Monday, September 1, 2008
I'm with
Rich--
Hamlet 2 is really, really, really good. He's saving his take for the DVD, but here's mine. (I'll go light on the spoilers, but I am going to talk about plot points. This shouldn't be too big of a problem, but come back after you've seen it, if you'd rather.)
If you want to know what
Hamlet 2 is about, just check the structure. Sure, it's got a standard overall arc, which the movie itself makes fun of with Mr. Marsch's (the drama teacher and main character, played by Steve Coogan) repeated references to inspirational-teacher flicks like
Mr. Holland's Opus,
Dead Poets Society, and
Dangerous Minds. Yes, there's a setup, a period of trouble, and then a successful resolution. But how does it resolve? After what amounts to a really long build-up, we get to see the performance of the titular play--and that's it. After the performance, there's a brief (and fantastic) epilogue, but it's only a couple minutes long. The thing the movie was leading up to was not the resolution of various emotional and character arcs--the kids don't learn any lessons, and Marschz's romantic interest exists purely as a gag--but the actual performance of the play itself. What matters is not the journey the characters went through, but the journey the play itself went through. The movie, in other words, is about the unpredictable and ignoble nature of the creative process.
As any critic can tell you, creative types are rarely what we want them to be. Sure, every once in a while there's a David Byrne who's as culturally literate, thoughtful, and intentional as we critics are (or, at least, like to think of ourselves as being). In the main, though, artists, writers, and musicians are the kind of people who we'd be embarassed to know if they weren't geniuses. They're boorish, dickish, passive-aggressive, fickle, emotionally stunted, alcoholic, abusive, and/or pathetic. They have an extremely difficult time maintaining healthy relationships, with any friendships or marriages characterized by neediness, selfishness, leechiness, and sulking. They are, in short, losers--jobless wrecks of humanity who are so pathetic that you can't engage them in a conversation without feeling kinda guilty that you're a normal, together person. Worst of all, at least from the critic's standpoint, they are generally incapable of talking about their creations, either coming up with simplistic explanations revolving around their own personal issues or refusing to explain them at all.
And this is exactly what Marschz is for almost the entire movie--in fact, that's where the humor comes from. He has to roller-skate everywhere because of a past DUI, and he's not very good at roller-skating. When he breaks his sobriety, he ends up pantsless on a couch in the middle of a field. After getting him to wear a caftan so that his testicles are at room temperature, his wife leaves him with their roomate, who it turns out is the one who actually impregnated her. Marschz says it himself: "My life is a parody of a tragedy." And yet, after a life as a loser, his last-ditch effort succeeds wildly. In the world of the film, whether or not we think so, his play is a masterpiece both creatively and commercially. How does he do this?
The movie's explanation, in a memorable line, is this: "It doesn't matter if you have talent as long as you have enthusiasm." This is a funny little epigraph for the current generation, but it's also true. Marschz has enthusiasm in spades, and it's that enthusiasm that allows the play to be a success. His enthusiasm draws talented people to him, and this pathetic loser is at the center of a group of very successful people: a great actor, a great lighting designer, great security guys, a great lawyer. And when they all work together and deploy their talents in service of Marschz's enthusiasm, they produce something that is well and truly moving.
What's funny about this is that the creative process depicted in the rest of the movie gives no indication that this will be the case. A sequal to
Hamlet is, as many people point out over the course of the film, a horrible idea, and Marschz has given no indication at any point that he's a good enough writer or director to make up for that questionable decision. And at no point does he suddenly develop a full artistic sensibility, complete with taste, thematic complexity, and nuance. It works because he pours all those loser qualities out in such a charming way that, when surrounded with an aura of success and competence, it seems to glow with meaning. None of which, it becomes clear, he actually intended. When one character argues with her mother that "Rock Me Sexy Jesus" is intended as a critique of celebrity, Marschz interjects, "That's an oversimplification." The Christians who come to the foot of the stage to protest change their minds when they come up with their own interpretation, that "Jesus kicks the devil's ass!" All the while, the play, in which Marschz is simply working out his own issues with his father, continues on its merry way, oblivious to the storms of meaning being kicked up on its periphery. That, indeed, is why it works. Because people are able to pin their own meaning to it, it speaks to them on a personal level. Marschz's "parody of a tragedy" life is ultimately so knowable that it forges a multitude of connections with otherwise disperate identities. The restraint that taste imposes is generally crucial. When absent, it is almost always embarassing and cringe-inducing. But sometimes--when surrounded by talent--tastelessness allows for such an openness that beauty can rush through.
