Fame Junkies: Dr Drew and Celebrity Rehab

Okay, I admit it. I’ve recently been tuning into Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew, on the not-so-venerable ABC2. It’s emotional car-crash television and I feel guilty watching it.

This low-rent reality TV program follows a group of the kind of people who qualify as celebrities these days – actors, porn stars, models, reality TV stars, rock stars, sports stars, and the parents of stars – as they attempt to recover from addictions to alcohol, drugs and prescription pills in a luxury treatment centre in Pasadena, California. Swollen lips, flouncy hair, floods of tears, tantrums and attitude problems abound. Perhaps the most poignant participant was Leif Garrett, a 1970s teen idol addicted to heroin and cocaine.

The group leader and treating doctor is celebrity medico Drew Pinsky, who was also executive producer on the first five seasons of the show. True to the fact that the budget of ABC2 matches its trashy values, the fourth season, which first aired in the US in late 2010, is currently screening in Melbourne.

When I started researching the show I discovered I was hopelessly out of date; Pinsky finally ended the series this year after six seasons. He'd grown tired of the storm of criticism he received from doctors, psychologists and addiction experts every time a former participant died. Those critics were quick to point the finger when Mindy McCready, a country singer who had appeared on the show’s third season in early 2010, shot herself in February 2013, just a month after her boyfriend’s suicide; she was the fifth former participant of the show to die. 

The experts who slammed Pinsky accused him of having an inherent conflict of interest: his need for the show to be entertaining versus his interest in his patients’ recovery. They claimed that his methods were dangerous and outdated, and went against treatment guidelines from the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Detoxing at the clinic was done quickly and painfully, a practice that was potentially deadly but conveniently dramatic; and contrary to Pinsky’s belief, 12-step programs and complete abstinence were not the only means of recovery, and not right for everyone.

They also criticised the fact that participants were paid to appear in the show – five hundred thousand dollars in some cases – because it amounted to luring addicts with the promise of money they could then splash on their addiction. This also goes against the whole concept of addiction recovery – the addict has to want to recover, and shouldn’t need a financial incentive to do so.

I’m in no position to make judgements about the causes of the deaths. The people concerned weren’t in Pinsky’s care at the time and in some cases it was years since he’d treated them, and addiction is a notoriously stubborn condition. But that’s not my main point here. My point is that the whole concept of filming a celebrity being treated for addiction is toxic.

Pinsky, by the way, is no Dr Phil - he is Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Keck School of Medicine at the University of California.

Abusive therapy?

My issue with the show centres around narcissism. It’s the curse of our age, and the term narcissist is used as a term of derision, but narcissism is actually a crippling disorder. Many narcissists harbour deep childhood wounds from years of abuse. Pinsky himself has researched narcissism and fame, co-authoring a 2006 study that demonstrated that celebrities were significantly more narcissistic than the general population (which makes him doubly culpable for playing on his patients' incessant need for attention).

To be a celebrity these days almost automatically demands narcissism to begin with. To film these celebrity addicts is, I believe, a kind of abuse, because the presence of the camera actually encourages their narcissistic tendencies without dealing with those tendencies as part of the therapy.

A case in point is Janice Dickinson, who styles herself as the world’s first supermodel and these days makes her living as a talent agent, photographer and writer. With her face so plastered with filler she can barely move it, and beestung lips so thick she can hardly talk, this woman displays levels of anger and exhibitionism that suggest serious emotional damage. Dickinson has spoken out about the physical and emotional abuse she suffered at the hands of her father, and her decades-long drug habit. Given that she filed for bankruptcy earlier this year, it’s also likely she has a spending problem. 

In one scene she complains to Dr Pinsky that another patient has been playing up to the camera. She then stages a walk-out, declaring that she’s leaving the treatment centre. The camera keeps filming her and the question of whether she is acting or not suddenly becomes incredibly complicated. While she rants and packs, she accuses the camera of being intrusive. No doubt she too is playing up to it, and probably thinking about her own career, yet she also seems aware that the camera is actually part of the problem.

It strikes me that the last thing these people need is to have a camera pointed at them. The lure and promises of the camera – an increase in fame, recognition, attention, love – would be a barrier against effective recovery. And surely the first thing a good doctor would do, for a celeb or would-be celeb deep in addiction, would be to turn the camera off; to hide her away from the world so that she has the chance to heal. These are people at rock bottom, at their most vulnerable. Privacy is the very least they deserve. Giving Dickinson a camera to parade in front of may have simply played on her vulnerabilities, and actually worsened them. Just because you exploit yourself doesn’t mean you’re not also being exploited by others.

But the show itself is the thin end of the wedge; the use of Dickinson to promote the show is far worse. In this video, probably promoting the show’s fifth season, Dr Pinsky and two others, who appear to be producers, start a line of questioning about the penis size of the many famous men Dickinson has bedded, and then prompt her to list these men (don’t watch it if you’re easily offended). She’s slurring just a tiny bit, which suggests that she may be on some kind of tranquilliser or antidepressant. This promo goes so far against the ethics of the patient–doctor relationship that it’s breathtaking. It also demonstrates that for Pinsky at least, the line between entertainment and therapy, between staged drama and reality, has not simply blurred but completely disappeared.

Dickinson has written about a hellish childhood in which she was beaten repeatedly by her father, a paedophile, for refusing sex with him. If we assume that her addiction is linked to that childhood abuse, it’s beyond the pale that a woman who has never been fathered is being encouraged by her male therapist to boast about her sexual conquests with men in graphic terms. It is likely that she would seek the love and approval from her therapist that she never got from her father, and would use her sexuality to try to obtain that love. If so, this would amount to a toxic relationship that involved simply re-enacting her incessant need for attention rather than actually examining it.

Dickinson, it must be said, credits the show with getting her sober. Good luck to her; perhaps in between all the exploitation by self and others, she somehow got what she needed. But to take the risk that a minority of patients, even a tiny minority, could be damaged or even killed by such a flawed treatment method seems negligent in the extreme. And it’s sad and disheartening to see these vulnerable people, sometimes with faces ravaged by abuse, parading in front of the camera.

Ethical TV therapy
The idea of filming people in therapy is not necessarily bad. I thought Pamela Stephenson’s ShrinkRap one of the best things on television, suggesting its potential as a medium for genuine inquiry and discovery. Sitting opposite each other in comfy chairs in a dimly lit room, Stephenson confronted a tortured celebrity or artist, and asked them therapeutic questions about their childhoods and the way their pasts affected their careers and personal lives. The show featured megastars like Robin Williams, Salman Rushdie and Joan Rivers (ironically, Stephenson like a few of her own guests, sports ironed hair and face).

There is a sense of dignity and choice. Stephenson manages to cover tabloid topics in a way that probes for the reasons behind public scandals and private torment. Questions mimick those of a therapy session but are cleverly geared to television, and the whole thing takes about fifty minutes, the time of an average therapy session. Stephenson's demeanour is respectful yet fairly detached, her approach finding a balance between letting her guest go off in their own direction, and bringing them back to difficult topics. Imagining yourself in that particular therapy chair is neither difficult nor unpleasant.

If you enjoyed this blog entry, you might also like The mysterious life of the psyche: on watching United States of Tara and A tale of two talk show hosts.

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A New Direction for Slightly Nutty

Sorry that this blog has been left fallow for so long - I've finally decided the direction I want to go in blog-wise. I'm more or less amalgamating Slightly Nutty with my other blog, Melbarts, to create an informal arts/politics/culture blog.

The new blog is called Feminist Culture Muncher and really came out of a need to justify my frequent telly watching!

My Inspired Shopper book is not yet ready, but it won't be long now. In the meantime I've reactivated the Inspired Shopper blog.

It feels strange to be 'moving'. In fact, there are many things I would still love to write about on Slightly Nutty - it's just that the other projects take greater priority at this time. And many of the kinds of concerns I've been airing here I will continue to air on the new blog, although I'm not sure how frequent entries will be at the moment - I'm aiming for shorter, more frequent entries than the ones in Slightly Nutty, but we'll see.

Hope to see you all at my new locations!

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Scuttling social justice – Julia Gillard and the 2010 federal election

Australia is going to the polls in a month’s time. Julia Gillard, the Australian Labor Party prime minister, looks set to win. But, in playing so clearly to middle Australia, she is using her considerable political talent to further drag the ALP away from some of its primary responsibilities: the upholding of human rights and support for the disadvantaged.

For the benefit of overseas readers, Gillard, then the deputy prime minister, shocked Australia when, following weeks of Kevin Rudd suffering in the opinion polls, she deposed him in an unforeseen overnight 'coup' on June 23–24; knowing he no longer had the numbers, Rudd stepped down rather than face a leadership ballot.

It may be that the coup wasn’t quite as sinister as it must have appeared to international observers, despite the involvement of faceless union officials and the fact that Gillard got multinational mining companies onside by ending a terrible imbroglio over mining tax soon after taking power. Rudd appears to have been stuck in a compulsive, controlling, workaholic state that he was unable to shed – some have hinted at mental health issues, and it was impossible not to anticipate the advent of some sort of personal crisis.

