Law & Order
You know that beginning scene on Law & Order, when the people are just sort of chilling and bam! dead body? It always seems sort of interesting and glamorous, as if finding dead bodies is awesome.
I never really had an opinion on it until Thursday. Most people don’t find dead bodies, but then every once in awhile someone does. And it might look something like this: you realize that your neighbor‘s shoes haven’t moved in a couple of days, his mail is piling up, and his plants are sort of wilting. And, then, maybe if you’re sort of out of it and these things aren’t evidence enough, his co-workers will stop by and tell you that he’s missed three days of work.
Then you’ll put it all together and realize, it’s time to call the police.
But you’ll call the landlady first, and she’ll get here and want to open the door. You want to discourage her. But she does it anyway. She’ll call the police and unlock the door. The door will be chained from the inside, and there will be an unmistakable and completely unforgettable odor.
And you’ll realize that someone who was awesome and amazing and a huge presence in the world is dead, and you found him, and you’ll get really sad.
Just because someone lived alone doesn’t make his life somehow less valuable.
None of this is awesome as Law & Order. None of it.
Always Glutton for Family Punishment
This has gotten me in trouble in the recent past, and I mean no disrespect for posting on this, but I do think that I’m disturbed by my own depravity and moral outrage when it comes to Always Sunny in Philadelphia vs. my depravity and moral outrage watching Family Guy.
I watch both. I have laughed at both. The issue is… part of me protests at Family Guy, whereas the least tasteful aspects of Always Sunny are often the best.
I think this speaks to their format and the ways they address their audience. Family Guy goes for the gut laugh. When it makes jokes about, say, rape, it’s not situating that joke in anything other than the scatological. It’s more like.. what can we get away with, and it’s funny because it’s taboo. It’s funny because it twists a familiar formula (hell, it’s even called family guy, as in, “he’s just a regular bloke with a family, dealing with family stuff”) into something both somewhat familiar and somewhat taboo. In the process, it transforms the taboo into the familiar. I’m also sensitive to people using the word “rape” casually [thanks a bundle, Alexander Pope]. To me, this is part and parcel of the same slippage, and directed at the same audience.
Always Sunny, on the other hand, makes us part of this gang of depraved folk. They’re no good, and we know it. They start up sweat shops, they are racist and homophobic cannibals, yet somehow they’re way more cuddly than even the family dog on Family Guy. [Aside: I want a plush doll of Charlie!] In the course of the episode, without hardly meaning to, Always Sunny is commenting on these issues. They don’t familiarize things, instead they let us be complicit. I have to acknowledge my own depravity, instead of my normalcy, when I watch it.
So, yeah. Liminal spaces. Are they always good? Can you set limitations on your liminality? Am I a dork?
