A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (14 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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