Lipstick Jungle, the second of Cameron Bushnell’s novels about high-powered women to grace the tube, has not garnered as many accolades or as wild a fan-base as it’s older-sister series Sex in the City. But for all its obvious plots and expected moments of emotional catharsis, Lipstick Jungle has the benefit of actually delving into women’s struggles (and triumphs) during the working day. This past episode was particularly pointed, as Wendy and Nico both had to deal with the stress of a new, high-powered boss moving into the penthouse and rearranging their skyscraper ambitions. The episode specifically focused on the repercussions of an emotional decision made by each woman. Wendy had forged health insurance waivers for the lead actor (and friend) in a movie about John Lenon, even though she knew that he had a brain tumor. Nico had mouthed off to the new boss and subsequently wrote a scathing email to him about a decision he’d made. Specifically, a women’s advocacy group had demanded an apology for representations of women in their magazine, an apology the boss wanted written and Nico thought would amount to capitulation. While Wendy gave way to her sympathetic tendencies, taking a huge risk to help a friend make his last movie, Nico wanted revenge (or at least a suitable tongue lashing) on a boss who seemed too soft, or at least too sleazy, acceding to a confession he didn’t really believe in but for the publicity. By the end of the episode, Nico’s email (sent not by her but by her nemesis to her boss) gets leaked to the press and ends up garnering “good” publicity about the company. Wendy, on the other hand, gets fired.

All this to say that both high-powered women make emotional decisions, as opposed to their hard-headed boss. Even Victory represents the emotional side of business when she breaks up with her real estate mogul boyfriend because he has bought her business without telling her. The gendered split here is obvious, as is the moral of the Nico-Wendy comparison: true emotion is a liability whereas emotion wielded for rhetorical effect, particularly as some kind of publicity stunt–even if the stunt is only to challenge your boss–is condoned. Women like Wendy and Victory retain their role as the keepers of authentic emotion. Nico, who viewers know has already been “tainted” by her sometimes-manipulative affair with a younger man, represents the more masculine manipulation with appearances.

This representation leaves me wondering. In the work-place, are women still overly-feeling women and men still the rational ones occasionally coping a feel?

A friend of mine & I recently had a bout of an argument that we have periodically. The great thing about some good friends is that you can have the same discussion for years that rear themselves occasionally, and though most of the time you repeat yourselves and back over each others points again and again, the narrative of that discussion develops as you do and acts as a history of yourselves, your ideas, and your friendship. This one we have is about fashion, gender, self-worth, and what it means when we dress up for ourselves and others and watch each other doing it.

I watched the episode of 90210 (old school) where Brandon runs off to San Francisco and runs into an old ex-girlfriend, the notorious psycho Emily Valentine. While parents Jim & Cindy are wringing their well-lotioned hands back in LA–after all bleached-blonde with roots Emily did light a few matches in their back yard with the intent to burn down the float, that pure sign of football love and autumnal patriotism, Brandon finally says I love you to a prozaced-up and brown-haired Emily. If the narrative arc was satiating, though, it wasn’t because Brandon & Emily get it on and almost stay together, which would finally let 90210’s serial-dater settle down into a Relationship. It’s because Brandon finally narrates his girl-crazy days to Emily as a string of failed hook-ups, basically admitting that he’s never really loved any of his datees. Except for her, he finally coughs up. The honesty and earnestness of his confession redeems a character who, for the past two seasons, has basically slipped the tongue to any pretty girl who threw herself at him. And refracted through his narrative to Emily, his trysts–and most of them were pretty luke-warm on-screen smoochies–reveal Brandon searching for The Thing: his punk psycho girl who was really too smart to play by the Bev Hills rules. That’s why he dates messed up chicks. Not because he can’t love nobody, but because he likes girls who are too smart for the system and have to either put themselves in a sanitarium or ship themselves off to San Fran (Berkeley) and eventually France (Europe’s post-lapsarian intellectual paradise).

But the thing about the episode that really got me was the clothes. I’d forgotten how Emily & Brandon dress the same. Both of them generally wear button down shirts or t-shirts tucked in with thick belts, jeans, and some clunky black shoes. Oh, 90s style. Tuck in those shirts and roll up those sleeves. Ok, so the show is a trend about other trends, but Emily & Brandon are wearing clothes that are gender neutral, that themselves signify equality, not sexual difference. What a world away from tonight’s 90210 (new), that “edgy contemporary spin-off.” The entire plot was about Annie deciding to have sex with new unboyfriend Ty, sauntering up to the grotesquely rich hotel room he’s booked for them, and finding a jealous biotch who makes it seem like she’s already whored herself out to the high-priced personality-less chiseled face of a boy. As Annie breathlessly jogs up the hotel stairs, thinking, this is the last time I’ll be bouncing my boobs all over the place as a virgin, she’s sporting some hot hootchie wear. The necklace is the killer–a big chain of gigantic metal circles spells O for orgasm and the perfect un-O’Keefe-like sign of vaginal space. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve worn my share of damn-my-ass-looks-good-look-at-it shifts. And yes, she, in the end, doesn’t have sex with him. But the clothes spelled out sexual difference. For the new 90210, sex, lust, and passion equals sexual difference. For Brandon and Emily it was a conversation they had over two years, which developed even as they wore the same, exchangeable clothes. Annie & Ty don’t even have the dumb conversations Brandon & miscellaneous girls had.

