Once Upon a Time Dating

When I first saw commercials for the new Fox show Red Band Society, I wasn’t sure what to make of it. The show is a look at the lives of teenagers living in a hospital. Some of the characters have cancer, one has cystic fibrosis, one has an eating disorder, and another has a heart condition. What makes the show interesting is that each character fits a typical high school stereotype: the cheerleader, the jock, the nerd, the stoner, etc. It’s essentially a combination of Grey’s Anatomy and The Breakfast Club.

I had forgotten about the show until I was watching Wednesday’s episode of The Mindy Project last night on demand, and the pilot of Red Band Society started playing immediately after. Kudos to Fox, because I was instantly hooked.

Red Band Society is narrated by a young boy in a coma, who can see and hear everything that’s going on around him. The “red bands” represent the red hospital bands all of the characters wear that emotionally bind them as a group. The show is surprisingly light and funny even though concepts of death and loss encompass each character’s life. The nurse is played by Octavia Spencer, who provides the same comic relief she did in The Help while also playing the dramatic scenes perfectly. The writing is witty and original, and the acting is superb.

I haven’t read much media hype surrounding the show, so I have a feeling it might get cancelled. So everyone give it a shot! Wednesdays, 9 pm, on Fox.

*The actor who played Ricky Vasquez on My So Called Life has a small role as a nurse on the show. I feel that Homeland is Angela Chase all grown up, and this is Ricky Vasquez. Now Rayanne needs a television show.

Prior to reading Poetics, the only thing I knew about Aristotle was what I learned from Professor Stromwell in Legally Blonde: she asks David Kidney if Aristotle said, “The law is reason free from passion” and then makes him swear his life on it. But yesterday as I dove into one of the Greek philosopher’s most influential works, it really began to peak my interest. Aristotle conveys many theories in Poetics, but one of the most thought-provoking philosophical claims is that any form of poetry, like a comedy or a tragedy, is fundamentally a form of imitation. Comedies and tragedies convey realistic representations of what could possibly happen when human beings act on certain motivations. It is natural for humans to derive pleasure, feel empathy, and have catharsis from engaging in poetry.

I began to think about how this theory applies to modern pop culture, particularly television. I think for adults, television is primarily either a form of entertainment, or an escape. I don’t think my mom watches Mad Men, her favorite show, looking for a way to learn some deep lesson about life, or to connect to Don Draper on an empathetic level. Maybe she connects to Betty on some level as a wife and mother (hopefully not though), and I guess the show does portray the dividing line between virtue and vice that Aristotle described in Poetics. But more or less, I think my mom watches Mad Men because it is an hour every week when she can disappear into the 1960’s and indulge in the brilliant writing and aesthetic; it is cathartic.

But then I started to think about the purpose television serves for young adults. When I was a teenager, television wasn’t just a form of entertainment for me- it was a way for me to relate to the world, and to understand that everything I was feeling and going through was normal. When I was in ninth grade I watched Rory Gilmore get a D on her first test at Chilton Academy, and it made me feel better that I got a C on my first biology test in high school. I felt empathy for Rory Gilmore, I learned life lessons from Rory Gilmore, and I don’t think I could have gotten through my teen years without Rory Gilmore.

Note: I also became so obsessed with Sylvia Plath in high school to the point that my family made fun of me because I memorized her poetry.

I know that the generation before me had fantastic teen shows too- like My So-Called Life and Beverly Hills 90210. When I think about the shows teens watch today, I realize it is mostly reality TV. I guess there are shows like Glee, but I know I didn’t break out in song to get through problems in high school, and I don’t know many people that do. Not to say that important lessons can’t be learned from Glee, but I also find it discouraging that the only way a teen show can be popular this day and age is to have some sort of gimmick.

I think teens are mostly watching reality shows like Teen Mom and Rich Kids of Beverly Hills. To me, the scary part of teens watching reality television as their outlet isn’t the scandalous and outrageous nature of most of the shows. Plenty of the fictional young adult shows I watched when I was younger featured teen pregnancy and rich kids behaving badly. Plenty of the poetry Aristotle was referring to in Poetics featured human beings behaving badly. But because the characters were fictional, the writers always made a point to show how the characters progressed, got help, or learned from their mistakes. On a show like Teen Mom, you might watch one of the cast members get a DUI and then simply act defensive and make the same mistake over and over. But when Rayanne Graff OD’d on My So-Called Life, or when Marissa Cooper OD’d on The OC, you watched the characters own up to their mistakes and try to get help. Aristotle described poetry as having a clear plot: a beginning, middle, and end. Reality television is lacking because there is no rhyme or reason; there is no moral to the story.

