In Praise Of The Pointless and the Trivial

Sorry Alec, I guess you fulfill an important purpose after all

Not long ago I posted a pretty scathing critique of television and I used Alec Baldwin as the poster boy for poor television. I’m sorry. I have no business getting up on my high horse because if I don’t watch television how can I possibly know what I am talking about? I can’t. Sometimes it is good to not have a point. To just mindlessly exist with no purpose. I’m down with that. I am sick of all this self-important nonsense that I spew. What the hell do I know? Television provides some comfort to many. Our lives consist of work, which we must do in order to survive. Hopefully we like our work, but even then it is still work. When we come home we don’t want to have to think. It is up to us to find meaning in our lives. If you derive satisfaction from television then who am I to deride it? It is a burden to be heavy and significant every moment of your life. The trivial has it’s purpose. It placates the restless anxious mind. That’s a good thing. I think I was being far too harsh on television. True art is a rare thing. If it were common it would cease to have it’s impact and become trivial. Some experiences are meant to be disposable. Enjoyed and then forgotten. Such is television. It never asked to be taken seriously. It was meant to bring a bit of pleasure and information into the average household, to make our lives a little less dreary. There were no lofty expectations, and there ought not be any now. So kick back and watch something fun, something totally dumb and pointless, because that is, in fact, the point. After I wrote that piece, which not surprisingly garnered no likes, I took stock of myself and realized I was full of it. How dare I knock television? By my own admission, I never watch it. FAIL Actually it’s not as bad as all that. It is just entertainment. If you want heavy significance read Nietzsche.

And finally, to belabor the point some more. I find that I often take life far too seriously. I just need to lighten up a bit. Maybe even a lot. I have been spending so much time dangling over the edge of a cliff that I have forgotten how to have fun. Television can offer that, if you let it. You can’t watch television like a critic watches it. That’s no good. Put your judgements in your back pocket and just let it wash over you. Forget all your cares and woes and just cut yourself adrift in an electronic sea. Give yourself a media massage. It helps a lot if you have plenty of chips, a pizza, some soft drinks. Junk food and tv are the perfect combo. You need not become a total couch potato, just restrict yourself to an hour or two of guilt free nonsense. You deserve it. For two hours cease to take yourself seriously, and be a total boob. Have no point and immerse yourself in trivia. That is my advice, although knowing myself as I do I will probably continue to take myself too seriously and indulge in blogging instead of watching television. But I know you will take to this advice with relish, hopefully on a couple of hot dogs. Enjoy!!

Why I Don’t Watch TV

Stone me if you like, but he just isn't all that funny. 30Rock and the Office come off as not particularly good SNL skits, and not the funny SNL, the almost never funny SNL.

I don’t watch much television. People start going on about tv shows and I am in the dark. So I tried watching more tv and you know what? It sucks. Not only does it suck, it sucks badly, really badly. Most of the tv shows I saw are embarrassments. What has happened to the fundamental tenets of plot and character? Now the whole thing is to be too hip for their pants, or whatever. I don’t know what the current lingo is and I don’t care. Fail!!! That’s fine. As for as I’m concerned you could stamp Fail across all of current network television. I like Jon Stewart most of the time, but the suckiness even creeps in there. I attribute this to just plain laziness. Why bust your buns trying to put together something of genuine quality when you can get by with crap. Hasn’t this been the problem with television from the beginning? When I was younger I was still entertained even though I knew it was crap. But now, I have less patience. I have only so much time left, you know? I don’t want to waste it. I watched the first twenty seconds or so of 30 Rock the other night and I couldn’t stand another second of this uninspired ‘look at me aren’t I hip and hilarious’ sitcom, which isn’t a sitcom really. It is just one liners that aren’t funny delivered as though they are the cutting edge of comedy. It made me want to gag. I saw the Office briefly too. Same thing. Cardinal lesson in comedy: do not point to the comedy!!! The audience does not need to be told that the program is funny, it either is or it isn’t. I have to admit, though, that I don’t get a lot of young humor these days. I thought I was missing out on something, but I’m not. It isn’t that I am out of touch, it’s just that none of that stuff is funny. It is trendy. It is faux cool. So I don’t bother with it. Somebody suggested I watch Grimm because of the crazy premise. The premise is interesting but the creators had no clue about how to be truly inventive. So they stuck with formula, make it a stupid thriller, designed to appeal to thirteen year olds. Sorry, I meant to say three year olds, I don’t want to insult thirteen year olds. This show might even insult the intelligence of a three year old. Most movies these days aren’t all that great either. Popular culture today is a wasteland of talent contests and reality show bullshit. I hate it. The music is mostly uninspired as well, You can find interesting exceptions if you try but I am talking about the general trend. Where is the talent? It’s not on television.

The Dark Knight

I was listening to Danny Elfman’s opening credits music for the first Tim Burton Batman film, when I came across a story in the San Francisco Chronicle. A man in Oakland had been walking his tiny little eight pound terrier, when he was approached by a couple of thugs. These guys thought the Red Sox cap and red sweater meant this man belonged to a gang, and proceeded to beat the crap out of him. When the little dog, named Shadow, began barking and trying to protect his owner, the thugs stomped the little dog to death. The music swelled in my headphones as a perfect accompaniment to my rage over this gross injustice. A little dog! What threat did he pose? I wanted to kill those thugs with my bare hands. Such is the birth of Batman.

