It's been a weird last half of the decade, though maybe "weird" doesn't cover it--awful and dark and mean and petty would be better, probably. And yet most of our popular art has not really dealt with modern culture in any significant way over the past five years. This was not the case of the first half of the decade, when popular culture, and particularly music, seemed caught up in an eternal present tense. The iconic pop of that period, along with major TV shows like Sex and the City and The Sopranos, relentlessly engaged with the now. The moment might have been created by a SATC episode or a Destiny's Child video, commented on by Britney or David Chase, and pushed forward by Justin Timberlake or Survivor.
But somewhere around 2004, the present tense became too fraught, too full of importance and horrors, for pop to find any way in. In a political moment when change was largely decentered, with one-party rule requiring us to wait for a self-hoisting even once the petard was clearly visible, pop could play no leadership or rally role even if it wanted to, and was left instead with a moment it had a hard time figuring out what to do with. To ignore it, as most pop did, simply made you look out-of-touch and past your prime, but short of the kind of direct engagement with current that allowed some of the decade's most significant artistic products (e.g. The Colbert Report)to flourish, it was hard to deal with our particular times in any real way. Those aside, what we got mainly looked backward, whether for comfort and resonance with the present, like Amy Winehouse and Mad Men, or entered innovative continuations in established realms, like Gossip Girl and 30 Rock and, uh, pretty much everything else in pop music that wasn't Amy Winehouse. Those things that did offer something new, like Lost, didn't seem to have any necessary connection to outside events, but registered instead as regular old artistic innovation, not in dialogue with anything but itself.
And so it's nice that we've had such a clear historic and chronological break here. The election of Obama and the economic crisis, which are essentially simultaneous in the longview, make it very hard to continue as we were before. So much of the culture of the 00s was and is tied up with the particular kind of economic prosperity that we can now mark as part of the past, and while the destruction of that culture does not negate the good things that came out of it, such desctruction does make it very hard for pop creators to regard it as normal. Almost every single significant piece of pop culture from the previous part of this decade would, if it were created today, either look very different or much less relevent. Almost everyone on television was affluent--not even middle class, but affluent--and the shiny bliss that 00s pop does so well reeks, as it was intended to do, of money money money. While there are undeniably artistic creations that were forward-looking enough to see this coming, it's likely that there's a slow but major change coming, and it would be really great if we could finish off the decade with a little bit of forward-looking pop.
Which is why I liked the first episode of Glee so much: it is the first TV series that's about this decade rather than a part of this decade. How the rest of the series will go remains to be seen, but for now it has definitively staked out its position on the 00s truth and reconciliation committee. For one thing, it's the first show I can think of to draw from a form firmly situated in the current decade, rather than drawing from 80s and 90s forms as even the best current series do (with, again, the exception of brand new things). Bring It On came out in 2000, and the show is clearly working in the tradition of that movie (and maybe 1999's Election as well), a form old enough now that the Wayans brothers have gotten around to parodying it. The genre is obviously indebted to some old forms (sports movies, 80s b-movie ensemble comedies) but makes something new by taking a minor thing and portraying it in precisely the terms its most dedicated participants see it in. This shit was serious, and because image was serious to the participants, the movies took image seriously, too. This did all sorts of good things for a visual form that ultimately requires you to believe things that aren't true anyway, and Glee plays that forward.
The characters, too, are products of the decade. Rachel, the main female singer, is essentially a fameball, which is not something we're used to seeing. Usually, the pretty girl who wants to be famous is either hilariously untalented or actually destined for stardom. But Rachel doesn't seem to be either. She's good at singing, but not great, and her personality is too self-conscious to take her to easy success. She's a scrabbler and a striver, ambitious for the sake of being ambitious, trying and trying without really having a project to tie it to. She uses modern technology just because it seems to be what the kids to or as a way of furthering the plot, but as an integral part of her personality: she puts herself out to the world beyond her peer group through digital media as a way of seizing success. Mercedes, meanwhile (who I hope gets developed more!), is the daughter of ANTM, embracing that weird Beyonce feminism that I guess is what Girl Power turned into. And, of course, the girlfriend of Finn, the main male singer, is the head of the celebacy club, and as such the representative of cultural conservativism, another high point of the decade. She's an obvious one, but Rachel and Mercedes strike me as believable characters that I know lots of in real life but would not expect to see on TV, and kudos to the show's creators for catching that.
But this isn't just Bring It On: The Series. A key moment in the pilot is where Finn confronts his fellow football players and gives a great little speech which starts like this: "We're all losers. Everyone in this school. Hell, everyone in this town. Out of all the kids that graduate from this school, maybe half will graduate college and two will leave the state to do it." This is true, but it would have been unthinkable to express such a thing earlier in the decade. It would have violated the ethos of total committment that dominated the 00s--one which produced some great results for pop, if not so much for government. While the glee club is maybe just another competitive activity, the show is clear that it's a pretty stupid one, and all the characters except Rachel seem to know that. They do it, then, because they like it, because they get something out of it. It's smaller than cheerleading but bigger than just being a quiet nerd trying not to be noticed. I like that, even without the football player, the characters aren't just a clique to themselves, but are individuals from different circumstances doing something for the pleasure of it. What the show endorses, then, is not victory or social stasis but mastery. When Mr. Schuester takes over, his goal is for the club to win a championship, but that motivation on its own fails to sustain the club's momentum. What propels them to some kind of unitity is, rather, a committment to excellence, to artistic acheivement beyond the validation of others but simply to know for yourself that you and others have done something good, and the moment at the end of the episode captures precisely that. And it captures, moreover, joy, the other thing Mr. Schuester says he was interested in. While that emotion was certainly conjured by many of this decade's best pop products, it's hard to say it was a concern of them. Success always seemed to matter more than happiness. Glee seems interested in asking what it would be like if that evaluation was reversed.
Then, of course, there is "Don't Stop Believin'," the song that the group sings at the end. My thoughts went not to the finale of the aforementioned Sopranos, which also ended with that song, but to the pilot of Freaks and Geeks, which ended with "Come Sail Away" by Styx. The final moment of The Sopranos struck me as being essentially the same as the final moment of Seinfeld, and its use of the Journey song had less to do with pop music than with TV and with audience expectations, a sort of forced "let's go out on a high note!" kind of thing. But in Freaks and Geeks, it was all about the song and its resonance to the particular characters. That's sort of the mirror image of what's happening in Glee. Here, Journey is being celebrated for its universal appeal, for the freakish and essentially inexplicable ability of that song to appeal to everyone everywhere at least a little bit, and the metaphor being drawn is not the any of the characters' situations but to the enterprise on which they have mutually embarked. The experience of pop is an unavoidably collective one, made eternally in the context of others, and while that opens up all kinds of great possibilities, it also means you have to go wherever pop goes, and you might not always like it. When you find yourself in that situation, the trick may be to find that one sweet spot, the thing that everyone can agree on that turns the momentum back toward you, tacking the ship gradually back to the course you would prefer. Glee is most certainly a part of that effort, and I am excited to see where it goes.
Watching the Powder Blue trailer and reading the description of "one of those montage previews full of quick erotic cuts set to a familiar indie-centric score" makes me think a little harder about the way indie music is used in TV and films. Its use here is striking because the placid, comfortable sound of the music is in sharp contrast with the scenes of strippers, poverty, liquor stores, hospitals, age, and black people, if that makes sense. To put it another way: indie is so firmly aligned with white, middle-class values, lives, and concerns, and the small stakes of everyday living, that to see it paired with these images makes them rise above their possible association with a Cops sorta thing. Either they're being used to suspend disbelief by pairing realistic scenes with unrelated music, or they're being used to connect the likely middle-class audience with the concerns of these characters and assuring us that they will be placed in a context familiar to us, or--and this is the point here, so you know--there is actually something about indie music that really is connected to scenes of high drama and hard living.
And this prompts the question: when is indie going to start writing about the sort of things that it's used to soundtrack? When are there going to be songs about teenagers overdosing in Mexico, people dying in hospitals of obscure diseases, sad strippers, moments of revelation after a physical and spiritual trial, etc.? Sure, there are some songs about these topics, but judging by the genre's televisual use, these should be the dominant themes. And given how much of a boost these televisual uses can give to the market share of an indie song, there's a strong possibility that the iTunes bump happens not just because of the wider exposure, but because the coupling of sound and image brings out something in the song that wasn't previously obvious, some connection between the sounds being made and the themes onscreen. The continued use of indie songs on soundtracks seems like a market opportunity not just through the adaptation of existing product but through the creation of new product that can work in this way without the outside influence. I've argued before that The OC's use of a particular sound made other people pursue that sound, and I've no doubt that people are having an emotional experience in interacting with these records not entirely unlike what they have by watching the TV show they might be used in. But there still seems to be more room for expansion.
Adults are confused by Hannah Montana. Why were her concert tickets going for hundreds of dollars? Why does she have a 3-D movie? Who is this Miley person? Is she really the daughter of the "Achey Breaky Heart" guy? And he's her dad on the show? How does that all work, exactly?
It is true that the Hannah Montana gestalt encompasses an odd number of identity issues. On a normal TV show, there would be the character, Hannah, and the actress, Miley Cyus. The character would not appear outside the show, and the actress' real life would not be reflected on the show itself. But from the beginning, that line was blurred. The character named Hannah Montana is the secret identity of a character named Miley Stewart. Miley Stewart's dad, who knows her secret, is a character named Robbie. Robbie is played by former country star Billy Ray Cyrus, and his daughter on the show is played by his daughter in real life, Miley Cyrus. (Who isn't actually named Miley, but let's not even get into that.)
