Tag Archives: TV Shows

The White-Boy Logic of Supernatural

15 Thursday Jul 2021

Posted by in 1, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Hebrew-Israelite, Movies, Politics, Pop Culture, Religion

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Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki as Dean and Sam Winchester in Supernatural, Season 9, Episode 13 (“The Purge”) screenshot. Originally aired February 4, 2014.

One of the benefits of working from home for years is the ability to take in copious amounts of popular culture in passive and subliminal ways. For more than a decade before the pandemic, my daily schedule included a multitasking routine of writing, teaching, grading, working-out, napping, running errands, and getting my son off to school and my partner off to her job. All the while, I am consuming news and pop culture. BBC World News from 6 or 7 am until I go to the car to drive my spouse to the Metro stop or run errands, sometimes longer. In the Honda Element, listening to my tunes or ESPN 980 (before Dan Synder sold the station two years ago) or WAMU/NPR. And, bouncing from show to show while writing, grading, working out, making lunch, prepping dinner, sometimes taking a brief nap between 1:30 and 2:45 (when my son returned home from school) or between 3:45 and 6 pm (when it was time to pick my significant other up from the Metro). 

Of all the TNT reruns I’d put on in the midday slot over the years, between Bones, Castle, Arrow, and Law & Order, the one that has stuck with me the longest is Supernatural. Its final episode aired at the end of this past year. Perhaps it’s because it’s such a white boy’s show, or because it’s about as American as a show filmed in Vancouver, British Columbia can get. Whatever it was, I went from calling the show “Brooders” and “White Males Brooding” to actually enjoying the series, a not-so-guilty pleasure in between grading, writing, and revising, and yoga poses, planks, pushups, crunches, free weights, and plyometrics.

That doesn’t mean I’ve watched it with an uncritical mind. Just like with what I’ve called “white male angst music” in the 1990s — alt rock and grunge (think Pearl Jam and Live here) — Supernatural is a tour-de-force of whitemansplaining the world. Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki as Dean and Sam Winchester might play classic ‘70s rock in their legendary 1967 black Chevy Impala, but they are all “White, Discussion” and Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Under The Bridge” in their attitudes. Seriously, how do two white dudes get away with mass murder while they constantly “save the world” with the “family business” of “hunting and killing monsters”?

The premise of the show, for the generation of folks who haven’t watched the 15 seasons of episodes between 2005 and 2020 (I watched my first episode in 2012, so there’s that), is that the Winchesters have to fight monsters born of supernatural forces while hunting for a yellow-eyed demon who killed their mother, and eventually, their father. In between bouts with demons, angels, archangels, Lucifer, Leviathans, Knights of Hell, Princes of Hell, the King of Hell, and God, er, “Chuck” himself, the Winchesters battled the usual. Ghosts, vampires, werewolves, skinwalkers, jinns, Greco-Roman, Norse, Incan, and Mayan gods, witches, and whatever other supernatural monster one could imagine. Supernatural was at its absolute best when the focus was on the ancient lore around cultural considerations of the metaphysical.  

But the overarching theme of Dean and Sam Winchester “saving the world” is the great white man’s white lie. How does anyone get credit for “saving the world” when they broke the world, the natural order, multiple times. Here’s a short list of the Winchester’s thirst for revenge leading to Armageddon:

– the father John Winchester selling his soul to the “yellow-eyed demon” to save Dean’s life (Season 1)

– Dean selling his soul to the same demon to save Sam’s life (Season 2)

– Sam drinking demon blood to kill a Princess of Hell and Dean torturing damned souls in Hell, breaking the last and the first of 66 seals to unleash Lucifer and the Four Horsemen on the planet (Season 4)

– Dean not allowing Sam to die after finishing the three trials to forever seal up the gates of Hell, and then tricking Sam into allowing a rogue angel possess him for months afterward (Seasons 8 and 9)

– Dean taking on the Mark of Cain, becoming a demon in the process, and Sam freeing Dean from the Mark, unleashing the Darkness (think if so-called dark matter was God’s sister here) and another universe-destroying force (Seasons 9, 10, and 11)

– The Winchesters allowing a nephilim to live and its power to open up a rift between alternative Earths, a rift that threatened both versions of the planet in the process (Seasons 12 and 13)

– Engaging in a all-out war with God, ending only when they resurrect the nephilim Jack from the Empty, as he become the new God, and the old God becomes just Chuck, “just a slob like one of us,” ala 1990s rocker Joan Osborne (Seasons 14 and 15).