Batman has remained popular since his inception in  1939, on the eve of the Second World War, because he is us. A human being outraged by the outrageous evil in our everyday lives. His parents were gunned down senselessly, and so the young Bruce Wayne devised a way to strike fear into the hearts of such thugs. Batman appeals to the vigilante within us, but he has a code of conduct. He does not carry a gun, and avoids killing if at all possible. The genius of Batman lies in the fact that although he’s quite gothic, at least in the beginning, and today, he is a beacon of hope within the darkness in which he dwells. He has been represented in various ways throughout his career, but the dark knight is probably the most resonant, especially in today’s dark times. Batman was born in the Depression, as was Superman, and he fought for the underdog. Of course, Bruce Wayne is a rich playboy, but unlike Donald Trump, Bruce Wayne could be imagined visiting an Occupy Wall Street demonstration to offer his qualified support. The wealth was a device to enable Bruce Wayne to support himself while being Batman, and to have a very expensive Batcave lair, with an undoubtedly expensive Batmobile, Batplane, and even a Batsubmarine.

The early Batman comics, which are among my favorites, are spooky. Shadows loom large, and his cape gave Batman a spectral majesty. He was quite operatic, with the cowl and cape, and connects us with antiheroes in literature and film, such as the Phantom of the Opera. He is not an evil figure, and yet he evokes Dracula. His appearance owes a debt to the German expressionists, and stimulates a complex array of emotions, much of it subconscious. But to me, as a snot-nosed kid, he just looked cool.

Unlike Superman, Batman was vulnerable. You could easily imagine him getting killed or hurt. It wasn’t until recently with his ongoing battle with Bain, that Batman actually gets badly hurt. I had to suspend my disbelief, as a child, when Batman managed to escape from harm with bullets flying all around him. His utility belt also stretched my imagination to the breaking point. Just how much stuff is in there? Why does he always have the most improbable thing in his belt just when he needs it? Of course, I realized that comics are not logical.

  Then there is the matter of the eyes. There aren’t any!! I can recall a fairly recent Batman comic which made fun of this fact, with another character commenting on the creepiness of the white space in place of eyes. Actually it just adds to the uncanny quality of Batman. When Bruce dons the costume and cowl, he becomes a magical icon from out of our collective unconscious, and such icons don’t have eyes. All psychologists know this. It was one of the few things that Freud and Jung agreed on.

Because Batman had no special powers, he always represented us. We could put ourselves into the story much  more effectively with Batman than Superman, Green Lantern, Flash, or Wonder Woman. With them there was always a gimmick, which was fun, but with Batman you could really imagine how you would fair in that comic book world. I could learn martial arts just like Bruce did. I could manage to keep my massive cape out of the way as I engaged in fisticuffs with a bunch of loons with very poor aim.

With the Silver Age of Batman (the fifties and early sixties) he lost his original mysterious quality and become a much friendlier, but also goofier hero. The stories became much more outlandish, but as a kid I didn’t really care. The Silver Age was packed with all kinds of great characters. Never mind that you see Batman in outer space with no helmet, somehow avoiding death by suffocation. Never mind that he joined the Justice League and spent a lot of the time standing about, listening to the other superheroes discuss strategy.

  Undoubtedly one of the best things about Batman was his car. I mean, none of the other heroes had cars, didn’t need them, but Batman had the very cool Batmobile. My favorite has to be the Silver Age Batmobile, I mean the bat fin and the cowl on the front is kitsch paradise as far as I am concerned. It has that Buck Rogers 1930’s chic going for it. Seeing that awesome car barreling through the streets of Gotham is great to recreate in your imagination and I did for many years.

Batman created the car himself in 1950, and the panel above shows Robin’s reaction. Ten years ahead? You bet! Fuel-injected overdrive, bullet resistant glass, state of the art intercom, and whitewalls. It was a heavy vehicle and only someone with Batman’s strength could handle a standard transmission. Power steering? That’s for sissies!

There have been other Batmobiles since (see above) but they don’t compare to the original. In fact, what the heck is that last thing? That isn’t the Batmobile, it’s some kind of Humvee from Hell.

  There was a campy mid-sixties Batman tv show, which I didn’t particularly like as a kid. It wasn’t Batman. It was Adam West. I got involved in other things and lost track of Batman until the awesome Batman cartoons of the nineties on Cartoon Network. There had been Batman cartoons before, but Super Friends was not the kind of cartoon I craved. I never watched them. The great film treatment by Tim Burton resparked my interest in the Dark Knight. I did think Michael Keaton was miscast, but Jack Nicholson played a memorable Joker, unmatched until Heath Ledger created an equally memorable Joker. The cartoons of the nineties however managed to capture the hip quality of Batman, and the artwork was superb, matching the look of much of both the Golden and Silver Age. He became a character somewhat removed from the others, unlike the family friendly Batman of the Silver Age. He retained his dark allure, and the voice was perfect.

Batman is still going strong today, although he has become a bit too dark for my taste. I liked the grey outfit with the blue cape and the bat on the chest, both with or without the yellow oval. In the latest movie versions, and even in the comics he is becoming too macho. I don’t like the super buff transformer outfit he wears. I would like to see him become more of a human being once again.

This is not Batman. This is Adam West. This is not Robin. This is Bert Ward.