The word "nerts"
Cinderella Man is worth your time. I saw it yesterday, and while director Ron Howard pulls pretty much every red herring trick possible to rachet up the tension, the film actually does rouse. There's a montage toward the beginning when Braddock (Russell Crowe) is out on the street hoofing it toward the docks, and the music's great: an old Tin Pan Alley ditty about how down everybody is, and how they should just pull up their bootstraps - but then the jaunty chorus asserts "Nerts!" as though to say, "Ah, g'wan, you're crazy." It's a neat song that simultaneously captures the "take heart" encouragement the country heard back then as well as a skeptical rejoinder to those encouragements. "Nerts" means basically "Yeah right" or "Buzz off" or "Make like a tree and get outta here."
To that end, check out some pop music from the early 20th century hosted here at the University of California at Santa Barbara's Cylinder and Digitization Preservation Project.
*
MARK THIS SECTION POST-POSTMODERNISM SIGHTING #266
Last night's Family Guy reached new heights of self-referentiality and pop culture referenciality. (Someone check "referenciality" against a reputable dictionary.) Example: last night began with Osama bin Laden making a "Death to the West" videotape in a series of dusty tunnels "somewhere in Afghanistan." What happens is that the crony terrorists outside of the frame keep mugging and making bin Laden laugh; then, bin Laden gets into it and starts goofing around: putting on oversized neon green sunglasses, that sort of thing. He can't keep a straight face. This is a pretty clear parody of any Hollywood blooper reel, as well as home moviemaking in general. Mug for the camera etc. It goes on long enough that you begin to think that that's the joke: Ahaha, bin Laden's not scary, he's a goofball. Then it goes on longer, and just when you're beginning to think Seth McFarlane's just laughing at us, the gullible enraptured viewer, a tiny terrorist to the left whips off his mufti attire and hey, it's Stewie Griffin, the talking evil scientist baby who is the show's antihero! He begins taking out terrorists with all kinds of standard action movie moves. It becomes clear that this is a take-off of The Naked Gun, in which Lt. Frank Drebin (Leslie Nielsen) of Police Squad infiltrates and takes out a gathering of Soviet, Middle Eastern, and vaguely Othered terrorist malcontents. THEN, bin Laden spies a scimitar and has at Stewie, who's dispatched the cronies by now. Stewie seizes on a rubber chicken (whatever) and has at bin Laden, and does so in a particular, manic ninja-flippy way that, when combined with the camera angles and the swordplay's choreography makes it very clear that now we're doing a Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones bit, in which Stewie's doing Yoda's Jedi flippy shit and bin Laden's Count Dooku (Christopher Lee). THEN Stewie wins, whatever, falls down the hillside and onto his Big Wheels tricycle and we're suddenly doing the Police Squad intro, in which our Point Of View is that of the Big Wheel as Stewie drives it through all manner of scenes: the Ben Hur chariot race, the Battle of Hoth scene from The Empire Strikes Back, in which Stewie / Luke's Snowspeeder dives in at an AT-AT, and then, and this is just tops, the intro scene to Doom, the first-person PC computer game that changed video games forever, etc. etc. And this is just the intro and the credits. The whole thing was just an orgy of Gen X and Gen Y references, one after another, and while Family Guy's long been the exemplar and high priest of postmodern pop-culture juxtapositions, is just the fastest gun in the West on this score, still, last night's intro topped anything it'd ever done before.
But it all made me think about accessibility issues. On an episode of The Simpsons recently, someone made a joke and Marge (maybe it was Mrs. Krabapple) laughed, saying "I get that reference." Family Guy makes me wonder about the possibility that there's a cultural endgame playing itself out here. It's great for those who get that reference, but otherwise I have to wonder how sustainable is this type of humor? What does it mean, if you haven't amassed the pop culture knowledge needed to decipher the jokes? The coolest video game geeks on the Internets over at Penny-Arcade talk about a new game called Viva Pinata; although the news capsule seems all ready to bash the game as another form of empty branding, the author comes down on the other side. Check it:
"I feel a pressure in my mind to call this a transparent, despicable, mercenary act, but my own childhood was fabulously enriched by shit like this. I don't want to make baseless assertions, but the odds are good that - as a person who visits Penny Arcade - you hold Optimus Prime in high regard. Optimus Prime was not spontaneously generated by the pure wish of a child. These supposedly 'valid' market expressions are differentiated from the grasping, sordid toys of modernity by our vast personal investments."
