Law, Philosophy, Theology, and Art(s)/Entertainment, Culture Reviews

Note: Gather round…. Wait, what should I even call you guys? oh, I got it, you’re my community. My plans for this week’s Passion Post were totally derailed by the fact that the long-awaited movie companion to Community was announced a mirror a few days ago, and will be premiering on Peacock in 2023, and this post is partially the result of that excitement. It also makes a nice companion to the Ted Lasso essay, unintentionally. It seems rather appropriate to be winging it today, as we will be talking about Joel McHale’s Jeff Winger. My senior year of high school, I related to him quite a lot.

 Initially, this puzzled me, despite the fact that the cult, (in all of the senses of that word) favorite sitcom Community is my favorite show of all time. (I mean, just listen to that theme song.)  I have occasionally related to the wisecracking ex-lawyer before, but this time felt different and more intense.   You know what they say, for everything there is a season.

The series follows 7 eccentric students, at the even more eccentric Greendale Community College, who initially come together to form a study group, and end up becoming something more.  

Although Community is an ensemble show, Jeff is clearly the main character of season one, because he is perhaps the most dysfunctional of all of the very dysfunctional characters within the series.  This makes him a little more complicated than any of the others that we have covered in this series thus far, but important nonetheless. A narcissistic former lawyer who faked his degree and is attending the college because he was caught, Jeff is charismatic, manipulative, and can convince almost anyone to do anything. One of his establishing moments in the pilot is a wonderful example of this, and yes, that is John Oliver as the neurotic Professor Duncan. Under all this bluster and bombast is a deeply emotionally insecure man yearning for love and connection. He softens around the edges due to  his fellow study group members and friends.

When my identification with Jeff in season six began, I wondered why Jeff, in particular, and not Abed, a film student who  uses references to pop culture to connect with people and to understand the world around him, or driven, high-strung academic Annie? It has to do with how I have learned to handle change.

Jeff returns to Greendale and reluctantly agrees to become a teacher.  Known for making  stirring speeches he says this in season 6, episode 11: “We self-destruct like this because we’d rather be heroes and villains than just kind of sucky people that need to work a lot at getting less sucky.,” further reinforcing  the idea that the characters are all just broken people attempting to help each other make it through.  Immediately after becoming a teacher in season 5, episode 1 he says: “Look, if you feel there’s more work to be done on yourselves, then as crappy as this place is, it’s a place  that you can do it.”  However, in season 6 episode 2,  he says this to Greendale’s wacky Dean:” I’m never going to get out of here, am I?” His response: “I haven’t met many that do.”  Jeff further progresses in his arc and  is at his most relatable to me  in season 6, episode 8 titled Intro to Recycled Cinema, when Abed begins to make a movie for Greendale and it doesn’t go Jeff’s way, the root of the problem is revealed as Jeff says this: “Every one of you is going to leave here except for me. So we force you to make the crappiest movie of all time, and then we force you to make it even crappier. We watch it and it’s still not even that bad. The part that I accidentally got the most excited about are the 7 minutes we can cut. Do you know what that means? I finally know in my heart, then I will literally be the last one of us here.” 

 This was immensely relatable to me, as somebody who’s closest friends are a year older,  I felt left behind and isolated my last year of high school, especially due to the pandemic.  After rewatching this episode, I finally realized why I related to Jeff so much. I guess you could say this episode about filmmaking gave me a new lens through which to look at my situation.

This arc reaches its conclusion, after Jeff learns that most of his friends are moving on from Greendale, and he is upset and says, ” I don’t want to be fine,” but he realizes he has to let them go.  This is one of the most significant things that Community has taught me, to embrace change, and you have to let people go, no matter how upsetting it is. 

 Greendale’s motto is, “You’re already accepted.”  Not only is this a humorous dig at the college’s lack of academic standards, it also underscores the series’s attitudes about people, accepting one another as they are, with all their flaws and virtues.  This motto has been a great comfort to me, and it has become one of mine as well.

We will be back to format next week, pending no earth shattering news about my favorite pieces of pop culture! If the news is this good, I’m not going to complain.

Huh, I just realized that if I had a nickel for every time I had an emotional realization about myself from the emotionally stunted and jokey main male character of a lighthearted American sitcom from the last 10 years, and blogged about it here, I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot but it’s weird that it happened twice in a row. Such is life, I guess.

