Daria S01xE03 College Bored

1. Thesis
The Eichler Principle, as explained in my last post, is that Daria takes place in an alternate universe, where women are stronger than men. This naturally leads to a lot of subtle ramifications, and one of the more fascinating is the show’s treatment of sexual harassment.

It's not as if such harassment doesn't exist in Daria. Quite the contrary: a fair percentage of Daria’s male characters are creeps who regularly attempt to sexually coerce women. In fact, if you just look at the peripheral, single-episode male characters, damn near all of them meet that description. The difference is that, in Daria’s universe, men are simply unable to coerce women. Women are perfectly capable of fending off unwanted advances, and both sides know it. Women are insulted by creeps, sure, but never scared by them.

2. Recap
Short: Helen and Jake insist that the girls take a college prep class

Long: The Morgendorffers visit the home of some friends of Helen and Jake, who have already begun prepping their 3-year old daughter for college admissions. Stunned, the parents insist that the girls take a college prep course, which turns out to include an assignment to go on a campus visit. Helen and Jake decide to take the girls to their alma mater, Middleton College. There, the family gets split up when Helen and Jake suddenly run off to see Jake's old dorm room.

Both Helen and Jake make various efforts to fit in with the college kids, with results ranging from “awkward” to “breathtakingly inappropriate.” Helen gets asked for her panties by a frat pledge, and is initially flattered, until she finds out that she was chosen because her panties are big enough to be seen from a distance, when flown from a frat house flagpole. Jake, meanwhile, goes to the bursar's office and is stunned when he learns the cost of tuition.

Daria and Quinn, along with the tour guide, visit fraternity row (at Quinn's insistence). There, Quinn is mistaken for a Theta pledge, and plays along without hesitation. Daria heads back to the tour guide's dorm room, where she discovers that the guide is paying big money for mail-order term papers, and offers to do better work for her at a lower rate. Word spreads, and she spends the afternoon helping college students with their homework (and cracking wise, of course). The tour guide suggests they go to a party, where they find that Quinn has been elected “Keg Queen.” Meanwhile, Helen and Jake have enlisted the campus police to find their daughters. They arrive at the party, and all four are immediately kicked off campus.

The next day at the college prep class, the students recount their various experiences. Back home, Daria's paid homework scheme gets busted. As Jane and Daria discuss recent events at the pizza place, Quinn turns down the amorous advances of their college prep teacher.

3. Recapitulation
Sexual harassment is all over this episode. The most jarring example is the college prep teacher's pursuit of Quinn. This is not the first example, nor is it remotely the last, of someone behaving toward Quinn in a way that seems like it should result in a firing at the very least, if not jail time and a life on the sex offender registry. He asks Quinn to meet him outside of school to discuss (I swear I'm not making this up) a “making out scholarship.” And Quinn’s parents don't object! (Granted, this is partly because it's not entirely clear at the time whether it's a joke, and the conversation quickly moves on. But still.) This leads to the tag on the episode, when Quinn throws a drink in the teacher's face upon learning his real intentions. If the viewer was dismayed by the lack of concern from Quinn's family (her parents may have been oblivious, but Daria knew perfectly well what that teacher was up to), we now see that the family wasn't concerned because they simply didn't need to be. Quinn, who is no more than 15, finds herself out alone with an adult man who is pursuing her sexually, and what does she do when she realizes this? Does she get scared? Does she run away screaming? Does she stay quiet and try and find a non-confrontational way to disengage? Nope. She throws a drink in the creep's face, and storms off without looking back.

The theme continues throughout the episode. Quinn and Daria's college fantasies both involve creepy or threatening men, and Helen looks back nostalgically at being catcalled during her college days. In all this, there is exactly one character that is threatened by another's advances, and that character is a man. Specifically, Helen takes a break from searching for her missing daughter (!) to aggressively flirt with a freshman in a desperate attempt to recapture her youth. He grows increasingly flustered, before abruptly running away, which is exactly what Quinn does not do in the same scenario. Now, to be clear, this theme is not emphasized or underlined in the episode, the way I might make it sound. In fact, according to Glenn Eichler, this was all still subconscious on the writers' part. All these encounters are just written as gags, and frankly, not all of them quite work on that level (the show is still finding its comedic voice a bit). Whatever themes are present are the ones that are inherent in the characters from the beginning. But when you step back for a second, and consider a world where women can intimidate men, but men can NOT intimidate women… well, you start wanting to write dozens of blog posts to try and explain what a strange and extraordinary thing it is.



4. Closeup
In the college prep class, the students are invited to fantasize about what they expect out of college, and the results are, naturally, revealing:

Kevin simply imagines himself wearing his football uniform on a college campus, until the actual football team walks by, all significantly bigger than he is. He quickly restarts his fantasy, this time imagining himself suitably tall and strong. A beautiful woman walks up and thanks him for some flowers, which he says his high school girlfriend sent to him. Next, Brittany fantasizes about being named Miss College; as she is walking down the runway, Kevin desperately proposes marriage from the crowd, but is hauled away by security. It's funny: before starting this project, I had remembered Kevin and Brittany's underlying hatred for each other as something that slowly developed throughout the series, but clearly I was wrong, it's there from the beginning. I'd also note that football is the only thing Kevin is any good at, and yet he doesn't have the body to make even a college team, let alone play professionally. And what's worse, he knows it. Which is pretty sad, when you think about it, though for better or worse, thinking about it is the one thing Kevin will never do.

