I’ve been thinking a lot about family, and more specifically, in the context of media. As far as how family does or doesn’t operate in my own life, I think I’ve refrained from seeing a connection that helps explain my approach to who I’ve let in my life and why. Let’s talk this out.
TV is reliable. For hundreds of episodes you can tune into the same faces. No matter the levels of betrayal or craziness, the characters return to each other. No one is ever too dimwitted or angry or caring or wacky. They serve a purpose and have a role. They play off and round out until you get a picture of something that persists. Modern Family is never going to seriously discuss divorce nor is Blackish ever going to have Dre wake up to a burning cross in his yard.
TV isn’t just reliable in that way, it’s what we flatten out with a rolling pin to make it easier to consume. Depression can be touched up by endearing quirks and not-too-off-color jokes. Obesity gets a backstory of excuses and room to understand. Entitlement sits at the head of an overflowing dinner table. Rage gets redirected towards off-screen or low-tier entities you’re not invested in. Every time a TV show tries to get “tough” and “deal with the real issues,” it is, by being designed, serving to undermine the stated goal in service to the reason it ever became such a powerful reflection in the first place. We care about the story, not the truth.
Think about what happens when a character dies. When a “beloved” character is ripped from our expectations, we revel in the surprise. Game of Thrones is nothing if not for its “shocking” deaths, now so numerous it’s a built in joke and expectation. If half the cast were killed in the opening episode of the new season, the show would go on. Our TV families are expected to go through everything so we don’t have to. Let them negotiate peace. Let them forgive. Let them cope.
TV is an indirect measure of where “we” collectively reside as a culture. The ever-expanding diversity of television and networks acts as though it speaks towards a measure of progress or that we’re hearing new and marginalized voices. I don’t think so. I think we’ve always been prepared to hear the black story, or gay story, or woman’s story, because the story absolves us of any real responsibility to any real relationship with someone who’s black, gay, or a woman. Somewhere, deep down, are more representations of different people a good thing? I think so. Is it the kind of work that traverses deep cultural divides and fosters togetherness? I think not even close.
There’s a weird irony constantly at play. The closer you look, and the harder you try to capture, the more likely you are to corrupt. I’m criticized for my “direct” nature. I hate dancing around pleasantries and speaking in code. People often think I don’t understand the kind of mistake I’m making. Our culture is predicated on that indirect approach. You don’t tell the girl you like her, you feign like you’re not interested. You don’t tell the boss to go fuck himself, you accomplish something that impresses the person above them. TV is a natural extension of this. You don’t make a gay friend, you reference something funny Cam said to signal you’re not an overt hater. You can’t be racist if you love watching Insecure.
The writers are usually trying to accomplish something real in any series that takes itself seriously. They lived those moments. They had those almost exact conversations. They didn’t have the lighting and the timing, but here’s as close an approximation to what happened when I came out at Thanksgiving, where’s my Emmy? But they wrote the episode. They lived it. They did the work, so you don’t think you have to.
It’s the indirect pose that I think gives us our baseline ideas regarding our own families. People put up with the worst kinds of abuses. They shoulder the responsibility when nothing is ever returned in kind. Family sticks together, right? Flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood. At the end of the day, all you have is family. It works for the Mafia! If you weren’t paying attention. I was told growing up, “You’re brothers, you should love each other.” No doubt a sentiment passed to my father as earnestly as he tried to pass it onto us.
But where is the love? I don’t recall a single week my entire life me and my brother got along particularly well. My dad’s siblings have done everything in their power to resent and take advantage and steal from him. My mom was all forms of abusive towards him well before she got around to taking things out on us. But we’re family? Right? My dad and stepmom are currently shouldering the major portion of the fallout from my uncle’s recent cancer diagnosis. A task I wouldn’t put into the hands of any of his siblings were he on the receiving end. If it were an episode of TV, my dad would be the resilient everyman who’s capacity for forgiveness knows no bounds, and my uncle might see the light of his actions previously for just a second before dying off serenely surrounded by tearful, artfully suggestive of caring, family.
I tried to be more explicit in my concept and approach to “family.” I started picking friends. Where I screwed up was in the assumption family in and of itself meant anything, let alone that anyone would hold similar ideas to me as to how they would function. I think this is a major component to my confusion and frustration regarding my relative expectations about them. I had said out loud that they weren’t going to be playthings, they were different, I choose them to be as good or as bad as they are and we can all agree that this is how it works. I tried to cast a show that didn’t know it was filming. I directly dictated a puzzle that could only fall apart after it slid together while no one was looking.
