Archive for 2004
Wednesday, June 2nd, 2004
I think sitcoms are some of the most fascinating television, sociologically speaking. Every piece of entertainment tells us something about what resonates with the culture - the trick is to figure out why something resonates. Conspiracy theory is especially interesting for this kind of analysis - what is it about alien abduction that captivates the imagination to the point where many of us really believe it's happening? What about the JFK assassination, secret societies, or hidden military bases? Whether or not these things are true is beside the point; the interesting thing is why we're talking about them at all, why they have such a grip on us as a culture.
Situation comedies evolve in an interesting fashion. The first sitcoms are probably The Honeymooners and I Love Lucy; both are similar in that they reflect fairly realistic relationships, but they're distinct in that The Honeymooners illustrates an actual common working-class situation, whereas I Love Lucy illustrates a relatively exotic situation (the wife of a Cuban big band performer). Into the '60s, sitcoms begin to move towards the fantastical and surreal; shows like The Addams Family and Gilligan's Island, neither of which have much connection to reality at all, become wildly popular. In the '70s and early '80s, we return to "realistic" sitcoms, many of which turn on sexual humor or oddball familial situations; Three's Company and Bosom Buddies are the flagships for the sexual contingent, while The Odd Couple, Different Strokes and Family Ties lead the familial contingent.
From most of these shows, we can learn a few basic lessons about the popular view of human behavior:
1) Most people can be boiled down to "types" of people - the smart one, the goofy one, the rebel, etc.
2) Most people are fuck-ups.
3) The few people who aren't fuck-ups usually run the show.
4) Everyone is innately good and will do the right thing eventually.
5) Everything works out.
Keeping these rules in mind, it's interesting to compare Night Court and The Addams Family. They're essentially the same show.
There are a few rare exceptions to these rules prior to the 1990s, though even the exceptions tend to adhere to one or two of the rules. The grandest exception is All In The Family. Archie Bunker, race relations, generational conflicts and working class crises revolutionized sitcoms at the time; there was simply nothing like it. All In The Family seemed to make up for all of the failings of The Honeymooners, and introduced actual character development and confrontation of social issues into the sitcom industry. The other grand exception is M*A*S*H, which was the first sitcom to regularly intersperse war, tragedy and death with its comedy.
The most recent great revolution in situation comedy was, of course, Seinfeld. Seinfeld capitalized upon many things developed by previous sitcoms - character development, environmental cues, social anxieties - but turned almost all of the rules on their head. After Seinfeld, the rules for sitcoms often go like this:
1) Most people aren't types, but they don't change much over time.
2) All people are fuck-ups.
3) The people who run the show are best at covering up their fucked-uppedness.
4) People will try to get away with anything.
5) Nothing works out the way you planned it.
Seinfeld makes many of our best contemporary sitcoms possible; its aesthetic is responsible for Sex and the City, Everybody Loves Raymond, That 70s Show and a ton of other "smart, hip" sitcoms.
So, here are a few random questions about sitcoms:
- The Honeymooners is a show primarily about the working class. Who was watching it? Was the show successful because the working class watched it and found a connection with it, or because the upper class watched it and had a few laughs at the working class' expense?
- What sexual anxieties are reflected in Three's Company?
- Why were we so interested in the adoption of black children in the early 1980s?
- Seinfeld is a largely anxiety-driven show. What anxieties are constant? Are the neuroses of the characters realistic, or do they relate to real everyday anxieties? Do you find yourself laughing at them, laughing with them, or laughing because you're one of them?
- Sex and the City is often referred to as a "post-feminist" show, and lots of criticism has been written describing the show as pro- or anti-feminist. In what ways is the show empowering, and in what ways does it detract from empowerment? Are these real people? Does the show strike you (as it does me) anti-lesbian or somewhat racist?
- Do you feel that sitcoms are getting better at describing reality? Is their subject matter getting narrower, or broader?
Posted in media / news, theory | No Comments »
Friday, May 14th, 2004
Posted in quizzes/memes | No Comments »
Friday, April 30th, 2004
In my dream this morning, Travis was running around the apartment with a handgun. It wasn't one of those little .25 caliber deals that he liked so much (most little guys like big guns, but not Travis). This one was a big black nine-millimeter monster, thick-handled, counter-weighted barrel. I could hear his boots thumping against the hardwood floor, the clean sounds of his black leather jacket jangling and rustling, and that snicker.
He was so real and so complete I could smell him - musty, with a hint of something like stale tapwater. And when he shot me, I stood there in stunned wonder, dropped to my knees, and thought to myself: the dead have returned to kill me.
Posted in dreams | No Comments »
Thursday, April 8th, 2004
bold = I've read it
italics = I started it or only read part of it
– Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart
Agee, James - A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James - Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel - Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul - The Adventures of Augie March
Bront', Charlotte - Jane Eyre
Bront', Emily - Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert - The Stranger
Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton - The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate - The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore - The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen - The Red Badge of Courage
Dante - Inferno
de Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore - An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre - The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George - The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo - Selected Essays
Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry - Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox - The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von - Faust
Golding, William - Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph - Catch 22
Hemingway, Ernest - A Farewell to Arms
Homer - The Iliad
Homer - The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor - The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik - A Doll's House
James, Henry - The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry - The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz - The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong - The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt
London, Jack - The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas - The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel Garc'a - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman - Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman - Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur - The Crucible
Morrison, Toni - Beloved
O'Connor, Flannery - A Good Man is Hard to Find
O'Neill, Eugene - Long Day's Journey into Night
Orwell, George - Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan - Selected Tales
Proust, Marcel - Swann's Way
Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond - Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry - Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William - Hamlet
Shakespeare, William - Macbeth
Shakespeare, William - A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare, William - Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon - Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles - Antigone
Sophocles - Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John - The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis - Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher - Uncle Tom's Cabin
Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver's Travels
Thackeray, William - Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David - Walden
Tolstoy, Leo - War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan - Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire - Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. - Slaughterhouse-Five
Walker, Alice - The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith - The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora - Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard - Native Son
Posted in books | No Comments »
Thursday, February 12th, 2004
That Robin Williams. Mork and Mindy was pretty charming I suppose, but sometimes he can be one creepy fucker.
Posted in media / news, rant | No Comments »
