Milan Kundera gave a great descriptive example of kitsch, writing that:
“Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.”
Television weeps that second tear like it really means it.
TV loves kitsch for a number of reasons. Reason one: the technology came of age in the 50’s, during the inception of America’s postwar boom, when a generation of veterans and their wives were driving mainstream culture. If the Second World War laid bare some horror submerged in modern, mechanized civilization, it was not enough to reverse the progress of technology. Instead, mainstream culture reacted by cocooning itself in a peacetime kitsch fixed on a certain image of innocence. TV fiction was instrumental in constructing the narrative.
Reason two: since the advent of public relations – itself a child of television – companies worry continually about their public images. If your ad offends someone morally and they raise a stink, it’s likely to hurt your company whether or not the public agrees or has even heard the complaint. For this reason, the morality of public discourse generally defaults to that of its most sensitive members. Kitsch is ideal because it has only aesthetic offense to offer, never moral.
The Eisenhower government was actively involved in the birth of the postwar kitsch. They wanted to boost the economy after a shaky period in the 40’s when urban crime spiked (due to a class of urban workers newly disenfranchised from work). The ideas TV promoted were intended to reassure the new American middle-class: the war is over, the future no longer hangs in the balance, the Depression’s gone, things are good.
This status quo bias became the new default assumption for TV fictions. 50’s sitcoms like Beaver popularized the “anodyne ending,” in which the resolution to the plot affirms the essential goodness of things-as-they-are. The anodyne ending trope was everywhere in earlier years – shows like Jeanie, Star Trek and M*A*S*H all relied on it to varying degrees. It reached its apex in the 70’s, by which time it no longer meant much and was simply taken for granted. Eventually, the desire to tell horrific or literary stories weakened its hold on TV drama. Amazingly, it continued to rule the sitcom world for decades after the bubble deflated. The ubiquitous family sitcoms of the late 80’s and early 90’s (Full House, Family Matters, etc.) display the anodyne value system in full flush, perhaps as a consequence of backward-gazing Boomers nostalgic for childhood TV.
The fashion for “edge” in the 90’s was a collective reaction to the “wholesome” aspects of 80’s Boomer culture. The success of Seinfeld was part of that overall trend. It deliberately took aim at the anodyne sitcom with an approach based on nihilism and irony. In doing so, it created a space for negativist sitcoms in general by showing that anti-kitsch could be a commercial force, which engendered a wave of ironic sitcoms that would include The Larry Sanders Show, Family Guy and King of the Hill.
Today, anodyne values remain strongest where advertisers have the most tacit control over content. Newspaper comics are a holdout. There’s no real sport in satirizing Family Circus; it’s so hopelessly anodyne that, in many eyes, it parodies itself. Peanuts is anodyne in a somewhat less vacuous way. On TV, network channels seem the least changed, particularly shows in the “aspirational” subgenre. Friends, for example, pretends to be worldly as was the requirement for its time, but the world it inhabits is narrow and sheltered no matter how knowing the characters act. House, M.D. acquired an anodyne flavor from a wishful-thinking refusal to contemplate its premise or pass judgment on its central character.
That wishfulness is the most toxic of the values implied by anodyne fiction. At the core of these are a longing to see things-as-they-are as good, God as protective and the future as understood. But when the values of society at large – whatever people covet as happiness – are incoherent or at odds with reality, the longing to live in “that world” instead produces confusion and desperate thinking.
In many ways, this is old news. The postwar message was intended to condition expectations so that Americans would be comfortable with the nation’s new economic power. Today’s economy is totally different, and it can be argued that today’s aspirational TV habitually conditions expectations that are unfair to most Americans.
In the meantime, Seinfeld’s regime has become so mainstream that it now inspires reactions itself. Susan Sontag observed that the process of selecting subject matter undermined photography’s claims to depict things neutrally or as-they-are; the same is unreservedly true of the television camera. So while nihilist stories often trade on the promise of straighter talk and realer attitudes, its eye isn’t actually more objective. Actually, it’s often the opposite in that irony and satire de-emphasize society’s perceptions in favor of the author’s sense of humor. Moreover, reflexive irony can become its own kitsch. When irony ceases to arise from doubt and becomes an ally of certainty, it begins to comfort and secure rather than criticize. Nihilism then adapts to its new meaning: resignation, excuse, denial-of-concern.
Hyperrealism and New Sincerity are related ideas. Shows in the hyperrealist mould try to fictionalize as little as possible, or else “rough up” the final cuts with improv and found quirk (e.g. novice actors, unusual dialects). This is meant to conceal the author behind the subject, an uncommon choice of priorities that may hold appeal to eyes accustomed to the anti-empirical, good-versus-bad value-warring of the 20th century. New Sincerity shows are typically morality stories, but stories that yield social morality from the personal and local. For example, Aaron Sorkin’s shows come packaged with the notion that the resolution to his characters’ dramas is analogous to hope for wider social harmony. It’s a post-ironic gesture, one that’s only meaningful with a prevailing sarcasm to rebel against. With New Sincerity, it’s typical to bundle straight-faced moral and political appeals along with the emotional ones. That makes it a descendant of the anodyne weltanschauung, but aimed at audiences that grew up with less social and economic certainty. Its twee populism suits it to the present in the way that irony suited the 90’s.
Over the past two decades, cable and internet programming have diminished the extreme one-to-many character of traditional TV. This means that there may never be another regime that dominates like the anodyne one did (though as I’ll explain later, advertisers will eventually drive any cultural message into the ground). Between HBO, Comedy Central, FOX and PBS there is a vast gulf in mores; this can only be a good thing, in that one cannot make meaningful choices without options that differ meaningfully from one another. Further, kitsch loses much of its power to flatten if alternative views are allowed to exist; this is part of why totalitarian states pursue such severe cultural programs. It seems likely that fiction will continue to be instrumental in America’s cultural adaptation; one can only hope that the broadening of perspectives seen in the last two decades continues.
