Only an Onscreen Ending

No discussion of Family Ties would be complete without looking at Tracy Pollan, the actress who played Alex's girlfriend, Ellen Reed, in season four, and who would marry Michael J. Fox a few years later. I do remember the character of Ellen from when I originally watched the show as a kid, but I had imagined that her goodbye was much more emotional than it seems now. For one thing, although the whole second episode of season five is devoted to Ellen's absence, we don't actually see Ellen leave; we join the story after she's already accepted a dance scholarship in Paris, and we see the aftermath with Alex trying to date again. And we don't get any flashbacks in that episode, either, or montages of Alex and Ellen's relationship. It's an interesting choice, especially since we saw a montage when they first got together, and the show has already begun the process of using clip shows, or flashback-based episodes. (The first use of the clip episode was with Ellen, actually, near the end of season four - the family sits around in the living room telling her stories about Alex's past antics - two episodes' worth, in fact. Maybe I'll write more about the use of the clip show later, but for now I'll just say that it's a shock of self-awareness - this family remembers its own past and sees connections between seemingly disparate events! - that goes beyond mere attention to continuity. Too bad it feels only like an easy way to deliver new episodes and pointless, narratively).

Is this great old tech or what?

This lack of flashbacks and montages is doubly surprising because without them the show relies uncharacteristically on audience memory. For example, at the campus snack shop juke box, Alex selects the Billy Vera & The Beaters song "At This Moment," which played during the school dance where Alex and Ellen first kissed. But the show doesn't replay that scene, and it doesn't have Alex remark on his choice - "This was our song," or the like - perhaps simply trusting that viewers would remember the earlier, pivotal scene, which took place 25 episodes before. (Or perhaps recent summer episodes reminded viewers; the Ellen's-gone episode, "Starting Over," was only episode two of a new season). The show rarely seems to expect us to remember anything about the characters beyond the most important biographical details or relationships, so if it was expecting viewers to remember Alex and Ellen's song, that would indicate a storyline that was unusually popular and therefore memorable.

Another example of a makeover, btw.
Mallory and Jennifer helped Alex look "hip" for a date.

My own memory of this storyline does suggest that it was notable, but then my memory seems to have given it an extra gloss of romance, probably influenced by Pollan and Fox's real-life romance. For example, I remembered the scene where Alex sits at the kitchen table and writes Ellen a letter, but again, I'd remembered it as being more emotional, a plea to return to Ohio that went unanswered or denied. But that's not the case at all; he's telling her that he's moving on and he wishes her well. He considers several joke closings - "Your pal," "Your son" - before choosing "Love." Alex is not over her yet - that date, with Sharon (played by Haviland Morris, who would have been familiar from 1984's Sixteen Candles) did not go well, mostly because he kept trying to get her to order her food, look, and smell like Ellen. But ultimately he accepts that Ellen is gone.

Spraying your ex-girlfriend's perfume on your date? A no-no.

Although the love story didn't end the way I remembered it, there's a lot to like about the ending. The show gives Ellen a good reason for leaving, a reason that fits with her character as an artist. When we meet her, we learn that she's a painter, and in later episodes we see her as a dancer, too. I might write a post specifically about how art is represented on the show - Elyse is a singer; Nick is a sculptor, etc. - but for now I'll just say that I think it's cool that Ellen pursues her art, which she was shown to be committed to, even if it takes her away from her serious boyfriend. She's not gone from the picture because of some other possible reason - her rich father doesn't fall sick, for example. Characters leave to tend to sick relatives all the time, but that kind of reason would have been inorganic to her character.

I also like that she's gone, period. Don't get me wrong; I love the character, Tracy Pollan is great, and the chemistry between her and Michael J. Fox is so good that I find it hard to believe that they didn't actually become romantically involved until they reunited on the set of Bright Lights, Big City. (I recommend reading that New York Times story about Tracy Pollan's guest appearance on Spin City; in addition to the Fox-Pollan information, it's worth reading to catch the before-he-was-famous reference to Michael Pollan). What I mean is, I like that the writers didn't make Ellen stick around just for the sake of Alex having a girlfriend or transform her into the kind of person who would stay in spite of a scholarship offer because she is loyal to him, can't bear to leave him, etc. Of course, Pollan herself may have had other commitments, which could explain why the character was written off the show, but whatever the reason, I like the way the writers handled it.

George Eliot has this great passage in Middlemarch where she writes that we don't often discuss how people - well, she's focused on men, but I'm expanding the range for my purposes - find their vocations, even though arriving at work we're passionate about that can make an impact on the world requires "industrious thought and patient renunciation of small desires" in the same way that arriving at love does. But instead, Eliot writes, it's love that is the focus of our narrative energies: "We are not afraid of telling over and over again how a man comes to fall in love with a woman and be wedded to her, or else be fatally parted from her." Onscreen, vocation wins out over romance for Ellen, which feels like a triumph, writing and gender-wise; offscreen, acting and love could co-exist. This impulse to recount a love story seems like it would be particularly pronounced with two people like Pollan and Fox, who met in what turned out to be breakout work for both of them and are still together more than 26 years later. We love love stories, and we admire love stories that last.

I once read an interview with Kate Hudson where she talked about how fun it was to watch movies like Overboard to see her mom, Goldie Hawn, and Kurt Russell when they were young. I hope that Fox and Pollan's four children get a similar kick out of seeing their parents on Family Ties, a show that ended up as a home movie of sorts, offering the earliest images of them together.

