I Like to Watch

by Emily Nussbaum

  In “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right,” two writers for Breitbart mapped out the alt-right movement as a patchwork of ideologies: There were “the Intellectuals,” “the Natural Conservatives,” men’s-rights types, earnest white supremacists, and anti-Semites (whom the authors shrug off as a humorless minority), and then the many invisible others—the jokers, the virtual writers’ room, punching up one another’s gags. In Breitbart’s take, this was merely payback for the rigidity of identity politics. “If you spend seventy-five years building a pseudo-religion around anything—an ethnic group, a plaster saint, sexual chastity or the Flying Spaghetti Monster—don’t be surprised when clever nineteen-year-olds discover that insulting it is now the funniest fucking thing in the world,” the article states. “Because it is.”

  2016 was the year that those inside jokes were released in the wild. Despite the breeziness of Breitbart’s description, there was in fact a global army of trolls, not unlike the ones shown on South Park, who were eagerly “shit-posting” on Trump’s behalf, their harassment an anonymous version of the “rat-fucking” that used to be the province of paid fixers. Like Trump’s statements, their quasi-comical memeing and name-calling was so destabilizing, flipping between serious and silly, that it warped the boundaries of ordinary discourse. “We memed a president into existence,” Chuck Johnson, a troll who had been banned from Twitter, bragged after the election. These days, he’s reportedly consulting on appointments at the White House.

  Last September, Donald Trump, Jr., posted on Instagram an image of Trump’s inner circle, which included a cartoon frog in a Trump wig. It was Pepe the Frog, a benign stoner-guy cartoon that had been repurposed by 4chan pranksters—they’d photoshopped him into Nazi and Trump drag to mess with liberals. Trump trolls put Pepe in their avatars. But then so did literal Nazis and actual white supremacists. Like many Jewish journalists, I was tweeted images in which my face was photoshopped into a gas chamber—but perhaps those were from free-speech pranksters, eager to spark an overreaction? It had become a distinction without a difference. The joke protected the non-joke. At the event that Tila Tequila attended, the leader shouted “Heil Trump!”—but then claimed, in the Trumpian manner, that he was speaking “in a spirit of irony.” Two weeks ago, the Russian embassy tweeted out a smirking Pepe. The situation had begun to resemble an old story from the original fake-news site, The Onion: “Ironic Porn Purchase Leads to Unironic Ejaculation.”

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  There’s a scene in the final season of Mad Men in which Joan and Peggy, former secretaries, have risen high enough to be paired as a creative team. It’s 1970; the feminist movement finally has the pull to be threatening. (Earlier, it was a punch line: “We’ll have a civil rights march for women,” Peggy’s left-wing boyfriend, Abe, said, laughing.) They sit at a conference table to meet their new bosses, three frat-boy suits from McCann Erickson. “Well, you’re not the landing party we expected,” one of them says.

  The account is Topaz pantyhose, a competitor of the newly global L’eggs. “So they’re worried that L’eggs are going to spread all over the world?” one man says with a leer. “That wouldn’t bother me at all.” It’s a joke delivered past the women to the other men, who chuckle and make eye contact. Peggy and Joan smile politely. It goes on like that: The women’s pitches slam against a wall, because the men are one another’s true audience. “Would you be able to tell them what’s so special about your panties?” they ask Joan. She can be crude or elegant, she can ignore them, or she can be a “good sport.” But every path, she knows from experience, leads to humiliation.

  Afterward, Joan and Peggy stand in the elevator, fuming. “I want to burn this place down,” Joan says. They have an argument—they fight about Peggy being homely and Joan hot, how each of them dresses and why. The argument has the same premise as the jokes: How men see you is all that matters. Knowing what’s wrong doesn’t mean you know how to escape it.

  I thought of that scene the first time I saw the Access Hollywood tape, the one that was supposed to wreck Trump’s career, but which transformed, within days, on every side, into more fodder for jokes: a chance to say “pussy” out loud at work, the “Pussy Grabs Back” shirt I wore to the polls. In the tape, Billy Bush and Trump bond like the guys at McCann Erickson, but it’s when they step out of the bus to see the actress Arianne Zucker that the real drama happens. Their voices change, go silky and sly, and suddenly you could see the problem so clearly: When you’re the subject of the joke, you can’t be in on it.

