Problems

One of the inherent problems with approaching TV critically is that it’s not a self-critical medium. That’s because any given production becomes such a massive enterprise to make and air that inevitably, going forward requires everybody to compromise at every stage, and what remains can be called a “work,” with an “author,” only in the loosest sense. That’s why I’ve so far tried hard to stay focused on what feelings TV artifacts produce in me, rather than what they “mean.”

That said, part of the problem with upkeeping this blog regularly is that I don’t watch as much TV as I did when I began (ran out of interest, really). Which is a long way around saying: I might need to change format.

Spirituality

There’s a lot of guff going around right now about spirituality. According to many religious commentators, Liberalism (and its evil cronies Science and Capitalism) spent this decade eradicating the spiritual from the experiences of modern people. That, they say, is why the nonreligious are now joining churches in epic numbers – the Liberal-prescribed urban lifestyle is a spiritual desert with nothing to offer people on “the biggest questions.”

It really makes me wonder where the hell these people have been. If we’re calling the spiritual that dimension of experience that is immaterial, for which subjective consciousness is the theater, then it occupies a greater part of Americans’ lives daily than, probably, it ever has. Even if we include faith in the unbeheld, faith in our place in the universe, non-instrumental morality and so forth, modern Americans cannot be called an unfeeling people. We are a deeply spiritual people. That the things which move us to spiritual feeling – fiction, mostly, and politics – are silly is inadequate to invalidate them, particularly if we’re talking validation along the same lines as religious (and historical) mythology.

Yeah, okay; so reading the masterpieces of modern fiction never educated society, civilized evil men or put a stop to tyranny or callousness, like imaginary platonic dick-stroking 19th century Liberals said it would. But neither did religious faith, in all the thousands of years people practiced it. And daily, I see Americans communicate entirely in the symbology of shared fiction (Hollywood, mostly) to make moral posits and speculate about our place in the universe. I don’t know how many of them realize they are effectively participating in a communal spiritual discourse, but the alleged “function” of spirituality is being exercised nonetheless.

Okay, so between you and me, our common mythology sucks. Hollywood films are particularly tainted by the toxic claw of capital. There’s also, probably, something pretty pernicious in getting our talking points from people paid to tell us what we want to hear. But you don’t need to travel far to find someone with a legitimate complaint about the plot to Exodus, either (and it’s not like the original publishers of the Moses story weren’t pandering to political enthusiasms). As far as I can tell, the only thing that ensures a more inherently fulfilling experience at church than at the movies is community. Why on Earth would people assume you need Exodus to build that? In two hundred years, we’ve simply taught ourselves to neglect that. Not even the whole decadent West, only America.

It’s true that American spiritual life seriously lacks something. It’s probably even true that it’s drawing secular people back to churches, choirs, God and the doctrine of eternal damnation. The Sender blames lack of imagination. These are not the only two choices.

The Nihilistic Comedy

Imaginary critics in my head are inveighing about my misuse of the word “nihilism.” Yes, I know it’s a frequently meaningless word in the plethora of contexts that it’s used. Just so we’re on the same page, or at least in the same book, here’s how The Sender defines nihilism on TV:

An artifact of writers’ attitudes toward the subject, expressed in plot, character and humor suppositions; sensed most immediately as an aspect of setting. You could describe it as a “malevolence principle.”

In comedy, particularly this means nihilistic irony: the view that it’s funny because it sucks, funny because it hurts someone, funny because people are shit, funny because the media is hypocritical, funny because the government are incompetent, funny because manners are a rigged game, etc.

Nihilism provokes strong feelings and divides audiences. Nice people don’t like it. Nihilistic comedies often come off like they’re trying to force bitterness on you. Other times, they seem to forgive what viewers find unforgivable. Nihilistic storytelling has a long and respectable history with the English (who prefer naturalism and lean pessimist), but many Americans see no reason why they should be shown this sort of thing at all.

Except in TV comedy, anyway, where thanks to TV’s screaming feedback bombs of catastrophic self-destruct (directed, last time, at anodyne comedy), it’s been the unchallenged norm for at least ten years. The Simpsons was so shocking to 1990 eyes precisely because nihilistic irony in cartoons was unheard of. Seinfeld was criticized for extremes of negativity (hard to imagine now). Some shows sneak negativity in under other guises, like ironic endorsement (All In The Family, Married With Children), deadpan (King of the Hill), moralizing (Arrested Development), zany cartoon shit (Family Guy), a huge, pink cloud of aspiration (Friends), mock anodyne (Venture Brothers), mock naturalism (House, M.D.), being entirely fair and fucking humane (That 70’s Show). Since 2000, though, most nihilistic comedies are out about it, and simply write off the portion of the audience who’d rather see something sweet.

