Elisabeth Hasselbeck, another loser in the decline of the culture wars (lede buried btw)

Well, having deflated the hype around the likes of Kat Timpf and Megyn Kelly, let's go right on ahead with Elisabeth Hasselbeck, the token conservative on The View for a decade, and more recently co-host on the Fox & Friends morning talk show. She was a shining example of the "values conservative" type, whose fortunes have evaporated now that conservatism is finally about nationalism and populism, not dead-ends like abortion, family values, and so on.

I want to be clear that I sympathize with audiences who want there to be values-conservative icons. We live in a pretty depraved world today, and it would be nice for there to be role models to guide us or at least serve as a standard we measure ourselves against. Unfortunately, it's very difficult to vet these models to make sure that they are who they say they are.

With matters like populism, we can simply check to see how much money they've taken from Wall Street banks, or whatever else. With moral values, the actions that provide proof are usually private and deeply held secrets -- or maybe they're not really there after all. But if there is damning evidence, it will probably be hard to uncover without devoting massive resources to unearthing it.

What we get instead is a contest to see who is holier than thou, each of the competitors striving to maximize their morality stats in order to draw in the largest crowd of eyeballs to sell to TV advertisers or book publishers.

In Hasselbeck's case, her schtick on The View (from 2003 to 2013) was standard cuckservatism of the 2000s -- protesting against abortion while accepting its finality, and shilling hard for the Iraq War well into the late Bush years. She still hadn't figured out which nationality brought down the World Trade Center on 9/11.

But those views were a dime a dozen back then. What drew in huge audiences of youngish and middle-aged women was the aggressive cultivation of her persona as a wholesome, traditional, yet hip mother-and-wife who could also hold down a career and look great on national TV every day. This lifestyle and persona appeal of hers continued into the transition to a more officially conservative venue, the Fox & Friends morning talk show, in 2013.

And then a strange thing happened -- late last year, she abruptly announced she would be leaving not just the show, but the network and the medium, indefinitely. I never watched Fox News, let alone The View, so I didn't think anything of it at the time (I did happen to be watching the morning show a little). If she stuck with The View for an entire decade, and now had a venue more suitable to her, why on Earth would she be leaving so early?

Her official reason was that she was entering a "season" where her kids needed her to be there full-time, and that she needed to give them "the best of me, not the rest of me". Again, not knowing anything about her career history at the time, I took that at face value. Nothing weird about a female conservative icon heeding the calling of domestic duties over career ambitions.

But if she was at The View for a decade, she likes not only having a career but being on TV. There's no way that desire would have stopped so suddenly in late 2015. She'd only just gotten going on her Fox career, having been there for only two years.

As for her kids, by late 2015 they were 6, 8, and 10 years old -- still needing maternal supervision, but not exactly in their most vulnerable stages of development. In fact, Hasselbeck kept working in daily TV production when her children were infants, and indeed while she was pregnant. A 2007 notice from People magazine said that while she would take some maternity leave, she would host the show right up until her due date. And of course she didn't end her busy TV career once she had one, two, and then three kids. As infants, toddlers, and schoolchildren, the three of them were growing up with a full-time working mother, which clearly did not bother her.

Why the sudden maternal guilt? There wasn't even a triggering event like another pregnancy, a crisis in the family, or something else.

Apart from hosting a daily TV show, she also wrote two books about the gluten-free diet in '08 and '12, when her children were infant to school-aged. This separate career track didn't cause her to reconsider how much or how little time her kids were getting from their mother. Building her personal media brand came first.

Then there's the timing of her departure from Fox: she bowed out during the Christmas / New Year's period (Dec 22), when the fewest possible viewers would be paying attention. If she's such a beloved icon, she should have waited until her fans were not so distracted by the back-to-back holidays to share their final moments with her. Maybe host the New Year's Eve celebration, and end on a high note.

This is also the most highly watched election season in recent memory, so it makes even less sense to bail now than during the relatively more boring seasons of the 21st century.

So why the abrupt and indefinite self-sequestering of a values-conservative icon? If this item from Blind Gossip is to be believed, she may have had an affair with a married man -- none other than the Donald himself. The item was reported on Aug 13, 2015:

Whether you love or hate this Presidential Candidate, he certainly gets people talking. One of those people is a female journalist from a large media company. She had an affair with the married Candidate. She has been talking to friends and colleagues about how worried she is that the story of the affair will break nationally and ruin them both.

Obviously the candidate is Trump. Because this came out one week after the first GOP debate where Megyn Kelly obsessively hounded him, almost every commenter at Blind Gossip figured that the journalist was her -- no wonder she behaved like a vindictive jilted lover!

But several pieces of the item don't really fit with it being Kelly. If she and Trump had an affair, and the news of it broke nationally, it would not ruin either of them. Trump's affair with Marla Maples during his first marriage is well known, and he has even said that those episodes are fair game in this election season (again, nobody cares about these topics this time around, so he exposes himself to almost no risk in being so frank about the affair).

Nor would it ruin Kelly -- it would certainly make for big-league awkwardness, but she has not built her personal brand on being the most moral family-values icon under 40 or 50. Her persona is being sassy, bossy, edgy, etc. -- not a traditional wife and mother with wholesome girl-next-door appeal.

Also, the word "talking" is used twice in the brief blind item, suggesting a talk show more than a reaction/analysis show like the Kelly File. In fact, the word "friends" conspicuously appears in the item as well, and Hasselbeck's talk show is called Fox & Friends. Before that she was on another talk show for a decade.

Certainly Hasselbeck would be ruined if it came out that she had an affair, with a married man, who was "notorious womanizer bla bla bla" Donald Trump. There goes her whole trad/con family values brand, and she's forced to eke out a living on the comic con circuit, signing autographs for nerds who bring pictures of her stint on Survivor.

The image in the blind item also looks a lot more like Hasselbeck, showing a newswoman who is more prim and proper, upbeat, and suppressing a grin rather than plastering it across her face like bossypants caricature Megyn Kelly would have done.

(The only other guess at Blind Gossip was Katy Tur, but she was openly Keith Olbermann's cohabiting sex doll, so she could not have been ruined by news of having a fling with Trump.)

Fearing that the intense scrutiny during this spectacle of an election season might turn up the frontrunner's affair with one of the hosts on a show that regularly interviews him, she decided to get out of the limelight as fast as possible, making sure to slather on the "doting mother" imagery for good protective measure before leaving.

Trump has already said that he could walk out into the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and his voters would still remain loyal to him. During one of the debates, Ann Coulter tweeted something to the effect of, "They can start aborting babies in the White House, as long as we fix the immigration problem once and for all". So even if this affair does get picked up by a more mainstream source than a gossip site, with more of the details and credible sourced filled in, it wouldn't even put a dent in Trump's momentum. "Seriously, you banged Hasselbeck? High-five bro!"

I'm putting all this out there to really hammer home the dead-end and corrupting nature of the values conservatism movement. Trump never campaigned on being for family values, anti-abortion, prayer in public schools, etc. Not that he is against all those concepts like the liberals are -- just that this election is not the time and the place for them. Pushing them has gotten us nowhere anyway.

But the movement sure was great for puffing up the status and bank account of icons like Hasselbeck who market themselves aggressively based on their wholesome holier-than-thou persona, while having affairs away from the cameras, not to mention letting someone else raise her kids while they're little, and then claiming her media departure is because her children need mommy by their side.

Who was she, anyway? A reality show contestant, an airheaded Bush cheerleader, and a self-aggrandizing gluten-free evangelist. Sorry, we may be desperate for moral icons, but not that desperate.

Persona strivers like Megyn Kelly make horrible interviewers and debate moderators

Now that Trump is skipping the Fox News debate for an event of his own to raise funds for the veterans, we won't have to sit through another two-hour event moderated by Megyn "Penis Envy" Kelly.

Some might identify her problem as being a careerist, but she's not really competing at being the best at some job. Her career is founded on a persona that she has crafted -- sassy, bossy, random/snarky, and dominatrix (revealing a lot about who her fans are). Her TV show and other media appearances are all geared toward promoting her personal brand in order to amass legions of groupies who can then be sold to advertisers.

Because her livelihood relies so much on crafting and promoting a persona, she can never act like a normal person or a professional in a setting where the focus is on someone else. With a professional interviewer, the focus is on getting answers from the interviewee -- remaining in the background, presenting an unassuming facade, gaining the subject's trust, and coaxing out responses when they're reluctant.

With a persona striver, the professionalism becomes inverted -- her groupies are tuning in to watch "Megyn Kelly doing an interview," regardless of who happens to be responding this time around. It's a performance of a character, rather than doing a job. Now the focus is on the interviewer, the emotional satisfaction comes from hearing not the responses but the questions (zingers, gotchas, effusive praise, etc.), acting like a hammed-up caricature, keeping the subject at arm's length and not caring if they trust you, and being bullheaded and failing to get a good answer when the subject is reluctant.

Moderating a debate is like juggling several interviews at the same time, so naturally a persona striver will pollute a debate even more than a one-on-one interview. We saw that big-time during the very first GOP debate, where Kelly led off by attacking Trump's character in a statement, rather than asking a good-faith question about some substantive issue.

