More West Wing chat

Lindsay's response to my criticism of the West Wing is worth promoting from comments:

David, you're confused on the subject of Magical Negroes. You're mixing them up with the concept of Competent Humans.

Firstly, a Magical Negro is never in a true position of recognzied power in society. Secondly, their power is always connected to the earth and to a spiritual truth that white people (excepting Southern women and Bohemian women) are allegedly not connected to. The conceit of a Magical Negro as a hackneyed story device is to help the main white character connect with that spirituality. No character on the West Wing does that, ever; least of all the black characters. What the black characters do, however, do is to constantly demonstrate to the show's liberal characters that even in their open-mindedness, they're sometimes total cocks about race, by assuming again and again that black will always stick with black. And this I find genuinely satisfying, as it a) sometimes needs doing and b) actually often ends up being the tedious work that a black person will have to do when a white person is unwittingly being a cock.

The characters you point to merely happen to be black. Their competence, intelligence, insight, and warmth is not an indicator of a Magical Negro character. It's a competent, intelligent, insightful, warm character who happens to be black. Go back and look at scenes between Charlie and Barlet, Fitzwallace and Bartlet, and so on. You'll notice that their being black doesn't really have anything to do with it, it's the position they hold. Whereas with a truly insulting Magical Negro character, it has everything to do with race. That's what's so insulting about the Magical Negro/Wiccan Woman character - that merely by being black/a woman, you're plugged in. Sorkin's desire to write well-rounded, compassionate black characters is just that. He writes very strong female characters too.

The reason the white characters are the only ones fucking up is because they're the main characters. So obviously, they're going to have wins and losses, good choices and bad choices. Main characters simply have the freedom and longevity to be more well-rounded. And really, Sorkin just likes moding his characters. Sometimes it's a black person putting them in their place, sometimes it's a Republican, sometimes it's a call-girl ... any variety of characters are doing the moding, not just the black characters.

Anyway, that's my argument against calling Charlie, a young, intelligent, college age black man a Magical Negro. There's an injustice in that. You may as well call Obama a Magical Negro. It's off-base. I thought there was something off in your calling Tim Gunn a Magical Gay the other night too, but couldn't quite put my finger on it. But it's clearer after reading this post. Someone being FUCKING AWESOME isn't what makes them a Magical ____. It just makes them FUCKING AWESOME.

Alright, I take your point--I think I was conflating awesomeness and Magical-ness. Clearly, Charlie is very awesome, which is completely different from being spiritually plugged in and close to the earth, which is what the Magical Negro concept is all about. Charlie is no Bagger Vance.

However, though I might have been misapplying the "Magical Negro" concept, I think there is still something off--or at least, dated--about the way black characters are treated in the West Wing in the aggregate. What I mean is, I don't think any one black character taken in isolation is anything to raise an eyebrow at. But what is conspicuous is a pattern where every black character, without fail, is super-awesome and, indeed, super-emblematic-of-what-America-is-really-all-about: humble, hardworking, magnanimous, competent, fair, pragmatic. After a while you suspect that Sorkin is being a little too self-aware with his black characters--that he is so afraid of reinforcing negative stereotypes that he forgets that black people can be jerks too.

Again, I only bring all this up because I think it contributes to a peculiar 90s feeling to the series. I am accusing Sorkin of nothing more than pre-South-Park, pre-Curb-Your-Enthusiasm unreconstructed political correctness (Curb--and to some extent Seinfeld as well--are masterful at leveraging political correctness to wreak cognitive dissonance on the viewer. For example, a character in a protected category--say someone who is disabled--will invariably turn out to be a complete asshole). Even it it's true, it's really no big sin.

So, anyway. All of this is based on the first 8 episodes--it could be that episode 9 features a cut-throat, heartless black lobbyist who gets pwned by Josh Lyman, and I'll have to eat my hat. But I won't be holding my breath.

PS: I think there was some kind of blogging Murphy's Law going on with the first West Wing post, because it was a fairly dumb post, and yet for some reason received like 3 times as much traffic as any other post to date. Maybe if I write a really dumb post it will really boost traffic...

