For years I have been trying to locate this interview with Norman Mailer in which the author defends television. I don’t recall where I read it, but Mailer’s main point was that television was just a new form of story-telling. His only real objection was to commercial interruptions. Otherwise, TV was just a new medium for the ancient art of narrative.
I suppose one of the main reasons I was excited by that interview was that I grew up a television junkie. I watched tons of TV. I loved cartoons and sitcoms. I was addicted to Happy Days at one time. I remember it always came on right after my cub scouts den meeting at Trevor Hill’s house. We’d have the meeting in his parents’ finished basement and then run upstairs to huddle up in the TV room to watch the show. My grandfather used to love watching wrestling, which I never really got into, but my grandmother loved crime shows, courtroom dramas, old black and white thrillers, and old comedies. She loved Perry Mason, Columbo, Barnaby Jones, Murder She Wrote. With her I watched all the Sherlock Holmes movies with Basil Rathbone as Holmes, or Robin Hood with Errol Flynn as Robin and Rathbone as Guy of Gisbourne. She and I watched a lot of Abbott and Costello movies, I Love Lucy episodes, and Agatha Christie films.
When I was in eighth grade I had a huge crush on this seventh grade girl that I considered way out of my league. One day on the bus home from school, she made my day when she confessed that she loved old movies and asked if I’d ever heard of a movie called Some Like It Hot, which was perhaps my favorite movie of all time. (I still love when Jack Lemmon describes Marilyn Monroe’s walk as “Jell-O on springsâ€). Suddenly I forgot all about my preconceived notions and we fell into a great conversation about old movies.
Years later, in college, I went through a phase where I shunned television and aspired to be one of those hip, literate adults who doesn’t own a TV. But then I read Robert Probst’s Response and Analysis, in which he has a chapter titled Visual Literacy, where he defends TV in much the same way Mailer does. He challenges teachers to drop their pretensions, admit they read sufficiently trashy beach novels every summer, and accept TV as just a new media. In that chapter, Probst suggests we assign a show to our students that the whole class can watch as homework and then discuss and analyze as a text in class. He argues that this will prevent TV from becoming a bad influence upon students’ literacy because it can teach them to be critical viewers of visual texts.
These days I openly watch TV. Some nights I read in the quiet of late night, after everyone else has gone to bed. But many nights I want to just chill out and watch a show. I like to watch DVDs or programs in Netflix so I can avoid commercials. My favorite shows all have cool anti-heroes and often deal with the supernatural, which strikes me as odd since I’m not a religious believer of any variety. (I like to tell my son that there’s a lot of mystery in life and that I’m cool with the mystery).
Amy and I have been making our way through the early seasons of Mad Men. We blew through the first four seasons of Californication. On my own I’ve been watching Weeds, but lately my real favorite has been Supernatural.
The one thing all these shows have in common that appeals to me is the cool anti-hero: Don Draper, Hank Moody, Nancy Botwin, Sam and Dean Winchester. Kinda dark and edgy, conflicted, contradictory, but essentially good people. I like how their flaws make them sympathetic to other outcasts, kind of like Hester Prynne. I liked how in season one of Weeds all the messed up high school kids gravitated toward the Botwin residence because Nancy was the only adult who seemed to get them and accept them. (Though the producers seem to have decided to move away from that angle).
Supernatural appeals to me for a variety of reasons, but I especially love all the literary allusions sprinkled throughout the episodes. (Californication does this too, perhaps since Duchovny was ABD in English at Yale). Sam and Dean are basically Sal and Dean from On the Road, and the whole series is a modern take on Paradise Lost, which I think can be said of Kerouac’s novel, too. Remember that scene toward the end of On the Road when Sal Paradise says, “Suddenly I had a vision of Dean, a burning shuddering frightful Angel, palpitating toward me across the road, approaching like a cloud, with enormous speed, pursuing me like the Shrouded Traveler on the plain, bearing down on me. I saw his huge face over the plains with the mad, bony purpose and the gleaming eyes; I saw his wings; I saw his old jalopy chariot with thousands of sparkling flames shooting out from it; I saw the path it burned over the road; it even made its own road and went over the corn, through cities, destroying bridges, drying rivers. It came like wrath to the West. I knew Dean had gone mad again�
The only thing is that in Supernatural the characters have their roles reversed, so that Sam is the demonic one and Dean is the Michael-like angel.
So these shows are my guilty pleasures, my late night escapes from jadwal reports and budgetary crises and attacks on the teaching profession. Some day maybe I’ll even get to teach a course on TV anti-heroes.
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