I have a number of crackpot theories about why the universe works the way that it does. The collection assembled here is but a small fraction of the vast crackpottery that is my brain, but I hope they will edify and amuse.
The Accidental Theory of Television
The Asshole Theory of Government--now a major motion picture!
The Bullshit Theory of Oppression
Actresses and Bad Hair
Why There Is No Good Film Adaptation of Hamlet
Elian Gonzales and Operation Rescue
A Gynocentric Approach To Driving A Standard Transmission
The Group Therapy Theory of Flamewars
Or, peruse my partner's crackpot theories!
Problem: Why is it that so many television shows start off well and then begin, slowly yet inexorably, to suck as the years pass?
Answer: Good television never happens on purpose. It is always an accident, one which market forces will sooner or later correct.
Now admittedly, much depends on your definition of “good television.” If you bust a gut laughing at Home Improvement, weep copious tears throughout every episode of Touched by an Angel, and can happily entertain yourself with 30 hours of Baywatch, you may as well just skip this whole rant. If, on the other hand, you believe that the merits of a television show are linked to good writing, interesting characterization and at least a hint of original thought, then you probably have often asked yourself this very question. Why is The X-Files deteriorating into a series of lackluster formulaic exercises punctuated by occasional Mulder-glorifying testosterone-packed action fantasies? Why is The Simpsons mouldering into unfunniness? Why has The Practice, after a strong start, suddenly taken a turn down a very wrong path? Why did Deep Space Nine get sucked into a giant black hole of badness in its fourth season, only barely managing to drag itself back to the event horizon? What mysterious forces took a good concept and an interesting slate of characters and boiled them down into the limp and nauseating mess that is Voyager? Why does every TV show that I like sooner or later betray me? Is it just that I can’t be pleased?
Probably; but since the problem of my unpleasability is a knotty one, let us turn to the question of how it is that the world conspires to pervert and corrupt good TV. I propose that to understand the end, we must look to the beginning, concerning ourselves not so much with how good TV dies as with how it comes into existence. And my hypothesis is that it comes into existence by accident.
To go far back into TV history, let us look at the example of Saturday Night Live. Why does one of NBC’s longest-running and (once) most lucrative shows air at a time when no one who had anything better to do would be watching television? Because SNL was not supposed to become a comedy legend; it was supposed to be a cheap way to fill up some waste space in the schedule. Because nobody in the network was paying attention to what happened, a bunch of seriously insane people were allowed to do whatever the hell they wanted, and the results were startling. Of course, now, SNL’s glory days are long over, and it has become a moribund collection of unfunny stock characters and running gags which frequently, somehow, find their way into Godwaful feature-length films. There are probably multiple factors involved here but I’ll point the finger at the big one: SNL is a big deal now, and a lot of people are involved in managing it. There’s money at stake, and money doesn’t like risk. People like things that are familiar, and something that was not funny once will generate laughter when it’s brought back again. Once something has generated laughter, it becomes a safe bet, and anything else is risky. Thus, we degenerate into a wilderness of catch-phrases and shtick, and Saturday night is a wasteland once more.
But although SNL Syndrome can to some extent account for what’s happened to The Simpsons (if you ask me, the turning point was when someone decided it would be a good idea to increase ratings by building episodes around celebrity guest stars), it cannot explain what’s happened to The X-Files. Here, it is clear that the flow of badness stems from Chris Carter himself, who has plenty of control over what happens on the show and who seems perfectly happy with the direction it’s taking. How can this be, we ask ourselves, when he used to be good at writing television? Well, in interviews, Chris Carter has revealed that essentially, all the good things about this show were accidental. For instance, the “mythology” plot line—the one that involves the aliens, government conspiracies, etc. etc. etc.—is something that CC more or less stumbled into during the first couple of seasons; if he hadn’t, the show would basically have been an endless seires of Monster of The Weeks. More tellingly, in his original concept he imagined that the believer would be female and the skeptic would be male, and then on a whim decided it would be fun to switch the genders, so that the impulsive irrational hothead was male and the cold rational scientific type was female. Mulder lovers and diehard Scully fans alike, I summon you here to witness: is that role reversal not the sole thing that has kept all of us interested? And yet, as we watch, that reversal has been reversed because deep down inside, Chris Carter never really understood how important it was, and has spent the last four years feminizing Scully (making her more vulnerable, more intuitive, more credulous) and masculinizing Mulder (making him more into shootin’ and fightin’, tougher, and more skeptical). Not to mention completely arsing up the “mythology” plot line, which he obviously never really bothered to sit down and puzzle out.