True. And I don't want to muddle my own discussion here by constructing a false dichotomy between a child-oriented video game and a subversive (arguably subversive) animated TV show broadcast on a major network. All the same, while I got the references and thrilled to them, I didn't feel the humor last. It was very fast-burning, my enjoyment of Family Guy. Maybe I was just not in the right emotional place to really enjoy the jokes and feel that comfort that laughing gives a person who needs a laugh (last night was tough). But I'm also increasingly sure that this kind of cultural production veers close to having nothing to say. Eventually the episode constructed a pretty coherent (for Family Guy) argument against censorship, complete with a fantastic Broadway-revue style recap of all the Family Guy bits that the FCC had shorn from previous episodes.
I suggest only that it's harder to make "vast personal investments" in things that are already themselves invested in and derived from the past. It's harder to feel relief from those forms of cultural production that don't offer much more than what we've seen before, just glossier and newly packaged. This is the basic postmodern condition that has been both a problem and a cause for celebration, depending on whom you query. I'm in the former camp. Last night I felt as though I'd finally had my fill of bread and circuses.
*
Recently acquired:
Kanye West, Late Registration.
Lewis Black, The End of the Universe.
Gorillaz, Demon Days.
To that end, check out some pop music from the early 20th century hosted here at the University of California at Santa Barbara's Cylinder and Digitization Preservation Project.
*
MARK THIS SECTION POST-POSTMODERNISM SIGHTING #266
Last night's Family Guy reached new heights of self-referentiality and pop culture referenciality. (Someone check "referenciality" against a reputable dictionary.) Example: last night began with Osama bin Laden making a "Death to the West" videotape in a series of dusty tunnels "somewhere in Afghanistan." What happens is that the crony terrorists outside of the frame keep mugging and making bin Laden laugh; then, bin Laden gets into it and starts goofing around: putting on oversized neon green sunglasses, that sort of thing. He can't keep a straight face. This is a pretty clear parody of any Hollywood blooper reel, as well as home moviemaking in general. Mug for the camera etc. It goes on long enough that you begin to think that that's the joke: Ahaha, bin Laden's not scary, he's a goofball. Then it goes on longer, and just when you're beginning to think Seth McFarlane's just laughing at us, the gullible enraptured viewer, a tiny terrorist to the left whips off his mufti attire and hey, it's Stewie Griffin, the talking evil scientist baby who is the show's antihero! He begins taking out terrorists with all kinds of standard action movie moves. It becomes clear that this is a take-off of The Naked Gun, in which Lt. Frank Drebin (Leslie Nielsen) of Police Squad infiltrates and takes out a gathering of Soviet, Middle Eastern, and vaguely Othered terrorist malcontents. THEN, bin Laden spies a scimitar and has at Stewie, who's dispatched the cronies by now. Stewie seizes on a rubber chicken (whatever) and has at bin Laden, and does so in a particular, manic ninja-flippy way that, when combined with the camera angles and the swordplay's choreography makes it very clear that now we're doing a Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones bit, in which Stewie's doing Yoda's Jedi flippy shit and bin Laden's Count Dooku (Christopher Lee). THEN Stewie wins, whatever, falls down the hillside and onto his Big Wheels tricycle and we're suddenly doing the Police Squad intro, in which our Point Of View is that of the Big Wheel as Stewie drives it through all manner of scenes: the Ben Hur chariot race, the Battle of Hoth scene from The Empire Strikes Back, in which Stewie / Luke's Snowspeeder dives in at an AT-AT, and then, and this is just tops, the intro scene to Doom, the first-person PC computer game that changed video games forever, etc. etc. And this is just the intro and the credits. The whole thing was just an orgy of Gen X and Gen Y references, one after another, and while Family Guy's long been the exemplar and high priest of postmodern pop-culture juxtapositions, is just the fastest gun in the West on this score, still, last night's intro topped anything it'd ever done before.
But it all made me think about accessibility issues. On an episode of The Simpsons recently, someone made a joke and Marge (maybe it was Mrs. Krabapple) laughed, saying "I get that reference." Family Guy makes me wonder about the possibility that there's a cultural endgame playing itself out here. It's great for those who get that reference, but otherwise I have to wonder how sustainable is this type of humor? What does it mean, if you haven't amassed the pop culture knowledge needed to decipher the jokes? The coolest video game geeks on the Internets over at Penny-Arcade talk about a new game called Viva Pinata; although the news capsule seems all ready to bash the game as another form of empty branding, the author comes down on the other side. Check it:
"I feel a pressure in my mind to call this a transparent, despicable, mercenary act, but my own childhood was fabulously enriched by shit like this. I don't want to make baseless assertions, but the odds are good that - as a person who visits Penny Arcade - you hold Optimus Prime in high regard. Optimus Prime was not spontaneously generated by the pure wish of a child. These supposedly 'valid' market expressions are differentiated from the grasping, sordid toys of modernity by our vast personal investments."
