From the Radio Free Michigan archives ftp://141.209.3.26/pub/patriot If you have any other files you'd like to contribute, e-mail them to bj496@Cleveland.Freenet.Edu. ------------------------------------------------ The following book excerpt was found on the gopher server at panix.com. a commercial internet BBS in New York City. I am posting it here because of the author's extraordinary insights into the techniques of cultural and information warfare. I do not necessarily agree with all his perspectives (I'm not even quite sure what they are), but I think this material is worth reading and contemplating. There were no use restrictions noted on this sample. Nevertheless, my repost here should be considered as fair use for research and education. -Steve MEDIA VIRUS!: HIDDEN AGENDAS IN POPULAR CULTURE by Douglas Rushkoff Publication date: October 1994 in hardcover Copyright 1994 by Douglas Rushkoff Finally, there is a way to understand the bizarre relationship we have with our information technology: the media is alive. Welcome to the "datasphere," also known as the late twentieth century. Here, good news, bad news, _any_ news, travels in the blink of an eye. And not just news, but information: ideas, images, and icons; fads, fashions, and fantasies; truth, lies, and propaganda. While cable television, fiber- optic telecommunications, satellite dishes, computer modems, camcorders, fax machines, and videocassettes form the crisscrossed arteries of a vast "information superhighway," we must ask ourselves: What sort of messages are these brave new medias carrying into our culture? As culture critic for our wild times, Douglas Rushkoff shows that where there's a wavelength, there's a way to "infect" those on it--from the subtly, but intentionally, subversive signals broadcast by shows like "The Simpsons," to the odd serendipity of a classic New York-style sex 'n' family values scandal (a la Woody and Mia) exploited by the Republicans during their convention. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- MEDIA VIRUS Table of Contents Introduction: The Nature of Infection Part 1 On Getting Cultured Chapter 1: The Datasphere Part 2 The Mainstream Chapter 2: TV Forums Chapter 3: Presidential Campaigning Chapter 4: Kids' TV Chapter 5: The MTV Revolution Part 3 The Underground Chapter 6: Alternative Media Chapter 7: Tactical Media Chapter 8: The Net Chapter 9: Pranks Chapter 10: Meta-media ----------------------------------------------------------------------- From the INTRODUCTION: THE NATURE OF INFECTION The messages in our media come to us packaged as Trojan horses. They enter our homes in one form, but behave in a very different way than we expect once they are inside. This is not so much a conspiracy against the viewing public as it is a method for getting the mainstream media to unwittingly promote countercultural agendas that can actually empower the individuals who are exposed to them. The people who run network television or popular magazines, for example, are understandably unwilling to run stories or images that directly criticize the operating principles of the society that its sponsors are seeking to maintain. Clever young media strategists with new, usually threatening ideas need to invent new nonthreatening forms that are capable of safely housing these dangerous concepts until they have been successfully delivered to the American public as part of our daily diet of mainstream media. This requires tremendous insight into the way media works. Today's activists understand the media as an extension of a living organism. Just as ecologists now understand the life on this planet to be part of a single biological organism, media activists see the datasphere as the circulatory system for today's information, ideas, and images. The datasphere was created over the past two or three decades as the households and businesses of America were hard-wired together through devices like cable television, telephone systems, and personal computer modems. As individuals we are each exposed to the datasphere whenever we come into contact with communications technology such as television, computer networks, magazines, video games, fax machines, radio shows, CDs, or videocassettes. People who lack traditional political power but still seek to influence the direction of our culture do so by infusing new ideas into this ever- expanding datasphere. These information bombs spread throughout the entire information net in a matter of seconds. For instance, a black man is beaten by white cops in Los Angeles. The event is captured on a home camcorder and within hours the beating is replayed on the televisions of millions. Within days it's the topic of an afternoon talk show; within weeks it's a court case on the fictional L.A. Law ; within months it's a TV movie; before the end of the year it's the basis of a new video game, a comic book, and set of trading cards. Finally, what began as a thirty- second video clip emerges as the battle cry for full-scale urban rioting. This riot, in turn, is amplified on more talk shows, radio call-ins, and new episodes of "L.A. Law"! A provocative image or idea like Rodney King getting beaten or even Pee-Wee Herman masturbating in a porno theater spreads like wildfire. The event attracts our attention and generates media for several seconds, minutes, or even months ... but its influence on us doesn't stop there. Within every media sensation are ideas, issues, and agendas often purposefully