Tag: Television

METAMERICANA: TOO MANY COOKS Is a Political Statement Worth Hearing

METAMERICANA: TOO MANY COOKS Is a Political Statement Worth Hearing

The argument for the recent viral short Too Many Cooks
being a postmodern parody is easy to make—too easy, in fact. Sure, on the face
of it, Casper Kelly’s eleven-minute video for Cartoon Network’s “Adult Swim”
viewing bloc is a deconstruction of the opening credits often found on
cheesy 80s sitcoms, police procedurals, and sci-fi knock-offs. And yes,
the fact that the running conceit in the video is the power that language has
over us (the actors’ names, which appear beneath them in the usual way of all opening
credits, ultimately become a terrorizing force more human than the humans
they’re attached to) does tend to support the claim that the
postmodernist principle that we are all constructed by and in language is in play. But Too Many Cooks is mixing together too many opposite inclinations, effects,
and plot structures to be adequately described as “postmodern.” Instead, it
seems to intend, as so many Adult Swim videos do, to be inscrutable rather than
analytical, contradictory rather than instructive, and simultaneously
deconstructive and constructive rather than merely deconstructive.
 
For
all its fragmentation—the video moves rapidly between
television subgenres, even as it endlessly recycles the same theme song
(with
slightly different lyrics each time)—Too Many Cooks has a story to
tell that’s surprisingly conventional. First, there’s a villain: a
mysterious,
cannibalistic killer who’s introduced early on, whose name isn’t known,
whose
motives beyond bloodlust are inscrutable, who’s frightening in
appearance, whose
early victims are caught unawares, who understands his local environment
much
better than any of the good guys, and who towards the end of his
homicidal spree faces a “final girl” (an attractive young female more
canny than all the victims preceding her).
Sound familiar? It should, as it’s every horror movie ever made, other
than
meta-commentaries like Scream or Joss
Whedon’s A Cabin in the Woods. Too Many Cooks even features hapless law
enforcement, as several police officers fail to notice the killer even when
he’s literally right under their noses.
 
Just as it has a fairly conventional villain, Too Many
Cooks has a hero whose placement is conventional even if certain of his
descriptive particulars are not. Smarf the Cat, described by The New Yorker
as the product of “Alf mating with a cat rather than eating
one,” is
introduced early on in a way that makes him endearing. Smarf has special
gifts that
others don’t immediately see (e.g., he can shoot rainbows from his hands
and
lasers from his eyes), has an apprehension of danger that exceeds that
of law
enforcement and all the other good guys, and in the end kills the
villain but is
gravely injured himself. Smarf’s role in Too Many Cooks is undergirded
by such a human inclination that it belies the fact he’s the only
non-human in the video: he’s trying to put everything back to normal.
“Back to normal,” in
the terms of the world of Too Many Cooks, means finally ending the
opening-credits loop all the characters in the video are caught up in;
Smarf, though grievously wounded, does
this by pressing a giant red button, after which he appears to die.
But—surprise!—he doesn’t die. In fact he’s fine, though the
cliff-hanging ending of Too Many Cooks suggests that Smarf’s still
caught up in the cycle of danger we’d assumed he’d escaped. All of which
should surprise no one,
as it’s exactly how the hero of a conventional horror film is dealt
with.
 
So why are so many commentators in major media (including not just The New Yorker, but also The Daily Beast and others) referring to "Too Many Cooks" as postmodern, or using terms common to postmodernist literary theory
(like “parody”) to explain the operations of Kelly’s intricately networked art-house flick? The
answer seems to be that “postmodern” is the term we use habitually, even
instinctively, for things we don’t understand and don’t really care to. Too
Many Cooks is blindingly fast in its transformations, and
repeatedly obscure in its deconstructions of iconic images and ideas, so it
must be “postmodern” in some way—that is, beyond our understanding.
 
In fact, the new avant-garde in the arts, and particularly
in the visual arts, very much wants to
be understood. It wants you to be able to follow with little difficulty what
you’re seeing, even as the effect it has on you pushes you simultaneously
toward several internally contradictory extremes. Too Many Cooks is at once funny and
horrifying, mesmerizing and cloying, exhilarating and depressing, filled with
obvious references to popular culture and entirely disinterested in whether you
can catch even a fraction of them. If it seems in a sense ironic—as it clearly
does take a dim view of the formal constraints that typified 80s
television programs—it’s also earnest enough to want to give you everything you
expect from a fantasy: a villain, a hero, a plot, some tragedies, some
emotional manipulations, and a resolution that both satisfies and keeps you
guessing about what could come next.
 
“Classic” postmodern art emphasizes that meaning falls apart
at every critical juncture, and therefore usually requires specialized academic
training to fully interpret and appreciate. If and when it seeks a popular
audience, it does so to shock, distress, or otherwise disgust its viewers; even
Andy Warhol’s paintings, while easy enough to “get” on a first look, were
intended to provoke anxious debate over what is and is not art. Too Many
Cooks is a different breed of artwork entirely because it requires little debate
regarding its central premise but still provokes significant emotional anxiety among
its viewership. If postmodern literature usually sends us running to our scholars for assistance, Too
Many Cooks is much more likely to have you singing its theme song in
the shower. We’ve moved from a time when avant-garde art wanted to
unsettle our
minds to a time when it wants to unsettle our nerves and give us
immediate pleasure simultaneously. What’s at stake in this
movement from the postmodern paradigm to what’s lately being called
“metamodernism”? It’s a good question, and by now there’s enough visual
art like Too Many Cooks out there that we do well to consider the
omnipresence of contemporary art that ostentatiously combines opposing ideas in a way most of us can’t
readily process.
 
Metamodern art like Too Many Cooks is trying to
do an end-around past those institutions we once turned to for communal
sense-making: mass media, the academy, and non-academic "experts" within
their subfields.
When Too Many Cooks was released, everyone began forwarding it to
everyone
else via social media and email, whether or not anyone doing the
forwarding had
yet processed their emotional reactions to the video. The currency of Too Many
Cooks became attention itself, not understanding, and the power to pass
on that currency resided in any person with access to the Internet, not
just those specifically empowered with cultural capital (for instance,
via
higher education) to tell everyone else what’s worth sharing and viewing
and
what isn’t. If we live in a time of great cynicism about media,
academic, and
of course political institutions, art that’s designed to virally
infect all of us with emotions we can’t process is subversive by definition.
 
Consider the way Too Many Cooks moved through the culture:
it at once became a hot topic on The New Yorker, New York Magazine,
and CNN websites,
even as it was still burning its way through every discussion board on
countercultural hotbeds Reddit and 4chan. The disconnect between those
two
audiences—one attracted to High Art, the other, broadly speaking, to
Low—was so
great that Reddit and 4chan users were heard loudly complaining that
their
enjoyment of Too Many Cooks was being coopted by those whose values
and tastes they didn’t and can’t share.
In other words, Too Many Cooks was destroying class distinctions by
appealing
to basic human emotions all of us contend with, regardless of income,
education, or
institutional affiliation. To call Too Many Cooks mere parody when it
deliberately speaks directly to and about longstanding story structures
and
psychosocial conventions unfairly casts it as deliberately obscure. It’s
a strange thing: we
live in an age in which we treat as obscure that which is simple in
order to avoid
seeing that it’s our simplicities that unite us, and that we all
struggle daily to resolve contradictory ideas and emotions. Too Many
Cooks may suggest a worldview troubled by the overload of information
we all experience in the Internet Age,
but it’s also trying to remind us that, for now at least, we’re all in
the same kitchen
and eating the same food.

Seth Abramson is the author of five poetry collections, including two, Metamericana and DATA,
forthcoming in 2015 and 2016. Currently a doctoral candidate at
University of Wisconsin-Madison, he is also Series Co-Editor for Best American Experimental Writing, whose next edition will be published by Wesleyan University Press in 2015.

KICKING TELEVISION: Re-imagining the Sitcom

KICKING TELEVISION: Re-imagining the Sitcom

null

The sitcom is dead. Though we’re
continually told we’re living in the New Golden Age of Television, a quick
survey of the situational comedy landscape suggests that this is not the case.
After The Sopranos gave television
permission to tell stories in more cinematic and innovative ways, we have been
blessed with unparalleled artistry and achievement on its dramatic side. Breaking Bad, Lost, Mad Men, True Detective, The Walking Dead, Friday
Night Lights and their brethren have treated audiences to heretofore-unseen
storytelling and production on the small screen. And yet on the comedy side,
we’re left with The Big Bang Theory,
capable if uninspiring television that is forgotten moments after the credits
roll.

It wasn’t that long ago that the
sitcom ruled the airwaves. In the ‘90s, Seinfeld
and Friends were not just the most
watched shows on TV—they were part of the cultural zeitgeist. Before that, Cheers and Roseanne reveled in blue-collar settings with grace and humour.
Their predecessors, like Maude and All in the Family, contributed to the
greater discourse, addressing societal change and issues beyond what TV had
discussed previously. The sitcom wasn’t just entertainment time-filler. It was
art.

And then came Chuck Lorre.

I’m certainly not blaming the
creator of Two and a Half Men and The Big Bang Theory for the demise of
the medium, but rather pointing to these productions as indicators of the
critical flaws in the sitcom. These shows lack ambition. The writing is
borrowed from episodes we’ve seen ad infintum. The characters are stock. The
format is flat. Consider the new sitcoms cancelled already this fall season: Bad Judge, A to Z, Manhattan Love Story,
and Selfie. There was nothing
memorable or exciting about them. There was nothing we haven’t seen before.
Bland versions of those same four shows have been rolled out each season,
pillaged from the pile of pilot season dreck. And even more bland versions will
be rolled out midseason.

