Bill Shakespeare Asked to Re-Write his Glee Script. "Not trendy or shallow enough. Too human."

The ‘Glee’ Phenomenon and Courage

 

I approach Glee knowing it’s a perilous road.   The show attracts a loyal following, and I know you can get sent to the gallows for trashing peoples’ icons, but I’m trying to carve out a niche for Courage, and I suppose I’m curious to know what you all think.   Among my loved ones, (my close family), I can’t find a single soul who likes Glee, but I have a few dear friends who do, so let me work this out in a roundabout fashion:

When I was fourteen or fifteen, someone gave me a copy of James Michener’s Novel Centennial and I found myself captivated by his approach to story — take a physical spot on the globe, start with the stone age inhabitants, and spend three or four hundred pages passing across a few millenia, tying the characters together with a common genealogy and delivering up the present day in the final chapter.   In this particular story, Michener created a fictional town,  ‘Centennial,’ and told a story about the Arapaho Indians, then the original European settlers, and the range wars between cattlemen and sheep herders.  If memory serves, he finished the story with a modern day election drama of some sort.

I can remember being so absorbed by it that I was a tad disappointed the place name was fictional as well.  It seemed that real to me.   Finishing the book, turning the last page, was a melancholy thing.

As time went on, I remember being assigned authors in school — Hemmingway, Raymond Carver, John Updike, John Cheever, Flannery O’Connor — and I sensed they weren’t quite as accessible as Michener, that they made me stretch a little more, but after I invested in them, authors like Michener started to seem, well, both flat and overcooked, even a little insulting.   When I went back to writers like Michener, I sensed an agenda that wasn’t always about the story.  The author was engaged in a thesis of some sort, an essay, and the characters were just different fiddles in his orchestra.   Michener was a particular grind on this score.   In his novels about the South Pacific he just layered in Margaret Mead’s pseudo-anthropology between the outrigger canoes and the coconut milk.   Michener even admitted in one interview that he never really could write dialogue.  He wasn’t really telling a story.  He was blowing a horn.  It’s not that Michener was a total pauper on the storytelling front, but once you see what a real artist can do, Michener started looking like an imposter.

That’s the most generous way I can relate to the ‘Glee’ spectacle.   I literally can’t make it through more than about 10 minutes of an episode.  The ‘characters’ are not, in any sense, flesh and blood realities, but parallel streams in the author’s consciousness, giving voice to the author’s idea for character, but never really becoming character, affording the author a chance to vent, but never entertain.   Years ago, in writers’ workshop, when something wasn’t funny, we tried to be nice by calling it ‘clever.’  This doesn’t even rise to clever.  Watching Glee is something like overhearing the conversation of two nerdy, horse-faced girls on the far edge of the cafeteria:  it’s a little depressing to find out they’re not very bright either.

And depressing is very much the Glee reality.  These are all cruel, wretched souls in a cruel, wretched place doing cruel and wretched things to each other.   One woman threatens to kick another in her “taco.”  Another, presumably innocent, teenage girl concludes she can only advance by cultivating a bad reputation.   There is no praise, no affirmation, just a steady, sneering stream of insult.  Anyone foolish enough to propose a plan is ridiculed immediately.   Watching this crowd is something like seeing chicks peck a sibling to death for having a blemished feather.

And then someone dances, or sings, and you get the sense that this show is about musical performance, with long tedious bouts of bad dialogue and cruelty in between.  I suspect this is the show’s power plant, that if they didn’t break out into exuberant performance, these characters would start gunning each other down, and the audience would tire of people who look as though they reside, literally, in hell.

So how do I account for the radical divide over Glee among the people I know?   Well, on one level,  it’s a good thing that our taste is so radically different.    People can like what they like.  That’s America.

It’s also possible — quite possible — that I sniff agenda in story, where others just wait for the music and enjoy it.   That’s fine too.   Not everything has to be about the political agenda of the screenwriter.

But I also sense that we’re the products of what we read and what we watch.   I know from growing up on television and then moving away from it completely, for years, that television can coarsen your tastes,  harden your feelings, numb your mind.    If you settle for Law and Order, long term, you just won’t appreciate the depth and power of Flannery O’Connor.

And that’s the tragedy of shows like Glee.  It smears a little trendy dialogue on the surface of our animal selves, seasons it with music, and then calls it art.

Well, it isn’t art.  It’s a perfect example of what happens when Hollywood chooses to dumb it down.   The audience gets dumber..and so does the next show in the pipeline.