The event was notable regardless, being the first time in Australian history that a first-term serving prime minister had been deposed. And, as most people know, Gillard became Australia’s first female prime minister.

An election was due anyway, but Gillard was always going to call it early because she wanted to rule as chosen prime minister, rather than being seen as a pretender. Now a snap election has been called for the 21 August.

There are a few things I’ve been dying to write about Gillard ever since her surprise ascension.

Like some others, I hoped that she was more radical than she appeared, and that with Rudd out of the way she would take some simple progressive steps such as allowing gay marriage (Rudd’s a god-botherer and has always opposed this; Gillard is an unmarried atheist with no kids).

It was difficult not to assume, or at least hope, that Gillard would be a little more radical simply because she was a woman. Having slogged her way to the top in a male-dominated party, surely she would have empathy for the marginalised, and go into bat for them once she got into power? My hopes were ill-founded – Gillard soon stated unequivocally that she had no plans to legalise gay marriage.

This should have been no surprise – Gillard as education minister and minister for workplace relations was disturbingly reactionary. Despite her frequent eloquent pronouncements on her commitment to education, she seems to have done absolutely nothing to reduce the glaring inequities of Australia’s education system, a two-tier system that blatantly favours private schools and suffers from hopelessly complicated federal–state funding arrangements.

Gillard specialised in gimmicky, hugely expensive policies that caught the attention of the media as they were designed to do, before at least partly crashing and burning on their ineptitude and lack of groundwork; but she did absolutely zilch to reduce the system’s glaring inequities.

The building and computers-in-schools programs that characterised her tenure were open to the most obscenely wealthy private school, despite the fact that public education has been severely underfunded for years in Australia, resulting in rundown schools and inadequate teacher numbers and support services. The aim of the building program was partly to stimulate the economy, but, writing in The Age, Kenneth Davidson said that ‘Funding directed to maintenance upgrades according to the greatest needs would have had the same economic stimulus impact dollar for dollar and a far bigger pay-off in terms of equity and efficiency’.

Moreover, the public schools were disadvantaged in their access to the building program because they had much less choice compared with the private schools about exactly what was to be built, and no ability to negotiate the cost, resulting in ‘inflated costs and dubious projects’.

With regard to the computer program, private schools benefited while some government schools couldn’t afford to pay for the infrastructure that extra computers would entail.

Moreover, in her determination to impose a national test (NAPLAN) on skills such as literacy and numeracy and a website that would allow parents to compare the relative performance of schools, Gillard fought with the overworked teachers she should have been supporting – teachers who feared that the website would lead to the creation of divisive league tables, and that the expertise of teachers working with students with specific needs would be overlooked.

Also, Gillard had been part of the ‘gang of four’ that replaced Cabinet government under Rudd. The Cabinet still sat of course, but apart from Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner, Treasurer Wayne Swan and Gillard, they were mainly asked to tick the boxes.

This anti-democratic tendency, a recipe for poor government, was part of the reason why MPs were willing to vote Rudd out; but I didn’t realise until after the ‘coup’ that it was Gillard, as part of the ‘gang of four’, who had urged that controversial emissions trading legislation be deferred until 2013 – a decision identified with Rudd at the time, and that had signficantly contributed to his poor showing in the opinion polls.

Perhaps the most shocking development since Gillard’s win has been her willingness to use the issue of asylum seekers as a political football. This was evident in the speech she gave on the issue on 6 July, when she signalled the possibility of a regional processing centre for refugees to be established in Timor L’este (using, incidentally, the inappropriate title ‘East Timor’).

But it’s become even more blatant now the election’s been called. In fact, ‘stronger borders’ is one of the key catchphrases on the ALP’s first television election advertisement featuring Gillard. Even before her asylum seekers speech, she was talking about ‘good migrants’ like her parents, with the strong suggestion that there was another sort of migrant that people were right to abhor.

This is simply astounding. I won’t go through the history of the issue, but since the Tampa incident in 2001, which saw the introduction of the notorious Pacific Solution whereby asylum seekers were removed to the island of Nauru for their claims to be processed, these vulnerable people have suffered to keep Australia’s politicians in power. And now the ALP, already accused of trying to please everybody on the issue, are indulging in shameless dog whistling, much more so than they did under Rudd.

Some progressives claimed that Gillard’s asylum seekers speech was nuanced and not as politically insidious as the selective media quoting would have it appear. It’s true that in some ways Gillard was trying to have it both ways – stating that those wanting greater border protection should not be labelled racist, any more than those concerned about children in detention should be labelled bleeding hearts. Responding to earlier criticism by refugee advocate and respected lawyer Julian Burnside, QC, she said:

… in the context of our migration program, the number of asylum seekers arriving by boat to Australia is very, very minor.

It is less than 1.5 per cent of permanent migrants each year; and indeed it would take about 20 years to fill the MCG with asylum seekers at present rates of arrival. This is a point well made.

On the second point [Burnside] is very, very wrong. It is wrong to label people who have concerns about unauthorised arrivals as ‘rednecks’.

Of course, there are racists in every country but expressing a desire for a clear and firm policy to deal with a very difficult problem does not make you a racist.

Elsewhere in the speech she affirms as an organising principle of asylum seeker policy ‘That people like my own parents who have worked hard all their lives can’t abide the idea that others might get an inside track to special privileges’.

This rhetoric is erroneous. It strongly suggests that the opinions of those fearful of the boats are every bit as well-informed and worthwhile as those who are steeped in the issue and have serious legal and moral concerns about government actions. And it completely ignores the fact that the role of a leader is to educate and lead rather than to pander to the whims of the least educated and politically aware; and to set an example and produce a vision that can make the nation more cohesive, not less.

Those criticising Gillard for aiming her narrow policies straight at the seats most under threat in Sydney’s west are fully justified. She should be explaining to the electorate the push factors that bring the boats here, and eliciting Australia’s collective compassion – the kind that erupted so forcefully after the January 2009 Victorian bushfires.

More generally, Gillard is encouraging voters to see this election as being all about themselves and their needs, rather than promising to look after Australia’s most disadvantaged, surely one of the major remits of any labour party worthy of the moniker? She has said that voters will choose the policies most useful to them and their families, encouraging the continuation of the solipsism that thrived under Howard.

Gillard has great charm and verve, and, it’s indisputable that since Labor’s coming to power in 2007 the conviction, authority and intelligence she has managed to project in speeches and interviews has only increased, despite the rubbish that so often spouts from her mouth.

But let’s be clear: there was nothing progressive about Rudd’s Labor party, and there’s nothing progressive about Gillard’s. Below are just a few examples of straightforward social justice actions Rudd and now Gillard have failed to take, apart from not allowing gay marriage. Not all of these would have involved the magic millions or billions that both these politicians love to announce; but they would have produced greater social justice for Australia’s most needy as well as improving environmental outcomes.

* No carbon tax

* No mandatory staff–resident ratios in aged care homes (such ratios exist in hospitals and child care centres), leading to a shocking lack of skilled nursing care and other staff for frail, ill aged people. This is despite a 2009 Four Corners report in which the Minister for Ageing, Justine Elliot, promised that the government would consider the issue as part of its review of aged care funding. In May this year the NSW Nursing Association had to call for such mandatory ratios – all the government had offered in the 2010 budget was ‘$500,000 to conduct a research study on staffing levels, skills mix and resident care needs in Australian residential aged care facilities’.

* No rescinding of the regressive changes to education funding made by Howard. These gave more money to wealthy private schools at the expense of government schools.

* No real increase to unemployment benefit (Newstart allowance), which has long given up even attempting to adequately cover the excessive costs of market rents. Because increases are measured against inflation and not male wages as the pension is, the dole will continue to decrease in value against the pension. The May 2010 budget refused a request by the Australian Council of Social Service for an increase of $42 a week for the Newstart allowance; this request was ignored. But in refusing the increase the government was also ignoring its own Henry report on taxation, which stated that ‘a single person relying on an unemployment allowance is well below the OECD benchmark for poverty’.

* No attempt to ditch the 30 per cent government rebate on private health care. Instead the government tried to make the 30 per cent rebate means tested (the rebate results in all taxpayers subsidising, for example, dental care for the wealthier while there is no national dental scheme for the poor, whether or not they pay tax. The bid to means test the rebate failed anyway because of a hostile Senate, partly the result of a preferences deal Labor had done with the conservative Family First).

* No change to the shocking lack of residential and respite places as well as educational services for children with severe disabilities.

* No change to outrageous tax breaks for property owners, with the result that tax-paying renters subsidise the wealthy. Negative gearing, which enables property investors to claim losses on their investments as a tax deduction, has encouraged property investment, thus helping to lift the cost of housing out of the reach of first home buyers. Home owners who live in their homes are exempt from capital gains tax.

