I used to love Madonna. I realize that this in one of those somewhat embarrassing things to admit as a full-grown man, but there you have it. I thought she was just the coolest human being on the planet for years and years and years. This probably has a lot to do with the overlap between the peak of her popularity and the years I spent figuring out my identity as a gay man. She was awesomely famous and surrounded by her cadre of ‘mos, and there was something about her persona I found incredibly appealing.
I can pinpoint the exact moment that this changed. It’s not that she got older, though the sentiments of the GFY ladies about her suddenly aged appearance mirror mine. (As an aside, it’s uncanny how often the women who write there express thoughts exactly like things my best friend and I have talked about. See also their comments about Kristin Scott Thomas and Andie McDowell here.) It’s that it became obvious how desperately she craved our attention.
The moment the scales fell from my eyes is the moment she kissed Britney Spears at the MTV Video Music Awards. (She also kissed Christina Aguilera, but nobody seemed to care about that.) To quote one of Lisa’s friends at Little Pwagmattasquarmsettport, the whole thing smacked of effort. It was so patently and pathetically calculated to shock. Whereas all of her attention-getting behavior in the past had somehow felt like something fun she thought she’d do, the only reason I could see for her to play tonsil hockey with Britney Spears is to make us all talk about it. Bleah. Cynical and desperate and boring.
I like to think that there was some kind of ontological change at that moment. That the Madonna of “Material Girl” and “Express Yourself” and “Ray of Light” really was cool, and then all of a sudden she wasn’t. Doubtless her many detractors would disagree. Regardless, I just don’t find her all that interesting any longer.
So here’s this week’s question — what did you once love and then stop, and why? When did it jump the shark for you? It must be something you truly enjoyed, and then did no longer.
Has anybody talked about Star Wars yet?
I was one of those folks who argued, in the late 80’s and early 90’s that Star Wars was superior to Star Trek because of the quality of the themes that were addressed and those arguments always devolved into arguments over Star Wars Universe minutiae (Remember the arguments made in Clerks? Yeah. Arguments like those).
Then Episode I came out…
While I watched Episode I at the theater, and maybe for a few hours afterward, I tried to force myself to believe that it was a good movie, that Jar Jar really was just a figment of my imagination, and that the weird blood test of little Annakin to find out if he was really a Jedi wasn’t a quasi-racial thing, and that one of the final scenes with Annaking piloting a fighter to attack whoever the bad guys were didn’t remind me of “The Bad News Bears.”
But in truth, a little of me died inside.
The two laws of Star Wars.
1. Han Solo always shoots first.
2. Darth Vader never, at any time in his life, said, “yippee.”
Or as a friend of mind said after episode 3. “So now we know how Annakin Skywalker became Darth Vader. When do we find out how Darth Vader became cool?”
The Sopranos stopped being interesting to me after the second season. The dialogues with Melfi became tedious, the character development focus fell on secondary characters, and the writers seemed to lose interest in anything resembling a plot arc. I think they got back the intensity after a while but it took a long time. The long delays in production didn’t help, either.
I think most of the stuff I liked and then suddenly stopped liking was to some degree shame-based. I liked it until someone explained why they hated it, and then a combination of things happened: The criticisms resonated just enough that my enjoyment fell. The social stigma attached to liking it became great enough that I couldn’t share my like of it. To me, art is a social experience. If I can’t tell anyone I like it, can’t introduce it to anyone, and so on, it sort of falls off my radar.
“I think most of the stuff I liked and then suddenly stopped liking was to some degree shame-based.”
You’re talking about loving My Pretty Pony until the kids got after you about it, right? I’ve been there, brother.
I’m assuming this isn’t the kind of question where I bring up people I dated in my teens and twenties. So I’ll go with X-Files. I used to make my Friday night plans around it.
And then it got… bad. Little by little. I never watched the last season and a half, expect later on dvd. I have said this before (probably on Mindless Diversions), but the moment I knew that it had jumped the shark completely was an episode where M&S got caught in a video game, and the script was so horrible it occurred to me that the only reason the writers had made it was to get the scantily dressed, heavily bosomed, Laura-Croft-like swimsuit model on the set.
Oh, I remember that episode. It was the second one written by William Gibson, who had apparently just seen someone play “Lethal Enforcers” and was totally stoked about the AMAZING POSSIBILITIES OF VIRTUAL REALITY.
It takes a lot for me to love something, and I can’t offhand think of a time that I’ve gone from loving something to not.
On the other hand, there have been innumerable instances of me going from hating or disliking something to thinking, “Hey, this is a bit aiight.”
“West Wing.” And I don’t mean the show “after Sorkin left,” but specifically the Sorkin-written shows (the others for me were non-watchable from the start). I liked them when they came out and for the next few years in syndication. And now….I see so many simplistic, unbelievable renderings of white house characters.
The portrayal of C. J. seems more and more sexist the more I think about it: she doesn’t realize that the Mercator projection makes Greenland seem bigger than it is; she doesn’t know what the census is for; she just can’t get it into her little womanlibber’s head that the U.S. might have to ally with countries that tolerate mistreatment of women.
I always liked West Wing, and it had little to do with the politics (backdrop) or character depth (shallow). What I liked was it’s amazing, amazing dialogue.