Only trouble, Meg, is that we're tuning in to hear Trump's views on trade, immigration, terrorism, etc. -- not you doing your schtick. Everyone who saw it remembers Trump's effortless interrupting comeback about "only Rosie O'Donnell" did he call a fat pig, disgusting animal, etc. It totally deflated her would-be dominatrix interviewer routine. The rest of the cucks on stage may not mind getting slapped across the face before a live national audience, but Trump showed America that he wouldn't take the petty vindictive crap of some sassy lawyerette. His brand went through the roof, hers cratered.

Some of the other female moderators did a basically professional job -- Dana Bash, Becky Quick. But so far the best has been Maria Bartiromo during the Fox Business debates. Working for a business network, her focus is on the career world, not the lifestyle and persona contests that are more popular with those who are not / cannot rise to the top of their career path. She's just trying to get the answers that will resolve the uncertainty her viewers have over where some candidate stands on this or that topic.

She also behaves respectfully and charitably, and just a bit playfully, when other matter-of-fact interviewers come off as almost distant and therefore not trying to gain the trust of the subject.

We see how fine a balance it can be to behave "just a bit" playfully by comparing her to Erin Burnett on CNN. Like most Celtic people, Erin is a born instigator, but she lets it go too far most of the time, and savvy interviewees will sense that she's trying too hard to get them to reveal a secret. She always has this raised-eyebrow expression like she's playing flirtypants with the men or begging the women to dish on whatever juicy gossip they have. It's almost child-like in its not-so-subtle eagerness, and while that does lend a cuteness to her that is lacking among most TV news personalities, it keeps her from getting the most out of her subjects. More like, she's good at stirring up a food fight at the cafeteria table of her discussion panel.

Maria's more charming-and-disarming approach lets her get more from her interviews, and keeps her personality in the background where it belongs. We know she can be cute, too, but we don't need for it to become a performance. Only on occasion, when it will feel less artificial anyhow.

Wow, SNL still sucks 20 years later

Only because Trump was hosting it, I tuned into Saturday Night Live for the first time in about 20 years. I've only caught it occasionally since then in re-runs on Comedy Central, and snippets of the live broadcast.

Tonight confirmed that the trend continues to this day: ever since the major cast overhaul of the mid-'90s, it's been consistently lame. All that changes is the flavor of crappy tryhard, or not-so-hard, comedy. Super extreme in-your-face characters of the mid-to-late '90s, self-aware awkward types from the 2000s, and now apparently just commentary on pop culture du jour.

That really struck me tonight -- how few characters there were, acting out situations that were based on real life, however absurd. Everything was some kind of pop culture reference.

Then again, maybe it's not so surprising since the peak of SNL coincided with the golden age of the sit-com, during the early-to-mid '90s. The SNL sketches were just that -- a sketch of one scene from an imaginary sit-com, with the situation being more absurd because it only had a few minutes to get laughs, unlike the serial-form sit-com that could stretch the characters out over weeks and years.

Another great sketch comedy show from the late '80s through the mid '90s was Kids in the Hall, also produced by Lorne Michaels, though for gay Canadian audiences. The anarchic take on real-life situations was well suited to the free-wheeling late Boomer actors.

The Gen X actors of The State on MTV did a decent job, too, although you could tell they had to force it a little bit. Early X-ers are a tad more self-aware than late Boomers, and it keeps them from turning off their internal monitor and just getting into the role and running with it. Still, its time was only '93 to '95, before the over-the-top extreeeeme form of self-aware caricatures took over in the second half of the '90s (like that cheerleader group from the Will Ferrell / Cheri Oteri era).

Side note about generations of SNL actors: all 10 of the victims of the "SNL curse" -- dying before age 60 -- were Boomers. Some died in their early 30s in the early '80s, others in their late 50s in the 2010s. The only constant is a cohort effect, namely imprinting on the self-destructive approach to life during the hedonistic Seventies and succumbing sooner or later to a premature death. Although Robin Williams wasn't a cast member, he could have been, and he barely cleared the 60-year mark before killing himself.

There were some Silent Gen actors like Chevy Chase, and he's still doing fine. The early X-ers are well over 40, and aren't about to drop dead. There are some borderline X-er / Millennial actors in their early 30s, and they aren't going to OD any time now like John Belushi did.

Speaking of the current cast, they're pretty old. Most are in their 30s, with a few in their late 20s. During its heyday in the early '90s, the median age must have been at least 5 years younger, most of the hit players being in their mid-to-late 20s. And back in the doldrums when it was just The Eddie Murphy Show, the star was in his early 20s.

The fast-paced, anarchic approach that is required of sketch comedy simply doesn't work so well when the actors are old enough to have school-aged children. Unless they're going for a somewhat higher-brow angle, a la Monty Python, where the actors were still in their late 20s and early 30s rather than further advanced into their 30s (and 40s).

SNL, however, works the opposite angle -- appealing now to juveniles and overgrown children. It was depressing to see how bad it had gotten, but I'm not about to tune in again out of pity. Like The Simpsons, which I also stopped watching after the mid-'90s, SNL needs to be allowed to die already. It stopped being funny or even relevant a long time ago.

Convincing portrayals of ghost encounters on naturalistic TV series

Before the serial drama became a popular genre in television, it was not possible to do a serious "Halloween episode" because the dominant genre was the sit-com. Ghosts, spirits, and the like would have clashed with the light and comedic tone of the series overall. So, on hit sit-coms like Roseanne and The Simpsons, the Halloween episode took the form of the characters playing morbid pranks on one another and telling scary stories.

Then came series that follow fantastic plotlines and themes on an ongoing basis, such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Supernatural. The presence of ghosts, spirits, etc., on Halloween would actually feel ordinary in the worlds that these shows are set in. Bummer.

To get the Halloween atmosphere right, the series ought to be naturalistic, so that the Halloween episode stands out as up-ending the ordinary order of things, just as it is supposed to be in real life. We've already seen that it needs to be a drama rather than sit-com, so that the tone of the Halloween episode won't clash with the usual tone. And the narrative should be serial, so that we can tell that there's a disturbance to the ordinary goings-on with the characters whose lives we already know.

The Halloween episode I remember most is the one from My So-Called Life, which features a plotline about a ghost of a former student at the high school who died on Halloween. It is played seriously, as though something supernatural has entered the mundane world of the series, which usually focuses on typical teenage drama.

In fact, for their Christmas episode they again introduced a ghost plotline that was played seriously (the ghost of a homeless teen runaway, not the Christmas Carol kind of ghost). Both ghosts appear in ordinary human form rather than transparent and wispy, which helps the viewer of a naturalistic series to suspend disbelief.

Judging from reviews of these episodes at the Onion AV Club, hardcore nerds can't stand the serious introduction of supernatural elements in a realistic drama. I don't remember these episodes having a credibility problem back then, nor when I re-watched the series a few years ago. There's nothing unrealistic about the occasional encounter with something that can't be explained naturalistically. Haven't we all had some kind of experience like that in real life? And what better time to set it in than during holidays where there's a carnivalesque atmosphere of "up is down and down is up"?

If ghosts, spirits, etc. only made appearances as recurring characters in a fantasy world, they wouldn't stand out as beyond the ordinary. The nerds who write that kind of stuff (e.g. Joss Whedon, Buffy the Vampire Slayer) seem to think of ghosts, vampires, etc. as like invisible friends who interact with the normal characters on a regular basis.

In reality, ghosts are something that we only encounter very rarely, perhaps only once or twice in a lifetime. And those encounters do seem to take place within our mundane lives before and after, not as though we feel transported to some fantasy world where ghosts dwell, or as though some portal has opened up into our world like a horror movie. They have an unsettling surreal quality, where we can't tell if this is a natural or supernatural experience.

Have there been any similar episodes in the 20 years since the ones from My So-Called Life? Wikipedia has a list of Halloween TV specials with sections for "American drama" and "teen drama". It's hard to judge whether ghosts appear at all, or whether it's just about partying on Halloween, let alone whether the ghost encounter is portrayed seriously. It sure doesn't look like it, though.

Earlier, Twin Peaks made surreal episodes -- every episode. Expecting them every day or week is not how we have ghost-like experiences in real life.

In any case, you can watch the entire sole season of My So-Called Life for free on Hulu. The Halloween and Christmas episodes are 9 and 15, although it's worth watching the other ones in order, too, to appreciate the contrast in subject matter and theme. It's one of the few pop culture phenomena of my teenage years that I'm not embarrassed to have enjoyed, a kind of Breakfast Club serial drama for the grunge/alternative era. There's certainly a lot worse you could be streaming to get in the mood for Halloween.

Millennial memories of adolescence: Digital isolation

An earlier post looked at how Millennials get nostalgic for not having a life during childhood. Almost all their memories revolve around mass media and the virtual rather than the real world -- TV, movies, video games, and so on. Very little music, clothing, fads, or toys -- especially ones that required you to be playing outside.

Public environments for social interaction with peers, like the mall, the bowling alley, or the video game arcade from the '80s, are completely absent. They grew up when cocooning and helicopter parenting had really gotten going, so what else are they going to remember? Poor kids.

These themes continue into their memories about their adolescent years. Now that we're getting farther and farther away from the 2000s, it's possible for them to reflect on what it was like. What do they come up with?

Here is a recent BuzzFeed video with over a million views and over 3,000 comments, about "Memories from the early 2000s". Nearly every item is about technological devices and the internet.

