On the pop front, I greeted with relief the news that Rosie O'Donnell will be leaving ABC's "The View." Joy Behar will get some oxygen at last. What a crass solipsist, clod and yahoo O'Donnell is -- and what a bad advertisement for both liberalism and lesbianism. I thoroughly enjoyed Donald Trump putting the shiv to her with his eye-opening insults of withering accuracy. The list of O'Donnell's faults overfloweth -- beginning with her stentorian humorlessness and her infantile rudeness to her cohosts and ending with her crackpot conspiracy theories and her constant flaunting of her banal regimen of antidepressants.
Speaking of flawed gay role models, here's a blast from the past. Roving round the Web, I stumbled by chance on this article of mine from 10 long years ago in Salon: "Is Anne Heche another vampirish Yoko Ono?" Tempests of pique blew up from chi-chi gay circles in California for my daring to question the way Anne Heche had gotten her claws into Ellen DeGeneres. But I was right as rain, wasn't I? Ellen seems much better matched these days with Portia de Rossi, who commendably hasn't tried to upstage her.
My partner Alison and I have been recording and watching ABC's "All My Children" for several months now. Daytime soap operas, which I used to adore, have been declining in quality and importance for over a decade, and I gradually stopped monitoring them. But "All My Children" (on its best days) is currently being written with a speed and intensity that are remarkable.
We were lured back by publicity over a pioneering transgender theme, which was unfortunately treated with sometimes cartoonish hamminess and excessively ideological sermonizing. (And he/she seriously needed a stylist -- is dowdy the new hip?) But "All My Children" has recovered the old-time emotional resonance of soaps. I've been particularly impressed with Alexa Havins, who gives warmth and depth to her role as Babe. When it looked like Babe had been killed and Havins written out of the show, I went ballistic and vowed to counterattack (via Salon, of course). But it was just a plot trick: when Babe suddenly returned from the dead, I shouted for joy!
Campy lines were once central to the soap aesthetic. But when soap actors aspired to prime-time credibility in the late 1980s and '90s, flamboyance faded. Hence I'm happy to report that "All My Children" is dishing the camp like fried scrapple and waffles. Some recent samples I scribbled down:
"A dead slut can cause just as much trouble as a live slut!"
"Your mother is a cheating tramp, and she taught you everything you know!"
"A man has to learn how to take care of himself -- especially if he's wearing lipstick!"
"You just had to bring your gender-bending game into Pine Valley!"
"An escaped mental patient has my baby!"
One huge problem, however, is that "All My Children," like most of the other major daytime soaps, has a deplorable record of integrating African-Americans into the cast. What the hell is the matter? Black actors are made to play to cliché (lily white or sassy street), and they're whizzed in and out of the plot without making a dent in it.
Considering the popularity of soaps with the African-American audience, it's grotesque that the entertainment industry, for all its vaunted liberalism, is lagging so far behind social changes in the United States. And why has there never been an all-black daytime network soap? It would probably blow the white soaps off the map. I see far stronger and more charismatic personalities strolling around Philadelphia's neighborhoods than are being featured in most of today's bland daytime soaps. As in Italian neorealism (the low-budget, on-location films shot amid postwar rubble), sensational acting can come from non-professionals.
A lesser complaint: hair extensions. There are moments on "All My Children" when half the women actors, young and old, seem to be afflicted by android Barbie creep. All those thick swatches of lifeless strands clustering lankly round ladies' necks! Like orange tanning spray, this is a fashion fad that should be put out of its misery.
Next page: A return to Romanticism?