This was written a decade ago (more than two years before the publication date at that Amazon link - not only does academic writing like this not pay, but the lead times before publication are the longest I've experienced); television criticism and I have both come a long way, and I'd do it better now. (I've published over a million words between now and then, literally; one would hope that I've developed my voice a bit in the process.) But so it goes. At the time, My So-Called Life was almost everyone's go-to example of a "brilliant but canceled" show, one that had left a real mark on our collective psyche but had come and gone in a flash. Although Freaks and Geeks aired about halfway between MSCL's cancellation and the writing of this chapter, my recollection is that it hadn't yet accumulated the same level of retrospective critical adoration -- maybe the teenagers who grew up with it just weren't old enough yet.
One Of Those Fights Where It Feels Like The Fight's Having You:
The "Patty Reading" of My So-Called Life
The pilot episode of My So-Called Life opens with a lie and an audience lied to: the first scene, shot from the point of view of random passers-by, shows teenage Angela and her new friend Rayanne claiming to be twins while asking for spare change. Rayanne compounds the lie, claiming Angela's mother is in a coma. The scene tapers out with Angela's first of many voiceovers, one which relates to the scene but doesn't address it in the way that, say, a Wonder Years voiceover directly comments on the on-screen action:
So I started hanging out with Rayanne Graff. Just for fun. Just cause it seemed like if I didn't, I would die or something. Things were getting to me. Just how people are. How they always expect you to be a certain way, even your best friend.
How people are, how they... expect you to be, is a lens through which we can view the rest of the series. The lens I'm offering here isn't the only lens; it isn't a prescribed view against which all other interpretations suffer; it isn't "true" so much as it's a game. It's a possible take on things, one that adds an extra layer to some scenes, while completely changing the meaning of others:
Imagine MSCL takes place not from Angela's point of view, but from Patty's. Consider the series as a narrative not witnessed by Angela, but rather imagined by Patty, combining the actual events she witnesses with the events she imagines, fears, or believes transpire when she's not around. Consider a mother who has become less and less intimate with her daughter and can literally only imagine what her daughter's so-called life is like. Circumstances give her a handful of facts and clues, which she connects based on her own experiences and anxieties.
Like "what if you told The Great Gatsby from Daisy's point of view" or "how does Fitzgerald use color symbolically," this is a game we can play with MSCL as the board. The rule is simple: any scene without Patty in it (and any voiceover or internal monologue that isn't Patty's) takes place in Patty's imagination, though this does not exclude the possibility that at least some of her imaginings are accurate.
This is a reinterpretation of the series' diegesis: the diegesis of a fictional text consists of those things true for or experienced by the characters, while the non-diegetic material is experienced only by the audience. Music playing on a jukebox is diegetic: the film score is non-diegetic. A character's facial expression is diegetic: the close-up on that face in a reaction shot is non-diegetic. The default interpretation of MSCL, of any TV series, posits a very inclusive diegesis, in which most of what is seen and heard that is not voiceover is experienced by the characters present in the scene, and furthermore that voiceover accurately reflects the character's internal monologue (either in the moment, or in retrospect from some near-future moment). The Patty reading rejects this, and supposes that most of what we see is, in essence, Patty's daydream, experienced only by Patty just as only Calvin experiences his conversations with Hobbes.
Just as the split between diegetic and non-diegetic is, in most cases, one that affects presentation more than plot -- a dramatic sting in the score cues the audience to expect the killer to burst from the closet door but does not cause the killer to do so -- so too the split between diegetic and Patty-diegetic. The difference between MSCL's "real world" and the world as Patty imagines it does not cause dissonance between mother and daughter, or mother and family: it is emblematic, symptomatic, of it.
MSCL easily accepts the shift to half-dreamworld, as even the adjective of the title shifts from the eye-rolling intonation of a teenager to an adult's confession of unreality. This is a show, now, about an imagined life: an imagined Angela who begins the series in the final stage of losing her two best friends (Sharon and Patty herself) as she replaces them with Rayanne and Ricky, just as her father is replaced with the mysterious and almost mythical Jordan Catalano.