You can find more focused lists on clothing from the 2000s, music of the 2000s, and so on, but when you leave their memories open-ended, all they ever recall is which form of technology they were using to socially isolate themselves at the time -- was it Instant Messenger, multi-tap texting, MySpace, etc.?

Even the two items about music are not about the music itself -- which bands they were into, or which genres were popular -- but about the technology used to store it (burning mp3s onto a disc, and long download times for filesharing).

Not only is there no mention of activities that you do in-person with other people, there is no awareness of the broader outside world -- 9/11, American flags everywhere, Islamic terrorists, etc.

We can dismiss blaming all this stuff on the internet, since Gen X was using the internet back then too -- more so, given that we were older and had our own computers -- yet our memories of the early 2000s don't all come back to the digital devices du jour.

We remember how terrible Nickelback & Co. all sounded, not how long it took to download their mp3s. We remember whale tails (thongs + low-rise jeans), not which reality TV stars made it their signature look. And of course we remember 9/11 and its aftermath.

Millennials' social isolation began long before they were on the internet and using cell phones anyway. Recall the earlier post about their childhoods. Back in the '90s, it was Nickelodeon TV shows, Disney movies on VHS, and N64 or PlayStation video games. But still using mass media to distract and anesthetize their brains while being cooped up inside the house all day, every day.

Another 10 to 15 years down the line, Millennials will have the same deprived memories about their digital-only lifestyles during young(ish) adulthood -- the buzz you felt from getting likes on Facebook status updates, those annoying ads before the video loaded on YouTube, posting pictures of your lunch to Instagram, "damn autocorrect!" etc.

If 9/11 barely registers in their memories of the 2000s, I'm sure that the first black President, gay marriage, etc., will evaporate from their memories as well. It's all just been a series of distractions for a socially isolated generation in search of one novelty after another to alleviate their perpetual boredom.

It's truly amazing -- an entire generation with no memory of real life. Even more bizarrely, they have no memories of "the good old days" because  technology keeps improving, and that's all that counts to them. Digital heroin keeps getting more potent, cheaper to score, and more efficiently transmitted.

Parents beware: this is the outcome of digitally bubble-wrapping your children out of overblown paranoia about what'll happen if they have a social life.

Tonight's GOP debate: The "jerk store" episode from Seinfeld, as snarky Repubs get asses handed to them by nimble Trump

Time ran an article about how all the losing candidates are going to focus their (lowww) energy on taking shots at Trump, with the moderators at CNN eager to stir up a food fight atmosphere.

One problem: the other candidates can't think on their feet, and have to come with a canned speech, micro-tailored talking points, etc. Only this time around, their boring canned speech will include a few barbs aimed at Trump. Shit-eating grins are already spreading across their faces in anticipation. No suffering from l'esprit d'escalier this time, eh Rand?

Obviously they were too busy mentally reciting their canned talking points during the first debate to notice that Trump batted away Megan Kelly's volley about the war on women -- instantly, effortlessly, devastatingly. "Only Rosie O'Donnell!" :crowd goes wild:

No matter how many times these clowns have rehearsed their one-liners, Trump is guaranteed to slam them with an even greater zinger, without missing a beat.

It could be the most entertaining spectacle you'll see all year. Just imagine -- two solid hours of the "jerk store" episode from Seinfeld, where George gets publicly outwitted by an even better comeback to his one-liner that he'd been crafting all week long, and had looked so smugly toward delivering.

The deflation that these limp-dick cuckservatives are going to feel will be all the more yoo-miliating because Trump won't just be swatting down some petty off-the-cuff insult, but their long-festering revenge fantasy.

Too bad it's going to be broadcast to the entire nation, so they can't go on Reddit afterward and write a phony story about how they finally worked up the courage to take on the bully and made him eat his mean words!

Fox News lobs bomb at Trump, bounces back, blows the face off of sell-out "right-wing" media

In case you missed the GOP debate, the cuckservative moderators failed to ask any substantive questions of Donald Trump, using the opportunity instead to try to snare him with petty, snarky "gotcha" questions about:

- Whether he's inflaming the War on Women by calling Rosie O'Donnell a fat hairy dyke?

- Whether he has a professionally lit cell phone video of the Mexican government nudging their undesirables over the border? And

- Whether he'll swear loyalty to the Republican Party rather than the American people?

On and on it went, the most shameful thing I've seen in a long while. The substantive questions went only to the empty suits who gave boring, dickless responses, all of them canned. Yet I sat through two hours of questions from a bitter bimbo and a leathery, closeted Jew (frat bro was OK, aside from the opening ambush about GOP uber alles), just to see if it would ever get good (it didn't).

That was the first and last time I'll willingly tune into Fox News. But I'm not part of their target audience, so big deal to them, right?

However, check out the comments at Fox News' Facebook page, or responses on Twitter. Those are coming from the large pool of regular viewers. Not a single person chimed in to tell them what a great job they did as media moderators between the public and the candidates. Every single one that talks about the debate overall is not only negative, but shaming of Fox News as a whole and the individual moderators too (mostly the airhead and the putz).

Even if these devoted viewers weren't all gung-ho for Trump, they were still disgusted by the flagrant set-up of the most popular candidate, and coming from what they had trusted as the only (quasi-)conservative news source in the mainstream media. Recurring comments to the effect of "Now we see your true colors," "Never watching again," and so on.

In fact, most reactions weren't in favor of this or that candidate's total performance, so the debate's effect on the polls may or may not be noticeable. Fox News failed at their goal of souring the conservative voters on Trump.

The main result of the network's debate was in fact to alienate and anger a YUGE segment of the party's base from the network itself. The consensus from the audience response is, "I don't know who won, but the clear loser was Fox News".

And so, not only is the Trump phenomenon breaking apart the corrupt Republican establishment, it has also led one of the central propaganda outlets to self-destruct. While flailing to wound Trump, the arrogant fool wields the blade so recklessly that it hacks off its own head.

Truly this campaign is the gift that keeps on giving.

Teens react to the Apple IIe

Is the queen of rom-coms a lesbo?

This item at Blind Gossip mentions an actress who was playing all touchy-feely with her man at the Oscars, but only when the cameras were on them. During the pre- and after-party, when the cameras were not rolling, she was with her girlfriend. Her public relationship is just a PR stunt.

She will not come out of the closet because she fears that she'll lose her fan base and industry support.

The only way a closeted lesbian could lose a male fan base by coming out is if she were a sex bomb that they're all jerking off to. Nobody in Hollywood is that hot. No one who gets into the Oscars, anyway, which excludes mere eye candy actresses. In fact, coming out might actually titillate a sex-crazed male fan base, who'd start picturing her getting it on with some other celebrity babe.

That leaves a female fan base, who have invested so much of their lives into following her as a role model. How would coming out as a lesbian shatter their faith in her? If her roles had primarily been about a down-on-her-luck kinda gal who meets Mr. Right and everything works out great in the end. Discovering that they had been trying to imitate the love life of a lesbian all along would ruin the last hope they had of finding their prince.

The only good guess in the comments at the BG post is Jennifer Aniston. Most of them are moronically guessing Oprah, who is not an actress. One clue pointing to Aniston is the phrase "so sweet," perhaps referring to her recent drama Cake. Another clue is that "she really wants to win an Oscar more than she wants you to know the truth!" Someone pointed out that Aniston made headlines recently with the phrase "We know our own truth," referring to her relationship / engagement to seemingly closeted homosexual Justin Theroux.

Pictures of them show zero chemistry, which technically just means they are a sham couple, not necessarily that she is incapable of chemistry with men altogether in real life.

Still, check Google Images for pictures of Aniston and Selena Gomez, whether at the recent Oscars after-party or in numerous other occasions. They look way more into each other than Aniston and Theroux do. There's another set of pictures from Sunday's after-party of Aniston and Amy Adams looking tender together.

The blind item didn't say that the actress' girlfriend was famous herself, so I don't claim that Gomez or Adams are Aniston's girlfriend. It's just to point out how much more open and warmed-up she evidently feels around other women.

I'm happy to say that I never did get the whole Jennifer Aniston craze. They tried to make her a sex symbol during the '90s, and I even watched a few episodes of Friends just to see what all the hubbub was about. Nothing. Talk about being over-hyped. I didn't know any other guys who were into her either, but she must have had a niche following among doormat types.

I do understand her appeal to aging single women, and that makes me think it's her. She would lose industry support because her whole schtick is the rom-com princess, something that absolutely does not allow for a lesbian actress.

The Hollywood executives would lose so much money that could've been scored from churning out a dozen more inane Aniston rom-coms. And her fans would feel betrayed and led astray. "No wonder she has such trouble finding and holding onto a man!"

Lesson number one in finding Mr. Right: don't imitate the personality of a lesbian.

Entertainment as mood stabilizer vs. experimentation

This video by the gang at Red Letter Media pokes fun at how many of this year's upcoming movies will be sequels, prequels, remakes, reboots, adaptations from other media, etc. The unstoppable nature of this trend really makes you wonder what's behind it. To understand it, we need to see its full scope.