There is some hope. In the
instances of a post-Seinfeld TV-scape
where the industry was ambitious, there has been success. The Office in its first few seasons was as funny and clever as
anything that has ever fit beneath the sitcom umbrella. Arrested Development was punished for its ingenuity, a victim of
poor scheduling and a network that failed to see its burgeoning cult status. It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia was Seinfeld on crack, before it became It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia on
crack and lost its way. Party Down
was imaginative and inventive, and yet its location on the upstart Starz network
and its micro-budget couldn’t maintain its momentum nor cast. Louie is more original than most, but it
limits itself and fails to step to far beyond the confines of the genre,
despite the overwhelming sensation that it wants to. Community was the one great hope. A show that satirized the genre,
that defied the tropes. But NBC did its best to kill it, and now its left with
a fraction of its original cast in the unknown wasteland of Yahoo TV, whatever
that is. But what we’re left with, what the industry trumpets as successful, is
Modern Family, a fading Parks and Rec, a middling Mindy Project, and a sea of forgettable
offerings that don’t resonate with the audience and don’t challenge the medium.

(You’re the Worst, as I
have previously written, is absolute genius and exempt from this tirade.)

And that’s it, other than a few
episodes here and there and a cancelled-too-early show that had promise that
we’ll never see realized. Is Modern
Family really the best sitcom the industry can offer, as the Emmy voters
would contend, or is it simply the most not incompetent? It’s overly celebrated
in a manner that proves my thesis: It is the best of a genre that doesn’t try;
it is inoffensive and forgettable. In reality, it’s a milquetoast offering that
offends no one and takes up twenty-two minutes of twelve million people’s
Wednesday night. It is not appointment viewing. It is not Must See TV. Quite
simply, it’s all that’s on.

So is the sitcom really dead, or
is it just on life support, in desperate need of a shot of adrenaline or
whiskey or Wes Anderson?

Writing, in any of its
incarnations, is simply about telling a story. At its best, it’s telling
stories in ways that are interesting. I don’t know if the Vassar MFA grads that
currently make up 80% of the sitcom writer pool are afraid to be progressive or
are just cursed with moderate talents, but it’s time the industry looked past a
writer’s room that couldn’t get an honest guffaw without a bag of shrooms and a
laugh track.

While television dramas have
mined external resources for auteurship, the sitcom has stayed with the
tried-and-tired formula of an unambitious rotation of series creators with
pilots directed by James Burrows. David Fincher (House of Cards), Frank Darabont (The Walking Dead), and Martin Scorsese (Boardwalk Empire) are just a few of the prominent filmmakers who
have made successful forays into serial storytelling on the small screen during
the unprecedented rise of the drama in the past decade or so. Nic Pizzolatto
was a celebrated novelist, a finalist for the Edgar and National Magazine awards,
an honourable mention for the Pushcart Prize, and the winner of the Prix du Premier Roman étranger, as well
as a creative writing professor, before True
Detective took him out of the classroom and Barnes & Noble discount
bin.

And yet, in the sitcom world,
we’re still saddled with shows “from the creators of Suburgatory and According to
Jim.” In an industry that loves to attempt to Xerox success, why has the
comedy side of television refused to learn from its drama cousins? Would we not
be interested to see what interesting and progressive comedic filmmakers could
do with a television comedy? This trend may be slowly beginning, with TV
projects forthcoming from Mark and Jay Duplass (Togetherness) and Jason Reitman (Casual). Wouldn’t you love to see what Anderson could do with the
medium? Nicholas Stoller? Lorene Scafaria? Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris?

And why be so shortsighted as to
stay within the Hollywood bubble? Did HBO’s moderate success with Bored to Death, from the celebrated
novelist Jonathan Ames, not prove that literary quality has a place on
television? I’d love to see a sitcom born of the mind of George Saunders, or Jennifer
Egan, or Irvine Welsh, or Chuck Klosterman, or Sam Lipsyte, or Sloane Crosley,
or Elna Baker, or… the list borders on infinite. At least their adaptation of Pygmalion (ahem, Selfie) would come from people who had actually read the book.

The limits of the contemporary in
TV are not confined to its writing. The entire production has become stale. Let’s
put up the fourth wall once and for all, and be done with the live studio
audience, shall we? I suppose the multi-camera sitcom was supposed to be the television
version of a play, but the genre has become tired. What was the last
multi-camera sitcom to be interesting or innovative? (And if your answer in any
way suggests a Chuck Lorre production, your punishment is to watch Mom and only Mom for eternity.) The last multi-cam sitcom of any significant cultural
value was likely Seinfeld, and it
went off the air in 1998. Since then, every September and February, networks
march out a slew of carbon copy multi-camera endeavours that are rarely funny,
never innovative, and suffer tremendously at the will of their tropes.

And the laugh track? How in the
name of the Charles brothers does the laugh track still exist? I think an
audience knows when to laugh without 240 tourists on the Warner Brothers lot
telling us for twenty-two minutes.

Twenty-two excruciating minutes.

Does anyone know why the sitcom
is only a half-hour (with commercials)? Why is comedy limited and tragedy
open-ended? Would you rather laugh for an hour or cry for an hour? And from a
purely budgetary standpoint, why do Mark Harmon and Jon Cryer make the same
amount of money per episode for the same mediocre and unimaginative drivel? If
comedic and dramatic films can be of similar length, who is to say that the
same can’t be done on television?

Beyond the temporal structure of
the sitcom, its aesthetic structure is in need of contemporization and
ambition. The industry has limited the genre to two options: multi-camera and
single camera. The worlds of sitcoms are confined, insulated. They exist on
three to five sets. They are painted in the same colours, shot with the same
filters, and staged as they were three generations ago.

The incredible six-minute-long
take from the episode "Who Goes There" of True Detective is an example of what the talents of an innovative
director like Cary Fukunaga can bring to the medium. Why can’t sitcoms be
visually inventive? We have seen glimpses of such inventiveness in Pushing Daisies and to a certain extent
in the aesthetic of Community, but
their absence elsewhere in television are tenable. Why the reluctance to push
boundaries and challenge formula the way dramatic television has?

The answer to most of these
questions is that the television industry is remarkably stubborn and unimaginative,
for a business that requires creative minds. But the ability of dramatic
television to evolve in the past decade suggests that comedic television could
do the same, if just given the chance. Cable and streaming television have
reinvigorated an industry once limited by the whims of the four major networks.
The exodus of talent from film to TV has proved that the small screen is not
limiting to artistic or material aspirations among the Hollywood elite.
Removing the antiquated reins from the sitcom would certainly produce a
defining new era of the medium, and no doubt reduce the amount of half-hours of
our lives ruled by Chuck Lorre.

Mike Spry is a writer, editor, and columnist who has written for The
Toronto Star, Maisonneuve, and The Smoking Jacket, among
others, and contributes to MTV’s PLAY
with AJ. He is the author of the poetry collection JACK (Snare
Books, 2008) and Bourbon & Eventide (Invisible Publishing, 2014), the short story collection Distillery Songs (Insomniac Press,
2011), and the co-author of Cheap Throat: The Diary of a Locked-Out
Hockey Player (Found Press,
2013). Follow him on Twitter @mdspry.

ARIELLE BERNSTEIN: PARKS AND RECREATION, A Feminist Utopia

ARIELLE BERNSTEIN: PARKS AND RECREATION, A Feminist Utopia

nullAt the end of the penultimate season of Parks and Recreation, our heroine Leslie Knope gets everything—the
man, the kids, the high profile job. She even manages to move her new position right smack into the middle of her beloved hometown Pawnee.
Though the finale of the most recent season was wrapped up in a very pretty bow, it still felt genuinely satisfying, as well as genuinely
subversive. In a world where the T.V. show Girls
portrays sex and romance as empty and unsatisfying for its female leads, and
heroines in shows from Game of Thrones
to American Horror Story navigate a
landscape where sexism is rampant and men are often depicted as deeply
misogynistic, Leslie Knope’s triumphant success felt like a kind of joyful
respite and relief from a terrifying and cruel world.

One of the reasons Parks
and Recreation has succeeded as a feminist T.V. show is not simply because
the female characters have remained funny, dynamic, ambitious, unique and
interesting, but also because the show succeeds at presenting male characters
that are equal parts strong, vulnerable, silly and staunch advocates for the
rights and successes of female characters throughout the series. Male and
female characters in Parks and Recreation
actively root for one another, rather than tearing each other down. Ben and
Lesley’s marriage is a model of egalitarianism; April and Andy’s young, silly
love is presented as a string of silly, ridiculous games and make out parties,
with each character deeply invested in helping the other grow. Even Ron
Swanson, staunch individualist and rugged he-man, is distinguished throughout
the series by his commitment to women’s rights. By the end of the series he is
a proud dad and loving husband, all without having to give up his signature “strong
silent type” brand of masculinity. Ron’s appreciation of feminism doesn’t
diminish his hatred of vegans, or devotion to woodworking—it simply makes him a
much more interesting and funny character.

Many of the current debates about female representation
onscreen are about granting female protagonists access to male spaces. We saw
this in the 80s and 90s when there was a proliferation of women as warrior
motifs from Xena the Warrior Princess
to Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Recently, a slew of articles have called for women to have access to the joys
and pitfalls of the antihero world as well, as we praise the glorious brutality
of Orange is the New Black’s character
Vee and go to theaters in droves to see the icy villainy of Gone Girl. 

Heroines today are more diverse and complex than ever
before, yet few serious dramas that feature a cast of strong female characters
showcase romantic relationships that are genuinely egalitarian, the way we see
romance unfold in Parks and Recreation.
Often, female protagonists who are strong and willful are presented as
rejecting male romantic interest. In modern Disney Princess films like Brave, the heroine often makes a big
deal about not needing a man or romantic partner. In some films, like The Hunger Games, the romantic scripts
are flipped and male romantic interests are portrayed as doting, helpful and encouraging
mates. In truth, while many
cluck their tongues at the unhealthy dynamics presented in teen romances
like Twilight, and their adult
equivalents Fifty Shades of Grey, one
of the pleasures of both these series is the positioning of boys and men as
being the objects of desire, even if the female protagonists within these
worlds aren’t particularly interesting in and of themselves.

