Based on your viewing of our screening of Thirtysomething as well as Feuer's analysis of the program--what role do you think yuppie guilt plays on the show and how is it represented?
Tony Hawk once said of yuppies, “A bitchin’ tattoo cannot hide your inner desire to be Donald Trump.” According to this (extremely informal definition), the main characters of thirtysomething, Michael and Hope, are depicted as standard yuppies, or “young urban professionals.” At the beginning of the episode we screened in class (“Housewarming”), Michael fawns over memorabilia from his younger years: albums and posters of Jimi Hendrix and Jefferson Airplane. Although audiences’ views of Michael are primed with this hippie-type projection, his actions dissent from this image throughout the episode. His desire for material wealth and a successful career is a focal point of the episode, as he struggles making profit-maximizing decisions at his advertising job and desperately wants a gourmet kitchen. He suffers from an immense amount of guilt for wanting these things—best expressed through his hallucinatory encounter with his grandfather and his nightmare about Gary and the mob. Yuppie guilt plays an enormous role on the show according to Feuer, who notes that “Housewarming” focuses on “[Michael’s] personal crisis of faith [over his] success in two areas crucial to defining the yuppie lifestyle: urban gentrification and self-fulfilling careerism.” When Gary charges Michael with being a “profit-mongering capitalist” and of “selling things to people who don’t need them,” and the subsequent nightmare that Michael suffers, audiences are reminded that he has strayed from his old morals and into (gasp!) yuppie territory. I personally think that yuppie guilt played such a big role on the show because it helped audiences connect with the show’s content (as well as its advertisers). Homophily is a principle from psychology that essentially states “birds of a feather flock together.” All of the yuppie guilt and “whining” that thirtysomething contained resonated with at least a fraction of viewers (as best exemplified by Feuer’s mention of the interviews ABC conducted in thirtysomething’s eulogy on GMA), and perhaps led the former tree huggers to tune in each week.
Yuppie guilt is mainly represented through the dichotomy of the characters' swanky 1980s lifestyle and their hippie pasts. Although Feuer points out that the so-called "flower children" would have been too young to participate in any of the '60s protests and counterculture, Thirtysomething appeals to both ends of the baby boomer era by associating them with those memories and their youngish age in the yuppie era. Characters like Gary (who has longer hair and dresses in more earth tones that evoke the 1960s) represent the idealism and nonconsumerist utopia of the 1960s. Though life was far from ideal, the struggles of these characters against the harsh realities of the 1980s is depicted as sympathetic. Gary is immature but endearing, and represents the green and hopeful hippie who hasn't grown much since his undergraduate years. Michael, on the other hand, paints the picture of a successful 1980s advertiser, but he can't help but feel like a "sell-out". He gave up his dream of writing for a job, and somehow that undesirable job turned into a career, and he's worried that he has drunk the Kool-Aid and isn't the same person he once was. His "dreams" in the episode we viewed represent this guilt over his idealistic past. He sees his traditional Jewish grandfather, and he is sparked to feel even more conflicted. For now he has to navigate his former person of being talented and hoping for change, his current identity of successful father/husband/career man, and his history built by ancestors who chased freedom and a balanced American dream. Representations of the past and present and the depiction of both as incompatible but hopelessly entangled color Thirtysomething's central theme of so-called yuppie guilt.
As Feuer explains in his piece, the writers of thirtysomething not only recognize the “yuppie-ness” of their characters (specifically Michael and Hope), but they use their characters’ social and economic status to create a fuller critique on yuppie guilt and yuppie envy. In the 3rd episode of the series, towards the middle of the episode, Michael is on the soundstage and, in an imaginary situation, faces judgment by his peers and friends for being a yuppie. This is seemingly because Michael, earlier in the episode, admits to Elliot that he wanted to be a writer and couldn’t make it, which is why he now makes advertisements. This imaginary judgment session propagates his deepest fears that he is selling out on his beliefs just to make enough money for his family.
Feuer summarizes the tribunal in thirtysomething well, stating: “the writers of thirtysomething anticipated every charge that would ever be made against them” (74). He makes two claims here: one, that the imagined tribunal scene, since it is from Michael’s POV, it is only just another example of yuppie “whining;” however, it is also “a kind of artistic summing up of the existential dilemma of 1980s baby boomers” (74). In essence, by portraying yuppie guilt as part of the essence of the yuppie (Michael doesn’t want to be in advertising, but he doesn’t want his family to be on the streets), the audience is able to see that although Michael isn’t willing to quit his job at the moment, his job does not emotionally satisfy him. And as Michael knowingly states during his tribunal, “I am not a yuppie. Yuppies only want new cars and CDs. I want those things too, but I can’t afford them. Doesn’t that count?”