The double irony of the old 90210 episode comes when Brenda, in her first University theatre production, “The Melancholy Mask,” has to take of her clothes during the play’s climax, to take of her “mask.” But when Jim & Cindy surprise her in the audience, she stumbles and can’t get them off but then turns the gaff into a joke: maybe masks are good because I don’t have to be naked, but can be what I want to be with clothes on. So here’s the rub, though taking off our clothes lets us feel and smooch some awesome differentiated sex parts, wearing androgynous garb lets us be equal, lets us get off on the friction between similar thinking and looking people. I’m not saying I want to wear loafers, but today’s 80s leggings just emphasize the gulf between men and women, just like popped collars widen the cultural gap between rich preps and the rest of the poor lot of us.

If TV has any cultural prowess, it is how the form can spin narrative arcs that come to fruition only after two years. It’s a payoff to those who’ve paid attention (and spent oodles of time) watching and clocking character habits and changes, but it also gives a true air of realism. Characters might have neuroses that make them repeatedly fall into similar plot lines (especially once the writers get lazy), but some times they can spin these dialogues out into larger life epiphanies. As she’s leaving for France, Emily tells Brandon, you can’t humanly try to be celibate for the next few years while I’m away, but be true to yourself. Go for the girls who are crazy because they’re smart, not the ones who end up crying at the end of the episode on the other side of a locked door, curled up alone in a frock that reveals so much it shows nothing.

In an early Buffy Season 2 episode, Buffy challenges Angel to a duel of sorts, quipping more wittily than I can remember exactly, don’t you ever wonder who’d win if we fought?  Sometimes I think of that as an allegory for their careers, wondering who has won in the career-off between David Boreanaz and Sarah Michelle Gellar.  Not that they’re in competition really, but when characters die because shows go off the air, it’s difficult not to transfer some sort of narrative continuity to their successive characters.  Like incarnations, the stars’ new roles seem like new lives for their old characters, new necessary stages actors must move through on their way to Hollywood nirvana.  Whatever that might be.  

Anyway, while SMG has mostly stuck to horror/supernatural/thriller type movies (not including the interesting Southland Tales), DB plucked himself a funny–but creepy–new mystery-sitcom.  He’s finally allowed to display the excessive irony that I’d say equals if not tops Hugh Laurie’s balls-to-the-wall House.  Tops because against the back drop of Bones’ Spock-like logic and Amelia-Bedelia literalisms, Booth gets to be pretty absurd, almost moving out of the show altogether by injecting moments of irony into the sitcom. Contra scientific-spread-sheet-driven Bones, Booth is the voice of social commentary.

I’m thinking specifically about a moment in the first episode of this season, where Booth & Bones go to England, so Bones can show her analytical skills are transatlantic and Booth can show he’s still-sexually-desirable and can carry a gun even in England.  The scene that the whole episode inadvertantly drives toward is at the end, when the English detective Pritchard, who Booth has nicknamed “Pritch” and who kind of has the hots for Booth, fake-knights Booth by tapping him on the shoulder with a random sword and gives him a blue ribbon attached to a ribbon necklace.  Earlier in the episode, Booth was drunkenly asking for knighthood, that irrefutable sign of power and manliness. In the final scenes, the phallic imagery clearly is motivated, and Pritch is in part snubbing Booth because he turned down the opportunity to sleep with her. So Booth giggles–I mean really gets slap happy, and B & B go home having shown their quality.  

American nostalgia or curiosity for English roots seems to have abounded in recent TV and movies.  Think of Woody Allen’s Matchpoint and Scoop and, of course, Gossip Girl’s new introduction of royalty as B’s new boy-toy.  If in Woody Allen, the aristocracy is shown in all its ruthless murderousness (even if it’s the bourgey class-jumper that kills to get what the Lords still have and covet), teenage biotch Blair Waldorf seems to have outwitted and seduced the doe-eyed Lord and his American step-mum.  Booth’s double desire for knighthood and working-class repudiation of it by laughing at the ribbon/gift, however, presents a more complicated, ironic reaction to our English roots.

One reason may be that Booth is Catholic, and so if not Italian then Irish, which would already make him less nostalgic for England than complicatedly related to Britain. His desire and mockery of the knighthood also serves as a foil to his status as FBI, the modern knighthood of America, which seems to operate through ability and merit, yet as a government agency might be too closely related to that bumbling cousin, the CIA. But even more disturbing is Booth’s happiness at wearing the symbol of mockery, which seems like a quintessentially American situation at this point. He wants the symbol of specialness–of American exceptionalism–even if the way he is special is by donning international mockery. As a soldier who has been to Iraq, Booth must know all about symbols for courage that, in the eyes of the world, double as symbols of America’s exceptional hubris, stupidity and, most of all, failure. It is quite apropos that Pritch gives Booth the ribbon, herself an emblem of Britain’s faded imperial botches, particularly the domestic imperialism of Queen Victoria. What else can Booth do but make a joke of his own ineffectuality and tell Bones not to explore one of her own powers–her sexuality. Will she save it for him and “knight him” later in the season, or will she find a more virile object worthy of her dalliance–perhaps Booth’s high-ranking Naval brother? If we haven’t won the worst land war of our times, then we still, for the moment control the seas and international trade.