See my earlier post that crunches the numbers on how common this unoriginal approach to storytelling in film has been, using the top movies at the box office from 1936 to 2011. In short, it tracks the outgoing vs. cocooning social cycle: cocooning audiences prefer familiar material more than outgoing audiences, who want to experience a story they haven't already heard about. Another post hinted at the same trend in pop music, where the same song stays on the year-end charts for more than a single year nowadays, although that was not an exhaustive study over time.

I haven't crunched any numbers on it, but there's also a clear trend in TV shows toward creating multiple adaptations of a single brand (CSI, CSI: Los Angeles, CSI: Sheboygan...). American Idol featured entirely familiar songs, only sung by people you've never heard of. And Dancing with the Stars not only has familiar songs, but familiar personalities dancing along to them. The judges on these competitions are also familiar stars.

As long as it's instantly recognizable, audiences will cling to it for dear life. That seems to be the proper way to interpret this broad trend — not as "against change" or "against novelty," and by implication "for what is traditional" or "for what has been proven to work."

These lame rehashings are no more than a generation old, so they are not part of an enduring tradition whose preservation the audience feels bound to maintain. They are merely a security blanket for a population afflicted by anxiety and depression, in contrast to the delightfully off-beat material that the fun-loving audiences sought in more outgoing times, with a peak in the 1980s.

This view of entertainment as self-medication as opposed to experimentation suggests a link to the forms of drug use that prevail in cocooning vs. outgoing times. This post reviewed the distinction between stabilizing and destabilizing drugs, and showed that the stabilizers soar in cocooning periods, while destabilizers become popular in outgoing periods.

Stabilizers give a little pep to the depressed and mellow out those with shaky nerves — the popular amphetamines and barbiturates that were consumed on a massive scale during the Midcentury. The turning point came during the '70s when the public reacted against the attempt to mainstream the use of Valium. But as cocooning returned in the '90s, the mainstream returned to drugs like Prozac for the on-edge and Ritalin for the restless. These stabilizing drugs are an attempt to correct the emotional dysfunction that comes from being socially cut-off.

Destabilizers are about opening up the mind to strange, new moods and experiences, not to return the mind to normal. Marijuana, cocaine, alcohol, and the like. They flourish when the mainstream already has a satisfying social life and normal emotional functioning, and seeks out something beyond the ordinary. They are "party drugs" or "social drugs," unlike Miltown or Prozac, which are meant for the isolated housewife or Man in the Grey Flannel Suit. Because they are more destabilizing, people use them with greater wariness about their dangers than they do when consuming antidepressants and focus-enhancers, which are taken complacently.

Entertainment, then, is just another form of self-medication in cocooning times, or off-the-beaten-path experimenting in outgoing times. This psychiatric view may go farther toward explaining the tendency of cocooning periods to be more culturally bland, stale, and monotonous, than other views which tend to dehumanize the self-medicating cocooners as inherently dull and uncreative.

They may in fact have similar creative capacities and ability to appreciate novelty, but they are being suppressed in order to meet the more fundamental psychological need for everyday emotional regulation. Folks in outgoing times have Maslow's basic social and emotional needs met, so they are freed up for higher pursuits in creativity and self-actualization.

Back to the '90s dramedy, Hindsight, shows difficulty of recreating even the recent past

Millennials who keep hyping up the awesomeness of growing up as a "90s kid" may find it odd that the teenagers of that decade, the tail end of Gen X, have very little fondness for that period. This failure to resonate across neighboring generations is not found among the kids and the teenagers of the '80s, both of whom feel pride rather than shame when thinking back on the era.

So it is purely for sociological reasons that I've watched the first two episodes of a new scripted dramedy on VH1, Hindsight, in which an early 40-something woman who is about to get married for the second time miraculously travels back to the year 1995, when she was about to get married to husband #1, and now has the chance to improve on the choices she'd made the first time around. It's basically Hot Tub Time Machine, only for chicks, and set in the '90s rather than the '80s.

I could care less about the plot or character arcs, which seem to be the usual self-absorbed stuff found in the female-oriented medium of television. I'm more interested in seeing what the show's creators have chosen to make the world feel like the Nineties, and how the actors are choosing to interpret the personalities of the time.

First impression: it doesn't really feel like the '90s. It's not for lack of accurate references — shorter skirts on girls, longer hair on guys — or even for lack of placing those differences in their proper context (everyday relations are shown to be more sexually charged and promiscuous than in the middle of the 2010s).

It's more the delivery of these period markers that is off-key to those who lived through the time. The emotional range is what you'd find in mumblecore dialog of the present day, and the attempts at humor are also distinctly 2010s — reading wacky or self-aware lines in a totally deadpan manner. It feels more like Parks and Recreation, only without the annoying shaky cam, and with the cast and sets dressed up in a LARPing '90s style.

(Hot Tub Time Machine also suffered from a jarring mismatch in tone. It was basically The Hangover with cosplay '80s wardrobe and set dressings.)

Where's the extra-thick layer of sarcasm and cynicism? Or showing some kind of emotion on your face? The '90s did see the beginning of the trend toward today's emotional numbness, robotic speech, and attitude of glib dismissal. But it wasn't that pronounced in '95, when there was still a little soul and defiance in the personalities of young people, albeit less so than during the '80s.

See the cult TV show My So-Called Life for the definitive portrayal of coming-of-age in the mid-'90s, where the characters aren't mumbling through most of their dialog, and where something is actually at stake in the lives of the characters, rather than a kiddie romp through a bubble-world free from consequences, in which nothing you do ultimately matters.

Leaving out that side of the '90s will only confuse the Millennials about the decade being one of a pendulum grinding to a halt (after moving in the outgoing direction since the '60s) and starting to swing in the opposite cocooning direction.

A major part of youth angst back then was feeling pulled in opposite directions by larger social forces — the open and outgoing spirit that had been familiar during the '80s, and now this new closed-off and withdrawn impulse. It wasn't clear at the time whether the cocooning thing would win out — maybe it was just a blip of lameness? — but then again maybe that's the way the wind is beginning to blow. You couldn't tell, so you had to hedge your bets by expressing fondness, but then immediately dismissing it or slathering it with sarcasm. That way you had an "out" if either the sincerity police or the irony police got word of what you'd said.

This emotional schizophrenia, and the general feeling of gear-shifting, makes the zeitgeist of the '90s hard to distill and convey, just like the previous decade of switching from an outgoing to a cocooning atmosphere, the 1930s. Nobody can come up with a good picture of the social-cultural zeitgeist of the '30s, caught between the end of the Jazz Age and the beginning of the World-of-Tomorrow Midcentury. "The Depression" refers to the economic and political setting, not everyday social and cultural life.

In fact, the only time that Hindsight feels '90s-y is when the soundtrack plays. Contemporary actors are attempting the impossible — uprooting your mindset from your immediate surroundings and re-growing its tendrils in a distant time. However, the singing and playing from pop music have been preserved in their original form. Not that '90s music was very good, but it is shocking to see how far it has devolved in the last 20 years. Although becoming more withdrawn, you can still hear the soulfulness and melody carrying over from the '80s in the songs by the Gin Blossoms, the Cranberries, and Soul Asylum. That's a way more authentic '90s feel.

Hot Tub Time Machine had the same jarring breaks from its artificial feel, whenever an '80s song played in the background. For a moment, it actually felt like the '80s for real.

The VH1 show has an even tougher time getting the mood right because the actors are mostly born from '82 to '87, making them a bit too young to directly recall the atmosphere of adolescent and young adult world circa '95. Children in the unsupervised '80s were more in touch with what the older kids were up to, but as helicopter parents locked their kids up starting in the '90s, they lost touch with the generation just above them.

(It is striking how the average Millennial's recall of '90s music is entirely restricted to the boy bands and girl groups that were aimed at their own pre-pubescent audience, while suffering from a huge blind spot for the vast majority of pop music aimed at teenagers and young adults. Again, a severe change from children of the '80s, who remember the full spectrum of girl groups, rock bands, and adult contemporary hits from their early years.)

Then again, Hot Tub Time Machine had unconvincing performances, and those guys were all of the right generation to portray those characters. The main stumbling block is removing yourself from your surroundings. Still, when the past is not merely distant but foreign, it becomes nearly impossible to pass yourself off as one of the natives.

"My Husband's Not Gay" - Mormon wives of openly gay men, now on reality TV

"These Mormon women married men who like men — and they’re all OK with it"

So reads the clickbait headline for an NY Post article on the subjects of a new reality show ("My Husband's Not Gay") about Mormon women who were duped into marriage and children by queers, who were only selfishly concerned with finding the ultimate beard defense against social ostracism.

"Who lookth tho fabulouthly not-gay? Thith guyyy!"

Just imagine the poor children whose family portraits will be disfigured by their Peter Pan daddy flashing his flaming drama queen gayface in every picture. And imagine when your friends come over, having to explain why your dad looks like a creepy pedophile.

Or whose minds will be forever scarred by being told at age 6 that, "Daddy has these feelings, but he chose to be with Mommy." No joke, one of the couples actually revealed daddy's buttsex yearnings to a SIX YEAR-OLD CHILD. The poor kid isn't old enough to understand anything about sex, romance, marriage, etc. It would be awkward enough for a normal couple to talk about their sexual urges with a child that young. It's a downright abomination of the parental role to do so when daddy digs dicks.

Imagine growing up knowing that mommy and daddy do not, and cannot love each other as husband and wife, but that daddy was looking for a baby-maker to satisfy his ego, and thus had to settle for marriage to a woman.