  The political journalist Rebecca Traister described this phenomenon to me as “the finger trap.” You are placed loosely within the joke, which is so playful, so light—why protest? It’s only when you pull back—show that you’re hurt, or get angry, or try to argue that the joke is a lie, or, worse, deny that the joke is funny—that the joke tightens. If you object, you’re a censor. If you show pain, you’re a weakling. It’s a dynamic that goes back to the rude, rule-breaking Groucho Marx—destroyer of elites!—and Margaret Dumont, pop culture’s primal pearl-clutcher.

  When Hillary described half of Trump’s followers as “deplorables,” she wasn’t wrong. But she’d walked right into the finger trap. Trump was the hot comic, Obama the cool one. Hillary had the skill to be hard-funny, too, when it was called for: She killed at the Al Smith charity dinner in New York, while Trump bombed. It didn’t matter, though, because that was not the role she fit in the popular imagination. Trump might be thin-skinned and easily offended, a grifter CEO on a literal golden throne. But Hillary matched the look and the feel of Margaret Dumont: the rich bitch, Nurse Ratched, the buzzkill, the no-fun mom, the one who shut the joke down.

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  On “The Waldo Moment,” an episode of the British show Black Mirror, a miserable comic named Jamie is the voice behind Waldo, an animated blue bear whose specialty is humiliating public figures. His act is scatological and wild, in the tradition of Ali G and Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, as well as the meaner correspondents on The Daily Show. It’s ambush comedy, taking the piss. But Jamie’s bosses, who are hip nihilists with their eye on the bottom line, see greater potential for profit: Online, an act like Waldo can go viral, jumping live from phone to phone.

  As a gag, they run Waldo for Parliament, just as Stephen Colbert once started his own satirical super PAC. Jamie has no true politics—“I’m not dumb or clever enough to be political,” he protests—but his crude attacks take off. He becomes a populist sensation, like Trump: He’s the joke that’s impossible to fight. The politicians he’s attacking are required to be serious, both the Tory stuffed shirt and the young female Labour upstart, who is dryly funny in private but can’t risk showing it in public. A blue bear doesn’t need to follow rules, however. Since Waldo attacks phonies—and is open about his own phoniness, including the fact that he’s a team effort—viewers find him authentic. Even a brilliantly acerbic chat-show interrogator can’t unseat him, because Jamie’s got so much more bandwidth. He’s allowed to curse, to be stupid, to be angry—the fight is fixed in his favor, because all the emotion belongs to him.

  “The Waldo Moment” came out in 2013. By then, viewers had spent years getting their news delivered via comedy, and vice versa. Jon Stewart was two years from retirement; Colbert would soon jump to CBS. Newspapers, starved of print ads, had died years before—or been shoved into the attention economy, where entertainment mattered most. Online, all clicks were equal. Breitbart got traffic off quasi-comical headlines; the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones screamed on his livestream like Sam Kinison. It was no great leap for paranoid delusions, like Pizzagate, or deliberate hoaxes, like the one about the pope endorsing Trump, to pass muster on Facebook, because the design made all newslike items feel fungible. On both the left and the right, the advertising imperative was stronger than the ethical one: You had to check the URL for an added “.co” to see if a story wa
s real, and how many people bothered to do that? If some readers thought your story was a joke and others thought it was outrageous, well, all the better. Satire was what got traffic on Saturday night.

  Black Mirror was a more humane show than South Park: It could imagine a funny woman in the world. But like South Park, Black Mirror could see far, but not all the way to the end. Waldo, who has come in second in the election, gets acquired by sinister global-capitalist forces, which recognize that his Pepe-goofy image is the ideal mask for fascist power. As a militarized police force rousts homeless people from an alley, Waldo gleams from billboards, his message having pivoted to “Hope.” When the episode came out, it was divisive: Some viewers found it overly cynical in its portrait of the mob. Now it seems naive: The creators did not imagine that Waldo might win—or that the person controlling him might want to win. Like Mr. Garrison, like the shysters in The Producers, Jamie tries desperately to escape the prank persona that he’s created. But when he shrieks “Don’t vote for me!” the audience only laughs; when he flees the van in which he’s performing, his boss takes over the voice of Waldo. It’s only when Jamie threatens to disrupt the show, attacking the screen on which Waldo appears, and the blue bear orders the crowd to beat him up, that people stop laughing.