Although this all might sound trivial, teens having a fictional role model to look to for advice, laughs, and shared experiences is so important. Before TV, young adults had characters like Holden Caulfield to empathize with through literature, but times are changing. It’s not that teens don’t want guidance, in fact they want it desperately. They just want guidance that isn’t condescending, and that is being passed down from someone they admire and trust. Sure, my parents told me that it was okay when I got a C on that first biology test because I studied and tried my best. But until I saw Rory, who felt like my friend, going through the same thing and ultimately getting over it, I didn’t get over it. In my humble opinion (to quote Angela Chase), adults need to stop shaming kids for watching too much television, and instead start thinking of ways to bring back the “television teenage heroin”. I know twenty-somethings have Girls at the moment, and thirty-somethings will always have Sex and the City (timeless), but teens need something current, because their issues are ever-changing and evolving.

Aristotle felt that poetry should use fictional representations of realistic events to elicit powerful emotions, provide catharsis, and ultimately become the equivalent of therapy. And I, Lacey Kaplan, another prominent philosopher, feel that television (particularly young adult television) can and should do the same.

*This post is primarily aimed at teenage girls because a) I have never been a teenage boy b) from what I’ve witnessed they just need video games and ESPN c) teenage boys do not read my blog.

I love all Lifetime movies (Who is Clark Rockefeller? is my all time favorite, and based on my twin sister), but especially ones about famous court cases (ex: Casey Anthony trial, Jodi Arias trial), and celebrity tragedies (ex: Anna Nicole Smith). Therefore, I was EXTREMELY excited to watch The Brittany Murphy Story, which premiered last night. Unfortunately, I was very disappointed.

First of all, the actress playing Murphy (Amanda Fuller) literally looks nothing like her. No offense, but Brittany Murphy was gorgeous and thin, and this actress was… not. Fuller is also just a horrible actress in general- trying way too hard to convey the quirkiness and vulnerability that everyone loved about Brittany Murphy. She came across as annoying, whiny, and dumb. I especially detested the scenes on the set of Clueless that portray Murphy (who played Tai) feeling left out and jealous of Alicia Silverstone (Cher). It is well known that the two actresses were friends, and if anything Murphy’s character stole the spotlight from Silverstone. You’re just a virgin who can’t drive.

The movie also focused too much on the idea that the paparazzi are what killed Murphy. First of all, no one knows exactly what the cause of Murphy’s death was. While there was prescription medication in her blood at the time of death, she also had pneumonia and anemia, and ten toxic metals were found in her system in an autopsy. Some say the cause of death was toxic mold, because her husband died in their apartment shortly after. Others say they were poisoned by Murphy’s mother (others being Murphy’s estranged father). Ultimately, the entire tragedy is a mystery. For this movie to capitalize on a 32 year old’s untimely death and tell a story completely unauthorized by Murphy’s friends and family is going way too far, even for a Lifetime movie.

To quote Cher Horowitz: That was way harsh.

Everyone that knows me is aware that Mean Girls is my favorite movie of all time. I have watched the movie over and over to the point that I could rehearse the entire script by heart (trust me, my sister and I have done it before), and my camp friends and I mastered the slutty and scandalous “Jingle Bell Rock” dance at the ripe age of thirteen. While The Parent Trap and Clueless definitely tie for second, Tina Fey’s 2004 classic undoubtedly takes first… here are my top five reasons why:

1. Its quote-ability

I can find a Mean Girls quote to apply to every situation, Instagram picture, comeback, etc. While I worship every sentence spoken in Mean Girls, these are the quotes I use the most:

“Stop trying to make fetch happen, it’s not going to happen”

“I can’t go to Taco Bell I’m on an all-carb diet. GOD Karen you’re so stupid”

“You go, Glen Coco!” (I use this one the most)

“Get in loser, we’re going shopping”

“You can’t just ask someone why they’re white…”

“So you agree… you think you’re really pretty” (This is what I would like to comment on every selfie a girl uploads to Instagram)

“Grool”

“Boo, you whore!”

“Did you have an awesome time? Did you drink awesome shooters, listen to awesome music, and then just sit around and soak up each others’ awesomeness?”

“I wish we could all get along like we used to in middle school… I wish I could bake a cake filled with rainbows and smiles and everyone would eat, and be happy…” “She doesn’t even go here!” “Do you even go to this school?” “No… I just have a lot of feelings…” “Ok, go home…”

“Say crack again” “Crack!”

“Halloween is the one night a year when girls can dress like a total slut and no other girls can say anything about it.”