Another couple is also telling their kids what's up at early ages:

And, depending on their ages, our kids [ages 9 through 16] know about the SSA [obscuring euphemism for homosexuality, i.e. "same sex attraction" - ed.] to varying degrees. They love and support their dad, and realize that people don’t have to be perfect to be loved by God.

Imagine growing up having to cope with the burden of your dad being mentally crippled and warped — and not in a garden variety way where he just wails on the kids every now and then, but is subject to all the myriad symptoms of gay Peter Pan syndrome. Children should not have to grow up supporting their stunted father, the father is supposed to be the support for the fledgling children.

The rationalization about being loved by God is a shameful red herring. It's not their gay yearnings per se that will get them tossed into the fiery pits of Hell, but their duping of naive women who could have had a halfway normal marriage and family life, and assuming a parental role when they are still stuck in the immature "yucky, girls have cooties" stage of development themselves.

Not to mention the endless adulteration of the marriage because gay men can't actually control their urges nowadays, despite all the propaganda we hear from both secular and religious ideologues on the matter. One of the couples has been married for 20 years, and for the first 15 years the husband had been whoring himself around with other men. Yup, no big deal to overcome, just being told that your husband of 15 years has been licking the shit out of other dudes' buttholes.

Anyone who thinks these women haven't already contracted something from their gay husbands is dangerously naive. AIDS is only the tip of iceberg, and there are surely hundreds or thousands of pathogens that are primarily passed around among gays that we don't even know about (forbidden science because think of the homophobic implications). That's why AIDS is much higher among black women than white women: black men who sleep with (black) women are way more likely to be "on the down-low," i.e. not sharing that part of their identity that prefers getting blasted up the ass with viral loads.

In fact, one of the couples had a child that died shortly after birth. I wonder how much daddy's toxic sperm contributed to that ending. Women are already engaged in an evolutionary arm's race against men regarding intercourse and pregnancy (sperm evolving to out-maneuver the female reproductive tract, which in turn evolves greater defenses and rejection strategies in case it becomes compromised). It's no stretch to imagine their reproductive system becoming corrupted by all the germs that the gay husband has been carrying around, both inside and outside.

Who would even consider staying in such a relationship once they found out about being duped, adulterated, and still in for a lifetime of shame? Women with no self-esteem, AKA fat chicks (look at the pictures). Who else would sit through a dinner date where their husband is constantly ogling the waiter, with whom he also makes childish handjob jokes?

Episodes like that reveal the phoniness of their philosophy of "It's OK to look but not touch." It's disrespectful and trust-destroying for the husband to have such a roving eye and flirtatious speech, especially when his wife is right there the whole time.

It's obvious that the two are not equals or compatible, and that the wife is serving as a babysitter for the broken kiddie husband. Although not sexually attracted to each other, they at least claim an emotional fondness. But that makes the relationship more like that of an impulsive kid brother and his protective big sister. This quasi-incestuous nature of their marriage and family formation adds a whole 'nother layer of freakishness onto their abomination of a relationship.

But they're not just any old bunch of broken fat chicks — they're Mormon fat chicks, whose religion emphasizes marriage and large nuclear families as a step toward salvation.

Here we see a critical weakness in natalist approaches to preserve tradition and enhance cohesion. If it's all about family size, then O come all ye Mexicans living 20 people to a house. Blessed are the fag-wedders: for theirs is the future of America.

American traditions won't survive in a world where natives are being out-bred by immigrants. And if natalists don't care about preserving the sanctity of marriage and of the parent-child relationship, then their influence is toward greater corruption — more and more marriages of the broken kind. There may be a logical independence between natalism and purity-mindedness, so that you could be both natalist and against all of the corrupting trends under way.

But psychologically, natalism trumps purity-mindedness. Or at least here and now it does. It's the same mindset that views all growth as good, no matter in what direction growth is headed toward or how fast and uncontrollably it's moving. It's a mindset that worships an abstraction and treats real physical beings and things as homogeneous fungible units.

Even more disturbingly, it's not a mindset that recognizes a trade-off between quantity and quality, while choosing more quantity of lower quality. They are simply blind, deaf, and numb to matters of quality, and see only in quantities. People who accumulate stuff, and economists who rejoice at how much stuff is consumed nowadays, don't mention that most of it is cheap Chinese crud, but hey at least we've got a lot of it. It's just, "Wow, look at all this stuff!"

In the same way, "Wow, look at all these new Utahns!" Salt Lake City is now around 65% white and 25% Mexican.

Reminder: Salt Lake City is also the gayest city in the country, by objective measures of gay lifestyle signals per capita. And those statistics were compiled before a Salt Lake City judge ruled in favor of gay marriage.

Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised by the permissive attitudes toward cultural stewardship in a population that traces its roots back to a polygamous cult founded in the 19th century, that was driven out of every town east of the Mississippi that they tried to settle into. But hey, economic growth and big nuclear families, so no big deal I guess.

Add on top of that the pussy behavior of the largely Saxon-Scandinavian make-up of the white population in Utah, and it's no wonder to find such weak effective policing of gay deviance in the Minnesota of the West.

A glimpse into the de-romanticizing of the Sixties among Gen X teenagers

In a recent comment thread about the lack of iconic coming-of-age movies in the '90s, I pointed to the sole exception -- the cult TV show My So-Called Life.

It only ran during the '94-'95 season, and was not aired much (if at all) in re-runs. So, unlike the John Hughes movies of the '80s, they were not available to rent on video long after the first run, and even the initial showing was just another prime-time TV broadcast rather than a big-time theatrical release. This kept the show from catching on with a wider range of birth cohorts -- mostly those born in the late '70s and early '80s. But at least among them, the show was iconic, one that always comes up when they think of examples that define the zeitgeist of the '90s (for better or worse).

After posting that comment, I felt a tiny wave of nostalgia and got curious about whether My So-Called Life is still being offered on a streaming service. And sure enough, all 19 episodes are free to watch on Hulu (click here). Worth checking out if you've never seen it, although nothing you need to be in a rush to see. Hearing a musical score modulate the tone from one scene to the next was a breath of fresh air, compared to how devoid of music today's movies and TV shows are.

The episode I watched, "The Substitute," starts off like The Dead Poets Society, with the high school students introduced to a new English teacher, whose iconoclastic style shakes up the stodgy status quo, and whose passion captures the attention of the previously bored-to-death teenagers. As the teacher and the students prepare for the publication of the school's literary magazine, a battle over censorship ignites between them and the principal. (One of the poems is clumsily erotic but not obscene, written by one of the girl students.) By the end of the episode, the substitute is gone, and the bow-tie-wearing principal has taken his place.

Unlike the Very Special Episodes of the '80s, the tone throughout is naturalistic and low-key, rather than histrionic shouting between the teacher / students and the principal.

But even more distinctive of its time, by the end the protagonist Angela has a bitter taste left in her mouth over the whole ordeal, rather than the satisfaction of "fighting the good fight" and holding out hope for greater success next time. After the literary magazine is pulled from circulation, only one other character joins Angela in re-distributing it. Evidently no one else is willing to stick their neck out for The Cause. Her Boomer parents instinctively take the principal's side, and she more or less calls them hypocrites who have endlessly told her stories about how they marched for ideals in the Sixties.

These are relatively minor reasons, though, for losing your youthful Romanticism. The main disillusionment comes near the end, when Angela learns the truth about why the substitute will no longer be teaching there, which leaves her feeling cynical and betrayed by him, rather than righteously hopeful after her side's defeat.*

The Boomers, who would have felt a heartwarming bridging of generations in The Dead Poets Society, would have interpreted this episode as a sign of a defeatist and apathetic mindset among the teenagers of the Nineties. The teenagers themselves, however, took it more as a cautionary tale about allowing yourself to be easily seduced by charismatic strangers who urge you to question everything and follow your passion, as they are more likely to be some kind of con man than a genuine role model.

If the take-away message had only been about choosing your battles, tempering idealism with pragmatism, and rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar's, I think the Boomers could have felt that their Sixties legacy had still been passed along relatively intact to the younger generation. After all, by the mid-'90s even the Boomers themselves were no longer tie-dyed hippies.

But given the sordid and banal unraveling of the substitute's stature by the end, the Gen X viewer took away the message that being a passionate idealist was wrong-headed to begin with. Not simply that they should aim in the same direction as the Sixties generation, only walking in baby steps and not pushing as hard. But that the Sixties path pointed in an entirely off-base direction altogether.

What direction did the show preach that teenagers travel along instead? It didn't give an answer, other than "not in the Sixties direction". It was not a lame episode that would play out today about the relative merits of competing ideologies. It was a simple coming-of-age story about lost innocence, and learning from it a lesson of humility -- that your impulsiveness can lead you into acting like a naive idiot who can be easily taken advantage of.

Despite the wishes of helicopter parents, that lesson is not one that can be taught by instruction beforehand, like the alphabet or the list of American presidents. It's one of those experiences, like skinned knees, that the kid has to go through themselves in order to come away from it stronger and more mature. It's not a dangerous experience, just one that is unpleasant and uncomfortable for a little while. The relatively non-interventionist approach of Angela's parents strikes me as realistic for the time. Millennials were being over-protected during this period, but the late X-ers were still allowed to experience skinned knees in the course of growing up out of childhood.

