Oh, Roswell! / Insomniac Interludes

First of all, it's not my fault that I slept in this morning and couldn't make any of my appointments until after noon. I had to take a break. I needed to watch something light, something that wasn't about rape, and also, just to be picky, had to contain no central murder.

I was a nanny when Roswell reruns were all over the SciFi channel, and it played in that one pristine hour where the toddler and the infant had naptime crossover. You always remember your first time (watching Roswell), the leather-scented upholstery of the wealthy house where you, starving and broke, graze organic food and feel feelings entirely too sexy for someone getting paid to take care of children. That pilot is absurdly erotic. Oh Roswell, oh, organic string cheese, oh, the squalor.

What can I say? Roswell hit me right in that saccharine soft spot last night. I careened through almost the first ten episodes, preparing for bed roughly at the time that I could hear my housemate upstairs, leaving for her Real Job.

The show is just steeped in teen sexuality, both real and symbolic. It's all bowls of strawberries, throbbing teenage lust, the erotic energy of resisting attraction, and there is Shiri Appleby's fresh, gorgeous face, clean and round as Eve's own right breast, there is even the urgency of that horrid Sara McLaughlin song: Kind of like its soundtrack, Roswell makes me want to cringe, but it is a cringe that has a shrill golden vein of exuberance.

I seriously almost ruined my entire next day because I had to watch teenagers try really hard not to fuck each other all night.

I've only seen the first season, enough to know that the Sheriff Isn't So Bad, and I did mistakenly catch the series finale last year: I vaguely remember Katherine Heigel's character was marrying like a 40-year-old teenager and there was something about a motorcycle coming onstage during high school graduation? And why was Max giving the speech? Liz would have TOTALLY been the valedictorian. Side note: While this show isn't super progressive, it does have a nice stereotype reversal in which the main character, Appleby's Liz is a GIRL who likes SCIENCE. I'm not saying they get a cookie, but maybe they get a plastic-wrapped, organic string cheese.

As you can see, there is lots to clear up here. The show began in 1999, circling the drain by 2003 (definitely one for the deeply tragic list of pop-culture that was overshadowed or otherwise killed by 9/11). Also, peeling back for the moment the sexy teenage lust, we find just a turd nugget of  highly inappropriate, painfully embarrassing cultural appropriation. Watching Roswell depict Native Americans is excruciating for me, and I'm white, which means, if I really wanted to, I could pretend not to notice how we stereotype people so that we can genocide them. So. They either don't specify or maybe even just make up the "Tribal Nation That Has Answers" (because, of course they do). It is about as humiliating as thinking about my first attempts to (resist) learning about white priviledge in college. Really, both things are. just. horrifying.

Despite sed turd, I will probably watch the show through the end, a three-season commitment (pre-writer's strike, which means the whole 22ish episode seasons). I think for me, the best part, the sexy pages with the creases in them, when it comes to Roswell, are really the first three minutes of the pilot (or the first 24 seconds of this promo). Shiri Appelby gets shot in a diner, and hunky Max (Jason Behr) races to her aid, tearing open the top of her dress to reveal a deeply Freudian bleed: it's like she took one look at Max and got shot with a puberty gun. But it's also like she's having her first period/sexual awakening out of her abdomen, in her guts, right below her sexy little bra. Max is able to heal Liz by cradling her head, hovering over her and making absurd little effort faces; they are practically in the missionary position, and let's face it, this metaphor isn't thinly veiled, it's translucent: this IS sex. Max runs out of the diner so that no one finds out that he's a magical unicorn alien, and Shiri Appleby holds her dress together at the neck, watching him retreat, with a stunned, hungry look that pretty much stays on her face for the rest of the season.

So now I will ignore social media, and I will watch more Tobasco-loving aliens, and the awkwardly excessive eye makeup of a freshly-launched Katherine Heigel, and the less successful launch of Tom Hanks' kid, who may or may not have hit puberty by now, but retains a gangly earnestness that will likely haunt him until he goes all Denzel in Training Day, or bulks up for a role until his neck is as thick as his head.

Go on Roswell, shoot me with your puberty gun.