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Reviewed by Julie Hilden March 27, 2000
Sniffle. Sob. Choke. Alert the media. Billy has … well, Billy, Someone else will have to review Ally McBeal this week. It was so moving, I can barely type. A moment of silence, please. All right. If Billy had the courage to up and die this episode, then I will find the strength to memorialize his departure from my Monday nights (at least until the repeats begin). I. Hooters Equal Death If I had to summarize the message of this week’s Ally in less than ten words, I would say: Male chauvinism is a disease. Death is the cure. This week, we find out that Billy is not just chauvinistic and sexist, but terminally so. Gross men who frequent Hooters, beware! This could happen to you. Billy’s hallucinations took a markedly piggish turn in this episode - as he in turn hallucinated (1) Nell’s breasts ballooning to the size of Anna Nicole Smith’s, and her tongue flicking out to lasso him; (2) A topless Sandy, with her long hair covering her breasts, Venus-on-the-half-shell style; and (3) his client, a woman with breast augmentation, also topless but fortunately covered by the top of the witness stand. Among female readers, these hallucinations might raise the pressing question, "Should I try these looks at home?" The answer is no. They are the type of Glamour "Don’ts" that cause them to put that black bar over your eyes in the photo. Repeat after me: The witness stand is not a Among male readers, these hallucinations might raise another pressing question urgently posed to me by a male friend (who didn’t watch the show) : "Do you see anything?" To this I have to regretfully respond, "Sorry, you do not." This is still Fox, not the Spice Channel. Billy’s (male) doctor, interestingly enough, does not appear in any state of undress. Ever. Maybe we should be thankful for that. The doctor is an aging Chinese-American man with the type of "Ancient Chinese secret" accent that one would have hoped had died with detergent commercials in the 1980s - if not with Audrey Hepburn’s painful "Chinese-American" neighbor, Mr. I.Y. Yunioshi, played by Mickey Rooney, in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Let’s save those prosthetic buckteeth and squinty eyes for Austin Powers, shall we? Rather than undressing, the doctor’s only role, at least for a while, is to provide a rendition of "Lean On Me" - rather than, say, providing any treatment for Billy’s brain tumor. I suspect he’ll be played by Robin Williams in the movie. With a funny red nose. Later, the doctor does suggest surgery, but Billy heroically decides to go to trial rather than resting up before going under the knife. Based on this dramatic sacrifice of his health, you’d think Billy would be drafting the Microsoft settlement. But no - in typical Ally McBeal style, it’s an annulment action in which a man wants to divorce his new wife for failing to disclose, prior to marriage, her extensive cosmetic surgery, including artificial breast implants. This earth-shattering legal precedent clearly could not wait. America waits with baited breasts…. At trial, the husband seeking the annulment claims that he wants a body that was "God’s work" - perhaps believing that, on the eighth day - after finishing off the duckbill platypus and rubbing his hands on his cosmic coveralls - God created 36DDD’s with an eighteen inch waist. Failing to run the classic "Three For the Price of One" defense (you got me and these artificial breasts too!), his wife simply argues that he ought to love her for herself. This allows Billy to deliver a summation, on the wife’s behalf, about luuuuuv, American-style, and marriage. In the midst of his summation, Billy hallucinates that he’s actually married to Ally (his second chair at the trial), and declares his eternal love. Then he drops dead. Leading us, in quick succession, to:
Billy’s funeral features typical Ally McBeal antics - tiresome as they have grown - group sing-a-longs like the kind you avoided at camp, lots o’ hallucinations, banal sayings about love (FYI: It is "stronger than death"; It is "the only thing that counts"), spontaneous gospel choirs, et cetera et cetera. It’s a shame that this episode dissolved into melodrama because there were a few hilarious hints, early on, that it might not - Billy’s joke to Ally that his brain tumor was actually "in my ass"; Billy’s joke to Ally that he was telling her about the tumor because "You’re probably the cause"; and Fish’s supposedly comforting remark that a friend of his found out that his brain tumor was actually "all in his head." This kind of compassion fatigue was promising and - if pursued a little further - might have made for a truly interesting, and less maudlin, episode. John Lennon described the weird feeling of happiness that may come after someone else’s misfortune as "Tee hee hee, I’m glad it’s not me." If at least one of the characters had betrayed a similar feeling of schadenfreude about Billy’s death, that would have been interesting. Interestingly, although no one was allowed to show anything but sadness over Billy’s death, the idea of empathy deficit in general is becoming thematic in Ally McBeal. The writers just didn’t have the nerve to use it frequently enough in this episode, where the death of a major character was at stake. Indeed, empathy deficit - a sort of exaggerated, narcissistic sense of self-involvement and selfishness - is the core of Ling’s character. For example, in this episode she complains that Cage’s being stuck in the elevator shaft might cause her to miss a facial. And, failure of empathy characterizes Nell as well, at least recently. Think of her refusal to pay attention to those hierarchically lower on the totem pole than she. Or, in this episode, think of her decision to break up with Cage while he’s trapped in the elevator shaft, on the basis that he’s just too weird to date anymore. With nasty moments like these, Ally’s writers are onto something. But they don’t have the courage to take it to its full extent. The interesting reaction is the one that is unexpected and uncommon. When the Ally writers hit that reaction, they shoot, and they score: Fish is rude; Ling is cold; Nell is unbearable, and their ways of behavior are all, though caricatured, nevertheless recognizable and real. When the writers rely on mere melodrama, they miss, and the episode itself goes dead on the screen, as this one did. Death always causes grief and sadness in the people who endure it; the question is, what else does it cause? That’s the question that this episode didn’t have the courage to answer. Julie Hilden, a Yale Law School graduate, practiced First Amendment law at the Washington, D.C. law firm of Williams & Connolly from 1996-99. She is the author of a memoir, The Bad Daughter, and is currently living and working in New York, where she is a freelance writer. Her e-mail address is JulHil@aol.com. |
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