Last spring I volunteered to pick up roadside trash for the town's green-up day. There were three denominations of garbage that were overwhelmingly discarded on the roadsides above all others: cigarette butts, alcohol containers and junk food wrappers. To me there seemed to be a correlation between what we consumed, how we treated our bodies and our relationship to our immediate environment. To wit, those who trash their bodies, think nothing of trashing the roadsides of their towns and neighborhoods. The garbage that floats on the cultural ocean of American movies and t.v., is equally prolific, yet a closer look reveals as much about what preoccupies us, what we put in our minds, as the roadside trash says about what we put in our bodies.
The explosion of original television series and movies on streaming networks Netflix, Amazon and Hulu (not to exclude network T.V.), have replicated like fruit flies on a bowl of rotting pears left by a sunny window. There are clouds of them. So many choices. Too much t.v. and too little life to devote to them. If you think you are missing out on something, fear not. Many are cheap derivatives of a Hollywood hit (a cheesy hit at that), more often something done better on premium cable, which usually was adapted from something done even better in a novel (yeah, those things nobody really reads anymore; more on that later). As for the television fruit flies of steaming t.v. you just have to cut through some of the genre blending and bending to reveal the dominant forces in the cultural zeitgeist.
The Supernatural (Myths and Monsters)
A couple of the series of recent years that have captured the public's imagination include American Horror Story and Stranger Things. These are interesting examples because they derive from the two central strains of the supernatural in t.v.: the former from the original spooky/scifi anthology series The Twilight Zone and the latter (as do all others of its ilk) from Twin Peaks. Whatever the sub-genre, from Vampires and Werewolves to Witches and Zombies, and the strange-goings-on-in-a-small-town, one major change from the earliest incarnations of the genre is that the fangers and freaks are often the heroes (or anti-heroes) of the shows. Some of the mystique of perennial icons of horror have been dimmed as
the vampires and werewolves have been humanized, as in HBO's True Blood. There has also been a refreshing element of camp and humor added to this historically grim genre. The monsters in our midst theme is about coming to terms with otherness and difference, not necessarily the embodiment of our primal fears and our dark side.
The mythic premises house metaphors too. Usually the familiar tropes of good and evil, (sometimes fate and destiny) laced
with a heavy dose of nostalgia for the abandoned magic of the theology
and demonology of biblical Christianity (in the case of American Gods even Greek mythology). The eponymous Midnight, Texas (NBC) is a town that straddles the fault line between heaven and
hell. It's probably no coincidence that this idea was better and more subtly evoked
in season two of HBO's existential drama The Leftovers,
where an ancient well is the place between heaven, earth and the
underworld in the town of Jardin, Texas. What sets The Leftovers
apart from most t.v. shows (supernatural or otherwise), aside from its psychological depth and its beautiful
design, is that it is not trying to cater to wish fulfillment, or follow established formulas that appeal to the key demographic groups. Rather than containing a system, with its own unique rules, which is revealed and explained in due time for the audience, the story premise, that 2 percent of the world's population disappears one day, backgrounds an archetypal hero myth (more strongly foregrounded by Season 3) about finding
meaningful attachment and belief in a world where everything
you love can be taken away from you in an instant.
It intuitively and elegantly dramatizes how
people cope in a time of intensified or catastrophic loss, and does not
trade in comforting modes of escape. The forces behind the sudden departure are
never fully understood or explained (now there's realism); its
characters are not defined in terms of good or evil but by how they've chosen to cope--succumbing to despair or nihilism, clinging to magical
superstitions or conspiracy theories as solace (understanding the underlying cause of tragedy is one way people
cope); insisting on staunch rationality and psychoanalytic models in the face of the inexplicable, or clinging to each other as a way to regain what was taken from
them, perhaps before they've fully come to terms with their loss.
Ultimate answers and a coherent worldview, many
narrative loose threads later, cannot be found. They are beside the point and that is what a mass television audience finds so alienating about the show. In the absence of answers, the show's final episode suggests, we have to find a story, an explanation, that allows us to go forward, find the courage to live on after the illusions of everyday life have been stripped away to reveal the terror and loss that was lurking all along. The power of that confrontation with death and how helpless we are as humans brings an emotional catharsis that is utterly novelistic in its power, and the sheer beauty of its
formal aesthetic transcends the notion that this is television. It faces the essential truth of being human in a way no other television drama has before or since, and for that it is the crown jewel of the television era.
