Ladies We'd Like to Bring to Life: Daria Morgendorffer
Posted at 8:00 AM Jul 08, 2009
 |
la la LA la LA
Alright, I couldn't resist this one when I saw it on Jezebel. Apparently, on the soon-to-be-released DVDs for The State, there's a promo shot for the Daria DVD collection, coming out in 2010!
Admittedly, it's a bit oxymoronic to be getting excited about a character like Daria. She's pretty much pure apathy wrapped in heavy boots and a green jacket. But I grew up on this series. I spent the night with a large pizza during every marathon. I set the VCR (whoa, remember VCRs?) for the two extended specials about summer break and college. I identified with and longed in reality for more of the sort of banter she and Jane enjoyed in bedrooms. And I watched all five seasons of the show until it went off the air in 2002, the year I graduated.
Daria's attitude encapsulated the trapped teenage angst of late 90's, middle-class suburbia; a place full confusing classmates driving loud cars with purple lights under the sides, or hypocritical, contradictory teachers and parents whose logic always seemed to go wandering in lazy circles as they put a happy face on everything. It was hard to explain those sorts of frustrations adequately in high school, and my own comebacks were mostly of the "well ... YOU are" variety, or occasionally I emitted a stitch of nervous laughter. I therefore had to count on Daria to express what I either couldn't or wouldn't, and she didn't disappoint.
A Daria rebuttal formula: one devastatingly well-articulated counterpoint plus a disinterested, monotone voice equals the sort of comment and expression that, should you be at its business end, leaves you reeling and hanging onto things for balance and generally questioning your own values and beliefs for days. Observe the following:
I'd like to see what, say, a 30-year-old Daria would be capable of doing/thinking/expressing. Maybe she'd have found an audience for her views. Maybe she'd be blogging (heh). More likely she'd still be staying in with a good book and a coffee. Either way, she'd be out of suburbia, finally freed, probably just the slightest hint of a pencil-thin smile on her face.
Comments
...wow. "val" is totally supposed to be jane pratt. of "jane" magazine fame.
nice burn, daria.
Posted 07/08/2009 at 10:48:09 AM"reeling and hanging onto things for balance and generally questioning your own values and beliefs for days"
I think I've experienced at least one of those kinds of rebuttals in the face of a certain gentleman friend of mine who maybe took an awful lot of Daria into his personality...
Posted 07/08/2009 at 02:41:24 PMOf course, now that I bought bootleg DVDs it's going to come out. (Though mine have the original music!)
I love Daria. It was one of those shows, like Beavis and Butthead, that I watched as a youngster because it was a cartoon.
Posted 07/11/2009 at 07:27:54 PM