Thoughts on Tales of the City

[breathedout]

greywash and I have been watching the new Tales of the City miniseries (we're through the fourth episode), and I'm having a lot of interesting-to-me reactions to it.

It seems that in the current moment the dominant narratives of both New York City and particularly of San Francisco are ones of loss and nostalgia. For people who lived in both cities pre-gentrification and especially pre-AIDS—but even for a more recent batch of transplants, like my transfeminine friend/lover who moved to San Francisco in the 90s, got involved in the lesbian-feminist organizing world here, and then witnessed the way the schism between the trans-inclusive and trans-exclusive branches of lesbian feminism fragmented and de-vitalized that community—the city seems to feel like a palimpsest, with the present day overwriting all the things they've lost. Reading something like Rabih Alameddine's Angel of History or Sarah Schulman's Maggie Terry, or just walking around the Mission with my friend, it sometimes feels like, for them, the landscape is more populated by ghosts (of establishments, buildings, people) than it is by things and people that are still around.

This is a strange feeling for someone like me, who not only has just moved here, but who honestly had no particular emotional investment in the mythos of San Francisco in the first place. My reasons for moving to the Bay were almost entirely logistical/practical. I like the city well enough, although on a day-to-day basis I prefer the more laid-back smaller-city vibe of the East Bay. I certainly value the proximity to world-class museums, restaurants, cultural events, etc., but I'm not in love with San Francisco the way I have been with other cities, both from afar (London) and via an intimate, long-term family & lived connection (Portland). I don't even feel the sort of intense but unsustainable fascination for it that I feel for LA. But so many people are invested in that Story of San Francisco, in a way that I can totally relate to even if I don't share those feelings about this particular place. And it's a strange sensation to feel like an outsider to the grief and tenderness of a mass of people who are all around me, every day. (Of course, as greywash pointed out, this sense of nostalgia & loss also becomes performative at some point: many of the folks loudly lamenting the loss of some kind of prelapsarian San Francisco literally could not have been around in the pre-AIDS/pre-gentrification days; they're just too young; and if they're also white and working in tech, well. Not that one can't genuinely lament the loss of a community one never had access to, but it's also true that certain people's deeply-felt loss has become other people's fashion of the moment.)

Anyway, Tales of the City actually doesn't traffic too heavily in the loss/grief part of that equation (although it touches on it, for sure). But it's definitely in love with San Francisco, and what "San Francisco" has come to stand for to its characters; and that feeling is part of the reaction it's trying—pretty successfully, I think—to evoke in the viewer. It's interesting to observe my reactions to this, because a lot of the buttons they're pushing in terms of the things with which they're equating "San Francisco" are ones that really get me: queer found family, intergenerational friendships and support structures, relationships that shift and change and need repair but overall last over time, the erasure and endurance of queer history. I feel a lot of feelings about all that stuff! But I still don't feel any particular feelings about San Francisco itself. Give it a decade, I guess.

On the other hand, I am having a lot of feelings about the Mary Ann character, and just in general about the ways all the middle-aged characters are allowed to be trainwrecks. Media is so skewed toward characters in their 20s and 30s; you hardly ever see characters in their 50s & 60s who are allowed to struggle, enter new phases of life, fumble to find their footing, etc. Mary Ann is A Lot, and she's frankly embarrassing to watch a lot of the time, but as a portrait of someone on the verge of a divorce, returning to a place she was previously happy in a painfully awkward bid to escape her unhappiness, I find her extremely convincing. (I speak from experience.) I am a bit surprised at myself that the character I most relate to in this almost-exclusively-queer narrative is the one straight lady, but that's how it goes sometimes.

I'm also very much enjoying the way they're subverting a bunch of romance tropes in their depiction of Mary Ann's relationship with her estranged non-biological daughter Shawna (a delightfully pansexual Ellen Page). Both Shawna and Mary Ann spend a lot of time thinking about the other person; questioning their mutual friends about what the other person said about them; and just digging for dirt about the other person in general. Shawna is understandably prickly with Mary Ann, who left her when Shawna was two years old; she repeatedly pushes her away and then, when she's alone, visibly pines after a connection with her: watching footage of Mary Ann's TV show, which she has on tape; playing the LP that Mary Ann gave her. There's the classic "they break through their barriers enough to connect over drinks; one of them gets too drunk and the other one tenderly covers her with a blanket to sleep it off" scene, but with the care-taking would-be lover re-cast instead as the daughter(/friend). I'm just really loving the way they're using those tropes to, as usual, create relationship tension, but instead of romantic relationship tension it's semi-familial, semi-friendship relational tension. In particular the mutual-pining trope, which I normally find a bit boring in a romantic context, is shockingly affecting to me here—maybe because it's not the kind of relationship with which one generally associates that sense of deep yearning, so drawing on tropes normally associated with romance becomes a really effective way to access those feelings in the viewer.

Anyway! Good stuff, good stuff.

Comments

[starshipfox]

I've been meaning to watch this (although I've never read the books) and your description makes it sound very appealing. I am particularly intrigued by the evocation of deep yearning outside of a romantic context, and the use of romantic tropes for non-romantic relationships. Putting narrative (and societal tbh) weight on non-romantic relationships is so important to me, so that alone sells me on it!

