March 2021 has been a weird month. It marks the one-year anniversary of a global pandemic upending many of our lives. Who has time to craft cogent commentary about media when you’ve got all that to process? But also—surely you have time to watch a lot of media to distract yourself from the chasm of dread swirling all around you, right? Ahem. Have I completely procrastinated writing this month’s newsletter until the last possible second, opting instead to fill my days with movies and tv and Zoom plays? Yes, yes I have.
And I’ve made my job harder in the process! There was a lot I enjoyed this month, and I wasn’t sure what I wanted to spotlight. So, to cheat a little bit, I’m going to list the good stuff that didn’t make it into the deeper dive sections here:
Pass Over (film of the play, 2018, available on Amazon Prime)
The Thanksgiving Play (play, reconceived for Zoom, 2021. Sadly, no longer streaming, but the memory of Keanu Reeves saying, “Dramaturgs, the holy grail of American theater titles” will live on in my heart forever)
True Detective (television show, Season 3, 2019, available on HBO)
Chris Fleming (comedian/performer/witch from the woods, 2009-present)
Chris Fleming is not somebody I discovered for the first time this month, but I would say that I’ve glommed onto his output in a new way this month. Cliff notes for the uninitiated: Chris Fleming is a comedian who found success on YouTube, both through his absurdist web series about a high-strung suburban Massachusetts mom (Gayle) and his stand-alone videos that dissect highly specific scenarios (what it’s like to be propositioned by a polyamorous couple, what it’s like to be the non-theatre friend of a theatre artist). If you recognize him, it’s probably from “COMPANY IS COMING”, excerpted from Gayle.
Fleming also does stand-up, and lately has been experimenting with different mediums like TikTok and virtual live streams. His recent live-stream, Chris Fleming: Through the Baleen, A Virtual Show Deep Inside the Belly of a Whale, was a delightfully off-the-wall concept that I can guarantee no other comedian would have come up with. It involved an artist residency inside the belly of a whale (naturally), a recovering addict octopus named Jennifer (savage), and a Buzzfeed-style personality quiz about which krill different audience members might be (surprisingly wholesome).
If I had to sum up what makes Chris Fleming’s comedy and storytelling so hilarious and special to me, it’s that he makes you feel seen while also transporting you to a surreal escape. Something I think we all could use a little more of.
Link Roundup
“‘Through the Baleen’ Review: Who Does Confusion Like Chris Fleming?”, Mira-Rose J. Kingsbury Lee writing for The Harvard Crimson
“Things That Are Great About Chris Fleming”, Mara Wilson writing on her Substack!
Disclosure (documentary film, 2020)
I had meant to watch Disclosure last year. Unlike my year-long wait for Promising Young Woman after its Sundance debut in January 2020, Sam Feder’s documentary was released on Netflix in June 2020. The film chronicles the depiction of transgender people in Hollywood media from the beginning of cinema to today. Its aim is like The Celluloid Closet, a landmark 1995 documentary directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman that conducted a similar survey of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender characters in Hollywood films. A couple of notable differences: the interviewees in Disclosure are all transgender, whereas The Celluloid Closet interviewed LGBT actors and writers alongside straight actors who played queer-coded characters. This, I feel, leads to the second difference: Disclosure feels a lot more like a conversation among friends, whereas I remember The Celluloid Closet feeling a bit more academic.
Like with any documentary, choices are made about which stories and which examples are examined and elevated. If you view Disclosure as aiming to be exhaustive and thorough, it might fall short. But a central thesis of the film is that more transgender representation is needed in film and television so that the story of transgender people in media is exhaustive and thorough. I think the film knows that it is painting a broad picture in a condensed amount of time. For example, the film is very aware that transgender men have significantly less media representation, good or bad, than transgender women, and deliberately includes the voices of multiple trans men with different perspectives and experiences.
A quote that will stick with me for some time comes from Jen Richards, a writer, actress and producer:
“I think that one woman's armor becomes another woman's adornment, in the sense that a kind of Kardashian aesthetic - this hyper-feminine, plump lips, the big hair, the extensions, the silicone-injected curves of the body - in some ways might be a reflection of a change in aesthetics that comes out of the kind of gay men who are often doing the styling for celebrities. And that, for them, it comes out of the street queens that they know from the clubs. And for them, it comes out of, ultimately, the sex workers, who have to hyper-feminize their body in order to compete for clients in order to survive. And of course they're then imitating an older version of femininity that they learned that men like from movies and TV, and it kind of creates this ultimate cycle. But a lot of people will look at trans women's performance of femininity and see it as somehow reinforcing the worst patriarchal stereotypes of women, and I think it's really unfair and ahistorical to foist that same perspective on people who are just trying to survive.”
