I’d like to start this blog post with a perhaps, vacuous but risky premise: television in the U.S. in the last 10 years has entered into a golden age. There have been a number of shows that have not only been able to catch the attention of all kinds of audiences across the country and the world, but also, they have shown a quality in the writing, and the acting, that has been beyond any of the decades prior to it. There are many reasons for this golden age that have to do with the advent of TV on the internet, Netflix-type services where one can watch a whole season in one go, and the importance of powerhouses of cable TV like HBO who have given film talent the opportunity to be showcased in the small screen, and a number of other reasons.
I have certainly been paying attention to many different
types of shows, but more than anything, I’ve been paying attention to sit-coms. That’s the genre that I have seemed to prefer
the last few years, and one that I hope continues to be as innovative as it has
been in the last 10 years, where the technique of single-camera set-up with a
cinema verité style has been employed in sitcoms like The Office and Parks and
Recreation, to great responses from audiences that have been able to
benefit, in my opinion, by the lack of laugh tracks, and the reality-tv style
interviews that help enhance character depth and plot intrigue.
Though these are interesting characteristics of the U.S. America
sit-com, what interests me the most, what most piques my curiosity, is not the
technical developments of these shows in the last 10 years, its virtues and
issues – though in fact not all shows utilize this technique (30 Rock being a great counter-example),
and some of the most recent debutante shows are not really sticking with
it. What really interests me is a
particular type of character that seems recurrent in all sit-coms, and the
character on which much of the intrigue, plot-development, and comedic moments
rests. This is also a great development
of the last 10 years in television: the right-wing looney. Dwight Schrute, Jack Donaghy, Ron Swanson and
even Schmidt from New Girl (though
maybe a younger, “cooler” type) all embody the right-wing looney. All of these characters have
pro-capitalistic, small government, power-grabbing, male-dominant delusional
utopic fantasies of what the world should be – and the audiences of sit-coms
just fall in love with these characters – mainly because they can easily laugh
at them.
Audiences love their rage, their over-the-top personalities,
their ridiculous pomposity, their overt orthodoxy, their phallic personas and
actions that overpower in many occasions, with their antics, the characters of
the well-intentioned, beautiful and politically-safe protagonists of these
shows. Just like Milton’s Satan, they
are also given the best lines – and the most outrageous ones: Swanson: “myperfect idea of government is one guy who sits in a small room at a desk, theonly thing he’s allowed to decide is who to nuke”;
or Donaghy’s “(on being asked why he’s wearing a tuxedo) it’s after six, whatam I? a farmer?”; and even Schrute’s
“a horse doctor… is just a regular doctor who shots your horse in the head whenhis leg is broken”.
The audience loves these characters so much that in fact, as
an example to my theory, Nick Offerman (Ron Swanson) took a stand-up show on
the road based on his Parks and
Recreation persona. The end of The Office might be another example of
this, with the highlighted importance of Dwight Schrute, and the audience’s
complicit agreement with the writers of the show in the ultimate well-being of
Dwight: he got married to the real love of his life, and will live happily ever
after. I think the show could not have
ended with Dwight just being Dwight – his narrative arch needed to end with his
ultimate happiness, or the show would not have real closure. And in fact, it’s not that other characters
did not get the closure they wanted, but the end of Dwight’s narrative arch was
front and center.
I do wonder, how is conservative, white, middle-U.S. America
reading these characters, or their personas.
Do they appear over the top to them?
I think the answer is absolutely yes, and mainly because these are
different type of right-wing nut cases: the rural type, the small town type,
the big corporation type, the yuppie type, and not one person can feel so
identified with all of these that cannot recognize the prevalent tone in all of
them: over-the-top conservative social politics and/or over-the-top neoliberal
economics. But isn’t laughing at
someone, sometimes, the best form of flattery?
As I say, don’t audiences love these characters? Meaning, that, in fact,
by laughing at their absurdity, they are actually condoning and accepting the
existence of such personas? Don’t we all
want Dwight to get married and be happy, at the end of The Office, because he’s
a good person, despite his anti-Jim antics, his backward ways?
But ok, fine! I can
expect this, they are right-wing looneys! We come to expect this of them right?