placed that influence us less directly. A home video of police beating a black man, for example, initiates a series of responses in the viewer. Questions of racism, police brutality, the First Amendment, Los Angeles politics, drug abuse, even the power of consumer-grade electronics to name a few are all released by the single media image in its media context. Similarly, a media icon like Pee-Wee Herman attracts attention because he is bizarre and funny, but hidden in the image and forcing us to respond are questions about homosexuality, consumerism run amok, the supposed innocence of childhood, and the farce of adulthood. If we are to understand the datasphere as an extension of a planetary ecosystem or even just the breeding ground for new ideas in our culture, then we must come to terms with the fact that the media events provoking real social change are more than simple Trojan horses. They are media viruses. This term is not being used as a metaphor. These media events are not _like_ viruses. They _are_ viruses. Most of us are familiar with biological viruses like the ones that cause the flu, the common cold, and perhaps even AIDS. As they are currently understood by the medical community, viruses are unlike bacteria or germs because they are not living things; they are simply protein shells containing genetic material. The attacking virus uses its protective and sticky protein casing to latch onto a healthy cell and then inject its own genetic code, essentially genes, inside. The virus code mixes and competes for control with the cell's own genes, and, if victorious, it permanently alters the way the cell functions and reproduces. A particularly virulent strain will transform the host cell into a factory that replicates the virus. It's really a battle for command of the cell, fought between the cell's own genetic programming (DNA) and the virus's invading code. Wherever the cell's existing codes are weak or confused, the virus will have a better chance of taking over. Further, if the host organism has a weak immune system, its susceptibility to invasion is dramatically increased. It can't recognize that it is being attacked and can't mobilize its defenses. The protein shell of a virus is the Trojan horse. The genetic codes are the soldiers hidden inside, battling our own genes in an attempt to change the way our cells operate. The only "intention" of the virus, if it can be said to have one, is to spread its own code as far and wide as possible from cell to cell and from organism to organism. Media viruses spread through the datasphere the same way biological ones spread through the body or a community. But instead of traveling along an organic circulatory system, a media virus travels through the networks of the mediaspace. The protein shell of a media virus might be an event, invention, technology, system of thought, musical riff, visual image, scientific theory, sex scandal, clothing style or even a pop hero as long as it can catch our attention. Any one of these media virus shells will search out the receptive nooks and crannies in popular culture and stick on anywhere it is noticed. Once attached, the virus injects its more hidden agendas into the datastream in the form of _ideological code_--not genes, but a conceptual equivalent we now call memes.* Like real genetic material, these memes infiltrate the way we do business, educate ourselves, interact with one another even the way we perceive reality. Media viruses spread rapidly if they provoke our interest, and their success is dependent on the particular strengths and weaknesses of the host organism, popular culture. The more provocative an image or icon like the videotaped police beating or a new rap lyric, for that matter the further and faster it will travel through the datasphere. We do not recognize the image, so we cannot respond automatically to it. Our interest and fascination is a sign that we are not culturally immune to the new virus. The success of the memes within the virus, on the other hand, depends on our legal, moral, and social resiliency. If our own attitudes about racism, the power of police, drug abuse, and free speech are ambiguous meaning our societal code is faulty then the invading memes within the media virus will have little trouble infiltrating our own confused command structure. There appear to be three main kinds of media viruses. The most obvious variety, like publicity stunts or activist pranks, are constructed and launched intentionally, as a way of spreading a product or ideology. There are also what we can call co-opted or "bandwagon viruses" the Woody Allen/Mia Farrow debacle or the AIDS epidemic that no one necessarily launches intentionally, but which are quickly seized upon and spread by groups who hope to promote their own agendas. (Republicans used the Woody affair to criticize New York's family values; ultraright conservatives used the AIDS epidemic to equate homosexuality with evil). Finally, there are completely self-generated viruses like the Rodney King beating, the Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan affair, or even new technologies like virtual reality and scientific discoveries that elicit interest and spread of their own accord because they hit upon a societal weakness or ideological vacuum. Today's media activists understand the properties of media viruses. The designers of intentional viruses take into account both the aspects of the status quo they wish to criticize, as