So far, so good; it's really just one step removed from Jerry Seinfeld playing a character named Jerry Seinfeld, right? What makes it confusing is that there are also albums associated with this particular gestalt. The first album, Hannah Montana, was credited to the character Hannah but one song was sung by Miley Cyrus as herself and her dad as Billy Ray Cyrus. The second album, Hannah Montana 2: Meet Miley Cyrus is a double album, with the first disc being credited to Hannah and referring to the show's world and the second disc being credited to Miley and referring to the actress as a real person. There is then a concert movie, in which Miley performs songs as herself and as Hannah Montana.
To sum up: the character Hannah Montana has released an album and toured. The actress who plays Hannah has also released an album and toured, but always in combination with the character she plays. She has also sung a song as herself with the actor who plays her dad on the show, who is actually her dad. And who also sang "Achey Breaky Heart."
The reason I go through all this rigamarole is to show that, when you try and lay it all out, it is a fairly tangled web of connections that can be confusing if you're not immersed in it. And yet, for all its structural complexities (!!!), children have no trouble grasping how the Hannah Montana universe works. There's a good reason for this: for all that Hannah Montana might seem like a fantastically complicated postmodern art experiment (think Nikki S. Lee), she fits seamlessly into the current media/entertainment environment. And this is especially true for children. Adults are too tied to their formative experiences with straightforward entertainment television to really grasp what's going on. But for those people growing up in the reality show era, Hannah Montana makes total intuitive sense.
John Ellis' essay "Stars as a Cinematic Phenomenon" is a useful touchpoint for explaining all of this, though I don't want to get totally behind its occasionally overwrought "OMG postmodernism" tendencies. His take, basically, is that an individual performer had a a "star image" made up partially of their actual performances and partially through entering into "subsidiary forms of circulation" (see?), which is his way of saying "publicity." By giving interviews and being written about in the press and having your picture taken, a performer creates an image (tough, sexy, stoner, slutty, whatever) that then works as a way of informing the public's understanding and anticipation of their performances in films. To simplify: Brad breaks up with Jen and starts dating Angelina, so let's go see Mr. and Mrs. Smith.
That may be true from the perspective of, say, a film studio interested in making money. But from the perspective of everyone else, the really interesting thing about all this, the thing we followed and remembered, wasn't the movie. It was the actual story of Brad breaking up with Jen and dating Angelina, and why, and what would happen next. Ellis would consider this to be a failure--that the system has failed in its intended purpose if the movie in question is less memorable than the story surrounding it. Indeed, you would be hard-pressed to find anyone that would speak kindly of our "obsession with celebrity," as it is generally put. But that, to me, seems unproductive. This system that has evolved is intensely fascinating--that's why, after all, we're all "obsessed" with it. And that's interesting. So rather than (just) criticizing this, we should recognize it as a new form of entertainment. Or, rather, a new incarnation of a very old form.
Mass media did not invent entertainment, though previous forms of entertainment might not seem very, er, entertaining to a modern audience. The Reign of Terror, for instance, was a form of popular entertainment. So were the Lincoln-Douglas debates, which is why they lasted for three hours. (More bang for the buck!) These are momentous events that represent practices (public executions, public speaking) that reach far back into human history. Perhaps we should think of another ancient human behavior as entertainment: gossip. I'm not alone in suggesting this by any means, but I have a slightly different take on it. Whereas others think of it in terms of its effect on the people doing the gossiping (display of social status, strengthening bonds, enforcing norms, etc.), I'd like to discuss the things that gossip collectively creates. In other words, I'd like to talk about gossip as narrative.
Humans seem to have an inherent tendency toward narrative. We form stories out of the bits and pieces of our lives in order to make some sense of them--to figure out what caused us to get where we are, or to at least feel like we know what made us get here. This urge extends to other people. We get pleasure out of learning other people's stories because to have a glimpse into others' lives helps us make further sense of the world. This is clear in our consumption of pop culture, especially TV, but is also clear in longstanding traditions of oral history and folk stories and even, arguably, news reporting. These are all stories about lives lived.
The great advantage of gossip is that it structures true stories about others in a way most advantageous to pleasure. Because bits of gossip are things we're not supposed to know, they give us the thrill of the illicit as well as the clarity of a secret revealed. Moreover, because the story is being revealed in pieces, we get the sort of tension and release dynamic that structures most great narrative works. At first, we don't really know what's going on. A problem is introduced. Then, we get more information. Tension builds. What is going on? What is she going to do? Is he going to find out? And then, finally, there's a break and things are resolved--or, they're not, and we get to speculate endlessly about what happened in the perpetual glow of limitless possibility. The slow drip of information keeps us coming back for more, keeps us interested in these stories, keeps us engaged with those around us. I can't wait to see you again, we say to our informant, and our informant can't wait to see us, either.
This is precisely what's going on with modern-day celebrities. For all that paying attention to news about Britney feels illicit and wrong, we are ultimately doing nothing more than following someone's story, doled out teasingly in daily doses. Rather than sitting and passively having a story told to us, we are expected to figure it out for ourselves from fragments of news, from photos we have to decipher, from actions the main character didn't want us to know about. We process these and judge these and try and decide what kind of character we're dealing with. The phrase "soap opera" is intended as a kind of pejorative when applied to such cases, but it's entirely accurate. The fact that the story is about a non-fictional person ultimately matters little to the end-of-the line consumer who's following the gossip. All it does is make the whole thing less predictable, since real people don't always follow stock storylines, and give the events an extra charge of verisimilitude. And let's not moralize around the bush here about people being exploited. If you are a celebrity and don't want to be the subject of gossip, there is a simple solution: move out of LA. There aren't paparazzi in Ohio. Britney in particular is an interesting test case for this, since for all her problems, she seems to have a collaborative relationship with the media.
All reality shows did was serve as a factory floor for generating these sorts of stories about people's lives. The thing that makes something like America's Next Top Model a reality show, of course, isn't the competition aspect of it--that's just any old talent show. What makes it a reality show is the Real World element. By putting all the girls into a house and filming their interactions under the always-fraught conditions of communal living, producers are able to generate stories that they can then edit skillfully into compact narrative chunks. The gossip that would normally have to come from a secondary source is here related directly by the cameras that film the offending behavior. And each week, good reality shows are able to edit their material in order to make clear in viewers' minds what kind of character each contestant is.
But from the beginning, reality shows never limited themselves to the show itself. The first American reality show of the post-MTV era, Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire, was successful in no small part because of the "controversy" that erupted in the media after the show aired. The idea of the program (on Fox, natch) is that a bunch of women would compete to marry, sight unseen, a multi-millionaire who was watching on monitors in a hidden room. At the end of the show, he would pick one, and they would get married then and there. This is indeed what happened, but because of the setup, we ended up with very little information about the multi-millionaire in question, Rick Rockwell (whose name makes him sound like a character in a Marvel comic). Afterwards, however, we found out a number of things about Rockwell that were textbook examples of gossip, because they complicated the simplistic public image he'd tried to construct for himself. He had multiple restraining orders placed on him, and was probably an abuser. He was not actually a multi-millionaire, but just some guy that dabbled in real estate. And theirs was not a fairy-tale marriage, but one that was quickly annulled.
At the time, this seemed like a disaster for Fox, and commentators predicted that this would be the end of reality shows. In hindsight, we can see that it demonstrated just how potent reality shows can be. By promoting an unknown into the public eye, we're able to find out their story from scratch. Reality show participants are, in essence, each their own little novel (or maybe just short story), a new character whose life story we now get to hear. They might not be very good novels, but the best selling ones rarely are.
This, then, became the model for reality shows. Bad ones stayed self-contained, because no one cared enough about them to unearth dirt on the contestants. But good ones generated coverage simply as a result of being interesting. Since what was happening on the shows was essentially gossip to begin with, these external pieces of information just became part of the overall narrative. Again, this is a violation of Ellis' idea of the star system. The gossip wasn't working as contextual information to enhance our viewing of major motion pictures, but creating its own gestalt, its own story told in bits and pieces. But this is what the modern media is built on. Political campaigns work this way as surely as American Idol does. And, to be honest, I think it's pretty awesome. If we were more willing to be honest about what we found entertaining and to embrace this as a source of pleasure rather than a source of shame, we might be willing to endorse strategies that took pleasure as a positive force rather than a debased one.
Anyway, point being, if this is all second nature to you--if the construction of character through multiple streams that duplicate and build on existing information just seems like the way the media works--then Hannah Montana fits right in. Taking the show on its own, we have essentially a superhero narrative; taken in context with the identity issued detailed above, it's basically Keeping Up With the Kardashians, except less soul-destroying. There's a family on a show that's like a family in real life, and sometimes the family on the show/in real life does stuff like make albums or release, uh, movies. This isn't confusing, but elevating. Instead of sealing all these things off from each other behind characters and fourth walls, they're able to mix and mingle as they would in real life. This is ultimately the real power of gossip-based narrative: it tells a story like we would get it in real life. Each episode is a phone conversation, the gossip is what you hear from other people or see at the grocery store. We rarely find out life stories all in one gulp (except when we're drinking with strangers), but slowly, as they're lived. We have to get through a lot of banality to reach the dramatic high points. Not coincidentally, this is how the best fictional shows on TV construct their narratives as well (think Ugly Betty, or even more appropriately, Gossip Girl). Hannah Montana's real strength is that it does all this without ever calling attention to its constructedness or to its radical collapsing of information streams. It comes off as easy as breathing, as the most natural thing in the world, and to its young audience, it most assuredly is.
ADDENDUM: Two related things that I couldn't figure out how to work into the actual entry: this quote from Rebecca West, via Marc, and of course the whole microfame thing. There's more to be said about YouTube as a medium, but that's another post.