That idea of a "parody of a tragedy" points toward the play's ultimate character arc. Marschz's idea for a sequel to
Hamlet is to have Hamlet travel back in time in order to stop all the tragedy from happening, ending it not with a bloodbath but with a marriage. He has, in short, turned a tragedy into a comedy. In the process, Marschz does the same thing to his life. But that doesn't happen through him becoming a better person--he
does not change at all. What changes is the play.
Hamlet starts as sadness and dissolusion and becomes happiness and connectedness. In our traditional understanding of art, that itself should be a tragedy: a great work of
meaningful-core should be ruined by the inclusion of happiness. That it's not is an argument for comedy itself--and a pretty powerful one, I might add. Don't get me wrong: this is a deserved cult classic in the making, and there are a lot of hilarious testicle jokes that I was a bit Shue about. But it's also a really smart and, I think, important piece of art.
Labels: comedy, hamlet 2, meaningfulcore, movies
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Roberts's speech was supposed to be about the first amendment, which is already ironic given the "
Bong Hits 4 Jesus" decision. But then a not-unfair paraphrase of his speech would be "Without me, the first amendment is nothing. We might as well be living in Communist Russia." This is a fair paraphrase because he quoted the Soviet Union's constitution. And he actually said "these words are meaningless" in reference to the first amendment. It was like an ironic civics lesson! God protect Chief Justice John Roberts and confusing outlawing of absurdity! Fight that strange rear-guard action against the demon seed of "postmodernism" as if it's an ideology rather than a neutral description of the world! Stand up for schools' hilarious attempts to curb drug use! God bless you and yours: in a world where rebellion has seemingly become impossible, you give teenagers something to rebel against. From our seats in detention, the smartasses of the world salure you!
Labels: comedy, john roberts, politics
Thursday, July 19, 2007
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.
Labels: cartoons, comedy, libertarians, lil bush, politics, south park, theory, TV
Thursday, March 29, 2007
- Sorry about no post last week, but I ditched to go to the beach. It was real purty though--here's a picture:
- I got to see Madeleine Albright on
The Colbert Report up close and in person, thanks to
Nick. (Thanks Nick!) Seeing the taping was a pretty interesting experience, although I think I'm too scattered right now to really express how. I can say this, though: Maddie looks like, if you cross her, she'll shoot lightning out of her fingers at you, and I like that in a woman.
- Congratulations to
Scott and
Alison!
- Thanks, Google Ads--you can watch the Bolton interview
here if you'd like.
Labels: clinton administration, colbert, comedy, notes, pictures, politics
Thursday, March 15, 2007
To what degree does metaphor shape reality? In 1946, ENIAC, the first modern digital computer, becomes operational; in 1953, Watson and Crick announce the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA; a few years later, transistors replace vacuum tubes as computers' primary physical component, and the digital age kicks into high gear. Before was analog, with individual elements constituting a fungible whole. Now there are bits: discrete units that are in one of two states, forming no whole, and thus able to be reordered and added to or taken away from. Part of one bit can never pass into another bit, because nothing constitutes them beyond themselves. They are discrete, interchangeable units. Early programming methods, like punch cards, emphasize this granularity.
DNA, it turns out, works in a similar way. It is built from four separate nucleotides, each occupying a place on the DNA strand, and with a matching nucleotide joining it in the other helix. They're bits, but with four states instead of two. By changing the state of a given element on the strand, you change the output. Each unit is the same; only the information it relays is different, and this is changeable.