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  When Vladimir Putin was elected president in 2000, one of his first acts was to kill Kukly, a sketch puppet show that portrayed him as Little Tsaches, a sinister baby who uses a “magic TV comb” to bewitch a city. Putin threatened to wreck the channel, NTV, unless it removed the puppet. NTV refused. Within months, it was under state control. According to Newsweek, “Putin jokes quickly vanished from Russia’s television screens.”

  Soon after Trump was elected, he, too, began complaining about a sketch show: Saturday Night Live, which portrayed him as a preening fool, Putin’s puppet. His tweets lost the shape of jokes, unless you count “not!” as a kicker. He was no longer the blue bear. Instead, he was reportedly meeting with Rupert Murdoch about who should head the FCC. Soon, Trump would be able to shape deals like the AT&T/Time Warner merger, to strike back at those who made fun of him or criticized him, which often amounted to the same thing. Fox would likely be Trump TV.

  Last week, at his first press conference as president-elect, Trump made no jokes. He was fuming over the BuzzFeed dossier and all those lurid allegations worthy of South Park, the pee jokes lighting up Twitter. Only when he reminisced about his rallies did he relax, recalling their size, the thrill of the call and response. He almost smiled. But when CNN’s Jim Acosta tried to ask a question about Russia, Trump snapped back, furiously, “Fake news!”—and the incoming White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, told Acosta that if he tried that again he’d be thrown out. Now, it seems, is when Trump gets serious. A president pushes buttons in a different sense. As Putin once remarked to a child, “Russia’s borders don’t end anywhere”—before adding, “That’s a joke.”

  BREAKING THE BOX

  LOVE, ACTUALLY

  Jane the Virgin

  The New Yorker, March 12, 2018

  This entire book was inspired by an exchange I had with a young female staffer at The New Yorker who told me—with an embarrassed shrug—that all she watched were “guilty pleasures, like Jane the Virgin.” I proceeded to deliver an extended, crazy monologue about how, no, that was one of the best shows on television, which she found either supportive or terrifying.

  A few weeks ago, The CW aired a perfect episode of Jane the Virgin, directed by its star Gina Rodriguez. It had five plots, ranging from poignant to zany. Each scene was tinted in pastels, like a plate of macarons. There were two gorgeous dresses and three hot consummations, plus a cliff-hanger, several heart-to-hearts, and Brooke Shields getting attacked by a wolf on live TV. As usual, the world took all this perfection for granted.

  Jane the Virgin, which debuted in 2014, is an extremely loose adaptation of a Venezuelan telenovela in which a poor teenager has the ultimate “whoops” pregnancy: She’s accidentally impregnated via artificial insemination, then falls for the wealthy bio dad. For the American version, the creator, Jennie Snyder Urman, added a fabulous framing device—a Latin-lover narrator who punctuates his remarks with the refrain “Just like a telenovela, right?” An excitable fanboy who tosses out Twitter hashtags like confetti, the narrator (voiced by the very funny Anthony Mendez) works as a bridge to the globally popular genre, but he also helps link it to other women’s “stories”: the soap, the rom-com, the romance novel, and, more recently, reality television. These are the genres that get dismissed as fluff, which is how our culture regards art that makes women’s lives look like fun. They’re “guilty pleasures,” not unlike sex itself. Women use this language, too—even Rodriguez, in interviews, has compared her show to red-velvet cupcakes and Justin Bieber.

  In fact, Jane the Virgin is more like a joyful manifesto against that very put-down, a bright-pink filibuster exposing the layers in what the world regards as shallow. When the American version begins, Jane is twenty-three, living in Miami, and still a virgin, torn between her devout Catholic grandmother and her wild-thing mom, who had her at sixteen. Her soul mate, Rafael, is a roguish hotel heir—and the show gives him meaningful competition, in the form of a nice-guy detective, Michael, whom Jane eventually marries. But, in four seasons, the show has expanded far beyond that formative love triangle. Jane has been a single mom, a happily married woman, and a devastated widow. The virgin part disappeared in Season 3, the word scratched out every week in the titles.

