episodes loaded with references, and they’ll likely be pleased with this week’s upcoming Pulp Fiction-themed outing. (Harmon and the cast mentioned at last week’s PaleyFest panel in Los Angeles that they’re also working on a mock clip show and a sequel to last season’s paintball war that shifts genres midway through.) I don’t think this is a particularly major problem -- the show is at its best when it melds legitimate emotional arcs with extended riffs on action movies and conspiracy plots and bottle episodes. But it makes me worry that the shelf-life of the most innovative network show on TV is pretty limited, because eventually Harmon is going to run out of genres to parody unless he wants to use History Channel apocalypse specials or match the reality TV obsession of the South Park braintrust. This might not be the worst outcome in the world -- I’d much rather watch a show of this caliber burn out than fade away -- but it’s an issue nonetheless. Then again, perhaps Community has only leaned on the gimmicks this season because of cancellation fears. In case you missed it, NBC renewed the series for a third season last week (the tremendous Parks and Recreation was reupped, as well), and maybe the writing staff won’t feel as much of a need to swing for the fences now that they seem to be in the network’s good graces. A show doesn’t always focus on a particular style for purely creative reasons. This is a business, after all, and sometimes concern over 60 jobs trumps commitment to artistic intentions. So, if Community eventually takes a turn back towards the normal, it might not be a case of Harmon selling out. It might actually be that he wanted the show to be like that all along.

Community: Clean the Mold

Typical episodes of Community are becoming harder to distinguish from parody episodes. The recent "Intro to Political Science" frames itself as a parody episode, with three of the study group (Annie, Jeff, and Pierce) facing off against each other and five others for the office of president of the Greendale Community College student government and the chance to meet Vice President Joe Biden, but the political sphere, which the show portrays with all its cruelty, nonsensicality, and vanity intact, doubles seamlessly as the interpersonal sphere. Political maneuverings are depicted with all the absurdity that accompanies them in the real world, but are also made the substance of the conflicts and confluences among characters. The student body election, while cannily parodying the insanity that is the norm in politics, is simply another way for the members of the study group to discover the humanity that undergirds the political element. The political is at all levels personal because it can never be anything but. A nice encapsulation of this principle is offered by the pseudo-suitor Abed enjoys in this episode's secondary storyline, Special Agent Robin Vohlers, of Biden's advance detail, who though clearly infatuated with Abed, only admits to official motives for being around. Abed is pegged as a possible threat to the vice president because of his inveterate observation of others; Vohlers, even after confirming that Abed isn't a threat, sticks around to be with Abed, subjecting him to a pat-down and ransacking his dorm room for subversive and dangerous materials. Although her personal motives are consistently excluded from the explicit description of her situation in favor of an official explanation, Vohlers's motives are never anything but personal. "You smell like nice soap," she tells Abed, and then, "I need to go. I'm sorry you weren't a more obvious potential threat the the country." Personal closeness is here a function of the extent to which one can clothe oneself in the guise of the a-personal and official. Compare Vohlers's motives to Pierce's motives for entering the election period and we see the same principle at work. Pierce's entire campaign consists of smearing another candidate, Vicki, whose sole distinguishing characteristics are her yellow shirt and her choice to wear a hat. She is the Beckettian human being stripped bare, and as is his wont, Pierce works to squelch her, insulting her personally as his mode of running for office. "I'm going to crush you," he tells Vicki, during a debate among the eight candidates.

I'm going to eat your brains, Vicki. I'm going to slurp them right out of that melon you call a head. You freak people out, you know that? You look weird. Because of your overbite.

"My platform," he tells Dean Pelton, "will be one high enough to push Vicki off to her death." At this, Vicki, distraught, flees the stage. Pierce responds by declaring his withdrawal as well. "I was only here," he says, "to get back at her for not lending me a pencil." Pierce's motives for entering the political sphere are exclusively personal. Personal closeness -- in this case, Pierce's ability to come within existential striking distance of Vicki -- is here a function of Pierce's decision to enter the political sphere. The official serves as a guise for the personal. The arc of an argument between Jeff and Annie frames the episode's commentary on politics and the personal. Annie enters the race because she earnestly hopes to make Greendale a better place to be a student. Jeff enters to prove to Annie that politics is bullshit. Annie sees politics as a sphere in which people "can set aside their egos and join together to support a larger cause." For Jeff, "politics are all about ego, popularity, and parlor tricks." Annie's platform consists of plans to improve the school. "I just want to get the black mold out of the east stairwell," she says. "I just want to clean up Greendale." Jeff's platform unabashedly consists of meaningless platitudes.

My name is Jeff. I'm no politician. I'm just a fella. I think that beer should be cold and boots should be dusty. I think 9/11 was bad. And freedom? Well, I think that's just a little bit better.

How pathetic, and persuasive. "Say what you will about this or that," says Abed in his role as Greendale's closed-circuit television station's political reporter, "but people just like the guy." Jeff Winger is winning. Annie responds by reducing her campaign to a representative slogan -- "No matter what you're told, we have to clean the mold" -- and succeeds in getting her audience to chant it riotously along with her. But this plays right into Jeff's hand: Annie has retaken the lead only by simplifying her grand vision of reform to a single issue. Annie recognizes this. "If I admit politics are stupid," she asks Jeff, "will you stop making them stupid?" He refuses, so she goes for his figurative jugular, playing for a audience a video in which 1997 Jeff debases himself with a guitar-solo audition for MTV's The Real World: Seattle. "We've all been 19, Jeff," declares Annie, "and none of us did this. None of us." Jeff, like Vicki before him, struck at his core, his humanity threatened, dashes from the stage in shame. Annie, ashamed at what she has done, remorseful at hurting her friend, then also withdraws. The ultimate winner of the election is, by write-in, the television show South Park. Politics is nonsensical. Annie's pronouncement that the mold must be cleaned, though a reduction in its context, serves as a shrewd double-entendre. Greendale's growing, living mold must be eradicated from the stairwell, but the mold that Greendale offers, the mold that nominally makes one into a human being -- a state that is both the upshot of liberal education and Greendale's mascot: the Human Being -- must be scraped clean of pretentions to the impersonal. Only in recognizing the that the personal supersedes the political can we be human. "You were right the whole time," Annie tells Jeff. "I just couldn't admit it until I saw you running away crying." The human explodes the political. Pierce discovers this when Vicki finally lets him borrow a pencil by stabbing him in the face with it.

Jeremy Bernard, Take Two

Jeremy Bernard is the White House's newly chosen Social Secretary, an individual charged with leveraging the institution's prestige for political currency—or "party planner." Bernard is currently chief-of-staff to the U.S. Ambassador to France, prior to which he raised heaps of cash for the Obama campaign. (Sometimes correlation does indeed imply causation.) Bernard is the first man to become Social Secretary. He is also the first openly gay person to do so. This last fact was conveyed a little differently by two familiar Manhattan-based newspapers. The New York Times used the phrase "openly gay" both in the title and body of their blog post reporting the news. The Wall Street Journal, on the other hand, was not so direct. The Journal's short article, "White House Names First Male Social Secretary," never once mentioned the phrase or its equivalent. Instead, journalist Danny Yadron opted for implicit association, by highlighting Bernard's work in the gay-rights community.

