Misapprehending What's Popular (4 Feb 2011)

I don't recommend this essay about Mad Men by Daniel Mendelsohn; it seems like an extended exercise in shaming its "addicted" viewers, who are assumed to be prurient poseurs trying to excuse their interest in a soap opera (used pejoratively throughout the piece) by overhyping its supposed smartness. Mendelsohn writes as though he is shocked and affronted to discover Mad Men is not as good as the hype promises. What is?

I find I often make this mistake; I expect culture product that is widely discussed among the intelligentsia will be somehow extraordinary rather than adequate, when really what is at work is a kind of power-law phenomenon: one show among many worthy contenders will start to get momentum in the attention it attracts, and suddenly, thanks to the supercharged network effects and all the mediated feedback loops in society, it looms large. It becomes something that must be discussed in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books and so on. Late comers, like Mendelsohn to Mad Men (or me to such things as Radiohead, Pixar movies, Harry Potter, etc., etc.) can't help but wonder what all the fuss is about, and tend to import critical standards that the work itself doesn't warrant. It becomes hard to take a work on its own terms; instead, the zeitgeist around it is judged, and almost always condemned as vulgar or vaguely dangerous.

Mendelsohn accuses Mad Men of the "worst possible offense that can be committed in a creative work set in the past: it’s simultaneously contemptuous and pandering." I wonder what works set in the past aren't pandering and contemptuous when viewed without sympathy; what historical fiction isn't at once also about the era in which it was conceived and thus suffused with doubleness and distortions? Such judgment is an expression of the critic's temperament, not an account of the work being assessed. (And really, the "worst possible offense"? Lots of revisionist history arguably does worse things than that. And does Mendelsohn really think that most people assumed Mad Men would be watched by 70-year-olds? "This, more than anything, explains why the greatest part of the audience for Mad Men is made up not, as you might have imagined at one point, by people of the generation it depicts." ?!?)

Critics aren't obliged to be sympathetic to everything they write about, of course, but it's unsatisfying for me as a reader to get nothing from an essay but "that critic thinks he's too good for that thing he's discussing." Probably too much of what I write has that effect on others.

Eco ego (14 Sept 2010)

More entertainment-ad blogging. On the way up the stairs from my subway stop at 49th St. is a poster for what I guess is a new TV show starring Will Arnett (Gob from Arrested Development) and Keri Russell called Running Wilde -- I know, I know, with a funny pun like that as the title, it couldn't possibly fail -- or fail to be hilarious. This is the poster I am talking about:

It's probably been up for a few weeks, but today was the first day I realized that it does not read "Ego meets ego."

I can't decide whether my misreading is a matter of my believing that promoting one's interest in "eco" is really all about "ego," or if I just see two large head shots of celebrities and automatically assume two big egos. Either way, this show will certainly contribute to the elision of the two by stereotyping eco-consciousness as a personality trait rather than a set of policy positions or political beliefs. Maybe the tagline is meant to be open to a double reading, and this show will illustrate the point at which ego and eco become inseparable.

Eco, we are supposed to assume from this poster, is a lifestyle choice, a potential character flaw marked by carrying a stainless-steel water bottle, which is just as absurd in its way as drinking champagne for no special reason. Arnett is probably putatively the butt of the show's jokes, being an obnoxious and semi-clueless Archie Bunker type whom audiences, the producers hope, will secretly love for his refusal to cave to the PC-obsessed termagant Russell presumably plays. Then the producers get to have ii both ways -- they can claim to be progressive by showing anti-greens to be louts while actually giving succor to those louts and dignifying them with all the laugh lines.

I am always surprised at how often people make a point of saying that they are not "PC," as if anybody really supports the kind of Thought Police fascism that is meant to evoke. Usually they say it precisely when they are trying to be sensitive, when they realize that they are not going to air some lazy stereotype or are even about to argue against one. But PC remains there for them to rebel against and establish themselves to be what passes in much of America as reasonableness -- that is, pretending to not really care about other people's sensitivities. A chief thrust of right-wing ideology is invested in making green and "eco" the heirs to their earlier success with "politically correct," turning them into bywords for phoniness and self-righteousness that "ordinary" people everywhere will strive to define themselves against.

Immaterial Labor and Cognitive Surplus (2 June 2010)

Wired has a dialogue between Clay Shirky and Daniel Pink, both of whom are promoting their new books that apparently promise to recycle leftist ideas about the "post-Fordist" economy. Shirky recognizes that people are doing stuff online instead of watching TV, and these liberated hours of self-directed labor constitute what he calls the cognitive surplus. In leftist theory, the same phenomenon is sometimes called immaterial labor, a term that stresses the work side rather than the capital side of the equation. The work/leisure divide was the product of the "Fordist" relations of production -- factory-style labor in which the meaning of work was rendered irrelevant to the worker marking time who just wanted a paycheck. Management tried to remove intelligence and decision-making from labor processes so to own those processes and control them, and to make workers interchangeable spare parts. But to get workers to go along with that soul-crushing arrangement, their life outside of work had to be enriched, with education and culture-industry entertainment products (e.g., the TV consumption Shirky marvels about). Eventually, educated and culturally aware workers were tapped into the "general intellect" regarding the contemporary moment and the zeitgeist, and were becoming innovative outside of work in the "social factory." That is, they were producing value outside of the "subsumption" by capital. What is happening with Web 2.0 initiatives and the networked economy and so on is capital's struggle to figure out how to seize that value without preventing the workers from doing the volunteer production or hampering their access to the commons, the shared goods used in their innovations.

Anyway, that's what I got from this 2007 article (pdf) by Carlo Vercellone, which examines the cognitive surplus as a form of cognitive capitalism. The upshot is that immaterial labor is basically a new kind of division of labor and new blurring of the work-leisure divide -- all in response to the "crisis" in production that comes from workers looking for more meaningful investment in their work beyond the paycheck. Which is apparently what Daniel Pink's book, Drive is about.

