Information Age TV, Industrial Revolution Concerns

For those of you with a healthy appreciation of trash TV, you may have noticed that this fall's line-up is loaded with characters who are pretending to be someone they are not. Hidden identities are nothing new to night-time soaps, but the introduction of Emily Thorne/Amanda Clarke from Revenge, Siobhan/Bridget from Ringer, and the unfortunate reintroduction of Gossip Girl's Charlie/Ivy, we are reminded that in the information age, it is easy to recreate yourself in ways unthinkable even a few years ago.

However, like all soaps, these story lines have been recycled multiple times. Reaching back as far as Samuel Richardson and his unfortunate heroines, anxiety over the destabalization of identity has fueled compelling tales. While Richardson, Dickens, and Hardy faced a world that was becoming urbanized and anonymous, we are faced with a global community where we expect everyone to have a published (and accessible!) identity. This, paradoxically, allows us to create an identity without there being a physical body to match (see also: North by Northwest). The best and easiest way to hide is to hide behind another Facebook profile.

That said, these recent TV plots do fail the credibility test. Charlie is only able to "pass" because she is surrounded by idiots in a sex-drugs-money fog who reduce the greatest city in the world to a few similarly limited sexual partners. Bridget passes as her twin without knowing anything of her life or fashion sense. I actually believe that Amanda can get away with being Emily, but she also has a Mark Zuckerberg-like sidekick who is a master of manipulating information (and has the money to act as a smokescreen).

Of course, everyone passes as a fancy, rich New York lady. Because that's the fear and the dream. We all know that rich people are moral degenerates. We can only wish that People Who Have Suffered will be rewarded with material wealth--and if it doesn't come naturally, maybe they stop "playing by rules [they] had nothing to say about setting up." But we still do have that sense that the rich are somehow better than the rest of us. Whether that's the Protestant work ethic instinct still embedded in multicultural America or the vestiges of feudalism, I don't know.

Let's not overlook the fact that all of these characters are women. Women's identities have always been malleable--we shift from daughters to wives to mothers to crones. Women can upgrade (or downgrade) their lives based on their male partners. Since women's wealth (or lack of) hasn't historically made as much difference to their male partners, men don't experience this potential flush of fortune. In these shows, the class-passeer's relationship to men is paramount. Emily's identity is questioned because she starts dating Daniel, the foxy son of mean witch Victoria Grayson (and Amanda's childhood relationship with the foxier Jack Porter threatens to undo her plans of revenge). Bridget gets to pretend to be Siobhan because her husband Andrew is too much of a doofus to realize that he is in bed with a different woman. Charlie passed last season because she distracted Dan Humphrey for awhile, and everyone was just so relieved that they let a lot of stuff slide.

We want to think that identity is stable, that we have souls that determine Who We Are, but this stability has been becoming less necessary or desirable since we started moving away from the family farm. These TV shows explore the anxiety we feel about the split between our public and private lives, about the decreasing importance of our physical bodies, and about the class struggles of our every day lives.

The New Age of Storytelling

For several weeks the news has been crazy with news about Greg Mortenson and his alleged truthiness in his memoirs and reports from his non-profit, Central Asia Institute. This is part of a larger trend of Americans' general distrust of both memoirs and non-profits. I never really cared too much about the memoir issue. And despite the fervor over A Million Little Pieces, at the end of the day, readers didn't care. They read for a good story, just like they watch reality TV for a good story. Evidently there's some attraction to a "real" story, but that's a fuzzy definition. After all, we all know the editing that goes into reality TV and are not surprised--or deterred--by the similar story arcs in every dating show/addiction memoir/brave truth-telling.

The issue of non-profits, however, hits closer to home. I work for non-profits and constantly struggle to tell the specific story of the organization and our clients/audience in a way that will raise money from foundations, corporations, governments, and individuals. I explain long-term change, I limit how I use numbers, but funders--who complain about how non-profits represent their work--want to hear that I am changing millions of kids' lives on a dollar day and am instantly able to change them from slum-dwellers to university graduates. I do my best to balance these conflicting sides, and it is possible to do without lying. But it's not easy.

Non-profits are under scrutiny in part because we are exempt from taxes. We get audited every year to prove that we are working for the greater good. Our tax returns are public records (remember this, journalists, it's super easy to see what Planned Parenthood does with their money). But think of the corporations who get out of paying taxes without having to be transparent about there that money goes. Corporations that employ more people--and screw more of them over when they fail.

The bigger question, as it alway is, is "what is truth?" An annoying college student question, yes, but there we are. When we tell a story, we truncate the timeline, we make everyone wittier or stupider or prettier or uglier, but none of this actually changes the story. It makes the story more interesting to hear. This is not lying. This is not saying that 50,000 girls are going to school rather than being prostituted or beaten. In a crowded media environment, how do we cut through the clutter and get people to really listen to our stories? It is not by describing three separate trips or the 501c3 paperwork. So what are we left to do?

"Just Kids" by Patti Smith

Every girl should be introduced to Patti Smith at the age of 15. Overly literate, annoyingly "poetic," dirty, smelly, and tough and sexy as hell, she is neither the precociously perfect nor the pneumatic jailbait currently offered up as models of femininity. She's refreshing--and terrifying--because she is so imperfect.

Her unevenness and imperfections are part of what make "Just Kids" so enjoyable, not just from a fangirl POV, but also as a literary experience. There are maddening gaps in the story (what do you MEAN you didn't talk to Robert for all that time???), Patti's narration is completely unreliable, and there are times when you don't know who she's trying to convince--the reader or herself.

The book focuses on her young relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe, a portrait of the artists as a young man and woman. Mapplethorpe is crucial to the Patti Smith-mythos, and her deep love and respect for him is evident and extremely moving. And yet. And yet, he can be a total ass to her and she just accepts it. Accepts that he blocked her from going to Ethiopia to search for Rimbaud--not because it is a ridiculously pretentious project (it is, but that's Patti), but because he's scared that she'll get eaten by hyenas (he's PROTECTING her get it? because she's an idiot.). Her fear for him while he's out hustling, skating the edges of a sexual underground (while still sleeping with her, FYI) doesn't stop him from doing shit.

Mapplethorpe isn't the only incredibly hot artistic genius who screws/over our affable Patti. Jim Carroll would rather shoot up. Sam Shepherd forgot to tell her she was married. Allen Lanier left her for long stretches to tour and fuck groupies. Her benign responses to such bad behavior speak to either extremely low expectations...or the unspoken crimes that she committed against them.

Ann Friedman has already written about Patti and creative ambition, and the evolution of her putting herself first is fascinating. For instance, when she decides to first smoke pot. No more good girl Patti waiting for Robert to get his shit together to go to Max's--she learns how to roll a joint so she can work, like an adult. She takes hash and goes to the piers with Mapplethorpe and ends up with "Horses." This is a long way from the woman who wrote, upon seeing Stieglitz's portraits of O'Keefe: "Robert was concerned with how to make the photograph, and I with how to be the photograph."

It's shocking to me that Patti Smith, PATTI SMITH, didn't immediately see herself as THE poet, rock star, artist, and adventurer. And maybe the dirty secret is that she actually did, but the most bad-ass woman on the planet is still worried that you'll think she's stuck up or that she isn't good enough to just be herself.