Here I think about your “first love.” I certainly didn’t expect to be taken for a ride, and then I was on it. My “second love” did exactly the same thing, but it took a lot longer. I was paying attention this time. I was fighting back. The puzzle didn’t start with the edges and fill in quickly, it slipped a couple together here and a couple there until I saw a completed picture with nowhere to go but back in the box. It’s easy to be with someone when you’re letting whatever it is be. Then you turn them into your TV character with predictable, reliable, patterns to reinforce a feeling. That feeling has to be a good one, as I persistently learn my very presence instantiates negativity in many people.
Part of what I considered me “maturing” was adopting the ability to let people be who they were. The problem is when they don’t know, or don’t care, to figure out what they are. I’ve said a number of times that for as much of a roller coaster as I think I’ve put on display in blogs, “I” still remain “me” in some perverse impossible to nail down individuality. You’re not writing this, I am. It seems that the indirect habit applies as much to our own experience as much as anything else. We already know our eyes are a lie. We slowly lose the ability to hear and taste and smell. Why not forgo the mind it takes to pay attention and make choices? You don’t have to be you as long as you surround yourself with people telling you nice things about who you are.
I wanted to pick my family, but they had other plans. I still want the people I desire and look out for and heap endless praise and resources at to represent more than time spent in school together or partying or blood. And because I’m me, I know what I know and recognize what I’m after. I’ve done the work. I lay my TV characterizations of who you are to rest and try to engage the human who’s at least as convoluted and contradictory and confusing as I am. We have to be on the level. We have to choose each other. It’s an impossible and miraculous feat that most are barely willing to get a glimpse of.
The sickness is that you can attach yourself to an endless array of things and people that do nothing for you. They don’t help. They don’t teach. They don’t challenge. They leach while they let you leach. They hide you from yourself by making you all about them thus hidden in return. You can’t share with those resentful of you. You can’t save someone by cutting the noose when they’re dangling over a cliff. Here you get to make what you think is my fatal flaw. You pop into action and focus all of your time and energy. You advocate and celebrate and encourage. You take from the very finite yet always giving well of energy to keep the television on.
I don’t feel like this often, but I’ve been ashamed to think that I think many of the people I care about, the ones I would consider family, are cowards. I’m usually immediately fashioned into some kind of “that guy” who’s coming in hot or “doesn’t get it” or is so stubborn I’m only able to undermine all of my best intentions. But I’ve given those ideas room to breathe. I’ve talked them to death and invited commentary. I can’t function as your character who represents the things you don’t feel you have the permission to say. It makes me feel cheap and inhuman, and it’s dishonest. I can inspire, but I can’t substitute. Just like all the “nice” people in my life I envy aren’t going to determine my attitude to new acquaintances.
When I think about the amount of times some relationship in my life has “failed” and put it in terms of who the person is verses who they’re projected to be, a lot makes sense. I’ve “failed” many fuck buddies by not blossoming into “husband material.” They used to be friends, but now they’re fuck buddies, because when I wasn’t a character, they wanted nothing to do with me. By trying to accept certain friends as “who they are,” I came across as the overconfident judgmental blowhard who doesn’t leave room for anyone else to breathe as I offered scathing commentary about all of “them” out there, so how couldn’t I think those things about my friends as well? Our familiar familial connection turned to static. TV-me doesn’t have friends and family. TV-me is trapped in a time warp oozing Howard Stern in his 20’s energy. Off screen, we assume he’s okay with his books or his shows, wearily shaking his fist at the fall of man.
I’m not a character. More importantly, I’m not your character. I’m never going to treat you like you’re one of mine. I’ve chucked the longing and sentimentality and gone back into my selfish obnoxious preservation, but that doesn’t mean you’ve been demoted. That doesn’t mean I don’t suffer your cowardice or dishonesty in service to my attempted “maturity” with regard to our friendship. Because that’s just how you are, right? I say mean things, not you. Your brother is your brother, not me. Your story is the one you’re picking and fighting for, not a theme and skin that feel “good enough” for you to ride things out. You have things to say; you’re not a cordial parrot with teeth. Now there’s an animal fit for the screen.
