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

  Not that these realities about actors and phosphenes and furniture are unknown to us. We choose to ignore them. They are part of the disbelief we suspend. But it’s an awfully heavy load to hoist aloft for six hours a day; illusions of voyeurism and privileged access require serious complicity from the viewer. How can we be made so willingly to acquiesce to the delusion that the people on the TV don’t know they’re being watched, to the fantasy that we’re somehow transcending privacy and feeding on unself-conscious human activity? There might be lots of reasons why these unrealities are so swallowable, but a big one is that the performers behind the glass are—varying degrees of thespian talent notwithstanding—absolute geniuses at seeming unwatched. Make no mistake—seeming unwatched in front of a TV camera is an art. Take a look at how non-professionals act when a TV camera is pointed at them: they often spaz out, or else they go all stiff, frozen with self-consciousness. Even PR people and politicians are, in terms of being on camera, rank amateurs. And we love to laugh at how stiff and fake non-pros appear on television. How unnatural.

  But if you’ve ever once been the object of that terrible blank round glass stare, you know all too well how paralyzingly self-conscious it makes you feel. A harried guy with earphones and a clipboard tells you to “act natural” as your face begins to leap around on your skull, struggling for a seeming-unwatched expression that feels so impossible because “seeming unwatched” is, like “acting natural,” oxymoronic. Try hitting a golf ball right after someone asks you whether you in- or exhale on your backswing, or getting promised lavish rewards if you can avoid thinking of a green rhinoceros for ten seconds, and you’ll get some idea of the truly heroic contortions of body and mind that must be required for a David Duchovny or Don Johnson to act unwatched as he’s watched by a lens that’s an overwhelming emblem of what Emerson, years before TV, called “the gaze of millions.” 2

  For Emerson, only a certain very rare species of person is fit to stand this gaze of millions. It is not your normal, hardworking, quietly desperate species of American. The man who can stand the megagaze is a walking imago, a certain type of transcendent semihuman who, in Emerson’s phrase, “carries the holiday in his eye.” The Emersonian holiday that television actors’ eyes carry is the promise of a vacation from human self-consciousness. Not worrying about how you come across. A total unallergy to gazes. It is contemporarily heroic. It is frightening and strong. It is also, of course, an act, for you have to be just abnormally self-conscious and self-controlled to appear unwatched before cameras and lenses and men with clipboards. This self-conscious appearance of unself-consciousness is the real door to TV’s whole mirror-hall of illusions, and for us, the Audience, it is both medicine and poison.

  For we gaze at these rare, highly-trained, unwatched-seeming people for six hours daily. And we love these people. In terms of attributing to them true supernatural assets and desiring to emulate them, it’s fair to say we sort of worship them. In a real Joe Briefcase-world that shifts ever more starkly from some community of relationships to networks of strangers connected by self-interest and technology, the people we espy on TV offer us familiarity, community. Intimate friendship. But we split what we see. The characters may be our “close friends,” but the performers are beyond strangers: they’re imagos, demigods, and they move in a different sphere, hang out with and marry only each other, seem even as actors accessible to Audience only via the mediation of tabloid, talk show, EM signal. And yet both actors and characters, so terribly removed and filtered, seem so terribly, gloriously natural when we watch.

  Given how much we watch and what watching means, it’s inevitable, for those of us fictionists or Joe Briefcases who fancy ourselves voyeurs, to get the idea that these persons behind the glass—persons who are often the most colorful, attractive, animated, alive people in our daily experience—are also people who are oblivious to the fact that they are watched. This illusion is toxic. It’s toxic for lonely people because it sets up an alienating cycle (viz. “Why can’t I be like that?” etc.), and it’s toxic for writers because it leads us to confuse actual fiction-research with a weird kind of fiction-consumption. Self-conscious people’s oversensitivity to real humans tends to put us before the television and its one-way window in an attitude of relaxed and total reception, rapt. We watch various actors play various characters, etc. For 360 minutes per diem, we receive unconscious reinforcement of the deep thesis that the most significant quality of truly alive persons is watchableness, and that genuine human worth is not just identical with but rooted in the phenomenon of watching. Plus the idea that the single biggest part of real watchableness is seeming to be unaware that there’s any watching going on. Acting natural. The persons we young fiction writers and assorted shut-ins study, feel for, feel through most intently are, by virtue of a genius for feigned unself-consciousness, fit to stand people’s gazes. And we, trying desperately to be nonchalant, perspire creepily on the subway.