While we receive largely the same information from either source, the subtle difference between the pieces so wonderfully reflects a chasm between cultural worldviews. The Times points out the most "contentious" aspect of Bernard's identity: his sexual orientation. For the Times, it is a salient socio-political fact that must be placed front-and-center, a piece of data essential to the reader's understanding of Obama's historic hiring decision and the context in which he made it. Over at the Journal, Yadron (or perhaps his editor) believed that this tidbit was was either not relevant to the story or should not be mentioned for some other reason, or both. If the Journal thought it irrelevant, we have a classic case of ignoring the exotic elephant in the room. The solution to discomforting otherness is to ignore it entirely, hence the willful blindness to Bernard's sexual orientation (not unlike "colorblind" approaches to policymaking). Another possible reason for the omission: a gender-roles story about a man taking on a job traditionally executed by women would be undermined by explicitly stating that Bernard is openly gay. The innuendo transmits the information, but the reader is not forced to acknowledge it. A central tenet of all flavors of liberalism is that individuals are rewarded or punished for their merits rather than their immutable characteristics. However, it does not follow that said characteristics are moot. Like a woman hired as an equal at a male-dominated office, the mere presence of an "other" in a homogeneous culture can instantly rattle the status quo. As a journalistic endeavor, the Journal owes its readers the context we all need to better understand the world around us. Even if it is a throwaway piece about a glorified maître d'.

The People of Paper

Quickly, the premise of Salvador Plascencia's virtuosic first novel, The People of Paper (2005): Ten years after his wife left him, her intolerance of his nightly bedwetting finally outweighing her love, Federico de la Fe makes war to reclaim his subjectivity from the floodwaters of despair. Though flatly crushed for a time in the wake of his abandonment, de la Fe yet summons a martial resolve, as he recruits volunteers and devises strategy for a supernatural campaign, with headquarters in El Monte, California. His opponent in this fantastical war? A force-in-the-sky alternately identified as “Saturn” and “omniscient narration”—yes, de la Fe’s declared foe is the author himself. But what of this war—and why? Froggy, leader of the local street gang El Monte Flores turned footsoldier for de la Fe, is posed the same question by his peers; he answers by calling it “a war for volition and against the commodification of sadness”; whereas de la Fe himself explains, “it is a war against the fate that has been decided for us.” Fucking epic, right? And the ostentatious grandness of Federico de la Fe’s statement of purpose is mirrored in his creator’s own audacity, as Plascencia quite transparently believes his novel to be a paradigm-shifting one. For my part, I see no good in being cynical about the pretense undergirding Plascencia’s claim here. In a previous era, the ingenious American critic Alfred Chester implored of artists,

Teach us, O Artists, not to settle for guilts and anxieties, for twitches and  embarrassments! Teach us…to feel again! Because emotions are the only thing  that artists have to say—and emotion will make us gigantic and tragic.

If, hastily described, People of Paper might seem cold and theoretical—or else too fantastic—let me try and redeem it (and myself) here by affirming that its voice is rich with sincerity and human passion, and that its work is of the saving sort.

Community: Real Life

The mockumentary has been without question the most successful format for TV comedy over the last decade. Shows like The Office, Modern Family, and Parks and Recreation have ridden a cinema-verite visual style with talking-head interstitials to critical praise and varied levels of popularity. In our time, it's as dependable a structure as the four-camera sitcom used to be. Make a mockumentary, and you generally know how the show will look and how the jokes will hit -- you just need to make sure the approach matches the subject matter reasonably well. Community is very obviously not a mockumentary -- the show almost always employs a slick visual style with a cinematic flair unmatched by any broadcast-network comedy series. And, when the show does an episode parodying zombie, astronaut, or action movies, the style only gets more professional. Unlike most comedy series, where the jokes take clear precedence over everything else, Community prides itself on making every shot count, and in some cases hiding entire storylines in the background. So it was a little jarring to watch "Intermediate Documentary Filmmaking," an episode firmly planted in the world of mockumentary. It's shot entirely with handheld cameras, features a decent number of talking heads (although not quite as many as an average episode of The Office), and generally doesn't oversell its jokes as Community often does. As in most parody episodes of the series, a number of cliches are mimicked and mocked: Jeff says he feels fine and tells Abed not to intercut footage of Jeff freaking out, only for those clips to appear immediately; Pierce narrates the closing fight between him and Jeff with a moral that has very little to do with what happens on screen; and Abed even begins the show by saying the format works because it's easy to do exposition while also explaining why he's shooting a documentary. Even the less obvious stylistic tics of a mockumentary are carried out to a tee. As noted by Jaime Weinman, the edits between scenes are much more haphazard because scenes in a mockumentary can appear to be slices of life rather than narrative units with logical beginnings and ends. To glean the real differences between a regular episode of Community and this one, it's first necessary to discuss how a mockumentary actually works. While the format takes its style from documentaries, it actually very rarely mimics real life -- the mockumentary is fundamentally a genre of outsized performances and ridiculous developments. Take, say, Ron Swanson's insane trysts with his ex-wife Tammy or Chris Traeger's unbreakable enthusiasm on Parks and Recreation, a show whose Pawnee has more in common with Springfield on The Simpsons than any live-action world. Even Modern Family, the most true-to-life of the current mockumentaries, features the caricatured performance of Sofia Vergara as a fiery Colombian trophy wife. If Dwight Schrute sometimes seems out of place on The Office, it's because he seems to be on a different show than Michael Scott or Pam Halpert, not because he's impossibly obnoxious and much too convinced of his own misguided superiority. As long as the show has a firm vision and sticks to it, any sort of character can work in a mockumentary. It presents a fictional world through a documentary lens rather than the real world in a fictional structure. This has never been more clear than in Real Life, a 1979 Albert Brooks comedy playing on the 1973 documentary An American Family that in many ways serves as the ur-text of the mockumentary genre. In the film, Brooks (playing a variation of his own neurotic self) follows an Arizona family of four for a year in order to make the point that real life can be more interesting than any work of fiction. This plan doesn't work at all -- Brooks's cameras ruin the family's relationships and distorts their everyday existence beyond anything resembling normal American life. But the film is also very clearly a work of fiction -- cameramen use ludicrous helmet-shaped devices called Ettenauers but nevertheless remain able to frame shots perfectly as if their cameras were mounted on tripods. The effect of the film's style isn't only to show that a camera changes reality, but that fiction can be just as interesting and valuable a storytelling format as any documentary. A mockumentary can present emotions more rawly than other fictive formats, but nobody watches one and thinks they're witnessing real life.