  Beyond these plot tweaks, however, the show made a bolder move, crosshatching the narrative with self-referential inventions, frame inside frame inside frame. Jane, her abuela Alba, and her mother, Xiomara, relax by watching telenovelas, just as the Gilmore girls once watched screwball comedies. Jane’s ambition is to write romance novels—and, when she goes to grad school, she spars with a romance-hating feminist professor, played by the show’s frequent director, Melanie Mayron (Melissa Steadman on Thirtysomething). Jane’s long-lost father, Rogelio De La Vega (Jaime Camil), is the hilariously vain star of the telenovela The Passions of Santos (and, for a while, of a reality show called De La Vega-Factor Factor, along with a matchmaker named Darci Factor). This season, the U.S. version of The Passions of Santos has been picked up—on the condition that it also features Rogelio’s latest nemesis, America’s sweetheart River Fields (Shields, naturally), star of The Green Lagoon.

  The meta television show is hardly a new invention. And, in one sense, Jane is simply the latest in a tradition of ambitious shows that both emulate and deconstruct established TV genres, from Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman (daytime soaps) to BoJack Horseman (nineties sitcoms). But one of the striking things about Jane the Virgin is that it is never truly ironic, let alone condescending to its source material. It is a deeply heartfelt production, sweet without being saccharine, as well as sophisticated about and truly interested in all the varieties of love, from familial to carnal. It’s a smart show that parents and teenagers can watch together—which, in a better world, might be a recommendation to a larger audience. Although it employs all the tools of high melodrama—evil twins, gaslighting—it doesn’t have a camp sensibility. Instead, it ballasts the most outrageous twists with realistic emotional responses. How would you feel if your twin stole your identity and drugged you into paralysis, thus intensifying your postpartum depression? This is one show that will take your trauma seriously.

  The performances are equally layered, particularly a breakout one by Yael Grobglas, as both Petra, Rafael’s ex-wife, and Anezka, the aforementioned evil twin. A Czech street hustler turned glam hotelier, Grobglas’s Petra glides from Carole Lombard daffiness to Grace Kelly hauteur, noir to slapstick to heartbreak, often within a scene. For two seasons, I kept forgetting that the twins were played by one person, let alone one person acting like one character pretending to be the other character pretending to be the first character.


  Without a marquee director in the credits, Jane rarely comes up in conversations about visually provocative television, but it should: It has an unusual optical density, somehow managing to be simultaneously meditative and manic. Spanish speakers, like Alba, get subtitles. But other captions bubble across the screen, to underscore plot points or to add visual punch lines: The “one hour later” that stripes a set of double doors cracks in half when a character walks through them. Rogelio’s overeager tweeting provides entire subplots. When lovers text, words appear and disappear as they edit, letting us enter their thoughts.

  And then there’s the show’s frequent backdrop, the Marbella hotel, a dreamy castle full of turquoise sofas. Color is a huge part of the show’s appeal: Hearts throb pink when people are in love; Rogelio’s lavender accessories are flags for his moods. Lacking the big bucks of pay cable, Jane turns The CW’s limitations into advantages, making elegant use of the screen, often through a kind of flirtatious denial. When Jane gazes to her right during a dinner at the Marbella, her face blocks our view of the seductive text that Rafael has sent her. When the two finally make love, we get mere flashes of flesh in the shower: her arm, his back, her hip. “Come on, I can’t show you everything,” the narrator tells us. “We’re not on HBO.”

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  Despite that meta wisecrack, that sex scene is genuinely steamy, and not just because it’s set in a shower: It’s the consummation of an attraction that has lasted four seasons. Telenovelas have a long tradition as transmitters of social messages; in Mexico, the government used hit shows as vehicles to advocate for family planning. Our own government would surely deplore the messages Jane sends: Like the Netflix series One Day at a Time, it puts Latino immigrants, including undocumented workers, at the center of the story. It also goes deep on women’s health, with plots that include Jane’s struggle to breastfeed and a crisp, unapologetic story about abortion. Once in a while, there’s a corny note of edutainment—a bisexual-boyfriend plot had this vibe—but it’s a rarity.