The World Turned Inside Out
Page 15
By this accounting, the anal-sadistic urges are transhistorical dimensions of human being, but they remain as recessive symptoms of infantile development, as signs of childishness or deviance, until the advent of a money economy validates them as necessary, rational, even admirable character traits of adults. At that point, the anal-compulsive personality becomes normal; for when money mediates all social relations outside the family, no one can avoid the urge to accumulate—to abstain is to suffer poverty and social disgrace, perhaps even to starve to death.
Let us now restate the question that was the occasion for this methodological manifesto: What if the creators of South Park are 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? What if the desublimation of money, which requires the return of the repressed infantile experience Freud named anal erotism, is both the means and the end of their cartoon abstractions?
In the sixteenth century Martin Luther explained that “money is the word of the Devil”—this Evil One was the modern Protestant version of the ancient and medieval Trickster—so that bondage to the new world of capitalism meant surrender to the demonic. The Devil and commodity fetishism always go together, as Norman O. Brown and Michael Taussig have more recently demonstrated. Like Luther, they also explained that since money was more or less excrement—in dreams and in archaic cultures, money always appears as some kind of shit—this surrender to the demonic was a way of dredging human beings in their own feces. If the world is ruled by the Devil, as Luther insisted it was, everyone is unclean. But the Protestants’ revolt against the complacency of Catholicism—you’d better understand that your very soul is at risk, they kept saying, don’t trust the priests—was also a way of making the anus the central organ of waking life, thus inverting Dante’s specification of the afterlife, the last circle of Hell, where the worst sinners keep writhing in the Devil’s asshole.
This new, angry attitude toward the demonic monetary forces of globalized capitalism is what the unconscious Protestantism of South Park accomplishes. We are all awash in our own feces, it tells us—suburban Americans are no less subject to the financial forces driving globalization than Mexican peasants—and in this sense the cartoon series is a primitive, antirealist
rendition of Karen Finley’s equally excremental vision of a world turned inside out. Neither South Park nor Finley is stuck in an anal stage of infantile development—neither are the rest of us in their audiences—no, we respond to their extreme anality because we can feel in our bodies, in our bones, the universalization of exchange value that goes by the name of globalization.
For there is no such thing as progress from one infantile stage of development to another; all of them remain as the residue of your individual reality, and each of them is differently elicited by the larger cultural reality. In the case of South Park, that larger reality is something we can all feel as a world reshaped by the mysterious, demonic, excremental forces of capitalism without borders. If everything has a price, no matter where you are on earth, then everything has turned to shit. No brand of authenticity is any longer available. The question South Park makes us ask is, so what? Darkness falls on our brightly painted suburbs—the excremental Other invades; “the blues moved in our town,” as the Sopranos theme song puts it—but we’re going to laugh about it anyway. This tragedy may well look like comedy before we’re through. Keep watching, Cartman says, keep laughing. Maybe Chef will save you, too.
The questions that remain about South Park center on the allegorical function of the oracular Chef, the surreal voice of reason who is the only black character. Is he the Trickster whose advice makes no sense to the literal-minded children who attend the school where he cooks? Is he the demonstration of the demonic—the Trickster and the Devil are always linked, and their connection is always commerce—and if so, does that explain why he is black? Is he Br’er Rabbit’s Tar Baby, that gooey, fecal mass, all grown up and growling at us? He looks and sounds like the Other, a voice from another time and place, but he’s not one of those aliens from outer space. Where then does he come from? Does he represent the desublimation of money accomplished by the insistent anality of the series? Is he in this sense the figuration, the caricature, the shape, the presence, of globalization? Again, is that why he’s black? Ask the question another way: If Bill Clinton was “the first black president,” as Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison put it—he knew all those hymns by heart—is Chef the last racialized Other, the comedic version of the dream that has haunted the American imagination since 1607?
There are more questions to be asked about South Park, of course, and the even greater number of answers shouldn’t end with yes or no. So let us now turn to other cartoons, always asking why every medium became less and less realistic toward the end of the twentieth century, when angels
and vampires and seers and cyborgs convinced us that a “posthuman future” had arrived. That would be a future in which the borders between heaven and earth, mortality and immortality, life and death, machine and man, fact and fiction, or, for that matter, between human and animal, have somehow been erased. Miracles abounded back then, in keeping, perhaps, with the approach of the new millennium, with all its mechanical promises and technological horrors.
Apocalypse Now?
For example, Anne Rice became a best-selling author writing realistically, although always adverbially, about Lestat the vampire, who descended, somehow, from the ancient pharaohs of Egypt and hung out in modern-day New Orleans. Tim LaHaye, the evangelical firebrand, and his coauthor, Jerry B. Jenkins, a cheerful journeyman, meanwhile created a twelve-volume novel series called Left Behind (1995 and following), which has sold over fifty million copies. Here we begin with The Rapture, the end of days when Jesus yanks the righteous out of their seats, places them in heaven, and leaves the rest of us hardworking stiffs to fight the Antichrist over at the United Nations—in a reversal of a PG movie rating, everybody twelve and under gets to go to the fun place. This odd idea and its equally odd demographic become the Pentecostal premise for interminable dialogue about getting right with God.
