Entourage

HBO’s Entourage is another in a growing series of “postmodern” shows about showbiz. Whereas predecessors like I’m Alan Partridge, Extras, Lead Balloon and Curb Your Enthusiasm are nihilistic comedies about how shitty their protagonists are, Entourage follows a clique of popular, successful people about whom the show’s author is much less ambivalent.

Movie star Vincent and his best friend Eric spend their screentime emoting, arguing or congratulating one another; meanwhile, their loser friends Johnny and Turtle are put through Larry David-esque pratfalls that become less and less plausible as the writers run out of low-hanigng fruit. Presumably, this format is meant to establish the careful tension between dramatic and comic aims that so many contemporary shows shoot for, but here it just makes for very awkward tonal shifts.

Their agent, Ari Gold, is a perpetual-schtick that teeters precariously between amusing and tiresome. He’s also the device through which an interminable series of celebrities walk on and goof off. But where Extras wrote subplots for its characters, Entourage limits them to cameos and minor roles. This keeps them firmly in a separate neighborhood from the show’s fictional cast. The sense is that Vinny and company have enough backslapping camraderie among them to share with everyone, even people who have no reason whatsoever for appearing.

The Simpsons is cloyingly pally toward celeb guests, but at least there’s always some kind of a joke. On Entourage, the jokes are feeble (Dennis Hopper gambles a lot, Anna Faris has a dorky boyfriend, M. Night Shyamalan is cuckoo about keeping his plots a secret, etc.) and as often as not, there isn’t one at all (Kanye West’s appearance). At times, one wonders if the whole show was dreamt up by celebrities itching for new ways to celebrate themselves.

If it were just that, the cast’s natural charisma and snappy repartee could carry Entourage. But no matter how you dice up an onion, if it’s a confused, self-congratulatory onion, then the outcome is bound to be annoying. Entourage can’t decide whether it wants to be ironic or sincere about its subjects, whether we’re meant to see them through the flat tones of enforced naturalism or the moralistic lens of romanticism. For one example, the storyline gods return again and again to teach Johnny and Turtle familiar lessons about chasing after fame. But simultaneously, they humanize Ari by arguing that well, at least he moves Heaven and Earth to make things happen for his stars. So wait, is fame a bitch? Or is it — the greatest gift of all?

Ultimately, Entourage irritates because, for a self-referencing clever-cock concept, it’s unusually aspirational. Yes, it’s a postmodern show – and has lifted enough gimmickry from other postmodern shows to establish that aim clearly. And to its credit, the characters are no less shallow, desperate and status-seeking than real, honest-to-god confused people in a popularity business – but the sympathy claims aren’t ironic. We are supposed to approve of these guys’ shallowness, desperation and status-seeking, at least the ones vindicated by success. In fact, we’re supposed to (and this is the crux of aspirational fiction) want to be them, which begs irritating questions when they’re depicted as alternately petty and pathetic.

Attention

Consciousness is characterized by attention. There are likely kinds of unconscious cognition that aren’t, but attention is precisely the relationship of the conscious mind to its objects. The neurotransmitter dopamine appears related to the apprehension of salience; perhaps this represents something like a final phase in behavioral response to phenomena, after impressions have been parsed for content and context.

In his 1987 film Videodrome, David Cronenberg calls TV “the retina of the mind’s eye.” That’s glib but not far wide of the mark. Programmers guide, draw, pull or coax the viewer toward steady attention; it’s this guaranteed attention for which advertisers pay so richly. They achieve this by manipulating our sense of salience, hitting us with signals that in everyday life might indicate reward (sexual display) or danger (alarm klaxons). Sometimes, it’s even more transparent than that, as in the past six months when overnight, TV advertising reimagined itself as a commentator on the economic crisis. “When times get hard,” “with money tight” and so forth are meant to announce the salience of the spot, though in fact an ad’s true claim to meaning hasn’t changed at all.

The decline of a successful show will eventually signal the lost salience of its premise. This ought to make sense even with typically postmodern suspicions taken into consideration; television is not an automatic feedback system, its choices are of individuals but at the same time, they are not geared toward the individual. At some point, every programming decision is made by a person, with the aim of capturing broad attention, using “common knowledge” about the cultural significance of images. So, Lost loses currency as its chief theme – Manichean, stern-father morality – exits the White House. 24 suffers similarly as its real-life reference point (the “war on terrorism”) makes fewer headlines.