The point here, as it pertains to Community, is that "Intermediate Documentary Filmmaking" is a more standard episode of the series than it might initially seem. For one thing, the basic structure of the episode is a sitcom standby: Pierce gives each other character a gift -- er, bequeathment -- as a sort of moral test (except for Annie, who gets a tiara because she actually is his favorite). In this sense, Pierce controls the action like a Greek god, pulling strings with an omniscient power that can do everything except tell the characters how to react to the situations in which they've been put. Several critics thought Pierce acted like too much of a cartoonish villain in the recent "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons," but his behavior here is much less realistic -- it's just that he sits in a hospital room instead of in a supply closet lair bathed in red light and full of traffic cones. Plus, while this episode's humor tends to feel downbeat, that's a product of the mockumentary delivery system rather than the jokes themselves. When Jeff and Britta act out a role-playing game that goes from Jeff talking things out with his father to Jeff becoming Britta's father to Jeff's father becoming gay to Britta's father becoming an undercover cop to the whole thing taking place in Iran, we witness the same kind of sarcastic oneupsmanship that defines Jeff and Britta's entire relationship. There are also a host of the show's famous random pop-culture references: LeVar Burton appears out of nowhere for an extended appearance that includes singing the Reading Rainbow theme song, Jeff refers to the thrillers F/X and F/X 2: The Deadly Art of Illusion, Pierce thinks the Bruce Willis sci-fi movie Surrogates was as horrific as his overdose, etc. There are other examples of the series's typical humor -- Britta coins the terms "complisult" and "explanabrag," for one -- and the general narrative structure of the episode is similar to that of any other Community installment. The deviances here are actually less stark than in the slower and equally downbeat "Mixology Certification," in which Troy turns 21 years old and almost all the jokes are based on character moments and not parodic tricks or pop culture references. Even the emotional moments in the episodes are not so different. But whereas these beats are usually buried under layers of irony and stylistic tricks in other episodes, the mockumentary format of "Intermediate Documentary Filmmaking" allows them to be delivered more rawly. Again, though, that doesn't mean that the emotional moments don't happen in a typical episode of the show. As Kevin has explained very well, Pierce has a consistent psychological profile that's been explained in the midst of episodes that don't even focus on his fragile relationships. The difference here is a matter of what's stressed -- Pierce manifests the same sense of feeling unwanted that he did in "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons" even though they're very different episodes.

Still, many critics, including NYMag.com's Emily Nussbaum, have found this entire recent Pierce storyline -- including the events of this latest episode -- incredible in the pejorative sense, citing the fact that normal people would not tolerate the presence of such a destructive force just because he was a part of the study group when it formed. But an early moment can help explain the situation at hand with Pierce and his nominal friends. Jeff begins the episode by saying that there's "no point in feeling bad" for Pierce since he brought these troubles upon himself. But as Annie notes, the point isn't that there's no point in feeling bad, it's that they feel bad anyway because they organically feel some connection to Pierce. Logic never factors into this relationship -- their bond is a product of spending time with each other and experiencing the wacky world of Greendale together. This is typically the way that human relationships work; people are willing to stick with friends and loved ones past the point where it becomes detrimental to their health simply because they feel an enduring connection. Nussbaum may be right that the study group should dump Pierce -- he has done horrible things to all of them over the last batch of episodes beyond what you'd tolerate from a friend. However, the point of this series isn't to show life as it should ideally be, but to provide a novel or radical take on the real-world relationships we all have. The study group's bond with Pierce might not be healthy for all of them, but it can say something interesting about the limits of logic when empathy and compassion are involved. The series deploys every visual and structural format at its disposal -- not just the mockumentary -- to show its characters struggling to connect with other humans. But the general argument is the same no matter the style: an ongoing argument for the power of popular culture and art as vessels for positive emotional development. The series almost never recreates real life and somehow always relates to it.

Just Kids

Part memoir, part devastating lyrical elegy, Just Kids (2010) is Patti Smith’s fulfillment of her promise to Robert Mapplethorpe, who, dying of AIDS in 1989, asked his friend to write the story of their lives together. But just as Smith has here given us a kind of memoir, so too has she created something far grander for its literary ambition—and, indeed, for its merit: a text at turns elusive, musical, and deeply affecting, and which bears indelibly the structure and arc of tragedy. Joan Didion calls the book “so honest and pure as to count as a true rapture.” Her praise is as justified as it is gilded: Just Kids is a fucking masterpiece. And with her invocation of that word of words—rapture—Didion scores a direct hit on the dual character of Smith’s project—viz., her nearly seamless coupling of memory and myth—and the myriad of powerful affective responses she is able to evoke. Just Kids is, to be sure, an elegy for Robert Mapplethorpe before all else, and yet it is clear that Smith is mourning more than just her friend here. Through the book’s many torrents of nostalgia, which blur the edges of its world and at times can levitate it to a plane of oneiric rapture, it becomes clear that she loved the time and place at least as much as the man. This is a book unshy about positing human innocence; it is a record of so many beautiful things no longer of this earth. (In other words, a poem.) And at its very center: the open question of rapture and what comes after.  -- Benjamin Ladner

Raising Hope

Greg Garcia's first foray into poor, white American life, NBC's My Name Is Earl, never quite broke free of the stereotypes it mocked, maybe because Earl's mystical list said little about the human potential of those around him. Fox's Raising Hope, Garcia's second go, corrects Earl's missteps by incarnating magic in the form of a baby, the universal lovable object. This baby is foisted on her 23-year-old father, Jimmy, when her mother is executed, and Jimmy, with the help of his working-poor parents and senile great-grandmother Maw Maw, must raise Hope. Instilling hope is the nominal goal of the show. Such a cheesy goal is counterbalanced by the hard, hilarious realities of American poverty. When Hope gets sick, Jimmy calls the doctor to set up an appointment, and asks his parents, "What type of insurance do we have?" They look at one another and burst out laughing. His mother: "We don't have that." When the doctor's office hangs up on Jimmy, his father chimes in, "Insurance! Sure, I'll just have the butler go get it out of the hot air balloon!" Harsh, yes, but true, and motivated by love. Fostering hope (and humor) is still possible in the face of poverty—even if only with a baby around to remind everyone that life must go on.  -- Kevin Hilke

