The Opposite of Facebook: Public Discourse in One Mississippi
I try to go at least a year in between the times I check Facebook. Even though it means I don’t keep up with old friends as much, I can’t help much with promoting Get Lit, and I miss out on what’s happening in my students’ lives, I just can’t cope with Facebook anymore. It’s the tone of discourse, especially but not only surrounding politics: people attack each other, are unwilling to consider others’ points of view, propagate hateful ideas, and, of course, spread misinformation of all stripes. It feels increasingly to me that basic respect for the humanity of others is under pressure in our public discourse. I find myself yearning for deeply humanist, warm cultural texts.
The TV show I’ve most enjoyed recently speaks to these concerns: One Mississippi, a marvelous Amazon series by stand-up comedian Tig Notaro. It’s a “traumedy” that’s all about humane values in a world that puts them under pressure. In the show’s world, such values have to get expressed through informal education, through talking it out — that’s the only way forward in a world where things have gone horribly wrong. It’s exactly what I’ve been needing to fill my hour-before-bed TV time. It’s the opposite of Facebook.
I heard about this show only after the depressing truth about Louis CK’s history as a sexual predator came out last fall. I started One Mississippi basically as penance, feeling bad about having loved Louis CK so much and wanting to learn more about one of the women who first started to make the world understand who he is.
But then I fell into the show. It portrays a gay woman from LA who goes back home to Mississippi when her mother dies, and then stays with her stepfather and brother. She’s a comic with a radio show, and she’s a cancer survivor. Tig Notaro’s eponymous character is constantly confronted by all of the elements of this Mississippi town that conflict with her values: the people who accost her at her studio with “Pray Away the Gay” pamphlets, for instance, and the advertisers who withdraw from her show in droves when she talks about her own experience of sexual abuse. Everything about the world Tig has been thrust into is uncomfortable and frankly terrible. Her radio show moves to a company run by a sexual harasser. There are homophobes everywhere. She’s returned to the place where she was sexually abused for more than a decade.
But she sticks around. What makes this plausible is that this is not a show about emotion. These characters talk their way through problems more than they emote. The response to problems in this world is thoughtful, meaningful discourse, not tears. That’s what Tig’s radio show, the center of the show, is all about: creating discourse around difficult topics, and in particular forcing her community to confront the sexual abuse that it has inadvertently condoned. The first season revealed that Tig was abused by her step-grandfather throughout her childhood. In the second season, she takes up the issue of sexual abuse on air from the beginning and then reveals her own abuse, sending shockwaves through the community and forcing them to talk about what’s going on behind closed doors.
Its subplots in particular show off this mode of informal education. Her stepfather gets together with an African American woman he meets in his office building, after she steps in to help him when he has a panic attack. The two actors (John Rothman and the original Dreamgirl herself, Sheryl Lee Ralph) use an identical style — the flattest in a sea of intentionally flat, unemotional acting — so that their compatibility is obvious to us from the moment they meet. But the show goes beyond just portraying an interracial romance to deal with the problems that ensue. Tig’s stepfather, Bill, gets woke: he realizes how much racism structures the experiences of African Americans. He reads The New Jim Crow. And he has some really awkward conversations with Felicia’s family about contemporary racism. There’s a scene at Felicia’s daughter’s wedding that’s quite difficult to watch, when Bill starts excitedly talking to her family about what he’s been reading. Yeah, they know that racism wasn’t solved when the country elected Obama. But her family responds sympathetically to his overdue adolescent awakening. “I’m glad you’re reading about this,” Felicia’s daughter responds. That all-around sympathy, acknowledging awkwardness and moving through it with talking — that exemplifies the warmth of this show. Bill is ridiculous and kind of pathetic — but also awesome. He learns.
The other main subplot is even more interesting in these terms: Tig’s brother, Remy, takes up with a single mother he meets at church. Desiree is a brash, forward woman who pursues Remy and moves in, with her daughter and breast-milk-selling business, soon after they meet. Tig is not too sure about Desiree, but we see little but honest effort and good will from her. We know she’s a churchgoer, and that makes her compatible with Remy. But then, in a startling scene, we realize that she thinks dinosaurs are fake, that God created the world in 7 days and started with Adam and Eve. “I’ve never seen one,” Desiree says. “I’ve seen their bones, in a museum,” Tig responds. The conversation that ensues is much calmer than what would have happened at my dinner table, that’s for sure.
The season ends without resolving whether Desiree’s difference — her lack of education that leaves her outside of the bounds of normal discourse — can be accommodated in the world of the show. Bill showed a lack of education too, a blindness to racism, but he is recuperated. It remains to be seen whether the same can be said for Desiree, but Tig’s family is still gracious to her.
This is warmth I can get behind: a capacious, humane vision of the world that accepts difference and finds humor in the difficulties that come when different cultures meet. This is a world where education can make people compatible and enable communities to continue even when they no longer seem to work. This is a show that’s about healing, recuperation, rebuilding communities out of the shards we’ve been left. One Mississippi is like the public discourse that once seemed possible on the internet, back in the day when scholars though that technology would strengthen democracy, that the internet might create a true Habermasian public sphere. Today, of course, it’s hard to have their optimism.
