Beverly Hills 90210: Something in the Air

"Something in the Air," the 28th episode of Beverly Hills 90210's 3rd season, aired on May 12, 1993. It's better known as:

It's astonishing the shelf life this episode has had. Even in 2014 if you yell out "Donna Martin Graduates!" at a bar, baseball game, bar mitzvah, or at the microphone, there's a good chance someone is going to answer you with one of these:

What is it about Donna Martin's brief uncertainty over whether or not she's going to get to graduate with her friends that has resonated with audiences so loudly and for so long? I don't think anyone planned for it to have this kind of staying power. Beverly Hills in general, sure - like The Brady Bunch, it's hard to pinpoint why it became a cultural reference point in the first place. But "Donna Martin Graduates" was hardly an original concept for high school TV melodrama. Every series that ever dealt with high school characters had an episode where one of them suddenly might not graduate. What does "Something in the Air" have that others don't?

I mean, she just wants to graduate with her friends! Mom.

Hold up a second.

Let's say you have never watched an episode of Beverly Hills 90210 or that you've an aversion to teeny-bopper TV that precludes your knowing the first thing about Donna Martin, her commencement or otherwise. You've likely still come across "Donna Martin Graduates" just as part of the pop media ether, the same way people use or recognize another idiomatic phrase "Jump the Shark" without necessarily a working knowledge of Happy Days.

Now, by most (but certainly not all) definitions, "Something in the Air" is not a great work of art, and I'm not here to convince you otherwise. I watched 90210 almost all of the ten years it was on, but it wasn't something you watched-watched, it was something you watched with friends. (Weirdly, this did not mean you never watched it by yourself.) No one watched it for authentic drama or lived experience; right down to the haircuts, its distance from reality and from profundity was the whole attraction. 

If none of this makes sense, it simply means you belong to a saner demographic than I.

I saw this when it originally aired - I want to say it was at the old Lambda Chi Alpha house on Old North Road in Kingston, RI, but it might have been in the dorms (at URI.) My circle of friends at the time had a weekly meet-up for Beverly Hills 90210 and Melrose Place, a movable feast of smoking and drinking that I recreated with as many different groups of friends as I could until the show went off the air in 2000. (Side-note: I never took to Melrose, then or now, when not-paired with 90210.)

Itself a spin-off of 90210. Lest we forget!

Anyway, I've watched with some bemusement how "Donna Martin Graduates" has evolved into one of the "Marcia Marcia Marcia!"s of its era. For those of you who are far too sensible to not have the plot details memorized, here's what happens in this episode:

Donna was caught drinking at Prom and faces suspension, putting her attendance at commencement in jeopardy.

Sure enough, she's suspended. She's not going to be able to walk across the stage in cap and gown with her friends.

Brandon and Andrea are berated by their younger colleagues at the student paper for their selective concern over Donna's fate but not the dress code which oppresses their own (junior) class. "In a sick way, what's happening to Donna Martin is an appropriate epitaph for the dead spirit of the entire class of 1993."

Kelly and Dylan make out.

Soon, the gang's all called to the office. They think Donna's sold them out. After all, they were all drinking at Prom as well. I know! Drinking. At PROM.

Turns out, though, the Vice President (Mrs. Teasley) is just giving them a heads-up that Donna's family is appealing her suspension and that they can write letters on her behalf. "You do want to help Donna, don't you?"

Dylan reminds everyone that Donna would do anything for a friend... Anything.

Brandon's junior colleague's admonishments continue to burn in his ears. When he complains to Andrea about how his generation never does anything, he's taken out into the hall by Mr. X their teacher/ the student paper adviser.

"Donna's being railroaded... this school board is a kangaroo court."

Brandon seeks the advice of his Dad, who fondly recalls marching against Vietnam in Grant Park, Chicago in the '60s. Brandon's heard enough. "Someone's got to stand up for Donna, Dad."

"Just do me one favor, son -"

"don't get arrested." (Implied high five.)

Mr. and Mrs. Walsh's role on the show is to be unreasonably supportive (but benevolently firm) of every whim of their son's. And to a lesser extent, their daughter's. And Dylan's. And later, adopted strays like Tiffani Amber-Thiessen. Jim and Cindy were retired after the 5th season. (Eventually, all the Walshes were off the show, but their home was conveniently enough sold to Steve.) 

When Brandon leads the students of West Beverly to march on Donna's appeal hearing, Mrs. W hears the tumult outside. "What's that?" she asks.

"Sounds like a revolution." Jim Walsh: sage and succinct.

Brandon assembles the gang at the Peach Put and lays out his plan: tomorrow, they ride.

At first Dylan's all, Nah, count me out, bro.

