The Bad Kind of Violence, pt. 1: I May Have Watched Too Much 9-1-1
Two sections here. First one's titled "Finding Art," second one's titled "I Just Got Banned From Another Gymboree."
I. Finding Art
How do you navigate the cultural surfeit? Genuinely, I'm asking. In theory, I'm mostly fine with being left behind, letting the amount of art in this world increase as I stay paying attention to my known quantities. I'm resigned to it, given how little free time I have and how much stuff deserves a fair shake.
If I can trace my relationship with a good artist or piece of art back to a single moment of discovery, that point was rarely spontaneous or coincidental. This is one of my favorite songs, "All The Things We Were Supposed To Be," by Amy Bezunartea, which I discovered when she opened a concert I went to eleven years ago:
Bezunartea's released two albums, Restaurants & Bars in 2010 and New Villain in 2015, and they're stunners. Sadly, I haven't actually seen her live. The show I mentioned was at a poorly-run DIY venue, it started at least two hours late and I had to leave before Bezunartea went on. Looking her up the next day, I realized how badly I'd fucked up in not waiting around. If I'd known the pay-off was hearing her play stuff like this, especially if I'd known how rarely she tours, I could have dissociated in the venue's backyard for a couple more hours.
That's the most coincidental type of collision I can have with art. That's me being in the right place at the right time to discover something I probably wouldn't learn of elsewhere, that nobody close to me would have known to recommend, that isn't propped up by bot farm dark magic. And even then I walked away too early and almost missed learning about it completely. It's easy to miss even the things you end up loving most.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, there's inescapably advertised art. Unfortunately for the people perfecting the algorithm and deciding what gets ad pushes, you probably learn to filter this stuff out like traffic sounds, like you open Netflix to watch something Netflix didn't make and the app goes "Hey, you like to laugh? Wanna watch The Roast of Kevin Hart or our new Jo Koy special?" and you don't even feel revulsion, you just recognize Koy would have to get pushed off a bridge live on air to warrant your interest, and you scroll on. That heavy handed of a push has to indicate the thing sucks, right? And in the same way you wouldn't read the ad copy on a bag of sand, you don't read the little blurb Netflix has prepared about the topics Jo Koy covers in Really Now? or Too Soon! or whatever his special is titled. Somebody's putting that Theo Von/David Spade movie at the top of the streaming charts but you aren't even a little curious because it's a Theo Von/David Spade movie. In the last ten years, Ozzy Osbourne's son Jack has had six paranormal investigation shows, some running concurrently, on the Travel Channel and Investigation Discovery. The ads for whichever one he's hosting now litter HBO Max like local election yard signs in a town you're driving through and will never again see. There's no reason for you to know the names of the people running for Sheriff in Drinkwater, Oregon. This work matters to somebody, but not you.
A few months ago, my wife and I saw an ad for 9-1-1 Nashville where, amidst all the generic TV procedural yelling, a cop unholstered his gun and started walking toward a tornado. Okay, we decided, maybe this is some of the good traffic noise. Maybe this is something worth experiencing.
Here's a publicity photo from the 9-1-1 Nashville people. That's firefighter Chris O'Donnell, also walking toward a tornado.
Chris O'Donnell feels like the ultimate case of Hollywood going "Oops, we messed up, we'll take that one back now." I'm not saying he's bad. It's just that he was only in movies for a very specific period of time and now he's on a 9-1-1 spin-off and nobody ever rolls their eyes when they see him, but also nobody's refreshing IMDb in the hopes a meaty new dramatic lead role is going to come Chris O'Donnell's way. Nobody's like "Come on, get this man in the right picture, throw this skinny little dog a bone, and he could earn an Oscar." Occasionally while watching a Chris O'Donnell project, you will think to yourself "Oh, Chris O'Donnell is in this?" and you will realize he is and then you'll ask that question again, 20 minutes later. If I'm calling this aspect of the surfeit Traffic Noise Culture, O'Donnell is a good avatar for it.
The tornado is a ways down the road for us. We did not watch 9-1-1 Nashville. We started with the original and we're two seasons in.