Perhaps because I have a taste for turgid Marxist jargon, I didn't find Shirky and Pink's more accessible account of these ideas especially illuminating. They acknowledge research into motivational crowding out and choice architecture and make familiar points about the wealth of networks, but they skirt around the real conflicts that have broken out across the economy, manifesting mainly as persistent unemployment, as structural shifts have started to take place. What will happen to our livelihoods if the wage relation is slowly being phased out more or less by technological developments? Just because humans like to create things to fulfill our species being doesn't mean we don't need to eat. And if we can't effectively market our share of the cognitive surplus, what then?

I want my garmonbozia (10 April 2010)

Metafilter has an omnibus of links about Twin Peaks, which is now, unbelievably, more than 20 years old. I have long since thrown away most of my VHS tapes, but one I have held on to is a taping of the Twin Peaks pilot off network TV -- WPVI, channel 6 in the Philadelphia area. It's much easier to understand how revolutionary Twin Peaks was -- particularly that first episode -- when you see it in the context of the commercials that aired with it, the local news-anchor interpolations and the plugs for other ABC shows. The shift in tone when it cuts away from the stark despair of Laura Palmer's mother -- the horror on her face and her otherworldly moan of grief -- to the first commercial break is just insane. Having had my mind blown by Blue Velvet (and Dune, I admit it) I was already a fan of Lynch's, and I was predisposed to be enamored with the show, but Twin Peaks went far beyond anything I could have expected. Each of the early episodes inspired a weird mood that I couldn't shake for hours or even days afterword, an acute awareness of a whole different layer of causality beyond the surface of things, a deliciously ambiguous blend of anxiety and excitement. When "Twin Peaks mania" swept through what was then a much more monolithic mainstream media, I was fully sympathetic -- probably the last cultural fad of that scope that I can say that about. It was very strange to be in such harmony with what was being promoted everywhere -- kind of like those first few months Nirvana was popular, driving the Steve Miller Band off boomboxes at the keg parties.

Anyway, one of the MeFi links led me to this perceptive review by Tom Huddleston of the way-underrated Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, which is without question the film that creeps me out the most of anything I've ever seen. It's an uncompromising portrayal of disassociative emotional pain -- the anguish that produces the surreal. Slicing up eyeballs has nothing on the scene in which Leland is revving the engine in his convertible while the one-armed-man is yelling at Laura about her awful destiny. Huddleston captures another such moment in the film:

The infamous David Bowie dream sequence is equal parts entertaining and ludicrous, the Thin White Duke mumbling obscurely about Judy in a mangled pseudo-Southern accent. It’s as willful and pointless as Richard Pryor’s cameo in Lost Highway, a distorted display of counterculture namedropping. But as Bowie mumbles and Lynch’s Gordon Cole yells, the tone shifts and somehow the sequence becomes genuinely unsettling, the face of the monkey behind the mask an unexpected, nightmarish image. This blending of the absurd and the horrifying to dreamlike and disturbing effect has become Lynch’s hallmark, from the chickens in Eraserhead to the hobo behind the diner in Mulholland Drive. Nowhere else in his work does he use the technique as effectively as in Fire Walk With Me. Sudden tonal shifts from joy or security to overwhelming sadness, unease, terror and back again are perhaps the film’s most effective emotional weapons, and Lynch deploys them mercilessly.

In short, this movie will freak you out, even (or perhaps especially) if you have no idea what is going on or what anything is supposed to mean in its garbled cosmology.

A note on the phrase "I want my Garmonbozia." Apparently that is Lynch's cryptic way saying that there is a debt of pain and suffering -- owed by whom? to whom? Not clear. But the experience of watching the film sinks you right into that ambiguity -- right on the border where voyeurism blurs into victimization.

Boredom Production (17 March 2010)

I mentioned earlier that I was reading Suburban Youth in Cultural Crisis a book from 1979 by Ralph Larkin that is derived from a participant-observation study he conducted in an affluent New Jersey high school. He basically "raps" with teens and then lays a heavy Marcusean trip all over them. Frankly I didn't get much out of that section of the book, but I found his theory-driven conclusion very interesting.

I went into the book with a vague sense that the "cultural crisis" that has been more or less ongoing since the 1970s is the fact that the post-scarcity economy can't easily absorb younger generations and provide them with jobs. (Larkin points to "the necessity for education to act as a surplus absorption device.") Thus society has had to find ways of keeping young people occupied, delaying their entry into the workforce or diverting them entirely. Larkin writes:

The governments of the Western nations, at the writing of this book, are busy wringing their hands over what to do with the children of the baby boom in stagnating economies that are increasingly unable to absorb the younger part of the labor force. Yet these children of post-scarcity society do not necessarily want routinized labor. In addition, since they have been brought up in a televised world, they have been repeatedly told that pleasure is something that commodities provide.

Much of that seems to apply today; just replace "in a televised world" with "with the internet."

The early 20th century solution to this problem was world war and mass killing. (We can only hope that the Tea Partyers and their nihilistic ilk won't take us down that road.) After World War II, consumerism evolved as a way to invent new desires, and authorize wasteful consumption under the guise of self-actualization. Identity becomes a never-ending process, rather than a lived-in fact. More recently, we've seen the extension of adolescence, and the evolution of slacker norms to rationalize people in their 20s living with their parents (cf. Buster Bluth). But it seems the post-postmodern solution to this crisis evolving now involves "hipsters on food stamps" and immaterial labor online in social networks and the like. Consumption becomes a form of free labor, and while young people get acclimated to making the art of being themselves into a full-time job, they come to de-stigmatize the receipt of a social wage in the form of food stamps and pirated entertainment.