Then he remembers his own dialogue from earlier in the episode and it's all good.

Their gamble works:

DONNA MARTIN GRADUATES.

The End. So I ask again, what is it about the above that separates it from any garden-
variety storyline of any high school show? Is it the absurdity of how seriously everyone takes Donna's "predicament?"

At one juncture, Dylan makes the obvious point that what's at stake here is not all that serious: she's still going to graduate, for fuck's sake, just in August. He is immediately shunned. 

As always, it's a sad day when Dylan McKay is the voice of reason.

As we saw, though, Dylan surrenders and joins the resistance. And it's not just Donna's friends and family (none of which I screencapped, but holy moley the various extended scenes of the parents discussing the issue and apportioning blame and responsibility are so somber) that treat the question of whether or not there is graduation in Donna's future as if it's a nuclear countdown hostage situation. As we saw above, it's the teachers, the advisors, the juniors, the downtrodden,

Mrs. Teasley, the VP, and

and the superintendent and board members.

Donna's pain is theirs; their struggle is hers. There isn't a soul in the 90210 zip code that doesn't carry some of the burden.

Donna struggles heroically throughout, conveying through tear-blotched eyes and body language (and over-the-top dialogue) how sad she is, how much she regrets it, how unfairly she's been targeted, and how badly she just wants to graduate with her friends.

Adolescence and high school are such intense rites of American passage that we can sometimes take for granted the media industry around the subject, especially things like 90210 or its ancestor The Brady Bunch, which so successfully portray an inoffensive, affluent, imaginary American reality. I don't know if it's the truth or just my own projection on things - and of course I'm hardly an unobjective observer - but my generation (say, the graduating classes of 1990 through 1995) seemed to have an easier relationship with ironic appreciation. (As skewered brilliantly in The Simpsons Hullabalooza episode.) Sure, we were slackers and we "Yeah, whatever"ed a lot of things - too many maybe - but it's not like reality has cleaned up its act any since the 90s. Things are snortworthier than ever. Hell, "Donna Martin Graduates" would be taken up as a hashtag campaign slogan nowadays, absolutely without irony, and you'd see people weepy or crazy trains about it all over social media. Perspective and context have been obliterated.

I digress. But maybe that's something this episode actually called correctly. If half the news you heard or read last year was dubbed over with "Donna Martin Graduates," would we even tell the difference?

"Something in the Air" was

and

The TV Tomb of Mystery is an ongoing attempt to stave off  acquisition of any more impulse-buy DVDs by taking better inventory of the ones already in hand.

Friday Night Film Noir: Detour (1945)

  "The difference between a crime film and a noir film is that the bad guys in crime movies know they're bad and want to be, while a noir hero thinks he's a good guy who has been ambushed by life."

The above quote and all quoted material below is from Roger Ebert's review of the film. (I put all the dialogue from the film itself between single-quotation-marks.) That's probably the format I'll adapt for this Friday Night Film Noir series - pick one arguably-definitive review of the film and sprinkle in my own thoughts and screencaps.

"Detour tells the story of Al Roberts, played by Tom Neal as a petulant loser with haunted eyes and a weak mouth, who plays piano in a nightclub and is in love, or says he is, with a singer named Sue, played by Claudia Drake."

I italicized or says he is because that's the right approach to take with this film. Detour is heavily narrated (perhaps even heavily redacted) by Al, and the reasons Al gives for the things he does (or doesn't do) don't always make sense. Moreover, the things we see on-screen don't always appear to be accurately described by the narration. This works perfectly well - if we accept that what we are seeing and hearing is what the film's protagonist desperately wants to believe. We are eavesdropping on his own self-rationalizations and sublimation. From the first moment we meet him - 

he is (Ebert again) "an innocent bystander who looks (and sounds) guilty even to himself." For clarity's sake, let me first recount the plot as he sees / narrates it.

When Sue leaves for the west coast, Al stays behind and continues to play piano. Unhappily. After a particularly successful gig - where he receives a ten-dollar tip, prompting the great line 'When this drunk gave me a ten spot, I couldn't get very excited. What was it? A piece of paper crawling with germs.' - he decides to hitch-hike cross-country to be with her. No more sitting around torturing himself with thoughts of her life apart from him. (Sidenote - his and Sue's song is "I Can't Believe You Fell in Love with Me.")

He ends up getting a lift from one Mr. Haskell.

Haskell tells him about the last hitch-hiker he picked up, 'a dame with claws' who left deep scratches on his hand. Al is hesitant to comment either way. ('A lot of rides have been cut short by a big mouth.') That night, Mr. Haskell dies of a heart attack while Al is driving.

Uh-oh.