well as the kinds of packaging that will permit the distribution of their critique. Most, but certainly not all, intentional media viruses are cultivated from scratch. The "smart drugs" virus is an excellent example of such designer memes. By the late 1980s a small group of AIDS activists, pharmaceutical industry critics, and psychedelics advocates felt the need to call our current drug paradigm into question. The AIDS activists were upset by laws limiting the domestic use of unapproved or experimental drugs from overseas. The pharmaceutical industry critics were frustrated by the way that the profit motives of drug companies could limit rather than expand the number of helpful medications and nutrients available to the public. The psychedelics advocates were disturbed by the "just say no" drug abuse publicity campaign, which denies the possibility of any value to experimentation with mind-altering substances. The virus began with the carefully conceived phrase "smart drugs." Like many of the media viruses we'll be exploring--virtual reality, techno- shamanism, ecological terrorism--"smart drugs" is an oxymoron. By juxtaposing two words or ideas that do not normally go together, the phrase demands thought: Drugs are smart? Utilizing a hypnosis technique first developed by Milton Erickson, the contradictory phrase creates its own unique conceptual slot in the minds of people who hear it. The longer the phrase demands conscious attention, the more opportunity the virus has to inject its memes. If it makes us think, then we cannot be immune to it. Like a deer in a car's headlights, we freeze in our tracks. The term "smart drugs" is meant to refer to a group of nutrients and prescription drugs that have long been shown to enhance memory functioning in senile people. A few doctors and nutritionists began to experiment with these substances on normally functioning people to see if they could induce superior mental functioning and found some positive results in their tests. These doctors ran up against many obstacles when they tried to publicize their findings and get research dollars for further study. AIDS, pharmaceutical industry, and psychedelics activists adopted this cause as their own and came up with smart drugs as part of an overall media strategy. The next task was to develop what we can call the "syringe" for the virus. The way a virus is administered is as important as the construction of the virus itself. Often the way in which a virus spreads communicates as much as the memes within the virus. The smart drugs activists decided to create "The Smart Bar," a dispensary for over-the-counter cognitive- enhancing substances, right on the dance floor of a popular nightclub. Within minutes after The Smart Bar opened, computer bulletin boards carried news of the smart drugs. Within weeks, _Rolling Stone,_ _GQ,_ "Larry King Live," "Nightline," and a host of other media outlets were covering the event. Other clubs began to sell smart drugs, health stores stocked up on cognitive-enhancing nutrients, and a lot of people and agencies became alarmed not only because smart drugs were sweeping the nation, but because controversial memes within the smart drugs virus were spreading themselves throughout the datasphere. While these drugs may or may not make a person smarter, their infusion into the datasphere as an idea has called our FDA laws, pharmaceutical industry, drug use policies, and medical mind-set into question. The smart drugs themselves are the Trojan horse--the sticky shell of the virus getting all the attention. As the smart drugs virus spread, one of its creators, John Morgenthaler, was asked to appear on "Larry King Live." Once safely nested on the studio set, he used the forum to explain how information about many smart substances has been ignored or even suppressed by the American pharmaceutical industry for years. The young, unassuming, and well-dressed man explained (to an audience whose appetite had already been whetted by the term "smart drugs" and video footage of the smart bars) how current FDA regulations require that millions of dollars of tests be done before these substances can be prescribed for cognitive purposes. Because the patents for many of these chemicals expired before the pharmaceutical companies realized their value, no firm today is willing to spend research dollars on a chemical it can't own. This particular meme--we can call it the patent law meme--within the smart drugs virus burrows deeply into the existing medical business paradigm. As smart drugs promoters go on the air to discuss the problems caused by patent-motivated medical decisions, they convince viewers that the pharmaceutical industry is dangerous to the population it claims to serve. Along with smart drugs, says an AIDS activist friend of Morgenthaler's who appeared on "Nightline" a few weeks later, several potentially effective AIDS medications have been suppressed because they, too, cannot be patented. Whether or not smart drugs prove effective at all, the memes within the smart drugs media virus have infiltrated the existing conceptual framework for drug legalization. The inconsistencies of our AIDS drug policies were exposed by the smart drugs virus first on computer bulletin boards, then in magazines, then on cable television, and finally on national network news. The attraction to the idea and sound of smart drugs and smart bars opened the necessary media channels for the virus to spread. The immune