The suggestion that strong female characters are the sole
hallmarks of feminist media may simply not be setting the bar high enough. In
order to really dismantle the patriarchy we need to see more varied
presentations of men. This is not to say that we should do away with the
douchey bros, bullies and alpha assholes that have become a mainstay in popular
media. Complex villains are fascinating, but excellent dramas like Breaking Bad, Mad Men, American Horror
Story and The Walking Dead too
often pit men and women against each other, as if one gender’s success is
another’s loss.

The great T.V. dramas of today are about creating immersive
fantasies where we are transported to different times, places and worlds. The
adherence, then, to the narrative that men and women are consistently at odds
with one another is not about portraying a kind of gritty realism; it’s about
perpetuating the status quo and limiting our imagination about the
possibilities for a feminist future. I’d like to see a media landscape that
acknowledges the changing roles of men and women with greater nuance and
compassion, and also recognizes that there are many men today who are
incredibly happy to be living in a world where they aren’t shackled to one
particular model of male strength. Parks
and Recreation’s greatest feminist success is not simply that the heroine
is allowed to “have it all” but in creating a world where male and female
characters are equally one another’s allies.

Arielle Bernstein is
a writer living in Washington, DC. She teaches writing at American
University and also freelances. Her work has been published in The
Millions, The Rumpus, St. Petersburg Review and The Ilanot Review. She
has been listed four times as a finalist in Glimmer Train short story
contests. She is currently writing her first book.

A NEW COLUMN BY MIKE SPRY: KICKING TELEVISION: It’s Time to Bring Back The Muppets. Again.

A NEW COLUMN BY MIKE SPRY: KICKING TELEVISION: It’s Time to Bring Back The Muppets. Again.

nullWhen I was a kid, there were few things I enjoyed as much
as the Muppets. The worlds created by Jim Henson dominated and cultivated my
childhood. Sesame Street, Fraggle Rock, and all things Muppet were
my earliest, fondest memories of entertainment. My mother had read an article
in the late ‘70s that claimed children should be limited to no more than an
hour-and-a-half of television per day–so most of the TV my sister and I were
allowed to consume involved Henson. Despite my parents’ insistence on the
dangers of television then, there has always been a virtue to Henson’s
productions. Sesame Street taught you
about the number 7, the letter M, what it was like to live on the Upper West
Side, and unrequited love. Fraggle Rock extended
one’s imagination, taught us about issues of class, and radishes, and
unrequited love. The Muppet Show brought
us into the realm of the subversive, prepared our young minds for Saturday Night Live, reveled happily in
absurdity and slapstick, and taught, of course, the lessons of unrequited love.
The Muppet Show was the star of them
all, the crown jewel of the Henson universe. And given the current sad
landscape of programming for kids, it’s
time to play the music, it’s time to light the lights, it’s time to meet the
Muppets on The Muppet Show tonight. Again.

It’s time to reboot The
Muppet Show.

For the most part I couldn’t give a flying fish about
television for kids. I don’t have kids, don’t really understand the desire to
have kids, doubt that unconditional love could be any more thrilling than clean
towels, and I think children should be unseen and unheard until they’re old
enough to watch and disseminate Breaking
Bad. But my sister has two kids and offers a wealth of opportunities for
unpaid babysitting internships, and so I’ve found myself, over the past eight
years, confronted by what passes for televised entertainment for children. And
it’s god-awful. What the hell are Wiggles? Isn’t a sponge in someone’s pants
counterintuitive? Why does Lego suddenly talk? In an infinite channel universe,
there’s nothing on (except the timeless Sesame
Street) that challenges, entertains and does not insult children, while
maintaining a subversive adult narrative and humor for Disney Channel-weary
parents and uncles.

What made, and makes, the Muppets such an enduring and
iconic part of the cultural landscape is their ability to treat children like
adults while allowing adults to be children. As a kid, “The Swedish Chef” is a
funny-looking mustachioed foreigner speaking gibberish and making a mess. It’s
hilarious. Pee-inducing. To an adult, the show is a perfect satire of the
cooking shows and inane cooking segments on The
Today Show and its talk-formula brethren. Also pee-inducing. “Pigs in Space”
to a child’s eyes is a bunch of talking pigs being silly, superfluous, insane.
Those of us past our adolescence recognize it as a parody of Star Trek, Lost in Space, and early sci-fi. Kids don’t care that Dr. Julius
Strangepork is a reference to Dr. Strangelove, but its inclusion doesn’t
counter their enjoyment of the sketch, and provides safe passage for adult viewing.
The list of clever, funny, and remarkably well-written and well-crafted
sketches is endless. The intelligent and hilarious satire raised the level of
the show beyond the condescending time-filler programming that infects present
day children’s television, pandering nonsense which serves only as a virtual
babysitter, absent of form or substance.

Furthermore, The
Muppet Show borrowed from variety shows of the era like SNL by having guest stars that were
unknown to children but comforting to adults, giving them permission to watch
the show even in the absence of children. And though kids didn’t know who
Johnny Cash or Elton John or John Cleese were, the guest stars’ participation
in the program slowly introduced youngsters to a grander cultural discourse.
The contemporary equivalent of this would be celebrities lending their voices
to animated TV shows or films. But in this manner they are rarely themselves,
and are included in order to increase ratings or box office revenues, not to
present a production that respects a cross-generational demographic.

The Muppets are the property of the Walt Disney Company,
currently charged with the task of reviving the Star Wars franchise. Their return to the big screen, successfully,
suggests that a revival of the seminal variety show is not without merit or
possibility. The Jason Segel-Nicholas Stoller-led The Muppets re-invigorated the franchise in 2011 (after a long
stretch of poorly conceived, straight-to-video releases) by employing the
elements of clever satire, well-placed cameos, and musical theatrics that made
the show (and films) so successful. The film commented on the folly of reality
TV, the economic disparities of the day, and the tropes of romantic comedies.
The soundtrack was playful and accomplished, and appealing to both children and
adults. Every generation can appreciate a puppet barber shop quartet covering
“Smells Like teen Spirit”. Its follow-up, the less successful commercially but
equally endearing Muppets Most Wanted,
solidified the Muppets as a viable entity for the studio in which to invest and
returned them with prominence to the cultural zeitgeist. So why not revisit the
production that started it all?

The Muppet Show was
revived briefly by ABC in 1996 as Muppets
Tonight, but failed to attract enthusiastic audiences. My memory of the
show is that I have no memory of the show, which speaks volumes as to its
failure. But the landscape of television has changed drastically since then.
The medium is more intelligent, more ambitious, and has far more outlets than
ever before. A venue like Netflix, tailor-made for parents to provide viewing
entertainment and respite on their own schedules, would be perfect for a
rebooted Muppet Show. Two generations
have had to withstand the inanities of the Teletubbies,
Dora the Explorer, and Barney, programming that is nothing but
refined sugar and starch and shows contempt for tired adults. 

In one of my earliest experiences with my niece and nephew
left in my charge, we watched the 2011 The
Muppets. Admittedly, I was rather nervous. What if they didn’t like it,
didn’t get it, didn’t want to finish watching it? Even worse, what if I didn’t like it? George Lucas had
broken my generation’s heart in 1999 with poorly conceived Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, and broke it two more
times over three summers. Lucas did it again when he produced the Indiana Jones
film whose name shall not be mentioned. There was reason for skepticism. But The Muppets exceeded my expectations,
and my niece and nephew and I have watched it together too many times to count,
singing along, reveling in the wonder of its genius and that of the Jim Henson
universe. Pretty soon they’ll be too old for the Muppets, having reached that
strange period known as adolescence, puberty, when you hate everything. The
promise of a rebooted Muppet Show
would extend this connection we have. Hell, it may even encourage me to have my
own kids.

 


Mike Spry is a writer, editor, and columnist who has written for The
Toronto Star, Maisonneuve, and The Smoking Jacket, among
others, and contributes to MTV’s PLAY
with AJ. He is the author of the poetry collection JACK (Snare
Books, 2008) and Bourbon & Eventide (Invisible Publishing, 2014), the short story collection Distillery Songs (Insomniac Press,
2011), and the co-author of Cheap Throat: The Diary of a Locked-Out
Hockey Player (Found Press,
2013). Follow him on Twitter @mdspry.

HAPPY VALLEY, PRIME SUSPECT, and the Growth of the Everywoman in Crime Dramas

HAPPY VALLEY, PRIME SUSPECT, and the Growth of the Everywoman in Crime Dramas

nullWhen we first meet Catherine Cawood
(Sarah Lancashire), a uniformed police sergeant patrolling West Yorkshire in
Sally Wainwright’s Happy Valley,
she’s dashing into a convenience store to grab a fire extinguisher and a pair
of cheap sunglasses.  She’s on her way to
a local playground where one of the town’s many unemployed, heroin-addicted
youth has doused himself in petrol and is threatening to set himself on
fire.  "He can send himself to paradise,
that’s his choice,” she explains to a subordinate as they walk briskly toward the
scene, “but he’s not taking my eyebrows with him." In these first moments, Wainwright tells us a
lot about the middle-aged Cawood as Cawood tells us a lot about herself, using her
own story, sketched out in broadly downbeat strokes, to build a bridge to the
suicidal young man:

Catherine: I’m Catherine, by the way. I’m 47, I’m
divorced, I live with my sister who’s a recovering heroin addict. I have two
grown-up children. One dead, one who doesn’t speak to me, and a grandson.

Man: So why? Why doesn’t he speak to you?