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This post will mark three weeks since I’ve started this series, and so I’ve decided it’s time to get a little more personal. Even though do you know about characters who have spoken to me, I don’t feel like you could get a particularly good sense of me a person, even though I’d like to think my writing style is fairly distinctive and reflective in some, way of what it’s like to talk with me.

So let’s do that, shall we? Let’s get personal and vulnerable, while exploring the same themes that we have been taking a look at in the last two posts. I feel as if it’s a good way to practice the kindness, empathy, and positive masculinity I’ve been talking about, and it’s an opportunity to bee kind not just to others, but to myself.

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About a year ago now, I went through what I would describe as a “rough patch”. I felt, somehow, as if a part of myself had “gone on vacation”. I am normally an extremely joyful person, and one of the things I take joy from is participating in witty banter or repartee with friends and acquaintances alike, a rapid stream of consciousness fire of zany pop cultural references that comes a mile a minute. People tend to make a lot of assumptions about me, so this dialogue which takes control of conversations and introductions is a way that I’ve adapted to politely dismiss these assumptions or play into them when appropriate.

All of these things apply to the eponymous Ted Lasso, played by the wonderful Jason Sudeikis. Here’s a link to one of my favorite moments in season one. I always connected with the scene, but didn’t put it together so that it could apply to my own experiences. Later on, in season two, sports psychologist, Dr. Sharon Fieldstone, says about Ted’s speaking pattern: “This is obviously your way of connecting with new people. Makes sense. It’s very disarming”. I woke up one morning, and I was no longer able to access any of those parts of myself. I was in this emotional state because I was unable to maintain my usual mood, just like Ted. I realized that maintaining one emotional state is an impossible metric and I wondered if my own attitudes were in some way artificial, contrived, nothing but a dangerous coping mechanism.

Over the next couple weeks, I experienced what I can only describe as feeling a profound outpouring of divine love, mercy, and grace as I was talking to some students about technical theater and later when talking with my therapist, I was able to access that part of myself once again, the one which I had wondered whether it would ever come back. I was able to realize that to feel a full spectrum of emotions is normal. This reignited my spark and I was able to accept that even though I was not always able to maintain my usual demeanor that didn’t mean it was not valid or just a coping mechanism, but a genuine part of the things that make me who I am, although not all of it, and not inherently toxic or unhealthy. All of this, because of Ted Lasso.

This, I think speaks to the power of stories to help us to better understand ourselves, and work through our issues, but there’s perhaps an even greater lesson to be found here: you are not, and are never, alone.

Continuing our series from last week on positive, kind, and optimistic depictions of masculinity in popular culture, let us look at a very well-mannered transplant from the jungles of Darkest Peru, one Paddington Bear, who is named for the London train station where he is found by the Brown family. I will specifically be restricting my analysis to the two films directed by Paul King, in which the titular character is voiced by Ben Whishaw (Despite this, it seems important to note that a series of books by author Michael Bond laid the foundation for the many interpretations of the character throughout the past several decades.) 

 In the films, Paddington is raised by his Aunt Lucy, and Uncle Pastuzo, who were found by a British explorer, and an excellent subversion of a British colonialist civilizing noble savages, they are already intelligent and cultured, and form a bond with this explorer, who installs in them a great love of marmalade and talking about the rain.  

Paddington moves to London as his Aunt Lucy goes to live in a home for retired bears, and the plot of the first movie revolves around Paddington becoming an accepted part of the community and the plot of the second film is too good to spoil here. He is opposed by a sinister taxidermist played by Nicole Kidman, and, in the second film, a narcissistic and washed-up actor named Phoenix Buchanan, played delightfully by Hugh Grant. 

The reason why Paddington is such a positive depiction of masculinity is that, like Clark Kent, he is unfailingly well mannered and gracious in a cynical world, changing others for the better and allowing them to become the best versions of themselves. Despite his many positive qualities, he is not without areas he has the potential to grow. His naivety, as well as his lack of understanding of human culture in general creates issues. He is also clumsy, although always well-intentioned. He also positively breaks down stereotypes by being scrupulously civil, and being interested in domestic activities like cooking and cleaning, as well as artistically inclined, and in contrast too many modern blockbusters is emotionally intelligent and non-aggressive, which are typically associated with women in western societies 

Let’s break down a specific scene together to look at how this excellent writing, paired with the whimsical cinematography and fantastic sense of comic timing endear us to Paddington and the characters around him, even when facing extreme adversity. In this scene, Paddington takes the jail where he has been imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit and betters his community, making it idyllic, even though previously his fellow prisoners were hostile to him, because of his overbearing politeness and the fact that he accidentally died all of their uniforms bright pink. He makes the best of any situation. 