Dean and Sam die and go to Hell, Heaven, and Purgatory multiple times in this series. How narcissistic do even white guys — get to be when they assume that they can come back to life over and over again in order to “save” their brother while also saving the world? Especially when they sacrifice other family and friends to keep each other living and hunting monsters? So many die in this show because of their ignorance, so many who didn’t have to. When you take apart the context of their “jobs” as hunters involves hustling pool tables, identity theft and hacking credit cards, stealing cars, and regularly killing people who’ve turned into monsters or in the midst of demon possession. Any two of these gets Black and Brown and Indigenous folks a one-way ticket to prison or a grave, with no chance for resurrection.

It’s hilariously macabre and the height of arrogance of two white guys believing they are doing more good than harm. But isn’t Supernatural really just a parable about how white guys see themselves in the world? Everything is there for the taking, it’s all about us and our lives. Between the drugs, the boozing, the meaningless misogynistic sex, the endless buffet of death by food, Supernatural is the ultimately expression of white male-dominance, or at least, the quest for it, from two average Joes.

Near the end of Season 9, Episode 13 (“The Purge”), Dean and Sam talk, not for the last time, about putting their need to save each other from certain death above the needs and lives of everyone else. Sam has a moment of complete clarity, one that fades away by the end of Season 10 (see the list above). 

You think you’re my savior, my brother, the hero. You swoop in, and even when you mess up, you think what you’re doing is worth it, because you’ve convinced yourself you’re doing more good than bad…but you’re not…What is the upside of me being alive?

Dean’s response:

You kidding me? You and me — fighting the good fight — together.

It never occurred to these characters, and perhaps, even the actors, producers, directors, and writers for Supernatural, that Dean and Sam Winchester are the real monsters here. Two everyday white guys who think that killing monsters and a host of supernatural entities is the solution to everything. Did they even consider that killing monsters might be the reason they need to keep hunting, because they create more each time they kill one? Or that maybe because the US is a place full of kidnapping, rape, enslavement, genocide, and murder, this nation is a natural incubator of supernatural hauntings and possessions, a place where all monsters can thrive? Did they ever see themselves as the humans they never seem to understand in the show? Probably not until the final episode in Season 15, when Dean and Sam finally die — this time for good, and for good. 

I never wanted them to “Carry On Wayward Son,” as Kansas sang it in 1976, as a choir of white girls sang it Season 10, Episode 5. As sad as it was to see the final finale of Dean and Sam Winchester, we need a world without the hundreds of millions of Dean and Sam Winchesters around us, an anti-racist world. A world without these narcissistic and yes, racist and misogynistic and homophobic monsters who see themselves as do-gooders.

Hollywood and the Sounds of Empire

21 Monday Dec 2015

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Da Vinci's Demons Season 3 Poster, October 2015. (Starz via http://www.ew.com/). Fair use due to direct connection with subject matter and non-commercial use.

Da Vinci’s Demons Season 3 Poster, October 2015. (Starz via http://www.ew.com/). Fair use due to direct connection with subject matter and non-commercial use.

I finished catching up on the Starz series Da Vinci’s Demons over the weekend, which included me watching the final episode via Xfinity On Demand last night. I will not provide any spoilers. But, I am at a loss regarding the one constant with most period pieces or fantasy TV series and movies. I simply do not understand the need for a British accent in everything that isn’t American in Hollywood or its near-equivalent. If my understanding of history is correct, Romans didn’t speak in British English with English colloquialisms like “Needs must” or “bollocks.” Alexander the Great was never “knackered” or “gobsmacked.” And Leonardo da Vinci as played by Tom Riley saying “codswallop” or “fortnight” or any of a hundred British sayings with a nasally, pretentious accent is about as accurate as firing a shotgun at a barn’s broadside from 1,000 meters away.

Brit Slang Explained: Translation Chart for a British Slang Bus Blind T-shirt Design, December 21, 2015. (https://anglotees.com.

Brit Slang Explained: Translation Chart for a British Slang Bus Blind T-shirt Design, December 21, 2015. (https://anglotees.com.

In general, I love hearing and reading the differences in British and other forms of English when not spoken by Americans. With so many TV series and movies now done with international casts, though, it has turned into a form of cultural imperialism. Especially since I know that until two centuries ago, the average Brit sounded more like the average Canadian or American than like James Bond while attending Oxford. The change in accent was part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain’s rise to superpower empire status during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Anyone who wanted to become part of the British gentry class — including newly monied industrialists and merchants — hired speech coaches to train them to speak English in the manner that we hear from most British English speakers in 2015.

