Thought That Came Unbidden

It is our third pandemic winter and I am starved for novelty. TGF and I drove downtown to pick up carryout last night and it was the first time in a month I’d left my zip code and the first time in two weeks I’d left the house. Literally.

I work at home now. I realize how lucky that makes me. I have what in the BeforeTimes^TM most of us dreamed of: no commute. But in those times we dreamed of no commute based on the idea that we could go out and do other things, like hit that 4 pm movie or join a sports team near our house where games started at 5 pm.

There’s not a lot of going out and doing other things in my life. And the net result of having no commute, in addition to not having to slog to work in the rain and the cold, and not having to deal with subway delays, I am under stimulated, starved for novelty, which is how I found myself watching And Just Like That…, the Sex & The City reboot.

Reviews for the show have been decidedly mixed. The New York Times called the show “…an awkward bid at relevance” while Entertainment Weekly gave it a B- saying “It’s better than the movies, at least” and NPR’s Pop Culture podcast summed up their review with “All we can do is cringe.” Even The Atlantic did a piece focusing specifically on Miranda, how her character had changed, and how those changes made very little sense.

Weird, cringy, overly woke, these are some common themes in the reviews. I knew all that going in and I watched it anyway (see starved for novelty). I’m not sorry I did.

For one, Sex & The City has never been about reality. It presented a vision of 1990s New York that was no more real than the idea that Monica and Rachel could afford that apartment on Friends.

Sex & The City was always about the idealized potential of New York, where culture and glamor were a mere cab ride away, never worrying about what the cab ride cost or if there was going to be someone puking in the gutter when you got out at your destination.

And guess what? It absolutely was weird. The first couple of episodes feinted toward acknowledging the pandemic with:

• Specific dialogue about how great it was to be coming out of the pandemic
• Background characters wearing masks who suddenly basically disappear altogether (though some of this is handled with an awkward opening credits time passing montage)
• How Miranda and Steve were coping with having their son and his girlfriend in their “pod”
• Anthony’s hunks delivering bread business, born during 2020 when everyone was doing sourdough

But the show essentially took the stance of “Hey, let’s just live in a world where we acknowledge the pandemic was a thing but act like it’s totally over and we’ve gone back to ‘normal.'”

Was it cringy? Maybe. My guess is most of that feeling is generated by the internalized misogyny that causes discomfort with talking about the sex lives of 50-something women whom we were more than happy to watch when they were in their 30s.

Overly woke? Perhaps. Woke is such a trigger word. I’d reframe it this way: It wasn’t overly woke so much as working extra hard to surface the third leg of Hollywood’s Minority Trope stool: The Magical Queer.

A Lesson in Character Tropes: The Magical Negro and The Manic Pixie Dream Girl

Hollywood has already given us the first leg of the stool, the Magical Negro, the Black character who Wikipedia says is “typically, but not always, in some way outwardly or inwardly disabled, either by discrimination, disability or social constraint.”

The Magical Negro trope character has no life of their own, and typically very little back story. The character usually works in a job seen as menial – janitor, housekeeper – and exists in the story to help the white lead character achieve their goal, often at great personal sacrifice.

The Magical Negro often has access to spiritual wisdom, through their inherent savagery, that is closed off to the white characters. We see this a lot when this trope is the Magical Native American (or Magical Indian if you prefer)

On a bigger scale, the Magical Negro exists to assuage white guilt, to legitimize continued racism in American society by saying with subtext “See, these people serve a valuable purpose in the position they are in.”

The second leg of the Minority Trope Stool is the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Like the Magical Negro, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl exists to “help the [male] protagonist achieve happiness without ever seeking any independent goals herself.”

The Manic Pixie Dream Girl (MPDG) isn’t new. TV Tropes maintains she’s been around since the 1200s even though this specific term wasn’t coined until 2007 by film critic Nathan Rabin in response to the movie Elizabethtown and the character played by Kirsten Dunst.

The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is everything the label says: high-energy, in contrast to our brooding hero’s natural malaise, and quirky enough to make your teeth ache like you’ve been on a sugar binge.

Unorthodox, spontaneous, often with hair an unnatural color, and always, always white and petite, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl has a lot of projects going on but nothing she isn’t willing to drop to make the hero realize his own potential. Oh, and take for granted that she is sexually aware and most likely bisexual but in that non-threatening way that straight men prefer.