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 actually been since proven wrong. But before they were, the climactic speech seemed, well, a little too jingoistic:[5]
We're dicks! We're reckless, arrogant, stupid dicks. And the Film Actors Guild are pussies. And Kim Jong Il is an asshole. Pussies don't like dicks, because pussies get fucked by dicks. But dicks also fuck assholes: assholes that just want to shit on everything. Pussies may think they can deal with assholes their way. But the only thing that can fuck an asshole is a dick, with some balls. The problem with dicks is: they fuck too much or fuck when it isn't appropriate - and it takes a pussy to show them that. But sometimes, pussies can be so full of shit that they become assholes themselves... because pussies are an inch and half away from ass holes. I don't know much about this crazy, crazy world, but I do know this: If you don't let us fuck this asshole, we're going to have our dicks and pussies all covered in shit!
In restrospect, though, Trey and Stone have always been decidedly sympathetic to the left, even if they do criticize it[4], and in this post-Iraq world, that speech reads more like a corrective to the isolationist drift that the Bush doctrine has set liberals on. War's bad, sure, but so are genocides and civil wars and all sorts of things that we might be able to stop. As Madeline Albright said, if we're paying for this giant military, we should use it. Just because the current administration picked maybe the absolutely wrongest country possibile to intervene in doesn't mean that intervening in countries is bad, no more so than adding kimchee to strawberry shortcake means that kimchee is bad, and if we can accomplish the kind of things we did in Bosnia et al--well, if the dicks can do some good, what's wrong with a little fucking? It all depends on what you define as an asshole.
[1] The analysis of which was a watershed moment in structuralist criticism for me, at least as an eight-year old. I somehow never managed to crack the code of Scooby-Doo until I was well into my adulthood, which is super embarassing. [2] There's an odd tradition of long-lasting political humor that I've never quite understood. The most famous example is The First Family, a parody of the Kennedies released in 1962 that sold enough copies to be as ubiquitous as Journey and Frank Sinatra at garage sales and used record stores. Essentially, the things being made fun of are all as time-sensitive as, say, the astronaut who wore a diaper, but peeing-astronaut jokes are told on TV and then disappear, whereas Presidential humor gets enshrined on albums and DVDs. Maybe that's just because Presidents stick around so long and inevitably do a lot of things you can make fun of, but regardless, it's interesting. [3] In the 80s I guess this would be "like Alan Alda," which I only know from reading old comic strips and still don't really understand. [4] Conservatives who think South Park is on their side would seem to think making fun of liberals necessarily implies you're against, say, gay marriage, in which case all my friends should be fighting with each other a lot more. [5] And apparently endorsing the invasion of North Korea due to Kim Jong Il being a space alien.
Well, maybe less convergence and more "the two halves of a post actually coming together in real life." I.e. this plus this. What's worth talking about--although, for the record, I really had no idea that West Side Story was actually going to come up on Ugly Betty when I made my post comparing the two--is the way in which it worked, and how it was a new and different addition to the canon of great music usages in TV shows. It wasn't an "expressing the characters' inner lives" kinda thing, or a "directing the emotional mood of the scene" kinda thing, or an "ironic counterpoint" kinda thing. It was closest to the complicated dance (har har) that "Come Sail Away" does in the pilot of Freaks and Geeks (which there's a whole book to be written about), but that was more an instance of a song's different levels of emotional context playing out in and enhancing the visuals.
But this is more like when you smell cumin, and you're like, "ugh, smells like BO" and then you put it in something (hummus, roasted potatoes) and it makes it taste much more delicious, and you're like, "well, these potatoes are great, and maybe cumin isn't so bad after all." The song in question is "Somewhere" and the context (spoiler alert, obvs) is that Justin is singing it onstage in a school production as Hilda finds out from Betty that Santos, her fiancee and Justin's father, is dead. This sounds a bit cheesy, and it certainly had the capacity to be, especially considering that (as reviews have noted), Santos was far from a central character. Similarly, the song itself is close to the height of cheese, and not necessarily all that good; in the movie of West Side Story, it falls particularly flat, seeming to want to conjure a tragic sadness that's unearned by the drama or the characters.
The show seems to agree with that assessment to a certain degree, placing Justin within a realistically cheap-looking set and not giving him abilities beyond expectation, nor do they switch to a directly-delivered professional recording of the song as the camera switches focus to Betty and Hilda. The point is not the song itself but that Justin is singing it. When the news of Santos' death hits, the song suddenly earns its emotional impact and reveals itself as a lovely thing, even when delivered in an unperfect way; indeed, its unperfect delivery is a large part of its charm, since the emotional impact stems not from a melodramatic, heightened sense of loss, but an arbitrary and everyday one. At the same time, the conceivably familiar scene of someone finding out about a death is heightened by the fact that Justin is unknowingly singing a lament for his dead father. The affectedness of the song works as the only adequate way to convey a common but horrible loss, and by placing it in the middle of a realistically dingy school musical, the loss hits us as viewers in a way it couldn't otherwise. That ability to mix wonderful camp with the life that always surrounds them works here better than it does at any other point on the show so far, actually uniting the two by showing why that camp exists. It's a way of whistling past the graveyard, tragedy rehearsed so when it really comes, it feels familiar. The point is not that "Somewhere" is a great song or that Santos is dead; these things don't affect us. But the way it hits the characters, and the way it doesn't hit Justin yet, that gets to us, and that's why the moment works so stunningly well.
I always liked Ugly Betty, but when I realized that it was a primetime network TV show about gays, illegal immigrants, and trannies, I liked it even more. This might sound like I'm praising it for being subversive, but I'm not, in part because the idea of something in a non-DICTATOR'D! society being actually subversive is ludicrous.[1] To be subversive, you have to subvert something, and not only does almost nothing that's called subversive art-wise actually do that, but the fact that it's a definition based on effect makes it useless as a term of artistic classification: in an authoritarian society that outlawed anthropomorphic representations of food, Mayor McCheese would be a folk hero,[2] but that doesn't say a damn thing about the good Mayor. Intentionality and imagined reception are poor ways to describe, say, possible libertarian themes in a children's cartoon.
No, I like that it works with these elements without pretensions to novelty, and that by doing so it's actually done better than it could have otherwise. A brief recap before we go on: Betty is a Latino girl from Queens who's hired as an assistant to the publisher of Mode (i.e. Vogue) magazine, Daniel, because he keeps sleeping with his assistants and Betty is ostensibly ugly, in that she has braces and awesome glasses. Daniel is in a rivalry with both the Creative Director, played by Vanessa Williams, and his brother, Alex, who faked his own death and came back as a woman a few episodes ago. Alex is played by Rebecca Romijn; yes, the tranny is hot as hell. Betty's sister, Hilda, is a single mom, whose son, Justin, is gay gay gay gay gay,[3][4] and her father, Ignacio, turns out to be an illegal immigrant; he is currently fighting deportation to Mexico.
It's quite a collection (I haven't even mentioned the gay assistant or the designer who's a closeted straight that the female assistant who's not Betty started sleeping with) but it all happens in the context of a telenovela, which is what the show was in Columbia and is, kinda, here. A telenovela, of course, is in shorthand a "primetime soap opera," and it's this particular context that gives Ugly Betty the freedom to do the things it does. Telenovelas are legendarily stupid, if breathtakingly so (The Soup was covering one regularly, and their usual reaction to the clips was to gape), and so the implication is that they’re not taking anything they do very seriously; the melodrama is at such a high pitch (and, in the American version at least, it's self-aware enough to be happily camp at times) that sex change operations and statutory rape charges just seem like an everyday occurrence. Plot devices are generally not tragic.
And yet Ugly Betty deals with two of the most hot-button issues in the country right now, homosexuality and illegal immigration.[5] The fact that it hasn't attracted controversy is notable but not important, and possibly attributable to the show's focus on the non-gay, non-illegal, non-sexual Betty, which presents an implied moral/cultural superiority to the magazine culture and to their father's illegal status. (Although Papi has a very good excuse for not taking advantage of an earlier amnesty--he killed a man in old Mexico because he was abusing the woman Papi loved! Swoon!) What's important, I think, is that it deals with these issues without being either Very Special Episode moralizing or Brokeback Mountain pleas-for-tolerance Important Social Issue grandstanding.
They pull off this trick because it's a soap opera. [6] Soap operas are a part of your life, happening everyday, with continuous storylines and no particular importance to the beginnings and ends of episodes. They're like talking on the phone with someone everyday, catching up, no particular message, just "here's what's happening." And so these Big Issues become what they are for most of us: part of everyday life. Trannies gotta go to work too, and being an illegal immigrant isn't ostentatious government round-ups or diabolical plots hatched to take our jobs, it's meeting with government functionaries, paperwork at the kitchen table, trying to raise money for a lawyer--and then it's nothing, it's just there in the background and you're living your life with your family, like always, as long as you can be. Justin doesn't have some sort of fraught relationship with his mother that she has to come to terms with or he has to fight against; she takes him to Broadway shows and lets him go to fashion shoots, which is how you deal with your gay kid if you love him. In another show, the normalization of all these things would be depicted with a certain smugness, an air of "look, these things are normal!" But in a soap opera, nothing's normal, so something has to be really abnormal to be actually unusual, and all the other stuff just becomes part of the reality. A soap opera is a show that depicts a recognizable reality in which literally anything can happen: brain transplants, evil twins, men with eyepatches.