* Not withdrawing our troops from Afghanistan. Despite the bravery and skill of our troops, Australia’s involvement in this war serves the sole purpose of maintaining the relationship with the US, which is supporting the very same corrupt, greedy warlords whose mass murdering, raping and pillaging contributed to the rise of the Taliban.

Despite this dereliction of duty, the government boasts about the tax cuts it has managed to budget for, while promising to bring the budget back into surplus within three years – on the backs of Australia’s most needy and marginalised, truly the forgotten ones in this election.

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‘Richmond’s not in his room!’ – Why I love the IT Crowd

I have spent too many hours of my life splayed out on the loungeroom floor watching reruns of a sitcom that has grabbed and colonised my heart, soul and mind. It’s called The IT Crowd and its controlled ridiculousness is keeping me semi-sane during what is proving to be a rather grim winter. This British comedy is written by the unfairly talented Graham Linehan, cowriter of Black Books.

Moss, Roy and Jen constitute the IT department of the chaotic but phenomenally successful Reynholm industries (that the company’s raison d’etre is never specified is a running joke of the show; one fan has set up a spoof company website). Stuck in the basement of the Reynholm tower, they’re cut off from the other workers in their airy offices who enjoy stunning views of London.

Moss and Roy are hapless nerds while Jen, their ‘relationship manager’, sees herself as their bridge to the normal world but too often is marginalised herself by association.

Then one day Jen spies a red door in the basement, and, as in Bluebeard’s castle, is only more determined to discover what’s behind it when Roy and Moss warn her that all hell will break lose if she does. After the initial terror of encountering Richmond, an unearthly Goth, she settles down for a chat with this sweet-tempered former high-flyer who has been banished to the server room because of his infatuation with the extreme metal band Cradle of Filth.

‘Richmond’s out of his room, he’s not in his room, he’s supposed to be in his room, why isn’t he in his room?’ laments Moss, his love of routine and predictability thwarted, the British pronunciation of ‘room’, less drawn out and therefore more formal sounding than the Australian version, adding weight to his objection.

Moss, despite Graham Linehan’s denials, is clearly meant to be an Aspergers person. Not only does he thrive on routine but he’s technically proficient to the point of genius, socially clumsy, and entirely oblivious to nuance and Machiavellian craftiness; he even walks and holds his head in a way that is awkwardly wooden.

However, given that Moss’s most salient and attractive quality is his childlike need for certainty, it’s highly unlikely that the character represents an accurate portrayal of an Aspergers person. Yet it’s his childlike aspects that contribute most to his appeal, and perhaps they defuse the kind of criticism you might expect such a portrayal to evoke in the Aspergers community – I couldn’t find any criticisms of the character on the web, although that doesn’t mean they’re not out there.

Another reason for the seeming lack of criticism could be that while we often laugh at Moss’s unintentional funniness, we also chortle at his deliberate jokes, delivered in a self-consciously signature style that fans find adorable.

And generally speaking, Moss suffers far less than the other characters; he’s naturally cheerful, wins out against bullies (as in the first episode in the third series) and is canny enough to take advantage of amorous and financial opportunities (returning the attentions of a glamorous female psychiatrist in the first series; unintentionally stealing money from thieves in the third).

Like many women and probably men, I’m in love with Moss. This is partly because the actor who plays him, Richard Ayoade, is a very attractive man, with large brown eyes, a snub nose, finely sculpted cheekbones and a cherubic mouth; because Moss’s social incapacities make him so vulnerable that he arouses maternal instincts; because his character, and the actor who plays him, are both extremely funny (and sometimes their personalities seem to blend together, as if Ayoade and Moss were in league with each other); and because the childlike aspects of his nature promise a temporary, atavistic return to childhood.

Yet I couldn’t find much on the web about Ayoade himself, except for a frustratingly short beginning of an interview that seemed to suggest that he himself might suffer from Aspergers (he mentions a difficulty in maintaining eye contact with the interviewer while speaking) but in fact appears to show him in a very understated role in a satire.

Ayoade seems to lack his own website, despite what is clearly a huge fan base out there. The Channel 4 website for the show has clips and episodes that are frustratingly off-limits to Australians (I can understand the downloadable episodes being off-limits, but why the clips, including an interview with the actress who plays Jen?).

Despite Moss’s vulnerabilities he succeeds in life (if not romantically), partly because Jen and Roy both protect him from himself; he needs them to smooth the social waters, just as his esoteric knowledge is vital to the company but also occasionally useful to Jen and Roy.

Soon after Jen joins the IT department Roy and Moss are about to complain to the CEO, Denholm Reynholm, that Jen has no understanding of IT and they don’t want her as their manager. But as the three sit opposite Denholm while he barks to his inferiors on the phone, his conversation makes clear that he will ruthlessly sack any team who can’t ‘work as a team’ (gloriously sending up company-speak).

Knowing that all three of them will be sacked if the complaint goes ahead, Roy and Jen have to drag Moss away, assuring Denholm they had only come to the office to install voice activation on his computer. Moss can’t understand why he and Roy aren’t going through with the complaint; he just hasn’t been able to transfer the meaning of Reynholm’s phone conversation to his own situation. But later, in the second series, Moss demonstrates the usefulness of his peculiar genius; he’s able to tell by smelling it that the creepy new boss of Reynholm Industries, Douglas Reynholm (Denholm's son), has put Rohypnol in Jen’s tea.

Prisoners of gender

Aspergers is associated with maleness, but Moss isn’t the only one burdened because he’s male; all three main characters are ‘prisoners of gender’. They are extreme in their habitation of gender roles and they all suffer for it.

Roy is a standard nerd who tries hard to succeed romantically (a cause for much of the comedy) but always fails. The harder he tries the more ludicrous he appears; in one episode in the first series, with carefully pomaded hair and an oversized retro jacket, he attempts to proposition a girl while oblivious to the fact that a dollop of shit or chocolate (it’s deliberately never made quite clear which) is sitting in the centre of his forehead.

Jen is female in a way that is ludicrously stereotypical. When suffering from the monthly arrival of ‘Aunt Irma’ the cure lies in a girls’ night in, with Roy and Moss playing at being her faux girlfriends, all three dressed in terry towelling robes and watching predictable old chick flicks like Beaches and Steel Magnolias.

This should be offensive but largely isn’t because Jen’s workmates are equally stuck in their extreme masculinity. In fact, there’s only one moment when I was truly offended by the show’s portrayal of her.

It’s in the episode in which Jen becomes obsessed with a pair of red high-heeled shoes that are three sizes too small for her. While in this state of obsession she becomes incoherent. When asked for an idea about combating stress by the hyperactive Denholm, she responds ‘What? Shoes …’. But, back in the basement, while she’s mumbling about the shoes, when Roy calls her a ‘crazy bitch’ in an affectionate, condescending tone as he walks her into her office, it’s too much for this feminist to stomach. And the stereotype of women being obsessed with shoes is overwrought.

Return to childhood

Yet the whole show is overwrought, regularly venturing into surreal territory, making it difficult to be offended by the stereotyping. It’s basically a child’s world where the everyday and the magical are seamless parts of a whole, and where reality is often viewed as a series of extremes.

It’s a world of play, the unknown and the novel, girded by the iron certainties that children cling to because they are still so ignorant of its machinations, but also bounded by the terror that lurks when Roy and Moss enter social situations they aren’t equipped to deal with, and when Jen enters emotional situations in relationships that always seem to end badly.

This is why Moss is so vital to the show and why he is in some ways its central character; he’s a child who hasn’t grown up. His literal view of the world, his inability to understand nuance and sarcasm, in some ways reflect the child’s brain. Watching the show is an invitation to re-enter childhood.

And this is why Richmond is also an attractive character. Gentle and softly spoken, if a trifle melancholy, he adds to the fantastical nature of the show. Yet there is something very traditionally British about him; the way he speaks to Jen at his first appearance, not to mention his 19th-century costuming, has something of the period hero, as if Mr Rochester had blended with Bertha Mason to create not the madwoman in the attic but the sane gentleman in the basement; even his name has a 19th-century flavour.

As a social phobe I can’t help identifying with Richmond, stuck in the IT server room, not even the basement proper but a room off it, a secret room with a forbidding red door. Once out of his room, Richmond is ‘allowed’ to flutter freely around the basement in the first and second series but he never makes it back upstairs, although in the first series Jen tries valiantly to persuade Denholm to have him back.

A continuing obsession

I regret that this little world that Graham Linehan has created lives only in his head and those of his fans. I can’t bear that these characters do not actually exist, especially Moss and Richmond, although on some level I believe that they do. I'm hungry for information about the actors who portray them because that is a way of refusing to believe they aren’t real; the last thing I want is to see them in other shows playing different characters.

And for good or ill, I’ve watched each episode of the first and second series so many times on DVD that I now have the funniest sections on standby in my head; I’m liable to start smiling to myself for no reason as I ‘play’ one back, which has both advantages and disadvantages. (The third series has aired on the ABC and Australian fans now await the fourth, which is currently being aired in Britain on Channel 4.)