In Larkin's pre-internet world, there were far fewer opportunities for immaterial labor for youth, only boredom, which is how my generation tended to experience the "cultural crisis." The production of boredom -- depriving people of the resources by which they can get themselves into flow states -- is a key prerequisite to the consumerist solution to the larger issue of what do to with jobless youth. Pervasive boredom sets up the acceptance of novelty as an ideal. Novelty helps take care of the overproduction problem, creating a situation in which redundant consumption becomes normal. But it merely exacerbates boredom by accelerating its onset. Knowledge of immediate alternatives allows boredom to set in faster. (Hence the ADD epidemic.)

How is boredom produced? Larkin has some ideas. Advertising deploys the carrot and stick: it makes goods seem desirable and pleasurable (ads function like drugs in that they mobilize a mode of temporary escape into fantasy), and it instills insecurity about falling behind, or lacking the necessary goods for admittance into acceptable society. And institutions do their part to make social relations seem instrumental. It's normal to be bribed to behave well, and rewards should be materialized as belongings, not as the ongoing experience of well-being. But what I found most interesting in Larkin's account of the production of boredom was his analysis of "packaged experience" and "ersatz success." He develops a long argument based on the example of model airplanes.

Since the process [of building a model airplane from a kit] is reduced to essentially assembling fitted plastic parts and then gluing them, the young person learns nothing of the structure of an airplane while constructing it, only its outer form.

That sounds a lot like a critique of Rock Band, which also denatures a hobby that might have turned into a skill but instead is reduced to escapist distraction. Larkin continues:

By degrading the process by which one can attempt to reconstruct the world, external reality assumes a facile and, at the same time, a mystical quality. Prepackaging allows young people to believe that problem solving is essentially a process of selection the correct combination of alternatives.... The emphasis is altered to focus on quantity rather than on quality. Since the construction of model airplanes has been degraded, advertisers emphasize collections to enhance sales.... Once a hobby or any other endeavor becomes easily quantifiable, it becomes the basis for the accumulation of status and psychological dominance. The degradation of the process of labor teaches the child at an early age to participate in a competitive struggle surrounding commodity consumption.

Digital mediation has only accelerated these processes, making the measurement of the self nearly inescapable, and making the archive the model for the self rather than engaged presence. The present is always shattered by multitasking into fragments, and connectedness promotes a lack of commitment to what is happening in the moment and perpetual fantasizing about the alternatives that are always instantaneously available. ("Boring. Think I'll click off this page to something else. Keep scrolling...")

Larkin sees youth as defeated by the way they are encouraged to be buyers rather than doers. And he ties that into passive consumption of entertainment.

Once a person accepts the superiority of the mystified process of the production over his own abilities, he is reduced to a mechanical entity who chooses among preset alternatives. The same process is revealed in human relations. National talent is continually present on television, i the movies, on recordings and so forth. The disparity between the young person's own rudimentary skills and those of a star may stimulate the emulation of a few, but discourages the many; especially since most young people are aught to desire instant gratification. Contemporary American culture discourages the learning of a discipline, as the average person is reduced to a spectator viewing professionals who are paid for participating in activities which might be intrinsically satisfying to the amateur.

The key question is whether the modes of sharing online alters Larkin's analysis. Does Web 2.0-style participation do anything to change our expectations of instant gratification? Does it offer social rewards for the careful mastery of a particular discipline? Or does it encourage frivolity and narcissism? Does it present an array of choices that we merely click through? Has it diminished the fascination of celebrities as unattainable models?

It's not really an either-or situation, of course, but the tendency does run more one way than the other, I think. The experience of being online has become an amalgam of consumption and production, but it seems more the former than the latter. I'm not sure it has made breaking the habits of boredom and distraction any easier; it seems like it probably reinforces them even as it provides us with all sorts of information and opportunities for engagement and connection.

The strange suspicion of advertising (30 April 2009)

In the NYT yesterday was a brief item about a meeting of the American Association of Advertising Agencies -- which has decided, perhaps in part because of advertising's growing unpopularity with consumers, to rebrand itself as 4A's. The article quotes the president of 4A's:

“Our business is still fighting for more respect in the public sphere,” Ms. Hill said. “The common perception of our business in the United States continues to be so negative for so many people.”

The belief that simply renaming something removes the underlying structural problems that afflict it is basically everything that is wrong with advertising in a nutshell: The main premise of the industry is that every conceivable goal can be accomplished entirely through reputation and perception management. And consequently, it tends to recognize only those goals that suit such a program, fixing superficiality as an ideal. The success of the industry hinges on how seductive it can make that ideal.

So is it any wonder that consumers are wary of it. The NYT article also mentions this Harris poll (also noted by Rob Walker) that reports that among those polled, two thirds believe that advertising and marketing share some of the blame for the current economic malaise, because they encouraged people to buy things they couldn't afford. The coverage of the poll linked to above attempts to dismiss this finding as Americans playing the bad old Blame Game, but that doesn't wash. (This might be the most ridiculous claim I've ever seen: "Now, thanks to television shows like Mad Men and Trust Me, [advertisers] are slightly more visible and they are an easy scapegoat." So people dislike advertisers more now that they are glamorized in TV shows? And Americans are so myopic that they don't know what an industry does, or that it even exists, until it's depicted on a show?)

Sure, the advertising industry isn't responsible in the same way Wall Street is (though one shouldn't forget the aggressive marketing campaigns of lenders and mortgage brokers over the past decade), and neither are imprudent consumers buying what they can't afford, for that matter. But what the poll gets at is the climate of irresponsibility that people felt to be palpable, a climate that derives directly from the ideology that marketing must by its nature disseminate: namely that whatever we are doing is inherently inadequate, that we need more, that we shouldn't be too secure in ourselves because we don't really control that all-important surface that we present to people, for which the evaluative criteria are always changing. We distrust advertising because we sense that it is stripping us of our ability to desire, that it entices us to outsource our own motivation (it is far more convenient that way), leaving us as shadows of ourselves. We see that we are giving it all away to avoid the very sort of effort we should be striving to find opportunities to exert.

