Chuck Klosterman On Film And Television (5 page)

15
. This was that chick with Lyme disease.

16
. This was the gay law student with the spiky hair.

Sometimes I’m a bad guy, but I still do good things. Ironically, those good things are often a direct extension of my badness. And this makes me even worse, because it means my sinister nature is making people unknowingly smile.

Here’s one example: I was once dating a girl in a major American city, and I was also kind of pursuing another girl in another major American city. I had just received one of those nifty “CD burners” for my computer, so I started making compilation albums for friends and particularly for lady friends. Like most uncreative intellectual men, almost all of my previous relationships had been based on my ability to make incredibly moving mix cassettes; though I cannot prove it, I would estimate that magnetic audiotape directly influenced 66 percent of my career sexual encounters. However, the explosion of CD burning technology has forced people like me to create CDs instead of cassettes, which is somewhat disheartening. The great thing about mix tapes was that you could anticipate the listener would have to listen to the entire thing at least once (and you could guarantee this by not giving them a track listing). Sequencing was very important. The strategy was to place specific “message” songs inbetween semimeaningless “rocking” songs; this would transfix, compliment, and confuse the listener, which was always sort of the goal. However, once people starting making their own CDs, the mix tape suddenly seemed cheap and archaic. I had no choice but to start making CDs, even though they’re not as effective: People tend to be more impressed by the packaging of the jewel case than the songs themselves, and they end up experiencing the music no differently than if they had thoughtlessly purchased the disc at Best Buy (i.e., they skip from track to track without really studying the larger concept behind the artistic whole).

ANYWAY, I was making a mix disc for one of these women (I will never admit which), and it was my intention to find eighteen songs that reflected key elements of our relationship, which I thought I did. But as I looked at the track selection, it suddenly dawned on me that these songs were just as applicable to my
other
relationship. My feelings for “Woman A” were completely different than my feelings for “Woman B,” but the musical messages would make emotional sense to both, despite the fact that these two women were wildly dissimilar. So I ended up making two copies of this album and sending one to each woman, using all the same songs and identical cover art (computers make this entirely too easy). I expressed identical romantic overtures to two different people with one singular movement. And they both received their discs on the same day, and they both loved them.
¹

Part of me will always know this was a diabolical thing to do. However, I’m mostly struck by the fact that all my deepest, most sincere feelings are so totally stereotypical that they pretty much apply to every girl I find even vaguely attractive. My feelings toward every woman I’ve ever loved can be completely explained by Paul McCartney’s “Maybe I’m Amazed,” Rod Stewart’s “You’re in My Heart,” and either Matthew Sweet’s “Girlfriend” or Liz Phair’s “Divorce Song” (depending on how long we’ve known each other). My feelings about politics and literature and mathematics and the rest of life’s minutiae can only be described through a labyrinthine of six-sided questions, but everything that actually matters can be explained by Lindsey fucking Buckingham and Stevie fucking Nicks in four fucking minutes. Important things are inevitably cliché, but nobody wants to admit that. And that’s why nobody is deconstructing
Saved by the Bell
.

Saved by the Bell
is like this little generational secret that’s hyperfamiliar to people born between 1970 and 1977, yet generally unremarkable to anyone born after (and completely alien to all those born before). It was an NBC sitcom that ran for four years (1989 to 1993) after an initial thirteen-episode season on the Disney Channel (where it was originally titled
Good Morning, Miss Bliss
). The show spawned two spin-offs—
Saved by the Bell: The College Years
and
Saved by the Bell: The New Class
—and also included a six-episode summer run (usually referred to as the “Malibu Sands” miniseason) and two made-for-TV movies (one set in Hawaii, the other in Las Vegas).

It was a program about high school kids.

