Josh Schwartz has always been accused of having autobiographical characters in his shows, and this is meant as a criticism. Seth Cohen on The OC and Dan Humphrey on Gossip Girl are gifted, misunderstood, self-important teenage nerds, and the shows seem to take them as seriously as they take themselves, arguably to their detriment. But the main character on his other show, Chuck Bartowski, is just as autobiographical, but in a more mature and perhaps more revealing way. Where Dan and Seth represent an artist remembering an adolescence many people can relate to, Chuck is his way of telling the story of his adult life, and as a television producer, this shouldn't be something most people can relate to. By masking autobiography in metaphor, however, he makes his story more inclusive, tells a personal story in a decidedly impersonal medium, and launches a subtle critique of the system that made him what he is today.
This will make more sense with two pieces of context. First is the context in which the show itself appears. Chuck, along with Gossip Girl, is one of two new shows Schwartz created after the cancellation of his first show, The OC. That show had a monumental first season overstuffed with drama and disasters, but couldn't keep up the impossible pace, and in the middle of its fourth season it was announced that it would not be returning for a fifth. The OC was always regarded as a trashy teen drama, but the two new shows reveal that there were, in fact, three elements to The OC: melodrama (which was obvious, and which now resides on Gossip Girl), action (fires, overdoses, earthquakes, all now on Chuck), and, perhaps counterintuitively for viewers who missed the excellent final half of The OC's final season and the relationship between Ryan and Taylor, comedy. These three elements worked in harmony only briefly on Schwartz's original show, but broken out into their own series, they can flourish.
Secondly, there is Josh Schwartz's biography. A child of Rhode Island toymakers, he was a junior in the film school at USC when he sold his first script for $500,000. After two failed pilots, The OC became a massive success. Schwartz was 27 when it premiered, making him "the youngest person in network history to create and produce his own one-hour series." He was so young that he had never been a staff writer; all of his television credits were as a show creator and producer. In a very real sense, he was plucked from obscurity and thrown directly into the maelstrom of the TV business.
It's important that where Schwartz's two other fictional doppelgangers are teenagers. Tolstoy to the contrary, all unhappy adolescences are basically the same, and what makes them so ridiculous in hindsight is that every single unhappy teenager thinks they are going through something totally unique. Seth and Dan certainly do, and this makes them less appealing to adults. But Chuck Bartowski is an adult, and as an adult, you're responsible for yourself. You can't afford the luxury of a generic unhappiness, nor the simple pleasure of believing you are special. Because adults must find their own unhappinesses, Chuck is a much more interesting and complex character. When you're a teenager, you welcome drama with open arms; as an adult, you try constantly to keep it at bay, so when it comes, it's something new.
Where Seth and Dan were characters heady with the excitement of firsts, Chuck is a character settled into smallness, a big fish quite content in a small pond. Seemingly the one member of his class at Stanford not to get a high-status job, he is now the alpha nerd at a fictionalized Best Buy ("Buy More"), living with his sister and hanging out with his loser friend Morgan. When his college roommate Bryce implants a treasure trove of government secrets into Chuck's brain, he falls under the protection of a mildly sociopathic NSA agent named John Casey and a CIA agent, Sarah Walker, who also poses as his girlfriend. As he now has the only copy of these secrets, he is enlisted to assist on spy missions, which he fumbles through successfully in roughly the same way Seth Cohen fumbled through adolescence. At the same time, he stays within his old life, and the conflicts between that and the spy world drive the show's emotional drama.
Removed from the particulars, the setup of Chuck is more familiar than one might expect from ass-kicking espionage. A normal guy with a normal life is suddenly thrust into a world of power, secrets, and action, and must survive within a system that could easily crush him. In other words, he's thrust into Hollywood--a whole world of power, secrets, and action that a newcomer must negotiate without knowledge of the immensely complex interpersonal histories that inform every interaction, without any training and with only the most cursory advice as to what's expected. This is not unlike the story of a college student who gets offered $500,000 for a script and ends up producing his own primetime network show without any prior experience--Schwartz's story.
In the third episode, Chuck returns to Buy More from a mission he feels he's botched. A pile of old computers awaits repair, and though his friend offers to help, Chuck demurs. "It'll be nice to do something I'm good at," he says. For "creatives," especially those who work day jobs, this is sure to resonate. You spend your nights trying to figure out this immensely complex system, whether it be record labels, the art world, magazines, publishing houses, or movie studios, and, most of the time, you aren't very good at it. You make a fool of yourself in public, commit horrible faux pases with people of influence, and seem to repeatedly sabotage your own prospects. It's nice, in that situation, to just come into the office and pump out a spreadsheet, because it's simple and straighforward, and when it's done, you did it right. This is the life of a writer before he gets discovered, and as Schwartz found out, success comes all at once, when it comes. You are a failure right up until the moment you succeed.
The fourth episode introduces a DEA agent named Karina. When Sarah gets captured by the enemy, Chuck tries to convince Karina to rescue her. Karina replies, "You know this thing of ours? We're all in it for ourselves. It's what we do." This is not entirely true, in context; spies are at least partially in for their agencies and the policy goals of the government they represent. But it is quite true of Hollywood, which is the real "us" of Karina's statement. Before they leave, she tells Chuck, "It's our job. We shed identities like people shed clothes." Who is speaking here? Is it the character, or the actress playing the character? Where is the mask?
This is Schwartz's way of writing about his experience without being accused of solipsism or whininess. (And if there's any doubt that Chuck is autobiographical, by the ninth episode he's dating a girl named Lou, played by Rachel Bilson, who also played the love interest of Seth, the Schwartz-surrogate on The OC; Chuck even gets into a double-dipping problem with her, as did Seth.) He has constructed an unfamiliar metaphor that nevertheless speaks powerfully to his particular experience and the experience of the struggling writers with whom he ultimately identifies. After all, in a sense he is the loser from his college class: in a program that prepares its graduates for art, he spends his time writing about spoiled teenagers and secret agents.
It is college, significantly, that opens up a new thematic avenue for Schwartz. In the seventh episode, Chuck is forced to return to Stanford, a school that expelled him in his junior year. The autobiographical angle here is obvious--both Schwartz and his surrogate left college in their junior years. But there would seem to be a disconnect in that where Schwartz left on his own terms to pursue success, Chuck's departure was a kind of failure. As the episode continues, though, the strands come together. Chuck thinks he was kicked out because Bryce told a professor that Chuck cheated on an exam. But as we find out, Bryce got Chuck kicked out for his own good: the professor was going to recruit Chuck for the CIA, and Bryce didn't want his friend to face that awful life. So as it turns out, Chuck left to go on to bigger and better things too--it was just against his will, and it took a while. Then again, it did for Schwartz, too.
If we read the CIA as a symbol for Hollywood, this episode changes the scenario significantly. Chuck is not, in fact, an innocent brought into this system against his will; he was implicitly part of the CIA all along. As the professor says, "He's in no matter what." And Chuck would never have been recruited--or made friends with Bryce--if he hadn't gone to a particular college. This is just like Hollywood, which only brings you in if you have a connection, and just like Schwartz, who wouldn't have been creating network shows if he hadn't gone to a very specific college (e.g., USC film school). Despite all the business about the two worlds colliding, it turns out that Chuck's world was always part of this larger system. He just didn't know it yet.
This episode leaves little doubt that the world of espionage is Schwartz's autobiographical metaphor for Hollywood. And this reflects back on the show's depiction of the intelligence game, making it into a subtle critique of Hollywood. When in the next episode Chuck's sister randomly encounters a rogue agent and is poisoned, this is a comment on the way a Hollywood career inevitably intrudes into your personal life. In the sixth episode, Chuck meets a guy named Lazlo who was recruited by the agency as a teenager and had since been locked underground; when he finally escapes, he has gone crazy, a joke about the way Hollywood ruins child stars. Chuck tells Lazlo that Sarah and John can help him. "They're the good guys," Chuck says. "There's no such thing in this business," Lazlo replies, and note the pointed use of the word "business."
Thomas Schatz wrote of "the genius of the system." But while the products of that system may be wonderful for those of us outside it, and while we may admire the almost mechanical process by which those products are created, for the human beings within that system, it can feel crushing even as it enables them to do what they do. Schwartz is not only telling his own story but carefully expressing ambivalence about the business that has made his dreams come true, because it is also a daily horror to actually deal with: the ruthlessness, the power plays, the lies. Schwartz offers the perspective of a "creative" within this system, and speaks for them convincingly, in a language perhaps only they will recognize.
Schwartz also, in the end, demonstrates a way to keep your sanity within the system by being a smartass on occasion. In November of 2007, NBC, the network on which Chuck runs, had a "green week," during which "network logos turn green, on-screen graphics offer tips for reducing carbon emissions and television episodes emphasize environmentally friendly plot line." Chuck did its part, with two of its actors appearing in a promo spot and sporting numerous environmentalist elements in its seventh episode. One of these involved the new manager at Buy More starting a recycling program. He explained why: "Tree-hugging is all the rage these days. I plan on exploiting the burgeoning conscience of the American consumer." This is funny, but it's also a fairly accurate take on the ridiculous spectacle of "green week." Schwartz did his duty to the system by, in effect, trying to undermine its message.
Josh Schwartz is no fool. As a writer-producer, he is a member of an extremely select club, and he uses his position to not only make art, but to tell his own story in a new kind of way. But he also has to be honest, and honesty demands criticizing that which surrounds him. Chuck may not be the best show ever--and to be honest, I have largely stopped watching it--but the fact that Schwartz is able to do all this while still making a reasonably satisfying spy show is a testament to how much thought he puts into his entertainment products.
