On No More Drama

I’ve had it. I can’t take any more drama. I don’t mean in my life–my life is blissfully undramatic. I mean in my entertainments.

We bought the season of Studio 60 on iTunes and a couple days ago, two new episodes showed up in my TV Shows file. Last night, we plugged the computer into the TV (we don’t have AppleTV…yet) and watched the first.

It was dreck.

It was strike two. The night before, we’d watched a Kate Winslet movie called Little Children. For a movie, it was quite good, directed and co-written by Todd Field (who directed In the Bedroom). It was an “adult” drama–not like New Wave Hookers IV, but rather “adult” in the sense of “for grownups.”

But which ones? Not us. The story is about a group of adults who can’t control their desires and screw up their lives. Two of them start an affair. One of them is a pedophile who ends up cutting off his willie. Another is a cop who’s been fired from the force for accidentally shooting a kid. And then there’s the guy who puts panties on his head and masturbates to Polaroids of Internet sex-vixen “Slutty Kathy.”

This is all pretty standard dramatic stuff, and none of it surprised me much other than the Slutty Kathy story. I mean–Polaroids? C’mon! She wouldn’t send him Polaroids! Does film for those cameras even exist? It’s all digital now.

Anyway, it’s all heading for tragedy, but then there’s a little uptick at the end, and we get a happy ending. Which is fine. But, while the movie was well done–well shot, well acted, well plotted–it was just a bunch of cliches, really. Nothing new. And thematically, it was pretty heavy handed. (Toward the end, there’s a shot of a little girl staring up at a light, around and which hover moths…drawn to the light…get it? Months–drawn to the light. Just like the adults who couldn’t control their desires!).

I’m done with stories. Memoirs, diaries, biographies–I want to read about real people. Give me a good story that’s at least true (or truthy). There are enough falsehoods in the world without dramas about pedophiles cutting off their johnson with steak-knives.