Moira Rose – a hater who deeply loves
-Schitt’s Creek, Schitt’s town, Our town, Your town –
Several weeks ago I ran into a show called Schitt’s Creek. Being a fan of Catherine O’Hara since childhood, since Beetlejuice, to be precise, I decided to give it a chance and watch one episode. The description of the pilot episode “Our cup runneth over” was rather off-putting for me, where the family who lost everything had to move to a town which was their only asset. It all sounded rather dull, fake and unrelatable. Little did I know how I was about to fall in love with the show which effortlessly and with loads of sarcasm portrays everything I consider wrong with this world. In continuance, provides and encompasses a wonderful, meaningful everyday life in to some of us so very despised small town.
A very spoiled family lost everything due to it’s accountant who stole all of their money and the Federal Bureau of Investigation had confiscated all of their assets. Shipped all the way to a town, which the father, Johhny Rose, bought as a joke to his son David, the town whose name corresponds the state it’s in, Schitt’s Creek. And really, it truly is, as poets would say, “a heap of dung”. The town is poor and so are its towns people, condemned to live uninteresting lives due to lack of resources. After losing their main crutch, endless money flow, Rose family, also condemned to live in such “obsidian”, as their matriarch would say, continuously has nervous breakdowns. However they are forced to deal with them and stay together, putting up with each other, forced to get to know one another, and be each others helpers. Because really, where else would they go? In each episode things get pretty dark, desperate, bizarre, sarcastic and life like. They seem to reminisce of The Addams Family, also a satirical inversion of an ideal American eccentric, wealthy family clan, who delights in the macabre and are unaware that people find them bizarre and frightening. The main character that of matriarch Moira Rose bizarrely captured my attention because of her very posh and peculiar word registry and her gothic sense of fashion very much as Addams’ matriarch Morticia.
Moira Rose begins as a subversive character, whose family failed to live the American dream, where at the end of her life, instead of enjoying her retirement and organizing charities, galas and luncheons, she turned into a looser as a former soap opera actress and a looser mother. Loosing all of her friends, unable to get a casting for any role, living in an old motel in Schitt’s Creek, not knowing even how to cook a decent meal for her children, shredded of all her proficiencies. Moira rejects to fit into the town, drama queen by nature, having many wigs, structured designer gothic black and white armour-like garments, to protect her and differentiate her from the locals, who are covertly interested and terrified of her at the same time. While Morticia Addams had her haunting flowers to groom, the stem of roses with no buds, Moira has her carefully selected wig collection which she named and grooms them in moments of sadness and is, just as Morticia Addams, musically inclined. On the start of their journey of being again at the rock bottom, as all the family members, Moira has helpers, quite common for the affirmative American drama. It is in fact all the talents of the Roses’ that get them to all eventually connect with the locals and discover the way back to the top. Moira’s talent is acting and singing which enables her to connect with Jazzagals, a women’s choir where they not only perform but also spend quality time and get to know each other. It is in fact those women who are her constant support no matter how bizarrely peculiar they found Moira’s behaviour, clothing and speaking to be. Through that part of community she learns of the town’s actualities and involves in the work of the city council, books gigs for the choir, celebrates birthdays and even does the unthinkable, cooks the famous enchiladas after her mother’s recipe. Nonetheless the use of the word “cook” is dubious because all she does is bosses David around on which ingredient to add without actually doing anything herself. Nevertheless whenever something triggers her drive to prove herself, she is pushing herself to learn and deliver. Despite being an utterly helpless cook determinately screams after David leaves her alone with the enchiladas, “What does burning smells like?!”
Most of the time, conflicted with whether to keep going or wallow in sorrow, the family members refuse to acknowledge the fact that their lives are now supposed to carry on in Schitt’s Creek, which is under the jurisdiction of The Schitts’. The mayor Roland Schitt and his wife Jocelyn, a school teacher, in love with her job, who nevertheless always talks about her students’ erections which she is the cause of, make the Roses’ lives impossible. At least that is what their attempts of befriending look like in the eyes of the Roses. In one of their many attempts of rejecting the town, the Roses even decide to sell it. Despite their eagerness the town is proclaimed worthless and impossible to be sold and have one of the episodes end with the family staring in the sexually suggestive welcoming poster of the town where “everyone fits in” and a man holding a woman from the back looking as they’re simulating sex. The scene being even more ridiculous when the mayor Schitt, in his attempt to rectify that, adds a sign which says “Don’t worry. It’s his sister!”.
