Debauch Delayed
PODHORETZ, JOHN
Television Debauch Delayed By John Podhoretz Last week on Friends, the NBC situation comedy that has launched a thousand magazine covers, the star-crossed friendship between the cute nebbish Ross...
...Casual sex became tawdry...
...There has been more jealousy expressed when one of the two participants in these unfulfilled romances decides to date somebody else...
...It's no accident that the unconsummated romance made its debut around the time that AIDS became a national obsession...
...the idea that love must be earned over time, with a lot of suffering (and banter...
...Sexualized images of adolescents like Brooke Shields stopped being cute and provocative and became pornographic instead...
...You might think its writers were 13-year-old boys surfing the Internet for naked pictures of Teri Hatcher, and the same can be said for most of the other programs on which romance interruptus is a regular feature...
...in 1993 he had a real-life affair with his 19-year-old stepdaughter and the world went mad...
...Soap operas have the most loyal audience in television, and the key to sustaining a soap opera, said Claire Labine, one of the form's leading lights, was to follow this simple formula: "Make 'em laugh, make 'em cry, make 'em wait...
...And what has replaced it, on television at least, is something weirdly poetic: a yearning for the beloved...
...What would have seemed like playful foreplay in the age of Playboy became date rape...
...That's comedy...
...There have been literally dozens of sitcoms in which the lead characters are clearly wild for each other but never go to bed, and the plot device has turned up on literally every ensemble TV drama in the past 10 years...
...they are utterly, completely obsessed with sex...
...My finger is important...
...It bleeds, and I'll cry, and I'll run around, and go into Mount Sinai for a day and a half...
...Eliot said...
...That's tragedy...
...Its four characters are promiscuous in a 1970s way, but the show's lesson (if there is one) is unmistakable: Don't live like these people...
...What do I care...
...The assumptions that animated the sexual revolution-repression is bad, self-expression is good, and it's all just so natural-fell very quickly by the wayside...
...But that was not all...
...Television Debauch Delayed By John Podhoretz Last week on Friends, the NBC situation comedy that has launched a thousand magazine covers, the star-crossed friendship between the cute nebbish Ross (David Schwimmer) and the adorable Jewish-American princess Rachel (Jennifer Aniston) finally erupted into romance after almost two seasons of waiting...
...There is precious little joy and enthusiasm when these characters talk dirty...
...First, Ross loved Rachel, but Rachel had just fled from marriage with a suburban dentist and was more inclined to quickie affairs with Italian hunks who barely spoke English...
...And yet the mixed messages are maybe not so mixed after all...
...I'm very nervous about it...
...Woody Allen had an affair with a 17-year-old girl on screen in Manhattan in 1979 and nobody said boo...
...Next, Rachel loved Ross, but Ross had given up on her and fallen for somebody else...
...instead, their sex-talk is riven with anxiety, as though a cruel Providence is forcing them to undergo all manner of trial and tribulation...
...But to me, comedy is if you fall into an open sewer and die...
...Friends, for example, is riddled with breathtakingly crude innuendo, and a lot of talk that is practically explicit...
...There is no better example of this than Seinfeld, surely the most sexually explicit program ever to air on national television...
...Ever since Moonlighting and Cheers thought it up simultaneously in the early 1980s, the most prevalent romantic arrangement on American television has been unfulfilled, unconsummated love...
...The arts community may have had its consciousness raised by AIDS, but the signs were everywhere that free and easy sex was no longer culturally viable...
...But when it comes to sex and romance, it puts me in mind of the great saying of Mel Brooks's 2,000-year-old man: "To me, tragedy is, if I'll cut my finger...
...They discovered that sex was not simply a pleasure, an itch satisfied by a quick scratch, but something more powerful and mysterious...
...But there is far more to it than this...
...They are miserable, unhappy, selfish thirtysomethings incapable of honest emotion...
...If it weren't for all the talk of contraceptive sponges and masturbation, Seinfeld could be shown to a class of 14-year-olds at a Christian academy as a depiction of the soulless Hell premarital sex might plunge them into...
...No, the chivalric age has not returned to us through the agency of the television networks...
...The fact is that the sexual messages on these shows are bizarrely muddled...
...Part of the answer comes from daytime soap operas, which feature a host of characters who come together and spin apart over a great many years...
...Of course, Seinfeld is funny, as is Friends...
...What does it all mean...
...There have been more uncoupled couples on television than married couples...
...Although he was talking about art, not sex, this fairly well describes the elite opinion of casual sex in the aftermath of AIDS, particularly in the arts, where a disproportionate number of homosexuals have always found a home...
...There have been more longing glances exchanged than deep-throated kisses...
...Time to murder and create," TS...
...The AIDS scare pulled the American elites out of their two-decade-long debauch...
Vol. 1 • February 1996 • No. 22
