Chuck Klosterman Sounds Smart

Chuck Klosterman is very good at sounding smart.  At actually being smart or writing smart things, however . . . That’s a different story.  Let’s start, shall we, on our magical mystery tour.  Klosterman on the future of television.  Believe me, you will very soon come to regret it.

Television is an art form where the relationship to technology supersedes everything else about it.

Wow!  That sounds smart.  That sentence is a perfect simulation of a smart-sounding sentence!  “Relation to technology”!  “Art form!” “Supersedes”!  This guy knows about what he is talking!

Except . . . huh?  What does that sentence actually mean?  Are other art forms less about technology?  Why is TV all about technology?  Presumably Chuck will explain.

It’s one realm of media where the medium is the message, without qualification. 

McLuhan reference!  A smart man, we’re dealing with.

TV is not like other forms of consumer entertainment: It’s slippier and more dynamic, even when it’s dumb. 

Hmm.  You keep making assertions, but you’re still not explaining anything.  Why, pray tell, is TV so different?  Also, that last sentence.  I thought you were at least trying to sound smart.  That’s not helping.  

We know people will always read, so we can project the future history of reading by considering the evolution of books. (Reading is a static experience.) 

Again, if you don’t think about this, it sounds good, and that’s the key to being smart-sounding.  But then you stop and think: is the experience of reading on a computer screen the same as reading a printed book the same as reading a manuscript?  Umm, not quite.  So is reading a static experience?  Umm, not quite.

We know music will always exist, so we can project a future history of rock ’n’ roll by placing it in context with other genres of music. The internal, physiological sensation of hearing a song today is roughly the same as it was in 1901. (The ingestion of sound is a static experience.) 

I can’t speak for internal, physiological sensations, but I can tell you that listening to my wife play the latest sheet music she just bought for the piano in the drawing room in 1901 is exactly the same as listening to my Pandora station as I surf the internet. 

And even more than that, I can tell you when I see a mixed metaphor. I am Sound Monster! Um num num, ingesting my sounds!  

The machinery of cinema persistently progresses, but how we watch movies in public — and the communal role cinema occupies, particularly in regard to dating — has remained weirdly unchanged since the fifties. (Sitting in a dark theater with strangers is a static experience.) But this is not the case with television.

Yes, how we watch movies in public is unchanged.  But you might want to just kind of point out that there are a lot of other ways to watch movies now that didn’t exist in the 50s.  Watching movies—not a static experience.

Both collectively and individually, the experience of watching TV in 2016 already feels totally disconnected from the experience of watching TV in 1996. 

Similarly to how the experience of watching a movie in 1900 (nickelodeon, projection displays at carnivals) would feel totally disconnected from the experience of watching a movie in 1920 (movie palaces, ushers, etc).  So yeah, TV’s totally different from other media.

I doubt the current structure of television will exist in two hundred fifty years, or even in twenty-five. 

Wow—what a provocative claim!  I’m sure there are hundreds of scholars chomping at the bit to disagree with you.

. . .

 . . .

 . . .

Crickets.

People will still want cheap escapism, and something will certainly satisfy that desire (in the same way television does now). But whatever that something is won’t be anything like the television of today. It might be immersive and virtual (like a Star Trekian holodeck) or it might be mobile and open-sourced (like a universal YouTube, lodged inside our retinas). But it absolutely won’t be small groups of people, sitting together in the living room, staring at a two-dimensional thirty-one-inch rectangle for thirty consecutive minutes, consuming linear content packaged by a cable company.

Imagine that!  The television of the future will look different from television consumption practices that are already ten years in the past.  It’s easy to predict the future when your experience of the present is already out of date.

Something will replace television, in the same way television replaced radio: through the process of addition. TV took the audio of radio and added visual images. The next tier of innovation will affix a third component, and that new component will make the previous iteration obsolete. I have no idea what that third element will be.

 

And yet you’re writing an article on the future of television.