I don't have the DVD of the third series, but recently I realised I could watch repeats of whole episodes on Youtube. Yet watching the show on my PC doesn’t do it for me at all; it’s not just the poor quality of the footage but the fact that I don’t associate sitting at my desk with leisure. I love the whole DVD experience of sinking against cushions and losing myself in three indulgent hours of comedy paradise.

However, having now seen the first and second series in full, I think the content of the third series, which I originally watched on telly, isn’t quite as good, and it’s not just the Youtube factor that’s making me feel that way. The show’s becoming more like Seinfeld by the minute; Seinfeld is not surprisingly one of Linehan’s inspirations, and worth imitating, but the particular magic of character-based dialogue needs to be preserved.

Just one tiny example: when Jen and Richmond have their first conversation, Richmond says of Roy and Moss ‘I don’t know their names’. In the context this line is simply brilliant, illustrating how cut off Richmond is from the world and yet how self-chosen is his exile; Roy and Moss are no more than functionaries who form part of the background of the catastrophe he finds himself in. Why this is so funny is difficult to pin down, but it has a lot to do with the rarefied worldview of this underrated and now sadly lost character – somewhere between the second and third series he ‘got scurvy’ and was never seen again.

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Reluctant lover of Big Love

I wrote this blog entry while the third series of Big Love was still playing in Australia, and then got caught up with writing about diet and food intolerance, so it’s a bit out of date. But I couldn’t stand to hang onto for another year so have decided to give it an airing now.

I have a big but in some ways reluctant love for the HBO television series Big Love.

This long-running drama series centres on polygamist Bill Henrickson and his three wives, Barb, Nicki and Margene. The family live in three neighbouring houses in a suburb in Salt Lake City, Utah, with their numerous offspring.

Bill and his wives are renegade fundamentalist Mormons who have adopted polygamy because they believe that producing as many children as possible will increase their favour with their ‘heavenly father’ in the afterlife.

With a fifth series in the pipeline and seemingly as popular as ever, the show details the never-ending dramas as Bill tries to financially care for his large family while hiding his polygamy from the world. There are also the tensions cooked up at Juniper Creek, the rural compound housing an oppressive Mormon sect that Bill and Nicki grew up in and are still entangled with. Dynamics among the three wives, the criminality of Roman, the patriarch of Juniper Creek, and the endless obstacles to Bill’s business ambitions are complicating factors.

I watch the show for the drama, but find myself wanting the family to ‘make it’ and stay together because they obviously gain strength from the deep bonds they’ve developed (in plural marriages, it seems, the women are married to each other as well, but as sisters rather than lovers, which of course begs its own questions).

The show is honest in its portrayal of human dilemmas, including sexual dilemmas, while also being, in its own way, conservative. Each of the personal conflicts ultimately gets resolved, although they may continue for several episodes and even from one series to the next (although I can only speak for what I’ve seen so far, and I’ve just reached the end of the third series, whereas the fourth has recently been screened in the US, and seems to herald some changes). But the resolution always occurs because the character concerned decides for themselves that they are going to ‘behave’. They make a choice based on their feelings of love and of belonging to the family group.

And that’s why the show is ultimately a fantasy – the characters must always make this conservative decision for the series to continue. In real life such intelligent, complex characters might well end up separating and living their lives on new and broader canvases. Or, as many women in polygamous marriages must do, they might simply continue with the status quo even if they were basically unhappy. The relationship conflicts in Big Love give a nod to realism (even if the interiors are usually preternaturally clean and ordered, and even if Margene looks impossibly fresh-faced despite having three toddlers to look after) but the never-endingly peaceable resolutions don’t (again, this may have changed in the fourth series).

Not only that, but the show goes to great pains to portray Bill’s plural marriage as one that is relatively enlightened. We know that not all polygamous marriages are as equitable as Bill’s, and deeply inequitable and often criminally abusive marriages take place on the Juniper Creek compound, sometimes between elderly men and teenage girls. Some of the wives on the compound are portrayed as living restricted lives of deep unhappiness.

In contrast, the individuals in Bill’s plural marriage are always free to leave if they choose – the only catch is that staying involves accepting the ‘principle’, which means having as many children as possible. That’s part of the show’s cleverness – the members of this marriage are portrayed as ordinary people in a very challenging situation. This impression is reinforced by the back story, in which Bill and Barb, the first wife, originally had a conventional marriage before deciding to embark on polygamy in order to live the principle and keep reproducing. Also, it’s constantly emphasised that Bill is in love with each of his three wives.

The makers of this series have been ludicrously clever in their ability to pitch it to a range of audiences. Mormons are a tiny minority in the USA, making up only 1.7 per cent of the total population, and probably mostly object to the show; but Big Love is likely to appeal to a wide swathe of non-Mormons who are religious in some way. According to Wikipedia, in 2008, 76 per cent of Americans identified as Christian; Protestants made up 51.6 per cent of the population, that is, they were a majority of the country’s population. Meanwhile, 3.9 per cent were part of non-Christian religious communities; this figure included Muslims and Jews.

The members of Bill’s marriage make huge sacrifices to maintain their complex arrangement. I’d imagine that many conservative Christians, and perhaps even Muslims and Orthodox Jews, might enjoy watching the show to receive affirmation for the sacrifices they themselves make for their religion, such as abstaining from alcohol, not using contraception, or marrying young to avoid having sex before marriage.

But the show’s target market is wider than that. Women who watch this show may think ‘There but for the grace of God go I’. But some men may watch it because they like the fantasy of having three wives. That relates to what I think could be another reason for the show’s attractiveness. Given the in-between status of this family, sitting somewhere between the oppressive world of Juniper Creek and the uncomprehending secular world from which they must hide their illegal arrangement, their situation has glaring similarities with much more progressive forms of polyamory. Surely this would be part of the subliminal appeal of the series?

Genuine polyamory has to hide in the USA just as polygamy does. An interesting documentary shown on Australian television last year featured an arrangement between a man and two women living together, all of whom were in love with each other – in other words, there were three sexual relationships going on. One of the women was a lawyer and she had to hide the nature of her relationship in her workplace, just as do the characters in Big Love.

But the interdependence that characterises the adult family members (when they’re not warring with each other) also reminds me of the first share house I lived in, a communal arrangement in which we ate and shopped together, and had a food kitty and a cleaning roster.

Communal share houses can have polyamorous undertones (mine certainly did) but don’t rely on polyamory as a structure for the relationships of the members. They offer a different version of adulthood from the one that involves breaking away from one’s family of origin by living in an adult sexual relationship. Share houses allow a form of adult cooperation that helps young people to separate from the family, but also enables a great sense of autonomy and freedom for those not yet ready to form lasting ties (of course, share houses may also involve established couples, and the arrangement may give rise to new relationships). And yes, share houses are, like polyamory, difficult to get right.

I think there’s something similar between this kind of arrangement and the way the family in Big Love are housed: the family live in three adjoining houses but are always in and out of each other’s homes.

The share house model is very much evident in the way the show is marketed. The youngest wife, Margene, has a blog in which she talks frankly (ie bitches) about the goings-on in the family. (The comments from viewers that appear on this blog suggest that some at least have trouble distinguishing fiction from real life).

These echoes of the share house no doubt help to explain why the show also appeals to a lefty feminist like me. But I think it may be the very lack of political correctness that is the clincher. I enjoy the drama of the continuing conflicts, but can ultimately blame the Mormon lifestyle for causing the conflicts in the first place, thereby avoiding the need to feel guilty about the show’s political unsoundness. I get to have my self-righteous cake and eat it too.

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The mysterious life of the psyche: on watching United States of Tara

I hope this blog doesn’t turn into a cut-price television review column, but I’ve been watching the new comedy drama series United States of Tara and had some thoughts about it I just had to share. That Tony Collette recently won an Emmy for her knock-’em-down performance in the series only adds to my need to comment on this innovative show.

For those who don’t watch it, United States of Tara is a US series about a woman and her family struggling to cope with her mental illness – dissociative identity disorder (DID). It’s currently screening on the ABC in Melbourne.

Apart from ‘herself’, Tara’s psyche contains four distinct characters or ‘alters’, one of whom she may temporarily transform into at any time. Each dresses, speaks and acts in their own unique way but most are aware that they’re inhabiting Tara’s body; meanwhile she herself disappears, mentally speaking. Any one of them is most likely to appear when Tara is under stress, and while they are incredibly disruptive, their behaviour indirectly expresses Tara’s own feelings, conflicts and motivations.

Although the show’s makers consulted extensively with DID experts and patients, it does not pretend to be an accurate portrayal of the disorder. The workings of the disease can be more subtle than the obvious ‘switches’ made by Tara’s psyche. And Collette’s depiction of the multiple personalities is highly theatrical; in contrast, alters, apparently, are created by the sufferer as a kind of emotional shield, so tend not to draw attention to themselves.

As well, Tara's alters are always perfectly reflected in her appearance, with meticulously appropriate costumes, props and hairdos, to an extent that it would be impossible for any individual with a complex mental illness to achieve. For example, where did the latest alter, Gimme, who appears to be all Freudian id, get the bright red plastic poncho?