The Motive: The supernatural drama is conceived as existential metaphor, rather than a purely 'thrill' genre. As the world gets bleaker, people are looking for some kind of transcendence (as conventional religion and science too have failed to deliver). The strange intrusion of the supernatural represents outside intervention and the uncertainty it brings is preferable to waking up to the reality of the opioid crisis, gun violence, out of control forest fires, our teetering democracy, home foreclosure, facing illness with crap health insurance and mind numbing service jobs that pay shit and have no benefits.
The Message: Things are not always as they seem (we hope); we may be vulnerable and misunderstood freaks but we are special and powerful too.
Wish fulfillment: Finding acceptance, community and some kind of moral framework in dark times, especially for "freaks" and outsiders.
Ultimate Truth: Somebody out there had better be in control of this ship, or we're sunk.
Conclusion: When it comes to the supernatural, be wary of special effects, and go with two strange and archetypal masterpieces. Try the boundary pushing Twin Peaks (especially Fire Walk with Me, the first season and the epic and otherworldly strangeness of the 3rd and final season). Then, clear your head, turn off your smartphone and be ready to pay attention and get real with all three seasons of The Leftovers.
Superheroes
These are the dominant force in motion picture blockbusters today, from Wonder Woman to Black Panther, but there are a number of current t.v. series spread across several cable networks and just as many new ones slated for 2019. This mega-genre bears some relationship to the supernatural genre in that some superheroes have supernatural powers, live underground lives and often have dual identities, like their supernatural freak counterparts. For some reason they have to hide themselves, perhaps owing to their potential vulnerability to their arch villains and the attention they would otherwise gather from the adoring public (kind of like celebrities). One convention of the genre is, of course, that they are misunderstood by the public and sometimes villified by the villains themselves or they are of somewhat mixed moral character, so must secret themselves out of some sense of shame. Why are they so popular? Ernest Becker would have seen it as a natural part of our hero system: "When we appreciate how natural it is for man to strive to be a hero, how deeply it goes in his evolutionary and organismic constitution, how openly he shows it as a child, then it is all the more curious how ignorant most of us are, consciously, of what we really want and need."
It must speak to how unsatifying and lacking in viable heroes and heroism our culture is to make such an obsession so eminently marketable. The veneration extends from annual Comicon events to which hundreds of thousands flock to the phenomenon of Cosplay: dressing and acting the part of any popular t.v., movie or comic book character. Though Cosplay seems a too reductive playing at hero to count as useful creativity. The incredible detail and extravagance of the costumes makes you wonder if these people have anything else to do. Want to be a hero? How about taking a stand for something in real life? We elevate sports heroes and military heroics and we combine the two
religiously with military flyovers during major sports events like the
Superbowl. It is all about pugilists, gladiators and warriors. Our politicians are corrupt and venal. Our celebrities are beautiful and shallow. The best we can do is worship at the altar of fictional ideals.
The Motive: At a time when the majority of people feel essentially powerless in their lives, and abandoned by the powers that be, they are looking to redeeming fantasies of heroic beings to take the place of our abandoned gods and failing institutions, and fulfill our evolutionary drive to be an object of primary value (the hero). Some superheroes are ordinary people, often troubled and haunted people, who put on a suit and a mask and become super-human. Most have an Achilles heel. Superman's Kryptonite is the most iconic example. But for two hours on the big screen, they fight the villains and give us a false sense of hope and a momentary feeling of vindication that lasts until the feature streams on our favorite service and we can watch it again.
The Message: Good triumphs over evil, until the sequel.
Wish Fulfillment: Vengeance is mine saith the superhero and I wish I could leap tall buildings in a single bound.
The Ultimate Truth: Good and evil is not only about heroes and villains, it is also about corrupt and greedy systems that need to be changed. The question is can we change systems without changing the nature of mankind?
Conclusion: Mistakenly viewed as a progressive genre, many of the big Hollywood franchises trade in the window dressing of identity politics that promote self-congratulatory feelings, or globalist propaganda with the heroes and their leagues acting as stand-ins for the USA or some idea of a liberal Western society. Worst of all, with their thrilling special effects and manipulation of emotion they are one of the most powerful narcotics this side of opioids. Unplug this genre altogether and spend a few hours reading a book, preferably a good one. As an antidote, try Christopher Hedges "America: the Farewell Tour" and find out that the real threat to existence does not leer from behind a creepy mask, and how a real every day hero gets by with two ordinary hands and feet.