Ugly Betty takes this freedom and really runs with it, creating plots that are imaginative, funny, involving, playful, and entertaining. And by widening the cast of characters beyond the traditionally narrow scope of a soap opera--or any TV show, really--they're able to look at things like class and ambition in recognizable and insightful ways. It's purest example of television currently running, because it nails the essence of what's great about TV. I've never been able to nail down quite what that essence is--something about taking things seriously enough to know what not to take seriously, about being playful without being shallow, about using the need to entertain on a mass scale as an artistic goad rather than a limitation. By fully embracing (and fully understanding) the artificiality of their chosen medium, Ugly Betty's runners have made something more true--more demonstrably true, not I'm-being-contrary-and-9/11-was-beautiful-art true--than they would have made by being serious.
Which is why it's funny that I happened to catch West Side Story the other day. Here we have another filmed entertainment partially about the Latino experience in New York, one that clearly takes the whole thing much more seriously as an object of study, that wants to depict the plight of these people with sensitivity and understanding. And yet! The first time a putative Puerto Rickan--excuse me, Rican--appears on screen, it's hard to do anything but laugh, and not at the hijinx on offer. It's not Charlton Heston bad, but it's certainly giving ol' Chuck a run for his money. The quickest demonstration is simply to state that Natalie Wood plays the main Puerto Rican character, and they don't even bother with makeup for her. It's camp without trying to be, and that's not good, because it's trying to reach beyond the conventions of its form (whereas Ugly Betty plays happily within them) to something more like social realism, what with the ugly racism and the police oppression and the gritty urban setting, and in terms of realism, it's an utter failure. Viewed today, and AFI's opinion to the contrary, it's a laughably bad movie, with almost all the dialogue on a My Three Sons level, embarrassing effects, and the kind of acting that does its damdest to make musical theater unrespectable again.
And yet, it has arguably the best collection of songs of any musical ever written: "Maria," "Tonight," "America," "I Feel Pretty," and, if you swing that way, "Somewhere" and "One Hand, One Heart." Maybe Bernstein and Sondheim needed the inspiration of social realism and life-as-they-saw it (although that seems unlikely for Sondheim) to create such a mind-blowing batch of tunes. But it seems telling that the thing in West Side Story that comes close to expressing some sort of truth about life as it's lived is a song, "America."[7] In it, the men and women trade lines, with the woman making fun of the men for their complaints about their unjust treatment, and the whole thing ends in a romantic resolution, the tension released. It feels right: all the melodrama collapsed into mockery and the details of living interspersed with social commentary. I suppose it also helps that Rita Moreno is involved, but the fact is that a dance number by a white guy imitating Latin rhythms rang more true than all the earnest dialogue in the rest of the movie. The framework of the artificial gives us license to be inaccurate, and given that most of us are wrong most of the time, inaccurately is how we see the world, and therefore true. The artificial conjured into mass awareness creates its own little corner of reality, and that's why TV today matters as much as it does.
[1] Nor is it Ludicris. Or is it? Uh, he? Have I made this joke before? Is that subversive of my own project? [2] Thus joining the Hamburglar in the pantheon of populist idols. Property is theft, robble robble! [3] In one of the show's more touching moments, he performs the entirety of a musical on a stuck subway train, and when a fellow passenger tells him to stop, accompanied by a gay slur, Justin's estranged, butch father, who is uncomfortable with Justin's effeminate ways, nevertheless stands up for his son and faces down the tormenter, after which the entire train applauds and Justin continues performing the musical. I think this is what I'll tell people when they ask what New York is like from now on. [4] I just noticed the actor who plays Justin is named Mark Indelicato, which I find hilarious for some reason. [5] And I have my fingers crossed for Amanda, the assistant who's not Betty, to have an abortion next season, preferably performed by an Islamic Darwinist. Also, c'mon, we've all known Amandas, and they've all had abortions, and they're all fine. [6] There's a whole tangent here about the presence of soap opera elements in other shows; the one that springs immediately to mind is The X-Files, for some reason. Good thing? Bad thing? Discuss! [7] Which, were it in 4/4 time, would have stood as the hook for a Big Pun hit already.
Below is my EMP paper as it was originally presented, followed by a new afterwards.
"It Doesn't Matter Which You Heard": the Curious Cultural Journey of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah"
by Michael Barthel
Let me take you back to the long-ago time of mid-February, 2007. Popular emo band Fall Out Boy had the number one album in the country and, being a responsible music critic, I of course illegally downloaded it. As my train crossed the Manhattan Bridge, I reached track five on the album. And I heard this:
What they're singing there, aside from what I believe professionals call "twaddle," is the chorus of a Leonard Cohen song. This is mildly incredible. Twenty-five years ago, a character on the TV show The Young Ones named Neal--the hippie--said, "I'm beginning to feel like a Leonard Cohen record, cause nobody ever listens to me." Today, in contrast, one particular Leonard Cohen song is featured prominently in no less than three separate episodes of teen uberdrama The OC, and can be heard in at least twenty-four separate movies and TV episodes, almost always as the soundtrack to a montage of people being sad.
What I hope to show today is how, exactly, that happened to a song called "Hallelujah."
What's now considered the definitive version of this song is by dreamy, dead troubadour Jeff Buckley. (Some people are even under the impression that Buckley's cover is the original version.)
This is more like your uncle's band playing in a warehouse, assuming your uncle was weird and labored under the impression that he was a crooner. It passed into the public realm almost unnoticed, and remained that way for some time; in the major Cohen biography, published in 1996, there's no entry for the song in the index, despite the fact that the book's name is the same as the album on which "Hallelujah" originally appears.
It's a weird little song in this incarnation. Check out this sound. It's not sad--in fact, it's kinda funny. The entire performance is so hyperserious that it's almost satire. Certainly there's a healthy dose of irony here, especially in the sneeringly wry line "but you don't really care for music, do ya?" Cohen sings: "There's a blaze of light in every word, it doesn't matter which you heard, the holy or the broken Hallelujah," and the lyrics, far from being unremittingly dour, explore these different Hallelujahs—holy, broken, profane, transcendent.
On Cohen Live, an album recorded in part on a 1988 tour, Cohen radically revises the song. The tempo slows down drastically:
More importantly, Cohen adds three new verses. Whereas the original begins with some light musician humor, the new first verse ends with the line "it's a cold and a very broken Hallelujah." Combined with the slower tempo, the overall effect is considerably sadder.
At the same time, Cohen explores even more Hallelujahs: a verse containing the line "I remember when I moved in you" is unambiguously about sex, and the final verse --also the original's final verse, and the only verse they share--is defiant, coming as close to shouting as Leonard Cohen can while declaring "Even though it all went wrong, I'll stand right here before the lord of song with nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah."
John Cale's cover of "Hallelujah" for the 1991 tribute album I'm Your Fan clearly refers to this live version. Since Cale's cover dates from before the release of Cohen Live, Cale most likely saw Cohen perform this new version in person, on the 1988 tour from which that recording is taken. It's almost as radical a reworking of the song as Cohen's own.
Cale preceded the three new verses of the live version with the original first and second verses, while speeding up the tempo to the more natural andante of the original and simplifying the arrangement to just voice and piano. He also changes the last of the three new verses in small but important ways.
Where Cohen says "It's not a complaint," Cale says "it's not a cry." Cohen's "It's not the laughter of somebody who's seen the light" becomes just "It's not somebody who's seen the light." And finally, "It's a very lonely Halellujah" becomes "it's a broken Hallelujah." Where Cohen depicted bittersweet regret, Cale has utter despair: a complaint becomes a cry, laughter is gone, a shot that could miss becomes a murderous hit, and it's not just a lonely Hallelujah—it's a broken Hallelujah. Moreover, this verse now ends the song, taking the place of the I-will-survive statement Cohen used to end his versions.
And so when Jeff Buckley decided to cover "Hallelujah," he didn't really cover Cohen, he covered Cale; the form and lyrics of their versions match almost exactly, while none of the three previous versions (Cohen studio, Cohen live, Cale) match at all.
Musically, though, he slowed the tempo back down again, and let it float in a way that Cale's regular piano arpeggios didn't.
The effect was to flatten the song emotionally, to take out all the different Hallelujahs Cohen depicted and reduce them to one: the cold and broken, which appears here twice. Even the "you don't really care for music" dig sounds more wronged than cutting, and the sex is now the ecstasy of the brooding artiste, an image Cohen always seemed careful to subvert.
This simplification resulted in a torrent of covers. Following Buckley's version in 1994, we see a slow but steady increase, until it becomes a veritable tsunami around the turn of the century.
If Buckley was covering Cale, there's little doubt that almost all of these people were covering Buckley. And no one was really covering Cohen anymore.
It took a while longer, but Buckley's reductio ad despairium also inspired musical directors to include the songs in their filmed entertainments. Here's a list of all the usages.
And here's a graph showing the usages by year.
If we overlay that onto the graph of covers by year, we see that, while it took a while for TV and movies to catch up, they undoubtedly did.
The first significant use of the song in a soundtrack was, somewhat logically, Cale's version in Basquiat (1996), followed by, totally illogically, Cale again in Shrek (2001). While it seems clear that the gradual revision of the song is what made it appealing as a soundtrack device, it's also possible that when directors saw that the song was so potent, it could impart gravitas on a cartoon Ogre voiced by Mike Myers, it could make even the shallowest character seem tragic.
After these two uses of Cale in movies, the song, almost always Buckley's version, begins to pop up on television shows. The West Wing is the only usage in 2002, but in 2003 it was everywhere.
"Hallelujah" appeared in the fourth episode of Zach Braff's medical dramedy Scrubs, and twice in the first season of teen drama The OC, including an extremely prominent use in the finale. This established it, and it popped up regularly in every subsequent year, in numerous different versions, as artists like K.D. Lang and Rufus Wainwright recorded their own covers. (Wainwright's is nearly indistinguishable from Cale's, suggesting that perhaps Cale had begun to refuse usage requests and Wainwright was brought in as a ringer.)