Similarly, I call your attention to The Practice. I am a recent convert but an extraordinarily faithful one, having finally found a lawyer show that I not only can stand, but am actually interested in. Why am I interested in it? Two reasons: one, it’s much closer to the actual realities of practicing law than most other lawyer shows, and two, the characters. But when I say “the characters” I’m not talking about Bobby “Outraged Puppy Dog” Donnell, Lindsay “Poor Man’s Calista Flockheart” Dole, or Helen “Maybe You’d Win More Often If You Ate A Complete Breakfast” Gamble. I’m talking about the real characters: Ellenor, Jimmy, and Eugene (Rebecca hasn’t gotten enough screen time to make her presence felt; Lucy annoys the shit out of me and I have dismissed her from consideration.) These are real people, with real bodies and real scars who do real work and make real mistakes. Because I enjoy watching them, I am willing to put up with the other three. But lately, the bad writing and bad plotting that has always dogged Bobby’s heels and made a cow pat out of every part of the episode he touches has begun to infect the others. After following the George Vogelman plot with considerable interest, I found the Fatal Attraction-style denoument unworthy of the buildup, damaging to the show’s overall credibility, and a serious affront to poor Ellenor, who has not been allowed to do a single thing right all year. Meanwhile Jimmy’s romance with Judge Kittelson alternates between being a rather sweet and quirky exploration of an unlikely love affair and being a typical crazy-older-woman-preying-on-innocent-young-man soap opera plot. Eugene so far is doing all right, but how long can he hold out against this onslaught?
More to the point, why is D.E.Kelley doing this to his own show? I’ll tell you why: because all the stuff about it that I like is the exact same stuff that he thinks of as secondary. As far as he’s concerned, Ellenor, Jimmy, Eugene and the rest of them are all there as window-dressing that will better set off the star attraction, which is of course the exciting narrative of the exploits of the superbly handsome and vastly talented Bobby Donnell and his extremely skinny women. Never mind the fact that every time Bobby Donnell gets involved in a case he does something stupid or unethical enough to get himself disbarred. Bobby is A Hero. It’s his firm and it’s his show. Now that D.E.K. is having it his way, Bobby is moving to the fore and everyone else is going to the wall.
What have you got against Bobby? I hear you cry. Same thing I have against the new improved Mulder: they’re both boring as hell, being cut from the same cloth as every other handsome brooding male genius I’ve ever had to watch. Same thing I have against Lindsay and Helen, who are just as brittle, two-dimensional and annoying as the same women who have been populating every nighttime drama from here to Falcon Crest. But this is the thing: Bobby, Lindsay, and Helen were created by design. That’s what the market wants, and that’s what DEK wants. Ellenor and Jimmy were created by accident; they’re sidekicks and as we know from all of Disney’s movies, the sidekicks are always much more fun to watch than the principals. Over time, the market wins, and the poor cranky viewer loses.
This Crackpot Theory has now been made into a short film called Theories of Government #9 by an Australian filmmaker named Larry Larstead.
Problem: Why is it that no matter what kind of political system man devises it always ends up going bad?
Answer: Because no political thinker has yet managed to solve the problem of the Asshole.
Sure, the details often differ, but when you come right down to it all forms of government run into the same problem: What does society do with the asshole? Nobody has yet come up with a satisfactory answer, and this is why the vision of life on Earth as put forth in Star Trek has failed to materialize. No matter what principles you build your system on, there will always be some asshole out there who can screw it up and pervert it from its presumed ends. Let’s break it down with a few familiar examples:
System: Capitalism.
Principle: Efficiency and virtue will be rewarded by the market; only the truly useful will survive. Those who cannot make it to the top will be employed in the service of those who have, and if anyone falls through the cracks, private charity will alleviate the worst of their misery.
Problem: Some asshole with money and power will always be trying to fix the market to protect his own assets. Also, assholes don’t give a damn about the suffering of others and have no incentive to take care of them.
