Plasma Pool

Trauma, of any sort or degree, is traumatic because the subject cannot apprehend it within the bounds of the person he knows himself to be. It fractures the subjective frame. Recovering means not repairing the frame as it was but reshaping it to contextualize the trauma in a way that helps the subject make it useful rather than incapacitating or paralyzing. This is an inherently reconstructive process. We must narrate ourselves to ourselves. To do so, we borrow, defining and coping with trauma by example. This happens whether we like it or not; just by being, we constantly assemble new ways of thinking, seeing, and doing in the face of subjective rupture.

Religion and art, broadly thought, are probably the two most acknowledged sources of these new ways, but their most prolific source is undoubtedly the infinite interpersonal diversity of simple everyday experience. Everyone and everything we encounter offers us new potential ways to model ourselves to ourselves. When you first see someone cope with death, a prototypical trauma, you learn one way to do it. When my mother’s father died she cried for hours, seated on my bed, where she’d sat down to tell me, and I learned one way; when my grandmother on my father’s side died just two months later I learned many more ways. Between then and now I’ve learned countless others (like this, this, and all of these) from just as many sources. This means not that I know how I will mourn in the future for any given person, place, relation, aspiration, or other abstraction, but that my models for mourning, from the mundane to the absurd, are myriad, there, knowable, and could rightly, after the fact, be said to have influenced how I mourned. The art of losing is very hard to master. For help we look outside ourselves, automatically and baldly appropriating the experience of others living, dead, fictional, and fantastic.

Writer and producer Aaron Sorkin’s Sports Night scripts are most alive precisely at these moments of experiential analogical appropriation—at the points of raw encounter in which experience is discerned, fleshed out, and made an abstract foundation for action with the help of an interpretive supplement. Because few of Sorkin’s characters are devoutly religious, this supplement is almost always secular (i.e., artistic, musical, architectural, technological, natural, etc.) or interpersonal (i.e., my family mourning) rather than scriptural or meditative. Sorkin gives us pictures of how people go about structuring their self-thinking by appropriating elements of their experience, various interpretive supplements, and refashioning them as reference points for reflection and as new grounds for action, as spurs to new modes of thinking possibility.

Sorkin’s characters are always adopting one another’s traumas and successes as models for understanding and creatively constructing their own, as well as and looking to pop-cultural, artistic, and sometimes religious sources for guidance in interpreting and acting in their daily lives. But what makes Sports Night such a phenomenal show is that this interpretive process is not though of by the characters as any sort of interpretive process. They don’t see themselves as thinking through their experience, selecting various models for possible sorts of action from a cognitive catalog, and then executing action based upon a weighing of those models. Sorkin’s characters see themselves as simply living their lives—very much like actual human beings do. In that he succeeds in portraying the relentlessly interpretive nature of experience, at least, Sorkin’s curse was to write human beings better than he wrote network TV characters. This didn’t sit well with ABC executives, and the strangeness of much of Sports Night’s first season was occasioned by the network’s insistence on sitcom standards like a laugh track. (More on this in a future piece.)

Sports Night’s second season is Sorkin at his peak. The show was freed from the garish laugh track, but Sorkin was still given general short shrift by network execs. This may have had something to do with the fact that he centered the season’s primary arc on defending artistic integrity against the philistinism of network bureaucrats. (Sorkin is endlessly generative of metacommentary.) ABC’s contentious relations with Sorkin account for my severe confusion the first time I saw the second season’s “The Local Weather” (available on YouTube in two parts), on its original airdate, on ABC affiliate KDNL, in St. Louis, Missouri. A sports event, speech, or the like had delayed the episode’s start time for about six minutes. For some U.S. timezones, including the mine, the decision was made to cut sixish minutes from “The Local Weather” in such a way that it appeared to be a coherent episode (much as some programs do, usually to a far lesser extent, for their syndicated versions).

Watching ABC’s bowdlerized edit of the episode was especially trying because it is structured as a series of flashbacks—some remembered, some plausibly and practically imaginative—stemming out of anchor Dan Rydell’s (Josh Charles) psychotherapy session with his psychologist, Abby Jacobs (Jane Brook). The episode shifts constantly between Dan’s recollections and speculations—the meat of experience, presented to us just as the show normally is, aside from being framed by Dan’s debriefing—and the therapy session. In the process of the session, Abby helps Dan usefully situate his various thoughts and impressions, and to illuminate for himself how his interpretations and deployments of others’ experience relative to his own all point to a particular trauma that Dan certainly sees for himself, but cannot, without nudging, acknowledge as traumatic. The dots are all there to be seen, but Dan is too much inside himself to see them. Dan is the dots.