However, that’s all by the by. As even the mental health experts agree, it’s meant to be entertainment.

The reason that I find the show compelling is that every Wednesday night at 9.30 pm I see a woman’s dodgy unconscious causing mayhem in her own life and those of her loved ones. And I see a human being and her family doing their best to cope with the after-effects.

Tara is never portrayed as stupid, weak or childish. She’s a fully fledged person with a career (she paints indoor murals) a family, and the usual concerns of an adult. Her mind, or aspects of it, causes her and her family great difficulties but she is never blamed for them in a lasting sense (her children sometimes blame her momentarily, and her needy sister, Charmaine, sometimes has to be reminded that she is not simply seeking attention).

The subtext seems to be that the kids – Marshall, a sweet, sensitive 14-year-old and Kate, a promiscuous, prematurely tough 15-year-old – will sometimes act out and indeed may suffer psychologically, but in the end have the maturity to keep loving their mother despite her sabotaging alter egos. And Tara’s cute, beefy husband, Max, has endless buckets of concern and love to offer her.

It’s a pretty good model for viewing mental illness in our society. The sufferer is not morally weak for succumbing to illness, just unlucky. Family members are affected by the illness but in the end rally around and some semblance of order is maintained.

But the series is even a bit more sophisticated than this in its portrayal of mental illness.

It’s very common these days to portray psyche disorders as being purely biochemical in nature, with little if any basis in past experiences. There are many instances where this may be the case, particularly when it comes to illnesses such as schizophrenia and bipolar. But in many other cases, I believe that mental illness has its own logic and is caused by predisposing factors interacting with particular life experiences.

The form that the illness or disorder takes may be determined by the fact that it performs a particular function for the sufferer (for example, enabling psychic survival), rather than being an accident. But the illness is not merely a product of the past – it interacts with the sufferer’s current circumstances as an out-of-date coping mechanism that takes on a life of its own.

The accident, if you like, lies in being predisposed to this form of coping, or even highly sensitive, and having the particular life experiences that led to the original need for such a mechanism. Again, the victim is not to blame. (I’ll reiterate that I don’t think all mental illness has this meaning and function; I’m just worried that all disorders now seem to be portrayed, in the media at least, as being due solely to biochemistry).

Thus, Tara’s disorder is a result of trauma she experienced at boarding school (which incidentally neatly lets her parents off the hook!). Presumably she had a predisposition to the kind of disassociation of which the disorder is an extreme example, but her recourse to alternative personalities is an attempt to deny as well as manage this past trauma.

Yet Tara’s illness also has meaning in the present as a way of dealing with the various difficulties she encounters as an artist, a wife and a parent. If she’s feeling under stress in her parental or domestic role, Alice, the perfect 1950s housewife, rocks up to restore domestic harmony. If her daughter’s acting up, Tara turns into T, the pot-smoking teenage nightmare, forcing her daughter to assume the role of carer. And if her relationship with her husband gets too complex or her children need defending from predators, Buck, the boozy, gun-loving Vietnam vet, makes an appearance.

Again, this doesn’t mean that the sufferer of mental illness is weak or bad. Instead, like all of us, they have an unconscious mind with its own agenda, one that may be contrary to that of the ego.

There are things I don’t like about the show, and my criticisms about it risk sounding hopelessly old-fashioned. But I think what I’m actually opposed to is a kind of solipsism in the characters that poses as sophistication. In trying desperately to be cool, the show wants the characters to be at various times self-obsessed, socially inappropriate, rude and offhand.

There’s heaps of swearing, for example. Don't get me wrong, I’m happy with strategic uses of ‘fuck’ and other expletives. But for me they lose their potency if used too often. I also don't like the disengaged way Charmaine and Kate talk about sex. In the presence of Marshall, a shy gay kid who at this stage is yet to have his first kiss, Kate says of him that ‘he’s chasing cock’, and neither Tara nor Max reacts negatively. The character of Charmaine is particularly narcissistic in the face of her sister's illness, in a way that the show sometimes seems all too happy to endorse (at one point she co-opts a family gathering by pulling her shirt open and displaying the results of a botched boob job).

I know that the show is trying to demonstrate that underneath all this ‘attitude’ the characters are struggling, that they act out in order to cope. It’s also trying to be naturalistic and to avoid being overly sentimental in its portrayal of modern life. And it’s understandably opposing itself to the pious, idealised image of family life peddled by America’s religious right. It must be acknowledged, too, that Charmaine's inability to comprehend that Tara is ill is a common reaction of siblings to mental illness.

But what's actually being portrayed here is the way that pornography and digitisation have combined to produce a new, sexualised uber-consumer, with Kate and Charmaine its most obvious avatars.

This new subject is not confined to the US -- the UK hit movie Love, Actually also portrayed elements of it. But I think in United States of Tara it's combined with a US tradition of straight talking and individualism in an unfortunate way, so that the characters are sometimes applauded for verbally abusing each other (this occurs to a much worse degree in the comedy film Knocked Up -- I don't for a minute believe it comprises an accurate portrayal of Americans, which makes it all the more disturbing). It's a shame, because at times the show is in danger of making some of the characters so unlikeable that I stop sympathising with them.

Still, I’ll definitely be watching United States of Tara for the rest of the series, and hoping the ABC buys the second series. (The story line is continuous, too, which keeps up the suspense). In so many ways it’s infinitely more enlightened than a thousand silly sit coms.

(Oh dear -- I've just realised that although I'm more or less the 'disordered' one in my family, I'm much more like the attention-seeking Charmaine than Tara -- eek! Perhaps that's why I dislike the former so much.)

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‘What light through yonder window breaks?’ On getting up and going to bed early

I’m a naughty stubborn contrarian from way back. It took a good fifteen years for me to get off caffeine even though it was giving me panic attacks and shocking blood sugar problems. Going against the demands and needs of my body has come ‘naturally’ to me for years, but I’ve tried hard to change and to start listening to myself.

For the last five years I’ve been living in a noise-afflicted house that has kept me in a constant state of sleep deprivation (note the victim mentality evident in the words ‘kept me’). I’ve tried every sort of ear plug on the market and sometimes even wear clunky headphones in bed if things get really bad.

The night noises that have assailed me at various times include a distressed dog who yelps frantically whenever its owner leaves it alone in the house (steps have been taken and now the yelps are confined to working hours), trams that whine and clatter full pelt down the hill until midnight and beyond, weekend hoons blasting up and down the busy street I live on, a constant low-frequency hum whose source I’ve never been able to identify, and European washing machines reaching an orgasmic frenzy of spinning before finally subsiding to an exhausted clunk.

Rather than getting used to these noises, in some ways I’ve grown more sensitive to them (the exception is routine traffic noise: at the level I can hear it with ear plugs on, it’s almost soothing).

Until recently, the neighbours with the dog ran their washing machine, dryers and so on up until 11-11.30 pm, and crashed and banged as they were getting ready for bed around that time. It got to the point where going to bed after them was preferable to lying in the dark awake and bathed in hot fury. But they’ve quietened down lately (the note I dropped into the letterbox about the dog – not the first time I’d complained – also contained a polite request to run appliances only between the hours of 10 am and 10 pm, and it seems to have worked!).

So finally, finally, I am obeying the rhythms of my body and going to bed when it wants me to, namely, before 10.45 pm (actually I think it wants me in bed by 9.30, but that’s a bit extreme).

My body clock is a ruthless disciplinarian who takes no prisoners when it comes to sleeping patterns. When I was going to bed between 11.30 and midnight, it would still wake me up at about 6, often earlier. But this was during the winter months. Now that the earth’s drawing closer to the sun, my sensitive biorhythms alert my hypothalamus to start rousing me at about 3 or 3.30 am, and I routinely wake up more or less fully at about 4.30 am. I’m alert, with cortisol coursing through my body, but also tired because I haven’t had enough sleep. I lie there moving in and out of a light, inadequate doze until about 7 am.

But I’m not really complaining. It’s impossible to explain how right it feels to be going to bed a bit earlier, even if I’m still sleep deprived. I have more energy, more life force. I’m more in tune with myself. I even notice the extra energy when I’m trotting off to bed. Even at the end of a busy day, I’m not dragging myself around exhaustedly the way I used to.

I’m working a bit more at the moment and struggling to get the practical things done that I’m so neurotic about. Last Saturday I got up early so as to be able to wash my car before the weekend queue had set in at the local car wash. By the time I got there it was already 8.45 am, but I’d never been at the car wash that early before, and I enjoyed the pale yellow sun glinting on the lights and the stainless steel as I scrubbed. The freshness of early morning was still in the air, the traffic was lighter, the air cleaner and cooler. It felt so right to be there at that time.

So now, with a bit less darkness available every night, I have to work up to going to bed earlier still. Bed time has been, since my transformation, anywhere between 10.30 pm and 10.45 pm. But it has to become even earlier still if I’m to beat the sun. I’m now aiming for 10 pm.

