What if…Virgin River exists outside the attention economy?
Can social media celibacy with a hearty pour of Netflix-ified whimsy heal trauma? Unlikely!
Hello!
The best thing about this silly little newsletter is absolute freedom from timeliness. Relevance? Who needs it! If I want to write about the first season of an awful Netflix show that aired in 2019, not a single person is going to say “but what’s the news peg?” Anyway, here’s Wonderwall.
Out the gate, I need to make three disclaimers.
If you don’t want to spoil Virgin River S1 for yourself (although I’m not sure this is possible? The plot is just “melodramatic brooding”), either stop reading or scroll down to where I talk about my favorite snacks or whatever.
This close-reading is exclusively of season one. If later on, Lilly decides to sell the farm and make TikTok her full time job, good for her I guess.
Virgin River is awful.
Imagine a Lifetime holiday movie. You know the kind — city slicker girl boss runs away from her problems to be a do-gooder in a slice of Americana with exactly one very hot very straight man that’s just her type and a different town gathering every 18 hours to keep everyone mingling. Virgin River is basically 42+ episodes of that, except replace the Christmas cheer with a bottomless pit of unaddressed trauma.
The city slicker is named Mel, a nurse practitioner and midwife, who uproots her LA life after the death of her husband and daughter to work under Doc, Virgin River’s sole source of community healthcare. If you’re thinking “wait, isn’t that the plot of Everwood?” you would be 98% correct!
But instead of Chris Pratt, this time we’ve got extensive Iraq combat flashbacks to remind us we are firmly in AMERICA — Mel’s bar-owning love interest, Jack, is a veteran and alcoholic (when it’s convenient to the storyline). Before I go on a 700 word tangent about the military industrial complex, what I really want to talk about is surveillance capitalism. Or rather, the fact that Virgin River seems to exist in a parallel universe untouched by it.
I am fairly sure Virgin River exists sometime in the recent present. COVID is never addressed and presumably never happened (surely it would be a core element in Mel’s flashback library of ER nurse moments), but just about everyone has a smartphone. There is no texting (also no cussing). Phones are used for 1. making angst-driven phone calls, 2. taking photos, but only when performing detective cosplay, and 3. looking up flirty facts before immediately returning to very PG pining.
While it’s easy to point toward small town quaintness leading to healthier relationships with technology, correlation does not imply causation. Everyone on this television program has at least two to three major sources of trauma coupled with a quirky Shakespearean-level fatal flaw. Sadness, loneliness, and daily PTSD flashbacks are not exactly a recipe for resisting the dystopian casino on your phone. The fact that Muriel or Charmaine haven’t made nefarious deals with the local drug bozos to whittle down credit card debt amassed from buying every item the Instagram algorithm posits as a personal ticket to wellbeing isn’t proof they’ve reached a higher plane of self-control, refusing to let scrolling become their maladaptive coping mechanism of choice. It’s proof that scrolling, at least as we know it, might not exist.
Virgin River’s attention economy void can be seen mostly clearly in the context of a search engine. Preacher, bar chef and fellow veteran, happens upon an old driver’s license with a different name for Virgin River’s most mysterious cutie. Instead of “Paige Lassiter” it says “Michelle Logan.” People change their names for all sorts of reasons and it’s none of his business, but this bro is nosy as hell and wants more info on his crush.
He does a quick search, and what does he get? More or less the same results you’d get if you went to the library in 1997 and used their new computer to peruse the card catalog.
It’s not just that “Paige Lassiter” doesn’t exist, because the results come from the same sources — with a bonus FBI “WANTED” page — when he searches “Michelle Logan.” It’s that the search engine appears to not be in a polyamorous relationship with every social media platform storing and selling personal data. I dare you to go to Google right now, type in any name, and see if you can get the first page to be free of surveillance capitalism heavy hitters (Facebook, IG, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc).
In theory, this should all be great! Look at these crazy kids living their lives instead of getting carpal tunnel because they refuse to get a pop socket. But somehow being extremely offline has a neutral effect at best. Take busybody broad Hope McCrea. Instead of doing whatever a small town mayor does, she spends every waking moment hiding her emotions behind bitchy gruffness and not just gossipping, but actively interfering with other people’s lives because “it’s what’s best for them.”
What results is perpetual sabotage of herself and everyone around her. Hope has no real friends, and the community she does wield runs on fear. What would fix this? Self work and exercises in vulnerability! But a short term solution would be displacing her IRL meddling energy into gossiping about pop culture with the knitting circle. Someone get this woman a Switch pre-loaded with Animal Crossing! Or at the very least an intro to the Real Housewives cinematic universe and some ideas for hosting a watch party!
Luckily I still have 1,408 minutes (and counting — a new season has been announced) of Virgin River remaining. Plenty of time for at least one person to maintain a reciprocal relationship of any flavor! With bated breath we wait.
This newsletter brought to you by:
A quesadilla made in the toaster oven
Elena teaching me how to get around Netflix’s no-screenshot policy
The bearded dragon’s costumes in Netflix’s Do Revenge
An advanced copy of Aesthetica by Allie Rowbottom
Insomnia!
Great piece! So much information here!!! And who didn’t love Everwood?!!! 😝