I don't want to suggest that this episode in itself changed the minds of an entire generation. It was not one of those "Who shot Mr. Burns?" episodes that all the kids were talking about. But it was the kind of thing that strongly resonated with teenagers of the time, and marked the shift away from passionate idealism and toward even-headed pragmatism among Gen X.

Also worth noting, by way of contrasting X-ers with Millennials, that Angela doesn't throw a hissy fit at the end. The ordeal was just another one of those disillusioning experiences of adolescence -- better get over it and move on, no point wallowing in pity. She also humbly realizes that she'd allowed herself to be had, rather than putting all the blame on one or another of the grown-ups. You definitely would not see that if they tried to re-make the series today.

* Spoiler, highlight to read: [He had not been fired by the principal, as though it were the final injustice in the battle over ideals. Instead, the principal had received a notice that the substitute was wanted for deserting his family in another part of the country, and failing to pay child support all along. The substitute quit upon seeing the notice. When Angela tracks him down to confront him about leaving his family, he gives a series of evasive and empty answers, further disappointing her for having been taken under his spell.]

Hit shows from the '90s were shot on film

After regularly tuning in to Seinfeld for the first time in about 15 years, I started to notice how much better it looks compared to either today's digital shows or the video-taped shows from the '70s and '80s. And sure enough, IMDb says it was shot on 35mm film stock.

It doesn't have video's fast frame rate which makes it look more like you're right there in the audience of a live play performance. The slower frame rate stylizes movement enough to distance you from the show's world. The lighting and colors also come out much better than on a typical sit-com from the '80s, which were shot on video.

And it wasn't only Seinfeld -- ER, Friends, Frasier, Murphy Brown, Law & Order, The Drew Carey Show, just to name the ones I checked. Some were still being video-taped if they were in the vein of the '80s sit-com, such as Roseanne and Home Improvement.

Perhaps that's one reason why some people respond best to TV shows of The Nineties (meaning, '93 and after). They probably didn't know it, but just sensed that they had better visual production put into them. Like me, you might not respond to some of them for reasons of tone -- wacky/zany, emo, glib, etc. -- but at least they are nice to look at.

During the 2000s, first it was all the game shows and reality shows that brought the video look back to mainstream TV. Reality-based content calls for greater photorealism in capturing motion, so video's high frame rate won out. Now even the comedies and dramas are leaving film for digital. The Big Bang Theory, about the only 21st-century sit-com to break into the top of the Nielsen ratings, started out on film but switched to digital.

Why didn't they care to shoot all the big shows on film in the '80s? (Some in the action genre were, like Magnum, P.I.) I think TV shows that looked film-y only appealed to audiences once the cocooning climate had set in. Since then the ideal has been to never leave the house. But they still want something cool-looking to watch for entertainment. If the small screen was the new big screen, then why not start shooting TV shows on film?

Not Earth to Echo: Characters who looked and sounded creepy, but proved themselves as trustworthy friends in '80s kid culture

Coming out this week is another one of those nauseatingly cutesy, inoffensive, painless, and unchallenging kids' movies, Earth to Echo (trailer here). By all accounts, the plot is a shameless rip-off of E.T. In one major respect, however, they deliberately took the opposite approach from the original -- in designing the alien creature to look like a cute baby owl who purrs like a guinea pig.

I guess an ugly-ass naked midget with a slow raspy voice would be too much for today's generation of wimpy kids.

Although it may seem like a trivial difference, making the alien so cutesy completely undercuts the intended themes of bridging a trust gap between wary strangers, tolerance of that which we initially fear if it proves itself friendly, and judging others by their character and conduct rather than their outward appearance. The cute little robo-owl looks harmless, and acts harmless -- wow, what a challenging lesson to learn!

Children haven't been exposed to characters like E.T. for so long that it's worth taking a look at how common that type used to be back in the '80s. They all frightened us at first, with their ugly appearance and weird voice, but by asking for our help and then returning the favor, they proved that they were to be trusted as friends, not turned away as enemies.

E.T. from E.T. (1982), the prototype who started the phenomenon.

Lame rip-offs of E.T. are nothing new. But back in 1988, Mac and Me still featured an ugly-looking alien because that was such an important part of the whole "strangers growing to trust each other" thing.

Even when the tone was purely comedic, not dramatic, the alien was still ugly. In the TV show ALF (1986-'90), the alien is a wisecracker who creates and "odd couple" dynamic with the serious and cautious head of the household, Willie, who nevertheless does his best to keep others from finding out about his family's new alien companion. ALF was also made into a popular stuffed animal for kids.

Speaking of hideous-looking, potentially frightening stuffed animal friends, 1986 saw the release of My Pet Monster, which was like the My Buddy doll, only ugly and scary. Its bulbous green schnoz was covered in warts, its eyebrows pointed downward, and its yellowy fangs hung out in plain sight (although it looked more like an overbite than an aggressive display). But it still looked friendly enough to be your partner-in-crime when you were playing make-believe.

In Labyrinth (1986), Ludo the gentle beast has an ugly mug, and Hoggle the cynic looks downright repulsive. After an initial scare, both of them help the protagonist Sarah navigate the dangers of the labyrinth to rescue her kidnapped baby brother from the Goblin King, whose glamorous evil contrasts with the ugly yet kind-hearted pair of helpers.

Just about all of the friends that Atreyu makes along his adventure in The NeverEnding Story (1984) look weird, ugly, or creepy. In fact Morla, the giant old tortoise, looks almost like E.T. in the face. But by far the most disturbing is Falkor the luck dragon, whose likable doggie face does not seem to match with his pedo grooming voice, or the reptilian scales that cover his back. (As a kid I thought those were large blisters -- no joke, it made my skin crawl when I first saw it.) But he helps the kid along his journey, rather than take advantage of him, so our initial revulsion was misplaced.

Then there was that creepy, personal space-invading robotic fish eye lens, voiced by Pee Wee Herman himself, who commanded the spaceship that the young protagonist flew in Flight of the Navigator (1986).

Gizmo from Gremlins (1984) has a soft voice and a generally cutesy look, but his naked wing-like ears look a little off-putting when seen against his overall primate appearance. If they really wanted to take it easy on the kids, they wouldn't have included those freaky-looking ears.

Also in the vein of freaky primates was the sasquatch Harry who befriends a middle-class family  in Harry and the Hendersons (1987 movie, 1991-93 TV show). Something about how close together his eyes are, and how often you see his lower row of teeth, give him a disturbing rather than cutesy primate look.

Then there's the title character of the children's picture book Gorilla (1983), who startles a little girl when he comes to life from her imagination, but then earns her trust as he whisks her away from her depressing latchkey kid existence for a night of adventure around town.

Is he human or not-quite-human? Sloth from The Goonies (1985) scares the hell out of all children when his twisted face and horrible scream are first revealed. Yet this lovable abomination of nature proves himself ever faithful and sacrificing when the shit is about to hit the fan for the adventurous kids who stumble upon him chained up in a dark cellar.

By the early '90s, the alien/monster gave way to more familiar creatures who were still creepy-looking yet benevolent. In Home Alone (1990), there's a sinister-seeming old man who turns out to only be upset from being estranged from his son. He and the pint-sized protagonist Kevin have a heart-to-heart understanding in church, and the old man later clobbers the pair of robbers who have Kevin cornered in his own house.

Finally, in The Sandlot (1993), a band of baseball-playing kids discover that the neighborhood dog with Cujo's reputation is in fact a gentle giant, and that his blind owner is not as creepy as they'd thought either. The avuncular owner simply prefers his privacy.

That's about the last example I came across in looking things over. Since then, any aborted attempts at the character type have made it too cute on first impression, or disarmingly campy (which amounts to the same thing). The Nickelodeon show Aaahh!!! Real Monsters, Quasimodo in Disney's take on The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Pixar's cute-ification of Shrek (who looks grotesque in the original picture book from 1990), Monsters, Inc., How to Train Your Dragon, and so on and so forth.

Helicopter parents devote their entire effort toward insulating their child's body and brain with bubble wrap. No hard falls, no hard lessons. Anything awkward must be smoothed over, anything yucky must be sterilized. If this warps your kid's development and stunts them permanently, don't worry -- at least you won't personally feel uncomfortable having to watch them grope toward maturity.

With such a seismic change in the goals of parents, it can come as no surprise to see the repulsive yet trustworthy character from the '80s replaced by the cutesy and harmless ones over the past 20 years.

When music videos were shot on film

Checking out the videos on Totally '80s today on VH1 Classic, I was struck by how common it was to shoot on film back then, despite the fact that video technology was not only available but cheaper than film, and already becoming the standard for shooting news and pornography.

Shouldn't music videos have joined in with other lesser media like reporting and porno, and chosen to shoot on video? They could have, but then they wouldn't have that stylized look that film gives.

Video is shot at a higher frame rate (capturing more motion per second), gives more desaturated colors, and has a more restricted dynamic range of brightness levels. It's more photorealistic and ordinary, making it better suited to media where the viewer wants that "you are there" feeling -- such as news reporting and porno.

For music videos, this format was generally chosen when the idea was to put the viewer in the audience of an ordinary, real-world live performance by the band. It's as if a documentary crew went to shoot a small gig that the band was playing that night.