But whatever it is will result in a chronological “freezing” of TV culture. Television will be remembered as a stand-alone medium that isn’t part of any larger continuum.

And yet you’ve just traced the link between radio and TV.  So it’s already part of a continuum. 

It seems more probable that the entrenched memory of television will be like those massive stone statues on Easter Island: monoliths of creative disconnection. 

I’ll just say it—this might be a bad metaphor.

Its cultural imprint might be akin to the Apollo space program, 

Uh oh.  What’s one bad metaphor when you can top it with an even worse one!

What’s hazier are the particulars. Which specific TV programs will still matter centuries after the medium itself has been replaced? What TV content will resonate with future generations, even after the technological source of that content has become nonexistent?

These are queries that require a thought experiment.

Oh God.  We haven’t even started yet.  

Let’s pretend archaeologists made a bizarre discovery: The ancient Egyptians had television. 

Really coming into my wheelhouse now, aren’t you.

Moreover, this insane archaeological discovery is also insanely complete — we suddenly have access to all the TV shows the Egyptians watched between the years 3500 and 3300 BC. Every frame of this library would be (on some level) interesting. From a sociological vantage point, the most compelling footage would be the national news, closely followed by the local news, closely followed by the commercials. 

Why?  From an historical vantage point, yes.  But from a sociological vantage point, everything would be interesting.  

Let’s try a little experiment of our own.  Let’s count all the words Chuck Klosterman doesn’t actually understand.  Number one—“sociological.”

But the least compelling material would be whatever the Egyptians classified as their version of “prestige” television.

Again, why the fuck would that be true?  I would love to know what TV in ancient Egypt was considered the best (I can’t believe I just wrote that sentence).

The ancient Egyptian Breaking Bad, the ancient Egyptian House of Cards, the ancient Egyptian rendering of The Americans (which I suppose would be called The Egyptians and involve promiscuous spies from Qatna) —

Ha!  You’re dumb.

 these would be of marginal significance. Why? 

Yes, God, please tell me why.

Because the aesthetic strengths that make sophisticated TV programs superior to their peers do not translate over time. 

Finally, an argument!  A mind-numbingly stupid argument, but still—an argument.  Let’s play a game.  Instead of talking about a medium that’s only been around for 70 years or so, let’s talk about a medium—written text—that’s been around a tad bit longer.  Let’s re-write that sentence, ok?

Because the aesthetic strengths that make sophisticated works of literature superior to their peers do not translate over time. 

That’s why everyone is reading Christopher Marlowe and John Ford works instead of Shakespeare’s, right?  And everyone’s just reading any random nineteenth century novel—people talk about Dickens and the Brontes, but how am I supposed to know about their aesthetic strengths?  It was all so long ago!

All it would have taken was one moment to stop and think over what a stupid statement you’ve just made, Chuck.  But thinking is not something Mr. Klosterman does well.

Looking backward, no one would care how good the acting was or how nuanced the plots were. Nobody would really care about the music or the lighting or the mood. These are artful, subjective qualities that matter in the present. 

That’s why no one reads Greek plays anymore.  Sophocles, Aeschylus—who’s even heard of those guys?  

What we’d actually want from ancient Egyptian television is a way to look directly into the past, in the same manner we look at Egyptian hieroglyphics without fixating on the color palette or the precision of scale. We’d want to see what their world looked like and how people lived. 

Actually, you do know that people looked at the scale and palette of the hieroglyphs for two thousand fucking years before they were able to read them.  But far be it for you to actually think through your stupid Egypt analogy.

Just to step back for a second—sure, if I were an historian, I might be more interested in the historical information than the aesthetic qualities of “Egyptian television.”  But if I were an historian, I’d be less interested in Egyptian television at all—there are plenty of better places to get historical data.  What TV would provide is an understanding of culture, an understanding of the values of ancient Egyptians and how they like to imagine itself.  We also might appreciate Egyptian television because it was good, like Oedipus Rex is good.

