Don't Kill the Birthday Girl by Sandra Beasley Page B

the end of another. The sound track? “Duel of the Fates” from
Star Wars
lightsaber battles. Their fight comes to a draw when the catwalk collapses, dumping them into a vat of equally imperiling peanut-covered shrimp. And I laughed, I did. I can take a joke.
    But
The Simpsons
is, by definition, a cartoonish treatment of the world. What worries me are the programs that do not operate in the register of satire or surrealism. These shows develop a grounded setting, present three-dimensional characters, and invest in those characters’ emotions; yet when the plotline employs an allergy incident, it does so with callousness that suggests the writers don’t see allergies as any real threat to life.
    The media frames food allergies with three recurring clichés. The first cliché: the allergic reaction as sight gag. In
Hitch
, a 2005 romantic comedy, Will Smith plays matchmaker Alex “Hitch” Hitchens, and Eva Mendes costars as his love interest. When Hitch accidentally ingests shellfish, his eyelids swell into a grotesque mask. This isn’t a way of showing that Hitch’s braggadocio is actually rooted in a lifetime of vulnerability over whether his body can be trusted not to turn on him. Nah. This is an excuse for Smith’s character to go into a drugstore, scarf down Benadryl, and stage a “look, he’s acting like a funny drunk” scene, which is about as funny as the ol’ runaway wheelchair gag.
    The second cliché: allergy as Achilles’ heel, in which an otherwise competent, competitive character is taken out by an allergen. In the ABC Family movie
Picture This
, the prototypical“evil blonde,” Lisa Cross, is determined to prevent the lead character, Mandy Gilbert (played by
High School Musical
star Ashley Tisdale), from going to a party with Cross’s ex-boyfriend. Her solution? She bribes a mall worker to sell Gilbert a nut-laced smoothie, knowing this will transform the allergic girl’s features into the dreaded “butt face.”
    Three years earlier, in the big-screen
Monster-in-Law
, Jane Fonda’s titular character sneaks peanuts into the Jennifer Lopez nut-allergic character’s food the night before her wedding day, hoping a reaction will prevent Lopez from marrying her son. The real-world potential for a charge of attempted murder? Details, details.
    The third cause for an allergy cameo: provide an excuse for the protagonist to act heroically. In the recent movie version of
Nancy Drew
, Emma Roberts’s Nancy is introduced as a brave, practical, and preternaturally well-read young teen. Our proof? A party where one of Nancy’s friends passes out on the floor, and it’s discovered she is in the grip of an anaphylactic reaction due to a known peanut allergy.
    Nobody asks if the girl carries an epinephrine injector. Instead, it just so happens that Nancy is versed in at-home tracheotomies. Give her a ballpoint pen, a pocketknife, and some room, and she can save a life. (The grateful friend appears in a later scene, remarkably none the worse for wear. There is no scarring in the world of teen cinema.)
    All these clichés come together in a 2005 episode of
That’s So Raven
that still lives on in syndication. I caught it one night during one of those dull-eyed, 1 a.m. moments when it’s either the Disney Channel or HGTV, and I’d already seen that episodeof
Property Virgins
. So instead I got season three’s “Chef-Man and Raven.” Victor Baxter and his daughter, Raven (played by Raven-Symoné, aka Olivia from
The Cosby Show
), are invited to compete against Victor’s former college cooking rival for the
Iron
Chef-styled program
Challenge Captain Cook-off
.
    When it looks as though Raven and her father have a fighting chance of defeating the defending champions, their jealous competitors take matters into their own hands by spiking Raven’s dish with mushrooms. Apparently, fungi are Raven’s