Voyou Desoeuvre » TV

Protocols of the elders of Zeta Reticuli

voyou — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 07:41:22 +0000

Some of the things that made ABC’s new show V terrible can doubtless be attributed to the constraints of making a pilot: the rushed pace, the thin characterization, the complete lack of any visual design sense, perhaps even the terrible dialogue. But the main problem is the show’s politics, which are so stupid as to become offensive. The problem derives in part from the original miniseries, a well-meaning anti-fascist allegory (which opens with a scene of heroic Sandinistas), in which the fascists are reptilian aliens from outer space; the difficulty, of course, being that the idea of an insidious alien threat is itself an uncomfortably fascist one. Still, the original miniseries skirts over this problem, and focuses on collaborators with and resistors to this rising fascism.

The remake, on the other hand, takes this potentially fascist starting point and really fucking runs with it. The new aliens aren’t just lizards, they’re secret lizards who have infiltrated the government and the media, and now they are offering universal healthcare as an attempt to poison humanity’s precious bodily fluids. They are, in other words, an anti-semitic stereotype. Now, I’m not saying that ABC and the makers of V are actually anti-semites. Rather, by making vague and deeply stupid gestures towards contemporary politics (ooh, universal healthcare, how topical), the show accidentally exposes underlying anti-semitism in contemporary political discourse: it’s the teabaggers and birthers as sci-fi (and it’s surely no accident that the one significant black character in the pilot has a secret radical past, and the same beard as ex-Maoist Van Jones).

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“There is no big lie”

voyou — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 06:02:22 +0000

I didn’t watch Mad Men when it first started, which in hindsight is surprising, as I’m a big fan of both the advertising industry and the style of high Fordism. However, all the buzz I heard at the time amounted to a shocked “OMG THEY SMOKE AND ARE SEXIST,” and there are few things less interesting than minor differences between contemporary and past mores, the ruffs and fardingales of the past.

On the strength of Adam’s recommendation, I’ve been making my way through the show over the past month. Although from the beginning it was clear that the show looked beautiful and was marvelously acted, some of my initial concern remained: was the show’s 1960s setting anything other than window-dressing?It wasn’t until eight episodes into the first season that the thematic significance of the 1960s advertising industry became clear. The crucial scene comes when Don Draper drops in on his bohemian mistress and argues with her beatnik friends, who tell him that the adverts he creates are merely lies. Don’s response, that “there is no big lie, there is no system,” is quite correct. Advertising doesn’t simply lie about the world, on the contrary, as Don’s practice throughout the show makes clear, it tells, or rather constructs, a particular sort of truth, a kind of dream image of capitalism. In Mad Men, however, this accusation of lying strikes Don particularly closely, because he is a liar, who has been passing himself off under an assumed identity, that of Don Draper, which is not his own. Don has used this name to “make something of himself,” to recreate himself as a different person, but the falsehood leaves a stain of uncertainty, perhaps only visible to himself, in his identity.

Žižek argues that contemporary capitalism is not based around demanding that subjects conform to a specific identity, but rather demanding that they answer the question, “what do you want?” While the classical liberal subject was based on identity defined in relation to a structure of authority, the contemporary subject requires a continuous self-questioning based on a fundamental insecurity. Don Draper is precisely this subject, involved in the dream-construction of capitalism at precisely the time when symbolic authority was eroding and the subject of fixed identity was being replaced by the flexible subject. Mad Men is, in part, a dramatization of this transformation, and so is not about how different the 1960s were, but about how similar they are.

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The ethics of the cocksucker

voyou — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 06:28:30 +0000

Some time ago Adam wrote a fine piece about ethics in House, arguing that House’s apparently unethical behavior—his devotion to solving the intellectual puzzle of illness at the expense of obeying hospital rules or caring about the wellbeing of patients—is in fact the ethical attitude par excellence. Adam explains: “Only by practicing medicine for its own sake and not for the people, and directly enjoying its inherent satisfactions, can he ever hope to solve the hopelessly complicated cases that he is faced with.” You could derive a couple of ethical theories from this. Focussing on the part about “practicing medicine for its own sake” might lead you to something like Badiou’s claim in Ethics, that there is no such thing as ethics in general, but only the ethics of a particular situation, such that the only possible “medical ethics” is simply to practice medicine as well as possible.

