At the same time, the series manages to be as skeptical as Candide without Voltaire's righteous anger simmering just below the ironic froth. The trick is to assume that we will identify with Jerri not despite everything that's repellent about her, but because of those things. This makes the show bright and bouncy, even while Jerri's rankness allows Sedaris and her crew to conjure a nightmare version of our memories of that age (when, for instance, a teacher intercepts Jerri's note and reads it out loud to the class: "My vagina is on fire. I'm trying not to scratch it, Orlando, I'm afraid it'll get infected.").
Clearly, this identification is not served up with the usual cynical-naïve pathos. When the popular girls in gym class pick a student with two broken arms over Jerri for their basketball team, we are not asked to shed a tear. In fact, the makers know how to cauterize pathos by mimicking the emphatic techniques Hollywood uses to wring salt water from us. But neither is the irony affectlessly inflicted on the characters as it is in Todd Solondz's Palindromes (2004). Instead, we observe Jerri with detachment from the outside while at the same time identifying with her — in all her near-worthlessness — from the inside. Jerri's grotesque appearance, speech, and behavior expressionistically externalize how we fear people — justly — view us. In this sense, the identification with Jerri tickle-tortures a silent confession out of anyone who responds to the show.
At their simplest, the series and movie exploit the fact that Jerri brings to the typical experiences of a high school freshman not just the outlook of a middle-aged woman, but her anytime-anywhere taste for drugs and sex as well. (Sex with boys and girls — as she puts it with attempted worldliness, "I like the pole and the hole.") And all of this is inflected with the adaptations she's made on the street and in prison. For instance, her answer to a fresh-faced fellow student who asks what Jerri considers an obvious question is, "Does a pimp carry a razor?" The girl gives what she considers an obvious answer, i.e., that she doesn't know, and Jerri sets her straight: "Trust me — they all do."
The character is more intricately knotted than that, however. Jerri would like to do better, provided it takes no effort, but she's got too little to work with. She's both stupid and ignorant, unable, for instance, to read the movie's title before it disappears from the screen. (She's a blank that can't be filled in.) Moreover, she is guilty of all categories of vice — victimless, petty, felonious, and moral — even when indulging a vice is self-defeating. (When a friend asks whether she's thinking of signing up for the science fair, Jerri replies, "No, I'm thinkin' about pussy. Science fair's for queers.") In the mooshy uplifter The Enchanted Cottage (1945), a disfigured serviceman and a homely woman fall in love and in that magic cottage they can see each other for what they "really" are underneath their imperfect surfaces. In Strangers With Candy, by contrast, Jerri's lack of external beauty only masks her lack of inner beauty.
Article comments
1 - Alan Dale
you have not said it in ways i thought you never could, bravo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! your B.F.
2 - Al Barger
Hey, that's some outstanding writing, Mr Dale. I watched just one or two episodes of the series, but this definitely has me interested in seeing the feature film.
3 - Alan Dale
Lee Siegel alert: that top e-mail is, in truth, from the B.F. He's not a computer wiz and so he used my log-on without realizing that it would make it look as if I had attempted to comment on my own writing under a pseudonym. Sorry for any confusion.
4 - Alan Dale
Thank you, Mr. Barger for your comment. I'm thrilled that it has made you want to check the movie out. (Remember, though, I was quoting from the series as well as the movie.) SWC has turned me into a combination of St. Paul and Typhoid Mary--I want everyone to succumb, for their own good.
5 - Hobokamp
Now that was the most thoroughly in-depth review of SWC that I have ever seen! Bravo, well done. You really "get" what they were putting out there. What seems simple and sometimes bizarre on the surface unfolds nicely into a strangely insightful comment on society once you scratch the surface, right? Thanks for the great read-hope Amy, Paul and Stephen all get a chance to see it.
6 - Alan Dale
Thanks for the comment, Hobokamp. (Or is that spelled V-I-C-T-O-R-Y?) I totally agree that the show seems simple and bizarre on the surface, but reveals a totally coherent vision underneath. The only thing I would alter is that SWC strikes me as going deeper than social commentary. It dramatizes the lowest estimate of what we humans are, in ourselves. If you know how to send the review to the SWC, please do. Thanks again.
7 - Michael J. West
So if I found the TV show stale, clumsy, and unfunny--which I did--will the movie change my mind?
8 - Erin
What a pleasure to read this in-depth analysis of my favorite show. To those who find it stale & unfunny - you haven't watched it enough. Amy Sedaris does deserve a nomination for Best Actress.
Mr. Dale, I would love to see your review of my favorite audiobook, "Wigfield."
9 - Alan Dale
Dear Michael, I doubt the movie will change your mind. No accounting for taste! Thanks for writing.
10 - Alan Dale
Hey Erin, Thanks for the comment. It's hard for those of us on the other side of the SWC mirror to realize that some people might not like what they see. I have the disease and I don't want the cure! I doubt that further viewing will contaminate someone as resistant as Michael seems to be, however. I'll have to check Wigfield out.