Even with the rise of the US as the world’s leading superpower and its gigantic cultural and economic footprint, British English still is the language and sound of empire. At least where Hollywood is concerned. Because British English sounds imperial, high-class, important, urgent, and intelligent, according to the ears of many an English speaker, whether in the UK, the US, or elsewhere in the world. It doesn’t matter if the modern version of f–k didn’t exist until the eighteenth century. It doesn’t matter if some shows like Game of Thrones or movies like Lord of the Rings are complete fantasy and should have no adherence to any particular language or sound. British English is all that and a bag of chips, the cat’s meow, is dope for the English-speaking world.

For me, though, all I’m hearing with shows like Da Vinci’s Demons, Rome, Spartacus and The Borgias (the Showtime version), and with movies like 300 and Gladiator is a narrative framed by imperialism and the triumph of the West. It’s not just the British English accent and the imperialism it represents. It’s also how producers, directors, and actors consistently frame period pieces in the West vs. East, civilization vs. savagery narrative. Be them Ottoman Turks, Germanic barbarians or Persian emperors, they’re all simplistic antagonists for cinematic fodder that reinforces the West as good, godly and victorious. Or, rather, to quote Pittsburgh Steelers’ head coach Mike Tomlin, those without British accents are “the dead Indians” in these modern-day “cowboy” movies.

"Linguistic Imperialism" - what the world might look like if borders were based upon the 10 major languages, May 10, 2014. (The Economist via http://pinterest.com ).

“Linguistic Imperialism” – what the world might look like if borders were based upon the 10 major languages, May 10, 2014. (The Economist via http://pinterest.com ).

And like Tomlin, in the case of screen entertainment, I’m kind of tired of the same theme running over and over again. Not only is depicting the Ottoman Empire or Achaemenid Persia as evil heathens when compared with Italy in the 1480s or Greece in 480 BCE a historical lie. It also reinforces the idea that when the West wields its power and imperialism, the world is always a better place. If the climate summit in Paris demonstrated anything, it showed how much damage the West has done to the world.

A century or two from now — assuming our globalized world doesn’t fall apart due to wars and climate change — entertainment will likely be highlighted with accents unfamiliar to today’s Western ears. Even if one of entertainment’s primary languages remains English, it will likely have another accent. Ace!

 

Fake History, Historians’ Fakery

09 Tuesday Jun 2015

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Fake History Channel Twitter account, June 2012. (@NotHistory1).

Fake History Channel Twitter account, June 2012. (@NotHistory1).

For many of you, this will sound like a “been-there, done-that” kind of a post, but I’m posting anyway. It’s fairly evident Discovery Communications and A&E’s collection of history-related channels are meant for an older crowd of mostly White males with a hankering for military history, for big wars and powerful European (and occasionally Asian/Middle Eastern) men in history. H-History, H2 (soon to be Vice Channel), American Heroes Channel, and Military History are basically a collection of old and new-yet-rehashed documentaries on history that middle-aged and elderly White men can keep up with without ever feeling challenged by facts or different views on such facts. Especially when it comes to anything beyond the actual battlefields of World War II.

Giorgio A. Tsoukalos, regular snake-oil salesman on H2, History regarding Ancient Aliens, June 6, 2015. (tumblr.com).

Giorgio A. Tsoukalos, regular snake-oil salesman on H2, History regarding Ancient Aliens, June 6, 2015. (tumblr.com).

I can only criticize the TV networks and their owners but so much, though. The fact is, the only reason I watch these channels is to fall asleep faster, after a long day, getting my hyper eleven-year-old son to bed, and after some prayer or finishing up some work. Because History and H2 now dip their toes into reality TV and dramatic TV series with Pawn Stars, Ancient Aliens, Vikings, and Texas Rising, I can’t use these useless shows to cure insomnia. In the past year, American Heroes Channel’s gotten into the act, with How We Got Here and America’s Most Badass, a regular portrayal of great White men (and occasionally, women) and their self-made, rugged individualism building a modern America with their bare hands and teeth.

The result is that I can’t fall asleep to these channels anymore. But for the past seven months, I’ve discovered a treasure chest of older or fairly recent documentaries on either Netflix or YouTube to watch, or rather, to watch me as I fall asleep. I listen for soothing narrators, like actors Peter Coyote, Avery Brooks, Keith David or Martin Sheen, or at least, British voices like Robert Powell or Kenneth Branagh.