Techno-Thrillers; Science Fiction:
We are so in love with technology. From Mr. Robot to The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest, from Inception to Minority Report, whether its hackers or dream-sharing technology, we can't get enough of the dazzling and sinister possibilities of technology done right, then gone wrong. This category is every bit as much about where big tech has taken us, the mode as much as the medium of t.v and movies. Big tech has succeeded in keeping a global audience self-secured to the umbilicus of technology while feeding it a steady steam of cautionary tales about the dangers of technology, like some kind of failed self-inoculation. After all, what is the meaning of this futile exercise that has never in any way deterred or put anybody off either creating or consuming the latest technological wonder/trap? Unfortunately, even the Jurassic Park franchise has to be put in this category. It is not really about dinosaurs at all, but they are really the best thing about this series. And if it were possible to recreate dinosaurs, human beings would do it--for both profit and wonder. The lesson of the original Jurassic Park didn't sink in with the fictional humans in the sequels (even though the message was clear). After all, we could not have had a franchise if humans had gotten the point. This sort of negates any moral dilemma that had been raised at the outset. We just want to see dinosaurs and their special brand of carnage recreated realistically with the latest CGI.
The Motive: What will they think of next?
The Message: Technology is the God of human progress. There is apparently a firm belief that we will either be saved or destroyed by our technology; and no matter what the risk of abuse or danger to our privacy, security and autonomy, we say give me tech or give me death.
Wish Fulfillment: If I can follow this convoluted piece of progress pushing nonsense, maybe I'm not as stupid as my chem teacher thought I was, i.e. technology makes us smarter.
The Ultimate Truth: When our destruction comes we will stream it live and rather than try to actually escape it, we will be mesmerized by it. Which is sort of what we are doing with our lives anyway.
Conclusion: If we really saw this genre as anything but high tech masturbatory material, we might take a step back, unplug a little more and actually pay attention to the ways technology is already being used to control and surveil us. Maybe take one of those high-tech time machines back to a pre-surveillance world.
Detective/Police/Crime/Military/Anti-Terror
There's the war on drugs, prosecutorial powers and harsher criminal sentences reaching new levels of excess; there's the War on Terror stoking paranoia, bringing us the Patriot Act and a far reaching surveillance that has ended privacy, as well as agencies like Homeland Security and ICE, and let's not forget, the militarization of the police. With the rise of an American police state, it is inevitable that the offerings of this genre would encompass the whole of our national security apparatus. Not only is there the old fashioned private eye and ever popular crime fighting duo, there's the day in the life of America's finest (often with the word blue in the title), the Law and Order style police procedural with it's special crimes units, there are CSI's, NCSI's, JAGS, cold case units, serial killer units, special forces, FBI, Homeland Security, spy dramas, undercover units, why even Lucifer has gotten involved in solving crimes. If the devil himself is no longer outside the law, then we've definitely reached a new threshold in conformity messaging.
When people say that Hollywood and the entertainment industry is a liberal bastion, I say look at the number, scope and tenor of this genre to get a feeling for how retrograde the industry truly is. Watch a steady diet of these shows and you will be completely desensitized to police methods, draconian laws, excesses and abuses of judicial and prosecutorial power, the militarization of police forces, the ubiquity of law enforcement presence, government surveillance of emails and cell calls, the normality of the police state itself. And it's no accident. Among the ideas you will become inured to: anyone who clams up and asks for an attorney has to be guilty (because, after all, if you are innocent you have nothing to fear from the police, right?); it's okay to bend the rules or subvert constitutional rights as long as Sam Waterston is sure the defendent is guilty; DAs are the good guys and all defense attorneys are grand-standing sleazeballs who would get Jack the Ripper off if it would increase their public profile; criminal cases usually go to trial (in fact only about 3 percent of defendants get their day in federal court). Stacked charges and enhanced sentences have meant that most defendants take plea deals and with mandatory minimums these are not light sentences, but to go to trial and lose could mean spending a big chunk of time behind bars, and the cost of a trial with a competent attorney is beyond most people's means. Further fun facts: one in twenty-five of those sentenced to death have been wrongly convicted. The numbers of those unjustly convicted in misdemeanor cases is reportedly much higher. Given the unreasonably high bails, those who cannot post them are pressured to take plea deals (admitting guilt whether or not they are guilty) rather than sit in jail unconvicted for months or up to a year awaiting trial. The prosecutors offer one day only plea deals to turn up the heat on those whose lives hang in the balance. What this process amounts to is a form of extortion and harassment of the poor the likes we haven't seen since the days of debtors prisons and indentured servitude.
