Lifetime Movies

I have a sad addiction to Lifetime movies. Why is this, I always wonder. What is it about a Lifetime movie that I find to be so interesting and entertaining. I usually consider myself to have pretty good taste in movies (some of my faves include The Seventh Seal, Seven Samurai, The Barbarian Invasions, Badlands) but not when it comes to Lifetime. I will even rewatch the same Lifetime movie if it reappears.

I tell myself that I appreciate the irony of Lifetime movies, the bad acting, predictable plots, plucky heroines, but I am never sure if I am being honest with myself. My sophisticated sense of humor and subtle appreciation of the cultural underpinnings from whose loins Lifetime movies spring, I tell myself separate me from the normal viewer. I am a "metaviewer"--I watch Lifetime movies while imagining the "typical" viewer enjoying herself, jumping at all of the plot twists and turns, feeling empathy for the hard done by heroine, but no this is not true. I AM the typical viewer, who am I kidding? I am a young television watching mother who spends a lot of time around the house.

The Heroine--Lifetime movie heroines, though they vary widely in age, attribute, profession etc. always have a few common characteristics. Unfortunately, they usually find themselves in a horrible predicament--a detective hot on the trail of a murderer and the murderer is HER son; a teenage kid whose drug abusing mother is unfit to take care of her kids so she must adopt her siblings at age 15; a detective hot on the trail of a serial murderer and the murderer's mother works in HER office, but she is having trouble scraping together enough evidence to pin it on her (there are alot of these kind); a mother whose ex husband fakes his and his son's death in order to kidnap her son. In the face of these horrible disasters, the heroine always 1) is appropriately shocked 2)then scraps everything together, puts together all of the pieces 3) finds herself or the party on whose behalf she is acting in even more danger due to her intelligence and diligence and 4)saves the day.

The Villian: Either a dumb but mean man, or a sick and twisted conniving kind of woman. Men in Lifetime movies are even more superficial than the women. They are either physically evil (the raping, murder in cold blood type, but without any intellect) or totally flat and "perfect" for the heroine (the winsome dumb-bunny neighbor, the sweet but dumb, always count on the woman detective partner). The truly evil villians of Lifetime movies are almost always women--see above examples, the mother who comes in and out of her four children's lives at her leisure, sometimes forgetting to feed them for days, continuing to date the same dumb-bunny that tried to rape her daughter, the scorned ex-wife who arranges for a young women to seduce and once he is totally hooked abandon her ex husband, the mother who never thinks any woman is good enough for her son and so emotionally bullies him into murdering his girlfriends.

The things that every Lifetime viewer must find to be appealing deep in her psyche are the ability of women to be extremely cruel to each other, and the violence. Violence is a common element in lots of movies, I think there must be some kind of psychological benefite to watching violence acted out in movies. I think the settings are also appealing, the heroines always find themselves in some ordinary woman kind of setting.