The nostalgia aspect is interesting -- I'm often frustrated by how inclined we are to romanticize the past, when I think stuff was usually WORSE (aside from the Earth's environment, god), but I'm curious to see that explored in a queer context.

[breathedout]

Yeah, I'm generally suspicious of romanticizing the past as well, and I don't think this show is actually a particularly bad offender on that score, although some nostalgia & grief are present. I also, like--I do think there are genuine complaints to be made about present-day San Francisco, especially by people who remember when there were actual working-class folks who lived there & you didn't literally have to be a millionaire to afford the rent on a run-down studio apartment. The matriarch/landlady of the Tales of the City series bought an old Victorian back in the 70s, converted it into apartments, and has been living there ever since, presumably able to heavily subsidize the rents she's offering her tenants, whom she considers family. This is also essentially how the only working-class/activist folks I know in SF are even able to afford their grubby, plumbing-challenged shared living situations. You have to know someone who knows someone, and then if your roommates or landlord ever kick you out of your house they've more or less kicked you out of the city. :-P

Anyway, I'd be curious about your thoughts if you watch it! There is a lot of attention paid to romantic relationships as well, but for my money the most interesting parts are the friendships and semi-familial stuff.

[donut_donut]

Oh, thanks for sharing, I've been curious about that. I have no particular nostalgia or affection for San Francisco in any era, but I do have an odd sort of nostalgia over watching the original Tales of the City miniseries with my parents when I was 15, as a sort of formative queer experience, lol.

I once tried to read the books as well, but couldn't get into them for some reason.

[breathedout]

Ha, I can definitely understand having nostalgia for the show but no particular nostalgia for the place. Based on the first four eps, I'd say if you enjoyed the original you will definitely enjoy the new ones. They're soapy in all the old familiar ways.

I haven't read the books either, although my ex loves them! I keep meaning to check them out.

[nyctanthes]

I read Tales of the City and the sequel(s) repeatedly in my late teens, though I haven't gone back to them since then. I find that many of the books I loved when I was young - and especially the comfort reads - don't weather the passage of time that well. And I don't want to potentially ruin the good feelings I have towards this particular book by looking back.

It's one reason I haven't watched this latest mini-series, I think.

[breathedout]

Yeah, I very much relate to that experience of beloved early-life books not weathering the test of time! It's so sad when one doesn't, and then your memories of it are tarnished retroactively.

I haven't actually read the Maupin books, although my ex read all of them, and loves them. I keep meaning to get around to them, especially now that I live here; but so far it hasn't happened yet.

[magnetic_pole]

I didn't realize there was a new Tales of the City series! Glad to see that. Thanks.

I arrived in the Bay Area in the mid 90s, and the SF folks were already deeply nostalgic about the old SF, before gentrification, before AIDS/HIV, before tech (back when we thought tech and rising housing costs had already devastated the area; little did we know), etc. It seems to be a thing. At the risk of sounding a bit cynical, it's also nostalgia for a time when the city was more white and filled with migrants from the midwest and the south looking for bohemia rather than people from other parts of the world looking for work.

That said, I read and loved the books and watched the original series. I'll have to take a look at this one. M.

[breathedout]

Right, yes, my friend and I have touched on that a little bit too, that nostalgia has been the dominant mood in SF at least since the 90s, so that the nostalgia she feels is sort of a double-nostalgia: loss of a time when people were already lamenting the loss of another time. From a writing perspective this strikes me as solid gold, ahahaha. Very Proustian.

Your point about it also being nostalgia for a whiter time is interesting—I'd heard the opposite at least about, e.g., the Mission pricing out the previous, heavily Latinx residents in favor of white tech people? But I'm sure it varies by neighborhood & both can be true.

In any case, yeah, the series is enjoyable! We're now through the 5th episode, in which Mary Ann is successively congratulated by Mouse at having spent the night in Shawna's apartment, and then, later, consoled after they fight (as Mary Ann puts it, "We broke up.") Both of which I really enjoyed as per my comments above. :-D

[fennishjournal]

I've recently fallen down a "Tales- of the City" hole and I've been puzzling about the whole nostalgia issue, too. I found a copy of the original novel in one of the book exchange cupboards that have sprung up around Cologne and have started to devour the entire series, discovering the netflix series through that. The fascinating thing for me is: I only lived in San Francisco for a couple of months and in the Bay Area for 2,5 years and that was 8 years ago. And I still feel a visceral reaction of recognition when reading about San Francisco in the 1970s. Which is more than a little bizarre, given that I wasn't born until the early 80s. With the tv show I find it more logical to have that instant recognition of "yeah, that's the city I remember and I that I fell in love with" but it might just be the queerness of it all.

And then of course there is the issue of recognising certain political tensions (between lesbians and gay men, between trans-inclusive and -exclusive political lesbianism) from my CURRENT queer activism in a diverse queer city in a different context. Which honestly makes me smile in that slightly twisted, bitter way because it seems so pointless to have these arguments again and again and again.

But yes, I'm loving the tv show and the books very, very much and I like that all the characters over the years actually do grow and change in realistic ways.