The problem eventually is that every single Sorkin character is alike, from White House staff, to military lawyers, to the production crew of a sports wrap up show. They all talk with a staccato trivia laden polymath quick wit that arguably always makes good television (and theater – Mamet writes with a similar style, but is able to vulgar it up a bit), and is perfectly serviceable when your watching an episode a week or a movie a year. But, when you watch a DVD marathon of Sorkin’s work, this affectation becomes very very noticeable to point of annoyance. (which is defined as just short of throwing the computer across the room)
(fwiw, I thought C.J. was actually one of the more differentiated characters of the lot, entirely due to Allison Janey’s talent, which is much underrated by the market. Unfortunately, she was born about 10 years too late; in a TV scape where scripted shows still reigned supreme, she’d still be getting steady work in ensemble casts rather than just doing Kaiser Permanente commercials.)
Kolohe,
I agree with most of what you say. Janey is an amazing actor (which is yet another reason why it’s a shame that Sorkin made her character occasionally so clueless).
Also, you have a good point about Sorkin overload: it’s probably no accident that I started disliking WW only after it came on syndication and I could watch 2 episodes a day, for 4 days a week, on Bravo (back when I had cable).
“To quote one of Lisa’s friends at Little Pwagmattasquarmsettport, the whole thing smacked of effort. It was so patently and pathetically calculated to shock. ”
er…she says that like Madonna hadn’t ever done anything patently and pathetically calculated to shock before then.
Hm, what did I once like and then not like?
Spaceballs. When I first saw Spaceballs I thought it was the funniest thing on Earth. I thought that we’d hit the end of funny, that nothing else I ever saw would be that funny again, that we should just close up Hollywood and watch Spaceballs for the rest of time.
Now it’s kind of tiresome. I’ve seen the parody done better, the whole thing is overlong, and it’s way too willing to go for the low-hanging fruit of pop-culture references and nut shots.
Also, miniatures wargames. When I was in college, every Friday night started around 8 PM at the student center, and we’d play until they kicked us out at 2 AM, and then we’d go over to a dorm where one guy was the nighttime door monitor and we’d play until none of us could stand it, then stagger back to our rooms. Later, when I had my own car, I’d routinely pull twelve-hour sessions at the game store. And I’d play anything that had pewter figurines made for it. Bought it, painted it, played it once or twice, put the figures in the box and never looked at them again.
Somewhere in the mid-2000s I realized that it just wasn’t really that fun anymore, that I was only playing because I had the figures and needed an excuse to keep them, and I only needed an excuse to keep them because I felt guilty that they weren’t quite all painted yet. Finally I bit the bullet, slapped up the last bits, sold the lot on eBay, and I’ve never looked back.
(er. although it turns out they’re playing Battlefleet Gothic at the local GW store on Thursdays. And I, well, I still have some of those cruisers somewhere.)
can I get an “amirite” for Sorkin himself? “Sports Night” was so awesome that a complete non-sports fan like myself was digging every ep (I watched most of the first season and it still holds up). “West Wing” was good and had some INCREDIBLE episodes, but also had some absolute losers.
Then came “Studio 6 on the Sunset” — the first couple of eps were OK, but it dived FAST. I didn’t know L’il Spark-plug (Kristen Chenowirth) at the time, but the show had me feeling sorry for her. (Now I’ve come to absolutely love L’il Spark-plug.
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Star Trek: DS9 was my favorite of the series, until they killed off Dax. HATE!
The Avengers was fun until Mrs Peel was replaced by Tara. Yuck.
I got a hold of a collection of the first 2 or 3 seasons of Babylon Five a bit ago. The pilot is near unwatchable. It’s so unbelievably plodding, I can’t believe it got picked up for a series run.
(But maybe, like early ST:TNG, this is a different phenomenon than the original post was asking for)
U2. Somewhere between Rattle and Hum (which has some great moments) and their next album I realized that almost everything everyone said about them was true. Unforgettable Fire is still one of my favorite albums of all time, in part because it’s so unfinished. But then they got really polished and Bono made some dumbass comment about “trying to make a type of music that’s never been made before, and that’s really frightening” right about the time they began to sound like every other band from the ’80s, and I said “screw this, South Park needs to make an episode about Bono being the biggest piece of s**t in the world.”
> But then they got really polished and Bono
> made some dumbass comment about “trying
> to make a type of music that’s never been
> made before, and that’s really frightening”
> right about the time they began to sound like
> every other band from the ’80s
Back up one album; this is why Joshua Tree actually sucks. Not because it’s bad, musically (it’s totally enjoyable), but because it bodes all the mediocrity that follows it.
High five on the idea, James.
Hmm, maybe. It’s got a few really excellent songs (Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking for is a great gospel song, but then they didn’t really make that clear until the next album, did they?), but yeah, there’s a lot of mediocrity in it. Point taken.
The Pogues (Irish rock-folk band). When I was in my late teens I thought their mix of whiskey, social protest and looking back at history was incredibly potent and thoughtful. There was no “kiss” episode or anything; I just found, going back to them now, that it was all really quite shallow, that their protest was more of an attitude than any real understanding of the evils of this world, and that their Oirishry was really too laboured to be believed. It did not help that the lead singer had by then utterly destroyed his voice with drink, but I doubt that it would have made a difference had he not. I’d outgrown them.