“If You’ve Got to Work This Hard, It’s Not Working”

First, and most importantly, I encourage everyone to read Charles Taylor’s fantastic piece on The O. C. in this week’s Observer. There’s some deeper cultural work that Taylor touches upon regarding the teen genre that he leaves pushed aside. I’ll attack that in a future post, I promise. Anyway, the Observer doesn’t seem to have online archives, so if you don’t hurry, you’ll have to settle for my illegal copy of the article that I’ll make available once this one is gone. So there!

Next, this week’s episode. But before that, I want to commend the writers on being so damn smart. In so doing, I have to remind us all of two elements from last week’s writeup: Melissa said the show’d “jumped the shark,” and I said that the show was starting to develop an interest in history—deleting, recreating, salvaging, whatever. Using history as a malleable object that can serve a future end. I’d go so far as to say that this is a use of the History News Network’s slogan, but it’s not—this use of history is far more cynical.

Already last week, Seth was demonstrating an interest in reliving last year by trying to get the Fantastic Four all together. Throughout this week’s episode, he riffs off last year—he tries on last year’s clothes (all my clothes are last year’s), watches last year’s season of The Valley, remarking, in an oblique tweak to sharkjumpers, that, yes, in fact, “last year was just better.” At the top of the show, his pleading with Ryan yields the world’s first positive use of “It would be so last year” maybe ever.

Seth is anxious to rebuild the past, anticipating (again in a nod to Eternal Sunshine‘s internal logic) a way of rebuilding in order to relive, but without the mistakes. He wouldn’t swim off to Portland this time. He wants a do-over, and this time everything will be better.

Julie, in the meantime, is trying to delete her past and be someone she wasn’t. Her explanation of The Porn Identity is simply that “it was the 80s”—a time of variability and uncertainty that is sort of distasteful now. What’s interesting here is that, implicitly, what Julie criticises the 80s for is what we criticised the 70s for only a few years ago, when Felice Martin was explaining to Donna Martin how on earth her father, esteemed cardiologist Dr. Martin, could possibly have slept with Felice’s sister, thereby making Gina Kincaid not only Donna’s cousin but her half-sister, too. Will we, then, 20 years away, also be talking about the puritan early aughts through a filter enforced by a narcotic haze? I don’t think so. We’ll see.

But Julie is also worried about the past in terms of the future—her constant pleading to get Marissa to move home circulates around Marissa’s throwing away the future that she’s “worked so hard” to provide. Similarly, she’s worried about the effect on Marissa’s future if the movie surfaces (what of Caitlin’s future? Or does she no longer exist?). At the same time, though, Julie, after Marissa hangs up on her, utters, “she’s such a little me.” (A great line anticipated in the Observer piece but not by me) Julie’s deleting her past and yet still Marissa is growing up to be just like her. But Marissa is growing up in a completely different world than Julie did—Julie grew up with hairspray and acid-wash. Marissa gets, I don’t know, seaspray and bodywash? There are implications here on the incest theme in the show, too, but I’ll leave those for now.

Then we have Carter, a man who refuses to leave his past, except to the degree in which he may force Kirsten to abandon hers. Carter celebrates his wedding anniversary drunk (not on tequila, despite Kirsten’s assertion) listening to “Debaser” while wearing a Hüsker Dü t-shirt. Can’t get much more in the past than that—other than, I suppose, blasting “Rock You Like a Hurricane” while entertaining a hooker at a motel.

Kirsten, for reasons that are still totally unclear to me (which is why I assume she must just want on the Rocketeer) really wants Newport Living to succeed, and she wants Carter to be a part of it. She wants it to be about culture (haa……………), and she entreats Carter to “be subversive, be irrerverent.” He responds, “I’d rather be drunk.”

But, surprise! He has a history older than his history with the bottle. He was Sandy’s inspiration back at that loony left-wing bastion known as Berkeley, publishing Revolution (all episode I was imagining this as a weird hommage to Revolution Books in Cambridge), a magazine about lovable losers (like executioner Che Guevara?). Kirsten appeals to an older history to get Carter back on his feet, suggesting that the boozing, etc.,—that was just drifting. Go back far enough, and you get the real person (which makes people who call me “spineless” somewhat right, I guess). With Carter, we go back, and we pass the drunk and see the revolutionary. With Julie we go back far enough and pass the socialite to get to “I don’t remember anything.” With Marissa we go back far enough and pass Alex to get to Ryan. Next week we have Caleb resorting to old school tactics against Rick Solomon.

Is The O. C. becoming reactionary? Conservative?

Maybe. Maybe also this is one of the overlooked genius things about the show—it’s painfully conscious of its history. This is sort of what I meant when I wrote at the beginning of the season that the writers worked overtime to give Summer depth. The conversations Ryan and Seth have are so believable because, perhaps unlike anything else on television, they trade on a past that makes a lot of sense. It’s how the show can have inside jokes (the weirdness of Seth’s calling Marissa “Coop” and Julie’s calling Sandy “Sanford”) that actually work. They make sense since they follow a pattern; they are part of a history.

90210 traded on the cliché of how Brandon and Kelly were meant to be—how they’d always just sort of circle back together, except, of course, for when they didn’t, at the end. Similarly, David and Donna were meant to be. That sort of flatness of characterisation stood in for depth of history. It gave an illusion of continuity in lieu of a imbricated subjectivity made up of overlapping events that conspire to create a seemingly unified subject. The O. C. makes no similar concessions. Where 90210 was a romance, The O. C. is realist, but with a veneer of romance to try and make it fit within the soap genre conventions.

The episodes are not fueled by the couples’ getting back together or anything as flat as that—they’re fueled by an ever complicating web of interaction that ties the characters together. Seth and Summer aren’t “meant to be”—the difficulty with which they got together in the first place shows that. But they do get on well for now, and that’s good enough.

And when they break up, it will make sense, because this show is smart enough to make it make sense, and because, in the real world, no one is “meant to be” with anyone else. That’s sort of Ryan’s advice to Alex—”if you have to work this hard, it’s not working.” He’s encouraging Alex to understand the realist conventions of how little things happen and people don’t conform to a generic type—they have a radical particularity (does it sound like I just finished a class on early novel theory?) that constantly disrupts what to expect of them.

Yet Ryan’s advice is also undermined by Sandy’s advice about marriage—that it takes work. Ryan is encouraging Alex to take a realistic view, but granting the possibility of it “working” without the work. But, then, he’s the romantic teenager just learning the world around him. Sandy is the lapsing romantic, too realistically aware of the fickle state of a person’s heart.

Alex doesn’t take the advice, and her exit is a grand romantic gesture. She falls on the sword for her love Marissa. She lets Marissa go back to Julie without it being an admission of defeat. She lets Ryan and Marissa rekindle their fire (yes, at the bonfire). She walks away, the martyr to love.

Or, in the economy of the show, Alex cleans up after Marissa.

God damn this show is good.