Yuppie guilt is a clear theme shown in thirtsomething as evidenced in our viewing and Feurer’s analysis. Yuppie guilt is most clearly seen in the flashback sequence when Michael falls asleep in the sound stage. In the scene, family and friends in clothing reminiscent of hippie culture of the 1960s repeatedly shout at him that he is a yuppie who has given up his values for the capitalist lifestyle he once protested. This clearly shows a visual depiction of his internal guilt for abandoning his artistic ambitions of becoming a novelist for a corporate lifestyle of comfort. The show further analyzes yuppie guilt through contrasting Michael’s lifestyle with that of Gary who is seen as still partaking in a more hippie lifestyle with his less corporate job, long hair and more relaxed style of dress. However, Feurer argues that through this comparison the show actually is able to discourage yuppie guilt, and help the audience come to terms with it, through presenting Gary as less mature than his more yuppie friends as he is never able to maintain a steady relationship. Feurer also describes another episode in which he cannot gain tenure, as he is unable to work through the academic bureaucracy. Thirtysomething was able to depict yuppie guilt as a natural feeling and encourage it while also subtly trying to help audiences come to terms with this more yuppie style as a necessary evil that comes with maturing and growing older.
From our screening in class, yuppie guilt of Thirtysomething is represented through the character of Michael, who begins the episode by looking through an old box full of college memorabilia that has yet to be unpacked in his new house. For Michael, the new house represents a new chapter of his life and he has become something that he never believed he would become. With this new life, his college days have been packed away in boxes to be shoved to the side while he makes room for his new material possessions. Feur also relates the character’s guilt with how they deal with aging and their resentment towards life itself. For Gary and Michael, they feel “a sense of regret and lost idealism” along with having to “grow up, have children, buy condos, and curry favor at work.” When Michael was a student and had little cares in the world or money, he was able to be the political activist and hippie that he was, but now that he’s older, he has a family to care for and a job to maintain. Although he loves his family and job, he can’t help but feel guilty for allowing himself to grow up instead of staying in the Neverland he felt like he was living in as a young adult. The guilt comes from his acceptance of life instead of fighting it and keeping the youthful spirit alive within himself. The show was important in the eyes of this baby boomer generation in that it showed how natural aging was and that it is okay to let yourself grow old and do something for yourself. It is the natural order of life that young adults are liberal but grow conservative as time goes by.
Yuppie guilt is presented very prominently in the episode of “Thirtysomething” we saw during our screening. Michael’s guilt over his possessions, as well as his desire to show them off, is apparent. He does not like that his home requires him to devote so much of his time and money to it, yet wants to make it presentable so that he is able to make a spectacle of it at a housewarming party for his friends. He is so consumed with contempt for the yuppie lifestyle he has adopted that he is unable to enjoy the life he has made for himself until the end of the episode. This guilt causes him to essentially declare himself a yuppie, seemingly a crime in his eyes, in his dream where he is put on trial by family, friends, and coworkers. These feelings are consistent with the ideas of yuppie guilt explained in Feuer’s essay. According to Feuer, “’Thirtysomething’… creates an aesthetic out of yuppie guilt” (68). Other similar shows at the time, like “L.A. Law”, presented images that perpetuate “yuppie envy” in addition to their storylines filled with yuppie guilt. Feuer states that this is not the case with “Thirtysomething”, where later in the series, even the previously enviable nuclear family loses this desirable quality. The objects and lifestyle that one would expect to be a source of pride for these yuppie characters, such as Michael’s stable job and the large home he owns with his wife, are instead a source of guilt. This guilt is communicated through the characters’ connections to the past. In the “Housewarming” episode, Michael is haunted by his memories of his grandfather, the 1960s hippie values he once shared with his comrades, and even his wife’s past affair with another man. In this way, yuppie guilt is clearly portrayed in “Thirtysomething”, where the characters’ pasts act as an obstacle that they need to overcome in order to enjoy the present.
