On Glee, Satire, and the Evolution of Culture
So, here's the thing. I watch Glee. I watch it for the music and the characters and the stories and the way it makes me laugh every week at its sheer ridiculousness. I also watch it for those moments when all the drama and silliness is suspended for a moment and something deep and moving occurs. I've watched it from the very first moment almost three years ago, usually with family and friends, all of whom agree that it is hilarious and meaningful and a whole lot of fun. We yell at the tv, we comment on costumes and song choices, and we marvel at the way the world and television has changed in a few short years, to allow this sort of show to thrive.
After the show every week, I get online to talk through the episode with the bff, who is the only other person in my life who will willingly dissect it in that much detail for that long. It tends to lead us in all sorts of directions, including discussions of media, heterosexual privilege, queer theory, and just how unnecessarily attractive a large cross-section of the cast is. We both love that the show makes us laugh and clap just as much as it makes us think. That, to me, is the very definition of a good satire, which is what I believe Glee is, at its core.
Glee is actually a whole lot of things: it's a tv show - a vehicle for making money and stardom for companies and producers and directors and writers and actors; it's a form of creative expression - letting a whole bunch of those producers and directors and writers and actors tell stories every week to people who want to hear and see them; it's a force for change - whether the people who make it want it to be or thought it could be or not; it's part of our cultural dialogue - both product of and agent in the narrative that we all contribute to. And because of that, because of all the things that it is and can be and becomes as it is conceived and created and let out into the world, it doesn't belong to any one of us. None of us - from the studio execs on down to the most casual viewer - can control what Glee is and what it means in the world. I'm sure Ryan and the writers really appreciate the credit a lot of the fans give to him/them when they get pissed about things he/they have supposedly forced to happen or not happen, but I suspect the forces at work are actually a much more complicated alchemy.
All this is to say: I have a theory. I've seen a lot of people online lately getting upset about what they perceive as an injustice on the show. They're observing that straight couples seem to get a lot more screen time and public displays of affection than the queer couples. At the moment, I'm not particularly interested in whether this observation is empirically true or not. I'm not even that interested in the hows and whys within the show that might make it true. What I am interested in is this: what if being upset about perceived injustice is the point?
This brings me back around to my original thoughts about satire. Satire is designed to bring injustices - both the really obvious ones and the ones that people just deal with because 'that's the way it is' - to light through making fun of them or (frequently, in the case of Glee) making them so obvious and over-the-top that you can't help but find them both ridiculous and horrifying. Glee does satire really well. We might almost say that they're too good at it. They're so good at it, in fact, that they're making people talk about all sorts of things that don't get talked about nearly enough. Things like why it is that queer kids suffer through all sorts of verbal and physical abuse, and even when that doesn't happen, they still rarely feel safe enough to kiss or even hold hands in public.
It's easy to get caught up in the Glee world, to get annoyed at the little things they don't do well or well enough, to forget that for a lot of people, for a long time and sometimes still, the world Glee depicts is a dream rather than a nightmare. It could be, and has been, and still sometimes is, so much worse. Glee is part of the change, both by pushing us forward and by shining a light on the things that are still wrong. Glee is helping us to sharpen our critiques and to raise our expectations. In fact, you might say that the fact that fans are complaining about the show not being perfectly equitable means that the show is doing something right.
15 years ago, when I first came out, I couldn't have imagined a show like this, discussions like these, happening on such a broad scale. The changes have been big, and they have happened fast. We still have a long way to go, but I think Glee is firmly on the right side of history in this case. It's part of the solution, often because it demonstrates how we should be, and sometimes because it illuminates how we don't want to behave anymore.
So I guess my point is this: I love Glee. I love that it is complex and serious and simple and absurd. I love that it can simultaneously be entertainment and a force on and in the culture. But most of all, I love that it is letting a whole lot of people - writers, actors, and fans alike - find their voices and tell their stories. I firmly believe that only good can come of that.