As Dan enters Abby’s office, he insists that he has nothing to talk about today, and so will cancel the session. To make this pronouncement official, he remains standing and leaves his coat on. But before he makes his way out the door Abby asks him the time, and the unexpected emergence of a sports statistic as his response redirects him into the office and into an anecdote about an American long jumper, Oscar Parrish (Derek Webster). Parrish’s decade’s worth of bad luck has kept him from two competitions—Berlin (a torn ACL) and Atlanta (the poorly-timed death of his father)—at which he was all but sure to break a record. The evening prior to his and Abby’s session, Dan and his coanchor and cowriter Casey McCall (Peter Krause) anchored coverage of Parrish’s third and final chance, at the Millennial Games. Abby will be interested in all this, Dan’s sure, because she’s already acquainted with and amused by the cast of eccentric characters who give substance to his daily life.

Dan’s Parrish story becomes the first of many, as he surveys the current trials in the lives of his friends. He tells Abby that Casey, ramping up to appointing himself ad hoc morale officer, has to openly bribe his friends with food to get them to attend a soiree to watch Parrish break his record; Sports Night’s executive producer and Dan’s boss, Dana (Felicity Huffman) fears she’s “spiritually bereft” after finding herself with nothing but “I’m a hot young single woman in New York!” to say when innocently asked by her boss, the show’s managing editor, Isaac Jaffee (Robert Guillaume), whether she ever goes to church; and associate producer Jeremy (Joshua Malina), after breaking up with Natalie (the senior associate producer—and his boss—played by the vibrant and often scene-stealing Sabrina Lloyd) because she demanded too stridently that he step outside his social comfort zone, courts, agonizes over, spurns, and finally romantically reconciles with a porn star. Parrish, we learn as the episode progresses, both succeeds and fails: he breaks his record, only to be bested, five minutes later, by an unknown Austrian fresh from adolescence. The statistic Dan mistakenly utters in response to Abby’s question about the time, 29′ 8 1/4″, is the Austrian’s new world record.

All of these anecdotes dance delicately around Dan’s recent exclusion—and his partner Casey’s pointed inclusion—from a list of movers and shakers in the world of professional sports. Abby guesses at it midway into their session, offhandedly slipping in into the conversation. Dan, emphasizing just how badly Abby should feel for Parrish, has told her that “The distance is always a hundred miles between first place and second place.” Abby mentally seizes on “hundred” and replies:

Hey, I was talking to a friend of mine who’s a sports fan, and he said there was a magazine that did a top 100 list of the most influential people in sports, and he thought it was strange that uh, Casey made the list and you didn’t.

Dan immediately denies Abby’s insinuation—thereby, of course, working to articulate and legitimate it—even calling Abby on her obvious construction of “a friend” with a vaguely accusatory question. But by the end of their session, Abby’s reading of Dan’s psyche has proven itself first plausible and then palpable:

ABBY
You’re bothered because [Parrish] came in second.

DAN
He held the world record for five minutes.

ABBY
That’s five minutes longer than most people do.

DAN
You know what, I’ve heard that kind of thing and I’m going to say this: If you’re good enough to come in second place than you’re good enough to be disappointed about it. [...]

ABBY
You feel disconnected from people around you now?

DAN
Yeah.

ABBY
People are challenging themselves, trying new things. Dana went to church, found out she liked it. Jeremy’s on an adventure, you wonder why that didn’t happen to you. Meantime your partner got on “the list” and you didn’t. Just like Oscar Parrish.

DAN
It was his whole life.

ABBY
It probably wasn’t. And his whole life isn’t over yet. Now I think most people would say, you’ve got a pretty good life. And yours isn’t over yet either by the way. Though our time is up.

Dan’s good-naturedly vicarious appropriation of others’ experience, thinly but earnestly dressed up as superfluous banter, has exhausted the hour.

In the process of detailing his friends’ lives—giving ways of seeing how others deal with their own sorts and degrees of trauma—Dan presents a particular way of seeing himself and his own trauma, one that he probably isn’t personally privy to and that Abby gradually discerns with simple, concentrated, conscientious attention to what Dan says. In this she is very much like Sorkin—there’s that metacommentary again!—who, at his best, insists on attending fastidiously to the complexities and contradictions of human beings as they actually exist.