In Which Introducing Joey Lauren Adams Into Any Situation Achieves A Good Result

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The World According
to Tara

by ELEANOR MORROW

When I realized that Diablo Cody and John Irving were in fact the same person, I was not totally surprised.

Irving's 1981 epic The Hotel New Hampshire is probably his worst novel. The family dog is named Sorrow, two major characters die for no reason in an airplane crash, and the remaining ham-fisted symbolism is dull at best, insulting at worst. Like in all Irving, bad things are set up to happen and occur with astonishing regularity, especially the laziest of all plot devices: the accidental death. When Irving stops being able to imagine a future for his characters, or if he is bored at how happy they are, he invents another calamity.

Diablo Cody's Showtime series The United States of Tara, which has begun its second season and has already been renewed for a third, takes a similar tact. The worst is going to happen; the best of intentions is bound to end up costing you everything in the end. Although the show's first season was primarily about Tara (the absolutely magical Toni Collette) and the other personalities which inhabit her body, it has now become about her children, which is the introduction to every single fucking John Irving novel.

Two people come together to start a family in The Hotel New Hampshire, and it basically turns into a haunting version of Irving's sickest high school fantasies - with incest to spare! One of the daughters is raped; a black football player saves her. Someone dances around in a bear suit. Like in The United States of Tara, this union results into peripheral accidents, which Irving and Cody say is really the only way life unfolds.

In many ways these two diablos, both legendary for their command of invective, are actually puritanical celebrators of determinism. Everything is fate in Irving, and coincidence takes on the significance of a missive from God. Who can forget Garp's lonely battles with other people's foibles, the petty love of The Cider House Rules, the thinly-veiled super-gross autobiopic A Widow for One Year?

Mere attraction in Irving is accorded the same level of meaning as the deepest love. Sorrow isn't just another name for the family pet, it's the generalization Irving makes about the world.

Cody's show improves upon this by giving her characters some freedom, although we are still wary of the destructive friendships they might foster and the inevitable resulting pain. It is in fact an open debate on how much control anyone has of their own lives in The United States of Tara. Are Tara's disturbing drifts into other personalities not essentially representations of her true self? It is easy to see how Cody finds this appealing.

The show's incredible ensemble has taken what can only be called an important step forward by adding Joey Lauren Adams, in that Chasing Amy is basically what The United States of Tara is going for; bringing a cultural milieu that exists one place into another. This is a lot of drama for Kansas.

Tara's daughter Kate Gregson is played by Brie Larson, one more of the more exciting young talents in acting. (Diablo's advice for her is always, kind of like Ellen Page, but blonder.) This season, she has taken a job with a debt collection agency and every scene she's in is better than Mike Judge's entire career. Kate's job is the finest subplot in American television since George Costanza got engaged, and the best thing Steven Spielberg has ever been involved with.

Tara's son (Keir Gilchrist) is named Marshall, and he's basically the inverted Juno, except he dresses a lot better than she did. Marshall is ostensibly gay or questioning, and after experimenting with unrequited love last season, he's now prepared to explore all the possibilites. Like John Berry in The Hotel New Hampshire, Marshall harbors a strange love of his older sister, which is currently manifested in time spent with a brunette. He used a Ouija board to close, and it worked.

The quirky Kansas presented in The United States of Tara is basically New Hampshire if you think about it hard enough. There is another, saltier America forged from the intersections between its parts. All is exaggerated - the dangers of high school, Rosemarie DeWitt as Tara's sister Charmaine pining for marriage, the weird gay couple next door, Marshall's suave sexual confusion, the way that Tara loathes weakness in herself and others.

In their depictions of gender, Irving and Cody are polar opposites. Women in Cody's imagining are spheres of reciprocity and cultural innovation; they master their men and achieve intellectual superiority through force of mind. Diablo Cody does to what women what Irving, that former wrestler, was so keen to do with boys: make them short, Owen Meany-esque projectiles of enthusiasm, slowed as often as they speed forward into unknowing destruction. Each view of gender is profoundly sexist and aggrandizing, but the broadest of strokes is likely to leave some lasting impression.

Irving's Hollywood career was marked by several missteps; he can also easily be blamed for Tobey Maguire's career as a feckless ciderboy. There has never been a really good adaptation of Irving's books, because they are never-ending repositories of details which by their simple incoherence are expected to assemble together into a whining whole. Characters are neither funny or tragic enough because of the plaintive way they are portrayed.

