No one told you
Posted on | January 31, 2008 |
Whether it’s a sign of the writers’ strike biting or just the serendipity of summer programming, for the past month or two Channel 10 has been screening Friends re-runs at 7pm. This is right about the time that William orders me out of the kitchen, I won’t let myself on the laptop anymore and I’m looking for something non book-like to do.
For a while, the novelty of being a bit older than the characters turned into a pleasant enough holiday pastime given that the first time around I was quite a bit younger. It was also nice to have the chance to feel a bit reassured contrasting my own twenty-something progress — career wise, at least — with each of the uniquely goofy/ lovable/ annoying members of this claustrophobic clique.
But I can’t take it any more. Knowing what I know now, at the end of my twenties, the narrowness of their lives proves unbearably contrived. As another famous 90s Manhattan sit-com lady might write, “it makes me wonder”: was this show the greatest ideological ruse of the decade?
Leaving aside the complete disconnect between the theme song (your job’s a joke, you’re broke, your love life’s D.O.A…) and the perky lifestyle of adjoining lofts and lattes that enabled the narrative, I guess it never really rang true to me how this group of friends could plausibly be content to keep seeing each other so often. Especially at a period in their lives when so many people I’ve known have seemed variously broken, disappointed or emboldened to finally leave the constraints of a formative friendship group and move on, already.
Trouble is, for many of us moving on has literally meant leaving those one or two amazing and perfect friends we did want to keep with us for the rest of the life we were looking for. And now, the struggle to keep hoping for something somewhere better has left some of us exhausted and wanting to retreat to a place that feels safe — all the while knowing that we have changed, maybe just slightly, but still fundamentally.
For me this change has come from living my twenties surrounded by the kinds of people that would pose significant scripting challenges for a sit-com. Of course by this I mean that the vast majority of my ‘friends’ and colleagues are gay — or at least not straight, and even this distinction is still hard to discern on TV without an accompanying joke or pathology. For all its historical significance, The L Word is moving even further away from any credible relation to its theme song ( ‘this is the way that we live…’ ); meanwhile watching The Line of Beauty this month* has been a confronting reminder of the conditions faced by those a little older than these liberated lipstick ladies. As such important alternative stories emerge (thinking of two other powerful portrayals of AIDS in recent mainstream visual culture) I find it hard to even imagine the magnitude of the trauma that still lingers from that time — just a few years before Friends started screening (although Eric Michaels and Eve Sedgwick are just two of the writers who have helped me understand a little, and from a distance).
I was also forever changed in my twenties by my first long-term relationship, which was with an indigenous partner. This partly explains why I have found the last few days in Australian politics immensely exciting. But along with the usual challenges of monogamy and cohabitation, these were some major issues to reckon with, and once I’d moved state, there weren’t many people around to help.
Thinking back, I seem to remember this TV show being credited by pop-sociologists as marking the shift to ‘friends as the new family’ for a generation who had little choice but to move away from home to cash in on their parents’ investment in their future. It captured the prospects for mobility in our prosperous times, or whatever. But no matter how insistently positive those 22 minutes of content, they were never any match for the momentous amount of solitude that is still so constitutive of modern metropolitan life. Certainly after 2001, they would never compensate for the feelings summoned by the Manhattan landscape once it became associated with terror.
Watching Friends in Australia 2008, the ad breaks are dedicated to health insurance, STD prevention and skin cancer awareness. Ever stop to wonder why? Maybe it’s because the next generation need to be taught to look after themselves; maybe it’s because they are smart enough to see through the utopian promise, ‘I’ll be there for you’.
*My own half-cooked theory is that the ABC could only screen gay male sex on a Sunday night because the Australian Open was on at the same time.
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