True. And I don't want to muddle my own discussion here by constructing a false dichotomy between a child-oriented video game and a subversive (arguably subversive) animated TV show broadcast on a major network. All the same, while I got the references and thrilled to them, I didn't feel the humor last. It was very fast-burning, my enjoyment of Family Guy. Maybe I was just not in the right emotional place to really enjoy the jokes and feel that comfort that laughing gives a person who needs a laugh (last night was tough). But I'm also increasingly sure that this kind of cultural production veers close to having nothing to say. Eventually the episode constructed a pretty coherent (for Family Guy) argument against censorship, complete with a fantastic Broadway-revue style recap of all the Family Guy bits that the FCC had shorn from previous episodes.
I suggest only that it's harder to make "vast personal investments" in things that are already themselves invested in and derived from the past. It's harder to feel relief from those forms of cultural production that don't offer much more than what we've seen before, just glossier and newly packaged. This is the basic postmodern condition that has been both a problem and a cause for celebration, depending on whom you query. I'm in the former camp. Last night I felt as though I'd finally had my fill of bread and circuses.
*
Recently acquired:
Kanye West, Late Registration.
Lewis Black, The End of the Universe.
Gorillaz, Demon Days.
posted by Wil at
5:39 AM
6 Comments:
Ah, Wil Lobko--
You are a perceptive and articulate fellow.
I've been trying, for months, to articulate (mostly to my girlfriend) exactly WHY _Family Guy_ leaves a bad taste in my mouth. And you've done it for me.
When the show first debuted six or seven years ago (before it got canceled) I found it amusing--now whether this was due to my relative youth at the time (not yet burned out on pop-culture "ironic" references) or the fact that it was the only thing doing THAT particular thing at the time, and for that reason, it seemed fresh. In any case, with _Family Guy_, once you get the gag, there's not much to get.
It's like Dread Zeppelin or Matisyahu.
Or try this thought experiment. Compare seasons 1-8 (not, scratch that--3 through 9) with seasons 10-17 of _The Simpsons_. In many ways a different show. No surprise that I find 3-9 vastly superior.
Or look at _Futurama_. Though always engaged in probably the most thorough critique of pop- and consumer culture around (before or since), it never lost its HEART.
HEART is still a scary word for those youngsters (and a lot of now-oldsters) who are busy strategizing (in their poems and maybe in their real life relationships) new ways to ironize themselves out of feeling.
For them, _Family Guy_ works. It makes them feel good that they get the references and it reassures them that nothing is _really_ that important. Not to be a moralist, but it strikes me as a morally vacuous form of entertainment.
Not that there's anything wrong with that. This is coming from a guy who used to listen to Slayer. And who's seen a few obscene films (on accident--I assure you). The fact, though, that _Family Guy_ IS such a huge cultural phenomenon at THIS POINT in time bothers me just a bit. Everyone (or most everyone) who I know who watches the show is between the ages of 18-27. Does this new "half-generation" after mine have some information I'm not privy to? Or am I just getting old and crotchety in my early 30s?
By
Anthony Robinson, at 5:56 PM
I like all the pop culture (and Fox-bashing) references on "The Simpsons". It's part of what makes the show enjoyable. And you have to be attentive or you'll miss them. I've found with these prime-time animated shows, you can't just watch them while doing the dishes or folding the clothes or whatever because you'll miss the visual gags which are another thing that make such shows enjoyable. Like the episode you described about the bin-Laden video. All visual gags.
I haven't watched much of "Family Guy" but my stepbrother thinks it's the best show.
What I found really odd was the (apparent) universality (is THAT a word?!) of "Beavis and Butthead". When I discovered the Citizen liked "Beavis and Butthead" I was really surprised. I thought it would be something you could only enjoy when you had an American perspective (you either went to school with kids like B & B or you WERE B & B!). The Citizen said "Are you kidding? All the guys in China are like B & B!" (So much for the studious, careful Asian child stereotype). It's interesting with the Citizen because alot of pop culture things, I have to fill in the gap for him but not Beavis and Butthead.
By
junebee, at 6:42 PM
Beavis and Butthead, for all its crudity, respects its audience and its characters.
I know this may seem like a baseless claim at this point, but give me some time to think about it--I'm certain I'm correct.
I'm not surprised at all by B&B's "universal" appeal.