Catherine: It’s complicated.

Catherine: Let’s talk about you.

It’s an introduction that’s both sharp and endearing, which simultaneously
hints at one of the show’s central, if somewhat buried, themes: Carwood’s
sublimation of her lingering grief at the suicide of her daughter and her
attempt to channel it into selfless service to her family and her community.  Over the course of Happy Valley‘s six episodes, the Cawood we meet in the series’
opening moments—coolly competent, pragmatic, holding on to a touch of vanity—will be pushed to, and past, her breaking point. 

Happy
Valley is one of three series from Wainwright currently on-air in the U.K. (the
others are Last Tango in Halifax and Scott 
& Bailey).  It’s
ostensibly the story of a failed kidnapping—there’s a touch of the Coens’ Fargo in the set-up, in which a
seemingly put-upon accountant arranges a kidnapping of his boss’s daughter—and
it’s not until about half-way through that it becomes clear that it’s as much a
case-study of grief and loss as it is a police procedural.  Like its protagonist, however, Happy Valley acknowledges that the world
doesn’t pause for our personal drama—there are teacher conferences, family
crises, and jobs that continue to demand our attention—and so it dutifully
trudges on with its narrative.  As a
result, although the first season (of six one-hour episodes) is available in
its entirety on Netflix, it’s not a show that necessarily invites binge-watching.  It digs too deeply into messy emotions,
placing as much emphasis on its characters’ reactions to events as it does on the
events themselves.  In keeping with this,
actual violence is rare—though when it occurs, it is almost vulgar in its
brutality.

Although it is not without its dark
humor, day-to-day suffering permeates this series—there’s terminal cancer and multiple
sclerosis, alcoholism and drug abuse, high unemployment and abundant squalor. The
focus nevertheless remains on Cawood herself. 
Her daughter killed herself after giving birth to her rapist’s son—a
difficult boy named Ryan who Cawood is
raising without any help from the rest of the family, save her sister.  It’s the release of that rapist, Tommy Lee Royce
(James Norton), from prison—she’s been warned about it by her ex-husband but
it’s not until she sees Royce on the street that it hits her—that triggers
the return of long-suppressed turmoil.  But the stressors that feed that turmoil are
everywhere, and often self-imposed.  Cawood
is raising her grandson, the product of that rape, and his volatility makes her
fear that he’s inherited Royce’s violent streak; she is sheltering her sister, who
is recovering from a long-term heroin addiction; and her position on the police
force thrusts her into competing, contradictory, and occasionally impossible
roles—uniformed police officer and investigator, maternal figure and authority
figure, all at once.  That she serves as
a de facto mother to everyone but her children functions as a cruel,
cosmic irony.

The mini-series form suits Happy Valley.  It’s easy to imagine it collapsing under the
weight of its bleakness and interiority at a longer length.  And it could just as easily get lost in its granular
focus on Cawood.  At roughly six hours, Happy Valley is the same length as Top of the Lake and a few hours shy of Fargo, True Detective, and American
Horror Story, and yet its ambitions couldn’t be more different—it doesn’t
play to the crowd (or a critical culture built around recaps) with the attention-grabbing
virtuosity of Cary Fukanaga’s direction in True
Detective (a six-minute-tracking-shot!). Nor does it approach Steven
Soderbergh’s nuanced direction of The
Knick (which just this week Matt Zoller Seitz called “the greatest
sustained display of directorial virtuosity in the history of American TV”).  Happy
Valley, on the other hand,is no-frills. 
Because of this, perhaps, the West Yorkshire of Happy Valley is almost indistinguishable from the British police
procedurals I fell in love with in the early-to-mid nineties—Prime Suspect, Cracker (and later, I confess, even lesser series like Blood on the Wire and Rebus) – when I studied and worked in
London. Grey skies. Drab public housing. That general sense of physical and
spiritual fatigue.  What surprised me,
however, is how pleasing I find its drabness. 
Part of this is likely nostalgia. 
But part of it is the knowledge that—having tossed aside pyrotechnics
– the show must succeed or fail on its writing and performances.  In succeeding on those narrow terms, Happy Valley feels like an antidote to the
high-art pretense, elaborate composition, and under-cooked philosophy of so
many of its brethren.

I spent a lot of time thinking
about Prime Suspect while watching Happy Valley. Revisiting Prime Suspect now (something I
recommend), the sexism that Helen Mirren’s DCI Jane Tennison faces at every step—both viciously personal and blithely institutional—can feel a little heavy handed.  It’s easy to forget just how radical Tennison
was when Prime Suspect debuted in
1991. [1] It wasn’t Tennison’s intelligence that made Prime Suspect so different (though it
was uncommon enough) but rather her appetites—for alcohol, for sex, and, especially,
for recognition and promotion.  They
dwarfed those of the men around her, including her superiors (no small
feat).  Unlike Prime Suspect’s wildly popular contemporary, Cracker, which coated its main character’s (Robbie Coltrane) bad
habits in a Romantic gloss, all part of his larger-than-life genius, Tennison’s
appetites are more thorny.  She pays the
price for them just as often as they drive her forward.  By staying neutral, Prime Suspect ushered in an era in which women were not only viable
protagonists in a police procedural, but were finally permitted (if not yet
entitled) to make bad decisions, and even to be occasionally unlikeable. (It
helped, of course, that Tennison’s abundant flaws were dramatized by Helen
Mirren.) The best shows that followed in its wake—like Happy Valley—have found a way not only to acknowledge their
protagonists’ flaws, but to capture the richness and complexity gained from
living with bad habits and decisions.  Wainright
smartly capitalizes on Lancashire’s ability to carry Cawood through endless
registers, from the coolly competent officer we meet in Episode 1 through
periods of grief, depression, anger, and—yes—“unlikeability.”  In doing so, she creates a believable, and
complicated, Everywoman.

To be clear, Cawood does not share
Tennison’s appetites, or her bad habits: 
she’s far more likely to have a cup of tea than a whiskey at the end of
a long day. And yet she engages in an ill-advised affair with her married
ex-husband.  And there’s a fleeting awkwardness
in some of her conversations with superiors and former colleagues that suggests
the kind of personal history neither party wants to revisit.  That these plot points are not central to the
drama—and are often no more than implied—could be interpreted as a sign of
progress, though Wainwright has taken some pains to distance Cawood from Tennison,
explaining that "Prime Suspect was 20 years ago," and that, in talking to current police
officers, "None of
them seemed to think it was a big deal they were women. The police have gone
through a lot of reforms. There might be some hidden sexism, but now it’s
really not that unusual for a woman to be the head of an investigation. To try
and make an issue out of that would have felt rather old fashioned."

Perhaps she’s right. 
Times change.  The recent attempt to
adapt Prime Suspect to US television never
quite figured out how to translate the original’s tension into the 21st
century. But how distant is it, really?  I
got the sense watching Happy Valley that
the changes Wainwright cites aren’t, in spite of her optimism, necessarily all for the better.  At least Tennison was generally left to do
her investigative work.  Cawood’s
responsibilities, on the other hand, are endless—part Sherlock, part social
worker, both manager and mother.  And it’s
not as if sexism has disappeared, either in or out of the station-house.  It’s embodied by her superiors, who at times display
a boys-club disregard for her concerns (though, as with Tennison, they’re quick
to trot her out for public relations value.) 
And it’s on display in one of the show’s best—and funniest—scenes,
when Cawood’s ex-husband, a reporter who Cawood has repeatedly pushed to write
about the Yorkshire drug trade, calls her to say that he’s followed her
advice.  As he goes on and on, explaining
the workings of a local supply and demand that she deals with on a daily basis,
Cawood feigns interest in what he’s telling her—to preserve his enthusiasm,
or his pride, or just out of learned deference – as her expression simultaneously
reveals a bemused frustration that he doesn’t realize she already knows all it with
a level of detail he’ll never even comprehend.  This isn’t the misogyny and sabotage that
Tennison faced—her ex-husband loves and respects her—but it’s also clear that
we’re a long way from out-growing our conditioned biases (including,
apparently, mansplaining).

It’s true,
however, that these issues aren’t the focus of Happy Valley—even if the series benefits from the heavy lifting
of those that came before, it’s content to swap the personal for the
political.  But it’s not all Cawood, all the time.  Underlying the kidnapping narrative is a
somewhat half-formed argument regarding evil and its origins.  As the focus narrows on Cawood, however, the
peripheral stories and characters grow a little threadbare, including the
kidnapping narrative (though both George Costigan, as the father of the
kidnapped young woman, and Siobhan Finneran, as Cawood’s sister, are excellent
in their roles).  Problematically, the
motives of the criminals are never entirely clear—not even their greed explains
why they take on the risk of a kidnap and ransom—though they share a few
traits:  hubris, myopia, and selfishness,
to start, but also an abject refusal to take responsibility for their actions
and the damage they’ve caused. 

The philosophical argument, on the other
hand, begins and ends with Tommy Lee Royce, whose violent sadism over the
course of the series confirms Cawood’s worst fears.   At her
low-point, exhausted, depressed, and likely suffering from PTSD after a beating
at Royce’s hand, Cawood confesses to her ex-husband her fear that Ryan is
destined to be like his father.  In answering
the age-old question of nature or nurture, however, Happy Valley comes down emphatically on the side of nurture and
against the idea of ineluctable evil.  As
her ex-husband explains, Royce isn’t a sociopath, he’s a "little twisted
thing[s] who grew up unloved . . . more than unloved, despised probably,
treated like dirt on a daily basis in squalor and chaos.”  And he’s right, at least to some extent—we’ve met the mother and she is, in technical terms, a nightmare.  These abstract themes would be empty
exposition if it weren’t for Wainwright’s and Lancashire’s work.  In numerous scenes, when Cawood’s carefully
cultivated patience and selflessness are peeled back to reveal a very real
rage, she is legitimately frightening in her isolation and her instinct to lash
out at those nearest to her.  In those
scenes, Happy Valley comes closest to
making a political pitch, though it is fittingly rooted in psychology.  The "little twisted thing" inside
Tommy that drives him to violence exists in each of us, it suggests, and what
holds it at bay is family, stability, and structure.  And martyrs like Catherine Cawood.  But given the unrelenting chaos and squalor that
threatens Happy Valley, and the
punishment Cawood endures (she half-jokes at one point that she should have “punching-bag”
written on her forehead), it’s unclear if this is any reason for optimism.

