Contemporary TV Modes

Asshole Drama

House, M.D. appeals to people who admire the attitudes of patriarchal authority; House is imperious, dictatorial, possessing an implicit conservatism effaced only by his distaste for organized belief. Temperance Brennan, protagonist of the knock-off drama Bones, is identical but female; Emily Deschanel’s performances bring less archness, swap instead for naive shock at the inadequacy of others’ logic. Tim Roth in Lie To Me plays a smug deception expert who makes unilateral decisions based on his superior knowledge of human nature (hence FOX’s decision to schedule him next to Hugh Laurie). Glee, too, features a hard-ass front and center; the idea is that even sincere, spirited “good kids,” like the kind mythologized in the “high school musical” genre, could use the teachings of a know-it-all jerk. On the further end of the spectrum, these are joined by Dexter, about a know-it-all serial killer cop, and 24, about a know-it-all serial killer cop. The M.O. of the “asshole drama” is that people are inadequate, and the reason assholes exist is to teach us to be better. It’s a low-key kind of emotional fascism, which borrows the attitudes of the nihilistic comedy but dispenses with nihilism; its covert message is the promotion of various forms of authority.

New Sincerity

Doctrine has it that postmodern excesses leave Millennials with a new mandate for sincerity in the arts (where that tends to mean optimism) and a new license to be grandiose. The West Wing, arguably the first TV show in this mould, turned the political genre on its head by presenting politics as a lot of basically decent people (!) doing the best they can. Since then, the same logic gave us everything from the frankly spiritual Lost to the frankly dispiriting Cold Case, whose producers signal their hope for the inner city by playing U2 all over it. The danger for this genre is that with hamfists like the authors of Cold Case making grandiose gestures everywhere, sincerity (and optimism) could acquire the stink of chauvinist, majority naiveté.

Neoclassicism

In my mind, this is the bellwether for the era’s defining Boomer conservatism. Neoclassicism is a movement currently gaining momentum in the pop arts that prioritizes such qualities as traditional content, formal elegance, restraint and “class.” This is the secret to the The Sopranos’ critical success. More than its story, its formal qualities appealed to critics’ inarticulate sense for canonicity; naturally, it was quick to canonize. Perhaps the most thoroughgoing neoclassicist show is AMC’s Mad Men, which extends the mandate for tradition to actual nostalgia, and makes formal elegance such a byword that its setpieces often resemble living paintings. The trouble, I suppose, is that formal elegance is intoxicating when it frames a story like The Sopranos, which is compelling and well-told, but is easily imitable and dulls in application to the half-assed and the ill-conceived.

Hyperrealism

Hyperreal shows blur the boundary between fiction and reality, generally by fitting wholly fictional elements into a milieu that’s deliberately as realistic as possible. The realism is achieved either by meticulously low-key storytelling, or (more commonly) by the insertion of recognizably real elements (like real landmarks or celebrities) into a more fictionalized narrative. Hyperrealism has a long working history with nihilistic comedy (Curb Your Enthusiasm, Head Case, etc.) but is now being appropriated by dramedy too (Entourage), to occasionally striking effect. Baudrilliard would argue that the hyperreal is aimed at supplanting reality, but to my feeling, the true silliness of this genre is in the way it makes reality a mere product placement; the fiction is often no more believable for the inclusion of realities than it would be without them. In other words, the tools of postmodernism do wear out: the mind becomes habituated to these anomalies and it no longer seems disorienting. Then what? I’m guessing the cheeky celebrity guest spots start to look pretty stupid.

New Naturalism

Not to be confused with hyperrealism, this is a cousin of both neoclassicism and New Sincerity; like those, its rise is intimately connected with the decline of postmodern dogma. The degree of naturalism varies. The Wire and The Thick of It are as naturalistic as possible, going to elaborate lengths to “rough up” the speech with dialect and found idiom, and whenever possible depict stories taken from the news. Others shoot for impressionistic naturalism; Deadwood uses deliberately anachronistic profanity to convey the gritty, underclass feeling of the American frontier. Strict diegetic sound is popular in this genre. Naturalism is a strange thing on US television, which has tended to skew toward the imaginary; for an example of the weaknesses of this dogma, look toward British TV, where naturalism reigns and even so, actual insight can be elusive.

Sympathy

In Characters & Viewpoint, Orson Scott Card’s how-to for fiction, he writes extensively about the subjective dimension of characterization, what he calls “sympathy.” Writers use tools to make characters more or less likable to the reader, and these don’t necessarily have a lot to do with what makes a person good. For example, we tend to sympathise more with a character who suffers, even an evil jerk — which is why in fiction, evil jerks we’re supposed to tolerate are generally put through a lot of suffering. Pain and fear are hooks for empathy.