I realize that is not much expository information. Typically, one tries to explain TV shows in terms of “context”—if someone asked me to describe
The X-Files,
for example, I would seem like a moron if I said, “It was a program about two people who mostly looked for aliens.” That would never qualify as a significant description. I would have to write about how the supernatural religiosity of
The X-Files
personified a philosophical extension of its audience, and how the characters represented two distinct perspectives on modern reality, and how the sexual chemistry between Mulder and Scully was electrified by their lack of physical intimacy. All this abstract deconstruction is necessary, and it’s necessary because
The X-Files
was artful. However, I have never watched even one episode of
The X-Files,
because I’m not interested. I’m not interested in trying to understand culture by understanding that particular show, and that’s part of the social contract with appreciating
anything
artful. You can’t place something into its aforementioned “context” unless you know where (and how) to culturally file it, and I honestly don’t care where
The X-Files
belongs in the American zeitgeist. Dozens of smart people told me how great this show was, and I’m sure they were right. But I’m satisfied with assuming that program was about two people who mostly looked for aliens, so—as a consequence—the show meant nothing to me. I “don’t get it.”

That’s not the case with
Saved by the Bell
.
Saved by the Bell
wasn’t artful at all. Now, that doesn’t mean it’s bad (nor does it mean it’s good). What it means is that you don’t need to place
Saved by the Bell
into any context to experience it. I didn’t care about
Saved by the Bell
any more than I cared about
The X-Files,
but the difference is that I could watch
Saved by the Bell
without caring and still have it become a minor part of my life, which is the most transcendent thing any kind of art can accomplish (regardless of its technical merits).

When I first saw
Saved by the Bell,
I was a senior in high school. It was on Saturday mornings, usually right when I woke up (which I think was either 11:00 or 11:30 A.M.). It was supposedly the first live-action show NBC ever broadcast on a Saturday morning, an idiom that had previously been reserved for animation. I would watch
Saved by the Bell
the same way all high school kids watch morning television, which is to say I stared at it with the same thoughtless intensity I displayed when watching the dryer. I watched it
because it was on TV,
which is generally the driving force behind why most people watch any program. However, I became a more serious
Saved by the Bell
student when I got to college. I suspect this kind of awakening was not uncommon, as universities always spawn little cultures of terrible TV appreciation: When I was a sophomore, the only non-MTV shows anyone seemed to watch were
Saved by the Bell, Life Goes On
(that was the show about the retarded kid),
Quantum Leap,
the Canadian teen drama
Fifteen,
and
Days of Our Lives
. And what was interesting was that everybody seemed to watch them together, in the same room (or over the telephone), and with a cultic intensity. We liked the “process” of watching these shows. The idea of these programs being entertaining never seemed central to anything, which remains the most fascinating aspect of all televised art: consumers don’t demand it to be good. It just needs to be watchable. And the reason that designation can be applied to
Saved by the Bell
has a lot to do with the fundamental truth of its staggering unreality.

Saved by the Bell
followed the lives of six kids at a California high school called Bayside. Architecturally, the school was comprised of one multipurpose classroom, one square hallway, a very small locker room, and a diner owned by a magician. The six primary characters were as follows:

Zack Morris (Mark-Paul Gosselaar):
Good-looking blond kid with the ability to talk directly to the camera like Ferris Bueller; possessed a cell phone years before that was common; something of an Eddie Haskell/James Spader type, but with a heart of gold.

Samuel “Screech” Powers (Dustin Diamond):
Über
-geeky Zack sycophant.

Albert Clifford “A.C.” Slater (Mario Lopez):
Good-looking ethnic fellow; star wrestler; nemesis of Zack—except in episodes where they’re inexplicably best friends.

Kelly Kapowski (Tiffani-Amber Thiessen):
Sexy girl next door; love interest of Zack.

Jessica “Jessie” Spano (Elizabeth Berkley):
Sexy 4.00 overachieving feminist; love interest of A.C.

Lisa Turtle (Lark Voorhies):
Wildly unlikable rich black girl; vain clotheshorse; unrequited love interest of Screech.