Why was it used so frequently? Featurettes on the DVD sets of Scrubs and The OC talk about the music used on these shows, and the OC's creator, Josh Schwartz, says that "the music was going to be expressing the characters' inner lives." Why did they pick the music they did? Schwartz says that, for the first five or six episodes, "it was everything that was on my iPod"--echoing "Hallelujah"'s appeal as a personal discovery, a secret hidden in plain sight. Interestingly, though, they at no point in the featurette mention the song "Hallelujah," despite using it twice in the season they're ostensibly discussing, and once in the third episode, which is when Schwartz himself was soundtracking the show. Are they embarrassed about it? They shouldn't be. To say that using "Hallelujah" to express sadness is unoriginal is like saying a picture hanger using a level is unoriginal: the point is not novelty, but functionality. The damn thing just works so well, you'd be a fool not to use it.
The usage was so pervasive that, based on the numerous OC Mix CDs that were released, it seemed to inspire musicians to create their own soundalike songs, and to boost those artists who had already been working that sound. (This was the "indie rock boom" that the OC supposedly instigated, bringing sensitive-crooner bands like Death Cab For Cutie to fame and fortune.)
The most prominent example is Imogen Heap, someone who I, at least, had not heard of since a cassingle was mailed to me in 1998. But Heap's song "Hide and Seek" soundtracked the final moments of the OC's second season, the slot occupied a year before by a full rendition of Buckey's "Hallelujah." This pairing was so successful that, for the finale of season three, the final moments were accompanied, once again, by Heap, this time covering --and, to be clear, I am not shitting you--"Hallelujah." This is the point where the OC consumes itself whole, and it is a sickeningly gorgeous thing to watch.
(Incidentally, Heap is also a member of Frou Frou, a group who gained prominence by Zach Braff's including their song "Let Go" in his film Garden State, the other indie-boom instigator.)
What's fascinating about all this is not simply the song's ubiquity on TV dramas--it's that it's used in the exact same way every time. Songs can be used sincerely, ironically, as background shading, as subtle comment, as product placement. But "Hallelujah" always appears as people are being sad, quietly sitting and staring into space or ostentatiously crying, and always as a way of tying together the sadness of different characters in different places. In short, it's always used as part of a "sad montage."
Now, I could go into details about how exactly the "sad montage" is constituted, but it's more efficient and probably more effective just to show you a montage of the montages. You'll see what I mean.
The way Hallelujah is being used here is the auditory equivalent of a silent film actress pressing the back of her hand to her forehead to express despair—emotional shorthand. It's sometimes called a needledrop, and it's an element of visual grammar that signals the mood of the scene loudly and unmistakably. In the Scrubs musical featurette, creator Bill Lawrence says, "How are we gonna make a show where a lot of the comedy comes from broad, silly jokes switch gears on a dime and suddenly be dramatic? What we found is we were able to make that transition quickly if we chose the right song."
But it doesn't work if it's too explicit. That theatrical gesture of hand to forehead has no obvious connection to the emotion of despair, and neither does "Hallelujah." It gets used in scenes more obviously soundtracked with songs called, say, "We Are In a Hospital And Everyone is Dying Or Facing Difficult Choices." But that would be too explicitly about sadness, whereas the chorus of Cohen's song was designed to apply to a range of emotions—the different Hallelujahs. It can both reinforce and counterpoint.
If its use is becoming less common, that's because its overuse has erased the line-by-line, verse-by-verse meaning and replaced it with an overall feeling of sadness. You hear those opening chords now and the words hardly matter. The visual emotions it was used to counterpoint have overtaken the lyrical content. This is the nature of tools--they are imprinted by their materials--and there's nothing wrong with tools per se, but making a Matisse into a washcloth would erase some of the details, and Hallelujah's overuse has had a similar effect.
In twenty-five years, Leonard Cohen has gone from a punchline on a TV show to a sideways joke mixed with a tribute in Nirvana's "Pennyroyal Tea"--"give me a Leonard Cohen afterworld so I can sigh eternally"--to a totally serious starring role in a song by Fall Out Boy, a band not especially known for their irony. It seems like this has been accomplished by an emotional flattening--reducing a song about the varieties of grace to a mere lament. But this is not the only direction the song could have gone in. Something of Cohen's defiance, sensuality, and triumph could just as easily inform a cover. A cover such as this one:
This is the beauty of the pop song: it's an artistic hooker with a heart of gold, always willing to be used. It can become a tool, but a song isn't a Matisse—if it's used as a washcloth, just wring it out and it's good as new. We may call something the "definitive version," but it's not, not really. It's just the temporary consensus, a beautiful beach house built always within reach of the next great flood. There's a blaze of light in every word, it doesn't matter which you heard, and every song contains a thousand possibilities—or, at least, the great ones do. Hallelujah's place in the pantheon was assured only by the song's mutability; were it not open to change, it would have remained an ignored album cut. Instead, it went on to function as a performance standard, a perfect piece of visual grammar, and even a raw element of creation for an entirely new song. Among all those covers and all those montages, Fall Out Boy's reappropriation of Hallelujah is undoubtedly the most radical, interesting, and adventurous. It reminds us that if you disagree with the journey a song has taken, the original and all its revisions are always there, waiting to be born again.
(many, many thanks to Alta Price for helping with the video.) -
Afterward
The above is the as-presented version of the paper, which should probably be preserved for purposes of historical veracity and so on and so forth. ("Where did the tide finally turn against the evil that is Jeff Buckley?" future historians will no doubt ask, and I want to make sure they have the answer.) But there were a few points that I wanted to expand on, and a few comments I received before and after I delivered the paper that deserve addressing.
Mainly I will be playing off two things:
1) "Hallelujah's appeal as a personal discovery, a secret hidden in plain sight." 2) "the 'indie rock boom' that the OC supposedly instigated"
The influence of Buckley's version is especially strong here in Norway. Not only does buying his Grace album seem to have become some kind of rite of passage for the average University student, it also seems to be the one record that every non-record buying person owns. Last year, a group consisting of two ex-Norwegian Idol contestants, a one-time Prince-wannabe turned producer, and a fourth guy recorded a live version of 'Hallelujah' based on Buckley's - taking turns singing the verses. The subsequent record named after the song went on to become the biggest selling album in Norway last year - almost solely on the strength of 'Hallelujah.'
While, as I say above, the song's popularity as a soundtrack device seems to be winding down, the song itself is more popular than ever. Why is that?
Musically, I am almost certain I once wrote a whole dissection of the song, which I of course cannot find at the present time. Nevertheless, the gist was that Cohen et al employ a fairly classic chord progression (in my cover the bassline during the verse is meant to evoke the doo-wop songs that also used this shift), but then instead of trying to disguise it or merely riding it, Cohen calls attention to not only the chords he's using, but their very commonality: "the minor fall, the major lift." Note the definite article there--it's not just some sort of minor chord, it's the iconic minor fall, which it pretty much is; you can find this progression, in the abstract, in all sorts of pop songs. By calling it out, he both makes you aware of its pop status while simultaneously apologizing for it and mythologizing it as not just chords, but a sort of Biblical imperative. But then, when he gets to "composing," there's an atypical chord, an E major, that doesn't fit in the C major key we've been in so far, and this is the little bit of novelty that turns the song from the pop of restatement to just pop. This ability to turn the common into the timeless while leavening it with something to set it apart is a big part of the song's appeal.
The non-musical appeal of "Hallelujah," though, must be understood in the context of generations X and Y, who are the ones responsible for the song's canonization. The people for whom Cohen's song (in Buckley's version) is a generational touchstone are not the people who consider other Cohen songs, like "Suzanne" and "Bird on a Wire," generational touchstones. They're not Cohen's original audience, and are unlikely to have paid much attention to a weird synth-crooner album by an old folkie when it came out in 1985. And so for them, it was something always existing, way out there in an area they wouldn't usually venture; an object to be discovered.
However you come to the song, it's got an aura around it. If it's through Buckley, well, he's this beautiful dead boy with an apparently "ethereal" voice, and he's singing this song that sounds like a long-ago thing. Cohen himself is distant enough at this point to be symbolically equivalent to an old blues guy: mysterious, wise, world-weary. Buckley's martyrdom cleanses him of the "dude with a guitar who signed to a major label in the 90s" status, and Cohen, cheesy though he may be at times, comes from the pre-corporate past of the music industry, and is untainted by its commercialism.
This is all awfully contextual, though. What about the song itself? The religious imagery and language should be a hindrance among the sensitive college students (and, as mentioned in the quote above, the secular-humanist Europeans) who make up the song's fanbase. But, certain acquaintances' "Christians are fucking weird" attitudes to the contrary, the Bible has an enduring appeal to millions of people, for whatever reason, and no matter how sensitive a college student you are, the thing can still work its magic. (Like vegetarians really wanting a steak every once in a while--doesn't mean you’re a meat-eater again, just that people who love it aren't fools, after all, just bad people.) Shorn of the offensive trappings, old time religion looks pretty awesome, and indeed people who like Jeff Buckley also like the idea of fire-and-brimstone preachers and dilapidated churches and gospel choirs. Unfortunately, actual gospel music doesn't shed those trappings. It tends toward the cheesy rather than the "earthy," and the words seem more interested in talking about how great Jesus is than in exploring the mysteries of faith or making Moses jokes.
