I've put a few entries in the bullet points of my previous posts tagged "Daria Timestamp Watch" (or some such, I may not have been consistent). Like any other work of art, Daria is a product of the specific time in which it was made. And while it isn't particularly topical compared to, say, South Park, its setting does tend to put a bit more focus on the show's temporal location. After all, it's a high school show, and we all have a tendency to anchor our cultural tastes, our standards of propriety, and just our general idea of what "normal" means in our high school years. This is the time when we first truly encounter the world - not as the amorphous series of tasks, rules, and mysteries which a child must navigate, but as a coherent, independent entity with which we must define our relationship.
Which is an elaborate way of saying that the two episodes I'm discussing today are about an internet cafe and a mall, respectively. And while there are still plenty of internet cafes and malls around (if you go looking for them), it has been years since either had a place in society like that shown in these two stories. So the questions I have are, first: what about these episodes remains timeless, and what does not? And second: Can I discuss all this without turning into "Buzzfeed's 17 Raddest Things About 1997"? We’ll find out!
2. Recap (Café Disaffecto)
Short: Lawndale's cyber café, alt.lawndale.com, is vandalized
Long: Mr. O’Neill’s class is studying Shakespeare, to Kevin's dismay. However, Mr. O'Neill is more interested in the fact that the town's cybercafe has been robbed (or is it the school's cybercafe? It's never really made clear). The students are indifferent, but Mr. O'Neill misinterprets a statement of Daria's as a recommendation that the cybercafe be replaced with an actual coffee house.
At dinner that night, Helen hassles Daria about getting some extracurriculars for her college application, and threatens to send her to music camp. Cornered, Daria goes to Mr. O'Neill and volunteers to fundraise for the coffeehouse, and convinces Jane to join her by promising the opportunity to see the inside of strangers' houses. Kevin and Brittany inadvertently solicit Mr. DiMartino for funds, while Quinn, unsurprisingly, proves herself to be a masterful fundraiser. Daria and Jane, on the other hand, find themselves forced to refuse an offer from Mrs. Johannsen, a morbidly obese woman who, before trying to buy their chocolate bars, informs them that her doctor has forbidden her to have chocolate, and then passes out. Ms. Li (not valuing human life above Lawndale fundraising), is displeased, and forces Daria to read some of her work at the coffeehouse in order to gain extracurricular credit.
At the coffeehouse, we see an array of acts: a scruffy (and seemingly in his late 30s) punk guitarist, a scene from Romeo and Juliet starring Brittany (and whatever-the-opposite-of-starring-is Kevin), and a bitter poem by Andrea, a Goth-ish Lawndale student. Finally, Daria steps to the stage, and reads her new short story: a hardboiled right-wing Cold War thriller featuring the deaths of either 21 or 22 Communists. It is a huge hit, and next morning Jake reads in the paper that it sparked an anti-Communist riot. That night, the coffeehouse is robbed again.
Malled
Short: Quinn has discovered what amounts to the Holy Grail of shopping: the Mall of the Millennium
Long: Quinn wants to go to The Mall of the Millennium, a new "super mall" 100 miles from Lawndale. Her parents refuse, but Mrs. Bennett, Daria's economics teacher, decides to take the class on a field trip to that very mall (she was inspired a stray remark of Daria's). The class (which conveniently includes all the main characters we've met so far), takes the long drive out to the mall. Mrs. Bennett finds herself a bit overwhelmed by the size of the mall, but is distracted by the "Fuzzy Wuzzy Wee-Bit" (Beanie Babies. They're Beanie Babies) Shop. The students then gather for a "presentation" which turns out to be a thinly veiled, uncompensated focus group. The mall executives atone for their deception by handing out gift certificates to random stores.
Mrs. Bennett (belatedly) assigns the students actual tasks, and they all split up. The members of the Fashion Club (who are not in the economics class, but have cut class to go to the mall) decide to offer a makeover to a random teen, and choose Daria, mortifying Quinn. Daria extracts favors from Quinn to refuse the makeover, then accompanies Jane to Scissors Wizard (for which she has a gift certificate). However, Scissors Wizard is not the scissors store Jane was hoping for, but rather a hair salon. They then proceed to Daria's store, the Doo Dad Shop, where Daria is the 10,000th customer (she's not thrilled). Daria and Jane catch a ride home with the Fashion Club. Next morning, their parents announce that they've decided to treat them to an outing to… the Mall of the Millennium.
