Chores were today. Good chores, really. Who can complain about having to watch TV as a part of work? Certainly not I. Especially when this go-around was far more entertaining than the last.
I divided my watching into two segments, one during the afternoon and the other during the evening. I had other things to do in between, and at any rate, I wanted to get a feeling for the different programs that would be shown at different times.
A few facts will serve to frame my entire experience, before I discuss specific shows and the hilarity and intrigue within. First, you’d never ever guess that France had minorities. I watched a news program, and they didn’t even include a token minority. The other thing is that the commercials are all at the end of the programs, and the programs start at really random times. For example, the first news program ended on the forty-second minute of the hour; the last show I watched in the evening ended at the thirty-eighth minute of the hour.
Another major theme was the explicit nature of the subjects and jokes—it was surprising where they went and how they went there. Contrast this with the frequent PSAs of the commercials, including one about TV, “le banalisation de violence” (the normalization of violence, I think). Furthermore, the advertisements warn you a lot more—there are cigarette-style warnings during every single food advertisements. Judging from the way the French eat, they don’t seem to be taking it seriously. Which is a good thing.
The last thing is that, from all appearances, a major upper-middle-class activity seems to be watching TV. I feel like I’ve heard the sentence “…and then we watched TV” from Stanford students describing their evening’s activities with their host families surprising amount. To a certain extent, it’s not surprising—the lack of commercials allows the show to really develop itself, almost like a short story to the movie’s novel. The production values are generally quite high. So it was really quite enjoyable to watch, language issues aside.
The first show, the news show, was generally pretty uninteresting. The segments were fast-paced and didn’t go into much detail, nor did they cover very interesting subjects. No minorities, and no beautiful people.
The second show I watched was one I had pegged early on as a soap opera. It was called, “Un jour, un histoire” (A day, a story). I can’t really classify it—at times it definitely did cross into that territory, but with a knowing wink and a nod, that it was all a joke. The plot concerned a high powered woman lawyer and another woman, a single mom. After the stresses of the day—the woman lawyer attempts to have sex for the purpose of conception, and her boyfriend, while being given what I assumed was a blowjob, rejects her; the mom, by comparison, faces unruly kids—the two friends decide to switch jobs, because each has what the other wants. So they do. Hilarity ensues. Favorite moments include: the lawyer rushing to get to a about-to-be-closed supermarket (?) with the two children in hand, with the camera quickly cutting between fifty camera angles for what appeared to be a twenty yard run (conservative estimates each: It was probably more angles and less distance and more ridiculousness)…the two children finding the lawyer and her boyfriend’s (who appears in a wifebeater and boxers for most of the show, doesn’t appear to work, and chastises his girlfriend about “responsibility”) stash of lubricated condoms and asking what they are…the single mom, first day on the job, going into a cathedral for no apparent reason, and knocking a sexy male restorer into a pile of mud. The restorer proceeds to wash himself off with a hose, like some female’s male pinup fantasy, while she bites her lip and an angel’s chorus sounds…the overly dramatic music for mundane moments…the title music, the stylings of Blink 182.
That was it from the afternoon session. Other boring stuff ensued. Then, after dinner, back to the tube.
This time, I watched a show whose elevator pitch was probably this: “So we’ll take an overly cutesy French woman, and make her do a reality cooking show. Sounds good?” And that worked. The idea is that this woman goes to some region in France, and after eating a master’s meal, tries to duplicate it after getting the ingredients herself. She is then judged by a jury. This is the type of show where a cartoon chef’s hat floats over the woman’s head for the title credits. Also the woman takes Polaroid pictures everywhere. Also she has a squeak. This is a show that’s so cutesy the woman slaughters chickens onscreen.
That is correct. Chickens are slaughtered, beheaded, defeathered and eviscerated onscreen. Needless to say, I found this gross. I’m overstating the grossness somewhat though—the chickens are shocked to death, and the chickens didn’t seem to suffer that much, at least from what I could see. The defeathering is done by machine and we don’t see that much. The beheading is after that and they, the heads, come off like so many strawberry tops. The blood is not so bad either—it looks like cranberry sauce. The show carries on with the same cute tone, not seeing anything particularly unusual in what has occurred.
This is me rationalizing the whole affair. The French deal with it upfront; you’d never see it on American TV. But the American approach is one that sticks with me, because it’s a lot tougher to eat meat after you’ve seen it slaughtered. The meat we eat has very little visual relationship from the animal it comes from. It’s bloodless, often marinated, and so it’s very possible that we don’t have to think of steak as coming from some cow’s flank. In fact, as David Foster Wallace astutely pointed out, often, the names themselves of food is different than the animal: steak/cow, pork/pig, veal/lamb, etc. It’s as if we can’t bear to connect the dots. Then a show like this comes along and connects them up for you. And doesn’t even care about it.
Did I mention that I had meat with both dinner and lunch, and will probably have more in the future? Intellectually, there’s a conflict; emotionally, I’ll be damned if that steak doesn’t taste good.
****
BOOK REVIEW: WHERE I’M CALLING FROM
Raymond Carver’s characters might sympathize with this conflict, even if they’d never have that specific one. The characters—the drunks, the divorcees and the drudges—are masters at self-deception and deception of others. Often they skim over the truth. That understatement, combined with the prose’s understatement, makes Carver’s stories a deceptively quick read. But they don’t leave you; you must confront the mysteries and ambiguities of the stories. Often, especially with his earlier works, I spent more time thinking about the stories after I finished them than actually reading them.
Resting and thinking about Carver’s stories is necessary; otherwise, they become too overwhelming. Emotionally, they punch above their word count and frustrate you, in a good way.
The characters of Carver’s stories spend most of their fictional lives trying to make sense of it all, and their success or lack of it is mirrored by Carver’s style. In his earlier stories, he appears to be more pessimistic; later on, the loss is still there, but they are able to pick up afterwards. The stripped-down minimalism is followed by a more evocative and expressive style.
Carver grows a little wearying, though, when a story feels simply repeated. He has a gift for making the strange normal, as in “Fat,” where a waitress becomes dissatisfied with her life after serving a fat man’s meal, and so it feels very frustrating for him to simply repeat earlier plot lines, as happens to often in this compilation.
I don’t believe I’m saying anything new about his stories, but I really enjoyed them, and I often find that reactions to enjoyable things are the most clichéd of all, because how many ways can we say, I enjoyed a thing?
****
There were no poor fashion choices today. There was one man wearing seersucker, which was odd—it’s not like we’re in the Deep South here, not like we’re going to bust out our drawls—but not exactly awful-looking.
****
There was a new pastry today. The mille feuille! With a white-and-milk chocolate top resting on alternating rows custard and wafer, it was truly delicious.
****
The weekend starts on Thursday here.
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