Below are screenshots from the videos for "Any Way You Want It" by Journey, "Start Me Up" by the Rolling Stones, and "I Want Candy" by Bow Wow Wow, all of which were shot on video. (Click on the song titles to see the full videos.) No real reason for these particular examples, except that they're fresh in my mind from today, and are all from the early '80s -- to show how early the format was adopted for the ordinary/documentary approach. (Click to enlarge.)

Film gives lusher colors, more striking dark-bright contrast, more texture of the medium itself (film grain), and stylized motion by shooting fewer frames per second.

Here are some screenshots from "Papa Don't Preach" by Madonna, "Rhythm of the Night" by DeBarge, and "Love in an Elevator" by Aerosmith. No real reason for these either, except that they're fresh in my mind, and are from the second half of the '80s -- to show how film was still going strong well after it had been abandoned for video in news and porno. It didn't even need to be a narrative video like the one by Madonna. The other two feature a lot of live performance footage, but the setting is supposed to be larger than life and out of the ordinary, requiring a more stylized look.

Now that music videos are so rarely made, let alone watched, and even then are shot on digital, you wonder what effect it will have on the visual expectations of today's young generation. Will they expect the sky to be white rather than blue, will they find black shadows too dark, and will they feel comfortable only with either washed-out or caricatured/campy colors rather than ones that are warm and lush?

After all, it's not as though they have replaced music videos with another medium that has a film-y look and feel. The major new visual medium for them is video games, which they prefer to look more pale, blandly colored, and evenly lit than a news broadcast.

The generational structure of status contests: Competing over careers vs. lifestyles

Periods of relative economic and political stability are marked by a pervasive code of reining-it-in and making-do, which prevents individual ambitions from overgrazing the commons. The last such period was the Great Compression of the 1920s through the 1970s.

Peter Turchin's analysis of the dynamics of cycles in ideological climate and in material conditions suggests that popular attitudes change first, followed by their aggregate material effects. The Great Compression was preceded, for example, by the Progressive Era. Likewise, the period of rising inequality since circa 1980 was preceded by a popular push away from the ethos of reining-it-in.

In 1976, Tom Wolfe summed up this decisive shift in attitudes by labelling the trailblazers as "the Me Generation." Why should I have to rein it in, when I deserve better? I see what I want, I'm going to take it, and everybody else better get out of my way. After all, I deserve better.

These people in the early and middle stages of their working years, who were going to shake up the stability of the older incumbents, were the Silent Generation and the Baby Boomers. And ever since, they have made careerism their preferred mode of status competition. That's the closest to what we mean by "status" — job prestige, income and wealth, and the necessary credentials.

Once they began aging into the middle and later stages of their careers, did they gradually work less and then retire to make way for younger generations — in the way that the older generation did for them, when they were starting out? Hell no. They've dug themselves in like ticks on the political-economic body.

This has saturated careerism as an arena for status competition. Later generations can certainly try to break into that arena and do battle with the incumbents, but their success will be far smaller than back when the incumbents in the economy and government didn't put up much of a fight, since in those days they were glad to retire and give the next generation an opportunity to control things.

What options does this leave for the status strivers among later cohorts such as Generation X and the Millennials? Compete over your leisure pursuits, rather than pursuing your career.

I've eaten at more trendy food trucks than you guys have. I've heard of more obscure music groups than you guys have. I've unlocked more achievements in some video game than you guys have. And I'm more up-to-date on some epic TV show than you guys are. You jelly?

This does not boil down to an effect of age, as though young people will always have difficulty competing in the career arena and will therefore invest more of their efforts in lifestyle competition. Remember that in the '70s and '80s, the Silents and Boomers faced almost no pushback from the incumbents. The dazzling success of the Me Generation was not necessarily due to some greater talent they had, but perhaps due to the incumbents following a different, not-too-competitive code. It doesn't take much of a soldier to wipe out a bunch of pacifists, now does it?

An economic study by Erica Segall of age, period, and cohort effects on consumption patterns did find a significant cohort effect of being a member of Gen X or later when it came to what portion of your budget goes to consumer spending.

Now, the Me Generation has always indulged in contests of conspicuous consumption, but only to the extent that they honestly signal the competitors' superior job prestige and earning potential or accumulated wealth. If they compete over food, it will be based on the price of admission and dining per se — not steering the vanguard fad of vegan egg creams.

In general, then, their consumerism will be limited to longer-lasting and higher-priced items such as cars, real estate, and trophy wives. With all of their energies focused on dominating their career, they just don't have enough time and effort to compete over their possessions. Rather, they'll set aside a huge amount, in payments that can be made monthly and automatically instead of having to be attended to on an hourly basis, and for items that are obvious to everyone as status symbols.

The later generations who compete primarily on consumerism don't have much wealth to flaunt, but it doesn't take that much money to enter the lifestyle competition. Let's say your weekly foodie excursion sets you back $50, and that you take two weeks off a year. That's only $2,500 for the whole year — a sum that you'd have to fork over every month to rent in New York City, and even then only in a shoebox far away from all the action.

Competing as a fashionista or as a gadget geek will set you back a little more, but still nowhere near the cost of luxury cars and real estate, or credit cards to keep the trophy wife.

In fact, as long as you're competing more on how trendy rather than how wealthy you are, why not just buy clothes, gadgets, and meals that aren't very expensive at all, provided they run through fashion cycles fast enough? Cheap and static doesn't allow for any kind of competition, but cheap and high-turnover opens up a whole 'nother arena for poor strivers to climb their way to the top of some pyramid, and then another pyramid, and another, and another.

Hence, purchasing the top du jour at Forever 21, the app du jour at the Apple Store, the burger du jour at Wendy's, and to wash it down, the microbrew du jour at Whole Foods.

Then there's consumption's twin, leisure. The early waves of strivers kicked off the higher ed bubble, but it was purely to obtain credentials that would let them shove aside the incumbents in the economy and government, who didn't have an MBA or whose JD was not from Harvard or Yale. Even at the middle level, as long as it served as a launching pad toward a higher-earning career, the Me Generation had no problem going to State U.

For Gen X and the Millennials, however, choosing which college to attend was influenced more by what the choice would tell the world about their lifestyle. Nobody's paying for college out of pocket, so which school they go to reveals little about their wealth. Rather, they're trying to show how much time they researched what the different schools are like, and which one matched up the closest with their lifestyle, and would signal their commitment to competing in that lifestyle.

Not to mention that college is pure leisure these days. Kids do no work and get full credit. Degrees are bought and sold, so as long as your student loans don't bounce, you're in the clear as far as your studies go. That frees up more time for you to compete with the other students over lifestyle pursuits, whether that's being a shopaholic or a video game addict.

The "year abroad" during college is a big deal for the same reason — do you know of a more trendy yet less spoiled location than the other year-abroaders? Ditto for the unpaid internship: nobody is earning money, nor will anybody's gig lead anywhere afterward, so you try to score a more trendy and enviable spot for making yourself busy.

In daily life, the post-Me generations spend a lot of time in coffee shops, foodie joints, and cafeterias at Whole Foods style supermarkets. They're the minority, though. The cocooning majority hangs out online, where status preening takes place on websites where each competitor is assigned an ID card that shows how many points they've racked up within that domain — likes on Facebook, followers on Twitter or Instagram, gamerscore on Xbox Live, elite posting status on HuffPo / Amazon / IGN / Rotten Tomatoes, and so on and so forth. Climbing these ladders doesn't cost much money, but if all you've got is time and effort, you too can achieve internet immortality.

Thus, from the Me Generation to the Stuff White People Like Generation.

There are some interesting distinctions even within the career vs. lifestyle groups. Silents seem to be driven more by wealth, Boomers by influence and power, although both are careerists. And although both are lifestyle competitors, Gen X wants to be cool, Millennials want to be famous. I attribute these splits to how the cocooning vs. outgoing cycle has affected them. Accumulating wealth or having a bunch of followers are less social (you don't interact with fans), while influencing and controlling others is more interactive, and so is membership in a scene that's cool (not lame).

This has been a rough outline, as there's still a lot more to be said about the effects and implications of a generational split in status competition. But I'll save those for further posts, rather than try to cover everything all at once.

Are Millennials consciously reversing their sheltered upbringing when they raise kids of their own?

An earlier post looked at the dynamics of parenting styles, where folks who grew up mostly in rising-crime times choose to lock their kids up from the outside world, while these locked-up people themselves, who grew up in falling-crime times, don't see what the harm is in letting their kids lead a more unsupervised life.

We saw this during the last wave of outgoing behavior and communal focus. The Silent Generation, who were locked up by smothering mothers during the cocooning Midcentury, begat the late Boomers and first half of Generation X, who couldn't have enjoyed a less supervised childhood and adolescence. This continued with the second half of Gen X, whose parents were mostly early Boomers — who for their part spent a good deal of childhood in the Dr. Spock climate of the Midcentury.

I was taken aback during an episode of the Real Housewives of Orange County (which I sometimes tune into, for sociological insight), where the daughter of one of the housewives is beginning to raise a family of her own. The housewife Vicki is a late Boomer, the daughter Briana an early Millennial ('87).

Briana has decided to move away from Orange County, way out to Oklahoma, where her money will go a lot farther than it could in southern California. There's Steve Sailer's "affordable family formation" unfolding in clear terms.