response of our culture to the virus was weak because of our ambivalent attitudes toward drug use. The memes themselves were able to infiltrate because of our ambiguous laws and policies our faulty societal code. But not all media viruses are constructed purposefully. The Woody Allen/Mia Farrow scandal was most probably, anyway not created as a publicity stunt. The particularly New York story broke, however, during the Democratic Convention for Bill Clinton. The Republicans, who had already been denouncing New York as a hotbed of morally decadent and cultural elitist attitudes, were quick to capitalize on the Allen/Farrow media virus. Introductions for Bush's campaign speeches made reference to Woody Allen, hoping to reinterpret the memes that had already spread--child molestation, movie stars not being as they appear, New York confusion as condemning evidence of Democratic family values. Finally there exist what countercultural activists would consider "self-generated" viruses. These are concepts or events that arise in the media quite spontaneously, but spread widely because they strike a very resonant chord or elicit a dramatic response from those who are exposed to them. If all of civilization is to be seen as a single organism, then these self-generated viruses can be understood as self-corrective measures. They are ways for the organism to correct or modify its own code. This is what is known in evolutionary circles as mutation. One such self-generated virus, the theories of chaos math, come to us from deep in the computer departments of major universities, but their implications have reignited enthusiasm for ancient pagan and antiauthoritarian values. This new, highly heralded form of mathematics works without the straight lines and linear equations we have used to interpret reality for the past dozen or so centuries and instead paints a picture of our universe as a quite random, discontinuous field of natural phenomena. Chaos math is now used to analyze systems as complex as the stock market or the weather with astonishingly accurate results. The famous phrase "a butterfly flapping its wings in China can create a hurricane in New York" means that a tiny event in one remote area can lead to huge repercussions in another. It is no wonder that those attempting to demonstrate the fall of hierarchical systems and to debunk the notion of top-down control cherish the memes of the chaos math virus, which contradict these orderly notions of natural behavior. Activists love evidence that supports their minuteman tactics. It is the media activists, most of all, who depend on a world-view that accepts that a tiny virus, launched creatively and distributed widely, can topple systems of thought as established as organized religion and institutions as well rooted as, say, the Republican Party or even the two- party system altogether. This is why it is so important that we understand that, at least as far as media activists are concerned, viruses are not a bad thing. True, biological viruses, when successful, can destroy the host organism. If they invade and take control of enough cells, they redirect vital functions that the host needs in order to survive. Media viruses do target a host organism, but that beast is not culture as whole; they target the systems and faulty code that have taken control of culture and inhibited the natural, chaotic flow of energy and information. A media virus may be designed to fight a political party, a religion, an institution, an economy, a business, or even a system of thought. Just as scientists use viruses to combat certain diseases within the human body or to tag dangerous cells for destruction by the person's own antibodies, media activists use viruses to combat what they see as the enemies of our culture. Media viruses, whether intentional, co-opted, or spontaneous, lead to societal mutation and some sort of evolution. The purpose of this book is not to cast judgment on any of the issues these activists raise, but rather to examine the methods they use to promote what they see as positive, evolutionary change. Interestingly enough, however, to come to grips with the efficacy of media viruses in our present datasphere, we must also accept, or at least acknowledge, the basic principles of the datasphere as these activists view them. To understand media viruses, we must allow ourselves to become infected. *See Dawkins, Richard, _Universal parasitism and the co-evolution of extended phenotypes,_ _Whole Earth Review_ 62:90, Spring 1989. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- From CHAPTER 4: KIDS' TV Children's television is as innovative as any programming being done today. Kids learn from and are entertained by puppets, animation, elaborately costumed characters, special effects, and popular music. The most imaginative of kids' shows, though, appeal to the parents, too. In the tradition of "The Soupy Sales Show" and "Rocky and His Friends," most kids' shows are directed at the child on one level and at the parent on another. There is a subtle, usually satirical or ironic communication going on between the makers of kids' TV and the parents who are watching alongside their children. This communication almost always has an irreverent tone, as if to counterbalance the surface sweetness or moral uprightness of the show's main message. This is why kids' television has become, perhaps, the media's best conduit for controversial memes. The shows, their styles, and their