Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

by Douglas Rushkoff

  This way of organizing stories—Joseph Campbell’s “heroic journey”5—is now our way of understanding the world. This may have happened because the linear structure is essentially true to life, or we may simply have gotten so accustomed to it that it now informs the way we look at events and problems that emerge. Whatever the case, this structure also worked perfectly for conveying values of almost any kind to the captivated audience. For if we have followed the protagonist into danger, followed him up the incline plane of tension into a state of great suspense and anxiety, we will be willing to accept whatever solution he is offered to get out. Arnold Schwarzenegger finds a new weapon capable of killing the bad aliens, the interrogator on Law & Order uses psychology to leverage the serial killer’s ego against himself, or the kids on Glee learn that their friendships matter more than winning a singing contest. The higher into tension we have gone, the more dependent we are on the storyteller for a way out. That’s why he can plug in whatever value, idea, or moral he chooses.

  Or product. The technique reaches its height, of course, in any typical television commercial. In just thirty seconds (or twenty-eight seconds, when you account for the fades to and from video blackness), a character finds himself in a situation, makes choices that put him in danger, and then finds a solution in the form of a purchase. For just one actual example: A girl is anticipating her high school prom when she notices a pimple on her cheek (initiating event). She tries hot compresses, popping it, and home remedies, which only make it worse (rising tension). Just when it looks as though there’s no way to avoid being terribly embarrassed and humiliated at her prom, a friend sees the pimple and, instead of teasing her, tells her about the new fast-acting pimple cream (reversal). She puts on the cream (recognition) and goes to the prom, pimple free (catharsis).

  If we have followed the character up the ramp of tension into danger, then we must swallow the pill, cream, gun, or moral the storyteller uses to solve the problem. For all this to work, however, the storyteller is depending on a captive audience. The word “entertainment” literally means “to hold within,” or to keep someone in a certain frame of mind. And at least until recently, entertainment did just this, and traditional media viewers could be depended on to sit through their programming and then accept their acne cream.

  Even if television viewers sensed they were being drawn into an anxious state by a storytelling advertiser who simply wanted to push a product, what were the alternatives? Before the advent of interactive devices like the remote control, the television viewer would have had to get up off the couch, walk over to the television set, turn the dial, tune in the new station, and then adjust the rabbit ears. Or simply walk out of the room and possibly miss the first moments of the show when the commercial ended. Although television viewers weren’t as coerced into submission as a churchgoer forced to stay in the pew and listen to the story as the minister related it, they were still pretty much stuck swallowing whatever pill the programmer inserted into the turning point of the narrative.

  Then came interactivity. Perhaps more than any postmodern idea or media educator, the remote control changed the way we related to television, its commercials, and the story structure on which both depended. Previously, leaving the couch and walking up to the television to change the channel might cost more effort than merely enduring the awful advertisement and associated anxiety. But with a remote in hand, the viewer can click a button and move away effortlessly. Add cable television and the ability to change channels without retuning the set (not to mention hundreds of channels to watch instead of just three), and the audience’s orientation to the program has utterly changed. The child armed with the remote control is no longer watching a television program, but watching television—moving away from anxiety states and into more pleasurable ones.

  Take note of yourself as you operate a remote control. You don’t click the channel button because you are bored, but because you are mad: Someone you don’t trust is attempting to make you anxious. You understand that it is an advertiser trying to make you feel bad about your hair (or lack of it), your relationship, or your current SSRI medication, and you click away in anger. Or you simply refuse to be dragged still further into a comedy or drama when the protagonist makes just too many poor decisions. Your tolerance for his complications goes down as your ability to escape becomes increasingly easy. And so today’s television viewer moves from show to show, capturing important moments on the fly. Surf away from the science fiction show’s long commercial break to catch the end of the basketball game’s second quarter, make it over to the first important murder on the cop show, and then back to the science fiction show before the aliens show up.

  Deconstructed in this fashion, television loses its ability to tell stories over time. It’s as if the linear narrative structure had been so misused and abused by television’s incompetent or manipulative storytellers that it simply stopped working, particularly on younger people who were raised in the more interactive media environment and equipped with defensive technologies. And so the content of television, and the greater popular culture it leads, adapted to the new situation.

  NOW-IST POP CULTURE IS BORN

  Without the time or permission to tell a linear story with a beginning, a middle, and an end, television programmers had to work with what they had—the moment. To parents, educators, and concerned experts, the media that came out of this effort has looked like anything but progress. As Aristotle explained, “When the storytelling in a culture goes bad the result is decadence.”6 At least on a surface level, the new storyless TV shows appeared to support Aristotle’s maxim.

  Animated shows masquerading as kids’ programming, such as Beavis and Butt-head (1993) and The Simpsons (1989), were some of the first to speak directly to the channel surfer.7 MTV’s animated hit Beavis and Butt-head consists of little more than two young teenagers sitting on a couch watching MTV rock videos. Though dangerously mindless in the view of most parents, the show artfully recapitulates the experience of kids watching MTV. As the two knuckleheads comment on the music videos, they keep audience members aware of their own relationship to MTV imagery. The show takes the form of a screen-within-a-screen, within which typical MTV videos play. But where a rock video may normally entice the viewer with provocative or sexual imagery, now the viewer is denied or even punished for being drawn in. When the sexy girl comes into frame, Butt-head blurts out, “Nice set”; Beavis giggles along; and the viewer is alienated from the imagery. The two animated kids are delivering a simple object lesson in media manipulation. When they don’t like something, one says, “This sucks, change it,” and the other hits the remote. Beavis and Butt-head might not have singlehandedly rendered the rock video obsolete, but their satire provided a layer of distance and safety between viewers and the programming they no longer trusted.

  The cult hit Mystery Science Theater 3000 (first aired in 1988) turned this genre into something close to an art form. Set in the future, the show allows the audience to watch along as the sole captive inhabitant of a space station and his two robot companions are forced to view bad B movies and low-budget science fiction sagas. Our television screen shows us the movie, with the heads of the three audience members in silhouette, Looney Tunes–style, several rows ahead of us. The trio makes comments and wisecracks about the movie, much as we may do if we were watching with our own friends.

  But we’re not. For the most part, viewers of this late-night show are isolated in their apartments, using the images on their screens as surrogate companions. In a self-similar fashion, the character trapped in the futuristic space station has fashioned his own robot friends out of spare projection parts—the ones that could have given him some control over when the movies are shown. He uses the technology at his disposal to provide himself with simulated human interaction but has given up a certain amount of freedom to do so. So, too, do the young viewers of the show simulate a social setting with their television sets, suffering through the long, awful sci-fi movies delive
red on the network’s schedule for the joy of simulated companionship. MST3K, as its fans call it, is both entertainment and mirror. If we can no longer follow a character through his story over time, we can instead be that character in the moment. Most of the film’s dialogue is drowned out by the antics in the audience, and the plot is lost to the endless succession of jokes and mimicry. The linear progression of the film’s story is sacrificed to the more pressing need for a framework that mirrors the viewing experience.

  The individual jokes and asides of the characters also make up a new media education for the show’s audience. Almost all of the humor is derived from references to other media. The robots make an Andrew Lloyd Webber grill to burn the composer’s self-derivative scores and argue about the relative merits of the Windows and Macintosh operating systems. When they observe Bela Lugosi taking off his lab coat in a campy old sci-fi feature, the robots sing, “It’s a beautiful day in the laboratory” to the tune of the Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood theme. The robots make sure to call attention to every cheesy special effect and structural flaw. As the noise of guns and guard dogs pursue escaping convicts, a robot shouts, “Sounds like the foley artists are chasing us. Move it!” Toward the end of another film, one robot comments, “Isn’t this a little late in act three for a plot twist?”

  To appreciate the humor of the show, viewers need to understand the media as a self-reflexive universe of references, any of which can be used to elucidate any other. Each joke is a demonstration of the media’s self-similarity. This is not a humor of random association but a comedy of connectivity where images and ideas from very disparate sources are revealed as somehow relevant to one another. To belong to the MST3K culture is to understand at least some of the literally hundreds of references per show and, more important, how they relate to one another. When this is not the object of the game, the characters instead keep their audience aware of their moment-to-moment relationship to the media, either by commenting on the technical quality of the film or by calling attention to themselves as recapitulated bracketing devices.

  The Simpsons, now in its twenty-fourth season of self-referential antics, brings the same TV-within-a-TV sensibility to an even wider, mainstream audience. The opening theme still plays over animation of the entire family rushing home to the living room couch in time for their favorite show. Mirroring our increasingly ironic sensibility, the program’s child protagonist, Bart Simpson, seems aware of his own role within the show and often comments on what his family must look like to the audience watching along.

  Although The Simpsons episodes have stories, these never seem to be the point. There are no stakes: characters die, or do things that would kill them, yet reappear in later episodes. The fact that Homer (after the Greek hero) Simpson might have caused a nuclear spill does not create tension in the typical sense, and nobody watching particularly cares whether the town of Springfield is spared the resulting devastation. We are not in a state of suspense. Instead, the equivalents of recognition or reversal come from recognizing what other forms of media are being satirized in any given moment. When Homer picks up his daughter from child care, she is perched on a wall next to hundreds of other pacifier-sucking babies. The “a-ha” moment comes from recognizing it is a spoof of Hitchcock’s The Birds—and that institutional child care has taken on the quality of a horror movie. Unlike his ancient Greek counterpart, Homer has no heroic journey. He remains in a suspended, infinite present, while his audience has all the recognitions.

  Still on the air after all these years, The Simpsons, along with the many satirical, self-referential shows that followed its path (the creators of Family Guy, South Park, and even The Office all credit The Simpsons as a seminal influence), offers the narrative-wary viewer some of the satisfaction that traditional stories used to provide—but through nonnarrative means. Family Guy (1999), canceled by FOX in 2002 but revived in 2005 when its popularity online kept growing, seems tailor-made for the YouTube audience. The show’s gags don’t even relate to the story or throughline (such as they are), but serve as detours that thwart or halt forward motion altogether. Rather than simply scripting pop culture references into the scenes, Family Guy uses these references more as wormholes through which to escape from the temporal reality of the show altogether—often for minutes at a time, which is an eternity on prime-time television. In one episode the mom asks her son to grab a carton of milk, “and be sure to take it from the back.” Apropos of nothing, a black-and-white sketch of a man’s hand pulls the child into an alternate universe of a-ha’s iconic 1984 “Take On Me” music video. The child runs through a paper labyrinth with the band’s front man for the better part of a minute before suddenly breaking through a wall and back into the Family Guy universe.

  This reliance on what the show’s YouTube fans call “cutscenes” turns what would have been a cartoon sitcom into a sequence of infinite loops, each one just as at home on the decontextualized Internet as they are strung together into a half hour of TV. The only real advantage to watching them in their original form within the program is the opportunity to delight in the writers’ audacious disregard for narrative continuity (and for pop culture as a whole).

  Finally, going so far out on this postnarrative journey that it comes full circle, NBC’s unlikely hit Community (2009) is ostensibly a plotted sitcom about a group of misfits at Greendale Community College—except for the fact that the characters continually refer to the fact that they are on a television sitcom. For example, as Greendale’s principal completes his standard PA announcements at the opening of one scene, the character Abed—a pop-culture-obsessed voyeur with Asperger’s syndrome who is often a proxy for the audience—remarks that the announcement “makes every ten minutes feel like the beginning of a new scene of a TV show.” He continues, “Of course, the illusion only lasts until someone says something they’d never say on TV, like how much their life is like TV. There, it’s gone.”

  Community assumes such extensive pop cultural literacy that even its narrative tropes—odd couple turned best friends; triumph of the underdog; will they or won’t they do it?—are executed with dripping irony. These are overwrenched plots, recognized as parody by an audience well versed in television’s all too familiar narrative arcs. They even do one of those highlights episodes stringing together scenes from previous episodes (the kind that normal sitcoms do to fill up an episode with old free footage), except none of the scenes are actually from previous episodes. It’s a series of fake flashbacks to scenes that never appeared in those episodes—a satire of the clip-show trope. “Community,” writes Hampton Stevens in the Atlantic, “isn’t actually a sitcom—any more than The Onion is an actual news-gathering organization. Community, instead, is a weekly satire of the sitcom genre, a spoof of pop culture in general.”8 While The Simpsons and Family Guy disrupt narrative in order to make pop culture references, Community’s stories are themselves pop culture references. Narrative becomes a self-conscious wink.

  Through whichever form of postmodern pyrotechnics they practice, these programs attack the very institutions that have abused narrative to this point: advertisers, government, religions, pop culture sellouts, politicians, and even TV shows themselves. They don’t work their magic through a linear plot, but instead create contrasts through association, by nesting screens within screens, and by giving viewers the tools to make connections between various forms of media. It’s less like being walked along a pathway than it is like being taken up high and shown a map. The beginning, the middle, and the end have almost no meaning. The gist is experienced in each moment as new connections are made and false stories are exposed or reframed. In short, these sorts of shows teach pattern recognition, and they do it in real time.

  Of course, this self-conscious parody was just one of many responses to a deconstructing mediascape. TV and movies, low culture and high culture, have all been contending with the collapse of narrative. Some resist and some actively contribute; some complain while others celebrate. We are just now
finding a new equilibrium in a transition that has taken over twenty years—most visibly in the cinema. As if responding to the disruption of the remote control and other deconstructive tools and attitudes, many American films of the late 1990s seemed to be searching for ways to preserve the narrative structure on which their messages and box office receipts were depending.

  Movies dedicated to preserving the stories we use to understand ourselves turned the cut-and-paste technologies against the digital era from which they emerged, as if to restore the seamless reality of yesterday. The mid-1990s blockbuster Forrest Gump, for just one example, attempted to counteract the emerging discontinuity of the Internet age by retelling the story of the twentieth century from the perspective of a simpleton. Filmmaker Robert Zemeckis was already most famous for the Back to the Future series in which his characters went back in time to rewrite history. Forrest Gump attempts this same revisionist magic through a series of flashbacks, in which the audience relives disjointed moments of the past century of televised history, all with Gump magically pasted into the frame. We see Gump protesting the Vietnam War, Gump with John Lennon, and even Gump meeting JFK and saying he needs to pee.