Obviously the model of recombinant DNA suggests a certain metaphor, and that metaphor takes a different form with digital computing. Would computers have developed as rapidly as they did without the presence of this metaphor? John von Neumann says why not, but he wanted to bomb Russia before they could get the bomb themselves, so maybe he's not the guy we should be listening to. [1] Still, perhaps it's not the best example.[2]
So let's take music. And let's take ourselves. We sit around and we listen to music on computers, read about music on computers, talk about music on computers. Some of us--many of us--make music on computers, or DJ on our computers. And those of us who write about music do, as a group, like certain things you don't really find lots of other people liking, at least not as a group's canon. We like extended remixes, mixtapes, mashups, DJ sets. We like hip-hop that refers to its own history, that uses samples smartly, that's been chopped and/or screwed. We like rock music that alludes to literary or musical antecedents, and music that sounds like chart pop but isn't. We like[3] Jacques Lu Cont, Destroyer, Girl Talk, Kanye, Soulwax, the Scissor Sisters. Look at that list: dance, hip-hop, indie rock, and other. It doesn’t make any sense; surely that's not a genre. Is it?
Consider the metaphor through which all of that is viewed. Here we are at the computer, looking at pixels on a screen produced by information contained in bits, or listening to sound encoded as a series of numbers. We can take songs out of their context on an album and put them up on a blog (at this point, we're actively encouraged to do so). We can take part of one song and mix it with part of another song with
the greatest of ease. We can hear lyrics and cross-reference them with other lyrics, hear a sample and look up its source, then download it. The world comes to us now in bits. So let's call it something. Let's call it recombinant pop.
Of course, this sort of thing has been going on for a long time: composers writing pieces based on themes by other composers, or quoting past works or folk tunes in their melodies; early recording artists stealing all sorts of things from their contemporaries (see below)[4]; and all sorts of things in other artforms, from portraits with another painter's work in the background to the real-life figures in the Inferno to, shit, the Book of Revelation. But where before these referential touches were largely filigrees, now they're the crossbeams. Technology has played a huge role in this, in ways so obvious that they don't really deserve explicating, but in short, music-making technology has now made it easier to use existing music to make new music than to play your own, and the internet's ability to provide almost any piece of music from the entire history of recorded sound has expanded the amount of existing music available to any individual exponentially. Whereas before, there were severe technological restrictions on reusing music[5], now there are almost limitless possibilities.
Recombinant pop, then, is a genre that's different from most other genres in that it's defined not by the set of sounds it uses, but the method by which it's made. (Kinda like
12-tone.) If a rock band plays a song that consists of four harmonicas playing an hour-long staggered drone, that's not rock music, even if they wrote the piece by getting together in a practice space with drums/guitars/bass and jamming until they came up with something cool. But if you make a song by throwing together a bunch of pre-existing sounds, it's recombinant pop. The use of identifiably pre-existing pieces of music as the elements of creation are prized rather than inspiration. Inspiration plays a part, but that presupposes originality, which is obviously a non-starter here. Craft matters--craft always matters, but here even more so, because there aren't the excuses of "energy" or heroic artistry to fall back on. What did you pick? How did you use them? How does it sound?
It's also defined, though, by how we listen to it. This isn't unusual: different people can hear Wilco as jazz or rock or indie, and they can comfortably fit into all those genres exclusively yet simultaneously. It just depends on how you hear it. So recombinant pop can be, as said above, dance, hip-hop, indie rock, and other. It can always be appreciated without knowing the referents. But once you start hearing those, and seeing their connection with each other and with what lies outside the song, it's part of this genre.
Let it not be said, however, that this isn't an aesthetic experience. One of the things recombinant pop has shown us is that aesthetics can absorb meaning. When you hear a recognizable sample in a song, your reaction to it isn't predicated on stopping and thinking about the release date and cover art of the song being sampled.[6] It's more like a joke: an unconscious reaction to something familiar being found where you didn't expect it to be. There's a bear in that closet! There's Elton John backing Biggie! That horse farted! You got Sting to willfully misinterpret his own song!
That's the recombinant part, but what about the pop? Well, one of the interesting things about this kind of music is that it's always contextual. The meanings being conveyed are necessarily of-the-moment, since meanings aren't fixed. There's a reason mashups almost always feature a current pop song as one of their elements, and it's because that frisson of combination comes from the temporary rubbing up against something that's endured.[8] (Also known as the "rappin' grandma" effect.) Similarly, referential rock or hip-hop always refers to something the intended audience will be familiar with, but this body of knowledge also changes, and so the reference is temporary, or at least floating. This quality of explicitly and self-consciously existing within a particular place in time is a big part of recombinant music's power.
