Why I hate Boston Public (and keep watching it anyway)

"Somewhere between home, heaven, and hell, there's high school."

- www.fox.com /bostonpublic

Introduction

(transgression doesn't make you radical)

I hate Boston Public.1

I feel better just saying that. I feel like I should hate Boston Public. As a teacher, I should look at this show and hate it more and more with each passing episode-I should find that the ways educators are presented undermine the educational enterprise. And I do. Yet I also find myself, every Monday night, sitting in front of the television waiting for eight o'clock, waiting for that introductory music, waiting for the latest installment of teacherly craziness.

I hate so many things about this show. I should write about each of these problematic situations:

A teacher sleeps with a student in the school (who is legal-she's 18, she is not his student, and they are both consenting adults) and is fired for his transgression. Additionally, another teacher who knew about the affair and failed to inform school officials is also fired. The logic of the administration is that this teacher failed to protect students who were being taken advantage of by another teacher.

Now, besides the problematic nature of dictating personal relationships and the implications of gender and how this mature and capable woman is presented as unable to negotiate her own body, the show makes matters worse by simultaneously running another storyline about a teacher who fires a gun in class, sending his students scrambling under desks for protection. This gun-carrying teacher, who also started a "suicide" club, who got a student working in a morgue (a student who later brought body parts to school), and who had two students solve an argument by having them fight, fist to fist, during class, has never been suspended, much less fired.

The politics of who can cross what line is not clear in this school. Oh, and the young 18-year-old woman who pursued and slept with the teacher was not only free from punishment of any kind, she was even given her own senior English class to teach, even though she lacks the proper credentials.

A student play deals with "homosexual" issues and the school protects the play and allows it to be produced. In the mix, a young student who we,the audience, has gotten to know is found kissing another boy. The next several episodes deal with this student's professed "bisexual" identity.

The problem, for me arises when this student, the one the producers/writers wanted to frame as queer, is the same student who locked his mother in the basement, chopped off her hand, tried to kill the assistant principal by dropping a planter on his head, and then is seen making moves on the principal's daughter, who is, of course, of another race - a racial crossing that creates yet another site of transgression. All these complications work to frame this queer body as abnormal, as a body that is psychologically unstable and potentially dangerous, as a body that seeks to cross lines without a purpose or sense of direction. And did I mention that the hand-less mother of this young man was given her own class at the school, also absent the proper credentials, and becomes known to the school as the "hook lady"-at least until the Vice Principal, whom she is dating, fires her for striking a student?

A white teacher decides to approach the "N-word" with his students. The Black principal threatens to fire him unless he stops, the students keep pushing him to continue the conversation about language and its impact, and the faculty all take sides.

The potential of such an issue in classrooms is exactly the kind of dialogue that educators should desire-the potential of talking about how language has affects that go beyond the specifics of the speaker-yet the show ends with the Black principal taking over the class, the white instructor denied access to the class conversation, and implications of power and cultural representation lost as the next episode moves on to the next crisis, ignoring that such a racially-charged conversation ever occurred.

Oh, and to get the class talking, the white instructor began the class by purchasing copies of a new book by Randall Kennedy, Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word. Teachers who really care are apparently willing to pay $22.00 per copy for their class of 35 ($770.00 before tax).

Finally, a well-meaning lawyer (played by sexy Jeri Ryan) decides one day to be a teacher. She quits the law firm (at which she is a huge success), pops into the school, and is immediately given a classroom, even though she has no teaching experience or expertise. After the first several months, she is shown to be a dedicated and successful teacher. Students, faculty, and administration, after some initial friction, seem to feel she's now one of the group.

Message: anyone can be a teacher, anyone can be a success in education if they just want it, if they are willing to give up everything for their students.

I hate these messages-the ways teachers and students are portrayed. I hate that the images and ideals that are being foregrounded and promoted here only serve to make me wonder why anyone in their right mind would be a teacher. I hate that meaningful issues like sexuality, race, language, and potential sexual abuse are given lip service, but never critically engaged. I hate that the show tries to paint itself as radical, yet never really allows these moments to truly radicalize our, the viewers, conservative ideals.

These transgressions are only used to frame the show as "risky" or "transgressive" without ever really doing anything-those moments become selling points for more viewers, more money, while never really deconstructing anything. The transgressions become transgressions just for the sake of crossing some line, some social norm.

But to transgress does not make you radical. What makes you radical is transgressing in the service of changing social norms, not creating the illusion of subversion.

Boston Public as seduction

(why I can't stop watching)

My graduate class got scheduled for Monday nights. At first, I'm cool with it. After all, I have a VCR and I can tape it, right? The first several weeks go by and we successfully get the episodes of Boston Public on tape. I watch them late, but nevertheless get to see them. One Monday, a new episode is missed and I am destined to wait until reruns. I try to find others who might have recorded it, but there is no one-no one who has it.

