A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again Read online

  I’ve claimed—so far sort of vaguely—that what makes television s hegemony so resistant to critique by the new Fiction of Image is that TV has coopted the distinctive forms of the same cynical, irreverent, ironic, absurdist post-WWII literature that the new Imagists use as touchstones. The fact is that TV’s re-use of postmodern cool has actually evolved as an inspired solution to the keep-Joe-at-once-alienated-from-and-part-of-the-million-eyed-crowd problem. The solution entailed a gradual shift from oversincerity to a kind of bad-boy irreverence in the Big Face that TV shows us. This in turn reflected a wider shift in U.S. perceptions of how art was supposed to work, a transition from art’s being a creative instantiation of real values to art’s being a creative rejection of bogus values. And this wider shift, in its turn, paralleled both the development of the postmodern aesthetic and some deep and serious changes in how Americans chose to view concepts like authority, sincerity, and passion in terms of our willingness to be pleased. Not only are sincerity and passion now “out,” TV-wise, but the very idea of pleasure has been undercut. As Mark C. Miller puts it, contemporary television “no longer solicits our rapt absorption or hearty agreement, but—like the ads that subsidize it—actually flatters us for the very boredom and distrust it inspires in us.” 24

  Miller’s 1986 “Deride and Conquer,” far and away the best essay ever published about network advertising, details vividly an example of how TV’s contemporary kind of appeal to the lone viewer works. It concerns a 1985-86 ad that won Clio Awards and still occasionally runs. It’s that Pepsi commercial where a special Pepsi sound-van pulls up to a packed sweltering beach and the impish young guy in the van activates a lavish PA system and opens up a Pepsi and pours it into a cup up next to the microphone. And the dense glittered sound of much carbonation goes out over the beach’s heat-wrinkled air, and heads turn vanward as if pulled with strings as his gulp and refreshed-sounding spirants and gasps are broadcast. And the final shot reveals that the sound-van is also a concession truck, and the whole beach’s pretty population has now collapsed to a clamoring mass around the truck, everybody hopping up and down and pleading to be served first, as the cameras view retreats to an overhead crowd-shot and the slogan is flatly intoned: “Pepsi: the Choice of a New Generation.” Truly a stunning commercial. But need one point out—as Miller’s essay does in some detail—that the final slogan is here tongue-in-cheek? There’s about as much “choice” at work in this commercial as there was in Pavlov’s bell-kennel. The use of the word “choice” here is a dark joke. In fact the whole 30-second spot is tongue-in-cheek, ironic, self-mocking. As Miller argues, it’s not really choice that the commercial is selling Joe Briefcase on, “but the total negation of choices. Indeed, the product itself is finally incidental to the pitch. The ad does not so much extol Pepsi per se as recommend it by implying that a lot of people have been fooled into buying it. In other words, the point of this successful bit of advertising is that Pepsi has been advertised successfully.” 25

  There are important things to realize here. First, this Pepsi ad is deeply informed by a fear of remote gizmos, zapping, and viewer disdain. An ad about ads, it uses self-reference to seem too hip to hate. It protects itself from the scorn today’s TV-cognoscente feels for both the fast-talking hard-sell ads Dan Aykroyd parodied into oblivion on Saturday Night Live and the quixotic associative ads that linked soda-drinking with romance, prettiness, and Group-inclusion, ads that today’s hip viewer finds old-fashioned and “manipulative.” In contrast to a blatant Buy This Thing, the Pepsi commercial pitches parody. The ad is utterly up-front about what TV ads are popularly despised for doing, viz. using primal, flim-flam appeals to sell sugary crud to people whose identity is nothing but mass consumption. This ad manages simultaneously to make fun of itself, Pepsi, advertising, advertisers, and the great U.S. watching consuming crowd. In fact the ad is unctuous in its flattery of only one person: the lone viewer, Joe B., who even with an average brain can’t help but discern the ironic contradiction between the “Choice” slogan (sound) and the Pavlovian orgy around the van (sight). The commercial invites Joe to “see through” the manipulation the beach’s horde is rabidly buying. The commercial invites a complicity between its own witty irony and veteran viewer Joe’s cynical, nobody’s- fool appreciation of that irony. It invites Joe into an in-joke the Audience is the butt of. It congratulates Joe Briefcase, in other words, on transcending the very crowd that defines him. And entire crowds of Joe B.’s responded: the ad boosted Pepsi’s market share through three sales quarters.