Tony Hawk once said of yuppies, “A bitchin’ tattoo cannot hide your inner desire to be Donald Trump.” According to this (extremely informal definition), the main characters of thirtysomething, Michael and Hope, are depicted as standard yuppies, or “young urban professionals.” At the beginning of the episode we screened in class (“Housewarming”), Michael fawns over memorabilia from his younger years: albums and posters of Jimi Hendrix and Jefferson Airplane. Although audiences’ views of Michael are primed with this hippie-type projection, his actions dissent from this image throughout the episode. His desire for material wealth and a successful career is a focal point of the episode, as he struggles making profit-maximizing decisions at his advertising job and desperately wants a gourmet kitchen. He suffers from an immense amount of guilt for wanting these things—best expressed through his hallucinatory encounter with his grandfather and his nightmare about Gary and the mob.
ReplyDeleteYuppie guilt plays an enormous role on the show according to Feuer, who notes that “Housewarming” focuses on “[Michael’s] personal crisis of faith [over his] success in two areas crucial to defining the yuppie lifestyle: urban gentrification and self-fulfilling careerism.” When Gary charges Michael with being a “profit-mongering capitalist” and of “selling things to people who don’t need them,” and the subsequent nightmare that Michael suffers, audiences are reminded that he has strayed from his old morals and into (gasp!) yuppie territory. I personally think that yuppie guilt played such a big role on the show because it helped audiences connect with the show’s content (as well as its advertisers). Homophily is a principle from psychology that essentially states “birds of a feather flock together.” All of the yuppie guilt and “whining” that thirtysomething contained resonated with at least a fraction of viewers (as best exemplified by Feuer’s mention of the interviews ABC conducted in thirtysomething’s eulogy on GMA), and perhaps led the former tree huggers to tune in each week.
Best use of Tony Hawk ever. Also, hilarious, given that he was basically a Trump-desiring sellout himself. Amazing.
DeleteYuppie guilt is mainly represented through the dichotomy of the characters' swanky 1980s lifestyle and their hippie pasts. Although Feuer points out that the so-called "flower children" would have been too young to participate in any of the '60s protests and counterculture, Thirtysomething appeals to both ends of the baby boomer era by associating them with those memories and their youngish age in the yuppie era. Characters like Gary (who has longer hair and dresses in more earth tones that evoke the 1960s) represent the idealism and nonconsumerist utopia of the 1960s. Though life was far from ideal, the struggles of these characters against the harsh realities of the 1980s is depicted as sympathetic. Gary is immature but endearing, and represents the green and hopeful hippie who hasn't grown much since his undergraduate years. Michael, on the other hand, paints the picture of a successful 1980s advertiser, but he can't help but feel like a "sell-out". He gave up his dream of writing for a job, and somehow that undesirable job turned into a career, and he's worried that he has drunk the Kool-Aid and isn't the same person he once was. His "dreams" in the episode we viewed represent this guilt over his idealistic past. He sees his traditional Jewish grandfather, and he is sparked to feel even more conflicted. For now he has to navigate his former person of being talented and hoping for change, his current identity of successful father/husband/career man, and his history built by ancestors who chased freedom and a balanced American dream. Representations of the past and present and the depiction of both as incompatible but hopelessly entangled color Thirtysomething's central theme of so-called yuppie guilt.
ReplyDeleteAs Feuer explains in his piece, the writers of thirtysomething not only recognize the “yuppie-ness” of their characters (specifically Michael and Hope), but they use their characters’ social and economic status to create a fuller critique on yuppie guilt and yuppie envy. In the 3rd episode of the series, towards the middle of the episode, Michael is on the soundstage and, in an imaginary situation, faces judgment by his peers and friends for being a yuppie. This is seemingly because Michael, earlier in the episode, admits to Elliot that he wanted to be a writer and couldn’t make it, which is why he now makes advertisements. This imaginary judgment session propagates his deepest fears that he is selling out on his beliefs just to make enough money for his family.
ReplyDeleteFeuer summarizes the tribunal in thirtysomething well, stating: “the writers of thirtysomething anticipated every charge that would ever be made against them” (74). He makes two claims here: one, that the imagined tribunal scene, since it is from Michael’s POV, it is only just another example of yuppie “whining;” however, it is also “a kind of artistic summing up of the existential dilemma of 1980s baby boomers” (74). In essence, by portraying yuppie guilt as part of the essence of the yuppie (Michael doesn’t want to be in advertising, but he doesn’t want his family to be on the streets), the audience is able to see that although Michael isn’t willing to quit his job at the moment, his job does not emotionally satisfy him. And as Michael knowingly states during his tribunal, “I am not a yuppie. Yuppies only want new cars and CDs. I want those things too, but I can’t afford them. Doesn’t that count?”