Enormous Changes Not at the Last Minute

Alex sweaters shouldn't get all the love

I've been thinking about continuity and clothes again on Family Ties, and I think Judith Butler (yes, I went there) would be useful here:

If the ground of gender identity is the stylized repetition of acts through time and not a seemingly seamless identity, then the spatial metaphor of a "ground" will be displaced and revealed as a stylized configuration… .The abiding gendered self will then be shown to be structured by repeated acts that seek to approximate the idea of a substantial ground of identity, but which in their occasional discontinuity, reveal the temporal and contingent groundlessness of this "ground." 

The characters on Family Ties present gendered selves through the "stylized repetition of acts through time" - for example, they return to the same outfits, which conform to gender norms (even as some characters are understood to be more fashionable than others). But I would argue that the show uses the "occasional discontinuity" in characters' clothing, appearance, and behavior to solidify the "ground" of identity, gender and otherwise. In other words, on Family Ties there's no surer sign that a character is going through a phase than when he or she makes a big, physical change. All extreme transformations signal the temporary.

Sometimes these transformations are chosen individually, as when Mallory scores higher than Alex on an IQ test and then dresses differently to rub it in:

Or when Alex tries to be part of his girlfriend Ellen's world by auditioning for a dance company:

But more often than not, one character gives another a makeover, as when Alex helps Jennifer prepare for a history presentation on how a bill becomes a law and costumes her in the style of his brand of overachieving student:

Or when Mallory and Jennifer take their little brother Andy shopping:

Or, in the most problematic example of all, when Alex helps Nick change his style so he'll better fit in with the Keatons:

(I'll write a whole post about the show's treatment of Nick, but I want to finish the series first).

On shows like Family Ties, discontinuities don't shake the solid ground of identity; they reveal an anxiety about our true selves and our relationships, concerns that are resolved playfully or seriously in a matter of scenes but that are always resolved in favor of the "real" person. Everyone dresses like themselves, again. In this way, the show flirts with alternatives but comforts its audience with a continued return to age, class, heterosexual, and other norms, all of which can be bought and worn.

I do wish this store existed, though.

Our TV, Ourselves

In the season one Family Ties episode unfortunately titled "Oops," Mallory's friend Cindy finds out she's pregnant and struggles with telling her mother. First, they confide in Mallory's mother, Elyse.

"I'm so confused," Cindy says. "I don't know whether to have an abortion or put the baby up for adoption or keep it."

It was December 22, 1982, only one month away exactly from the tenth anniversary of the Roe v. Wade ruling, and the extent to which this decision had become an established fact in American lives seems reflected in the structure of Cindy's sentence; she lists abortion alongside adoption and becoming a mother as a possible choice. It's X or Y or Z, each possibility given equal weight.

We don't learn what Cindy chooses to do - the main point of the episode is about establishing open communication with her mother - but even that unresolved ending feels different from how this same subject matter would be handled on later television and film, where the point often feels like an avoided abortion  - whether that's avoided through miscarriage, as on Party of Five in the 1990s or adoption, as in Juno in 2007. The prevalence of these alternatives makes stories where a character actually has an abortion, as on Friday Night Lights or The Obvious Child, rarities and news. And not knowing the outcome of a pregnancy, as in the case of Cindy? Other than the 1996 film Citizen Ruth, I can't think of another example off the top of my head, although I'm sure there are more. Still, the dearth of such examples seems telling: in most mainstream TV and film, women's bodies need to be resolved.

"Did I really look like that when I was born?" Jennifer wants to know.

Before Cindy comes over to the Keaton house, 10 year-old Jennifer sits down on the couch with the copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves that she's taken from Mallory's room. Alex, the conservative teenager, objects to "a book like that being in this house," but Elyse sets him straight: "There's nothing wrong with this, Alex," she says. "It's just a health and sex manual for women."

This scene, and much of this episode, amazes me and makes me a little sad, too. I love that it's "just" a manual, just another day for this family, but it makes me sad that their ordinary day, 30 years later, feels more than a little extraordinary now.
 

No Major Spoilers Here...Just Another Nanny

Now that finals are over, I have time to return to this blog and the very serious business of...how bad Dexter is this season. But while other reviews and comment feeds are focused on plot developments with the villain and the main characters, I am fascinated and frustrated by a new minor character, Jamie. She is Angel Batista's sister, Dexter's new nanny, and Louis the lab intern's girlfriend. Notice a pattern there, people? Her interactions with other women are few and mostly negative - as when she and Debra fought over Deb's influence on Harrison - and even though she's uttered the phrase "my dissertation" once or twice, no way is that girl in school. I do not say that because she is coded as attractive, young, and happy and therefore we should interpret her as dumb or something but because we never see her near a non-picture book. Yes, when you are a nanny your focus should be on the child, but if you worked the kind of hours Jamie works AND you were getting a PhD, you would bring some of your own work to your job...because the kid naps, and what do you do then? Just prance around waiting for your boss to return...only to ask you to stay and work, oh, I don't know, 5 more unscheduled hours? You would be saying no even if you had no date to go on because you have to study and write and other schooly stuff.

A former nanny myself (and a current student), I realize I'm sensitive to this kind of thing, and in a show like Dexter it probably seems funny to single out this aspect as ridiculous. But c'mon. You don't get to have a female character as incredibly self-sacrificing as Jamie and still present your main character like this (from an interview with Executive Producer Sara Colleton in The Daily Best - emphasis mine):

This season, the producers and writers decided it was time for him to explore faith—and his lack thereof—as he raised his baby boy, Harrison, by himself and wondered what code he should teach him.

No disrespect to actress Aimee Garcia, but Jamie is a prop that gets less official credit for her work on the show than the mannequin hand of the Ice Truck Killer. Nice work, Showtime.