The penultimate episode of the most recent (third) season of Friday Night Lights has a scene that gets to the core of what makes it a real work of art (and a rarity for television). Tyra, emotional fireball who is trying to write the perfect essay for her University of Texas admissions application, is explaining to Landry – the wisecracking nice guy who has doggedly believed in her for as long as we’ve known them – what was different about her only a few years earlier:
“Should I write about my trashy family – the fact that my sister is a stripper, or that my mama is a high school dropout who drinks boxes of wine like its water? Or about the fact that I lost my virginity when I was 13, or the fact that my papa wasn’t around? How ‘bout that? Oh! I know what I should write about: the fact that until about two years ago, I had enough hate in my heart to start a freakin’ car!”
Landry understands that the key to life isn’t simply knowing that you used to be different, but rather, figuring out why you used to be different. And so he asks why she is no longer the person that she just described:
“Well… what changed? What changed from two years ago? Why did you stop having enough hate in your heart to start a freakin’ car?”
She answers after a brief moment of thought, “Jason Street got paralyzed.”
Now, Jason Street is the former star quarterback who was paralyzed during a tackle in a game in the very first episode of the very first season of Friday Night Lights. Though the show has a short “Previously on…” segment at the beginning of each episode, there is no recap of who Street is, no expository dialogue explaining the event or back-story to fill-in the first-time viewer.
What you realize is that – my goodness gracious! – Tyra actually has a memory. Things that happened in the first season of the show still matter, because nothing in life ever stops mattering.
I’ve been telling friends to watch this show for a couple of years now. Early on, my praise was, “It’s not about football, it’s about life.” Having spent more time with the characters, what I tell people now is this: “When it’s between seasons, I feel like I’m missing my friends. I don’t ‘miss watching the show,’ or ‘miss my favorite characters,’ because that implies some level of artifice that is remarkably absent. So whenever there’s a question of whether or not the show will be renewed (which there always is), it’s like wondering if my dad will take another job and I’ll have to move away from everyone I know, and no longer be able to keep up with what’s going on in their lives. Because I know their lives will go on.”
Dramatic, I know – but entirely sincere. Friday Night Lights is somehow able to achieve an undeniably organic feel, and it tackles real issues with an honesty and acuity that is commendable. I personally connect to it because the vast majority of the themes it approaches – family and community chief among them – are themes near and dear to my heart. But above all, it’s the show’s refusal to settle for anything less than portraying the most complete human beings and interactions possible that makes it special.
Despite the brilliant writing, acting, et al., Friday Night Lights is still fighting to stay on TV. After thinking about it for a while, here is my proposal as to why:
Any significant piece of popular culture necessarily has two overriding qualities. First of all, it has to be something that a large number of people can relate to. It has to hit the zeitgeist; it has to be cool. Second of all, it has to be commercially viable. For anything in pop culture to get big, it has to be backed by serious dollars, because dollars buy widespread visibility. Bankability buys exposure and growth.
Two of the newest forms of American pop culture (though they are already relatively old) are Reality TV and online Social Media – particularly social networking sites, like Facebook. They both fit these criteria to a T.
Consider Reality TV. Someone asked the question, “What will people relate to more than the celebrities they see on typical TV shows?” and came up with the answer, “normal people.” That was smart: after all, the allure of Reality TV is the chance to see a group of “real people” interacting, facing challenges, and reacting. Cameras are around to capture the action, and there’s usually a “Confessional Booth” for participants to share their thoughts and feelings. Honest and organic, right… right…? Wrong – and that was the brilliant part of Reality TV. Someone understood how effective it would be to cut normal people into Soap Opera-worthy personalities and storylines. People don’t just want to be able to relate to what they are watching; they want to imagine it could be them. It’s cool to relate to the people on a Reality TV show; it’s even cooler to imagine you are them when they are as big and glamorous as the celebrities they “replaced.” On top of that, these personalities (unlike normal people) can be marketed – they are bankable. And in the end, they also belie the farce of the situation: that reality TV is edited into something as artificial as typical, celebrity-laden TV – and the viewer knows it.
Now consider social media websites. The big one now is Facebook, the last big one was MySpace, and the next big one probably doesn’t yet exist. In all cases, the general idea is to create a page that represents you, via photographs, lists of interests, and pithy quotes. Once you’ve created this page, you “make friends” with other people – which basically means they can read your lists and pithy quotes, and a thumbnail of their picture shows up in your list of “friends.” Then, once you’ve established a group of “friends,” you keep up with them by writing on their “wall” and announcing how you are doing with ever-present “status updates.”
To recap, the idea is to posit oneself as a collection of lists and one-liners, and use this self to make friends with other one-liner selves. Then your selves talk to each other. This is how the most technically advanced generation thus far has decided to have relationships. And it attracts astounding numbers of people; lucky for Mark Zucker, in the new economy of the Internet, traffic is worth well more than its weight in gold.
