Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/092192/0921996.000

Text File | 1993-04-08 | 12KB | 246 lines

                                                                                COVER STORIES, Page 50

CANDICE BERGEN

Folklore in a Box


By LANCE MORROW


    It is very strange, and metaphysically untidy: television
has eaten a hole through the membrane separating America's
right brain and left brain.

    Fantasies seep into facts. Entertainment and journalism
drift back and forth across the borders. The bicameral
arrangement of culture and politics dissolves. The baby of the
(nonexistent) Murphy Brown flies out of its cradle and hovers
like an illicit pink cherub over the American presidential
succession.

    About these spectacles -- the Sister Souljah nonsense a
few months ago, the Vice President of the U.S. wagging his
finger at hallucinations of the popular culture, denouncing
Murphy Brown, or telling the MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour, "I will
continue to speak out against Ice-T," as if he were preparing
for the Lincoln-Douglas debates -- there is something both
confused and vaguely degrading. Something unworthy and a little
stupid. Here is American history deteriorated to Roger Rabbit,
to interactive slapstick, to 'toons. What will America do at the
end of history? Francis Fukuyama asked. Well, maybe watch a
little TV.

    But the new electronic metaphysics is not always trivial.
It harbors wild disproportions. A homemade videotape could burn
down a large section of Los Angeles. The videotape told a
story: Los Angeles cops hit Rodney King on the head and, doing
so, split the social atom.

    The movie director Spike Lee set off a small tabloid
uproar not long ago when he suggested that young blacks should
skip school if necessary to see his movie biography of Malcolm
X when it opens this fall. A hideously wrong message, people
said, undermining discipline and education. But Spike Lee
understands a central truth: what is occurring today is a war
of American myths, a struggle of contending stories. And pop
culture, often television, is the arena in which it is being
fought.

    Stories are precious, indispensable. Everyone must have
his history, her narrative. You do not know who you are until
you possess the imaginative version of yourself. You almost do
not exist without it. Blacks were mostly excluded or held in
the margins of the national story. As Spike Lee knows, blacks
more than other Americans need their stories now, the recovered
histories of what they have been and fantasies of what they
might be. The American family, as well, desperately needs a new
folklore, a new driving myth. The old version, which in
caricature is a 1950s suburban setting out of Ozzie and Harriet,
does not entirely work anymore, except in nostalgia, in
Kennebunkport, Maine, or in Ronald Reagan's afternoon naps.

    America needs to restock its repertoire of folklore and
self-images and archetypes. The 1992 presidential campaign has
made its noisy way across a nation that has lost many of its
defining ideas about itself. The cold war's end gave Americans
only a kind of abstract triumph -- and left a void. The collapse
of communism and the Soviet empire suddenly removed the dark
moral counterweight by which Americans measured their own
virtue. Chronic recession, the rise of Japanese and European
economic competitors, the vast inflow of immigrants from
non-European sources (strangers to the older American
tradition), the shrinking of the buffering Atlantic and Pacific
oceans (jet travel, satellites, global distribution of goods),
all these have eaten away at the long American smugness, the
postwar sense of superiority, of grace.

    The oldest version of the narrative glowed with a
confidence of divine sponsorship: America was lit from within.
Later, Americans adopted the more aggressive myth of Manifest
Destiny. Curiously, the members of the baby-boom generation came
to believe that the ideas of divine sponsorship and Manifest
Destiny were intended to apply to them. Now the boomers, who
transform every moment that they encounter and every twig that
they step upon into unprecedented trauma or revelation, have
arrived at midlife crisis. Noises of the generation's falling
hair and its disillusionments -- is that all there is? -- are
muzzing in the American background. A certain unease with
grownups maybe: in JFK, Oliver Stone took apart a representative
American myth with a chain saw and reassembled it in strange
shapes. During the '60s, the boomers watched in some wonder as
American authority (the university system, for example, and the
presidency of Lyndon Johnson) seemed to fall before them. But
they have been slow to install their own authority in its place.

    America is littered with the unorganized and unassimilated
marvels and griefs of recent years. Enormous questions about the
relations between men and women, for example. The country is
changed. It has taken a lot of curves very fast, on two wheels.
Many old habits are useless and even destructive now.

    Much of folklore and myth is embedded in oddments of
visual memory (stereotypes, propagandas, stray entertainments)
and in a few national epics like the story of the Kennedys,
with its bright, shining moments and its darker subplots and
disgraces. The narratives that Americans need may be somewhat
more advertent, and morally organized. People invent stories to
explore their own behavior and to imagine their own
possibilities. Few moments in America's moral life have
surpassed the soliloquy, product of Mark Twain's imagination,
in which Huck Finn agonizes over what to do about turning over
the runaway slave Jim to the white authorities. Huck ends by
accepting the consequences of his decision not to do so: "All
right, then, I'll go to hell."