characters serve as innocuous veneers for the hidden agendas of their creators. The Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons, made in the sixties, were a tongue-in-cheek satire of America's cold war paranoia. Boris Badenov and his partner, Natasha, were sinister Russian spies, out to capture and kill Moose and Squirrel at any cost. Viewers were encouraged to laugh along at this glaring satire of patriotic fervor, as embodied by the all-too- serious flying squirrel. Soupy Sales was a bitingly funny intellectual comedian whose own kids' show served more as a platform for higher comedy and media satire than it did as an entertainment for children. Even his infamous downfall when he asked each of the children watching to send him little green pieces of paper was really a comment on the ruthless merchandising exercised by shows like "Romper Room" and "Bozo the Clown" on their young viewers, selling do-bee hats or promoting contests. The joke, of course, backfired, but Soupy had launched a prototypical media virus and developed a new mutation of the kids' show host that was to evolve much further in the coming decades. We have come to expect hidden messages in our kids' TV. Today parents are more suspicious of shows _without_ satirical subtexts. Programs like "Barney," which are huge hits with children under ten, are despised by parents and college-age students, who can find no entertainment value in them at all. Barney is just a purple dinosaur who sings songs with kids. The show is absolutely straight. But his straightness has led to anti- Barney rallies on college campuses, where giant effigies of the kiddie-hero are thrown into bonfires. In similar quests for irony, news shows jumped at the opportunity to appeal to the anti-Barney sentiment by covering, in great detail, the story of a boy who started a tragic fire by setting his Barney doll ablaze. Meanwhile, more sophisticated "kids'" programming like the cartoon "Ren & Stimpy" finds a receptive audience among teenagers, college students, and adventurous adults. By following in the tradition of children's TV with satirical subtexts aimed at adults, new kids' TV, produced and written mostly by late baby boomers and Generation X members, is testing the limits of the tube's ability to spread countercultural messages. REN & STIMPY: PLAYING IN THE CLOSET "Ren & Stimpy" is a lesson in media activism, too--not as played out by cartoon characters but by their animator, John Kricfalusi, who personally tests the limits of his medium's ability to carry countercultural messages. Kricfalusi comes from another adult entertainment tradition, that of Ralph Bakshi and his 1972 X-rated cartoon feature, Fritz the Cat. Kricfalusi's own directing debut came in 1987 on Bakshi's Saturday-morning cartoon, a modernization of "Mighty Mouse" that, not surprisingly, aired on CBS in the half-hour slot after "Pee-Wee's Playhouse." "The New Adventures of Mighty Mouse" was a much more blatant display of adult humor and hidden agendas than "Pee-Wee's Playhouse," and the network's censors were correspondingly more paranoid. Eventually, believing they saw Mighty Mouse snort cocaine in one episode (no one knows for sure exactly what he was really doing), they canceled the whole series. Kricfalusi went out on his own and soon gained the interest of the Nickelodeon cable channel (owned by MTV), which was looking for alternative "personal" styles of animation to compete with network, mainstream cartoon programming. With Kricfalusi they got more than they bargained for. His unlikely cartoon duo--Ren, an emaciated, hypertense Mexican "asthma-hound" Chihuahua, and Stimpy, a fat, lovable, dim-witted cat--embody a psychedelic, postmodern, homosexual, antiestablishment set of memes. Kricfalusi's dedication to lacing his cartoons with these agendas ultimately cost him his job and his rights to the material. Episodes were deemed unfit for children by Nickelodeon's executives, who decided to do further seasons of "Ren & Stimpy" without their creator. (Nickelodeon claims the dismissal was due to Kricfalusi's inability to meet production schedules, and its current producers--in an obvious attempt to keep its older viewers--still try to lace episodes with provocatively subversive content, although not with the success of the original creator.) Kricfalusi's dismissal notwithstanding, "Ren & Stimpy" may be the most direct hit by subversive children's TV on the mainstream media that houses it. Unlike "The Simpsons," which satirizes media through sampling and guest appearances, "Ren & Stimpy" makes a frontal assault on our expectations about media. Such outrageous events occur in this cartoon, and so explicitly, that viewers almost feel the need to shake themselves awake, as if to say, "Is this really happening on television?" The specific ways "The Ren & Stimpy Show" accomplished this high naughtiness quotient reveal a lot about our current cultural immune deficiencies. Most important to the success of "Ren & Stimpy" was Kricfalusi's convincing target viewers that his show was, indeed, intended for them. His "wink wink" came, as it usually does, in the form of obvious bracketing devices like fake commercials, direct address, and shows within the show. Many episodes begin with a commercial for Log, a toy from fictional toy manufacturer Blammo (meant to rhyme with Whammo). Log is just what it says it is: a log. The advertisement's lyrics immediately recall "Everyone wants a Slinky" or "Another