The Motive: Why are the liberal elites so gung-ho for law enforcement? To protect their massive wealth and property against the unruly mobs, could be one reason. The main driver of this genre is to convey to the populace that the more law and order there is, the more safe and secure they will be.
The Message: You have nothing to fear from the law unless you are guilty.
Wish Fulfillment: Guilty until proven innocent.
The Ultimate Truth: The country that considers itself the freest in the world, incarcerates more people than any other nation. It is in fact a very free country if you are a wealthy criminal. The truth is we are a country with two different justice systems. But about the only outrage most white people ever express about our justice system is over the OJ verdict. One black defendant gets a rich white man's justice and 25 years later, white people still can't get over it.
Conclusion: Boycott this genre unless something really good with a broader perspective comes along , such as HBO's haunting and tragic limited series, The Night Of. At least think before you settle in with reruns of your favorite Law and Order franchise and that bowl of low-fat ice cream. One thing is for sure, the televised police state can't be much better for the human spirit and psyche than the real one lurking as close as your I-phone.
Dystopia:
This genre has been in the popular imagination since Huxley's Brave New World. Almost two decades later, the other iconic dystopian vision, Orwell's 1984, came
on the scene. In hindsight, it's popular to debate which author was the better prophet,
but neither of them have the last word on the subject. There are actually
quite a few new visions of the dystopian future to choose from. So many, that they may be the touchstone genre of the past 10 or 15 years. It has preoccupied the likes of Cormac McCarthy in The Road and become a Hollywood obsession of grotesque and baroque imagination: Mad Max: Fury Road, The Purge and Blade Runner 2049 (not to mention the many sci-tech movies backgrounded in dystopian worlds), plus the YA trilogies (The Hunger Games and Divergent) that have spawned popular movie franchises. On t.v., AMC's The Walking Dead is the perennial standard-bearer of dystopian mayhem. These are survival stories in the face of bleak conditions, environmental disaster and civilization's ruin. Human being's ability to trust each other, cooperate and even survive the harsh conditions and the ruthless instinct to grab the last scraps of sustenance is the greatest challenge. These dramas force viewers to put themselves into such scenarios and ask of themselves: What would I do under the circumstances? How would I act? What character would I be?
The Motive: By identification it is pretty easy to decide who we'd like to emulate, but we don't watch these stories to steel ourselves for future disasters and to bolster our characters into a heroic frame. No, this genre represents the counter-intuitive escapism of choice.
The Message: your life sucks, your family is a disaster area, your job may be worse, in fact you may never be able to retire from it (and suicide is beginning to look like a more attractive option than getting older)--but wait, things could be much worse. You emerge from the theater or from a Walking Dead binge and think, life is good. The streets aren't full of flesh-eating monsters; you can still breath without a gas mask (except some days in China); you can still buy gasoline; the grocery stories aren't looted shells. Yes, our sucky lives are still, as Larry David would say, pretty, pretty, pretty good.
Wish Fulfillment: Seeing the world end and living to tell about it.
The Ultimate Truth: Things can't keep going the way they are going forever. We're just messing up too many things.
Conclusion: Just as Huxley was truly trying to look into a real future world based on what he knew of human nature and social control, and Orwell was really resetting the world of post-war London into the future and his totalitarian world was based on the Stalinism of his day, so you can look at today's dystopian offerings and see which ones are creating worlds with a true eye on the future, and those that are projecting extreme parallels of what is going on in the world already.
Anti-Hero Dramas:
The anti-hero was born in the literary world centuries before it became the overarching trope on t.v. for exploring the moral complexity of human nature. It is almost indispensably and reflexively the starting place of most shows that wish to be seen as "edgy" and sophisticated. Good guys are for the Hallmark Channel. It has allowed us, at its best, to see the kind of characters we love to hate, and experience the moral ambiguities of the real world in ways t.v. and movies had been too conventional to show us in the past. The good guys were good and bad guys were bad and never the twain shall meet. But as the realities of economic globalism bring an increasing sense of connection between the lifestyles we live here (the ways in which our patterns of consumption and other geopolitical forces) have ripple effects across the world, it has become more difficult for us to broadly isolate ourselves from the consequences of our everyday choices. Plus, heightened ideological polarities have forced cultural confrontations, such that the veneer of civility has been stripped away. It was only a matter of time before our protagonists exhibited this moral splintering between ideal behavior and real-life shortcomings, between social conventions and undercurrents of less civilized emotions. While Tony Soprano is usually associated with the rise of the anti-hero on t.v., the character of Andy Sipowicz on NYPD Blue may actually have proceeded him by a few years. He captured the racially tinged zeitgeist of the tough on crime 90's that heralded the rise of the burgeoning American police state (see Detective/Police/Crime/Military/Anti-Terror above). It is for that reason he is generally overlooked. However politically incorrectly he behaved, he represented an establishment viewpoint after all. At it's worst the anti-hero has been granted a license, has created a cheering gallery for the worst in human behavior with often little more humanity than familial loyalty or a flimsy ethical code to mitigate our disgust.