Speaking of which, because irony is so de rigueur in comedy, plenty of shows work the opposite gimmick, sneaking in serious messages beneath faux-nihilism. This is an inherently inferior approach, though, as it weakens any point to bracket it between declarations of indifference. One show definitely hurt by its patina of false negativity is South Park. For a comedy essentially about morality, South Park does its best to conceal having any – hedging all bets with the golden mean fallacy and following with a fart joke, as though half the time, the central characters weren’t voicing authorial arbitrage anyway. But there have been plenty of comedies that, one suspects, would be happy to drop the irony.

Unfortunately for them, the way mass, one-to-many media seems to work is: much too slowly to avoid incubating an enormous backlash that destroys everything standing when it occurs. As for us, the timeframe is about right; no doubt the economic news is already making people self-importantly reconsider themselves (all of which they will type on the New York Times website in any available comment page). This is the sort of thing that tends to change during such windows. All things considered, the ironic kitsch is probably doomed.

More About SafeAuto

In a previous post, I made a joke about SafeAuto commercials for adopting the symbols and doomy overtone of police PSAs. I said that SafeAuto behave as though they’re majority owned by the police. But I retract that argument as both disingenuous and overly naive. It would be far more reasonable to infer plain mimickry: SafeAuto copying the sights and sounds of PSAs whose stock-in-trade is engendering fear feelings deliberately. Many real PSAs are intended to reinforce social stigmas; against drunk driving, for example. SafeAuto are counting on this reflexive fear to make their ad memorable.

Unfortunately for them, literally every other auto insurance company has a show-stopping campaign of spectacular, offensive stupidity with mascots (Geico), nauseating smarm (eSurance), or horrible monsters from featureless metaphysical voids (Progressive). Against that kind of dread, these off-brand fnords don’t stick.

McDonald’s In Ad Claims

Go away, McDonald’s. Get the hell off my TV. Your food looks like shit and your pitches are irritating nonsense. Playing “A Minha Menina” at the height of that Os Mutantes fad was lame. Your coffeeshop dorks were worse. But the new one where people debate over the existence of the word “pangs” is the sort of conversation I’ve made lifestyle choices to avoid having. Why would replaying this tedious, unfunny and banal soundbite again and again make me want to eat your revolting tacos? Go away, go away, go away you stupid people.

Language

Wittgenstein said that “about what one cannot speak, one must remain silent.” 

I can’t prove to you that I have non-linguistic thoughts (because proof is a form of essentially linguistic rigor), but I assert that I do nonetheless. When I make a snap judgment whether to speed through a yellow light or slow down abruptly, I don’t phrase it as a question before an answer arrives. Usually, my head is full of song lyrics whenever I’m driving. I suspect this kind of calculation, if it’s even profitable to think about in terms of sensoria, to be performed visually and spatially, a quick-compare against memorized impressions of speed and inertia.

Wittgenstein might argue that this doesn’t constitute a form of thought, but surely it’s an interaction between the contents of my brain. In order to know whether my van will fishtail if I slam the brakes, I have to know something about (a) how heavy objects behave when acted upon, (b) how slick the road feels, and (c) how much distance there is, deceleration-adjusted, to the stoplight. I don’t know any of these things in a form that could be easily communicated – that is, I have no precise words for the knowledge that I act upon. If asked, I am left to describe the thought, and with effort.

I’m actually a pretty bad driver. Let me refer instead to music, something I’m alright at. The usual role of bass in a rock band is counterpoint. In order to know what notes to walk, to bridge the chords in the song, I pick around intuitively until I produce sound with an emotional character that I like. I can’t tell you why I prefer certain modes, except using an invented vocabulary (e.g. “burnt,” “bluer,” “darker,” “pointier,” etc.) which is the reason most people hate musicians. To me, these characters are expressed as shapes and colors, but since I can’t share my synaesthesia directly with others, I can only hope my metaphor produces “favorable coincidence” in the mind of the person to whom I am speaking.

Now, I’m not refuting Wittgenstein here. When I say that I prefer F# because it’s orange, I’m still speaking about my private impression of F#. But I’m not communicating it, particularly. There is no language model by which I can assume that my bandmate will hear “orange” and know why I think that fits. However, neither could Wittgenstein demonstrate that I don’t think about its fitting as such, unless we’re defining thought circularly as langauge.

Almost every form of art has developed a means of using impressions to elicit responses in the recipient – particularly the manipulation of emotion. For example, one emotion I have frequently when watching motives is hate (i.e. an “unfavorable coincidence”). When I was watching The Watchmen, I had no idea why certain action beats made me want to groan, until somebody told me Snyder was doing a bunch of shit to conceal wirework. Now, I know why I hated half a dozen other movies. At the time, I only knew that the response it produced in me was negative. I have forgotten what the scene even looked like. How would Wittgenstein explain the immediacy of such impressions from art? With a “hidden language” that operates beneath or outside the space of conscious speech? It’s too bad I can’t ask him; I somehow doubt this would be his reply. 

