Very big deal in America

I always liked Ugly Betty, but when I realized that it was a primetime network TV show about gays, illegal immigrants, and trannies, I liked it even more. This might sound like I'm praising it for being subversive, but I'm not, in part because the idea of something in a non-DICTATOR'D! society being actually subversive is ludicrous.[1] To be subversive, you have to subvert something, and not only does almost nothing that's called subversive art-wise actually do that, but the fact that it's a definition based on effect makes it useless as a term of artistic classification: in an authoritarian society that outlawed anthropomorphic representations of food, Mayor McCheese would be a folk hero,[2] but that doesn't say a damn thing about the good Mayor. Intentionality and imagined reception are poor ways to describe, say, possible libertarian themes in a children's cartoon.

No, I like that it works with these elements without pretensions to novelty, and that by doing so it's actually done better than it could have otherwise. A brief recap before we go on: Betty is a Latino girl from Queens who's hired as an assistant to the publisher of Mode (i.e. Vogue) magazine, Daniel, because he keeps sleeping with his assistants and Betty is ostensibly ugly, in that she has braces and awesome glasses. Daniel is in a rivalry with both the Creative Director, played by Vanessa Williams, and his brother, Alex, who faked his own death and came back as a woman a few episodes ago. Alex is played by Rebecca Romijn; yes, the tranny is hot as hell. Betty's sister, Hilda, is a single mom, whose son, Justin, is gay gay gay gay gay,[3][4] and her father, Ignacio, turns out to be an illegal immigrant; he is currently fighting deportation to Mexico.

It's quite a collection (I haven't even mentioned the gay assistant or the designer who's a closeted straight that the female assistant who's not Betty started sleeping with) but it all happens in the context of a telenovela, which is what the show was in Columbia and is, kinda, here. A telenovela, of course, is in shorthand a "primetime soap opera," and it's this particular context that gives Ugly Betty the freedom to do the things it does. Telenovelas are legendarily stupid, if breathtakingly so (The Soup was covering one regularly, and their usual reaction to the clips was to gape), and so the implication is that they’re not taking anything they do very seriously; the melodrama is at such a high pitch (and, in the American version at least, it's self-aware enough to be happily camp at times) that sex change operations and statutory rape charges just seem like an everyday occurrence. Plot devices are generally not tragic.

And yet Ugly Betty deals with two of the most hot-button issues in the country right now, homosexuality and illegal immigration.[5] The fact that it hasn't attracted controversy is notable but not important, and possibly attributable to the show's focus on the non-gay, non-illegal, non-sexual Betty, which presents an implied moral/cultural superiority to the magazine culture and to their father's illegal status. (Although Papi has a very good excuse for not taking advantage of an earlier amnesty--he killed a man in old Mexico because he was abusing the woman Papi loved! Swoon!) What's important, I think, is that it deals with these issues without being either Very Special Episode moralizing or Brokeback Mountain pleas-for-tolerance Important Social Issue grandstanding.

They pull off this trick because it's a soap opera. [6] Soap operas are a part of your life, happening everyday, with continuous storylines and no particular importance to the beginnings and ends of episodes. They're like talking on the phone with someone everyday, catching up, no particular message, just "here's what's happening." And so these Big Issues become what they are for most of us: part of everyday life. Trannies gotta go to work too, and being an illegal immigrant isn't ostentatious government round-ups or diabolical plots hatched to take our jobs, it's meeting with government functionaries, paperwork at the kitchen table, trying to raise money for a lawyer--and then it's nothing, it's just there in the background and you're living your life with your family, like always, as long as you can be. Justin doesn't have some sort of fraught relationship with his mother that she has to come to terms with or he has to fight against; she takes him to Broadway shows and lets him go to fashion shoots, which is how you deal with your gay kid if you love him. In another show, the normalization of all these things would be depicted with a certain smugness, an air of "look, these things are normal!" But in a soap opera, nothing's normal, so something has to be really abnormal to be actually unusual, and all the other stuff just becomes part of the reality. A soap opera is a show that depicts a recognizable reality in which literally anything can happen: brain transplants, evil twins, men with eyepatches.