Showtime's Ray Donovan comes to mind. It has become in it's latter seasons a broad canvas for cycles of mindless, credulity straining violence, with high body counts, frequent disposals and dismemberment, and most remarkably a string of killings by Ray and members of his family that magically are never traced back to them. It became obscenely comical near the end of Season 5, as daughter Bridget hoists a chain saw to help dismember the bodies of some corrupt cops. The family that slays together... The resigned march to existential and moral hell behind Ray's near zombified and punch drunk stagger is one of the low points of the t.v. anti-hero and should give the show's creators pause when it comes to creating a story board for Season 6 (read cancel it). Speaking of Showtime hits that didn't know when to quit, Dexter, took the anti-hero idea to its thrilling and extreme conclusion. Yet its inability to develop the character and the material in Season 5 toward a convincing denouement after the shattering and climactic Trinity case in Season 4, left the show with nothing else to offer but kill room repeats and the same fatalistic lessons. It insisted all along that a psychotic killer could have insights about his violent nature, while making him incapable of learning from them, and because of this failure it would drone on into Serial Dementia for another three seasons.
The Motive: Perfect people don't exist and aren't interesting anyway because they always make the right choices. So let's put our subjects under intense pressure, let the causal world of the novel lead the way, and then, just then, we may get a glimpse of what human beings are really like.
The Message: Judge not, lest ye be judged.
Wish fulfillment: Vicariously we can step on the cracks, get out of line, make impulsive life changing decisions, feel pity about the mess left behind, and then at the finish sigh with relief that it's not our life.
Ultimate Truth: The unconventionality of the anti-hero has quickly become a cliche itself. More problematic, is the way it has become, minus the soul-searching, a model for conventional behavior.
Conclusion: With the grotesquue orange-haired, orange-faced, Anti-hero-in-chief spewing a Vesuvius of lies and leaving a trail of avarice, conflict of interest, criminal indictments and incompetence broadcast via twitter and the echo chamber of Fox state t.v. it may be time to give the contemporary icon of the anti-hero a carefully considered reboot. For one thing, there isn't a writer who can create a fictional drama capable of sustaining the screenplay twists of our daily news cycles, or hold the ongoing interest of a culture with such an insatiable appetite for serialism on demand. T.V. can't keep up with Trump. It also reveals how exposure to increasing doses of uncritical, less nuanced storytelling from an extreme narcissist's point of view can sicken and damage a culture. Even on t.v., false narratives and debunked nonsense offered in an entertaining format can seduce the intellectually vulnerable and discourage those who are too appalled and exhausted to change the channel.
The Novel as Template for the Golden Age of T.V. and late stage Serial Dementia:
Some of the most noteworthy series on t.v. in recent years have come from adaptations of upmarket literary fiction, and even those that originated as teleplays and series pilots were based on the unfolding, causal structure of the novel, rather than the episodic nature of the traditional t.v. series. It was topical and followed ongoing personal narratives in such a discontinuous way that it was not critical to watch every episode. With the novelistic series, the addictive quality is the draw, while the drawback is the commitment involved. You can't miss episodes without losing track of what is going on. The streaming networks mentioned at the outset have in large part solved this problem. It is easy to catch up, or binge watch previous seasons when time allows. Depending on how many series you follow, however, it still amounts to a lot of time watching the tube.