System: Communism.
Principle: Everyone cooperates and shares the work and the wealth so that everyone’s needs are taken care of.
Problem: Some asshole will always try to get out of doing his share of the work while at the same time collecting his share of the profits.
System: Fascism.
Principle: Everyone surrenders their will to the State, whose leaders will decide what is best for the people.
Problem: Fascist leaders are almost always assholes.
System: Pacifism.
Principle: Nobody hurts anyone else.
Problem: Some asshole is always going to be willing to hurt you to get what he wants.
System: Anarchy.
Principle: People are left to themselves to do as they see fit without being hassled by The Man.
Problem: Left to themselves, most people will behave like assholes.
System: Democracy.
Principle: Government by the people, for the people.
Problem: Get enough assholes in one place, and you’ve got government by assholes for assholes.
And so on. It really is quite a knotty problem, because the asshole is a peculiarly intractable and unmanageable sort. The true asshole cannot be appealed to in the name of any ideal, or in the name of the public good, or even in the name of other people he knows and presumably cares about. The true asshole is driven by one thing and one thing only, and that is to do what he damn well wants to do no matter who else he hurts along the way. You cannot convince the asshole to comply voluntarily; therefore your system of government must have in place a way of punishing the asshole when he oversteps the line. But a real asshole has surprising powers of resistance, and ultimately can require you to mobilize such a huge penal system that you discover, having finally quashed the asshole, that you have quashed all the ordinary law-abiding citizens along with him. Paradoxically, the more freedom your system allows its citizens, the greater room the asshole has to work his assholic will on those around him.
The only system of government that would actually work would be one where, somehow, the assholes could be detected by an impartiable and incorruptible Asshole Detention Board and exiled to a desert island somewhere. But unfortunately even this is impractical, because there is a little bit of the asshole in all of us.
While trying to explain why I was giving preferential treatment to one of the evil characters in Women On FireI was inspired to formulate an ethical distinction between lies and bullshit. This is what I came up with:
A lie is a falsehood that you intentionally tell another person in order to mislead him or her.
Bullshit is a lie you tell yourself in order to justify an action or belief which, while convenient, you also know in your heart be fundamentally wrong.
People generally do not believe their own lies, but they generally do believe their own bullshit. And I think that if a scientific study could be done, we would discover that it's bullshit--the attempt to justify things that cannot possibly not be wrong--that has done our world the most long-lasting damage.
Think about it. Where does racism come from? It comes from the attempt, on the part of Europe and later of white America, to explain that what we were doing to Africans, native Americans and Asians was right and good. Suppose Europe had gone into Africa and said, “You know what? There’s all kinds of valuable stuff in here, and we’re going to start exploiting the hell out of both you and your environment because we can. Oh, we know it’s not fair; but you can’t do anything about that right now, so until you guys develop the tools and organization necessary to resist military conquest, we’re going to keep on selling you as slaves, destroying your land and raping your natural resources. Suck it up.” Materially, it wouldn’t have changed things; but once the revolution came, people wouldn’t be coping with hundreds of years of bullshit developed by Europe about how white people are intellctually, morally and culturally superior to everyone else and therefore had not only the right but the duty to exploit the world and everyone in it. This is just one example of how bullshit becomes the most damaging weapon in the arsenal of evil.
Most American politicians, for instance, don't lie--they bullshit. In fact, the better you are at bullshitting yourself, the better you become at bullshitting voters. Clinton, for instance, is the most accomplished bullshitter of the contemporary political era--so accomplished, in fact, that he has completely lost whatever authentic beliefs he has in order to develop the art of genuinely believing in whatever happens to be politically expedient at the moment. It's obviously taken a huge toll on his personal life--and ultimately, on all of our personal lives--but it has been very good for his political career.
Problem: Done right, Hamlet is actually a pretty good play. Why do all the film adaptations of it suck so hard?
Answer: Because Hamlet is the most canonical text in the English language.
