Movie Maven

People don't understand the concept of a guilty pleasure. Most label chocolate, or grande mochas from Starbucks as their guilty pleasure. Some say television or Lindsay Lohan. I had one guy tell me his guilty pleasure was Harry Potter.

But these are not true guilty pleasures. First of all, they are all extremely popular things, which many people love and adore. A true guilty pleasure should be relatively unpopular, or at least unpopular in the sense that people don't like to talk about it. It must be specific: television, for example is too broad. There are loads of fabulous and reasonable things to watch on TV. Well, maybe not loads, but at least two or three. And the guilty pleasure must be something indulged in rarely. If you're scarfing down Hershey kisses every day of your life, it's not a guilty pleasure, it's your diet.

Plus the whole point of a guilty pleasure is the guilt. If you're telling everyone you meet that you really like grande mochas from Starbucks, how guilty do you truly feel about it? You're paying lip service to the guilt: I'm on a diet, I know this is bad for me, but it's so good, oh I'm being so bad, etc. etc. But true, deep guilt is not voiced aloud, or at least not voiced regularly. No- a true guilty pleasure has to be genuinely embarrassing.

So, after that long and particularly patronizing introduction, I find I have a confession to make. I know this will probably come back to haunt me, but what the hell, I don't know most of you in real life anyway.

I have a guilty pleasure. It's name is Passions

Passions. You know you know it- the soap opera on NBC, modeled a little off the earlier soap Dark Shadows. Every day at 2 pm for the past six years or so it's been on. It involves the natives of a small New England town called Harmony (one's not quite sure what state it's in, kind of like The Simpsons.) Besides traditional soap opera fare (murders, amnesia, forbidden love, children who go away to boarding school and come back one month later as adults) it also has a bizarre spiritual/mystical component, which weaves in and out of the plotline as necessary. There's a witch, for example, named Tabitha, played by veteran British actress Juliet Mills, looking like she's having the time of her life. When the show first began, Tabitha had a living doll named Timmy, who became a real boy, but then was killed, and then she got pregnant by Julian Crane of the Crane empire and had Andora who's a witch, but she has a conscience and is a hopeless romantic and just wants her half-brother Fox to be happy with Kay, but Kay still loves Miguel, who right now is having a thing with a mermaid, and....

um, never mind.

The plot is relentlessly complex, and yet one can leave it for months to go to school, come back to it in the summer and know within ten minutes what's going on. They basically tell the entire back story in their dialogue. Like, "I can't believe Whitney's in Rome! We need to find her before she gets hurt or runs into Chad, her half-brother who she had a relationship with before she knew they were related and fostered an illegitimate child with him. Now she's gone crazy and thinks that monk is God, and is doing his nefarious bidding."

The best plotlines on Passions always have to do with the Cranes- the family that runs Harmony and has amassed a huge amount of wealth and influence from what appears to be a fish cannery. One of the best lines I ever heard on Passions was from Sheridan, talking about her father Alistair Crane, the evil patriarch of the Crane Empire. "You don't understand," she says. "He's so powerful. He could bring down governments with a single phone call."

That's right. A fish monger can bring down governments with a single phone call. He doesn't even need a second call to confirm it.

He knows it's done.

I don't know how this show has survived. Perhaps it's mainly due to people like myself who know its absolute crap and yet cannot look away. It's like a freak show- we are repulsed and yet amazed. We know we're wasting one hour of our lives we could be spending doing meaningful work. We could be working on a painting. Helping the poor. Teaching inner city children how to read. Finish that book about global warming we've been meaning to get to. But we don't care. We sit. And watch.

We watch with friends and loved ones and giggle like schoolgirls at how bad we are. We make fun of the show, of the acting, the writing, the production values. And yet there's something in its complete vanity and emptiness that we find comforting. We indulge in its cheerful, airheaded nature for an hour, before having to wander back to the painstaking muck of everyday life.

Now that, my friends, is a guilty pleasure.

(Photo courtesy of Passions website- see above)