I watched the pilot episode of Desperate Housewives. I haven’t
watched the show before as I didn’t think that I would find the show
interesting. I thought, what could be so interesting about the affairs of
housewives? I had a glimpse of the show once when it appeared on television
back when Desperate Housewives was a popular sitcom on television, and I was
quite repulsed about what I saw in that episode, which was nearing its end. It
showed a man who chose to leave his mother for a woman, and him telling his
mother that he never intends to come back to visit his mother again, before he
left the mother’s house to be in a romantic relationship with the woman. And
the female narrator of the show was trying to portray the man’s action in a positive
light of being courageous to choose his wife (or girlfriend?) over his mother,
because the mother had supposedly been a very bad person who deserved such
treatment from her son. I suspect that the show had been following the theme of
the archetypal difficult mother-in-law before that such that the audience who
have been following the show would have come in support of the son’s decision.
But from a passing-by viewer like me, the son’s action seemed rather
reprehensible. And I had qualms about whether the show was one of those
so-called western shows promulgating loose liberal moral values that my Church
community warns about.
Recently though, I have encountered some references to
the show on blogs that I read. The authors of those blogs are Christian, and
they do acknowledge the elements of liberal values that are portrayed in the
show. But they also talk about the educational aspect of the show, and about
the value of the show in portraying the intricacies of human psychologies and
relationships. I actually enjoyed watching the pilot episode of Desperate
Housewives. The characters, with their antics, and housewife schemes and
politics, was an interesting watch. And I think it gives me a better picture of
the concerns that affects women and the perspectives they hold on various
affairs in their daily lives, although it would be good if I confer with female
friends to hear their opinions regarding the portrayal of women in the show.
From what I gather from the show, women have a lot more inner subtle thoughts
in their dealing with people and issues than men, and they tend to take a more
passive aggressive approach in dealing with relationships and problems rather
than openly voicing out their sentiments and seeking a direct resolution.
For example, there is this character named Susan, played
by Teri Hatcher, who is a divorced mother looking for love. She encountered
this guy who works as a plumber at a funeral, and became interested in him.
There is this other divorced woman in the neighbourhood who was competing with
her. She is portrayed as the “predator of eligible bachelors” in the show, and
has seduced pretty much all the men she previously encountered, including a
church minister! Susan went over to the guy’s house one day, only to see that
the other woman had got there first. In a presumptuous bid to get the man to
come over to her place, she made the excuse that she had a clog in her pipes in
her house (with whatever innuendo that may have been), and that she thought the
guy could help her out since he was a plumber. The guy agreed, and told her he
would be over in a while, which got her panicking because she had made those
remarks in haste, and there was no actual plumbing problems. She immediately
ran back to her house, and with her daughter from her previous marriage, began
frenetically stuffing down things into the kitchen sink to clog it up.
Then there is this other character named Lynette, a
former business woman turned stay-at-home mum of three children. She felt
embarrassed when she encountered a former colleague at a supermarket. When the
colleague asked her how she finds being a stay-at-home mother, she masked her true
sentiments with a big smile on her face and her response that “it is the best
job I ever had”.
Another of the desperate housewives is Bree. Her husband
had revealed that he wanted to divorce her. While emotionally distraught, she
stuck to her stoic demeanor to avoid betraying her emotions. She tried to kill
her husband by adding onions to her husband’s salad dish, knowing that he is allergic
to it.
The final character of the desperate housewives clique is
Gabrielle, played by Eva Longoria, an ex-model whose unhappy marriage has had
her beginning an affair with her 17-year-old gardener. Her husband wanted to
fire the gardener because the lawn outside the house had not been mowed and he
felt that the gardener had been lazy in not finishing his task of mowing the
lawn. The real reason is that the gardener had been busy making love with his
wife, Gabrielle every time he is at the house (which ought to get him fired as
well!). Gabrielle saved the gardener from getting fired by telling her husband
that he was having a wrong assessment of the height of the lawn as it was
evening and that he could not see well as a result. When they were at a party
where her husband was to make a business deal, she bribed the person serving
alcohol, telling him to ensure her husband had a drink in hand throughout the
entire evening. While her husband was distracted with the business dealing and inebriated
by the booze, she went all the way back home to get out the lawn mower and mow
the lawn herself, before going back to the party. The next morning, when her
husband got up and went out of the house, and found the lawn perfectly mown, he
appeared bemused, but went along his way to work probably in the belief that he
had it wrong about the gardener. Gabrielle is shown looking atop from the
balcony as her husband leaves for work with a repose demeanor to her, probably
feeling satisfied at having managed and kept the crisis under tabs.
I like watching sitcom dramas like this because it gives
me a way to understand how people view things and allow me to have an insider
picture to the reasons why people behave in particular manners. I am not always
able to understand people’s actions or infer the rationale behind their actions
from observation alone. And I don’t want to be either too presumptuous or prejudicial
with my inferences. But I fear being oblivious to people’s intentions as well,
especially if they are bad ones, and to fall into their traps, or to treat
people as friends when they may not share the same sentiment about me. What I
like about Desperate Housewives is that it shows and explains the underlying
rationale for why these women act the way they do, which may otherwise appear
befuddling to an outside observer. I do notice some behaviors from girls in my
life that puzzles me, and which causes me to speculate to no ends about why
they behave in such manners. And I have encountered girls who use passive
aggressive tactics against me. I hope I am intelligent enough to decipher their
actions. For example, there was this girl whom I worked with for a company law
group assignment who erased substantial portions of my part in a group
assignment in order to meet the word count before submitting it to the
professor for marking, much to my detriment, and she continues putting on a
cordial expression when interacting with me, as if everything is amicable. I
suppose I am very much averse towards confrontation, and it doesn’t help that I
am sometimes less eloquent than these people in law school. But I think that I
could help myself better by calling out their unethical actions and bringing a
complaint against them to relevant authorities. One thing I have also learnt is
that I could very much benefit by consulting female friends to seek advice about
dealing with female people. I suppose it takes one to know one, and I mean that
in a good way. I suppose I could do better with more close female friends whom
I can consult. But there are some things in life where I suspect that like one
of those guy characters in the Desperate Housewife show, I will be oblivious to
some of the ways and schemes of a woman.
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