But people tend to see this as a negative. Mashups, for instance, are often called too easy, or flavor-of-the-week. But this is exactly what people say about pop, and have said about pop since people were making the pop music that we regard today as fully canonized classics. (The Beatles!) Far from being a negative, though, maybe this is what recombinant pop is aiming for. It's created by people who feel alienated from or shut out of the pop mainstream, and so they create an alternate form of pop, still populist and transitory, but narrowcast enough to seem credible within the subcultures they operate, although ironically enough this credibility has the capacity to attract a wider audience.
If I sound a bit reserved in my praise, it's because the most prominent examples of this form--remixes and mashups--are still in their infancy. But we can see improvement: from "A Stroke of Genius," mashups moved through Ozymandias' fifteen-minute-long megamixes and Cex/Kid606's jamming cut-ups and beats under strung-together rap verses to Girl Talk's carefully orchestrated production of what can be legitimately called an album. Remixes, too, have begun to move from enjoyable-but-simplistic "make it dancier" exercises to true reinventions. To be pretentious, here's what I said about it in a recent review:
It would be interesting to see the remix collection taken more seriously as an
artistic form. Just as some bands have taken to covering entire albums, a
remixer could take an album and remix every track, with an eye less for their
individual impact than for their coherence and the way in which they play off
the original in productive and illuminating ways. Sure, there was that rash of
album-length mashups, but those lacked the access that a remixer has to not only
the a capellas but every individual track. It's unlikely that a band would offer
someone else that kind of freedom, and even less likely that someone else would
want to invest the time necessary to make it work. But it sure would be
interesting, no?
This is just one avenue the form could pursue, but there are many others. One of its great advantages is that it actively encourages incorporating outside influences, and so individual artists might begin to borrow from their peers, rather than keeping strictly to non-recombinant sources. It's exciting to watch.
What could kill it, though, is the law. The law has its problems, and certainly needs to be changed; since you're on the internet, you probably know the usual suspects. But what's interesting is that the law hasn't changed all that much, at least not in terms of your standard-issue we-made-some-msic-and-are-putting-it-out-on-some-sort-of-physical-object scenario. In
Douglas Wolk's book on James Brown's Live at the Apollo, there are a number of songs whose history, as he recounts it, sound nothing short of criminal. People steal songwriting credit, people steal other people's riffs, people blatantly replicate a hit song and release it without any compunctions. Some of this is illegal and some of it isn't, but if an established record label today caught wind of it, this would likely be enough to halt the release, let alone if it was sampling entire verses from other songs. The reason isn't that they would get successfully sued so much as they would get threatened with a lawsuit, and dealing with that costs time and money[9], especially when you're in the kind of legal gray area that these sorts of examples represent.
The point, though, is not that the law is too harsh, but maybe that the labels are too lawsuit-happy. There's a whole spiel here that I've probably written elsewhere, but suffice to say that once you're a corporation the benefits to litigation start to drastically outweigh the drawbacks. Despite all the quasi-legal/clearly illegal business that Douglas details in his book, though, it seems like the people involved didn't really sue each other. Oh sure, lots of people got really screwed, and they probably should have sued. But if they hadn't been able to release a song that had a legally questionable background, it's unclear how music would have developed. Douglas points out (I think) that James Brown basically invented funk by yelling over cover songs until the song part disappeared, and if those songs weren't there for him to yell over…who knows?
So the law needs to be changed, yes, but in the meantime there is a model to emulate. One of the benefits of grabbing from your peers is that, if they're doing the same thing, there's far less impetus to start flingin' lawyers. This sort of arrangement is already in place to a certain degree, with mixtapes and Illegal Art and unofficial remixes released online. This, too, is in its infancy, so we'll see where it goes.
The law is the ultimate example of a metaphor that's become reality. Words are written and they become actions: because someone wrote that you aren't allowed to pee in public, if you do, someone can come around and lock you up. If something takes on the designation "illegal," that changes the reality in which it operates. Meanings shift, contexts change, but law stays the same.