We would want to understand the experience of subsisting in a certain place during a certain time, from a source that wasn’t consciously trying to illustrate those specific traits (since conscious attempts at normalcy inevitably come with bias). What we’d want, ultimately, is “ancillary verisimilitude.”

 

Note to readers: coining phrases sounds smart.  But why wouldn’t we want a show that attempts and succeeds at realism?  Unless he’s going for something bigger: the “experience of subsisting” (and why subsisting, by the way—does this need to be a show about poverty, or is he just misusing the word “subsisting”?).  In which case realism doesn’t matter, and, again, it’s about expressing the values or ideologies of a society, which any kind of show could do.  

We’d want a TV show that provided the most realistic portrait of the society that created it, without the self-aware baggage embedded in any overt attempt at doing so. In this hypothetical scenario, the most accurate depiction of ancient Egypt would come from a fictional product that achieved this goal accidentally, without even trying. Because that’s the way it always is, with everything.

 

Great argument.  That last sentence really clinched it.  

So apply this philosophy to ourselves, and to our own version of televised culture: If we consider all possible criteria, what were the most accidentally realistic TV shows of all time? Which American TV programs — if watched by a curious person in a distant future — would latently represent how day-to-day American society actually was?

This is the kind of question even people who think about television for a living don’t think about very often. 

Because they’re not fucking idiots.

(Well, actually, they kind of are—see the rest of this blog).

When I asked The Revolution Was Televised author Alan Sepinwall, 

(after he paused for a minute to guffaw loudly at Chuck with his hand over the phone)

he noted the “kitchen-sink realism” of sitcoms from the seventies (the grimy aesthetics of Taxi and the stagnation of Barney Miller, a cop show where the cops never left the office). New Yorker TV critic Emily Nussbaum suggested a handful of shows where the dialogue captured emotional inarticulation without the crutch of clichés (most notably the mid-nineties teen drama My So-Called Life). Still, it’s hard to view any of the programs cited by either as vehicles for understanding reality. 

Um, and why is that?  So you’re just going to out of hand reject the thoughts of two critics way smarter than you when they deigned to try to answer your ridiculous question.

This is not their fault, though: We’re not supposed to think about TV in this way. Television critics who obsess over the authenticity of picayune narrative details are like poetry professors consumed with penmanship. 

Yeah—who the fuck cares about the realism or authenticity of a TV program?!  It doesn’t fucking matter.  And from the standpoint of ideology—what it tells us about the larger culture—CSI is going to be way more illuminating than anything else, and it is a ridiculously unrealistic show.

To attack True Detective or Lost or Twin Peaks as “unrealistic” is a willful misinterpretation of the intent. We don’t need television to accurately depict literal life, because life can literally be found by stepping outside. Television’s only real-time responsibility is to entertain. 

So your whole article is pointless.  Can I stop reading now?  I’ve already wasted way too much time.

But that changes as years start to elapse. We don’t reinvestigate low culture with the expectation that it will entertain us a second time — the hope is that it will be instructive and revelatory, which sometimes works against the intentions of the creator. 

Sure, true.  But that has nothing to do with realism or “ancillary verisimilitude” or whatever phrase you want to come up with.

Take, for example, a series like Mad Men: Here was a show set in the New York advertising world of the 1960s, with a dogged emphasis on precise cultural references and era-specific details. The unspoken goal of Mad Men was to depict how the sixties “really” were. 

That is an absolutely ridiculous sentence.  Mad Men has absolutely no interest in realism.  This is a show in which Robert Morse bursts into a song-and-dance number, in which everything from the performances to the set design are ridiculously mannered.  It does have an interest in trying accurately to capture our cultural imagination of the 60s, one gleaned from movies and TV shows, and the ironic distance between then and now.  According to Matthew Weiner, Mad Men is most deeply inspired by Billy Wilder’s The Apartment.  Great film, but not, you know, real life.  

