Beautiful Americans Don’t Star in The Porn Identity

Melissa, upon leaving our dept. soirée last night in order to watch The O. C. said that the show had “jumped the shark.” I’ll forgive her a bit of exuberance over the term (there’s a way in which no show that’s only 1.5 seasons old can engage in sharkjumping), but she generally complained about the quality of this season writ large. Then she went home and watched what I was certain would be a stinker of an episode. Instead, the episode abandoned the slightly awkwardly worn out theme of incest that’s been driving the show all season and, instead, returned us to some good, old-fashioned, class warfare, circling mostly around Julie Cooper Nichol, who was doing her best Mr. T impression in the still I’ve reproduced here. Anyway, class warfare; ah, The O. C.… way to remind us what initially made you great.

Part of what gives the anxiety-over-miscegenation reading of this show the force it does is since difference is coded on class lines as well as on implicit religious and racial lines. Ryan is the most persistent emblem of this—Caleb routinely refuses to welcome him into his household because he’s convinced that Ryan is a deliquent from trashy Chino (which, well, he is). And so the episode starts by again underscoring this difference. Seth comes to pester a despondent Ryan, and discusses the idea of switching rooms with him, reminding explicitly to the viewers that Ryan, despite being part of the family, still doesn’t live in the Cohen house (is it so ludicrous to imagine they don’t have a spare bedroom?). Ryan, remarking on people leaving him, decides to run away himself, via the bus. I swear, between that almost trip, Seth’s busride from Portland, and Sandy’s busride after stranding Rebecca, The O. C. has accounted for about 80% of the bus use in the greater Los Angeles area for the past 12 months.

Later, when the Fantastic Four are locked in the storeroom of the mall, it’s Seth who assumes right away that Ryan can pick a lock. Finally, Marissa, in trying to (maybe?) light the Atwoody back on fire, recalls their trip to Chino. Throughout, within the leitmotiv this week of reflection and history and, dare I say, salvage, we’re reminded that for all the advances Ryan has made in the past season and a half, he’s still a Chino boy. Still the guy in the “wifebeater.” Still the delinquent.

Similarly, we have Alex, the only teenager on the show who has a job and needs to do things like pay rent. Marissa, in proper princess fashion, imagines she can just leave home and everything will be the same, except without her mom around. Instead, she is going to begin to see that laundry has to be done a certain way, that cleaning has to be done in lieu of having maids, and that rent is something that needs to get paid via a job. Marissa’s whining about going out over the weekend to party with Alex’s response that Alex has to keep things low key since she has to work reminds us of the hidden economy in the show that allows the fantasies of the teenagers continue without obstacle. It’s not that they don’t fully see the labor around them (Marissa has slept with her gardner, and now sleeps with her bartender), but they don’t imagine themselves as parts of the same market. I’m not sure what the payoff will be here, but the upcoming conflict between Alex and Marissa will probably figure it a bit. It’s high time this show attacked the paucity of responsibility among the upper-middle-class/upper-class youth of today. Ahem.

Anyway, Ryan and Alex aren’t the only parvenus in Newport. Julie, who has her own past among hairspray and acid-wash, is engaged in whatever the reverse of salvage is: slash and burn regarding her own history. Her marriage to Jimmy Cooper was not quite enough to pull her out of her trashy past. She needed to add a second respectable surname to “Julie.” And now, as Julie Cooper Nichol, she’s imagined her vanity magazine as a sort of propaganda vehicle to prove that she belongs in Newport. That’s why every issue needs her photo on the cover—the magazine exists to repeat a lie long enough that it becomes the truth. Recall that Carter, late of a career that shortcircuited along with Rocketeer, comes to Julie off the heels of publishing the travel magazine Ugly American. We have no idea what the magazine was like, but we know what Ugly Americans are like—nouveau riche narcissists riding the power of a (once) strong dollar to exploit the fuck out of nations blowing off real infrastructure industries to sink everything into nice hotels and casinos. In other words, Julie. In all her incarnations. Julie responds that “our magazine is about beautiful Americans,” setting up her own self-glorification. Again—repeat a lie enough…

So what happens at dinner? Julie gets blackmailed by a guy who filmed a porno with her (The Porn Identity) back when she was young and not (yet) famous enough to be able to deliver on a huge windfall in the form of hush money. Where have I heard this before? Is it only me who noticed that a week after rerunning the Paris Hilton episode last week, the writers of the show would début a character who seems to be just an older, more dangerous version of Rick Solomon? Fantastic.

By the way, the snippet we saw of The Porn Identity was gold. It may even be better than Logjammin’.

Julie, who is managing to even make us all feel a bit sorry for her, is doing so only since we also would like to buy into the fantasy of erasing your past (hi, Eternal Sunshine!). Furthermore, unlike Paris, who was just exploited because of naïvté/youth/drugs (if you’ve seen A Night in Paris, there’s no way to leave the experience feeling anything less than rather sorry for Miss Hilton, unless you’re, I guess, Solomon), Julie did it, like any good American, since she needed the money. She needed to make rent (just like her daughter does in this episode), and, there you go. Next thing you know, she looks like an extra on Fame with a bandage around her head, lustily saying, “I’m a virgin. Or at least I think I am. I have amnesia. I don’t remember anything.”

Tragic. But hilarious. Still, we’ll see if she’s able to refashion her history or not. Lance says “a girl never forgets” her first lay, but Julie counters with “maybe she had so much Southern Comfort she never remembered in the first place.” That’s one of the sticky things about porn—it’s kind of evidence of what you may have used drugs and alcohol to try and erase from at least your own imagination.

Some notes:

* The booze Sandy and Caleb start drinking at the Cohen bar? Starr African Rum from Mauritius.

* I like Caleb’s misremembering of the story of Sandy’s engagement ring as coming from a Cracker Jack box. No, that was in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, jackass.

* There may be little as hilarious as Summer’s describing sleeping at a mall as one of her fantasies.

* It was pointed out to me that Alex is played by Olivia Wilde, very late of Skin, a show I didn’t really hate. That means, of course, that my high school is getting mad props on The O. C. Way to go, Olivia!

* “Mukluks are the new UGGs” almost brought a tear to my eye for complicated reasons.