"Hallelujah," though, offers all those great, resonant Biblical signifiers and intense religious emotions without the proselytizing or the attempt at a modern updating. Spiritually, it keeps things at a nice distance and doesn't ask too much. In Cohen's hands, this makes sense, since it's explicitly a literary exploration into an alien culture. And for Buckley, it works as a signifier of depth, allowing him to take on the symbols of an old country preacher, in keeping with his attraction to Sufi mysticism: whirling dervishes are nothing if not pentecostal. In sum, "Hallelujah" is able to function as a kind of accessible gospel music, smart and beautiful and allusive to classic themes without demanding any kind of actual faith or any translation from evangelicalese. It presents the emotional experience of religion shorn of the cultural barriers.
And this particular--and particularly amazing--trick is a big part of why, no matter how it comes to you, "Hallelujah" always manages to seem like a discovery. It can pass through a thousand corporate paws and be marked by them all, arriving at its destination in the form of a TV show or a mass-market major-label CD or a bunch of pop idols. The song is just so strange--so alien, so smart, so densely packed with signifiers--that it doesn't seem possible that it's actually part of mainstream culture, no matter how much mainstream culture embraces it. Clive Davis himself could hand it to you, but this would just seem like evidence of Clive's human side rather than another slime-dripping part of the corrupt music industry. Its strange incursion of Biblical poetry (as well as, to be honest, Buckley's unusual guitar work, curse him) seems like nothing more than an anomaly. It's the Teflon song.
And this is why it's interesting that it popped up so many times in The OC. Once is just, as I say, a tool, something you whip out to enhance a mood, but generally you can only use it once without it ceasing to be a tool and starting to be a character, or at least a symbol of something. The fact that The OC used a song immune to the appearance of co-option so many times means something--it meant that a network TV show was trying for legitimacy. This is both unusual and seemingly nonsensical--even shows that achieved some sort of genuine subcultural capital like Saturday Night Live or David Letterman didn't feel the need to defend or generate cred, since the shows themselves were the sources of credibility--the writing and the performances, in other words, not the accoutrements. But The OC was clearly concerned with this, a fact demonstrated most ably by their apparently sincere championing of Death Cab for Cutie, who were on Sub Pop and had a ridiculous name and were thus quite credible. Much of the show concerned the awakening of Seth Cohen, an unreconstructed geek character (comic books, unpopularity, social awkwardness, intelligence, embarrassing bedroom accessories) who suddenly found himself inching towards coolness, and this was the character championing Death Cab. The use of "Hallelujah" here was like wrapping a strange new vegetable in bacon: you know this is good/true/right, so why not try what goes along with it?
The song had a different meaning every time it was used. The second and third times it was notable for the repetition and referred to all previous uses--number two (on the season 1 finale) was "OK, we have come into our own" and number three, when Marissa died at the end of season 3, was a completing-the-cycle thing--but that first usage made The OC what it was, like the thread of saffron that turns rice and seafood into paella. There's the cliché as banality, like in Scrubs, fulfilling its role precisely and simply echoing what's around it, the very heightening it performs becoming workaday in its predictability and obviousness. And then there is the cliché as element of transcendent over-the-topness, when there are so many iconic elements that the cliché makes it an identifiable context and ties everything together.
The first time "Hallelujah" appears on The OC, the situation is as follows: on his last night in town, a good-hearted but troubled wrong-side-of-the-tracks kid who's in a fish-out-of-water situation has been visited by a all-wrong-for-him skinny blonde rich girl who's defying her parents by professing her feelings for him, but he turns her down in an act of noble self-sacrifice only to have the rich-kid boyfriend pull up in a jeep and start a fight, and then the house he's in catches on fire. Through all this, "Hallelujah" plays. This willingness to go for the jugular so quickly and so shamelessly is one of the many reasons the OC was so great, and also, not coincidentally, why it wasn't so great for the next two seasons.
To put it another way, it was Casablanca, at least as Umberto Eco described it:
When all the archetypes burst in shamelessly, we reach Homeric depths. Two clichés make us laugh. A hundred clichés move us. For we sense dimly that the clichés are talking among themselves, and celebrating a reunion. Just as the height of pain may encounter sensual pleasure, and the height of perversion border on mystical energy, so too the height of banality allows us to catch a glimpse of the sublime. Something has spoken in place of the director. If nothing else, it is a phenomenon worthy of awe.
What's interesting about The OC was that there was a particular specificity to some of the clichés. Seth Cohen, for instance, was both a stereotypical social outcast character and a character actually stolen, along with the actor, from another show--Adam Brody, who played Seth, played an almost identical character on the show Gilmore Girls. (There is an entire paper to be written about the Gilmore Girls teen-drama diaspora, what with all of Rory's boyfriends that have gotten their own shows.) This brings up some interesting issues about art's tendency toward referentiality also being a tendency toward clichés as building blocks, and if this might not cause us to reconsider the merits and uses of both, but more importantly it shows just how densely packed The OC was as a TV show. It was essentially an intensification and acceleration of everything about the established genre of teen dramas, and as such, it acted as a center of gravity to attract all sorts of new things, like, I suppose, Andy Warhol. (The CW = The Factory.) Like in cooking or geology, its density created something new, and novelty creates more novelty, so the things that attached themselves to the show by the time it ended earlier this year could serve as a checklist for the tenor of our times. This acceleration and concentration was, as I say, a good thing for the first season and a bad thing for the next two, when the show felt decidedly burnt out. This served as an object lesson for just why teen dramas don't go to such heights, and subsequent shows have not really approached its pace, perhaps wisely. The OC is important as social history because of its compact evocation of the decade it helped soundtrack, but important as art in the same way opera is: ridiculous in its scope and occasionally breathtaking in its beauty.
Its status as cultural big-bang helps explain why The OC served as year zero for the indie-rock boom. But it's also a big part of why it was dead in the water before it even began. The 00s indie boom and the 90s indie boom, which we also call grunge, were qualitatively different. Nirvana appeared as a separately-constituted incursion, a band of a piece making its way into the mainstream, whereas the most recent boom came through the debased form of network TV (or, to a lesser degree, movie soundtracks). Hackles were raised from the start, but the products of the boom still maintained their credibility, which raised even more hackles. The problem seemed to be that instead of having whole albums you could buy and shows you could go to and bands you could support, now there were singles you could download and soundtracks you could buy, clothes you could wear to signal your sympathy that were, unlike grunge, not really all that different from what people already seemed to be wearing. It was not an activity but an accompaniment--not something you listened to but something you watched other people listening to. In other words, it's lifestyle music.
But what's wrong with that? All sorts of styles have served as lifestyle music in the past without it debasing the styles themselves, from crooners to bebop to bossa nova to R&B to dance; hell, even Kanye West recognizes that Talib Kweli is something you play primarily to get girls to have sex with you, which is I guess the definition of lifestyle music.
Still, as I say, "Hallelujah" is a weird fucking song (and "Death Cab for Cutie" is a weird name for a band), and whether in Buckley's version or Cohen's version, it does not seem like it would function in the same way that something like, say, Johnny Mathis or Gilberto Gil does. And yet it does. How? Well, the short answer would be "the 90s," but there's also the fact that Jeff Buckley kinda sounds like Johnny Mathis, and that another name for indie is "college rock," which admits its lifestyle status right in its name. Essentially, no matter how hard it may struggle against it, any genre achieving some sort of mainstream popularity is inevitably brought to a fully commodified state, as indie clearly has become given that no one really uses the term "sellout" anymore.
But wasn't the whole point of the 90s that things shouldn't be commodified, especially culture? Wasn't the rule that you picked hot emotion over cool style, grit over lifestyle, ethics over aesthetics? How did the tide turn so completely? To put it simply, the 90s ended, and when we all looked back, we realized that we were being ridiculous. It's all style in the end; a flannel from JC Penny's is indistinguishable from a vintage flannel after a few wash cycles, and we don't therefore conclude that the style of dress doesn't matter, but that the point of origin doesn't. These songs we were being so precious about served essentially the same purpose as clothes do: to express our true inner selves. In other words, they were, like clothes, just tools of expression. We couldn't really use music to feel or seem cool, because it's just music, and instead saw it worked best as a way of quickly expressing what we are truly feeling: I am sad, so I am playing a sad song; I am horny, so here are so slow jams. And this, of course, is exactly how "Hallelujah" is used on TV. It expresses my inner life as surely as it expresses that of Seth Cohen, and that's amazing: the way art uses it is the way we use it, which is true for very few things.
The fact that aesthetics won is indicative of how the 90s lost. By focusing their moral and political critiques on aesthetic forms, they guaranteed morality and politics would be subsumed by aesthetics. If authenticity is merely a stylistic choice, then how could it matter very much? Seriously applying political issues to music inevitably trivializes them, and indeed, here were are in the apolitical present.
Jeff Buckley had to reach back to an artist of the 60s to touch the kind of consensus that "Hallelujah" has generated and maintained; nothing escaped the 90s similarly unscathed except Sleater-Kinney and Biggie. When we demand purity of our art, all art is inevitably impure, and possibilities are closed off; when we recognize the beauty of ambiguity, as in "Hallelujah," a universe opens up.
Lately, people have been complaining about House. They say it's gotten formulaic, and that a half-season story arc about House being hounded by a detective for drug charges came to nothing. (For those unfamiliar with the show, it's about a diagnostician named Dr. Gregory House, who is brilliant, acerbic, and unsentimental. He has a leg injury, walks with a cane, and pops painkillers constantly. He has a team of three attractive young doctors, a best friend named Wilson, played by the guy from Dead Poets Society, and a sparring partner of a hospital administrator named Cutty. British comic actor Hugh Laurie plays House with an American accent; it's not a particularly comic show, although its comic moments are probably its best.)