And to the present-day Mad Men viewer, that’s precisely how the show came across. The goal was achieved. But Mad Men defines the difference between ancillary verisimilitude and premeditated reconstruction. Mad Men cannot show us what life was like in the sixties. Mad Men can only show how life in the sixties came to be interpreted in the twenty-first century. Sociologically, Mad Men says more about the mind-set of 2007 than it does about the mind-set of 1967, in the same way Gunsmoke says more about the world of 1970 than the world of 1870. 

My mind is blown!  Mad Men is more about life today than life in 1960!  Holy shit! 

Again, so good at sounding smart.  Except, like his compatriot Malcolm Gladwell, this is one ridiculous “Straw We.”  Who the fuck would ever think Mad Men was how the sixties “really” were.  

Compared to The Andy Griffith Show or Gilligan’s Island, a mediated construct like Mad Men looks infinitely more authentic — but it can’t be philosophically authentic, no matter how hard it tries. 

Let’s add “philosophically” to the list of words Chuck Klosterman doesn’t understand.  So far we have:

Sociologically

Philosophically

My point is not that we’re communally misguided about which TV series are good, or that prestige programming should be ignored because the people who make it are too aware of what they’re doing. As a consumer, I’d argue the opposite. But right now, I’m focused on a different type of appreciation. I’m trying to think about TV as a dead medium — not as living art, but as art history (a process further convoluted by the ingrained reflex to never think about TV as “art,” even when it clearly is).

 

Because art history is entirely about realism and sociology and nothing about aesthetics.

And also, hasn’t sixty percent of all internet takes in the last fifteen years been about treating TV as art?  Who’s still fighting that battle?

This brand of analysis drives a certain type of person bonkers, because it ignores the conception of taste. 

If a certain type of person is anyone with half a brain, then yes, that’s correct.  But it’s not because it ignores the conception of taste, Chuck.  It’s because it’s really fucking dumb.

Within this discussion, the quality of a program doesn’t matter; the assumption is that the future person considering these artifacts won’t be remotely concerned with entertainment value. My interest is utility. It’s a formalist assessment, 

And another one!  The list now:

Sociological

Philosophical

Formalist

focusing on all the things a (normal) person is not supposed to (normally) be cognizant of while watching any given TV show. Particularly . . .

1. The way the characters talk.
2. The machinations of the world the characters inhabit.
3. The manner in which the show is filmed and presented.
4. The degree to which “realness” is central to the show’s ethos.

Really, you’re not supposed to be cognizant of these things?  When I watch Seinfeld, my favorite show, you’re saying that I am entirely unaware of the New York-inflected, slightly unrealistically snappy dialogue; that I am entirely unaware of the increasing absurdity of the plots and of the world over the course of the series; that I am even entirely unaware of the fact that it’s a three-camera sitcom?  As Jerry would say, “Really?”

That first quality is the most palpable and the least quantifiable. If anyone on a TV show employed the stilted, posh, mid-Atlantic accent of stage actors, it would instantly seem preposterous; outside a few notable exceptions, the goal of televised conversation is fashionable naturalism.

Yeah, Mad Men is an extremely naturalistic style.  Vincent Kartheiser’s performance is not at all mannered.  And Gilmore Girls.  And The West Wing.  They talk just like life.  Not at all stilted. 

What’s even harder to compute is the relationship between a period’s depiction of conversation and the way people of that period were talking in real life. Did the average American father in 1957 truly talk to his kids the way Ward Cleaver talked to Wally and the Beaver? It doesn’t seem possible — but it was, in all likelihood, the way 1957 suburban fathers imagined they were speaking.

That’s right.  So we’re not talking about realism at all.  We’re talking about a cultural imaginary.  

All of which leads to one central question: What TV show will this be?

Oh, God.

Removed from context, it’s a question that can also be asked like this: What is the realest fake thing we’ve ever made on purpose?