The other position here focuses on House’s enjoyment; House’s ethics lie in embracing his enjoyment, rather than attempting to find some moralistic justification for his actions. Adam’s description of House enjoying medicine’s “inherent satisfactions” kind of aligns this with the Badiouian theory in that the ethical act depends on the specifics of the medical situation. But I think House would get the same enjoyment from some other intellectual pursuit; the medicine is at bottom extrinsic to House’s enjoyment. It would be interesting to consider the ethical implications of a character whose pursuit of an apparently praiseworthy pursuit hinges on an enjoyment that is extrinsic to, even at odds with, the apparent norms of that pursuit.

The Wire‘s Jimmy McNulty is just such a character. McNulty’s most prominent characteristic is his willingness to go uo against the Baltimore Police Department’s chain of command in order to pursue a case; but it’s not clear this is ever motivated merely by a desire to solve crimes. At the end of the first season, McNulty claims his pursuit of Barksdale was motivated by a desire to prove himself right; the beginning of the second season provides an even better example. In the first couple of episodes, McNulty spends a great deal of time and effort assembling information that ensures that murder investigations are opened into the deaths of 14 unknown women, something which he does, and with great pleasure, solely to fuck over his old commander, Major Rawls of the homicide unit, who will know have to deal with the statistical fallout of 14 unsolvable cases. What’s interesting here is that McNulty, employing the bureaucratic obstructions of the police department in order to pursue a personal vendetta, sets in motion a train of events that leads to these women being identified, and legal procedings against drug and human traffickers (the other impetus, it occours to me, is Major Valcheck’s even more petty vendetta against union boss Frank Sobotka).

(Adam also talks about House‘s medical utopia, in which doctors, rather than insurance companies, make decisions about treatment. I wonder how much this TV image—not confined to House—leads people to accept those absurd ads currently on TV talking about Obama’s terrifying plan to introduce bureaucrats into the US health care system. Of course, the ads’ fantasy healthcare system in which medical decisions are made by doctors actually exists, but it’s not in the US, it’s in the UK, and doubtless every other country with socialized medicine.)

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Glamor

voyou — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 05:46:30 +0000

Steven Shaviro writes about post-celebrity celebrity while NBC is running trailers for the new American version of I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here (regrettably, due to the intervention of the courts, not starring Rod Blagojevich). The arrival of this show from the UK disappoints me a little; American TV, with the respectful celebrity reporting of Entertainment Tonight and the always-suited late-night talk show hosts, seemed like the last redoubt of the aura of celebrity, which the celebrity reality genre decisively does away with.

It’s not a surprise that the celebrity reality genre arrived in the UK so much earlier than in the US; as with so much else (Thatcher, financialization), the UK exhibits the tendencies of late capitalism in a purer form, with celebrity having been abolished over there a long time ago. Instead, there’s a continuum of decreasing glamor from the soap, to Heat, to Nuts, to the glamor model (the inclusion of the term “glamor” in the name being, of course, a sure sign of an absence of glamor in the thing). The difference between the last two categories is kind of interesting; while glamor models perform an absurdly hyperbolic version of femininity (the really quite charming Jordan being perhaps the best recent example), the lads mags put as much, if not more, effort into insisting that the version of femininity they present is not a performance at all, which is the specific performance of which Jo Guest, Donna Air, and Sheridan Smith are masters.

This reminds me, in a roundabout sort of way, of the dual descriptions that circulate on the internet of Fox News’s female anchors as looking like either porn stars or transsexuals. What I think maybe people are groping at with these misogynistic and transphobic comparisons is a sense that Jamie Colby or Megyn Kelly perform gender in a way that’s somehow too obvious. The mistake here is to think that it’s only when you’re sexy that you’re performing sex; but Tamron Hall’s no-nonsense short hair, or Brit Hume’s rumbling monotone delivery are also gendered performances.

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The postmodernization of drug production

voyou — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 07:29:55 +0000

A while back, I was flipping through the channels and came across a cop show with the now de rigeur shaky camerawork, which I assumed to be Law and Order or CSI (though I realized it wasn’t CSI from the lack of unwatchably saturated colors). But it turned out to be a repeat of Homicide: Life on the Streets. It was an interesting illustration of the way in which the signifiers of “realism” can so easily be appropriated by content that is anything but realistic.

Which is why, “realistic” though it may be, The Wire‘s brilliance doesn’t lie in a realism of form.Quite the contrary; The Wire frequently adopts self-consciously stagey or filmic tropes (the most obvious of these, of course, would be the Western elements that run throughout the portrayal of Omar). But the show is realist in another sense: as opposed to moralist. The show’s few missteps have occoured when an applied moral evaluation slipped in, such as the horrible screeching of gears in the fourth season when they attempted to shift Carcetti from a personally venal politician to a decent guy whose personal decency is politically irrelevant.

