Fox: Trucking in Ignorance Across the Dial

Much has been written and said over the years about Fox News and its troubled relationship with the truth. Yet while it does continue to dominate cable news (Ratings), the average age of a Fox News viewer was recently reported as 68-years-old (versus 60 for MSNBC and 62-64 for network news), white (only 1.5 percent black) and conservative (Daily Mail). And there has been a steady decline overall in those watching a network where you are likely to hear the same general perspective every hour of every day, only contrasting in the content. With Fox News, as Marshall McLuhan once argued in a more general sense, the medium really is the message, and the daily content irrelevant to the conservative worldview it consistently provides.

What occurred to me the other day, as I tried to give the show The Following a chance was how often the programming on the other networks of Fox serve a similar purpose to the News stations, from a different vantage point. If Fox News trucks in framing all news in a way that serves the conservative ideology, the rest of the Fox family of stations sells another essential feature of Chomsky’s Propaganda Model with even greater verve – distracting the masses toward early onset dementia. We see it across their programming, from their addiction to reality television that sells the American Dream and dour views of humanity to the obsession with celebrity culture, the spectacle and, maybe most importantly, naïve ignorance as the highest virtue a character can aspire toward.

The Following was a show that earned some early hype for its shocking violence and the slick visual world it created. For many, including me, that surface appeal quickly waned as one realized that there was little below the surface of a cat and mouse game between a damaged detective and a deranged serial killer. If that sounds familiar, well, of course … that is one of the key formulas for success on television, as well as in non Super Hero films, in the post-exhaustion-of-ideas world we live in today. The Following takes cliché to heretofore-unreached heights with an endless procession of trite conversations, pathetic attempts at profundity, endless chase scenes, narrow escapes and FBI agents being made to look like they must have attended the Rosco P. Coltrane school of policing. There is also a surfeit of flashbacks that sometimes seem to serve no purpose but to fill up time before another shoot-out scene (generally with both knives and guns). The show was cancelled after three seasons, but how it got that far and how some fans and even critics could claim it as worthwhile, is truly hard to understand.

Shows like this test the viewers intelligence by forcing them to assess how much stupidity in narrative structure and dialogue they can take. For me it was 15 episodes, to be fair, but I had a nasty cold and was doing other things as the show droned on in the background. Yet this attachment to simplicity and the celebration of a particularly American form of naïve obliviousness is really a staple of the Fox worldview. Take the popular shows that pushed the network toward respectability – The Simpsons and Married with Children. While The Simpsons is a brilliant show under the surface, its celebration of the virtue of ignorance is probably the reason it has lasted so long and been so popular.

Looking at the lineup for this Fall on Fox and FX, we see that dedication to ignorance as a lifestyle choice in clear focus. A representative sample includes Are You Smarter than a 5^th Grader?, Family Guy, Bordertown, Bob’s Burger, Bullseye, Anger Management, The League, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Mike and Molly among a host of others. This is coupled with reality shows where simple narratives of good and evil – and talent – prevail and celebrity news like TMZ fill in the spaces between. While there are a few shows that do demand more of the audience, the general tendency is to play to our basest instincts and celebrate ignorance and dude culture as if these are the natural state of existence for all humans, at least of the male variety.

Ignorance might in fact be bliss, as Fox seems to often indirectly aver, but it certainly does little to improve our material condition or quality of life. When it comes to democracy, ignorance is the quickest route to its destruction.  

What Mad Men Can Tell Us About Contemporary Culture

Mad Men recently ended its seven-year run as one of the most rewarded and respected shows in cable television history, even as it has its many detractors (see here, here and here). There is no question that the show captured something deep in the American psyche and was a second coup for creator, director and writer Matthew Weiner (of Sopranos, for those not paying attention). The final episode certainly elicited a wave of reactions, with many disappointed by the too tight wrap-up of the many interconnected stories, while others were disappointed by the ambiguity of Don’s denouement. Rather than add yet another analysis of that episode, I thought I would consider some of the broader implications of the show’s critical and popular success:

1. Misogyny is still alive and kicking across the dial: for all the claims that more female voices are being heard and seen on television and in film, the industry is still dominated by male writers, producers and directors (to the tune of over 80 percent). And Mad Men is a show that seems particularly disturbing on the question of female empowerment. Sure it shows the struggles of working women in the 60s and 70s trying to garner success and respect, but are any of the female characters truly redeemed in the end? Trudy takes back Peter after years of betrayal and a relatively long abandonment, Joan is still a single mother who literally sold her body for success (and chose a career over a man, and probably happiness), Megan has a million dollars but at the expense of the loss of her youthful exuberance and Sally Draper is dying. Peggy does finally find love in the end, to be fair, but it felt somewhat anti-climactic and overridden by the endless procession of women used as objects by the male characters throughout the show’s run. Maybe more troubling than the way they used and abused women throughout the show is the way the women seemed to adapt to this abuse and to pile more abuse on themselves. We see this with the last love interest of Don Draper, who can’t accept his love because she continues to punish herself for abandoning her own family – with sexual shaming her preferred form of self-flagellation. And really, one could make a compelling argument that all of Don’s crimes relate back to his childhood in a whorehouse and a mother who just didn’t love him enough (or at all, to be fair). Women are the enemy and their destruction the collateral damage of men trying to find themselves and an elusive contentment with the American Dream.

