How to use this Page

From Jennifer Donnelly’s THE TEA ROSE:

“It’s never been alright. Not since the day I walked up these stairs and walked away from you. I ‘urt you that day, I know I did, but all you lost was me. I ‘urt myself a million times worse because I lost you.”

From MY SO-CALLED LIFE’s should’ve-been-penultimate episode (damn you, “Weekend”), “The Betrayal”:

Angela: Look, I don’t care anymore, okay? So just go away.

Rayanne: You’re not the only one who got hurt.
Angela: Well, forgive me if I can’t feel sorry for you, Rayanne.
Rayanne: You lost nothing, Angela. You lost a lousy, selfish friend, a guy you never really had… you lost nothing! …. I lost a really good friend! I lost everything.

And then comes the part where I cry and cry. It’s better on the show than in the book.

Two books I read recently in my ongoing LGBT reading challenge — Nancy Garden’s ANNIE ON MY MIND and Julie Anne Peters’s LUNA — employ the same interesting technique: the narrator-protagonist is really telling you the story, as evidenced by their struggling to remember particular details.

It’s more pronounced in ANNIE ON MY MIND, where the narration repeatedly includes passages like,

I remember we were both watching the sun slowly go down over one end of the beach, making the sky to the west pink and yellow. I remember the water lapping gently against the pilings and the shore, and a candy wrapper — Three Musketeers, I think — blowing along the beach. Annie shivered.

Sometimes — I can’t find a good example — Garden has the narrator Liza trying, and failing, to remember details that are important to her (who put their hand on the other’s arm first), even while she remembers other things that don’t matter. You get a strong sense that the story is her actively constructing her memories for you.

And you get a sense that she’s really explaining things to herself, as much as to you, when she adds narrative commentary like, “But maybe — and I think this is true — maybe we also just needed more time.”

When Garden isn’t highlighting the imperfections of Liza’s memory, or her struggle to make sense of it, she’s sometimes drawing attention to the fact that she does remember, as in this passage:

I nodded, trying to smile at her as if everything was all right — there’s no reason, I remember thinking, why it shouldn’t be — and I sat down on the edge of Annie’s bed and opened the letter.

Which, for me, pulls up that recognizable feeling of knowing something is wrong but pretending to yourself that it isn’t, far more than if Garden had simply told us that that’s how Liza felt. For some reason, the fact that she remembers feeling that way matters.

It actually reminded me of nothing so much as a moment toward the very end of the pilot episode of MY SO-CALLED LIFE. Angela and her mother reconcile after their fight over her hair (which she has dyed “crimson glow,” and which her mother says looks like it “had died — of natural causes”). The scene ends with Angela’s voiceover narration, “I fell asleep right there — I must have been really tired.”

MSCL does not, in general, have WONDER YEARS-style narration, where older Kevin Arnold is looking back; most of the narration is real-time. And partly, this was the pilot and they were probably still figuring out the limits of their template, but it always stands out to me as, I think, the only example of Older Angela thinking back. And it’s funny because it’s such an utterly banal thing to remember!

I think that’s what I liked about the technique in both of these books… it’s a convention of fiction that the narrator has this obscenely good memory, and you accept it for the sake of getting the story. Garden, and to a lesser extent Peters, break that convention and make their narrators into …people narrating, instead.

My friend Iain reminds me that,

It was fifteen years ago to-day that Angela Chase dyed her hair. Television
drama was never the same again. It was real. Not some la-la-la land where
everyone was happy all the time. Not some far-off place where things were
packaged into 43-minute chunks, everyone knew their place, and everything was
neatly resolved.

And pulls out an old set of questions:

1. Which character to you most identify with?
2. Why?
3. Which character would you most want to bang?
4. Why?
5. Favorite Episode?
6. What would you have Corey Helfrick paint on your shoes if given the chance?

I’ll throw out a question of my own: What moments of the show do you experience the most differently today, compared to when you first saw it? (Whenever that was… sometime during the MTV years, for most of us.) And what parts do you think you will always view the same way?

My own answers later.

I couldn't find a Once & Again-era picture of Audrey Marie Anderson, but she looks a hell of a lot better with the shorter hair in this more recent pic.

O&A’s Carla is the season’s vehicle for exploring some MSCL’s themes, with a twist. As in: what if the teen with no place to go, taken in by the main upper-middle-class family of the show, was — rather than the most moral character ever to stalk the halls of a fictional high school — actually pretty bad?

Or: what if you took the same elements of one of MSCL’s core dramas — the “bad girl” is taken with the more innocent main character, so much so that she exploits her own lower inhibitions to pursue the main character’s crush — but wrote it so that she bore none of the consequences of the emotional havoc she wreaked… and the main character had to make her own peace with that?

I also noticed, watching Carla, how it’s possible to fully believe your own crap, and yet have that pose no barrier to your utterances being perfectly pitched to manipulate others. I recall that Television Without Pity’s recappers couldn’t stand Carla; I enjoy her, because I believe in her. This is partially the acting — I think ONCE AND AGAIN is extraordinarily well cast, my commentary on Shane West aside — but it’s also that Carla is perfectly written as a character who is extremely gifted at manipulating the right kind of people, but not well-attuned to how off she seems to others (especially, most adults). More than any of the other characters, I think — even Grace — she’s congenitally teenage.

