Jessica Fletcher, Jessica Fletcher
My Fellow Shennyer:
As you likely know, Angela Lansbury died last week, just 5 days shy of her 97th birthday. Friends and family texted immediately with their condolences, knowing how big a fan I am. And why am I such a fan? I don’t know exactly. I’ve had it in my head for a decade to write an essay to figure that out, an essay I’ve had only a title for: ‘Jessica Fletcher, Jessica Fletcher’.
Now seems as good a time as any for that essay, which appears as our Main Matter below.
Dame Angela lived a long life and died at home in her sleep. All the reports I’ve read since her death indicate she was loved by everyone she ever met. What does it mean to bring joy to people? How do you build a life around that, and why might you?
It’s a small thing to dedicate an issue of a newsletter to someone who lived such a large life for so long. As Jessica Fletcher taught me, small things solve the mystery befuddling everyone else.
Yours:
Dave
Endorsements: Murder, She Wrote–episode edition
1. S2.E4: ‘School for Scandal’ (Peacock)
Those of you who work in, or graduated from, English departments will love this episode. Jessica arrives at Crenshaw College to deliver their commence speech, and the fun thing about Crenshaw is that it holds the kind of English department where being chair is something faculty try to out-kiss the ass of the current chair to win, rather than get scarce when it’s time to find the next sap who’ll say yes to all that service. The current chair is a respectable woman whose skinny-dipping daughter shows up for an important party with her hot boyfriend in tow, a mustachio’d ruffian who soon slugs both a colleague and wine straight from the bottle:
The daughter writes sex-heavy romances, to her mother’s scholarly shame, and then one morning her hot dummy is found dead in some bushes. Was it Roddy McDowall? Or June Lockhart’s husband? Or the guy who played sweet brainless James on Twin Peaks, who has a small role as a student? And most importantly: Who will get the position of new chair?
2. S5.E9: ‘Something Borrowed, Someone Blue’ (Peacock)
To love this episode, you might need to love Grady, Jessica’s nephew who moved in with her and Frank after his parents died, making him the closest thing she has to a son. This episode is set on the weekend of Grady’s wedding with Donna Mayberry (played by the actor’s real life wife), the only daughter of a wealthy man who sees the weekend more as a business venture. Her mom is played by Gale Storm, whose stage name testifies to the force of breath support she gives every shrieking line of dialogue. This one’s got more red herrings than most M,SW eps, and it’s a tour de force of how many wacky characters they’re able to pack into 47 mins: the horny great uncle, the drawling Southern belle with much too much money, the airheaded aunt nobody can remember inviting, another bad-boy boyfriend in tight denim. Oh, and the murder weapon? It’s a meat thermometer.
Jessica Fletcher, Jessica Fletcher
Recently, a hetero colleague asked me why gay men liked old white women so much. She was referring to my love for Murder, She Wrote and my secondary interest in The Golden Girls. I quickly said, ‘Well, it’s about....’ And then I hit a wall. I was versed in theories on gay men and drag, and theories on gay men and divas, but none of those tools was able to explain it to me, Jessica Fletcher being neither drag queen nor diva, but something entirely different.
For a people whose erotic imagination seems too often to require just this total erasure of the feminine, it is peculiar that gay men’s aesthetic or even moral imaginations glom onto certain types of women. Also: there’s a lot in me that bristles at the task of needing to find an explanation for such behavior—this after Gayle Rubin, who argued the same in 1982 [PDF]:
[H]omosexuality, sadomasochism, prostitution, or boy-love are taken to be mysterious and problematic in some way that more respectable sexualities are not. The search for a cause is a search for something that could change so that these ‘problematic’ eroticisms would simply not occur. Sexual militants have replied to such exercises by maintaining that although the question of etiology or cause is of intellectual interest, it is not high on the political agenda and that, moreover, the privileging of such questions is itself a regressive political choice.
But far be it from me (if I could be called a sexual militant) to avoid intellectual interest. One of the chief delights of watching M,SW and the like is being absorbed in stories whose plotlines aren’t driven forward by straight men. As the Bechdel Test shows us, this is indeed a rare thing, particularly in movies and TV. Growing up gay means often resigning yourself to the lie that because straight men run things, they are right to do so and always should. The corollary to this lie is that gays should expect never to be the center of our culture’s Important Stories.
Gays aren’t the center of our culture’s Important Stories, and may never be, but watching a retired widow show up the straight-guy cops of every town she visits, patiently ignoring their arrogance and stupidity while she solves crimes herself, gives me a glimpse into a world that might make more room for us than any Law & Order episode ever could.
