Maintaining a Lifestyle of Conformity
“A home is not a mere transient shelter: its essence lies in the personalities of the people who live in it.” — H. L. Mencken
Jeanine and I rarely sit around and watch TV. Before we lived together, I didn’t even have a television so it might seem strange that we’re willing to pay for cable. When we do watch it’s typically because of programming on HBO or Showtime and even then it’s just 1 show per season.
Currently, in the winter it’s The L Word, in the spring: Huff, and right now it happens to be Weeds… close to 100 bucks a month just to watch Weeds… I know it really doesn’t make financial sense. But our friend, Colleen over at Communicatrix, already wrote about this topic last week and most of us agreed. It can be justified.
So Season 2 has started of Weeds and Robert Lloyd had insights in his LA Times review called: Wild Doings in Gated America. For those of you that don’t know, Weeds is about a suburban LA mother that sells pot to her neighbors.
A few things about the show don’t make sense such as, “It’s never clear why Nancy (played by Mary-Louis Parker) finds it necessary to stay in gated, upscale, barren Agrestic, a place where she doesn’t fit or have any real friends… or why she strives to maintain a lifestyle to which she does not seem at all attached. Neither is it clear why she is so spectacularly unprepared to get a job or so confused about what’s good for her kids that she risks losing them.”
The series’s bigger theme is the discontents of suburbia. He writes, “Although it’s easy to hate suburban sprawl and gated communities, it’s dangerous to generalize about the people that live there.”
I have my own feelings about master planned communities. You’ll find them in many areas of Orange County. Ever wonder how it all got started? Fool.com gives this explanation about the history, “A funny thing happened to architects during the Depression. Mr. Roosevelt, through the WPA, gave them jobs designing houses at a time when most people could barely afford to eat, much less buy a new house. And what they designed gave rise to a new theory about how and where Americans should live — theories that reverberate today in some of the neighborhoods that you’ll probably be looking at as you hunt for your new home.”
“These designers thought it would be swell if every family could have a detached home with a little yard out back. They also liked the idea of what they called ‘community.’ Community was a concept that included things like groups of neighborhoods with their own schools and shopping areas, but which were united within a larger municipal complex. Sounds old hat, you say? That’s because you probably grew up in a suburb that came out of these pretty radical ideas of the ’30s and ’40s.”
Are community and conformity the same thing? According to Wikipedia: Conformity is the degree to which members of a group will change their behavior, views and attitudes to fit the views of the group. The group can influence members via subconscious processes or via overt peer pressures on individuals.
Weeds theme song is “Little Boxes” by Malvina Reynolds, which as Lloyd notes, is a “jaunty attack on conformity.” Why do so many of us feel we need to spend money and keep up with the Joneses? Sheryl Crow put it all in perspective with the words in her song, “It’s not having what you want. It’s wanting what you’ve got.”
So many people are working hard to maintain a lifestyle that they don’t even want. Even Nancy is selling a little weed to maintain hers.
Nina, I swear we are separated cosmic twins.
Your viewing habits mirror ours! (We are SO mad at Showtime for not renewing Huff- but not mad enough to miss out on Weeds!) Your finance philosophies mirror ours! Case in point, all my responses to your wonderful blogs.
But on the subject at hand- we refer to planned neighborhoods as “poltergeist communities”- referencing the movie Poltergeist (homes were built in a “ticky tacky”, planned community way-oops- unfortunately on an ancient burial site). To me, the horror is the implied or even specifically mandated sameness of these kinds of places. Beige, sameness, conformity are fightin’ words for me! I love my technicolor, over the rainbow queerness- don’t box me in!
Many co-workers (and even some closer friends) disagree when we lunchroom chat, but my sensibilities lead me to where I know I could a) walk to work in an emergency and b) walk to just about any other resource if needed (grocery store, pharmacy, etc). Out in the ‘burbs, you hop in the car and gas up for everything. Maybe its the hippie/lesbian connection, but I want to save the earth for a while longer and reduce/reuse/recycle whenever possible.
I also think on some level, we queer folk find safety in numbers- ie the city and want to be somewhere that glorifies differences, not conformity.
“A few things about the show don’t make sense such as, “It’s never clear why Nancy (played by Mary-Louis Parker) finds it necessary to stay in gated, upscale, barren Agrestic, a place where she doesn’t fit or have any real friends… or why she strives to maintain a lifestyle to which she does not seem at all attached. Neither is it clear why she is so spectacularly unprepared to get a job or so confused about what’s good for her kids that she risks losing them.””
Not to mention why she absolutely always has to have a super jumbo sized iced coffee drink from Dunkin Donuts in her hands! Isn’t the idea to stop buying expensive coffee drinks outside the home the very first thing EVERYONE recommends when its time to economize? (Yeah I know the real story is the product placement deal that the producers of the show made- but I’m just sayin’…)