Where's My MacArthur Genius TV-Watching Grant?*

I'm starting to realize how boring crucial media "relationships" are in some of their particulars--not consumption, relationships, a much more accurate description of how things actually work these days. I'm talking about the way I watch and don't watch and half-watch things and above all the REASONS for all this that roll around in all sort of layered and interconnected meanings. I mean, who cares, right? It's like all the backstory that goes with being a picky eater--either you eat it or not, right? Wait, I am a picky eater.

Well, the point is I can't avoid all the reasons and hoo-ha and ponderousness. 1) What the hell, it's my fucking bl*g 2) Three cheers and dammit, c'est la vie and 3) I think some of this is just part of being a media consumer in a world that is too much a-crowded with offerings way beyond what I'd call "choice" at this point. Dabble dip dip dabble dip. Previews, post-game, highlights, shows about shows. It's possible to see things without actually seeing things more than ever. Certainly possible to *absorb* media more easily than ever, through passing headlines, clips, interviews, magazines. Osmosis. Smush smush smush. Just by sitting on one's tuffet and not looking at one thing, all into one's pores. But that's not even it--media consumption is not just about what you see or don't anymore. It's too everywhere.

Which brings us to Grey Gardens, currently undergoing a surge in canonization/popularity/approval a couple layers up in pop culture. A push past the cult status into--what? Hairspray-dom? I don't know.

It's certainly one of those films I like, basically, can talk about, one that has passed my CP (cocktail party) threshhold to where I'd get most of the jokes/be able to talk about it at a party (I can fake my way through many things; this is a slightly higher superficial standard). I've never really seen it, though. All of it, in one gulp, I mean. I've seen bits and pieces of it, many separate scenes, and often: enough to patch together a cracked but complete vase.

Sunday night it was on TCM, and I made my 4th/5th serious attempt to watch it straightup, straight through, and couldn't. It's surprising--seems like it'd be so up my alley, including being so faggy. I realized finally, though, that at I really need to see this film with somebody. Every time I've tried to watch it straight through I've been by myself, and I just can't get enough distance on it to want to see more or not feel antsy or trapped. It doesn't seem so charming alone--I find myself thinking very flat-footed, literal-minded--hopelessly bourgeois--things like, "Why would anybody want to see this?" "God, please clean up." I need somebody else to buoy me up (The opposite of what one needs for some films.) And I feel surges of contrariness--why must I be participating in this? Why is everything shot from just the distance of a camera so hilarious, so far away, so postmodernically fascinating and riotous? Um, well, yes. I don't think that everyone who loves this movie is a hopelessly ironic wreck--at all--remotely--but some of the rabid fandom does turn me off just the slightest bit, I don't know why (it is kind of an all-or-nothing movie). Sheer contrariness, probably, mixed with a little too close-to-home-itude. I figure I'm probably one good viewing with a friend away from really liking this film (or becoming lil Edie). And all this other stuff won't be relevant. But it just didn't work Sunday.

(I'll say this, I always find it very hard to hang on to my appetite when I watch it. Yuck. And it's made me wonder which of my cats is Little E and which is Big E.)

So, because I have a sleazy streak a mile wide, as I taped Grey Gardens and flipped back and forth, I watched one of the few reality shows I like to watch (note: I don't like them, I like to watch them). These shows are all really bad, and don't really or in fact at all justify any reality show watching. Even in their paucity. Doesn't matter. That is--I watched, um, The Girls Next Door. You know, the show about Hugh Hefner's three girlfriends. HAH!

What can I say, I find it fascinating. I don't watch it for the sight of the fake boobies, or grotty ol Hef shuffling around in his pajamas. It's partly because you're seeing behind the curtain of some extreme gender roles and what the hell I don't live there but find it a little interesting (where do people who want to make their hair that blond come from? what do they do? eat?). This goes along with the sleazy streak (what can I say, I became a platinum blond for a while in my 30s). It's more, for me, I think, about the relentless allure of the DOMESTIC--exactly what the show's not supposed to be about, but what I like the most. Not huge drama, but the workings of a house, showing the kitchen and dining rooms and habits and the trivial domestic round. (The other reality show I love is Dog the Bounty Hunter and I don't even know what to write about that now. Saving it up for an essay, I think. Gawd.) I suppose it is the allure of the hyper-domestic that will finally get me to like Grey Gardens the way I should? Just a different kind.

The other thing I like about The Girls Next Door are the half-assed but fascinating little sociological constructs, such as the last episode where two of Hef's girlfriends were sitting in a cage with one of the Mansion's (depressed, sway-bellied) monkeys while a monkey expert explained their "matriarchal" society (sooooo 1,000 words). Or the way that there is this strict order of precedence when Hef kisses his girlfriends, and how that works (very monkey-like). Or the time when an episode cleverly intercut scenes of one woman getting (everything) waxed with shots of one of the dogs being shaved--that sounds mean in the telling, but it was actually kind of hilarious and made a decent point.

I can't justify it, fundamentally, how I like this show. (And do I love it in the relentlessly ironic way I feel uncomfortable with when people watch the Beales? I don't think so, but duh.) I once made my poor friend Holly watch four episodes in a row, and I don't know why she's still talking to me (she is a big Grey Gardens fan, natch). HHefner is the architect of some social phenomena I just can't get with, kinda hate, can't stand! Boob jobs, this image of women as hairless young chihuahas. But I kinda like his life. Everything comes to him at his neato 1920s mansion and he's the ultimate media consumer with his movie library and all that. Maybe I want to be living in my 80s with a bevy of young men and an editorial dictatress-ship?

What one watches, says one watches, actually watches, theoretically watches, half-watches, watches through other people, watches through clips on other stations, watches repeatedly, watches because one hates it, watches it for good/bad frissons...how does Nielsen measure that? It's all about approach, what you see/don't.

What's on the TV: too much to talk about.

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*PHOTOS: I didn't want to put up photos of the Edies or Hef's girlfriends, so instead please enjoy shots of:
1) A panda cub.
2) Leslie Ann Warren as Norma Cassady in Victor/Victoria; she's the character who sings "Chicago, Illinois" (the song quoted in the Cahiers header above!)
3) Another panda cub.
4) The only image that's actually relevant here. The portrait of Norma Shearer is by photographer is George Hurrell (I'm obsessed with G. Hurrell, esp. his portraits of her) and at least once on The Girls Next Door a Playboy photog has talked about going for a "George Hurrell" look in one of their photos! GAWD! Have you ever seen anything as *less* GH than Playboy photography? Then I thought: wow, that photog must be really bored. But maybe photographing for PB speeds some other aesthetic plough.
5) Lovely Jack Carson, early in his career.
6) Singin' in the Rain--I have *always* wanted a pair of baby blue ankle straps with bows like Debbie Reynolds'. They would look like holy hell on my swollen feet, but I'm just saying. Aren't they great?