Though most 90s-era 90210 fans night disagree with me, one of the prime differences between the old and new West Bev crew is the Donna factor. As I’ve been watching a bunch of old episodes, particularly from the last high school days and the early college ones, I was surprised at how interested I was in Donna’s character. I remember originally getting cranky with the show, thinking, yeah, let’s not let Donna Martin graduate, or at least please let her slide into post-virginal, overly-complicated college sexuality like the rest of us. If I never really thought about why she was so goddamned infuriating then, now it’s kind of a revelation to realize just how obviously Aaron Spelling was setting up his angel of a daughter to be West Bev’s moral compass.

Brandon might have been downright preachy at times, but at least he got himself in trouble with gambling, drinking and dabbling with girls who are too smart to be socially well-adjusted. Aside from Donna refusing to bend her Catholic morals by going to bed with her several-years boyfriend, she was constantly reminding each of the characters to get over their selfish, ego- or lust-driven motivations and see the bigger picture. Which when you’re 18 is pretty annoying and parental. In the Christmas episode where they bring presents to the poor school (and almost get into a cataclysmic bus crash except for a few angels looking out for them and irritatingly narrating their stories), Donna was the only one who wasn’t so stressed out or intwined in a love triangle enough to tell them all to can it. And the next year, when David and Kelly couldn’t stop fighting over their parents’ messy divorce, Donna again stepped in as the voice of reason.

I haven’t seen enough Aaron Spelling productions to know if this was a signature of his, though I was surprised to google and see he was a producer for what could win an Emmy for Sap, 7th Heaven. But the old 90210 seems to have had a moral backbone that this new one doesn’t. Jim & Cindy single handedly force fed the West Bev Crew a huge dose of middle-American ethics, especially through their two denizens Dylan-saving Brenda and journalism-as-objectivity Brandon. That is still somewhat the case with the new show’s Kansas-ites, who own up to their mistakes and accept parental punishment with gusto. But the new-West Bev crew doesn’t have a pure soul among them. Whether 90s optimism and liberal promises have deserted us, or the new writers are too fired up by the grim realism of West Bev is too early to tell. I’m not sure I could have lived in a house with Jim & Cindy and not tried to run away more times than Brenda did. But Principal Ex-lacrosse Pranks who knocked up his HS girlfriend may, sadly, end up being as screwed up as anyone who hasn’t left LA to be an adult in the heartland.

The voice of reason, who can separate herself from any teenage drama, is nowhere to be found. To bring in another example from a CW show, Gossip Girl’s ridiculously funny spot last episode of three tween readers of Gossip Girls’ texts is a good case and point. Even outside observers, like some random tweens, couldn’t help but weigh in–or should I say screetch and whine their cases–about Serena & Dan’s relationship. Which sent Dan, who likes to act like the show’s moral compass, but really might just be insecure about all the rich Upper East Siders judging him, spiraling into a vortex of reading readers comments–ostensibly on the hypothetical GG website–about how he should feel about his and Serena’s breakup. TV no longer can supply characters who can get a hold of their own morals, and worse their own ideas. Perhaps I shouldn’t be lamenting an objectivity that maybe really never existed in the first place. But maybe we’re even more afraid, now, of being annoying.

I figured it was time to come out of the closet with one of my more shameful obsessions, and what better way to do it than some high-dictioned legitimization.  I spend too much time doing it, and doing it by myself, or thinking about it when I’m not actually sitting down to it.  When I write on the network message boards, I sound scarily articulate.  The kind of scary when you’ve been staring at someone on the metro for so long you’ve concocted an imaginary sex life for them.  On the one hand, so what.  Some people spend sizeable chunks of their bi-weekly pay hunting down random Indian ingredients at suburban bodegas and then spend more time steaming garlic or caramelized sugar into their pores.  Other friends of mine spend hours learning to play fake guitar or playing in fake bands in front of a tv monitor.  My dad likes to shop for stuff, even if he’s waiting in a train station with a perfume counter and a mini-Borders that sells the same best-sellers you can buy anywhere.  My brother likes to talk on the phone while sitting in hours of the best LA traffic you can buy.  So I watch too much tv, occasionally dream about its characters and talk about them more than that.  In the eighteenth century, it was novels people couldn’t get enough of–reading or complaining about how they were degrading the culture.  It’s hard not to wonder about this Paris-Palin culture of ours, and I’ve never been really good at coming up with the short, prose-poem quips that reveal something stunning, or stunningly disgusting, about our humanity.  But better to be full of shit than pretending you haven’t eaten.