  Pepsi’s campaign is not unique. Isuzu Inc. hit pay dirt in the late ’80s with its series of “Joe Isuzu” spots, featuring an oily, Satanic-looking salesman who told whoppers about Isuzu’s genuine llama-skin upholstery and ability to run on tapwater. Though the ads never said much of anything about why Isuzus are in fact good cars, sales and awards accrued. The ads succeeded as parodies of how oily and Satanic car commercials are. They invited viewers to congratulate Isuzu’s ads for being ironic, to congratulate themselves for getting the joke, and to congratulate Isuzu Inc. for being “fearless” and “irreverent” enough to acknowledge that car ads are ridiculous and that Audience is dumb to believe them. The ads invite the lone viewer to drive an Isuzu as some sort of anti-advertising statement. The ads successfully associate Isuzu-purchase with fearlessness and irreverence and the capacity to see through deception. You can now find successful television ads that mock TV-ad conventions almost anywhere you look, from Settlemeyer’s Federal Express and Wendy’s spots with their wizened, sped-up burlesques of commercial characters, to those hip Doritos splices of commercial spokesmen and campy old clips of Beaver and Mr. Ed.

  Plus you can see this tactic of heaping scorn on pretentions to those old commercial virtues of authority and sincerity—thus (1) shielding the heaper of scorn from scorn and (2) congratulating the patron of scorn for rising above the mass of people who still fall for outmoded pretensions—employed to serious advantage on many of the television programs the commercials support. Show after show, for years now, has been either a self-acknowledged blank, visual, postmodern allusion- and attitude-fest, or, even more common, an uneven battle of wits between some ineffectual spokesman for hollow authority and his precocious children, mordant spouse, or sardonic colleagues. Compare television’s treatment of earnest authority figures on pre-ironic shows—The FBI’s Erskine, Star Trek’s Kirk, Beavers Ward, The Partridge Family’s Shirley, Hawaii Five-0’s McGarrett—to TV’s depiction of Al Bundy on Married… with Children, Mr. Owens on Mr. Belvedere, Homer on The Simpsons, Daniels and Hunter on Hill Street Blues, Jason Seaver on Growing Pains, Dr. Craig on St Elsewhere.

  The modern sitcom, 26 in particular, is almost wholly dependent for laughs and tone on the M*A*S*H-inspired savaging of some buffoonish spokesman for hypocritical, pre-hip values at the hands of bitingly witty insurgents. As Hawkeye savaged Frank and later Charles, so Herb is savaged by Jennifer and Carlson by J. Fever on WKRP, Mr. Keaton by Alex on Family Ties, boss by typing pool on Nine to Five, Seaver by whole family on Pains, Bundy by entire planet on Married… w/ (the ultimate sitcom-parody of sitcoms). In fact, just about the only authority figures who retain any credibility on post-’80 shows (besides those like Hill Street’s Furillo and Elsewhere’s Westphal, who are beset by such relentless squalor and stress that simply hanging in there week after week renders them heroic) are those upholders of values who can communicate some irony about themselves, make fun of themselves before any merciless Group around them can move in for the kill—see Huxtable on Cosby, Belvedere on Belvedere, Twin Peaks’s Special Agent Cooper, Fox TV’s Gary Shandling (the theme to whose show goes “This is the theme to Ga-ry’s show”), and the ironic ’80s’ true Angel of Death, Mr. D. Letterman.

