Another note in a series on Is the American Dream Killing You? by Paul Stiles.
Chapter Five: “Jolts Per Minute”
Yes, this is the one where the author complains about bear-baiting and cock-fighting, which are ... wait a minute, no, evidently that never happened. Nor gladiatorial combats, nor jousting tournaments. Nor football. No, everything is new.
Okay, enough with the cheap shots for a moment. Mr. Stiles makes the point that to the extent that The Market rules, with its impetus to maximize transactions, entertainment and culture (waddevah dat means) will also engage in transaction-maximizing, which means that the market impulse will trump the artistic impulse. “Since the material world is the world of sense, the Market’s primary appeal is sensual rather than intellectual.” This makes sense; entertainment that appeals to the senses is much more likely to lead to transactions than that which appeals to the intellect. That is, it makes sense if you don’t think about it too much. If you think about it too much, you may decide that it’s really difficult to define ‘senses’ and ‘intellect’ in that context without having half an eye to the market you will use to test your thesis. It’s a tautology, then, where intellectual stuff is shown to be less marketable because it is less marketed, and it clearly less connected to the market because it is intellectual, and therefore less marketable. Whee! Let’s go round again! You can tell something is aimed at the senses because it’s connected to the market and material things, and then claim that the market prefers sensual stuff to intellectual stuff, as you can tell by looking at all the connections between sensual stuff and market stuff.
Er, yes. Which is Queer Eye? Oh, yes, sensual. No doubt. All about the products. Frontline? Intellectual. Which is Will and Grace? Between the Lions? March of the Penguins? The DaVinci Code? The Lord of the Rings?
Now, he’s getting to a point that I think is a good one, although he applies it broadly. The Jolts per Minute of his chapter title refers to the idea that if you are selling jolts, you’d better be selling more jolts than the last guy. We get used to one level, and can’t be jolted by that anymore. We’re bored with one murder in a half-hour show, we need three to keep us paying attention. Also, the jolts need to get joltier: if you said bullshit three years ago, saying bullshit won’t jolt anybody, but fuck might. You have to break new taboos: we did adultery two years ago, and a lesbian affair last year, so this year we’ll have a pedophile. So goes the argument, and I think there’s a lot to it. I’m all in favor of busting the dumb taboos, but there are things that are and ought to be taboo, and we should keep those. If the Market is demanding more and better jolts, though, it’s hard not to offer up taboos to the sacrifice, and that’s a problem.
On the other hand, the argument has a couple of flaws. First, you have to apply it narrowly, within specific genres and forms. A bisexual lead character in a police procedural won’t immediately affect sitcoms and soap operas. Also, things don’t all move at the same speed, so that the Jolts per Minute in a news show will be different from the Jolts per Minute in a game show. You can’t just say that across the board things will get more sensual and more depraved every day, particularly since the data show that it doesn’t work like that. There are data, pretty good data I think, that back up the Jolts per Minute point applied narrowly, but I haven’t seen any that convince me that it can be applied broadly.
The other flaw is that it doesn’t allow for the evolution of taboos, but assumes that everything is fixed. The truth is that if you showed an episode of Dave Chappelle’s show (which I have not seen, I’m afraid) to somebody in 1800, it wouldn’t be transgressive, it just wouldn’t make any sense. Over a generation, there grow up new things that we don’t talk about in public, new things that jolt us. And because of the broadcast nature of so much of our entertainment, the producers of entertainment tend to break only those taboos that we want broken, that is, the ones that aren’t really taboo anymore anyway. Yes, they often misjudge that, but ... let’s just ask whether, say, the Bernie Mac show had an episode where Bernie was turned away from a polling place because his name was struck from the rolls, being similar to a felon’s name (or just because). There’s a peculiar combination of sensationalism and timidity in broadcast television; it’s not just jolts per minute.
There are a couple of other points that Mr. Stiles makes that I want to address. One is a commonly used observation that Hollywood makes a lot more R rated movies than G rated movies, but that G rated movies make a lot more money than R rated movies. Mr. Stiles points to this as an odd perversion of the Market’s influence, where movie-makers assume that Jolts are what the Market wants and so produce them even when the real Market tells them not to. Or something. Usually it’s an example of how Hollywood wants to ruin us. Really, though, it’s (everybody together) more complicated than that. Let’s see ... (a) Disney is really, really, really good at marketing children’s movies, and they can’t make twenty a year of those; (2) a children’s movie that is successful will likely be hugely successful, as young children like to see a movie over and over again; (iii) the children’s market is easier to predict and therefore harder to break into than the R-rated market. Anything else? Oh, yes, pursuant to (2), because children like to see movies over and over again, they don’t want to see a new movie every other week, while teenagers want to see a new movie every other week unless it’s Titanic or Rocky Horror, so there will be fewer blockbuster Rs but more successful ones. And, of course, there’s the creative aspect, where it’s just possible that more film-makers are interested in making movies that address adult concerns, and that the market can’t (and shouldn’t) force filmmakers to eschew those concerns just for the paycheck.
Mr. Stiles also addresses the way that porn has managed to become mainstream, at least in a way. That is, although I think there’s still a good deal of stigma attached to buying (much less producing) porn of any kind, there’s also a (contradictory, yes) expectation that everyone has seen some and is familiar with the formulas. There were jokes on Friends, for instance, that only worked if you knew at least a little about video porn, although certainly there was no actual porn shown, and certainly watching porn was shown as unhealthy and shameful (and inherently male as well). I don’t exactly know what to make of this. I happen to like porn myself, although my own preference is for prose pornography, rather than videos or pictorials, so it’s not like the widespread semi-acceptance of porn I don’t happen to like has done me all that much good personally. On the other hand, I think that if my society is going to be screwed up about sex, it’s just as well to be screwed up in a porn-friendly way as a porn-hostile way. On the other other hand, the cognitive dissonance of watching sitcom characters watching porn is, well, dissonant. You know, cognitively. It’s screwed up. And since all this happens at different speeds in different parts of society, you get things like ...
Janet Jackson’s breast! Yes, of course Mr. Stiles will finish this chapter with a discussion of the Incident of the Wardrobe Malfunction in the Halftime. Mr. Stiles takes for granted that the whole thing was planned in advance and that it came off (so to speak) exactly as was planned, which is plausible but not the only plausible scenario. At any rate, he takes for granted that showing one’s bosom—a boob!—degrades both the exposer and the exposee. Further, what was at stake was The Super Bowl, the pinnacle of sport: “What Jackson did was strip that meaning from the game, and from all those who played it and watched it. The game became subordinate to the halftime show and to Jackson herself.” (pp. 139-140) Um, yes. Because the Super Bown is ordinarily meaningful, and hardly commercial at all.
And—I know I should stop, but just one more thing—throughout his discussion of the Incident, all the blame goes to Janet Jackson, as if she thought of the whole thing and pulled it off (as it were) with only minor assistance from other people. What Jackson did, he says. Not what Timberlake did, or what MTV (Viacom) did, or what the choreographer did. Now, in one way it’s nice that he grants Ms. Jackson that kind of agency. On the other hand, that just isn’t what happened. It’s not even one of the plausible scenarios: Ms. Jackson goes to the choreographer and the sponsors and her co-star and says “I’ve got this idea...” I think not. It’s hard not to read Mr. Stiles as just thinking that women are, somehow, obscurely, the problem here; it’s hard for me to actually look at what happened and think that women or even breasts were really the problem.
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.