fluffer nutter": "What's great for a snack and fits on your back? It's log, log, log." Log is nothing more than a wooden log, but, as we learn in later ads, it can be used in any number of ways or even purchased in one of dozens of costumes. The commercial appeals to the childhood mind-set specific to GenX, in which industrial waste products like springs, plastic rings, or gummy rubber became multimillion-dollar products like Slinky, Hula Hoop, and Silly Putty. But Kricfalusi regenerates and celebrates the imagery without the cynicism of "The Simpsons." GenXers enjoy the ironic distance they have as adults, but do not condemn the experiences of their youth. Slinky and Silly Putty may have been overpriced scams, but they were fun. Log is exaggeratedly silly, allowing GenX viewers to laugh at the aspirations they or their boomer parents had as kids, but also giving them permission to enjoy, with ironic distance, what it was like to grow up in a postmodern junk culture. This sets the tone for the whole show. Meanwhile kids can watch, too, and simply enjoy the characters and silly songs. "Ren & Stimpy" also winks to its older audience in the form of shows within the show. Like "The Simpsons," who watch "Itchy and Scratchy," Stimpy is a fan of "The Muddy Mudskipper Show," a cartoon about a rather abusive little fish. The characters' relationship to the cartoon comments on the nature of their own animated reality. Ren, the realist, scolds Stimpy for believing in Muddy's existence. "Cartoons aren't real!" he screams. "They're not flesh and blood like _us_!" Stimpy simply looks through the camera at us, confused. His fanaticism about Muddy is no worse than the cult following for "The Ren & Stimpy Show." By calling attention to this, we are both distanced from and rewarded for our own relationship to the cartoon. This is a celebration of the GenX ethic: We can acknowledge the need to relive the media of our past and are allowed to do so as long as we wink along in recognition of our own silliness. "Ren & Stimpy" is a kids' experience from the past, but pushed so far stylistically and subtextually that adults can appreciate the nuances and techniques they may have missed the first time around. To analyze it this way is not beyond the intent of the show or the experience people have watching it. "Rocky and His Friends" and "Underdog" are enjoying comebacks, but "Ren & Stimpy" is so tremendously successful because it is directed at an audience that enjoys a self-conscious awareness of their relationship to media. The show gives us exactly what we wanted when we were kids and then some. It tests the limits of allowable grossness, weirdness, and naughtiness. The original Kricfalusi episodes of the show were fraught with some of the most humorously disgusting images in television. Stimpy had a collection of nose goblins he kept stuck to the bottom of a chair; they are green, talking pieces of dried mucus. Fantastically exaggerated magnifications of tooth decay, ear wax, ticks, nose hairs, eye veins, and underarm stubble abound. One episode was about harvesting Stimpy's coughed-up hairballs, and another focused on his Kitty Litter, which he also eats. This passion for the grotesque is a tribute to repressed childhood fixations. Kids love gross, slimy stuff. Some psychologists even believe that the fascination with slime and intimate body parts is an aspect of the child's developing sense of intimacy and sexuality and an important stage in the development of physical affection. But children are usually scolded for what are thought to be disgusting preoccupations. They are told that growing up means learning to be clean and are encouraged to repress messier urges. "Ren & Stimpy," by freeing its viewers to enjoy all the grotesqueness they can tolerate, is a statement against this sort of repression. It is an invitation to reawaken the child's world-view and, more than that, to overthrow societal restrictions and possibly arbitrary barriers to self-expression. The original version of the show also daringly opened other locked closets of our social psyche. Homosexuality, perhaps our deepest, darkest cultural dust bunny, was the issue that got "The Ren & Stimpy Show" in the most trouble. Ren and Stimpy are not necessarily gay, but there are many suggestions even in current episodes that they are more than just friends. The dog and cat live together, sleep in the same bed, bathe together, and assume the roles of a husband and wife. Theirs is a domestic American life, and their relationship is often depicted as overly codependent. If anything, by not explicitly mentioning the boys' sexuality, the show is telling us that their sexuality is just a part of their lives and no big deal. But as a meme within the cultural virus of the show, their gayness has been exploited quite deliberately. In the original pilot, Stimpy was supposed to have been pregnant with Ren's love child. This, like many other direct references to their homosexuality, was cut, but Kricfalusi managed to sneak in other more oblique references. In one episode Stimpy wins a contest and leaves home to become a TV star. Ren cries by his bedside photo of Stimpy especially because he had a fight with him before he left and misses his pal so much that his pillow turns into Stimpy and embraces him. In the end Stimpy gives up his fame and $43 million to come home to his true love. In another show Stimpy gives birth to a child who turns out to be a fart named Stinky. Ren