Spencer Short is an attorney and author. His collection of
poetry, Tremolo (Harper 2001), was
awarded a 2000 National Poetry Series Prize. His poetry and non-fiction have
been published in The Boston Review, Coldfront, the Columbia Review, Hyperallergic,
Men’s Digest, Slate, and Verse. He lives in Brooklyn.

 
[1] Prime Suspect
debuted in the U.K. just three years after the demise of Cagney & Lacey here in the U.S.– a show canceled early in its
run over concerns the characters were too tough (and thus likely to be mistaken
for lesbians) before being revamped, softened, and returned to the
line-up.  Wainwright’s Scott & Bailey bears more than a
passing resemblance to Cagney & Lacey.

Finding the Best in YOU’RE THE WORST

Finding the Best in YOU’RE THE WORST

nullMy generation was ruined by Friends. The popular ‘90s sitcom, which recently celebrated the
20th anniversary of its premiere, flaunted vicious lies. It told us that, despite
our being undereducated, underemployed, and underwhelmed, we could have
beautiful apartments, plentiful leisure time, and love. I’m just entering my
late 30s, the same age that Ross, Chandler, Joey, Monica, Rachel, and Phoebe
would have reached at the show’s end, and I have neither a beautiful apartment,
nor leisure time, nor love. And worse, my expectations of those things, whether
by osmosis or by syndication (or both), have been manipulated and tempered by
the false hope embodied by the Central Perk 6 and the endless stream of
imitative sitcoms and romcoms that followed in Friends’ wake. FX’s You’re
the Worst is the antithesis of Friends,
an exploration of contemporary relationships that is fearless in its
dissemination of the futile and frustrating search for love.

The freshman sitcom from former Weeds and Orange is the New
Black writer Stephen Falk finished its first season last week, and here’s
hoping for the sake of the impressionable, helpless, loveless, spoiled
millennials who may have found this gem of a program that FX renews it for many
seasons to come. While Friends
placated a greedy generation while pandering to its flawed aspirations, You’re the Worst celebrates the flawed,
and panders to no one. The show is fiercely loyal to its rhetoric, finding
truth and honesty in the day-to-day frailties of its characters. You’re the Worst is a brilliant
re-imagining of the romantic sitcom, an exercise in using dark humour and
cynicism to provide a realistic and surprisingly hopeful outlook on life, while
eschewing the tropes of the genre, which made my generation cynical and
hopeless in life and love.

You’re the Worst
revolves around Jimmy Shive-Overly (Chris Geere) and Gretchen Cutler (Aya Cash);
two deeply wounded late 20-somethings who hook up at a common friend’s wedding.
Their first night together establishes both their selfish individualism and
rabid idiosyncrasies: He’s a failed novelist with a foot fetish. She’s a
publicist who once burned down her high school to avoid a math test. They are certainly
not the milquetoast insights of typical sitcom fare. Their expectation is that
they are indulging in a one-night stand, which breeds honesty in their pillow
talk. Yet somewhere in the twisted marginalia of their liaison, they find their
flaws bring them closer, and a romantic sitcom is born. Where once Ross and
Rachel’s will they/won’t they tied a generation to the deceit of Thursday
nights, Jimmy and Gretchen begin You’re
the Worst’s narrative arc by answering that question, and then they build a
show by endeavouring to sort through the painful minutiae involved in making a
relationship work.

The problem with the success of Friends (besides leading me to believe I could afford a Lower East
Side loft earning minimum wage) and the other seminal sitcoms of its era is
that it bred formulaic attempts at counterfeit programming. What resulted was
an endless supply of stock players who paled in comparison to the original
characters, and homogenized the medium. The wacky neighbour, the sarcastic best
friend, the couple with it all, the manic pixie dream girl. In a commentary on,
and indictment of, these archetypes, You’re
the Worst manages to both include and defy these trope characters beyond
its leads. The wacky neighbour (Killian) is a lonely kid (Shane Francis Smith).
The sarcastic best friend (Edgar) is a war vet with PTSD (the excellent Desmin
Borges). The perfect couple (Lindsay and Paul) is anything but (the equally
excellent Kether Donohue and Allan McLeod). And the manic pixie dream girl
(Cash’s Gretchen) is… well, okay, some things never change. However, You’re the Worst dares its audience to
indulge not in laughing at the comically flawed as did its sitcom ancestors,
but the comedy of the flawed, which is far more honest and infinitely more
entertaining.

At the core of the show is the relationship between Jimmy
and Gretchen, and the brilliant twisted chemistry between Geere and Cash. While
sitcoms like Friends operate under
the false understanding that love and its consummation is impossible yet oddly
inevitable, You’re the Worst contends
that consummation and love are easy, but breakups and heartbreak are
inevitable. In the show’s first season’s finale, the two main paramours end up
moving in together. Not because they love each other, which they might. Not
because it makes sense financially, which it could. And not because the
audience demands it. Rather because Gretchen sets fire to her apartment with a
poorly maintained vibrator. That never happened to Rachel. But the truth
remains that life is more often dictated by happenstance that shapes important
decisions, as opposed to grandiose and theatrical declarations. In the pounding
rain. With Coldplay playing.

Beyond discussion of love and a distain for archetypes, You’re the Worst finds delight in the
notion that people are quite simply fucked up. Television typically treats us
to caricatures of the wounded, clowns for our amusement, monkeys who dance for
twenty-two minutes a week, twenty-six times a year, and infinitely into the
abyss of syndication.  For those of us
all too aware of our flaws, our struggles, our shortcomings, these characters
are insulting, because they demean our reality. You’re the Worst manages to gratify itself in the blemished
weaknesses of its characters, and in doing so satisfies the audience’s need for
empathy. Jimmy is a narcissist and coming to terms with the limitations of his talents.
Gretchen is a drug-addled slob, a barely competent adult. Lindsay is an
adulterer in a quietly broken marriage. Everybody is promiscuous. And in
contrast to the tired sitcom fare we’ve been drowned by, yet asked to aspire to
for twenty years, in truth many people are promiscuous, narcissistic,
drug-addled, barely competent adults coming to terms with the limits of our
talents. Yet in You’re the Worst, the
fucked-up are not exploited as caricatures, as television is wont to do. They’re
simply presented as average. And within the comfort of that acceptance, the
vindication of normality is the essence of the show’s ability to find humour in
our flaws.

As the finale makes its way to its conclusion, the central
couple are startled by the decision to cohabitate. Gretchen looks at Jimmy, and
with hesitatant affection, she says, “We’re gonna do this even though we know
there is only one way this ends. Whether in a week or twenty years there is
horrible sadness and pain coming and we’re inviting it.” There is a powerful
and beautiful honesty in that declaration, a vicious truth that is rarely found
in television, let alone a sitcom. And yet, they’re willing to try. The sad
inevitability of their end demands that the audience follows them to their
demise. But not with trepidation or worry, but with understanding and empathy.
Because for most of us, the inevitable end is the norm, whether in learned
truth or cynical expectation, and the route there is all we have. To find
humour in that commonality is comforting, and that is what makes You’re the Worst the most engaging
exploration of relationships within the sitcom genre in recent memory. In fact,
there may have never been a more honest examination of the history and mythology
of a relationship on television before.

For the first time in U.S. history, single people (16 and
over) are the majority, according to data used by the Bureau of Labor
Statistics. And while television loves to exploit the lives of the unattached,
it has always done so with the understanding that true love is an impending
determinant, that eccentricity is a phase, that the flawed can be fixed. You’re the Worst revels in the majesty
of eccentricity and flaw, and argues that heartbreak is inevitable, and yet
indulges wonderfully in the narrative of the attempt to settle that argument. Like
relationships, we never really know when a sitcom will end. As a result, the
norm has been to couple and uncouple characters until the audience, or the
network, has seen enough. In You’re the
Worst, we’re being treated to a truly prodigious employment of the sitcom
and the device of love. I just hope FX allows us to continue to indulge in its
journey.

Mike Spry is a writer, editor, and columnist who has written for The
Toronto Star, Maisonneuve, and The Smoking Jacket, among
others, and contributes to MTV’s PLAY
with AJ. He is the author of the poetry collection JACK (Snare
Books, 2008) and Bourbon & Eventide (Invisible Publishing, 2014), the short story collection Distillery Songs (Insomniac Press,
2011), and the co-author of Cheap Throat: The Diary of a Locked-Out
Hockey Player (Found Press,
2013). Follow him on Twitter @mdspry.