Yearning for the destruction of Battlestar Galactica (16 March 2009)

Am I the only one who can't wait for Battlestar Galactica to be over already? The only one who feels compelled to watch it through to the end even though it ceased to be consistently compelling right around the time people started hearing Bob Dylan songs in their heads? If you haven't watched the show and you intend to (and I would recommend the first two seasons wholeheartedly, though you will inevitably be sucked into the unrewarding final seasons) you probably shouldn't read on here, because it may spoil the plot line. And the fact that the show can be "spoiled" by undermining the suspense suggests something worth remembering about the show -- that in the end it turns away from providing a subtle and provocative commentary on contemporary politics and becomes just another show where you try to guess how the writers will twist the plot next. It devolves into a hermetic, self-referential show like Lost, the television-watching equivalent of doing a tricky word find.

At 3 Quarks Daily, David Schneider argues that the show ambitiously attempts and succeeds in creating "a vital, dynamic myth for contemporary Western civilization." His case is well-supported, but I'm not persuaded -- the presentation of the mythic dimensions on the show, particularly in the final 10 episodes being aired currently -- is too truncated and incoherent, too compromised and rushed. We get scenes of incoherent exposition that are dead dull as well as confusing. As with teh Star Wars series, these latter developments feel as though they were invented ad hoc, to extend the show's life, rather than something that animated the writing from the beginning. As a consequence, viewers can't possibly know what is even at stake anymore, particularly when the obvious arc -- finding Earth -- proved to be a subterfuge. I find myself uncertain of whether the writers are working in moral ambiguity intentionally or whether I am in open revolt against the show when I eagerly await the death of Adama and Roslyn and Lee and the whole sanctimonious crew. That is to say that the writers lost me; I don't trust that they are in control of what they are doing anymore; their emotional manipulations aren't working, the sentiment suddenly seems rote and unearned, the characters no longer compel me to keep watching. All that is left is seeing what happens next, the same motivation that drives me to finish jigsaw puzzles.

One could make the argument that the show is testing the boundaries of the form or something like that, but the experiment seems to have yielded -- perhaps fittingly, given its preoccupations with healing feuds through cross-breeding -- an unsuccessful hybrid. The show's mythos is intricate enough to be irresolvable yet general enough to be open to endless exegesis by zealous fans. Perhaps that means the show went from transcending its roots in the science-fiction genre to returning to them, to providing the SF-specific pleasure of articulating an invented world, with the consumers fleshing out and resolving the hints and contradictions supplied by the writers. Schneider regards this as unfettering viewers' imaginations, and I'm not saying he's wrong. The show's incoherence is fertile ground for exegetical exercise. But I find myself too annoyed by the pieces that don't fit, by the inconsistencies. And I'm annoyed that it ceased to be a show about life during wartime, about exigency and hard choices and scarcity and fear, and instead became a show about metaphysical mumbo-jumbo, about the writers' fantasy of being cosmogonists.

In the show's marketing, a constant refrain is "You will know the truth." At one point, the show threatened to reveal some truth about actual human life, as it is lived on Earth, but now it seems content to reveal the "truth" about its own fictitious world.

Operational aesthetics in Survivor (29 Jan 2009)

In the comments to my post about complex TV, McChris pointed me to this essay by Jason Mittel, "Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television." Mittel provides an interesting survey of narrative in TV over the past few decades, even if his account tends toward the telelogical -- despite an evenhanded tone, the emphasis seems to be on how TV is necessarily becoming more complex and viewers more sophisticated. I'm not convinced that TV is necessarily evolving toward the good or has any role in improving audiences. TV has done a good job of improving its own reputation, however, as Mittel points out. But the fact that audiences are now expected to be engaged with the form as well as the content of shows, as Mittel amply demonstrates, is simply a change, a way for shows to introduce novelty -- not a move to a higher level of aesthetic appreciation. Viewers may need to invest more time in shows and engage with them in a more interactive way, but these developments are not necessarily positive (or negative). That one can spend an entire Saturday watching episode after episode of Mad Men testifies to how compellingly crafted the show is, but it also might leave one empty and exhausted, frustrated with oneself over all the other activities you neglected. (I use "one" as though I'm not talking about myself.)

Toward the end of the essay, Mittel focuses on shows that call attention to their own production:

The viewers of such complex comedies as Seinfeld and Arrested Development not only focus on the diegetic world offered by the sitcoms but also revel in the creative mechanics involved in the producers’ abilities to pull off such complex plot structures, a mode of viewing Sconce labels as “metareflexive” but that warrants more detailed consideration. This set of pleasures suggests an influential concept offered by Neil Harris in his account of P. T. Barnum: Harris suggests that Barnum’s mechanical stunts and hoaxes invited spectators to embrace an “operational aesthetic” in which the pleasure was less about “what will happen?” and more concerning “how did he do that?”20 In watching Seinfeld we expect that each character’s petty goals will be thwarted in a farcical unraveling, but we watch to see how the writers will pull off the narrative mechanics required to bring together the four plotlines into a calibrated comedic Rube Goldberg narrative machine.

