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As we all know, Lynn had to be talked out of turning her strip into a D-grade soap opera strip. The people surrounding her knew that the daytime drama plots she wanted to inject into the strip would so destroy the premise that Lynn would have wound up standing in the burning wreckage of the franchise screaming about injustice because she was unable to understand the parable of Batman at the 4077. Just as one cannot accept a scenario in which a campy superhero barges into Alan Alda's preachfest waiting for Cesar Romero to show up, it would destroy the Pattersons were they to mutate from realistic suburbanites into soap opera weirdos on a dime but you can't tell Lynn that because she hates reality. The reason that I mention this is that it seems to me that Lynn, John, Mike, April and Liz aren't alone in turning innocent bystanders into monsters from the televised id bent on ruining their lives. Elly does so too and in doing so, she really kind of made a dog's breakfast of her kids' social lives.
We're about to see the illness become virulent over the next few years when she starts shitting bricks turning a wispy little girl with parents who see her baby boy as a threat to be avoided into a menace to her family. You would have thought that Elly would look at Martha and see someone a lot like she was at that age: a confused and unhappy slip of a thing with parents who sat on her and friends who are hard to tell from enemies. You would be wrong because despite knowing on an intellectual level that what she sees on movies and the like isn't real, part of Elly's fear of Martha must have stemmed from watching too much the television and confusing it with reality. She let her envy of girls with active social lives team up with the nightmare fantasy image of the teenaged monster girl trying to derail the brilliant career of an innocent and rock and roll all over Martha. In so doing, she proved Mencken right when he said that a misogynist is a man who hates women almost as much as women do.
We're about to see the illness become virulent over the next few years when she starts shitting bricks turning a wispy little girl with parents who see her baby boy as a threat to be avoided into a menace to her family. You would have thought that Elly would look at Martha and see someone a lot like she was at that age: a confused and unhappy slip of a thing with parents who sat on her and friends who are hard to tell from enemies. You would be wrong because despite knowing on an intellectual level that what she sees on movies and the like isn't real, part of Elly's fear of Martha must have stemmed from watching too much the television and confusing it with reality. She let her envy of girls with active social lives team up with the nightmare fantasy image of the teenaged monster girl trying to derail the brilliant career of an innocent and rock and roll all over Martha. In so doing, she proved Mencken right when he said that a misogynist is a man who hates women almost as much as women do.