Some have argued the that Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope is finally done. Nathan Rabin himself has disowned the term. I think she’s just been replaced by the GirlBoss Trope. More on that later. Misogyny runs deep enough that the MPDG still belongs here.

Meet the Magical Queer

That third leg of the stool is something new: the Magical Queer. Until recently, queer character and plot tropes were more about pity and less about how these characters could enable the main characters to live their fullest lives and be their best selves. It was less “thanks for the assist” or “you have served your purpose in society” and more “there but for the grace of God” in feel.

But as queer people have become more accepted by so-called “mainstream” society, some of these character and plot tropes have slowly eroded and a new one has emerged that has much in common with the Magical Negro.

The Magical Queer by benefit of struggles against society’s prejudice is able to see and speak truth that the straight main characters can’t and identify it as what is holding them back. Most often, the Magical Queer is a transgender woman, and typically one who appears gender-conforming.

Part of what made And Just Like That… seem so horribly woke is that it doubled-down on the Magical Queer, first in the form of Che Diaz, a non-binary they/them pronoun using, masculine-presenting, polyamorous bisexual fuckboy who checked so many non-conforming boxes there might as well have been a literal checklist used to build this character.

Che, who is a third of the featured personalities and Carrie’s boss at the podcast where they both work, has a lot going on: active love life, successful podcast, stand-up career. Che, as The Atlantic noted, has zero reason to be interested in stuffy, uptight, traditional, rational Miranda.

And it’s a pity, too, that they stay together for more than a weed and booze fueled grapple in Carrie’s kitchen after which Che tells Miranda to “DM me sometime,” because Che isn’t a character so much as a Magical Queer who finally clarifies for Miranda the middle-aged funk in which she finds herself 20+ years into a marriage and a career.

Che shows Miranda through that Magical Queer vision that the world can be as you shape it to be, especially if you’re a well-off, gender-conforming white woman. Your power is so great, in fact, you can get someone who has no business being in love with you to uncheck one of those boxes that is so dear to them and lean toward a more traditional life.

One thing I will say, whether this is at the behest of Cynthia Nixon, a real life, late-in-life lesbian coming out story, or if it was the show runners trying to tap into some sort of zeitgeist that they see coming, it was gratifying to see two female-bodied people, one of whom was obviously masculine-presenting, in an intimate relationship.

Our other Magical Queer comes in the form of the transgender Rabbi Charlotte and Harry finally hire to officiate their child Rock’s (nee: Rose) “they-mitzvah,” which I really hope isn’t a thing. This woman finally makes Charlotte and Harry understand what the other Rabbis they tried to hire wouldn’t tell them: That their child hadn’t bothered to prepare at all for the ceremony, which seems at best unrealistic to me given how important an event the -mitzvah is in any Jewish child’s life.

Regardless of how it happened, And Just Like That… seems to be at the forefront of a trend that needs to die an early death. If we’re going to see more trans and gender non-conforming characters on TV, let’s skip the trope phase and let them be real people from the start.

And Just Like That… is available on HBO Max.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the Viet Nam War lately. Probably because for my birthday I bought myself a boxed set on DVD of China Beach, possibly one of the finest pieces of network television ever made.

If you missed the show in its brief run between 1988 and 1991, it follows a cast of characters around China Beach, a real location near Da Nang for troops to catch some rest and relaxation to which the show’s creators added the 510th Evacuation Hospital and Graves Registration Unit.

One of the structures the show rests on as you get to know the characters – a numbed out, shut down nurse from Kansas, a burned out Marine acting as life guard and chief entertainment provider, an arrogant doctor, and a female entrepreneur willing to engage in the world’s oldest transaction if she must – is the idea that there is Viet Nam (in-country) and there is the world, which was often stricly defined as “the United States.” Turns out it was a little more complicated than that.

This concept plays out in every non-fiction book I’ve read about the war, and I’d read more than I have fingers of which I have the usual number, and I took the time a while back to ask my uncle M. about his experiences as a Marine in-country from 1967 to 1968 in a mechanized platoon.

The basic idea is what happens in-country is separate from the world so what happens in-country doesn’t matter. Some people used it as an excuse to be horrible human beings but for most, I suspect, it was a way of dissociating, of pretending the experience was happening to and around someone else. Thinking it through, this may be why 30% of Viet Nam veterans have PTSD diagnoses compared to lower numbers from other military engagements post-World War II according to the Department of Veterans Affairs.