Community: Señor Chang's Changing Insinuations

Señor Ben Chang (Ken Jeong) has floated, sometimes ominously, in the background of nearly every Community episode since the penultimate episode of last season, when he was dismissed from his position as Spanish instructor at Greendale Community College for having forged his academic credentials. During the first season, Chang, as the teacher of Spanish 101, the course that united Community's cast into a study group, was explicitly necessary for the show's existence. With the loss of his stated purpose, Chang went from central to ethereal, manifesting himself at random turns and demanding to be admitted to the study group, clawing back toward his erstwhile centrality. In truth, Chang's centrality was always precarious and uncomfortable. Even more than the alienating and alienated Pierce Hawthorne, Chang seems perpetually unwelcome, even in his own first-season classroom. His clothes are frequently stolen from Greendale's gym locker room. Anthropology instructor Duncan makes a habit of undermining Señor Chang in front of his students, as does Dean Pelton, who announces to students over Chang's objection that the latter has a crippling fear of frogs. Chang's introduction to his Spanish 101 students in the series's first episode is a study in preemptive overcompensation for a dearth of self-confidence. He declares himself "a Spanish genius" and promises that his superior knowledge will "bite [the] face off" all who dare to question him. By the first season's tenth episode, Chang has deteriorated to a depressive nadir. "I'm so alone," he confesses frankly to Jeff, through tears. "I'm so lonely. I want to die," he continues, before asking Jeff to let him rest his head on his pecs like a child at its mother's breast. Chang's course may be the structural lynchpin of the show, but he belongs absolutely nowhere in its world. Second-season Chang must work to surreptitiously inject himself into the main cast's milieu by, for instance, hiding atop a bookshelf in their study room and encouraging the use of his name as a pun on the word "change," as he does in "Asian Population Studies." Diversely insinuating himself where he doesn't belong has become, over the second season, Chang's mode of maintaining his relevance. Chang, now a student, has joined Anthropology 101, the class around which the study group now organizes itself. But thanks to a standing beef with psychology Professor Duncan, Anthropology's substitute instructor, Chang isn't even allowed in the classroom. He is no more embraced in the study group. At the end of the meeting in "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons" (treated last week by Eric Freeman) to plan a Dungeons & Dragons intervention for "Fat Neil," voiceover narration tells us, the study group "realized that Chang had been there, and felt too awkward to mention it." This despite the fact that two episodes earlier, in "Asian Population Studies," Chang was ostensibly voted into the group. We see this dynamic at play, too, in Chang's potential impregnation of Shirley. Shirley consented to a tryst with Chang during the zombie Halloween episode, but upon learning that he may be the father of her child, she spurns him as "crazy." As in the first season, Chang is nominally but not actually welcome. He is tenuously invited in only to be shunned. But this may be slowly changing. Two recent episodes, "Celebrity Pharmacology" and last Thursday's "Early 21st Century Romanticism," find Chang taking his being-as-insinuation to new heights, but with slightly different, and more relevant and hopeful, ultimate results. "Celebrity Pharmacology" concerns Annie's efforts to put on an instructional play about the dangers of drugs for middle-school students, using the study group as a cast. Pierce, cast to play the role of Drugs and reliving a conflict with his father which necessitates that he steal the show, deviates from the script such that the middle schoolers come to think drugs doubtlessly cool, one of them even declaring, "I love you, Drugs!" Annie freaks out. Cue Chang, who enters with, "Did someone say crazy person?" "No," Chang-averse everyone answers in unison. "Well I heard it," replies Chang. He then takes the stage—as Drugs. "Greetings you little snots," he begins. "You're not drugs," a student protests. Chang:

Oh but I am! Disappointed? Did you expect me to stay the same forever? 'Cause that's not what drugs does, baby! I'm gonna deep fry your dog and eat your momma's face! And I'm gonna wear your little brother's skin like pajamas! I control your lives, and there is nothing you can do.

The students rush the stage and beat Drugs to a pulp. Chang, invited by no one, repairs the situation and inspires everyone. "That was brave of you," Shirley says to him. "I owe you an apology. It was rude to call you crazy. Maybe I haven't been giving you enough credit." "My God that was amazing," says Britta, hugging him; "Way to go!" says Jeff; "I learned something," says Annie. Rather than expelling Chang, in this instance the group embraces him, making him the center of an impromptu group hug. This reluctant, eventual embrace of Chang occurs, too, in "Early 21st Century Romanticism," in which Chang indeed serves as the agent of change his puns on his name suggest that he can. After Jeff has a fight with the rest of the study group—ostensibly over the Barenaked Ladies (a theory on which is offered by Jethro Nededog)—Professor Duncan invites himself over to the suddenly plan-less Jeff's apartment to watch the Valentine's Day evening Manchester United vs. Liverpool match. Chang, hiding his face behind newspaper in the cafeteria, overhears these plans, clads himself in Liverpool garb, and crashes the non-party. Jeff, reluctant to admit Chang, eventually does; Chang proceeds to immediately break Jeff's lamp with his nunchucks. To make up for breaking the lamp, Chang offers to order a pizza. He calls former student and current classmate Starburns. "Remember that pizza you owe me?" he asks. "Well, it's time to pay up. Party, at Winger's, tonight. Yeah you can tell people." Chang's ordering a pizza thus also creates an impending party. Chang freshens up, bathing and employing Jeff's bathrobe and toothbrush, exiting the toilet just in time to open the door for Starburns and accompanying partygoers—Leonard, Magnitude, Swizzle, Scandalous, C-dub, Tim, Mighty D, and Glisten, among others. Jeff, miffed, reconciles himself to hosting a small party. Chang takes the chaos as an opportunity to stealthily move into Jeff's apartment. Because Jeff lacks a clothes washer, Chang uses Jeff's dishwasher and bathtub to wash his clothes, wearing Jeff's underwear in the meantime. He lodges his four pet hermit crabs in Jeff's bathroom sink. He heats up his sleeping bag, which he plans to use on Jeff's floor, in Jeff's oven. Jeff, discovering Chang's plan, confronts him: "You orchestrated this entire party just so you could weasel your way into staying here!" "I'm homeless, Jeff," Chang pleads. Jeff throws Chang and his hermit crabs out, and terminates the party. "I actually started to have fun," Jeff tells Duncan as they clean up, "till that maniac tried to move in." But it is precisely Chang's "moving in" that precipitates the hopeful climax of the episode. Later, taking out the trash alone, Jeff discovers the "maniac" Chang half-sleeping in the hallway. Jeff contemplates Chang, picks him up, carries him back into his apartment, and lays him down gingerly on the couch. And, while conversing with Chang, Jeff composes and sends a text message to his study-group friends:

It might not shock you guys to hear the real reason we had a fight today. It wasn't about the Barenaked Ladies, although I do have some unresolved issues there. Caring about a person can be scary. Caring about six people can be a horrifying, embarrassing nightmare, at least for me. But if I can't say it today, when can I say it? I love you guys.

Receiving the message at the same time, the study group members (save Pierce, who is left forebodingly alone on a park bench, pills bottles strewn about him) come together to read it. Chang's insinuation into Jeff's day and Jeff's home prompted sarcastic, snide, emotionally-stifled Jeff be honest with himself about his desire to tell everyone else that he loved them. Chang's insistent imposition here births an earnest, loving, useful act. As in "Celebrity Pharmacology," the gang unites because of Chang. Chang's insinuations are slowly moving from incidental to consequential. One must wonder what Shirley's baby will bring.