  the finger

  Existentiovoyeuristic conundra notwithstanding, there’s no denying the simple fact that people in the U.S.A. watch so much television basically because it’s fun. I know I watch for fun, most of the time, and that at least 51% of the time I do have fun when I watch. This doesn’t mean I do not take television seriously. One big claim of this essay is going to be that the most dangerous thing about television for U.S. fiction writers is that we don’t take it seriously enough as both a disseminator and a definer of the cultural atmosphere we breathe and process, that many of us are so blinded by constant exposure that we regard TV the way Reagan’s lame F.C.C. chairman Mark Fowler professed to see it in 1981, as “just another appliance, a toaster with pictures.” 3

  It’s undeniable, nevertheless, that watching television is pleasurable, and it may seem odd that so much of the pleasure my generation takes from television lies in making fun of it. But you have to remember that younger Americans grew up as much with people’s disdain for TV as we did with TV itself. I knew it was a “vast wasteland” way before I knew who Newton Minow and Mark Fowler were. And it really is fun to laugh cynically at television—at the way the laughter from sitcoms’ “live studio audiences” is always suspiciously constant in pitch and duration, or at the way travel is depicted on The Flintstones by having the exact same cut-rate cartoon tree, rock, and house go by four times. It’s fun, when a withered June Allyson comes on-screen for Depend Adult Undergarments and says “If you have a bladder-control problem, you’re not alone,” to hoot and shout back “Well chances are you’re alone quite a bit, June!”

  Most scholars and critics who write about U.S. popular culture, though, seem both to take TV very seriously and to suffer terrible pain over what they see. There’s this well-known critical litany about television’s vapidity and irrealism. The litany is often even cruder and triter than the shows the critics complain about, which I think is why most younger Americans find professional criticism of television less interesting than professional television itself. I found solid examples of what I’m talking about on the first day I even looked. The New York Times Arts & Leisure Section for Sunday, 8/05/90, simply bulged with bitter critical derision for TV, and some of the most unhappy articles weren’t about low-quality programming so much as about how TV’s become this despicable instrument of cultural decay. In a summary review of all 1990’s “crash and burn” summer box-office hits in which “realism… seems to have gone almost entirely out of fashion,” it takes Janet Maslin only a paragraph to locate her true anti-reality culprit: “We may be hearing about ‘real life’ only on television shows made up of fifteen-second sound bites (in which ‘real people’ not only speak in brief, neat truisms but actually seem to think that way, perhaps as a result of having watched too much reality-molding television themselves).” 4 And one Stephen Holden, in what starts out as a scathing assessment of the pass pop music’s come to, feels he knows perfectly well what’s behind what he hates: “Pop music is no longer a world unto itself but an adjunct of television, whose strea
m of commercial images projects a culture in which everything is for sale and the only things that count are fame, power, and the body beautiful.” 5 This stuff just goes on and on, article after article, in the Times. The only Arts & Leisure piece I could find with anything upbeat to say about TV that morning was a breathless article on how lots of Ivy League graduates are now flying straight from school to New York and Los Angeles to become television writers and are clearing well over $200,000 to start and enjoying rapid advancement to harried clipboarded production status. In this regard, 8/05’s Times is a good example of a strange mix that’s been around for a few years now: weary contempt for television as a creative product and cultural force, combined with beady-eyed fascination about the actual behind-the-glass mechanics of making that product and projecting that force.