II. I Just Got Banned From Another Gymboree
I didn't. I've never been banned from a Gymboree. It's very hard to get people to read the things you write and you do what you can. You lie to them with exciting section titles. Sorry.
When my wife and I began 9-1-1, I didn't realize it was a Ryan Murphy joint. It's the best thing he put his name on and then probably ceased contributing to in any real way, but it's still a Ryan Murphy joint. His shows are so generic I feel unreal when I watch them. They're art from a fallen reality where the best art looks like Ryan Murphy shows.
The tone is never fully right. It's always somewhere between 20% and 80% off, and when it's most off, it's funny and I can enjoy it. That's the promo with the cop, the gun and the tornado. When it's least off, it's like two people with sunglasses trying to maintain eye contact. The "20% off" Ryan Murphy only understands human emotion as a thematic tool.
9-1-1 is a popular franchise, but it's possible you haven't seen any of it, so I'm going to illustrate the type of unreality I'm talking about with a broader example:
Sometimes on TV shows, an actor dies in real life and the writers have to acknowledge the deceased's character is gone, leading a broad sitcom that normally has stock characters making clumsy jokes about their horrible neighbors to get those same characters to say things like "I just can't handle the grief. I knew life would be hard but I didn't think it'd be this hard. If Corey's death has taught me anything good, though, it's that with friends, you can get through anything." The sitcom characters commemorate a real person's life by talking about their character, using only that character's name. And then the studio audience cheers like they've just watched the most profound thing, like God held a press conference to announce people would no longer feel depression.
A less severe example would be the primarily white sitcom somberly discussing race. Somewhere in Growing Pains' 500 episodes, Kirk Cameron could be found saying "You know something, I think racism is wrong and the next time somebody hassles my Black and Korean friends, I'm going to tell them to jump in a lake!" and the studio audience cheers super proudly, like "Our boy just did something impactful to fight bigotry." And then at the end of the filming day, Cameron knocked on a producer's door and threatened to quit if they kept forcing him to share scenes with atheist women.
I remember an episode of Blossom where Blossom's brother Tony (a white) went on a date with a Black woman and they were going to order ice cream for dessert and the waiter made a joke like "Let me guess, you'll have vanilla and you'll have chocolate." And you better believe he was saying Tony would have vanilla and the lady would have chocolate! And then I believe Tony punched the waiter and the entire Blossom main cast convened in the family's living room to debrief on bigotry.
Every show did this. Theo learned about sexism and Screech learned about inappropriate touching. Cory found out Shawn's dad was in prison and Elizabeth Berkley got addicted to caffeine pills. "I'm so excited, I'm so excited, I'm so... scared." You know what I'm talking about.
What was that? Where did the people behind Saved by the Bell get the idea they could prepare any viewer for the shame of being alive?
9-1-1 pulls this constantly. The show lacks a studio audience, so the crowd's sympathetic cheers are replaced by actors looking at each other and smugly saying "We did some good today."
This show will tackle spousal abuse and strongly imply women who stay with their abusers have given up and somewhat invited their continued hell. It'll show a person having a sacred moment after saving a baby's life and looking right into its new eyes, but that person will have rescued the baby from a pipe, after the baby was flushed down a toilet.
There's a whole series of "[Name] Begins" episodes in 9-1-1's second season where we get individual characters' origin stories and see how they've dealt with racist bosses and homophobic neighbors. In its best moments, which are its stupidest, the show brings me joy. In its worst, it's "Fix You" by Coldplay– an empty power ballad designed for real emotions it'll never get come close to communicating.
And these are not bad actors delivering this material. Angela Bassett is 9-1-1's biggest star. Peter Krause was great on Six Feet Under, a show I've been too nervous to revisit since ten minutes after its finale aired. There's an actor playing a character called "Chim," as in "Chimney," I guess because he's a firefighter, and ten years ago he had a big part of The Last Man on Earth, one of the funniest, most unyieldingly bleak shows to air on network TV in my life, and now he's getting rich and twenty times the audience he used to get and he's getting it telling jokes written at the top of the intelligence of a bunch of people who think Star Wars Day being "May the Fourth" is cool and still very funny and novel, and you know there's a cold war between two of the writers because they both own the same mug that says "The beatings will continue until morale improves" and each feels ownership over that Spencer's Gifts joke. Did the actor playing Chim not know why The Last Man on Earth was funny?