He adds that such shows "convert many viewers to amateur narratologists, noting usage and violations of conventions, chronicling chronologies, and highlighting both inconsistencies and continuities across episodes." It seems that Mittel has in mind scripted shows exclusively, but I feel the spur to amateur narratology most of all when I watch the reality game show Survivor, the script for which must be found after the fact in the editing room. Examining scenes in terms of how contestants are shaped into characters and given story arcs and conflicts can often be as suspenseful as the action depicted in the show, since careful attention to the narrative structuring can clue attentive viewers in on who will ultimately win. In a sense, that is where the action is in each episode, in the editors' choices. And rather than merely marvel at how they are woven together, as one would with a Curb Your Enthusiasm episode, viewers instead have the opportunity to try to calculate out the ultimate purpose of those choices and deduce the denouement that would make them necessary. Referencing scripted shows, Mittel coins the term "narrative special effects": "moments push the operational aesthetic to the foreground, calling attention to the constructed nature of the narration and asking us to marvel at how the writers pulled it off." All of Survivor is one long narrative special effect, except writers aren't involved.

Since the contestants can't be judged for their performances, and there are no writers, viewers have only the editors to second-guess. Editors become the auteurs, just as DJs have become in the pop-music world. Like the Bush administration, the show's editors make "reality," very usefully directing our attention to the means by which this is accomplished. The ability to see how "truth" is being manipulated in its presentation on TV has never been more important. So perhaps all the complexity on TV serves a laudable political function after all.

Complicated television (26 Jan 2009)

The increased complexity of TV shows is sometimes offered as evidence of an increasing sophisticated audience who has come to appreciate greater complexity in their entertainment. Look at shows like Lost and The Sopranos with their ambiguity and their multiple, interweaving plot lines and so on. Presumably, the implication seems to be, people have adapted to the conventions of television and require greater amount of complexity to hold their now-mammoth capacity for attention, for holding complicated details suspended in their minds.

But this argument, as flattering as it is to us and despite how pleasant its justification of our couch-potatodom may be, doesn't seem quite right. The shows aren't more complex so much as they eschew unnecessary reiteration of what is going on and what the conflicts and tensions are supposed to be. In reminiscing with a friend about Twin Peaks we recalled how the integrity of the show was compromised by the efforts it had to make to bring in and acclimate new viewers who arrived at the show late -- perhaps after the avalanche of hype that greeted its first few episodes. New shows don't confront that problem. Writers and producers don't have to worry about incorporating inane exposition (like you see on daily soaps -- the convention that most makes them seem sort of dense to non-viewers) or introducing new plot lines to hook new viewers. They know that when people hear hype, they will start from the beginning, not tune in in medias res. The writers can therefore plot accordingly, comfortable in the knowledge that new and potentially confused viewers can (a) see episodes on demand or during one of HBO's frequent re-runs, (b) catch up online, (c) rent the DVDs, which come out almost immediately after a season first airs, or (d) download episodes from pirate sites. Considering (c), it almost behooves producers to insist on a certain complexity that would require viewers to pony up for the DVDs.

So I would argue that the apparent increase in complexity in TV shows is a consequence of the new technologies in delivering content as opposed to the advancing tastes of the viewing public. Lost, for instance, would be unthinkable without those technologies. The audience would have necessarily dwindled as it went on (because new viewers would be hopelessly confused) or the show would have had to solve many more of its mysteries more expediently, to make space for entry points for latecomers. So lamentably, Twin Peaks was ahead of its time in this sense; if it were being made now, there probably wouldn't have ever been that awful Miss Twin Peaks side plot.

When shows get "televisiony" (24 Oct 2008)

Matt Yglesias pinpoints why The Wire is superior to The Sopranos:

the Wire, though I think it does flag a bit in seasons four and five, absolutely never stops feeling like a single coherent work that deserves to be watched uninterrupted from end to end. The Sopranos is extremely well-made television, but especially after season two it begins to get very “televisiony” — full of occasional digressions and sub-plots that feel like filler or stalling or efforts to spread screen time around rather than being crucial to the development of the story. If The Wire had never existed, one might be inclined to say that this is just intrinsic to the medium, but we while it is endemic to the medium we also know now that it’s avoidable.

I had hoped that <>Mad Men would avoid getting "televisiony" -- that is, it would continue to be about capturing the particular historical moment it sought to dramatize rather than becoming about itself. I'm always disappointed when a show becomes more about what crazy thing happens next to the characters, who we are supposed to sympathize with for their own sake and not for what they bring out about the larger theme. Unfortunately Mad Men, like The Sopranos seems to have dropped off from its original concept -- which seemed to me to dramatize the advent of the 1960s wave of feminism, and illustrate the role advertising plays in sexism -- and now we are supposed to watch to find out what happens to Don. I'm curious to see what will happen, but it doesn't make me think the way the show did originally. The same thing happened to the Sopranos -- the show started out by drawing interesting parallels between the crime family and the American family, between domestic and commercial forms of extortion. But then it became about the audience liking the characters as simplified faux-people we could root for. Yglesias is right; if not for The Wire it would be easy to assume this retreat from thematic exploration was just inevitable.

Regarding "Channels of Desire" (9 Sept 2008)

A few ideas derived from the Ewen's Channels of Desire, a look at the history of using images to stoke consumerism.

1. The core thesis: "The mass media and the industries of fashion and design, through the production and distribution of imagery, have reconciled widespread vernacular demands for a better life with the general priorities of corporate capitalism." In other words, consumerism becomes the solution to the political threats that might have otherwise arisen from inequality; consumerism deals primarily with images, the goods end up being somewhat secondary to what they are purported to represent -- i.e. the good life.

2. Images can be disseminated widely and cheaply, and technology assures that they are never scarce. Access to such images comes to stand in for actual lived experience of the life represented in the images. Digitization of culture allows more of the world to function as images; in fact, "image" in the Ewens' usage may be reinterpreted to mean "digital culture," which has become as cheap and ubiquitous as images were in earlier decades. We can all possess the symbolic representations of things that prompt satisfying fantasies of the good life, of a richer self with a greater range of reference points through which to express itself. Tallying and cataloguing the images/digital cultural goods we possess becomes a shorthand way of conducting our life. We gather ersatz experiences, and then we struggle to defend these experiences as authentic. The consequence of this may be that we see the presentation of self as image as the essence of life -- life is a project in which we attempt to perfect our user profile.