METAMERICANA: Why James Franco’s MAKING A SCENE Is Worth Your Patience

METAMERICANA: Why James Franco’s MAKING A SCENE Is Worth Your Patience

null

The
half century-long postmodern era—roughly, 1945 to 1995—gave us the
parody, in which an artwork comments on and finally trivializes its
source material by closely emulating it. Our present period in art has
given us something superficially similar but in fact quite different:
the remake, in which an artwork comments on art itself by differentially
reproducing an earlier work. In a remake, it may simply be that primary
elements in the source material are retooled (as with
James Franco and Seth Rogen’s shot-for-shot re-shoot of Kanye West’s "Bound 2" music video), or it may be that the concept of the original work is
maintained while all its constituent elements are refurbished (as with the new sequence of Spider-Man
movies). The purpose of the remake is not to deconstruct and critique
an original artifact, but to reconstruct, and thereby expand upon, an
idea that’s already implicitly been deconstructed by our earlier
consumption of it. Franco’s newest project,
the AOL On Originals television series "Making a Scene," deserves
credit for using dated but immediately recognizable source material to
create cinematic moments entirely of our time—and moments that are
remakes rather than parodies, for which reason alone they deserve more
attention than we might otherwise offer them.
Too
frequently, we confuse remakes
with parodies because we assume ironic intent on the part of a remake’s
author. In reality, remakes, however funny they may sometimes seem to
us, are merely opportunities for us to envision how an artistic idea
might otherwise have played out. This "re-visioning" has a significant
social function; in a time in which we are constantly erasing and
recreating, online, both ourselves and the texts and imagery we
associate with ourselves, remakes are an instrumental good. They confirm
for us our ability, even in the chaos of the Information Age, to
idiosyncratically process intensely personal data in a way we find
satisfying. Just as Franco’s "Bound 2"
paradoxically opted to remake rather than parody West as a way of
clearing space for its own artistic vision, Making a Scene is not
about looking for a cheap laugh. Rather it is concerned with—all the
show’s superficial trappings aside—promoting a lingering
self-contemplation.
Just
as we can and must distinguish between parodies and remakes, there’s a
difference between pastiche (a postmodern technique in which one artist
imitates the style of another) and intertextuality (a technique native
to the current era, in which a single artist uses multiple source
materials to construct an entirely new statement). Where pastiche calls
attention to the banality and of the past and the ease with which we can
commodify it in the present—thereby deconstructing both past and
present—intertextuality is entirely about the creation of the new. Making a Scene may use the remake and
the "mash-up" as its tactical components, but its strategic ambition is
an important statement on intertextuality. When Franco
"mashes up" two
movies (through a chaotic juxtaposition of characters and scenes), he
simultaneously honors and creates critical distance from the films he
exploits. 
Those
who see Franco’s Making a Scene as a thoroughly cynical enterprise
are seeing it through a lens it entirely rejects. Though it’s
especially hard to do with the work of James Franco, it’s important to
distinguish between how a work makes us feel (which is often a product
of our biases) and
what a work is capable of making
us feel. As with all Franco’s other recent projects, Making a Scene
offers little if you treat it as merely another basis for your ongoing
grievance against Franco—an imposition upon you personally that the
actor intends condescendingly—and seems a minor act of genius if you
consider how much it runs against the conventional wisdom of late
postmodernism. Franco’s aim in Making a Scene seems to be to play
"straight" a series of gestures his audience can’t possibly take
seriously, thereby challenging them to consider whether we still live in
the age of parody or, instead, the age of what cultural theorists call
"informed naivete."
The difference between pastiche and intertextuality has been recently discussed by Dutch cultural theorists Tim Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker in ArtPulse,
and the distinction is worth consideration by anyone who is sick of hipster
irony and poststructuralist moping. What we learn from Vermuelen and van
den Akker is that Franco is not actually asking to be taken
seriously—or, in the alternative, to be laughed at. All he’s doing is
enacting a series of data-processing
events that many people are always-already engaged in anyway. Do you
remember the movie Reservoir Dogs? Good. How about Dirty Dancing?
Okay. Do your memories of movies as distinct as these two sometimes run
together, so that you accidentally attribute actors and scenes and
one-liners to one movie that actually belong to another? If you’re
anything like me, the answer is sure—sometimes. And if you’re like me,
the sensation of feeling like you’re drowning in popular culture and
your own life experiences is not always, in fact is not often,
particularly unpleasant. Our experiences shape us, and our local and
national cultures often act as our psychic foundation, a fact that
contemporary art like Franco’s performs without judgment or irony. Thus
this mash-up of Reservoir Dogs and Dirty Dancing
from the first episode of Making a Scene, which shows Jennifer Grey’s
character superimposed over a (literally) tortured patrolman from
Tarantino’s smash hit, just as Tarantino’s Mr. Blonde is laid atop
Patrick Swayze’s ne’er-do-well dance instructor Johnny. 
Watching "Grey" dancing with "Johnny" while drenched in buckets of blood from the goriest scene in Reservoir Dogs
isn’t exactly entertaining, nor is it precisely funny or precisely
distressing. It’s something else entirely—a reenactment of the way
memory works that feels intuitively reasonable even as we don’t quite
know what to do with it emotionally or intellectually. In foregrounding
content like this via an original series, Franco is taking a significant
risk and placing significant faith in an audience base that, if we’re
honest, has never shown him much patience or grace. But it’s a risk
that’s entirely of our time, and perhaps more relevant to how we live
today—or might wish to live—than the despairing irony we were all
steeped in throughout the nineties. In other words, how about we just leave
Jimmy alone for a moment and see where he’s going with all this? We
might just find that, however
self-aggrandizing we sometimes assume Franco to be, this latest project
is much more about us than it is about him.

Seth Abramson is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Thievery (University of Akron Press, 2013). He has published work in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Best New Poets, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, New American Writing, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, and The Southern Review.
A graduate of Dartmouth College, Harvard Law School, and the Iowa
Writers’ Workshop, he was a public defender from 2001 to 2007 and is
presently a doctoral candidate in English Literature at University of
Wisconsin-Madison. He runs a contemporary poetry review series for The Huffington Post and has covered graduate creative writing programs for Poets & Writers magazine since 2008.

Of Scalpels and Synthesizers: The Music of THE KNICK

Of Scalpels and Synthesizers: The Music of THE KNICK

nullThe latest series from director Steven Soderbergh begins
jarringly, with an uncomfortably intimate, front-row seat view of a disastrous C-section
operation.  This widely discussed scene
set the tone for what has evolved into a consistently disconcerting and
uncompromising show, one that immerses viewers in the grimy, gory, greedy world of a
turn-of-the-century New York hospital. 
Soderbergh has said that he wanted to give a vision of the past that was anything but nostalgic, and in this he has certainly succeeded. 

One of the more jarring manifestations of this
anti-nostalgic vision is the show’s innovative synthesizer score, composed by
long-time Soderbergh collaborator, Cliff Martinez.  After a steady diet of Ken Burns
documentaries, one might have expected to hear the stately rhythms of ragtime
or perhaps the Irish folk music or Italian opera that one could reasonably have
expected to hear blaring from the New York bars and music halls of
yesteryear.  Instead, the images of
horse-drawn carriages and gaslit streets are accompanied by the kinds of sounds
we might associate with dystopian visions of the future.  The combination of old and new is both
unsettling and revelatory.

Martinez has worked with Soderbergh for some twenty-five
years, ever since he composed the score for the director’s explosive debut, Sex, Lies, and Videotape.  Since then he has continued to hone his
signature sound: a taut, tensile aural web where melody and rhythm are
inextricable.  Sequenced melody patterns
emerge and evolve slowly, like a Philip Glass symphony, adapting to the
changing dynamics of the film.  Martinez’
music does not so much accompany scenes as insinuate itself into them: what begins
as a barely heard rhythmic tapping may slowly blossom into vast, crystalline
sound structures, as in his mesmerizing soundtrack to Solaris; elsewhere, a subtle heart-beat will mount in tension along with
scraping industrial noises before fading to lurk in the background, as in Contagion.  His masterpiece may be the score for Nicholas Winding Refn’s Drive, where his brooding urban nocturne takes on a presence as substantial
as that of any of the film’s characters. 

The soundtrack for The
Knick does not stand apart from Martinez’ previous work so much in its
sounds and melodies as in its relation to context.  We first hear it in the sequence leading up
to the disastrous C-section operation, where we see Dr. John Thackery waking in
an opium den, calling a horse-drawn cab, and surreptitiously shooting up in the
back seat before ascending the steps of Knickerbocker Hospital.  We’ve certainly seen similar seedy dealings
in previous portrayals of turn-of-the-century life but never with a soundtrack
so jarringly modern.  Combining elements
of house music and old-school German electronica, The Knick’s opening number wouldn’t sound out of place in a hipster
bar or a zombie film soundtrack; in the context of 1900s New York, it is so
blatantly anachronistic as to risk undermining any possible suspension of
disbelief the director might have achieved through the show’s painstaking set
design and costuming.  And this may well
be the point.

Consider The Knick’s
premise: a once state of the art but now struggling hospital finds itself in
thrall to its major donors, and unwittingly involved in a host of illegalities
thanks to its double-dealing financial manager. 
Head surgeon Thackery copes with the mounting pressures of his job
through chronic drug use.  In a bid for
racial progressiveness, the hospital’s chief benefactor pressures them into
hiring a black surgeon, who must struggle against the entrenched racism of the
medical institution.  In short, nothing
central to the show’s premise requires that it be set in the past: all of these
elements unfortunately remain part of American life in the twenty-first
century.  Indeed, one might even regard
the show as timely, given its depiction of the greed running through the
medical industry, and the reluctance of even its most enlightened members to go
against the status quo.  While the show’s
portrayal of race is necessarily one that involves more blatant forms of
oppression and disenfranchisement than we typically see now, to regard the
problems it portrays as a thing of the past would be disingenuous or naïve.

Given the show’s contemporary resonance, then, it is
somewhat baffling to hear director Soderbergh say, as he did in a recent Rolling Stone interview: “Your
overwhelming sense watching the show is one of happiness that you’re living in
2014. I wanted to make sure that’s what people were feeling.”  The overwhelming sense I get, which for me is
a central appeal of the show, is that not much has really changed since 1900,
and that the messed-up health care system we have is the product of decades of
greed and failed ambitions.  Ambulance
drivers in the show are paid a bounty according to the number of injured or
sick patients they are able to bring to the hospital.  Though presumably this doesn’t happen any
more, is it really any more shocking than doctors getting money from drug
companies for peddling their wares to patients, regardless of whether these
products are going to do them any good? 
Though doctors might not shoot cocaine with silver-handled needles
before going into surgery, some very possibly take painkillers pilfered from the
pharmacy’s stock before scrubbing up. 