2. Its on-point description of how girls operate

As a senior in college, I think it’s safe to say I get how girls think and how they operate. In the movie, Regina is trying to get revenge on Cady for liking her ex-boyfriend Aaron Samuels by getting back together with him. Then, Cady tries to get revenge on Regina by exposing to Aaron that she is secretly hooking up with Shane Omen in the projection room above the auditorium. Cady joins forces with Janis and Damien to ruin Regina’s life for ruining Janice’s life (when she was excluded from Regina’s all-girls pool party in middle school because Regina thought Janis was a lesbian). When Regina finds out about this, she tries to get revenge on Cady by pinning the whole Burn Book and her and making the entire school hate her. But what this movie really shows, is that all of these acts of revenge and “meanness” stem from insecurities and self-doubt every young girl faces. We all spread rumors and go behind each other’s backs because we are all secretly afraid that that is what everyone is doing to us. Simply put, being a girl is fucking scary.

3. Its on-point description of female cliques

Janis: You got your freshmen, ROTC guys, preps, J.V. jocks, Asian nerds, Cool Asians, Varsity jocks Unfriendly black hotties, Girls who eat their feelings, Girls who don’t eat anything, Desperate wannabes, Burnouts, Sexually active band geeks,

[a picture of herself and Damian come on screen]

Janis: the greatest people you will ever meet, and the worst. Beware of plastics.

4. In the end, Cady offers the best wisdom

“Calling somebody else fat won’t make you any skinnier. Calling someone stupid doesn’t make you any smarter. And ruining Regina George’s life definitely didn’t make me any happier. All you can do in life is try to solve the problem in front of you.”

Being mean is a defense mechanism against getting hurt. To find true happiness, you need to stop trying to climb the social ladder and be around people who accept you for who you really are. Which brings me to my last reason…

5. The moral of the story: life is a whole lot easier when you stop fighting and back-stabbing, and can just float…

“All the drama of last year just wasn’t important anymore. School used to be a shark tank, but now I could just float… Finally, Girl World was at peace”

There you have it… this movie is utterly perfect in every way. When I become a teacher, I will make it my mission to have this movie screened to every freshman girl on their first day of ninth grade.

I end on this note…

Yo Yo Yo! All you sucka MCs ain’t got nothin’ on me! From my grades, to my lines you can’t touch Kevin G! I’m a mathlete, so nerd is inferred, but forget what you heard I’m like James Bond the third, sh-sh-sh-shaken not stirred – I’m Kevin Gnapoor! The G’s silent when I sneak through your door. And make love to your woman on the bathroom floor. I don’t play it like Shaggy, you’ll know it was me. Cause the next time you see her she’ll be like, OOH! KEVIN G!

Thank you Kevin, that’s enough.

Happy Holidays Everybody!

The first time I saw Masters of Sex was when I visited my sister in Miami last fall semester. I really wanted to watch The Real Housewives of New Jersey reunion- but hey, her apartment, her rules. The episode we watched was mid-season, so I basically had no idea what was going on and instead spent the hour pretending I was busy texting, but I was really just stalking my own Instagram account.

The following semester, I took an “Introduction to Sexuality” class and absolutely loved it. Once we started discussing Masters & Johnson’s research, I decided to give Masters of Sex another chance.

I binge watched the entire first season and instantly understood why people love it so much. It portrays Dr. William Masters (played by Michael Sheen) and his secretary/ research assistant Virginia Johnson’s (played by Janice Ian, Dyke… AKA Lizzy Caplan) study that would eventually challenge society’s concept of human sexuality and ignite the sexual revolution of the 1960’s. There are supporting characters’ entertaining story lines to add to the hour-long drama, but primarily the season focuses on Masters and Johnson’s execution of their study and how their personal/ romantic relationship flourishes as a result. Beau Bridges’ story line as Barton Scully- the Provost of Washington University and Masters’ longtime friend and mentor- is particularly heartbreaking. In the show, he harbors a long-held secret that he is gay, and the show’s portrayal of his personal struggle and his wife’s unhappiness (played by the brilliant Allison Janney) is poignant and beautifully depicted.

I had high expectations for the second season. Usually when the first season of a show is so fantastic, it is hard to believe that the following season won’t measure up. Unfortunately, the second season has really disappointed me so far. First of all, I have no idea where this season is even going. Season one ended with Dr. Masters being fired from Washington University because his presentation of the study was too vulgar and outrageous (I mean, he did show a video of a girl masturbating to a group of older men in the 1950’s).

Then, season two begins with Dr. Masters at another hospital, but he punches his boss in the face and is fired again. Now he is at an African-American hospital, and suddenly the show shifts from focusing on the sexual revolution to exploring segregation and civil rights. The show extends that focus to Masters’ wife, Libby’s, (played by that annoying actress who was Meryl Streep’s daughter in It’s Complicated. I don’t care enough to look up her real name) relationship with her nanny, a black girl named Coral (Keke Palmer). She forces Coral to wash her hair (even though she can only afford to get her hair done once a week) because she believes Coral gave her son, Johnny, lice. In actuality, Libby is just a hater because Coral has demonstrated to Bill that she is better with the baby than Libby is. I wonder if Coral nurses Baby Johnny and repeats, “You is kind, you is smart, you is important”. God knows that kid needs it.

