Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto
Page 14
An inordinate number of cereal commercials are based on the premise that a given cereal is so delicious that a fictional creature would want to steal it. We are presented with this scenario time and time again. The most obvious is the Trix Rabbit, a tragic figure whose doomed existence is not unlike that of Sisyphus. Since the cereal’s inception, the rabbit—often marginalized as “silly”—has never been allowed to enjoy even one bowl of his favorite foodstuff, and the explanation for this embargo smacks of both age discrimination and racism (we are to accept that Trix is reserved exclusively “for kids”).1
An even sadder illustration of cereal segregation is Sonny the Cuckoo Bird, arguably the most tortured member of the advertising community. Sonny is plagued with self-loathing; though outspokenly otaku for Cocoa Puffs, he doesn’t feel he deserves to consume them. Sonny will do anything to escape from his jones, including (but not limited to) locking himself into a primitive skycycle and shooting himself into outer space. To make matters worse, he is bombarded by temptation: Random children endlessly taunt him with heaping bowls of C-Puffs, almost like street junkies waving heroin needles in the face of William S. Burroughs. The kids have cereal, and Sonny does not. Translation: The kids are cool, and Sonny’s an extremist and a failure. And as long as they possess what he does not, Sonny shall remain a second-class phoenix, doomed by his own maniacal ambition for breakfast.
Commercials for Lucky Charms star a leprechaun who replaced the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow with a bowl of marshmallow-laden cereal, a narrative device that slightly overstated the value of the actual product. The Cookie Crisp2 mascot was a masked rapscallion named “Crook,” whose whole self-identity was built on stealing cereal. In ads for both Cocoa and Fruity Pebbles, Barney Rubble went to ridiculous lengths in the hope of shoplifting Fred Flintstone’s breakfast, occasionally dressing like a woman and/or rapping like Ghostface Killah. Time and time again, commercials for cereal assault children with the same theme: A product’s exclusivity is directly proportional to its social cachet, which is the definition of calculated adult coolness.
When I say calculated adult coolness, I’m referring to the kind of coolness that generally applies to people between the ages of nineteen and thirty-six. This is different than mainstream teen coolness and aging hipster default coolness, both of which reflect an opposing (and sort of pathetic) consumer aesthetic. Cereal ads are directed at kids, but they barely work on young people; the kind of advertising that works on a teenager are bandwagon spots for things like Trident and khaki Gap pants. Those ads imply that these are products everybody else already owns. Teenagers claim they want to be cool, but they mostly just want to avoid being uncool. It’s the same for aging hipsters, an equally terrified class of Americans who slowly conclude that the key to staying relevant is by exhibiting default appreciation for the most obvious youth culture entities; this is why you often hear forty-seven-year-old men with ponytails saying things like, “Oh, I’m totally into the new stuff. That new Nickelback record is just terrific.” Aging hipsters and corduroy-clad high school sophomores are both primarily concerned with dodging lameness. However, there is a stretch in everyone’s early adulthood where they can choose (or choose against) creating their own personalized version of nonpopulist cool, which may (or may not) succeed. This is accomplished by embracing semioriginal, semielitist cultural artifacts that remain just out of reach to those who desire them—the so-called “Cocoa Puffs of Power.”