The sticking point is my beloved tele watching. To wind down at night, I like to have time enough to read but also time to watch a bit of tiv. It’s my link to the wider world, and it takes me out of my own head. It’s my treat at the end of a long day at the computer. I wouldn’t want to give it up completely, even if I could. But I’m going to have to cut down, and that’s a discipline I’ll struggle with.

Eating and dishes will also have to be disposed of earlier – no more Phillip Adams on the radio as my hands paddle around in soapy hot water.

It’s going to be tough but it will add a whole new dimension to my life. With more sleep I’ll be stronger and more present, there’ll be more of me. And the mornings will be mine, for writing, reading and working. Evenings will be shorter, but I’ll stop work earlier to wind down. And at night, when I slide into the waiting sheets, sleep, precious sleep, will claim me.

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There’s something about Cate

‘Our Cate’, as the Australian media love to call Cate Blanchett, has well and truly made it. She’s been in countless successful films, and is regularly on the red carpet at opening nights. But she’s one of the few stars who will always be first and foremost seen as a practitioner of the actor’s craft rather than an empty-headed celebrity. This blog entry is a little treatise of admiration for her – well, sort of – and a meditation on acting styles.

The other night I watched a great documentary on ABC 1, In the Company of Actors, that featured Blanchett. It’s a fly-on-the-wall study of the process of taking a successful Australian production – the Sydney Theatre Company’s Hedda Gabler – to New York.

The original season, directed by Robyn Nevin, was performed in 2004. It starred Cate Blanchett as Hedda, who agreed to the project because it was to be based on an adaptation of the original Ibsen play written by her husband, Andrew Upton. The cast would include actors of the calibre of Hugo Weaving, Aden Young and Justine Clarke.

We watch the cast rehearsing the play in Sydney, in a huge high-ceilinged studio, where they’re dressed casually and horseplay around in between finetuning scenes. Next thing they’re in New York, working out how to buy subway tickets, carrying out a technical rehearsal, experiencing their first taste of New York snow, and taking part in a Q and A with local high school students.

Despite the stellar cast, it’s Cate Blanchett who stands out in the doco, even in the rehearsal room. Cate can’t help but always be acting. In this doco, sometimes I swear she responds to the camera (despite herself, I reckon) and plays the part of an actress rehearsing a role. Not that she’s not actually rehearsing the role as well, of course.

Which leads me to the thesis of this blog entry. Forget the bad actors, I’m not talking about them, the ones who are stars first and actors second. (I’m also talking about film rather than the stage, as the latter necessarily involves exaggeration of movements, voice projection and so on.) When it comes to good film actors, I think there are two kinds – those who overtly dramatise the role, perhaps are in danger of overdramatising it, and those who disappear into it. Blanchett is definitely in the former category.

In the doco, the camera takes advantage of this quality in Blanchett. We see her dressed for her role as Hedda Gabler, hair up in a severe bun and wearing a very fitted Edwardian gown with a high collar, set to make her first entrance on the first night in New York. (We find out later that the audience has included luminaries such as Jane Fonda and Meryl Streep.) In the moments before she goes on stage she stares nervously around, breathes, drinks some water, waits. The camera at this point shows a quick series of stills of her performing these actions, rather than obvious motion. Blanchett’s whole persona lends itself to this beautifully. Again, she’s unconsciously acting being an actress waiting to go on stage.

You can’t fake this kind of, well, fakery. It has to be there, in the litheness of your movements as well as your intelligence, and the way that the two work together. That’s why Nicole Kidman and Gwyneth Paltrow will never be great actresses – they’re reasonably intelligent but they can’t communicate their characters through their bodies that effectively. When Kidman tries too hard to do this, she’s ludicrous. Blanchett's lanky body, in contrast, drips affect, no matter what she's doing.

This category of actors show off their craft – you know they’re acting, you can see it, but does that matter if the acting’s good? I don’t think it does, mostly, in the same way that you might be able to see the machinations of a favourite writer but still love their work.

The other classic example of this style is, of course, Meryl Streep. Think of the mannerisms she employed in Sophie’s Choice, or the exaggerated accent in Evil Angels. Streep is always on show, always being seen, yet she’s mesmerising. Recently I watched her being interviewed by British talk show host Jonathan Ross about her role in Mumma Mia. She draped herself on the couch and smiled just a little too magnanimously, and she was stately, dignified and actorly. But she was also funny, ironic, willing to laugh at herself.

Emma Thompson’s another obvious example of this category – her style was just perfect for a classic melodrama like The Remains of the Day.

The danger with this kind of actor is that if they are let loose they may ultimately overdramatise, so it’s very important that the director reins them in. One of the few of Blanchett’s performances I didn’t like was her role as Katie Hepburn in The Aviator. A drama queen playing a drama queen? It was way too much (and she was too old for the role, I thought).

I sympathise with this kind of acting because I think I can understand it. It’s fuelled by a particular kind of sensibility that always needs to add another layer to life, to either send it up, ramp up its emotional volume, or both. It’s born of a compulsive need to comment on things, to reflect the world back at itself, through the medium of the body. It runs in my family – my uncle was an amateur thespian and my sister’s a drama teacher, and as a frustrated non-actor I’m always wanting to mimic people and dramatise the stories I tell others. I don’t think it’s necessarily an exclusively feminine tendency, but I think women add to it a further layer of culturally installed self-consciousness that men don’t tend to have.

There is a very different kind of actor that, as I said, inhabits the character so entirely they disappear into it. It’s not a matter of underplaying the role, but of letting one’s ego disappear altogether. Samantha Morton stands out in this regard, for example in her role as Deborah Curtis in the film Control.

At her best Kate Winslet does this too and Aden Young is simply brilliant at it, as he demonstrated in the role of Nat in the recently released film Lucky Country. And let’s not overlook Anthony LaPaglia: it’s been said of him that you can see him thinking. Finally, there’s Russell Crowe, bless his cotton socks, who despite his huge ego and the dramatics he gets up to with telephones in real life, is never afraid to play men of every stripe and character, and to ‘become’ them.

Ultimately neither acting style is innately superior to the other. Both styles remind us that no matter how obscenely rich and ridiculously feted they are, and even how absurd their private lives may become, good actors are first and foremost artists.

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A tale of two talk show hosts

At 11.30 pm or thereabouts I can be found clutching the remote and flicking restlessly between two talk shows: the Late Show with David Letterman and the Ellen DeGeneres Show. Could there be two TV hosts further apart in style and, well, substance? I could write a book on the glaring contrasts between them.

I have to admit at the outset that I have developed a little girly crush on Ellen. This woman is so often surrounded by stereotypically boosted Hollywood beauties and it’s to her credit that she’s never succumbed to the standard look, by getting a nose job for example.

But away from the overly ravishing, she really is quite beautiful herself, with huge, deep-set eyes, a strong chin and a cute, engaging smile. Her cheeks glow with the kind of good health only the super-rich can aspire to: she probably has her own in-house macrobiotic chef and yoga instructor (she’s talked about how practising yoga has helped her slow down, and she's also a vegan).

Despite my crush the show itself doesn’t grab me (except for the beginning bit which I’ll describe shortly). It’s full of inane games played by excitable audience members, and quirky guests who demonstrate their unusual skills. The whole thing is a weird combination of embodied 1980s feminism, quiz show hysteria and celebrity self-congratulation – tempered, thank god, by DeGeneres’s ability to make fun of herself (which the more famous Oprah could benefit from). The whole look of the set is light and minimalist – it’s probably played as a daytime show in the US.

There’s no doubt that in a country crippled by homophobic religiosity, DeGeneres, an out lesbian, is a phenomenon. The audience adores her, and no, they’re not all bulldykes in motorcycle leathers, just average, mostly heterosexual women with mortgages, as well as a few men. I didn’t realise the extent of her popularity until she had Portia De Rossi, her spouse, on the show (not literally of course).

Portia (who was another pleasant surprise: gangly, shy and skittish, and they sang ‘I got you babe’ at the end) complained that on their honeymoon, fans were constantly greeting DeGeneres while having no idea who Portia was.

DeGeneres has graced a bevy of magazine covers, including Ladies Home Journal, People and W (the headline was 'Ellen: America's Unlikely New It Girl) and last year signed a $1 million advertising deal with Cover Girl.

So what’s the secret of Ellen’s popularity (somehow you want to call her Ellen and not DeGeneres)? One reason might be her style. She dresses in a deliberately non-feminine way: not all that butch though, more androgynous, owing much to the Annie Hall phenomenon of the mid-seventies. She favours loose, comfortable-looking but perfectly fitted and styled pants, loosely fitting vests or beautifully cut jackets over unstructured but expensive-looking shirts that she doesn’t tuck in, and sneakers.

I have a probably unprovable hypothesis about the appeal to heterosexual/femme women of this type of androgyny. Almost all girls start out being boyish and then have to give up their tomboy selves to become women. They therefore find androgynous women attractive because they’re reminded of the part of themselves they’ve lost.