How does that follow? I’ll tell you. For whatever reason, and I’m not sure that any of them are adequate because althought as I said it’s a pretty good play there certainly are better ones out there, Hamlet has become the be-all and end-all of English literature. It has also become the be-all and end-all of the thespianic arts. Playing Hamlet is something all actors aspire to; directing Hamlet is something all directors hunger to do. However, most actors and directors don’t really actually spend much time realizing these fantasies because they quite sensibly understand that a play that is staged this often has been interpreted so damn many times that there really isn’t that much left to say about it, and even if there is how can you not be intimidated by the huge number of illustrious actors and directors who have done Hamlet before you, and undoubtedly done it better?
And yet Hamlet is, every once in a while, adapted for film. But here’s the problem: In order to decide that you, John Q. Actor-Director, are going to make the definitive filmic version of the most sacred text in the English language, you must already be possessed of an ego the size of Texas. And so the people who make these films have already achieved a state of self-deluded narcissism that makes them absolutely unable to accept or act on feedback, criticism, or indeed any form of collaboration whatsoever. And this, as Laurence Olivier, Franco Zefirelli, and Kenneth Branagh have painfully shown us, makes it impossible for them to turn out a good product.
Problem: Why do so many of today's hot actresses have such hideous, lanky, sickly-looking hair that never looks good no matter what their stylists do to it?
Answer: Because they are all suffering from malnutrition.
You've noticed it, I'm sure. The big hairstyle that seems to have become the vogue in Hollywood is straight, limp, and thin. If, like me, you think that the Gwyneth Paltrow is the worst coiffure mistake since the Dorothy Hamill, you must be wondering why all the other big names seem to be doing variations on something that most people would consider prima facie unflattering. Well, my crackpot theory is this: the stick-straight/limp/lifeless 'do is an attempt on the part of Hollywood stylists to compensate for the fact that all of these women are too underweight to grow a healthy head of hair. You cannot grow a luxuriant mane on a half a radish a day.
The Hollywood body image has never been more alarming. Remember when everyone was worried about Calista Flockheart because she seemed abnormally skinny even for an actress? Now she hardly even stands out among a crowd of TV actresses who all seem hell-bent on reducing themselves to skeletons. Closest to being hospitalized are Lara Flynn Boyle (it's frightening; she always looks to me like she's just about to pass out), Courtney Cox (in the previews for Scream it was seriously hard to distinguish her head shots from those of a human skull), Jennifer Aniston, and of course Gwyneth Paltrow. Sarah Michelle Gellar is looking a little angular these days too, and I worry about Kelli Williams.
Starving bodies conserve energy where they can, and one thing that happens when you're malnourished is that your body stops wasting good material on something that's just going to die as soon as it leaves your scalp anyhow. These women can hide some of the other symptoms of anorexia (loss of menstrual periods, etc.) but you can't do anything about that lid--except shellac it into some kind of pseudo-interesting shape and hope for the best.
Ever on the cutting edge, Calista Flockheart is the most egregious example--she has now adopted a godawful perm which makes her hair look every bit as strawlike and starved as the rest of her, and which does little to hide her accelerating emaciation. But the others are not far behind. I don't know exactly what it will take to reverse this trend. I'm hoping that enough of these women will get tired of starving to create a critical mass of starvation-resistant actresses and turn the image around. But what I'm worried is that someone is going to have to be hospitalized or die before anyone really acknowledges the problem.
I was thinking about why it is that Uncle Lazaro et al. push my buttons to the extent that they do. I mean, my feelings re Cuba have never been particularly strong one way or the other, and I am usually far less tolerant of jackbooted thuggery than I have been in this instance. And yet, watching Uncle L. and Maryselis whip the crowd outside their house into a frenzy has always made my skin crawl, and I think I now realize why. It's because they remind me of Operation Rescue.
What we have with the Elian cause is a large group of people who share a particular conservative political ideology professing intense love and unselfish concern for a child who is not theirs, who most of them have never met, and for whom none of them are prepared to take personal responsibility--but in whose name any action, legal or otherwise, can be justified. Elian has become, for them, what "all those unborn babies" become for the Republican right: a blanket excuse for whatever coercive or repressive measures they want to take in order to further their other political ambitions. This is why children become useful as political footballs in the first place--because something that would be seen as unacceptable if done on your own behalf becomes permissible if you can argue that you're doing it to protect the welfare of an innocent child. That's why the unborn baby has become so central to ultraconservative politics, and that's why Elian has become a cause celebre for the Cuban-American community.
