Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now (4 page)

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 delivered 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.

Gump’s lack of awareness allows him to fall, by sheer luck, into good fortune at every turn. He becomes a war hero and multimillionaire by blindly stumbling through life with nothing more than the good morals his mom taught him, while the people around him who seem more aware of their circumstances drop like flies from war wounds, AIDS, and other disasters. In this story’s traditionally narrative schema, Gump is saved and most everyone else is damned. The impending unpredictability of life beyond narrative is reinterpreted as a box of chocolates—“You never know what you’re gonna get.” But it’s a box of chocolates! You can pretty well count on getting a chocolate as long as you don’t reach outside of the box into the real world of sharp rocks and biting bugs. The opening sequence of the movie tells it all: in one continuous shot a feather floats on the wind, effortlessly wandering over the rooftops of a small, perfect town, and lands at Gump’s feet, either coincidentally or by divine will. Of course, it was neither luck nor God’s guiding the feather’s path, but the will of the movie’s director, who used cinematic trickery to create the continuous sequence. Just like Gump, we, the audience, are kept ignorant of the special effects, edits, and superimpositions, as technology is exploited to make the facade look seamless and real. And what does Gump do with the feather? He puts it in an old box with his other collected trinkets—contained, like everything else, within his oversimplified narrative.

If
Forrest Gump
could be considered a defender of the narrative worldview, its mid-1990s contemporary, Quentin Tarantino’s
Pulp Fiction
, may be thought of as its opposite. Where Gump offers us a linear, if rewritten, historical journey through the decades since World War II,
Pulp Fiction
compresses imagery from those same years into a stylistic pastiche. Every scene has elements from almost every decade—a 1940s-style suit, a 1950s car, a 1970s telephone, a 1990s retro nightclub—forcing the audience to give up its attachment to linear history and accept instead a vision of American culture as a compression of a multitude of eras, and those eras themselves being reducible to iconography as simple as a leather jacket or dance step. The narrative technique of the film also demands that its audience abandon the easy plot tracking offered by sequential storytelling. Scenes occur out of order and dead characters reappear. On one level we are confused; on another, we are made privy to new kinds of information and meaning. The reordering of sequential events allows us to relate formerly nonadjacent moments of the story to one another in ways we couldn’t if they had been ordered in linear fashion. If we watch someone commit a murder in one scene, our confusion about his motivations can be answered by going backward in time in the very next scene. The movie’s final protagonist, Bruce Willis, comically risks his life to retrieve the single heirloom left to him by his father: his watch.
Pulp Fiction
delights in its ability to play with time, and in doing so shows us the benefits of succumbing to the chaos of a postnarrative world. The object of the game is to avoid getting freaked out by the resulting gaps, juxtapositions, and discontinuity.