This is the dumbest question that has ever been asked.  You realize no one who studies or even has ever for a moment thought about TV has ever asked that question?  Look, if I’m interested in TV from a cultural perspective, I could go any number of ways: If I’m going for a reflection of the nation’s ideology, I’d start with CSI.  If I was going for sociological realism, I’d go with The Wire (which weirdly isn’t even mentioned in this article).   “Ancillary verisimilitude” or whatever the fuck phrase it was is totally meaningless.

I’m (slightly, but not really) embarrassed to admit that this is an inquiry I’ve been thinking about for my entire life, years before I ever had a financial incentive to do so. 

You should be embarrassed.  Not slightly, but really.

It is inexplicably hardwired into my brain. For as long as I can remember, whenever I watch any scripted TV show, part of my consciousness interrogates its relationship to reality. “Could this happen? Does this look the way it would actually look? Does this work the way it would actually work?” It does not matter if the details are factually impossible — if I’m watching Game of Thrones, I can readily accept that dragons exist. Yet I still wonder if the dragons on my TV are behaving in the way I believe real dragons would behave in reality. I still question the veracity of those dragons, and I instinctively analyze the real-world plausibility of a scenario that’s patently impossible. This is just the way I am, and I never had to try.

You are the worst.  And, to tie this back to the themes of the blog, you realize that this is a dumb-ass way of looking at TV, since these characters and worlds are not real and aren’t even trying to be real, right?

So I am ready for this question.

(And I’d better be, since I appear to be the only person asking it.)

And the only person who has any interest in answering it.  Hence, why not write a chapter of a book about it!

The first candidate to consider — and the easiest candidate to discount — is reality television. As a genre, the social and generational importance of these shows is vastly underrated; they are postmodern picture windows.

And number four: postmodern!

Our new tally:

Sociological

Philosophical

Formalist

Postmodern

But they’re pretty worthless at demonstrating the one quality they all purport to deliver. Even if we take The Hills and Storage Wars and Keeping Up with the Kardashians at face value — that is to say, even if we’re willing to accept (or pretend) that these are normal people, behaving naturally in unnatural circumstances — the visual presentation makes no attempt at masking the falseness of the staging or the contrived banality of the conflicts. Nothing on TV looks faker than failed attempts at realism. A show like The Bachelor is instantly recognized (by pretty much everyone, including its intended audience) as a prefab version of how such events might theoretically play out in a distant actuality. No television show has ever had a more paradoxical title than MTV’s The Real World, which proved to be the paradoxical foundation of its success.

Obviously reality TV isn’t real.  It’s not even particularly claiming to be.  But if we’re trying to understand the culture, reality TV would be perfect!  Imagine the cultural studies books that could be written about ancient Egyptian reality TV.  God knows there’s already been a ton about the Real Housewives.  They’re only not illuminating if your criterion of value is realism, and the only person whose criterion is realism is you, Chuck.

Beyond a few key exceptions, simulacrum shows are soap operas, marketed as fantasies, geared toward mass audiences who don’t want to think very hard about what they’re watching. Characters need to invent ways to say, “This is who I’m supposed to be,” without saying so directly. Nothing in a simulacrum is accidental, so you end up with the opposite of naturalism: It’s bogus inside baseball, designed for outsiders who didn’t know anything to begin with. You can’t be real by trying to be real.

Let’s add “simulacrum” to the list. 

So now:

Sociological

Philosophical

Formalist

Postmodern

Simulacrum

(I’m having to copy and paste; my hands are hurting from typing)

Also, is anyone claiming that Entourage and Empire—the shows he’s discussing here—are realistic?  In one sentence he says they’re “soap operas” and in the next that they’re “trying to be real.”  Um, Chuck.  They’re not trying to be real.

Let’s skip ahead.