    Especially when venturing into new territory where mere
habit will no longer suffice, people require the stabilizing,
consoling, instructing influence of other human tales. People
without a surrounding atmosphere of myth and example are prone
to the stupidity that arises from being isolated and incurious
about the nuances of others' experience.

    It misses the point to say that Murphy Brown is not a real
character. Fiction is real enough in its powers. When Abraham
Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom's
Cabin, he said, "So this is the little lady who made this big
war." That, at least, is the legend. Little Eva perhaps belongs
to a higher order of symbolism than Murphy Brown's baby, but the
simple principle, the power of stories, remains the same.

    Poets and playwrights and novelists have always processed
political events into entertainments and legends. Television now
hastens reality into art with a sort of Irish efficiency: when
an Irish Republican Army terrorist-hero blows up a British army
truck in midafternoon, the deed will probably be a song in the
pubs that night. Such ready glorification is one reason that no
peaceful settlement has been found. Sitcom writers have
developed similar reflexes. Topicality, however, ages a script
rapidly. It strands an episode in time, and makes reruns seem
alienated, quaint.

    Fictions that get mixed up in politics -- or religion --
can become dangerous. Salman Rushdie has reason to know this:
sitting alone with his imagination, he conjured up a story, The
Satanic Verses, that has had him in hiding, under an ayatullah's
fatwa, a sentence of death, for the past 3 1/2 years. But as
Rushdie has said, "The idea that writers should not argue about
the world and simply write their little stories is a defeat."

    Television is almost always unsettling and amazing when
one thinks about it. It imposes upon America a strange
simultaneity, if not a unity. It makes for a coast-to-coast
viewers' version of what Kurt Vonnegut Jr. called a granfalloon,
a wholly artificial brotherhood. TV characters themselves,
whatever good lines their writers give them, almost inevitably
have the flat soulless quality of people dropped on earth and
hatched from a pod. Maybe it's the electron dust on the screen.

    Still, surely it is preferable to have television dramas
and sitcoms addressing important dilemmas now and then --
single motherhood, for example, or drug addiction or wife
battering. Better that than to revert entirely to Gomer Pyle and
Gilligan's Island and My Little Margie.

    On certain levels, the U.S. is a dangerously splintered
and tribal country. America's historically indiscriminate
embrace has depended on economic opportunity to make the whole
enterprise (The Dream) function. Obviously, angers and abrasions
deepen when many are competing for fewer jobs. In such an
atmosphere, television acts often as a universalizing, mediating
influence. It becomes a kind of third eye, however myopic on
occasion, or however silly. By telling stories as it does
(however skewed its critics, like Quayle, may think the stories
are), television may militate against fanaticism and fantasies
of revenge. The medium's demographic gyroscopes almost
inevitably discourage bigotry. It is sometimes a shaming agent:
a drama about the dilemmas of homosexuals, for example, may
shame many Americans into being more tolerant on that score. The
medium has a ceremonial and sacramental role when it covers
tragedies, Challenger explosions, state funerals and the like.
It even performs some of the functions of an American
conscience. Its priestly influences reach into areas of everyday
attitude and morals.

    Ross Perot proposed an instantaneous participatory
television democracy -- a national electronic town meeting in
which Americans could directly register their opinions on
issues. Television has already swallowed the political parties,
and Perot's hookup would override the Constitution's framework
of representative democracy and deliberation.

    But in a bizarre way, television's storytelling has become
a form of representational democracy -- or symbolic democracy,
anyway. Perhaps, as Quayle says, the mythmaking roles are in the
hands of a cultural elite that is alien to much of America.
Still, being sensitive to the market economy of ideas and
entertainment preferences, television naturally represents
various American points of view and dilemmas. It churns out a
visual rhetoric, an electronic folklore. It is the griot of
American transience.

    In the struggle of the stories, whose is the authentic
American voice? Murphy Brown (played by the daughter of the
long-ago-famous puppeteer-ventriloquist Edgar Bergen, and
manipulated by activist fortysomething Hillary Democrats)
represents a certain constituency. Dan Quayle, having no
television surrogate to manipulate, has passed through the
looking glass, playing himself, representing another America.
He has become a moral symbol and performer himself: statesman
and 'toon.

    American storytelling is too important to be left so much
to television. In American TV, a spirit only modestly gifted --
and sometimes flat stupid -- sits at the wheel of a
trillion-dollar vehicle. The machine, being commercial, has that
tendency to veer toward the ditch, seeking the least common
denominator. The medium's technological prowess -- and its
relentless, pervasive presence in the society -- imposes a
responsibility that its writers and producers and directors
probably should not have to bear. National Bard . . . and
banality. Television does its work. But there are better ways
to tell a story.