But I’m starting publicly, politically, when I wanted to start personally, privately. In 2010, I moved to Tuscaloosa and lived alone in a small house for seven months, while N. finished up at his job back in Lincoln. Every night, I’d sit on our sectional and watch TV, N’s side of the sofa filled now with my guitar which I’d pick up during commercials to fill the empty house with noise, and soon in this routine I found that Murder, She Wrote aired at 10pm, with back-to-back episodes.
Growing up, only my granddad watched M,SW, which made it a joke of a show, Vaseline-smeared ‘crime’ for old folks with heart conditions. What hooked me in 2010 most likely was the gimmick: a show about a mystery writer who solves mysteries. I myself was trying to be A Writer (Jessica hits the ‘t’ crisply every time she says it); my first book was coming out later that year, I was in Year One of a tenure-track job teaching nonfiction to grad students not much younger or less experienced than I was. My very old friend Clay was doing something similar but in Math across the country, and once I asked him if he liked teaching, a job I was still on the fence about.
‘I do,’ he said. ‘If I didn’t spend hours and hours doing equations on a blackboard, nobody would care or even notice. But if I don’t show up in the classroom to teach, there’s a roomful of students who don’t get to learn something. It makes me feel useful.’
I understood the need. Jessica Fletcher not only got to be useful to her fans—who are legion; there are suspects all over the world who gush about The Corpse Danced at Midnight—but she got innocent people out of jail by always being smarter than the cops. All while prioritizing her writing time, sitting at her kitchen table, pounding away at her big old manual typewriter, never missing a deadline.
Now is the time in this essay to talk about camp. Because isn’t that the simplest solution to this mystery? I love Jessica Fletcher because she’s the star of a bad show for old people, because of the goofy improbability of coming across that many corpses in your day-to-day, because of the laughably quaint textures in nearly every shot?
A camp savant (I loved the B-52’s in pre-adolescence), I’ve got kneejerk defenses against The Camp Interpretation, owing to a longstanding feeling (while in and out of the closet) that it aims to dismiss the things I love, or who I am, or my own values, as unserious, contrarian, queer. And then counterdefenses that work to esteem the unserious, contrarian, and queer.
Camp gets me in a muddle, is what I’m saying, and so I turn to America’s best and smartest thinker on camp, Eve Sedgwick. (What a contrarian position not to say Susan Sontag!) From her piece on reparative reading, with my emphasis:
As we’ve seen, camp is currently understood as uniquely appropriate to the projects of parody, denaturalization, demystification, and mocking exposure of the elements and assumptions of a dominant culture; and the degree to which camping is motivated by love seems often to be understood mainly as the degree of its self-hating complicity with an oppressive status quo…. The desire of a reparative impulse, on the other hand, is additive and accretive. Its fear, a realistic one, is that the culture surrounding it is inadequate or inimical to its nurture; it wants to assemble and confer plenitude on an object that will then have resources to offer to an inchoate self.
I love that ‘a realistic one’ aside, Sedgwick aware of how deadbeat a dad our culture is to its queer kids. In this light, Murder, She Wrote becomes my Braveheart or Star Wars or The Civil War—whatever Important Stories straight guys have championed again and again as teaching ‘us’ about ‘who we are’.
Which then leads me to ask, who did Jessica Fletcher make me into? What resources, per Sedgwick, did she offer my inchoate self—or does she, this self feeling, still, confused and in development?
Until her husband Frank died, and she turned to writing mystery novels, Jessica taught high school English; when she runs into old students, or when they hit her up for writing advice, she not only remembers their names but happily reads their manuscripts. She has so many nieces and nephews it’s hard to keep track, and yet makes time over the 12 years of her show to visit all of them. She drives an hour out of her way on book tours to visit old friends. She knows everyone in Cabot Cove, and has standing lunch and dinner dates with her good friend Seth, the town doctor.
Jessica, thus, lives by herself but among others. She is the smartest person in any room she stands in, and if there’s one cardinal virtue I’ve valued more than any other ever since I was listening to Cosmic Thing, it’s to be the smartest person in any room. Jessica uses this virtue not for her own glory, or protection, but to be exactly what other people in the room are needing. She is a hero who shows the term ‘lone hero’ to be a contradiction, a myth, and likely even a danger.
She is, yes, a fiction. (Which might also be a virtue.) And in the show’s final 8 minutes, during her showdown with the murderer, she can get a little smug and moralistic—then again, she’s talking to a murderer.
But what Jessica Fletcher embodies is commitment: to the truth, to justice, to her writing, to her neighbors, to her family, to her town. She even commits to figuring out the secret ingredient of any dish people serve her. She is commitment draped in the yesterdecade folksiness and oversized eyeglasses of camp, and so how couldn’t I love her?
This week’s natatorium is the big bubble bath Angela luxuriates in on her famous 1988 fitness video Angela Lansbury’s Positive Moves, where she encourages viewers to stay sexual in their golden years:
