Out of Egypt: How Our Enslavement to Mediocre Mass Media Stifles Creativity

This post was tangentially inspired by the most recent episode of South Park, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while. I don’t feel like summarizing the episode, so if you’re unfamiliar, let me direct you to this great synopsis and analysis from The Onion‘s A.V. club.

What I’ve been thinking about is mediocrity. Specifically how mediocrity destroys our investment in visual media and our desire to envision the greater potential of television and film, and how it creates passive spectators who don’t even know how to articulate what they want.

I’m reminded of the four children at the Passover seder. Although I love to read the question posed by the rebellious child (often referred to as “wicked” in earlier English editions of the Haggadah), in this instance, the role is firmly claimed by the studios and the networks that produce our mainstream visual media.

The rebellious child denies involvement in the exodus from Egypt and instead demands that others explain the personal significance of the event for them. The culture producers at the top of this pyramid aren’t stupid. They know that they often produce a mediocre product, but they reject their role in the creative process by asking us to find the value in their efforts–to identify with one-dimensional characters, to attribute great significance to unrealistic situations (this blog is guilty!), to tune in every night without fail, and to cry at Jim and Pam’s wedding or get hot for McDreamy and McSteamy.

As viewers we are left with two options: Are we the simple child, whose naive curiosity is met with the didactic answer that this is just the way things are, or are we the child who does not even know how to ask a question, a child whose inability to articulate results in a lesson about authority and power: It is because of what the Almighty did for me when I left Egypt.

But we haven’t left Egypt yet, and our enslavement to mediocre mass media continues unabated. The culture producers determine the structure of the pyramid, but viewers determine its scale. It’s their vision, and we build it. Bart Simpson didn’t become a cultural touchstone of the 1990s because Matt Groening set out to invent the ideal image of the rebellious child; Bart became famous because we, his fans and admirers, made it so.

Every purchase of a Bart Simpson lunchbox engages the consumer with the product. But when it’s a good product, we should support it. We should watch the television programs and films that are worth it, that genuinely make us feel something different and exciting, but we should abandon our complicity in the perpetuation of mediocrity. We need to watch the visual media that demands more of us.

There is a caveat, of course. If we reject the rehashed plots, the hackneyed scripts, and the stock characters, how should we interact with the purposefully bad visual media? The films that are so bad they’re good, the overblown doctor melodramas, the reality TV dreck that makes us glad we are neither on the prowl for an eligible bachelor, a cultish wife with several non-genetic “sisters,” or a piece of ass whose name begins with the letter “K.”

We return to the wise child, who asks about the rules and laws of the Passover seder: in effect, the structure that dictates the ritual. The ritualistic evening flicker of every television screen in every American household is an opportunity to question the foundation. We can still enthuse about our favorite media, but we should take control of the construction of the pyramid, from initial blueprints to the onset of erosion.

For me, this means loving the good and the bad, but shunning the ugly average (Sorry, Tuco). My affinity for the good is likely self-explanatory, but I will gladly justify my love for the bad.

The truly bad visual media (and here I am thinking of Troma films, most Arnold Schwarzenegger projects, Toddlers and Tiaras, The Bachelor, etc.) knows something that mediocre media will never realize: In order to create trash, you must first understand the structure of gold.

Meaning that Troma films recognize viewers’ visceral enjoyment of violence, gore, sex, and monsters in limited quantities in the good movies, so they give us exactly what we want, but in excess. Excess is crucial to the success of the so-called “bad” visual media. Bad, or so-bad-it’s-good, media takes the components that we most enjoy in good media and exaggerates them to the point of overstimulation.

Schwarzenegger is the Terminator, a pregnant man, and the grotesquely tall twin of a man whose shortness is equally disarming. His characters are grounded in tropes of traditional masculinity, but then they explode into hyperbole, much like his unconstrained seed.