I look for histories that I know all too well, boring enough to fall asleep to, but not so boring that it leaves me thinking about how poorly the producers did in putting together their documentary. So World War II in Colour, World War I in Colour, Barbarians, Barbarians II, Ancients Behaving Badly, Rome: Power and Glory, Engineering An Empire, Rome: Rise and Fall of an Empire, The Story of India, Islam: Empire of Faith, and The Medici: Godfathers of the Renaissance have been my go-to sleeping pills since last Thanksgiving (I also fall asleep to Wild China, Lions in Battle, Aerial America, The Universe, How The Universe Works, Cosmos, the BBC Planet Earth series, and other, less problematic shows and documentaries). Other documentaries, like We Shall Remain (on the plight of Native Americans since 1607) or The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross, would cause too much pain, anger or interest, blowing an opportunity for six-and-a-half hours of sleep or more for that night.

Thomas R. Martin, Jeremiah O'Connor Professor in Classics at the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA, June 6, 2015. (http://www.historyseries.net).

Thomas R. Martin, Jeremiah O’Connor Professor in Classics at the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA, June 6, 2015. (http://www.historyseries.net).

So I tend to tolerate — but definitely do not accept — the ideas that the creators of these documentaries push. Like Rome being “the greatest empire the world has ever known” (the Mongols, the Hellenistic Greeks, the Arabs of the Dar al-Islam days, T’ang Dynasty China, Achaemenid Persia, even the British would all beg to differ) or Archimedes as the “greatest genius of the ancient world” (Imhotep’s probably saying, “Really now?!?”). That’s bullshit, of course, typical White and European navel-gazing. This is exactly why there’s no need for a White History Month or a college major in White Male Studies. As I often have that thought, I usually fall asleep, secure in the fact that this mythology would never make it into any class I teach.

Lately, though, I’ve noticed that some of the so-called academic historians that help move the story along in some of these documentaries. Some, like Thomas S. Burns (Emory University), Thomas R. Martin (College of the Holy Cross), and Robocop (1988) actor/historian Peter Weller (Syracuse University), all tell the story of ancient Rome’s rise and fall, or the medieval spread of smallpox and bubonic plague as if they actually lived through it. The assumptions they make about the people of 1,500 or 2,000 years ago are just staggering. It’s as if Rome and Western Europe had a monopoly on civilization, and that when Rome fell, a black cloud full of lightning bolts descended on the subcontinent like Hell itself, drowning it in invasion and sickness for half a millennium. Except that Spain (especially under the Moors), parts of Italy, southern France and Byzantine Europe weren’t exactly crying for a return to the glory days of 20,000 rich Roman families and 16 million slaves.

Krispy Kreme Hot Dogs at minor-league Wilmington (DE) Blue Rocks (consisting of glazed raspberry jelly donut, with hot dog, bacon and onions in between), April 16, 2015. (http://www.cnn.com/2014/11/18/living/gallery/hybrid-food-mashups/).

Krispy Kreme Hot Dogs at minor-league Wilmington (DE) Blue Rocks (consisting of glazed raspberry jelly donut, with hot dog, bacon and onions in between), April 16, 2015. (http://www.cnn.com/2014/11/18/living/gallery/hybrid-food-mashups/).

Others, like David B. Mallott, associate professor and associate dean at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, have applied modern-day thinking of social science — in his case, psychiatry — to their alleged analysis in these overly scripted documentaries. Describing someone like Genghis Khan or Alexander the Great as “bloodthirsty” isn’t exactly in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders, is it, Dr. Mallott? And, given the historical context — a time without the UN Declaration of Human Rights or the Geneva Convention on the treatment of civilians or prisoners of war — would borderline personality disorder or schizophrenia with violent paranoid delusions really apply to Julius Caesar or Napoleon Bonaparte? Ugh!

If you’re going to entertain me, Discovery Communications or A&E, can you please do it without using the pretense of academic expertise as support for your grandiose mythologizing of historical events and the powerful Eurasian men involved? At least when the BBC and PBS do documentaries, they don’t just turn it over to geeks in the fifties and sixties to act out their preteen imaginations of what Rome must’ve been like two millennia ago. How can I continue to fall asleep to your shows and documentaries if you continue to exaggerate and lie and have academically trained hacks-for-historians and social scientists do the same, all in the name of entertainment?

Tells In Telling The Tale

21 Saturday Jul 2012

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Adm. Adama hugging Starbuck scene (screen shot/cropped), Battlestar Galactica, 2009. (http://blazingangel.tumblr.com).