Most of the supporting characters from season one are gone, except for Betty, the former prostitute who helped Masters with his study early on. Betty is now married to a rich businessman and discovers that her husband met her at a brothel years before they formally met in church, but still married her despite her sordid past… proving the story of Pretty Woman is timeless. Then her former lesbian lover, Helen, (played by Sarah Silverman- who is only on the show because she is sleeping with Michael Sheen) reappears to start dating Betty’s husband’s best friend. Talk about random. Oh, and Virginia is now selling diet pills (Regina did predict that Janice Ian was on crack).

I really hope this show can pull itself together, and start appearing less scattered, because it does hold so much potential. If it stopped deviating so much from what the premise of Masters of Sex fundamentally is- a depiction of the research that triggered the sexual revolution- it would still be great. But, by the looks of it, it might be pulling a Dexter/ True Blood: fantastic in the beginning, but a parody of itself in the end.

I, like many of you that are probably reading this, have been obsessed with Orange is the New Black from the moment I went on Netflix and pressed play. For those of you who haven’t watched (and you really should), it is an adaptation of Piper Kerman’s memoir of the same name, detailing the 13 months she spent in Federal Prison due to a 10 year old drug offense.

I have been obsessed with the show for a while now, and am not ashamed to admit I watched the entire second season in a day and a half. While there are certainly other television shows focused on women, Orange is the New Black is unique in that it doesn’t portray the female protagonist as a mother, a daughter, a wife, a friend, or a sister. But rather, it simply illustrates Piper’s relationship with herself, in addition to the personal struggles of her fellow inmates. It is common to see men portrayed as stoic, introspective, tenacious characters, but rarely do we see women that way. This show is remarkable for “going there”.

I recently read Piper Kerman’s book and was surprised at how different the tone of her book is from that of Jenji Kohan’s show. While the television show is touching, hilarious, entertaining, and at times heartbreaking, the book is full of revelations and is incredibly enlightening. Here are some parts of Piper’s book I found particularly thought provoking:

• “It’s hard to conceive of any relationship between two adults in America being less equal than that of prisoner and prison guard. The formal relationship, enforced by the institution, is that one person’s word means everything, and the other’s means almost nothing; one person can command the other to do just about anything, and refusal can result in total restraint. That fact is like a slap in the face. Even in relation to the people who are anointed with power in the outside world- cops, elected officials, soldiers- we have rights within our interactions. We have a right to speak to power, though we may not exercise it. But when you step behind the walls of a prison as an inmate, you lose that right. It evaporates, and it’s terrifying.”

• “A lengthy term of community service working with addicts on the outside would have probably driven the same truth home and been a hell of a lot more productive for the community. But our criminal justice system has no provision for restorative justice, in which an offender confronts the damage they have done and tries to make it right to the people they have harmed. Instead, our system of ‘corrections’ is about arm’s-length revenge and retribution, all day and all night. Then its overseers wonder why people leave prison more broken than when they went in.”

• “I would seem to have been ready-made for prison time then, as a familiar jailhouse trope says ‘you come in alone and you walk out alone,’ and common counsel is to keep to oneself and mind your own business. But that’s not what I learned in prison. What I discovered was that I am emphatically not alone…I realized that I was not alone in the world because of the women I lived with for over a year, who gave me a dawning recognition of what I shared with them. We shared overcrowded Dorms and lack of privacy. We shared eight numbers instead of names, prison khakis, cheap food and hygiene items. Most important, we shared a deep reserve for humor, creativity in adverse circumstances, and the will to protect and maintain our own humanity despite the prison system’s imperative to crush it. I don’t think any of us could have managed those survival techniques alone; I know I couldn’t- we needed each other.”

• “In my third prison (she was transferred twice in order to testify in Chicago), I perceived an odd truth that held for each: no one ran them. Of course, somewhere in those buildings, some person with a nameplate on their desk or door was called the warden and nominally ran the place, and below them in the food chain there were captains and lieutenants. But for all practical purposes, the people who lived in those prisons day in and day out, the captain’s chair was vacant, and the wheel was spinning while the sails flapped…Great institutions have leaders who are proud of what they do, and who engage with everyone who makes up those institutions, so each person understands their role. But our jailers are generally granted near-total anonymity, like the cartoon executioner who wears a hood to conceal his identity. What is the point, what is the reason, to lock people away for years, when it seems to mean so very little, even to the jailers who hold the key?”

Visit Piper Kerman’s website to learn more about the organizations that are helping to make our justice system work properly for all of us.