If so, however, then it brings up the question I ask of linguistic determinists in general: given the hypothesis that our other forms of thought are conditioned or even constituted by language, why is everyday speech so frequently useless for explaining them?

I’m Alan Partridge

More postmodern shows about showbiz! That’s what we need! 

Presumably the appeal of this genre, at its inception, ran something like this: “Everybody thinks actors and screenwriters don’t know anything about the real world, so either we abandon the pretense to naturalism entirely, or we can write TV shows about what we know: working in the media.” 

What distinguishes the postmodern variety is its hyperreality, particularly the implication that some kind of common veracity or reality underlies these depictions, that we are viewing out into the bigger world instead of in to a narrow, fictionalized one. The Larry Sanders Show purported to be about the backstage life of a talk show host. The “reality” claim was made by the insertion of various real celebrities as themselves. But the hyperreal effect was undermined by the knowledge that its central characters were all fictional. Curb Your Enthusiasm went further, including several real celebrities among its regular cast to firm up the illusion. Entourage involves “real” people in several serial plots, and alleges the involvement of its fictional characters throughout the real life of Hollywood. And now there’s Head Case, starring Alexandra Wentworth as a psychiatrist who handles showbiz crazies.

Before most of these ever piloted, there was I’m Alan Partridge, a BBC sitcom following the career flame-out of former television presenter Alan Partridge (Steve Coogan), now consigned to Radio Norwich. Partridge is uptight,  narcissistic and socially reactionary, and most of the people he meets regard his clueless self-importance with contempt. The key to the show is the relentlessly muted tone of the scripts (written by Coogan, along with Peter Baynham and Armando Iannucci), which teeter on the edge of complete absurdity without slipping the patina of naturalism that sells the schadenfreude. 

In contrast to the others, there’s nothing particularly postmodern here. However, the writers take a number of admirable risks. In “Basic Alan,” Partridge refuses a (possibly facetious?) proposition from a hotel attendant and spends the day doing nothing with any purpose at all. He walks around, talks to himself on a voice recorder, goes to the store and buys pointless things, dresses up as a zombie for an ill-planned joke. None of it comes to anything. He’s propositioned once more in the elevator, but he stiffly declines and walks out muttering “this country.” There are no big gags, and yet – all the little jokes are just so. It’s about a billion miles from Curb Your Enthusiasm or any of its fellow travelers despite a very similar premise, and that alone would make it fascinating study, but it’s also very good (in keeping with Armando Iannucci’s damn impressive record) and well worth watching illegally on the internet.

I’ll get back to you on whether or not Head Case is any good. As for the impulse to abandon naturalism entirely – TV has seen a burst of genre and speculative offerings in this last decade, and I plan to write about that soon too.

The Ironic Kitsch

In The Simpsons, every cliché and stereotype, however noxious, gets a wink. The doctor is a cynical malpractitioner. The shopkeeper is a cynical fleecer. The clown writes bad gags and steals good ones. The bully reads Readers’ Digest. The evil mogul has a gay minion. The town’s only Scot is an angry, thrifty, uncouth janitor.

The raison d’être of the nihilistic comedy is that everything deserves to be mocked. That would be an out, if it were possible to ridicule all things simultaneously. We can, in reality, only ridicule those things for which we have notions. There is no sitcom in America about the foibles of Germans. There is no sitcom about commodities speculation. There is no sitcom about black astronauts, and if there were, the joke would be “Look, black folks in space! They’re acting just like black folks on Earth do!” Nobody would base a show on what’s funny about the life of an actual black astronaut because long before it got to production, TV execs would ask where the joke was and can the whole project.

Cynicism is purportedly more realistic than idealism. The story goes that the idealist is a wishful thinker whose veracity, however well-intentioned, is ultimately undercut by desire. The cynic says, “I don’t see the possibility of good, and that makes me a clear thinker.” But as television comedy illustrates, this begs the question. Does discounting the possibility of good excise bias? Or is it merely evidence of a different pervasive conviction?

I used the phrase “status-quo bias” before in reference to the anodyne worldview of archaic TV, but it’s equally applicable to the ironic worldview of The Simpsons. Springfield never changes. The characters have their births moved around, their backstories transplanted at a moment’s notice. Even their lineages are totally fluid. But the town itself is a rock: it will always have the same mayor, the same police chief, the same age and ethnicity demographics. It’s as though the whole show is meant to be subsumed beneath a banner: “It was ever thus!” Its characters are sacrifices before the implausibility of any change. 

Like dada and other forms of radical criticism, nihilistic comedy hinges on forswearing constructive impulses and saving all credibility for the attack (usually on family, friendship and other clichés of anodyne television). But only recently has such austerity been viable on TV, whereas this genre predates those conditions by some time, necessitating compromise with less-than-perfectly-critical mores. The Simpsons, at long last, locates good in children and family obligation. Everybody Loves Raymond finds it in familial feeling, whereas Everybody Hates Chris finds it in the mores of the urban working.