3. The book hints at the role of consumerism in healing the wounds of hegemonic rationality -- the disenchantment of the world by scientism and industrialism and the cash nexus. The gist is that capitalism tends to make money the measure of all things, eroding the sentimental value of things and traditions. But consumerism works to reenchant the social realm in a manner suitable to capitalism -- reviving magical thinking in a commercial context. (The recent series of posts at 3 Quarks Daily about philosopher Akeel Bilgrami's "Occidentalism, the Very Idea: An Essay on the Enlightenment and Enchantment" explores the fate of enchantment in Western culture at great length.) To reduce the argument to a platitude, shopping functions as secular religion. What we end up with after our shopping pilgrimages are just souvenirs of our spiritual quest, with little inherent usefulness in and of themselves. Of course, these goods have objective, practical functions, but those functions -- usually a matter of helping us get on with everyday life, or enabling us to have some type of experience through their use -- are being degraded or occluded by the spiritual, identity-fashioning aim. So the depth and breadth of our everyday life and lived experience is suppressed in the very acquisition of the goods meant to facilitate it.

4. The Ewens cite soapmaker Benjamin Babbitt as an innovator in the creation of branding. Babbitt figured out that you sell the soap wrapper, and the soap itself is ultimately incidental. "Babbitt -- and other innovators like him -- wrought massive changes in the daily life of Americans. Taking a staple of home production and turning it into an attractive marketable commodity, he established a basic principle of American marketing -- masking the ordinary in a dazzle of magic." This tends to be the thrust of the Ewens' critique throughout, which seems to unduly champion the drudgery of home production and the dignity of what's "ordinary." They acknowledge that Americans may have embraced brands to escape ordinariness, to spend less time making things at home that bear little stamp of individual creativity. Consumerism thrived on the promise of beauty and ease -- the "substance of style." The trouble is that the pendulum swung too far, or worse, the pendulum metaphor doesn't apply, and we have shifted permanently into a world where passive consumption and perpetual self-branding through goods are the default life experiences for most Westerners.

5. A few 1890s-era quotes from Simon Patton, whom the Ewens describe as an "apostle of industrial consumerism," captures the logic behind why consumerism is basically an addiction to images, not things in themselves:

So cheap are many kinds of pictures that they are largely distributed as means of advertisement. Everywhere the homes of the poorest people are full of beautiful objects, many of which have no cost; and when their taste is improved by contact with these objects, others more suited to the new condition can be obtained at a slight increase in cost.

Consumerism hinges on this question: Is it possible to enjoy the implications of the images without their being activated by acquiring the objects advertised? One of the promises of the internet is to keep our supply of images teeming without our being subjected to the slight increases in cost. If the functions of objects are made irrelevant by the enhanced accessibility and functionality of images, will we be able to do away with material possessions altogether? That probably makes no sense, but I'm thinking of how I no longer have a physical music collection; chances are I won't have a book collection once they are digitized and portable electronic-book readers become more prevalent. At that point, the space I inhabit will have about 90% less objects in it. Will there be a counter-trend that emerges to preserve our physical habitat? Will my apartment come to resemble a museum of self even more, when the objects seem to have even less practical necessity? If I got rid of things I don't really use (but only fantasize about being the sort of person who uses), how much would be left?

The other Patton quote: "The standard of life is determined not so much by what a man has to enjoy, as by the rapidity with which he tires of the pleasure. To have a high standard means to enjoy a pleasure intensely and to tire of it quickly." An odd definition of standard of living, in that it's based on opportunities to shop rather than the usefulness of what is owned. If you can consume something faster, it's better, because then you can move on to the next thing. Something that must be understood slowly is less "intense", and bogs consumers down. This sets up the justification of convenience as a virtue -- convenience increases consumption throughput, which allows for more shopping, which is where the real pleasure lies. But isn't increasing consumption throughput a defensive measure -- a desperate and futile attempt to keep up with new things that is then reconceived as pleasurable? Increased throughput only serves the positive interests of manufacturers. The quote also speaks to the consumerist ideology of novelty as a virtue in its own right, and the pressure that places us under to refuse to return to familiar things. The assertion that novel pleasures are "more intense" seems purely ideological. It seems just as valid to argue that familiar pleasures are deeper because our past experience with them enriches the possibilities in them. Novelty and boredom are the key concepts of consumerism; any effort to beat back consumerism must invalidate boredom and repudiate novelty for its own sake. The arbitrary fashion cycle would have to be a fundamental target. We follow the fashion cycle to keep up with what people around us seem to know; we don't want to fall behind and into irrelevance. But what pleasure is to be had in the cycle itself? It just imputes boredom to a populace and then offers its arbitrary variations as the cure. But people aren't bored; they are worried boring others by being conversant in what's happening now.

Wrongness and Family Guy (14 August 2008)

Recently I started watching Family Guy, the animated Fox show that for a long time I assumed was sort of an vulgarized take on The Simpsons, with the jokes made dumber to appeal to the Maxim-reading frat crowd. That assumption was wrong; though there are plenty of surface similarities between the shows, Family Guy represents an entirely different kind of humor -- mainly it's a matter of arbitrary references piled up. Kind of like Mystery Science Theater, these are random stabs, meant to seem spontaneously generated as a reaction to events and seemingly designed to gratify the audience for its ability to recognize the allusions. It's pleasant to know trivia; Family Guy works on the theory that remembering pointless pop culture tidbits is funny in and of itself. Just remembering there was such a cultural creation as Mrs. Garrett from The Facts of Life is the essence of the joke. It cuts both ways -- it's flattering to get what the show has dredged up, but at the same time that makes us the butt of joke for having remembered.