"Al buries the body, and takes Haskell's car, clothes, money and identification; he claims to have no choice, because the police will in any event assume he murdered the man."

"He picks up a hitchhiker named Vera (Ann Savage), who 'looked like she'd just been thrown off the crummiest freight train in the world.' Though not necessarily in this pic.

"She seems to doze, then sits bolt upright and makes a sudden verbal attack: 'Where'd you leave his body? Where did you leave the owner of this car? Your name's not Haskell!' Al realizes he has picked up the dame with the claws."

From that point on, Al is completely at Vera's mercy. He offers her all the money he took from Haskell, but she insists they go to Los Angeles as planned and sell the car. Which almost happens, until Vera picks up the newspaper. 

"(She) dreams up a con for Al to keep impersonating the long-lost son and inherit the estate."

"Waiting for the old man to die, they sit in a rented room, drinking, playing cards and fighting - 

"until Al finds himself with another corpse on his hands, once again in a situation that makes him look guilty of murder."

The last we see of Al, he is walking along the road, bemoaning his fate, when he is picked up by the cops.

'Someday a car will stop to pick me up for a ride I never thumbed.'

'Yes, fate - or some mysterious force - can put the finger on you or me for no good reason at all.'

The End.

The Leads

"Roberts is played by Tom Neal as a sad sack who seems relieved to surrender to Vera ('My favorite sport is being kept prisoner,' he tells her.)" 

"Most noir heroes are defeated through their weaknesses. Few have been weaker than Roberts. He narrates the movie by speaking directly to the audience, mostly in a self-pitying whine. He's pleading his case, complaining that life hasn't given him a fair break."

Detour is more a tone poem than a sensible narrative, realizing onscreen a particularly masculine state of anxiety, guilty conscience, masochism, and above all, a kind of chronic helplessness and self-sabotage. 

"These are two pure types: the submissive man and the female hellion."

'I kept imagining I was being followed...'

Some biographical info: "Neal, who was born into a wealthy family in Evanston, Illinois, was a former boxer with a Harvard law degree who played mostly tough guys in the movies. A troubled man, he was blackballed in Hollywood in 1951 after beating Franchot Tone to a pulp and giving him a concussion in a quarrel over the affections of Barbara Payton." 

Payton and Neal separated shortly after the above, and in 1965 Neal was tried in the shooting death of his wife Gale and served six years in prison for manslaughter.

As for Ann Savage, who shows up in my news feed and probably yours at Halloween time:

"Ann Savage plays Vera as a venomous castrator. Every line is acid and angry. (...) There is not a single fleeting shred of tenderness or humanity in her performance as Vera, as she snaps out her pulp dialogue."

Examples include: 'What'd you do... kiss him with a wrench?'

'Where'd you hide the butts?'
'ON THE TABLE, SUCKER!'

"I don't like you, Roberts - you're not a gentleman, see!?"

Allegedly, Savage was a guest-star in the Saved By the Bell episode "Boss Lady" but I can find no visual corroboration for this. What a world, what a world, though, if so.

The Director

Edgar Ulmer started off as an assistant to F.W. Murnau before emigrating to the United States to escape Hitler. Thus, curiously, Nazi-flight “provided one of the links between the German Expressionism (of Murnau,) with its exaggerated lighting, camera angles and dramaturgy, and the American film noir, which added jazz and guilt.”

Ulmer keeps it simple in Detour, but that shouldn't detract a contemporary viewer from appreciating the artistry of some of the production choices, particularly the extensive use of rear projection for the many car scenes.

Reliable Narrator?

Back to the Freud:

"Of course Al could simply escape from her. Sure, she has the key to the room, but any woman who kills a bottle of booze in a night can be dodged fairly easily. Al stays because he wants to stay. He wallows in mistreatment."

"Most critics of Detour have taken Al's story at face value. (...) But the critic Andrew Britton argues a more intriguing theory in Ian Cameron's Book of Film Noir. He emphasizes that the narration is addressed directly to us: We're not hearing what happened, but what Al Roberts wants us to believe happened. It's a 'spurious but flattering account,' he writes, pointing out that Sue the singer hardly fits Al's description of her, that Al is less in love than in need of her paycheck, and that his cover-up of Haskell's death is a rationalization for an easy theft. For Britton, Al's version illustrates Freud's theory that traumatic experiences can be reworked into fantasies that are easier to live with."

"At the end, Al is still complaining: 'Fate, for some mysterious force, can put the finger on you or me, for no good reason at all.' Oh, it has a reason."

As a story about an innocent man who is swept along in circumstances he can neither control nor understand, it's passable but not very complex or satisfying. As the retcon-projection of a man lying to himself (and us) though, it's fascinating.