The Power of Satire
Isaac Davis: Has anybody read that Nazis are gonna march in New Jersey? Y'know, I read this in the newspaper. We should go down there, get some guys together, y'know, get some bricks and baseball bats and really explain things to them.
Party Guest: There is this devastating satirical piece on that on the Op Ed page of the Times, it is devastating.
Isaac Davis: Well, a satirical piece in the Times is one thing, but bricks and baseball bats really gets right to the point. It's hard to satirise a guy in shiny boots.
- Woody Allen's 1979 movie Manhattan
The above excellently lambasts the impotence of liberals intelligentsia vis-a-vis something like fascism and is one of my favourite parts of the movie. It is also however, fundamentally incorrect.
It is wrong because satire actually works well when used against people with shiny boots. In fact, of all it's targets it best against such people. Don't get me wrong, if fascists are on the march then Isaac's right - you'll want to get some guys together with some bricks and bats. But before it gets to that stage ridicule is probably the most potent weapon available.
This is true because fascism requires in order to be a force that people take it seriously. Again, this is not to suggest fascism can be defeated by clever op-ed pieces, nor does it mean there won't be a time for baseball bats. But for fascism to be seen as some great spiritual revival it (or whatever) requires people to be in a particular mental state. This is why there are anthems, symbolism and marching. It is like a horror movie - the music, lighting and actors all have to work together to maintain the terror in the audience. If someone in the audience laughs then the spell is broken and we see what is really there, most usually a blonde with limited acting skills in a tight top as some clichéd music screeches away in the background.
Ideas in this sense build a house of cards and when one suddenly is pulled away as a result. It's not just fascism. Take the idea of an absolute monarchy, where the king or queen is the total ruler of a nation.
Against such a structure let's concoct a piece of satire. We'll imagine a scenario where the king's main advisor has just quit. Somewhere someone publishes a rather crude cartoon : A picture of the king, sitting on a toilet looking in a confused manner at some toilet paper while two servants look on. One servant says to the other 'So it's true - without help he really doesn't know how to wipe his own arse.'
And so it is suggested simultaneously that the king is a man with bodily functions like anyone else and also he is actually less competent than the average child. And instantly punctures it the ideas behind a monarch : that he is a figure chosen by God to lead to people - that he is a serious and wise figure and so on.
How could a king respond to such mockery? Ban the cartoon, which would give the piece more attention and confirm his own lack of sense of humour? Or does he leave the idea that he is an incompetent buffoon out in the zeitgeist? Either way damage is done.
Or take religious fundamentalists. People have said that forces like Al-Qaeda are somehow 'unsatirisable', but they are the easiest people of all to mock Sure, they may not care - as with Isaac's fascists - but that is different. The object of satire is not to make the King think he is a fool, it is to make everyone else think he is a fool.
And as the recent Danish cartoons of the prophet Mohammed shown, people who hold religious beliefs strongly are the very easiest to mock. The resultant protests showed how much many Muslims cared about such things. And as any child who has encountered bullying or taunting learns : you should never show you care. I suspect that in the next twenty years (as Islamaphobia grows) you will see an incredible torrent of abuse and ridicule poured onto Mohammed and representations thereof. There will probably be (if there is not already) some gay porno where someone dressed as Mohammed (or Bin Laden) has several dozen men ejaculate on his face after he is fucked in the arse. Why? Because it will piss people off, and that is enough for some people.
What every child eventually learns about insults is the J Russell Lynes quotation :
If you can't ignore an insult, top it; if you can't top it, laugh it off; and if you can't laugh it off, it's probably deserved.
And in a sidewise sort of way, we've arrived at my point. You see unlike fascism and religious fundamentalism there is another blot on human civilisation which I've come to see as basically immune to satire. And that is the phenomenon of 'celebrity culture'.
By this, I mean the trend where trivia about nonentities come to media communications generally. Yes : Big Brother, manufactured boy bands, Hollywood 'stars' and their inexplicably dull lives.
It is not something I write about particularly because that would miss the point (as I'll now explain) but I'm breaking my own rule to make some things clear.
You see, I have an illness. Well, a personality disorder really. Or better put I have many personality disorders. One of these disorders is an overwhelming desire to be a complete and utter know-it-all. Not that I think I know a great deal or that I am not aware of the cavernous gaps in my own knowledge. No, I am referring to knowing things on a much more banal and uninteresting level. Not general curiosity about the world (which is obviously a healthy driver in any persons education) but more a sort of low level nosiness.
So, someone at work will be having a conversation that I am in earshot of. They will then ask something like 'What does EKCFG mean?'. Then, I will interrupt my work regardless of what I am doing alt-tab to IE and find myself (should I not know) on Google typing in 'define:EKCFG'. I do not know exactly why I do this, but there we go. It is not simply to appear smart - in most cases, I do not even bother letting the person know. I just would be annoyed not to know.
