Bye-bye, dancing baby

Something about all this Ally bashing is unnerving. It's unsettling to see how few, if any, farewell-to-Ally pieces have been written by women that do not emphatically put a disgusted distance between themselves and the skinny, nervous ditz in micro-minis. (Entertainment Weekly's Nicholas Fonseca was far kinder in his send-off than the two New York Times writers.) Ally may have pioneered the now stale girl-in-the-city genre, both on television and in fiction, but this doesn't really explain why all these stories consistently get lumped together and dismissed.

Nor does it explain why each of these characters should bear the weight of gender representation on her scrawny shoulders. In fact, save perhaps for what has been called "the Nick Hornby man" -- a feckless, idle, noncommittal, eternal adolescent -- there is no male equivalent in the popular culture of this class of fictional womanhood so utterly lacking in gender consciousness, this "lumpenfeminitat," to coin a phrase. Yet Ally's male co-workers were as consistently neurotic, flawed, vain and self-absorbed as she was. So what are we supposed to conclude from this? That the modern world has not altered them at all? That the boys are all right?

Ironically, "Ally McBeal" gave us Fish, an unrepentant womanizer with a thing for hiring impossibly beautiful lawyers and then hitting on them, whose big dramatic moment will probably involve the thunderous occasion of his finally meeting his love match in the nefarious Eliza Bump (recent guest star Christina Ricci). It also gave us John Cage, the lovable but emotionally stunted dork, who is as neurotic and damaged as Ally, if not more so.

And, of course, it gave us Billy, resident "nice guy" and the love of Ally's life (until Robert Downey Jr. came along), who was not exactly deserving of the honor. After all, Billy and Ally, childhood sweethearts, didn't just break up. Billy unceremoniously dumped Ally after meeting Georgia at a party and quickly marrying her. And unlike Ally, Billy got off easy (although, after he also ran out on Georgia, the show's producers swiftly smote him with a fatal brain tumor). "Ally McBeal" served up these characters in equal proportion; it was up to others to parse and categorize them. No one, for instance, put Richard Fish on the cover of Time magazine and asked, "Is Chauvinism Alive?"

Ultimately, it has always seemed to me that "Ally McBeal" was neither a comedy nor a drama but an allegory about modern urban life and the noxious dreams that thrive there. What was the law firm of Cage, Fish and McBeal, anyway, if not a sort of "Animal Farm" for the lonely urban professional set? The cases Ally and her colleagues took to trial often hinted at a seemingly pandemic longing on the part of their clients to have order imposed on the chaos of their emotional lives, to have their dreams legally enforced in the wake of their disappointed expectations.

When clients sued on "Ally McBeal," they did so to try to bridge the emotional distance between them and others, especially those they loved or used to love. How else to explain the parade of cases in which women sued their husbands for leaving them, men sued their plastic surgeons for causing their lovers to leave, men sued rock stars for arousing feelings in their wives that they themselves would never be capable of arousing, and lawyers filed class action suits against phone company telemarketers because the phone kept ringing all night and it was never him?

In fact, the show might have been better had it forgone the fantasy sequences that telegraphed these emotions and turned them into sight gags. After all, Ally was never much more than a neat sum of all female neuroses, an unchecked id run rampant. The things Ally and her colleagues blurted out in meetings, on dates and in court were precisely the sorts of things most people strain to repress in meetings, on dates and in court. As if playing a part in a Greek play, Ally expressed and acted on everything that she thought and felt. There was no psychology mediating her impulses at all.

Fantasy permeated all the characters' lives and made real life seem paltry by comparison. Characters like Ally, Cage, Elaine and Jenny always seemed to lack a membrane between their outer selves and their inner lives. Those who didn't -- Nelle, Ling, Fish, Eliza -- seemed to lack an inner life entirely, or at least anything one might call a soul. In this way, "Ally McBeal" played like an extended anti-fantasy public service announcement. ("Dreams destroy dreams," the tag line might have read.)

Maybe we were never meant to take Ally -- or her colleagues -- at face value. Rather than sport an individual personality, Ally simply embodied certain ideas about late 20th century living, personifying such existential abstractions as loneliness, regret, longing and melancholy, just as, in the medieval morality play "Everyman," the characters personified "fellowship" or "good deeds." But Ally also emphasized the tensions between those ideas and her own will and desires. As she told her newest boyfriend Victor, after he rather vengefully bought her a ticket to Detroit so that she could go "resolve her issues" with her ex-boyfriend Larry, "This mess is my life."

Poor Ally. She's been consigned to a type, dismissed offhandedly as a grotesque mutation of what postfeminist womanhood should have been. It's easier to blame her and characters like her for making us all a little uncomfortable than it is to take a look at the compendium of toxic notions that women are asked to filter daily, and wonder how they manage not to choke. After all, that dancing baby was never more than a hologram -- a mocking, ugly one at that. And it's not like she didn't know it.

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