We all relate to Sonny the Cuckoo Bird. We pursue that which retreats from us, and coolness is always a bear market. Coolness is always what others seem to have naturally—an unspecific, delicious, chocolately paradigm we must pilfer through subterfuge. It drives us, for lack of a better term, coo coo. And part of the reason we struggle is because there is no hard-and-fast clarity about what qualifies anything as cool. It needs to be original, but only semioriginal: It would be legitimately inventive (and kind of “out there”) to casually walk around with the petrified skull of a orangutan under your arm for no obvious reason, but this would only seem cool to a select class of performance artist. A better choice would be a T-shirt featuring the cast of After M*A*S*H. A cool image also needs to be semielitist, but it can’t be wholly elitist: What you display should be extremely hard to find, yet could have been theoretically found by absolutely anyone six months ago (had they possessed the foresight). This is why calculated adult coolness would reward the possession of, say, a can of Elf soda pop, yet frown upon the possession of, say, four ounces of weapons-grade uranium.3
The impact of this understanding comes later in life, usually at college, and usually around the point when being “weird” starts to be periodically interpreted by others as “charming” and/or “sexually intriguing.” As noted earlier, kids don’t really understand the nuance of cereal advertising until they reach their twenties; this is when characters like the Trix Rabbit evolve into understated Christ figures. And though the plot is not purposeful on the behalf of cereal makers, it’s also not accidental. Cereal mascots are generally associated with sugared cereals—while a box of Wheaties might feature anyone from Bruce Jenner to Michelle Kwan, Count Chocula sticks with its mischievous vampire. Super Golden Crisp sells itself with the portrait of a laid-back bear wearing a mock turtleneck; Grape Nuts sells itself with a photograph of Grape Nuts. And this is more proof of cereal’s overlooked relationship to American cool: Being cool is mostly ridiculous, and so is sugared cereal. That’s why we like it.
I eat sugared cereal almost exclusively. This is because I’m the opposite of a “no-nonsense” guy. I’m an “all-nonsense” guy. Every time I drive a long distance, I’m hounded by the fear that I will get a flat tire and be unable to change it. When a button falls off one of my dress shirts, I immediately throw away the entire garment and buy a new one. I can’t swim; to me, twelve feet of water is no different than twelve feet of hydrochloric acid (it will kill me just as dead). However, I can stay awake for seventy-two straight hours. I can immediately memorize phone numbers without writing them down. When flipping channels during commercial breaks in televised sporting events, I can innately sense the perfect moment to return to what I was watching originally. So the rub is that I have these semicritical flaws and I have these weirdly specific gifts, and it seems like most Americans are similarly polarized by what they can (and cannot) do. There are no-nonsense people, and there are nonsense people. And it’s been my experience that nonsense people tend to consume Cocoa Krispies and Lucky Charms and Cap’n Crunch ( “nonsense food,” if you will). Consequently, we nonsense types spend hours and hours staring at cardboard creatures like the Trix Rabbit and absorbing his ethos, slowly ingesting the principles of exclusionary coolness while rapidly ingesting sugar-saturated spoonfuls of Vitamin B-12.
The desire to be cool is—ultimately—the desire to be rescued. It’s the desire to be pulled from the unwashed masses of society. It’s the desire to be advanced beyond the faceless humanoid robots who will die unheralded deaths and never truly matter, mostly because they all lived the same pedestrian life. Without the spoils of exclusionary coolness, we’re just cogs in the struggle. We’re like a little kid trying to kayak (or perhaps freestyle rock climb), and all the older kids keep mocking our efforts, openly implying that we cannot compete. But if we can just find that one cool thing that nobody else has—that gregarious, nine-foot animated jungle cat who can provide a glimmer of hope and a balanced breakfast—we can be better than ourselves. We can be tigers. ’Atta boy.
1. Proof that America is ultimately a sympathetic nation surfaced in 1976, when a consumer election sponsored by General Mills indicated that over 99 percent of Trix eaters felt the flamboyant six-foot rabbit deserved a bowl of Trix, which places his approval rating on par with Colin Powell in 1996.
2. This is not to be confused with the short-lived Oatmeal Cookie Crisp, a cereal fronted by the good-natured wizard “Cookie Jarvis.”
3. Although this would make you very cool in Syria.
; The three questions I ask everybody I meet in order to decide if I can love them:
1. Let us assume you met a rudimentary magician. Let us assume he can do five simple tricks—he can pull a rabbit out of his hat, he can make a coin disappear, he can turn the ace of spades into the Joker card, and two others in a similar vein. These are his only tricks and he can’t learn any more; he can only do these five. HOWEVER, it turns out he’s doing these five tricks with real magic. It’s not an illusion; he can actually conjure the bunny out of the ether and he can move the coin through space. He’s legitimately magical, but extremely limited in scope and influence. Would this person be more impressive than Albert Einstein?
2. Let us assume that a fully grown, completely healthy Clydesdale horse has his hooves shackled to the ground while his head is held in place with thick rope. He is conscious and standing upright, but completely immobile. And let us assume that—for some reason—every political prisoner on earth (as cited by Amnesty International) will be released from captivity if you can kick this horse to death in less than twenty minutes. You are allowed to wear steel-toed boots. Would you attempt to do this?
3. Let us assume that there are two boxes on a table. In one box, there is a relatively normal turtle; in the other, Adolf Hitler’s skull. You have to select one of these items for your home. If you select the turtle, you can’t give it away and you have to keep it alive for two years; if either of these parameters are not met, you will be fined $999 by the state. If you select Hitler’s skull, you are required to display it in a semi-prominent location in your living room for the same amount of time, although you will be paid a stipend of $120 per month for doing so. Display of the skull must be apolitical. Which option do you select?
11 Being Zack Morris 1:27
Sometimes I’m a bad guy, but I still do good things. Ironically, those good things are often a direct extension of my badness. And this makes me even worse, because it means my sinister nature is making people unknowingly smile.
Here’s one example: I was once dating a girl in a major American city, and I was also kind of pursuing another girl in another major American city. I had just received one of those nifty “CD burners” for my computer, so I started making compilation albums for friends and particularly for lady friends. Like most uncreative intellectual men, almost all of my previous relationships had been based on my ability to make incredibly moving mix cassettes; though I cannot prove it, I would estimate that magnetic audiotape directly influenced 66 percent of my career sexual encounters. However, the explosion of CD burning technology has forced people like me to create CDs instead of cassettes, which is somewhat disheartening. The great thing about mix tapes was that you could anticipate the listener would have to listen to the entire thing at least once (and you could guarantee this by not giving them a track listing). Sequencing was very important. The strategy was to place specific “message” songs in-between semimeaningless “rocking” songs; this would transfix, compliment, and confuse the listener, which was always sort of the goal. However, once people starting making their own CDs, the mix tape suddenly seemed cheap and archaic. I had no choice but to start making CDs, even though they’re not as effective: People tend to be more impressed by the packaging of the jewel case than the songs themselves, and they end up experiencing the music no differently than if they had thoughtlessly purchased the disc at Best Buy (i.e., they skip from track to track without really studying the larger concept behind the artistic whole).
ANYWAY, I was making a mix disc for one of these women (I will never admit which), and it was my intention to find eighteen songs that reflected key elements of our relationship, which I thought I did. But as I looked at the track selection, it suddenly dawned on me that these songs were just as applicable to my other relationship. My feelings for “Woman A” were completely different than my feelings for “Woman B,” but the musical messages would make emotional sense to both, despite the fact that these two women were wildly dissimilar. So I ended up making two copies of this album and sending one to each woman, using all the same songs and identical cover art (computers make this entirely too easy). I expressed identical romantic overtures to two different people with one singular movement. And they both received their discs on the same day, and they both loved them.1
Part of me will always know this was a diabolical thing to do. However, I’m mostly struck by the fact that all my deepest, most sincere feelings are so totally stereotypical that they pretty much apply to every girl I find even vaguely attractive. My feelings toward every woman I’ve ever loved can be completely explained by Paul McCartney’s “Maybe I’m Amazed,” Rod Stewart’s “You’re in My Heart,” and either Matthew Sweet’s “Girlfriend” or Liz Phair’s “Divorce Song” (depending on how long we’ve known each other). My feelings about politics and literature and mathematics and the rest of life’s minutiae can only be described through a labyrinthine of six-sided questions, but everything that actually matters can be explained by Lindsey fucking Buckingham and Stevie fucking Nicks in four fucking minutes. Important things are inevitably cliché, but nobody wants to admit that. And that’s why nobody is deconstructing Saved by the Bell.