[1] Damn fine job with the game theory, though.
[2] Although SIGARCH did put out
a paper on the double-helix model of computing in 1986, so it can't be that far off.
[3] Or liked, anyway.
[4] Unexpectedly, I'm finding myself
echoing a Congressman in this. I like this a lot, mostly because when netnerds get on the subject (and boy do they ever), they come at it like it's some social justice issue, whereas it's, you know, playing a Beatles song and a Jay-Z song at the same time--not exactly gay marriage.[7] This is presenting it as a political/legal issue, which is way more interesting.
[5] Check out the
specs on the old samplers--wahoo sampling and all, but you only got a few short snippets to work with on even the best equipment.
[6] By the way,
Mark, if
I'm a poptimist, then this is popism, OK? I'm not going to claim that particular term at this juncture, but come on. Pleasure's opposed to difficulty, not meaning. Modernism, dude!
[7] (insert your own joke here)
[8] Presumably one day people will be pairing current Swizz Beats productions with whatever pop style is popular then, which I imagine will be something along the lines of children chanting political slogans over pitch-shifted whalesong. Hott!
[9] Since the company's gone under, maybe now some of this shit can be told. Of course, this is all ALLEGEDLY ALLEGEDLY ALLEGEDLY. Remember when "The Ketchup Song" was a huge hit? The label I was working for distributed a single released by a label we had an agreement with, and this single was a blatant rip-off of "The Ketchup Song." (I think it may have even been credited to "The Catsup Girls.") Well, the problem is, the company that released the actual Ketchup Song distributed our label internationally. Who knows what happened, but suffice to say we dropped the single, and the company putting out the cash-in song sued the hell out of us. I won't say how much money it cost just to get that dismissed, but it was enough to finance the release of at least two albums.
Labels: comedy, pop, recombinant pop, theory
Thursday, March 8, 2007
It's hard to think of a show that's ever had as good a year as
The Colbert Report did in 2006. It was its first year of existence, and no one was really sure it was going to make it.
The Daily Show didn't really seem like something you could spin off, let alone spin off with someone whose best-known bit was "This Week in God." Good stuff, but how is that a half-hour program?
Well, suffice to say the show justified its existence. By the time it broadcast its last episode in December, one devoted entirely to a guitar duel between Colbert and one of the Decemberists, the show managed to attract both a devoted fanbase that Colbert delighted in exploiting as well as guests of increasingly high stature. And they did all this without significantly changing their approach. They just waited for people to come to them, and it worked.
What is that approach? In a nutshell: effusive cynicism.
The Colbert Report is undoubtedly the most cynical show in America, and it's paid off enormously for them. You realize just how cynical it is when you compare it to its sister program.
The Daily Show promotes the image of a sane oasis in a crazy world, never content simply to show you what's wrong when they can also explain why it's wrong[1], albeit sarcastically, and they even go so far as to suggest alternate policies at times, again sarcastically. But sarcasm is a language we all speak now, so much so that it no longer sounds like a foreign tongue. The most sincere among us (left-wing college students, say) routinely use sarcasm as a way of belittling our opponents, and it's worked its way into modern usage enough that we hear the sincerity simultaneously with the sarcasm. There's no translation, only synonyms. Begin a sentence with "Yes"[2] and it's as sure a reversal as slapping "ne" and "pas" around a French verb.
The main exceptions are the correspondents / "experts," of which Colbert was one before he left. They deliver their reports with a straight face, and this is a big part of the humor. But after their segments, they almost always talk with Stewart, and here the "we are sanity" feeling comes back in: they make some outrageous statement that's recognizable as an exaggeration of what someone else has said, and then Stewart plays the straight man and asks them the questions we ourselves would ask them if we didn't know they were making a joke. It's effective, but it's giving the audience an out, making the correspondent into the object of ridicule before our eyes rather than requiring the audience to make that leap.
On Colbert's show, this almost never happens. The attitude seems to be that the things they're parodying are so obviously absurd that they don't need to hold the viewers' hands. There's no critique necessary, no explanation of why the things they're saying are wrong. The correspondent stands alone, with no one to question him except his guests, who rarely succeed. This is a bleak view of society, one that simply repeats what it hears, raises its eyebrows slightly, and waits for a laugh.