Seinfeld's Slow Shift on Mental Illness

Seinfeld is callous. The show seems, deceivingly, to eschew all responsibilities at sensitivity to marginalized others in favor of a cruel, mocking engagement with the otherness of those others. Nowhere is this as stark as in Seinfeld's treatment of mental illness. Until late in the series—the seventh season—only two beings are discussed as carrying anything like a true mental malady worthy of deference. One of them is a fat, pitiful, failing artist. The other is a monkey. The artist, Roy, is a former boyfriend of Elaine, who, in the fourth season's "The Junior Mint," split with him because he was too fat. This sends Roy into a depressive spiral that coincides with weight loss so dramatic that Elaine becomes interested again. Elaine simply will not date a fat person, a fact rivaled in callousness only by the fact of Elaine's own indifference to having conspicuously caused Roy's latest depressive episode. In the sixth's season's "The Face Painter," depression is instilled in a monkey when Kramer throws a banana peel at it. We could make of this a commonsense statement on the etiology of depression: it is caused or facilitated by the contingencies of our upbringing and the interpersonal vicissitudes of our everyday lives. But we can also make of this a dismissal of human depression as so trivial (or, alternatively, so simplistically somatic) as to be diagnosable in a sulking monkey. This monkey is sadly Seinfeld's most complex and accurate statement on mental illness, despite the show's late, ambiguous turn toward attention to real-world depressive subjects in the form of Kramer's deference toward one Lloyd Braun. A survey of the series demonstrates that psychiatric disorders are usually treated with insensitivity to the mentally ill and innattention to the real circumstances of mental illness. The "pigman," Kramer's fantasied government-experiment test-subject in the fifth season's "The Bris," is ultimately pronounced "just a fat little mental patient." In the fifth season's "The Pie," someone who refuses pie without making her reason for the refusal explicit is casually referred to as "a psycho." Later, in the ninth season's "The Dealership," George's maniacal screaming is excused by Saab salesman David Puddy's blaming it on "a mental hospital right near here." The mentally ill here are freaks and scapegoats. Psychiatry and psychology as professions are treated with similar disregard. In season four's "The Wallet," Elaine dates and attempts to break up with a psychiatrist who began as her practitioner, but soon neglects her as a patient as begins manipulating her for personal ends; and in season four's "The Contest," George's mother Estelle Costanza attempts to convince George to visit a psychiatrist because he masturbates. In reality, psychiatrists are neither allowed to become involved with patients nor in the practice of diagnosing normal human functions like masturbation as mental disorders. When George does eventually visit a therapist, in season four's "The Pilot," because he fears that God will strike him down before allowing him to be happy, the therapist spends the bulk of the hour trying to help a distraught George undo a zipper on his jacket. George and Elaine are in clear need of help, but the practitioners Larry David provides them with are exploitative caricatures. No wonder that Elaine, by season eight's "The Andrea Doria," is driven to a violent hysteria by an insulting remark ("You have a big head") that makes her inattend to overwhelming evidence that her head is of average rather than gargantuan size; she's never been shown, by parents (e.g. writer-alcoholic father Alton Benes), friends ("No hugging, no learning"), or a therapist, how to counter such a remark. But the notion that such a remark could be countered at all seems to be excluded from the possibilities of the show, the humor of which is largely dependent on fostering the flourishing of neuroses and psychoses in the characters. The plot of the eighth season's "The Fatigues," for instance, drives toward Frank Costanza's preparing a meal for more than 100 Jewish singles despite the trauma he experienced while a military chef in Korea; Frank's suffering a cooking-induced PTSD flashback is the climax of the episode. When Frank seeks professional help in the ninth season's "The Serenity Now," the doctor, rather than prescribing medications or conducting psychotherapy as a practitioner typically would, gives him a tape to listen to which instructs him to exclaim "Serenity now!" when stressed. Functional, helpful practitioners who did more than hand out cassette tapes would threaten to heal the maladjustments and disorders we find so hilarious. These sorts of distortions are, of course, excusable in comedy. Less excusable today is Seinfeld's early, explicit treatment of depression and suicide. This begins with the suicide attempt of Newman, who appears as an offstage voice in season two's "The Revenge," announcing to Kramer that he's planning to jump from the roof of his, Jerry's, and Kramer's building. Jerry and Kramer discuss Newman's mental state:

KRAMER Boy, I have really had it with Newman. He wakes me up again last night at three o'clock in the morning to tell me he's going up onto the roof to kill himself. JERRY Well, what'd you say? KRAMER I said "Jump." Well, he's been threatening to do this for years. I said "Look, if you're gonna kill yourself do it already and stop bothering me." At least I'd respect the guy for accomplishing something. JERRY What's his problem? KRAMER No job. No women. JERRY He called the right guy. KRAMER What am I supposed to tell him? How much there is for him to live for? Why should I lie to him? JERRY All right, I'm leaving. I going to the laundry.

Kramer can't think of a single reason his good friend should live, and Jerry responds to the potential suicide of a neighbor by prioritizing his laundry. Newman's offstage suicide attempt is treated as just so much whining by Kramer and Jerry. At the beginning of "The Revenge," contextualizing this conversation, Jerry's stand-up routine conflates the mentally ill with heinous offenders against the law, speaking of the "criminal-terrorist-psycho-maniac-mass-murderer guy" as though all these adjectives were usually, and best, found describing a single person. Later, in the third season's "The Suicide," another of Jerry's neighbors, Martin, attempts to take his own life by a method that lands him in a coma. Once again, Jerry and Kramer respond with mockery and disrespect. Jerry, with Kramer's urging, attempts to steal the slumbering Martin's girlfriend, Gina, whose own indifference to Martin couldn't have been a boon to his depression. Martin is treated as though he were recovering from a straightforward, physiological disease; as though when he wakes up from his coma, his depression and desire to die will have vanished. And in the fourth season's "The Ticket," the formerly suicidal Newman unsuccessfully attempts to get out of a speeding ticket by convincing Kramer to testify that he, Newman, was rushing home to prevent Kramer from committing suicide out of his disappointment at never having become a banker. Newman, who as of the fourth season—in the pre-"Hello, Newman!" days—is defined chiefly by his suicide attempt, here fabricates a tale of a friend's attempted suicide to evade the law. Suicide and depression are here cast as failed excuses. The sole sustained exception to Seinfeld's insensitivity to mental illness—though not its ignorance of the actual world—is the case of psychotic depressive Lloyd Braun. We first meet Braun in season five's "The Non-Fat Yogurt." Once George's hated childhood neighborhood chum, Lloyd now serves as a "big advisor" to New York Mayor David Dinkins. When his passing along to Dinkins Elaine's suggestion that New Yorkers wear name tags costs Dinkins the mayoral election and gets Lloyd canned, the latter suffers a nervous breakdown. From then up through his next appearance in season seven's "The Gum," Lloyd, locked away in and then released from a mental institution, serves for George as a sort of psychotic counterpoint to his own neuroses—however crazy he is, at least he isn't as crazy as Lloyd Braun! Although not successfully treated, Lloyd is the beneficiary of the sincere effort of some around him, namely Kramer and Frank Costanza, to reinvigorate his sense of confidence in himself, an effort coextensive with Seinfeld's shifting portrayal of the mentally ill. By the time of "The Gum" and Lloyd's release from the institution, Kramer, perhaps out of guilt for having treated Newman and Martin so shabbily, has made Lloyd's rehabilitation his personal project. Here, with Kramer, Seinfeld turns, with well-timed political sensitivity, from seeing mental illness as a foible to be made fun of as such to seeing being stricken with a mental disorder as just one of any number of characteristics—skin color, religion, height, profession—that make a person a human being out of whom and around whom fun can be made. The humor of "The Gum," unlike that of "The Revenge" and "The Suicide," comes not from dehumanization of the mentally ill, but from Kramer's attempts to bolster Lloyd's self-confidence by ratifying his every notion, usually with too much verve. As a result, Jerry is forced to wear absurd glasses out about town and buy far too much Chinese gum, and Kramer is forced to eat an eons-stale hotdog. Similarly, in "The Serenity Now," Frank attempts to give Lloyd a fresh start by hiring him to sell computers. The now-delusional Lloyd, in the space created by Frank's sympathetic gesture, fakes dozens of sales, but fails to sell a single real computer, much to George's narcissistic delight. The humor here is no longer derived, as in early seasons, from the afflicted's condition as such, but rather from the absurd results of the cloying attempts of those around him to help him heal.