Saved by the Bell is like this little generational secret that’s hyperfamiliar to people born between 1970 and 1977, yet generally unremarkable to anyone born after (and completely alien to all those born before). It was an NBC sitcom that ran for four years (1989 to 1993) after an initial thirteen-episode season on the Disney Channel (where it was originally titled Good Morning, Miss Bliss). The show spawned two spin-offs—Saved by the Bell: The College Years and Saved by the Bell: The New Class—and also included a six-episode summer run (usually referred to as the “Malibu Sands” miniseason) and two made-for-TV movies (one set in Hawaii, the other in Las Vegas).
It was a program about high school kids.
I realize that is not much expository information. Typically, one tries to explain TV shows in terms of “context”—if someone asked me to describe The X-Files, for example, I would seem like a moron if I said, “It was a program about two people who mostly looked for aliens.” That would never qualify as a significant description. I would have to write about how the supernatural religiosity of The X-Files personified a philosophical extension of its audience, and how the characters represented two distinct perspectives on modern reality, and how the sexual chemistry between Mulder and Scully was electrified by their lack of physical intimacy. All this abstract deconstruction is necessary, and it’s necessary because The X-Files was artful. However, I have never watched even one episode of The X-Files, because I’m not interested. I’m not interested in trying to understand culture by understanding that particular show, and that’s part of the social contract with appreciating anything artful. You can’t place something into its aforementioned “context” unless you know where (and how) to culturally file it, and I honestly don’t care where The X-Files belongs in the American zeitgeist. Dozens of smart people told me how great this show was, and I’m sure they were right. But I’m satisfied with assuming that program was about two people who mostly looked for aliens, so—as a consequence—the show meant nothing to me. I “don’t get it.”
That’s not the case with Saved by the Bell. Saved by the Bell wasn’t artful at all. Now, that doesn’t mean it’s bad (nor does it mean it’s good). What it means is that you don’t need to place Saved by the Bell into any context to experience it. I didn’t care about Saved by the Bell any more than I cared about The X-Files, but the difference is that I could watch Saved by the Bell without caring and still have it become a minor part of my life, which is the most transcendent thing any kind of art can accomplish (regardless of its technical merits).
When I first saw Saved by the Bell, I was a senior in high school. It was on Saturday mornings, usually right when I woke up (which I think was either 11:00 or 11:30 A.M.). It was supposedly the first live-action show NBC ever broadcast on a Saturday morning, an idiom that had previously been reserved for anim
ation. I would watch Saved by the Bell the same way all high school kids watch morning television, which is to say I stared at it with the same thoughtless intensity I displayed when watching the dryer. I watched it because it was on TV, which is generally the driving force behind why most people watch any program. However, I became a more serious Saved by the Bell student when I got to college. I suspect this kind of awakening was not uncommon, as universities always spawn little cultures of terrible TV appreciation: When I was a sophomore, the only non-MTV shows anyone seemed to watch were Saved by the Bell, Life Goes On (that was the show about the retarded kid), Quantum Leap, the Canadian teen drama Fifteen, and Days of Our Lives. And what was interesting was that everybody seemed to watch them together, in the same room (or over the telephone), and with a cultic intensity. We liked the “process” of watching these shows. The idea of these programs being entertaining never seemed central to anything, which remains the most fascinating aspect of all televised art: consumers don’t demand it to be good. It just needs to be watchable. And the reason that designation can be applied to Saved by the Bell has a lot to do with the fundamental truth of its staggering unreality.
Saved by the Bell followed the lives of six kids at a California high school called Bayside. Architecturally, the school was comprised of one multipurpose classroom, one square hallway, a very small locker room, and a diner owned by a magician. The six primary characters were as follows:
Zack Morris (Mark-Paul Gosselaar): Good-looking blond kid with the ability to talk directly to the camera like Ferris Bueller; possessed a cell phone years before that was common; something of an Eddie Haskell/James Spader type, but with a heart of gold.