is disgusted with Stimpy's stretch marks and even more disturbed when Stimpy goes through tremendous postpartum depression. When Ren tries to get Stimpy to kiss him under the mistletoe, little hearts emerge from his chest and his eyelashes grow. Another time Ren kisses Stimpy's forehead, causing his tongue to slowly uncurl and erect. The most blatantly gay episode, and the most meaningful one, too, was called "Sven Hoek" and concerned the visit of Ren's brother, Sven. Ren, who has gotten fed up with Stimpy's stupidity, is anxious for the visit of his brother, who should be smart, like him. Sven turns out to be a near clone of Stimpy, and the two bond very fast. First they share their disgusting collections of nose goblins and spit with each other. Then, after a game of "seek and hide," the two end up in the closet together, sitting in Stimpy's cat box. As Stimpy relieves himself in the litter, we watch Sven smile as he realizes he is sitting in Stimpy's pee. As if aware of our own emerging realization about his sexuality, Stimpy turns to us and says, "Hey! This is private!" and shuts the closet door. Then, in the original script but cut by Nickelodeon from this scene, were lines through the closed closet door about playing circus. Stimpy volunteered, "I'm a sword swallower," after which we were to hear a gulping sound. If there was any doubt at that point about what was happening, it was made even clearer by Ren's jealous reaction on returning home to find "Sven Loves Stimpy" scrawled on the living-room wall. He goes mad with jealous rage and decides to urinate on Stimpy and Sven's favorite board game, "Don't Whizz on the Electric Fence." When he does all three are electrocuted and die. Besides the obvious metaphorical value in the dangers of "sitting on the fence" when it comes to sexuality, the episode made clear, once and for all, that the hints at Ren and Stimpy's sexuality were absolutely intentional. _Esquire_ picked up on the cue and commented, "Kids won't even find out how much their values have been perverted until they hit high school!" What _Esquire_ considered a perversion, other, less mainstream media outlets praised as culturally progressive. _Reactor,_ a Chicago alternative music and club-life magazine, conducted a spoof interview with Ren and Stimpy about coming out of the closet called "Happy Happy Queer Queer!" The piece jokingly concluded, "Now, there's no doubt that in the future, we will be forced to witness arranged dates, vehement denials from the network, along with probably a well-publicized marriage for one of them and of course the macabre speculation every time one of them takes ill." The writers at _Reactor_ obviously have a sense of how Ren and Stimpy function as media entities, so their mock analysis concerns ways in which gay people have their lives fashioned and adjusted for media representation. It is surprising that so many gay references were left in the show while its seemingly less virulent political memes were more often cut by network censors. Maybe this is because political satire is easier and less embarrassing to recognize. Kricfalusi managed to offend both right-wing traditionalists and "politically correct" liberals by daring to consider all such thought obsolete. The most famously banned episode, titled after its superhero protagonist "Powdered Toast Man," cast Frank Zappa (a notorious rock and roll media viralist in his own right) as the pope, who at one point shoves his face deep into the superhero's buttocks. Later in the episode, Powdered Toast Man crumples what he calls "dusty old papers "- -the Constitution and the Bill of Rights--and burns them in the Oval Office fireplace in order to roast marshmallows, an action he says will "relieve U.S. citizens of their constitutional rights." Righteous viewers complained to the Federal Communications Commission and the episode was shelved. Another of Kricfalusi's characters, staunch conservative George Liquor, infuriated feminists on the Nickelodeon staff, who thought the name was meant as a pun on "lick her" (which is why Kricfalusi went through the pains to spell out the name Liquor on the screen so many times). According to Kricfalusi, his critics have lost the ability to distinguish between cartoons and reality, and consider characters like Liquor a genuine threat to their value systems. Nickelodeon executives rejected one episode, "Man's Best Friend," in which George Liquor physically "disciplines" Ren and Stimpy. Kricfalusi is angered but almost amused by these naively harsh reactions to his brand of comedy and cites an overfelt sense of political correctness for the misinterpretation of his humor. "Somebody...used the word 'vile' to describe 'Man's Best Friend,'" Kricfalusi argues, "but it's not violent. It's slapstick. I had to keep explaining to them that it's a cartoon!...Our biggest mistake is that we do our risque material cleverly. They notice it more because our show is a hit." In all fairness, though, "Ren & Stimpy" draws more attention than, say, MTV's "Liquid Television" cartoons because it is more ostensibly directed at children. The dissociated style and meme-rich content of a TV show is no crime in itself. Foisting these ideologies on growing minds is considered a far greater cultural crime. Kricfalusi himself admitted in an early _Spin_ magazine interview, "I think we are destroying the minds of America, and that's been one of my lifelong ambitions." Kricfalusi's formula for accomplishing this