By now, you've likely heard the incredibly gross news about what Mackenzie Phillips's "BOMBSHELL SECRET," as it's been teased for a week, will be when she detonates this atomic taboo bomb on The Oprah Winfrey Show later today. But before we do a swan dive into that muck, I'd like to back up a bit. I did something recently that I'd never done before: I added Oprah to my DVR queue. Her two-part season opener interview with Whitney Houston wasn't a letdown. On the contrary, it was something of a triumph for Winfrey, who'd gotten her elusive subject to snap back from the cracky abyss and reflect on the circumstances that led to her flash-and-burn marriage and astonishing fall from grace.
They explored the functional details, too. Her drug was cocaine -- premium rock cocaine, sprinkled like icing sugar in marijuana cigarettes and puffed while watching TV, sometimes days at a time, sitting wordlessly on the couch by Bobby Brown. I, however, needed no blow-joints to enjoy this show: I was high merely on the intrusion.
Yesterday's show featured two female guests, linked only by their Ripley's Believe It or Not!ness: Connie Culp, a woman who was shot in the face by her husband and survived (he turned the gun on himself and also survived), and who lived for some time with a sutured hole where her nose and palate once existed, giving her face the appearance of a bialy. However Culp became the lucky recipient of North America's first successful face transplant. Pragmatic, resilient, courageous -- she's all those things. But then she vacillates on whether or not she'd take back her husband after he's released from his seven-year prison stint, and you realize just where this woman's new head is at. You've heard of turning the other cheek; Connie takes it to its literal extremes.
The second guest was Shiloh Pepin, the girl made famous in a TLC documentary who has two fused legs that sort of form a single, tapering flesh-flipper below her waist, giving her the appearance of a mermaid. The condition is one from which she was thought never to survive past infancy, but Shiloh turned ten this summer, and like Connie, she too seems completely disinterested with matters of self-pity. Shiloh is instead preoccupied with tormenting her doctors with syringe water guns, plotting out her career as a jewelry designer, and leaving the bulk of the worrying over her quality of life to her parents -- who are divorcing, she let slip.
Phillips' story, meanwhile, is the most horrific of them all: A child of Hollywood born into privilege and fame, cursed with an inherited addiction from a father who actively encouraged it, and who, in their drugged fog, coaxed his own daughter into a consensual and ongoing sexual relationship. Too awful for words. Or, at least, too awful for Oprah.
As it happens, all of these stories, but particularly Phillips', tie in nicely with the upcoming explorations of incest, abuse and other manifestations of unbelievably shitty luck heaped upon women in Precious, the brutal movie about an obese, inner-city teen carrying her own father's two children that Winfrey has taken under her wing, and will shepherd to Oscar glory this February.
Is it deeply cynical to suggest Phillips is being unwittingly used as incest victim marketing tool to push a film based on Precious? Perhaps, and it could just as easily be argued that what drew Winfrey to the film is what drew her to Phillips' story, and even the Mermaid Girl's as well: From her very first screen role in A Color Purple, Oprah has been preoccupied with guiding the female downtrodden to their own salvation. It's what led to the founding of the South African Leadership Academy for Girls that bears her name -- making the abuse scandal that erupted there in 2007 all the more painful and ironic.
But let's address a hard fact here: A great deal of money is on the line. It's the thing Winfrey never likes to acknowledge. No matter how much money she accumulates, ratings are necessary to achieve her agenda. Box office success is necessary. Further, my problem with the film, and with a new season overstuffed with female-suffering-themed episodes, is that they are calibrated to secure deliverance, for the subjects and the gawkers, in the shortest number of steps. The victims, across the board, are victims. The perpetrators are the devils. And their suffering is meant to simultaneously make us feel both bad, that such evils exist, and good, at all we have that these women do not.
Enough, already.