Maura had a good post a couple weeks back reacting to Virgina Heffernan's NYT Magazine piece lamenting the imminent passing of Friday Night Lights. Maura's conclusion:
i think what heffernan’s argument really boils down to is the fact that, generally speaking, scripted shows that are adored by self-proclaimed tv connoiseurs–from your alessandra stanleys to your twop message-board denizens–don’t really do well on a mass level in general. (the success of a show like lost is probably the exception to the rule, although that show is pretty compelling on a mass level, and it featured many shots of absolutely stunning people running around shirtless and/or in rainstorms. hello, josh holloway!) but the online chatter, ancillary fantasy worlds, and general obsessing about those sorts of shows creates the illusion of greater popularity than there really may be, much like certain other phenomena that i’ve come across in the day job.
Maura's coming at this from the particular perspective of her aforementioned day job--and in this case that's probably the right perspective to come at it from, since Heffernan's trying to make this about the internet. But what she says resonated with me for another reason. Let me come at it from my particular perspective for a minute.
I don't really know why I've felt the need to be coy about this, but I'm going to the Newhouse school right now as a grad student. (Please do call me out if I'm no longer keeping it real on clapclap. The implicit prohibition on swearing and general uncomfortableness with elaborate, obscene metaphors in the academy has been hard to adjust to.) I've taken two classes so far with Bob Thompson, who's probably the most visible television scholar in America. And while it was refreshing at first just to hear someone talk seriously about television, as the classes have progressed, I've become more and more dissatisfied with his critical perspective. And while I don't want to shy away from calling him out in particular on this--I'm going to use examples from his lectures in a second--he is, ultimately, a part of the group Maura calls "self-proclaimed tv connoiseurs." And as someone who's looking to spend a lot of time studying TV, I have a few problems with them and the particular artistic values they're attempting to impose on the rest of us.
While I don't recall him necessarily ever coming out and saying so, Thompson's favorite show of all time is probably St. Elsewhere. When he first began discussing the show last year, I was happy to go along for the ride. He's watched the show very closely and even corresponded with the show's staff to clarify and confirm certain points. But his argument for the show's quality revolves around one particular assumption: that it works on multiple levels. For instance, in watching an episode where Howie Mandel goes through the afterlife, he broke down a basic scene where two characters sit in the hospital kitchen and recapitulate previous plotlines by showing how a series of lines go by that all employ condiment metaphors, that those metaphors are also dirty jokes, and that the lines sometimes alliterate. He compared this to Shakespeare, as well as to Arrested Development, the former in a positive way, the latter in a negative. He criticized Arrested Development for being overly obvious in its delivery of jokes, whereas with St. Elsewhere, you might not even notice that there was a joke.
Now, I could point out here that this is at least partially because puns on condiments aren't particularly funny, whereas Arrested Development's jokes could sometimes exhibit the kind of structural complexity that would make a grown man weep. His point was, in this and other discussions of the show's worth, that the writing was dense, complex, and worked on multiple levels, and that therefore this made St. Elsewhere a great show.
Heffernan goes on about franchising and the internet and "museum fatigue" (agh!), but what her argument ultimately comes down to is the same thing Thompson's argument ultimately comes down to: that a show's worth is directly related to how dense it is. Not only that, but that density has to be visible and deliberate. It's not enough for a show to resonate on multiple levels; we have to have evidence that the show's creators intentionally put those multiple levels of meaning in there through a heroic act of creation. The show must cater to us or challenge us, rather than expecting us to bring our own meanings to it--it cannot be, as Heffernan puts it, "art that doesn’t need us." But art that does need us sounds like, well, needy art. And since when is needy attractive?
I don't mean to sound like I'm dismissing complex art here. I think complexity, intentional or otherwise, is certainly one level on which quality and pleasure can be generated, though as I imply above, I think it's a little silly to want it to be intentional complexity all the time. But it should not and cannot be the only critereon for excellence when it comes to TV programs. Indeed, it's clear that complexity is not the only way shows can prove their worth. There are too many well-loved, straightforward shows to think otherwise.
Thompson makes the case that the new crop of "quality TV" that's emerged over the last 25 years has fulfilled the promise of television as a medium by allowing it to become a new way to tell stories. But is it really a new way? Don't we often hear The Wire compared to novels? Isn't The Sopranos, for whatever you might think about it, just as much a "middle-class form of the novel," as Heffernan so annoyingly puts it, as anything else? For that matter, isn't Battlestar Galactica? (And in terms of storytelling, haven't we seen this before everywhere from Dickens to comic books to movie serials of the 1940s and 50s?)
I'm just saying that what gets touted as "quality TV"--shows that are, as Maura points out, overwhelmingly scripted dramas--aren't the be-all and end-all of good television. The formal possibilities of TV are by no means limited to the serialized episodic structure. You can do other things on the small screen besides what Dickens did when he was getting paid by the word 150 years ago.
Again, I'm being coy, so let me just come out with it. In an overview of the first 60 years of American television, Thompson commented while watching the famous chocolate eating scene in I Love Lucy that it was not all that different, formally, from what we're still watching today. The scene, he said, would fit right into an episode of Will and Grace. On this, he is most certainly right. And it applies to almost every genre of television. Game shows (which includes reality shows), dramas, soap operas, and news have changed their formats strikingly little from the 1950s. The tone and design might be slightly different, but the essential forms have been set for a good half-century.
And then there are cartoons.
What you see above is an episode of Space Ghost Coast to Coast, and I would challenge anyone to find a show predating it with which it shares any formal qualities. Seinfeld was hailed--rightly!--for its formal innovations, and it referred to itself as a show where nothing happened. But, of course, lots of things happened in Seinfeld episodes. There were numerous conflicts which were then complicated and intertwined and eventually resolved. That complexity and manipulation was a big part of what made the show so satisfying.
In contrast, there is one episode of Space Ghost which could be summarized thusly: Thurston Moore plays the guitar for 5 minutes. Then the credits roll. Literally nothing happens. The episode above consists of 9 minutes of Space Ghost following an ant along the ground, until he encounters giant ants and is chased by them for about 10 seconds. Then the episode ends. That's it. That's the episode. It's certainly like an Andy Warhol film, except this was broadcast on national television and ends with a joke about fire ants. (Miss Clap's comment: "Wow, I can't believe they aired that.")
Ostensibly, it was supposed to be a cartoon talk show, and sometimes it was structured as such: opening with a monologue, proceeding to interviews, and the three characters would banter back and forth for a while between. But other times, the show might start in the middle of a line, or wander off to Space Ghost's apartment, or take place entirely in black & white, or be not a cartoon at all, but a re-creation of a past cartoon by human actors. A bad recreation. Long--loooooong--uncomfortable silences were a regular gag. You counted it lucky if the show made any sense whatsoever. And it was immensely enjoyable. Generally, you know what's happening on TV shows; even what counts as a surprise is really just a lesser-traveled path on the recognizably branching forks of the basic TV plotlines. But with Space Ghost, you legitimately had no idea what was happening next. Look above--don't you keep thinking something's going to happen? Don't you keep thinking that they can't possibly drag it out this long? And yet--and yet--they do.
I am happy to recognize that there is an element of taste going on here. Even if I am not as blown away by many of the dramas hailed as groundbreaking and transcendent by the TV connoisseur crowd, I certainly recognize their worth and would never try and talk other people out of liking them so much. But if there was a shift to "quality TV" in the early 1980s, then it has to be recognized that TV cartoons went through at least as sweeping and productive a change starting with Ren and Stimpy in the 90s, and that cartoons are at an entirely different level than cartoons were for the 30 or so years preceding the arrival of NickToons in 1991. Though they might not all be as widely recognized as the HBO canon or the NBC canon, I think the cartoons that have come out of that explosion constitute a canon of at least equal worth. There's a great history to be written--by me, I hope--of the post-80s cartoons, which include, besides Ren and Stimpy and Space Ghost Coast to Coast, Beavis and Butt-Head, The Simpsons, Futurama, Family Guy, South Park, Metalocalypse, Animaniacs, Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, and whatever your personal favorites may be. If that seems too frivolous, narrow it down to The Simpsons--soon to become the longest-running show on TV--and South Park, plus a bunch of other quality short-hops. Are they excellent in different ways than Six Feet Under and The Wire? Sure. But that's still excellence.
Again, consider not depth of theme of complexity of structure, but formal innovation. In an interview, Metalocalypse creator Brendon Small said his pitch for the show went like this:
We’ve got a TV show. It’s going to be about a metal band, like a death metal band or black metal, I’m not sure -- old-school, kind of thrash stuff. But it’s going to be about a metal band, and there’s going to be tons of murder. And we’re not interested in having anyone understand anything anyone says.
Now look, that is just not a show. Why would anyone want to watch that? And yet it is a fairly accurate description of the final product, which is eminently watchable. That's formal innovation. People are talking over each other, sometimes in unintelligible accents, people are constantly getting killed, the whole conceit revolves around an extremely obscure genre of music--it's like having a show about bluegrass musicians who converse half in Gaelic--and they have found a way not just to make it work as art, but to make it entertaining, incisive, and funny as hell. That is at least amazing as multiple-layer jokes about condiments, isn't it?
