May 16, 2016

"What most distinguishes the televised wine... It is coping wine. It is medicative wine."

"It is wine that is often consumed alone. And it is wine that is, as an element of TV production, used by its respective storytellers as a visual metaphor for its drinkers’ worry and fear.... Instead of conviviality and/or snobbery, the wine in this case suggests the stormy silence of that most modern of afflictions: stress. While traditional wine-drinking might suggest social confidence-building  ('lubrication,' etc.), this version emphasizes introversion rather than extroversion: anger that steams into a closed vessel, fear that has no outlet. Olivia gulps wine when, you know, she thinks she might be murdered. Alicia does it when she thinks her husband might go to jail. Skyler, Claire, Carrie, Tami—their wine, to varying degrees of acuteness, indicates the pressures that bear down on them, constantly. And the notion that those pressures must be borne, ultimately, alone."

From an Atlantic article by Megan Garber titled "The Women and the Wine/Whether red or white, whether drunk by Alicia Florrick or Olivia Pope, the beverage has become a metaphor for anxieties that are uniquely feminine in their form."

Well, in the old days, actresses smoked cigarettes...



... but that standard stage business has been medicalized out of drama. I'm not surprised to read about all the actresses drinking on screen these days. It's very visual. Lots of hand and face action. Dark red color. (Is really any of the wine on these shows white?)

10 comments:

Bob Ellison said...

Those post-Today Show ladies, Kathie Lee and Hoda, always have a glass of wine, and that's at 9:00 AM EST. The author of your article only mentions that at the very end of her essay. Drinking wine in the early morning-- or at least admitting to it-- is the most important theme.

Ann Althouse said...

"Those post-Today Show ladies, Kathie Lee and Hoda, always have a glass of wine..."

I doubt if it's wine.

Bob Ellison said...

OK, so maybe K and H are not imbibing at early hour. Who knows? Could be Welch's grape juice.

What's the difference? They are playing to a maybe 98% female audience, drinking wine every morning.

buwaya said...

Cigarettes were better for drama.
Also other things.
I bet the diabetes epidemic would be 90% solved if smoking returned.

mikeyes said...

Penny, on the Big Bang Theory, drinks white wine all the time.

Ann Althouse said...

I did a Bloggingheads with a wineglass full of Pom.

Ignorance is Bliss said...

A bottle of red, a bottle of white
It all depends upon your appetite
I'll meet you any time you want
In our Italian Restaurant

Zach said...

Key word -- visual metaphor. A TV screen isn't that big; a TV episode isn't that long. You have to have some genre conventions or you spend all your time establishing things the audience already knows.

traditionalguy said...

Acacia has a Pinot Noir from Sonoma Valley that is a winner and usually only costs about $12 a bottle. We drink all the bottle the night we open it, which is 2 medium size glasses apiece. Chardonnays are good too with food, especially Sonoma Cutrere. All Red Zinfandels are good appetizer wines before eating.

Wine lovers are the luckiest people in the world.

MayBee said...

On television, men drink beer or a shot of whiskey if really stressed. Women drink wine. Couples drink wine.
We'll see if Rob Reiner tries to make that verboten too, like he did with smoking. Sadly, his own 18 year old just finished rehab. Sometimes stars are too busy saving the world and miss the smaller picture.