But of course the clothing’s only relevant to the extent that it expresses the inner woman. DeGeneres is fun loving, winning, warm, witty, quick. Celebrities, it is said, sell images of themselves. DeGeneres is no exception – her down-to-earth warmth and chumminess are nothing less than a brand – but perhaps that brand happens to be more in sync with the reality than, say, the personality of Oprah Winfrey. She exudes warmth rather than just putting it on. To tell you the truth, I don’t find her screamingly funny, but her wit is quick and sure and she’s constantly coming up with fast one-liners.

Now, I just need to quickly explain what I love about the beginning of the show. It always includes DeGeneres dancing among the audience members. She shimmies up the stairs of the seating area, down one of the rows, and back down to the set, before limbo-ing over (if that’s possible) the coffee table in front of her seat and settling herself down in it.

When she starts dancing the audience gets up and dances in their places and she has a brief boogie with one or two as she goes past (eliciting screams of excitement). I’ve never seen her style of dancing before and it’s hard to explain but it involves swinging each shoulder forward alternately while her hands are on her thighs, and gives new meaning to the word cute. When Portia came on the show she danced in the same way, but more awkwardly: my guess is she’s copied DeGeneres because she found her dance style so endearing.

This little ritual reminds me of nothing so much as the way, at the few women’s collective meetings I attended in the mid-1980s, everyone would get up halfway through the meeting to have a good stretch. It was a reminder not to forget your body, not to be too abstract about life.

Of course the show will not make the world safe for women, or men for that matter. In a recession-ravaged USA, DeGeneres plays Lady Bountiful, changing the world one mortgage-stressed audience member at a time. The presents for winners of the kooky games are extremely generous: gift vouchers worth thousands of dollars, exotic holidays. To that extent DeGeneres is pushing the virtues of materialism and luck as much as any TV show host.

David Letterman couldn’t be more different. Even the set is different: much darker colour scheme, blown-up image of Manhattan at night as a backdrop, and Letterman sitting behind a desk instead of a coffee table.

The first time I tuned in I wondered what people saw in him. He seemed slightly bored with the whole process, as if he’d been doing it too long. Crusty, rude, dry, he doesn’t even pretend to be anything but jaded and cynical. A comedian like DeGeneres, he’s extremely quick with the one-liners.

The weird thing is if you’re desperate enough to watch (and there’s nothing else decent on at that hour besides DeGeneres) you get used to his personality, just as you put up with the unwelcome quirks of colleagues and family members. In fact the dryness and world-weariness are welcome in the often saccharine world of US entertainment. (The word on the street is that what charm there is in Letterman’s persona gets turned off during ad breaks. At least his world-weariness is genuine.)

I freely admit that Letterman’s segments are marginally funnier than DeGeneres’s. A segment that recently got the chop for obvious reasons was ‘Great moments in presidential speeches’; this played clips from old, truly great presidential speeches followed by a humorous gaffe by George Bush. (Letterman’s hatred of Bush is one of his redeeming features.) I also have to admit that sometimes at least, Letterman’s guests are often more high profile than those of DeGeneres and the interviews slightly more in-depth (if that term can ever apply to a talk show interview).

But something I never get used to is the man’s brazen sexism. Last night he made a horrible joke about Pamela Anderson, comparing her to a caravan that sleeps four. But he’s just as awful with his female guests, at least the ones wearing skimpy evening dresses (and that means most of them). He kisses their hands in an icky way and sometimes expresses his desire for them – yuk. During an interview with one lissome guest, I could hardly believe it when he claimed to be getting distracted by her attractive legs.

There’s a double standard here of course. Letterman is allowed to slobber over his guests while DeGeneres must be clean, girl-next-door, strictly chummy. She freely talks about Portia, and the joys of marriage, which is nice. But if she actually expressed lesbian desire, told one of her female guests she had a crush on her, what would the consequences be for her career? (She told Paul Rudd recently she’d had a ‘safe crush’ on him in the past – what could be safer than the crush of a married lesbian on a man)?

But perhaps the point is that we don’t want our female talk show hosts to be like Letterman. The goal of equality is not for women to be as misogynistic and sexist as patriarchal men. We want an alternative. I think DeGeneres knows this. I can’t help thinking that a combination of the two shows, with a slightly edgier DeGeneres asking more incisive questions, ditching the silly games and bringing in some less puerile humour, would be perfect.

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Yet again, the ABC stoops low for high ratings

Sooner or later, defenceless babies were going to be the hapless victims of the television networks’ ruthless opportunism.

It happened in Britain over a year ago and now it’s happening again in Australia, despite the controversy that erupted the first time.

Bringing Up Baby, currently showing in Melbourne, is a reality TV program first screened on the UK’s Channel 4 that has as its basis three of the 20th century's most influential childcare manuals - Dr Truby King's 1913 Feeding and Care of Baby, Dr Benjamin Spock's Baby and Child Care and Jean Liedloff's 1975 The Continuum Concept. Each book presents a particular system for caring for young babies.

The show keeps tabs on six families as they attempt to carry out one of the three methods for the first weeks and months of their babies' lives. They grapple with methods of feeding, where the baby should sleep, how much parental contact it should have and whether it should be allowed to cry without being comforted.

The families are guided by three ‘mentors’ who single-mindedly instruct them on their chosen method. The mentors are intermittently shown arguing among themselves about the advantages and disadvantages of each method.

But one of the show’s ‘experts’, Claire Verity, who advocates the Truby King method, was shown to be a fraud and thoroughly discredited following the series’ UK screening, while qualified experts have decried her methods as life endangering. Parents were so concerned that they set up this blog before the show was even completed. A Facebook group against Verity was also set up and her own promotional website has now been taken down.

Yet the series is currently being screened in Australia, leaving Australian babies vulnerable to parents who might believe that Verity’s method has merit.

Two sane methods, one crazy one
Dr Spock is the closest the series gets to a mainstream view, and the most flexible method of the three. Spock’s advice, popular in the 1960s, could be summarised as ‘almost anything goes’. Parents follow their instincts and do what’s right for them, for example deciding whether to breastfeed or not.

The other method, the Continuum Concept, was developed in the 1970s and is based on the writer’s observation of South American tribes in which mothers carried their babies around with them constantly, resulting in incredibly happy, well-adjusted babies and children.

This method integrates the baby completely into the life of the mother (or any caregiver). She carries it around in a firm sling that allows her to do her household tasks, and breastfeeds on demand. She does not fuss over the baby but responds non-judgementally to its needs. The method is inflexible in that breastfeeding is mandatory. It also mandates that the baby sleep in the same bed as the parents so that it can feed whenever it’s hungry – considered dangerous by some as the baby could smother.

So far so uncontroversial, besides the sleeping arrangements dilemma. But the third method, based on a book by Truby King, is off the planet – a draconian, militaristic view that discourages bonding between parent and child and has been thoroughly scientifically discredited. Blogger Poor Pothecary has charted reactions to this method as practised on the program, including complaints from professional organisations.

Unscientific and dangerous
Truby King’s method, apparently widely followed in the 1950s, entails leaving the baby alone in a pram outside for hours to get ‘fresh air’, minimising cuddling, feeding strictly every four hours and leaving the baby alone to scream its lungs out for hours if need be.

Claire Verity, the ‘mentor’ who pushes this method, earns thousands of pounds for teaching parents to basically abuse their children. The method also includes the baby sleeping in a separate bedroom; the Times reports that the Foundation for the Study of Infant Deaths warned Channel 4 that this advice was putting babies’ lives at risk. In addition, feeding only every four hours can result in failure to thrive and could be life endangering for premature babies.

The method is also unscientific in that leaving babies to cry and providing minimal contact has been proven to leave them open to psychological problems in later life.

Calling herself a ‘maternity nurse’, Verity has since been investigated by Channel 4 and found to have lied about the raft of childcare qualifications she claims to have garnered. The anger that her appearance on the series generated was so great that a large baby show being held in London cancelled her scheduled appearance for her own safety.

What angers me about Bringing Up Baby is that the abuse of helpless children that Verity oversees was planned for the titillation (sorry about the pun) of viewers. Controversy for its own sake is a principle in the ascendant across all media, including respectable broadsheets, which have regular columnists who present unsubstantiated, extreme opinions, including climate change denial, because such extremity sells newspapers.

This attitude, replicated in Bringing Up Baby, reduces the quality of public debate, which requires an understanding of nuance, detail and grey areas if it is to enhance democracy. The extreme method demonstrated on the show is there simply to increase audience numbers, yet has already harmed the babies who had no choice but to be part of the show. In addition, it may have detrimentally affected the parenting styles of those viewers unaware of Verity's lack of authority to provide advice in this area.

But for the ABC to repeat this dangerous deception and expose Australian babies to dangerous parenting practices, particularly as Verity herself has since been exposed, beggars belief.

Verity doesn’t simply disregard parents’ instincts, she positively spits on them. She states with a chilling surety, again and again, that the baby doesn’t need to be cuddled (you may as well substitute ‘loved’ for ‘cuddled’): it needs to be warm, fed, in a routine and left alone. She makes the controversial ‘controlled crying’ method look positively permissive.