It seems fair to say that, after a long time in the wilderness, TV is finally being taken seriously as an artform in the same way that pop music and movies are. Which means that, right now, we're negotiating the consensus critical understanding of the genre. With films, that seems to have coalesced around the idea of the auteur working through the Hollywood system to make a personal statement. With pop music, that centered on the creative genius making masterpieces in the context of a genre of teenage fluff. And with TV, we're rapidly coming together around these HBO shows that, if they crack a smile, are never remembered for doing so, with their successes attributed to single creators: David Chase, Alan Ball, David Simon. But why do these have to be the shows that legitimate the genre? Why, in the context of an artform that celebrated and was built on insubstantiality more than almost any other, do we have to once again fall prey to the cult of the serious--the cult of the complex, the cult of the romantic creative, the cult of the absurdly meaningful. Can we ever sanctify a form of expression without first deeming it sufficiently serious? And do we really want TV to move solely in this direction? Do we really want the standard of worth for future creators to be just these canonized shows, when the people who made these shows grew up on a very non-canonical diet of television? I object here not just because I think shows of incredible worth are being undervalued, but because I love the medium. I love that TV now is going in so many different directions, that it's exploring possibilities rather than closing them off as gauche or critically unacceptable. It's easy to say that we're embracing the discredited simply because we're taking TV seriously. But is it really an act of daring to trumpet the quality of shows that insist so visibly on being taken seriously? Isn't it possible that there are shows out there just as full of meaning which don't try and hit you over the head with it? Why not the cartoon? Why not now? Why not, before it is too late?
If there's anything notable about how Gossip Girl's debut episode opens, it's that it's so aggressively un-notable. Our introduction to Serena ("the blonde female lead") is a shot of her attractively wistful face staring out a train window; our introduction to Dan ("the dark-haired male lead") is a scene in which he tells his father he's hungry. There's nothing about this that would make us want to keep watching. After Serena gets off the train, a voice-over tells us that Serena is getting off the train in a tone that implies but does not explain importance--as if we should know already--and the Humphreys' conversation suggests a pre-existing but essentially uninteresting tension with their mother. We're not built up but dropped in.
Why in the world would you make the opening of your brand new television series un-memorable? Well, the fancy term for starting a narrative in the middle of the action is in media res, and as anyone who's read the Aeneid (or seen Pulp Fiction) can tell you, it can be very effective, as long as the middle you're being dropped into is exciting. This is not the case with Serena and Dan in the goddamn train station. So why, then? Well, because it's TV, and because TV is serial. The opening of Gossip Girl is doing an interesting thing: it's taking an assumed familiarity with the genre of teen dramas, within which the show is explicitly situating itself, and making that into a continuous thread rather than one cut off at the barriers of individual shows--making the whole genre into a serial narrative. It's using the very familiarity of its setting to dispense with the normal necessities of set-up. It safely--and, really, correctly--assumes that if you are watching Gossip Girl, you have watched other shows like it, and so with a few spare gestures it's able to tell you what the conflicts that already exist. Whereas most narratives employing the technique of in media res drop you in the middle of action that has been going on within its own fictional world, out of sight of the viewer, Gossip Girl's opening drops you in the middle of a world you already know: the world of teen dramas. And as we'll see, it doesn’t merely drop you in the middle of conventions and stories you already know about, as most genre shows do, but quite literally inside the (comic-style) universe created by other shows.
The solid proof for this comes a little later in that first episode, with a seemingly innocuous shot of Dan getting on a bus. Now, the entire scene that follows takes place on that bus, so we can safely assume that the particular bus was chosen deliberately--they had to first acquire the bus, then shoot on it, and probably pay for it. The particular appearance of that bus is no accident--the producers chose it very deliberately. So it is highly notable what ad is plastered on its side. It's an ad for Smallville--a show that, like Gossip Girl, is on the CW network.
Normally, characters on a TV show seeing an ad for another TV show would simply indicate that the show takes place in the real world, and undoubtedly Gossip Girl does: it's set in a very recognizable present-day New York City. But context matters. The fact that it's on the CW, née the WB, is highly significant, and the fact that the ad in question is for the show Smallville is even more so. In the CW's universe of teen dramas, Smallville is an anomaly, because it does not take place in the real world but in the explicitly fictional world of the comic book from which it originates. The creators of that show could have made it more realistic by ditching the made-up town and city names, but Metropolis is still Metropolis, not New York. This is not in our world. In contrast, most of the CW's other shows take place very much in reality; even if the towns in which they're set don't actually exist, the characters will then take trips to places we're all familiar with. Some of the shows even use real people playing themselves.
At the same time, though, these shows are fictional, as are the characters on them, and they don't exist within the real world. But they do exist in a strong dialogue with our world, often presenting a one-to-one correspondence with familiar landmarks of our reality. This relationship is apparent in the genre's contemporary wellspring: Gilmore Girls. Though the stylistic fount of the CW teen drama is undoubtedly Dawson's Creek, Gilmore Girls is the uniter, the one that brings them all together. Unintentionally, one assumes, that show was a workshop for male leads on teen dramas: if you dated Rory, the daughter of the lead character, you got your own show. Milo Ventimiglia, who played Rory's first boyfriend Jess, got his own WB show (the sadly-canceled The Bedford Diaries) before moving on to Heroes; Jared Padalecki, who played Rory's second boyfriend Dean, now co-stars in the CW's Supernatural; Chad Michael Murray, who merely had a crush on Rory, nevertheless became the co-star of One Tree Hill. And though he only dated Rory's friend, Adam Brody jumped from Gilmore Girls to the male co-lead on Gossip Girl creator Josh Schwartz's previous show, The OC, where he played a character, Seth Cohen, that Gilmore Girls creator Amy Sherman-Palladino has (with some cause) accused of being exactly the same character he played on Gilmore Girls. In other words, it wasn't just that the actor changed shows; the character changed shows as well. Rory's boyfriend moved to Cali.
Now, Schwartz has returned the favor. Though The OC was on Fox, he's put his new teen drama on the CW, practically an acknowledgement that The OC did take place in the CW universe. (Gossip Girl being, after all, basically The OC: East Coast Edition.) And by having a scene early in his new show's pilot wherein three character ride a bus sporting an ad for Smallville on its side, he provides the rope to tie that universe together. If these characters are aware of Smallville, the show on the CW that explicitly takes place outside our reality, that means they might not be aware of the CW's other shows, which would make sense if those shows all took place inside the characters' semi-realistic reality. This is why you can start a series in media res and expect viewers to stay tuned: Gossip Girl is, ultimately, just a continued depiction of the world these viewers have already been watching. We're dropped in the middle of the action because, by watching the CW, we are already in the middle of the action. The pilot might as well have begun with a caption: "Meanwhile, in New York…"
Though it's true that the actors play different characters when they jump to different shows, often the characters are practically identical (even if the names change, most actors in teen dramas are incapable of playing more than one personality). We're still talking about the same people, on the same channel, in the same sorts of situations. It's also true that the characters on different shows don't refer to each other, in the way that the characters in, say, the DC Comics universe do. But they really have no reason to know each other, after all; all the shows deal with fundamentally small-town concerns, even when the small town is the Upper East Side of Manhattan, as it is on Gossip Girl. Why would, say, a girl in Connecticut like Rory Gilmore know about a high school basketball player in North Carolina like Lucas Scott? This is a realistic universe, after all, and these aren't superheroes, but ostensibly regular kids.
Still, these kids all face similar concerns and all seem part of the same social and geographic circle. The OC was an anomaly not just in its choice of channel, but in its choice of milieu: California. The CW's teen drama world is an east coast one, so by setting his new series in New York City, Schwartz is, once again, bringing the world back together, symbolically tying it up. Rory's last boyfriend on Gilmore Girls, Logan, was a rich kid from Manhattan (one as yet without his own series), just like the characters on Gossip Girl; presumably when she would visit the city last season, she could've run into Blair or Serena. But Logan was an Upper West Sider and the girls who gossip are Upper East Siders. The universe includes them all, but by divvying up the characters into separate series, boundaries are created.
And so from its first episode, Gossip Girl makes its intentions clear: it means to perform genre criticism on the very genre in which it is firmly and unironically situated. For example, one of the stranger aspects of the CW's teen dramas is their treatment of sex. For all the teen characters, virginity is a continually fraught subject. Whether or not to have sex for the first time is a question they struggle with over multiple episodes, and often when they do take the plunge something horrible happens--they break up marriages, lose their jobs, fall into ruin. What in real life is generally an awkward and uncomfortable situation you just want to have over with becomes, on the teen drama, an issue of almost secular faith, in which you have to stay pure or face smiting by the CW universe's unseen hand.
On Gossip Girl, Blair ("the dark-haired female lead") keeps trying to lose her virginity to Nate ("the lighter-haired male lead"), her longtime boyfriend. In the context of the teen drama, this is bad enough--the conflict isn't over whether she should lose her virginity, but how fast--and she then compounds the offense by making her attempts in especially trashy ways. To have a character so vigorously and unapologetically pursue sex will not do. But instead of merely punishing her after the fact, we get something even better: for almost seven episodes, the show simply does not allow her to lose her virginity. Every time Blair tries to make it happen with Nate, they're either interrupted, have a fight, or get distracted. On a teen drama, you can't lose your virginity until you've suffered, and by not allowing Blair to lose her virginity outside of the expected narrative, the show comments on the conventions of the genre.
Nate, meanwhile, isn't refusing Blair's advances because he's worried about her making the right decision, but because he's just not that into her. Virginity isn't a big deal to him, either. When Chuck encourages him to "seal the deal" with Blair, Nate responds, "Who says 'seal the deal?'" Secondary male characters on teen dramas, that's who! This is nothing less than an explicit joke about teen dramas' prudish obsession with virginity.