Does it make good moral sense? Not really. That Rudolf Hess suffered in Spandau prison doesn’t make him any more likable as a Nazi fuckhead. Nor does it make sense to assume an intellectual is a bad guy, though as Card points out, that’s the rule as often as not. The crux of sympathy is perceived likeness. People being people, they generally like a character if the character is like them. But where do we get our ideas about what we’re like?

I remember, when I was a child, watching cheesy box-office adventure movies and feeling desperately alienated from the heroes. By convention, these were mostly square-jawed football types whose distinguishing feature was a sort of moral “clarity” (i.e. simplicity). My sort of people – science-freaks, skeptics, liberals – were invariably sidekicks and jokes, misguided fools or finks for evil. I often suspect that this kind of cognitive dissonance, with its origin in normatizing fictions, is as much responsible for the appeal of the “gothic” subculture (and other deliberate affronts to popular morality) as anything else.

One of the purposes of The Sender, when I began writing, was to study television’s sympathy ploys and infer something of America’s emotional landscape. So what, then? Well, if we momentarily accept Card’s hypothesis about sympathy, we can guess that Americans still feel stupid; broad popular support for Homer Simpson attests to that. Moral simplicity also remains much-prized; cf. Marge Simpson, sure, but also Michael Bluth, Jack Bauer, John Locke, Buffy Summers, etc., all protagonists who face moral challenges by being conscientious and inflexible.

Card didn’t write about nihilistic irony; perhaps he never recognized it. I’d argue that comedies making heavy use of it tend to employ an inverted value structure. Curb Your Enthusiasm consists almost entirely of unsympathetic, unlikable people — we follow Larry David not because he’s particularly likable (though who can’t relate to faux pas?) but because his flaws are so much more spectacular than the others’.

The Office makes such an explicit hierarchy out of its sympathy claims that it’s often embarrasing. Young, white and clever are the top of the heap, privileged not only to viewers’ presumed sympathy but also their interest (we follow their personal lives without any humorous hook). Black and gay follow, privileged to viewers’ respect and called upon to add moral weight, but from a distance. Viewers are not asked to respect the elderly, the misfit or unattractive women — they’re mostly used for one-note jokes. For the boss and his sycophants, the show asks our occasional pity. Toward the conservative Christian, we are invited to feel mostly contempt.

Card makes a few questionable posits — for one, the tenor of his writing suggests that he believes these claims to be universal, a tedious and predictable assumption. He also seems to believe that the relationship between consumers’ attitudes and fiction is, for all intents and purposes, one-way. Kate Wright offers a more nuanced, if a thousandfold more disturbing, view in her Hollywood how-to Screenwriting Is Storytelling — but I’ll cover that another time.

New Format

Some maudlin citizens will think that they can send something edifying, not realizing that sending is evil. Scientists will say: ‘Sending is like atomic power . . . if properly harnessed.’  Artists will confuse sending with creation. They will camp around screeching ‘a new medium’ until their ratings drop off. Philosphers will beat around the ends and means hassle not knowing that sending can never be a means to anything but more sending, like junk. Try using junk as a means to something else. Some citizens with ‘Coca Cola and aspirin’ control habits will be talking about the evil glamor of sending. But no one will talk about anything very long. The Sender, he don’t like talking. The Sender is not a human individual. . . . it is the Human Virus.

- William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

You knew it was coming: The Sender will have a slightly new format going ahead. Media, news and very likely music will be joining the format. This is a pragmatic move on my part. I don’t watch as much TV as I used to (nor am I quite as fascinated anymore with mimicking Charlie Brooker’s format), and while I still believe there’s value in the “cryptography of mass media,” a writer is also a living organism, and maybe it’s better that my blog be a reflection of my actual thoughts more than a book-in-progress.

I will be re-categorizing everything so you can look at just the TV stuff, if that’s what tickles your pickle. You disgusting, unimagintive, joyless, intolerant nitpicker.

Spirituality

There’s a lot of wind blowing 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.

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 mind. 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. “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?

American Anti-Realism and Advertising

Since the invention of radio and TV, Americans have lived in a more fluid cultural environment than has ever existed before. For many of us, televised fictions made up the majority of our childhood observations of life. We grew up with a major source of cultural induction separate from our parents, our educators and our leaders – we may be the first humans to have received cultural education from media alone. A naïve observer might conclude that given this, contemporary Americans should be the most skeptical, intellectual society of people around. So what gives?

Well, for a start, our media do not present observations of life, exactly. In fact, our media have no epistemic standards per se. There are laws against slander and false advertising, but there are no laws against implication, lying by omission, framing statistics, appearing to say something without doing so, glibness, funny jokes at the expense of serious points, repeating bullshit ideas until they start to sound sensible, wearing a lab coat to sell dog food, and so forth. We inhaled these growing up just by living among televisions and people who watch them. It shaped us as individuals, shaped our perceptions of the world and, in aggregate, shaped our culture. It is of us, but we are equally as much of it.