The pilot focuses on the changes in Angela's life: her new friends, who are radically different from Sharon and very much the sort of teenagers parents have in mind when they talk about not being able to understand kids today; her new hair color and Patty's reaction to it; and changes in her relationships with her parents. Her father, Graham, can't relate to her as a parent now that she's becoming a young woman -- he barely speaks to her, barely looks at her, insists Patty tell her to wear more than a towel, and is incapable of disciplining her. These are all external, diegetic, things, things Patty is exposed to, things she can use as evidence or symbols of deeper and more complex changes below the surface as she reconstructs Angela's life.
Sharon and Rayanne
The changes in friends, for instance. Because Sharon is the daughter of Patty's best friend, a girl to whom she is a sort of honorary aunt in the manner of parents' friends, Angela's distance from Sharon compounds and underscores her distance from Patty. Sharon is someone Patty understands, even someone over whom she has a sort of authority. Sharon is also the popular, mainstream, seemingly uncomplicated one -- the one Patty may think she understands better than the increasingly gloomy and closed-off Angela. This makes it all the more important that Angela and Sharon's friendship, virtually abandoned by the time the pilot takes place, is slowly renewed over the course of the series, as Sharon becomes closer to the new additions in Angela's social circle (most noticeably Rayanne) and finally as Sharon's father suffers a heart attack.
Rayanne, often positioned as Sharon's opposite, serves as an instigator for Patty to blame for the changes in Angela, from the way she dresses to her new hair color. Rayanne also serves to reassure Patty that she made the right choices in parenting, since Rayanne's mother Amber is the picture perfect example of "parent as best friend" or "parent as litter-mate," a mother who never quite grew up and whose child has had to do so too quickly. (Even outside of her interactions with Angela, maturity and responsibility are clearly high priorities for Patty.) And perhaps most of all, Rayanne is a stand-in for Patty's unnamed college roommate, who died of some substance-related excess -- whether drugs or alcohol, we're never told.
It's Sharon who writes the erotic poem everyone assumes is Rayanne, and sexual experience provides their common ground. The differences between them are less about private behavior than public personae, something important not only to the high school setting but to Patty's examination of Angela's public persona in her search for clues as to her private life.
Sharon's relationship may tell us something else about her role as Patty-surrogate. Sharon's boyfriend Kyle is a typical popular guy who is a proper match for Sharon the typical popular girl, but in Patty's imaginings, Sharon is never particularly happy with him, and public appearance and sex provide the main motives to keep the relationship together. Meanwhile, Sharon's only male confidante seems to be Brian Krakow, dismissed by the women of the show as the school dork. While Patty and Graham went to high school together, Patty was the prom queen while Graham was so far from the popular clique that Patty didn't even remember him until they met later in life. It's possible Patty is imagining a similar arc for Sharon.
The reluctant and occasionally tumultuous relationship between Sharon and Rayanne, who likely understand each other better than Angela understands either of them, may be read in a variety of ways. It may represent closure for Patty's relationship with her late roommate, whose name we never even learn. It may, if we see this Rayanne as an aspect of Angela, reflect Sharon and Angela's new friendship as young adult peers, replacing the friendship that was forced upon them by proximity, as so often happens to children whose parents happen to be friends.
Ricky
Unlike Rayanne, Ricky doesn't replace anyone specific. In the Patty reading, he represents both the confusing world of modern teenagers -- should Patty worry about him being in Angela's bedroom? does worrying make her uncool, as though she's denying Ricky's apparent homosexuality, or does not worrying make her heteronormative, by assuming that certain displays indicate certain sexualities? should she ask if Ricky is gay? -- and the jeopardy that Patty so often imagines for Angela. It's Ricky who winds up homeless, Ricky who is the central figure in the "guns in schools" episode that ends with students passing through metal detectors we never see again (perhaps the best "evidence" for the Patty reading). Further, when Mr Katimski, the English teacher who has taken an interest in Ricky and his homelessness, lashes out at the Chases for not making sure Ricky was okay, it's Patty who bursts into tears. Her imagined world, her anxieties and fears, have just intersected with the real world.