Finally, at the end of one episode, Blair is allowed to lose her virginity. Significantly, though, she does not lose it to Nate, who just dumped her. Instead, she runs off in tears, gets drunk, and loses it in the back of a limo to Chuck Bass, Nate's man-whore best friend. So after she's suffered for her sexual desires, Blair finally gets to have sex, but only in a way that she immediately regrets and that will cause the maximum number of possible complications. To drive the point home, the first scene in the next episode finds Blair in a confessional, telling a priest what she's done--while also admitting that she's not Catholic. But of course! God is not her problem. What she really needs to worry about it the avenging hand of the teen drama.
While it may be commenting upon and even mocking the conventions of its own genre (seriously, I could go on with these), Gossip Girl still utilizes them. By not allowing Blair to have sex until she's suffered for it, the show makes a joke about teen dramas while simultaneously creating the delicious dramatic tension that virginity obsessions can generate. And this sort of intertextual two-edged sword of faking it so real can only happen within the CW's teen drama universe. There's strength in numbers, and by creating a galaxy of teen dramas whose realities could plausibly co-exist, the unrealities that necessarily populate those shows begin to glow with a contextual realism, like photoluminescent fish swarming together in the deep sea to create the illusion of a sun: a mirage, to be sure, but it nevertheless casts a certain light.
I am currently engaged in a study of 1980s television, which study also includes the commercials of the time. Since the shows are fairly familiar to most people, I thought I might post some of the notable commercials here.
First is an ad for an unfortunately-named diet pill--and yes, this is a real ad:
This is from 1983 or so, but amazingly, they kept these on the market until 1987!
Second is actually something I saw an ad for rather than the ad itself--a strange short film starring David Letterman:
And third...well, couldn't find the ad I actually saw, but this is pretty close, even if it neglects some key lines. This was actually a movie.
Along with watching the first day of MTV and (accidentally) Friday the 13th Part 2, this is all making me think about 80s aesthetics--what they were, where they came from, what they imply. It goes beyond the comedic signifiers of the period, like big hair and neon spandex, and I think it incorporates things beyond simple visuals or style. If we regard "the 80s" as a kind of individual, where did its tastes come from?
Last year Eric over at Marathonpacks wrote a post about Vampire Weekend's "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa." It was a good piece, but it had a weird effect on me: it made me hate a song I had, until reading the piece, pretty much liked. This is neither because his post was criticizing the song--quite the opposite--or because the post itself was bad. The problem is, in a nutshell, that Eric's right. He focused on one particular line: "this feels so unnatural/ Peter Gabriel too." Now, for those unfamiliar with the song, it borrows heavily from Afropop, a genre that, to be extremely and unfairly reductionary, exists in the same general ballpark as the production on Peter Gabriel's "Biko" and Paul Simon's Graceland. So when I first heard the song, the line popped out, as lines with proper nouns always do, and I liked that it seemed to be making a self-deprecating comment about the song in progress, admitting its derivative nature.
But I never much listened to the rest of the lyrics, and given that Eric did, I'm going to go with his interpretation. He argues--convincingly, I think--that it wasn't just a self-conscious admission of derivativeness, but a way of beating critics to the punch, not about being derivative, but about appropriating. The song contained its own prediction about reaction to the song, and the assumed reaction went like this: critic hears song, critic recognizes debt to Afropop, critic looks at demographic characteristics of band members (as well as the first two words of the song's title), and critic roundly decries band for stealing the sound of third-world artists.
The first problem with this: I remain unconvinced that anyone would have actually had the above reaction, absent that particular line. Afropop, after all, clearly borrows from Western music, so it seems like cultural fair trade to me; theoretically, it's more troublesome for a band to appropriate, say, gamelan music than it is to borrow a sound that's already half-rock. In effect, the line created the controversy, making their musical choices into a problematic move that needed to be defended, and once it needed to be defended, then it could be attacked. While I can like the band for this, given that the song is effectively trying to bait me when all I wanted to do was play it in my car to remind me of summer...well, that makes it way less enjoyable.
But the other problem, and the more important problem, is that it's dealing with this issue in an incredibly clumsy way. Eric brought up Sasha Frere-Jones' piece on indie rock's whiteness, and while I hesitate to once again assult a practically mummified corpse, it's worth reiterating my initial response: that though its reasoning may be flawed, it makes a good point. His argument has been reduced in the popular consciousness to essentially "indie rockers are racist lol," but what's lost is the idea that indie used to be much more comfortable incorporating influences outside itself. At the end of the day, this isn't a point about race but about the idea of "appropriation." Eric also invokes Carl Wilson's response, which pegs it as a class issue, and that's certainly relevent with Vampire Weekend, but again, I'm not sure how much of this is something that would've actually been an issue unless it was being foregrounded so aggressively, to the point of being almost self-flagellating. It was a criticism in the air far before Carl brought it up, precisely because of the bands Eric lists as sonic cousins to Vampire Weekend: the Strokes and the Walkmen. At the end of the day, the Peter Gabriel line seems more defensive than insistent, and the issues of race and class are canards papering over the broader artistic issue of appropriation.
So let's talk about appropriation for a minute, and let's try and talk about it free of these other issues. And yes, I think that's a valid thing to do. At the moment of creation, art is like sex: when the lights are out, it doesn't matter who you're with, as long as it feels right. If, for whatever reason, a style or a sound or a technique or an idea meshes with what you're trying to do as an artist, you use it. That's one of the reasons art exists: to make other art possible. I sincerely think that anyone who has enough love of art to become a critic or a fan should agree that anyone can take from anything. And unless you're a folk artist, you're going to have to take from other things, because all art is, at least partially, appropriation.
What matters, then, is not what you're appropriating from, but how you do it. If you properly acknowledge your influence, and perhaps give some sort of help to the artists being appropriated from, there's really no problem, at least morally. (Artistically, it can be really lazy, but that's for another post.) This is why that line bugs me so much now: I didn't have any problems with an indie band sounding like Afropop (it's a great idea, actually), so to be essentially told by the song itself that I should have a problem seems incredibly dishonest, and not a little cowardly. In its attempt to dictate the terms of my response, Vampire Weekend is expressing fear that their art will be taken in the wrong way. But good art is always free to be taken the wrong way, because good art can be taken in many different ways, and once it's released to the public, the artist really doesn't have any control over that. The band's gotten themselves so worked up about people possibly calling them colonialists or what-fucking-ever that they come across as insecure and unwilling to stand behind what they've made. I don't have much interest in people who aren't willing to let their work stand on its own.
A comparison might help here. In my piece on LCD Soundsystem's "North American Scum," I said that certain lines function as "establishing credentials," which is another way of saying that James Murphy is insisting on his right to say what he's about to say. This is a cousin to Vampire Weekend's technique, but instead of pre-emption, James Murphy's trying to move beyond the basic terms of a debate to a larger point that he'd like to make. Unlike Vampire Weekend, he's not justifying his basic right to artistic expression, which for him goes without saying[1]. This sort of self-consciousness is endemic to LCD Soundsystem's whole aesthetic, of course--even in their first song, "Losing My Edge," the narrator was careful to establish his credentials as an elder statesman before making his critique, and you could write a good piece cataloguing the little self-conscious nods all over Sound of Silver (say, in the title track itself). So where Vampire Weekend's nod is defensive, an attempt at cutting off debate (that of course really serves to cause a debate, albeit one that they themselves view as illegitimate), Murphy's self-consciousness is a bit more heroic, a way of driving things forward, to more complexity and more appropriation, not less. But at the end of the day, of course, it's still self-consciousness.
If we really want to see why Vampire Weekend's defensiveness--a defensiveness that is, I think, endemic to modern pop[2]--is so problematic, let's look at the Scissor Sisters. Specifically, let's look at their song "Mary." "Mary" is an Elton John/Billy Joel piano ballad. I don't think Jake Shears or Babydaddy would deny that. But there's nothing in that song to acknowledge the fact that they're appropriating from this debased source, no "this feels so familiar / Bernie Taupin too." Jake Shears gets up there and sings a sincere set of lyrics about someone he sincerely loves, and he sings them with absolute conviction. And as such, it works in the exact same way as an Elton John / Billy Joel piano ballad does.
This is no small feat. You can dislike the song--you should dislike the song--but "Candle in the Wind" sold how many fucking copies? It's reasonable to think people responded so strongly to that song because it powerfully expressed a particular emotion that they related to. And "Mary," again, functions in exactly this same way. What this means is that by appropriating something without apologizing for it or being defensive about it, the Scissor Sisters were able to engage with it not as sonic wallpaper but as a full phenomenon, as something that not only sounds a certain way and comes with certain connotations but that also expresses an emotional truth and artistic beauty. Doesn't that seem like a richer and more rewarding way of doing things?
But of course, then there's the how. Keeping in mind, as always, that the Scissor Sisters began as an electroclash band (e.g. irony taken to infinity), I think we can say that their use of the piano ballad derives strongly from camp, an ideology that makes explicit the claim that anything can be appropriated. Practicioners of camp might appreciate things in different ways than the object's primary audience does, but the appreciation is rooted in a true affection, not in derision, condescension, or exoticism. Basically, camp appropriates what it thinks is awesome.
How is it able to do this? Well, camp comes from a gay perspective, and it's fair to say that it generally appropriated mass culture artifacts aimed at a heterosexual audience. Camp was able to borrow because camp's practicioners were in a subordinate cultural position to the things it was appropriating. The "how" is determined by power relations.
So maybe Carl's right--maybe this does come down to class. After all, indie rockers never feel like they come from a subordinate cultural position, even when they do[3], and so from that perspective, there's nothing they can appropriate except things created by other indie rockers. Right?
Let me suggest another model.