It’s just what they are. Bah! You might
even know some of these people in real life! Isn’t that so? Man, some of these people might even post on
your Facebook feed 24/7.
Yet, the show Portlandia,
in my opinion, offers an interesting response. For a moment, let’s entertain the view that the
right-wing intelligentsia is pretty straight-forward about its views: “our way
or the highway” (or the other side of the thousands of miles-long wall they are
building along the border). Some of the
most recent political events, namely the government shut-down, shows that this
is indeed the case. Though, in the end, they
paid heavily for their intransigence. If
one believes this is true about the right-wing intelligentsia, one might say
that the left-wing, on the other hand, presents itself as much more
subtle. To explain this I will use the
IFC comedy show. On the very first
episode of the show, the characters sing a song that goes something like, “the dream of the 90’s is alive in Portland, Portland, Portland”. Now, on the second season, they start singing
the same song. Yet at the end, they add
a new punch line, “…the 1890’s”. Lines
about hipster mustaches, coiffures and outfits, artisanal sausage-making and
micro-brews fill the beginning of the show as a critique of Portland, and U.S.
American, hipster culture.
What the episode doesn’t mention, what’s funny about it, and
what I consider essential to understanding this phenomenon, is the orthodoxy
that accompanies it – a nostalgia for a time, a set of values, and a culture
that is beyond even the own personal histories of the people embracing it, and
an irreverent belief that this is, in fact, the only possible way of looking
at, and of living in, this world. Hipster
culture is the culture of the elites hiding themselves behind pop culture (I
knew Radiohead before Radiohead was Radiohead).
However, hipster culture is an old phenomenon disguised as a
new one: it’s a phenomenon that much resembles Slavoj Zizek’s oft-repeated story about the postmodernist father: orthodoxy hidden behind
free-thinking. And this is true of the
new U.S. American seemingly-progressive, green, free-thinking left: “look, it’s
not that we want you to do what we say, it’s that the earth will be happier
(and we will avoid catastrophe of apocalyptic proportions if the earth is
happier) if you do what we say, but please, do what you like, you are free to
follow us or destroy the world if you don’t”.
Is there a real choice to be made here?
This is another version of the saying “our way or the highway”. Portlandia
utilizes the same character of the right-wing looney, but flips it around and
makes a left-wing, Whole Foods-loving, organic, free-range version of it.
What Portlandia might
be revealing is that shows like The
Office, 30 Rock, and Parks and Recreation could be accurate
allegorical representations of contemporary U.S. politics: shows that, like the
U.S. American left, dress themselves to be progressive. These shows are about individuals like Jim
Halpert (he wants to start a company doing what he loves, and not necessarily
what will make him money), Leslie Knope (she wants to be a democratic
politician), Liz Lemon (he wants to be a happy successful woman writer in a
male-dominated corporate world) or Jessica Day (she wants to be a school teacher
and find real love), but in reality they are shows about right-wing nuts: the
Schrutes, the Swansons, the Donaghys…characters that get the most laughs, and
at the end, the most empathy.
Isn’t that same logic that’s hiding behind this supposed
liberal government, and Barack Obama, which have big explosive rhetoric about
left-wing ideals but have demonstrated time and again that it is behind big
business and their interests; couldn’t provide universal healthcare for their
citizens (one of the only industrialized western world powers to not do so) and
the roll out and implementation of the existent Healthcare reform (which does not include universal healthcare)
was a small catastrophe; and in recently heavily debated news, led by whistleblower
Snowden, has been shown to spy on its
citizens constantly, as well as countless people around the world, including
the leaders of “ally countries” such as Germany, France, Spain, Brazil and even
Israel, resulting in violations of privacy (that have been deemed
unconstitutional, and reprehensible by judges and investigating committees) in
order to gain military surveillance control of the world?
In
my opinion, the right-wing looney character in contemporary U.S. American
television becomes the limit of the imaginary horizon of expectation for political
values – they are not beyond what is possible in reality. In other words, these so-called nuts are, in
fact not, hyperbolic, but truly what we have come to expect as normal: a
systematic shift to the right of all of the (possible and acceptable) political
ranges.
...So...these “notes” are Part I, and in Part 2, I will discuss the show Newsroom and I will go beyond “the
right-wing looney” and talk some more about what I perceive as a systematic
shift to the right…
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