The novel is clearly an attempt to reproduce the narrative antics of John Bunyan’s great work of 1678, The Pilgrim’s Progress, the most popular book among nineteenth-century Americans outside the Bible. Left Behind has a cast of thousands, however, led by the small, agile, middle-class Tribulation Force, the faithful, fanatical A-Team that finally leads everyone to the promised land of life as death, the place where you go to die so you can meet your maker and reunite with your family. But unlike the filthy, funny Protestantism perfected by John Bunyan—a big fan of Luther—in The Pilgrim’s Progress and again on angry display in South Park, this urgent and yet boring, fiction is all dressed up with no place to go.
For in the postironic world of Left Behind, everybody has to “earn his salvation” and thus teach us how to get back to the discipline of real work—it’s the fictional, evangelical equivalent of Newt Gingrich’s “Contract for America,” the manifesto that brought the Republicans back to power in 1994, at least in the Congress, by insisting on a transparent relation between effort and reward or, alternatively, between crime and punishment (this is also how Law & Order, the Nixon slogan of 1968 and the Dick Wolf TV franchise, got revived, first as farce, again as tragedy).
And then there is Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the cult classic of 1990s TV, a show written, produced, directed, and otherwise managed by Joss Whedon, who was the screenwriter for the movie of the same name that bombed in 1992. Irony abounds in these televised parts because Whedon wants to know why good and evil are so thoroughly imbricated, so constantly entwined—why and how they wear the same face. In his narrative neighborhood, on the other side of town from Mr. Rogers, the vampires are as clueless and hilarious as the worried high school (then college) students who arm themselves to fight the products of the “Hellmouth�
�� underneath good old Sunnydale, California. Notice that the demonic rules this world, just as Luther claimed it did. You can’t escape evil because you’re always already part of it, Whedon insists, but you can fight it without being a conscientious parent or a principled counselor or a crusading principal.
You don’t have to be a well-educated adult or someone who can afford good books and good works, in other words; you just have to know that you can’t abstain from this struggle. You’re up to your ears in the stinking effluvia of life on earth, mingling every day with insufferable assholes. It is a very Protestant position in the old-fashioned, excremental, Lutheran sense. So it is no accident that the Trickster in the famously operatic episode of the last season—
it’s all song and dance, and it explains how Buffy’s friends unknowingly retrieved her not from death but from heaven, thus returning her to hell on earth, the world ruled by the Devil—is a well-dressed black man with horns. This correlation is not racism in action, not any more than Chef is the blackface echo of minstrelsy in South Park. It is instead the condensation of modern cultural history since Luther, which reminds us that when the Trickster who is the Devil makes the contracts, we must make the payments. Your money or your life, he keeps saying. Either way, you lose because everything has turned to shit—that is, to money. Everything is now a moment in the impossibly complex cultural system we call globalization, for everything is part of its price system. And maybe that’s not such a bad thing—maybe it’s a good thing. Maybe our attempted abstentions from the commodity form and consumer culture are worse than pointless.
But the series has a postmodern edge because it contemplates the impending catastrophe that is our posthuman future. What if we can live forever, like vampires Whedon asks—and why shouldn’t he, in view of cloning, artificial insemination, and the rest of the big science that will soon make us immortal? What then? Does a life that stretches across centuries, not mere decades, accrue meanings not available to us mere mortals? His answer is No, in thunder, like Hawthorne’s as Melville once heard it. Whedon’s vampires are desperate to return to the state of longing we call human nature, where we hope for the embodiment of our love, where we hope to commit ourselves to someone who will outlive us—a child perhaps—and to devote ourselves to some cause that will outlast us. For him, such hope for an ending is the reason to write, and it is also what drives his vampires back toward the finitude of human nature we call this mortal coil.
What does the Slayer teach us, then? Buffy teaches us, first, that the fear or the love of nonhuman forms of life is another way of hoping. It’s like the fear or the love of God, only better, because it requires the fear and the love of your neighbor, the vampire, who can get pretty ugly and pretty angry if provoked. The Golden Rule that culminates in the Declaration of Independence (“all men are created equal”) now scans the horizon of sentient beings who might not be human: they might be animals, they might be cyborgs, they might be vampires; they’re not anything like you, but you should be paying attention, and they may be your equal. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, that it’s the rule. But now the Others are not your kind, so be careful.
She teaches us, second, that women are extraordinary athletes who need a coach (The Watcher) but not a father or a husband, not even when the coach wants to graduate to fatherhood, as Giles, the Watcher, so poignantly does. Title IX is clearly at work in Buffy’s extracurricular activities—this federal statute creating equity in school funding for women’s athletics must be the origin of her mandate—because everyone knows her skills are superior but everyone also knows that exterminating all those dangerous creatures is a team sport.
She teaches us, third, that a girlish infatuation with the bad boy and the class clown and the most valuable player—he’s the matriculated vampire—could be deadly; indeed it could destroy civilization, so maybe the girls should get over this kind of high school attachment, maybe get with the nerds, or maybe just give up on boys altogether, as Willow, Buffy’s best friend, learns to do by becoming a lesbian. And finally, she teaches us, season after weary season, that there’s no way beyond this tedious world with all its tiresome, almost rural idiocy. Big science surrounds us, superheroes are among us, but we won’t get out alive. Maybe the vampires will survive the fire next time. The rest of us will be dead, sooner or later, and that is probably a good thing because the uniquely human knowledge of impending death—we’re all waiting to die, we just don’t know how it will happen—keeps us thinking about what should endure when we’re gone. If you’re immortal, you can’t care that much about what will last among human beings because you know that all of it will decay and that you’ll always be there to watch it die. If you’re not immortal, these things matter.
The Limit of Realism
Now the question becomes, what accounts for this outbreak of antirealist television toward the end of the twentieth century—a visual world in which not even the law of gravity holds, in which the chosen one, the Slayer, is a woman? What explains the increasingly cartoonish quality of American culture? Stupidity, some say, derived from a lack of good books and rigorous education, which results in an inability to understand the real world as it exists. Others say, no, it’s not stupidity, it’s the need to escape a real world constituted by inequality, imperialism, and war: we need entertaining diversions from the gross realities of our time. Either way, the real world looks like an inert, external thing rather than a prospect, a horizon of expectation, created by the discourse—the words and images—of TV.
There is a better answer residing in the American literary/artistic tradition, which has always resisted realism, the urge to photograph the world as if the camera has no bearer. Or, rather, that tradition, from Charles Brockden Brown to Toni Morrison, from Marsden Hartley and Stuart Davis to Will Eisner, has always tried to include Gothic and romance forms, and commercial vernaculars, in the reproduction of the real—and this attempted inclusion still happens in visual media like TV and motion pictures as well as novels. For example, speaking of novels, it happens in Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985), which convinces us that the only reality worth thinking about is the thinking we do about reality; and in William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), which convinces us that our bodies are not our selves; and in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), which convinces us that ghosts are always gathering to remind us of what we’d better not forget. Realism has never been the mainstream here, not even when William Dean Howells and Mark Twain were the twin pillars of the literary establishment in the late nineteenth century, not even when Ernest Hemingway tried to reinvent it in 1926 with The Sun Also Rises.
There is no adequate designation for this antirealist tradition. Some might call it literary naturalism, but the naturalists themselves, for example Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser, knew they were drawing on the romance forms perfected by the American Renaissance of the 1850s (Hawthorne’s “castles in the air”). Some might call it the North American version of “magical realism,” the Latin American genre perfected by Gabriel García Márquez, in which realist specifications of time, space, cause, and effect become irrelevant to the telling of the story. But let’s just call it natural supernaturalism, following M. H. Abrams, without reducing or equating it, as he does, to romanticism. Then we can see that all those angels congregating in late-
twentieth-century America, not to mention the demons and the vampires, are figures capable of reminding us of the possibility of redemption—they are a way of telling us that we have good reasons to hope rather than retreat. Like the love-struck angel played by Cary Grant in The Bishop’s Wife, a movie of 1947, or by Nicholas Cage in City of Angels, a movie of 1999, they are a way of telling us that this life, in this body, right here and now, is not probation for an otherworldly heaven. It’s all we’ve got.
The world elsewhere is close by, so be patient, they all say. If you watch carefully, they say, you might see that heaven and earth, God and Man, are not that far apart. Certainly Tony Kushner, the avowed Mar
xist who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for Angels in America, his two-part allegory about HIV/AIDS, said so. In this theatrical, postrealist world—it made it to TV thirteen years later in a highbrow production directed by Mike Nichols—the sacred and the profane are inseparable, and everyone is redeemable, even Joe McCarthy’s monstrous sidekick. But if that is true, if Kushner is right, if faith and love are active dimensions of our everyday lives, then even a world teeming with monsters becomes a more malleable place. That is the principle of hope kept alive by the strange allegories of late-twentieth-century television—in the cartoon universe of Springfield and in the “as if” suburb of Sunnydale.
Musical Endings
The same principle also abides in the music of that end-of-century moment, from disco to punk to heavy metal, on toward the hip-hop nation. Even country music got more edgy, more angry, back then in the 1980s and 1990s, as it became the mainstream of American music as such, at least on the radio.
There’s an American music as such? Isn’t that something like positing an American culture rather than an ethnocultural riot of difference? The answer to both questions is yes. American music was born in the brutal collision of European and African forms as mediated and modified by Caribbean styles. It was always an Atlantic hybrid being passed along from slaves to planters to Scots-Irish yeomen, and then back again, creating a circle of culture that we call either the blues or country music. The basis of almost all African and Celtic music was the pentatonic scale that reduced the classical seven-note scale to five notes—so the slaves and the Scots-Irish of the antebellum South always had something in common. By the 1920s, the hybrid noises built on this scale were sorting themselves into what we now hear as black and white, as the blues and country music, when the blues moved toward a minor key version of the pentatonic by adding intermediate notes that were neither major nor minor and when country music left the minor keys behind.