As for Katimski himself, he's one of only two teachers who stand out from the crowd of Peanuttian mutterers, the other being the over the top, toothpick-chewing Vic Racine, who may be literally plucked from some movie-of-the-week ripoff of Dead Poets Society. Where Vic comes and goes in a blur of sound and fury, exhorting his students to feel passion and carpe the diem but leaving no long-term effects in his wake, Katimski is the more realistic "magical teacher." Quiet, stammering, and uninspiring in the classroom, he nevertheless can probably be credited with saving Ricky's life, and is instrumental in Angela's reconciliation with Rayanne after Rayanne sleeps with Jordan (notable as one of the few moments of melodrama that we know Patty didn't imagine). It is not a coincidence that the teacher Patty has the most meaningful interaction with is the most realistic as well as the most influential.
Jordan and Graham
Speaking of the sex god jungle king brooding puppy dog of Liberty High, it is impossible to talk about the life of Angela Chase, so-called or otherwise, without talking about Jordan Catalano. The central figure in Angela's life, he is almost invisible to Patty, who pieces him together as the blind men did the elephant. He is untouchable and unknowable, a silhouette who leans like a rock star. He's the neglected underachiever who Slipped Through The Cracks of the System and needs a magic teacher to bring him out of his shell. He's illiterate. He's a user, a bad boy. He's sweet and charming. He's Rhett Butler and James Dean, seen only in slow motion as he passes you in the hall and you hug your books to your chest.
He's impossible, of course. He can't be all these things, and yet the better we get to know him, the more unreal he becomes, a patchwork of all the things a mother might imagine about the boy her angsty, flame-haired daughter likes. When she finally meets him, she even compares him to Tony Pool, a high school crush of hers from "long, long ago." "Like a fairy tale," Angela says, conveniently enough for us.
Jordan replaces Graham as the central male figure of Angela's life, and some of his unknowability reflects Graham's opaqueness to Patty, which fuels her paranoia about his affairs and mood swings. Angela's father is no longer comfortable about her, and the only time they talk without Patty there is to talk about Patty. Graham's portrayal is one that from the start is invested in sexuality, as Angela's voiceover tells us that her breasts have gotten in the way of their relationship, while in the second episode, Patty imagines Graham considering an affair with an unidentified woman (it can't be future business partner Hallie Lowenthal -- younger and redheaded -- because he hasn't met her yet).
These surrogate roles aren't static. In the fourth episode, "Father Figures," Angela is a stand-in for a younger Patty, to whom Graham gives Grateful Dead tickets that Patty has prevented him from using himself; there is an element here both of Graham trying to force his musical tastes on his daughter and of him forcing her, as a Patty surrogate, to partake of the very thing she forbade him. It backfires when Angela scalps the tickets, trading fun for monetary gain just as Patty forced Graham to stay home to prepare for an IRS audit. Patty, meanwhile, deals with her own father's refusal to take responsibility during that audit, or to treat her like an adult.
Juliana Hatfield
The famous Christmas episode, "So-Called Angels," lends itself easily to the Patty reading. Patty's worrying about Ricky -- which is really Patty worrying about Angela -- becomes so great that she imagines a ghost in the form of Juliana Hatfield as a fey homeless girl who eventually reveals that she died after running away from home, having had a fight with her mother. "It was one of those fights where it feels like the fight is having you," she says, quoting word for word Patty's description of a fight with Angela. "So-Called Angels" is the only episode without a voiceover, incidentally. Patty doesn't need to imagine Angela's thoughts here, when she has the dead Angela surrogate to speak to.
Conclusion
The Patty-view of Angela's world necessarily ends with ambiguity and uncertainty. In MSCL's final episode, Angela learns of Brian Krakow's feelings for her (and seems genuinely surprised, though we have to wonder how she could be unaware) and of his ghostwriting of illiterate rock star puppy god Jordan's love letter. She seems to choose Jordan anyway, the homunculus, the empty shell. Does she really? Does she change her mind? Does she choose either of them?
In the end, we don't know, not only because Patty does not know, but she does not give in to the urge to imagine. She won't construct a happy ending for her daughter, nor will she send her down an imagined road to ruin to meet Juliana in the snow. In the end, it's Patty who cancels the series when she accepts that her daughter is not an appendage or character, but a person, with a life that is both unpredictable and unknowable to others.
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