Television: Supersize She

Every few weeks the wife and myself spend an evening cavorting in the swamp of cable television courtesy of our pop culturally savvy friends James e Courney. Of course the next day is occupied by burning off the leeches with cigarettes, which explains why we have to travel to get more than three channels.

They tried to make me watch something called 'Intervention', where people who hit rock bottom are subjected to a few minutes of COPS-esque cinema verite backgrounding then rounded up and harangued by their families while the cameras roll and tears of self pity pool up on the indoor/outoor carpeting.

Which I'm not philosophically opposed too...after all, I do set out intending to bathe in the latter day Romanesque decadence of our popular culture.

No, the dealbreaker was several jolting close ups of people injecting assorted drugs.
I'm not a fan of needles, and I don't take well to the exploitative use of untelegraphed injections in any medium. I throw things at the TV when otherwise innocuous heath segments on the local news are spiked with shots of shots, and even though I was a youth capable of making fine distinctions between the cinematic decapitations of Tom Savini and Rob Bottin and comparing both with the work of gore effects godfather Dick Smith, I would hurl my popcorn at the screen of any movie delivering gratiutious needle shots.

I know I'm getting old now because I have what they call "historical perspective" on these kinds of things.
I can (dimly) remember when Larry Clark's still photos of addicts shooting up was an underground sensation and a cause for lawsuits and mainstream hysteria.

Now it goes unremarked on primetime basic cable.

So, after about the 3rd unnanounced injection scene I made them change the channel.

We settled on flipping between two shows: Fight for Fame, in which blandly attractive and talentless young people jump through hoops for a chance to be signed by a talent agency, and the infinitely more involving 'Supersize She', on the can't miss topic of high level women's bodybuilding.

The leech containing the details of 'Fight for Fame' is already well burned, since I can't remember a single embarassing moment of a show composed of nothing but.

Supersize She however is made of sterner stuff.

It's the tale of a seemingly normal young woman who became a "professional" bodybuilder, although "professional" takes a beating in a context wehre the winner of its premier event earns a measly 10k. I'm not up on the going rate for a year's supply of black market testosterone, but I'll bet 10k is just a down payment to keep them from breaking your massively muscled & tragically vascular legs.

It was of that genus of subcultural documentaries that make me shout SPEND THE MONEY ON THERAPY YOU FOOLS at the participants. The self-transformation and destruction involved is so transparently an externalization of unresolved inner distress that it can be hard for me to watch.
Even the most desultory armchair psychologist should be able to decode the tale of a normal young girl that dedicates her life to the transformation of her body into a grotesquely inflated man.

Or as James summed it up,
"This is the tragic story of homosexual men trapped in the bodies of heterosexual men."

I horrified my fellow viewers by noting that female bodybuilders have enourmously elongated clitorises thanks to the massive amounts of testosterone and human growth hormone they ingest, holding aloft and waggling my pinkie finger as a visual aid.

This earned me a left hook from the wife, and gagging sounds from both of our hosts.

I think their horror was mostly an act, because the three of them engaged in a heated game of 'spot the penis' during the climactic pose-off at the Miss Olympia contest in Vegas....