Re: 心得：看完Friends 1~10季 - 六人行

是這篇嗎?
給大家參考

Reconsidering Friends
The kids-in-the-city sitcom just wanted to be liked, not admired. But in
spite of itself, it helped redefine the idea of normal family life
By JAMES PONIEWOZIK

Monday, Apr. 19, 2004
In the Friends episode "The One Where No One Proposes"--in which Rachel Green
has had Ross Geller's baby after a one-night stand--Ross's father gazes at
the tiny girl in the hospital. "My first grandchild," he purrs. "What about
Ben?" asks Ross, referring to his son by his lesbian ex-wife, born in the
first season. "Well, of course Ben," Mr. Geller covers up. "I meant my first
granddaughter."

Is it farfetched that a man would forget his own grandson? Sure. But the gag
works, because many of us also forgot Ben existed, even though he figured
heavily in the sitcom's first two seasons. Jokes on Friends often involve
characters' reminding us of basic details about their lives (say, that Monica
and Ross are brother and sister) or forgetting details about one another (in
Season 7, Chandler gets glasses, and everyone, including his fiance Monica,
believes he has always had them). Friends is like that: content to be funny
and forgettable. Even the episode titles--"The One Where ..."--suggest that
even if the titles were more grandiose, you wouldn't remember them.

Friends underestimates itself. But that's understandable, because we
underestimate it too. The highly popular show, which signs off after 10
seasons on May 6, has not inspired the kind of cultural hand wringing about
its existential meaning that Seinfeld did--despite NBC's hubristically
plugging Friends as the "best comedy ever"--and its proud-to-be-shallow
attitude may be the reason. Beginning in the Norman Lear 1970s, we decided
that great sitcoms must not be simply funny; they must also be important.
That is, they must court controversy (All in the Family). They must document
social progress (Mary Tyler Moore). They must have a sense of satire
(M*A*S*H) or mission (The Cosby Show). They must be about something. Even
Seinfeld, the "show about nothing," was about being the show about nothing;
its nihilism was so well advertised as to beg cultural critics to read deep
meaning into it.

Friends, on the other hand, is simply about being a pleasant sitcom. The
bland, it-is-what-it-is title, the innocuous theme song I'll Be There for
You--everything about it screams that it would rather be liked than
respected. Its comments about the outside world are kept to the background.
(Literally. After 9/11 rocked New York City, the Magna Doodle board on Joey's
apartment door had the initials "FDNY" written on it.) What do people talk
about when they talk about Friends? Jennifer Aniston's hair. Jennifer
Aniston's husband. The Ugly Naked Guy across the street. The Smelly Cat song.
"We were on a break!"

But perhaps we need to redefine "important TV." When Aniston, Courteney Cox
(later Cox Arquette), Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry and David
Schwimmer arrived en masse, controversy was still a mark of great sitcoms
(Roseanne); however, it also allowed mediocre ones (Ellen, Murphy Brown) to
act important. Friends went out of its way to be lightweight. But it may have
done more to show how American values and definitions of family have
changed--and to ratify those changes--than its peers, precisely because it
was so innocuous.

Back in 1994--that Reality Bites, Kurt Cobain year--the show wanted to
explain people in their 20s to themselves: the aimlessness, the cappuccino
drinking, the feeling that you were, you know, "always stuck in second gear."
It soon wisely toned down its voice-of-a-generation aspirations and became a
comedy about pals and lovers who suffered comic misunderstandings and got pet
monkeys.

But it stuck with one theme. Being part of Gen X may not mean you had a
goatee or were in a grunge band; it did, however, mean there was a good
chance that your family was screwed up and that you feared it had damaged
you. Only Ross and Monica have a (relatively) happy set of parents. Phoebe's
mom (not, we later learn, her biological mother) committed suicide, and her
dad ran out. When Chandler was 9, his parents announced their divorce at
Thanksgiving--Dad, it turned out, was a cross-dresser, played by Kathleen
Turner. Joey discovered his father was having an affair. Rachel's mom left
her dad, inspired by Rachel's jilting her fiance at the altar.

For 10 years, through all the musical-chairs dating and goofy
college-flashback episodes, the characters have dealt with one problem: how
to replace the kind of family in which they grew up with the one they
believed they were supposed to have. One way was by making one another
family. But they also found answers that should have, yet somehow didn't, set
off conniptions in the people now exercised over gay marriage and Janet
Jackson's nipple.

There was, of course, all the sleeping around, though that's not exactly rare
on TV today. More unusual was Friends' fixation--consistent but never
spotlighted in "very special episodes"--with alternative families. Like all
romantic comedies, Friends tends to end its seasons with weddings or births.
And yet none of the Friends has had a baby the "normal" way--in the Bushian
sense--through procreative sex between a legally sanctioned husband and wife.
Chandler and Monica adopt. Ross has kids by his lesbian ex-wife and his unwed
ex-girlfriend. Phoebe carries her half brother and his wife's triplets (one
of the funniest, sweetest and creepiest situations ever--"My sister's gonna
have my baby!" he whoops). As paleontologist Ross might put it, Friends is,
on a Darwinian level, about how the species adapts to propagate itself when
the old nuclear-family methods don't work.

The message of Friends, in other words, is that there is no normal anymore
and that Americans--at least the plurality needed to make a sitcom No.
1--accept that. (To the show's discredit, it used a cast almost entirely of
white-bread heteros to guide us through all that otherness.) In January 1996,
when Ross's ex-wife married her lesbian lover, the episode raised scant
controversy, and most of that because Candace Gingrich--the lesbian sister of
Newt, then Speaker of the House--presided over the ceremony. "This is just
another zooey episode of the justifiably popular Friends," yawned USA Today.
Sure, sitcoms like Roseanne had introduced gays earlier--but it's not as
though that had rendered gay marriage uncontroversial, then or now. The
bigger difference was in attitude, both the show's and the audience's.

What was radical about Friends was that it assumed these situations were not
shocking but a fact of life. Maybe your dad wasn't a drag queen, Friends
says, but maybe your parents split up, or maybe you had a confirmed-bachelor
uncle whom the family, whatever its politics, had come to accept. If it was
important for Murphy Brown to show that a single woman could have a baby in
prime time--and spark a war with a Vice President--it was as important that
Friends showed that a single woman could have a baby on TV's biggest sitcom,
sparking nothing but "awwws."

In the end, the characters are approaching something like traditional happy
endings: Phoebe married, Chandler and Monica becoming parents, Ross and
Rachel headed for whatever closure the writers have devised, Joey going west
for the Valhalla of spin-off-dom. Still, what a weird route they took.
Friends may not have been as artistically great as NBC says, but it may have
been more important than the show itself seemed to believe. If, as the
headlines keep screaming, the culture war is not over, for half an hour a
week over 10 years, we were able to forget it existed. What else are friends
for?

--