3. Recapitulation
You know, now that I look at these episodes, I realize that what really stands out is that, while the internet cafe and mall settings do identify Daria's time period, it is in a strictly negative sense. Daria takes place in a post-mall, pre-internet world. In Café Disaffecto, the internet cafe is destroyed in the first few seconds of the episode, and not visibly mourned by anyone (even Mr. O'Neill only seems to like the idea of an internet cafe). And in Malled, all the sympathetic characters hate malls, and the Mall of the Millennium* itself is portrayed as a virtual dystopia. This was a very brief period in pop culture history; Mallrats came out just two years before Daria premiered, and Napster was released just two years later. But in Daria’s universe, ALL gatherings of people, whether on the internet or IRL, are suspect. Integrity can only be found in individuals, and individual relationships. Just look at the credits: they consist almost entirely of Daria excusing herself, Bartleby-like, from participating in crowd activities. This was the Golden Age of Slacking, where the cultural ideal was a person who (with the unique clarity of youth) had not only seen through society's hypocrisy, but also resigned themselves to its inevitability. You can't change the system, you can only withhold your participation.
In fact, the action in each episode is kicked off by the exact same scenario: Daria struggles to avoid participating in classroom discussion, and when she reluctantly speaks up, is not only punished by being forced into extracurricular activities, but is told that it was her own idea. Daria finds herself forced to patronize an old-fashioned coffeehouse and an ultra-modern megamall, both testaments in different ways to an idea she has rejected, the idea that two heads are better than one, that collaboration and community bring out the best of all of us. This pro-community viewpoint is as old as history, and to be honest, it has been overwhelmingly dominant (for every Emerson or Rousseau, there are a dozen Twains and Voltaires). But while Mr. O'Neill would see an enormous difference between the philosophical interchange of the coffee house and the economic interchange of the mall, Daria herself sees all intercourse as fundamentally weakening, a dilution of the pure indvidual spirit into the indistinguishable and amoral morass of public opinion. To what extent is this a factor of the time period, and to what extent is this just normal adolescent solipsism, Holden Caulfield Syndrome? Since I was a solipsistic adolescent myself at this time (I am, very roughly, 3 years older than Daria, but between the show's production schedule and my own somewhat arrested development, we were essentially peers), I'm unable to say. I can only say that Daria and I were of the same mind at this time, and we had no trouble finding validation for our beliefs.
*or, as history will refer to it, the Willennium
4. Closeup
The focus group scene in Malled is interesting as an example of the era's political atmosphere, and in how it positions Daria in its Teen Comedy genre. But I think what's most interesting about it is the relationships, specifically between Jodie, Daria, and Jane. The strength of Daria, even in mediocre episodes like this one, is the deep understanding of its characters and their relationships, and we can see this in the different, yet complementary ways that the three take down the mall executives. To recap:
- Jane is the first to speak, and is to an extent the Id to Daria's Ego and Jodie's Superego. She obstructs the executives (by providing absurd answers to their questions) not to advance any cause per se, but just because she's read the room, and she knows that she can get away with it. (In many episodes, Jane's anti-authoritarian lines will be delivered in aside, to Daria, but here she speaks directly to the executives.)
- With the ice broken, Jodie poses the question: “Do you think our demographic can really be addressed by middle-aged middle managers telling us what's fun to buy?” <As an aside, whoever transcribed this for Outpost Daria inserted a stage direction at this point: (the executives are silent; they obviously never expected to deal with a kid in possession of a functioning brain)>
- Daria then points out that they should be getting paid, and while the grownups splutter, points out to Jane that the wall is a two-way mirror.
- Jane turns out the lights (announcing out loud that she's doing so), revealing the other side of the mirror.
- Jodie obliquely threatens to start a media scandal. When the executives offer her a coupon, Jane non-obliquely responds “Don't insult her.”
- When the executives offer a $10 merchandise coupon, Jane bids them up again.
- When the price is met, Daria says that there's a principle at stake. Jodie says that there isn't, and Jane doesn't even bother to say anything as she heads off to grab her coupon.
These characters are fundamentally very similar. They're all three intelligent, not super-popular but comfortable in their position, obedient but unafraid. And yet there is no point in this scene where any one of them could be swapped for any of the others:
Jane is the amoral one: she talks back to amuse herself, she turns out the lights to amuse herself, she takes whatever fee she can negotiate, and she feels no responsibility towards Daria.