Anyways, while I’m probably beating a dead horse, I can’t move on without mentioning Twitter, my personal favorite of all social media phenomena. The idea in this case is essentially to be able to offer “status updates” ALL THE TIME.
Eating a good sandwich? Tell your friends!
Having a personal epiphany about why Whole Foods is totally worth it? Tell your friends!
Watching paint dry? Tell your friends!
All you have to do is fire off 160-character “tweets” that are received by people who choose to “follow” you. The advantage of tweets over Facebook status updates is that they fit perfectly into text messages, so that you can tweet and receive your friends’ tweets anywhere, anytime. Sounds fantastic.
I’m sure I don’t need to spell out the farce here.
As satisfying as it may be, I’m not mentioning these things just to make fun of them. After all, I’ve occasionally watched a reality TV show, and I use Facebook to keep in touch with friends that live back home, in California. (I don’t use Twitter, though. And I never will.)
The point I’m trying to make is this: these are arguably the two newest, biggest ways that the American people like to see themselves represented, and they are both exercises in doublethink. And by “doublethink”, I mean “believing that we are consuming real representations of real people, while at the same time knowing that these representations are as artificial as any other act of theatre.” So in other words, by “doublethink,” I mean “willful ignorance.”
That’s a troubling thought, at least from where I’m sitting.
But then, we all willfully ignore things to make ourselves feel better. It’s not a troubling idea on the individual level, necessarily. However, the aforementioned first requirement of popular is that it by definition has to capture the zeitgeist of the moment. It’s the proverbial canary in the coalmine for doomsday trends (Wouldn’t we have seen the 80’s drug apocalypse coming if we had just stopped for a moment and thought about how horrendous the music was?). It seems that our moment is saying, “We want to project ourselves onto our media – but we also want to make damn sure that we only project the parts we want. And then, for our next trick, we want to tell ourselves that we are doing no such thing.”
So where does that leave Friday Night Lights? In the midst of a culture that says, “Show me people that I can put in a box” or, better yet, “Allow me to create myself exactly as I wish,” it’s a show with no real heroes or villains. It’s a show where the most villain-ish character, the seemingly unscrupulous football booster, actually turns out to be the most loyal of friends to the good-guy Coach. It’s a show where the same good-guy Coach constantly screws things up for his wife, puts football ahead of education, and jumps to conclusions when it comes to his teenage daughter. These aren’t plot twists; they are the realities of the situation.
I suppose, however, that the show’s most egregious violation of the status quo is the fact that, really, it’s mundane. Instead of taking normal people and turning them into celebrities, it takes Hollywood archetypes – hot cheerleader, star quarterback, town slut – and explodes them until the only thing left is real people. It devotes no air-time to the fancy parties attended by Coach and Mrs. Coach (about the closest thing in the show to a power couple) – because there are none. On the other hand, it devotes considerable time to their quest to purchase a bigger, nicer house – which, of course, they ultimately realize they can’t afford anyway (sigh… if only life imitated art, who knows what our economy would look like…).
How can you possibly make that bankable?
Getting back to where we started: the anecdote about Tyra and Landry and memory? Functionally, it’s been the best illustration (among many) of the fact that there is no reductive element to the show. It truly tries to exhibit a real human experience. In a world of characters that are so often archetypes, or cause-and-effect machines, or cardboard cutouts, it’s refreshing to watch a show and feel like you are getting the real deal.
That said, it’s not exactly tenable to expect every piece of entertainment that makes it to a screen to have that quality. Nevertheless, its disheartening to see Friday Night Lights toil on with no audience, saved only by a deal with DirectTV, to be aired on a channel that is not accessible to many viewers.
I suppose we the people of this moment have made our bed, and now we have to lay in it.
Just to prove that this isn’t my own personal doomsday scenario, I want to close with a note from a completely different source. It’s a quote from one of the participants of the Up series of British documentaries that follow a group of children over the course of their lives, catching up with them every 7 years. The series is certainly among the most real, organic things I’ve ever found presented on a screen.
One of the participants, Neil, is a college dropout who has moved from place to place, and at the time of 28 Up lives in a trailer in a rural part of Scotland. When asked, “What other things about modern society turn you off?” he answers:
The cheap satisfaction in so many things. The aimlessness. But I think the total lack of thought is at the bottom of it. Nobody seems to know where they or anybody else is going, and nobody seems to worry. You know? You finish the week, you come home, you plug into the TV set for the weekend, and then you manage to get back to work on Monday. It seems to me that this is the path to total brainwashing. And if you have a brainwashed society, you’re heading towards doom. There’s no question about that.
That was in 1984.
Ironic, yeah?
I guess doomsday hasn’t happened yet – but what if the canary has, indeed, bitten the dust? What do we do? What can we do? Maybe nothing. Because if the smart part of popular culture is capturing the zeitgeist, the brilliant part is being beyond the influence of any one man.
I’ve never expected anything less than brainwashing from The Media; I just wish it didn’t seem like this was a case of the populace willfully brainwashing itself.