Just as most people hassling clients at abortion clinics have no intention of contributing to the maintenance of these children once they are eventually born (since the same party that opposes abortion also opposes welfare or federally funded day care), most of the people demonstrating outside the Gonzales home have no plans to become directly involved with Elian over the long term. In fact, the all seem to be animated by a simple belief that all Elian needs to become happy and well-adjusted is to live in the US instead of in Cuba--just as your average clinic picketer is convinced that once the kid is born, everything else will take care of itself. Neither group thinks about the child's future because at the bottom of it all neither group really cares.
In both cases, what we have is a classic example of mass bullshitting, using children as a device to protect the bullshitters from any consciousness of their own duplicity. I'm thinking that's what's really bugging me. Which is not to say that what Elian's relatives want is any better or worse than what the pro-life movement wants; it's just that in either case, the bullshit level has risen way, way beyond acceptable tolerance levels.
For reasons too embarrassing to go into, I have been without a car for a week or so, and as a consequence have been forced to learn to drive Liza's car, a sporty little red Mazda named Leo. Leo is a stick shift, and I have always been leery of them ever since my brother tried to teach me how to drive his car when I was a callow youth. We gave up after the experience made me carsick and him extremely, extremely uptight, and I never again attempted it.
I was also put off, I suppose, by the symbolism of it. I mean, I'm a phallophobe, and that gear shift...you know. Anyway it always seemed like such a guy thing. But needs must when the devil vomits into your kettle, as Blackadder says, so Liza took me out to an abandoned parking lot and showed me how it's done.
I realize now that I had a completely mistaken impression of what driving a stick involves. I thought it was all about the stick, but really, it's all about the clutch. Shoving the stick into its slot doesn't take any finesse. It's letting the clutch out slowly that takes technique.
So after a few minutes of jerking, stalling, bucking broncoing, and so on, Liza says, "You're letting the clutch out too fast. It's like in the song. She needs a driver with a slow foot."
After we had laughed about this for a while, she goes on to say, "It's like Chef says. Driving a standard is like making love to a beautiful woman."
So I step on the clutch, put the car in first, and begin starting up, while saying, out loud, "Sloooowly making love to a beau-ti-ful woooman."
And it worked!
So for the next couple hours we're going around and around the parking lot while I get the hang of it. Whenever I start lurching, Liza says, "Remember about the beautiful woman." And you know what, the stupid thing is that saying "slowly making love to a beautiful woman" does help me remember how to do the damn clutch. Which caused Liza to observe after a while, "It'll be really funny if you have to say that every time you shift gears."
After a while I was ready to go out on the road, where I could do all right if there weren't too many cars around. Because, you know, I had trouble at first performing under pressure. My most common problem was lurching or gunning at stoplights, after which Liza would say gently, "You forgot about the beautiful woman."
I now understand why I couldn't learn to do this the first time. I mean, I'd never made love to a beautiful woman. And anyhow, I'm not sure my brother would have understood at that point in his life why that would be a helpful metaphor in this context.
So, in conclusion, our culture's phallocentrism has rendered the standard transmission unnecessarily intimidating. It shouldn't even be called "driving a stick." It should be called "stroking a clutch."
Question: I just joined this great electronic discussion group, and already there's a flamewar. Why can't we all just get along?
Answer: Because an electronic discussion list is like group therapy without a therapist.
If you have spent much time on Yahoo!groups, you know that you cannot assemble an electronic discussion list of any size, around any topic, without eventually watching in dismay as it erupts into flames over some topic that appears to you to be at best trivial and at worst nonsensical. Why does this always happen? Well, the same principles that explain why group therapy works also explain why so many electronic communities don't.