  Surely I’m not alone in having acquaintances I hate to watch TV with because they so clearly loathe it—they complain relentlessly about the hackneyed plots, the unlikely dialogue, the Cheez-Whiz resolutions, the bland condescension of the news anchors, the shrill wheedling of the commercials—and yet are just as clearly obsessed with it, somehow need to loathe their six hours a day, day in and out. Junior advertising executives, aspiring filmmakers, and grad-school poets are in my experience especially prone to this condition where they simultaneously hate, fear, and need television, and try to disinfect themselves of whatever so much viewing might do to them by watching TV with weary contempt instead of the rapt credulity most of us grew up with. (Note that most fiction writers still tend to go for the rapt credulity.)

  But, since the wearily contemptuous Times has its own demographic thumb to the pulse of readerly taste, it’s probably safe to assume that most educated, Times-buying Americans are wearily disgusted by television, have this weird hate-/need-/fear-6-hrs. -daily gestalt about it. Published TV-scholarship sure reflects this mood. And the numbingly dull quality to most “literary” television analyses is due less to the turgid abstraction scholars employ to make television seem an OK object of aesthetic inquiry—q.v. part of an ’86 treatise: “The form of my Tuesday evening’s prime-time pleasure is structured by a dialectic of elision and rift among various windows through which… ‘flow’ is more a circumstance than a product. The real output is the quantum, the smallest maneuverable broadcast bit.” 6 —than to the jaded cynicism of TV-scholars who mock and revile the very phenomenon they’ve chosen as vocation. These scholars are like people who despise—I mean big-time, long-term despise—their spouses or jobs, but won’t split up or quit. Critical complaint seems long ago to have degenerated into plain old whining. The important question about U.S. television is no longer whether there are some truly nasty problems involved in Americans’ relation to television but rather what might possibly be done about them. On this question pop critics and scholars are resoundingly mute.

  The fact is that it’s only in the U.S. arts, particularly in certain strands of contemporary American fiction, that the really interesting questions about fin-de-siècle TV—What exactly is it about televisual culture that we hate so much? Why are we so immersed in it if we hate it so? What implications are there in our sustained, voluntary immersion in something we hate?—are being addressed. But they are also, weirdly, being asked and answered by television itself. This is another reason why most TV criticism seems so empty. Television’s managed to become its own most profitable analyst.

  Midmorning, 8/05/90, as I was scanning and sneering at the sneering tone of the aforementioned Times articles, a syndicated episode of St Elsewhere was on TV, cleaning up in a Sunday-morning Boston market otherwise occupied by televangelists, infomercials, and the steroid-and polyurethane-ridden American Gladiators, itself not charmless but definitely a low-dose show. Syndication is another new area of public fascination, not only because huge cable stations like Chicago’s WGN and Atlanta’s TBS have upped the stakes from local to national, but because syndication is changing the whole creative philosophy of network television. Since it is in syndication deals (where the distributor gets both an up-front fee for a program and a percentage of the ad slots for his own commercials) that the creators of successful television series realize truly gross profits, many new programs are designed and pitched with both immediate prime-time and down-the-road syndication audiences in mind, and are now informed less by dreams of the ten-year-beloved-TV-institution-type run—M*A*S*H, Cheers!—than of a modest three-year run that will yield the 78 in-can episodes required for an attractive syndication package. By the way, I, like millions of other Americans, know this technical insider-type stuff because I saw a special three-part report about syndication on Entertainment Tonight, itself the first nationally syndicated “news” program and the first infomercial so popular that TV stations were willing to pay for it.