Yuppie guilt is a clear theme shown in thirtsomething as evidenced in our viewing and Feurer’s analysis. Yuppie guilt is most clearly seen in the flashback sequence when Michael falls asleep in the sound stage. In the scene, family and friends in clothing reminiscent of hippie culture of the 1960s repeatedly shout at him that he is a yuppie who has given up his values for the capitalist lifestyle he once protested. This clearly shows a visual depiction of his internal guilt for abandoning his artistic ambitions of becoming a novelist for a corporate lifestyle of comfort. The show further analyzes yuppie guilt through contrasting Michael’s lifestyle with that of Gary who is seen as still partaking in a more hippie lifestyle with his less corporate job, long hair and more relaxed style of dress. However, Feurer argues that through this comparison the show actually is able to discourage yuppie guilt, and help the audience come to terms with it, through presenting Gary as less mature than his more yuppie friends as he is never able to maintain a steady relationship. Feurer also describes another episode in which he cannot gain tenure, as he is unable to work through the academic bureaucracy. Thirtysomething was able to depict yuppie guilt as a natural feeling and encourage it while also subtly trying to help audiences come to terms with this more yuppie style as a necessary evil that comes with maturing and growing older.
ReplyDeleteFrom our screening in class, yuppie guilt of Thirtysomething is represented through the character of Michael, who begins the episode by looking through an old box full of college memorabilia that has yet to be unpacked in his new house. For Michael, the new house represents a new chapter of his life and he has become something that he never believed he would become. With this new life, his college days have been packed away in boxes to be shoved to the side while he makes room for his new material possessions.
ReplyDeleteFeur also relates the character’s guilt with how they deal with aging and their resentment towards life itself. For Gary and Michael, they feel “a sense of regret and lost idealism” along with having to “grow up, have children, buy condos, and curry favor at work.” When Michael was a student and had little cares in the world or money, he was able to be the political activist and hippie that he was, but now that he’s older, he has a family to care for and a job to maintain. Although he loves his family and job, he can’t help but feel guilty for allowing himself to grow up instead of staying in the Neverland he felt like he was living in as a young adult. The guilt comes from his acceptance of life instead of fighting it and keeping the youthful spirit alive within himself. The show was important in the eyes of this baby boomer generation in that it showed how natural aging was and that it is okay to let yourself grow old and do something for yourself. It is the natural order of life that young adults are liberal but grow conservative as time goes by.
Yuppie guilt is presented very prominently in the episode of “Thirtysomething” we saw during our screening. Michael’s guilt over his possessions, as well as his desire to show them off, is apparent. He does not like that his home requires him to devote so much of his time and money to it, yet wants to make it presentable so that he is able to make a spectacle of it at a housewarming party for his friends. He is so consumed with contempt for the yuppie lifestyle he has adopted that he is unable to enjoy the life he has made for himself until the end of the episode. This guilt causes him to essentially declare himself a yuppie, seemingly a crime in his eyes, in his dream where he is put on trial by family, friends, and coworkers.
ReplyDeleteThese feelings are consistent with the ideas of yuppie guilt explained in Feuer’s essay. According to Feuer, “’Thirtysomething’… creates an aesthetic out of yuppie guilt” (68). Other similar shows at the time, like “L.A. Law”, presented images that perpetuate “yuppie envy” in addition to their storylines filled with yuppie guilt. Feuer states that this is not the case with “Thirtysomething”, where later in the series, even the previously enviable nuclear family loses this desirable quality. The objects and lifestyle that one would expect to be a source of pride for these yuppie characters, such as Michael’s stable job and the large home he owns with his wife, are instead a source of guilt. This guilt is communicated through the characters’ connections to the past. In the “Housewarming” episode, Michael is haunted by his memories of his grandfather, the 1960s hippie values he once shared with his comrades, and even his wife’s past affair with another man. In this way, yuppie guilt is clearly portrayed in “Thirtysomething”, where the characters’ pasts act as an obstacle that they need to overcome in order to enjoy the present.