The main complaint concerns the fact that every episode goes roughly the same way. A patient comes in with some mysterious disorder, the team misdiagnoses it, everything looks lost, then House has a revelation and realizes what the problem is. This is true. But if you're watching television for formal innovation, you're going to be regularly disappointed. Form must, by necessity, be formulaic for most TV shows, given uniform length restrictions and hectic production schedules that leave writers little opportunity to reinvent the wheel on a week-to-week basis. Even on shows that played with form, like Seinfeld and Arrested Development, played with form in roughly the same way each time. The pleasure in seeing multiple strands come together in Arrested Development wasn't the coming-together but the parts themselves, and admiring, once again, what a good trick the writers had pulled.
Television is like pop music in that the enjoyment comes from the execution rather than the conception. Sure, individual show concepts can be grabby, but ultimately it's just a gimmick--if the show is successful, that grabby concept is going to get ridden into the ground. What matters, then, is not the fact that a rabbit is being pulled from a hat, because we all saw that coming as soon as a hat made an appearance, but what color the hat is, what the stage patter concerns, if it's maybe a marmot instead of a rabbit. Like pop, the form is relatively fixed, because the form is nearly perfect and extraordinarily successful. What you do within those confines is what matters, and the unavoidable confines of a television show are episodes.
In this realm, House has excelled. Memorable recent episodes include one about a girl whose dwarfism turns out to be treatable and her dwarf mother has to decide whether to encourage her to be normal or let her stay within the community she's been raised in, and in the process manages to both address issues of minority rights and make a bunch of great midget jokes.[1] Another ended up essentially legitimizing the gypsy way of life as being pro-family. Another was a genuinely gripping mystery, one that I was able to watch in reruns without remembering what the solution was. And yeah, they all followed the arc described two paragraphs back, but aside from always solving the case, each did very different things. It's a frame for comedy, drama, or both, and it wraps up in 53 minutes, a tasty little one-act (in, uh, 6 acts, if you believe TV writers).
While all this was going on, as I say, there was this whole other story about a cop who arrested House, House was a jerk to him, now he wants to bust House for narcotics possession, etc. etc. It could have been interesting if it didn't pound quite so relentlessly on the go-to themes for the show, which have admittedly worn a bit thin by now: is House's jerkiness a bad thing (no, the patients never seem to complain), is his domineering conviction that he's always right harmful (it pretty much never is, and you'd think he'd have the track record to convince everyone of that by now), are attitudes about pain medication misguided (yes, yes), is his team loyal to him or are they disturbed enough by his erratic behavior to turn him in (once or twice, but generally, no). These all seemed settled issues, and so they were weird things to hang a continuing story around.[2] The writers clearly did so in response to concerns that the series had grown stale, and so they naturally went down the sure-fire path to critical love: the multi-episode story arc.
Taken from a distance, multi-episode story arcs are a good thing. HBO has built its brand around shows with episodes that don't describe a complete circle, instead leaving stories unfinished and placing resolution in unexpected places and with great emotional payoff. On network TV, you think, of course, of Twin Peaks, the grandaddy of them all, but also of something like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, especially the season where Buffy started dating Angel only to see him turn evil once they had sex.[3] And The X-Files' overarching story of conspiracy added layers of depth and greater meaning to a show superficially one step above Alien Autopsy.[4] Today, the form flourishes, with shows like Lost, Heroes, and Veronica Mars drawing audiences and critical acclaim by drawing a story out over the course of a season.
But, although it seems daring, requiring more foresight and allowing for more thematic resonance than single-episode stories, we can clearly see it as problematic. For one thing, it's such a major investment that it can kill an otherwise-good show. Twin Peaks is the classic example of this. By tying itself to a longer story that would require changing the status quo upon its conclusion, it raised the stakes higher than was really healthy, and the focus on the longer story made people miss the great individual episodes that not only followed the murder mystery, but those that were included in it. X-Files got so tied up in a conspiracy story it couldn't actually explain, partially because they knew they might then lose their audience a la Twin Peaks and partially because they had no fucking idea what they were talking about beyond "suspiiiiiicious," that it lost the ability to tell good, self-contained stories. Buffy dedicated itself to season-long "big bad" arcs productively for a while, but by the end the stakes had been raised so high with the world almost ending and ultimate evils and so forth that another episode in which they went and killed some vampires seemed meaningless.[5]
Clearly, too, it can be a crutch. By starting a story but dealing out plot details very slowly, writers know viewers will tune in every week just to see how the longer story is advanced, and so as long as that happens (OMG they kissed, what's that thing over there, a shaky shot of someone on the telephone) the actual episode can be crap.[6]
These problems would be less severe were we operating under a different system. These models can work well under the British model because shows have much shorter seasons and definite ending points. You can raise the stakes or promise a resolution or have a plot that makes sense, because you're not going to have to draw it out for 22 episodes a year, for as many years as you can continue to make money off it. You never know when the end is coming, and so things have a tendency to peter out. Maybe we should start injuring more TV writers' knees so they can retire at their peak like football players are doing now.
Coulda, woulda, shoulda. Point it, we're not operating under the British system. We're operating under the American system, and hell, if it was good enough to culturally colonize the whole damn world, it should be good enough for you, buster. We just need to be a little more aware of the particular charms of episodic television.
For illustration, consider the recent clip from the Craig Ferguson show on YouTube (here). It's a 12-minute monologue explaining that he's not going to make fun of Britney Spears for shaving her head. This is because he recognizes his own 20-year-old alcoholic behavior in Britney, and so he recognizes that she needs to get help. This may sound preachy, but it practice it's remarkable, richly detailed and full of emotional twists and turns that throw you from comic to serious. In other words, it's a good story, and apparently, a shitload of people have watched it. But before the technology changed, before YouTube and DVDs, the only people that would have seen it would be that night's viewers, and even many of these would have been making a snack, or dozing off, or having sex. They wouldn't have watched it with the attention you give to something being presented as uniquely worthy of your time, as we do every time we click a YouTube link.[7] Maybe it would've come out on a compilation 12 minutes later, or maybe it would've gotten passed around a small circle of people as a bootleg VCR tape, but probably not--it is a 12-minute monologue about Britney Spears by a late-night talk-show host. It would have gone unremembered. Before the internet and video recording, once a moment was broadcast over the air, it was more or less gone forever--or, at least, there was no reliable way for a viewer to recapture it.
The structure of the episode was television's way of dealing with the blink-and-you-missed-it conundrum. By taking those memorable moments and injecting them into multiple broadcasts, you could be reasonably sure that an audience would catch it, and thus catch on to the program. TV faced the problem of each week being a new performance that would be gone as soon as it happened, like theater, but without theater's idea of a "run." You got one shot at things, because next week you had to be on to something else. So by retaining certain elements, TV was able to be inclusive, to give everyone similar experiences even if you weren't able to make it to a particular broadcast. And by doing so, it was able to discover quite clearly what worked and what didn't, while simultaneously acclimating its viewers to the conventions of a new medium. In short, the episodic nature of television was its institutional memory. The laugh track is the old guy in the mailroom who knows what the notations on old files mean; the wacky neighbor is your great-uncle who knows the family tree by heart. It creates a throughline to the future that now extends into the past.
Of course, this sounds like a bad thing, with its repetition and its codification and its normalization. But as all commercial art does, through compromise and limits it evolved strategies to make art work under restrictive circumstances, and in doing so created a supple form. In a way, TV episodes are like little rituals. Sure, rituals can be empty, there only for the sake of convention, and even when they're meaningful they only confirm things--but they confirm different things, and sometimes a ritual, properly invoked, can cause change.[8] With the reassuring base of formula, you can say whatever you want.
[1] It also provides an interesting contrast with another show that's excelled on an episode-by-episode basis lately: Boston Legal. The actress who plays the dwarf on House, Meredith Eaton, also plays a lawyer and Shatner love interest on the legal thriller, but where House bonds with the dwarf on the basis of being an outsider, on Boston Legal she's almost aggressively sexualized, but not in an exotic way. Among tall, leggy blondes, she's the sexpot. She's the normal one. [2] There was one interesting element: the cop put a lien on Wilson's bank account and invalidated his license to prescribe medication, thus pretty much ruining his life. But this never really paid off. The cop's megalomania went largely unexplored, and after a bitter confrontation and Wilson eventually turning House in, essentially nothing changed. They're still friends, Wilson's got his life back. This would seem to indicate that the show wasn't ready to make the kind of changes a multi-episode story arc requires be at least nominally at stake. [3] Tell me about it! [4] It also gave the show enough legs to allow for some truly fantastic episodes, especially the Cher one. X-Files is arguably the progenitor of the modern extended-story series: try and imagine 24 or Lost without it. [5] You'll notice that the whole idea of "jumping the shark" doesn't have to do with a show repeating itself, but with a show changing, by altering the status quo in ways that are stupid. Call it the Poochie Principal--a show never really dies by staying the same. [6] Sadly, at this point I think we can safely term it "Gilmore Girls syndrome." [7] Almost always in error, but we keep trying anyway. [8] This is how The Simpsons permanently changed TV comedy.
- TV reminds me of probably the best argument for House's continued excellence: next week's episode features Dave Matthews playing a guy with brain damage. Allow me to repeat that. Next week, we will be able to turn on our television sets and see Dave Matthews, South African-born songwriter of such tunes as "Ants Marching," playing--and one can only assume he does so convincingly--a man with brain damage. Mmm.
- This bolsters another thing TV told me tonight, or more specifically Walter Mossberg, personal technology reporter for the Wall Street Journal, told me. Walter Mossberg says that TV critics say that we are currently in a golden age for television. I don't know who he's talking about, and I am suspicious given his claim to only watch things broadcast in high-definition, but I suspect those apocryphal TV critics are right. As far as I can tell, it's the only golden age we're living through right now, so enjoy it!