is based in postmodernism and chaos. More than challenging specific moral constructs, his cartoons eat away at the current model of reality, replacing the notions of linearity and continuity with a discontinuous, almost existential collage of pictures and ideas. "Ren & Stimpy" is a postpsychedelic cartoon. Its characters and plots do not follow the normal order set out by dramatic convention. In one episode they may reside in a trailer, and in the next they live in a house. Sometimes it is Ren who has a job, other times it's Stimpy. Sometimes they are astronauts, and sometimes they even die, then reanimate for the next show. This sense of discontinuity is amplified by the style of the show, which uses a disconnected sort of animation in which psychedelic and quick- changing images move in front of 1950s-style backgrounds of stars and paint splatters. The sound track of the show uses quick samples of classical music or sound effects over a satirically monotonous wash of 1950s Muzaky background tracks, reminiscent of old public school instructional films or "Leave It to Beaver" television-era vacuum cleaner advertisements. The juxtaposition of old seamless imagery with the popping veins and sudden mood shifts of the characters only makes this discontinuity more pronounced. In one episode, clearly meant to evoke the feeling of a sixties LSD-flashback movie, the boys, distanced as astronauts on a show within the show, get stuck on a planet where they physically mutate dozens of times and lose their language skills and many parts of their bodies. With no rational way out, they just embrace each other for the last time, push a button, and disappear. In Kricfalusi's new world disorder, the only alternative in an increasingly discontinuous and alien reality is to embrace the fundamental humanity we all share in the form of love. Before we dismiss this argument as reading too deep into the show, let us remember even _Esquire_ mused that "'Ren & Stimpy' is ultimately about friendship, need, and other timeless values. Who can say no to love? ... We see in Ren a projection of our own repressed psychotic tendencies. His scream, complete with eyeballs that detach from their sockets, taps into the shared primordial well of our societal alienation." Ren plays Vladimir to Stimpy's Estragon. While Ren recognizes the futility of his attempts to impose order and rationality on his world, Stimpy is too simple to care. Ren must learn to live in the "happy joy" manner of his pal Stimpy, even though he is so much more intelligent. At least on the surface. It is actually Stimpy, in all his dim-witted glee, who has developed the coping mechanisms necessary for smooth sailing on the waves of an unfathomable postmodern sea. In the episode called "Marooned," the boys are stranded on an alien planet. It is Stimpy who takes time to appreciate the beauty of the planet's moon, while Ren is so stuck in his expectations of where a moon should be that he hits his head against it. When Ren panics, "We're marooned!" Stimpy is self-conscious enough of his media identity--he is only playing the part of Stimpy--to smile and realize: "Just like the title of this cartoon!" Stimpy, as dull and TV-addicted as he may be, is also equipped to survive in a discontinuous reality. He intuitively understands the nature of media and its accompanying alienation and knows that the way to endure is to espouse the ancient virtues of joy and friendship. Like GenXers, who pride themselves on their ability to hold on to the merriment of their youth, Stimpy maintains his simple but grounded sanity by seeing his life as a free-form and joyous adventure. Because he has no expectations, he can adapt spontaneously to the ever-changing conditions around him. "Ren & Stimpy" _does_ destroy the minds of America, as Kricfalusi intended, by posing an alternative, albeit mindless, strategy for moving through life in the media era. While the post-Kricfalusi "Ren & Stimpy" maintains its reputation for provocative and disgusting moments, it has lost its greatest value as a viral conduit: At its core, like all of the best kids' TV, the show was a primer on living in a discontinuous, cut-and-paste reality. Whether it is Pee-Wee Herman re-creating a childhood through the antics of an adult or a kid like Bart Simpson deconstructing and subverting the media messages from the adult world around him, kids' TV manipulates adult culture by doing more than one thing with media at the same time. Titles of Interest from Ballantine Books: Del Rey Books is an imprint of Ballantine, and occasionally Ballantine publishes books that we think might be of interest to sf and fantasy readers. (For example, horror novels or interesting nonfiction.) We will occasionally be putting sample chapters, etc. online here from those books. Let us know what you think! Sample chapters available: THE HOMING, John Saul (horror) MEDIA VIRUS!: Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture, Douglas Rushkoff, author of CYBERIA and THE GEN X READER (non-fiction) |DEL| Ellen Key Harris ekh@panix.com E.Harris1@GEnie.geis.com |REY| Editor, Del Rey Books 201 East 50th Street, NY NY 10022 USA ====================================================================== ------------------------------------------------ (This file was found elsewhere on the Internet and uploaded to the Radio Free Michigan site by the archive maintainer. Protection of Individual Rights and Liberties. E-mail bj496@Cleveland.Freenet.Edu)