Arrested Development and Philosophy_ They've Made a Huge Mistake - Kristopher G. Phillips [47]
Maybe not. Not all of our identities are imperial ones—and maybe there’s a lesson to learn there. We don’t always insist that people are one way or the other. I mean, look, book reader, I don’t think you are either essentially a Yankees fan or essentially a Red Sox fan. You might not be either. When you take on that identity—when you don the Yankees cap—you do so recreationally (at least I hope that’s what’s going on!). You can take off that identity, and no one will know any better. You won’t find a box to be filled in on your job application or your health insurance about which team you like. You won’t be denied a job or a proper education because of it.
The danger of identities is not that we have them, but that we tend to take them so seriously—and we tend to regard them as essentially who we are.7 But, if identities are social things, we can take or leave any of them, no matter how real they are. This might well lead to a more tolerant world, where race and gender were toys to play with rather than tools of oppression.
I know, I know. I’m an idealist. A dreamer. And you’re a book reader and a TV watcher. But we’re more than that, too. The trick is to learn Franklin’s lesson. It ain’t easy bein’ anything. The sooner we can make identity recreational, the better. Essentialized identities tend to breed hate, and hate takes a lot of time (even more than the annual Motherboy event). The sooner we give up insisting people fit our identity expectations, the sooner we’ll be able to devote our lives to getting Arrested Development back on the air.
NOTES
1. Taylor, Charles, Multiculturalism and ‘The Politics of Recognition’ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990, p. 230.
2. Ibid., p. 230.
3. Georgia Warnke, After Identity: Rethinking Race, Sex and Gender (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
4. I borrow the term imperial identity from Warnke’s wonderful book After Identity.
5. Ibid., p. 85.
6. K. Anthony Appiah and Amy Gutmann, Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).
7. This is the line of argument advocated by Judith Butler in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999), as well as by Warnke in After Identity.
Chapter 9
“I JUST BLUE MYSELF”
The Use and Abuse of Language in Arrested Development
M. E. Verrochi
The use and abuse of language is one of the most delightful features of the endlessly delightful Arrested Development. The show’s title itself plays with at least three different senses of the phrase “arrested development”: It picks out the premise of the story (George Bluth is a developer who is arrested in the pilot episode), it refers to the story line that arcs the entire series (the development of more Bluth homes is perpetually arrested), and it denotes the stunted emotional and moral maturity of the characters. But this is just scratching the surface: Much of the humor deployed in the series is the result of playing with language in one way or another.
For instance, breaking up is hard to do, but if you’re an adult member of the Bluth family, it’s nearly impossible (and not for the typical reasons). Picture this: In the episode “Whistler’s Mother,” Gob’s wife has fallen in love with the Teamocil spokesperson. The Teamocil spokesperson is Tobias Fünke. Tobias is also Gob’s brother-in-law. In the following scene we see Gob’s wife sit him down, in one of the brightly colored sweaters that she likes him to wear, to break the news that she is in love with someone else.
Gob’s wife: I’m in love with your brother-in-law.
Gob: You’re in love with your own brother? The one in the Army?
Wife: No! I’m in love with your sister’s husband.
Gob: Michael? Michael!
Wife: No. That’s your sister’s brother.