What is most challenging about the series is the way it
makes us ponder the relationship between present and past; the soundtrack fosters
this.  The synthesizer itself is a
complex signifier: long used in film to conjure sounds and visions of the
future, it has also taken on a retro patina through its association with
nineteen-seventies progressive rock and disco. 
Martinez’ soundtrack exploits the disjunction, as he shifts from his signature minimalism
into more brazen territory, alternately evoking the soundscapes of 1970s Berlin
and 1990s British rave culture.  It is also
telling that one of Martinez’ signature instruments is an arcane construction
called a “baschet cristal” that makes sounds from vibrating rods and fiberglass
plates.  Used by mid-century avant garde
composers who saw it as an instrument of the future, now it sounds more like a
relic from some long-lost world’s fair exhibit. 
Martinez’ music occupies a similar aural twilight zone.

Notwithstanding Soderbergh’s own observations regarding the
distance between past and present, The
Knick offers one of the freshest manifestations of what dramatist Bertolt
Brecht called “defamiliarization,” in which the audience is reminded that what they
are watching is a performance.  Brecht
achieved this effect through epic dramas, often set at epochal moments of the
past, which the audience gradually came to recognize as a defamiliarized
version of the world in which they were presently living.  The
Knick also seems to traffic in what has been called “hauntology,” where
forgotten or unrealized visions of the past are felt to linger on, ghost-like,
into the present.  For Jacques Derrida,
the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989 left unrealized communist utopias to
wander like specters through the Wall Streets and shopping malls of
capitalism.  When we watch The Knick we might wonder whether black
doctors like Dr. Algernon Edwards really operated secret hospitals for black
patients in the bowels of white institutions, and whether these secret locations might have
offered a more positive model for health care than what we have now.  By scoring Soderbergh’s series with such a
rich array of musical anachronisms, Cliff Martinez helps to raise challenging
questions about present and past; a lesser composer might simply have
offered ragtime.

Jed Mayer is an Associate Professor of English at the State University of New York, New Paltz.

ARIELLE BERNSTEIN: Bloody Handprints: What Comes After Domestic Violence in Television and Life

ARIELLE BERNSTEIN: Bloody Handprints: What Comes After Domestic Violence in Television and Life

nullIn episode “Fifty-One” of Breaking
Bad, Walter White buys Walt Jr. a
gorgeous, fast-moving and expensive red sports car, even though Skyler has expressly
asked him not to. It’s a subtle move of dominance. Walt has already made it
clear that he is the one who will be calling all the shots, and this is another
way to drive a wedge between Walt Jr. and Skyler by painting himself as the
better, cooler parent. A few scenes
later we cut to Walt and Skyler in bed together, Skyler turned away from Walt
as they spoon; the camera affording us a view of a close up of Skyler’s face,
as Walt gently strokes her arm and tells her that everything is going to be
okay, putting in a coyly worded request for a chocolate cake to celebrate his
birthday. Throughout this monologue, Skyler’s eyes remain dead and far away.
She knows Walt’s gestures of affection are not meant to actually open a warm
dialogue about the future; they are about quietly asserting Walt’s dominance
and control. Skyler is no longer an equal partner to a man she loves; she is a
prisoner in her own home.

As TV dramas that focus on male antihero protagonists have
become increasingly in vogue over the last 10 years, the women who
bear the brunt of their specific brand of male entitlement and rage have become increasingly noticeable. Female
characters in shows ranging from Mad Men to Game of Thrones are constantly subjected to verbal, sexual and physical violence, sometimes from the
male characters we admire and love. Male-on-female violence is portrayed as
normal and is often sexualized or depicted as romantic or glamorous. While I’m
a fan of all three shows I just mentioned, I also worry about the ubiquity of the
victimized woman in many of these programs and how the attitudes towards women
presented in these otherwise nuanced, intelligent shows might bleed over into real
life.

I’ve been thinking recently of Breaking Bad in light of
the recently released footage showing Ray Rice punching his now wife, Janay
Rice, in the face. After all, at its heart, Breaking
Bad is a story about family and
violence, the family that Walt continues to claim to love, even as he selfishly
destroys it in order to become a drug kingpin. Walt’s transformation from
gentle chemistry teacher to leader of a drug ring comes at the expense of his
wife and children. He goes from being a protector to being someone who controls
every aspect of his family’s small suburban life, continuously putting his
wife and children at immense risk. 

The fact that Walt wants to provide for his family is often
listed as the most sympathetic excuse for his actions. In reality, it is
probably his most evil trait. Walter White’s transformation into a formidable
antihero is complex and rife with important moral questions, but Walt’s bad
behavior is often presented as less menacing than edgy; the newly evolved
Heisenberg, after all, has his fast sports cars and pork pie hat, his pithy,
brilliant one-liners. While clearly Walt is intended to be a villain by the end
of the series, many people still view Walt as a sympathetic figure and, while
Walt’s actions are never forgiven, they often do seem to be lionized. By the
end of the series Walt is presented as a flawed and tragic hero who did what he
needed to do in order to save the person he loved most: himself.

Skyler, who goes from being a strong, smart and willful
protagonist to a kind of cowering shadow of her former self, is never portrayed
as a hero. Her story is swallowed up by Walt’s. Indeed, many viewers took
tremendous joy from her slow collapse under Walt’s thumb. Often feminists cite
hatred of female characters under the broad, nebulous heading of “misogyny,” but the specific reason that Skyler was such a maligned character may have less
to do with a general hatred of women than with a specific discomfort at seeing the
White household descend into domestic violence and not wanting to blame Walt
for the deterioration. Skyler’s defiant attitude towards Walt, her refusal to
be willed into submission and go along with his egomaniacal plans, were
initially what inspired fans rooting for Walt to hate her.
Others criticized her when she began to become more desperate, give in to
Walt’s demands and eventually align herself with him after being worn out,
terrorized, and brainwashed by a person who was once her loving partner.

We spend a lot of time criticizing victims of domestic violence,
but we also spend a lot of time talking about them as victims, rather than
seeing them as whole people who are forced, by circumstance, to make a series
of genuinely complex and heartbreaking decisions. When footage is released of
Ray Rice knocking out his fiancé, we rush to see the evidence but don’t really
know what to do with it. A few commentators have struggled to excuse or defend
Rice’s actions, while others have complained that we simply don’t have context
to understand why he would do such a thing. Most mainstream discussion has
rushed to Janay Rice’s defense by pointing out the ways that she was an
innocent victim of a horrible crime.

But when Janay Rice herself responded to the public distribution
of this footage, she was primarily angry that she had been directly embarrassed by the
sudden media exposure. And why wouldn’t she be? When discussing Janay Rice, many
commentators rushed to criticize her choices, or simply left her out of her own
story. While the term “victim” is meant to put the blame on the perpetrator, it
also serves to flatten the person who has been hurt. We may feel sympathy for
victims, but we don’t see them as full people, with rich life stories, with the
combination of triumphs and mistakes that comprises each of our lives. In the
case of Breaking Bad, the
audience often could only think of Skyler in absolutes: either a shrew or a
victim, a bitch or a victim, a ball-buster or a victim.

We have plenty of stories where male protagonists fight
adversity and triumph over it, with dedication, with fists, with spiritual and
intellectual epiphanies that nurture individual growth. For female survivors of
domestic violence, we don’t tend to offer a similar opportunity for triumph. I
admire the number of women who have come forward to share their own stories
about how they experienced partner violence, but I also resent the fact that the
media still often presents these stories like a series of broken sighs and
resignations, rather than a deeply heroic act.

Even when leaving is presented as strategic, it is still
presented as a victim’s last decision, the path of least resistance, the thing
the weaker animal does when it knows it lost. The Skyler at the end of Breaking Bad is a
shadow of her former self, forced to support herself off the ugly drug money
she swore she would never take. Walt meanwhile is given his swan song, his
bloody handprint a signature stamp on the top of his baby blue.

We forgive a lot of male bad behavior. We are primed to see male characters as awash in their own hero’s journeys,
where the choices they make fundamentally matter, where they are leading the
charge of their own destiny. When Walt bellows at Skyler, “I am the one who
knocks,” late in the series, audiences applaud how Walt has been utterly
transformed. We see him as both menacing and brave, badass and brutal. In
contrast, in the world of the antihero, women have never been the ones to knock. We’ve been the ones to respond to that
knocking, the girls who end up dead in bloody bags washed to the shore, the
women condemned to stand by their man, or the women finally saved by a good
man.

This isn’t necessarily true in all media representations of
women. One of the reasons Buffy the Vampire Slayer succeeded as a feminist T.V. series is that although Buffy was
sometimes victimized, she was never ultimately portrayed as a victim. Her
response to trauma was complex and multifaceted, but she was consistently
portrayed as someone who is a survivor, rather than a victim of circumstances
beyond her control. In the same way, The Hunger Games’ Katniss’s greatest asset was not simply her skill at using a
bow and arrow, but her sheer resilience in the face of evil. 

Of course both of these stories are the domain of fantasy,
rather than the gritty realism we are supposed to see on any number of
antihero-centered T.V. dramas, genuinely brilliant, riveting shows, where,
nonetheless, female characters are often created in order to be broken. It’s time for women (and men) to start pushing back harder against narratives
that flatten female characters into either villains or victims of circumstances
beyond their control, and demand that female characters
are afforded a chance at redemption. I want a story that doesn’t end with death or leaving,
a world where we expect female protagonists, even those who experience violence
and pain, to ultimately carve out a new future.