The first thing you'll notice about the above scene, the finale of the pilot episode of Paul Feig's Freaks and Geeks, is the soundtrack: "Come Sail Away," by Styx. It may be impossible to find a more culturally debased song, one steeped more heavily in irony, condescension, and derision, than "Come Sail Away." For fuck's sake, it popped up on the cultural radar recently because it was covered by South Park's Eric Cartman as a horrible song he was unable to stop singing. So if you saw this scene out of context, you'd be forgiven for thinking that it was an ironic use intended to make fun of the ridiculousness of school dances during that particular time period. The present-day meaning of "Come Sail Away" is akin to bell-bottoms or shoebox-sized portable phones.
That's not what the show's doing, though. Lindsay, here helpfully representing indie nation, has started hanging out with the cool kids and thus thinks that going to a dance is lame. Her views would most closely mirror ours: she thinks the music is bad, the social scene is fake, and the whole enterprise is a joke. She's not happy to be there, and it's hard to imagine her being happy that Styx is playing. Meanwhile, her awkward brother Sam doesn't have any particular aesthetic objection to the idea of a school dance, but is trying to work up the nerve to ask a girl to dance with him.
In the scene, three things happen. First, thinking the song is a slow dance, Sam ask the girl, and she says yes. Just as Sam awkardly extends his hands to her in a "how does this work?" kind of way, as they're about to start dancing--a moment Sam has been planning for and dreading for some time--the song kicks up into the "rock" part. Sam looks around, surprised, terrified, unsure of what to do; the girl says, "C'mon Sam," a literal invitation to the dance. And so Sam does, unsure at first of what to do, but he gets into it, happy just to be dancing with her, and as the song rises, he passes into a kind of bliss.
Second, Lindsay sees this, and so sees what the song has done for her brother, setting him free from his awkwardness and anxiety and allowing him to express his feelings for this girl in a way that a slow dance couldn't have accomplished. She spies Eli, the weird kid, standing alone across the floor, and goes over to ask him to dance. We don't actually hear her ask the question, just see her lips move as the music transitions from a flutey bridge to the final, seemingly endless, section. As the music goes nuts, they dance, the singer sings about boarding a starship and heading for the skies, and the scene ends with Lindsay and Sam both happy, lost in the music, heading for the skies.
The third thing happens not on-screen, but in our heads. When the song starts, we think, "Ha ha, Styx." As it progresses, we start to notice that it's actually a pretty good song, one that we haven't really listened to closely before. And by the end, we, too, are caught up in the music along with the characters. Like Lindsay, we see what the music is possible of doing, and we start to hear it in a different way. Essentially, the scene is a cover of the song, not only lasting exactly as long as the song, but following the precise emotional arc: slow jam to rock out to flute break to climax, uncertainty to release to exploration to escape. What the scene does isn't use the song so much as allow us to see it in context, to see it as it was originally intended, without the baggage that time has brought to it. It literally makes the song sound new, even though it's the same damn thing it's always been.
This is undeniably appropriation, and it could've been done in a way that devalued the original object. It wasn't. In addition to serving the new artwork itself, it allowed us as the audience to understand the song, contextualizing it (or, arguably, recontextualizing it) so a meaning came through that we were not willing to consider. It made it relatable.
Maybe Vampire Weekend does this for some people--maybe their use of Afropop allows some Western listeners to get the same feeling from the music that listeners do in its original context. But by apologizing in advance, by doing something the original artists never would have had to do, they make that impossile, at least for me. They make it an object of appropriation rather than a recontextualization, a borrowing, or even just an inspiration. What I've tried to suggest with these other examples is that, while there can certainly be issues with appropriation, it's pointless to even do it in the first place if you aren't willing to let the art stand on its own. If it gets criticized, then it gets criticized. But if you have so much respect for the original that you don't want people to think you're misusing it, then do something with it that helps us understand it like you understand it. If you've seen something in an object, bring that out. If it feels right to you, let it happen. I want to see it like you see it--that's why I'm consuming art in the first place--but if you are embarassed about seeing it, then I'm just not interested.
[1] Though, of course, many Murphy moves do work within the framework of justifying or perhaps enhancing his "record collector rock" by referencing things obscure enough to make the people who might criticize him feel recognized; this is an extremely cynical way of putting it, though. [2] Indie, of course, but think of Kanye West. If he's our Prince--a producer/performer extrordinaire beloved by critics and audiences alike--then he's a remarkably defensive character. Prince exuded a relaxed sense of "I am the most awsome thing ever," an implicit claim made also by the very genius of his music. But Kanye's still got self-esteem problems, has always had self-esteem problems. In a MySpace age, that might be more appealing, but I think it's worse. [3] There's an intereting point here about how it's not just class but intelligence that creates this feeling, which Carl alludes to when talking about indie's values being derived from a liberal arts education but puts it down as just a cultural difference.
I just realized that since I made this sporadic, I don't have to have thoughtful critical opinions on everything to post it here. So with that in mind, allow me to alert you to by far the best thing happening right now: Cartoon Network's newly-translated Shin Chan episodes.
(Can't even tell you how many times that's been sung around the clap clap household of late.)
The first time I watched it, I thought it was some sort of What's Up Tiger Lily? / MXC kinda thing where they replaced the dialogue of a Japanese children's cartoon with lines about suicide and testicles, but as it turns out, those are the original lines. It's really a brilliant piece of work, both in terms of the places they go to comedically, the juvenline humor of Shin (who has a tendency to get naked), and the way the show's cut to a rhythm of glee. It's sorta like an alternate-universe candy-raver Andrew WK who's obsessed with potty humor made a children's cartoon. That doesn't sound very complimentary, but it is.
Anyway, again, no deep critical insights here, though I wish there were--just immense love. There are full episodes on YouTube if you want to check it out (I'm particularly a fan of an episode entitled "Super Pooper," which nails the Shin aesthetic pretty well), or you can just keep watching Cartoon Network after the similarly awesome Metalacolypse/Lucy, Daughter of the Devil midnight block. Party party!
The funny thing is, for a while now I was meaning to talk about Ugly Bettyagain. Specifically, I wanted to mention how happy the clap clap household is about Marc's boyfriend, Cliff, a photographer who's sweet in a gruff kind of way. (He reminds us of various kindly creative people we know, half of whom I suspect Miss Clap has had a crush on at some point.) He and Marc have an affectionate relationship that rings very true, and it's been immeasurably pleasing to watch them approach each other, not in a of Mulder and Scully "they have to hook up!" kind of way, but more like when your friend is hesitantly growing closer to someone you know will make them happy, and it's like kittens falling asleep on the couch together or something: you don't want to make too much noise or you'll frighten them away.
In the most recent episode, there's a lovely sequence when Marc's gotten jealous of Cliff and tells him that they're through. Then later, he reconsiders and says he wants to get him back. Amanda, his hag, says something to the effect of, "You should make some big, dramatic gesture, like making a mad dash to the airport, tearing through security, and just about as the plane doors are about to close, you yell, 'Cliff!'" To which Cliff, who as it turns out is standing nearby, replies, "Yes?" "Or," Amanda says, "you could just go talk to him."
This is a joke on Amanda's part (she knows Cliff isn't getting on an airplane, and she's making fun of Marc for being such a drama queen), but it's also a joke about television conventions, a joke which you can ascribe to, I guess, the show itself. There is an awful lot of running to the airport done on TV, and not only is that unrealistic in that no one in the real world has ever made a mad dash to the airport--it's also unnecessary. If you have a real relationship with someone, grand gestures are never really needed. Imagine if you had done something so bad that the other person was leaving on an airplane, and then you simply showed up at the airport, and they changed their mind. How dysfunctional is that, right? You've done something so bad that the other person wants to escape to at least another state, if not another country, but when you make the effort of basically braving traffic, they cancel their non-refundable plane ticket and take you back? That, it's safe to say, is not a healthy relationship.
But what happens next moves it even beyond a joke and to a real moment of connection. While running to the airport is a TV convention, so is talking it out: there's a conflict, both people say they're sorry, there's a kicker joke, and that's the end of the scene and the conflict. And so you expect Marc to do something like that, which wouldn't be bad at all, but it would be fairly conventional. But instead of talking to Cliff, he just leans in and gives him a hug, wordlessly, and that resolves the conflict just as easily but far more honestly. In a relationship, fights generally aren't fights so much as chillings, distancings, subtly (or not so subtly) withheld affections. You can both come out and say you're sorry, but apology isn't really the issue, it's forgiveness; not the offering of the apology, which may have been proffered for some time, but the actual accepting of it, the yielding of individual pride to the pleasures of connection. In a real relationship, fights are two people who would ideally like to be smooshed up next to each other holding back on that impulse because they feel hurt, and they don't want to be close to the person who hurt them. And in that situation, a hug says a lot. It can say, for instance, "I was dumb, let us be smooshed again." Wordless gestures tend not to happen much on TV, for perfectly reasonable institutional reasons, but this one worked because it rang so amazingly true.
What's interesting about Marc and Cliff is that, in the context of the show, they seem like such an unlikely couple. The show's gotten a lot of drama out of the fact that Marc is supremely, openly, and happily superficial above all else, but Cliff is schlubby and messy and not very concerned with his appearance. Marc has always been the most unreal character on the show precisely because he was all surface, and it's interesting that he's ended up with the most true-feeling relationship. But it feels true, I think, precisely because it's not a conventional TV relationship. The rhythms of television are pervasive enough that if two people you know have, say, a Ross-and-Rachel relationship, even if the relationship itself is totally genuine and serious, it still feels a little unreal. Marc and Cliff's relationship upends a number of conventions, not least the one about gay men only having tragic, shallow, or bitchy relationships. The only similar relationship that springs to mind from TV is Dan and Roseanne on Roseanne, but she would've had to be skinny and pretty for it to really work in the same way. Cliff actually seems flown in from another show, like Northern Exposure or Men in Trees or something, except he's a gay fashion photographer living in New York. The fact that he's a new type does a lot. But at the same time, of course, it's not accidental that he's named Cliff. He does share a lot with Cliff Clavin on Cheers, a show that was (also) very good at simultaneously dodging and exploiting conventions. And so it works in these two ways, making a joke about TV but also depicting a truth.