Moira, Johnny, David and Alexis all work really hard on moving forward, getting a job and earning some money using their proficiencies, they did not even know they own. Further on by doing whatever they can to move on from the feelings of misery transforms them into affirmative characters who did not allow the bad memories to destroy them. In fact they turn to accepting new values thus becoming in harmony with themselves and others. They acknowledge their helpers in one of the episodes, where they meet their former high society friends. Those former friends start by telling them about the hideous town they were driving through which has the worst welcoming billboard and looks and is properly named, Schitt’s Creek. At first Moira and Johnny are embarrassed but Johnny finds the strength and confronts them saying how since their downfall none of their former friends called them , while the Schitts’ have given them a free stay at the town’s motel and their truck at disposal anytime, since the day they met. Acknowledging their helpers goes rewarded where their friendship becomes stronger and venture together in a motel business franchise with the Schitts’. Eventually they all succeed once again confirming the American dream, where you can succeed if you put your heart and mind into something. Adopting the family values, small town closeness, being there for each other and doing things together with love and support and putting all that in place where they used to value only money, makes them truly didactical, a quality way of living a life. Turning a closed system, they wanted to run away from, into a warm and friendly one, where the end they experienced, actually turned out to be the beginning of their story, a fresh start for all of them. The right to life, love and freedom is something each of them goes through in the process of accepting reality and moving forward without constantly grieving for the way things were before.
All that awfully reminded me of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town”, a timeless drama, portraying the mythical village Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, which engages into polemics of the significance of small town people, the value of their every day lives and connections they make through life. Exploring the relationships of their neighbours, dealing with timeless questions of meaning of life, love, death, freedom and questioning the set of values everyone sorts for themselves. Small town offers healing, community engagement, marriage, strong participation in the circle of life, which can often be set aside due to the thrills of capitalism, mass consumerism and constant accumulation of instant gratification seeking. All that is found in Our Town as well as in Schitt’s Creek. One of the particularly emotional moments in the final episodes is when David has to decide on whether he wants to stay in town with his husband or come back to New York. He discusses that with his friend Stevie who reminds him how the posh people from New York failed to RSVP to his wedding because they went to an electronic music fest in Norway instead to his wedding. Desperately, Stevie asks him why would he want to come back to a place that had done nothing but hurt his feelings. At that point David says something that breaks the final barrier in his healing process. He says how he wanted for those people to know that he was not a joke and that he had won. Eventually he decides that he is not quite over with Schitt’s Creek yet.
From a self pitying failed character, small town brings healing to Moira as well. Having learned that she was raised in a small town which scared her pretty heavily, with her Bosnian made movie the Crows have eyes 3, The Crowening fallen through, she was offered a place on the reboot of the soap opera she worked on decades ago. Finally content with her career and the chance Johnny got with motel franchise, she encourages Alexis to take the ember of her independence and keep it burning in New York.
The emphasis on being different in small town, to being praised for being different in a big cosmopolitan city is actually relatable, to all the people who felt they do not fit in, like myself. The biggest fear the misfits have after capitalizing their misfitness and moving to a big city, is the fear of ever coming back to a small town and be exposed to the stares and judging Judys of all the small towns of the world. That same fear is also their drive to keep running and never look back to any small towns, funerals for the creative souls. The real revelation is how being different anywhere you go is not always an obstacle for being yourself unless you allow it to be and that may be one of the main revelations of the Roses’.
Finally Moira publicly acknowledges the women of Schitt’s Creek, telling them how she was like a wolf pup, born deaf and blind, but now she sees and hears the beauty. Evidently healed and ready to move on, but to return occasionally as well, because David is the one they leave there for good. I am not sure if an affirmative subversive character even exists as a terminology or is it just an oxymoron but I am determined to use it for Moira Rose.
One of the characters who appears to have very little depth but is somehow always there is the waitress Twyla. She has a big secret that she reveals to Alexis in the end, which very much reflects on the beauty of gratefulness and the circle of life. The secret is that she won 46 million dollars on the lottery, for which no one knows about, for as she says, it would change the way people would look at her. With all that money at her hands, she did not ever want to go anywhere else, because everything she needed, she found right there in Schitt’s Creek.
How does a human being come to terms with its own insignificance? How does one embrace its own meaninglessness and accepts it as his legacy? By trying your best and giving it all every day but not wallow in despair? By trying to find love for everyone around you even when you want to go nuclear and detonate yourself ? Schitt’s Creek offers some heavy pills difficult to swallow, but has very much at the end, become a town of my own.