By giving them a sense of purpose, and also improving the quality of their food, and their life in general, he is able to reform the prison for his fellow inmates, which previously focused on punishment, which created in environment where everyone felt alienated and angry, and transforms it into an environment where individual talents can be used, and not only are basic standards of living met, but people are able to enjoy simple pleasures, which respects their dignity and humanity, this is taken to a comic extreme by the fact that the guard institutes a custom of reading a bedtime story. This creates an interesting parallel between the way that Paddington is looked down upon in the first film buy some because he is a bear, and therefore different. The prisoners in the film are not bad people, they are simply misunderstood and were reacting to the lack of nurture within their own environment. The clip below can be paused at 10 minutes.  

Paddington | Making Friends in Prison | Friendly Faces 

I would love to talk about the ending of the second film, but it’s so good that I don’t want to spoil it, so I will close with a quote from the ending of the first: “Mrs. Brown says that in London, everyone is different, but that means anyone can fit in. I think she must be right, because although I don’t look like anyone else, I really do feel at home. I will never be like other people, but that is all right, because I am a bear. A bear called Paddington.” I raise my cup of tea and slice of marmalade toast to that! 

Let’s start with the illegal immigrant alien from Kansas.  

If you haven’t already inferred, I’m talking about Superman, Clark Kent. If you spend any time listening to people’s opinions on pop culture, like I do, you will often hear people whine about Superman. They maintain that he is overpowered and stale, that he wants for flaws, both moral and otherwise, and that he is not a three-dimensional character. This has spawned much debate, and some even opine that he would naturally see humanity as lesser, or that Clark Kent is, or should be, the mask and Superman his “real self”.  

I don’t have enough time to get into all of that here, but I feel that many stories that attempt to deconstruct Superman miss what make him compelling in the first place. Clark Kent, despite his Kryptonian heritage considers himself a Kansas farm boy, because that’s what he is. He deeply loves humanity. This is not only because these are the values instilled into him by his adoptive parents, but the fact that he believes in our capacity for goodness, and chooses to be of symbol of hope, to do as much good as possible with the extraordinary abilities that he’s been given, despite the fact that he could choose not to. He chooses to be optimistic and empathy, and always gets back up even when he is discouraged.

Pair him with a great foil as a villain, like Lex Luthor, who could do all the good in the world, but chooses not to, and who Superman can’t fight his way past, because of his seemingly unlimited resources and obsession with taking Clark down, despite the good that he is doing. No matter how hard you try, you can’t force someone to choose to be good.  What does Superman do when those in power don’t share his values of tolerance, truth, justice, etc, just because they don’t want to? What if some don’t want to be saved, and are content with others suffering, as long as it benefits them and have no incentive to change, especially because it’s made them rich? On top of all that, he is one of the smartest people in the multiverse, and a raging narcissist for good measure. 

In one of my most treasured Superman comics, All Star Superman by Grant Morrison, on an alternate earth in which Superman is running out of time to live, but, paradoxically is even stronger, more intelligent, and powerful. Through comic book shenanigans Lex gains Superman’s powers for 24 hours. In typical megalomaniac fashion, he immediately starts his hostile takeover. I love how it illustrates the difference between the two men, and that the power that Lex receives only reveals his true nature, as it does with Clark, as it is our choices that define us. Here’s how the scene  plays out in the pretty solid film adaptation, which even makes a couple of changes to this scene that make me adore it even more.

(Also, it’s extremely rad that we have a very anti-Nazi ubermensch, created by two Jewish men.)  

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That’s not even my favorite moment from the comic, though. I’ll just let it speak for itself.

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That’s what Superman means to me. He gives us an ideal, an example to aspire to. He is a symbol of hope and kindness. In this often troubling world, that is more than enough. I can’t wait to continue this series in later weeks!