Then she added that she wanted to raise her kids where they could run around in the driveway out front, and run off to go play with the other neighborhood kids. She revealed that in the 12 years that she lived in her family's house in Orange County, they'd only known two of their neighbors. The area is white and upper-middle class, so don't bother trying to excuse the helicopter parents there on the basis of dangerous ghetto Mexicans. It's just good old paranoia.

It may be only one data-point, but you can tell when someone is speaking more or less as a representative of their group.

Before, I noted that in the case of Millennials, they feel nostalgia for not having a life as children. Now that they are starting to have kids, this frustrated attempt at nostalgia has developed into a reflection on how deprived they were of social contact outside the home, from birth until college (by which time it's too late to cram 15 years of social maturation into the time you've got). Every generation remembers the negative side of their upbringing more than the positive, and try to correct that when they have kids of their own.

Before long, then, we'll see a reversal of the helicopter parenting trend that began about 25 years ago. Probably not for another five years or so, since the late X-ers are still busy raising kids, and lord knows they remember how dangerous childhood used to be. Who would've guessed that Beavis and Butt-head would become such over-protective fathers?

Wholesome and lurid themes in pop culture — separated or mixed together

Despite the trend toward increasingly squeaky-clean pop culture, where half of the top 10 movies at the box office for the year are kiddie crap, there's a counter-movement toward ever more lurid trash outside of the respectable mainstream — serial dramas about serial killers on TV, torture porn movies, and gory voyeuristic video games. Nothing is found in between that mixes wholesome and dark themes. There's a bunch of inoffensive kiddie stuff over here, and a pile of lurid filth way over there.

It's not so different from the climate of the Midcentury, where horror comic books, pulp novels, and the sleazier tiers of film noir stood out in stark contrast to the squeaky-clean world of Father Knows Best, Shirley Temple, and "How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?"

In between those periods, pop culture shifted toward a more even spread of wholesome and dark themes. This reached its peak in the '80s and early '90s, when every week one of the mainstream, fit-for-the-whole-family sit-coms ran "a very special episode" about death and grieving, suicide, drug addiction, divorce, teenage pregnancy, teenage runaways, and so on. On the other side of the spectrum, the slasher horror movies portrayed teenagers who were wholesome and basically sympathetic — not brats whose death you'll be cheering along, and not flat cut-outs for puppet-like use in a concern-trolling melodrama like Law & Order: SVU.

Although I haven't seen them, the plot summaries of many hit movies from the Jazz Age sound a lot like "very special episodes" from the '80s — Flaming Youth, Children of Divorce, and so on. Horror classics like Dracula, Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and King Kong show victims who are basically likable and respectable — not faceless crowds a la the "attack of the giant ants" flicks from the Midcentury, or victims who are randomly abducted without having time to establish their basic likability, a la the comic books reviewed in Seduction of the Innocent, or 21st-century torture porn.

The examples from falling-crime times reveal a cocooning mindset — sure, there's this whole other world of sick perverted crap, but as long as we quarantine ourselves from it, everything will be all hunky-dory. "That kind of thing could never happen here." Or, "We'd never allow our children to..." What begins as an impulse for greater security leads to an ignorant and arrogant attitude about how vulnerable their neck of the woods is to dark forces.

In rising-crime times, pop culture reflects the more streetwise and humble attitude that it can happen here, and that parents or adults in general cannot put up a magic force-field around young people, if the dark forces want to get to them bad enough. Being more out-and-about, and the rising-crime climate that follows along with it, is a humbling experience.

Looking into the texture of pop culture thus allows us keener insight into the popular mind when it comes to a trait as important as hubris vs. humility, which we could not tell from grosser measures like, say, church attendance (butts in seats). Nothing wrong with coarse measures to begin with, but it's striking how much you can learn about people from other times and places by what kinds of culture resonate with them.

Overuse of close-up shots in movies: not a borrowing from TV

Those who can stand to watch Millennial era movies more than I can have noticed that there are way too many close-up shots nowadays. See David Bordwell on the topic here and here, as well as a lengthy thread on the forums at cinematography.com.

Close-up shots allow us to read detail on the face, but obscure body language and posture, as well as the setting. We generally only see one person at a time, so we don't get to see the interaction between characters — only cutting from one to another. Other people are part of the setting, so we also can't see how the characters are placed with respect to one another in space, nor where they're facing (e.g., are two characters looking at each other during an exchange, or is one of them facing / looking away?).

A common complaint is that this overuse of close-ups makes a movie "look like TV," where the norm is one close-up shot alternating with another for each line of dialog, on and on and on.

I don't care for contempo TV shows either, so this sounds a little off. My hunch is that TV didn't used to rely so heavily on close-up framing and shot / reverse shot editing. That would mean the trend has affected both TV and movies, though perhaps being even more common on the small screen.

Let's investigate, shall we? I'll take it for granted that today's lame-o shows follow the close-up approach, if everyone says so. But I also checked the trailers on YouTube for the first and second seasons of Orphan Black, one of those trendoid "edgy" shows that styles itself as breaking new ground but is jumping on the bandwagon of the look du jour. It too is mostly close-ups, and minimal movement from either the camera or the actors.

What about older TV shows? Sit-coms are out because comedy, even today, is shot from farther back so we can see the characters interacting with each other, and see their reactions to each other in real time rather than interrupting one's expression to catch a glimpse of another's. That leaves action and drama, which have both undergone the shift toward close-ups. Fight scenes today are shot close up and tight around the characters. And drama unfolds in alternating close-ups of two people standing still or sitting down.

Well, I've already written an off-the-cuff post about how engaging the camera work was on Magnum, P.I., so why not continue with that example? It was one of the highest-rated shows in the '80s, its theme song landed on the Billboard charts, and it's one that anyone would nominate for definitive '80s TV shows. So this isn't cherry-picking.

It's also worth studying because it was an even mix of action and adventure with drama and mystery — and not comedy. Does the dramatic dialog unfold in shot / reverse shot while close up? Does the action lock right onto subjects, blocking out the arena that it's taking place in?

I'm certainly not going to review every episode, or even do a close reading of one scene in one episode. That could be cherry-picking. Instead I've put together an array of 20 screenshots that come from the thumbnails of full-length episodes available on YouTube. This places each shot halfway through the episode, not at a spot that I purposely chose to make old TV look better than new movies. I didn't cherry-pick which episodes I included either — the first ones that came up in the search results.

Here is a just-dropping-in look at a couple dozen episodes of Magnum, P.I. (click to enlarge):

None is shot up so close that only the face is in view. The single shots are from far enough back that we typically get a sense of place from the setting. The somewhat closer-up shots are two-shots where we see characters interacting with each other, using their hands and upper body language. Plus that two-shot of the not-so-friendly dogs. Just think of how much we'd lose if we only had a close-up framing the dogs' heads -- are they even facing toward some character, or are they just the type that barks indiscriminately? Quite a few have more than two characters interacting, and placed at different distances from the camera.

Read that earlier post on the show for a closer reading of how particular sequences tend to play out. The blocking is not just "enter room, walk straight to standing / sitting spot, and start blathering for five minutes." Actors move around the setting, often at different distances (e.g., someone pacing nervously in the foreground, while another leisurely strolls around in the background, with a wall separating them so neither is aware of the other, but with a window through it so that we can see both movements).

Lots of examples too of what Bordwell calls "the cross," where A begins on the left and B on the right, and their paths lead A to the right and B to the left. Simple switching like that makes us attend more to the action, rather than tune out spatially once we know that A has plopped down here, B has plopped down there, and they'll never move around until they need to leave the scene.

While on YouTube, I watched some scenes from an episode of Columbo, and there too there was no heavy use of close-ups. Indeed, the most famous staging of characters on that show has Columbo in a medium or long shot, almost ready to leave the setting when he remembers "just one more thing" that leads him to backtrack into a closer-up shot to ask the suspect another couple of questions. Like Magnum, P.I., that show combined mystery and drama, though not action (or comedy).

That's my take on what's going on in both TV and movies from the past 20-odd years — a shift away from mystery, anticipation, and tension, and toward obviousness and instantaneous reflexive responses.

Before, you could clearly perceive the configuration of the characters relative to one another, relative to the larger setting, and their trajectories (relative to each other and within the setting). You can't anticipate with projecting a current movement forward. No path of motion, no anticipation. But anticipated outcomes are not actual outcomes — you're held in suspsense until the climax or pay-off where you see if what you were projecting actually took place or not.

With super close-up shots, all that stuff that would've been included in the frame of reference has been sealed out, and you can't project where anything is heading. If there's no action, the result is dull. If there is action, the result is disorienting rather than engaging. Either way, close-up after close-up alienates the audience.

This ties into a separate but related shift in editing away from longer shots and toward a rapid pow-pow-pow rhythm. A single fluid shot allows you to anticipate the outcome, be held in suspense for a little bit, and then see if it happened or not. The interrupting back-and-forth rhythm prevents a physiological reaction from building in intensity, or develop into a full emotion or thought. It's like your sex partner switching positions every 1.5 seconds — dammit, just hold still for a little while so we can get it on.

But the ziggy-zaggy rhythm is a topic for another post. (See how annoying these abrupt cuts are?)