And dissociating is what most of us have been doing lately, and will probably continue to do for the next couple of years or until this fucking pandemic finally gets under control, only we’ve been doing it with binge watching Netflix and refusing to put on pants that don’t have a stretchy waistband instead of getting hooked on heroin. The problem is, dissociating isn’t really going to work for us the way it “worked” for troops in Viet Nam.

They had the advantage of a hard dividing line: in-country, with the atrocities of combat, the constant fear of death, the physical discomfort, and the ordinary struggles of being forced to be in close proximity to people you didn’t choose, or the world where everything was clean and shiny and death, both physical and of the soul, didn’t lurk around every corner. According to my uncle, even R&R in Thailand away from the combat theater wasn’t “the world” because it was still Asia, exotic and far from home.

It’s not going to work for us because the horror – climate change, fractious politics, the pandemic, school shootings, racism, rape culture and rampant misogyny to name a few things – has been going on so long we’ve lost our ability to flatten and divide it into small enough pieces to cope with.

And is it any wonder? Nadia Boltz-Weber, a Lutheran pastor, author, and bit of a badass, wrote beautifully recently about why we are unable to cope over time: we just aren’t made for it, in a literal, biological way.

It also doesn’t help that corporate America is gaslighting us, turning real psychological problems from all of the things we face in the modern era into the equivalent of “she was asking for it because she wore a short skirt.”

Even worse, they’re marketing the solution to the burnout created by late-stage corporate oligarchy pretending to be capitalism back to us as the self-care industrial complex (available mostly to white women at every outlet near you).

Dissociating isn’t going to help us. Unlike the GIs in Viet Nam, the world is the same as being in the shit.

I started 2021 with six habit tracker programs installed on my phone. Not from any obsessiveness, because I discovered something interesting about myself last year: I’m one of those people who is motivated by continuity.

Like a stereotypical urbanite creative, I started meditating recently. To my credit, I actually started before “these trying times” way back in August 2019. And while I was inconsistent in my practice, I did it enough to get a taste. What I didn’t realize is that for me, someone prone to anxiety, it actually does what all those patchouli doused hippies claim meditation does.

It calms me down.

On days when I don’t get my morning routine – which consists of morning pages (thank you, Julia Cameron) and 10 minutes of meditation – I’m like an over wound toy. Jangling nerves and snappish replies, followed by the inevitable guilt and shame which just winds me up even more. In a year when nothing worked right, this actually did.

And the app I’m using, the orange dot one, taps brilliantly into two aspects of human psychology: streak theory (or the theory of sunk costs) and nudge theory.

Streak theory powers every frequent buyer reward program in existence. For continued action – such as buying a certain number of sandwiches – someone gets a small reward. In sophisticated programs, or in certain educational settings, longer streaks earn rarer rewards. Keeping a streak going taps into our desire to make our sunk costs, the money or effort we’ve already put into something, be worthwhile.

Nudge theory, for which Richard Thaler won a Nobel prize in economics in 2017, is a concept that says that subtle shifts in policy are more effective at getting people to make decisions that are broadly beneficial for their lives. Digital apps leverage nudge theory by pinging you several times a day with light touch, often humorous reminders to buy that sandwich or do that meditation session.

In the digital realm, apps use these pings, or nudges, to leverage your working memory. Miller’s Law tells us that the human working memory can hold 7 plus or minus 2 things on average, unless something comes along to push it out of your mind, you’re probably going to do that session, or get that sandwich from that place when it comes time for lunch.

Streak theory and using nudge theory in this way both have a dark side, though. Keeping a streak going can be a form of addiction. It can also lead to paying for things you don’t really need.

There is also a school of thought that says streaks alone, which are neutral, aren’t effective at forming habits. To form habits, we need behaviors to become ingrained. They need to be things we do without thinking about them.

This is where the habit trackers come in. It isn’t simply a matter of getting that badge or seeing that graph add one more point for my completed activity. I also need the reminders. I need to use the addictive, distracting nature of cell phones to my advantage.

If I’m going to look at the thing, it needs to serve me in developing better habits.

The other thing I’m doing is off-loading responsibility to the application for making the decision to spend time on something.

If I’ve got the app nudging me to do morning pages, do my meditation, drink enough water, and take my vitamins then hey, I’m just responding to this thing. It’s not really me making the decision to spend the time on those tasks instead of having back-to-back meetings and working an average of 4 extra hours a week.