As a cis woman who tries to stay on top of why the TERFs are telling me I’m a traitor to my gender, I wish that more of them could hear this and understand it.
One last thing: I have always low-key defended the film The Crying Game because I—again, a cis woman—didn’t perceive any transphobia in it. I am also certain that I am one of the few people in my age-range who is more familiar with it than with Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. Spoilers for movies from the early 90s ahead.
In The Crying Game, the lead character (a cis man) does not realize that the woman he has been falling in love with is trans. When he discovers that she has a penis, he vomits. Despite this initial reaction, the two characters do later pursue a relationship in earnest. This “plot twist” was later parodied in Ace Ventura, where a trans woman is revealed to be the villain, and there are not one but two montages of cis men vomiting upon discovering that she is trans, all while the song “The Crying Game” plays. Watching these sequences play out in Disclosure was brutal and revealed my own blind spot: even though I still think The Crying Game had good intentions, the transphobic imagery it helped create had a greater impact.
Link Roundup
“Disclosure: The Oscar-Hopeful Documentary That Changed Hollywood”, Anthony Breznican writing for Vanity Fair
“Netflix Disclosure Doc Reveals Media’s History of Harmful Trans Representation”, Princess Weekes writing for The Mary Sue
“Disclosure and Pursuing the Trans Film Image”, Caden Mark Gardner writing for Reverse Shot
Superstore (television series, 2015-2021)
Dear readers who have not watched a single episode of Superstore, an under-the-radar gem of a sitcom set in a fictional big-box store that aired on NBC: you have a great adventure ahead of you. The entire show—whose series finale aired last Thursday—is available to watch on Hulu.
I honestly don’t have much to add that wasn’t covered by Emily VanDerWerff in her lovely tribute for Vox: “Superstore was the best sitcom of its era, a wildly funny and poignant capitalist tragedy”. If The Office (the US version) captured the absurdity of white collar work and the relationships that are forged by being in this space 40 hours a week with your co-workers, Superstore captured the absurdity of blue collar work and the relationships that are forged by being humiliated and dehumanized by your customers and your corporate overloads. If that makes it sound dark…well, so is capitalism, baby.
But what Superstore exceeds at is delivering this darkness in the form of rapid-fire jokes, gags both visual and verbal. The show’s interstitials—short sequences where customers silently do hilarious and horrible things while the employees aren’t looking—are utterly unique to the environment that Superstore is set in. Superstore is a bit of a perspective flip: when you go shopping at a Walmart, you are the main character of your story, and the employees remain invisible to you unless you interact with them (and sometimes, even if you interact with them). In Superstore, you as the viewer learn to identify with the employees, and so these glimpses of the customers behaving badly—which you would normally perceive from the customer’s perspective—are a great Brechtian tool.
As VanDerWerff points out in her piece, the show had started to slump in Season 5, which was ultimately cut short by COVID-19. But in a twisted sort of way, the pandemic breathed life back into the show. Quoting VanDerWerff:
“Yet season six was one of the show’s very best, largely because its handling of the pandemic’s many idiosyncratic oddities was better than that of any other show on TV. Superstore allowed Covid-19 to recede into the background without losing sight of it entirely. The pandemic wasn’t central to every storyline, but it was always present, in the masks everyone (usually) wore, in the infrequent deep cleans of the store, in the changing safety regulations handed down by corporate.”
I mean, the Season 6 promotional posters featured the cast masked-up with the tagline, “More essential than ever.” The moxie!
I have quietly loved this show, but even I wasn’t expecting the finale to move me the way it did. When Jonah (Ben Feldman) is pleading for news anchors (and indirectly, corporate) to give a shit about the people who work at the store after the discovery of some severed feet on the premises make the location prime for the chopping block (pun intended; and yes, the severed feet somehow make more sense in context), I teared up. It was a reminder that we could all be invisible, depending how much capitalism decides to value our particular labor in our particular industries on a particular day. And I thank this show for making these characters visible and vibrant and very funny.