How to handle 9/11 is, from a writerly perspective at least, a tricky business. It’s too big to shove into an “oh yes, this happened too” paragraph in another story. We’re not doing City of the Dead, the book that came out in September of 2001, and even if we were, it would derail that entire entry. And yet it’s too hard to get one’s thought around it to give it its own post as such. We’ve finally hit the point where the events we’re trying to cover are too recent. There isn’t enough distance to historicize. There are still too many different 9/11s to talk about its impact.

There are two ways of looking at this. The first is that this means that 9/11 hasn’t been wrapped up in the comforting bunting of fiction yet. We can still remember the actual event. I was still in undergrad at the time. It was two days after my birthday. I remember calling airlines for a friend who was scared that her uncle was on one of the flights. I remember taking the substantial leftovers from my big birthday dinner two nights earlier and heating them up for the people gathered around the television in the basement. I remember my roommate calling me to wake me up with the news, and clambering out of bed to put on the news and start sifting through the Internet. I remember mentally collating data from a dozen websites, trying to find out what was going on. The visceral feeling of the information starting to flow. The separate track of news as it emerged from my parents in Connecticut: how were they telling students at my sister’s school? The texture of 9/11 as a lived event, outside the master narratives.

But to say that it’s not historicized yet isn’t quite true. It’s been historicized. It’s just that its master narrative is still too hotly contested. 9/11 is still the justification underpinning a host of arguments, both from the right and from the neoliberal consensus. We’re still reeling in the affect of it. Still, let’s sketch out the basic Guardian-reader perspective, if you will. The basic illusion that the world is a stable, safe place was eviscerated. The idea that the systems that hold up the world are a secure foundation on which to build one’s life crumpled. Which, admittedly, they do on a regular basis for large portions of the world, but this was America. New York. The New York City skyline felt like one of the most immutable and permanent images in existence. And yet a couple bastards with box cutters turned out to be able to level it.

This, of course, led to horrifying overcorrection. It does that. Reveal to people that the structures that keep their world running are fragile and easily severed and they begin to create a bunch more to make themselves feel safe. London did it in 1992 in the wake of years of IRA disruption, whacking up a bunch of CCTV cameras that do little to actually secure the city and lots to make it a paranoid police state.…

Continue Reading

There’s an oddity to some of these Pop Between Realities entries. Once again, we’re on a show that we’d never have talked about if we didn’t know that Steven Moffat was going to be one of the central architects of Doctor Who’s revival. But he is, and we do, and so here we are.

Coupling is, of course, sex comedy. It’s more to the point sex comedy about gender essentialism. Precedent suggests I should be infuriated. I mean, let’s be honest: a substantial number of the jokes in Coupling trade on stereotypical depictions of women. And yet somehow Coupling escapes that. There are two aspects of this worth extrapolating a bit. The first is a bit theoretical, but still worth discussing given some of the reactions recent blog posts have gotten. Simply put, just because there are a lot of horrifically imbalanced and oppressive power relations surrounding gender doesn’t mean it can’t be good fodder for humor. Indeed, humor is almost necessary here.

Put another way, as socially constructed, oppressive, and artificial as contemporary gender stereotypes are, they also exist and influence people’s lives. The socially constructed is still real. Put a third way, just today a bemused conversation about why our sofa was functionally reupholstered in blankets led to my showing my fiancee the pillow bit from “The Melty Man Cometh.” Because it applies. It’s solid observational comedy about a real part of contemporary society.

But what’s the difference between it and outright sexist comedy? The main one is something we’ve previously noticed in Moffat’s work. Coupling skewers stereotypes of both men and women, but, crucially, in the grand scheme of things, women win. Or, more to the point, Moffat is far more willing to stick it to the people in his stories who are authorial stand-ins for him than he is to other people, and particularly to women. Coupling makes gestures at the absurd foibles of modern femininity, but it’s nothing like the depiction of men as essentially helpless buffoons.

This is perhaps most obvious in comparing Jane and Jeff, the representatives of each gender who are treated the most absurdly. Both of them are fundamentally absurd and profoundly misunderstand the entire world. But their treatment within the narrative is starkly different. Jeff is all but designed to be a fan favorite character, but he’s the eternal fool. When a plot line happens such that Jeff actually gets a girlfriend, it is in and of itself surprising, and he still manages to bungle everything. Jane, on the other hand, is the oddly charmed fool. No matter how incompetent she’s shown to be, and she’s shown to be at least as incompetent as Jeff, she’s also always given a strange power over the narrative. This pays off in spades in the final episode, where Moffat suggests that she’s actually entirely self-aware and is not actually the fool in the narrative but the character who best understands everything that’s going on.

So men are essentially helpless prats, while women hold both all the power and, as the overall plot regarding Steve shows, the ability to redeem men.…

Continue Reading