Rediscover: Red Lobster, White Trash, and the Blue Lagoon: by Joe Queenan

Rediscover:

1998

Rediscover is a series of reviews highlighting past releases that have flown under the radar and now deserve a second look.

From time immemorial, “they don’t make ‘em like they used to,” “things are going down the tubes” and “good ol’ days” have been the kind of clichéd terminology used as the personal salvo of old men, purists and premature curmudgeons everywhere, seeking to lament about the contemporary state of just about anything- more often than not, culture. The America of 2009 is not without its telltale apocalyptic signs; Hoda and Kathie Lee have a daily televised soapbox for their yenta concerns, the Jonas Brothers have bridged the demographic gap of unhip middle-aged mothers and clueless twelve year-old girls and Crazy Town’s Shifty Shellshock is still in the public eye, via a VH1 reality show. Grim indeed.

You shouldn’t get your dander up though and not because of any kind of keen, insightful evidence of Shifty’s cultural relevance I have to offer (I’m fresh out) but rather for the oddly comforting fact that much of mainstream culture has {always} been terrible. Published in 1998, Joe Queenan’s Red Lobster, White Trash, and the Blue Lagoon is a snapshot of the terror and malfeasance present in the mainstream of ’90s America, an America with her feet planted firmly in Culture Wars.

Queenan, a freelance critic and humorist whose work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, TV Guide and Playboy, has recently authored Closing Time, which is, by all accounts, a frank, blunt account of growing up poor, Irish and abused in Philadelphia projects. It’s the well-honed contempt this engendered in him that has made him his money as a witty ridiculer of celebrity. The recent media mourn-a-thon of Michael Jackson reminded me of something Queenan wrote in TV Guide, before the age of internet archives; concerning the E! True Hollywood Story’s tendency to replay the sordid stories of dead celebrities over and over again, Queenan likened it and media outlets like it as turning one’s TV into some kind of “morbid, coin-operated electric funeral home.” Queenan delivers every scoff and put-down with a stony face; imagine a more serious Bill Maher whose focus is more cultural, not political.

In Red Lobster, Queenan pokes fun at his effete, blue state metropolitan tastes. Working in New York City, he’s realized that he’s walked past a poster advertising Cats for weeks without ever thinking to attend the show. He decides to see Cats, a horrifying experience he describes as seeing a musical performed by KISS. Beholden now to trash culture, Queenan decides to throw himself into the lowbrow mainstream for the next year, hilariously describing attending John Tesh concerts (he says Tesh, in-concert, is given to “neo-Stallionian gestures such as thrusting his fists into the air to signify a triumph he has not in fact achieved”), reading Robert Ludlum and books by both Jackie and Joan Collins and eating at restaurants such as the Olive Garden and Red Lobster. Of these establishments, he says that they both possess a kind of “proletarian snootiness,” as he and his shorts-clad son are given dirty looks by diners who consider themselves “a little bit too upscale for Roy Rogers.”

Elsewhere, Queenan stands outside a theater showing the Pesci/Glover feature Gone Fishin’, representing himself as a Hollywood bigwig handing out $9 apology refunds to patrons who, hilariously, are not at all surprised but entirely grateful. Queenan also coins a term that never caught on, scheissenbedauern (German for “shit regret”), a term for the kind of disappointment one feels when something is not bad enough. Throughout his journey into the Heart of Suckness, Queenan again and again finds most of this entertainment to be not terrible but just bad. The harshest words are reserved for Michael Bolton’s savaging of classic R&B songs (“this K-Mart Joe Cocker”), Mel Brooks’s reliance upon ensemble movies and David Cassidy’s horrific Las Vegas show, EFX. After experiencing Vegas and believing himself diseased after touching Geraldo Rivera’s hand, Queenan wanders off to Branson where he must choose between the old time schmaltz of Andy Williams or the hackneyed corn of Bobby Vinton. Queenan chooses Vinton and finds himself resolutely disappointed that it’s not bad enough.

Queenan takes every chance he gets to thoroughly lacerate those in his path, casting even well-established diversions like blackjack or Spaceballs as nonsensical at best and shitty at worst. Red Lobster does lag at the end, where Queenan must rely upon a feigned internal Jekyll/Hyde taste struggle rather than skewering more entertainment figures. But Red Lobster does stand to prove that, mainstream culture has always sucked. On the first page, he speaks of his own “intellectual insurrection” from the ranks of his Boomer cohorts because he quickly recognized that “Cat Stevens and Iron Butterfly were not all that much of an improvement over Schecky Greene and Liberace.” It’s not that music/movies/books today aren’t as good as they used to be…they’ve always sucked.

by Chris Middleman