The Incest Leap on The O. C.

Allegedly, while in Hollywood writing scripts, Faulkner was approached by a producer complaining about his inability to find a proper twist on boy-meets-girl. What if, Faulkner responded, the boy and girl were brother and sister? Faulkner then parlayed this insight into the great boy-meets-girl novel The Sound and the Fury. This is nothing new, of course. Hell, I just read John Ford’s c. 1629 tragedy ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, and it opens with a brother and sister deciding that they can only possibly sexually love one another.

Despite Faulkner’s 60 +-year old advice, Hollywood hasn’t taken to it. Or if it has, it’s been in the extremely circuitous ways that playwrights like Shakespeare dealt with incest, in comparison to Ford, or, say, Middleton. Still, there are now, on free tv, only two shows worth watching, and both are so all about incest that it’s a little weird. The first is, of course, Arrested Development, which signals incest with its very title. The second is The O. C.

My investigations in the incestual nature of Arrested Development have been numerous, but recently rare. I haven’t had the time to go on about Buster and Oscar and so on, in part because the show is so over the top. The O. C., however, allows some deeper pulling.

Kirsten Numbers allow us to see how closely related, sexually, the Cohen family is to itself, or, more precisely, the Nichols family. Sandy, as the outsider from Brooklyn/Berkeley, like Ryan a generation after him, is brought in as the fresh blood to shake up the genetic makeup of hemophiliac-ridden Newport Beach. But it’s still not enough, since the traps keep arising. Already Kirsten has effectively had sex with everyone in her immediate family except Seth, and last night we learned that once/if Ryan gets with Lindsey, she’ll even be directly connected via shared bodily fluids to her secret, teenaged half-sister. This is all rather typical for the show, of course, and not particularly interesting.

Zach, however, had a great line in the episode. Upset that Seth and Summer are inseparable, he explains that they’re “one of those couples” that’s a couple even when it’s not a couple. He provides two examples: Joannie and Chachi and Luke and Leia. Seth immediately catches the peculiarity of the sentiment, saying “Luke and Leia… were brother and sister,” but Zach, currently my vote for character taking the place of the outside observer, doesn’t miss a beat when he responds, “Yeah, well, may the Force be with you.” (And really, what couple, other than brother and sister, is a “couple even when it’s not a couple”? Romantic liasions can be broken, contracts torn, divorces meted. But you are coupled with your sibling for life.)

With that sentiment, he explains that setting of the show is perpetually functioning on concentric circles of incest. At the center of Newport is the Newport Group, headed by Caleb and his daughter. His daughter, however, married an outsider instead of Jimmy. Jimmy, also, married an outsider, but Julie was more than able to assimilate herself to the center. She was the daughter Caleb did not have—the one that appreciated and fit into Newport. So what does Caleb do? He marries her. In the meantime, Sandy is brought into the family business in the only way he can be—via business. It’s possible that Sandy’s still marked as too outside to be part of the central sexual circle (or he’s too virtuous, but Quentin proved that even the virtuous can get fucked up and incestuous). Hence, he’s only invited into the family business, but not into the family.

Then Newport, at the second circle, is its own incestuous family. Outsiders are persistently shunned and pushed aside. In the distant past, we had Julie. Last season we had Ryan and, to a degree, Seth (despite being the grandson of Caleb, he’s too clearly marked as the child of the outsider Sandy). This season we have DJ (does he look so old just because he works outdoors?) and, eventually, Lindsey. Alex, I suppose, will end up like Anna—a red herring showing that it’s possible to thrive outside of the incest, only to eventually fade away, like by moving back to Pittsburgh. Marissa has it perfectly right when she notes how bizarre it is that Julie is trying to get Ryan and Marissa back together. Marissa, however, fails to see that, eventually, incest will normativise DJ out of her life, pinning her back with, perhaps, Ryan.

The still above comes from when Zach compares Seth and Sumer to Luke and Leia. I may be crazy, but they look alike. They are the only two dark-haired teens on the show (perhaps ever?—well, Oliver), and their sexual relationship grew out of silly sibling-like playing. They’ve known each other their entire lives, and whenever Summer says something like, “he’s just… Cohen,” she might as well be saying “he’s my brother.” What is interesting is that Zach, himself, comes from within this same circle (the second circle of Newport), but he’s not granted the same level of incestuous access. At first, Zach was supposed to be the same as Seth—they both like comic books—but that plot line has been dropped to highlight, instead, their differences—and they are differences that are similarities with Seth and Summer, like studying or reading newspapers, both things that, of the three, only Zach does. Furthermore, Summer’s father’s liking Zach signals that he doesn’t see Zach as an incestuous threat to his own position with Summer. The father could never settle for having his daughter marry her brother, since then he can be overthrown. Instead, he is content with his daughter being with someone who cannot ever be also her father. (Is it any wonder Lindsey was wearing Freudian slippers this episode?)

Anyway, Seth was weirded out last year by how much he and Anna were alike—the tuna for lunch, for example. He used it both to justify his liking her, but also to explain why he couldn’t stay with her. And it’s again here crucially important to remember that, on Chrismukkah, Summer dressed as Wonder Woman. She tried to get into Seth’s life and try to be more like him. However, by simply growing up next to him, she’d already succeeded in being so much like him that he would be pursuing both narcissistic and incestuous desires in sleeping with her. Anna never had a chance. She was socially able to fulfill a narcissistic dream (sleeping with yourself), but she could never be family, so it wasn’t as close.

It wasn’t supposed to happen this way…

Ryan and Lindsey are staking out a similar ground incestuously, but I’m not certain how to read it quite yet. They both have similar stories and are now going to be step-half-aunt and -nephew. But she might end up another red herring, like DJ—something to fill the time until you return to who you are. The question here becomes, then, exactly who Ryan is—is he beholden to the incestuous Nichols circle? The Newport circle? Or is he still “Chino,” hopelessly outside? With every episode, the latter seems less and less possible. He is fucking (I mean this both as a progressive present verb and a copula with a participle modifying “Newport Royalty”) Newport Royalty now.

I suppose there is a way in which when I write “incest,” I mean simply narcissism. Your sibling is the most like you person in the world, after all, so wanting to touch him or her is just a sort of less socially acceptable way of touching yourself. That’s how it comes off (as it were) in ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, but the generational boundaries here seem to make everything perplexing. It’s important that Ryan is part of the Cohen family—they never talk about his being in the family as merely a legal conceit, drawn up and ok’ed by the courts. He has somehow managed to become flesh and blood.

This is why it’s now incest when Julie and Jimmy get back together. When he’s with her, now, she’s no longer the white trash getting him in trouble with his parents. She’s now Newport Royalty. As is he. Plus, they were once family, and are now perversely a different family. However, I do have to add that Steve is right, people fall in and out of love far faster on this show than in real life. I can’t believe that two episodes ago, I predicted Jimmy and Julie hooking up within eight episodes.

Finally, I miss Marissa as an alcoholic.

Really, finally, when Seth called Top Gun “one of the greatest love stories of our time,” I was expecting it to correspond somehow with Steve’s promise of gay action later in the season. Top Gun is, of course, one of the most tragic love stories of our time—tragic since the love cannot be consummated before one lover kills the other in a jet wash.