The alert reader may have divined that I’m more than a
little prideful to be off to the side of the mainstream. To reveal that I
had a habit of watching Seinfeld re-runs and the occasional football game takes
on the tone of a confession. And so here comes another one:
I’m hooked on Downton Abby.*
I’m hooked on Downton Abby.*
It took three or four shows to jump in and feel connected,
but by Sunday’s show after the heart-wrenching Super Bowl, I was a believer. So
much so that I went to our local Le Video store and got Season One to begin the
long trek to catch up. Five shows into that and the addiction has taken root in
the bloodstream. If there was only one copy of the next show at the video
store, I’m sure I would commit physical violence against the person who tried
to get it before me.
Like Seinfeld or a Dickens novel, the first step is to
recognize the characters and get a feel for who they are and what they’re about
and how they react. You have to love or hate them enough to wonder what their
next move is, make little predictions and either have the satisfaction of
proving correct or the surprise of watching them grow or fall from grace. (It’s
not unlike the scientist making an hypothesis or a music listener imagining the
next phrase of the music.) Howard Gardner might call such shows schools for
developing the interpersonal
intelligence.
Then you get drawn into the threads of the plot and as I
wrote back in the The Three Pillars of Literacy, we story-brained humans
thrive on this kind of food. We live vicariously in an ongoing story similar to
our own, but three notches higher on the drama end and easier to stomach
because we’re a few steps removed. TV has always had this with the daytime soap
operas which we loved to make fun of, but from The Sopranos to The
Wire to Madmen to Downton Abby, it’s all the new, upgraded Days
of Our Lives and General Hospital.
And then there’s the beautiful hatreds and rivalries between
the characters and no matter if you’re upstairs, downstairs or out in the
garden. Our fantasies of “transparent" communication and New Age togetherness
would make for some poor drama. Who wants to show five seasons of people
hugging each other, working out their issues with good honest talk straight
from the heart in every encounter, relinquishing their positions of power
to be more inclusive and fair? One of my first shocks going to Mt. Baldy Zen
Center was discovering how the book image of a peaceful community was pretty
far from the actual gathering of bizarre characters. Even the Roshi at a
celebration talked about how when they began, this officer wouldn’t talk to
that one, that one abused the other and how if people in a place devoted to
nurturing peace in the heart couldn’t get along, what hope was there for the
world?
But the biggest lesson this naïve seeker has learned is that
such hope begins with the recognition that alongside the moments of deep
communion, hard-earned love, humor, shared joy and quiet connections, human
relations are all about power, betrayal, disappointment, rivalry, barbed verbal
assaults and occasionally outbursts (more honest!) of physical ones. In every
place, in every time, amongst any group of people thrown together in work,
travel, neighborhood, what-have-you. It’s all Peyton Place and Downton
Abby. No exemptions.
And then what’s fascinating are all the styles of personal
warfare. There’s the gender-based approaches—Bates collars Thomas against the
wall and tells him he’ll smash his face in if he doesn’t stop this crap, while
the Dowager and Mrs. Crawley throw their little verbal darts laden with secret
poisons. Mary and Edith forgot to read the book Siblings Without Rivalry
and go after the same man as a little game of one-upwomanship. Mrs. Patmore
uses Daisy as her whipping girl, while Sibyl is a living California bumper
sticker performing random acts of kindness.
And then the secrets that we all carry about, that ride on
our shoulder as we put on the front of being normal human beings. Mary’s
bizarre encounter with the Turk, Bates' secret story that throws up a wall
between him and Anna (back in Season One here) and most delightful of all,
Carson, the Guru of the stiff upper lip, and his secret shame that he once sang
and danced on the vaudeville stage. Horrors!
If you don’t know these people, these words don’t mean as
much. But perhaps they’re enticing you to join the club and that’s another
pleasure of this practice— now it is a shared story that peppers the lunchtime
conversations at school of those “in the know” and creates a common point of
reference. I imagine new words may creep into the vernacular— “Stop O’Briening
that person!” “That was so Thomas!”
Off to the video store for the next show. And don’t even
think about getting there before me!
* For those in the dark, this
is a BBC series about some upper-class Brits and their downstairs servants set
at a country estate in the early 1990’s.
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