Dixie chick (10/10/02)
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Idly channelsurfing, I happened across the proprietor of the jumping-the-shark website pitching his new book to some talkshow dork on MSNBC the other night. Apparently sharkjumping has now been elevated to a universal principle and applied to the explanation of the wider world, with illustrations down through history from Caesar’s jumping the Rubicon to Clinton’s jumping the intern. This either proves that the principles that govern television apply to everything, or that everything has now been dumbed down so that it can be explained to people who know nothing but television; I don’t know which.
One example he provided, I suppose an apt one, was the case of Al Gore: after Mister White-Boy-Who-Can’t-Dance decided to court the Spontaneity Vote by smooching his wife at the convention, says our scholar, everything went downhill. This appears to make sense: the theory here is that Gore lapsed when he tried too hard to be someone he was not; and I’ve always thought that this was the worst kind of bad faith [in the sense of Sartre], pretending to be someone that you’re not, and that this explained, for instance, why people who try too hard to reprogram themselves with psychotherapy automatically turn into assholes. [As you like I no doubt first observed when our loudmouthed fraternity president came back from a “sensitivity conference” and — if anything more obnoxious than ever — proclaimed himself a new man.]
On the other hand the locus classicus of political meltdowns was the famous “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore” speech, and this was, first, not at all the end of Nixon and, second, came under the heading not of somebody trying to be somebody he wasn’t but quite the contrary revealing himself as he really was: Nixon was infinitely scarier when he took off his mask. — Or should we argue that, as a purely political creature, the “real” Nixon did not exist? that what was frightening about those occasional attempts to reveal himself was that there was nothing beneath the pose? as if when he took the mask off, there was no face behind it, only a void. So that indeed he was trying to be something that he was not, i.e. an authentic person. [I’m sure Baudrillard could explain this. If only I were French.]
Another example he provided was the case of Woody Allen, whom he maintained jumped the shark when he married the child bride. I thought this a very curious thesis. He seemed to identify without a second thought Allen the writer/director and Allen the celebrity; in fact neither he nor his interlocuter hesitated for a moment in making this identification, as if it never occurred to either of them that there might be a distinction between the two. — Has television so completely destroyed the ability to distinguish form from function, appearance from reality? no wonder the postmodernist metaphysics has sprung up to “explain” this.
It’s more than that, actually: there’s some kind of general assumption that reality in general and Woody Allen in particular consists of a set of twenty-second sound/video bites on, say,
Entertainment Tonight. Everything is, inevitably, interpreted in terms of some kind of story line [the shortest summary of epistemology is that we make sense of the world by telling ourselves stories about it], but the story lines that can be presented on television are unusually simple and disjointed — serial, you might say: constructed by the repeated iteration of very minimal elementary components.
Thus the public perception of the character of Clinton, for instance, never deepened despite the fact that, when you add it all up, he got much more coverage than Dostoevsky ever gave Ivan Karamazov. Rather, he became something like a recurrent character on a soap opera — a sort of symbol, Slick Willy, like a desktop icon, something instantly recognizable which eliminates the necessity for backstory: he makes his entrance [like Art Carney in
The Honeymooners, to a spasm of canned applause] and you know immediately what he stands for; by definition, nothing he can say or do can surprise you. [No matter, incidentally, what he actually does say or do.] — The key is that, unlike Ivan Karamazov, no matter how much you see of the serial character you’re never going to think about him for more than twenty seconds at a time: the bites are windowless monads which can’t be combined, only concatenated. — Thus Woody Allen is turned into a semantic hook that can be inserted into a Leno monologue. How ironic.
An example which our author did not provide, but which occurred to me afterward: when did the American empire jump the shark? — Perhaps here: there’s a beautiful speech, delivered somewhere in the middle of that classic apology for robber-baron capitalism
Atlas Shrugged by the very dashing and romantic character Francisco d’Anconia, with which he lays waste to a parlorful of New York cocktail-party intellectuals who have been belittling the idea of merely “making money”. Quite the contrary, says Francisco, this is the noblest endeavor to which a man can turn his energies. Moreover, he continues, it is worth noting, in fact it is profoundly significant, that only Americans have ever referred to work as
making money, with the connotation that economic activity is inherently productive, indeed creative. — I don’t think I ever appreciated the depth of this remark until much later, when I read Jane Austen and discovered that Mr. Darcy, for instance, “had” ten thousand a year, and realized that this choice of verb encapsulated the presuppositions of an essentially static agricultural economy in which land was the only form of capital and all significant power lay in a very few hands. — How far we have come, I thought. — Foolishly. — Actually I think this is just it: that sometime in the none-too-distant future some linguistically-minded historian is going to look back on the decline of the American empire and place the turning point exactly at that moment, sometime during Reagan’s first term, when people stopped talking about “making” money and, started, once again, as they have for most of human history, about “having” money.
But the final observation, obviously, has to be that this is what happens to every clever idea, that there comes a moment at which its author can’t resist trying to apply it beyond its domain of validity, and that’s when the Fonz steps onto the waterskis in his leather jacket and renders himself an absurdity. — So this is where “jumping the shark” jumped the shark: when the author commenced a book tour. Ripeness is all.
____________School for scandal (9/17/02)