The disturbing thing is, and most of you will probably have similar experiences is about how much you don't need to google. Despite years of alcohol and drug abuse my brain still seems to hold in it a disturbing amount of unimportant things about a dearth of subjects. We all have this, about all sorts of things. Which year which movie was released in. About which side project of which band released a particular single and what position in the charts it got into, and so on. I'm sure that everyone finds themselves at some point thinking 'How the hell do I know that?'.
And without doubt, the most disturbing example of this is how much I find myself knowing about the lifestyles of the rich and the famous.
Celeb Culture More Generally
I won't spare too much time criticising this trend - it's been done by writers more eloquent than I. But an example. I returned home from Slimes this morning to find CNN on in the front room. The report was about Anna Nicole Smith's death and the subsequent struggle over her child's paternity. I did not time the report but I estimate it was three minutes or so, with a short interview with her former attorney (I think) plus comments from somebody whose name or significance I did not catch. The report, by today's, standards was nothing special.
Let's think about this for a moment. This was CNN, an international (allegedly respectable) news broadcaster with millions of viewers across the globe. And it was covering the death of one young woman in rather ordinary circumstances. The case does not highlight any new or interesting legal or medical point of which we should all be aware of. The woman herself had no political, economic or cultural significance in particular and in general the issue is not a particularly good example of, well - anything really.
Instead, her death is being given coverage because she is famous. And it is through coverage like this that trivia seeps into our minds. I do not care that Ms Smith has died, I do not care about her baby and nor do I care for the insights of her former attorney. I do not care to know the fact that her child has left the island of Barbados but now I know and I cannot easily unknow it. Apologies to those of you who did not care to know either but I hope you can forgive me for illustrating a broader point.
So why did the story get coverage? Well, firstly you could argue that as CNN and it's ilk are twenty-four hour stations they have to fill their airtime with something and this is quick and easy for them. Likewise, because there are four free London newspapers now (the Metro, the London Paper, London Light and City AM) there are four times as many column inches to fill. And thus this sort of news is pollyfilla which can be squeezed in to take up as much space as required.
And from the media outlets perspective there is some truth to all this. It's much easier (and cheaper) to sit at a desk in London and tap out some nonsense plagiarised from an internet forum about how some airhead propositioned some other airhead in a Hollywood parking lot than it is having correspondents around the world producing real coverage. But from a media recipients perspective should we care what is cheaper for them to produce? Why should we have to put up with substandard fare simply because they wish to cut costs? There is plenty going on in the world to fill every second of CNN, Sky News, BBC News 24 and he rest - without resorting to this kind of drivel.
The second (and more important) argument for such coverage is they are responding to demand. People want to know. And the scary thing is, I think they're right. Some people do want to know whether Britney has been dumped or who Paris Hilton was seen coming out of a restaurant with or whatever. And this could be for two reasons :
- Some people are just inherently shit.
- The need for closure.
The first we cannot do much about. But what do I mean by closure? Well, people may genuinely want to know what happens with Anna Nicole Smith's child simply because the story has begun to be told and so you must find out what happens next. If I said to you, 'Do you care about what happens to Jill Smith's baby?' you'd presumably ask 'Who?'. But if I told you about a girl I knew, who had been pregnant and who was rushed to hospital yesterday with some labour complications then, in at least some of you, a small amount of curiosity would be created as to how she would do. This seems natural.
And this is what I'd term 'the soap-opera effect'. Even the people who watch soap operas will often admit how silly they are but there is still a grim determination to find out what happens next, as if waiting for the punch line of a bad joke. But in the soaps at least, this is a punch-line which never comes. If the writers are in anyway competent they will have started the thread of a new storyline before the old is completed and so keep you hooked forever with all the self-respect of a meth addict.
Indeed, I would admit that this 'soap opera effect' probably applies to some of the television I watch. Smallville is a basically poor show, but I still find myself watching it week after week, if only to find out what horror the writers are going to inflict upon us. And once you've started, you might as well see it through to the end. At least Smallville will end. With the major soap operas, there's a good chance they will outlive some of us.
And so we want to know more about Anna Nicole Smith because we already know a little bit. But at least she is famous for something - she basically sucked off some old billionaire to inherit his fortune. Whatever the moral and legal issues raised by this, it's kind of an event, albeit not the sort of one I'd fill my newspaper with if I was an editor.