Toddlers and Tiaras showcases the extreme end of bad parenting–unaware mothers who ignore their children’s feelings and affected fathers who maintain their dominant paternal attitudes while stitching sequins on flamboyant competition dresses. This show only succeeds because we already know what good parenting looks like in visual media. Our understanding of good parenting allows us to gorge ourselves on a terrible representation of family life.

But if good visual media is characterized by a novel interpretation of the existing structures, and so-bad-it’s-good visual media is characterized by its subversive excess, then how do we define mediocre mass media so that we can recognize and subsequently reject it?

1. Mediocre visual media takes itself very seriously. It relies on established conventions of film and television, but it does not question them. When a show like How I Met Your Mother or a film like Bridesmaids acknowledges its adherence to a certain formula or script, it becomes extremely self-conscious. Rather than brazenly wear its appropriation of ancient gimmicks like Community or any Quentin Tarantino film, mediocre visual media quickly reverts to blind allegiance to traditional forms of expression.
2. Mediocre visual media takes no risks. Its usage of authoritative conventions acts as a safety net–nothing exceedingly bad can come out of the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” school of thought, but nothing exceptional will ever emerge. Any business major can tell you that the greatest rewards often emanate from the greatest risks. If you’re producing visual media and you’re not scared shitless about the final product at least some of the time, then you’re doing it wrong.
3. Mediocre visual media is inoffensive. Everyone tolerates these innocuous television shows and unobtrusive films, but we neither love them nor hate them. They exist to fill the gap when there’s nothing else on TV or you want to get out of the house for a movie, even if it’s another installment of the Pirates franchise. The best visual media gives us something to discuss: It arouses passion and invective, and makes us think about things we’ve never considered before.
4. Mediocre visual media is forgettable. You watch an episode of Modern Family or a recent episode of House, and a few hours later, you can’t remember anything about it without significant concentrated thought. If you’ve seen the same tropes before, then they’re not going to seem novel just because they’ve been given new characters and a fresh coat of paint.
5. Mediocre visual media doesn’t give a fuck about your personal enlightenment. It’s not there to make you think and it’s not there to teach you how to think. Mediocre visual media lulls you into submission purely by dint of its visual nature. There’s just enough stimuli to keep your brain engaged, if somewhat unfocused, but there’s not enough going on to encourage any sort of sustained thought.

So how do we fight a culture of mediocrity? How do we say, “Fuck it. We’re not going to build any more vast monuments to the mundane”?

I don’t think there’s any singular answer, but as consumers of visual media, recognizing our common enemy allows us to mobilize against it. I don’t know what’s out there in the desert, but I’m sure it’s a lot more exciting than our current state of media bondage. It’s scary as hell and there’s no guarantee you’ll find an oasis of challenging, insightful work, but I’d rather have 40 years of creative uncertainty over another few decades of the same old shit. Stay tuned.

More Meandering Thoughts on Television

Ronnie Ortiz-Magro of MTV's Jersey Shore

I started this blog on February 8 of this year, and so far there have been 57 entries. Considering that these shows range from the standard 22 minute sitcom to the 80+ minute Monday night episodes of The Bachelor, and considering all the television I watch and don’t write about, I would estimate my television watching from February 8 to today, March 22, to be at least 75 hours, or just over three consecutive days of eyeball-withering screen time.

Now when you watch this much television, and you force yourself to do something you’ve never done before while watching–that is to say, you force yourself to think critically about each show on which you plan to write–you learn a few things about television. You certainly don’t learn anything new about yourself (in fact, this concentrated effort at television will tend to reinforce a few things you already knew and subsequently tried to deny), but you will learn a helluva lot about television.

Most network television is incredibly tedious. It’s as if television is purposefully engineered for a specific kind of watching–the zoned-out, TV dinner watching that normal people do after their day jobs, not instead of their day jobs. And most television doesn’t stand up to any sort of in-depth analysis. After writing about three medical dramas (House, Grey’s Anatomy, and Off the Map) for three weeks, I felt as if I had exhausted everything notable or interesting about these programs that could be written about in an accessible manner. Sure, I could parse the tropes of colonialism in Off the Map or Dr. House’s compulsion to other himself and deny the emotional effects of trauma through his compulsive pill-popping, but that does a disservice to myself and my readers.

