Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now (5 page)

Slowly but surely, dramatic television and cinema seemed to give up the fight, and instead embrace the timelessness, even the purposelessness, of living in the present. The classic situation comedy had been narrative in its construction. The “situation” usually consisted of a history so important to the show that it was retold during the opening theme song. A poor mountaineer was shooting at some food, accidentally struck oil, got rich, and brought his whole hillbilly family to Beverly Hills. A three-hour boat tour meets with a storm at sea, shipwrecking a group of unlikely castaways. Compared to these setups, modern sitcoms appear as timelessly ahistorical as
Waiting for Godot
.
Friends
chronicles the exploits of some people who happen to frequent the same coffee bar.
Seinfeld
is a show about nothing. The backstory of
Two and a Half Men
has more to do with Charlie Sheen’s dismissal and Twitter exploits than the divorces of the show’s in-world characters. These shows are characterized by their frozenness in time, as well as by the utter lack of traditional narrative goals.

The new challenge for writers is to generate the sense of captivity, as well as the sensations and insights, of traditional narrative—but to do so without the luxury of a traditional storyline. So they come up with characters who simply wake up in a situation and have to figure out who they are or what the heck is going on around them. The characters are contending with the same present shock as their creators.

The movie
Memento
follows a man who loses his memory every few hours and must repiece together his existence (and a murder mystery) in essentially no time at all. He tattoos clues and insights to his body, turning himself into a mosaic of hints. If he is able to piece together the pattern, he will know who he is and what happened to him. Working with the same handicap as his screenwriter, the character is attempting to construct narrative sense without the luxury of narrative time. Somehow, the reality of his situation must come together for him in a single moment.

CSI
, one of the most popular franchises on television, brings this presentist sensibility to the standard crime drama. Where
Law & Order
investigates, identifies, and prosecutes a murderer over a predictable sequence of discoveries,
CSI
uses freeze-frame and computer graphics to render and solve the murder as if it were a puzzle in space. It’s not a crime, but a crime
scene
. Potential scenarios—even false ones—are rendered in 3D video maps, as the detectives attempt to deconstruct a single sustained moment.

The TV hits
Lost
and
Heroes
take on this same quality. In
Lost
, characters find themselves on an island where the rules of linear time no longer apply. Successive seasons of the series bring progressively more convoluted permutations on time travel and fate. Solving the mystery of the island and their relationship to it is not the result of a journey through evidence but a “making sense” of the world in the moment.
Heroes
moves back and forth through time in a similar fashion, replacing linear storytelling with the immediacy of puzzle solving. While the various superheroes are indeed preparing to prevent an apocalyptic explosion from destroying New York City, the dramatic action is much more concerned with piecing together a coherent temporal map of the universe in which they are living. The shows are less about what will happen next, or how the story will end, than about figuring out what is actually going on right now—and enjoying the world of the fiction, itself.

True, there may have always been forms of storytelling less concerned with climax than they are with their own perpetuation. The picaresque adventures of Don Quixote gave way to the serialized adventures of Dickens’s novels and eventually found new life in American soap operas. But the beauty and reassurance of these sorts of entertainments was that there was always a tomorrow. Somehow, the characters would continue on and never gain so much insight as to become wise. They were often children, or perpetually deluded, or just plain simple. As time sped up and narrative fell apart, however, the soap opera form declined from a height of nineteen different shows in 1970 to just four today.

Taking their place are the soap-opera-like series of pay television, such as the acclaimed
The Wire
and
The Sopranos
.
The Wire
, which follows drug dealers, corrupt union bosses, and politicians through Baltimore, never doles out justice. A world in which no good deed goes unpunished,
The Wire
is as existential as TV gets—a static world that can’t be altered by any hero or any plot point. It just
is
. (The characters may as well be on the series
Oz
, which takes place in the limbo of prison.) Characters experience their reality in terms of their relationship to the “game”—a way of life that is experienced more like a person playing an arcade shooter than going on an epic quest. Likewise,
The Sopranos
was a soap opera about survival in the midst of internecine battles. The characters long to be characters in
The Godfather
movies, who lived by a strict code of ethics and whose careers had more predictable, traditional arcs. The celebrated, controversial last episode of the series was one of TV’s most explicit depictions of present shock: in a seemingly innocuous scene, the screen suddenly just goes black. Tony Soprano’s existence could end at any moment, without his even being aware that it has ended. No drama, no insight. So, too, for the member of a society without narrative context—at least until he develops alternatives to the linear story.

Still other television creators have taken their cue instead from the epic narratives of Japanese manga comics, developing stories with multiple threads that take years to unfold. Individual episodes of
The X Files
(1993),
Babylon Five
(1994),
Battlestar Galactica
(2004),
Mad Men
(2007), or
Breaking Bad
(2008) may not be capable of conveying a neatly arced storyline, but the slowly moving “meta narrative” creates sustained tension—with little expectation of final resolution.

New incarnations of this approach, such as HBO’s sprawling
Game of Thrones
(2011), use structures and tropes more common to player-derived fantasy role-playing games than television. The opening titles sequence of the show betrays this emphasis: the camera pans over an animated map of the entire world of the saga, showing the various divisions and clans within the empire. It is drawn in the style of a fantasy role-playing map used by participants as the game board for their battles and intrigues. And like a fantasy role-playing game, the show is not about creating satisfying resolutions, but rather about keeping the adventure alive and as many threads going as possible. There is plot—there are many plots—but there is no overarching story, no end. There are so many plots, in fact, that an ending tying everything up seems inconceivable, even beside the point.