It was a lovely moment. But then, at the end of that episode, something else happened.
It was the wedding episode. The wedding episode is something any series with any sort of soap opera/melodrama aspect is required to have at this point. It's always a big episode, an event episode, and the show had really built up to this episode through the season. If you haven't been following, perhaps some background. Bradford Meade, the aging owner of the fashion magazine where the show is set, was engaged to marry Wilhelmina Slater (played, of course, by Vanessa Williams), the director of the magazine. Bradford's son Daniel was opposed to the marriage, and Bradford's ex-wife broke out of prison and repeatedly tried to kill Wilhemina in order to stop her from marrying her ex-husband. At the beginning of the season, the wedding was off, but Wilhemina engineered things to get it back on. She doesn't actually love Bradford, and is just marrying him for control of his magazines.
So. In the course of the episode, Daniel (who is on the outs with his father) finds out that Wilhemina is sleeping with her bodyguard. He bursts into the wedding and demands to talk with Bradford. They go into the hallway, Daniel accuses Wilhemina, Bradford doesn't believe him, they yell, he starts sweating, and then he goes back into the chapel. (Interrupting an amazing comic routine by Amanda, who was singing "Milkshake" because Quincy Jones was in the audience and got really into it.) After retaking his place on the platform, he sees the bodyguard in the audience, the sound starts to go blurry, and we hear heartbeats getting faster and faster. Suddenly he collapses, clearly having a heart attack, and Wilhemina tries to revive him, but they pull her off.
Then there is a montage: Daniel on his knees, performing CPR; the priest, crossing himself; Bradford's lifeless face, pulling out in a spiraling overhead shot to register the entire wedding party, filled with grief; Betty's family watching it on TV, looking shocked; and Betty herself watching it in Times Square, registering disbelief.
And what song do you suppose is playing over this montage?
"Hallelujah." The Jeff Buckley version.
Now, obviously, I'm biased, as I wrote an entire paper on covers of "Hallelujah" and their use in TV shows. But I'm pretty sure this is the very first ironic usage of "Hallelujah," because the situation over which it's playing is, in context, not particularly sad. First of all , the very next thing we see is a preview for next week's show, in which Bradford is alive and well in the hospital, so he's fine. Also, people have been actively trying to kill Bradford, mainly his son-who-became-a-daughter Alexis, who is in fact by his side when he gets the heart attack (she got amnesia and forgot that she hated him). Usually when you hear "Hallelujah" playing, it's because something actually tragic has happened, because a major character has died (as in The OC), or because everyone is sad about different things. Bradford is a total dick who people wanted dead anyway, and he's not even dead, so it's neither actually tragic nor a major death. Betty is sorta sad because she just got fired, but her dad just became a US citizen, and Marc has this cute new boyfriend, and more importantly, Christina is actually in a tragic situation (her ex-husband shows up out of the blue with a liver problem that will kill him unless he comes up with $100,000) and she's left out of the montage.
That's why the use is ironic. Like with the above situation with Marc and Cliff (and countless other times over the course of the show), it's a subtle joke about TV. More specifically, it's a joke about "Hallelujah" and the way it's used, mocking the situation and indicating that the show thinks it's as hilarious as I have for some time now. I could be wrong, but there were no major usages of "Hallelujah" at all last season, as everyone working in TV seemed to realize that it's become a cliche. So why bring it back now except to use it as a cliche, to make fun of the very cliche-ness of the situation while at the same time milking it for all it's worth? It's functionally equivalent to casting Posh Spice, except instead of making fun of Posh (as they do relentlessly and with her consent in this episode), it's making fun of the gesture itself. "Hallelujah" is as much a punch line as Posh Spice, but unless you already regard it as a cliche--and even if you do!--it still functions in exactly the way it always has. Nothing serious has happened and the guy it happened to deserves it wholeheartedly. But it's the big episode, the wedding episode, someone collapses at the end, you play "Hallelujah," and bam--you feel sad, right? You feel like something major and important has happened. It's the end of the wedding episode and so you need a big, dramatic moment. Instead, you get a parody of big, dramatic moments--the priest crosses himself, Times Square, Jeff fucking Buckley--that is so well-designed that it in fact does work as a big dramatic moment.
It's brilliant, but it's also an encapsulation of what I love about this show. Lots of shows make fun of TV conventions, but they often do so with a nudgy-nudgy self-congratulatory tone that can be very funny but which denies the real dramatic power and utility of many of these conventions; I love The Simpsons and South Park, say, but you simply can't use them in the way you do Gilmore Girls or, if you're into that sorta thing, ER or Friends. This makes it seem like you either have to mock the way TV is made or submit to it. But Ugly Betty dances on some microscopic line between camp and drama that allows it to mock TV conventions while simultaneously exploiting them to the fullest, so we can not only use it in the exact same way we do a soap opera, but we can enjoy it without feeling like we're compromising our standards, which in the end makes those moments of truth far more devastating than they would be in any other setting. (See, for instance, the Hilda business in the season premiere, which deserves its own post.) I still don't quite know how it does it, but I never cease to be impressed by how well it does it.
And holy shit, Hallelujah.
ADDENDUM: Argh! As commenters on Michelangelo Matos' TV Club post about this episode have pointed out, the actor who played Bradford also played the evil dad role on The OC, where "Hallelujah" got its real push into cultural shorthand, and where he did die of a heart attack. That's the final nail in the coffin of my argument that it's an ironic usage, I think. Don't believe I missed that.
I'm currently doing a review of the literature on TV violence, and it is enormously frustrating. All the meta-analyses insist that there is a widespread and definite consensus on the connection between televised depictions of violence and violence in society, that images of murders and deaths leads to actual murders and deaths. But then when you look at the evidence being used to conclude that, the proof simply isn't there. What it proves is that when you watch isolated examples of media violence, for a short time afterwards you are more likely to act more agressively than you would have otherwise. But being more agressive is a long, long way away from violent crime, and no one's worried about TV violence causing more shoving.
The typical study used to prove the connection goes something like this: you do an experiment where you get two groups of kids and you show one group some violent scenes and the other some non-violent scenes, then you let them play together and see how they act. And yes, it's been pretty well proven that the kids who saw the violent clips will act more agressively. But they are not going out and murdering people. Certainly we can all see that acting more agressively could conceivably eventually lead to being more murderous, but if all you can prove is that seeing Batman cartoons makes kids pushier, it would take a whole hell of a lot of cartoons to get them to the point where they're knife-wielding maniacs.
Showing that televised violence causes short-term aggression doesn't show that TV violence actually results in an increase in violent crime. The few studies I've seen that do attempt to prove this are highly problematic.[1] For instance:
According to Centerwall, prior to television's emergence in the United States, the national homicide rate was 3 per 100,000. By 1974, the homicide rate had doubled. Centerwall agues that this increase is directly linked to massive exposure to television throughout the culture.
Now, those of you not making your living as media-violence researchers can probably already see a few problems with this claim, mainly having to do with other changes besides the invention of TV in that period, like increased urbanization, changes in firearm technology, drugs, etc. But what makes me actively angry is that the statistic he's quoting is not true.
Centerwall is not only picking two data points extremely convenient to his argument (the little valley around 1942 and the spike around 1972), but the ones outside his cherry-picked range directly contradict his hypothesis. In the 30s, prior to the introduction of TV, the homicide rate was at the highest level it would hit until the 70s, and in the 10 years following the introduction of TV, the homicide rate hit--and maintained--the lowest level since 1910. If Centerwall was looking at this same graph, and presumably he was, he was doing something awfully close to lying.
Plus, though Centerwall couldn't have known about it since he was writing in 1989, the current homicide rate is pretty darn close to the homicide rate when TV came around. This is something you'd think today's supporters of media violence effects would have to explain if they want to continue to insist that media violence causes violence in society. Or has TV itself gotten less violent? The beginning of the current decline seems to roughly coincide with the premiere of The Sopranos, and so by that evidence, extreme media violence has actually served to lessen violent crime.
The counter to these sorts of points is that there is no way to experimentally prove that TV violence leads to homicides, since for practical and ethical reasons you can't do it. After all, how would you? Force someone to watch so much violent TV that they eventually snapped and killed someone? Following around enough people--and, judging by the above graph, enough people would be around 50,000--to find one that actually committed murder so we could analyze their TV-watching habits?
But it seems to me that if you can't prove that media violence leads to violent crime, then you can't say that media violence leads to violent crime. And people, even well-informed people, do. Here, for instance, is a quote from an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association:
[T]he epidemiological evidence indicates that if, hypothetically, television technology had never been developed, there would today be 10,000 fewer homicides each year in the United States, 70,000 fewer rapes, and 700,000 fewer injurious assaults.
Certainly we can all agree that excessive exposure to violent imagery is probably not the best thing, and children should probably be kept away from violent TV shows to whatever extent is practical. But even leaving aside the many other objections to TV violence research--that it confuses the existence of violence in the mass media with people's actual viewing of violence in the mass media, that people generally don't watch only violent programming or only the violent bits of programming when watching TV, that agression is not violence, and is certainly not violent crime--the fact that the agreed-upon findings (i.e. that exposure to TV violence leads to short-term agressive behavior) cannot be linked to any actual increase in violent crime, except by willfully misinterpreting statistics, shows that no responsible person should be making such outrageous and inflammatory claims. And, clearly, no one should be claiming that there is a consensus that media violence leads to real violence; if it exists, it is a false one, and I think to anyone concerned with responsible scholarship, it is a troubling one.