I guess that we as individuals each have tells in telling stories, including our life stories. Certainly all writers have a tell, a catch phrase or common set of words that use in telling a story or in setting a scene. All artists have a unique signature, a nuance within a particular style or genre that sets them apart from someone painting by numbers. Sometimes, at least for me, it takes heavy doses of a writer’s style or of someone’s art for me to see the unique tells in the telling.

Firefly series opening logo, July 21, 2012. (Adamwankenobi via Wikia.com).

That’s been so true for me in watching entire TV series through Netflix over the past two years, whether through DVD or online streaming. Since the spring of ’10, I’ve watched, in order and their entirety, Star Trek: DS9, Star Trek: Enterprise, Star Trek: Voyager, House, Firefly, Heroes, Breaking Bad, Dexter, Six Feet Under, Oz, Eureka, Warehouse 13, Battlestar Galactica, Bones and Fringe, mostly through Netflix. Now, some of these shows I’d seen plenty of when they were regular series, especially DS9, Six Feet Under, House and Oz, while I viewed most of these series for the first time.

There’s something different about watching a TV series all at once than watching it once a week in twelve, twenty-four or twenty-six episode blocks year by year. Especially with unlimited streaming. Earlier this year, I watched all seventy-six episodes of Battlestar Galactica over a six-day span in April, including the first two seasons between Saturday morning and Sunday evening Easter weekend (see my post “Battlescar Galactica” from June ’12).

In watching so many episodes, you quickly sense the rapport being actors, the plot and its direction, and the tells about a particular episode or season of a show. In watching DS9, I learned that whenever Quark would mention Dax’s relationship with a Gallamite (a race with a transparent skull) or a Tholian ambassador, I’d learn something revealing about one of the main characters, especially Dax or Quark. Only, there may’ve been only one scene in 176 episodes in which there was a Gallamite character, and none for a Tholian ambassador.

With House, if the “sarcoidosis” diagnosis came up before the last segment of an episode, it was always wrong, but if it came up in the last segment, it would occasionally be correct. The writers obviously knew that sarcoidosis was such a general diagnosis that it could mean nothing in nearly all the show’s mystery illnesses, revealing the desperation and pressure the characters felt in finding the right diagnosis to save someone’s life.

Bones in the human hand (from authentic human skeleton), March 25, 2004. (Raul654 via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via GNU Free Documentation License.

For other shows, it could be a word, a line, an appearance of a sign or character even. For the first five seasons of Bones, the tell for Brennan’s emotional state — or lack of one — was how she’d say “phalanges,” “distal phalanges,” or even “ungual phalanges.” Brennan wiggled her “phalanges” with delight for babies and kids, and examined microscopic details of dead peoples’ phalanges with scientific coldness otherwise. For the sci-fi western Firefly, lines like “the money was too good” and cursing in Mandarin Chinese illuminated the contrast between haves and have-nots of twenty-sixth century humans, between technological advances and moral devolution.

There’s also Fringe’s opening with changes in colors signifying alternate universes and timelines. Not to mention Breaking Bad’s opening scenes foreshadowing how a season would conclude, or the use of light-skinned or biracial actresses as either technically or ephemerally brilliant characters on Fringe, Warehouse 13 and Bones.

But my all-time favorite tell in any season these days is from Battlestar Galactica, when Adama asks,

“What do you hear, Starbuck?”

“Nothing but the rain, sir,” she says

“Then grab your gun and bring in the cat.”

No matter how the characters felt, how dire the situation, or how triumphant the moment, it was the line that showed how precious the connections we have and need to have with each other and with our humanity.

I think that the way I can — we can — watch movies, TV series, read books and articles, look at art, and listen to music through these tells can tell me a lot about a writer, a musician or an artist. But it also tells me a lot about me. Not just that I’m a little weird. I’m also a sucker for a good story, one that is a bit ironic, a tad asymmetrical, that is quirky and epic, unique and yet mundane. A story that mirrors my life is one that tells me about me, at least in part.

If Boy @ The Window Were A Movie…

10 Saturday Dec 2011

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Movies, My Father, Pop Culture, Youth

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Not So Young Man @ His Window, December 10, 2011. (Donald Earl Collins).

…who would I hire to play the characters in my memoir? Especially if I could reach across space and time to pick actors with the range necessary to play complicated characters, like yours’ truly, for instance. Hmm. I have a few ideas:

Rob Brown, ala Finding Forrester (2000) – He’d been a perfect character to play me during my high school years, between the blank stare and face, his height, and his ability to show awkwardness around Whites in authority.

