Kate: "Carol, gay or straight, you still have that certain something ...
you're a cunt."
Carol (sadly): "Still?"
Kate: "Work on it."
I first became aware of Serial in book form. I stopped at a book store
during lunch and found it on the bargain table. I spent the rest of the day
reading it from cover to cover, ignoring work, absorbed in a brilliant send-up
of life in the late 70s in Marin County, California.
The film is true to the book, so one cannot truly appreciate its satirical
insights without knowing something about Marin, which is directly across the
Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, and is where all of the hippies
migrated when Berkeley and The Haight declined. The real die-hard freaks moved
into remote communities and/or communes, but the bulk of the so-called
counter-culture assimilated into straight middle-class lives and became
co-opted into the capitalist system. The men donned suits and ties and bought
BMWs, the women joined consciousness-raising groups, and the kids were raised
permissively and sent to trendy pop shrinks.
As Roger Ebert notes: "The dialogue is jammed with code words, catch
phrases and fashionable pseudo-psychological jargon: everybody in the movie
seems to have learned the language out of the back issues of Mother Earth News
and Psychology Today."
There is still a good deal of this culture in Marin County today.
As the film begins, Tuesday Weld, Martin Mull, and their daughter are installed firmly in the
culture of fern bars, Beamers and "I'm ok, you're ok," but Martin is sick of
relationship talks and would like to get laid a little more often, while
Tuesday feels they don't really communicate. Their teenaged daughter is
chafing at parental restraint, and Tuesday is usually on her side. Their world
includes Tommy Smothers as a new age minister, Peter Bonerz as a POP
psychologist, Sally Kellerman as a free spirit into serial bigamy, and a host
of others.
Then their lives start to collapse. Their daughter runs away to join a San
Francisco religious cult; Martin has an affair with his secretary (at an
orgy); and Tuesday has an affair with her dog groomer, then moves out.
"Kate left me."
"'Right on' your ass. This is serious. She even took the Cuisinart."
It is one of my favorite films from the 80s, and
it's finally available on DVD.