The best of these adaptations include HBO's The Leftovers. The first season followed Tom Perotta's novel of the same name very closely. But the final two seasons had to be created with new material and yet still find that novelistic form that had made the 1st season a rare work of television art. The episodes each found their own structure, and what aesthetic pleasure and poignancy was wrought from these beautiful narrative designs, with music that elevated the atmosphere to a semi-religious/transcendental experience. The limited series also has produced gems like Season 1 of True Detective and The Night Of. The most popular of these novel-based series by far has been Game of Thrones, based on a seven novel project by George R.R. Martin, a television series that has outstripped the author's pace and will be finished before the books. Such is the demand and hunger for THE SERIAL. Tales abound online at how voracious fans turned hatefully on Martin for taking so many years to complete the 5th volume (the last thus far completed of the projected 7). Talk about biting the hand that feeds you. I mean just find something else to read while you're waiting people. The problem at the heart of serialized novels, not written like The Leftovers as a stand-alone, is the potential effect on the integrity of the form, especially how such a commercially hot trend can infect good novelists with a new itch to duplicate the same novel and a treasured set of characters to the point of nausea, idiocy and moral fatigue. After a while, all that changes is the plot. Series novels have been around for a long time (especially in the crime genre), but the novels really responsible for the current craze were the Harry Potter books that appeared in the late 1990's. This series sparked two marketing explosions: the young adult series novel and the adaptation of those and later adult novels into movie franchises and novelistic t.v. series. After this came the bland and badly written Twilight novels and The Fifty Shades adult erotica. It's been off to the races ever since, with the quality of the novels and their visual transcriptions varying widely in quality.
Another incredibly popular set of novels is the 8 volume multi-genre Outlander series, with its current t.v. analog having just aired its 4th season on STARZ. With novels 1 through 6, each one was successively longer than its predecessor, from the 1st at 600 plus pages to the 6th volume weighing in at a ponderous 1100 plus pages. The final two were each in the 800 page range. In total it's about twice as long as Proust's In Search of Lost Time. If you binge watch the series and get a feeling for its conflicts and general meanderings, even in the shorthand of t.v. compression, it becomes predictable, the moral dilemmas contrived and the characters tiresome by the time you roll up to Season 4. I can't imagine reading five or six thousand pages of this. Apparently, no matter how little you have to say and how much endless plot you need to say it (probably over and over again), a sentimentalist wedge of the culture has an endless (and here it really borders on endless) appetite for die hard romances that endure against all odds, for the idea of going back in the past to change a tragic episode in history, for period style drama period, and (at least on this side of the pond) for fetishizing men with muscles and foreign accents. There's your formula, go forth novelists, mix and match, mish and mash the genres to this bottomless well of popular taste and no editor or agent will ever tell you your novel is too long. Too much is never enough. The desire is always for more.
Outlander is a good example of what happens to characters when, in effect, you make them live forever. Their natural finitude betrays them. They begin to act predictably, stupidly it seems; they are kept around so long, like children raised from cradle to college. And when they are stupid or stubborn, they begin to infuriate us like children (teenagers especially) who forget to do their chores and homework and seem impermeable to instruction. We expect children to hang around our living rooms for 18 years, but the characters in our t.v. shows?
This craving for something new that is really the same old (characters dressed in new clothing, the same conflicts moved to a different setting) is paradigmatic of t.v. and formula fiction. The late David Foster Wallace worried about the ways that commercial entertainment (t.v.) was changing what we expected from other arts, especially fiction, given t.v.'s efficiency at delivering pleasure and how little it demanded of its audience. And it has changed the kind of books that are now considered literary fiction (the upmarket world of Sharp Objects and Big Little Lies testifies to this). Serialization holds out the greatest economic incentive and greatest potential danger to art in any form. The already slick, accessible literary novel (created with t.v. and cinema in mind), can be further thinned by the prospect of being made to extend its project beyond the author's conceptual framework, or tempting the writer to distort the natural boundaries of narrative in the first place, by arranging exciting new plots to move her beloved characters around in, like pieces on an infinite chess board playing an endless chess game. If that kind of chess seems more than a little pointless, then you get closer to understanding the serial problem.
The immortality project of the serial novel is born of the reader's often-stated wish that some books would never end. A wish for a state of permanent transcendence. But the nature of transcendence and fiction makes this impossible--the former is beyond us often before we realize it, and the latter is about beginnings, middles and ends. This immortality project then is betrayed soon enough by the limitations of the characters themselves, their inability to be broken down sufficiently to be regenerated in some organic or philosophical way as would transform them into new life forms. That usually signals the end point of a novel, and would be unbearable to the stated wish of the serial in sustaining the original life forms in the first place. So the character must not break down, disintegrate in the crucible of fiction. The prized character must be protected somehow from reacting naturally to the terrors and viscissitudes of endless plot twists and heaped up crises and tragedies by acting in psychologically and morally unrealistic ways. It is all too often a problem in plot heavy stand-alone novels if I am honest, but is almost guaranteed in the series.
Serialization acts as a marketers move around the problem of death (which is the natural finitude of stories, and includes the existential fear of a ratings dive or cancellation), but one that necessarily denies death on some level and ignores the way fiction seeks a structure, like life, that contains it. The ever-after of the prolonged serial breeds boredom and contempt for the life of the story that it originally strove to immortalize.
