16 sep 2021
When is my brain ever off?
I have been watching the Netflix comedy-drama series GLOW. I started watching GLOW because 1. I have a huge crush on Marc Maron and 2. I was nearing the end of my Mad Men rewatch and needed something substantial to ease the transition out of what has been an actually transcendent experience. I started rewatching Mad Men because more than a year ago someone told me he thought it was kind of overhyped and that the acting was bad, and I wanted to see if he was right. He was not. He was wrong. That person might be dead inside. I should call him and let him know that he was wrong and that he might be dead inside.
He might be dead inside because Mad Men is about the experience of trying to not be a bad person in a world where everything — capitalism, its requirement that we barely know ourselves so that we can carry out its bidding and put food on our tables, unresolved traumas, overwhelming and irresolvable world crises — makes it fairly difficult to not be a bad person. The plot-lines, both about the individual characters and about the advertising company, matter only insofar as they hold in place the show’s larger questions about life, love, and lying. I mean, really, what else is there? How could you ever think that was overhyped.
GLOW is not really about the big stuff. There might be a love plot-line brewing, I don't know. I’m only halfway through the second season; don’t tell me how it ends. The fate of the characters and their women’s wrestling TV show really does drive the whole thing forward; you have to care about what will happen to them and their show to keep watching. Do I care? Only sort of. Am I being entertained? For sure. I love the wrestling moves and am now convinced I could be a fairly good wrestler.
But I wonder if I will finish watching GLOW. I am not sure I care enough about what happens to anyone on the show to keep watching. Recently, I quit rewatching The Nanny when I got sick of the will-they-won’t-they plot-line taking over the whole show. I felt like I was being asked to turn off my brain to allow this show to still entertain me, and I did not want to do that.
When is my brain ever off? I wonder now. I think the answer is never, and I am fine with that. I guess it’s off when I meditate or do yoga or run or swim or play sports, but that’s not true, it’s not off, it’s just working differently. A brain can do many things. It can make me cry when Peggy and Stan finally admit they’re in love (sorry about the spoiler) or laugh when Alison Brie’s and Marc Maron’s characters share particularly witty repartée on GLOW. It can make me make these words now, here, and then make me wonder what the fucking point is, why am doing this again, every week, what even is this about.
And then I think about it — again with my brain — and I remember that the point of this is not to entertain myself or you or anyone. I do not care about entertainment. I want to know what’s actually going on.