Jane's college fantasy is to skip college, spend the money on a New York loft, and pursue her art career. Jane has no interest in school, either for education or social life, and her only dream is to leave everything behind.

Quinn imagines finding herself assigned to a room with three male roommates: one extremely muscular man wearing nothing but a towel, one preppie, and one cowboy. Upon meeting her, all three immediately decide to fight each other for the right to date her. Really, they don’t even decide to fight, it's simply taken as a given. This is the second time in the first three episodes that we've seen Quinn smiling beatifically at men fighting over her (her interest in cowboys will also be revisited). And getting back to my theme here, I have to emphasize that the three men are just massively larger than Quinn; she isn't aged up at all in her fantasy, and the scene is staged so that we see the three men looming over Quinn, whose back is facing the camera. And this is her fantasy, not because she has a thing for danger, but because it simply doesn't seem dangerous to her. And the same applies in real life: she has no problem convincing three large men not to play drinking games at a frat party, which you have to admit is impressive.

Finally, Daria imagines herself being invited to transfer to graduate school, in her first week, to teach on their Paris campus. Which, even for an adolescent fantasy, is rather unrealistic (compare to Jane's fantasy, which is at least not laughably implausible). Of course, Daria immediately undercuts her own fantasy: it turns out the professor only wants her transferred in order to use her apartment to bang “the more attractive students.” When Daria said “I have low esteem for everybody else,” in the premiere, this is exactly what she meant. She believes that, even if she reaches the absolute pinnacle of intellectual development and achievement, she will still be seen as nothing more than an obstruction, blocking everyone's view of the attractive women.

5. Bullet Points!
-The episode establishes the show's setting with a bit more precision. Middleton was established in 1776 (and the tour guide describes it as having been “a colonial religious college,” which, if it was founded in 1776, it wasn't colonial for very long). Thus, the college (and Lawndale) must be somewhere on the East Coast. For a long time I was under the impression that this show was set in California, primarily because the weather always seems to be so nice.

-I loved the scene in the bursar's office, where the bursar steers Jake to the Mafia for a student loan (“They sell candy. And make loans. Oh, and haul trash. They got a variety of interests.”). Which again, unsubtle, but I would point out that college financial aid departments really do work this way.

-Speaking of scams that are still quite relevant: Quinn gets accepted to a fake “college” that is in fact basically a time share in Florida.

-I wasn’t kidding about the show's interest in status anxiety in my last post. Helen and Jake are clearly very intimidated by their friends, and uncomfortable about the fact that their friends' house is clearly much nicer than theirs.

-Though note also that the house, while fancier, seems much less comfortable than the Morgendorffers’; it actually reminded me of nothing so much as a room Hildi might have designed on Trading Spaces (does anybody know where you can find old Trading Spaces online? I would SO get drunk and watch a random Hildi episode right now.)

-”Daria is more of a late bloomer, socially. And there's nothing wrong with that, is there, honey?” Shudder. Why do parents talk about their kids in front of them like this? Will I do it if and when I have kids myself?

-The chalkboard in the college prep course identifies the course name as “Push Comes To Love.” Chalkboards in Daria are fun to keep an eye on. They don’t tend to have joke-jokes on them the way that, say, The Simpsons writes jokes for background signs. But thought goes into them nonetheless, and they're reasonably close to what classroom chalkboards actually look like, semi-organized and free associated.

-Daria Timestamp Watch: Daria takes place in the very early stages of the internet. One of the geeks is writing an erotic letter to a female inmate he met on the internet. (“I think she's female”). And yet, just across campus, other college students are still getting term papers delivered via snail mail.

-As somebody who's done some flyering on college campuses in my time, I appreciated the bit where Helen puts up a flyer of her missing daughters, turns away for a second, and turns back to find the entire bulletin board covered with a fresh batch of flyers.

-When Jake learns about Daria's paper-writing scam, he simply compliments her on her savvy in demanding payment in cash. It falls to Helen to actually shut it down.

-In case there was any doubt which side of the Kevin-Brittany relationship the show's sympathy is with: in their college visits, Kevin gets stripped naked and covered in molasses, while Brittany takes part in a poetry circle, with people who express interest in her thoughts and feelings.

-Boy, Middleton sure doesn't hold its tour guides to a very high standard, do they?

-Best lines: “I don't stop you from reading, don't stop me from this.”

-”She’s God's problem now, kid.”

-”…or is this, like, personal advice or something?” (a rare zinger from Kevin)

-”Quinn… go… to beauty… school.”

-See you next time, with my first two-episode recap!