breathedout | Thoughts on Tales of the City (Reply)

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.