Every writer, no matter how good, has a finite number of things to say. The best ones try not to repeat themselves too much. The most prolific ones inevitably do. When we constantly repeat ourselves, the pretending that the old wine put into new skins tastes fresh, when the search for novelty of plot or concept confines moral dilemmas into little false cubby holes of choice, a kind of dementia, an amyloid plaque of ideas, begins to dull the brains creative connections and it's ability to have complex new conversations, alternative ways of seeing things. All is about novelty of appearance and is hailed as original if it looks new. But if a thing is at heart no different than something else, or hollow at it's core despite its theoretical or visual complexity, who will be sharp enough to perceive and articulate the difference?
It is like the problem of sorting through the inundations, the wearying avalanche, of the perpetual news cycle for vital information, or the useless product sponsored articles that pretend to be news. Just look at the number of articles and daily space fillers that populate a home page. How many times have I read, 'you've been cooking potatoes wrong your whole life', or 'you're probably doing dead lifts wrong'. The intentional marketing of self-doubt with some cookie attached that makes products related to potatoes or whatever your deficiency may be pop up on your screen is all manipulation to promote consumption. Gossip and tweets are elevated to the status of news. An ego (even the President's ego) and his warped personality is not the news. Style is not the news. Yet, this is how to stay in the news, how to market ourselves and find a loyal audience. Any good agent would tell you to know your audience. Find your base. In the new lingo of entrepreneurship it is called 'finding your tribe'. Repeat serial lies and those who have an appetite for a particular kind of lie, will keep tuning in, as they will for bodice ripping romance or time travel. Some markets in America are bottomless, being deeply rooted in our past and thus a little like time travel: racism is always part of the marketplace of public policy and opinion (our most profound and lethal form of serial dementia). Even while the entertainment industry shows us an increasingly inclusive face, some of that is niche marketing aware of demographic changes as much as from progressive motives. The genuinely transformative among these will not omit the struggle required to achieve full inclusion or the institutional nature of our entrenched structural problems, such as The Wire did in a systematic yet organic way.
Elsewhere, the marketing is all too tribal. The dislocated rhetorical labels of political discourse: liberal, conservative, capitalism and socialism are signified fears of and loathing for the other. These are the amyloid plaque of a failing political system--misapprehensions and failed ideologies cycling for decades, as if with no collective memory or possible alternatives--only false dichotemies and white-washed histories offered again and again. And we believe it as if told for the first time. While our country decays one road and bridge at a time, while a corrupt for profit criminal justice system destroys millions of lives and keeps alive a form of human slavery, while climate change moves past the point of no return, while the imperative of transitioning to a sustainable green economy is regarded as unaffordable and unnecessary, and while the looming global crisis of human migration has frighteningly found it's only unified response in the specter of rising white nationalism.
Our democracy, controlled by a rapacious economic system, has reached late stage serial dementia: we elect new people, marketed to us as change, hope or a return to core values; they rebrand old lies as common sense, go through the rituals, the mumbo-jumbo of exceptionalist myths, market fundamentalism, chanting off key paeans to our vaunted freedoms, while every day our condition and standing in the world worsens. Those at the very top are not demented or deluded. They know exactly what they are doing. The flow of resources to the top one percent is being carefully and relentlessly directed through policy that relies on our continued state of dementia and docile assent. We the dementia patients are shut ins, isolated from each other, alone with t.v. serials, the irrelevant torrents of the daily media cycle, memes, tweets, posts and pins, paranoid chat rooms and gaming analogs of rage and warfare, starved for nourishment, deprived of proper healthcare and a decent living. Our public wealth has been shoplifted by the unseen hand, our pensions looted and horded by societies corporate caretakers, while we struggle, through the serial fog, to remember and understand what happened to us yesterday. And we are expected to recoil at words like socialism and class warfare.
Go to any mid-size American city and it is exactly like the one you left with the same store and restaurant chains everywhere, the same big banks, malls, commuter lots, grimy bus terminals, generic office parks. Serial pharmaceuticals treat the serial pathologies of a society glutted with serial consumption: diabetes, heart disease, depression and bipolar, a raft of autoimmune disorders, erectile dysfunction, Hep C and cancer. Pills and injections promoting, stopping or counteracting the effects of serial thoughts and serial behaviors. We have a serial liar in the White House, serial killers, serials about serial killers, serial monogamy, serial cheating, serial rape, season after season of bachelors and bachelorettes, survivors, Big Brother, American Idol and Dancing with the Stars, a war in Afghanistan that just may end up with a longer run than The Simpsons. High Tech toys are doled out serially with people lining up for them. There are the digitized serial heroics of gaming. And right back around to our serialized novels--the one form, by the essence of its very name, that should resist serialization.