Rob Brown as Jamal Wallace in Finding Forrester (2000) Screen Shot. (http://filmdope.com).

Khandi Alexander, ala The Corner (2000) – While she isn’t nearly as tall and is a bit chestier than my mother, her affect as the down-and-out West Baltimore mother on the groundbreaking HBO miniseries fits here.

James Avery – He would be in the role of my idiot ex-stepfather, with his bulging eyes and belly, and with his flashes of rage, yeah, he’d been perfect.

Clarke Peters, ala The Wire, Treme – I thought about someone like Sammy Davis, Jr. playing the role of my father, Jimme, but Davis’ acting range wouldn’t have been enough to capture both my father’s drunken rage and the comedy that often served as an overlay to my encounters with my father growing up.

Clarke Peters at Edinburgh Festival 2010, August 6, 2010. (Ausir). Released to public domain via GNU Free Documentation License.

Jesse L. Martin – The man’s acting range is enormous, and would capture the complexities of playing someone like my older brother Darren, a super-shy kid who himself played the role of someone mentally retarded while also having taught himself to read at the age of three. Only, Darren didn’t know how to stop.

Jesse L. Martin at Annual Flea Market and Grand Auction hosted by Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, September 26, 2006. (Insomniacpuppy). Released to public domain via Wikipedia.

Harold Perrineau, ala Oz – His face alone captures a lot of emotion, and show does the way he says his lines, something that I’d want from someone playing my best friend from elementary school. Perrineau’s face would also capture duplicity, a necessary ingredient for betraying a friendship. Just like many of the characters in the HBO series Oz.

Thandie Newton – This was a tough one, as I also thought about Rosario Dawson in the role of Crush #1. But Newton has quirkiness as an actor that Dawson lacks at times, and for all of the wonderful traits of the character known as Crush #1, quirkiness is key.

Thandie Newton at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival, September 2007. (http://www.flickr.com/photos/gdcgraphics/1639139527/in/set-72157602744288487/). Released to public domain via Creative Commons Attribution 2.0.

Ray Liotta – Not nearly as tough, this despite the fact that the real “A” had blondish hair when we were kids. Liotta’s meanness, his laugh, his Italian coldness easily capture what “A” was like as my tormentor in seventh grade.

Nathan Fillion, ala Firefly (2002-03), Serenity(2005) – the near-perfect actor to play the contrarian one, “JD” (see my post “The Contrarian One” from February ’11), his aloofness, his sense of superiority, his maverick affect throughout our years in Humanities together.

Nathan Fillion as Capt. Malcolm Reynolds, Firefly (2002-02). (Wikipedia.org).

Alison Arngrim, ala Little House on the Prairie (1974-82) – She played Nellie Olson on the show, a bratty, well-off girl who only knew how to view the world through her own selfish lens. She could play any number of my former White classmates, especially many of the ones who left Humanities between the end of eighth and the beginning of tenth grade.

Little House on the Prairie's Nellie Olson as played by Alison Arngirm, circa 1977. (http://www.flickr.com/3595/3433153010_b5f3cae12a.jpg).

Gabrielle Union – as this actor has done the affect of pissed off and Black preppie well over the years, she’d be great for the role of Crush #2, the one the main character (me) becomes obsessed with in the six months after graduating high school. Like the character, Union can crush hearts.

Rita Moreno – A fixture in the acting business for more than sixty years, one of a handful to win an Oscar, an Emmy, and a Tony Award, she could easily slip on the role of a guidance counselor like the chain-smoking, stereotyping bigot Sylvia Fasulo. The only other person who’d fit this role is Callie Thorne from the USA show, Necessary Roughness.

Brian Dennehy – There aren’t many actors who could play my late AP US History teacher Harold Meltzer. You see, you’d need to be able to spit, to tell long and strange stories, to have moment of macabre laughter and moments of bitter rage. Dennehy, though, has experience doing all of those things, though not in one role. Plus, he’s tall and rotund enough for the part.

Brad Dourif, ala Dune (1984), Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002) – He’s weird enough to play the role of Regis, one of my older friends from my undergraduate days at the University of Pittsburgh, someone who was there for me the semester I went through homeless and three months without money.

Brad Dourif at the Lord of the Rings-Convention Ring*Con in Bonn, Germany, November 23, 2002. (Diane Krauss). Released to public domain via GNU Free Documentation.

I could go on and on. But that’s unnecessary here. This ensemble cast, with the right script — and a time machine — would make Boy @ The Window come alive, and have me blushing and crying over and over again.