Maisel's World

I finally started on season three of The Marvellous Mrs. Maisel last night. I'm only five years late. I like showrunner Amy Sherman Palladino's writing but I struggle with this show's point of view on early 1960s America. It's inevitable that it would be infused with the perspective of its creator, and that's how it should be, unless you have a time machine. The influence of an outsider's perspective is inevitable, you can either fight it or embrace it, and fighting it is futile. '70s movies about the '50s feel different from '80s movies about the '50s and that's a feature, not a bug, at least for me.

But I don't share the makers of Mrs. Maisel's evident preference for modern R&B over '60s R&B, as evidenced by the vocal styles of the singers in the episode I watched last night. Midge performs at a USO show in the episode. I guess it's also a problem I never find Midge's standup routines remotely funny. They always seem like careful formulae of theoretically funny material. She's much funnier in dialogue with Suzy. Their banter about being late and dick jokes was much better. The chemistry between the two actresses helps a lot. But another problem with the show is its uneasy mix of a sugary, idealised vision of the period with a desire to say something about the dirty, downtrodden side of the tracks, a world intended to be represented by Suzy and a fictionalised version of Lenny Bruce. In the episode I watched last night, Bruce is forcibly removed by police from a club when he tells some offensive jokes. But while it was a (slightly modified) version of an actual Lenny Bruce routine, it was one that happens to not be especially controversial; he argues that stag films portraying consensual sex do not present the hazards to the mental health of children as much as the publicly condoned depictions of violence in media. It's easy enough for an audience to-day to nod and agree but what if they used one of the routines in which Bruce used derogatory terms for homosexuals and religious minorities? The viewer might then get a better picture of what standing up for free speech really means, that you might also be made uncomfortable sometimes, not just people you don't like.

Speaking of censorship, I also noticed the episode digitally painted out Midge's bare ass. I wondered if this was because I was watching it on Japanese Amazon Prime so I checked to see if the topless scene is still in the first episode. It is, completely intact. Interestingly, this means the first episode is rated 16+ and almost the entire rest of the series is rated 13+. I'm fascinated by the shift that's occurred in Japanese public morals in the past 30 years. I remember my friends and I, in the late '80s and early '90s, being astonished by how casually Japanese shows, even kids' shows, showed nudity. According to Lenny Bruce's ideas, and my own, that meant the Japanese had a much healthier attitude. But that's changed. The remake of Urusei Yatsura lacks the famous nudity of the original. I remember one day in the library at one of the schools I work at a student was thumbing through an old manga. She came to a page where a man and woman were arguing and the woman happened to be topless. It wasn't sexual in any way, just a candid depiction of normal life. The student looked at me like I'd caught her holding a bottle of tequila. I just smiled pleasantly. What else could I do?

It's weird they'd remove Midge's butt, though. It reminded me of the butt in the digital shadow in Terminator: Genesys. Or Daryl Hannah's digitally hairy butt on the Disney+ version of Splash. Somewhere along the line, Americans seem to have become unable to handle the sight of butts.