The argument against obsessive consumption of the serial in favor of nurturing a broader information base is a little like arguing that you can ever have too many bags of mass produced chips and cheese doodles, or for that matter, ramen noodles. Their ability to break down so easily, to satisfy so lightly, only intensifies the need for more and more frequent doses. While eating a varied and nutritious diet, takes thought, time, resources, discipline and proper digestion. It's much more work to read a book, or even an overly long article like this one, follow an extended argument, or look up words. Or being able to identify a straw man argument when you hear one, or when we are making one ourselves. Taking the time to rightly process information, knowing where to look for good information when you need it is so last century. Much easier to turn on the t.v. and binge.
The Motive: The serial is the commodity par excellence, potentially a never-ending profit machine.
The Message: Don't worry, we'll make more.
Wish Fulfillment: Possibility is endless; everything is endless; Our appetites are endless and we the people demand more.
Ultimate Truth: We should read more. But what to read? A very wise college professor of mine always exhorted us to, "Read widely." Our increasing isolation in distinct information bubbles is a testament to the habit of only approaching media that provides a self-confirming world view. If you like conspiracy theories than it won't be long before you go from 911 was an inside job, to contrails are poison being released into the atmosphere and then to the granddaddy of them all to become a flat-earther. And that is a kind of willed detachment from reality, a sign of the schizoid distrust of everything (an information based, digitally induced mental illness, if you will). To extend the aside, let us just recommend to the flat-earther, you must not use GPS, could not trust GPS if not for global reality (as in globe-shaped reality), the fact of Magnetic North by which such navigation works. Come back to the real world. Information is how we develop a world view; increasingly, from behind a screen it is also how people experience the world. The distortions this produces are rife and proliferate 'virally' to use the vernacular. So then what information we gather and where we gather it is the critical factor in the dawn of a world where we have few shared truths and can't agree on even scientifically, verifiable facts. And our addiction to the image and our tendency to be so easily mislead by doctored versions of reality is even more problematic.
What has this to do with the serial? It has to do with habits of mind and habits of consumption, a willingness to be hypnotized by the passive, easy forms of cultural transcendence. And quite frankly, while t.v. land becomes a symbolic eternity and immortality project, we are wasting too much of the eternal now (the only time that truly exists) obsessed with non-creative illusions. Reading requires an attention, an active mind and an ability to synthesize complex ideas that the image alone cannot convey. Even in acknowledging that t.v. and cinema may be better suited to convey the ineffable, in that the medium does not rely on language, such moments are in rare evidence compared with the cliches it invokes to arouse us. As much as visual information is the present and future of how we understand the world and each other, and if there were no books, we'd be all the more liable for how we choose to open ourselves up or close ourselves off to the vast resources within our easy reach. The real meaning of serial dementia is the ways in which we are exploring ever narrower pathways and choosing ideologies as source rather than accuracy and knowledge, and, beyond this, we are all too specialized in our interests, too obsessive and demonic in our singular directions. There are fewer people today who know a little about a lot of things than there are people who know a lot about one or two things.
Conclusion: The most interesting common thread in this survey of the television landscape are the major trending heroic subjects: the supernatural monster/freak, the superhero, the criminal (especially the criminal genius) and the anti-hero. What they all have in common is the way in which they suspend either natural or moral laws and conventions (the average man who plays by the rules, it seems, will not do in our present state). Only in the crime genre is the cultural outsider the antagonist, and yet the anti-hero figure is the bridge between the criminal who is punished and the one who is granted the complex treatment of the protagonist, the one whose entire life we are allowed to glimpse in mitigation of his crimes--the Dexter Morgans, Al Swearengens, Tony Sopranos and Ray Donovans. It is a generous idea and art strives to be generous. For it is a place where we glimpse the world remade, where briefly there is clarity and we are able to transcend our human powerlessness, even if it is a transcendent sorrow for the doomed.
There are global problems, political problems and the existential problems we all have. Serial dementia is a trance we live in to cope with it. An illusion, like the illusion that natural resources, clean water, bees and food, are unlimited and endless, as ready for streaming as Netflix. An illusion that there will always be more. Think of the rage unleashed on poor George R.R. Martin when he dared take over five years to complete his novel. It's what happens when people wake up to a world of no more. Stay tuned for the exciting conclusion.