Every other kid at Bayside was either a nerd, a jock, a randomly hot chick, or completely nondescript; it was sort of like Rydell High in
Grease
. There were several noteworthy kids from the
Good Morning, Miss Bliss
era who simply disappeared when the show moved to NBC (this is akin to what happened to people like Molly Ringwald and Julie Piekarski when
The Facts of Life
changed from an ensemble cast to it’s signature Blair-Jo-Natalie-Tootie alignment). Tori Spelling portrayed Screech’s girlfriend Violet in a few episodes, Leah Remini served as Zack’s girlfriend during the six episodes set at the Malibu beach resort, an unbilled Denise Richards appeared in the final episode of the Malibu run, and a now-buxom Punky Brewster played a snob for one show in the final season. Weirdly, a leather-clad girl named Tori (Leanna Creel) became the main character for half of the last season when Thiessen and Berkley left the show, but then they both reappeared at graduation and Creel was never seen again (I’ll address the so-called “Tori Paradox” in a moment).

But—beyond that—the writers of
Saved by the Bell
always seemed to suggest that most adolescents are exactly the same and exist solely as props for the popular kids, which was probably true at most American high schools in the 1980s.
²
The only other important personality in the Bayside universe is Mr. Belding (Dennis Haskins), who is a principal of the John Hughes variety; there is no glass ceiling to his stupidity. However, Belding differs from the prototypical TV principal in that he tended to be completely transfixed by the school’s most fashionable students; he really wanted Zack to like him, and Belding and Morris would often join forces on harebrained schemes.

On the surface,
Saved by the Bell
must undoubtedly seem like everything one would expect from a dreadful show directed at children, which is what it was. But that’s not how it was consumed by its audience. There was a stunning recalibration of the classic “suspension of disbelief vs. aesthetic distance” relationship in
Saved by the Bell,
and it may have accidentally altered reality (at least for brief moments).

Here’s what I mean: In 1993,
Saved by the Bell
was shown four times a day. If I recall correctly, two episodes were on the USA Network from 4:00 to 5:00 P.M. CST, and then two more were on TBS from 5:05 to 6:05. It’s possible I have these backward, but the order doesn’t matter; the bottom line is that I sometimes watched this show twenty times a week. So did my neighbor, a dude named (I think) Joel who (I think) was studying to become a pilot. Sometimes I would walk over to Joel’s place and watch
Saved by the Bell
with him, and he was the type of affable stoic who never spoke. He was one of those quiet guys who would offer you a beer when you walked into his apartment, and then he’d silently drink by himself, regardless of whether you joined him or not. Honestly, we never became friends. But we sort of had this mute, parasitic relationship through
Saved by the Bell,
and I will always remember the singular significant conversation we had: We were watching an episode where Belding was blackmailing Zack into dating his niece, and Joel suddenly got real incredulous and asked, “Oh, come on. Who the fuck has that kind of relationship with their high school principal?”

Of all the things that could have caused Joel to bristle, I remain fascinated by his oddly specific observation. I mean, Bayside High was a school where students made money by selling a “Girls of Bayside” calendar, and it was a school where oil was discovered under the football team’s goalposts. This is a show where Zack had the ability to call time-out and
stop time
in order to narrate what was happening with the plot. There is never a single moment in the
Saved by the Bell
series that reflects any kind of concrete authenticity. You’d think Zack’s unconventional relationship with an authority figure would be the least of Joel’s concerns. However, this was the only complaint he ever lodged against the
Saved by the Bell
aesthetic, and that’s very telling.

Now, I realize there is some precedent for this kind of disconnect: Trekkies generally have no problem with the USS
Enterprise
moving at seven times the speed of light, but they roll their eyes in disgust if Spock acts a little too jovial. Within any drama, we all concede certain unbelievable parameters, assuming specific aspects of the story don’t go outside the presupposed reality. But I think Joel’s take on
Saved by the Bell
is different than the usual contradiction. What it made me realize is that people like Joel (and like me, I suppose) were drawn to this unentertaining show because we felt like we knew what was going to happen next. Understanding
Saved by the Bell
meant you understood what was supposed to define the ultrasimplistic, hyperstereotypical high school experience—and understanding that formula meant you realized what was (supposedly) important about growing up. It’s like I said before: Important things are inevitably cliché. Zack’s relationship with Belding—and his niece—was just too creative, and bad television is supposed to be reassuring. Nobody needs it to be interesting.