Arielle Bernstein is
a writer living in Washington, DC. She teaches writing at American
University and also freelances. Her work has been published in The
Millions, The Rumpus, St. Petersburg Review and The Ilanot Review. She
has been listed four times as a finalist in Glimmer Train short story
contests. She is currently writing her first book.

METAMERICANA: RICK & MORTY: The Ballad of Abradolf Lincler

METAMERICANA: RICK & MORTY: The Ballad of Abradolf Lincler

null

The Back to the Future films gave us Doc and Marty, the former a catchphrase-spouting, drunk-seeming, AARP-eligible scientist who was equal parts madman and genius, and the latter a high-voiced square with an alternately plucky and anxious disposition. Rick & Morty,
Dan Harmon’s and Justin Roiland’s new animated series on the Cartoon Network, deviates from
that formula by giving us Rick and
Morty: the former a catchphrase-spouting, drunk-seeming, AARP-eligible
scientist who’s equal parts madman and genius, and the latter
a high-voiced square with an alternately plucky and anxious disposition.
If there’s another similarity between Bob Zemeckis’ 80s cult-classic
film series and Harmon’s latest instant classic, it’s that both share
an interest in exploring the vagaries of transdimensional travel. That,
and physical comedy.

Apart from its resemblance to the Back to the Future franchise, Rick & Morty seems deliberately calibrated to defy analogy. Is it Futurama meets Harmon’s earlier hit, Community? Men in Black
meets Picket Fences? The X-Files meets Brazil? While Rick & Morty
is certainly another entry in a long line of genre- and reality-bending
TV programs, none of these analogies will finally do, largely
because the creators’ interest in Rick & Morty
is not in creating an identifiably parodic mish-mash of styles, but
juxtaposing opposing principles to the point of irresolvable paradox.
It’s not merely that most episodes of Rick & Morty
take place in the fifth and sixth dimensions—in the fifth dimension,
humans are able to perceive all possible futures stemming from their
present timeline; in the sixth dimension, we perceive alternate
timelines entirely
divorced from our own past, present, and future—it’s that even within
these dimensions the plot and characters oscillate between sense and
nonsense, unidirectional and spiraling narratives, optimism and cynicism
for humankind’s ability to create order from chaos.

In short,
Harmon and Roiland want to deny us all of our comfortable psychosocial
poles—excessive sentimentality and excessive cynicism, for instance—by
forcing us to reside, as viewers, in the same sort of ambiguous
head-space the Internet and popular culture forces us to reside in
anyway. If Rick at one point describes the transdimensional
Intergalactic Council of Ricks (it’s a long
story) as a "who’s who of who’s you and me," he could equally be
describing our own space-time continuum, in which we retain our sanity
not by establishing stable selves ever willing to betray their own prime
directives, but by
embracing plural selves who
exhibit an abiding fidelity to certain core principles. You and I are
always you and I, the transdimensional adventures of Rick & Morty imply, but surviving the Internet Age intact means knowing exactly which you and I we are at all times.

Rick & Morty
so defies generalization that one must resort to anecdotes and clips
from the show to even approach an understanding of the program’s
particulars. So, first, an anecdote: In the eighth episode of the first
season of Rick & Morty, Rick
chastises his daughter, son-in-law, and granddaughter for obsessing
over a pair of goggles that shows them their lives in alternate
dimensions rather than
watching Ball Fondlers, a
sixth-dimensional television program that has nothing to do with either
balls or fondling because those words mean something entirely different
in the sixth dimension. Seeing how miserable his relatives have been
made by visualizing how much better their lives would be in an alternate
reality, Rick says, "I don’t want to rub it in or anything, but you
guys clearly backed the wrong conceptual horse." What Rick means is
that, in the context of a workaday reality so nonsensically
contradictory that it requires highly conceptualized forms of resistance
to survive, the choice between fetishizing stable selves and a stable
reality and accepting the intertextuality (juxtaposition of
data-streams) and intersubjectivity (juxtaposition of consciousnesses)
of our daily experiences should be an easy one. If we treat realities as
multiple and elective instead of stable and imposed from
without, it enables us to better navigate an online cultural sphere in
which multiple and elective realities are already the order of the day.
Every day, in fact.

This, in a nutshell, is why Rick & Morty is like no other television program before it, and why even comparing it to alternate-reality cult hits like The X-Files or Brazil
is inadequate. In simple terms, the program’s plot and characters move
so seamlessly between opposing poles of thought and feeling that calling
it "sci-fi" does it a disservice. Instead of "sci-fi," Rick & Morty
is more appropriately termed "nonfi-fi": a subgenre in which the
boundaries between the things we can readily understand and those we
cannot possibly relate to our own experience is crossed so rapidly and
with such regularity that we enter an entirely new space (indeed an
entirely new dimension) simply by consuming it. We see this tendency in Nathan for You, a Comedy Central program which is ambiguously either an actual documentary or a mockumentary; in IFC’s Comedy Bang! Bang!,
which is ambiguously either an actual late night interview program or a
parody of a late night interview program; and–well, you get the
picture. These programs never give viewers the comfort of either earnest
immersion in a genre or ironic distance from any genre; instead,
viewers subsist in a central space between all possible received
expectations–a place in which the
normal rules of physics, individual morality, and collective culture
are intermittently suspended.

Yet Ricky & Morty
somehow takes even "nonfi-fi" to another level by being at once
meticulously written from a conceptual standpoint—its perspective on
the necessary flexibility of reality is unmistakable—and also
improvisational in its writing. Harmon’s and Roiland’s point, as seen in the episode "Rixty Minutes," seems to be that while we can
conceptualize approaches to reality, whatever our approach may be,
reality is simultaneously being improvised and solidified at every
moment. This, then, is the reason for its daily absurdity: we’re all
winging it all the time, but we all have to accept the aggregation of
all our improvisations to survive. As Morty observes when Rick upgrades the family’s cable package with programming from
every
conceivable reality, "Seems like TV from other dimensions has a
somewhat looser feel to it" (to which observation Rick responds, "Yeah,
it’s got an almost improvisational tone").

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAGtSvJLeQo

If there’s an iconic figure on Rick & Morty,
one whose composition best summarizes Harmon’s social and metaphysical
critique, it’s "Abradolf Lincler," a genetically engineered creation of
Rick’s who’s half Adolf Hitler and half Abraham Lincoln. Rick describes
him as "a crazed maniac—just a misguided effort of mine to create
a morally neutral super-leader . . . turns out it just adds up to a lame,
weird loser." Of course, that "lame, weird loser" is simply us—what
Lincler himself describes (in speaking of himself) as "an abomination,
tortured by the duality of its being"—and as much as the show may use
Lincler for comic relief, in fact his dilemma is our own. How do we
resolve our opposing inclinations without lapsing into a moral
neutrality that’s both uninteresting, perverse, and doomed to
self-destruction? In another several-minute stretch of Rick & Morty, its creators model for us how the fifth and sixth dimensions permit a
reconsideration of both the relationships between things and the
relationships between our selves and one another. In just a few minutes
of on-screen montage, we see all of the following
vignettes: (1) Two pizzas ordering humans on cell phones while sitting
on couches; (2) two cell phones
ordering couches on humans while sitting on pizzas; and (3) two couches
ordering cell phones on pizzas while sitting on humans.

In the
examples above, the point is not to create random permutations of
reality, but to render as equivalent all nouns (including pizzas,
humans, cell phones, and couches) in the fifth and sixth dimensions,
where the term "possible" is not limited by normative science or
psychology. Rick & Morty
doesn’t, however, contend that science is irrelevant, nor social
convention, nor human scruples—merely that all of these things are both
wholly integral and wholly context-dependent.

In parodies—a
postmodern art-form entirely divorced from Hamon’s twenty-first century
vision—we’re repeatedly reminded that certain social conventions are
integral to our lives by virtue of the fact that our lives
can’t function without them. In a show like Rick & Morty,
the takeaway is a very different one: that everything is always
integral within its own context. It’s for this reason that Rick’s
catchphrase in Season One of Rick & Morty
is a comically nonsensical string of syllables that’s only in the
season finale translated as "I am in great pain, please help me"; and
it’s for this reason that, at almost the same moment we discover this
translation, Rick switches his catchphrase to "I don’t give a f**k!" Of
course, Rick’s earlier pain is no less real because it’s completely
unintelligible to his family, nor is his subsequent happy-go-lucky
nihilism any less real because we find it sophomoric and banally
expressed.

By taking his "everyman" grandson Morty along on his
transdimensional adventures, Rick shows him
that anything which presently seems unreal or unintelligible either
can’t yet be translated or simply is not yet aligned with its proper
context. The lesson is an important one for all of us living in
twenty-first century America, where our reaction to online phenomena
that seem unreal or unintelligible is either to rail against them
ineffectually or to deconstruct them into tiny but largely irrelevant
parcels that briefly make sense to us but nevertheless leave us unhappy. The show’s creators would have us make neither of these mistakes: by forcing us to
watch the alternating harmony and disharmony of paradox, they ask us to
consider that paradox is our present state, and that our only remaining
action-step is to determine how we react to it. Perhaps the time for
microanalyzing the senselessness of popular culture is over, and the
time for somehow exploiting that senselessness to live better and richer
lives has begun. Rick and Morty are doing
it—and (spoiler alert) Abradolf Lincler dies doing it—so why can’t we?

Seth Abramson is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Thievery (University of Akron Press, 2013). He has published work in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Best New Poets, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, New American Writing, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, and The Southern Review.
A graduate of Dartmouth College, Harvard Law School, and the Iowa
Writers’ Workshop, he was a public defender from 2001 to 2007 and is
presently a doctoral candidate in English Literature at University of
Wisconsin-Madison. He runs a contemporary poetry review series for The Huffington Post and has covered graduate creative writing programs for Poets & Writers magazine since 2008.