With the possible exception of Roman Polanski, I suspect I might have been the only adult male over the age of 40 who watched the second-season opener of the ABC Family dramedy The Secret Life of the American Teenager earlier this week. I watched not because I am the heterosexual version of intern-trolling former Rep. Mark Foley (Maf54, where are you?), but to have some quality time with my 15 year-old son, who likes the show but can’t explain why (I suspect it might have to do with the idea that kids his age are having sex).
The show, which follows the (mis)adventures of a high schooler Amy who hooked up with a classmate at band camp and got preggers as a result, was a mini-hit last year and a mini-scandal. It’s most horrifying depredation to contemporary mores? The memento mori that is a puffy and still-largely talentless Molly “Sixteen Candles” Ringwald, who plays the lead character’s divorced mom. Like a boob-tube Ozymandias, look upon her visage and despair.
Last season revolved around Amy realizing she was in the family way and then having to tell her folks, friends, etc. The father of the still-unborn child was a cad, scamming on several gals, and Amy ended up falling in with Ben, a loveable nerd who promises to raise the bastard as his own. Although abortion was raised as a possibility, it was dispatched more quickly than the theme song from Maude, which may well have been the last prime-time show to feature a lead character who actually went the Planned Parenthood route. What was stressed again and again throughout The Secret Life to the point of tedium was that Amy did not have sex on a regular basis. Or even more than that one unfortunate moment in band camp. Nor did virtually any of the other kids (and apparently, Molly Ringwald’s character either).
In Season Two’s opener, Ben and Amy plan a secret wedding and they actually get hitched. During the course of the show, the bride and groom and their best man and bridesmaid need to get fake I.D.s so the ceremony can take place absent any parental input. Various classmates also get fake I.D.s so they can attend the reception, which was as dry as a Methodist’s liquor cabinet. Indeed, a running theme throughout the episode is how no one will drink alcohol at all, but especially if they have to drive anywhere. By the time the credits ran, I was looking to see if Carrie A. Nation was the script consultant.
Which is to say that apart from the vaguely titallating premise and promise of the show’s title, the thing is safe as milk. Skim milk. Soy milk. Possibly powdered milk. The Secret Life, arguably Hollywood’s most naked bid at the jailbait market since Saved By The Bell went into permanent summer recess sometime before Dustin Diamond entered a long-delayed puberty, thus exemplifies the worst tradition of after-school special.
It’s preachy beyond belief and, for all the bad stuff that’s supposed to happen to the characters, it plays out in a world that is about as menacing and gritty as the dancing gangs in West Side Story. Give me Rock and Roll High School any day, the 1979 flick that ends with the blowing up of Vince Lombardi High, as great a Sophoclean catharsis as has been recorded in a movie featuring Clint Howard.
The Secret Life also represents a ubiquitous Hollywood tendency that all libertarians and even conservatives should reject out of hand: That television and other forms need to be instructive to youth and other idiot members of society who apparently take their moral cues from the small and large screens.
In a telling and all-too-common moment of Hollywood hubris, director Rob Reiner (who has made some good movies, I think) said, “Hollywood should not be making exploitive violent and exploitive sex films. I think we have a responsibility [to viewers] not to poison their souls.” Thanks, Meathead, but you don’t have access to my soul in the first place. Or those of my kids.
We may be what we eat (which explains the puddles of foie gras that form whenever I stand up), but we’re not what we watch, and creative expression needn’t be the ethical equivalent of a Cross Your Heart Bra, designed to uplift and separate us from our base instincts. And certainly the viewer, whether 15 years old or 45 (alas!), doesn’t need to watch The Secret Life of the American Teenager to know to use condoms or not drink and drive.
One of the great disconnects in American life over the past 30 years is that even as popular culture has been getting more graphic in its depictions of sex and violence, sexual behavior and violent crime among youth have been declining. Folks on the left like Reiner and many on the right often assume a connection between what we watch and how we act. That’s just not the way it works. Which is actually cause for relief.