This is no longer considered bad writing. In fact, presentist literature might even be considered a new genre in which writers are more concerned with the worlds they create than with the characters living within them. As Zadie Smith, author of
White Teeth
, explained in an interview, it is no longer the writer’s job to “tell us how somebody felt about something, it is to tell us how the world works.”
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Like other contemporary authors, such as Don DeLillo, Jonathan Lethem, and David Foster Wallace, Smith is less concerned with character arcs than with what she calls “problem solving.” Just like the worlds of television’s
Lost
or
Heroes
, the worlds of DeLillo’s
White Noise
and Lethem’s
Chronic City
are like giant operating systems whose codes and intentions are unknown to the people living inside them. Characters must learn how their universes work. Narrativity is replaced by something more like putting together a puzzle by making connections and recognizing patterns.

REALITY BYTES

This same impulse lies at the heart of so-called reality TV—the unscripted, low-budget programs that have slowly replaced much of narrative television. Producers of these shows chose to embrace the collapse of linear narrative once they realized this meant that they were also relieved of the obligation to pay writers to tell a story or actors to perform it. Instead, the purveyors of reality TV simply roll camera in situations and locations that are most likely to generate drama or at least some conflict.

The first of these shows documented something close to reality.
Cops
, created by John Langley back in 1989 and still in production in dozens of countries, follows real police officers as they go on their patrols, chase drug addicts or drunk spouse abusers, and make arrests. The show’s opening song lyric, “What you gonna do when they come for you?” reveals the presentist premise: this is instructional video for how to act when you get arrested. The self-satisfied closing monologues of the police assuring us that justice has simply been served replace the character-driven insights and clever reversals of traditional crime drama. The arresting of lowlifes is not a special event but what might be considered a “steady state”—a constant hum or a condition of the presentist universe.

Another reality-TV archetype was born with MTV’s
The Real World
, first broadcast in 1992 and still on the air, which represents itself as a slice of its viewing demographic’s real lives. The show was inspired by the 1970s documentary series
An American Family
,
which set out to document the daily reality of a typical family’s experience but hit the jackpot when the parents waged an unexpected and spectacular divorce while the son also realized he was gay, all in prime time. In hopes of yielding similarly sensational effects,
The Real World
selects a group of good-looking eighteen- to twenty-five-year-olds and puts them in an apartment together with dozens of cameras running twenty-four hours a day. Any moment is as potentially significant as any other. It’s up to the editors to construct something like narrative, after the fact. Of course, the participants are actually competing for attention, and hoping to get noticed and selected for careers on MTV or in a related industry. So they generate drama as best they can by having sex, fighting, engaging in dangerous behavior, or thinking up something provocative to do that hasn’t been done by someone else in one of the other twenty-eight seasons of the show.
The Real World
also solves the television advertiser’s dilemma in a medium where traditional commercials no longer work: product placement.

After all, in the channel surfers’ DVR-enabled media environment, sponsors no longer have the luxury of captive viewers who will sit through commercials. Many of us are watching entire season’s worth of episodes in a single weekend through streaming services such as Hulu or Netflix. The traditional timeline of television schedules vanishes in an on-demand world, so the sponsor must embed advertising into the very fabric of the programming. Reality TV has proved a better backdrop for this, because the disruptions don’t compromise the reality of the situation. When we see a real product in a fictional show, we are drawn out of the fantasy and back into real-world considerations. The viewers of
The Real World
, ironically, have no such expectation of the consistency of reality. They know enough about marketing to accept that the clothes the participants wear might be sponsored by fashion companies in the same way that professional sports uniforms are sponsored by Nike. That’s the real world, after all. If Donald Trump’s “apprentices” are all working to brand a new hamburger, the audience understands that Burger King has paid for the exposure. In presentist TV, programmers lose the ability to distinguish between the program and the commercial—but they also lose the need to do so.

The bigger challenge is creating content compelling enough to watch, and to do so without any setup at all. Without the traditional narrative arc at their disposal, producers of reality TV must generate pathos directly, in the moment. This accounts for the downward spiral in television programming toward the kind of pain, humiliation, and personal tragedy that creates the most immediate sensation for the viewer. What images and ideas can stop the channel surfer in his tracks? The extent of the horror on screen is limited only by the audience’s capacity to tolerate the shame of its own complicity. We readily accept the humiliation of a contestant at an
American Idol
audition—such as William Hung, a Chinese American boy who revived the song “She Bangs”—even when he doesn’t know we are laughing at him. The more of this kind of media we enjoy, the more spectacularly cruel it must be to excite our attention, and the better we get at evading the moral implications of watching the spectacle.

It calls to mind the questions posed back in the 1960s by Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram, who had been fascinated by the impact of spectacle and authority on soldiers’ obedience in Nazi Germany. Milgram wanted to know if German war criminals could have been following orders, as they claimed, and not truly complicit in the death camp atrocities. At the very least, he was hoping to discover that Americans would not respond the same way under similar circumstances. He set up the now infamous experiment in which each subject was told by men in white lab coats to deliver increasingly intense electric shocks to a victim who screamed in pain, complained of a heart condition, and begged for the experiment to be halted. More than half of the subjects carried out the orders anyway, slowly increasing the electric shocks to what they believed were lethal voltages. On a structural level—and maybe also an emotional one—reality TV mirrors much of this same dynamic. No, we’re not literally shocking people, but we are enjoying the humiliation and degradation of the participants, from the safe distance of an electronic medium. The question is not how much deadly voltage can we apply, but how shamefully low can we go? Besides, the producers bear the real brunt of responsibility—just as the men in lab coats did in the research experiments.
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