The other instance that has troubled me is the shift from the Barksdale organization to Marlo’s organization that is the underlying narrative of the later three seasons; Marlo’s strange emotional blankness, particularly when compared to the portrayal of Stringer Bell, always seemed to have a moralizing psychopathologization to it. But an aside in this paper on The Wire at Infinite Thought has me thinking of another possible explanation of this arc. Alberto and his co-author remark that:

The “postmodern institutions” [of the drug trade] are remarkably, well, Fordist, in the sense that, following Vincenzo Ruggiero’s suggestion, this “crime as work” depends on the classic capitalist division of labour between programming and execution – dramatised in the show by the seemingly infinite distance between leader of the gang, Avon Barksdale, and the ‘hoppers’ on the street.

Now, this is true of the Barksdale organization, but I don’t think it is exactly true of Marlo’s operation. When the Barksdale organization disintegrates, the street level dealers who used to be part of the organization don’t end up working for Marlo, but as formally independent dealers who transfer money to Marlo in a variety of ways: as rent for the corners they work on, or, later, because they have to buy their drugs from him. Marlo’s organization is neoliberal in all kinds of ways, including the way in which, as with the neoliberal state, a decrease in size is accompanied by an increase in violence.

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On Shia LaBoeuf and the Big Other

voyou — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 06:34:52 +0000

I saw Eagle Eye on the plane back from England; it’s not as good as Singh is Kinng, which I also watched, but it’s not bad (except for Shia LaBoeuf’s acting; he’s like an ugly Keanu Reeves). I thought there was something kind of interesting about the central premise, which involves the Boeuf receiving orders from some mysterious agency that appears to have complete control of all electronic systems; sending text messages, looking through security cameras, derailing trains. The falsehood of this premise is pretty obvious; there is no homogenous system of “electronic equipment,” but a vast range of unconnected and incompatible electronic systems. The vague category of technology provides a materialization of the paranoid fantasy that is the traditional support of the conspiracy thriller, but it’s not less (and, I would imagine, no less obviously) a fantasy for all that.

What I wonder, though, is if it isn’t functioning as a kind of displaced version of a further fantasy. You could interpret the all-powerful conspiracy, or, the seamless control of electronic devices, as a kind of metaphor for capitalism; the all-powerful agency, which doesn’t exist, represents the all-determining system, which does exist, in the form of capitalism. But Eagle Eye, by emphasizing the seamlessness of the fantasy power structure, made me wonder if that might not be, indeed, a fantasmatic element too. Is capitalism really seamless and all-determining? The truth seems more complicated: capitalism’s system manifests itself by not being systematic, by breaking society up into complicated interconnecting parts. A truly radical conspiracy thriller, then, would have to expose the incoherence of the model of the conspiracy; perhaps 24 has been forced, by the pressure of producing 24 cliffhangers a season, into precisely this position.

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“Authorized non-circulating Liberian legal tender”

voyou — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 02:14:36 +0000

Incredibly, this manages to get funnier all the way through:

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The most boring candidate in the world

voyou — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 03:45:51 +0000

Is John McCain’s creepy linguistic tic an attempt to cash in on those rather annoying Dos Equis adverts?

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Only 11 years too late

voyou — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 06:37:30 +0000

Good to see the government finally adopting some of Chris Morris’s public policy suggestions.

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(Also parts one and two. The most disturbing thing about watching Brass Eye these days is that the graphics no longer seem at all satirical.)

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Kim Cattrall’s no Henry Winkler, though

voyou — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 05:59:48 +0000

I’ve no intention of seeing the Sex and the City film, obviously, but the sheer intensity of the media push for it has got me thinking (one of those eerie media campaigns that, like a Grant Morrison villain, becomes a piece of actual reality through sheer force of the imagination). Sex and the City, for all its purported shockingness, is an extraordinarily nostalgic show; an hour-long cry of “awww, aren’t 1950s gender roles sweet.” A bit like a 21st century Happy Days, but less funny. But this combination of the shocking and the nostalgic isn’t contradictory at all, indeed, the two support each other: it’s “shock” that we’re supposed to be nostalgic about. It’s very comforting to imagine that, once upon a time, there was a time when transgression was thinkable.

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Voyou Desoeuvre » TV

Pro­to­cols of the elders of Zeta Reti­culi