Monsters of Television

“Double bounce me! DO IT!“

Is it wrong that I kind of enjoyed “Aerodynamics of Gender” about as much “Epidemiology”? I’m not suggesting that this week’s episode is better than last week’s, but they’re doing different things, and I just happen to enjoy this week’s goals, overall, more than last’s week.

Which shows the flexibility of the show. It can do a splashy postmodern zombie romp, and do it very well, one week and then do this significantly less splashy episode (solid RoboCop work aside) that still has some good character beats in it. And that’s why I love this show so much: it can both of these things, and when it does them well, it does them really well.

I just compared this episode to “The Art of Discourse” on Twitter, and I think it works really well as a comparison, even narratively speaking. The group splinters a little bit to explore various plots (as is the norm), but puts the characters into compelling groups. Grouping the girls together with Abed was a nice idea, and allows for some great work between Brie, Brown, Jacobs especially. On the other plot, while Jeff and Troy have been paired before, I don’t think it’s been recently enough that it felt really fresh.

Their plot, the Secret Garden of Eden trampoline of whiteness, was the kind of silliness that the show can use on a regular basis, and still have it work. And while this isn’t explicit, the garden is a nice place of solitude within all the craziness. College campuses are crazy places, and if you manage to find that one place that brings you peace and calm, you cling to it. And the Secret Garden of Eden trampoline of whiteness is exactly like that. The message about purity, paradise, and exclusivity gets a little muddled since it really hinges on the swastika tattoo to sell it, but if it works for you (and it did for me), it’s a very touching little moment that comes out of some very real silliness.

I had a more difficult time with the overall A-plot, though. Karen’s going to address some of my issues in an addendum to this post (or a post of her own, we’ll see which she’s up for), but suffice to say that while I found the A-plot to be funny (cleverly written put-downs are almost always funny) I had real issues with the execution of it. That the women decide to take a women studies class about women in the media could lead to some really wicked and smart humor and insight into issues of feminism (which the show has explored to various degrees of success already). Instead, it gets into this painful faux-feminism (to prime you for Karen’s thoughts) that subtracted from the humor for me (at least they weren’t talking just about men the entire episode).

Also subtracting from the humor was Abed’s odd placement in the episode. The show has gently asserted that Abed is a high-functioning autistic, and it felt a little wrong for the women to take advantage of a quirk commonly associated with autism in the media (super-awareness of things) and have him say horrible and mean things. I liked the RoboCop overlay aspect of it (I like any reference to RoboCop, honestly), but the comeuppance doesn’t come for their abuse of Abed’s abilities.

Abed, instead, in a moment of great self-awareness, sacrifices himself to maintain the balance of Greendale. And I like this moment more than the put-downs since it plays into Abed’s whole awareness trait, but not in a meta way. This is something the show hasn’t really done with Abed before, and I really appreciate the extra step that the show makes by showcasing how Abed is able to turn that awareness into self-deprecating awareness.

Two strong (if somewhat problematic) episodes. Hoping for a hat trick.

FINAL THOUGHTS

• Missing from this episode, and what might’ve helped elevate it, was that the study table throw down never happened. It seemed like it was about to half-way through the episode, but is diffused pretty quickly and unsatisfactorily. Admittedly, this is kind of the point. Troy and Jeff are too zen to engage and the women are on serious power trip that they would rather storm out than be uncontested. Come to think of it, the show hasn’t done one of these since the premiere, I think. Maybe next week…?
• “Why name your daughter Megan? Are you stocking up for a bitch shortage?”
• Solid butt jokes in this episode: “Punch your butt.” “I’m gonna slit your butts’ throats.”
• “My white guilt is doing somersaults” is my new motto.
• Chang’s role in the episode was much appreciated, since it kept his screen time to a minimum, which is how that character works best.
• I cannot remember the wording of it, but Danny Pudi does look like the offspring of a lizard and Muppet. Eerie.

Addendum: View from the XX Chromosome by Karen

I’m a fan of Community and I respect its inherent silliness.  But if there is one thing I just can’t stand, it is faux feminism.  Need an example?   That terrible, awful, repulsive, cringe-inducing scene in one of my least favorite movies in the entire universe, Sex and the City 2–the karaoke scene.  Sidebar: I actually hate the first Sex and the City movie more, but let’s stick with the karaoke scene for now.

There are elements of struggle in being a woman today.  I could elaborate, but this likely isn’t the forum.  So when I watch a scene like the karaoke bit in Sex and the City 2, I see all of those real-life concerns subsumed under the gloss of girl power–a false power with no actual force behind the emptiness of the term.  Girl power depends upon explicit sexuality, a manipulation of the very objectification that has been imposed upon women for years.  It claims a right to feminist rhetoric without acknowledging the history of struggle supporting this claim.  It implies that women are more similar to other women than men, reinforcing a gender binary that pretends a view of women at the top of the hierarchy is progress.  Most critics have noted that Sex and the City is weakest when it tries to represent men.  Its women wield the tools of faux feminism, aka patriarchally-bound ideals of power and ascendancy, rending their men inferior and deferent (that’s just life with “the girls”, they say to each other).  Faux feminism insists that this is a battle, and for equality, women must “win.”  It is a destructive philosophy dependent on division over unity and surface over depth.

The “mean girl” effect is like “girl power,” it demonstrates women applying a patriarchal instinct against other women.  There are true horrors in the mean girl effect because it divides women and girls from each other through the most horrible of tactics: attacking women by applying a distorted patriarchal view of ideal womanhood based on surface appearance and some notion of physical perfection.  This insidious instinct among women to compete, supposedly deriving from “nature” (hence all the studies on little girls interacting, alpha girls, etc), generally positions men or male recognition as the ultimate prize.

Therefore, Abed’s role in this particular episode demands a moment’s pause.  Community put Abed in the middle because he’s not exactly a guy, but also not exactly a girl.  Imagine an alternate version of this subplot.  What if the episode had played with Abed’s ambiguous gender more?  Abed can’t hang with the boys, so he tries to be a girl.  His attempt to “be” a girl, however, derives from a distorted view of feminine power, a power of conquering instead of unifying.  Then, the girls realize that Abed’s actions reflect a destructive view of them, so they set out to restore order by deactivating the mean girl terminator.  Their tactic, however, is not one of destruction but rather understanding of commonality.  Order is restored, not by the man being wiser than those petty girls, but rather by the girls seeing their desires performed by a man–exposing the phallocentric logic that claims female appearance is the quintessential value of womanhood.

Okay, the show is a comedy.  Yes, I know.  But it also has deeper ambitions towards subtle social critique, as reflected in its episode about faith, which I quite liked.  Abed’s Terminator allowed the program to avoid any true commentary on gender, social dynamics, or authentic respect.  We have enough celebrated faux feminism in the world.  I expect a show like Community to do better.