Holiday Hide-out. Your Charlie's Angels WTF Reader.

Man, I remember loving that first 'McG'Charlie's Angels movie, but now it just seems dumb and loud, like a big commercial for itself. The sequel is even dumber and louder. And each made the critical mistake of giving them boyfriends. Dude! The Angels never keep a beau beyond the episode he shows up in - he either dies or turns out to be a crook. It's the rules. It's barely even the same thing once they have beaus. It's like letting nuns get married, and not to each other. Now the Angels have  kind of super spy action hero level of vapidity disguised as Bondian fluency, the type where they can squeeze off three shots while doing a slow-mo somersault backflip to catch a passing helicopter rope in order to swing up right into a drop kick on some rooftop sniper. The original may not have had that but it was real. If a car blew up or crashed, it really did, and was a highlight of the show. It meant something. The effect of the climactic and occasional violence and trauma was something the Angels felt and relied on each other to salve with their strong sisterly nurturing. Everything hurt, and violence was only the last resort. Luckily, once you had a gun in your hand and shouted "freeze!" the perps generally gave up, and meekly rolled along with the credits.

I hate to say it, but I'm dubious about this new Angels reboot. Why even call it that when it's so clearly a 'new' direction, Angels Inc., girls can do anything! The most odd part, seeing my beloved Kristen Stewart acting a common green screen action hero. But I have stayed in contact with the original series, and it looks better than ever over the dusty muskrat musk of time. Aaron Spelling wisely kept them all single, in a kind of perpetual sisterhood of the Charlie - handmaidens to the absent father; the dead father come alive

See in Moses and Monotheism Freud writes about the social order dawning when the jealous sons kill the evil father, for the crime of stealing all the women (i.e. like a cult, where they often kick loose the boys after a certain age so that the central leader can keep the young girls for himself, only he's wise enough to kick the sons out before they're old enough to kill him). With the killing of the evil father comes the guilt, with the result that the men each take one woman for their wives, and stick to monogamy, symbolizing the renouncement of the kind of initial Mormon ideology, and with that too the renouncement of full enjoyment of uninhibited lust and carnality (no more orgies now that you're married). The murdered father is expunged of his odium and now venerated as a kind of symbolic holy father. In his absence/his death, he becomes a holy guiding light. With those prayers comes the seeking of forgiveness. 

Charlie is, in a sense, the dead father speaking from beyond the grave, having not died but also sparing us the sight of his conspicuous enjoyment. He is alive yet not present in our reality, thus a mix of those two fathers so unique in TV that it's never quite been equaled.  We see the back of his head, or his hands, as various things are taught or done to him by various women, usually in skimpy attire and never in the same league of hotness as the Angels. But we never see him, nor do we see the women for long. Nonetheless it's these brief moments that people equate the show with, irregardless of the fact that 99.5% of it is the three Angels solving crimes, and they are seldom in bathing suits unless at the beach or on vacation or in disguise. The very fact it is three women solving crimes is threatening enough to the status quo that it gets reviled as "jiggle TV".  In critiquing a Taylor Swift video, my blood rite goddess Camille Paglia wrote:

" A warmer model of female friendship was embodied in Aaron Spelling's blockbuster Charlie's Angels TV show, which was denounced by feminists as a "tits-and-ass" parade but was in fact an effervescent action-adventure showing smart, bold women working side by side in fruitful collaboration." (Full)

I'm glad Kristen Stewart went for it, but she's too good an actress to be this kind of McG-ish super agent sexual manipulator. Directed by a woman, no less. Elizabeth Banks, it would have been great to see a stripped-down analog return to form. Mind you, I'm only going by the commercials, which show a female Charlie (visible?), a female Bosley (?) and a horde of Angels of all races, shapes and sizes, all around the needy world. That's taking feminism too far, ladies!

I may be old and out of control, but this is how it's done.
If you're hiding out from the world for the holidays, to hibernate and lay around snug in your electric blankets, crying or laughing, or just unwinding with easily unnerved relatives after the kids are in bed over the festivities, here are the first three seasons, episode by episode, to ensure a seemingly endless stream of mellowness and familiar guest stars (Dean Martin! Jamie Lee Curtis! Tiffany Bolling!) They got me through my last relapse, and they got me through my last recovery. They're there. 

ALSO: