chapter five
“Angels in America”
Technologies of Desire and Recognition
Cartoon Politics, Again
At the end of the twentieth century, American thought and culture became increasingly cartoonish. That is neither a criticism nor a complaint. It may even be a compliment. For cartoons are strident abstractions from the particularities of ethnic, racial, and sexual experiences, the stuff of identity politics. These abstractions reverse the typical moves of the classical Hollywood cinema, which rendered great social issues—for example, class struggle—as biography, and in doing so turned the public and the political into something personal (think of It Happened One Night [1934], Pretty Woman [1990], or Maid in Manhattan [2002]). These new cartoon abstractions move the other way, turning the world inside out by rendering what seems personal as something public and perhaps political. They attract our attention because the “characters” in cartoons don’t look or sound like anybody we have ever met—and they never have to change over time.
Cartoon characters don’t have inner lives—they’re allegorical figures, all surfaces. So they’re a blank screen onto which we can project ourselves, no matter what our origins might be. They’re “elemental,” as Norman Klein puts it: “The character is supposed to be empty, to be filled with the audience’s sensibility.” Here’s a visual demonstration drawn from Scott McCloud’s brilliant book Understanding Comics (1994):
McCloud comic. Source: Page 36 from Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. © 1993, 1994, by Scott McCloud. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
In this chapter, we’ll be visiting TV, music, and computer culture—maybe a novel or two, just for fun, but just in passing—as a way of verifying these cartoonish claims. The argument here is pretty simple. Toward the end of the twentieth century, Americans learned to live with real differences by blurring them, abstracting from them, in the postrealistic, almost fantastic settings of TV, music, and computer culture.
You have surely noticed that American art, all pictorial art, got more and more abstract in the twentieth century, as Cubist and surrealist sensibilities penetrated and reshaped every kind of painting and sculpture. The big exception was performance art, a new genre created mainly by women, beginning in the 1970s. But even here the world was turned inside out by artists like Karen Finley, who wanted you to know that the brown stuff she was eating and smearing on her body could be the real thing, genuine shit. Then what? What’s inside anymore? “We are what we eat,” but twice, once as food and then again as what our bodies have already expelled?
Cartoons, comics, and movies—the last is the distant echo of the first two—tilt the world differently. They are a way of rejoining what had been severed by the modern world we recognize in the coming of the codex book. Words and pictures parted company in the sixteenth century, during the Reformation, when people learned to read the Bible for themselves instead of just listening to the priests, when worship became a matter of words, without any visual distractions in the form of pictures or statues or stained glass. According to the Protestants, nothing but “plain speech” was needed to save the souls of the sinners.
The distance between words and pictures was never hard and fast—there were always illustrated books for children—but it kept growing so that by the eighteenth century it seemed unbridgeable, perhaps because realism was gaining on other narrative forms, both here and in Europe. Cartoons and comics closed that distance at the very end of the nineteenth century, reuniting words and pictures in startling ways that led straight to motion pictures.
Now you might wonder how the Reformation is relevant to the cartoonish quality of late-twentieth-century American thought and culture. It is, in the following strange sense. The original Protestants didn’t trust Reason because it was just another human faculty corrupted by sin (hence their fervent belief in faith as the condition of redemption); their distrust of Reason marked, but also complicated, the relation between higher and lower culture, or between educated and popular culture. The comics and the cartoons—and the movies—
of the early twentieth century completed that weird complication to the point of erasing the line between high and low culture.
Or, rather, those early comics and cartoons and movies waited patiently until the late twentieth century, when the graphic novel and Pop Art finally validated their postmodern complication of the relation between words and pictures. Will Eisner, Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy Warhol ended this long waiting period in the 1960s by making cartoons the stuff of stirring narrative and fine art. When Art Spiegelman won the Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for Maus, a two-volume story about a troubled Holocaust survivor and his son—rendered as figures who remind us of Mickey Mouse, if only Mickey had a shrink—the graphic novel suddenly acquired a new respectability. All these artists were nonetheless borrowing from the visual conventions of cheesy comics from the 1950s and even earlier.
Rock and roll had a similarly commercial, cheesy genealogy and a similar effect. By the 1970s it, too, was the cultural mainstream. But then disco and punk rock fought it out, and neither won, much to our current relief—
unless we think of heavy metal as the angry offspring of these unlikely parents. We’ll ask that genealogical question later, when we get to the music of the end of the twentieth century.
For now, let’s look at the cartoons, the real deal on TV. Of course they started as shorts that introduced feature-length movies—we’ve all seen the scrawny Mickey Mouse, just a line drawing in motion, steering that steamboat at the dawn of Disney studios—but they came of age on television, as the Saturday morning absurdities that taught the baby boomers how to understand surrealism and maybe even Situationism, yet another bastard child of Cubism.
That was long before The Simpsons, South Park, and The Family Guy. That was back when Bugs Bunny, clearly a new version of the Trickster who permeated African American folklore (think of Br’er Rabbit), and when Wile E. Coyote, Sisyphus reincarnated as a dog chasing the same bird unto infinity, remade the cartoon imagination. Back then we knew that Elmer Fudd, the supposed human, wasn’t going to kill the Wabbit because Bugs was too shifty, too cool, and we knew that the serious scientist, the existentialist hero—that would be the coyote whose every contraption mangled its own inventor—
wasn’t going to catch the Road Runner (beep-beep), the embodiment of natural athletic talent. But we kept watching, we suspended our disbelief because we knew, somehow, that these endlessly reiterated episodes had something to do with our real lives, with our own fantasies and frustrations.
Did we know, somehow, that Bugs Bunny announced the advent of a new racial regime in which the silly, sometimes angry white man with the gun would finally be outsmarted by the Trickster? Did we know, somehow, that Wile E. Coyote couldn’t build a machine that could contain or destroy the natural energies of the athletes and the animals among us? Did we know that big science was kind of a joke because the atomic bomb had only amplified the Cold War? Maybe. In any event, let us consider the cartoonish character of late-twentieth-century American culture with such questions in mind. In doing so, we might see a political agenda in the making.
Consider, to begin with, The Simpsons, the longest-running situation comedy on television, which is brought to you by FOX TV, the cable network that has carved out a unique niche for itself by being blatantly conservative. The series was created by Matt Groening, a starving artist whose previous credentials were confined to venues like The Reader, a free weekly, and In These Times, a socialist newspaper, two fugitive journals published in Chicago. By now the show has of course attracted the talents of innumerable Ivy League graduates who want to write smart dialogue for TV, but we should remember that it started out as a parody of The Wonder Years, a sappy sitcom with “real” characters that revisited the 1950s and 1960s from the standpoint of a boy who wanted to know why nothing about his world—the “outside” world tattooed on his family’s every gesture—made sense.
; At the outset, in the first three years or so, The Simpsons reproduced this standpoint, watching a world turned inside out by the idiocies of parents and siblings—where seemingly private transgressions became public scandals, and vice versa, because no one could keep a secret or a job long enough to let some personal interiority develop, because everything was out there, everything was written on the surfaces of the population on screen. Then something happened, and Homer, the hapless father, replaced Bart, the cynical son, as the lead character of this perverse and yet productive homage to Ozzie and Harriet, the sitcom that ruled the airwaves in the 1950s, and The Honeymooners, another sitcom from the same period that deleted all the children—and all the furniture—
to focus on the bizarre relation called matrimony.
In both Ozzie and Harriet and The Honeymooners, the nuclear family of the postwar suburbs and the outer boroughs is lampooned by watching as the leading man stumbles (Ozzie) or stomps (Ralph) through life without a clue as to what is happening inside or outside the home over which he is supposed to preside as husband. In the third or fourth season of The Simpsons, Homer became a hybrid of these “real” characters and the focus of the series, weekly addressing the questions raised at about the same time by Disney’s Toy Story I and II, not to mention Susan Faludi’s prize-winning book on the end of American manhood (Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man [1999]).
The familiar questions (we asked them in the last chapter) go like this: Where’s Dad? What is his function here in this small tribe we call a family? Can I count on him? Or has he been downsized to the point of an endangered species? And if he has, what happens to the family as such? Then as now, father did not know best, but we kept asking the questions.
Where both Toy Story I and II tried to restore the father to his proper role at the head of the family—you can go back and read about these movies in chapter 4 of this book—and where Faludi (and many other writers) tried even harder to revive the ailing patriarch, The Simpsons says, enough already—we don’t need fathers of the kind that haunt our familial imagination and keep us rowing, boats against the current, toward the place we never were. Groening & Co. tell us that families, those small tribes where the children try to grow up and the parents try, too, are hilarious, even ridiculous devices that do not need fathers who function as patriarchs. The Family Guy tells us the same thing, to be sure, and yet, as funny as it is—talk about surrealism—it is by now a parody of a parody: it’s a copy of The Simpsons, but with no affection for the past that is reanimated by Homer, his family, his neighbors, and his employers in Springfield.
The Family Guy does erase the boundaries determined by realism. Just like The Simpsons, it does turn the world inside out by identifying the infant and the dog as the only believable, that is, reliable, narrators, and this in accordance with longstanding cartoon practice. Even so, it also erases the boundary between the past and the present, so the laughs it gets are cheaper than the ones Homer earns by inhabiting and reexamining the social roles he thinks he has inherited. The fathers in both families are impervious to the cartoon realities that surround them, but Homer is at least nostalgic for the past in which the breadwinner was the head of household.
Excremental Visions
South Park is a very different cartoon genre, although it certainly borrows from MTV—from, say, Beavis and Butthead. For its creators have gone to the extreme of animation and rendered every character as a little round cutout with eyes and a mouth, a circle that moves like a stage performer who is always face front, as if the world is a chorus line made of buttons. The differences between the figures on screen are made of voice and color and hats, so there’s not much point in watching the “performance”; but if you listen in, you’ll get the joke, especially when Chef, the black voice of authenticity, speaks (performed by the late Isaac Hayes, who made his bones writing music for blaxploitation movies in the 1970s and who hosted an R & B radio show for a New York radio station). So the extremity of this abstraction, this conscious abstention from the possibilities of visual representation in comics and cartoons—from the possibilities Disney and Pixar provided—makes South Park a kind of radio show, almost all sound. It’s a television show for the blind.