The thing is, the laughs didn't really come at first. If you watch those early programs, people don't really get it: jokes fall flat, and guests seem genuinely outraged at the things Colbert is saying, even though they're on a network called "Comedy Central." No one seemed to know quite how to handle him, whether they should play along or take him at face value. It's hard to say if they'd be funnier now, if the jokes simply weren't up to snuff, but in terms of approach, it was essentially the same. Did this mean that their cynicism was unwarranted, that in fact things weren't so bad that you could offer up a simple parody in place of show-and-tell jokes?
Well, yes and no. Certainly people are actually laughing now, and comedy does require passing a certain tipping point of laughter before people really feel comfortable braying along, so maybe it's just that momentum built enough for them to cross that barrier. But the cynicism has been validated in unexpected ways. People have noted the ways in which Colbert's show has come to resemble the shows it's parodying, like
The O'Reilly Factor, particularly in regards to the devoted fanbase mentioned above. Colbert has built up a cult of personality around himself, so much so that he's able to get his fans to engage in coordinated collective action, and the ability he has to control his audience, down to the second he wants them to stop cheering, is a little scary.
This isn't a criticism of the show, though--it is the final proof of its cynicism. By managing to encourage this level of devotion, they've shown just how easy it is--so easy that a comedian can do it. And the appeal of this sort of rhetoric is so strong that even when it's being used sarcastically, it's incredibly effective. Colbert's fans read through the cynicism and take the sincerity they see on the other side just as fervently as O'Reilly's fans do. If this were
The Daily Show, this might be something to discourage. But the genius of Colbert's show is that it's absolutely committed to its cynicism. It's ridiculous that people will do whatever Colbert asks them to do, it's ridiculous that he could get Henry Kissinger to introduce a guitar duel and the newly-elected governor of New York to judge it. They've created such a good imitation that it functions in exactly the same way as what it's making fun of, and that's spectacular.
It's still cynical, though, and that's important to keep in mind. As effective a piece of performance art as
The Colbert Report is--utilizing mixed media, enabling interaction, drawing power to itself and using that power without restraint, just as its subject would--it all springs from a fundamentally cynical point of view. This rings false: cynicism seems to encourage a disassociation with the corrupted world, so devoted to its criticism that it is unable to engage with the things it's criticizing, and when it's criticizing society, the cynic sits outside it. Colbert has shown that you can be incredibly cynical (completely aware of the ways in which the object of study fails, clear-eyed in your evaluation of its faults) and yet use that knowledge, not simply throw it out there to prove your own superiority. They've seen exactly what's wrong with these sorts of shows and gone and pranked the world, making their points but also so cynical that they don't care if they cause exactly the same ill effects as the original. Why not? Doesn't it just prove their point more? And if you don't get the point, don't you deserve what you get? That's one way in which cynicism can be a productive force.
This is sorta-kinda the subject of an essay by Geert Lovink (!) entitled "
Blogging, the nihilist impulse." It's not the greatest read in the world, full of the autistic shorthand that's infested academia, and prone to statements like "there are 100 million blogs worldwide, and it is nearly impossible to make general statements about their 'nature' and divide them into proper genres. I will nonetheless attempt to do this." Don't mess with Lovink, man, that dude can do the
nearly impossible!
Anyway, this is a problem for me because there's no passage I can really quote to highlight what I'm interested in without subjecting you all to sentences like "It is constituted by cold enlightenment and by confession described by Michael Foucault." So, to summarize, Lovink[3] notes that blogging came about in this millennium, and the tenor of blogs is primarily cynical. This isn't an indictment, just an observation, and the consequence has been that there aren't grand movements (which are inherently suspicious), but the aggregation of lots of individual opinions, all of which can still think they're precious unique snowflakes, into a received wisdom.
He's right, and it's useful to acknowledge the inherently cynical nature of blogs. When I try to explain that, say, the Gawker sites aren't necessarily expressing a firmly-held and well-thought-out opinion, they're just paid to mock
everything, being able to cite cynicism will help. It's also a frustrating tendency of internet culture these days, one that leads to things like blogs being thought of as worthless even by their creators and so not worth the effort to make into art rather than brands, but that's for another time; for now, it's just nice to have a name.