  Its promulgation of cynicism about authority works to the general advantage of television on a number of levels. First, to the extent that TV can ridicule old-fashioned conventions right off the map, it can create an authority vacuum. And then guess what
fills it. The real authority on a world we now view as constructed and not depicted becomes the medium that constructs our world-view. Second, to the extent that TV can refer exclusively to itself and debunk conventional standards as hollow, it is invulnerable to critics’ charges that what’s on is shallow or crass or bad, since any such judgments appeal to conventional, extra-televisual standards about depth, taste, quality. Too, the ironic tone of TV’s self-reference means that no one can accuse TV of trying to put anything over on anybody. As essayist Lewis Hyde points out, self-mocking irony is always “Sincerity, with a motive.” 27

  And, more to the original point, if television can invite Joe Briefcase into itself via in-gags and irony, it can ease that painful tension between Joe’s need to transcend the crowd and his inescapable status as Audience-member. For to the extent that TV can flatter Joe about “seeing through” the pretentiousness and hypocrisy of outdated values, it can induce in him precisely the feeling of canny superiority it’s taught him to crave, and can keep him dependent on the cynical TV-watching that alone affords this feeling.

  And to the extent that it can train viewers to laugh at characters’ unending put-downs of one another, to view ridicule as both the mode of social intercourse and the ultimate art-form, television can reinforce its own queer ontology of appearance: the most frightening prospect, for the well-conditioned viewer, becomes leaving oneself open to others’ ridicule by betraying passé expressions of value, emotion, or vulnerability. Other people become judges; the crime is naïveté. The well-trained viewer becomes even more allergic to people. Lonelier. Joe B.’s exhaustive TV-training in how to worry about how he might come across, seem to watching eyes, makes genuine human encounters even scarier. But televisual irony has the solution: further viewing begins to seem almost like required research, lessons in the blank, bored, too-wise expression that Joe must learn how to wear for tomorrow’s excruciating ride on the brightly lit subway, where crowds of blank, bored-looking people have little to look at but each other.

  What does TV’s institutionalization of hip irony have to do with U.S. fiction? Well, for one thing, American literary fiction tends to be about U.S. culture and the people who inhabit it. Culture-wise, shall I spend much of your time pointing out the degree to which televisual values influence the contemporary mood of jaded weltschmerz, self-mocking materialism, blank indifference, and the delusion that cynicism and naïveté are mutually exclusive? Can we deny connections between an unprecedentedly powerful consensual medium that suggests no real difference between image and substance, on one hand, and stuff like the rise of Teflon presidencies, the establishment of nationwide tanning and liposuction industries, the popularity of “Vogueing” to a cynical synthesized command to “Strike a Pose”? Or, in contemporary art, that televisual disdain for “hypocritical” retrovalues like originality, depth, and integrity has no truck with those recombinant “appropriation” styles of art and architecture in which “past becomes pastiche,” or with the repetitive solmizations of a Glass or a Reich, or with the self-conscious catatonia of a platoon of Raymond Carver wannabes?

  In fact, the numb blank bored demeanor—what one friend calls the “girl-who’s-dancing-with-you-but-would-obviously-rather-be-dancing-with-somebody-else” expression—that has become my generation’s version of cool is all about TV. “Television,” after all, literally means “seeing far”; and our six hours daily not only helps us feel up-close and personal at like the Pan-Am Games or Operation Desert Shield but also, inversely, trains us to relate to real live personal up-close stuff the same way we relate to the distant and exotic, as if separated from us by physics and glass, extant only as performance, awaiting our cool review. Indifference is actually just the ’90s’ version of frugality for U.S. young people: wooed several gorgeous hours a day for nothing but our attention, we regard that attention as our chief commodity, our social capital, and we are loath to fritter it. In the same regard, see that in 1990, flatness, numbness, and cynicism in one’s demeanor are clear ways to transmit the televisual attitude of stand-out-transcendence—flatness and numbness transcend sentimentality, and cynicism announces that one knows the score, was last naïve about something at maybe like age four.