There's no attempt at coherent satire, like The Simpsons frequently presents, or clever plot architectonics, as in Seinfeld or Curb Your Enthusiasm, where disparate plot threads are implausibly tied together. Family Guy defiantly rejects any kind of thematic unity, along with the rest of the Aristotelian rules. Its form is more that of a website like Fark.com than a sitcom. It's anchored in an aesthetic that has probably never made it this close to the mainstream before in the history of mass culture: wrongness.

It's probably best to define wrongness by what strikes me as the most notorious example, the extended sequences in which Peter, the dad character, fights a giant chicken. These are elaborate parodies of the fights in blockbuster action movies, but that is only part of what is meant to make them funny -- that's just the shallow surface premise. Their complete gratuity, highlighted by the complete absence of relation to the episode's plot, is also part of the joke, but the core principle on which these scenes are based is their interminableness. They go on well beyond what the audience expects, well beyond the moment at which every possible person will have gotten the joke's surface premise, and enter a realm of annoyance and discomfort. They seemed designed to provoke the viewer's anger, to make us shout at the screen, "Enough already!"

One might protest that these are lazy ideas deployed to fill time when the show's writers' invention fails them, but these sorts of messed-up scenes are in virtually every episode. They are not accidental. They have their analogues, too, in several other aspects of the show, completing a sort of holistic spirit of wrongness. These moments, when Stewie (the diabolical baby) goes on and on about Brian (the family dog who, in a Snoopy-derived reductio ad absurdem, is the most intelligent and mature family member) and his procrastination about his novel, or when Peter deliberates over stupid Trivial Pursuit non-questions, provoke the same creeped-out feeling that is the basis for the character of Quagmire, the hypersexed neighbor who perpetually takes his advances too far with inappropriate people and derives sexual pleasure from things that are too bizarre. Herbert, the bitter old molester, prompts a similar feeling, as the moment we start to laugh at his skeevy advances, he becomes contemptuous and spews unfunny, ominous insults and threats.

And the show's lack of a plot works this way too -- ordinary markers of the "acts" of a sitcom episode are ignored, conflicts are introduced and then forgotten, unresolved. The show will end abruptly on an off beat, or introduce a digression that takes over as the main storyline. Traditional TV conventions are gestured toward and then suspended, not so much subverted as exposed, taken too literally, pushed too far to the point where they can't be allowed to function as the shorthand they serve as in other contexts but become instead strange. This makes Family Guy weirdly Brechtian. It often tries to alienate us, as though that were now understood to be a cutting-edge form of humor.

The show's writers seemed to purposely build in a moment to every episode where they make the equivalent of chanting "not funny, not funny, not funny" into something funny through sheer persistence. The scenes of wrongness refuse to let us sit back and passively tally the orchestrated moments when we are supposed to laugh (which sitcoms customarily choreograph with laugh tracks). Instead we are forced by frustration into a different sort of emotional engagement. It's a pretty audacious approach, and it's no wonder the show has been canceled several times. What puzzles me is that there are enough devotees of wrongness to keep getting the show resurrected.

Variety shows (22 January 2007)

It's typical to see media critics discuss how we've "disintegrated" into a niche society recently, from some peak cultural moment of homogeneity twenty or thirty years in the past. Since it's become so cheap to publish and disseminate your own work, since independent and DIY product now competes with industry-built entertainment product, since the sector is now an on-demand rather than an appointment-driven affair, since virtually every entertainment product ever made (along with an ever-widening pool of new material being made by the largest cohort of cultural producers in history) is always available for consumption at any given instant and so on, culture has lost the overarching unity once provided by shared reference points -- say, Johnny Carson. What will we say to each other at the water cooler if we are all lost in our own private maze of references? (Chuck Klosterman had a column in Esquire a few years back making this case.) We'll be trapped in our niches, or we'll have to embrace a new medium for friendship online, where we can filter out people until we hit upon those who share our particular taste peculiarities. Even worse, such a plurality might lead to a widespread relativism that says anything or everything should be tolerated or can be enjoyed or can warrant attention, and this attitude threatens to leak from culture into ethics and "family values."

It was strange to see critics lament this loss, since before so many railed against the soul-stifling horror of conformity and the tyranny of mass culture. Early in the 20th century, doomsaying cultural theorists -- people like Ortega y Gassett, the Leavises, Dwight MacDonald, Adorno, etc. -- were generally dismayed at the rise of mass culture, which seemed inexorable, and each innovation in media technology seemed only to consolidate a centralized grip on society's imagination. The studios, the networks, the big imprints, national magazines, the consortiums of radio stations and newspapers and so on, all of these seemed to have a greater share of the public's attention, and the public itself for the most part was seen as unified in its passivity and willing to be molded by whatever entertainment the industry found it convenient to provide. It seems obvious now that this analysis was backward. Were it to exist, the mass audience would provide an irresistibly desirable target for big business and political propagandists alike, and perhaps seduced by the implications of what a mass audience would mean for them, they argued it into existance. Moral dogmatists in America have always tended to lament the impossibility of imposing a unified national culture from above through a media they control to solidify their grips on the "mass" imagination -- on the "hearts and minds" -- and thus on power. (The conservative mind especially warms to themes that limit choice in the name of social rectitude. Limiting choice is a sure way of maintaining control; only recently have the advantages of a surfeit of choice as a means for social control -- the overconsumption/addiction model -- begun to be explored.) And economies of scale once may have implied a mass audience would be easiest to extract profit from, but the graveyard of failed shows and songs and novels and such demonstrates how fickle and recalcitrant that mass can be. In its beginnings, mass media hadn't the means to diversify in order to reach all the disperate audience blocs that have always naturally existed and fully exploit their commercial potential, yet it longed for an easily manipulable mass audience that could be uniformly gratified by its limited offerings and trained to expect more of the same, once marginal costs were reduced and the same crap with the same talent could be turned out. So a tension between the centralization of the means of entertainment and the inherent tendency of people to generate local scenes, if not wholly personal, individual frames of cultural reference became more and more pronounced as media's reach developed and extended, both undermining and enhancing the power of industry and the consumer alike. One result of this dialectic? The Captain and Tennille show.