2. That transitions smoothly to my second point. Like The Sopranos, it does provide an image of a troubled man who seems to have it all – money, power, sex on the offing and a loving family off in the background – but who is rarely happy and constantly questioning all that he has accomplished. That was the central premise of The Sopranos from the start and thus offered, as did The Godfather, a metaphor for the problem of American capitalism itself. Francis Ford Coppola was overt in his attempt to draw parallels between the destruction of the Corleone family and America, based on their shared lust for power and money against the backdrop of loyalty and tradition, along with the violence that accompanies that search. With Sopranos, it is unclear if this was Weiner’s intention, but it is still clear to see, and it is even more apparent in Mad Men, where characters both living and essentially creatively selling the American dream have trouble finding real pleasure in the former (nor real satisfaction in the latter). By capturing the advertising industry in the 60s, the first few seasons of the show accentuate the battle for the soul of America and the ways the spectacle of consumer culture overtook the fading idealism of the post-War period. The problem with this critique is that it was arguably encased within a narrative that too many men, and maybe women, found so compelling the underlying critique was lost in the desire to live these shallow and unfulfilling lives themselves. One could argue, instead, that it is actually schadenfreude (pleasure in the pain of others) that really drove its loyal viewers, but a combination of the two seems more accurate.

3. While substantially more complex and lyrical than Entourage, hip hop videos or Iron Man, I thus think Mad Men ultimately fits smugly within the genre I like to call “male lifestyle porn.” It is a genre that tends to focus on overgrown boys with money, power and sex drives that would put Hugh Hefner to shame; generally combined with the ultimate importance of male friendship bonds over healthy relationships with the opposite sex. The overgrown boys tend to sleep around, use women for sex, hurt them in their search for self-actualization and never seem to truly overcome their desire to exist in a state of perpetual adolescence. Sure Don Draper has suffered in his quest to break the half century mark of conquests on the road to being loved, but isn’t the sex really his only escape from a life of misery and loneliness, only amplified when he actually grabs that love he so desires? We can also see this with Roger’s endless sexcapades, Peter’s discontent with whomever he happens to be with and the general disregard the majority of the male characters on the show have for women in general.

4. Quality, contemplative television is possible: among the spectacle-addled world of reality television, endless series, remakes, reboots and sequels, sports extravaganza and news as entertainment, Mad Men stood out as a more artistic, tempered experience, unafraid to let the camera linger, to eschew conversation and to draw out storylines across seasons. While it did sometimes play with the tricks of the post-MTV generation, which cut the average movie shot from 10 to 6 seconds, it tends to have longer takes, quiet cameras and more or less follows the Classic Hollywood rules of continuity editing. Some have criticized this aspect of the show, calling it little more than a pretty costume drama, and the mis-en-scene has been stunning throughout, with great color, sets, costumes and the like, but it appears an essential part of the world Weiner is recreating before our eyes. Sure it sometimes used history as a largely pointless backdrop to the narrative, but there was a sense that the show followed Christopher Nolan’s desire to again marry narrative and form into one cohesive whole, rather than two related parts. To a large extent, I believe it succeeded in this daunting task, creating a reality within its fictitious world that felt genuine and authentic.

5. Finally, it is worth noting all of the lines of print and online pixels spent deconstructing the show as I am doing here. Fred Jameson argued a little over 20 years ago that contemporary popular culture WAS culture in America and that history was little more than stylized visions of an idealized past unrelated to the political, economic or social tumult they entailed. Both observations seem particularly relevant to the show, which has become not only a part of our popular culture canon but part of American culture itself, an embodiment of a country that seems more enticed by the fictitious world of others than their own lives. Our obsession with celebrity, with popular culture marginalia with the psychology of characters within fictional worlds all seem to indicate a general malaise outside the world of the spectacle we have so fully embraced. Television changed America from its birth, abetting the Civil Rights Movement, feminist advances, the mobilization against the Vietnam War and, in a broader sense, helped define the normative in American life itself. It changed the nature of neighborhoods, the nature of leisure and, of course, the nature of politics. But the first few decades of television still saw a public that was both politically and socially active. Today, I sense it has gone further, coming to define our political and social lives in ways wholly new and arguably equally troubling. Mad Men was a great television show that challenged audiences to contemplate what the show meant and why we cared. In the process, did it challenge us to ask why we watched it at all? That would be the most worthy legacy of a show that did demonstrate how advertising and TV were overshadowing our past and redefining our future.

Mad Men fascinated me from the beginning as a show that captured a lost America, ultimately the result of the very characters the narrative follows as that slow death occurs. I thought it faltered in the middle before a strong final two seasons where it began to reconcile with its own problematic politics, even if in an unsatisfactory manner. In the end, it was a springboard for other slow moving dramatic television series, like True Detectives, and a show that will probably be written about for years. The real question we should ask ourselves, however, is if the America it showed us is really the one we want to live in and whether, if the answer is no, we can do something to change our collective future.