For the better part of a century, our media have imposed the impression of consensus upon what was merely a choice of aggregates. Key viewing demographics embrace an idea, TV puts it up everywhere, and pretty soon nonviewers have to reckon with it too. The same viewers “turn away” from an idea and it reverts to seafoam, to be “swept aside.” This should be what is meant by the critical term “relevant”: not to an imaginary, objective “progress” of ideas, but to salience in the mind of a chosen subject, who is, after all, as ignorant, feckless and contingent on today’s manipulation as anybody. 

After the 2001 terrorist attack, there was a lot of talk about the world being “more dangerous” than before. The decade is almost over now and in retrospect it hasn’t been especially, at least not on account of domestic terrorists. The cliché is that a hammer sees nails everywhere. This “instrumental” aspect of attention may be preconscious (cf. Heidegger’s automatic distinction between equipment and “mere things”; for one example, I can’t help but think about the common supposition that the world was created the way a tool is, with a function). In that light, whether or not “turning away” from an idea makes it less real becomes a complex one. Many critics seem to assume, implicitly, that television is either designed to overwhelm the viewer and inculcate a foreign viewpoint (almost certainly untrue) or to represent a faithful feedback between viewer and box (similarly unlikely). Both views seem to reduce the phenomenon unduly. Much about our relationship to our equipment of cultural induction remains unknown; do we really parse ideas, collectively, through our media? Is there nothing more to it than a synchronized “play of surfaces”?

Perhaps more perplexingly, would that really be nothing? Or does “play of surfaces” suggest nothing more vividly than images on a retina?

Star Trek: The Next Generation

In Star Trek: The Next Generation, Patrick Stewart and a multi-culti (in space terms) crew of people with questionable hair fly around the universe enforcing the doctrine of nonintervention by intervening all over the universe. The USS Enterprise appears to be a science ship but is routinely given the missions of a battleship by an admiralty who are both bastions of the Federation’s virtue and completely rotten with evil. We’re given this expansionist Earth-state to sympathise with, against a universe full of harshly, racially caricatured aliens, but in this context their dysfunction is frequently baffling.

Star Trek enthusiasts can argue that the message of the show is humanism, and that the Federation is utopic relative to its neighbors. On the other hand, who hasn’t heard that one from some feckless defender of America’s shoddy work? Change the names and the whole plot arc could be cold-eyed propaganda for any number of historical empires, including the Klingon and Romulan ones.

The average episode follows a fairly strict arc:

Because Picard (Stewart) is a brilliant captain, Enterprise is in perpetual peril. It begins as something fairly routine, like a diplomatic envoy with some cheapo aliens, or a period of leisure time planetside. Pretty soon, though, things get hairy and Picard has to convene his council.

These are a crew of jocular people who sit in a room and talk about the plot. All of the humans from Earth have a clear ethnic identity in terms of nations that existed in the 20th century, and they are accompanied by an android who can memorize the entire history of music at a glance but can’t read or emit body language. Eventually, one of them suggests the plot to the episode and the Captain says “make it so.”

By the end of the second part, they’ve figured out the real nature of the threat they’re facing: always either an unknown entity from space (spiritual in disposition, sciencey in exposition), agents of a foreign empire or the Borg. Their first solution fails miserably. Fortunately, the whole team bring winning ideas to the second meeting: the Klingon proposes hitting it; the woman proposes understanding it; the engineer proposes rerouting things; and the android solves the entire plot like some kind of machina for deus-ing ex of.

There is a tense confrontation and Picard wins it by strength of Shakespearean delivery, literally staring his foes down while admonishing them on Federation mores. Or, if it’s the Borg, attacking them like a bad infestation, though admittedly with as much success as the guy from Creepshow. In the end, Picard wins by being human (the single greatest out in the entire universe of Star Trek) and status quo is restored. “Together with dignity,” Picard adds peevishly. “And one hopes, some small measure of understanding.”

Star Trek: The Next Generation is a prime piece of 80’s anodyne TV – the past is nostalgic and the future assuredly progressive. It’s today, which is full of uncertainty, that is the source of evil. After all, eventually the Federation will have pacified and preserved the universe, and everything that’s now a danger will be a curiosity, strictly limited to its preserve of space. Earth will always have an Ireland, a Picardy, a South Korea, and people there will use correct 20th century accents. Eventually, the Federation will overcome its saboteurs and the specter of moral decay, and then that will be true of every planet in the universe, forever.