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Notes -
Britta Perry: a Culture War time capsule
One of the fun things about reading old books or watching old movies is how you can be reminded of the way society changes. Obviously this is a somewhat trite observation, but it doesn't really make it any less jarring when something very casually conflicts with the subtle messaging you get every day in the present. Community is one of my favourite TV shows; it ran from 2009-2015 which isn't that far in the past, but I saw a Reddit post the other day that made an interesting observation about the zeitgeist it represented and how quickly we've moved on from it.
The female lead of the series is Britta Perry (played by the wonderful Gillian Jacobs), and in the first dozenish or so episodes of the show she's very much a conventional sitcom love interest: responsible, compassionate, earnest, striver for social justice, the Better Eventual Half of our morally listless protagonist, etc. This of course was bland and boring, so the writers ended juking things up and turning her into a much more interesting character. Rather than being the noble (and unfunny) stock liberal progressive, she became the annoying and semi-incompetent stock liberal progressive. She continues to be smug and overbearing about the same subjects, but she's flipped as a killjoy instead of righteous.
And it's interesting to see what the writers of the time considered to be the most annoying tendencies of white, urban, female, bourgeois progressivism. Yes, of course she complains about the patriarchy, thinks all her media consumption is about making a statement, she has to work her pet causes into every conversation, and she hates cops. But she's also a crusader for civil liberties, a big fan of Julian Assange, outspoken in favour of free speech, and paranoid about government surveillance. Even her evangelical vegetarianism seems notably out of place in 2023.
And of course perhaps what's most glaringly obvious is the subjects she DOESN'T care about: there's barely a mention of race (except for once suggesting they include an Asian member for more diversity!), she famously cares more about animal cruelty than racism, and not only does she never dip her toe into anything resembling bisexuality or gender experimentation, she's even portrayed as mildly homophobic. Until the last episode there's nary a mention of transgender people except for the transfer dance being referred to as the "tranny dance" in season 1 (in 2009, any idea of transgender people being anything other than a punchline was not even dawning in the minds of progressive Hollywood writers).
So this was the stereotypical annoying liberal progressive circa 2010. No mentions of black bodies and trans spaces, a lot of worrying about civil liberties. I guess we never knew how good we had it. I'll leave you with a link to an illicit streaming website which is one of the few places you can watch one of the show's best episodes, which got erased from existence after George Floyd for the crime of adjacent-blackface and features annoying Britta at her best.
Was the dean a liberal progressive? Surely he had aspects of that archetype due to being an overeager and overbearing college dean, but he always seemed mostly just bizarre rather than belonging any particular sociopolitical stripe. His liberal progressive views, I thought, was more of a byproduct of liberal progressivism being the Hollywood default, rather than his particulars. Versus Britta, who I thought was clearly meant to be a stand-in for that type of person.
The dean would have worn an SS uniform if he though "Jeffrey" might like it.
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