  Whether or not 1990’s youth culture seems as grim to you as it does to me, surely we can agree that the culture’s TV-defined pop ethic has pulled a marvelous touché on the postmodern aesthetic that originally sought to co-opt and redeem the pop. Television has pulled the old dynamic of reference and redemption inside-out: it is now television that takes elements of the postmodern—the involution, the absurdity, the sardonic fatigue, the iconoclasm and rebellion—and bends them to the ends of spectation and consumption. This has been going on for a while. As early as ’84, critics of capitalism were warning that “What began as a mood of the avant-garde has surged into mass culture.” 28

  But postmodernism didn’t just all of a sudden “surge” into television in 1984. Nor have the vectors of influence between the postmodern and the televisual been one-way. The chief connection between today’s television and today’s fiction is historical. The two share roots. For postmodern fiction—authored almost exclusively by young white overeducated males—clearly evolved as an intellectual expression of the “rebellious youth culture” of the ’60s and ’70s. And since the whole gestalt of youthful U.S. rebellion was made possible by a national medium that erased communicative boundaries between regions and replaced a society segmented by location and ethnicity with what rock music critics have called “a national self-consciousness stratified by generation,” 29 the phenomenon of TV had as much to do with postmodernism’s rebellious irony as it did with Peaceniks’ protest rallies.

  In fact, by offering young, overeducated fiction writers a comprehensive view of how hypocritically the U.S.A. saw itself circa 1960, early television helped legitimize absurdism and irony as not just literary devices but sensible responses to a ridiculous world. For irony—exploiting gaps between what’s said and what’s meant, between how things try to appear and how they really are—is the time-honored way artists seek to illuminate and explode hypocrisy. And the television of lone-gunman westerns, paternalistic sitcoms, and jut-jawed law enforcement circa 1960 celebrated what by then was a deeply hypocritical American self-image. Miller describes nicely how the 1960s sitcom, like the westerns that preceded them,

  negated the increasing powerlessness of white-collar males with images of paternal strength and manly individualism. Yet by the time these sit-coms were produced, the world of small business [whose virtues were the Hugh Beaumontish ones of “self- possession, probity, and sound judgment”] had been… superseded by what C. Wright Mills called “the managerial demi-urge,” and the virtues personified by… Dad were in fact passé. 30

  In other words, early U.S. TV was a hypocritical apologist for values whose reality had become attenuated in a period of corporate ascendancy, bureaucratic entrenchment, foreign adventurism, racial conflict, secret bombing, assassination, wiretaps, etc. It’s not one bit accidental that postmodern fiction aimed its ironic crosshairs at the banal, the naïve, the sentimental and simplistic and conservative, for these qualities were just what ’60s TV seemed to celebrate as distinctively American.

  And the rebellious irony in the best postmodern fiction wasn’t just credible as art; it seemed downright socially useful in its capacity for what counterculture critics called “a critical negation that would make it self-evident to everyone that the world is not as it seems.” 31 Kesey’s black parody of asylums suggested that our arbiters of sanity were often crazier than their patients; Pynchon reoriented our view of paranoia from deviant psychic fringe to central thread in the corporo-bureaucratic weave; DeLillo exposed image, signal, data and tech as agents of spiritual chaos and not social order. Burroughs’s icky explorations of American narcosis exploded hypocrisy; Gaddis’s exposure of abstract capital as deforming exploded hypocrisy; Coover’s repulsive political farces exploded hypocrisy.

  Irony in postwar ar
t and culture started out the same way youthful rebellion did. It was difficult and painful, and productive—a grim diagnosis of a long-denied disease. The assumptions behind early postmodern irony, on the other hand, were still frankly idealistic: it was assumed that etiology and diagnosis pointed toward cure, that a revelation of imprisonment led to freedom.

  So then how have irony, irreverence, and rebellion come to be not liberating but enfeebling in the culture today’s avant-garde tries to write about? One clue’s to be found in the fact that irony is still around, bigger than ever after 30 long years as the dominant mode of hip expression. It’s not a rhetorical mode that wears well. As Hyde (whom I pretty obviously like) puts it, “Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.” 32 This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing. Surely this is the way our postmodern fathers saw it. But irony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks. This is why Hyde seems right about persistent irony being tiresome. It is unmeaty. Even gifted ironists work best in sound bites. I find gifted ironists sort of wickedly fun to listen to at parties, but I always walk away feeling like I’ve had several radical surgical procedures. And as for actually driving cross-country with a gifted ironist, or sitting through a 300 page novel full of nothing but trendy sardonic exhaustion, one ends up feeling not only empty but somehow… oppressed.