It was not something to worry about. The family television was simply an appliance — a cathode box with the mentality of a mammary gland,

Whoa there big fellow.  Metaphor alert.  “Mentality” of a mammary gland?  So, no mentality, then?  Also, if you’re trying to come up with a metaphor for television being bad, why choose an organ that can nourish and sustain the life of another living being?  It’s almost like you didn’t think that metaphor through.

actively converting couch owners into potatoes.

Oof—I’m not sure how a mammary gland converts people into potatoes.  Since I have a breast-feeding baby myself, maybe I should double-check that’s she hasn’t become a Yukon Gold.  She’s perhaps caught a few seconds of TV here and there.  Hold on, she’s taking a nap.  Let me go upstairs and check.

Pheww.  Still a baby.

It was not until the late 1980s that the residue really stuck, and most of it stuck to one specific vehicle: Roseanne. It wasn’t perfect, it wasn’t reasonable, and — sometimes — it wasn’t even clever. But Roseanne was the most accidentally realistic TV show there ever was. The premise of Roseanne was not complex. Over time, it adopted an unrepentant ideology about gender and oppression.

Ding Ding Ding!  You mentioned the word “ideology”!  Ten points!  Only ten pages too late. 

I like Roseanne.  It’s a good show.  It’s not particularly realistic, ultimately, but it does talk about class.  And that presumably, is what is producing for you this realism effect.  Because TV shows typically do not deal with or represent class. But to say this is an accident is ridiculous.  Roseanne is quite obviously trying very hard to be more realistic than something like Friends (because they totally could have afforded that apartment, right?).  But you know this.  And this ridiculous argument of yours . . . you didn’t even come up with it on your own.

http://jezebel.com/5066405/roseanne-remains-the-most-realistic-comedy-on-tv.

That’s from 2008.

But that was not how it started. It was, in many ways, an inverted mirror of The Cosby Show: If The Cosby Show was an attempt to show that black families weren’t necessarily poor and underprivileged, Roseanne was an attempt to show how white families weren’t necessarily rich and functional.

So you acknowledge it’s not an accident.  So: what was the point of all this again?  Oh, right, nothing.

(I also get the sense that Chuck wrote this in the manner that David Brooks writes all of his columns: in a dark room, in his pajamas, frantically murmuring to himself, “Don’t mention class, don’t mention class” like John Cleese about the War in Fawlty Towers).

But there was realness residue from start to finish. Episodes would conclude with jarring, unresolved arguments. Barr was an untrained actress working with veteran performers, so scenes sometimes felt half rehearsed (not improvised, but uncontained by the normal rules of TV). There appeared to be no parameters on what could qualify as a normal conversation: An episode from the eighth season includes a sequence where Barr sits in the passenger seat of a car, reading Bikini Kill lyrics aloud. If these details strike you as immaterial, I understand — when described on paper, examples of ancillary verisimilitude usually sound like minor mistakes or illogical choices. And sometimes, that’s what they are — essential flaws that link a false reality to the real one.

Again, even if we acknowledge that the question you’re asking is worthwhile (it isn’t), even if we accept the train of your argument up to this point (we shouldn’t), this just doesn’t make any sense.  The acting, sure, but episodes concluding with unresolved arguments, Barr reading Bikini Kill lyrics—these are conscious choices!  The show is trying to be both more brutal and more random than your average sitcom.  It’s no accident.  All of this is intentional.  Here’s Roseanne herself: "I set out to talk about America's working women, and yeah, I guess that's groundbreaking.''

So what does this mean? Am I arguing that future generations will watch Roseanne and recognize its genius? Am I arguing that they should watch it, for reasons our current generation can’t fully appreciate? Am I arguing that future generations might watch it, and (almost coincidentally) have a better understanding of our contemporary reality, even if they don’t realize it?

I don’t know.

And there you go.  Chuck brings it all home, ties it up with a bow.  He has wasted twenty minutes of your time and he finishes off with the final acknowledgment: I’m just an idiot, who can’t even answer the question that only he cares about the answer to.