9-1-1 is the light at the end of the week for a person who regularly engages with Candace Cameron Bure's social media posts. It's an edgy show for people who say things like "Roseanne was really subversive because the main characters were poor." In high school, I was arguing with a friend about music, and he said of course All-American Rejects were punk because you don’t get a name like that if you’re a pop band, and I’m the embarrassing one in that memory, I’m the one who felt he needed to establish meaningless knowledge, I'm the one who was so insecure I had to gatekeep punk to a person who didn't give any kind of a shit, but that opinion, that a band can declare themselves dangerous and thus be dangerous, comes from the mindset I’m discussing.
Three episodes into 9-1-1’s first season, Chim is driving around, off-duty, and he gets into a wreck with a truck transporting rebar. When we see him next, he has a metal rod planted firmly in his third eye. He speaks coherently with the Peter Krause character, but it seems obvious he’s going to die. Plenty of people have died in 9-1-1, some with dignity, some having just lost a tube of brains to a pile of poorly-secured metal. If you took the rebar out of Chim’s face, there would still be the whole matter of the pierced and/or displaced brains. I don't know how his brains dodged that rebar, or how the rebar stabbed his brains but only the parts that don't control speech or motor function or anything like that. I don't think your brains move out of the way when a foreign object enters your skull. When an object slices apart your brains, I don't think your brains grow back.
A few episodes later, Chim is back at work, fully healed but for a little red boo boo where he was impaled.
One season later, he’s guiding us through a lesson on intimate partner violence. And, again, this lesson puts some blame on the victim. When Chim gets stabbed in the gut by his new girlfriend's ex, the show treats it with ASPCA ad sobriety.
The stabber runs away from the stabbee and nobody knows to even look for poor Chim as he bleeds out. This could be the end.
Only it’s hard to know whether to care because the last time something this severe happened to Chim, in "The One With Chim's Ripped Up Brains," 9-1-1 followed it up with the entire principal cast laughing and eating a cake shaped like Chim's maimed head.
This is what I mean when I mention unreality. This is the stuff that makes me feel like I’m one inch outside my body. The same head trauma is framed as (inept) comedy and then as (inept) drama and as television, especially scripted broadcast television, is dismantled, Ryan Murphy's teams are the only people who can still command a budget and this is what they're making.
I don’t need art to mirror the intensity of actual damage. I’d never ask that of a procedural where a cop, an EMT and a handful of firefighters cry/yuk it up across a Los Angeles suffering extinction-level events every month. But I would be a little surprised if any of the people involved in 9-1-1 has experienced a friend or family member's death. If you asked the showrunners if they'd done any research into the devastation of losing loved ones, they’d go “Hold up, are you shitting me? Death is real?”
In 2019, I wrote a mean poem after a holiday weekend. We were somewhere else, I didn't have the TV remote. Like anything made in anger (or that I've made at all) I don't know if the poem's any good, but I remembered it as I was putting this together and was surprised at how much of what I've written about here was already down on paper seven years ago.
Show Me
We were watching some whatever
on Investigation Discovery
and in the first reenactment
somebody ran into a room screaming
"No
no
no"
and in the second, somebody else cried
into his palm and said, "We've never
seen anything like this in our small town,"
and later a third actor showed up
and she was both
the third-most talented kid
in her middle school graduating class
and the person assigned to play the killer,
and I would like to be that disconnected
from human emotion.
I would like to be able to treat another's grief
with such a mercenary gravity.
Again, clearly, this is still my general mood.
