A Cynic's Waffling
Saraid Cameron
Why do I watch Glee when all it does is piss me off? The first season entertained me. I loved how barefacedly camp it was and some of the musical arrangements were stupendous! But no, every episode I find more and more to groan about, and less and less to make me laugh. And yet, I feel kind of bereft without it in my life. Why can’t I stop watching Glee? Of course, the obvious answer is that I need something to complain about, and although this is mostly true… I can’t help but think that it is not quite that simple.
And now I have hit on the answer. The reason I find Glee IRRESISTIBLE, is its insensitive treatment of contentious issues. You heard me; being the only open homosexual in your school, bulimia, teenage pregnancy, and the ‘perils’ of promiscuity etc. Don’t get me wrong, in some way, Glee actually is somewhat forward: A central character is severely disabled, their treatment of Kurt Hummel’s coming out has had some poignant moments, and they manage to include a young actress with down syndrome without letting her disability fully control her storyline. But still, I feel that Glee is nowhere near as progressive as it pretends to be, and this gets on my nerves.
Prime example: In Season One, Episode 16, the character Mercedes is told to lose ten pounds immediately by the school’s cheerleading coach, Sue Sylvester (played by the genuinely brilliant Jane Lynch). She dutifully starves herself, ends up visualising her friends as human-sized pieces of cake, and then faints during lunch. She is then cured of her anorexia in five minutes flat, by a girl she protests to hate. The episode concludes with Mercedes singing Christina Aguiliera’s ‘Beautiful’ in starry-eyed (vacant) defiance of Sue Sylvester’s aesthetic ideal.
That’s nice isn’t it? A large, talented girl realises her size isn’t the most important thing in life, and is able to feel good about herself for who she is rather than how she looks. Great, albeit completely fucking unrealistic.
What Glee has done here, is neatly parcel up the serious mental illness that is anorexia in just under 45 minutes. They gave us the insultingly simple trigger, a one day diet, and triumphant recovery in just one episode. Do people watch this show and believe it tells us the actual portrays the tragedy surrounding body dysmorphia?
Is there anyone out there who digests this kind of shit and walks away with the understanding that it is possible for an anorexic girl to take guidance from a 50 kg cheerleader telling her that it is okay to eat a cookie?
I think a show watched by the kind of demographic Glee attracts has much more responsibility than that. I believe that a show targeted specifically to what Chris Colfer called “the kids…that are constantly told ‘no’ by bullies in their school and can’t be who they are” in his Golden Globe acceptance speech, needs to properly tackle the issues it hesitates to face head on.