I feel a loss-it is as if I have lost something valuable, something that can eventually be replaced through reruns, but will not be the same-it will be different, less than, not the original. I feel a loss. The next week can't get here soon enough-- I crave my next installment. As I watch, I find myself putting together the missing piece, the episode I lost. I try to recover. Like an addict who is yearning for a fix that satisfies the void, I revel in the moment. It won't be enough, but perhaps it can help the cravings until next time.

My desire for Boston Public is, in many ways, nonsensical. That is, when I finish each episode I always-always-say, "I hate Boston Public." Sometimes I add, "I'm not watching this stupid show anymore." Yet when the next new episode comes on, there I am in front of the television, my need being satisfied again, but still disappointment persists.

I'm not exactly sure what to do about this desire-not sure how to respond. It is like watching Jerry Springer or Celebrity Boxing-Tonya Harding vs Paula Jones-- a draw to these wrecks that I can't control. As a moth drawn to fire, a gaze to an accident, my desire for this show is strong, uncontrollable, unable to be stopped.

Why do I watch? Is it to gain access to the world of teaching high school? I teach college in the Midwest-this is Boston, this is high school, this is, in a sense, an exotic retelling of a shared experience of high school. It is an experience that creates resonance (struggles with sexual identity, struggles with popularity, the secret conversations between administrators and teachers which we, the students, were denied access). Perhaps this viewing is about reimagining that experience, to retell it at a different point in our lives-if only I had been strong enough to do that, to try that, to be that person. Maybe I watch to find narratives of that tenuous time in my own life with the hope that in this televised educational sphere, my life could change.

Or, do I watch to exercise my critical voice-see the academic condemning this show. It is easy-it is so easy to pick this show apart, to critique its representations. Maybe I'm drawn to it for the sole purpose of being able to say I hate it, to be the critical voice of the popular. It is possible that part of my pleasure in this show is to be able to talk about it with others, sharing in the latest escapades over the office coffee potto be the one who says horrible things about the show. Is my pleasure about being both included in that conversation, all while never being one ofthem-one ofthose people who actually likes the show?

How do I get painted in those strokes? How do I get constituted when a grad student comes into my office: "Hey, did you see this week's episode? What do think about that one?"

Or do I watch to fulfill some sort of sexualized desire? To watch those beautiful bodies, those beautiful young teacher/ student bodies transgressing, crossing lines? Is it surprising that once the queer student comes out and develops as a sexualized figure, he suddenly appears socially secure, good-looking, comfortable, and well-- adjusted? Is it really surprising that his history of questionable behavior is erased as he becomes an object of desire?

It is not surprising that this young man (and the other student/teacher bodies) can serve as old enough for my (and other's) eyes, while remaining believable as a character in this school context-these figures must be both young and innocent, all while remaining possible sites of desire.

It is the erotics of schooling that make these bodies desirable, as possible sites of educational eros. Except for those bodies that are clearly marked as not-sexual (the older teachers, often characterized as out of touch, out of the field of desire), the bodies in Boston Public bubble with sexual tension. Bodies, highlighted by tight clothes, smooth curves, and female-sexual appeal or boyish good looks, create an educational atmosphere that is always about sex, always about the possibility of touch, always about the potentiality of contact, which is, of course, often actualized as sex between and among the teachers and students. So, do I watch to also become seduced by this contact? To be included? To be, potentially, touched? Or is it just to watch?

I think these things as I pick up the VCR tape and push it into the machine. I think these things as I rewind, just one hour. I think these things as I hit play. I think these things as I hear the opening credits and am slowly pulled into the show, the world ofBoston Public. I hate this show, but in it I am. In it I will be next week. It is a pull that is not easily subsided.

Boston Public as Pedagogy

(what this show does to us)

We cannot assume that a show such as Boston Public does nothing-that it is simply a TV show that just tells a story. I want to shift any conversation of popular culture from text to social context-to shift from the story to the ways the story functions within the social. Adapting Langellier's (1986) work on oral interpretation:

[T]he shift from text to context does much more than offer [media] new settings for performance, new performers and audiences, or new texts. For not only can [media] participate in the social world, it cannot avoid social ramifications. Understood in their theoretical implications, social perspectives clarify how [media] constitutes action in the world. (p. 68-69)

Here, Langellier's essay reminds us that any form of performance always does more than simply enact culture's wishes, reflecting the world we live in-these media texts constitute what is possible, what these kinds of social settings are like. In this way, Boston Public does more than represent a possible educational world-it makes and remakes education, affecting how we, as social actors, will think of this enterprise.

hooks (1994) suggests that investigations into popular cultural representations deserve a genuine cultural engagement-that is, these texts should be engaged in a cultural criticism that educates "for critical consciousness in liberatory ways" (p. 6). We should read these texts to uncover how they participate in systems of power, working to reproduce sexism, racism, classism, and heterosexism. Such engagement might mean that we can find new ways of making sense of how these texts participate in problematic cultural politics.

