I may be permanently ostracised from every intellectual clique on the planet for writing this but, Desperate Housewives ranks as one of my favourite works of art. It is one of the cleverest, most elegant pieces of social satire I’ve ever seen/experienced, although, admittedly, the quality of writing has deteriorated over the last couple of seasons. Viewed superficially, it’s just another another soap opera, filled with banal characters and cheap sentimentality. Its cleverness resides in two aspects. Firstly, its a pastiche of every kind of kitsch, melodramatic convention dredged up from day time soaps, tele-movies and romantic comedies. For example, each character represents a very clearly defined archetype: the frigid homemaker, the nymphomaniac, the glamourous model, the career woman, the emasculated husband, the rugged handyman and so on. Secondly, the various elements of this pastiche are heightened and exaggerated to the point of producing a kind of emotional pornography- situations, characters and conflicts that are respectively, so absurd, contemptible and over the top, that even the most uncritical viewer cannot help but suspect the writers have some underlying motive or allegorical intent. Each episode and season reaches a resolution that is so saccharin and cloying that one is compelled to search for some additional meaning.
Quite simply, the show points to the awfulness of the kind life that the worst excesses of consumerism, in a Lukácian sense, the total reification of society- the pointless striving for material goods, the banality and poverty of inter and intra-personal relationships, and the kind of hopelessness these generate. In this way, it seems to exhibit one of Marcuse’s criteria for ‘great’ art, “Artistic alienation, is sublimation. It creates the images of conditions which are irreconcilable with the established reality principle.” But the difference here is that it a cultural product, i.e. the pastiche which is sublimated or elevated to an art form. This kind of reflexivity and self-criticism is increasing in popular culture (although it’s not just a post-modern phenomenon)- pop culture can be elevated to high culture, that is to say, the popular have critical, political, social, and aesthetic value.