The phrase "punk in spirit" has become a cliche, which means we now know what's true and what's untrue about it. It's true insofar as it nails a worldview, one which can be roughly described as "gleefully pissing people off from an assumed position of weakness." This used to be associated with the word "rock," but then actual rock music got too big and unwieldy. Punk did the world the favor of staying pretty much what it was from the start, and so it can still be used to describe this attitude without conjuring things rock now does like "self-seriousness," "what your parents listen to," and "Journey." The "punk" attitude is, and has been (thanks, Greil Marcus!) evident in any number of artistic, social, and political endeavors throughout the ages, and so a term we can use to more properly categorize those things, and presumably to make it easier for others to adopt that worldview, is to be applauded.
At the same time, punk is still a definite genre of music that you can listen to--a genre featuring songs with the name of the genre in the lyrics, which is a pretty good sign the genre is well-defined--and so while you can argue that, say, Beethoven was "punk in spirit"[1], his music did not prominently feature electric guitars playing two strings in the interval of a fifth in an eighth-note pattern with drums playing a straight 4/4 rhythm with kick on the 1 and 3 and snare on the 2 and 4 and electric bass playing eighth notes in the root of the chord and a singer yowling about unfairness.[2] So calling something or someone "punk in spirit" requires ignoring the art, since the art isn't usually punk, and focusing entirely on social concerns[3], or else looking like a dingus. Alternately, because "punk in spirit" has a positive connotation, it gets planted on things as a way of not just saying "this is good," but what looks punk is merely cluelessness, or stupidity, or jerkiness. You can be an asshole and be punk in spirit, but you can't just be an asshole.
If this has been helpful, then, what other genre offshoots might be useful in ordering the world? Punk itself offers some alluring possibilities, and indeed, a number of its descendents have already staked their claim to a sensibility above and beyond their songs: straightedge, emo, indie. Ah, but what about punk's poor retarded brother? What about hardcore?
The hardcore sensibility is nowhere near as attractive as punk. Hardcore is punk played as quickly as possible, with a speed that kills nuance and anything that was fun or lighthearted, making something that could be about disgust or love or anger or confusion or joy into something consisting solely of rage and violence. In this sense, the most hardcore thing on the planet is Dick Cheney, but something else springs to mind. Sarah Silverman.
In her past work and on her new show, Sarah Silverman has been primarily known for saying things that offend people. Please note that this is different from "being offensive": she was chided for saying "chink" on a talk show, and Joe Franklin sued her for saying "Joe Franklin raped me." She was clearly trying to be offensive when she did these things, but she actually succeeded in demonstrably offending people. Being offensive is not the only thing that she does (she also makes fun of privileged white people by portraying one utterly oblivious to her status as such, without ever breaking character), but it's at the core, and this seems hardcore in spirit to me. Punk was certainly offensive at times, but while it did things that were seen as abnormal, it rarely did things that were actually taboo, except as superficial trappings (i.e. early punk's whole Nazi fixation). Punk is passive in its repulsion--I am wearing spikes, if you get near me you may get poked. But hardcore is active: you are at this show and I am going to punch you in the face. But maybe you like getting punched in the face. Maybe you like seeing a hot girl say "chink." It's not just hardcore-punk in spirit, it's hardcore-porn, too. Both provide an illicit thrill by gleefully depicting the forbidden and readily admitting that this is what they are doing, and Silverman does a good job on her show of drawing your gaze and arousing your prurient interest in the way many TV shows do, but then punishing you for that, repulsing you and throwing you back out. In both porn and comedy, there's a certain pleasure to that.
Not too much pleasure, though. I think that if you laugh at everything Sarah Silverman says you're probably a bad person, and that seems intentional. You're being baited, allowed to see exactly what it is you will and won't laugh at. From the point of view of a TV program, this doesn't seem to make sense. Why would you want to include jokes that only a sociopath would enjoy? But from a hardcore perspective, it's only natural. Hardcore is about lashing out at a corrupt world through self-mortification, taking every opportunity to inflict pain because it's the only way of getting out the anger you feel inside. It springs from the assumption that everything, including you and me, is fucked up, and the only reason people don't say fucked-up things is because they're unable to admit how fucked-up they are, so to come clean about your own complicity in the world's debased state is to let fly with all the fucked-upedness that's inside you. "We're all racists, at least I'm being honest about it." Where punk offers inclusion for anyone abnormal (the spikes are for sale!), hardcore wants to restrict, and having seen the problem punk had in doing this, it chose to express its sensibility in such an extreme way that only those who truly identify it will take it on. There are no part-time hardcore punks. Watching The Sarah Silverman Program is like watching a pit from a distance: you're safe, and it's interesting, but those people in there are sure beating the fuck out of each other.
If it's hardcore in spirit, though, what is it in action? What's the name for what's being done? The obvious one is "transgression," but, almost exactly like "punk in spirit," that's problematic, because it has such a highly positive connotation. MLK transgressed against the mores of white society; Joan of Arc transgressed against sexism; even fucking car commercials tell you to transgress now.
This wouldn't be as big a problem if transgression weren't so easy. For instance, I could go right now and poop in my sink. That would certainly be transgressive, since I'm not supposed to. Lord knows my girlfriend would be displeased.[4] But it wouldn't mean anything, and it wouldn't accomplish anything other than filling my sink up with poop.[5] There are lots of rules and conventions, because there have to be, and you can always pick one and transgress against it. But it will almost certainly be unimportant, and since transgression is supposed to mean something, what do you call pooping in a sink?
This is even a problem with transgressors who have movies made about them. According to Quills, the Marquis de Sade was a champion of free speech, but if you actually read what he wrote, he just seems like a pervy spectrum kid. He didn't seem to be trying to accomplish anything with his smut, he just seemed to really, really enjoy writing about fucking. Over and over and over again. To the point of tedium.
All of which is a long way of saying that I'm ducking the question and going with "conservative" instead.[6] Why conservative? Well, certainly it's difficult to think of a musical genre more conservative than hardcore punk. While punk has actually changed its sound to a certain degree, from the Ramones to the Sex Pistols to California punk, hardcore hasn't. You pick up a random hardcore album from 2006 and it will sound exactly like a random hardcore album from 1996. Certainly hardcore has spawned productive offshoots, like sludge and emocore, but those were created specifically because hardcore as a genre couldn't accommodate any changes, and that's the definition of conservative. (Which is why non-teenagers still involved with hardcore are so creepy, as Jessica Hopper has pointed out.)
So is Sarah Silverman conservative? Ah, there's the debate. Because you will be uncomfortable with something she says unless you're a bad person, and because she doesn’t come out and tell you that she's making fun of middle-class white people by portraying such a deadly caricature of one, people think that she's the kind of conservative who's "punk in spirit," i.e. the ones who are holding a "find the illegal immigrant" game at NYU right now. Saying these offensive things, the theory goes, doesn't point out people's prejudices, but simply reinforces them, while in the process hurting people. The ol' laughing-at or laughing-with. The problem, though, doesn't seem to be what she's doing so much as the nature of comedy itself.
A deadly serious, violent thing like hardcore gets translated into playful, light comedy because in both, lies are not allowed. In comedy, the impulse is always to mock that which you think to be untrue, and so if someone gives you an untrue thing to say, you'll either mock it or give an unconvincing performance. And since professional comedians insist that the only purpose of comedy is to be funny, then lying is bad comedy.
This presents a problem to deal with. Comedy says it's not interested in meaning, but that's what we deal with as critics. By focusing purely on aesthetics, i.e. the laugh, it walls itself off from certain dangerous criticisms--i.e. it doesn't matter if something is offensive unless it's so offensive it's not funny--instead of addressing them and dealing with them, as I think it could. But it regards critical acceptance as failure, because that means you've followed the rules. This can be result in a richly rewarding constant negotiation between pleasure and repulsion, but it can also mean stagnation. And comedy right now does feel a little conservative.
Nowhere is it more so, though, than Fox News' new Daily Show rip-off. It's called The Half Hour News Hour, and, to continue with the musical metaphors, it is undoubtedly Christian rock. Both seek to appeal to a particular segment of the population by taking something popular and making it accessible to that population, while missing the point that their sources weren't seeking to appeal to a particular segment of the population, they were seeking to be good. And naturally, it's not. Because it imposes limitations on the content--rather than the form, as genres do--it feels half-baked, like it's not telling us something. Like it's lying, in other words, and insofar as they seem to be consciously refusing to make possible jokes about Republicans, they are. This is one time when comedy's laughs-for-laughs-sake dictum seems to justify itself.
The unavoidable relationship of hardcore and conservative is one of the hobgoblins of politics. The people who most fully embody a worldview are thought to be the extremists, but extremists are also the least likely to change their minds or compromise, and democratic politics can't happen without those things; if everyone was pure in their beliefs, nothing would get done. Comedy is said to be apolitical because it doesn't have a pure belief system, but if that's true, then it functions in the center, and that's where politics happens. From this perspective, going hardcore, as Sarah Silverman does, is a radical act, but like most radical acts, if it keeps happening, it'll just become conservative again. It's a problem, and while I'm sure comedy will deal with it, I can't help but wonder how. Hopefully not through moshing.
[1] He wasn't; he was romantic, which is a whole different thing. In fact, the difference between punk and romantic is pretty much the definition of punk. [2] Well, except for his oft-overlooked operetta, "Fuck You, Dad." [3] Dada/situationism/Fluxus was art about social context, but when you're discussing the punk aspects of them you don't really discuss the aesthetics of Duchamp's readymades or do a textual analysis of Tzarza's poetry. [4] If also horribly amused. [5] This is literally what Rage Against the Machine have accomplished with their transgression. [6] For another take, consult the Clark Puppy-Punching Doctrine.