I'm not sure I can explain why, but I spent the better part of Saturday night watching highlights from the first season of Captain and Tennille, which aired on ABC in 1976-1977. In case you don't know, the Captain and Tennille were Toni Tennille, a singer from Alabama who looked a little like Karen Carpenter crossed with a chipmunk, and Daryl Dragon, an arranger and synthesizer specialist who prior to becoming famous with Toni worked with Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys on his spooky ballads for the Carl and the Passions album. As the Captain and Tennille, they scored a string of hits by taking established songs and giving them a sheen of gizmo electronica -- barf-bag effects and stray oscillator noises mixed in with some light funk arrangements, of such songs as Smokey Robinson's "Shop Around" and Neil Sedaka's "Love Will Keep Us Together." (They also did a version of America's "Muskrat Love," the tenderest ballad about rodent copulation that I know of.) Perhaps envisioning another Sonny and Cher, ABC gave them their own variety show and stocked it with guests from its own sitcoms and musicians from the L.A. soft-rock scene: I saw "performances" by the likes of Englebert Humperdinck, Leo Sayer ("You Make Me Feel Like Dancing"), Bread ("Lost Without Your Love"), and England Dan and John Ford Coley ("Nights are Forever"). Watching the show now, I found it nearly impossible to imagine how anyone could have watched it then (even though I have vague memories of having been subjected to it as a small child), but as an exercise in historical imagination it was pretty compelling.

It seems important to remember that the show would have been one of essentially three choices viewers would have had for TV watching -- there were no VCRs, no cable channels; you watched what was on the networks or you didn't watch at all. Networks couldn't cater to niches -- they wanted the largest audience possible to choose TV (people may have been less inclined to watch it by default then, have it on as an constant companion, as happens now). Hence the variety show: some singing and dancing, some comedy, and some showcases for performers trying to break out to a larger audience. It's tempting to see the lack of any alternative as leading to TV-production decadence; writers were sloppy, settling for half-baked ideas; costumers seemed to evaluate their work by the budget it required; guest stars acted as though unpreparedness would always come off as breezy charm; musicians faked their way through lip-synched performances; everyone was presumably high out of their mind on coke. But there was a kind of desperation to it as well, a striving for an impossible synthesis that no amount of money or writing or casting could ever supply. Captain and Tennille seemed especially ill-suited to the format -- they were no Donny and Marie, that's for sure. Tennille tried hard to manufacture cheerfulness and commit herself unflinchingly to the unbelievably hackneyed material, but Dragon -- at times indifferent, half-hearted, and palpably uncomfortable wih the contrived aspects of the show, barely bothering to mime his parts on the stack of keyboards he was typically parked behind -- looked like he was pioneering a kind of contemptuous irony about 15 years too early for popular audiences. The show's producers labored hard to build him a palatable personality, giving him an ersatz trademark (his variety of captain's hats, about which he was forced to make unfunny "hat jokes" in one running segment ) and trying to pitch him as a lovable curmudgeon, but he seemed to delight too much in the stubborness scripted for him. The show's formula tried to give a little something for everyone in a family -- dopey comedy for kids (an awful, awful segment called "Masterjoke Theater" that reeked of lazy writing); a sultry number from Tennille, often accompanied by a troupe of ludicrously costumed dancers; a rendition of a song from the current pop charts; some celebrity appearances; something old-timey, like a song with tack piano or a big-band arrangement; all stitched together with weak banter meant to convey the couple's chemistry and comfort with each other.

In short, it was a miscellaneous mess that has to feel pretty misguided to any modern audience, accustomed to shows that target their audience much more minutely. Slipping into moralist mode, I wondered if such shows taught those watching a useful kind of tolerance, a patience, a willingness to be exposed to material meant for others and take it in stride. I wondered if these shows could actually have brought families together (it was late, and I had been drinking). Perhaps it modeled respect for traditional culture, for practiced skills (like singing and dancing, like performing qua performing) whereas now all of that respect has been supplanted with a preoccupation with trend spotting and intentionally disposable youth culture. This line of thinking smacks a bit of technophobia similar to what this Economist editorial identifies, where new forms of entertainment such as video games are demonized simply because they are novel. In their own way, variety shows struggled with the legitimacy of novelty for its own sake: Not only did they attempt to balance mass and heterogeneous culture, the shows tried to tame novelty with a rigorous format and familiar show-biz routines. But the most striking thing about the Captain and Tennille was how it seemed blithely ignorant of youth culture and treated AOR as though it were hegemonic. It made me weirdly envious those who were adults in the 1970s, the last time culture at large respected them. Now 30- and 40-year-olds are expected to try to hang on and keep up with stuff made for teenagers, to pretend or fantasize about being forever 21. Otherwise they must retreat entirely into whatever specific niche they've marked out for themselves. Is it better to be in a culturally irrelevant niche than to belong to a dominant but moribund mass culture? Which is more responsible for the extinguishing of local scenes? Mass culture of the big-three-networks variety or hyperindividualistic culture that renders community activities irksome?

I don't know. I do know that I never again want to see a braless Toni Tennille wearing a satin pant suit and singing "Boogie Fever."