Community: Here Be Dragons

The last episode of brilliant-but-cancelled archetype Freaks and Geeks features a great deal of Dungeons & Dragons action engaged in by the show’s titular geeks and Daniel, a freak whom Dungeonmaster Harris Trinsky once said was cool if only because he has sex. Daniel, in the midst of a mild existential crisis after being caught pulling the school fire alarm to get out of a test, finds a home in the fantasy world of D&D. It’s quite possibly the first positive portrayal of the game in popular culture; instead of being a disgusting freakshow of society’s outcasts, it’s a place where less-popular kids can have fun with each other without being mocked for their interests. In “Advanced Dungeons & Dragons,” the Community study group also treats D&D like a legitimate social event rather than a sideshow. But this show being this show, the event is couched in various layers of irony that ultimately will make the episode more remembered for its riff on quest narratives than as the one in which Fat Neil -- a character seen only once previously on the series -- regains his self-esteem and finds a reason to live. There’s hyperbolic narration from a soothing but forceful female British voice, a host of established roles for characters to occupy, and even an established narrative by way of the D&D story guides. The most blatant way this episode hews to the classic fantasy narrative is by casting Pierce, who wasn’t originally invited to the game, as the villain. He spends the whole episode in a righteous fury, purposely trying to ruin the game and constantly insulting Neil as payback for being left out once again. Several reviewers -- including Todd VanDerWerff at The AV Club -- have argued that the episode turns Pierce into a caricature, sacrificing his normal behavior in service of the fantasy gimmick. In truth, though, this episode merely shows Pierce at his breaking point. As Kevin Hilke noted last week, Pierce’s racism and similar bad behavior typically manifest themselves when he’s been left out of group activity and fun. In this case, he simply turned his usually unthreatening anger into something more menacing. It’s a difference of degree, not kind, and it suits his character quite well.

That attention to character is what sets this episode apart from more recent Community gimmick episodes, most of which have relied on genre cliches for humor at the expense of emotional impact. The series’s zombie Halloween episode, for instance, was merely a collection of horror tropes with no real payoff; any reference to Chang impregnating Shirley on that night seem bizarre if only because that half-hour seemed to take place in a different world. “Advanced Dungeons & Dragons,” on the other hand, works because it’s firmly grounded in the show’s established world and the relationships within it. When it turns out that Jeff is the one who came up with Fat Neil’s hurtful nickname, the development makes sense as a cliched moment of past betrayal and as a character moment because Jeff has tried to become a better person as the show has progressed. Similarly, Annie’s graphically described and pantomimed sex act isn’t just funny because it’s crude -- it also relies on her character’s innocence to provide its shock value. All this is to say that this episode is delightful not because it’s endlessly funny, but because it deepens the show’s world -- both by letting the audience know Neil and by showing that the study group can enjoy things they wouldn’t have otherwise known they like -- and trusts its relationships and creativity to animate what should be the rather dull dramatic situation of people playing a bour game. The inventiveness of this episode is also what ultimately makes this episode an improvement on “Cooperative Calligraphy,” the show’s nominal bottle episode. Although “Advanced Dungeons & Dragons” also takes place almost entirely in the study room -- there are maybe two short scenes elsewhere -- the episode transcends its limitations by embracing imagination and eventually turning it into its subject. Whereas “Cooperative Calligraphy” took the trappings of a sitcom tradition and carried them out with a knowing wink, “Advanced Dungeons & Dragons” uses the bottle format out of necessity and shows that it’s not just a withered husk, but a legitimate path to satisfying emotional and competitive payoffs. Likewise, Neil regains his faith in life because a group of people is able to share his love for an imaginative process of creation and storytelling. This development mirrors the events of Freaks and Geeks, but it’s also an argument for the style and general artistic approach of Community as a series. This isn’t the funniest episode of the show, or even one that contains a lot of jokes. But it’s possibly the most representative because it’s a joyous celebration of creativity and basic human togetherness. Like all the best Community episodes, its interrogations of cliches and emotional payoffs are inextricably tied to each other. The emotional story of "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons" only works because of the quest narrative and the quest narrative only works because it's used in service of a legitimate emotional story. It's both ironic and earnest, a riff on cliches and an admission that they're valuable in spite of their familiarity.

Community: Pierce Hawthorne's Racism of Love

Community is the one and one-half year-old series that has most consistently kept NBC's Thursday nights worth watching. While The Office and even the redoubtable 30 Rock have begun to wane in their own ways, Community remains fresh by framing the indispensable earnest sentimentality of the traditional "community" sitcom—exemplified by Cheers, "Where everybody knows your name"—with the hyper-meta-irony that's come to characterize even the sincerity of the generation that now watches most of its TV on the internet. ("He has a landline and uses the word 'album,'" says Annie  of her 30-something almost-boyfriend.) Community takes the ironic framework expected of all things hip today and reveals its inherent flimsiness and insincerity by leaning on it far, far too heavily, squishing its hopeful filling out all over your unsuspecting face. Chevy Chase's Pierce Hawthorne's nominal allusion to the writer Nathaniel seems calculated as an ironic comment on his own rank immorality in the form of an anti-minority bias worn with shimmering scarlet pride. In last week's "Asian Population Studies," Jeff Winger, Community's update to womanizer Sam Malone, remarks that Pierce is "always looking for someone old enough to find [his] racism subversive." None of the main characters of Community—two of whom (Shirley and Troy) are black and one of whom (Abed) is Arab—in other words, find Pierce's habitual racism vaguely subversive: it is so egregious and pervasive as to have become an endearing part of his hyperbolically hapless character. And this haplessness, this ignorance, combined with Pierce's lack of apologies for it, is what makes him the exemplar of Community's comedic style, in which a snide, sarcastic, aversive veneer is revealed to be the product of an inner goodness screaming for release. In the process, Community demonstrates an important truth about sincere, deep-seated racism: it rarely announces itself.