We can look for things in television that aren’t explicitly there, but this esoteric approach to understanding popular culture often attributes more to the shows than what they actually depict. The more I dig into mass media television on a pseudo-philosophical level, the more I put myself into these shows. I begin to write about my own scholarly interests and theoretical positions through the tangible object of the television program, but I cease to consider each show as the arbiter of its own presentation.

Is this necessarily a problem? When I write about Parks and Recreation, should I talk about big ideas, like the socioeconomic growth of small towns, or should I talk about a particular character’s personal politics, like Ron Swanson’s specific brand of Libertarianism? And on a far more mediocre program, such as Gossip Girl or Hellcats, do I talk about class issues among the über rich and the injustice of three strikes laws?

So I guess what I’m wondering is where to draw the line. I can write about the television programs themselves, or I can position them within an external context where I end up writing about the issues they suggest. The first strategy leaves me complaining about the tedium of most television programs, and the second strikes me as neglectful of the source material, not to mention highly pretentious.

I want television to be more. As I try to reconcile my opposing critical instincts, I’m consistently awed by how many shows are instantly forgettable. I watch them, I pay attention, but when I sit down to write, I feel as though there’s nothing remotely insightful to say. Even mediocre films can be memorable, but mediocre TV is a cursory entertainment whose fleeting pleasure can always be revisited through the rerun.

This is exactly the problem: a replayed film is a revival, but a replayed television program is a rerun. We don’t think about these similar creative forms in the same way. Sometimes we’ll get a 30 Rock or a Mad Men, but even the most critically acclaimed series are uneven, distributed among phenomenal episodes and the merely decent ones. Maybe I want every television show to be a self-contained entity that can still say something without the context of its season or series, but I realize that this isn’t the nature of the medium. Still, I think that a greater attention payed to the construction of the individual episode, rather than the entire show, can only benefit an increasingly staid form. And it will likely give me more to work with. Stay tuned.

The Sub-Standard Simpsons S22 E15

"Howdy, handsome!"

The guys over at the zombie Simpsons blog are going to love me for this one. Finally an episode of The Simpsons that we can all agree on: some good one-liners, a terrible, ill-conceived plot, and a goofy visual gag that outlasted its brief welcome by about 18 minutes.

Last night’s episode illustrates a notable aspect of many recent Simpsons episodes. A show that once made us think about issues like the arrival of shoddy mass transit in a small town (Marge vs. the Monorail) or the implications of cartoon violence (Itchy & Scratchy & Marge–I do love a good Marge episode!) has now become little more than slapstick window-dressing. The Simpsons still makes us laugh, but it rarely makes us think.

I know The Simpsons is an American cultural institution, but I’m starting to think it’s time for a finale. I thought Matt Groening would give it a rest when The Simpsons finally surpassed Gunsmoke as the longest-running primetime television show, but here we are, two years later, and I actually have to look up the narratives of my favorite episodes on Wikipedia since years of devoted childhood viewings of the first ten seasons have been replaced by the mediocre plotlines of later episodes. To quote Homer Simpson, “…every time I learn something new, it pushes some old stuff out of my brain.”

The Simpsons has had a good run, but episodes like the most recent one are detracting from the legacy of an excellent television show that, at its best, could cause us to laugh and ponder simultaneously. Every time I watch a mildly tolerable episode that lacks the innate introspection of a fantastic episode, I feel like I’m taking whatever happy drug Grandpa’s on. The more I watch, the more I’m concerned about my own ability to differentiate between the quality and the dreck. And if I’m easily lulled into viewing passivity by this television narcotic, then I won’t be surprised when my retinas detach either. Stay tuned!