The producers were clearly having fun with the alterna-MSCL aspect of the season, because they cast both Devons in guest-starring roles both emotionally and physically opposite their MSCL characters. Devon Gummersall (Brian on MSCL) is the busboy who becomes a hostage-taker… and, like most such sad sacks, can’t even do that right; Devon Odessa (Sharon on MSCL) plays a lustful and incompetent temp. I think they both do a great job, which is notable in Odessa’s case because these days when I watch MSCL, I’m struck by the feeling that her acting is a notch below the rest of the main cast’s.

Final trivia: Devon Gummersall’s brother Josh was an assistant to the producers on O&A, and in the episode where Rick is summoned to testify before a grand jury about the misdeeds of the contemptible character* Miles Drentell, an unseen character accused of delivering a bribe is named Gummersall. …And I’m starting to understand what my friend Vic said about the odd experience of listening to the MSCL commentaries and realizing you remember the show much better than its creators… MSCL was my first, and will always be my best, trivia love.

Actually, on that: I inadvertently outed myself as a MSCL-obsessed freak on the last day of this seminar I took this spring. My friend Adrienne, also a MSCL fan (who isn’t?), was trying to remember whether something had occurred in Three Rivers, PA; I immediately informed her that Three Rivers is actually the fictional suburb of Pittsburgh in which MSCL is set. That’s not what showed my obsession. What showed my obsession is that when the professor expressed awe at the ease with which small details of the MSCL universe come to my mind in utterly different contexts, I didn’t understand why this was anything to be surprised about.

* “Contemptible character” in both senses, I’m afraid: the character, well-portrayed in all his annoying glory by David Clennon, is a contemptible man, and he also had a contemptible effect on my viewing, as in I wanted to stab myself every time he entered the scene.

Also: had anyone told me six months ago that I would be writing footnotes about scope ambiguities in a blog ostensibly about children’s books… I would’ve said they knew me alarmingly well.

So I’m rewatching ONCE AND AGAIN, a Herskovitz & Zwick (the producers of MY SO-CALLED LIFE) show. Why? Because it’s finals time.* Ahem.

And there’s a lot of things I’m thinking this time through, mostly centering on how much recognition I feel at all the classically identifiable H&Z moments and tropes. Some of which is wonderful and moving for me, and more of which, actually, is annoying than I would have expected.

But here’s my question. They did a simply amazing job of casting the teen girl actors, Evan Rachel Wood (who’s gone on to a very successful movie career) and Julia Whelan (who I believe mostly stopped acting after the show). And the teen male lead is… not as good. I don’t recall whether he improves later in the show (I’m still just halfway through season one), but it’s very noticeable. He’s not awful, but… the difference is striking.

And it’s making me remember just how incredible Claire Danes was in MSCL, and how in a few key scenes, Jared Leto just doesn’t measure up. (Like, after they’ve broken up and he comes to her house to return her bike, except it’s really Brian’s bike, and they’re talking about sex and death, and it turns out her dad is listening the whole time…)

So, obviously any show can have a dud actor. And I’m not talking about duds here, just actors who don’t always rise to the greatness of their costars. (And actually, I think the weakest acting in MSCL comes from Devon Odessa, who plays Sharon.) But H&Z have been consistently incredibly successful about casting female leads who take your breath away. Is it a general pattern that in the teenage years, it’s more common for female actors to reach great heights of naturalistic displays of emotion? Or am I overreaching? What do you guys think?

* I don’t actually watch much TV anymore; I never watch it live. But some semesters, when I’m really in a panic over finals, I feel an inexplicable urge to watch my shows. My first semester of grad school, I didn’t watch any TV all semester (which was actually kind of an adjustment, moving away from my parents’ TiVo and all)… until finals hit, when I suddenly felt compelled to watch three seasons of ANGEL. (My first-year-of-grad-school roommate and I picked one another for several reasons, but the complementary nature of our respective TV-on-DVD collections was not the most minor of them. I had MSCL and the Collectors’ Edition of Freaks and Geeks, both of which were hard to find at that time; she had… everything else.)

But yeah. I don’t know if this pattern is a reaction to the anxiety (Avoidance, the Greatest Strategy of Them All!) or because when I’m so close to freedom I start fantasizing all the things I could do with it and then I really want to, or what. But this semester’s papers are a particularly painful bunch for me (as measured by the triumvirate of how much I care about these classes (a lot), how much I’ve done on these papers (almost nil), and how soon they are due (let’s not discuss it)), so ONCE AND AGAIN it is.

From Laurie Halse Anderson’s WINTERGIRLS (Advance Reader Copy; may be different in the version available in stores and libraries). The number is the calorie-counting the anorexic narrator does throughout the book:

When the bread is done I scrape on a microscopic layer of [honey] (30) and pour a cup of coffee, black. She pretends not to listen or watch as I crunch through my breakfast. I pretend that I don’t notice her pretending.

…Now if only it’d been “pour a cup of coffee, black, with three or four sugars,” we’d be in a whole other realm of My So-Called Life reference. But anyways. This is from THE SWEET FAR THING by Libba Bray:

“I said, don’t look now,” Felicity hisses through clenched teeth. “The key is to make it seem as if you do not notice their attention.”

It may seem tenuous to connect these two quotes, which after all, don’t really have much in common. But what they do have in common is that they both totally echo this classic line from the pilot episode of MY SO-CALLED LIFE:

ANGELA (voice-over): Like with boys, how they have it so easy! How you have to pretend you don’t notice them, noticing you.

Of course, since this is television, that line precedes an ironic segue — in this case, a brilliant one, to Brian getting shoved up against some lockers. Oh, Angela. What don’t you notice, indeed.