Two years later, a man I knew was killed by a drunk driver. I hadn't known him as a man, though. We were kids. We went to Hebrew school together from 2nd to 7th grade. It's possible the last time I saw him was at my 8th grade birthday party, at Laser Quest. His name is Jesse. Six years isn’t too long anymore, but six years in elementary and middle school is a whole chapter of your early life. He had the coolest birthday party, where we used tech junk (keyboards, joysticks, miscellaneous toggles) to make Star Wars-y forts and costumes. I was an usher at his bar mitzvah and he was one at mine. Jesse was truly one of the kindest people I've ever known. This matters less, but he was also one of the smartest. In some ways, I’m still trying to be as good a person as he was back then. I'm failing, of course. He was special. He was survived by his wife, who was also in the car and was three months pregnant.
Before the shine wore off and we figured out what social media really was, I had this semi-romantic idea that we'd all grow old together on Facebook. It sounds ridiculous now, but halfway through my high school years, everybody migrated from MySpace to Facebook and then we graduated and I went off to college and I was able to get Facebook updates from people I knew but wasn't close enough with to ever see again. I'm talking about people I was friendly with, but who I wouldn't call up when we were both back in the Bay Area. Naively, I thought it was nice that I'd always have this tiny conduit to people I'd liked, whereas kids in previous generations had largely lost track of each other as they spread across the world. What a huge assumption, to think we'd all stay active on this platform that now shows me AI flyers and lets me find out how racist my neighbors are. Not to underline my themes too much, here, but Facebook revealed itself to be Traffic Noise Culture. It was everywhere, I dug in, I enjoyed it for what it was until it made me feel like an alien observing my own life. I have been disabused of the fantasy that we'd stay loosely tied together. Now I have realistic, big boy adult fantasies, where I think maybe Gordon Lish will subscribe to my newsletter and get me a publishing deal and ten months from now I'll be explaining my book-length expansion on last week's Y tu mamá también cum joke to Terry Gross.
I wasn't connected to Jesse on Facebook, but there were a few times I'd almost sent him a friend request. And then, inevitably, I'd hesitate, it'd feel embarrassing to reach out, and I'd skip it. We'd last talked when we were in middle school and I'd been a little shit head, not mean but attention hungry, eager to act out, not taking anything seriously. Whoever I was in my late teens through my early 30s, however much I wondered how Jesse was, I didn't know if he'd even want to catch up. I was too self-conscious to send a friend request while I still thought Facebook was a good thing. And then he died and all I could do was write a letter to his parents and donate to a GoFundMe. He's gone forever. He died and is dead.
I'd wanted to reconnect with Jesse because I liked him. It wasn't about maximizing my number of Facebook friends or getting affirmation I wasn't the twat I thought I was at 13. I wanted to talk to him and see how his life was going. When we last spoke, I'd essentially been a child. In 2021, my and everybody else's final chance to talk to Jesse, he had a kid on the way and Johanna and I were about to start trying for one of our own. I wish we could have related to each other as adults on the cusp on such a big life change. It's a horrible, hollowing feeling, being permanently unable to talk with a person you'd wanted to talk to for years. There's no going back.
In 9-1-1's most dramatic, violent moment, one of the actors reacts to a death with this face:
And sometimes one character will mourn another and they'll vocalize trite life lessons at that character's grave:
What is that? I have to ask again, Where did the people behind 9-1-1 get the idea they could prepare any viewer for the shame of being alive?
However unreal its depiction of human emotion can feel, and so make me feel, I will probably watch more 9-1-1. None of us can get anything right, and I'm not saying I'm any better at representing honest emotion better than the 9-1-1 people are. I'm sure even in writing like this, I've represented the world and emotion and whatever else in ways people have found offensive. We're all trying our best to not do that, I hope, but everything's subjective and it's hard to properly represent anything. I'm not better than 9-1-1, I'm just saying 9-1-1 makes me feel weird when it approaches Sam Raimi violence with melodrama and when every death is a teachable moment. It still has episodes where firefighters blast bad guys with their hoses and when things like that happen, none of the characters stand around talking about how meaningful their jobs are. Maybe I'll skip ahead to the 9-1-1 Nashville fire tornado. The tap that gives us this kind of trash is never going to run dry. I can take a break and come back whenever. When I leave, I'll retreat to my known quantities, anything I can trust to have grounding in life the way I and the people around me have lived it.