Some initial thoughts about the West Wing

My sister and I have set ourselves the task of watching The West Wing, in its entirety, in preparation for the real life Santos administration (replete with Chief-of-Staff Lyman). And I must say, even though the series ran from 1999-2006 (which I was surprised by--I thought it had started in the mid-1990s, given an early subplot involving swapped pagers), it has a very odd, very dated vibe to it. I think a part of it might be that, after the epic 2008 general election--and the emergence of an ESPN-watching, Jay-Z referencing, inspiring-speech-giving, campaign-finance-revolutionizing, unabashedly intellectual post-Boomer black President--the idea of a platonic Clinton--which my sister and I agreed is pretty much what Bartlet is supposed to be--just isn't that gripping. While in 2000 the idea of a frumpy sarcastic old white guy suddenly stopping in the middle of a chili cook-off to address his staff with a speech about how surely we can achieve a great feat of humanity, "[a]s we did in the time when our eyes looked toward the heavens, and with outstretched fingers, we touched the face of God"--these days, when my prime concern is that the United States stop, you know, torturing innocent people and detaining them without charges, such contrived eloquence fails to register.

Another weirdly dated aspect of the show--and another thing that made me think the series began in the mid-90s--is that there is no shortage of Magical Negroes: a character being black on The West Wing is a sufficient condition for that character being noble, resolute, uncorruptable, competent, hard-working, good-natured, humble, and unfailingly wise. For instance, it is a black General who gently convinces Bartlet not to overreact to an attack on an American plane--an incident that Bartlet is particularly upset about, because it caused the death of his favorite black doctor, Capt. Morris. And Leo--Bartlet's muscle, a man so connected and powerful he could end the Vice President's career if he had to--meets his political match when he tries to pressure a black Congressman into a vote on a watered-down gun control bill. Finally, there's Charlie, who applies for an ordinary White House job to support his sister after the tragic death of his mother but is instead given the prestigious post of the President's "body man" (real life's Reggie Love) after Josh Lyman has a "feeling" about him. Charlie is, of course, unfailingly competent. All this goes on against the backdrop of white people sleeping with call girls (although not qua call girl), white people making fools of themselves, white people having drinking problems, white people making hard-hearted political calculations, white people acting eccentric, etc. I don't find any of it offensive--just quaint and very politically correct in a Clinton-era sort of way.

In any case, all this, I think, doesn't make the show bad, so much as not current. It is still fascinating to see a depiction of what things might look like in a functioning White House, and I still like the characters. Oh, and also, all this is only a judgment made from the first handful of episodes--no doubt some of the awkwardness will be smoothed out once the show really begins to hit its stride.

PS: Recently, I re-read that dialog between Bartlett and Obama written by Sorkin (in Maureen Dowd's column space) from during the election. It's interesting how wrong the advice is that Bartlett gives. He says, "GET ANGRIER! Call them liars, because that’s what they are. Sarah Palin didn’t say “thanks but no thanks” to the Bridge to Nowhere. She just said “Thanks.” You were raised by a single mother on food stamps — where does a guy with eight houses who was legacied into Annapolis get off calling you an elitist?...Get angry. Mock them mercilessly; they’ve earned it." It's exactly the sort of fightin' posture that makes sense for an embattled Democratic President of the 1990s, and that doesn't make any sense for a Democratic President of 2009 who is the head of a governing majority.

Maureen Dowd ft. Aaron Sorkin

Patrick points us to an authentic, Sorkin-authored dialog between Obama and Bartlet. Hard not to imagine them walking brusquely through a series of hallways while uttering lines like these:

BARTLET I meant the Republicans. The Us versus Them-a-thon. As a Democrat I was surprised to learn that I don’t like small towns, God, people with jobs or America. I’ve been a little out of touch but is there a mandate that the vice president be skilled at field dressing a moose —

OBAMA Look —

BARTLET — and selling Air Force Two on eBay?

Ah, West Wing crack.