When Irving wishes to shock or offend, he tries to push a button but never succeeds, like an eight-year old putting forth a dirty joke. Thus he prefers the simplest of dramatic acts over all else: surprise!

Innocence isn't innocence if you take the time to point out how naive it is. Tragedy deserves roughly the same amount of skepticism. The United States of Tara, probably the funniest show to air this season, may not be clear on the difference between the two yet. Tara is not a show about mental illness, it's about how disturbing and painful it is to feel normal, you know, like Diablo and John.

Eleanor Morrow is the senior contributor to This Recording. You can read her previous work in these pages here.

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In Which We All Go A Little Crazy Sometimes

Mentally Chill

by ELEANOR MORROW

There's a scene near the end of the first season of The United States of Tara when I realized what was different about Diablo Cody's season-long stage play about mental illness. While the title character and her husband are trying to figure out where Tara went splitsville, Tara's sister Charmaine is babysitting the kids. After dinner, Patton Oswalt, Charmaine's sometimes fuck-buddy, stops by to watch Lost...with Charmaine's new bf and the rest of the kooky family. The camera pans across as they all watch Jack and Kate and Locke and Hurley and Sayid and Sawyer time-travel, and they're all absorbed in the mise-en-scene of Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse.

That's when I asked myself: when have I ever watched characters on TV consuming TV? It's an everyday fact of existence except for those charming people who drone, "I don't waaaaatch TV." Above all, this show is Zola and all the other naturalists. The United States of Tara may not be real life, but it's definitely life. United States of Tara works better for people who have seen all the dreck that television has to offer, and are capable of appreciating how far the medium has come in the hands of Spielberg and Diablo.

Yet United States of Tara also offers some old-school TV pleasures: the kind of people you would actually want to know in real life, would want to emulate, are terrified to see fail and are elated when they succeed. In this way, Tara is a lot more like say, Home Improvement than Juno.

To be fair, the show's also attempted plenty of storylines you'll never see on TV: workplace harassment, therapy failing, women ending up with the wrong guy, bi crush makes out with your Mom's 16 year old alter ego. Because Tara isn't the same old shit, it falls on its face sometime. But once you acknowledge this show isn't going to be all giggles, you do like Charmaine does - you lower your standards.

Some can barely stand watching Tara's sister Charmaine, played effortlessly but subtly by Rosemarie Dewitt. She's a mess. Her character got a bad boob-job, so she flashed her parents. They gave her the money to fix it. Her sister's practically ruined her life, but she still loves her sister. She's a little overwrought for a secondary character, but rarely have women been the centerpiece of a comedy or drama in this fashion, and flawed women at that.

That's the way it is for pretty much every member of Tara's family. Their lives revolve around her, and her insanity. At first it was daughter Katie (Brie Larson) who gave her mother the most shit. But really that was the show's clever subterfuge. Of course the moody Katie can empathize with her nutso mom - it's the men who have the deeper problems, who have to pretend to be OK with Tara long after they're not. Tara's children could be the same little Juno-clones they were when the season began, but they're both better actors than Ellen Page, and they bring a lot more depth to the role of witty tween.

The mystery of Tara's problem took hold of the show after I reviewed it many moons ago. According to people in a position to know, Tara was raped by this dude named Trip at boarding school. What we basically learn in the season finale is that it's a lot more complicated, and that Tara's gay son Marshall wishes he had gotten sent off to CT boarding school instead of being the only feglia in Kansas. The dark depths of what actually occurred to change Tara are to be saved for the show's well-deserved second season. Despite getting panned by MSM critics, audiences flocked to the show in droves and made it Showtime's most watched serial.

The setting (Overland Park, Kansas) is totally besides the point - Tara's family is the setting, and they are led by John Corbett tolerably well. I give him credit because he was so terrible in Sex and the City, but he's really bringing the My Big Fat Greek Wedding charm to this great role opposite the masterful Toni Collette. By the end of the season, the show is able to take the reins off Collette and do her thing, and the result is Primal Fear-believable, and funny, too.

United States of Tara puts us in the same position as Tara's family. We're as frustrated by her changes as they are. While the different Taras - T, Alice, Gimme, and Buck - are entertaining, and sometimes empathetic in their own way, we just want the real Tara. We don't care if she's boring, we don't care if she's just a charming homemaker, or a mediocre mother. We just want Mom back.

Eleanor Morrow is the senior contributor to This Recording. She tumbls here.

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