Some people think that the Big Three media companies answer to the Bilderberg group, take their memos from the Secret Chiefs of international finance in Bohemian Grove, and coordinate their programs like blitzes to make us more pliable to the corporate agenda on a day-to-day basis. They would contend that the deceit is conscious. I disagree, but find the simpler answer even more terrifying: this is what you get when advertising feeds into culture, when increasingly, people learn their basic attitudes from a systematic program of insincere flattery. This is an automatic process.

We live in a culture where supposedly, it’s okay to get what you want, as long as you pay retail value for it. But in reality, we’re all incredibly guilty. We constantly criticize ourselves for having no higher values. We’re anti-intellectual – because we disdain knowledge and erudition that “we don’t need.” We’re consumerists – because if the customer is always right, then everyone else must be wrong. We’re decadent – or so say legions of the religious, because we are so ready to forgive ourselves that we no longer crave the benedictions of God or society. We seem to feel sometimes as though this sort of moral anxiety is the only standard for authenticity in American culture.

We learned anti-intellectualism from our advertisers. They figured out a long time ago that it rates well with children. Of course, children themselves can hardly be blamed; at a really basic, brain-physiological level, they’re resistant to adult intellectuality. Like anybody else faced with something they can’t understand, they laugh at jokes about it. But anti-intellectualism is only one face of the problem, which has many. The common theme is anti-realism: the belief, pervasive in our consumer-empowering media, that wishes ultimately “mean” more than facts. That’s the heart of American consumerism and in many ways – as in movies where the messages are typically as vapid and undemanding as “follow your dream to a happy ending” – it is the heart of American culture itself.

We learned consumerism from the hasty promises of retailers and service providers: we care more than the other guy! We’ll help you faster then they will, we’ll do better work, we’ll charge less! Choose us! Keep us employed! “The customer is always right” is the final, reductio ad absurdum advertising claim. No surprise that when someone found it, everybody had to adopt it. If American consumers seem particularly blind and feckless – if they willingly fund disgusting agencies, if they make irresponsible choices, if they walk into harm from sheer failure to notice it there – can they be blamed? They’ve only assimilated one of our chief cultural messages, one that pervades not only media but the workplace as well.

Or are we too quick to forgive ourselves, as right-wing moralists often claim? Once again, be upset if you like, be dissatisfied with people – but this outcome was inevitable. Our subjectivities are inextricably entangled with the sales pitch – a purchase can be a moral choice, an aesthetic statement, a social subscription, a lifestyle, communion, confession, hajj. Advertisers encourage us toward simple moral essentialism, because ailments of that family are the ones most easily connected with the buying impulse.

The New Republic and other scolds bemoan how the pervasiveness of “postmodern” irony sucks the urgency out of moral situations. We should be asking why we find it so indispensable. The obvious answer is that Americans grow up in an environment where lies are taken for granted, where there’s an inherent conflict between the morals people “want” to have – for example on the anti-consumerist left or the fundamentalist right – and the ones implicit in the overwhelming body of communication – that is, capitalist and democratic messages we receive from the media. Maybe this should suggest some vague comfort: even born and raised in a dark hall, human beings unconsciously find the Exit sign.

But it’s hard to live in a society like this, torn constantly between a mendacious worldview that ill-equips us to survive, make good decisions, or be happy, and the sense that simultaneously, everything we know is unreal – either because the world where we live fails the one we saw growing up on TV, or worse still, because the one on TV seems more plausible than the one in front of us.

Obviously, we can’t ban dishonesty for the same reason we have failed at banning offense: it overlaps too much with well-meaning, failed communication. In any case, even moving toward the problem politically would raise all kinds of First Amendment specters, debating the relative merits of which would politicize everything and make people even more irrational about the whole subject.

Because I know I’m a crank and behooves me to fight my natural pessimism, here’s at least an idea submitted for consideration: if we are going to continue having a massive advertising media, then we should establish a genuine counter-culture to mitigate its effects. But whereas the 60’s counter-culture emphasized developing new values in reaction to the prevailing ones, I am fairly confident that this isn’t the part modern Americans need to worry about. We’ve proven again and again that we can formulate alternatives to mainstream anti-realism, particularly in periods of falling economic fortunes. What we need is a parallel apparatus, a parallel media – one with epistemic standards different from those of the advertising world even if they’re no deeper or truer.

Journalists, scientists and various movements of the arts have all tried at various times to represent themselves as bearers of epistemic standards. They grasped correctly that modern humans’ relationship with reality is what is now at stake. For the sake of surviving modernity, we need to do better than they did.