This is a woman who has never had children of her own and therefore has no firsthand experience of the strength of parental instincts and the cost, to parent and child, of disregarding them. It is clear to me that she is deeply injured and is taking out her fury at her own neglect on the babies unlucky enough to come under her care. And indeed, she was apparently brought up using Truby King's method.

I feel guilty watching this show because it basically facilitates child abuse for my entertainment. Almost certainly the parents who chose this method wouldn’t have followed it if it wasn’t for the show. All they started with was a general inclination for discipline and order (one at least seems to have chosen it because of the need to go back to work soon after the birth). They clearly had no idea what was in store for them or the poor baby.

I'm about to make a strong complaint to the ABC about screening this show and I'd ask anyone else in Australia reading this to do the same.

Stop press: Not surprisingly, Australian viewers started googling Verity after the first episode of Bringing Up Baby was screened, and the ABC received a flood of complaints. Following these complaints the ABC inserted a long and convoluted disclaimer at the beginning of the program. The issue was aired last night on Media Watch, a show that highlights poor performance in Australian media. According to Media Watch,the disclaimer clearly indicated that the ABC shouldn't have bought the program in the first place.

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Celebrity meltdowns: Joaquin Phoenix on Letterman

Seeing Joaquin Phoenix's strange performance on David Letterman about a week ago set me thinking about the pathologies that fame can give rise to. Phoenix refused to answer most questions beyond 'yes' and 'no' and appeared bemused, befuddled and deeply uncomfortable (but not exactly disorientated, as has been reported). Letterman was fulsome in his praise for Phoenix's performance in the film Two Lovers but stands condemned for his brutal encouragement of the audience's sometimes contemptuous laughter.

Okay, so Phoenix may be on drugs, or having some kind of nervous collapse, or both. If so, like Britney before him, he is forced to undergo his trials in the public eye -- surely a magnification whose implications we can't begin to guess at? There were a couple of things that this strange interview -- one wonders why it wasn't pulled at the last minute -- made me think about.

Nowadays the famous are likely to be those who lack talent but seek fame, the drug we all scream for -- the tired example of Paris Hilton is perhaps the most obvious. It's easy to forget that many, though not all, actors and actresses are, or were before they got onto the Hollywood treadmill, artists first and stars second. Like successful authors who must relentlessly sit on an endless series of panels at writers festivals to spruik their wares, they may well be shy, retiring or simply highly strung.

The self-confessed depressive Guy Pierce and the short-tempered Russell Crowe spring to mind, while Judy Davis in her heyday was famously perfectionistic. The tragedy of Heath Ledger is still fresh in the public's mind, but even at his most stable he appeared uncomfortable, shy and self-deprecating in interviews. It's now a truism that the legendary Monroe dwelt in a bottomless pit of insecurity. Cate Blanchett is perhaps one of the few stars who is allowed to be an artist first and a celebrity second.

Clinical psychologist and television personality Pamela Connolly, who made the psychological effects of fame the subject of her PhD thesis, believes that the famous become traumatised by an idealised version of themselves, constructed by the media, that they cannot possibly live up to. If this is true, such an effect would surely stir up any pre-existing psychiatric condition or issues arising from a difficult or abusive childhood.

Phoenix's odd appearance on Letterman might seem to bear this out: he's an attractive man, but the shaggy dog look does nothing for him. Was he trying to distance himself from an image that had started to tyrannise him?

Perhaps Phoenix could benefit from a session or two with Connolly. She makes full use of her talents in the television series Shrinkwrap, which aired in Melbourne on the ABC during the summer non-ratings period. Each program featured Connolly carrying out a public version of a psychotherapeutic session on a celebrity or public figure, including Sarah Ferguson, Sharon Osbourne and the stubbornly cheerful Stephen Fry.

I adored this show, largely because it was everything Andrew Denton's now-defunct talk show, Enough Rope, was not. The success of Enough Rope relied on Denton's sharp wit and his willingness to exploit his interviewees to get confessions and cheap emotions out of them.

Connolly of course is no stranger to television, veteran as she is of the comedy shows Not the Nine O'Clock News and Saturday Night Live, but her questioning has different motivations. She is genuinely interested in how people tick and how they came to be how they are but she is also on the side of the frightened child within them, sometimes relentlessly but always patiently so. And she knows that this is good television because when you dig down most people's stories are inherently interesting and exciting of our empathy.

This is why everything about this show seems oddly old-fashioned: the low-key lighting, the lack of an audience or special effects. Sometimes while watching I felt I was in a parallel universe in which the capacities of television were used in the ways its makers might have hoped for (and that the ABC is still legally obliged to do): to inform and educate as well as entertain. I kept thinking about those moody BBC Shakespeare productions.

And what's interesting about this is that it takes a while for the subject to submit to Connolly's digging and for their personal story to take off: you need a modicum of patience to get the most out of it. It's both odd and pleasing that the show has been made possible by the evil twins of trash culture and reality television: the show relies and rides on the assumption that we all want to eat celebrities and would-be celebrities alive, but instead it allows us to see them as vulnerable and needy human beings, just like the rest of us. And it also invites those of us who are not psychoanalytically aware to look at our own 'inner child' with a tolerant and even loving eye.

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Zen and the giants of professional tennis

Tennis is the only sport I can bear to watch. It is is above all else about personality and individual combat. It's about two wills and skill sets pitted against each other in a fight to the metaphoric death. Therefore I'm not one of those tennis lovers who will watch any game with glee, valuing only the skill of the strokes. I have to happen upon a player with a personality that interests me and then I'll watch their every match. This year, in my intermittent televisual consumption of the Australian Open in Melbourne, one of those players was Jelena Dokic.

There is of course this young woman's sad history, the horrific parent and the baggage we sense she must carry. But what I love about Dokic is her dagginess. Regardless of success or the lack of it, some players are unerringly graceful, appearing to move effortlessly even as the sweat makes their soaking wet tops stick to their backs. Others move heavily, awkwardly, and seem to be exhausted by every point. Dokic is one of the latter. Even when approaching victory every one of her points is hard won. That she was defeated before the final was somehow fitting but not a denigration of her talents.

I loved her constant frown, the beratings she served herself after every error and the strange way she would appear to unfocus her eyes, staring emptily at the net, for a few moments before her foe was due to serve. She always refocused in plenty of time and I wondered if this momentary turn-off was some kind of mental break she had learned to give herself.

So what do I take from Dokic's stoicism? During the recent heat wave I found myself thinking of her determined frown and the way she wiped her forehead or blew on her fingers after losing a point. The way she just kept going while obviously at near exhaustion (having got into the Open on a wild card, she was not at peak fitness). I found myself comparing the struggle to keep sane, to keep working in the heat, with her doggedness. And I kept going.

The men's final, between Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer, was an example of two giant personalities at war, but there were other interesting undercurrents. A defeated Federer had to halt his post-match speech because he broke down and wept, a sad inversion of the tears of joy he shed after his Australian Open victory in 2006. The crowd were with him, reassuring him with their enthusiastic applause, loving him for being an emotionally open man who is able to show his feelings -- off the court rather than on it.

Professional tennis is a celebration of athleticism at its youthful peak, of bodily strength, endurance and skill. But interleaved with this is an autumnal process of diminishing powers that as spectators we have no choice but to observe. Every great player is bound to go downhill sooner or later as youth begins to fade.

Federer's skill is clearly still evident -- he's not number 2 for nothing -- and despite being older than Nadal, in theory he could have won that match if he'd made far fewer mistakes and kept his cool. But the odds were against him -- at 22 Nadal was younger and fitter, his impatient leg tapping before the first game a small indication of his restless energy.

I think the popularity of Andre Agassi in the last years of his professional career was due to his acceptance of the ageing process and the maturity and emotional intelligence he brought to the game. He was so clearly still in it because he loved tennis and his cool, focused demeanour suggested he had done the mental work necessary to give himself longevity. His Zen approach was evident at every lost point -- he simply let it go, even after bad calls, and marched back to the baseline, ready for the next point. He had overcome his ego and was willing to bear the losses as well as enjoy the wins, and he used his diminished capacities to their fullest potential.

Watching tennis for me, then, is a philosophical experience. I rejoice in the possibilities of human talent and striving, and I watch with regret as, again and again, the devoted sloggers are defeated by factors they cannot control, including the limitations of their bodies and psyches. I'm constantly reminded that youth is fleeting, that victory is rare and that we are all slowly fading away.

Of course, those who lose on the court will, perhaps even before they leave professional tennis, find other outlets for their talents, have other kinds of victories and successes, and learn new skills as well as having made pots of money. Their lives as a whole won't be downhill at all: people can keep growing and developing up until the day they die.

But when the sweet bird of youth begins to stop singing and, more prosaically, your supply of growth hormone diminishes, there's an autumnal quality to life that simply can't be denied, and you need to find new strengths to compensate. Watching the tennis in Melbourne each summer helps me come to terms with this.

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