A couple of days ago at the library where I work, a "patron" came in seeking what she initially described as "DVDs of soap operas." I told her that I didn't think we had anything like that, but I would check the catalogue if she could come up with specific titles. I was expecting something on the order of General Hospital; instead, she asked for The OC. No such luck. We do, however, have Laguna Beach — would that be an adequate replacement? No, she answered. See, she was from Orange County, and she was homesick. But with The OC nowhere in sight, she left empty-handed.
Questions for discussion:
- If all she wanted was The OC, why didn't she just say so? What could she hope to gain by pretending she just wanted "soap operas" and then pulling a switcheroo? It's not like soap operas as a category are more respectable than The OC. Nor would any reasonable person respond to a request for "soap operas" by offering up The OC; it may have soap-opera elements, but then again so do X-Men comics — probably more so.
- The OC is fiction; Laguna Beach is, in some fraught but not entirely meaningless sense of the term, reality. What does it say about this person and/or her home county that the only way she could imagine alleviating her homesickness was by consuming a distorted fictional representation of it, not a (readily available) quasi-documentary of it?
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