But there’s something happening here that is worth remarking, and its name is shit. This show is the most amazing study in anality since Jonathan Swift, or maybe Martin Luther, and it marks a moment in what we have come to know as globalization. We know that its creators are close readers of globalization because they made a feature-length movie, Team America (2004) using marionettes, the antirealist halfway point between film noir and Disney animation, to debunk the so-called war on terror and to ridicule the larger contours of U.S. foreign policy. We also know that they are obsessed with how the world elsewhere always intrudes on the small-town life of their cartoon population (in this they follow the lead of The Simpsons). But this intrusion is famously depicted as an anal probe from outer space organized by aliens who are always those oblong skulls that appear on guitar picks, cartoon figures we somehow recognize. That intrusion from elsewhere is also depicted as Father Christmas from the sewer, the Santa (scramble the letters and you get Satan) who makes the once-sacred holiday—when was that?—an excremental, that is, commercial, vacation from reality. And it is similarly depicted as a loquacious turd that gets its fifteen minutes of fame as the subject of an interview. Is it your imagination, or do the microphone and that piece of shit have the same shape?
Now, we could dismiss the scatological investments of South Park as the backward, frat-boy humor of the creators, who do, in fact, indulge every adolescent idiocy available to them. In other words, we could say that their indefatigable anality has nothing to do with the culture they interpret and nothing to do with their aesthetic purposes and results—it’s something to be ignored or explained away, it’s unmportant, it’s just there. But what if they’re onto something? What if their otherwise inexplicable popularity is, like Luther’s, a function of a new anality determined and organized by the universalization of exchange value—of finance capital—we call globalization?
We can’t answer the question without recourse to psychoanalysis. At any rate, our answers will be more interesting if we treat Freud as we did in the last chapter, while pondering the spectacle of male masochism at the movies—as a theorist of culture rather than a psychotherapist. Notice that in using psychoanalysis in this way, we are participating in as well as reporting on the intellectual history of the late twentieth century, when the macroeconomic materialism of Marx (“the economy is determining in the last instance”) gave way to the bodily materialism of Freud. That was when the differences between males and females became a practical question because equality between males and females became a political purpose—when gender trouble and its attendant, an “imaginary femininity,” reorganized our thinking about everything. At that moment, Freud’s scandalous invention became an indispensable device in the tool kit of cultural criticism; for as Jacqueline Rose has observed, psychoanalysis “can in many ways be seen entirely in terms of its engagement with this question of feminine sexuality.”
Psychoanalysis helps to decipher South Park and its cultural traction from a different (but related) angle on sexuality. Here Freud’s general theory of sublimation and specific studies of “anal erotism” are immediately relevant and consistently productive. Sublimation happens, he argued, insofar as particular bodily experiences are repressed and translated into the more accessible symbolic resources made available by the culture at large. Words and less complicated visual icons are the crucial symbolic resources in this sense, for we situate ourselves in the world beyond our bodies by talking or writing (or drawing), by depicting and changing the world with words and icons that others can understand. We feel and communicate our original experiences as bodily states or desires because as infants we can make sounds, but we have no intelligible words or icons. We grow up, then, as we grow out of our bodies by means of linguistic abstractions—we sublimate a
nd sanitize those original experiences as we rise above our bodies by replacing sounds with words and icons. But of course the body’s urges always remain as ingredients in the mind’s eye.
Money is the only symbolic resource that is comparable in scope to language. It is the universal commodity that works like a primal metaphor, thus allowing us to recognize and negotiate difference by equating unlike things (reducing a whole person, for example, to a bodily orifice, as in “he’s a real asshole,” or acknowledging the equivalent values of an expensive car and a cheap house). Psychoanalysis follows the lead of anthropology, however, in treating money not as the epitome of economic utility but as the extremity of irrationality. In Freud’s terms, money is the sublimated, sanitized equivalent of shit. In other words, our desire for money—wealth in the abstract—is the enduring residue of the emotional attachment to excrement that comes with the anal-sadistic phase of infantile development, before the bodily sources of the child’s sexual pleasure are “elevated” and confined to the genitals by the rigors of the Oedipus complex.
The child’s feces are originally experienced and perceived as a detachable part of his body, as the first thing he can control with muscular effort and the first object he can give away, as a gift—by the same token, it is the first approximation of his property, a separate, tangible, and fungible asset he owns outright. No wonder anal erotism organizes his infantile being: his feces are the material evidence of his differentiation from himself and from the external world, but they also measure his mastery over his body, which is all the identity he knows. As he inevitably learns to rise above the bodily pleasures of playing with the fecal masses he produces, that is, as he sanitizes the urge to accumulate and allocate more of his own shit, he gradually transfers his emotional attachment to other separate, tangible, and fungible assets, like collectibles, coins, and eventually less solid forms of money.
The World Turned Inside Out Page 14