There is no denying that Pierce is a racist. In this season's "Cooperative Calligraphy," for instance, he is quick to accuse Troy of stealing Annie's purple pen, an act that could so certainly have been committed by anyone that the group eventually agrees to a mass strip-search; and in "Asian Population Studies," he presumes that Andre, Shirley's (also black) visiting ex-husband, is the dining room porter come to collect his tray. But almost without exception, this racism is nothing but a cover for an inability to genuinely connect with those around him, and even the mechanism of his reaching out to others. His mode of connection, that is, is to confront the other with insults and hope that his derision is received in the precise opposite spirit and reciprocated with love. Pierce's racism and other modes of insult are, indeed, motivated by and flummoxed expressions of his own love. In "Spanish 101," the series's second episode, Pierce goes to great lengths to become Jeff's partner in a Spanish conversational presentation assignment. When they meet to prepare, Jeff discovers, after hours of ostensible rehearsal, that Pierce's vision for the presentation is unaccountably anti-Semitic, one of many strands and themes that, we come to learn, Pierce has added in order to keep Jeff—whom he wants badly to befriend—interacting with him as long as possible. In the twenty-second episode, "The Art of Discourse," Pierce pantses Shirley, offending her to the point that she leaves the group over the others' lack of condemnation for Pierce. In the course of attempting to insincerely apologize to Shirley for his choice, he accidentally sits down next to the wrong black woman, gives her flowers, and begins his forced apologetic speech. Shirley, sitting on a bench across the way, denounces him. Pierce later reveals, though, that his entire reason for pantsing Shirley in particular in the first place—amid a group mass-pantsing—is that of all the members of the study group, he respects Shirley the most and envies her for the family she is singlehandedly, successfully raising. This respect, in his eyes, makes her more than able to withstand a mere pantsing. Pierce's choice has nothing to do with Shirley's race and everything to do with her accomplishments. Pierce is a racist, but his mother is also a lava lamp rather than a human being. This is true both literally and figuratively. He maintains it as fact in this season's "The Psychology of Letting Go"; and it is true as well insofar as nebulousness characterizes Pierce's own senses of identity and security, which are and were not positively constituted by parental figures. Pierce's parents failed to school him in safe, fulfilling interaction with others, a failure of love. Pierce is thus now a Reform Neo-Buddhist, a faith in which the bodies of loved dead ones are vaporized, made gelatinous, and placed in an "Energon pod," which looks remarkably like a lava lamp. Pierce is deeply invested in his faith, which he maintains is not a cult, but "a new way of looking at the world, emphasizing empowerment" and the breakdown of the boundaries between people ("When Buddha returns," says Pierce, "we all take liquid form and merge into a shimmering ocean of knowledge, which according to Scripture tastes like Hawaiian Punch"). Pierce's faith affords him a degree of agency that his real-world parents could not or simply did not. We find this theory corroborated in the most recent episode, "Celebrity Pharmacology." Pierce tells Annie that as a child, he was the "Gerber Baby" of moist towelettes, having co-starred with his father, baby-wipe magnate Cornelius Hawthorne, in commercials advertising the family enterprise. But when adult Pierce reviews these commercials alone, somber and ruminative, we see that the young boy playing Pierce was an actor named Nigel, the true child Pierce—seen here moping his way off the stage—having been rejected by his father as too poor an actor, too poor a Pierce, even to star in a moist towelette commercial as himself. Pierce's parents, the unsupportive corporatist and the lava lamp, never taught him how to love with anything other than insults. Pierce never learned another way to love or be a human being. For all Pierce's deficits, it is his continued striving toward connection at all costs that makes him a human being. Insult, both inadvertent and intentional, is, thanks to his upbringing, Pierce's unique way of pushing forward. In this season's stop-motion special, "Abed's Uncontrollable Christmas," Pierce, transformed by Abed's imagination into a teddy bear, is the only one of all the members of the study group with the imaginative capacity to accompany Abed all the way to the end of his journey; he is the only one whose worldview is plastic enough to allow him to fathom and carry forward through the supposedly absurd. Pierce, for all his setbacks, is full of hope. In the first season's "Beginner Pottery," Pierce goes so far as to define living as nothing more than the art of failing and failing better. When Jeff complains to Pierce that he has "a really hard time when I want to be good at something and I suck," Pierce responds by telling Jeff that although his classmates in a simulated sailing course had intentionally left him to die in the faux-sea of the community college parking lot ("They drowned me, for a better grade"), he, Pierce, is returning to that asphalt ocean in an effort to re-board the boat. Where does this ethic of persistence come from? "When I was born," Pierce tells Jeff,

I got my umbilical cord wrapped around my neck, both arms, and one of my ankles. Mom said there came a point when the doctors stopped delivering me and just started laughing. I mean, if I ever let being bad at something stop me I wouldn't even be here. That thing that some men call failure, I call living. Breakfast! And I'm not leaving till I've cleaned out the buffet.

Pierce's racism is one unsavory aspect of his generalized, hopeful way of being human: inveterately deploying an insult and awaiting the closeness it will inevitably bring him with the insulted. Pierce's racism is a racism of love, a reading buoyed by a simple look at Pierce's bottom-line treatment of persons of color: Troy, since the end of the first season, has been Pierce's rent-free roommate. For all the readings that could cast this relationship as one of a social imbalance that reflects societal racism, that racism is not Pierce's own.

Pierce's racism of love stands in stark contrast to the show's single straightforward portrayal of a cruel, unthinking racism—shrouded in a patina of friendship. When, in this season's "Aerodynamics of Gender," Troy and then Jeff happen on a trampoline hidden on Greendale's grounds, they also happen on a trampoline tender whose perfunctory hospitality toward Troy belies the fact that, as we later learn, he believes that black people ruin everything, including his special relationship with the secluded, mystical trampoline. The trampoline tender accuses Troy of this ruination, when in reality, the fault was Pierce's: he insisted that Troy double-bounce him, sending him rocketing up into the sky and plummeting him into a dumpster, landing Greendale in a lawsuit. The trampoline tender's surreptitious racism has no redeeming qualities; it is formed of a static, ignorant hatred, not of a knowledge-seeking love. Pierce, precisely in announcing himself a racist, loves. His inner goodness oozes through his harsh exterior. All that oozes from the trampoline tender is hate.

