Messy
One of the lessons I find it hard to wrap my head around is that life is not black and white. It’s grey.
The internet encourages binary opinions. More discussion is created in tweets and Instagram captions if you can inspire strong aversion or rage. I recently learnt that Facebook (or Meta, are we calling it Meta yet?) gives five times the amount of value to an ‘angry’ reaction than to a ‘like’ reaction, showing that creating drama online literally gets more airtime.
As I’ve gotten older (had more therapy, been medicated?) I realise that life is insanely messy and am continually challenged by this in everyday life. Initially watching TV shows or reading books with messy, or if I’m being honest, complex characters would make me uncomfortable to the point that I would have to stop reading/watching or skip/fast forward.
Mess is encouraged to make us uncomfortable. YouTube is filled with millions of videos encouraging us to tidy, deep clean or clear out. Having a clear space is equated with having your life in order as encouraged by many silly mantras such as ‘tidy space, tidy mind’. For Marie Kondo, we should only keep the items that ‘spark joy’ which invites us to take care of our possessions. Social media encourages us to live a colour-coordinated life and we (I) buy into it thinking that a high level or matching storage units equates to a higher level of organisation. A clean and tidy person is a controlled person. Parents hold messy rooms hostage. Untidy desks cause discomfort in offices. Houses must be of display home quality before anyone visits because because even though we live in this space. We live within rules Much like a duck swimming for survival or an iceberg, what goes on beneath the surface is irrelevant. As long as nothing is sticking out of the pristine white drawers, it doesn’t matter what they look like inside. Though there’s a video to help with that too.
Some ads encourage us to embrace the mess, but these are generally related to cleaning products that want us to make a mess and buy their product to clean it up. All traces that a mess ever existed is gone. The Coronavirus epidemic has stylised a virus carrying mess as we buy chic hand sanitisers. The message again that this person has their life together.
To be clean and organised is political. Your cleaning products should be eco-friendly but the plastic tubs we keep hordes of our stuff in aren’t. The act of consumption is no good for the environment, but the internet has taught us a very narrow perspective on minimalism. Simply having very few things is not enough. They must be of the right quality. Also, YouTuber’s accumulate so many things which they can create content about. The process of purging it all is another opportunity for content.
Cleaning is gendered. Regardless of the division of domestic labour and mental load in a home women and men are presented with items that need a different level of care. It is commonplace for a woman to not only own so much more which they need to take care of but for these items to be of a much more delicate nature so that care must be taken when they are out living their lives. Perhaps dry cleaning is necessary, special cleanser is needed for the makeup brush, or their jewellery must be polished before storage.
I have digressed a little from complex personalities to physical mess because the media uses signs (that we subconsciously decode) to tell us about a character. An interesting case of complicated characters is presented to us in the Apple TV Series, Morning Wars.
The characters on this show are challenging.
They have huge amounts of baggage, and they emote in strong emotional bursts before putting on a face for certain others or the public.
In the latest episode, Alex Levy, portrayed by Jennifer Aniston become frustrated with her producer Chip (Mark Duplass). He leaves an irate voicemail on her phone that is filled with hatred, frustration and passion. Alex hears this when they’re in the car together and, in short, they start yelling at each other, telling each other how much they hate the other person. Aniston’s character is a woman unravelling. The persona which she had and the one she stepped into to save her career are at a crossroads with who she is. Alex looks impeccable all the time. Her house looks like it belongs in a designer homes magazine and even when she is crippled over with back pain, she is crippled over in what looks to be a black cashmere coat. In this scene she is demanding to know what will be said about her in an expose. Fearing her deepest secret will undo the persona she has developed.
Parallel to this, we see how Bradley Jackson, plays by Reese Witherspoon lives. That is, in a hotel room with crap everywhere. Similar to Aniston’s character, Bradley wants to keep things under control and private. In the second last episode she is outed as queer, and in the most recent her brother shows up to her place of work, throwing things and screaming, airing all their dirty laundry as a helpless Bradley watches over. The distress on her face in stark contrast with the pink patterned wrap dress she had been wearing for the show.
These two women aren’t the only ones who lives threaten to unravel. The weather person, Yanko, is suspended after getting into a fight on the street whilst trying to deal with a racist, Chip vomits with stress and fear, and Mia, the show’s producer often sleeps in her office and confesses to a colleague that all her fear and anger was misdirected in an outburst towards them. In contrast, the network’s CEO, Cory Ellison (Billy Crudup) is manic in his approach to be positive/open about his approach whilst he is ruthless in his decisions so that the network succeeds. Naturally, this also leads him to be quite two-faced. As an audience member this is refreshing and we can laugh at his approach, even if we, or those in the show don’t know how to deal with him. It is only Mitch Kessler (Steve Carell’s character) whose horrific acts of sexual assault and manipulation see him outcast in an incredible house on Lake Como who has a lightness about them. Their mess is shown to the world, and they are given the gift of not having to keep it together.
As much as I struggle with Morning Wars, I like the fact I am seeing people who I don’t like or who aren’t at their best. The show’s context of the media allows for extreme personalities as we let celebrities or personalities get away with more. But I hope that this opens the doors for more mess. Bring on the sit-com where the characters have such baggage that it spills over the 22 minute episodes and can’t be hidden by a punchline or laugh track. And the type of mess that no Influencer can ever tell us how to solve in 12 minutes, including sponsored content and a montage.