Weirdly, it’s not that compromise but another which finally transforms nihilistic irony into kitsch. Many people have hypothesized the cultural aftershocks of the Berlin Wall’s collapse; one story runs that the end of the Cold War coincided with a trend toward the denying-of-stakes generally, denying that the outcome of anything matters. The Simpsons and its ironic brethren cannot but end up there, whatever their intentions are. Television’s ironic regime says, “trust in nothing except for these: Murphy’s Law, Sturgeon’s Law, the Peter Principle, the law of averages. And trust in these absolutely.” But absolute belief makes kitsch. Here, the rock of certainty is that nothing matters, the outcome of all ideas is the same and therefore, all ideas are the same.

But that’s nonsense, and at no time is this more obvious than when looking at ideas as self-similar as those of mainstream comedy. One may be tempted to say, “if you’re so convinced that all things are toward the same outcome, then try something different” — which would be missing the point. The point is not trying, not having to think about it, because failure is a given. It’s not moral cowardice, exactly. It’s the expectation that the only alternative to anodyne totalism (i.e. judge a tree by its fruit, evil never wins, etc.) is total denial, accompanied by the fallacy that “everything” is a possible subject matter for art. And it’s less pernicious than it is boring.

The Simpsons

The Simpsons is a show about how every single person in the fictional city of Springfield feels. The format begins with a fairly bald declaration of topic – via a news report, Homer becoming irrationally obsessed, etc. – followed by a series of scenes in which every single person from Springfield suddenly appears and opines about it. Fascinated with piracy? Wonder what Sideshow Mel thinks about pirates? Don’t worry, The Simpsons will answer this burning question for you.

People like to harp on Family Guy for using its cutaway gimmick to tell jokes with no bearing on the plot. Meanwhile, The Simpsons gets a free pass despite consisting mostly of jokes with no bearing on anybody or anything at all, anywhere. When they make the occasional self-aware topical gag it seems forced and awkward, like a dog eating waffles. Political reference falls flat in a world where there’s only one serious politician because the ballot is full of bartenders and clowns. Nobody writes op-eds about elections in Springfield, because it’s all been said already.

Once upon a time, The Simpsons was an edgy comedy aimed at the anodyne kitsch and all the ways it didn’t match the news of the early 90’s. But nearly twenty years on, ironic-and-unfunny is the norm. Oh, there was a plane crash. I bet it was TWA! Oh, thirty men just died in Zimbabwe. Let’s make an ironic joke about Robert Mugabe. Family Guy takes this sort of easy callousness to another level entirely, but it does so in the context of an all-consuming and almost total nihilism. It may be a cliché but at the very least, Family Guy rarely wusses out. Whereas The Simpsons remains stubbornly anodyne through the smirk. “But really, folks” is the organizing principle of its world.

Bart and Lisa are the great out of the Simpsons universe. Their parents do everything for them, or so the moral goes, and that’s why it’s okay that Homer lies, steals, drives drunk, punches people and causes nuclear accidents. “My family have made me realize” is enough to placate Springfield’s very stupid populace, and strict episodism ensures that by the next time Homer needs to say it, no one remembers the last million times.

The movie brought together everything wrong with the show, but for my money the shark finally came home with “That 90’s Show,” which transplants the elder Simpsons’ college romance to the grunge era. Marge is nearly seduced by an edgy leftist professor but Homer wins her back by forming Nirvana and changing the goddamn world.

Since every piece of low-hanging fruit has been eaten already and the seeds flushed down the toilet, The Simpsons has come to rely on time travel and flashback. But the show has no canon, and speculation runs thin and cheap with characters made of wind. I can’t bring myself to give a fuck. This show has worn out its welcome to such an extent that even the occasional funny joke comes out covered in flecks of shit from its decomposing fucking premise. Kill it. It’s dead. Kill it so that comedy may live.

Historical Periodization In Ad Claims

There is a phrase that torments my waking hours and haunts my dreams. It’s burned onto the retina of my consciousness like the letter “E” on the black-and-green screen of a library computer. It surfaces at the strangest times, like a gob of bile in the back of my throat, making me want to kill the nearest human. That phrase is: “Now during Truck Month.”

You see, every month is Truck Month. But every month we’re told that Truck Month is a one time only event that will be over before you can even find your keys, so you should really do a hot rail and take a 5 Hour Energy if you want to make it to the dealer fast enough to get one of these trucks before it’s all over. But they never add that when it’s all over, there will immediately follow another Truck Month, and then another, and then another. In calendars in the future, “A.D.” is succeeded by “T.M.,” but there’s no subsequent era, just more trucks forever.