By
Anthony Robinson, at 7:09 PM
I'm glad this topic sparked such smart responses. I continued to think about this while at the Big Top of Capitalism, and I thought back to a previous notion I had about post-postmodernism coupled with popular culture.
I once had a notion about the eventual and inevitable end to the splintering that postmodernism's occasioned in the pop cultural and intellectual sphere. Especially in the pop cultural sphere. The end would be a kind of "capitalistic victory," if you will.
It's like this: in David Mitchell's great book "Cloud Atlas", he imagines a future Korea (which plays the role the US does now) in which you don't order a cup of coffee, you order a cup of Starbuck. You don't watch TV - you watch Sony (or something).
That seems to extrapolate from the increasing hegemony that certain companies, brands, ideas, and "memes" tend to exert on the culture. There seemed - and seems - to be an inescapable hugeness to certain cultural phenomena or developments. These are the anchor points to which a post-postmodern piece of art might tether itself. Not too long ago, I believed that phenomena existed that anybody could "get", and therefore could serve as a sort of foundation on which one could formulate a poem, or a novel chapter, or assert a tangential point in an essay, or crack a joke in a TV show. And that these "unmissable references" would transcend the postmodern problem of splintered realities. In other words, the success stories of late-stage capitalism (Pepsi, say, or Nike, or wretched wretched latter-day Star Wars) would basically amount to a form of cultural currency that every American had jingling around in their pockets.
I still believe this to a degree. Because no matter what the reference is, there's always the chance that some, many, or most of the audience members just won't have access to it. And I believe in this process of post-postmodern referentiality when it's *used* for something. In "Family Guy", the whole set of missable and unmissable references alike just *are.* There're just there. All well and good, I guess, because the show would itself cop to being little more than a whiplash series of quick laughs that's heavily indebted to shouting out to the toys and shows of its demographic's childhood. In "Family Guy," we've still got the ol' postmodern "here's this and this and this and blaaah it's so chaotic it's nuts it doesn't *mean* anything man!" problem. I'll still watch it, and I'll probably still laugh when I see "Doom" clips unexpectedly; like as not, I'm of such an age and class that I get those references. But the show and my reactions to its methodology teach me something about what not to do when I sit down to create something of my own.
As to Beavis & Butthead, well, I agree with and even like the idea that it's universal. Basic stupidity - although I suspect that B&B is smarter than that surface-level stupidity - is something any culture has experience with and can laugh at. That's not necessarily an argument for its quality - it's not a show I'd spend much more time with than I already have - but I can see why it crosses lines on maps with such ease.
By
Wil, at 9:53 PM
i have to say, first, that i love family guy. and what i'm going to try to say here is said much much better by stephen johnson in 'everything bad is good for you,' which i strongly recommend, especially to you, wil, and everyone interested in these questions of, on the small scale, what the point of the intense referentiality of shows like family guy is and, on a larger scale, questions of what is going on with contemporary media and entertainment.
as i said, i love family guy. a good deal of that is the pleasure i take in the humor - i just think brian and stewie are fracking funny. but other than that, and this is the stephen johnson point, there's inherent pleasure in the references, in catching them. (in the book, johnson has an extended section on references and their sorts of in-jokes, using the simpsons as an example.) it takes a kind of brain work that's enjoyable, and doesn't let the shows sit isolated in their own little bubbles - they reach across pop culture, and that sort of intertwining makes them a, more challenging than a self-contained comedy, and b, well, i don't really have a b, but i think it makes them more fun, or at least more of a particular kind of fun.
again, i point you all to johnson's book. it's a great read, and makes some really interesting points that i'm just flattening and mangling.
but in final defense of family guy, there's a sense of play, a willingness to go there, that's really exceptionally fun, whether it's a dirty joke, or violence, or a three-minute broadway showtune, that's what makes it, to me, so great.
By
Jaime, at 7:11 AM
Oh yeah, I really liked "Futurama" too but I don't think it was on TV that long. Is it on cable anywhere?
Already, certain brands (to their corporate owner's dismay) are part of the general language vocabulary for that sort of thing.
Maybe it's my age group, but we almost always call it a "kleenex" even though it may be a Wal-Mart brand tissue, we xerox the report even if the machine we're using is a Konica, and any stretchy fabric is Spandex. I actually saw an ad for Spandex in a literary magazine one time, reminding would-be writers that the word "Spandex" is copywrited.
I think it would be Japan that would be the country chosen for the book "Cloud Atlas" because they seem to be the most consumer-driven and "Americanized" (in terms of capitalism) of the Asian countries.
By
junebee, at 12:35 PM
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