[1] Inside-baseball qualification: I'm ignoring Gerbner's cultivation theory here, because to me it seems to argue not for violent crime as a media effect, but for fearfulness or acceptance of consumerism. Lord knows I could be wrong though.
I don't really have my shit together enough to actually liveblog things, but I did tape the Emmys, and since I can now fast-forward through all of the truly horrible parts, let's give it a shot. So here we go with the 59th Emmy Awards. On FOX!
9:50 Oh god, Ryan Seacrest. 9:51 For me, Ryan Seacrest handing off to Ray Romano is like a monkey with a nailgun handing off to a cement truck full of leeches. FAST-FORWARD. 9:52 Comedy supporting actor. This has got to be Rainn Wilson, right? 9:52: Jeremy Piven?! Fucking LA. 9:53: I know American Ferrera is supposed to be ironically pretty, but something about her Ugly Betty outfit really pulls her together in a way her actual appearance doesn't. Perhaps I have been seduced by illusion. 9:54: OK, I don't care about supporting drama actor, but why is Shatner here? 9:55 So is the gay guy from ER Grey's Anatomy nominated because he's good or because of that whole Isiah Washington thing? Could they have a "best excuse for Hollywood to act self-righteous" award next year? 9:56 The guy from Lost who looks like he's about to star as "Mex Muthor" in a straight-to-video movie from 1982 called The Adventures of Superguy won. This is why I hate the Emmys: they keep rewarding shows I hate. 10:02 Why is Sally Field sitting next to Reese from Malcolm in the Middle? 10:03 Ryan Seacrest handing off to Tina Fey and Julia Louis-Dreyfus is like a plate of maggot-infested chicken handing off to bacon-wrapped filet mignon. But who is the bacon? 10:04 Comedy supporting actress: I guess I haven't seen Two and a Half Men, which for some reason has two separate actresses nominated, but this has got to be Jaime Pressly, right? 10:05 Haha, Vanessa Williams. She's like the Shatner of this category. 10:06 Oh, wshew, the industry has decided they like My Name is Earl, I guess. 10:06 Hooray for skipping speeches! 10:09 "It's HIGH-gel, actually." Honey, if we learned anything from Knocked Up, it's that we want our women to shut up and pump out babies, OK? You should be thankful we let you have a name. 10:10 Oh crap, first mini-series award. FAST-FORWARD. 10:10 Shit, it takes me longer to write FAST-FORWARD than it does to actually fast-forward and now I saw it. 10:10 Crap, and now I did fast-forward and apparently Thomas Hayden Church is thanking Rudy Guiliani? Somehow? Hold on. 10:11 Oh, that's Robert Duval, hahaha. 10:12 "Only on the 59th Primetime Emmy Awards!" Did the Emmys just tout their exclusivity at giving out Emmys? 10:14 Did they put Ellen up there just to highlight the fact that Seacrest is coming off like a bitter Carson Daly? 10:15 Now there's some sort of talk-show host montage. Huh, sorta wish they'd have shown more of Craig Ferguson's "No Britney Spears jokes" monologue, but I guess it would look strange next to a bunch of Al Gore fat jokes. 10:17 Hey, they're using music to switch from comedy to death, just like on Scrubs! 10:17 Wait, there was no point to that? Should I have listened to Ellen? 10:18 Actress on a drama. They should give it to Sandra Oh as a consolation for being "the overlooked one" in Sideways. 10:19 The Sopranos vs. Grey's Anatomy, and the pregnant chick won! I guess I would have much preferred John Turturro's sister, but what can you do? Man, the fact that there are only two shows represented in this category says something, doesn't it? Something about how the Emmys doesn't nominate anything that's not on the 4 major networks or HBO? 10:19 "Thanks for getting my name right!" Oh honey, shut up. 10:20 OK, but your mom totally deadpanned. She's awesome. 10:21 Sweetie, you don't want to do what you do, you want to move on to movies, so please, shuffle off, OK? 10:24 Nighttime talk-show writing. They all love Colbert, right? 10:25 So they all did little videos listing the names of the writers, and except for Colbert's, they all involved jokes about Bush or Republicans. That's a sign of something. Coincidentally, Colbert's (which involved all the writers going up to him and hitting him) was the best. 10:26 Oh, Conan. That's good too. As long as it's not Maher. That's a good life philosophy, actually. 10:27 "A performance by Tony Bennet and Xtina." I hope they do "Dirrty!" 10:29 I neglected to mentio this before, but the whole thing opened with a Family Guy song, and seeing the current performance (which involves, I shit you not, people in half-off tuxes and chairs), I start to wonder if the entire Emmy telecast is a Family Guy episode. 10:33 It's OK if I skip director awards, right? 10:35 I went to the bathroom and came back to find some dude thanking his parents, so I think I can skip director awards. 10:36 Jesus fuck, do people watch mini-series? It's like the best foreign film award of the Emmys. 10:36 WAIT HOLD ON MATTHEW PERRY WAS IN A MINI-SERIES? 10:36 WAIT HOLD ON TOM SELLECK WAS IN A MINI-SERIES? 10:36 AND THEY BOTH LOST TO ROBERT DUVAL WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON STOP. 10:37 Note to self, go up later and spell "Duvall" right. 10:37 Fast-forwarding through Robert Duvall's facial expressions is like watching a squirrel scurry around a tree. 10:38 "And the Jersey Boys pay tribute to the Sopranos!" I know this is a big victory lap for The Sopranos, but why did you let actual New Jersey residents pick the musical numbers? 10:40 Apparently there's a movie coming out called "Elizabeth: The Golden Age." Why can't they make "Elizabeth: Holy Shit, That Bitch Can Yodel!" 10:41 Queen Latifah is paying tribute to Roots, and I don't think I'm allowed to make fun of this. 10:42 Roots got a 44.9 rating! Good job putting it in terms we can all understand. 10:42 Oh, it's Roots' fault that we have mini-series. But y'all, they suck! Actual series are doing the same thing much better now! 10:43 This is the part of the Emmys where we pretend Lou Gossett, Jr. is respectable! 10:44 GEORDI WHERE IS YOUR MAGIC EYE VISOR 10:45 Ed Asner up there looks like a music industry executive from the 50s. 10:45 Oh please please please make the cast of Roots give an award to Debra Messing. 10:48 Every time I hear Hayden Panettiere's name I think someone's still stoned from the laser show. 10:49 They give out awards for guest stars? Well, I hope the aspy guy from Boston Legal wins, then. I also hope he accepts in character. 10:51 I'm going to be skipping all Sopranos-related content for the evening, by the by. 10:52 Drama writing! Apparently I'll be fast-forwarding through this, too! 10:54 Hahaha, Colbert is wearing one of his bracelets. 10:55 Anybody but Maher! Anybody but Maher! OK, the Daily Show, fine fine. 10:57 They just showed a shot of someone who looks like Colbert but with a Jewfro. That was creepy. 10:58 I'm just going to go ahead and lump Tony Bennett in with the fast-forwarding rule. 10:59 It's the accountants' spotlight! My favorite moment of any awards show. "Now, some nerds who we won't let talk!" 11:00 MINI SERIES CONTENT 11:00 The chairman of the television academy! And he's not talking about illegal downloading! Because the TV industry actually has their shit together with downloading! 11:01 Actually, his speech could be titled "Comic Relief: An Appreciation." 11:02 They really gave an award to fucking Idol Gives Back? "For when TV sacrifices its enjoyability for pandering and self-congratulation, we honor you!" 11:04 Oh, I keep forgetting Fred Willard is on that Kelsey Grammer show, and every time I am reminded I cry a single tear. Grammar/Heaton is like two gigantic anuses farting on each other for an hour. 11:05 Did they make Glenn Close thank TV for letting women on it? 11:07 I didn't think I'd have to include "Western content" in my fast-forwarding list, and now I am paying the price. BURY MY HEART AT SHUT UP. 11:08 Apparently anyone can make a tribute to the Sopranos by singing in front of screens on which clips from The Sopranos are playing. Look! Now I'm making a tribute to the Emmys by facing backwards and singing "TV Eye!" Now I'm making a tribute to my blog! Now I'm making a tribute to my couch! 11:10 "The Sopranos: It Existed!" 11:12 "And now, the cast of Roots will pesonally fellate the cast of The Sopranos!" 11:13 They just came out and people clapped for them. Thank goodness, because they've really been underappreciated. 11:17 The microphone accidentally started coming out the trapdoor and it looked like somebody sorta wandered in, went "whoops!" and left. 11:19 They are apologizing for promos by letting Louis Black complain about them, apparenly. 11:21 And then Louis Black leaves, his subversive message delivered! He doesn't have to present an award, he is an award. 11:21 "Mini-series, movies, and dramatic specials..." AAAGH "..thanks to the work of these talented directors." IS THERE A WAY TO DOUBLE FAST-FORWARD? Oh yes, there is. 11:23 Holy shit, they're actually running Til Death and Back to You back-to-back. 11:24 I love it when smart people get treated like performing animals. "People think this guy is really smart, and now we will make him participate in some retarded YouTube thing!" 11:25 The MySpace guy is a camwhore! I hope the guy from Heroes offers him an Amazon gift-certificate to show us his balls. 11:25 Guys, don't cheer Al Gore when you don't even watch the damn thing he's up there getting an award for. 11:26 "First, I want to do what you just did and thank Al Gore..." FF PLS 11:27 I stopped early and heard him say something like "...and reclaim American democracy!" Did Al Gore finally make the jump from wonk to libtard? Don't believe your hype, Al! 11:27 Dear California: please pass a law prohibiting Brad Garrett from ad-libbing. 11:28 PLEASE STOP I AM SERIOUSLY ALMOST CRYING 11:28 It's making me like Colbert more that he's/it's not winning any of the categories he/it is in. 11:29 Tony Bennett just thanked Target! Holy crap, he thinks it's 1957! 11:31 Yay, Alec Baldwin's mom on 30 Rock just yawned while accepting her award! "I'm not faking this, I really don't know what the hell I'm doing." Dear California: please require all of Brad Garrett's ad-libs to be played by her. 11:33 Comedy directing, which I do kinda care about, is won by Ugly Betty! Yay! They sure did put him in the cheap seats, though. 11:36 Comedy writing. 2 Office episodes? Really? And 2 30 Rocks? I mean, I love those shows, but c'mon. 11:38 Have they minimized Seacrest's participation, or have I just been fast-forwarding through it? And did he just say "this looked a lot less gay"? 11:40 Rainn Wilson looks a lot like John Hodgman tonight. 11:41 Whoa, seriously, Kanye? Did he request this? 11:41 They're doing a kareoke thing and it's actually hilarious. "Another one?" Kanye for host! 11:42 "I never win." "Sorry man." 11:44 That skit was a comedy music reality show. If they also incorporated a mafia doctor it would've encompassed all of TV, except the parts we don't care about like mini-series. 11:47 Man, this got much better at the end. Unfortunately, funny awards shows make liveblogs much less funny. 11:50 Does no one know when Steven Colbert is making fun of them? 11:51 Presumably you've seen the hug by now, yes? 11:56 The hug, though, is kinda important. Oh wait, there's another award. 11:57 Yay America Ferrera! Man, this liveblog has gotten boring, huh? 12:00 OH NOES IT'S THE FART PATROL Thank god they're running late so they can't say anything. 12:00 30 Rock wins for comedy series, which is great--I really like it when the Emmys spreads things around, because Ugly Betty really isn't doing the same thing as 30 Rock, you know? 12:02 OK, I'm stopping now because this has really gotten boring and I have to eat lunch and it's just going to be The Sopranos, but more on the hug later.
