You're Standing On My Neck...
...this kind of incisive, cynical cultural criticism wouldn't even get past the censors today!
I watched Daria when it came out. I was around 11. I think you’ll still find this interesting even if you have never watched it yourself.
I knew I found it extremely relatable on some level but I was too young to understand why. Watching it again I am discovering it now.
Daria was not “cool” as far as the popular kids in school dictated, but she always had a witty, sardonic comeback that went over their heads. She knew she was deep and they were shallow. She stood up for herself. She knew she wasn’t the one at fault but that it was a society that was vacuuous and glorified superficiality. This must have made her the hero for all the reject kids at school across America. The ones who wanted to speak up and say “fuck you” but in a searing, blistering way - hidden behind sophisticated language.
It was hard to understand why I loved Daria and found her so relatable because I knew I wasn’t as smart and sophisticated as her, well-read or quick with a comeback (I learned that a lot later) - I also did not think I was a "brain" (as her critics described her. I was not top of my class, my academic performance was average at best. That's partially because things were always stressful both at home and at school and I just wanted to check out whenever possible - watch tv or play computer games. I didn't really feel I had the capacity to work any more, I just put off my homework and didn’t study. I didn’t actually realise I was smart until well into adulthood!
The other major reason I didn’t perform well academically was that I born in January making me the youngest in the class. It would be interesting to see how I would have fared in school if I'd been kept back a year. I think that would have been the right thing to do because I really did not have the emotional maturity or stability to deal with the challenge of trying to fit in at school or understand social etiquette. I didn't get social skills from my interactions with family and I took my lack of social skills into school and looked weird.
Things started to get better when around 14 I started to get outside of school friends - rockers - at that point I started to develop more of a sense of identity and confidence. I got more practice socialising with people who liked me outside of school and I could bring some of that integration into school and got on better with people. Plus the kids were starting to get older and more mature and less judgemental and cliquey. By the last year of school I really liked being around my classmates. It would have been nice if it was just starting then and I had a few more years to develop relationships.
As far as coming into my own and developing a strong social presence the journey had just begun. I wrote a short ebook called How to Make Small Talk a few years ago which identifies a bunch of important principles that I had to learn the hard way and has exercises in it for improving your flexibility in social situations that really work. I wish someone had given it to me when I started going out to night clubs and parties to give me something to practice so I could have learned quickly. A passion for relationships, communication and connection was a seed in me from the beginning waiting to be watered and I am still working on my social skills and relationship skills to this day. That’s what got me into becoming a therapist and I have to say what I learned has had a massive impact on my own relationships.
Watching Daria back today it becomes clear why Daria was so relatable. She has such a keen eye and is so much more switched on than everyone around her, and it's that which is isolating. She’s not isolated for her flaws but for her qualities. She is the one that ends up isolated with low self esteem and perhaps a low grade depression because she can’t integrate into a world that is too superficial for her. Somehow I intuited that there was some of Daria in me even though I wasn’t cool or funny or sarcastic or smart like she was.
The social commentary in Daria is very 90s and I like that it’s not explicitly political, it’s more cultural - commenting on shallowness, vacuousness, superficiality, depravity. It’s implicit not explicit. They point to the joke rather than explaining it out loud. A lot of the humour revolves around someone saying something clever and deep and someone else being too stupid to get what it was implying and taking it at face value. It's so deep I hardly imagine how it got on TV and how enough people found it relatable to keep it going for 5 seasons. That's surely enough rejects to have formed a clan! All I can say is people must have been a lot less thick in 1997 than they are today.
Nah-na Nah Nah-na,
Nah-na Nah Nah-na.
I’ve never really followed the show, but goodness was the article relatable, Antony. You knocked it out of the park again, as per usual.