His point about this cynicism being useful is a good one, I think. The example of
The Colbert Report highlight one strategy for utilization, but might there be others? I think so. Take pop music, for example. Almost no one involved in pop isn't cynical about it, and yet it still inspires devotion. You can see the machinery behind the music--the product placement, the obvious marketing plans, the unmistakable demographic targeting, the record company's tracklist calculus, the parade of new talent--and still enjoy the music for what it is. No one doesn't become cynical about pop, so much so that this is now a standard part of the life of a pop fan, even if fans generally won't admit it. (It's understandable--part of the pleasure of rejecting pop is thinking you see what other people don't, even if millions of people have seen it before you--but it's still unfortunate.) But people still listen to pop, still like pop, still make pop out of a love for the music. You can be cynical about something without invalidating it.
This is merely cynicism counterbalanced, though. What's interesting about pop is the ways in which cynicism can actually increase your admiration for the music. Once you're aware of the way the machine works, you can follow it and use your knowledge to become a better listener, by doing things like noticing and following particular producers and songwriters. Moreover, by being aware of the commercial obstacles that pop faces on its way to a finished CD--a condition unique to pop these days, since only pop musicians need to worry about getting someone else's approval for what they release, whereas everyone else can just burn a few thousand discs in their basement--you can gain a greater appreciation for the difficulties the artists face, and this often leads to a deeper enjoyment of their music.
Lovink said something else in there, though, something else that's notably wrong. He thinks this cynicism is a post-bubble thing, a reaction to the repudiation of the net's early utopian promises and grand schemes; like an embittered failure, so burned by his unrealized hopes that he thinks the world is shit. Well, something else happened in 2001--or, rather, two something elses happened. We got a new President, and…well, you know.
An article recently mentioned the 1999 anti-globalization protests in Seattle, and it was like suddenly remembering a dream you'd had. This used to be an inspirational moment for the left, and while I'm sure it's still an inspirational moment to some, it seems impossibly distant now. Fighting over trade policy instead of occupying armies: it's almost hard to imagine. This isn't an indictment of Seattle--far from it--but an illustration of why the mood's shifted since the end of 2000. There's no reason to think the internet couldn't have been dominated by a bunch of Googles, modest start-ups that still had a gleam in their eye, but with reduced expectations and more realistic business plans. But, as I've said
elsewhere, we all went a little crazy after 9/11, on all sides, and it's produced a range of reactions. But certainly there's little choice but to react to the right's version of going crazy with cynicism; there's simply no other option, given how shameless they've become. If the tenor of our times is cynical, well, there are quite legitimate reasons for that.
Point is, we don't pick the conditions under which we make art any more than we pick our upbringing or our talents. Maybe it'd be nice to have some more non-cynical art, but that's not the reality we live in right now. Pointing out the usefulness of cynicism is really just a way of pointing out the usefulness of
anything that's imposed upon us from outside, be it totalitarianism or boundless prosperity or an excess of penguins.[4] Art is creative but also reactive, and since you don't get to choose what there is to react against, it's necessary to find ways to work with anything, and those ways always exist. As long as we're going to view art through the context of its times--and that's forever--this will be a concern, and not an unimportant one, either. But as Colbert demonstrates, you need to bring yourself back into the world, to use those forces to make art within it and around it and, maybe, to contain it.
[1] There's even a common moment now where Jon Stewart turns to a particular camera and addresses a newsmaker directly, with humor but without irony.
[2] "Yes, throwing yourself off a cliff would be a great idea." "Yes, democracy certainly is on the march in the Middle East!" Tone matters, but not that much.
[3] I'm giggling every time I type that, by the way.
[4] This, obviously, leads to penguin sculptures, penguin ballets, etc.
Labels: colbert, comedy, cynicism, daily show, politics, pop, theory
Thursday, March 1, 2007
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.
Labels: Boston Legal, Buffy, comedy, House, pop, TV
Thursday, February 22, 2007
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.
Labels: comedy, punk, Sarah Silverman, TV