But moving onto the next level we have people like Paris Hilton who, to quote Kelly Osborne is basically famous 'for sucking cock in a porno' (you see, why do I know Kelly Osborne said that? Who put that knowledge into my brain? Why do I ever know who Kelly Osborne is?). Now whatever our personal feeling towards young woman sucking cock we should admit it is not a particular unique event in global history. Even if we were to restrict numbers down to just women who have sucked cock on camera, should we ever desire to assemble all those who have done this we would need some football stadiums to put the resultant crowds in.
And it goes without saying that most of these women are not famous. So unlike Ms Smith (who, by marrying an old billionaire has done something most of us will never do) Ms Hilton is not famous for anything in particular, aside from being wealthy in the first place. If we continue downward on this celebrity ladder we arrive (especially in this country) people who are famous merely for being famous.
And while this trend seems to be getting worse, it is not new. The criminally under appreciated animated show Duckman had an episode where the protagonist accidentally gains fame and has the world's media camped out on his front lawn. One television journalist summarises the situation perfectly : 'Now live to the ongoing Duckman crisis : Not because the story is important, but because the constant coverage we give it makes it important'.
And this is more or less it. The media can select someone (more or less at random, although it helps if they are particularly crass, stupid or good looking) and amplify them into a world important figure. Eventually many of us find ourselves thinking - who is this person? Why are they are on television? Did they really say that Hollywood starlet is too fat to be a Bond girl? What are their opinions on origami. Etc, etc.
Once again I would re-emphasise nothing I am saying here is new and I suspect what I am saying here is understood by most thinking persons. I am interested, however in the response. A lot of people notice how shit the news is these days, where the BBC covers such drivel and such we all pay for. And one response is to get very angry (a little like I am doing here) and the other is ridicule or satire. Both miss the point (yes, including this post).
Satire, as discussed earlier, is a powerful tool in some circumstances. And unsurprisingly it's been used against celebrities in a variety of fashions. I was not a viewer but I have heard many people sing the praises of the Channel 4 program Pop World. From what I understand, the programs gimmick was basically taking the piss out of musicians. So in interviews they would make guests appear stupid by simply denying them the usual respect they might be given or asking them foolish questions or whatever. And while this sort of thing (and even shows like Brass Eye, which I was a personal fan of) may be amusing I think they actually contribute to the problem.
You see, there is no point in making Britney Spears look stupid. It's utterly redundant. Even with 'stars' who might take themselves more seriously, what's the point in mocking them? There's no point in pointing out this is all bullshit - we all know it's bullshit. Unlike the monarchy or religious fundamentalism all that a modern celebrity demands is that they are famous. By putting them on television, even if it is to call them a cunt you are acknowledging that they are worth insulting in the first place. It is not worth writing a blog condemning how shit Big Brother is because that implies it is something which requires the attention of thinking people in the first place. And that is why satire or even criticism (like this blog entry) is part of the problem.
So what is the solution? To Big Brother, to manufactured pop bands, to wealthy heiresses who suck cock on or off camera? Well, as every child is taught : quite simply : to ignore them until they go away. There is no point condemning them, or conducting interviews with stars so they look like idiots or even getting angry in your office at someone who starts telling you about Big Brother.
As I see it, there are three types of people regarding this issue.
- The first, will have no idea who any of the people mentioned above are. These are the most truly excellent of persons which we should all aspire to be. Keep up the good work.
- The second, will be people who buy Heat magazine, who genuinely care about whatever the media have selected for the love/hate of the week and who can't wait for Big Brother to start again. These people are the enemies of human civilisation and we should try to systematically ignore them.
- The third will be everyone else in the middle. They're aware on some level something is terribly wrong with the mass media, with the drivel pumped out under the guise of entertainment news. And although they hate it, they're not really sure what to do. They might pick up Heat magazine while in the dentists waiting room, or if they are on a train and someone's left a copy so they can sneer at it. Quite obviously by writing this blog I am in this category. I will seek to rejoin the first however.
Pledges Against Further Denigration of Our Culture
And so, my personal pledges I would ask people to consider in their own lives.
1. I will not buy any newspaper or magazine which covers these stories in any depth (or at all if possible). Or watch any related television show, or buy an CD related to any hype merchants, etc.
2. I will attempt to not buy products advertised along with such coverage (although this is tricky if you're not watching these things in the first place). I would not even bother telling people why you're not buying such things, let the companies work it out.
3. I will not get into arguments or discuss (except tangentially) any aspects of this cultural stain. I will not write tedious blogs like this one on the subject.
4. I will attempt to distance myself from persons who are likely to discuss such things. I saw once a Livejournal post where someone said they would delete anyone from their friends list who discussed Big Brother. This seems a most excellent policy to have (although it might be best not to tell people why you're doing it and simply ignore people who do this).
Hopefully that should be enough.
As always, I hope you are all well."
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