  Sunday-morning syndication is also intriguing because it makes for juxtapositions as eerily apposite as anything French surrealists could come up with. Lovable warlocks on Bewitched and commercially Satanic heavy-metal videos on Top Ten Countdown run opposite air-brushed preachers decrying demonism in U.S. culture. You can surf back and forth between a televised mass’s “This is my blood” and Gladiators’ Zap breaking a civilian’s nose with a polyurethane Bataka. Or, even better, have a look at 8/05/90’s St. Elsewhere episode 94, originally broadcast in 1988, which airs in syndication on Boston’s Channel 38 immediately following two back-to-back episodes of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, that icon of ’70s pathos. The plots of the two Mary Tyler Moore Shows are unimportant here. But the St. Elsewhere episode that followed them was partly concerned with a cameo-role mental patient who presented with the delusional belief that he was Mary Richards from The Mary Tyler Moore Show. He further believed that a fellow cameo-role mental patient was Rhoda, that Dr. Westphal was Mr. Grant, and that Dr. Auschlander was Murray. This psychiatric subplot was a one-shot; it was resolved by episode’s end. The pseudo-Mary (a sad lumpy-looking guy, portrayed by an actor whose name I didn’t catch but who I remember used to play one of Dr. Hartley’s neurotic clients on the old Bob Newhart Show) rescues the other cameo-role mental patient, whom he believes to be Rhoda and who has been furious in his denials that he is female, much less fictional (and who is himself played by the guy who used to play Mr. Carlin, Dr. Hartley’s most intractable client) from assault by a bit-part hebephrene. In gratitude, Rhoda/Mr. Carlin/mental patient declares that he’ll consent to be Rhoda if that’s what Mary/neurotic client/mental patient wants. At this too-real generosity, the pseudo-Mary’s psychotic break breaks. The sad lumpy guy admits to Dr. Auschlander that he’s not Mary Richards. He’s actually just a plain old amnesiac, a guy without a meaningful identity, existentially adrift. He has no idea who he is. He’s lonely. He watches a lot of TV. He says he “figured it was better to believe I was a TV character than not to believe I was anybody.” Dr. Auschlander takes the penitent patient for a walk in the wintery Boston air and promises that he, the identityless guy, can someday very probably find out who he really is, provided he can dispense with “the distraction of television.” Extremely grateful and happy at this prognosis, the patient removes his own fuzzy winter beret and throws it into the air. The episode ends with a freeze of the airborne hat, leaving at least one viewer credulously rapt.

  This would have been just another clever low-concept ’80s TV story, where the final cap-tossing coyly undercuts Dr. Auschlander’s putdown of television, were it not for the countless layers of ironic, involuted TV imagery and data that whirled around this incredibly high-concept installment. Because another of this episode’s cameo stars, drifting through a different subplot, is one Betty White, Sue-Ann Nivens of the old Mary Tyler Moore Show, here playing a tortured NASA surgeon (don’t ask). It is with almost tragic inevitability, then, that Ms. White, at 32 minutes into the episode, meets up with the TV-deluded pseudo-Mary in their respective tortured wanderings through the hospital’s corridors, and that she greets the mental patient’s inevitable joyful cries of “Sue-Ann!” with a too-straight face as she says that he must ha
ve her confused with someone else. Of the convolved levels of fantasy and reality and identity here—e.g. the patient simultaneously does, does not, and does have Betty White “confused” with Sue-Ann Nivens—we needn’t speak in detail; doubtless a Yale Contemporary Culture dissertation is under way on Deleuze & Guattari and just this episode. But the most interesting levels of meaning here lie, and point, behind the lens. For NBC’s St Elsewhere, like The Mary Tyler Moore Show and The Bob Newhart Show before it, was created, produced, and guided into syndication by MTM Studios, owned by Mary Tyler Moore and overseen by her erstwhile husband, eventual NBC CEO Grant Tinker; and St. Elsewhere’s scripts and subplots are story-edited by Mark Tinker, Mary’s stepson, Grant’s heir. The deluded mental patient, an exiled, drifting veteran of one MTM program, reaches piteously out to the exiled, drifting (literally—NASA, for God’s sake!) veteran of another MTM production, and her deadpan rebuff is scripted by MTM personnel, who accomplish the parodic undercut of MTM’s Dr. Auschlander with the copyrighted MTM hat-gesture of one MTM veteran who’s “deluded” he’s another. Dr. A.’s Fowleresque dismissal of TV as just a “distraction” is less naïve than insane: there is nothing but television on this episode. Every character and conflict and joke and dramatic surge depends on involution, self-reference, metatelevision. It is in-joke within in-joke.