I am very excited about Gossip Girl. But if I was runing that series, I would start it off all light and frothy and trashy like it currently is, but then over the course of its life, I would slowly make the characters more and more despicable, more and more repulsive (they could even do a crossover episode with Law and Order: SVU), kind of like taking the Frank Grimes episode of The Simpsons and making a whole mythology out of it. Then, in the finale, they all move to Charlotte and get jobs as i-bankers and meet every Tuesday at TGIFriday's to have fruity drinks and fondly recall the old days. All except for Serena, who was killed by the Latin Kings for protecting her 23-year-old coke-dealing boyfriend. "The Chloe bag," they will say, a few drinks into the evening, the road signs on the wall beginning to morph into grotesque shapes and the grease stains slowly spreading on their polyester pants, "couldn't stop that bullet."
Comedy Central recently started running a cartoon called Lil' Bush. It's set loosely during the presidency of George H.W. Bush, with all the players in the current political scene present as children. The main characters are the main characters in the original G.W. Bush administation, except with "Lil'" in front of their names: Lil' Condi (who has a crush on Lil' George), Lil' Cheney (who talks like a mix between Boomhauer and the Penguin), and Lil' Rummy. Also, Lil' Jeb, who acts like a dog for some reason. It's been generally panned, seemingly because it debuted as cell-phone-only content, which is always mentioned, and despite the fact that the creator, Donick Cary, wrote for The Simpsons, which is almost never mentioned.
It's a great show, though, in large part because it's not a Robert Smeigel-style one-off, so it can't just coast on the "Bush is a small child!" concept. It has to function as a cartoon in addition to functioning as a satire--it has to work in the way a regular ol' non-satirical cartoon does. And while it does engage in some parodying of its less-respectable cartoon forebears, with its opening credits featuing the Lil' characters jamming as a band for no particular reason a la Jem and many plots being resolved in schematically the same way they would be on Heathcliff[1], it still provides potent does of the silliness and absurdism that people have always come to cartoons for. (Take a look at old Looney Tunes shorts sometime and ignore the fact that all that stuff has become conventions and a common grammar. Is a talking meatball really that much more ridiculous than a coyote building a series of elaborate traps to catch a trickster bird?) The characters' status as children allows them to be cute--which is good--and also makes the offensive things more offensive. So, for instance, in the episode where the gang goes to camp ("Camp Lil' Camp David"), it allows the writers to tweak, revel in, and exploit all the conventions of a "going to camp" episode. The familiar structure provides opportunities for character-driven jokes (all Lil' George cares about is pranking), while at the same time the expectation of light conflict makes the discovery of an Al-Quaeda training camp as Camp Lil' Camp David's rivals (and the subsequent sending of a video in which one of the campers apparently has body parts sawed off) more surprising and thus more funny. The overall argument is not that Bush is dumb, but that Bush is unserious--in a world filled with real threats and real consequences, he blithely pursues his own individual interests and is saved only by a combination of luck and priviledge.
It's also notable, though, because it's the first of a number of attempts[2] at making sustained, character-based fun of the current administration to succeed both as comedy and as politics, the former in that it's funny and the latter in that it has a coherent and accurate point. You might recall Will Ferrell disowning his impression of George W. Bush as making him seem too nice of a guy and too harmless, more like a lost puppy than someone dangerously unfit to govern. Most other anti-Bush humor has been too self-righteous and desperate to really work as comedy, which requires both sympathy with and superiority to its subject.
The most obvious comparison, of course, is with the other show Comedy Central aired about George W. Bush: That's My Bush! It was created by South Park masterminds Trey Parker and Matt Stone and premiered shortly after the 2000 election (they said they were prepared to do one about Gore if he won, although I forget the less-hilarious title they had picked for his version of the show) and it wasn't very good, having little relation to any of the actual people being represented. Bush was just a lovable schlub, the other adminsitration members were his frustrated handlers, and the whole thing proceeded self-consciously as a parody of old laugh-track sitcoms. (See above about rising above your concept.) Non-Americans seem to like it, of course, but non-Americans seem to regard opposition to Bush as heroic rather than, you know, something at least half the country has done for most of his term. It didn't last more than three months.
It did, however, suggest some interesting things about Parker and Stone, which were later more or less confirmed in their movie Team America: World Police. It was doomed from the start given that it was their cinematic follow-up to the South Park movie, i.e. probably the Funniest Thing Ever, but it did fairly well for itself when it stuck to wonderfully ambiguous jokes about jingoistic action movies and jingoism in general. The rest, though, was their Ouroboros moment, a likely byproduct of too much time spent in Hollywood: everyone with an anti-war viewpoint was a celebrity who didn't know what they were talking about. While we can all agree that Sean Penn should shut the fuck up, I don't think we spend too much time thinking about it, and whatever point they had to make seemed to be limited to a three-square-mile area of California. They seemed far less interested in expressing any kind of fundamental truth or meaning than they did in pointing out how people who are obviously wrong are obviously wrong.
Which is another way of saying that they're libertarians. A libertarian is what you say you are if you're a white male member of the entertainment industry who wants to talk about politics without alienating certain segments of your fanbase, and it basically means you're a liberal, but not one-a them wussy liberals like Tim Robbins[3]--think Bill Mahr. You still talk about things being "politically correct," even though no one else has for 15 years. The theory is that this makes you look like you don't care about, and in fact hate, ideology and political parties, which is kind of like saying you're a baseball fan but think teams are stupid. Small-l libertarianism (which Stone and Parker have basically admitted to) is an almost entirely superficial way of thinking about politics, like constructing an ideology out of Maureen Dowd columns. "Everybody is wrong but me" is their rallying cry, and while that's an undeniably attractive one to consumers from crochety old men to emo kids, it's not a political viewpoint but an apolitical one. It's an attempt to opt out of something no one who interacts with other human beings can avoid. The social contract's a bitch, ain't it?
As usual, we can probably blame the boomers for this. They came along in the late 60s and decried politics based on one issue, Vietnam, that would have essentially corrected itself just as effectively without their help. They've lionized this moment ever since, despite the fact that what was accomplished through politics before them and outside them (school integration by the force of the friggin' military, civil rights, all of Johnson's great society programs) far outstripped anything brought about by their politics of no-politics; they also let douches like John Kerry have political careers. The party system has never been the same, although structural changes like open primaries account for a decent portion of that, and declaring yourself an independent, above the messy fray of politics and too smart to engage with other people's opinions, which are inevitably wrong, has increasingly been the thing to do. People have somehow gotten the impression that a political party is useless unless it precisely mirrors each and every one of their personal views, that unless a given candidate agrees with them on every issue, or even if they're insufficiently strenuous on a particular issue, then politics has failed. But the whole point of politics is that you can't always get what you want in a society of several million people. Politics is the process by which we negotiate the different things people want, need, think are right, and think are wrong, which unless you set up the kind of convenient scenarios Parker and Stone have a tendency to do, are rarely clear-cut. You're not supposed to get what you want in politics, and that doesn't mean politics doesn't work, but that it does.
Then again, maybe Team America: World Police was just ahead of its time. Back in 2004, when it seemed like no one was against the war, criticizing the few people who were (however incoherently and self-centeredly) speaking out against it seemed like strangling the baby in its crib, and to align yourself with a conservative viewpoint that has act