Ugly Betty takes this freedom and really runs with it, creating plots that are imaginative, funny, involving, playful, and entertaining. And by widening the cast of characters beyond the traditionally narrow scope of a soap opera--or any TV show, really--they're able to look at things like class and ambition in recognizable and insightful ways. It's purest example of television currently running, because it nails the essence of what's great about TV. I've never been able to nail down quite what that essence is--something about taking things seriously enough to know what not to take seriously, about being playful without being shallow, about using the need to entertain on a mass scale as an artistic goad rather than a limitation. By fully embracing (and fully understanding) the artificiality of their chosen medium, Ugly Betty's runners have made something more true--more demonstrably true, not I'm-being-contrary-and-9/11-was-beautiful-art true--than they would have made by being serious.

Which is why it's funny that I happened to catch West Side Story the other day. Here we have another filmed entertainment partially about the Latino experience in New York, one that clearly takes the whole thing much more seriously as an object of study, that wants to depict the plight of these people with sensitivity and understanding. And yet! The first time a putative Puerto Rickan--excuse me, Rican--appears on screen, it's hard to do anything but laugh, and not at the hijinx on offer. It's not Charlton Heston bad, but it's certainly giving ol' Chuck a run for his money. The quickest demonstration is simply to state that Natalie Wood plays the main Puerto Rican character, and they don't even bother with makeup for her. It's camp without trying to be, and that's not good, because it's trying to reach beyond the conventions of its form (whereas Ugly Betty plays happily within them) to something more like social realism, what with the ugly racism and the police oppression and the gritty urban setting, and in terms of realism, it's an utter failure. Viewed today, and AFI's opinion to the contrary, it's a laughably bad movie, with almost all the dialogue on a My Three Sons level, embarrassing effects, and the kind of acting that does its damdest to make musical theater unrespectable again.

And yet, it has arguably the best collection of songs of any musical ever written: "Maria," "Tonight," "America," "I Feel Pretty," and, if you swing that way, "Somewhere" and "One Hand, One Heart." Maybe Bernstein and Sondheim needed the inspiration of social realism and life-as-they-saw it (although that seems unlikely for Sondheim) to create such a mind-blowing batch of tunes. But it seems telling that the thing in West Side Story that comes close to expressing some sort of truth about life as it's lived is a song, "America."[7] In it, the men and women trade lines, with the woman making fun of the men for their complaints about their unjust treatment, and the whole thing ends in a romantic resolution, the tension released. It feels right: all the melodrama collapsed into mockery and the details of living interspersed with social commentary. I suppose it also helps that Rita Moreno is involved, but the fact is that a dance number by a white guy imitating Latin rhythms rang more true than all the earnest dialogue in the rest of the movie. The framework of the artificial gives us license to be inaccurate, and given that most of us are wrong most of the time, inaccurately is how we see the world, and therefore true. The artificial conjured into mass awareness creates its own little corner of reality, and that's why TV today matters as much as it does.

[1] Nor is it Ludicris. Or is it? Uh, he? Have I made this joke before? Is that subversive of my own project?
[2] Thus joining the Hamburglar in the pantheon of populist idols. Property is theft, robble robble!
[3] In one of the show's more touching moments, he performs the entirety of a musical on a stuck subway train, and when a fellow passenger tells him to stop, accompanied by a gay slur, Justin's estranged, butch father, who is uncomfortable with Justin's effeminate ways, nevertheless stands up for his son and faces down the tormenter, after which the entire train applauds and Justin continues performing the musical. I think this is what I'll tell people when they ask what New York is like from now on.
[4] I just noticed the actor who plays Justin is named Mark Indelicato, which I find hilarious for some reason.
[5] And I have my fingers crossed for Amanda, the assistant who's not Betty, to have an abortion next season, preferably performed by an Islamic Darwinist. Also, c'mon, we've all known Amandas, and they've all had abortions, and they're all fine.
[6] There's a whole tangent here about the presence of soap opera elements in other shows; the one that springs immediately to mind is The X-Files, for some reason. Good thing? Bad thing? Discuss!
[7] Which, were it in 4/4 time, would have stood as the hook for a Big Pun hit already.

Labels: musicals, TV, Ugly Betty, West Side Story

posted by Mike B. @ 10:44 PM