Jodie is the realist. She knows her advantages and her weaknesses, and those of her opponents. She doesn't talk back to amuse herself, she does it to gain a strategic advantage. She knows that her media threat is largely a bluff; these executives have their own strings to pull and would have a decent chance at hushing up any fuss she managed to stir up. So she takes what she can get, cashes in, and moves on.
Daria is the moralist. She doesn’t want money; she knows her parents have more than enough, and she already has enough guilt over her subconscious refusal to examine the source of her own financial well-being. She just wants to not be contributing to the system any more than she has to. But as it turns out, you have to contribute a lot. That’s why it's the system.
5. Bullet Points!
-I can state from personal experience that high school English teachers of the late '90s fucking LOVED the idea of coffee houses. (And now that I'm in my mid-thirties, I agree with them.)
-Café Disaffecto is the first script since the premiere credited to Glenn Eichler.
-Related point: I feel bad for cramming in Café Disaffecto in with Malled, when Café Disaffecto is the vastly superior episode
-I feel like this show (like most in the genre) oversells the intelligence of teens, but I don't think that it undersells the intelligence of adults. Mrs. Bennett takes 20 or 30 teenagers to a giant mall, by herself, and doesn't even have much of an idea of how they can actually learn anything once they got there, and everybody signed off on this. And yet, that scenario, particularly for the time period, seems perfectly plausible to me.
-Although, DID everybody sign off? Malled has a LOT of plot holes: the Morgendorffers are apparently unaware that Daria took a trip to the Mall of the Millennium, even though they must surely have signed a permission slip for it. The mall is clearly identified as being 100 miles away, even though that clearly means that the economics class must have missed all their other classes for the day, which seems like a lot for Mrs. Bennett to pull off on a whim. And is the Fashion Club really all cutting all their classes for the day to spend two hours driving each way to the mall? And how can Daria and Jane skip out on the bus ride home without Mrs. Bennett noticing? Daria isn't overly concerned with plausibility, but this episode is more than usually problematic
-I love that the Mall of the Millennium describes itself as “the world's second or third largest mall.”
-Related to my discussion of sexual harrassment in my last post: Upchuck cops a feel from Brittany, which is definitely a case of the character not being fully developed yet.
-But what's endearing about Upchuck is his non-discrimination. He also makes a pass at Mrs. Bennett, although she doesn't notice.
-Daria Timestamp Watch: beyond the mall/internet cafe aspects, there are a couple very dated references: specifically Fuzzy Wuzzy Wee Bits/Beanie Babies, and "Animal Maulings on home video", a clear reference to When Animals Attack! My favorite sentence from the Wikipedia entry on Beanie Babies: "In 1998, English authorities seized more than 6000 [counterfeit] Princesses and Britanniae." They Latinized the plural of Britannia!
-Jodie and Mack are both politically aware, but in a faintly resigned sense, as when Jodie asks Mack whether they would be damaging "Dr. King's memory" by moving to the back of the school bus to evade Kevin and Brittany (who are getting MUCH more intimate than would have been allowed in any school bus I've ever been on).
-Where does Upchuck get his winning ways? Well, his dad asked Upchuck to buy him bikinis for his secretary.
-Tiffany's voice is still all wrong, Stacey's is only slightly off.
-Has any store every actually awarded anything to, or even acknowledged, their lucky 10,000th customer? It's a reasonably common trope, but I've never once heard of it happening in real life.
-One of my favorite things about the Fashion Club is that their fashion tips are always, like, insane. Mandarin collar? Skort set?!
-OK, fine, here are the 17 Raddest things about 1997*:
17.) The last scene of Con Air
16.) Gwen Stefani doing pushups
15.) The Palm Pilot. Fun fact: I have actually written software designed to interface with a Palm Pilot.
14.) Dancing Baby
13.) The Fifth Element. I stand by it.
12.) Jamiroquai's hat
11.) The fact that somehow, for some reason, more people cared about Princess Di's death than any other death in human history before or since
10.) Lillith Fair (top-grossing festival of the year!)
9.) My last day of high school, when me and Ben and some other classmates went out in the woods and burned our school uniforms.
8.) The Bittersweet Symphony video
7.) Jackie Brown
6.) MMMBop. It’s been 16 years, and you’re still going to have that song stuck on your head now that I've mentioned it.
5.) How do you like them apples?
4.) I get knocked down! But I get up again! Na na na na gonna keep me down!
3.) Oh my God! You killed Kenny! You bastards!
2.) OK Computer. It's a cliche for a reason.
1.) Daria, obviously!
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