These observations and arguments are not new. For years and years education and cultural critics have talked about the influence of mass media texts on the consciousness of those who consume them. For instance, Dyer (1999) and Giroux (1997) both write about how popular cultural mediums not only portray cultural politics, but the ways they constitute themthe ways such images work on us, shape us, make us who we are. Yet what is often missing from these analyses is the draw, the seduction of the medium-how movies, TV, and music draw us into their conversations in ways that make critical engagement so difficult.

So often am I told, "Why can't you just enjoy the show without having to analyze it to death?" The power of the medium to erase critical engagement is just as important a site for critique as is the actual text one is watching. Thus, I can easily critique Boston Public for its representations of education, but to ask about the ways such texts draw us into the allure of their messages has yet to be fully developed.

Conclusion

(desiring a language of critique)

I begin this conclusion by changing my mind: I don't hate Boston Public. What I hate is that we, as a culture, lack both a sensibility of critique and a language from which to engage texts such as Boston Public. That is, we first lack a cultural desire to critique.

Often thought of as too hard or too taxing, critique is seen as a chore, as something that is different from other kinds of engagement. Built into this assumption is that, when I watch Boston Public and note the ways this show positions me, as a teacher, in problematic ways (i.e., that as a teacher I should intercede in students' families, student;' homes, students' very lives as if it is my business-as if it ought to be my business to solve all of my students' .problems"), that lam overreading or reading into the text in ways that encroach on my ability to be like everyone else.

My friends ask, "Why can't we just watch it like everybody else?" It is this assumption-that my "critical" reading of television texts somehow goes against the grain of "normal" viewing-that continues to promote the notion that critique is somehow a tiresome activity. It is a cultural sensibility that pervades American culture, making critical engagement seem like it is not worth the time, the energy, or the effort. I hate this stagnancy that makes critique so challenging.

I also hate that we lack a language of critique. Talking to a friend about this essay, I noted that shows like Boston Public pretend that transgression somehow equals radical cultural politics. From the word "transgression," she was lost, unable to follow my argument. This is not to say that she was stupid, that she lacked some vocabulary she should know. It is also not to say that my language was so confusing, so elite that everyday people can't be expected to understand it. It is to suggest that we lack a collective vocabulary from which to engage these texts together.

There is a gap-an inability for us to dialogue critically about what is happening in these texts. Even academic texts that critically engage popular culture often fail to really grasp it-fail to uncover the subtleties of what is happening in those texts. I hate that we struggle and ultimately fail to make meaning together.

Thus, I end with a renewed call for developing a "critical media literacy" (Fassett & Warren, 1999). Defined as "a critical perspective that allows individuals to engage in, reflect upon, and strategize the communicative techniques and choices that popular texts use to endorse a particular ideology or ideologies," a critical media literacy might begin to foster a way of engaging in textual sites in ways that promote sound cultural politics-politics that question our taken for granted assumptions about race, gender, and sexuality.

This critical media literacy not only must engage texts, but our textual engagement with these texts. It seeks to understand why we desire, how we communicate about that desire, and how the situatedness of this medium in our lives affects who we are (Langsdorf, 1994).

Thus, I search for a critical media literacy that helps us, as readers, viewers, and consumers of popular cultural stories, to find ways of engaging texts like Boston Public in ways that matter.

Note

1 Boston Public is a primetime television drama on Fox, currently showing on Monday night at 9:00 PM Eastern Time. The show is set in a Boston high school and follows the lives of its students and faculty.

References

Dyer, Richard. (1997). White. New York: Routledge.

Fassett, Deanna L. & Warren, John T. (1999). "A teacher wrote this movie." Challenging the myths of 187. Multicultural Education 7: 30-33.

Giroux, Henry A. (1997). Rewriting the discourse of racial identity: Towards a pedagogy and politics of whiteness. Harvard Educational Review 67:285-320.

hooks, bell. (1994). Outlaw culture: Resisting representations. New York: Routledge. Kennedy, R. (2002). Nigger: The Strange

Career of a Troublesome Word. New York: Pantheon Books.

Langellier, Kristen M. (1986). From text to social context. Literature in Performance 6.2: 60-70.

Langsdorf, Lenore. (1994). "I like to watch." Analyzing a participation-and-denial phenomenon. Human Studies 17:81-108.

John T. Warren is an assistant professor in the Department of Interpersonal Communication at Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio.

Copyright Caddo Gap Press Spring 2003
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