I have never been in group therapy myself, but one of my friends swears by it, and it was from her that I finally learned that my conception of what group therapy is was mistaken. I thought, based I guess on the Bob Newhart Show and other pop culture representations, that group therapy was basically a bunch of people sitting around in a circle talking about their issues with a therapist moderating the discussion. Well, it is, only it isn't. At least according to my friend, the point of group therapy is to allow people to better understand, and if necessary modify, the ways in which they interact with their peers. The goal of a session is not so much to get people to talk about their issues, as to get them to be aware of the way they interact with the other group members while doing it. In other words, it's really about how the conversation works-- who talks, who doesn't, who gets upset, who gets angry, who plays alpha dog and who rolls over to show his soft underbelly, and why. So, for example, if A brings up something shitty that happened at work that day, and B says, "That's nothing, listen to this much worse thing that just happened to ME," and C says, "Shut up, B, can't you see A is upset?" and D says, "Why are you always picking on B?" and then A says, "Oh, never mind, it wasn't important," the thing to investigate is not so much what happened to A at work as why B felt the need to upstage her, why C took it upon herself to defend A, why D is so critical of C, and why A retires crushed instead of defending her right to speak. Eventually, in theory, A will learn to be more assertive and less whiny, B will learn not to be such an attention hog, C will learn to fight her own battles and leave others to fight theirs, and D will learn not to leap gleefully into the fray at the first sign of conflict.
Is this sounding like your list yet?
Group therapy works, to the extent that it does, because of one simple principle: When you assemble any group of people, from any variety of walks of life, and ask them to talk about any topic, they will all inevitably start working their issues out on each other.
Now, in group therapy, it is absolutely crucial that people take their shit out on each other so that the therapist can help them work through it. If B weren't constantly trying to be the center of attention, the therapist wouldn't have the opportunity to get him to ask himself why, and he would never figure out that it's because his father never gave him any support or validation when he was a boy and so he's consumed with a desire to get it from everyone else. Unfortunately, on an electronic discussion list, there is no therapist. Consequently, nobody has the authority to call people on their shit; and therefore, the same people pull the same passive-aggressive, openly-aggressive, subtly manipulative, self-aggrandizing, insenstively-steamrolling shit over and over again. And the fact that it's all electronic makes it even worse--because the other people are just words on a screen, it's much easier for the average listmember to project his or her mother, siblings, abusive high school peers, etc. onto the other members. Plus, people will let shit fly online that they would never have the balls to say in a face-to-face interaction. So no matter what the topic of the list is, be it reproductive rights or the proper management of a riding mower, people will eventually flame over it--or rather, not over the topic itself so much as over the way they feel the other list members are treating their contributions to the discussion.
A good listowner can exercise a certain amount of authority within clearly defined rules (banning particularly divisive topics, sanctioning people for trolling or posting obvious personal attacks); but nobody can do anything about these subtler group dynamics. You can't put together a FAQ that says "Don't constantly get into it with someone just because her whining about how people always misunderstand her posts reminds you of how your mother used to say mean things to you and then pretend she hadn't. Don't compare someone to Hitler just because his opinionated way of talking politics reminds you of your domineering older brother who got a car for his sixteenth birthday and what did you get nothing." And if there happens to be someone on your list who tries to be this group's therapist, that's even worse; there's nothing that pisses people off more than being psychoanalyzed when they didn't ask for it. So there is no way to prevent conflict from erupting; and often there's no real way to resolve it because half the time people don't even understand what they're really arguing about.
For here, we run up against one of the other foundational principles of therapy: Nobody is ever hip to his/her own shit. No, dear reader, not even you; and certainly not me either. Oh sure, you think you're always being reasonable; but remember, so does everyone else. If your listmember realized that her flame in response to your defense of welfare was really an expression of resentment toward the co-workers who never appreciate all the times that her hard work has saved their lazy asses, she wouldn't be ranting at you; she'd be ranting at her co-workers. So judge not, my friend, lest ye be judged; for you and I are both working our shit out on our fellow listmembers too; and yea, like unto them, we also shall never know when we're doing it. The best we can hope for is that some kind soul will point it out to us in a friendly sort of way, and we'll be able to pay attention.
Some lists do escape this kind of conflict, either because their members are all relatively well-adjusted (rare), traffic is so low or discussions are so narrowly focused that people don't get their buttons pushed (more common), or the list is run by a totalitarian dictator who enforces peace by punishing dissent (not as rare as it might be, but frankly not always a bad thing). For the rest, the only thing to do is try to survive the flames when they erupt and remember that on the internet, a day is a long time, and most flamewars blow over pretty quickly.
Back to the Adder's Lair