I'll develop this more some time, but one can say that Arrested Development was so amazing precisely because it grasped the form of the television show more precisely than any other program, ever. What I mean by "grasped" is that it did not just combine the sitcom and the drama, Seinfeld and Larry Sanders, but internalized it, made the tension of the two the motor of its humor. Just look at the following exchange:Gob: Busy?
Michael: Actually, I'm--
Gob: Check this out, my lips don't move. You call me up to the stand, say something like, "Who's this little friend," and he'll say:
Franklin (outfitted with Judge Reinhold magazine-ad-recording-device): My name is Judge.
Gob: Who's name is Judge?
Franklin: My name is--
Gob: That's a silly name!
Franklin: Judge. My name--
Gob: Yes I am judging your name! It am silly!
Franklin: Is--
Gob: Oh! Now you're correcting my grammar!
Michael: Gob, not gonna put Franklin on the stand. And you're lips are moving just a little bit.
Franklin: Judge.
Gob: He's right. His name is Judge now.
What's so amazing about this--besides Will Arnett's acting, which is absolutely unbelievable--is that all we get is the same sentence repeated different ways. But not in the form: in the content. This is what is so striking, and so hilarious, and so typical of Arrested Development: here we have in miniature how the program picks up where it leaves off and yet always repeats itself, how it gets caught in (or catches itself up in) a logic of repetition that actually manages to go nowhere.
To be a bit clearer, what the sitcom or the drama always plays off of is that the show repeats with a difference the plot and the characters and the general look of the show with each new episode. In this repetition, jokes are made or, if it is a serious drama, character development or emotion gets enacted. But what we get here is the logic of the dialogue, the humor, the jokes, mirrors the logic of the sitcom and drama itself--it internalizes this form to the utmost and then throws it back at us, or rather at the program, and becomes the rule of its development. Everything has been repeated even before it comes on the scene, so that when it appears, it only enacts a pas de thèse, a thesis, a positing of something, that at the same time as it takes this step, has already consigned itself to not take a step. Out of this stepping/not-stepping, this running in place, we get the humor of the show.
If I used a Derridian play on a phrase, pas de thèse, to describe this, it is because this is a Derridian show more than any other. He was famously asked whether Seinfeld exhibited deconstruction, because it was ironic, to which Derrida responded with a no. Indeed, as he said, no television show is deconstruction--what an absurd question to ask!--but there is a logic within the text of a show that can enact certain structures that one finds characteristic of Derrida's work--particularly his work on Hegel. The auto-affection or running in place of the continual repetitiveness in Arrested Development might be a form of Derridian dialectic. I think at least trying to pair the two in an effort to show why exactly (in a Freudian way, similar to his book on jokes) Arrested Development is absolutely hilarious can indeed illustrate the general tenor of certain things he gets at.
This all revolves around the simple question of how we could actually get a new show each week, given the fact that in each show, a lot of it of it is watching previous shows!
2 comments:
I'll check out that essay--it seems problematic precisely because it seems to succumb to the notion that the television still reflects reality and doesn't from the beginning already chop it up and render it into "information:" but it sounds interesting! Have you read Sam Weber's Mass Mediauras? I'm sure you have--its awesome: he has an essay on television in there where he actually goes through and tries to tease out of the word "tele-vision" what it actually means---"setting-at-a-distance." I don't know how that bears on us here, but its kind of cool.
What's interesting is that I think all the things I've heard on television just look at the news: none really go into shows, and especially into comedy, where I think the real genius of television lies now as a form. Maybe with Seinfeld, but all I hear there is comparisons to plays like Wildes' etc. Cartoons would be even more interesting to look at--especially cause Bender's demon-alter-ego in that category is Mickey Mouse and Lizzy Mcguire.
A place where the form/content distinction is rebelled against is 24, which just tries to make them equal: the time of the show being the time of the content depicted in the show. Thus the weird fetish-experience of the 24, which has to do with how it fights and struggles (the stupid editing and effects--don't they reveal this futile fight and isn't it frustrating, ultimately, to watch?) against its medium to try and give us the real, while what we only really get is a further distancing of us from reality. Its a perfect instance of what is not a sort of arrested dialectic that Derrida likes, but a Hegelian redoubling that pretends to give you something different through its mediation--when all that is is just a crude semblance of actual difference.
I've been reading plays from just after the turn of the 17th century, and they really remind me of some of the best aspects of current television.
The theatrical audience at the time was one of the most sophisticated dramatic audiences that has ever existed--the London theater was cheap, prolific, and constantly new--and I'm astounded by how similar their meditations on form and content are to some contemporary work.
It makes me wonder what happens next, after shows like Arrested Development and Curb Your Enthusiasm have reacted to the existing artistic form.
England had a civil war.
Matthew
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