Legally Blonde

No one believes that this is my favorite movie, but not because I am male. This can’t be anybody’s favorite movie—it’s an airy romantic comedy, one of the latest in a menagerie of '90s Clueless rip-offs, right? I mean come on, there’s a “what-happens-to-the-characters-after-graduation” dénouement with everyone slo-mo flinging their caps up in triumph. Plus, the sequels and musical spin-off are terrible! All of this is true, like what Elle’s father says to dissuade her from applying to Harvard: “Law school is for people who are boring, and ugly…and serious.” Let those negative critics of Legally Blonde influence you the way daddy’s appeal affects our heroine. Reese Witherspoon’s character, Elle Woods, applies to HLS for just as crappy a reason as anyone (her boyfriend goes there). Over the semester, however, she performs an ahead-of-its-time critique of legal academia and the hollow paternalism of traditional white-shoe firms. Her stylized femininity supports lots of gags and one-liners, but Elle isn’t taking pot-shots at the glass ceiling. She maintains fierce individuality in the face of conformist pressures and holds a competitive advantage not because of her measurements but because of her work ethic, sincerity and loyalty. Ever the populist, she forsakes the Ivory Tower for the nail salon, winning the case. Give your mind a pedicure with a more thoughtful viewing of this cutely badass movie (often on TBS, but they take out the swears!).  -- Adam Schaefer

Walker

With the release of Sid and Nancy in 1986, filmmaker Alex Cox was the toast of the indie film community. So he decided to take $6 million from Universal and make the most bizarre biopic ever: Walker, an acid western starring Ed Harris as William Walker, an American filibuster who colonialized and ruled Nicaragua for two years in the 1850s. Like most Cox films, it's stylistically brash, changing tones with little notice, often within the same scene. But what sets Walker apart is its complete disinterest in hewing to the typical biopic formula. The plot is a clear analog for the U.S.-backed Contra wars of the 1980s—Walker enters the country with support from American oligarch Cornelius Vanderbilt (or "the Commodore," as he insists on being called) and advances American interests in the Central American nation with no regard for the citizens. Cox realizes this connection and does nothing to obscure it. In addition to the plot parallels, he injects obvious anachronisms like helicopters, contemporary automobiles, and magazines such as Time and Newsweek with Walker on the covers. This isn't subtle political commentary, but that's the whole point: the goal here is to mimic the absurdity of unnecessary American intervention in foreign countries and the single-minded drive and arrogance that fuel it. Walker is a hallucinatory viewing experience because American politics feels that way, too.  -- Eric Freeman

Alfred Chester

Alfred Chester fits into the American literary-critical narrative nowhere. Chester, born in 1928 and dead of drugs and depression 43 years later, was a radical, queer, Jewish, liberal writer of fiction (Head of a Sad Angel), criticism and theory (Looking for Genet) who made no effort to hide his various minority identities, making them central to the conduct of his work. He was not proud of them nor did he think ill of them; he simply refused to deny that they influenced him, and when they were relevant, he spotlighted their relevance and did his best to deal substantively with them. Freeing himself from the injunction to reign in affect as a prerequisite to doing criticism, Chester instead let it loose to put it to innovative argumentative use in asserting as fact the irreducible humanity of those characters (in Naked Lunch, In Cold Blood, Pale Fire, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and many more) whose creators, in Chester's estimation, gave them short shrift. Chester's concerted goal was to entertain while making a point, the reason his arguments are uniquely entertaining and the reason his arguments work. Chester's feeling makes us feel something. Chester's essays will work for a reader only if he is willing to go along with Chester, exploring the subjectivities of a work from the abject to the ecstatic and back again at breakneck pace—and, further, to learn the lessons of that journey and apply them, with astonishing precision and grace, to the struggles of real-world alienated subjects, particularly queer ones.  -- Kevin Hilke

Fernet-Branca

—Who’s drinkin’ Jäger!? —Actually, it’s Fernet. —It’s what? —Fernet. Fernet-Branca; it’s an amaro, an Italian aromatic liqueur. —… —It’s a San Francisco bartender drink. —San Francisco!? I let them give the admittedly Jäger-looking shot a sniff. Faces are made, and the bravest (drunkest) asks for and is granted a sip. I’ve heard lots of curiously angry pronouncements, everything from “ugh, it’s like mouthwash!” to “it’s like a black jellybean threw up,” but once in a few dozen times someone blinks hard and nods: “not bad.” Amari (Italian for bitters) are digestifs, and Fernet is one of the more readily available brands carried in the United States. It is infused with an entire apothecary of herbs and spices, and claims to its medicinal prowess range from the mundane (cures hangovers) to the fantastical (cures cholera). Abundant in the Bay Area (where it is indeed a favorite of industry folks), Fernet can be found in other cities’ swankier artisan bars, as well as places many Italians happen to be, like Argentina. Chilled as a shot, over rocks, mixed with Coke or ginger ale, chased with the same, in a cocktail, neat or even as part of a Tenderloin Stand-Off (an SF special: shot of Fernet, shot of Coca-Cola, shot of tequila, shot of beer, all in a row)—no matter how you order it, Fernet is a polarizing spirit. But whether you declare “never again!” or start following @FernetNation, you owe this indomitable spirit a try.  -- Adam Schaefer

My Library Card

Recently, having become addicted to young adult fiction, I had to face the harsh reality that I needed to find some new way to feed my habit before I became the star of the next episode of Hoarders. So I did what any other self-respecting Midwesterner would have done: I got a library card. The library itself is sort of an antiquated notion, but it’s a notion crawling slowly into the 21st century, even if it is eleven years late. For example, the library card is no longer just your Cold War-era second form of identification. Au contraire, mes enfants. If my city’s library system—the D.C. Public Library—were a books-only eBay, my library card would be a PayPal account with no credit limit. And much like eBay, I would argue that you have to learn how to game the system. I’ve made staggering my “holds” and “available nows” into a rare art form, and I can’t help feeling victorious every time I check out an entire series and renew it fifteen times, thereby ruining the life of that one person who only needs to read book three. Now I just need someone to create a library version of Netflix so I never have to leave my house.  -- Catherine Kozak

Infomercials

This year, my New Year’s resolutions were based less on introspection and more on watching an inordinate number of infomercials during Christmas break. Did I want to shake my way into shape in the new year? Yes! Was I interested in burning away unwanted hair? Absolutely!  Would I like to miraculously earn wealth without risk? Sign me up! That’s right, 2011 promises to make me buff, hairless, and rich. For those not interested in actually purchasing these products, infomercials at least offer viewers some of the best scripted television on the air. Not only does the ad for the Magic Bullet make a compelling case for the product, but it also features well-developed characters acted by some of the most overlooked stars of the small screen. Okay: so maybe nothing in reality is quite as good as is seen on TV. And perhaps some of the gimmicks sold end up in lawsuits (is there really no way to earn wealth without risk?). But infomercials do offer a level of entertainment rarely seen in advertising, all while trying to sell the American audience on ways to make life easier, make them look a little better, and make nutritious smoothies in literally seconds. And if you act now, you can do it all while in the comfort of your very own fleece onesie with ass flaps.   -- Sharon Rosenfeld